The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, #2)
Author: Neal Stephenson
Date: 2004-04-13 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Historical Fiction; Science Fiction; Fantasy; Historical; Adventure; Literature; Science Fiction Fantasy; Speculative Fiction; Alternate History
Description: In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves -- including one Jack Shaftoe, a.k.a. King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, lately and miraculously cured of the pox -- devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues, rife with battles, chases, hairbreadth escapes, swashbuckling, bloodletting, and danger -- a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans
Publisher: HarperCollins
Rights: All rigts Reserved

Contents

Also by Neal Stephenson

Quicksilver

Neal Stephenson The Confusion

Neal Stephenson The System of the World

About the Author

About the Publisher

Also by Neal Stephenson

Reamde

Anathem

The System of the World

The Confusion

Quicksilver

Cryptonomicon

The Diamond Age

Snow Crash

Zodiac

Map

Dedication

To the woman upstairs

Contents

Map

Dedication

Invocation

BOOK ONE Quicksilver

Boston Common

1655

Newtowne, Massachusetts Bay Colony

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts Bay

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts Bay

Banks of the River Cam

Aboard Minerva, off the Coast of New England

The Plague Year

Epsom

Aboard Minerva, Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts

Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire

Aboard Minerva, Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts

Charing Cross

Royal Society Meeting, Gresham’s College

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

Gresham’s College, Bishopsgate, London

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

London Bridge

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

Royal Society Meeting, Gunfleet House

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

The City of London

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

BOOK TWO King of the Vagabonds

The Mud Below London

The Continent

Erstwhile Camp of Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha

Bohemia

Bohemia

Leipzig

Saxony

The Harz Mountains

The Place

The Dutch Republic

Paris

The Hague

France

Amsterdam

Paris

Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Coast of Europe and of Northern Africa

BOOK THREE Odalisque

Whitehall Palace

Versailles

London

Beach North of Scheveningen

Dorset

The Exchange [Between Threadneedle and Cornhill]

Versailles

Bank of Het Kanaal, Between Scheveningen and the Hague

Versailles

The Star Chamber, Westminster Palace

Versailles

Tower of London

Château Juvisy

St. Cloud

Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

French Embassy, the Hague

Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

Sheerness, England

Venice

The Hague

Bishopsgate

Dramatis Personae

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Invocation

State your intentions, Muse. I know you’re there.

Dead bards who pined for you have said

You’re bright as flame, but fickle as the air.

My pen and I, submerged in liquid shade,

Much dark can spread, on days and over reams

But without you, no radiance can shed.

Why rustle in the dark, when fledged with fire?

Craze the night with flails of light. Reave

Your turbid shroud. Bestow what I require.

But you’re not in the dark. I do believe

I swim, like squid, in clouds of my own make,

To you, offensive. To us both, opaque.

What’s constituted so, only a pen

Can penetrate. I have one here; let’s go.

BOOK ONE
Quicksilver

Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations…may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be.

—ROGER COTES,

PREFACE TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON’S

Principia Mathematica,

SECOND EDITION, 1713

Boston Common

OCTOBER 12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M.

ENOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUST as the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner’s purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow—and, to a Puritan, tantalizing—glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.

Boston’s a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes. The road up the spoon-handle is barred by a wall, with the usual gallows outside it, and victims, or parts of them, strung up or nailed to the city gates. Enoch has just come that way, and reckoned he had seen the last of such things—that thenceforth it would all be churches and taverns. But the dead men outside the gate were common robbers, killed for earthly crimes. What is happening now on the Common is of a more Sacramental nature.

The noose lies on the woman’s gray head like a crown. The executioner pushes it down. Her head forces it open like an infant’s dilating the birth canal. When it finds the widest part it drops suddenly onto her shoulders. Her knees pimple the front of her apron and her skirts telescope into the platform as she makes to collapse. The executioner hugs her with one arm, like a dancing-master, to keep her upright, and adjusts the knot while an official reads the death warrant. This is as bland as a lease. The crowd scratches and shuffles. There are none of the diversions of a London hanging: no catcalls, jugglers, or pickpockets. Down at the other end of the Common, a squadron of lobsterbacks drills and marches round the base of a hummock with a stone powder-house planted in its top. An Irish sergeant bellows—bored but indignant—in a voice that carries forever on the wind, like the smell of smoke.

He’s not come to watch witch-hangings, but now that Enoch’s blundered into one it would be bad form to leave. There is a drum-roll, and then a sudden awkward silence. He judges it very far from the worst hanging he’s ever seen—no kicking or writhing, no breaking of ropes or unraveling of knots—all in all, an unusually competent piece of work.

He hadn’t really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included—with a blunt, blank efficiency that’s admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with færy-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships.

As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell. It reminds everyone here that if they don’t want to be dead in a few months’ time, they have firewood to stack and chinks to caulk. The wind is noticed by a hoarse preacher at the base of the gallows, who takes it to be Satan himself, come to carry the witch’s soul to hell, and who is not slow to share this opinion with his flock. The preacher is staring Enoch in the eye as he testifies.

Enoch feels the heightened, chafing self-consciousness that is the precursor to fear. What’s to prevent them from trying and hanging him as a witch?

How must he look to these people? A man of indefinable age but evidently broad experience, with silver hair queued down to the small of his back, a copper-red beard, pale gray eyes, and skin weathered and marred like a blacksmith’s ox-hide apron. Dressed in a long traveling-cloak, a walking-staff and an outmoded rapier strapped ‘longside the saddle of a notably fine black horse. Two pistols in his waistband, prominent enough that Indians, highwaymen, and French raiders can clearly see them from ambuscades (he’d like to move them out of view, but reaching for them at this moment seems like a bad idea). Saddlebags (should they be searched) filled with instruments, flasks of quicksilver, and stranger matters—some, as they’d learn, quite dangerous—books in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin pocked with the occult symbols of Alchemists and Kabalists. Things could go badly for him in Boston.

But the crowd takes the preacher’s ranting not as a call to arms but a signal to turn and disperse, muttering. The redcoats discharge their muskets with deep hissing booms, like handfuls of sand hurled against a kettledrum. Enoch dismounts into the midst of the colonists. He sweeps the robe round him, concealing the pistols, pulls the hood back from his head, and amounts to just another weary pilgrim. He does not meet any man’s eye but scans their faces sidelong, and is surprised by a general lack of self-righteousness.

“God willing,” one man says, “that’ll be the last one.”

“Do you mean, sir, the last witch?” Enoch asks.

“I mean, sir, the last hanging.”

Flowing like water round the bases of the steep hills, they migrate across a burying ground on the south edge of the Common, already full of lost Englishmen, and follow the witch’s corpse down the street. The houses are mostly of wood, and so are the churches. Spaniards would have built a single great cathedral here, of stone, with gold on the inside, but the colonists cannot agree on anything and so it is more like Amsterdam: small churches on every block, some barely distinguishable from barns, each no doubt preaching that all of the others have it wrong. But at least they can muster a consensus to kill a witch. She is borne off into a new burying ground, which for some reason they have situated hard by the granary. Enoch is at a loss to know whether this juxtaposition—that is, storing their Dead, and their Staff of Life, in the same place—is some sort of Message from the city’s elders, or simple bad taste.

Enoch, who has seen more than one city burn, recognizes the scars of a great fire along this main street. Houses and churches are being rebuilt with brick or stone. He comes to what must be the greatest intersection in the town, where this road from the city gate crosses a very broad street that runs straight down to salt water, and continues on a long wharf that projects far out into the harbor, thrusting across a ruined rampart of stones and logs: the rubble of a disused sea-wall. The long wharf is ridged with barracks. It reaches far enough out into the harbor that one of the Navy’s very largest men-of-war is able to moor at its end. Turning his head the other way, he sees artillery mounted up on a hillside, and blue-coated gunners tending to a vatlike mortar, ready to lob iron bombs onto the decks of any French or Spanish galleons that might trespass on the bay.

So, drawing a mental line from the dead criminals at the city gate, to the powder-house on the Common, to the witch-gallows, and finally to the harbor defenses, he has got one Cartesian number-line—what Leibniz would call the Ordinate—plotted out: he understands what people are afraid of in Boston, and how the churchmen and the generals keep the place in hand. But it remains to be seen what can be plotted in the space above and below. The hills of Boston are skirted by endless flat marshes that fade, slow as twilight, into Harbor or River, providing blank empty planes on which men with ropes and rulers can construct whatever strange curves they phant’sy.

Enoch knows where to find the Origin of this coordinate system, because he has talked to ship’s masters who have visited Boston. He goes down to where the long wharf grips the shore. Among fine stone sea-merchants’ houses, there is a brick-red door with a bunch of grapes dangling above it. Enoch goes through that door and finds himself in a good tavern. Men with swords and expensive clothes turn round to look at him. Slavers, merchants of rum and molasses and tea and tobacco, and captains of the ships that carry those things. It could be any place in the world, for the same tavern is in London, Cadiz, Smyrna, and Manila, and the same men are in it. None of them cares, supposing they even know, that witches are being hanged five minutes’ walk away. He is much more comfortable in here than out there; but he has not come to be comfortable. The particular sea-captain he’s looking for—van Hoek—is not here. He backs out before the tavern-keeper can tempt him.

Back in America and among Puritans, he enters into narrower streets and heads north, leading his horse over a rickety wooden bridge thrown over a little mill-creek. Flotillas of shavings from some carpenter’s block-plane sail down the stream like ships going off to war. Underneath them the weak current nudges turds and bits of slaughtered animals down towards the harbor. It smells accordingly. No denying there is a tallow-chandlery not far upwind, where beast-grease not fit for eating is made into candles and soap.

“Did you come from Europe?”

He had sensed someone was following him, but seen nothing whenever he looked back. Now he knows why: his doppelgänger is a lad, moving about like a drop of quicksilver that cannot be trapped under the thumb. Ten years old, Enoch guesses. Then the boy thinks about smiling and his lips part. His gums support a rubble of adult teeth shouldering their way into pink gaps, and deciduous ones flapping like tavern signs on skin hinges. He’s closer to eight. But cod and corn have made him big for his age—at least by London standards. And he is precocious in every respect save social graces.

Enoch might answer, Yes, I am from Europe, where a boy addresses an old man as “sir,” if he addresses him at all. But he cannot get past the odd nomenclature. “Europe,” he repeats, “is that what you name it here? Most people there say Christendom.”

“But we have Christians here.”

“So this is Christendom, you are saying,” says Enoch, “but, obviously to you, I’ve come from somewhere else. Perhaps Europe is the better term, now that you mention it. Hmm.”

“What do other people call it?”

“Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?”

“No, but you talk like one.”

“You know something of schoolmasters, do you?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg.

“Yet here it is the middle of Monday—”

“The place was empty ‘cause of the Hanging. I didn’t want to stay and—”

“And what?”

“Get more ahead of the others than I was already.”

“If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it—not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.”

“School is where one learns,” says the boy. “If you’d be so kind as to answer my question, sir, then I should be learning something, which would mean I were in school.”

The boy is obviously dangerous. So Enoch decides to accept the proposition. “You may address me as Mr. Root. And you are—?”

“Ben. Son of Josiah. The tallow-chandler. Why do you laugh, Mr. Root?”

“Because in most parts of Christendom—or Europe—tallow-chandlers’ sons do not go to grammar school. It is a peculiarity of…your people.” Enoch almost let slip the word Puritans. Back in England, where Puritans are a memory of a bygone age, or at worst streetcorner nuisances, the term serves well enough to lampoon the backwoodsmen of Massachusetts Bay Colony. But as he keeps being reminded here, the truth of the matter is more complex. From a coffeehouse in London, one may speak blithely of Islam and the Mussulman, but in Cairo such terms are void. Here Enoch is in the Puritans’ Cairo. “I shall answer your question,” Enoch says before Ben can let fly with any more. “What do people in other parts call the place I am from? Well, Islam—a larger, richer, and in most ways more sophisticated civilization that hems in the Christians of Europe to the east and the south—divides all the world into only three parts: their part, which is the dar al-Islam; the part with which they are friendly, which is the dar as-sulh, or House of Peace; and everything else, which is the dar al-harb, or House of War. The latter is, I’m sorry to say, a far more apt name than Christendom for the part of the world where most of the Christians live.”

“I know of the war,” Ben says coolly. “It is at an end. A Peace has been signed at Utrecht. France gets Spain. Austria gets the Spanish Netherlands. We get Gibraltar, Newfoundland, St. Kitts, and—” lowering his voice “—the slave trade.”

“Yes—the Asiento.”

“Ssh! There are a few here, sir, opposed to it, and they are dangerous.”

“You have Barkers here?”

“Yes, sir.”

Enoch studies the boy’s face now with some care, for the chap he is looking for is a sort of Barker, and it would be useful to know how such are regarded hereabouts by their less maniacal brethren. Ben seems cautious, rather than contemptuous.

“But you are speaking only of one war—”

“The War of the Spanish Succession,” says Ben, “whose cause was the death in Madrid of King Carlos the Sufferer.”

“I should say that wretched man’s death was the pretext, not the cause,” says Enoch. “The War of the Spanish Succession was only the second, and I pray the last, part of a great war that began a quarter of a century ago, at the time of—”

“The Glorious Revolution!”

“As some style it. You have been at your lessons, Ben, and I commend you. Perhaps you know that in that Revolution the King of England—a Catholic—was sent packing, and replaced by a Protestant King and Queen.”

“William and Mary!”

“Indeed. But has it occurred to you to wonder why Protestants and Catholics were at war in the first place?”

“In our studies we more often speak of wars among Protestants.”

“Ah, yes—a phenomenon restricted to England. That is natural, for your parents came here because of such a conflict.”

“The Civil War,” says Ben.

“Your side won the Civil War,” Enoch reminds him, “but later came the Restoration, which was a grievous defeat for your folk, and sent them flocking hither.”

“You have hit the mark, Mr. Root,” says Ben, “for that is just why my father Josiah quit England.”

“What about your mother?”

“Nantucket-born sir. But her father came here to escape from a wicked Bishop—a loud fellow, or so I have heard—”

“Finally, Ben, I have found a limit to your knowledge. You are speaking of Archbishop Laud—a terrible oppressor of Puritans—as some called your folk—under Charles the First. The Puritans paid him back by chopping off the head of that same Charles in Charing Cross, in the year of our lord sixteen hundred and forty-nine.”

“Cromwell,” says Ben.

“Cromwell. Yes. He had something to do with it. Now, Ben. We have been standing by this millstream for rather a long while. I grow cold. My horse is restless. We have, as I said, found the place where your erudition gives way to ignorance. I shall be pleased to hold up my end of our agreement—that is, to teach you things, so that when you go home to-night you may claim to Josiah that you were in school the whole day. Though the schoolmaster may give him an account that shall conflict with yours. However, I do require certain minor services in return.”

“Only name them, Mr. Root.”

“I have come to Boston to find a certain man who at last report was living here. He is an old man.”

“Older than you?”

“No, but he might seem older.”

“How old is he, then?”

“He watched the head of King Charles the First being chopped off.”

“At least threescore and four then.”

“Ah, I see you have been learning sums and differences.”

“And products and dividends, Mr. Root.”

“Work this into your reckonings, then: the one I seek had an excellent view of the beheading, for he was sitting upon his father’s shoulders.”

“Couldn’t have been more than a few years old then. Unless his father was a sturdy fellow indeed.”

“His father was sturdy in a sense,” says Enoch, “for Archbishop Laud had caused his ears and his nose to be cut off in Star Chamber some two decades before, and yet he was not daunted, but kept up his agitation against the King. Against all Kings.”

“He was a Barker.” Again, this word brings no sign of contempt to Ben’s face. Shocking how different this place is from London.

“But to answer your question, Ben: Drake was not an especially big or strong man.”

“So the son on his shoulders was small. By now he should be, perhaps, threescore and eight. But I do not know of a Mr. Drake here.”

“Drake was the father’s Christian name.”

“Pray, what then is the name of the family?”

“I will not tell you that just now,” says Enoch. For the man he wants to find might have a very poor character among these people—might already have been hanged on Boston Common, for all Enoch knows.

“How can I help you find him, sir, if you won’t let me know his name?”

“By guiding me to the Charlestown ferry,” Enoch says, “for I know that he spends his days on the north side of the River Charles.”

“Follow me,” says Ben, “but I hope you’ve silver.”

“Oh yes, I’ve silver,” says Enoch.

THEY ARE SKIRTING A KNOB of land at the north end of the city. Wharves, smaller and older than the big one, radiate from its shore. The sails and rigging, spars and masts to his starboard combine into a tangle vast and inextricable, as characters on a page must do in the eyes of an unlettered peasant. Enoch does not see van Hoek or Minerva. He begins to fear that he shall have to go into taverns and make inquiries, and spend time, and draw attention.

Ben takes him direct to the wharf where the Charlestown Ferry is ready to shove off. It is all crowded with hanging-watchers, and Enoch must pay the waterman extra to bring the horse aboard. Enoch pulls his purse open and peers into it. The King of Spain’s coat of arms stares back at him, stamped in silver, variously blurred, chopped, and mangled. The Christian name varies, depending on which king reigned when each of these coins was hammered out in New Spain, but after that they all say D. G. HISPAN ET IND REX. By the grace of God, of Spain and the Indies, King. The same sort of bluster that all kings stamp onto their coins.

Those words don’t matter to anyone—most people can’t read them anyway. What does matter is that a man standing in a cold breeze on the Boston waterfront, seeking to buy passage on a ferry run by an Englishman, cannot pay with the coins that are being stamped out by Sir Isaac Newton in the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. The only coinage here is Spanish—the same coins that are changing hands, at this moment, in Lima, Manila, Macao, Goa, Bandar Abbas, Mocha, Cairo, Smyrna, Malta, Madrid, the Canary Islands, Marseilles.

The man who saw Enoch down to the docks in London months ago said: “Gold knows things that no man does.”

Enoch churns his purse up and down, making the coins-fragments fly, hoping to spy a single pie-slice—one-eighth of a Piece of Eight, or a bit, as they are called. But he already knows he’s spent most of his bits for small necessaries along the road. The smallest piece he has in his purse right now is half of a coin—four bits.

He looks up the street and sees a blacksmith’s forge only a stone’s throw away. Some quick work with a hammer and that smith could make change for him.

The ferryman’s reading Enoch’s mind. He couldn’t see into the purse, but he could hear the massive gonging of whole coins colliding, without the clashing tinkle of bits. “We’re shoving off,” he is pleased to say.

Enoch comes to his senses, remembers what he’s doing, and hands over a silver semicircle. “But the boy comes with me,” he insists, “and you’ll give him passage back.”

“Done,” says the ferryman.

This is more than Ben could have hoped for, and yet he was hoping for it. Though the boy is too self-possessed to say as much, this voyage is to him as good as a passage down to the Caribbean to go a-pirating on the Spanish Main. He goes from wharf to ferry without touching the gangplank.

Charlestown is less than a mile distant, across the mouth of a sluggish river. It is a low green hill shingled with long slender haymows limned by dry-stone fences. On the slope facing toward Boston, below the summit but above the endless tidal flats and cattail-filled marshes, a town has occurred: partly laid out by geometers, but partly growing like ivy.

The ferryman’s hefty Africans pace short reciprocating arcs on the deck, sweeping and shoveling the black water of the Charles Basin with long stanchion-mounted oars, minting systems of vortices that fall to aft, flailing about one another, tracing out fading and flattening conic sections that Sir Isaac could probably work out in his head. The Hypothesis of Vortices is pressed with many difficulties. The sky’s a matted reticule of taut jute and spokeshaved tree-trunks. Gusts make the anchored ships start and jostle like nervous horses hearing distant guns. Irregular waves slap curiously at the lapping clinkers of their hulls, which are infested with barefoot jacks paying pitch and oakum into troublesome seams. The ships appear to glide this way and that as the ferry’s movement plays with the parallax. Enoch, who has the good fortune to be a bit taller than most of the other passengers, hands the reins to Ben and excuses his way around the ferry’s deck trying to read the names.

He knows the ship he’s looking for, though, simply by recognizing the carved Lady mounted below the bowsprit: a gray-eyed woman in a gilded helmet, braving the North Atlantic seas with a snaky shield and nipples understandably erect. Minerva hasn’t weighed anchor yet—that’s lucky—but she is heavy-laden and gives every appearance of being just about to put to sea. Men are walking aboard hugging baskets of loaves so fresh they’re steaming. Enoch turns back toward the shore to read the level of the tide from a barnacled pile, then turns the other way to check the phase and altitude of the moon. Tide will be going out soon, and Minerva will probably want to ride it. Enoch finally spies van Hoek standing on the foredeck, doing some paperwork on the top of a barrel, and through some kind of action-at-a-distance wills him to look up and notice him, down on the ferry.

Van Hoek looks his way and stiffens.

Enoch makes no outward sign, but stares him in the eye long enough to give him second thoughts about pushing for a hasty departure.

A colonist in a black hat is attempting to make friends with one of the Africans, who doesn’t speak much English—but this is no hindrance, the white man has taught himself a few words of some African tongue. The slave is very dark, and the arms of the King of Spain are branded into his left shoulder, and so he is probably Angolan. Life has been strange to him: abducted by Africans fiercer than he, chained up in a hole in Luanda, marked with a hot iron to indicate that duty had been paid on him, loaded onto a ship, and sent to a cold place full of pale men. After all of that, you’d think that nothing could possibly surprise him. But he’s astonished by whatever this Barker is telling him. The Barker’s punching at the air and becoming quite exercised, and not just because he is inarticulate. Assuming that he has been in touch with his brethren in London (and that is a very good assumption), he is probably telling the Angolan that he, and all of the other slaves, are perfectly justified in taking up arms and mounting a violent rebellion.

“Your mount is very fine. Did you bring him from Europe?”

“No, Ben. Borrowed him in New Amsterdam. New York, I mean.”

“Why’d you sail to New York if the man you seek’s in Boston?”

“The next America-bound ship from the Pool of London happened to be headed thither.”

“You’re in a terrible hurry, then!”

“I shall be in a terrible hurry to toss you over the side if you continue to draw such inferences.”

This quiets Ben, but only long enough for him to circle round and probe Enoch’s defenses from another quarter: “The owner of this horse must be a very dear friend of yours, to lend you such a mount.”

Enoch must now be a bit careful. The owner’s a gentleman of quality in New York. If Enoch claims his friendship, then proceeds to make a bloody hash of things in Boston, it could deal damage to the gentleman’s repute. “It is not so much that he is a friend. I’d never met him until I showed up at his door a few days ago.”

Ben can’t fathom it. “Then why’d he even admit you to his house? By your leave, sir, looking as you do, and armed. Why’d he lend you such a worthy stallion?”

“He let me in to his house because there was a riot underway, and I requested sanctuary.” Enoch gazes over at the Barker, then sidles closer to Ben. “Here is a wonder for you: When my ship reached New York, we were greeted by the spectacle of thousands of slaves—some Irish, the rest Angolan—running through the streets with pitchforks and firebrands. Lobsterbacks tromping after them in leapfrogging blocks, firing volleys. The white smoke of their muskets rose and mingled with the black smoke of burning warehouses to turn the sky into a blazing, spark-shot melting-pot, wondrous to look at but, as we supposed, unfit to support life. Our pilot had us stand a-loof until the tide forced his hand. We put in at a pier that seemed to be under the sway of the redcoats.

“Anyway,” Enoch continues—for his discourse is beginning to draw unwanted notice—“that’s how I got in the door. He lent me the horse because he and I are Fellows in the same Society, and I am here, in a way, to do an errand for that Society.”

“Is it a Society of Barkers, like?” asks Ben, stepping in close to whisper, and glancing at the one who’s proselytizing the slave. For by now Ben has taken note of Enoch’s various pistols and blades, and matched him with tales his folk have probably told him concerning that fell Sect during their halcyon days of Cathedral-sacking and King-killing.

“No, it is a society of philosophers,” Enoch says, before the boy’s phant’sies wax any wilder.

“Philosophers, sir!”

Enoch had supposed the boy should be disappointed. Instead he’s thrilled. So Enoch was correct: the boy’s dangerous.

“Natural Philosophers. Not, mind you, the other sort—”

“Unnatural?”

“An apt coinage. Some would say it’s the unnatural philosophers that are to blame for Protestants fighting Protestants in England and Catholics everywhere else.”

“What, then, is a Natural Philosopher?”

“One who tries to prevent his ruminations from straying, by hewing to what can be observed, and proving things, when possible, by rules of logic.” This gets him nowhere with Ben. “Rather like a Judge in a Court, who insists on facts, and scorns rumor, hearsay, and appeals to sentiment. As when your own Judges finally went up to Salem and pointed out that the people there were going crazy.”

Ben nods. Good. “What is the name of your Clubb?”

“The Royal Society of London.”

“One day I shall be a Fellow of it, and a Judge of such things.”

“I shall nominate you the moment I get back, Ben.”

“Is it a part of your code that members must lend each other horses in time of need?”

“No, but it is a rule that they must pay dues—for which there is ever a need—and this chap had not paid his dues in many a year. Sir Isaac—who is the President of the Royal Society—looks with disfavor on such. I explained to the gentleman in New York why it was a Bad Idea to land on Sir Isaac’s Shit List—by your leave, by your leave—and he was so convinced by my arguments that he lent me his best riding-horse without further suasion.”

“He’s a beauty,” Ben says, and strokes the animal’s nose. The stallion mistrusted Ben at first for being small, darting, and smelling of long-dead beasts. Now he has accepted the boy as an animated hitching-post, capable of performing a few services such as nose-scratching and fly-shooing.

The ferryman is more amused than angry when he discovers a Barker conspiring with his slave, and shoos him away. The Barker identifies Enoch as fresh meat, and begins trying to catch his eye. Enoch moves away from him and pretends to study the approaching shore. The ferry is maneuvering around a raft of immense logs drifting out of the estuary, each marked with the King’s Arrow—going to build ships for the Navy.

Inland of Charlestown spreads a loose agglomeration of hamlets conjoined by a network of cowpaths. The largest cowpath goes all the way to Newtowne, where Harvard College is. But most of it just looks like a forest, smoking without being burned, spattered with muffled whacks of axes and hammers. Occasional musket shots boom in the distance and are echoed from hamlet to hamlet—some kind of system for relaying information across the countryside. Enoch wonders how he’s ever going to find Daniel in all that.

He moves toward a talkative group that has formed on the center of the ferry’s deck, allowing the less erudite (for these must be Harvard men) to break the wind for them. It is a mix of pompous sots and peering quick-faced men basting their sentences together with bad Latin. Some of them have a dour Puritan look about them, others are dressed in something closer to last year’s London mode. A pear-shaped, red-nosed man in a tall gray wig seems to be the Don of this jury-rigged College. Enoch catches this one’s eye and lets him see that he’s bearing a sword. This is not a threat, but an assertion of status.

“A gentleman traveler from abroad joins us. Welcome, sir, to our humble Colony!”

Enoch goes through the requisite polite movements and utterances. They show a great deal of interest in him, a sure sign that not much new and interesting is going on at Harvard College. But the place is only some three-quarters of a century old, so how much can really be happening there? They want to know if he’s from a Germanic land; he says not really. They guess that he has come on some Alchemical errand, which is an excellent guess, but wrong. When it is polite to do so, he tells them the name of the man he has come to see.

He’s never heard such scoffing. They are, to a man, pained that a gentleman should’ve crossed the North Atlantic, and now the Charles Basin, only to spoil the journey by meeting with that fellow.

“I know him not,” Enoch lies.

“Then let us prepare you, sir!” one of them says. “Daniel Waterhouse is a man advanced in years, but the years have been less kind to him than you.”

“He is correctly addressed as Dr. Waterhouse, is he not?”

Silence ruined by stifled gurgles.

“I do not presume to correct any man,” Enoch says, “only to be sure that I give no offense when I encounter the fellow in person.”

“Indeed, he is accounted a Doctor,” says the pear-shaped Don, “but—”

“Of what?” someone asks.

“Gears,” someone suggests, to great hilarity.

“Nay, nay!” says the Don, shouting them down, in a show of false goodwill. “For all of his gears are to no purpose without a primum mobile, a source of motive power—”

“The Franklin boy!” and all turn to look at Ben.

“Today it might be young Ben, tomorrow perhaps little Godfrey Waterhouse will step into Ben’s shoes. Later perhaps a rodent on a tread-mill. But in any case, the vis viva is conducted into Dr. Waterhouse’s gear-boxes by—what? Anyone?” The Don cups a hand to an ear Socratically.

“Shafts?” someone guesses.

“Cranks!” another shouts.

“Ah, excellent! Our colleague Waterhouse is, then, a Doctor of—what?”

“Cranks!” says the entire College in unison.

“And so devoted is our Doctor of Cranks to his work that he quite sacrifices himself,” says the Don admiringly. “Going many days uncovered—”

“Shaking the gear-filings from his sleeves when he sits down to break bread—”

“Better than pepper—”

“And cheafer!”

“Are you, perhaps, coming to join his Institute, then?”

“Or foreclose on’t?” Too hilarious.

“I have heard of his Institute, but know little of it,” Enoch Root says. He looks over at Ben, who has gone red in the neck and ears, and turned his back on all to nuzzle the horse.

“Many learned scholars are in the same state of ignorance—be not ashamed.”

“Since he came to America, Dr. Waterhouse has been infected with the local influenza, whose chief symptom is causing men to found new projects and endeavours, rather than going to the trouble of remedying the old ones.”

“He’s not entirely satisfied with Harvard College then!?” Enoch says wonderingly.

“Oh, no! He has founded—”

“—and personally endowed—”

“—and laid the cornerstone—”

“—corner-log, if truth be told—”

“—of—what does he call it?”

“The Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts.”

“Where might I find Dr. Waterhouse’s Institute?” Enoch inquires.

“Midway from Charlestown to Harvard. Follow the sound of grinding gears ‘til you come to America’s smallest and smokiest dwelling—”

“Sir, you are a learned and clear-minded gentleman,” says the Don. “If your errand has aught to do with Philosophy, then is not Harvard College a more fitting destination?”

“Mr. Root is a Natural Philosopher of note, sir!” blurts Ben, only as a way to prevent himself bursting into tears. The way he says it makes it clear he thinks the Harvard men are of the Unnatural type. “He is a Fellow of the Royal Society!”

Oh, dear.

The Don steps forward and hunches his shoulders like a conspirator. “I beg your pardon, sir, I did not know.”

“It is quite all right, really.”

“Dr. Waterhouse, you must be warned, has fallen quite under the spell of Herr Leibniz—”

“—him that stole the calculus from Sir Isaac—” someone footnotes.

“—yes, and, like Leibniz, is infected with Metaphysickal thinking—”

“—a throwback to the Scholastics, sir—notwithstanding Sir Isaac’s having exploded the old ways through very clear demonstrations—”

“—and labors now, like a possessed man, on a Mill—designed after Leibniz’s principles—that he imagines will discover new truths through computation!”

“Perhaps our visitor has come to exorcise him of Leibniz’s daemons!” some very drunk fellow hypothesizes.

Enoch clears his throat irritably, hacking loose a small accumulation of yellow bile—the humour of anger and ill-temper. He says, “It does Dr. Leibniz an injustice to call him a mere metaphysician.”

This challenge produces momentary silence, followed by tremendous excitement and gaiety. The Don smiles thinly and squares off. “I know of a small tavern on Harvard Square, a suitable venue in which I could disabuse the gentleman of any misconceptions—”

The offer to sit down in front of a crock of beer and edify these wags is dangerously tempting. But the Charlestown waterfront is drawing near, the slaves already shortening their strokes; Minerva is fairly straining at her hawsers in eagerness to catch the tide, and he must have results. He’d rather get this done discreetly. But that is hopeless now that Ben has unmasked him. More important is to get it done quickly.

Besides, Enoch has lost his temper.

He draws a folded and sealed Letter from his breast pocket and, for lack of a better term, brandishes it.

The Letter is borrowed, scrutinized—one side is inscribed “Doktor Waterhouse—Newtowne—Massachusetts”—and flipped over. Monocles are quarried from velvet-lined pockets for the Examination of the Seal: a lump of red wax the size of Ben’s fist. Lips move and strange mutterings occur as parched throats attempt German.

All of the Professors seem to realize it at once. They jump back as if the letter were a specimen of white phosphorus that had suddenly burst into flame. The Don is left holding it. He extends it towards Enoch the Red with a certain desperate pleading look. Enoch punishes him by being slow to accept the burden.

“Bitte, mein herr…”

“English is perfectly sufficient,” Enoch says. “Preferable, in fact.”

At the fringes of the robed and hooded mob, certain nearsighted faculty members are frantic with indignation over not having been able to read the seal. Their colleagues are muttering to them words like “Hanover” and “Ansbach.”

A man removes his hat and bows to Enoch. Then another.

They have not even set foot in Charlestown before the dons have begun to make a commotion. Porters and would-be passengers stare quizzically at the approaching ferry as they are assailed with shouts of “Make way!” and broad waving motions. The ferry’s become a floating stage packed with bad actors. Enoch wonders whether any of these men really supposes that word of their diligence will actually make its way back to court in Hanover, and be heard by their future Queen. It is ghoulish—they are behaving as if Queen Anne were already dead and buried, and the Hanovers on the throne.

“Sir, if you’d only told me ‘twas Daniel Waterhouse you sought, I’d have taken you to him without delay—and without all of this bother.”

“I erred by not confiding in you, Ben,” Enoch says.

Indeed. In retrospect, it’s obvious that in such a small town, Daniel would have noticed a lad like Ben, or Ben would have been drawn to Daniel, or both. “Do you know the way?”

“Of course!”

“Mount up,” Enoch commands, and nods at the horse. Ben needn’t be asked twice. He’s up like a spider. Enoch follows as soon as dignity and inertia will allow. They share the saddle, Ben on Enoch’s lap with his legs thrust back and wedged between Enoch’s knees and the horse’s rib-cage. The horse has, overall, taken a dim view of the Ferry and the Faculty, and bangs across the plank as soon as it has been thrown down. They’re pursued through the streets of Charlestown by some of the more nimble Doctors. But Charlestown doesn’t have that many streets and so the chase is brief. Then they break out into the mephitic bog on its western flank. It puts Enoch strongly in mind of another swampy, dirty, miasma-ridden burg full of savants: Cambridge, England.

“INTO YONDER COPPICE, then ford the creek,” Ben suggests. “We shall lose the Professors, and perhaps find Godfrey. When we were on the ferry, I spied him going thither with a pail.”

“Is Godfrey the son of Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Indeed, sir. Two years younger than I.”

“Would his middle name, perchance, be William?”

“How’d you know that, Mr. Root?”

“He is very likely named after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”

“A friend of yours and Sir Isaac’s?”

“Of mine, yes. Of Sir Isaac’s, no—and therein lies a tale too long to tell now.”

“Would it fill a book?”

“In truth, ‘twould fill several—and it is not even finished yet.”

“When shall it be finished?”

“At times, I fear never. But you and I shall hurry it to its final act to-day, Ben. How much farther to the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”

Ben shrugs. “It is halfway between Charlestown and Harvard. But close to the river. More than a mile. Perhaps less than two.”

The horse is disinclined to enter the coppice, so Ben tumbles off and goes in there afoot to flush out little Godfrey. Enoch finds a place to ford the creek that runs through it, and works his way round to the other side of the little wood to find Ben engaged in an apple-fight with a smaller, paler lad.

Enoch dismounts and brokers a peace, then hurries the boys on by offering them a ride on the horse. Enoch walks ahead, leading it; but soon enough the horse divines that they are bound for a timber building in the distance. For it is the only building, and a faint path leads to it. Thenceforth Enoch need only walk alongside, and feed him the odd apple.

“The sight of you two lads scuffling over apples in this bleak gusty place full of Puritans puts me in mind of something remarkable I saw a long time ago.”

“Where?” asks Godfrey.

“Grantham, Lincolnshire. Which is part of England.”

“How long ago, to be exact?” Ben demands, taking the empiricist bit in his teeth.

“That is a harder question than it sounds, for the way I remember such things is most disorderly.”

“Why were you journeying to that bleak place?” asks Godfrey.

“To stop being pestered. In Grantham lived an apothecary, name of Clarke, an indefatigable pesterer.”

“Then why’d you go to him?”

“He’d been pestering me with letters, wanting me to deliver certain necessaries of his trade. He’d been doing it for years—ever since sending letters had become possible again.”

“What made it possible?”

“In my neck of the woods—for I was living in a town in Saxony, called Leipzig—the peace of Westphalia did.”

“1648!” Ben says donnishly to the younger boy. “The end of the Thirty Years’ War.”

“At his end,” Enoch continues, “it was the removal of the King’s head from the rest of the King, which settled the Civil War and brought a kind of peace to England.”

“1649,” Godfrey murmurs before Ben can get it out. Enoch wonders whether Daniel has been so indiscreet as to regale his son with decapitation yarns.

“If Mr. Clarke had been pestering you for years, then you must have gone to Grantham in the middle of the 1650s,” Ben says.

“How can you be that old?” Godfrey asks.

“Ask your father,” Enoch returns. “I am still endeavouring to answer the question of when exactly. Ben is correct. I couldn’t have been so rash as to make the attempt before, let us say, 1652; for, regicide notwithstanding, the Civil War did not really wind up for another couple of years. Cromwell smashed the Royalists for the umpteenth and final time at Worcester. Charles the Second ran off to Paris with as many of his noble supporters as had not been slain yet. Come to think of it, I saw him, and them, at Paris.”

“Why Paris? That were a dreadful way to get from Leipzig to Lincolnshire!” says Ben.

“Your geography is stronger than your history. What do you phant’sy would be a good way to make that journey?”

“Through the Dutch Republic, of course.”

“And indeed I did stop there, to look in on a Mr. Huygens in the Hague. But I did not sail from any Dutch port.”

“Why not? The Dutch are ever so much better at sailing than the French!”

“But what was the first thing that Cromwell did after winning the Civil War?”

“Granted all men, even Jews, the right to worship wheresoever they pleased,” says Godfrey, as if reciting a catechism.

“Well, naturally—that was the whole point, wasn’t it? But other than that—?”

“Killed a great many Irishmen,” Ben tries.

“True, too true—but it’s not the answer I was looking for. The answer is: the Navigation Act. And a sea-war against the Dutch. So you see, Ben, journeying via Paris might have been roundabout, but it was infinitely safer. Besides, people in Paris had been pestering me, too, and they had more money than Mr. Clarke. So Mr. Clarke had to get in line, as they say in New York.”

“Why were so many pestering you?” asks Godfrey.

“Rich Tories, no less!” adds Ben.

“We did not begin calling such people Tories until a good bit later,” Enoch corrects him. “But your question is apt: what did I have in Leipzig that was wanted so badly, alike by an apothecary in Grantham and a lot of Cavalier courtiers sitting in Paris waiting for Cromwell to grow old and die of natural causes?”

“Something to do with the Royal Society?” guesses Ben.

“Shrewd try. Very close to the mark. But this was in the days before the Royal Society, indeed before Natural Philosophy as we know it. Oh, there were a few—Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes—who’d seen the light, and had done all that they could to get everyone else to attend to it. But in those days, most of the chaps who were curious about how the world worked were captivated by a rather different approach called Alchemy.”

“My daddy hates Alchemists!” Godfrey announces—very proud of his daddy.

“I believe I know why. But this is 1713. Rather a lot has changed. In the æra I am speaking of, it was Alchemy, or nothing. I knew a lot of Alchemists. I peddled them the stuff they needed. Some of those English cavaliers had dabbled in the Art. It was the gentlemanly thing to do. Even the King-in-Exile had a laboratory. After Cromwell had beaten them like kettledrums and sent them packing to France, they found themselves with nothing to pass the years except—” and here, if he’d been telling the story to adults, Enoch would’ve listed a few of the ways they had spent their time.

“Except what, Mr. Root?”

“Studying the hidden laws of God’s creation. Some of them—in particular John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey—fell in with Monsieur LeFebure, who was the apothecary to the French Court. They spent rather a lot of time on Alchemy.”

“But wasn’t it all stupid nonsense, rot, gibberish, and criminally fraudulent nincompoopery?”

“Godfrey, you are living proof that the apple does not fall far from the tree. Who am I to dispute such matters with your father? Yes. ‘Twas all rubbish.”

“Then why’d you go to Paris?”

“Partly, if truth be told, I wished to see the coronation of the French King.”

“Which one?” asks Godfrey.

“The same one as now!” says Ben, outraged that they are having to waste their time on such questions.

“The big one,” Enoch says, “the King. Louis the Fourteenth. His formal coronation was in 1654. They anointed him with angel-balm, a thousand years old.”

“Eeeyew, it must have stunk to high heaven!”

“Hard to say, in France.”

“Where would they’ve gotten such a thing?”

“Never mind. I am drawing closer to answering the question of when. But that was not my whole reason. Really it was that something was happening. Huygens—a brilliant youth, of a great family in the Hague—was at work on a pendulum-clock there that was astonishing. Of course, pendulums were an old idea—but he did something simple and beautiful that fixed them so that they would actually tell time! I saw a prototype, ticking away there in that magnificent house, where the afternoon light streamed in off the Plein—that’s a sort of square hard by the palace of the Dutch Court. Then down to Paris, where Comstock and Anglesey were toiling away on—you’re correct—stupid nonsense. They truly wanted to learn. But they wanted the brilliance of a Huygens, the audacity to invent a whole new discipline. Alchemy was the only way they knew of.”

“How’d you cross over to England if there was a sea-war on?”

“French salt-smugglers,” says Enoch, as if this were self-evident. “Now, many an English gentleman had made up his mind that staying in London and dabbling with Alchemy was safer than riding ‘round the island making war against Cromwell and his New Model Army. So I’d no difficulty lightening my load, and stuffing my purse, in London. Then I nipped up to Oxford, meaning only to pay a call on John Wilkins and pick up some copies of Cryptonomicon.”

“What is that?” Ben wants to know.

“A very queer old book, dreadfully thick, and full of nonsense,” says Godfrey. “Papa uses it to keep the door from blowing shut.”

“It is a compendium of secret codes and cyphers that this chap Wilkins had written some years earlier,” says Enoch. “In those days, he was Warden of Wadham College, which is part of the University of Oxford. When I arrived, he was steeling himself to make the ultimate sacrifice in the name of Natural Philosophy.”

“He was beheaded?” Ben asks

Godfrey: “Tortured?”

Ben: “Mutilated, like?”

“No: he married Cromwell’s sister.”

“But I thought you said there was no Natural Philosophy in those days,” Godfrey complains.

“There was—once a week, in John Wilkins’s chambers at Wad-ham College,” says Enoch. “For that is where the Experimental Philosophical Clubb met. Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and others you ought to have heard of. By the time I got there, they’d run out of space and moved to an apothecary’s shop—a less flammable environment. It was that apothecary, come to think of it, who exhorted me to make the journey north and pay a call on Mr. Clarke in Grantham.”

“Have we settled on a year yet?”

“I’ll settle on one now, Ben. By the time I reached Oxford, that pendulum-clock I’d seen on the table of Huygens’s house in the Hague had been perfected, and set into motion. The first clock worthy of the name. Galileo had timed his experiments by counting his pulse or listening to musicians; but after Huygens we used clocks, which—according to some—told absolute time, fixed and invariant. God’s time. Huygens published a book about it later; but the clock first began to tick, and the Time of Natural Philosophy began, in the year of Our Lord—”

1655

For between true science and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

IN EVERY KINGDOM, empire, principality, archbishopric, duchy, and electorate Enoch had ever visited, the penalty for transmuting base metals into gold—or trying to—or, in some places, even thinking about it—was death. This did not worry him especially. It was only one of a thousand excuses that rulers kept handy to kill inconvenient persons, and to carry it off in a way that made them look good. For example, if you were in Frankfurt-on-Main, where the Archbishop-Elector von Schönborn and his minister and sidekick Boyneburg were both avid practitioners of the Art, you were probably safe.

Cromwell’s England was another matter. Since the Puritans had killed the king and taken the place over, Enoch didn’t go around that Commonwealth (as they styled it now) in a pointy hat with stars and moons. Not that Enoch the Red had ever been that kind of alchemist anyway. The old stars-and-moons act was a good way to farm the unduly trusting. But the need to raise money in the first place seemed to call into question one’s own ability to turn lead into gold.

Enoch had made himself something of an expert on longevity. It was only a couple of decades since a Dr. John Lambe had been killed by the mobile in the streets of London. Lambe was a self-styled sorcerer with high connections at Court. The Mobb had convinced themselves that Lambe had conjured up a recent thunderstorm and tornado that had scraped the dirt from graves of some chaps who had perished in the last round of Plague. Not wishing to end up in Lambe’s position, Enoch had tried to develop the knack of edging around people’s perceptions like one of those dreams that does not set itself firmly in memory, and is flushed into oblivion by the first thoughts and sensations of the day.

He’d stayed a week or two in Wilkins’s chambers, and attended meetings of the Experimental Philosophical Clubb. This had been a revelation to him, for during the Civil War, practically nothing had been heard out of England. The savants of Leipzig, Paris, and Amsterdam had begun to think of it as a rock in the high Atlantic, overrun by heavily armed preachers.

Gazing out Wilkins’s windows, studying the northbound traffic, Enoch had been surprised by the number of private traders: adventuresome merchants, taking advantage of the cessation of the Civil War to travel into the country and deal with farmers in the country, buying their produce for less than what it would bring in a city market. They mostly had a Puritan look about them, and Enoch did not especially want to ride in their company. So he’d waited for a full moon and a cloudless night and ridden up to Grantham in the night, arriving before daybreak.

THE FRONT OF CLARKE’S HOUSE was tidy, which told Enoch that Mrs. Clarke was still alive. He led his horse round into the stable-yard. Scattered about were cracked mortars and crucibles, stained yellow and vermilion and silver. A columnar furnace, smoke-stained, reigned over coal-piles. It was littered with rinds of hardened dross raked off the tops of crucibles—the fœces of certain alchemical processes, mingled on this ground with the softer excrement of horses and geese.

Clarke backed out his side-door embracing a brimming chamber-pot.

“Save it up,” Enoch said, his voice croaky from not having been used in a day or two, “you can extract much that’s interesting from urine.”

The apothecary startled, and upon recognizing Enoch he nearly dropped the pot, then caught it, then wished he had dropped it, since these evolutions had set up a complex and dangerous sloshing that must be countervailed by gliding about in a bent-knee gait, melting foot-shaped holes in the frost on the grass, and, as a last resort, tilting the pot when whitecaps were observed. The roosters of Grantham, Lincolnshire, who had slept through Enoch’s arrival, came awake and began to celebrate Clarke’s performance.

The sun had been rolling along the horizon for hours, like a fat waterfowl making its takeoff run. Well before full daylight, Enoch was inside the apothecary’s shop, brewing up a potion from boiled water and an exotic Eastern herb. “Take an amount that will fill the cup of your palm, and throw it in—”

“The water turns brown already!”

“—remove it from the fire or it will be intolerably bitter. I’ll require a strainer.”

“Do you mean to suggest I’m expected to taste it?”

“Not just taste but drink. Don’t look so condemned. I’ve done it for months with no effect.”

“Other than addiction, t’would seem.”

“You are too suspicious. The Mahrattas drink it to the exclusion of all else.”

“So I’m right about the addiction!”

“It is nothing more than a mild stimulant.”

“Mmm…not all that bad,” Clarke said later, sipping cautiously. “What ailments does it cure?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Ah. That’s different, then…what’s it called?”

“Cha, or chai, or the, or tay. I know a Dutch merchant who has several tons of it sitting in a warehouse in Amsterdam…”

Clarke chuckled. “Oh, no, Enoch, I’ll not be drawn into some foreign trading scheme. This tay is inoffensive enough, but I don’t think Englishmen will ever take to anything so outlandish.”

“Very well, then—we’ll speak of other commodities.” And, setting down his tay-cup, Enoch reached into his saddle-bags and brought out bags of yellow sulfur he’d collected from a burning mountain in Italy, finger-sized ingots of antimony, heavy flasks of quicksilver, tiny clay crucibles and melting-pots, retorts, spirit-burners, and books with woodcuts showing the design of diverse furnaces. He set them up on the deal tables and counters of the apothecary shop, saying a few words about each one. Clarke stood to one side with his fingers laced together, partly for warmth, and partly just to contain himself from lunging toward the goods. Years had gone by, a Civil War had been prosecuted, and a King’s head had rolled in Charing Cross since Clarke had touched some of these items. He imagined that the Continental adepts had been penetrating the innermost secrets of God’s creation the entire time. But Enoch knew that the alchemists of Europe were men just like Clarke—hoping, and dreading, that Enoch would return with the news that some English savant, working in isolation, had found the trick of refining, from the base, dark, cold, essentially fœcal matter of which the World was made, the Philosophick Mercury—the pure living essence of God’s power and presence in the world—the key to the transmutation of metals, the attainment of immortal life and perfect wisdom.

Enoch was less a merchant than a messenger. The sulfur and antimony he brought as favors. He accepted money in order to pay for his expenses. The important cargo was in his mind. He and Clarke talked for hours.

Sleepy thumping, footfalls, and piping voices sounded from the attic. The staircase boomed and groaned like a ship in a squall. A maid lit a fire and cooked porridge. Mrs. Clarke roused herself and served it to children—too many of them. “Has it been that long?” Enoch asked, listening to their chatter from the next room, trying to tally the voices.

Clarke said, “They’re not ours.”

“Boarders?”

“Some of the local yeomen send their young ones to my brother’s school. We have room upstairs, and my wife is fond of children.”

“Are you?”

“Some more than others.”

The young boarders dispatched their porridge and mobbed the exit. Enoch drifted over to a window: a lattice of hand-sized, diamond-shaped panes, each pane greenish, warped, and bubbled. Each pane was a prism, so the sun showered the room with rainbows. The children showed as pink mottles, sliding and leaping from one pane to another, sometimes breaking up and recombining like beads of mercury on a tabletop. But this was simply an exaggeration of how children normally looked to Enoch.

One of them, slight and fair-haired, stopped squarely before the window and turned to peer through it. He must have had more acute senses than the others, because he knew that Mr. Clarke had a visitor this morning. Perhaps he’d heard the low murmur of their conversation, or detected an unfamiliar whinny from the stable. Perhaps he was an insomniac who had been studying Enoch through a chink in the wall as Enoch had strolled around the stable-yard before dawn. The boy cupped his hands around his face to block out peripheral sunlight. It seemed that those hands were splashed with colors. From one of them dangled some kind of little project, a toy or weapon made of string.

Then another boy called to him and he spun about, too eagerly, and darted away like a sparrow.

“I’d best be going,” Enoch said, not sure why. “Our brethren in Cambridge must know by now that I’ve been in Oxford—they’ll be frantic.” With steely politeness he turned aside Clarke’s amiable delaying-tactics, declining the offer of porridge, postponing the suggestion that they pray together, insisting that he really needed no rest until he reached Cambridge.

His horse had had only a few hours to feed and doze. Enoch had borrowed it from Wilkins with the implicit promise to treat it kindly, and so rather than mounting into the saddle he led it by the reins down Grantham’s high street and in the direction of the school, chatting to it.

He caught sight of the boarders soon enough. They had found stones that needed kicking, dogs that needed fellowship, and a few late apples, still dangling from tree-branches. Enoch lingered in the long shadow of a stone wall and watched the apple project. Some planning had gone into it—a whispered conference between bunks last night. One of the boys had clambered up into the tree and was shinnying out onto the limb in question. It was too slender to bear his weight, but he phant’sied he could bend it low enough to bring it within the tallest boy’s jumping-range.

The little fair-haired boy adored the tall boy’s fruitless jumping. But he was working on his own project, the same one Enoch had glimpsed through the window: a stone on the end of a string. Not an easy thing to make. He whirled the stone around and flung it upwards. It whipped around the end of the tree-branch. By pulling it down he was able to bring the apple within easy reach. The tall boy stood aside grudgingly, but the fair boy kept both hands on that string, and insisted that the tall one have it as a present. Enoch almost groaned aloud when he saw the infatuation on the little boy’s face.

The tall boy’s face was less pleasant to look at. He hungered for the apple but suspected a trick. Finally he lashed out and snatched it. Finding the prize in his hand, he looked searchingly at the fair boy, trying to understand his motives, and became unsettled and sullen. He took a bite of the apple as the other watched with almost physical satisfaction. The boy who’d shinnied out onto the tree-limb had come down, and now managed to tease the string off the branch. He examined the way it was tied to the stone and decided that suspicion was the safest course. “A pretty lace-maker you are!” he piped. But the fair-haired boy had eyes only for his beloved.

Then the tall boy spat onto the ground, and tossed the rest of the apple over a fence into a yard where a couple of pigs fought over it.

Now it became unbearable for a while, and made Enoch wish he had never followed them.

The two stupid boys dogged the other one down the road, wide eyes traveling up and down his body, seeing him now for the first time—seeing a little of what Enoch saw. Enoch heard snatches of their taunts—“What’s on your hands? What’d you say? Paint!? For what? Pretty pictures? What’d you say? For furniture? I haven’t seen any furniture. Oh, doll furniture!?”

Being a sooty empiric, what was important to Enoch was not these tedious details of specifically how the boy’s heart got broken. He went to the apple tree to have a look at the boy’s handiwork.

The boy had imprisoned the stone in a twine net: two sets of helices, one climbing clockwise, the other anti-clockwise, intersecting each other in a pattern of diamonds, just like the lead net that held Clarke’s window together. Enoch didn’t suppose that this was a coincidence. The work was irregular at the start, but by the time he’d completed the first row of knots the boy had learned to take into account the length of twine spent in making the knots themselves, and by the time he reached the end, it was as regular as the precession of the zodiac.

Enoch then walked briskly to the school and arrived in time to watch the inevitable fight. The fair boy was red-eyed and had porridge-vomit on his chin—it was safe to assume he’d been punched in the stomach. Another schoolboy—there was one in every school—seemed to have appointed himself master of ceremonies, and was goading them to action, paying most attention to the smaller boy, the injured party and presumed loser-to-be of the fight. To the surprise and delight of the community of young scholars, the smaller boy stepped forward and raised his fists.

Enoch approved, so far. Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

Then combat was joined. Not many punches were thrown. The small boy did something clever, down around the tall boy’s knees, that knocked him back on his arse. Almost immediately the little boy’s knee was in the other’s groin, then in the pit of his stomach, and then on his throat. And then, suddenly, the tall boy was struggling to get up—but only because the fair-haired boy was trying to rip both of his ears off. Like a farmer dragging an ox by his nosering, the smaller boy led the bigger one over to the nearest stone wall, which happened to be that of Grantham’s huge, ancient church, and then began to rub his prisoner’s face against it as though trying to erase it from the skull.

Until this point the other boys had been jubilant. Even Enoch had found the early stages of the victory stirring in a way. But as this torture went on, the boys’ faces went slack. Many of them turned and ran away. The fair-haired boy had flown into a state of something like ecstasy—groping and flailing like a man nearing erotic climax, his body an insufficient vehicle for his passions, a dead weight impeding the flowering of the spirit. Finally an adult man—Clarke’s brother?—banged out through a door and stormed across the yard between school and church in the tottering gait of a man unaccustomed to having to move quickly, carrying a cane but not touching the ground with it. He was so angry that he did not utter a word, or try to separate the boys, but simply began to cut air with the cane, like a blind man fending off a bear, as he got close. Soon enough he maneuvered within range of the fair boy and planted his feet and bent to his work, the cane producing memorable whorling noises cut off by pungent whacks. A few brown-nosers now considered it safe to approach. Two of them dragged the fair boy off of his victim, who contracted into a fetal position at the base of the church wall, hands open like the covers of a book to enfold his wrecked face. The schoolmaster adjusted his azimuth as the target moved, like a telescope tracking a comet, but none of his blows seemed to have been actually felt by the fair boy yet—he wore a look of steadfast, righteous triumph, much like Enoch supposed Cromwell must have shown as he beheld the butchering of the Irish at Drogheda.

The boy was dragged inside for higher punishments. Enoch rode back to Clarke’s apothecary shop, reining in a silly urge to gallop through the town like a Cavalier.

Clarke was sipping tay and gnawing biscuits, already several pages into a new alchemical treatise, moving crumb-spattered lips as he solved the Latin.

“Who is he?” Enoch demanded, coming in the door.

Clarke elected to play innocent. Enoch crossed the room and found the stairs. He didn’t really care about the name anyway. It would just be another English name.

The upstairs was all one odd-shaped room with low adze-marked rafters and rough plaster walls that had once been whitewashed. Enoch hadn’t visited many children’s rooms, but to him it seemed like a den of thieves hastily abandoned and stumbled upon by a plodding constable, filled with evidence of many peculiar, ingenious, frequently unwise plots and machinations suddenly cut short. He stopped in the doorway and steadied himself. Like a good empiric, he had to see all and alter nothing.

The walls were marked with what his eyes first took to be the grooves left behind by a careless plasterer’s trowel, but as his pupils dilated, he understood that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke’s boarders had been drawing on the walls, apparently with bits of charcoal fetched out of the grate. It was plain to see which pictures had been drawn by whom. Most were caricatures learned by rote from slightly older children. Others—generally closer to the floor—were maps of insight, manifestoes of intelligence, always precise, sometimes beautiful. Enoch had been right in supposing that the boy had excellent senses. Things that others did not see at all, or chose not to register out of some kind of mental obstinacy, this boy took in avidly.

There were four tiny beds. The litter of toys on the floor was generally boyish, but over by one bed there was a tendency toward ribbons and frills. Clarke had mentioned one of the boarders was a girl. There was a dollhouse and a clan of rag dolls in diverse phases of ontogeny. Here there’d been a meeting of interests. There was doll furniture ingeniously made by the same regular mind and clever hands that had woven the net round the stone. The boy had made stalks of grass into rattan tables, and willow twigs into rocking-chairs. The alchemist in him had been at work copying recipes from that old corrupter of curious youths, Bates’s The Mysteries of Nature & Art, extracting pigments from plants and formulating paints.

He had tried to draw sketches of the other boys while they were sleeping—the only time they could be relied on to hold still and not behave abominably. He did not yet have the skill to make a regular portrait, but from time to time the Muse would take hold of his hand, and in a fortunate sweep of the arm he’d capture something beautiful in the curve of a jawbone or an eyelash.

There were broken and dismantled parts of machines that Enoch did not understand. Later, though, perusing the notebook where the boy had been copying out recipes, Enoch found sketches of the hearts of rats and birds that the boy had apparently dissected. Then the little machines made sense. For what was the heart but the model for the perpetual motion machine? And what was the perpetual motion machine but Man’s attempt to make a thing that would do what the heart did? To harness the heart’s occult power and bend it to use.

The apothecary had joined him in the room. Clarke looked nervous. “You’re up to something clever, aren’t you?” Enoch said.

“By that, do you mean—”

“He came your way by chance?”

“Not precisely. His mother knows my wife. I had seen the boy.”

“And seen that he had promise—as how could you not.”

“He lacks a father. I made a recommendation to the mother. She is steady. Intermittently decent. Quasi-literate…”

“But too thick to know what she has begotten?”

“Oh my, yes.”

“So you took the boy under your wing—and if he’s shown some interest in the Art you have not discouraged it.”

“Of course not! He could be the one, Enoch.”

“He’s not the one,” Enoch said. “Not the one you are thinking of. Oh, he will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.”

“Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?”

It made his head ache. How was he to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? “Something is happening.”

Clarke pursed his lips and waited for something a little more specific.

“Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers. Something is happening now—the mercury is rising in the ground, like water climbing up the bore of a well.”

Enoch couldn’t get Oxford out of his mind—Hooke and Wren and Boyle, all exchanging thoughts so quickly that flames practically leaped between them. He decided to try another tack. “There’s a boy in Leipzig like this one. Father died recently, leaving him nothing except a vast library. The boy began reading those books. Only six years old.”

“It’s not unheard-of for six-year-olds to read.”

“German, Latin, and Greek?”

“With proper instruction—”

“That’s just it. The boy’s teachers prevailed on the mother to lock the child out of the library. I got wind of it. Talked to the mother, and secured a promise from her that little Gottfried would be allowed free run of the books. He taught himself Latin and Greek in the space of a year.”

Clarke shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps little Gottfried is the one.”

Enoch then should’ve known it was hopeless, but he tried again: “We are empiricists—we scorn the Scholastic way of memorizing old books and rejecting what is new—and that is good. But in pinning our hopes on the Philosophick Mercury we have decided in advance what it is that we seek to discover, and that is never right.”

This merely made Clarke nervous. Enoch tried yet another tack: “I have in my saddlebags a copy of Principia Philosophica, the last thing Descartes wrote before he died. Dedicated to young Elizabeth, the Winter Queen’s daughter…”

Clarke was straining to look receptive, like a dutiful university student still intoxicated from last night’s recreations at the tavern. Enoch remembered the stone on the string, and decided to aim for something more concrete. “Huygens has made a clock that is regulated by a pendulum.”

“Huygens?”

“A young Dutch savant. Not an alchemist.”

“Oh!”

“He has worked out a way to make a pendulum that will always go back and forth in the same amount of time. By connecting it to the internal workings of a clock, he has wrought a perfectly regular time-piece. Its ticks divide infinity, as calipers step out leagues on a map. With these two—clock and calipers—we can measure both extent and duration. And this, combined with the new method of analysis of Descartes, gives us a way to describe Creation and perhaps to predict the future.”

“Ah, I see!” Clarke said. “So this Huygens—he is some kind of astrologer?”

“No, no, no! He is neither astrologer nor alchemist. He is something new. More like him will follow. Wilkins, down in Oxford, is trying to bring them together. Their achievements may exceed those of alchemists.” If they did not, Enoch thought, he’d be chagrined. “I am suggesting to you that this little boy may turn out to be another one like Huygens.”

“You want me to steer him away from the Art?” Clarke exclaimed.

“Not if he shows interest. But beyond that do not steer him at all—let him pursue his own conclusions.” Enoch looked at the faces and diagrams on the wall, noting some rather good perspective work. “And see to it that mathematics is brought to his attention.”

“I do not think that he has the temperament to be a mere computer,” Clarke warned. “Sitting at his pages day after day, drudging out tables of logarithms, cube roots, cosines—”

“Thanks to Descartes, there are other uses for mathematics now,” Enoch said. “Tell your brother to show the boy Euclid and let him find his own way.”

THE CONVERSATION MIGHT NOT HAVE gone precisely this way. Enoch had the same way with his memories as a ship’s master with his rigging—a compulsion to tighten what was slack, mend what was frayed, caulk what leaked, and stow, or throw overboard, what was to no purpose. So the conversation with Clarke might have wandered into quite a few more blind alleys than he remembered. A great deal of time was probably spent on politeness. Certainly it took up most of that short autumn day. Because Enoch didn’t ride out of Grantham until late. He passed by the school one more time on his way down towards Cambridge. All the boys had gone home by that hour save one, who’d been made to stay behind and, as punishment, scrub and scrape his own name off the various windowsills and chair-backs where he’d inscribed it. These infractions had probably been noticed by Clarke’s brother, who had saved them up for the day when the child would need particular discipline.

The sun, already low at mid-afternoon, was streaming into the open windows. Enoch drew up along the northwest side of the school so that anyone who looked back at him would see only a long hooded shadow, and watched the boy work for a while. The sun was crimson in the boy’s face, which was ruddy to begin with from his exertions with the scrub-brush. Far from being reluctant, he seemed enthusiastic about the job of erasing all traces of himself from the school—as if the tumbledown place was unworthy to bear his mark. One windowsill after another came under him and was wiped clean of the name I. NEWTON.

Newtowne, Massachusetts Bay Colony

OCTOBER 12, 1713

How are these Colonies of the English increas’d and improv’d, even to such a Degree, that some have suggested, tho’ not for Want of Ignorance, a Danger of their revolting from the English Government, and setting up an Independency of Power for themselves. It is true, the Notion is absurd, and without Foundation, but serves to confirm what I have said above of the real Encrease of those Colonies, and of the flourishing Condition of the Commerce carried on there.

—DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

SOMETIMES IT SEEMS AS IF everyone’s immigrating to America—sailing-ships on the North Atlantic as thick as watermen’s boats on the Thames, more or less wearing ruts in the sea-lanes—and so, in an idle way, Enoch supposes that his appearance on the threshold of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts will come as no surprise at all to its founder. But Daniel Waterhouse nearly swallows his teeth when Enoch walks through the door, and it’s not just because the hem of Enoch’s cloak knocks over a great teetering stack of cards. For a moment Enoch’s afraid that some sort of apoplectic climax is in progress, and that Dr. Waterhouse’s final contribution to the Royal Society, after nearly a lifetime of service, will be a traumatically deranged cardiac muscle, pickled in spirits of wine in a crystal jug. The Doctor spends the first minute of their interview frozen halfway between sitting and standing, with his mouth open and his left hand on his breastbone. This might be the beginnings of a courteous bow, or a hasty maneuver to conceal, beneath his coat, a shirt so work-stained as to cast aspersions on his young wife’s diligence. Or perhaps it’s a philosophick enquiry, viz. checking his own pulse—if so, it’s good news, because Sir John Floyer just invented the practice, and if Daniel Waterhouse knows of it, it means he’s been keeping up with the latest work out of London.

Enoch takes advantage of the lull to make other observations and try to judge empirically whether Daniel’s as unsound as the faculty of Harvard College would have him believe. From the Doctors’ jibes on the ferry-ride, Enoch had expected nothing but cranks and gears. And indeed Waterhouse does have a mechanic’s shop in a corner of the—how will Enoch characterize this structure to the Royal Society? “Log cabin,” while technically correct, calls to mind wild men in skins. “Sturdy, serviceable, and in no way extravagant laboratory making ingenious use of indigenous building materials.” There. But anyway, most of it is given over not to the hard ware of gears, but to softer matters: cards. They are stacked in slender columns that would totter in the breeze from a moth’s wings if the columns had not been jammed together into banks, stairways, and terraces, the whole formation built on a layer of loose tiles on the dirt floor to (Enoch guesses) prevent the card-stacks from wicking up the copious ground-water. Edging farther into the room and peering round a bulwark of card-stacks, Enoch finds a writing-desk stocked with blank cards. Ragged gray quills project from inkpots, bent and broken ones crosshatch the floor, bits of down and fluff and cartilage and other bird-wreckage form a dandruffy layer on everything.

On pretext of cleaning up his mess, Enoch begins to pick the spilled cards off the floor. Each is marked at the top with a rather large number, always odd, and beneath it a long row of ones and zeroes, which (since the last digit is always 1, indicating an odd number) he takes to be nothing other then the selfsame number expressed in the binary notation lately perfected by Leibniz. Underneath the number, then, is a word or short phrase, a different one on each card. As he picks them up and re-stacks them he sees: Noah’s Ark; Treaties terminating wars; Membranophones (e.g., mir-litons); The notion of a classless society; The pharynx and its outgrowths; Drawing instruments (e.g., T-squares); The Skepticism of Pyrrhon of Elis; Requirements for valid maritime insurance contracts; The Kamakura bakufu; The fallacy of Assertion without Knowledge; Agates; Rules governing the determination of questions of fact in Roman civil courts; Mummification; Sunspots; The sex organs of bryophytes (e.g., liverwort); Euclidean geometry—homotheties and similitudes; Pantomime; The Election & Reign of Rudolf of Hapsburg; Testes; Nonsymmetrical dyadic relations; the Investiture Controversy; Phosphorus; Traditional impotence remedies; the Arminian heresy; and—

“Some of these strike one as being too complicated for monads,” he says, desperate for some way to break the ice. “Such as this—‘The Development of Portuguese Hegemony over Central Africa.’ ”

“Look at the number at the top of that card,” Waterhouse says. “It is the product of five primes: one for development, one for Portuguese, one for Hegemony, one for Central, and one for Africa.”

“Ah, so it’s not a monad at all, but a composite.”

“Yes.”

“It’s difficult to tell when the cards are helter-skelter. Don’t you think you should organize them?”

“According to what scheme?” Waterhouse asks shrewdly.

“Oh, no, I’ll not be tricked into that discussion.”

“No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge,” Dr. Waterhouse reminds him. “But if each one is assigned a unique number—prime numbers for monads, and products of primes for composites—then organizing them is simply a matter of performing computations…Mr. Root.”

“Dr. Waterhouse. Pardon the interruption.”

“Not at all.” He sits back down, finally, and goes back to what he was doing before: running a long file back and forth over a chunk of metal with tremendous sneezing noises. “It is a welcome diversion to have you appear before me, so unlooked-for, so implausibly well-preserved,” he shouts over the keening of the warm tool and the ringing of the work-piece.

“Durability is preferable to the alternative—but not always convenient. Less hale persons are forever sending me off on errands.”

“Lengthy and tedious ones at that.”

“The journey’s dangers, discomforts, and tedium are more than compensated for by the sight of you, so productively occupied, and in such good health.” Or something like that. This is the polite part of the conversation, which is not likely to last much longer. If he had returned the compliment, Daniel would have scoffed, because no one would say he’s well preserved in the sense that Enoch is. He looks as old as he ought to. But he’s wiry, with clear, sky-blue eyes, no tremors in his jaw or his hands, no hesitation in his speech once he’s over the shock of seeing Enoch (or, perhaps, anyone) in his Institute. Daniel Waterhouse is almost completely bald, with a fringe of white hair clamping the back of his head like wind-hammered snow on a tree-trunk. He makes no apologies for being uncovered and does not reach for a wig—indeed, appears not to own one. His eyes are large, wide and staring in a way that probably does nothing to improve his reputation. Those orbs flank a hawkish nose that nearly conceals the slot-like mouth of a miser biting down on a suspect coin. His ears are elongated and have grown a radiant fringe of lanugo. The imbalance between his organs of input and output seems to say that he sees and knows more than he’ll say.

“Are you a colonist now, or—”

“I’m here to see you.”

The eyes stare back, knowing and calm. “So it is a social visit! That is heroic—when a simple exchange of letters is so much less fraught with seasickness, pirates, scurvy, mass drownings—”

“Speaking of letters—I’ve one here,” Enoch says, taking it out.

“Great big magnificent seal. Someone dreadfully important must’ve written it. Can’t say how impressed I am.”

“Personal friend of Dr. Leibniz.”

“The Electress Sophie?”

“No, the other one.”

“Ah. What does Princess Caroline want of me? Must be something appalling, or else she wouldn’t’ve sent you to chivvy me along.”

Dr. Waterhouse is embarrassed at having been so startled earlier and is making up for it with peevishness. But it’s fine, because it seems to Enoch that the thirty-year-old Waterhouse hidden inside the old man is now pressing outward against the loose mask of skin, like a marble sculpture informing its burlap wrappings.

“Think of it as coaxing you forward. Dr. Waterhouse! Let’s find a tavern and—”

“We’ll find a tavern—after I’ve had an answer. What does she want of me?”

“The same thing as ever.”

Dr. Waterhouse shrinks—the inner thirty-year-old recedes, and he becomes just an oddly familiar-looking gaffer. “Should’ve known. What other use is there for a broken-down old computational monadologist?”

“It’s remarkable.”

“What?”

“I’ve known you for—what—thirty or forty years now, almost as long as you’ve known Leibniz. I’ve seen you in some unenviable spots. But in all that time, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you whine, until just then.”

Daniel considers this carefully, then actually laughs. “My apologies.”

“Not at all!”

“I thought my work would be appreciated here. I was going to establish what, to Harvard, would’ve been what Gresham’s College was to Oxford. Imagined I’d find a student body, or at least a protégé. Someone who could help me build the Logic Mill. Hasn’t worked out that way. All of the mechanically talented sorts are dreaming of steam-engines. Ludicrous! What’s wrong with water-wheels? Plenty of rivers here. Look, there’s a little one right between your feet!”

“Engines are naturally more interesting to the young.”

“You needn’t tell me. When I was a student, a prism was a wonder. Went to Sturbridge Fair with Isaac to buy them—little miracles wrapped in velvet. Played with ‘em for months.”

“This fact is now widely known.”

“Now the lads are torn every direction at once, like a prisoner being quartered. Or eighthed, or sixteenthed. I can already see it happening to young Ben out there, and soon it’ll happen to my own boy. ‘Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?’ Against that, what’s in my shack here to interest them?”

“Could this lack of interest have something to do with that everyone knows the project was conceived by Leibniz?”

“I’m not doing it his way. His plan was to use balls running down troughs to represent the binary digits, and pass them through mechanical gates to perform the logical operations. Ingenious, but not very practical. I’m using pushrods.”

“Superficial. I ask again: could your lack of popularity here be related to that all Englishmen believe that Leibniz is a villain—a plagiarist?”

“This is an unnatural turn in the conversation, Mr. Root. Are you being devious?”

“Only a little.”

“You and your Continental ways.”

“It’s just that the priority dispute has lately turned vicious.”

“Knew it would happen.”

“I don’t think you appreciate just how unpleasant it is.”

“You don’t appreciate how well I know Sir Isaac.”

“I’m saying that its repercussions may extend to here, to this very room, and might account for your (forgive me for mentioning this) solitude, and slow progress.”

“Ludicrous!”

“Have you seen the latest flying letters, speeding about Europe unsigned, undated, devoid of even a printer’s mark? The anonymous reviews, planted, like sapper’s mines, in the journals of the savants? Sudden unmaskings of hitherto unnamed ‘leading mathematicians’ forced to own, or deny, opinions they have long disseminated in private correspondence? Great minds who, in any other era, would be making discoveries of Copernican significance, reduced to acting as cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers for the two principals? New and deservedly obscure journals suddenly elevated to the first rank of learned discourse, simply because some lackey has caused his latest stiletto-thrust to be printed in its back pages? Challenge problems flying back and forth across the Channel, each one fiendishly devised to prove that Leibniz’s calculus is the original, and Newton’s but a shoddy counterfeit, or vice versa? Reputations tossed about on points of swords—”

“No,” Daniel says. “I moved here to get away from European intrigues.” His eyes drop to the Letter. Enoch can’t help looking at it, too.

“It is purely an anomaly of fate,” Enoch says, “that Gottfried, as a young man, lacking means, seeking a position—anything that would give him the simple freedom to work—landed in the court of an obscure German Duke. Who through intricate and tedious lacework of marryings, couplings, dyings, religious conversions, wars, revolutions, miscarriages, decapitations, congenital feeblemindedness, excommunications, et cetera among Europe’s elite—most notably, the deaths of all seventeen of Queen Anne’s children—became first in line to the Throne of England and Scotland, or Great Britain as we’re supposed to call it now.”

“Some would call it fate. Others—”

“Let’s not get into that.”

“Agreed.”

“Anne’s in miserable health, the House of Hanover is packing up its pointed helmets and illustrated beer-mugs, and taking English lessons. Sophie may get to be Queen of England yet, at least for a short while. But soon enough, George Louis will become Newton’s King and—as Sir Isaac is still at the Mint—his boss.”

“I take your point. It is most awkward.”

“George Louis is the embodiment of awkwardness—he doesn’t care, and scarcely knows, and would probably think it amusing if he did. But his daughter-in-law the Princess—author of this letter—in time likely to become Queen of England herself—is a friend of Leibniz. And yet an admirer of Newton. She wants a reconciliation.”

“She wants a dove to fly between the Pillars of Hercules. Which are still runny with the guts of the previous several peace-makers.”

“It’s supposed that you are different.”

“Herculean, perhaps?”

“Well…”

“Do you have any idea why I’m different, Mr. Root?”

“I do not, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“The tavern it is, then.”

BEN AND GODFREY ARE SENT back to Boston on the ferry. Daniel scorns the nearest tavern—some sort of long-running dispute with the proprietor—so they find the highway and ride northwest for a couple of miles, drawing off to one side from time to time to let drovers bring their small herds of Boston-bound cattle through. They arrive at what used to be the capital of Massachusetts, before the city fathers of Boston out-maneuvered it. Several roads lunge out of the wilderness and collide with one another. Yeomen and drovers and backwoodsmen churn it up into a vortex of mud and manure. Next to it is a College. Newtowne is, in other words, paradise for tavern-keepers, and the square (as they style it) is lined with public houses.

Waterhouse enters a tavern but immediately backs out of it. Looking into the place over his companion’s shoulder, Enoch glimpses a white-wigged Judge on a massive chair at the head of the tap-room, a jury empaneled on plank benches, a grimy rogue being interrogated. “Not a good place for a pair of idlers,” Waterhouse mumbles.

“You hold judicial proceedings in drinking-houses!?”

“Poh! That judge is no more drunk than any magistrate of the Old Bailey.”

“It is perfectly logical when you put it that way.”

Daniel chooses another tavern. They walk through its brick-red door. A couple of leather fire-buckets dangle by the entrance, in accordance with safety regulations, and a bootjack hangs on the wall so that the innkeeper can take his guests’ footwear hostage at night. The proprietor is bastioned in a little wooden fort in the corner, bottles on shelves behind him, a preposterous firearm, at least six feet long, leaning in the angle of the walls. He’s busy sorting his customers’ mail. Enoch cannot believe the size of the planks that make up the floor. They creak and pop like ice on a frozen lake as people move around. Waterhouse leads him to a table. It consists of a single slab of wood sawn from the heart of a tree that must have been at least three feet in diameter.

“Trees such as these have not been seen in Europe for hundreds of years,” Enoch says. He measures it against the length of his arm. “Should have gone straight to Her Majesty’s Navy. I am shocked.”

“There is an exemption to that rule,” Waterhouse says, showing for the first time a bit of good humor. “If a tree is blown down by the wind, anyone may salvage it. In consequence of which, Gomer Bolstrood, and his fellow Barkers, have built their colonies in remote places, where the trees are very large—”

“And where freak hurricanoes often strike without warning?”

“And without being noticed by any of their neighbors. Yes.”

“Firebrands to furniture-makers in a single generation. I wonder what old Knott would think.”

“Firebrands and furniture-makers,” Waterhouse corrects him.

“Ah, well…If my name were Bolstrood, I’d be happy to live anywhere that was beyond the reach of Tories and Archbishops.”

Daniel Waterhouse rises and goes over to the fireplace, plucks a couple of loggerheads from their hooks, and thrusts them angrily into the coals. Then he goes to the corner and speaks with the tavern-keeper, who cracks two eggs into two mugs and then begins throwing in rum and bitters and molasses. It is sticky and complicated—as is the entire situation here that Enoch’s gotten himself into.

There’s a similar room on the other side of the wall, reserved for the ladies. Spinning wheels whirr, cards chafe against wool. Someone begins tuning up a bowed instrument. Not the old-fashioned viol, but (judging from its sound) a violin. Hard to believe, considering where he is. But then the musician begins to play—and instead of a Baroque minuet, it is a weird keening sort of melody—an Irish tune, unless he’s mistaken. It’s like using watered silk to make grain sacks—the Londoners would laugh until tears ran down their faces. Enoch goes and peers through the doorway to make sure he’s not imagining it. Indeed, a girl with carrot-colored hair is playing a violin, entertaining some other women who are spinning and sewing, and the women and the music are as Irish as the day is long.

Enoch goes back to the table, shaking his head. Daniel Waterhouse slides a hot loggerhead into each mug, warming and thickening the drinks. Enoch sits down, takes a sip of the stuff, and decides he likes it. Even the music is beginning to grow on him.

He cannot look in any direction without seeing eyeballs just in the act of glancing away from them. Some of the other patrons actually run down the road to other taverns to advertise their presence here, as if Root and Waterhouse were a public entertainment. Dons and students saunter in nonchalantly, as if it’s normal to stand up in mid-pint and move along to a different establishment.

“Where’d you get the idea you were escaping from intrigue?”

Daniel ignores this, too busy glaring at the other customers.

“My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone,” Daniel finally says. “To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666—Number of the Beast and all that. I was, therefore, produced in 1646—as always, Drake’s timing was carefully thought out. When I came of age, I would be a man of the cloth, with the full university education, well versed in many dead classical languages, so that I could stand on the Cliffs of Dover and personally welcome Jesus Christ back to England in fluent Aramaic. Sometimes I look about myself—” he waves his arm at the tavern “—and see the way it turned out, and wonder whether my father could possibly have been any more wrong.”

“I think this is a good place for you,” Enoch says. “Nothing here is going according to plan. The music. The furniture. It’s all contrary to expectations.”

“My father and I took in the execution of Hugh Peters—Cromwell’s chaplain—in London one day. We rode straight from that spectacle to Cambridge. Since executions are customarily held at daybreak, you see, an industrious Puritan can view one and yet get in a full day’s hard traveling and working before evening prayers. It was done with a knife. Drake wasn’t shaken at all by the sight of Brother Hugh’s intestines. It only made him that much more determined to get me into Cambridge. We went there and called upon Wilkins at Trinity College.”

“Hold, my memory fails—wasn’t Wilkins at Oxford? Wadham College?”

“Anno 1656 he married Robina. Cromwell’s sister.”

“That I remember.”

“Cromwell made him Master of Trinity College in Cambridge. But of course that was undone by the Restoration. So he only served in that post for a few months—it’s no wonder you’ve forgotten it.”

“Very well. Pardon the interruption. Drake took you up to Cambridge—?”

“And we called on Wilkins. I was fourteen. Father went off and left us alone, secure in the knowledge that this man—Cromwell’s Brother-in-Law, for God’s sake!—would lead me down the path of righteousness—perhaps explicate some Bible verses about nine-headed beasts with me, perhaps pray for Hugh Peters.”

“You did neither, I presume.”

“You must imagine a great chamber in Trinity, a gothickal stone warren, like the underbelly of some ancient cathedral, ancient tables scattered about, stained and burnt alchemically, beakers and retorts clouded with residues pungent and bright, but most of all, the books—brown wads stacked like cordwood—more books than I’d ever seen in one room. It was a decade or two since Wilkins had written his great Cryptonomicon. In the course of that project, he had, of course, gathered tomes on occult writing from all over the world, compiling all that had been known, since the time of the Ancients, about the writing of secrets. The publication of that book had brought him fame among those who study such things. Copies were known to have circulated as far as Peking, Lima, Isfahan, Shahjahanabad. Consequently more books yet had been sent to him, from Portuguese crypto-Kabbalists, Arabic savants skulking through the ruins and ashes of Alexandria, Parsees who secretly worship at the altar of Zoroaster, Armenian merchants who must communicate all across the world, in a kind of net-work of information, through subtle signs and symbols hidden in the margins and the ostensible text of letters so cleverly that a competitor, intercepting the message, could examine it and find nothing but trivial chatter—yet a fellow-Armenian could extract the vital data as easy as you or I would read a hand-bill in the street. Secret code-systems of Mandarins, too, who because of their Chinese writing cannot use cyphers as we do, but must hide messages in the position of characters on the sheet, and other means so devious that whole lifetimes must have gone into thinking of them. All of these things had come to him because of the fame of the Cryptonomicon, and to appreciate my position, you must understand that I’d been raised, by Drake and Knott and the others, to believe that every word and character of these books was Satanic. That, if I were to so much as lift the cover of one of these books, and expose my eyes to the occult characters within, I’d be sucked down into Tophet just like that.”

“I can see it made quite an impression on you—”

“Wilkins let me sit in a chair for half an hour just to soak the place in. Then we began mucking about in his chambers, and set fire to a tabletop. Wilkins was reading some proofs of Boyle’s The Skeptical Chemist—you should read it sometime, Enoch, by the way—”

“I’m familiar with its contents.”

“Wilkins and I were idly trying to reproduce one of Boyle’s experiments when things got out of hand. Fortunately no serious damage was done. It wasn’t a serious fire, but it accomplished what Wilkins wanted it to: wrecked the mask of etiquette that Drake had set over me, and set my tongue a-run. I must have looked as if I’d gazed upon the face of God. Wilkins let slip that, if it was an actual education I was looking for, there was this thing down in London called Gresham’s College where he and a few of his old Oxford cronies were teaching Natural Philosophy directly, without years and years of tedious Classical nincompoopery as prerequisite.

“Now, I was too young to even think of being devious. Even had I practiced to be clever, I’d have had second thoughts doing it in that room. So I simply told Wilkins the truth: I had no interest in religion, at least as a profession, and wanted only to be a natural philosopher like Boyle or Huygens. But of course Wilkins had already discerned this. ‘Leave it in my hands,’ he said, and winked at me.

“Drake would not hear of sending me to Gresham’s, so two years later I enrolled at that old vicar-mill: Trinity College, Cambridge. Father believed that I did so in fulfillment of his plan for me. Wilkins meanwhile had come up with his own plan for my life. And so you see, Enoch, I am well accustomed to others devising hare-brained plans for how I am to live. That is why I have come to Massachusetts, and why I do not intend to leave it.”

“Your intentions are your own business. I merely ask that you read the letter,” Enoch says.

“What sudden event caused you to be sent here, Enoch? A falling-out between Sir Isaac and a young protégé?”

“Remarkable guesswork!”

“It’s no more a guess than when Halley predicted the return of the comet. Newton’s bound by his own laws. He’s been working on the second edition of the Principia with that young fellow, what’s-his-name…”

“Roger Cotes.”

“Promising, fresh-faced young lad, is he?”

“Fresh-faced, beyond doubt,” Enoch says, “promising, until…”

“Until he made some kind of a misstep, and Newton flew into a rage, and flung him into the Lake of Fire.”

“Apparently. Now, all that Cotes was working on—the revised Principia Mathematica and some kind of reconciliation with Leibniz—is ruined, or at least stopped.”

“Isaac never cast me into the Lake of Fire,” Daniel muses. “I was so young and so obviously innocent—he could never think the worst of me, as he does of everyone else.”

“Thank you for reminding me! Please.” Enoch shoves the letter across the table.

Daniel breaks the seal and hauls it open. He fishes spectacles from a pocket and holds them up to his face with one hand, as if actually fitting them over his ears would imply some sort of binding commitment. At first he locks his elbow to regard the whole letter as a work of calligraphic art, admiring its graceful loops and swirls. “Thank God it’s not written in those barbarous German letters,” he says. Finally the elbow bends, and he gets down to actually reading it.

As he nears the bottom of the first page, a transformation comes over Daniel’s face.

“As you have probably noted,” Enoch says, “the Princess, fully appreciating the hazards of a trans-Atlantic voyage, has arranged an insurance policy…”

“A posthumous bribe!” Daniel says. “The Royal Society is infested with actuaries and statisticians nowadays—drawing up tables for those swindlers at the ‘Change. You must have ‘run the numbers’ and computed the odds of a man my age surviving a voyage across the Atlantic; months or even years in that pestilential metropolis; and a journey back to Boston.”

“Daniel! We most certainly did not ‘run the numbers.’ It’s only reasonable for the Princess to insure you.”

“At this amount? This is a pension—a legacy—for my wife and my son.”

“Do you have a pension now, Daniel?”

“What!? Compared to this, I have nothing.” Flicking one nail angrily upon a train of zeroes inscribed in the heart of the letter.

“Then it seems as if Her Royal Highness is making a persuasive case.”

Waterhouse has just, at this instant, realized that very soon he is going to climb aboard ship and sail for London. That much can be read from his face. But he’s still an hour or two away from admitting it. They will be difficult hours for Enoch.

“Even without the insurance policy,” Enoch says, “it would be in your best interests. Natural philosophy, like war and romance, is best done by young men. Sir Isaac has not done any creative work since he had that mysterious catastrophe in ’93.”

“It’s not mysterious to me.”

“Since then, it’s been toiling at the Mint, and working up new versions of old books, and vomiting flames at Leibniz.”

“And you are advising me to emulate that?”

“I am advising you to put down the file, pack up your cards, step back from the workbench, and consider the future of the revolution.”

“What revolution can you possibly be talking about? There was the Glorious one back in ’88, and people are nattering on about throwing one here, but…”

“Don’t be disingenuous, Daniel. You speak and think in a language that did not exist when you and Sir Isaac entered Trinity.”

“Fine, fine. If you want to call it a revolution, I won’t quibble.”

“That revolution is turning on itself now. The calculus dispute is becoming a schism between the natural philosophers of the Continent and those of Great Britain. The British have far more to lose. Already there’s a reluctance to use Leibniz’s techniques—which are now more advanced, since he actually bothered to disseminate his ideas. Your difficulties in starting the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts are a symptom of the same ailment. So do not lurk on the fringes of civilization trifling with cards and cranks, Dr. Waterhouse. Return to the core, look at first causes, heal the central wound. If you can accomplish that, why, then, by the time your son is of an age to become a student, the Institute will no longer be a log cabin sinking into the mire, but a campus of domed pavilions and many-chambered laboratories along the banks of the River Charles, where the most ingenious youth of America will convene to study and refine the art of automatic computation!”

Dr. Waterhouse is favoring him with a look of bleak pity usually directed toward uncles too far gone to know they are incontinent. “Or at least I might catch a fever and die three days from now and provide Faith and Godfrey with a comfortable pension.”

“There’s that added inducement.”

TO BE A EUROPEAN CHRISTIAN (the rest of the world might be forgiven for thinking) was to build ships and sail them to any and all coasts not already a-bristle with cannons, make landfall at river’s mouth, kiss the dirt, plant a cross or a flag, scare the hell out of any indigenes with a musketry demo’, and—having come so far, and suffered and risked so much—unpack a shallow basin and scoop up some muck from the river-bottom. Whirled about, the basin became a vortex, shrouded in murk for a few moments as the silt rose into the current like dust from a cyclone. But as that was blown away by the river’s current, the shape of the vortex was revealed. In its middle was an eye of dirt that slowly disintegrated from the outside in as lighter granules were shouldered to the outside and cast off. Left in the middle was a huddle of nodes, heavier than all the rest. Blue eyes from far away attended to these, for sometimes they were shiny and yellow.

Now, ‘twere easy to call such men stupid (not even broaching the subjects of greedy, violent, arrogant, et cetera), for there was something wilfully idiotic in going to an unknown country, ignoring its people, their languages, art, its beasts and butterflies, flowers, herbs, trees, ruins, et cetera, and reducing it all to a few lumps of heavy matter in the center of a dish. Yet as Daniel, in the tavern, tries to rake together his early memories of Trinity and of Cambridge, he’s chagrined to find that a like process has been going on within his skull for half a century.

The impressions he received in those years had been as infinitely various as what confronted a Conquistador when he dragged his longboat up onto an uncharted shore. Bewilderment, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild, was the lot of the explorer, and it well described Daniel’s state of mind during his first years at Trinity. The analogy was not all that far-fetched, for Daniel had matriculated just after the Restoration, and found himself among young men of the Quality who’d spent most of their lives in Paris. Their clothing struck Daniel’s eye much as the gorgeous plumage of tropical birds would a black-robed Jesuit, and their rapiers and daggers were no less fatal than the fangs and talons of jungle predators. Being a pensive chap, he had, on the very first day, begun trying to make sense of it—to get to the bottom of things, like the explorer who turns his back on orang-utans and orchids to jam his pan into the mud of a creek bed. Naught but swirling murk had been the result.

In years since he has rarely gone back to those old memories. As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he’s startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. It’s not plain to Daniel why these impressions have stayed, while others, which seemed as or more important to him at the time they happened, have gone away. But if the gold-panning similitude is faithful, it means that these memories matter more than the ones that have flown. For gold stays in the pan’s center because of its density; it has more matter (whatever that means) in a given extent than anything else.

The crowd in Charing Cross, the sword falling silently on the neck of Charles I: this is his first nugget. Then there’s nothing until some months later when the Waterhouses and their old family friends the Bolstroods went on a sort of holiday in the country to demolish a cathedral.

Nugget: In silhouette against a cathedral’s rose window, a bent, black wraith lumbering, his two arms a pendulum, a severed marble saint’s head swinging in them. This was Drake Waterhouse, Daniel’s father, about sixty years old.

Nugget: The stone head in flight, turning to look back in surprise at Drake. The gorgeous fabric of the window drawn inwards, like the skin on a kettle of soup when you poke a spoon through it—the glass falling away, the transcendent vision of the window converted to a disk of plain old blue-green English hillside beneath a silver sky. This was the English Civil War.

Nugget: A short but stout man, having done with battering down the gilded fence that Archbishop Laud had built around the altar, dropping his sledgehammer and falling into an epileptic fit on the Lord’s Table. This was Gregory Bolstrood, about fifty years old at the time. He was a preacher. He called himself an Independent. His tendency to throw fits had led to rumors that he barked like a dog during his three-hour sermons, and so the sect he’d founded, and Drake had funded, had come to be known as the Barkers.

Nugget: A younger Barker smiting the cathedral’s organ with an iron rod—stately pipes being felled like trees, polished boxwood keys skittering across the marble floor. This was Knott Bolstrood, the son of Gregory, in his prime.

BUT THESE ARE ALL FROM his early childhood, before he’d learned to read and think. After that his young life had been well-ordered and (he’s surprised to see in retrospect) interesting. Adventurous, even. Drake was a trader. After Cromwell had won and the Civil War ended, he and young Daniel traveled all over England during the 1650s buying the local produce low, then shipping it to Holland where it could be sold high. Despite much of the trade being illegal (for Drake held it as a religious conviction that the State had no business imposing on him with taxes and tariffs, and considered smuggling not just a good idea but a sacred observance), it was all orderly enough. Daniel’s memories of that time—to the extent he still has any—are as prim and simple as a morality play penned by Puritans. It was not until the Restoration, and his going off to Trinity, that all became confused again, and he entered into a kind of second toddlerhood.

Nugget: The night before Daniel rode up to Cambridge to begin his four-year Cram Session for the End of the World, he slept in his father’s house on the outskirts of London. The bed was a rectangle of stout beams, a piece of canvas stretched across the middle by a zigzag of hairy ropes, a sack of straw tossed on, and half a dozen Dissenting preachers snoring into one another’s feet. Royalty was back, England had a King, who was called Charles II, and that King had courtiers. One of them, John Com-stock, had drawn up an Act of Uniformity, and the King had signed it—with one stroke of the quill making all Independent ministers into unemployed heretics. Of course they had all converged on Drake’s house. Sir Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, came every few days and raided the place, on the suspicion that all those idle Phanatiques must be grinding out handbills in the cellar.

Wilkins—who for a brief while had been Master of Trinity—had secured Daniel a place there. Daniel had phant’sied that he should be Wilkins’s student, his protégé. But before Daniel could matriculate, the Restoration had forced Wilkins out. Wilkins had retired to London to serve as the minister of the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry and, in his spare time, to launch the Royal Society. It was a lesson for Daniel in just how enormously a plan could go awry. For Daniel had been living in London, and could have spent as much time as he pleased with Wilkins, and gone to all the meetings of the Royal Society, and learnt everything he might have cared to know of Natural Philosophy simply by walking across town. Instead he went up to Trinity a few months after Wilkins had left it behind forever.

Nugget: On the ride up to Cambridge he passed by roadside saints whose noses and ears had been hammered off years ago by enraged Puritans. Each one of them, therefore, bore a marked resemblance to Drake. It seemed to him that each one turned its head to watch him ride past.

Nugget: A wench with paint on her face, squealing as she fell backwards onto Daniel’s bed at Trinity College. Daniel getting an erection. This was the Restoration.

The woman’s weight on his legs suddenly doubled as a boy half her age, embedded in a flouncing spray of French lace, fell on top of her. This was Upnor.

Nugget: A jeweled duelling-sword clattering as its owner dropped to hands and knees and washed the floor with a bubbling fan of vomit. “Eehhr,” he groaned, rising up to a kneeling position and letting his head loll back on his lace collar. Candle-light shone in his face: a bad portrait of the King of England. This was the Duke of Monmouth.

Nugget: A sizar with a mop and a bucket, trying to clean up the room—Monmouth and Upnor and Jeffreys and all of the other fellow-commoners calling for beer, sending him scurrying down to the cellar. This was Roger Comstock. Related, distantly, to the John Comstock who’d written the Act of Uniformity. But from a branch of the family that was at odds with John’s. Hence his base status at Trinity.

Daniel had his own bed at Trinity, and yet he could not sleep. Sharing the great bed in Drake’s house with smelly Phanatiques, or sleeping in common beds of inns while traveling round England with his father, Daniel had enjoyed great unbroken slabs of black, dreamless sleep. But when he went off to University he suddenly found himself sharing his room, and even his bed, with young men who were too drunk to stand up and too dangerous to argue with. His nights were fractured into shards. Vivid, exhausting dreams came through the cracks in between, like vapors escaping from a crazed vessel.

His first coherent memory of the place begins on a night like that.

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

1661

The Dissenters are destitute of all decorations that can please the outward Senses, what their Teachers can hope for from humane Assistance lies altogether in their own endeavours, and they have nothing to strengthen their Doctrine with (besides what they can say for it) but probity of Manners and exemplary Lives.

—The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS, ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

SOME SORT OF COMMOTION in the courtyard below. Not the usual revels, or else he wouldn’t have bothered to hear it.

Daniel got out of bed and found himself alone in the chamber. The voices below sounded angry. He went to the window. The tail of Ursa Major was like the hand of a cœlestial clock, and Daniel had been studying how to read it. The time was probably around three in the morning.

Beneath him several figures swam in murky pools of lanthorn-light. One of them was dressed as men always had been, in Daniel’s experience, until very recently: a black coat and black breeches with no decorations. But the others were flounced and feathered like rare birds.

The one in black seemed to be defending the door from the others. Until recently, everyone at Cambridge had looked like him, and the University had been allowed to exist only because a godly nation required divines who were fluent in Greek and Latin and Hebrew. He was barring the door because the men in lace and velvet and silk were trying to bring a wench in with them. And hardly for the first time! But this man, apparently, had seen one wench too many, and resolved to make a stand.

A scarlet boy flourished in the midst of the lanthorn-light—a writhing bouquet of tassles and flounces. His arms were crossed over his body. He drew them apart with a sharp ringing noise. A rod of silver light had appeared in each of his hands—a long one in his right, a short one in his left. He drew into a crouch. His companions were all shouting; Daniel could not make out the words, but the feelings expressed were a welter of fear and joy. The black-clad fellow drew out a sword of his own, something dull and clanging, a heavier spadroon, and the scarlet boy came at him like a boiling cloud, with lightning darting out of the center. He fought as animals fight, with movements too quick for the eye to follow, and the man in black fought as men fight, with hesitations and second thoughts. He had a great many holes in him very soon, and was reduced to a heap of somber, bloody clothing on the green grass of the courtyard, shifting and rocking, trying to find a position that was not excruciatingly painful.

All of the Cavaliers ran away. The Duke of Monmouth picked the wench up over his shoulder like a sack of grain and carried her off at a dead run. The scarlet boy tarried long enough to plant a boot on the dying man’s shoulder, turn him over onto his back, and spit something into his face.

All round the courtyard, shutters began to slam closed.

Daniel threw a coat over himself, pulled on a pair of boots, got a lanthorn of his own lit, and hurried downstairs. But it was too late for hurrying—the body was already gone. The blood looked like tar on the grass. Daniel followed one dribble to the next, across the green, out the back of the college, and onto the Backs—the boggy floodplain of the river Cam, which wandered around in back of the University. The wind had come up a bit, making noise in the trees that nearly obscured the splash. A less eager witness than Daniel could have claimed he’d heard nothing, and it would have been no lie.

He stopped then, because his mind had finally come awake, and he was afraid. He was out in the middle of an empty fen, following a dead man toward a dark river, and the wind was trying to blow out his lanthorn.

A pair of naked men appeared in the light, and Daniel screamed.

One of the men was tall, and had the most beautiful eyes Daniel had ever seen in a man’s face; they were like the eyes of a painting of the Pieta that Drake had once flung onto a bonfire. He looked towards Daniel as if to say, Who dares scream?

The other man was shorter, and he reacted by cringing. Daniel finally recognized him as Roger Comstock, the sizar. “Who’s that?” this one asked. “My lord?” he guessed.

“No man’s lord,” Daniel said. “It is I. Daniel Waterhouse.”

“It’s Comstock and Jeffreys. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” Both of the men were naked and soaked, their long hair draggling and seeping on their shoulders. Yet even Comstock seemed at ease compared to Daniel, who was dry, clothed, and equipped with a lanthorn.

“I might ask the same of you. Where are your clothes?”

Jeffreys now stepped forward. Comstock knew to shut up.

“We doffed our clothing when we swam the river,” Jeffreys said, as if this should be perfectly obvious.

Comstock saw the hole in that story as quickly as Daniel did, and hastily plugged it: “When we emerged, we found that we had drifted for some distance downstream, and were unable to find them again in the darkness.”

“Why did you swim the river?”

“We were in hot pursuit of that ruffian.”

“Ruffian!?”

The outburst caused a narrowing of the beautiful eyes. A look of mild disgust appeared on Jeffreys’s face. But Roger Comstock was not above continuing with the conversation: “Yes! Some Phanatique—a Puritan, or possibly a Barker—he challenged my Lord Upnor in the courtyard just now! You must not have seen it.”

“I did see it.”

“Ah.” Jeffreys turned sideways, caught his dripping penis between two fingers, and urinated tremendously onto the ground. He was staring toward the College. “The window of your and My Lord Monmouth’s chamber is awkwardly located—you must have leaned out of it?”

“Perhaps I leaned out a bit.”

“Otherwise, how could you have seen the men duelling?”

“Would you call it duelling, or murdering?”

Once again, Jeffreys appeared to be overcome with queasiness at the fact that he was having a conversation of any sort with the likes of Daniel. Comstock put on a convincing display of mock astonishment. “Are you claiming to have witnessed a murder?”

Daniel was too taken aback to answer. Jeffreys continued to jet urine onto the ground; he had produced a great steaming patch of it already, as if he intended to cover his nakedness with a cloud. He furrowed his brow and asked, “Murder, you say. So a man has died?”

“I…I should suppose so,” Daniel stammered.

“Hmmm…supposing is a dangerous practice, when you are supposing that an Earl has committed a capital crime. Perhaps you’d better show the dead body to the Justice of the Peace, and allow the coroner to establish a cause of death.”

“The body is gone.”

“You say body. Wouldn’t it be correct to say, wounded man?”

“Well…I did not personally verify that the heart had stopped, if that is what you mean.”

“Wounded man would be the correct term, then. To me, he seemed very much a wounded man, and not a dead one, when Com-stock and I were pursuing him across the Backs.”

“Unquestionably not dead,” Comstock agreed.

“But I saw him lying there—”

“From your window?” Jeffreys asked, finally done pissing.

“Yes.”

“But you are not looking out your window now, are you, Waterhouse?”

“Obviously not.”

“Thank you for telling me what is obvious. Did you leap out of your window, or did you walk down stairs?”

“Down stairs, of course!”

“Can you see the courtyard from the staircase?”

“No.”

“So as you descended the stairs, you lost sight of the wounded man.”

“Naturally.”

“You really haven’t the faintest idea, do you, Waterhouse, of what happened in the courtyard during the interval when you were coming down stairs?”

“No, but—”

“And despite this ignorance—ignorance utter, black, and entire—you presume to accuse an Earl, and personal friend of the King, of having committed—what was it again?”

“I believe he said murder, sir,” Comstock put in helpfully.

“Very well. Let us go and wake up the Justice of the Peace,” Jeffreys said. On his way past Waterhouse he snatched the lanthorn, and then began marching back towards the College. Comstock followed him, giggling.

First Jeffreys had to get himself dried off, and to summon his own sizar to dress his hair and get his clothes on—a gentleman could not go and visit the Justice of the Peace in a disheveled state. Meanwhile Daniel had to sit in his chamber with Comstock, who bustled about and cleaned the place with more diligence than he had ever shown before. Since Daniel was not in a talkative mood, Roger Comstock filled in the silences. “Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor—pushes a sword like a demon, doesn’t he? You’d never guess he’s only fourteen! It’s because he and Monmouth and all that lot spent the Interregnum in Paris, taking their pushing-lessons at the Academy of Monsieur du Plessis, near the Palais Cardinal. They learned a very French conception of honor there, and haven’t quite adjusted to England yet—they’ll challenge a man to a duel at the slightest offence—real or phant’sied. Oh, now, don’t look so stricken, Mr. Waterhouse—remember that if that fellow he was duelling with is found, and is found to be dead, and his injuries found to be the cause of his death, and those injuries are found to’ve been inflicted by My Lord Upnor, and not in a duel per se but in an unprovoked assault, and if a jury can be persuaded to overlook the faults in your account—in a word, if he is successfully prosecuted for this hypothetical murder—then you won’t have to worry about it! After all, if he’s guilty, then he can’t very well claim you’ve dishonored him with the accusation, can he? Nice and tidy, Mr. Waterhouse. Some of his friends might be quite angry with you, I’ll admit—oh, no, Mr. Waterhouse, I didn’t mean it in the way you think. I am not your enemy—remember, I am of the Golden, not the Silver, Comstocks.”

It was not the first time he’d said something like this. Daniel knew that the Comstocks were a grotesquely large and complicated family, who had begun popping up in minor roles as far back as the reign of King Richard Lionheart, and he gathered that this Silver/Golden dichotomy was some kind of feud between different branches of the clan. Roger Comstock wanted to impress on Daniel that he had nothing in common, other than a name, with John Comstock: the aging gunpowder magnate and arch-Royalist, and now Lord Chancellor, who had been the author of the recent Declaration of Uniformity—the act that had filled Drake’s house with jobless Ranters, Barkers, Quakers, et cetera. “Your people,” Daniel said, “the Golden Comstocks, as you dub them—pray, what are they?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“High Church?” Meaning Anglicans of the Archbishop Laud school, who according to Drake and his ilk were really no different from Papists—and Drake believed that the Pope was literally the Antichrist. “Low Church?” Meaning Anglicans of a more Calvinist bent, nationalistic, suspicious of priests in fancy clothes. “Independents?” Meaning ones who’d severed all ties with the Established Church, and made up their own churches as it suited them. Daniel did not venture any further down the continuum, for he had already shot well beyond Roger Comstock’s limits as a theologian.

Roger threw up his hands and said merely, “Because of the unpleasantness with the Silver branch, recent generations of the Golden Comstocks have spent rather a lot of time in the Dutch Republic.”

To Daniel, the Dutch Republic meant God-fearing places like Leiden, where the pilgrims had sojourned before going to Massachusetts. But it presently came clear that Roger was talking about Amsterdam. “There are all sorts of churches in Amsterdam. Cheek by jowl. Strange as it must sound, this habit has quite worn off on us over the years.”

“Meaning what? That you’ve become used to preserving your faith despite being surrounded by heretics?”

“No. Rather, it’s as if I’ve got an Amsterdam inside of my head.”

“A what !?”

“Many different sects and faiths that are always arguing with one another. A Babel of religious disputation that never dies down. I have got used to it.”

“You believe nothing !?”

Further debate—if listening to Roger’s ramblings could be considered such—was cut off by the arrival of Monmouth, who strolled in looking offensively relaxed. Roger Comstock had to make a fuss over him for a while—jacking his boots off, letting his hair down, getting him undressed. Comstock supplied entertainment by telling the tale of chasing the killer Puritan across the Backs and into the River Cam. The more the Duke heard of this story, the more he liked it, and the more he loved Roger Comstock. And yet Com-stock made so many ingratiating references to Waterhouse that Daniel began to feel that he was still part of the same merry crew; and Monmouth even directed one or two kindly winks at him.

Finally Jeffreys arrived in a freshly blocked wig, fur-lined cape, purple silk doublet, and fringed breeches, a ruby-handled rapier dangling alongside one leg, and fantastical boots turned down at the tops so far that they nearly brushed the ground. Looking, therefore, twice as old and ten times as rich as Daniel, even though he was a year younger and probably broke. He led the faltering Daniel and the implacably cheerful Comstock down the staircase—pausing there for a while to reflect upon the total impossibility of anyone’s seeing the courtyard from it—and across Trinity’s great lawn and out the gate into the streets of Cambridge, where water-filled wheel-ruts, reflecting the light of dawn, looked like torpid, fluorescent snakes. In a few minutes they reached the house of the Justice of the Peace, and were informed that he was at church. Jeffreys therefore led them to an alehouse, where he was soon engulfed in wenches. He caused drink and food to be brought out. Daniel sat and watched him tear into a great bloody haunch of beef whilst downing two pints of ale and four small glasses of the Irish drink known as Usquebaugh. None of it had any effect on Jeffreys; he was one of those who could become staggeringly drunk and yet only wax quieter and calmer.

The wenches kept Jeffreys occupied. Daniel sat and knew fear—not the abstract fear that he dutifully claimed to feel when preachers spoke of hellfire, but a genuine physical sensation, a taste in his mouth, a sense that at any moment, from any direction, a blade of French steel might invade his vitals and inaugurate a slow process of bleeding or festering to death. Why else would Jeffreys have led him to this den? It was a perfect place to get murdered.

The only way to get his mind off it was to talk to Roger Com-stock, who continued with strenuous but completely pointless efforts to ingratiate himself. He circled round one more time to the topic of John Comstock, with whom—it could not be said too many times—he had nothing in common. That he had it on good authority that the gunpowder turned out by Comstock’s mills was full of sand, and that it either failed entirely to explode, or else caused cannons to burst. Why everyone, save a few self-deluding Puritans, now understood that the defeat of the first King Charles had occurred not because Cromwell was such a great general, but because of the faulty powder that Comstock had supplied to the Cavaliers. Daniel—scared to death—was in no position to understand the genealogical distinctions between the so-called Silver and Golden Comstocks. The upshot was that Roger Comstock seemed, in some way, to want to be his friend, and was trying desperately hard to be just that, and indeed was the finest fellow that a fellow could possibly be, while still having spent the night dumping the corpse of a murder victim into a river.

The ringing of church-bells told them that the Justice of the Peace was probably finished with his breakfast of bread and wine. But Jeffreys, having made himself comfortable here, was in no hurry to leave. From time to time he would catch Daniel’s eye and stare at him, daring Daniel to stand up and head for the door. But Daniel was in no hurry, either. His mind was seeking an excuse for doing nothing.

The one that he settled on went something like this: Upnor would be Judged—for good—five years from now when Jesus came back. What was the point of having the secular authorities sit in judgment on him now? If England were still a holy nation, as it had been until recently, then prosecuting Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, would have been a fitting exercise of her authority. But the King was back, England was Babylon, Daniel Waterhouse and the hapless Puritan who’d died last night were strangers in a strange land, like early Christians in pagan Rome, and Daniel would only dirty his hands by getting into some endless legal broil. Best to rise above the fray and keep his eye on the year sixteen hundred and sixty-six.

So it was back to the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity without saying a word to the Justice of the Peace. It had begun to rain. When Daniel reached the college, the grass had been washed clean.

THE DEAD MAN’S BODY was found two days later, tangled in some rushes half a mile down the Cam. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, a scholar of Hebrew and Aramaic who had been slightly acquainted with Drake. His friends went round making inquiries, but no one had seen a thing.

There was a rowdy funeral service in a primitive church that had been established in a barn five miles from Cambridge. Exactly five miles. For the Act of Uniformity stated, among other things, that Independents could not gather churches within five miles of any Established (i.e., Anglican) parish church, and so a lot of Puritans had been busy with compasses and maps lately, and a lot of bleak real estate had changed hands. Drake came up, and brought with him Daniel’s older half-brothers, Raleigh and Sterling. Hymns were sung and homilies delivered, affirming that the victim had gone on to his eternal reward. Daniel prayed, rather loudly, to be delivered from the seething den of reptiles that was Trinity College.

Then, of course, he had to suffer advice from his elders. First, Drake took him aside.

Drake had long ago adjusted to the loss of his nose and ears, but all he had to do was turn his face in Daniel’s direction to remind him that what he was going through at Trinity wasn’t so bad. So Daniel hardly took in a single word of what Drake said to him. But he gathered that it was something along the lines of that coming into one’s chambers every night to find a different whore, services already paid for, slumbering in one’s bed, constituted a severe temptation for a young man, and that Drake was all in favor of it—seeing it as a way to hold said young man’s feet to the eternal fire and find out what he was made of.

Implicit in all of this was that Daniel would pass the test. He could not bring himself to tell his father that he’d already failed it.

Second, Raleigh and Sterling took Daniel to an extremely rural alehouse on the way back into town and told him that he must be some kind of half-wit, not to mention an ingrate, if he was not in a state of bliss. Drake and his first clutch of sons had made a very large amount of money despite (come to think of it, because of ) religious persecution. Among that ilk, the entire point of going to Cambridge was to rub elbows with the fine and the mighty. The family had sent Daniel there, at great expense (as they never tired of reminding him), and if Daniel occasionally woke up to find the Duke of Monmouth passed out on top of him, it only meant that all of their dreams had come true.

Implicit was that Raleigh and Sterling did not believe that the world was coming to an end in 1666. If true, this meant that Daniel’s excuse for not ratting on Upnor was void.

The whole incident was then apparently forgotten by everyone at Trinity except Waterhouse and Jeffreys. Jeffreys ignored Daniel for the most part, but from time to time he would, for example, sit across from him and stare at him all through dinner, then pursue him across the lawn afterwards: “I can’t stop looking at you. You are fascinating, Mr. Waterhouse, a living and walking incarnation of cravenness. You saw a man murdered, and you did nothing about it. Your face glows like a hot branding-iron. I want to brand it into my memory so that as I grow old, I may look back upon it as a sort of Platonic ideal of cowardice.

“I’m going into law, you know. Were you aware that the emblem of justice is a scale? From a beam depend two pans. On one, what is being weighed—the accused party. On the other, a standard weight, a polished gold cylinder stamped with the assayer’s mark. You, Mr. Waterhouse, shall be the standard against which I will weigh all guilty cowards.

“What sort of Puritanical sophistry did you gin up, Mr. Waterhouse, to justify your inaction? Others like you got on a ship and sailed to Massachusetts so that they could be apart from us sinners, and live a pure life. I ween you are of the same mind, Mr. Waterhouse, but sailing on a ship across the North Atlantic is not for cowards, and so you are here. I think that you have withdrawn into a sort of Massachusetts of the mind! Your body’s here at Trinity, but your spirit has flown off to some sort of notional Plymouth Rock—when we sit at High Table, you phant’sy yourself in a wigwam ripping drumsticks from a turkey and chewing on Indian corn and making eyes at some redskinned Indian lass.”

THIS SORT OF THING LED to Daniel’s spending much time going for walks in Cambridge’s gardens and greens, where, if he chose his route carefully, he could stroll for a quarter of an hour without having to step over the body of an unconscious young scholar, or (in warmer weather) make apologies for having stumbled upon Mon-mouth, or one of his courtiers, copulating with a prostitute al fresco. More than once, he noticed another solitary young man strolling around the Backs. Daniel knew nothing of him—he had made no impression upon the College whatsoever. But once Daniel got in the habit of looking for him, he began to notice him here and there, skulking around the edges of University life. The boy was a sizar—a nobody from the provinces trying to escape from the lower class by taking holy orders and angling for a deaconage in some gale-chafed parish. He and the other sizars (such as Roger Comstock) could be seen descending on the dining-hall after the upper classes—pensioners (e.g., Daniel) and fellow-commoners (e.g., Monmouth and Upnor)—had departed, to forage among their scraps and clean up their mess.

Like a pair of comets drawn together, across a desolate void, by some mysterious action at a distance, they attracted each other across the greens and fells of Cambridge. Both were shy, and so early they would simply fall into parallel trajectories during their long strolls. But in time the lines converged. Isaac was pale as starlight, and so frail-looking that no one would’ve guessed he’d live as long as he had. His hair was exceptionally fair and already streaked with silver. He already had protruding pale eyes and a sharp nose. There was the sense of much going on inside his head, which he had not the slightest inclination to share with anyone else. But like Daniel, he was an alienated Puritan with a secret interest in natural philosophy, so naturally they fell in together.

They arranged a room swap. Another merchant’s son eagerly took Daniel’s place, viewing it as a move up the world’s ladder. The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity did not segregate the classes as rigidly as other colleges, so it was permitted for Isaac and Daniel to chum together. They shared a tiny room with a window looking out over the town—for Daniel, a great improvement over the courtyard view, so fraught with bloody memories. Musket-balls had been fired in through their window during the Civil War, and the bullet-holes were still in the ceiling.

Daniel learned that Isaac came from a family prosperous by Lincolnshire standards. His father had died before Newton was even born, leaving behind a middling yeoman’s legacy. His mother had soon married a more or less affluent cleric. She did not sound, from Isaac’s description, like a doting mum. She’d packed him off to school in a town called Grantham. Between her inheritance from the first marriage and what she’d acquired from the second, she easily could have sent him to Cambridge as a pensioner. But out of miserliness, or spite, or some hostility toward education in general, she’d sent him as a sizar instead—meaning that Isaac was obliged to serve as some other student’s boot-polisher and table-waiter. Isaac’s dear mother, unable to humiliate her son from a distance, had arranged it so that some other student—it didn’t matter which—would do it in her stead. In combination with that Newton was obviously far more brilliant than Daniel was, Daniel was uneasy with the arrangement. Daniel proposed that they make common cause, and pool what they had, and live together as equals.

To Daniel’s surprise, Isaac did not accept. He continued to perform sizar’s work, without complaint. By any measure, his life was much better now. They’d spend hours, days, in that chamber together, spending candles by the pound and ink by the quart, working their separate ways through Aristotle. It was the life that both of them had longed for. Even so, Daniel thought it strange that Isaac would help him in the mornings with his clothing, and devote a quarter of an hour, or more, to dressing his hair. Half a century later, Daniel could remember, without vanity, that he had been a handsome enough young man. His hair was thick and long, and Isaac learned that if he combed it in a particular way he could bring out a certain natural wave, up above Daniel’s forehead. He would not rest, every morning, until he had accomplished this. Daniel went along with it uneasily. Even then, Isaac had the air of a man who could be dangerous when offended, and Daniel sensed that if he declined, Isaac would not take it well.

So it went until one Whitsunday, when Daniel awoke to find Isaac gone. Daniel had gone to sleep well after midnight, Isaac as usual had stayed up later. The candles were all burned down to stubs. Daniel guessed Isaac was out emptying the chamber-pot, but he didn’t come back. Daniel went over to their little work-table to look for evidence, and found a sheet of paper on which Isaac had drawn a remarkably fine portrait of a sleeping youth. An angelic beauty. Daniel could not tell whether it was meant to be a boy or a girl. But carrying it to the window and looking at it in day-light, he noticed, above the youth’s brow, a detail in the hair. It served as the cryptological key that unlocked the message. Suddenly he recognized himself in that page. Not as he really was, but purified, beautified, perfected, as though by some alchemical refinement—the slag and dross raked away, the radiant spirit allowed to shine forth, like the Philosophick Mercury. It was a drawing of Daniel Waterhouse as he might have looked if he had gone to the Justice of the Peace and accused Upnor and been persecuted and suffered a Christlike death.

Daniel went down and eventually found Isaac bent and kneeling in the chapel, wracked with agony, praying desperately for the salvation of his immortal soul. Daniel could not but sympathize, though he knew too little of sin and too little of Isaac to guess what his friend might be repenting for. Daniel sat nearby and did a little praying of his own. In time, the pain and fear seemed to ebb away. The chapel filled up. A service was begun. They took out the Books of Common Prayer and turned to the page for Whitsunday. The priest intoned: “What is required of them who come to the Lord’s Supper?” They answered, “To examine themselves whether they repent of their former sins, steadfastly purporting to lead a new life.” Daniel watched Isaac’s face as he spoke this catechism and saw in it the same fervor that always lit up Drake’s mangled countenance when he really thought he was on to something. Both of them took communion. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Daniel watched Isaac change from a tortured wretch, literally writhing in spiritual pain, into a holy and purified saint. Having repented of their former sins—steadfastly purporting to lead new lives—they went back up to their chamber. Isaac pitched that drawing into the fire, opened up his note-book, and began to write. At the head of a blank page he wrote Sins committed before Whitsunday 1662 and then began writing out a list of every bad thing he’d ever done that he could remember, all the way back to his childhood: wishing that his stepfather was dead, beating up some boy at school, and so forth. He wrote all day and into the night. When he had exhausted himself he started up a new page entitled Since Whitsunday 1662 and left it, for the time being, blank.

Meanwhile, Daniel turned back to his Euclid. Jeffreys kept reminding him that he had failed at being a holy man. Jeffreys did this because he supposed it was a way of torturing Daniel the Puritan. In fact, Daniel had never wanted to be a preacher anyway, save insofar as he wanted to please his father. Ever since his meeting with Wilkins, he had wanted only to be a Natural Philosopher. Failing the moral test had freed him to be that, at a heavy price in self-loathing. If Natural Philosophy led him to eternal damnation, there was nothing he could do about it anyway, as Drake the predestinationist would be the first to affirm. An interval of years or even decades might separate Whitsunday 1662 and Daniel’s arrival at the gates of Hell. He reckoned he might as well fill that time with something he at least found interesting.

A month later, when Isaac was out of the room, Daniel opened up the note-book and turned to the page headed Since Whitsunday 1662. It was still blank.

He checked it again two months later. Nothing.

At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin.

This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments.

Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony

OCTOBER 12, 1713

Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

LIKE A GOOD CARTESIAN who measures everything against a fixed point, Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings. At an arbitrary place on a featureless plain, some would argue, but now the Origin of all his considerations. Sir Isaac would have it that all matter is a sort of permanent ongoing miracle, that planets are held in their orbits, and atoms in their places, by the immanent will of God, and looking at his own son, Daniel can hardly bear to think otherwise. The boy’s a coiled spring, the potential for generations of American Waterhouses, though it’s just as likely he’ll catch a fever and die tomorrow.

In most other Boston houses, a slave woman would be looking after the boy, leaving the parents free to discourse with their visitor. Daniel Waterhouse does not own slaves. The reasons are several. Some of them are even altruistic. So little Godfrey sits on the lap, not of some Angolan negress, but of their neighbor: the daft but harmless Mrs. Goose, who comes into their home occasionally to do the one thing that she apparently can do: to entertain children by spouting all manner of nonsensical stories and doggerel that she has collected or invented. Meanwhile Enoch is off trying to make arrangements with Captain van Hoek of the Minerva. This has freed Daniel and Faith and the young Rev. Wait Still Waterhouse[*] to discuss what is the best way to respond to the startling invitation from Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Many words are said, but they make no more impact on Daniel than Mrs. Goose’s incoherent narratives about cutlery leaping over cœlestial bodies and sluttish hags living in discarded footwear.

Wait Still Waterhouse says something like, “You’re sixty-seven, it’s true, but you have your health—many have lived much longer.”

“If you avoid large crowds, sleep well, nourish yourself—” Faith says.

“London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down…,” sings Mrs. Goose.

“My mind has never felt quite so much like an arrangement of cranks and gears,” Daniel says. “I decided what I was going to do quite some time ago.”

“But people have been known to change their minds—” says the reverend.

“Am I to infer, from what you just said, that you are a Free Will man?” Daniel inquires. “I really am shocked to find that in a Waterhouse. What are they teaching at Harvard these days? Don’t you realize that this Colony was founded by people fleeing from those who backed the concept of Free Will?”

“I don’t fancy that the Free Will question really had very much to do with the founding of this Colony. It was more a rebellion against the entire notion of an Established church—be it Papist or Anglican. It is true that many of those Independents—such as our ancestor John Waterhouse—got their doctrine from the Calvinists in Geneva, and scorned the notion, so cherished by the Papists and the Anglicans, of Free Will. But this alone would not have sufficed to send them into exile.”

“I get it not from Calvin but from Natural Philosophy,” Daniel says. “The mind is a machine, a Logic Mill. That’s what I believe.”

“Like the one you have been building across the river?”

“A good deal more effective than that one, fortunately.”

“You think that if you made yours better, it could do what the human mind does? That it could have a soul?”

“When you speak of a soul, you phant’sy something above and beyond the cranks and gears, the dead matter, of which the machine—be it a Logic Mill or a brain—is constructed. I do not believe in this.”

“Why not?”

Like many simple questions, this one is difficult for Daniel to answer. “Why not? I suppose because it puts me in mind of Alchemy. This soul, this extra thing added to the brain, reminds me of the Quintessence that the Alchemists are forever seeking: a mysterious supernatural presence that is supposed to suffuse the world. But they can never seem to find any. Sir Isaac Newton has devoted his life to the project and has nothing to show for it.”

“If your sympathies do not run in that direction, then I know better than to change your mind, at least where Free Will versus Predestination is concerned,” says Wait Still. “But I know that when you were a boy you had the privilege of sitting at the knee of men such as John Wilkins, Gregory Bolstrood, Drake Waterhouse, and many others of Independent sympathies—men who preached freedom of conscience. Who advocated Gathered, as opposed to Established, churches. The flourishing of small congregations. Abolition of central dogma.”

Daniel, still not quite believing it: “Yes…”

Wait Still, brightly: “So what’s to stop me from preaching Free Will to my flock?”

Daniel laughs. “And, as you are not merely glib, but young, handsome, and personable, converting many to the same creed—including, I take it, my own wife?”

Faith blushes, then stands up and turns around to hide it. In the candlelight, a bit of silver glints in her hair: a hair-pin shaped like a caduceus. She has gotten up on the pretext of going to check on little Godfrey, even though Mrs. Goose has him well in hand.

In a small town like Boston, you’d think it would be impossible to have a conversation about anything without being eavesdropped on. Indeed, the whole place was set up to make it so—they deliver the mail, not to your house, but to the nearest tavern, and if you don’t come round and pick it up after a few days the publican will open it up and read it aloud to whomever is in attendance. So Daniel had assumed that Mrs. Goose would be listening in on the whole conversation. But instead she is completely absorbed in her work, as if telling yarns to a boy were more important than this great Decision that Daniel is wrestling with, here at damn near the end of his long life.

“It’s quite all right, my dear,” Daniel says to the back of Faith’s bodice. “Having been raised by a man who believed in Predestination, I’d much rather that my boy was raised by a Free Will woman.” But Faith leaves the room.

Wait Still says, “So…you believe God has predestined you to sail for England tonight?”

“No—I’m not a Calvinist. Now, you’re baffled, Reverend, because you spent too much time at Harvard reading old books about the likes of Calvin and Archbishop Laud, and are still caught up in the disputes of Arminians versus Puritans.”

“What should I have been reading, Doctor?” said Wait Still, making a bit too much of a show of flexibility.

“Galileo, Descartes, Huygens, Newton, Leibniz.”

“The syllabus of your Institute of Technologickal Arts?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t know that you touched on matters of theology.”

“That was a bit of a jab—no, no, quite all right! I rather liked it. I’m pleased by the display of backbone. I can see clearly enough that you’ll end up raising my son.” Daniel means this in a completely nonsexual way—he had in mind that Wait Still would act in some avuncular role—but from the blush on Wait Still’s face he can see that the role of stepfather is more likely.

This, then, would be a good time to change the subject to abstract technical matters: “It all comes from first principles. Everything can be measured. Everything acts according to physical laws. Our minds included. My mind, that’s doing the deciding, is already set in its course, like a ball rolling down a trough.”

“Uncle! Surely you are not denying the existence of souls—of a Supreme Soul.”

Daniel says nothing to this.

“Neither Newton nor Leibniz would agree with you,” Wait Still continues.

“They’re afraid to agree with me, because they are important men, and they would be destroyed if they came out and said it. But no one will bother to destroy me.”

“Can we not influence your mental machine by arguments?” asks Faith, who has returned to stand in the doorway.

Daniel wants to say that Wait Still’s best arguments would be about as influential as boogers flicked against the planking of a Ship of the Line in full sail, but sees no reason to be acrimonious—the whole point of the exercise is to be remembered well by those who’ll stay in the New World, on the theory that as the sun rises on the eastern fringe of America, small things cast long shadows westwards. “The future is as set as the past,” he says, “and the future is that I’ll climb on board the Minerva within the hour. You can argue that I should stay in Boston to raise my son. Of course, I should like nothing better. I should, God willing, have the satisfaction of watching him grow up for as many years as I have left. Godfrey would have a flesh-and-blood father with many conspicuous weaknesses and failings. He’d hold me in awe for a short while, as all boys do their fathers. It would not last. But if I sail away on Minerva, then in place of a flesh-and-blood Dad—a fixed, known quantity—he’ll have a phant’sy of one, infinitely ductile in his mind. I can go away and imagine generations of Waterhouses yet unborn, and Godfrey can imagine a hero-father better than I can really be.”

Wait Still Waterhouse, an intelligent and decent man, can see so many holes in this argument that he is paralyzed by choices. Faith, a better mother than wife, who has a better son than a husband, encompasses a vast sweep of compromises with a pert nod of the head. Daniel gathers up his son from Mrs. Goose’s lap—Enoch calls in a hired coach—they go to the waterfront.

So I saw in my dream that the man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it began to cry after him to return: but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, “Life, life, eternal life.” So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

Minerva has already weighed anchor, using the high tide to widen the distance between her keel and certain obstructions near the Harbor’s entrance. Daniel is to be rowed out to join her in a pilot’s boat. Godfrey, who is half asleep, kisses his old Dad dutifully and watches his departure like a dream—that’s good, as he can tailor the memory later to suit his changing demands—like a suit of clothes modified every six months to fit a growing frame. Wait Still stands by Faith’s side, and Daniel can’t help thinking they make a lovely couple. Enoch, that home-wrecker, remains on the end of the wharf, guiltily apart, his silver hair glowing like white fire in the full moonlight.

A dozen slaves pull mightily at the oars, forcing Daniel to sit down, lest the boat shoot out from under his feet and leave him floundering in the Harbor. Actually he does not sit as much as sprawl and get lucky. From shore it probably looks like a pratfall, but he knows that this ungainly moment will be edited from The Story that will one day live in the memories of the American Waterhouses. The Story is in excellent hands. Mrs. Goose has come along to watch and memorize, and she has a creepy knack for that kind of thing, and Enoch is staying, too, partly to look after the physical residue of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, but also partly to look after The Story and see that it’s shaped and told to Daniel’s advantage.

Daniel weeps.

The sounds of his sniffling and heaving drown out nearly everything else, but he becomes aware of some low, strange music: the slaves have begun to sing. A rowing-song? No, that would have a lumbering, yo-ho-ho sort of rhythm, and this is much more complicated, with beats in the wrong places. It must be an Africk tune, because they have meddled with some of the notes, made them flatter than they should be. And yet it’s weirdly Irish at the same time. There is no shortage of Irish slaves in the West Indies, where these men first fell under the whip, so that might explain it. It is (musicological speculations aside) an entirely sad song, and Daniel knows why: by climbing aboard this boat and breaking down in sobs, he has reminded each one of these Africans of the day when he was taken, in chains, off the coast of Guinea, and loaded aboard a tall ship.

Within a few minutes they are out of view of the Boston wharves, but still surrounded by land: the many islets, rocks, and bony tentacles of Boston Harbor. Their progress is watched by dead men hanging in rusty gibbets. When pirates are put to death, it is because they have been out on the high seas violating Admiralty law, whose jurisdiction extends only to the hightide mark. The implacable logic of the Law dictates that pirate-gallows must, therefore, be erected in the intertidal zone, and that pirate-corpses must be washed three times by the tide before they are cut down. Of course mere death is too good for pirates, and so the sentence normally calls for their corpses to be gibbeted in locked iron cages so that they can never be cut down and given a Christian burial.

New England seems to have at least as many pirates as honest seamen. But here, as in so many other matters, Providence has smiled upon Massachusetts, for Boston Harbor is choked with small islands that are washed by high tides, providing vast resources of pirate hanging and gibbeting real estate. Nearly all of it has been put to use. During the daytime, the gibbets are obscured by clouds of hungry birds. But it’s the middle of the night, the birds are in Boston and Charlestown, slumbering in their nests of plaited pirate hair. The tide is high, the tops of the reefs submerged, the supports rising directly out of the waves. And so as the singing slaves row Daniel out on what he assumes will be his last voyage, scores of dessicated and skeletonized pirates, suspended in midair above the moonlit sea, watch him go by, as a ceremonial honor-guard.

It takes better than an hour to catch Minerva, just clearing the Spectacle Island shallows. Her hull is barrel shaped and curves out above them. A pilot’s ladder is deployed. The ascent isn’t easy. Universal gravitation is not his only opponent. Rising waves, sneaking in from the North Atlantic, bounce him off the hull. Infuriatingly, the climb brings back all manner of Puritanical dogma he’s done his best to forget—the ladder becomes Jacob’s, the boat of sweaty black slaves Earth, the Ship Heaven, the sailors in the moonlit rigging Angels, the captain none other than Drake himself, ascended these many years, exhorting him to climb faster.

Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country’s stock of memories—the composted manure from which it’s sending out fresh green shoots. The Old World reaches down to draw him in: a couple of lascars, their flesh and breath suffused with saffron, asafœtida, and cardamom, lean over the rail, snare his cold pale hands in their warm black ones, and haul him in like a fish. A roller slides under the hull at the same moment—they fall back to the deck in an orgiastic tangle. The lascars spring up and busy themselves drawing up his equipage on ropes. Compared to the little boat with the creaking and splashing of its oars and the grunting of the slaves, Minerva moves with the silence of a well trimmed ship, signifying (or so he hopes) her harmony with the forces and fields of nature. Those Atlantic rollers make the deck beneath him accelerate gently up and down, effortlessly moving his body—it’s like lying on a mother’s bosom as she breathes. So Daniel lies there spreadeagled for a while, staring up at the stars—white geometric points on a slate, gridded by shadows of rigging, an explanatory network of catenary curves and Euclidean sections, like one of those geometric proofs out of Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

1663

An Ideot may be taught by Custom to Write and Read, yet no Man can be taught Genius.

—Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

DANIEL HAD GONE OUT for a time in the evening, and met with Roger Comstock at a tavern, and witnessed to him, and tried to bring him to Jesus. This had failed. Daniel returned to his chamber to find the cat up on the table with its face planted in Isaac’s dinner. Isaac was seated a few inches away. He had shoved a darning needle several inches into his eyeball.

Daniel screamed from deep down in his gut. The cat, morbidly obese from eating virtually all of Isaac’s meals, fell off the table like a four-legged haggis, and trudged away. Isaac did not flinch, which was probably a good thing. Daniel’s scream had no other effects on business as usual at Trinity College—those who weren’t too impaired to hear it probably assumed it was a wench playing hard-to-get.

“In my dissections of animals’ eyes at Grantham, I often marveled at their perfect sphericity, which, in bodies that were otherwise irregular grab-bags of bones, tubes, skeins and guts, seemed to mark them out as apart from all the other organs. As if the Creator had made those orbs in the very image of the heavenly spheres, signifying that one should receive light from the other,” Isaac mused aloud. “Naturally, I wondered whether an eye that was not spherical would work as well. There are practical as well as theologic reasons for spherical eyes: one, so that they can swivel in their sockets.” There was some tension in his voice—the discomfort must have been appalling. Tears streamed down and spattered on the table like the exhaust from a water-clock—the only time Daniel ever saw Isaac weep. “Another practical reason is simply that the eyeball is pressurized from within by the aqueous humour.”

“My God, you’re not bleeding the humour from your eyeball—?”

“Look more carefully!” Isaac snapped. “Observe—don’t imagine.”

“I can’t bear it.”

“The needle is not piercing anything—the orb is perfectly intact. Come and see!”

Daniel approached, one hand clamped over his mouth as if he were abducting himself—he did not want to vomit on the open Waste-Book where Isaac was taking notes with his free hand. Upon a closer look he saw that Isaac had inserted the darning needle not into the eyeball itself but into the lubricated bearing where the orb rotated in its socket—he must’ve simply pulled his lower eyelid way down and probed between it and the eyeball until he’d found a way in. “The needle is blunt—it is perfectly harmless,” Isaac grunted. “If I could trouble you for a few minutes’ assistance?”

Now supposedly Daniel was a student, attending lectures and studying the works of Aristotle and Euclid. But in fact, he had over the last year become the one thing, aside from the Grace of God, keeping Isaac Newton alive. He’d long since stopped asking him such annoying, pointless questions as “Can you remember the last time you put food into your mouth” or “Don’t you suppose that a nap of an hour or two, once a night, might be good?” The only thing that really worked was to monitor Isaac until he physically collapsed on the table, then haul him into bed, like a graverobber transporting his goods, then pursue his own studies nearby and keep on eye on him until consciousness began to return, and then, during the moments when Isaac still didn’t know what day it was, and hadn’t gone off on some fresh train of thought, shove milk and bread at him so he wouldn’t starve all the way to death. He did all of this voluntarily—sacrificing his own education, and making a burnt offering of Drake’s tuition payments—because he considered it his Christian duty. Isaac, still in theory his sizar, had become his master, and Daniel the attentive servant. Of course Isaac was completely unaware of all Daniel’s efforts—which only made it a more perfect specimen of Christlike self-abnegation. Daniel was like one of those Papist fanatics who, after they died, were found to’ve been secretly wearing hair shirts underneath their satin vestments.

“The diagram may give you a better comprehension of the design of tonight’s experiment,” Isaac said. He’d drawn a cross-sectional view of eyeball, hand, and darning needle in his Waste Book. It was the closest thing to a work of art he had produced since the strange events of Whitsunday last year—since that date, only equations had flowed from his pen.

“May I ask why you are doing this?”

“Theory of Colors is part of the Program,” Isaac said—referring (Daniel knew) to a list of philosophical questions Isaac had recently written out in his Waste Book, and the studies he had pursued, entirely on his own, in hopes of answering them. Between the two young men in this room—Newton with his Program and Waterhouse with his God-given responsibility to keep the other from killing himself—neither had attended a single lecture, or had any contact with actual members of the faculty, in over a year. Isaac continued, “I’ve been reading Boyle’s latest—Experiments and Considerations Touching Colors—and it occurred to me: he uses his eyes to make all of his observations—his eyes are therefore instruments, like telescopes—but does he really understand how those instruments work? An astronomer who did not understand his lenses would be a poor philosopher indeed.”

Daniel might have said any number of things then, but what came out was, “How may I assist you?” And it was not just being a simpering toady. He was, for a moment, gobsmacked by the sheer presumption of a mere student, twenty-one years old, with no degree, calling into question the great Boyle’s ability to make simple observations. But in the next moment it occurred to Daniel for the first time: What if Newton was right, and all the others wrong? It was a difficult thing to believe. On the other hand, he wanted to believe it, because if it were true, it meant that in failing to attend so many lectures he had missed precisely nothing, and in acting as Newton’s manservant he was getting the best education in natural philosophy a man could ever have.

“I need you to draw a reticule on a leaf of paper and then hold it up at various measured distances from my cornea—as you do, I’ll move the darning needle up and down—creating greater and lesser distortions in the shape of my eyeball—I say, I’ll do that with one hand, and take notes of what I see with the other.”

So the night proceeded—by sunrise, Isaac Newton knew more about the human eye than anyone who had ever lived, and Daniel knew more than anyone save Isaac. The experiment could have been performed by anyone. Only one person had actually done it, however. Newton pulled the needle out of his eye, which was bloodred, and swollen nearly shut. He turned to another part of the Waste Book and began wrestling with some difficult math out of Cartesian analysis while Daniel stumbled downstairs and went to church. The sun turned the stained-glass windows of the chapel into matrices of burning jewels.

Daniel saw in a way he’d never seen anything before: his mind was a homunculus squatting in the middle of his skull, peering out through good but imperfect telescopes and listening horns, gathering observations that had been distorted along the way, as a lens put chromatic aberrations into all the light that passed through it. A man who peered out at the world through a telescope would assume that the aberration was real, that the stars actually looked like that—what false assumptions, then, had natural philosophers been making about the evidence of their senses, until last night? Sitting in the gaudy radiance of those windows hearing the organ play and the choir sing, his mind pleasantly intoxicated from exhaustion, Daniel experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.

Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts Bay

OCTOBER 1713

DANIEL BECOMES AWARE that someone is standing over him as he lies on the deck: a stubby red-headed and -bearded man with a lit cigar in his mouth, and spectacles with tiny circular lenses: it’s van Hoek, the captain, just checking to see whether his passenger will have to be buried at sea tomorrow. Daniel sits up, finally, and introduces himself, and van Hoek says very little—probably pretending to know less English than he really does, so Daniel won’t be coming to his cabin and pestering him at all hours. He leads Daniel aft along Minerva’s main deck (which is called the upperdeck, even though, at the ends of the ship, there are other decks above it) and up a staircase to the quarterdeck and shows him to a cabin. Even van Hoek, who can be mistaken for a stout ten-year-old if you see him from behind, has to crouch to avoid banging his head on the subtly arched joists that support the poop deck overhead. He raises one arm above his head and steadies himself against a low beam—touching it not with a hand, but a brass hook.

Even though small and low ceilinged, the cabin is perfectly all right—a chest, a lantern, and a bed consisting of a wooden box containing a canvas sack stuffed with straw. The straw is fresh, and its aroma will continue to remind Daniel of the green fields of Massachusetts all the way to England. Daniel strips off just a few items of clothing, curls up, and sleeps.

When he wakes up, the sun is in his eyes. The cabin has a small window (its forward bulkhead is deeply sheltered under the poop deck and so it is safe to put panes of glass there). And since they are sailing eastwards, the rising sun shines into it directly—along the way, it happens to beam directly through the huge spoked wheel by which the ship is steered. This is situated just beneath the edge of that same poop deck so that the steersman can take shelter from the weather while enjoying a clear view forward down almost the entire length of Minerva. At the moment, loops of rope have been cast over a couple of the handles at the ends of the wheel’s spokes and tied down to keep the rudder fixed in one position. No one is at the wheel, and it’s neatly dividing the red disk of the rising sun into sectors.

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

1664

IN THE GREAT COURT of Trinity there was a sundial Isaac Newton didn’t like: a flat disk divided by labeled spokes with a gnomon angling up from the center, naïvely copied from Roman designs, having a certain Classical elegance, and always wrong. Newton was constructing a sundial on a south-facing wall, using, as gnomon, a slender rod with a ball on the end. Every sunny day the ball’s shadow would trace a curve across the wall—a slightly different curve every day, because the tilt of the earth’s axis slowly changed through the seasons. That sheaf of curves made a fine set of astronomical data but not a usable timepiece. To tell time, Isaac (or his faithful assistant, Daniel Waterhouse) had to make a little crosstick at the place the gnomon’s shadow stood when Trinity’s bell (always just a bit out of synchronization with King’s) rang each of the day’s hours. In theory, after 365 repetitions of this daily routine, each of the curves would be marked with ticks for 8:00 A.M., 9:00 A.M., and so on. By connecting those ticks—drawing a curve that passed through all of the eight o’clock ticks, another through all of the nine o’clock ticks, and so on—Isaac produced a second family of curves, roughly parallel to one another and roughly perpendicular to the day curves.

One evening, about two hundred days and over a thousand crossticks into this procedure, Daniel asked Isaac why he found sundials so interesting. Isaac got up, fled the room, and ran off in the direction of the Backs. Daniel let him be for a couple of hours and then went out looking for him. Eventually, at about two o’clock in the morning, he found Isaac standing in the middle of Jesus Green, contemplating his own long shadow in the light of a full moon.

“It was a sincere request for information—nothing more—I want you to convey to me whatever it is about sundials I’ve been too thickheaded to find very interesting.”

This seemed to calm Isaac down, though he did not apologize for having thought the worst about Daniel. He said something along the lines of: “Heavenly radiance fills the æther, its rays parallel and straight and, so long as nothing is there to interrupt them, invisible. The secrets of God’s creation are all told by those rays, but told in a language we do not understand, or even hear—the direction from which they shine, the spectrum of colors concealed within the light, these are all characters in a cryptogram. The gnomon—look at our shadows on the Green! We are the gnomon. We interrupt that light and we are warmed and illuminated by it. By stopping the light, we destroy part of the message without understanding it. We cast a shadow, a hole in the light, a ray of darkness that is shaped like ourselves—some might say that it contains no information save the profile of our own forms—but they are wrong. By recording the stretching and skewing of our shadows, we can attain part of the knowledge hidden in the cryptogram. All we need to make the necessary observations is a fixed regular surface—a plane—against which to cast the shadow. Descartes gave us the plane.”

And so from then onwards Daniel understood that the point of this grueling sundial project was not merely to plot the curves, but to understand why each curve was shaped as it was. To put it another way, Isaac wanted to be able to walk up to a blank wall on a cloudy day, stab a gnomon into it, and draw all of the curves simply by knowing where the shadow would pass. This was the same thing as knowing where the sun would be in the sky, and that was the same as knowing where the earth was in its circuit around the sun, and in its daily rotation.

Though, as months went on, Daniel understood that Isaac wanted to be able to do the same thing even if the blank wall happened to be situated on, say, the moon that Christian Huygens had lately discovered revolving around Saturn.

Exactly how this might be accomplished was a question with ramifications that extended into such fields as: Would Isaac (and Daniel, for that matter) be thrown out of Trinity College? Were the Earth, and all the works of Man, nearing the end of a long relentless decay that had begun with the expulsion from Eden and that would very soon culminate in the Apocalypse? Or might things actually be getting better, with the promise of continuing to do so? Did people have souls? Did they have Free Will?

Aboard Minerva, Massachusetts Bay

OCTOBER 1713

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For WAR, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

NOW WALKING OUT ONTO the upperdeck to find Minerva sailing steadily eastwards on calm seas, Daniel’s appalled that anyone ever doubted these matters. The horizon is a perfect line, the sun a red circle tracing a neat path in the sky and proceeding through an orderly series of color-changes, red-yellow-white. Thus Nature. Minerva—the human world—is a family of curves. There are no straight lines here. The decks are slightly arched to shed water and supply greater strength, the masts flexed, impelled by the thrust of the sails but restrained by webs of rigging: curve-grids like Isaac’s sundial lines. Of course, wherever wind collects in a sail or water skims around the hull it follows rules that Bernoulli has set down using the calculus—Leibniz’s version. Minerva is a congregation of Leibniz-curves navigating according to Bernoulli-rules across a vast, mostly water-covered sphere whose size, precise shape, trajectory through the heavens, and destiny were all laid down by Newton.

One cannot board a ship without imagining shipwreck. Daniel envisions it as being like an opera, lasting several hours and proceeding through a series of Acts.

Act I: The hero rises to clear skies and smooth sailing. The sun is following a smooth and well understood cœlestial curve, the sea is a plane, sailors are strumming guitars and carving objets d’art from walrus tusks, et cetera, while erudite passengers take the air and muse about grand philosophical themes.

Act II: A change in the weather is predicted based upon readings in the captain’s barometer. Hours later it appears in the distance, a formation of clouds that is observed, sketched, and analyzed. Sailors cheerfully prepare for weather.

Act III: The storm hits. Changes are noted on the barometer, thermometer, clinometer, compass, and other instruments—cœlestial bodies are, however, no longer visible—the sky is a boiling chaos torn unpredictably by bolts—the sea is rough, the ship heaves, the cargo remains tied safely down, but most passengers are too ill or worried to think. The sailors are all working without rest—some of them sacrifice chickens in hopes of appeasing their gods. The rigging glows with St. Elmo’s Fire—this is attributed to supernatural forces.

Act IV: The masts snap and the rudder goes missing. There is panic. Lives are already being lost, but it is not known how many. Cannons and casks are careering randomly about, making it impossible to guess who’ll be alive and who dead ten seconds from now. The compass, barometer, et cetera, are all destroyed and the records of their readings swept overboard—maps dissolve—sailors are helpless—those who are still alive and sentient can think of nothing to do but pray.

Act V: The ship is no more. Survivors cling to casks and planks, fighting off the less fortunate and leaving them to drown. Everyone has reverted to a feral state of terror and misery. Huge waves shove them around without any pattern, carnivorous fish use living persons as food. There is no relief in sight, or even imaginable.

—There might also be an Act VI in which everyone was dead, but it wouldn’t make for good opera so Daniel omits it.

Men of his generation were born during Act V[*] and raised in Act IV. As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered planks afloat on a stormy sea into a sailing-ship and then, having climbed onboard it, building instruments with which to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those measurements. When they were at Cambridge, Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.

But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true—that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place—that men had made a reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since. Cambridge was run by a mixture of fogeys too old to be considered dangerous, and Puritans who had been packed into the place by Cromwell after he’d purged all the people he did consider dangerous. With a few exceptions such as Isaac Barrow, none of them would have had any use for Isaac’s sundial, because it didn’t look like an old sundial, and they’d prefer telling time wrong the Classical way to telling it right the newfangled way. The curves that Newton plotted on the wall were a methodical document of their wrongness—a manifesto like Luther’s theses on the church-door.

In explaining why those curves were as they were, the Fellows of Cambridge would instinctively use Euclid’s geometry: the earth is a sphere. Its orbit around the sun is an ellipse—you get an ellipse by constructing a vast imaginary cone in space and then cutting through it with an imaginary plane; the intersection of the cone and the plane is the ellipse. Beginning with these primitive objects (viz. the tiny sphere revolving around the place where the gigantic cone was cut by the imaginary plane), these geometers would add on more spheres, cones, planes, lines, and other elements—so many that if you could look up and see ’em, the heavens would turn nearly black with them—until at last they had found a way to account for the curves that Newton had drawn on the wall. Along the way, every step would be verified by applying one or the other of the rules that Euclid had proved to be true, two thousand years earlier, in Alexandria, where everyone had been a genius.

Isaac hadn’t studied Euclid that much, and hadn’t cared enough to study him well. If he wanted to work with a curve he would instinctively write it down, not as an intersection of planes and cones, but as a series of numbers and letters: an algebraic expression. That only worked if there was a language, or at least an alphabet, that had the power of expressing shapes without literally depicting them, a problem that Monsieur Descartes had lately solved by (first) conceiving of curves, lines, et cetera, as being collections of individual points and (then) devising a way to express a point by giving its coordinates—two numbers, or letters representing numbers, or (best of all) algebraic expressions that could in principle be evaluated to generate numbers. This translated all geometry to a new language with its own set of rules: algebra. The construction of equations was an exercise in translation. By following those rules, one could create new statements that were true, without even having to think about what the symbols referred to in any physical universe. It was this seemingly occult power that scared the hell out of some Puritans at the time, and even seemed to scare Isaac a bit.

By 1664, which was the year that Isaac and Daniel were supposed to get their degrees or else leave Cambridge, Isaac, by taking the very latest in imported Cartesian analysis and then extending it into realms unknown, was (unbeknownst to anyone except Daniel) accomplishing things in the field of natural philosophy that his teachers at Trinity could not even comprehend, much less accomplish—they, meanwhile, were preparing to subject Isaac and Daniel to the ancient and traditional ordeal of examinations designed to test their knowledge of Euclid. If they failed these exams, they’d be branded a pair of dimwitted failures and sent packing.

As the date drew nearer, Daniel began to mention them more and more frequently to Isaac. Eventually they went to see Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, because he was conspicuously a better mathematician than the rest. Also because recently, when Barrow had been traveling in the Mediterranean, the ship on which he’d been passenger had been assaulted by pirates, and Barrow had gone abovedecks with a cutlass and helped fight them off. As such, he did not seem like the type who would really care in what order students learned the material. They were right about that—when Isaac showed up one day, alarmingly late in his academic career, with a few shillings, and bought a copy of Barrow’s Latin translation of Euclid, Barrow didn’t seem to mind. It was a tiny book with almost no margins, but Isaac wrote in the margins anyway, in nearly microscopic print. Just as Barrow had translated Euclid’s Greek into the universal tongue of Latin, Isaac translated Euclid’s ideas (expressed as curves and surfaces) into Algebra.

Half a century later on the deck of Minerva, that’s all Daniel can remember about their Classical education; they took the exams, did indifferently (Daniel did better than Isaac), and were given new titles: they were now scholars, meaning that they had scholarships, meaning that Newton would not have to go back home to Woolsthorpe and become a gentleman-farmer. They would continue to share a chamber at Trinity, and Daniel would continue to learn more from Isaac’s idle musings than he would from the entire apparatus of the University.

ONCE HE’S HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to settle in aboard Minerva, Daniel realizes it’s certain that when, God willing, he reaches London, he’ll be asked to provide a sort of affidavit telling what he knows about the invention of the calculus. As long as the ship’s not moving too violently, he sits down at the large dining table in the common room, one deck below his cabin, and tries to organize his thoughts.

Some weeks after we had received our Scholarships, probably in the Spring of 1665, Isaac Newton and I decided to walk out to Stourbridge Fair.

Reading it back to himself, he scratches out probably in and writes in certainly no later than.

Here Daniel leaves much out—it was Isaac who’d announced he was going. Daniel had decided to come along to look after him. Isaac had grown up in a small town and never been to London. To him, Cambridge was a big city—he was completely unequipped for Stourbridge Fair, which was one of the biggest in Europe. Daniel had been there many times with father Drake or half brother Raleigh, and knew what not to do, anyway.

The two of us went out back of Trinity and began to walk downstream along the Cam. After passing by the bridge in the center of town that gives the City and University their name, we entered into a reach along the north side of Jesus Green where the Cam describes a graceful curve in the shape of an elongated S.

Daniel almost writes like the integration symbol used in the calculus. But he suppresses that, since that symbol, and indeed the term calculus, were invented by Leibniz.

I made some waggish student-like remark about this curve, as curves had been much on our minds the previous year, and Newton began to speak with confidence and enthusiasm—demonstrating that the ideas he spoke of were not extemporaneous speculation but a fully developed theory on which he had been working for some time.

“Yes, and suppose we were on one of those punts,” Newton said, pointing to one of the narrow, flat-bottomed boats that idle students used to mess about on the Cam. “And suppose that the Bridge was the Origin of a system of Cartesian coordinates covering Jesus Green and the other land surrounding the river’s course.”

No, no, no, no. Daniel dips his quill and scratches that bit out. It is an anachronism. Worse, it’s a Leibnizism. Natural Philosophers may talk that way in 1713, but they didn’t fifty years ago. He has to translate it back into the sort of language that Descartes would have used.

“And suppose,” Newton continued, “that we had a rope with regularly spaced knots, such as mariners use to log their speed, and we anchored one end of it on the Bridge—for the Bridge is a fixed point in absolute space. If that rope were stretched tight it would be akin to one of the numbered lines employed by Monsieur Descartes in his Geometry. By stretching it between the Bridge and the punt, we could measure how far the punt had drifted downriver, and in which direction.”

Actually, this is not the way Isaac ever would have said it. But Daniel’s writing this for princes and parliamentarians, not Natural Philosophers, and so he has to put long explanations in Isaac’s mouth.

“And lastly suppose that the Cam flowed always at the same speed, and that our punt matched it. That is what I call a flux-ion—a flowing movement along the curve over time. I think you can see that as we rounded the first limb of the S-curve around Jesus College, where the river bends southward, our fluxion in the north-south direction would be steadily changing. At the moment we passed under the Bridge, we’d be pointed northeast, and so we would have a large northwards fluxion. A minute later, when we reached the point just above Jesus College, we’d be going due east, and so our north-south fluxion would be zero. A minute after that, after we’d curved round and drawn alongside Midsummer Commons, we’d be headed southeast, meaning that we would have developed a large southward fluxion—but even that would reduce and tend back towards zero as the stream curved round northwards again towards Stourbridge Fair.”

He can stop here. For those who know how to read between the lines, this is sufficient to prove Newton had the calculus—or Fluxions, as he called it—in ‘65, most likely ‘64. No point in beating them over the head with it…

Yes, beating someone over the head is the entire point.

Banks of the River Cam

1665

Almost five thousand years agone, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two honest persons are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions, perceiving by the path that the pilgrims made that their way to the City lay through this town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a fair; a fair wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this Fair are all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.

And moreover, at this Fair there is at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of all sorts.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

IT WAS LESS THAN AN hour’s walk to the Fair, strolling along gently sloped green banks with weeping willows, beneath whose canopies were hidden various prostrate students. Black cattle mowed the grass unevenly and strewed cow-pies along their way. At first the river was shallow enough to wade across, and its bottom was carpeted with slender fronds that, near the top, were bent slightly downstream by the mild current. “Now, there is a curve whose fluxion in the downstream direction is nil at the point where it is rooted in the bottom—that is to say, it rises vertically from the mud—but increases as it rises.”

Here Daniel was a bit lost. “Fluxion seems to mean a flowing over time—so it makes perfect sense when you apply the word to the position of a punt on a river, which is, as a matter of fact, flowing over time. But now you seem to be applying it to the shape of a weed, which is not flowing—it’s just standing there sort of bent.”

“But Daniel, the virtue of this approach is that it doesn’t matter what the actual physical situation is, a curve is ever a curve, and whatever you can do to the curve of a river you can do just as rightly to the curve of a weed—we are free from all that old nonsense now.” Meaning the Aristotelian approach, in which such easy mixing of things with obviously different natures would be abhorrent. All that mattered henceforth, apparently, was what form they adopted when translated into the language of analysis. “Translating a thing into the analytical language is akin to what the alchemist does when he extracts, from some crude ore, a pure spirit, or virtue, or pneuma. The fœces—the gross external forms of things—which only mislead and confuse us—are cast off to reveal the underlying spirit. And when this is done we may learn that some things that are superficially different are, in their real nature, the same.”

Very soon, as they left the colleges behind, the Cam became broader and deeper and instantly was crowded with much larger boats. Still, they were not boats for the ocean—they were long, narrow, and flat-bottomed, made for rivers and canals, but with far greater displacement than the little punts. Stourbridge Fair was already audible: the murmur of thousands of haggling buyers and sellers, barking of dogs, wild strains from bagpipes and shawms whipping over their heads like twists of bright ribbon unwinding in the breeze. They looked at the boat people: Independent traders in black hats and white neck-cloths, waterborne Gypsies, ruddy Irish and Scottish men, and simply Englishmen with complicated personal stories, negotiating with sure-footed boat-dogs, throwing buckets of mysterious fluids overboard, pursuing domestic arguments with unseen persons in the tents or shacks pitched on their decks.

Then they rounded a bend, and there was the Fair, spread out in a vast wedge of land, bigger than Cambridge, even more noisy, much more crowded. It was mostly tents and tent people, who were not their kind of people—Daniel watched Isaac gain a couple of inches in height as he remembered the erect posture that Puritans used to set a better example. In some secluded parts of the Fair (Daniel knew) serious merchants were trading cattle, timber, iron, barrelled oysters—anything that could be brought upriver this far on a boat, or transported overland in a wagon. But this wholesale trade wanted to be invisible, and was. What Isaac saw was a retail fair whose size and gaudiness was all out of proportion to its importance, at least if you went by the amount of money that changed hands. The larger avenues (which meant sluices of mud with planks and logs strewn around for people to step on, or at least push off against) were lined with tents of rope-dancers, jugglers, play-actors, puppet shows, wrestling-champions, dancing-girls, and of course the speciality prostitutes who made the Fair such an important resource for University students. But going up into the smaller byways, they found the tables and stalls and the cleverly fashioned unfolding wagons of traders who’d brought goods from all over Europe, up the Ouse and the Cam to this place to sell them to England.

Daniel and Isaac roamed for the better part of an hour, ignoring the shouts and pleadings of the retailers on all sides, until finally Isaac stopped, alert, and sidestepped over to a small folding display-case-on-legs that a tall slender Jew in a black coat had set up. Daniel eyed this Son of Moses curiously—Cromwell had readmitted these people to England only ten years previously, after they’d been excluded for centuries, and they were as exotic as giraffes. But Isaac was staring at a constellation of gemlike objects laid out on a square of black velvet. Noting his interest, the Kohan folded back the edges of the cloth to reveal many more: concave and convex lenses, flat disks of good glass for grinding your own, bottles of abrasive powder in several degrees of coarseness, and prisms.

Isaac signalled that he would be willing to open negotiations over two of the prisms. The lens-grinder inhaled, drew himself up, and blinked. Daniel moved round to a supporting position behind and to the side of Isaac. “You have pieces of eight,” the circumcised one said—midway between an assertion and a question.

“I know that your folk once lived in a kingdom where that was the coin of the realm, sir,” Isaac said, “but…”

“You know nothing—my people did not come from Spain. They came from Poland. You have French coins—the louis d’or?”

“The louis d’or is a beautiful coin, befitting the glory of the Sun King,” Daniel put in, “and probably much used wherever you came from—Amsterdam?”

“London. You intend to compensate me, then, with what—Joachimsthalers?”

“As you, sir, are English, and so am I, let us use English means.”

“You wish to trade cheese? Tin? Broadcloth?”

“How many shillings will buy these two prisms?”

The Hebraic one adopted a haggard, suffering look and gazed at a point above their heads. “Let me see the color of your money,” he said, in a voice that conveyed gentle regret, as if Isaac might have bought some prisms today, and instead would only get a dreary lesson in the unbelievable shabbiness of English coinage. Isaac reached into a pocket and wiggled his fingers to produce a metallic tromping noise that proved many coins were in there. Then he pulled out a handful and let the lens-grinder have a glimpse of a few coins, tarnished black. Daniel, so far, was startled by how good Isaac was at this kind of thing. On the other hand, he had made a business out of lending money to other students—maybe he had talent.

“You must have made a mistake,” said the Jew. “Which is perfectly all right—we all make mistakes. You reached into the wrong pocket and you pulled out your black money[*]—the stuff you throw to beggars.”

“Ahem, er, so I did,” Isaac said. “Pardon me—where’s the money for paying merchants?” Patting a few other pockets. “By the way, assuming I’m not going to offer you black money, how many shillings?”

“When you say shillings, I assume you mean the new ones?”

“The James I?”

“No, no, James I died half a century ago and so one would not normally use the adjective new to describe pounds minted during his reign.”

“Did you say pounds?” Daniel asked. “A pound is rather a lot of money, and so it strikes me as not relevant to this transaction, which has all the appearances of a shilling type of affair at most.”

“Let us use the word coins until I know whether you speak of the new or the old.”

“New meaning the coins minted, say, during our lifetimes?”

“I mean the Restoration coinage,” the Israelite said, “or perhaps your professors have neglected to inform you that Cromwell is dead, and Interregnum coins demonetized these last three years.”

“Why, I believe I have heard that the King is beginning to mint new coins,” Isaac said, looking to Daniel for confirmation.

“My half brother in London knows someone who saw a gold CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA coin once, displayed in a crystal case on a silken pillow,” Daniel said. “People have begun to call them Guineas, because they are made of gold that the Duke of York’s company is taking out of Africa.”

“I say, Daniel, is it true what they say, that those coins are perfectly circular?”

“They are, Isaac—not like the good old English hammered coins that you and I carry in such abundance in our pockets and purses.”

“Furthermore,” said the Ashkenazi, “the King brought with him a French savant, Monsieur Blondeau, on loan from King Louis, and that fellow built a machine that mills delicate ridges and inscriptions into the edges of the coins.”

“Typical French extravagance,” Isaac said.

“The King really did spend more time than was good for him in Paris,” Daniel said.

“On the contrary,” the forelocked one said, “if someone clips or files a bit of metal off the edge of a round coin with a milled edge, it is immediately obvious.”

“That must be why everyone is melting those new coins down as fast as they are minted, and shipping the metal to the Orient…?” Daniel began,

“…making it impossible for the likes of me and my friend to obtain them,” Isaac finished.

“Now there is a good idea—if you can show me coins of a bright silver color—not that black stuff—I’ll weigh them and accept them as bullion.”

“Bullion! Sir!”

“Yes.”

“I have heard that this is the practice in China,” Isaac said sagely. “But here in England, a shilling is a shilling.”

“No matter how little it weighs!?”

“Yes. In principle, yes.”

“So when a lump of metal is coined in the Mint, it takes on a magical power of shillingness, and even after it has been filed and clipped and worn down to a mere featureless nodule, it is still worth a full shilling?”

“You exaggerate,” Daniel said. “I have here a fine Queen Elizabeth shilling, for example—which I carry around, mind you, as a souvenir of Gloriana’s reign, since it is far too fine a specimen to actually spend. But as you can see, it is just as bright and shiny as the day it was minted—”

“Especially where it’s recently been clipped there along the side,” the lens-grinder said.

“Normal, pleasing irregularity of the hand-hammered currency, nothing more.”

Isaac said, “My friend’s shilling, though magnificent, and arguably worth two or even three shillings in the market, is no anomaly. Here I have a shilling from the reign of Edward VI, which I obtained after an inebriated son of a Duke, who happened to have borrowed a shilling from me some time earlier, fell unconscious on a floor—the purse in which he carried his finest coins fell open and this rolled out of it—I construed this as repayment of the debt, and the exquisite condition of the coin as interest.”

“How could it roll when three of its edges are flat? It is nearly triangular,” the lens-grinder said.

“A trick of the light.”

“The problem with that Edward VI coinage is that for all I knew it might’ve been issued during the Great Debasement, when, before Sir Thomas Gresham could get matters in hand, prices doubled.”

“The inflation was not because the coins were debased, as some believe,” Daniel said, “it was because the wealth confiscated from the Papist monasteries, and cheap silver from the mines of New Spain, were flooding the country.”

“If you would allow me to approach within ten feet of these coins, it would help me to appreciate their numismatic excellence,” the lens-grinder said. “I could even use some of my magnifying-lenses to…”

“I’m afraid I would be offended,” Isaac said.

“You could inspect this one as closely as you wanted,” Daniel said, “and find no evidence of criminal tampering—I got it from a blind innkeeper who had suffered frostbite in the fingertips—had no idea what he was giving me.”

“Didn’t he think to bite down on it? Like so?” said the Judaic individual, taking the shilling and crushing it between his rear molars.

“What would he have learned by doing that, sir?”

“That whatever counterfeit-artist stamped it out, had used reasonably good metal—not above fifty percent lead.”

“We’ll choose to interpret that as a wry jest,” Daniel said, “the likes of which you could never direct against this shilling, which my half brother found lying on the ground at the Battle of Naseby, not far from fragments of a Royalist captain who’d been blown to pieces by a bursting cannon—the dead man was, you see, a captain who’d once stood guard at the Tower of London where new coins are minted.”

The Jew repeated the biting ceremony, then scratched at the coin in case it was a brass clinker japanned with silver paint. “Worthless. But I owe a shilling to a certain vile man in London, a hater of Jews, and I would drive a shilling’s worth of satisfaction from slipping this slug of pig-iron into his hand.”

“Very well, then—” said Isaac, reaching for the prisms.

“Avid collectors such as you two must also have pennies—?”

“My father hands out shiny new ones as Christmas presents,” Daniel began. “Three years ago—” but he suspended the anecdote when he noticed that the lens-grinder was paying attention, not to him, but to a commotion behind them.

Daniel turned around and saw that it was a man, reasonably well-heeled, having trouble walking even though a friend and a servant were supporting him. He had a powerful desire to lie down, it seemed, which was most awkward, as he happened to be wading through ankle-deep mud. The servant slipped a hand between the man’s upper arm and his ribs to bear him up, but the man shrieked like a cat who’s been mangled under a cartwheel and convulsed backwards and landed full-length on his back, hurling up a coffin-shaped wave of mud that spattered things yards away.

“Take your prisms,” said the merchant, practically stuffing them into Isaac’s pocket. He began folding up his display-case. If he felt the way Daniel did, then it wasn’t the sight of a man feeling ill, or falling down, that made him pack up and leave, so much as the sound of that scream.

Isaac was walking toward the sick man with the cautious but direct gait of a tightrope-walker.

“Shall we back to Cambridge, then?” Daniel suggested.

“I have some knowledge of the arts of the apothecary.” Isaac said, “Perhaps I could help him.”

A circle of people had gathered to observe the sick man, but it was a very broad circle, empty except for Isaac and Daniel. The victim appeared, now, to be trying to get his breeches off. But his arms were rigid, so he was trying to do it by writhing free of his clothes. His servant and his friend were tugging at the cuffs, but the breeches seemed to’ve shrunk onto his legs. Finally the friend drew his dagger, slashed through the cuffs left and right, and then ripped the pant-legs open from bottom to top—or perhaps the force of the swelling thighs burst them. They came off, anyway. Friend and servant backed away, affording Isaac and Daniel a clear vantage point that would have enabled them to see all the way up to the man’s groin, if the view hadn’t been blocked by black globes of taut flesh stacked like cannonballs up his inner thighs.

The man had stopped writhing and screaming now because he was dead. Daniel had taken Isaac’s arm and was rather firmly pulling him back, but Isaac continued to approach the specimen. Daniel looked round and saw that suddenly there was no one within musket range—horses and tents had been abandoned, back-loads of goods spilled on the ground by porters now halfway to Ely.

“I can see the buboes expanding even though the body is dead,” Isaac said. “The generative spirit lives on—transmuting dead flesh into something else—just as maggots are generated out of meat, and silver grows beneath mountains—why does it bring death sometimes and life others?”

That they lived was evidence that Daniel eventually pulled Isaac away and got him pointed back up the river toward Cambridge. But Isaac’s mind was still on those Satanic miracles that had appeared in the dead man’s groin. “I admire Monsieur Descartes’ analysis, but there is something missing in his supposition that the world is just bits of matter jostling one another like coins shaken in a bag. How could that account for the ability of matter to organize itself into eyes and leaves and salamanders, to transmute itself into alternate forms? And yet it’s not simply that matter comes together in good ways—not some ongoing miraculous Creation—for the same process by which our bodies turn meat and milk into flesh and blood can also cause a man’s body to convert itself into a mass of buboes in a few hours’ time. It might seem aimless, but it cannot be. That one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message that philosophers seek to decode.”

“Unless the message was set down long ago and is there in the Bible for all men to read plainly,” Daniel said.

Fifty years later, he hates to remember that he ever talked this way, but he can’t stop himself.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The year 1665 is halfway over—you know what year comes next. I must to London, Isaac. Plague has come to England. What we have seen today is a harbinger of the Apocalypse.”

Aboard Minerva, off the Coast of New England

NOVEMBER 1713

DANIEL IS ROUSED by a rooster on the forecastledeck[*] that is growing certain it’s not just imagining that light in the eastern sky. Unfortunately, the eastern sky is off to port this morning. Yesterday it was to starboard. Minerva has been sailing up and down the New England coast for the better part of a fortnight, trying to catch a wind that will decisively take her out into the deep water, or “off soundings,” as they say. They are probably not more than fifty miles away from Boston.

He goes below to the gun deck, a dim slab of sharp-smelling air. When his eyes have adjusted he can see the cannons, all swung around on their low carriages so they are parallel to the hull planking, aimed forwards, lashed in place, and the heavy hatches closed over the gun ports. Now that he cannot see the horizon, he must use the soles of his feet to sense the ship’s rolling and pitching—if he waits for his balance-sense to tell him he’s falling, it’ll be too late. He makes his way aft in very short, carefully planned steps, trailing fingertips along the ceiling, jostling the long ramrods and brushes racked up there for tending the guns. This takes him to a door and thence into a cabin at the stern that’s as wide as the entire ship and fitted with a sweep of windows, gathering what light they can from the western sky and the setting moon.

Half a dozen men are in here working and talking, all of them relatively old and sophisticated compared to ordinary seamen—this is where great chests full of good tools are stored, and sheets of potent diagrams nested. A tiller the dimensions of a battering-ram runs straight down the middle of the ceiling and out through a hole in the stern to the rudder, which it controls; the forward end of the tiller is pulled to and fro by a couple of cables that pass up through openings in the decks to the wheel. The air smells of coffee, wood-shavings, and pipe-smoke. Grudging hellos are scattered about. Daniel goes back and sits by one of the windows—these are undershot so that he can look straight down and see Minerva’s wake being born in a foamy collision down around the rudder. He opens a small hatch below a window and drops out a Fahrenheit thermometer on a string. It is the very latest in temperature measurement technology from Europe—Enoch presented it to him as a sort of party favor. He lets it bounce through the surf for a few minutes, then hauls it in and takes a reading.

He’s been trying to perform this ritual every four hours—the objective being to see if there’s anything to the rumor that the North Atlantic is striped with currents of warm water. He can present the data to the Royal Society if-God-willing-he-reaches-London. At first he did it from the upperdeck, but he didn’t like the way the instrument got battered against the hull, and he was wearied by the looks of incomprehension on the sailors’ faces. The old gaffers back here don’t necessarily think he’s any less crazy but they don’t think less of him for it.

So like a sojourner in a foreign city who eventually finds a coffeehouse where he feels at home, Daniel has settled on this place, and been accepted here. The regulars are mostly in their thirties and forties: a Filipino; a Lascar; a half-African, half-white from the Portuguese city of Goa; a Huguenot; a Cornish man with surprisingly poor English; an Irishman. They’re all perfectly at home here, as if Minerva were a thousand-year-old ship on which their ancestors had always lived. If she ever sinks, Daniel suspects they’ll happily go down with her, for lack of any other place to live. Joined with one another and with Minerva, they have the power to travel anywhere on earth, fighting their way past pirates if need be, eating well, sleeping in their own beds. But if Minerva were lost, it almost wouldn’t make any difference whether it spilled them into the North Atlantic in a January gale, or let them off gently into some port town—either way, it’d be a short, sad life for them after that. Daniel wishes there were a comforting analogy to the Royal Society to be made here, but as that lot are currently trying to throw one of their own number (Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz) overboard, it doesn’t really work.

A brick-lined cabin is wedged between the upperdeck and the forecastledeck, always full of smoke because fires burn there—food comes out of it from time to time. A full meal is brought to Daniel once a day, and he takes it, usually by himself, sometimes with Captain van Hoek, in the common room. He’s the only passenger. Here it’s evident that Minerva’s an old ship, because the crockery and flatware are motley, chipped, and worn. Those parts of the ship that matter have been maintained or replaced as part of what Daniel’s increasingly certain must be a subtle, understated, but fanatical program of maintenance decreed by van Hoek and ramrodded by one of his mates. The crockery and other clues suggest that the ship’s a good three decades old, but unless you go down into the hold and view the keel and the ribs, you don’t see any pieces that are older than perhaps five years.

None of the plates match, and so it’s always a bit of a game for Daniel to eat his way down through the meal (normally something stewlike with expensive spices) until he can see the pattern on the plate. It is kind of an idiotic game for a Fellow of the Royal Society to indulge in, but he doesn’t introspect about it until one evening when he’s staring into his plate, watching the gravy slosh with the ship’s heaving (a microcosm of the Atlantic?), and all of a sudden it’s—

The Plague Year

SUMMER 1665

Th’earths face is but thy Table; there are set Plants, cattell, men, dishes for Death to eate. In a rude hunger now hee millions drawes Into his bloody, or plaguy, or sterv’d jawes.

—JOHN DONNE, “Elegie on M Boulstred”

DANIEL WAS EATING POTATOES and herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day. As he was doing it in his father’s house, he was expected loudly to thank God for the privilege before and after the meal. His prayers of gratitude were becoming less sincere by the day.

To one side of the house, cattle voiced their eternal confusion—to the other, men trudged down the street ringing hand-bells (for those who could hear) and carrying long red sticks (for those who could see), peering into court-yards and doorways, and poking their snouts over garden-walls, scanning for bubonic corpses. Everyone else who had enough money to leave London was absent. That included Daniel’s half brothers Raleigh and Sterling and their families, as well as his half-sister Mayflower, who along with her children had gone to ground in Buckinghamshire. Only Mayflower’s husband, Thomas Ham, and Drake Waterhouse, Patriarch, had refused to leave. Mr. Ham wanted to leave, but he had a cellar in the City to look after.

The idea of leaving, just because of a spot of the old Black Death, hadn’t even occurred to Drake yet. Both of his wives had died quite a while ago, his elder children had fled, there was no one left to talk sense into him except Daniel. Cambridge had been shut down for the duration of the Plague. Daniel had ventured down here for what he had envisioned as a quick, daring raid on an empty house, and had found Drake seated before a virginal playing old hymns from the Civil War. Having spent most of his good coins, first of all helping Newton buy prisms, and secondly bribing a reluctant coachman to bring him down within walking distance of this pest-hole, Daniel was stuck until he could get money out of Dad—a subject he was afraid to even broach. Since God had predestined all events anyway, there was no way for them to avoid the Plague, if that was their doom—and if it wasn’t, why, no harm in staying there on the edge of the city and setting an example for the fleeing and/or dying populace.

Owing to those modifications that had been made to his head at the behest of Archbishop Laud, Drake Waterhouse made curious percolating and whistling noises when he chewed and swallowed his potatoes and herring.

In 1629, Drake and some friends had been arrested for distributing freshly printed libels in the streets of London. These particular libels inveighed against Ship Money, a new tax imposed by Charles I. But the topic did not matter; if this had happened in 1628, the libels would have been about something else, and no less offensive to the King and the Archbishop.

An indiscreet remark made by one of Drake’s comrades after burning sticks had been rammed under his nails led to the discovery of the printing-press that Drake had used to print the libels—he kept it in a wagon hidden under a pile of hay. So as he had now been exposed as the master-mind of the conspiracy, Bishop Laud had him, and a few other supremely annoying Calvinists, pilloried, branded, and mutilated. These were essentially practical techniques more than punishments. The intent was not to reform the criminals, who were clearly un-reformable. The pillory fixed them in one position for a while so that all London could come by and get a good look at their faces and thereafter recognize them. The branding and mutilation marked them permanently so that the rest of the world would know them.

As all of this had happened years before Daniel had even been born, it didn’t matter to him—this was just how Dad had always looked—and of course it had never mattered to Drake. Within a few weeks, Drake had been back on the highways of England, buying cloth that he’d later smuggle to the Netherlands. In a country inn, on the way to St. Ives, he encountered a saturnine, beetle-browed chap name of Oliver Cromwell who had recently lost his faith, and seen his life ruined—or so he imagined, until he got a look at Drake, and found God. But that was another story.

The goal of all persons who had houses in those days was to possess the smallest number of pieces of furniture needed to sustain life, but to make them as large and heavy and dark as possible. Accordingly, Daniel and Drake ate their potatoes and herring on a table that had the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge. There was no other furniture in the room, although the eight-foot-high grandfather clock in the adjoining hall contributed a sort of immediate presence with the heaving to and fro of its cannonball-sized pendulum, which made the entire house lean from one side to the other like a drunk out for a brisk walk, and the palpable grinding of its gear-train, and the wild clamorous bonging that exploded from it at intervals that seemed suspiciously random, and that caused flocks of migrating waterfowl, thousands of feet overhead, to collide with each other in panic and veer into new courses. The fur of dust beginning to overhang its Gothick battlements; its internal supply of mouse-turds; the Roman numerals carven into the back by its maker; and its complete inability to tell time, all marked it as pre-Huygens technology. Its bonging would have tried Daniel’s patience even if it had occurred precisely on the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, et cetera, for it never failed to make him jump out of his skin. That it conveyed no information whatever as to what the time actually was, drove Daniel into such transports of annoyance that he had begun to entertain a phant’sy of standing at the intersection of two corridors and handing Drake, every time he passed by, a libel denouncing the ancient Clock, and demanding its wayward pendulum be stilled, and that it be replaced with a new Huygens model. But Drake had already told him to shut up about the clock, and so there was nothing he could do.

Daniel was going for days without hearing any other sounds but these. All possible subjects of conversation could be divided into two categories: (1) ones that would cause Drake to unleash a rant, previously heard so many times that Daniel could recite it from memory, and (2) ones that might actually lead to original conversation. Daniel avoided Category 1 topics. All Category 2 topics had already been exhausted. For example, Daniel could not ask, “How is Praise-God doing in Boston?”[*] because he had asked this on the first day, and Drake had answered it, and since then few letters had arrived because the letter-carriers were dead or running away from London as fast as they could go. Sometimes private couriers would come with letters, mostly pertaining to Drake’s business matters but sometimes addressed to Daniel. This would provoke a flurry of conversation stretching out as long as half an hour (not counting rants), but mostly what Daniel heard, day after day, was corpse-collectors’ bells, and their creaking carts; the frightful Clock; cows; Drake reading the Books of Daniel and of Revelation aloud, or playing the virginal; and the gnawing of Daniel’s own quill across the pages of his notebook as he worked his way through Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens. He actually learned an appalling amount. In fact, he was fairly certain he’d caught up with where Isaac had been several months previously—but Isaac was up at home in Woolsthorpe, a hundred miles away, and no doubt years ahead of him by this point.

He ate down to the bottom of his potatoes and herring with the determination of a prisoner clawing a hole through a wall, finally revealing the plate. The Waterhouse family china had been manufactured by sincere novices in Holland. After James I had outlawed the export of unfinished English cloth to the Netherlands, Drake had begun smuggling it there, which was easily done since the town of Leyden was crowded with English pilgrims. In this way Drake had made the first of several smuggling-related fortunes, and done so in a way pleasing in the sight of the Lord, viz. by boldly defying the King’s efforts to meddle in commerce. Not only that but he had met and in 1617 married a pilgrim lass in Leyden, and he had made many donations there to the faithful who were in the market for a ship. The grateful congregation, shortly before embarking on the Mayflower, bound for sunny Virginia, had presented Drake and his new wife, Hortense, with this set of Delft pottery. They had obviously made it themselves on the theory that when they sloshed up onto the shores of America, they’d better know how to make stuff out of clay. They were heavy crude plates glazed white, with an inscription in spidery blue letters:

YOU AND I ARE BUT EARTH.

Staring at this through a miasma of the bodily fluids of herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day, Daniel suddenly announced, “I was thinking that I might go and, God willing, visit John Wilkins.”

Wilkins had been exchanging letters with Daniel ever since the debacle of five years ago, when Daniel had arrived at Trinity College a few moments after Wilkins had been kicked out of it forever.

The mention of Wilkins did not trigger a rant, which meant Daniel was as good as there. But there were certain formalities to be gone through: “To what end?” asked Drake, sounding like a pipe-organ with numerous jammed valves as the words emerged partly from his mouth and partly from his nose. He voiced all questions as if they were pat assertions: To what end being said in the same tones as You and I are but earth.

“My purpose is to learn, Father, but I seem to’ve learned all I can from the books that are here.”

“And what of the Bible.” An excellent riposte there from Drake.

“There are Bibles everywhere, praise God, but only one Reverend Wilkins.”

“He has been preaching at that Established church in the city, has he not.”

“Indeed. St. Lawrence Jewry.”

“Then why should it be necessary for you to leave.” As the city was a quarter of an hour’s walk.

“The Plague, father—I don’t believe he has actually set foot in London these last several months.”

“And what of his flock.”

Daniel almost fired back, Oh, you mean the Royal Society? which in most other houses would have been a bon mot, but not here. “They’ve all run away, too, Father, the ones who aren’t dead.”

“High Church folk,” Drake said self-explanatorily. “Where is Wilkins now.”

“Epsom.”

“He is with Comstock. What can he possibly be thinking.”

“It’s no secret that you and Wilkins have come down on opposite sides of the fence, Father.”

“The golden fence that Laud threw up around the Lord’s Table! Yes.”

“Wilkins backs Tolerance as fervently as you. He hopes to reform the church from within.”

“Yes, and no man—short of an Archbishop—could be more within than John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom. But why should you embroil yourself in such matters.”

“Wilkins is not pursuing religious controversies at Epsom—he is pursuing natural philosophy.”

“Seems a strange place for it.”

“The Earl’s son, Charles, could not attend Cambridge because of the plague, and so Wilkins and some other members of the Royal Society are there to serve as his tutors.”

“Aha! It is all clear, then. It is all an accommodation.”

“Yes.”

“What is it that you hope to learn from the Reverend Wilkins.”

“Whatever it is that he wishes to teach me. Through the Royal Society he is in communication with all the foremost natural philosophers of the British Isles, and many on the Continent as well.”

Drake took some time considering that. “You are asserting that you require my financial assistance in order to become acquainted with a hypothetical body of knowledge which you assume has come into existence out of nowhere, quite recently.”

“Yes, Father.”

“A bit of an act of faith then, isn’t it.”

“Not so much as you might think. My friend Isaac—I’ve told you of him—has spoken of a ‘generative spirit’ that pervades all things, and that accounts for the possibility of new things being created from old—and if you don’t believe me, then just ask yourself, how can flowers grow up out of manure? Why does meat turn itself into maggots, and ships’ planking into worms? Why do images of sea-shells form in rocks far from any sea, and why do new stones grow in farmers’ fields after the previous year’s crop has been dug out? Clearly some organizing principle is at work, and it pervades all things invisibly, and accounts for the world’s ability to have newness—to do something other than only decay.”

“And yet it decays. Look out the window! Listen to the ringing of the bells. Ten years ago, Cromwell melted down the Crown Jewels and gave all men freedom of religion. Today, a crypto-Papist[*] and lackey of the Antichrist[†] rules England, and England’s gold goes to making giant punch-bowls for use at the royal orgies, and we of the Gathered Church must worship in secret as if we were early Christians in pagan Rome.”

“One of the things about the generative spirit that demands our careful study is that it can go awry,” Daniel returned. “In some sense the pneuma that causes buboes to grow from the living flesh of plague victims must be akin to the one that causes mushrooms to pop out of the ground after rain, but one has effects we call evil and the other has effects we call good.”

“You think Wilkins knows more of this.”

“I was actually using it to explain the very existence of men like Wilkins, and of this club of his, which he now calls the Royal Society, and of other such groups, such as Monsieur de Montmor’s salon in Paris—”

“I see. You suppose that this same spirit is at work in the minds of these natural philosophers.”

“Yes, Father, and in the very soil of the nations that have produced so many natural philosophers in such a short time—to the great discomfiture of the Papists.” Reckoning it could not hurt his chances to get in a dig at Popery. “And just as the farmer can rely on the steady increase of his crops, I can be sure that much new work has been accomplished by such people within the last several months.”

“But with the End of Days drawing so near—”

“Only a few months ago, at one of the last meetings of the Royal Society, Mr. Daniel Coxe said that mercury had been found running like water in a chalk-pit at Line. And Lord Brereton said that at an Inn in St. Alban’s, quicksilver was found running in a saw-pit.”

“And you suppose this means—what.”

“Perhaps this flourishing of so many kinds—natural philosophy, plague, the power of King Louis, orgies at Whitehall, quicksilver welling up from the bowels of the earth—is a necessary preparation for the Apocalypse—the generative spirit rising up like a tide.”

“That much is obvious, Daniel. I wonder, though, whether there is any point in furthering your studies when we are so close.”

“Would you admire a farmer who let his fields be overrun with weeds, simply because the End was near?”

“No, of course not. Your point is well taken.”

“If we have a duty to be alert for the signs of the End Times, then let me go, Father. For if the signs are comets, then the first to know will be the astronomers. If the signs are plague, the first to know—”

“—will be physicians. Yes, I understand. But are you suggesting that those who study natural philosophy can acquire some kind of occult knowledge—special insight into God’s Creation, not available to the common Bible-reading man?”

“Er…I suppose that’s quite clearly what I’m suggesting.”

Drake nodded. “That is what I thought. Well, God gave us brains for a reason—not to use those brains would be a sin.” He got up and carried his plate to the kitchen, then went to a small desk of many drawers in the parlor and broke out all of the gear needed to write on paper with a quill. “Haven’t much coin just now,” he mumbled, moving the quill about in a sequence of furious scribbles separated by long flowing swoops, like a sword-duel. “There you are.”

Mr. Ham pray pay to the bearer one pound I say £1—of that money of myne which you have in your hands upon sight of this Bill

Drake Waterhouse London

“What is this instrument, Father?”

“Goldsmith’s Note. People started doing this about the time you left for Cambridge.”

“Why does it say ‘the bearer’? Why not ‘Daniel Waterhouse’?”

“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You could, if you chose, use this to pay a one-pound debt—you’d simply hand it to your creditor and he could then nip down to Ham’s and get a pound in coin of the realm. Or he could use it to pay one of his debts.”

“I see. But in this case it simply means that if I go into the City and present this to Uncle Thomas, or one of the other Hams…”

“They’ll do what the note orders them to do.”

It was, then, a normal example of Drake’s innate fiendishness. Daniel was perfectly welcome to flee to Epsom—the seat of John Comstock, the arch-Anglican—and study Natural Philosophy until, literally, the End of the World. But in order to obtain the means, he would have to demonstrate his faith by walking all the way across London at the height of the Plague. Trial by ordeal it was.

The next morning: on with a coat and a down-at-heels pair of riding-boots, even though it was a warm summer day. A scarf to breathe through.[*] A minimal supply of clean shirts and drawers (if he was feeling well when he reached Epsom, he’d send for more). A rather small number of books—tiny student octavo volumes of the usual Continental savants, their margins and interlinear spaces now caulked with his notes. A letter he’d received from Wilkins, with an enclosure from one Robert Hooke, during a rare spate of mail last week. All went into a bag, the bag on the end of a staff, and the staff over his shoulder—made him look somewhat Vagabondish, but many people in the city had turned to robbery, as normal sources of employment had been shut down, and there were sound reasons to look impoverished and carry a big stick.

Drake, upon Daniel’s departure: “Will you tell old Wilkins that I do not think the less of him for having become an Anglican, as I have the most serene confidence that he has done so in the interest of reforming that church, which as you know has been the steady goal of those of us who are scorned by others as Puritans.”

And for Daniel: “I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you—not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”

“It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially.”

“That is fine when you are talking about comets.”

“I’ll not discuss religion, then. Good-bye, Father.”

“God be with you, Daniel.”

HE OPENED THE DOOR, trying not to flinch when outside air touched his face, and descended the steps to the road called Hol-born, a river of pounded dust (it had not rained in a while). Drake’s house was a new (post-Cromwell) half-timbered building on the north side of the road, one of a line of mostly wooden houses that formed a sort of fence dividing Holborn from the open fields on its north, which stretched all the way to Scotland. The buildings across the way, on the south side of Holborn, were the same but two decades older (pre-Civil War). The ground was flat except for a sort of standing wave of packed dirt that angled across the fields, indeed across Holborn itself, not far away, off to his right—as if a comet had landed on London Bridge and sent up a ripple in the earth, which had spread outwards until it had gone just past Drake’s house and then frozen. These were the remains of the earth-works that London[*] had thrown up early in the Civil War, to defend against the King’s armies. There’d been a gate on Holborn and a star-shaped earthen fort nearby, but the gate had been torn down a long time ago and the fort blurred into a grassy hummock guarded by the younger and more adventurous cattle.

Daniel turned left, towards London. This was utter madness. But the letter from Wilkins, and the enclosure from Hooke—a Wilkins protégé from his Oxford days, and now Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society—contained certain requests. They were phrased politely. Perhaps not so politely in Hooke’s case. They had let Daniel know that he could be of great service to them by fetching certain items out of certain buildings in London.

Daniel could have burned the letter and claimed it had never arrived. He could have gone to Epsom without any of the items on the list, pleading the Bubonic Plague as his excuse. But he suspected that Wilkins and Hooke did not care for excuses any more than Drake did.

By going to Trinity at exactly the wrong moment, Daniel had missed out on the first five years of the Royal Society of London. Lately he had attended a few meetings, but always felt as if his nose were pressed up against the glass.

Today he would pay his dues by walking into London. It was hardly the most dangerous thing anyone had done in the study of Natural Philosophy.

He put one boot in front of the other, and found that he had not died yet. He did it again, then again. The place seemed eerily normal for a short while as long as you ignored the continuous ringing of death-knells from about a hundred different parish churches. On a closer look, many people had adorned the walls of their houses with nearly hysterical pleas for God’s mercy, perhaps thinking that like the blood of the lambs on Israel’s door-posts, these graffiti might keep the Angel of Death from knocking. Wagons came and went on Holborn only occasionally—empty ones going into town, stained and reeking, with vanguards and rearguards of swooping birds cutting swaths through the banks of flies that surrounded them—these were corpse-wains returning from their midnight runs to the burial-pits and churchyards outside the town. Wagons filled with people, escorted by pedestrians with hand-bells and red sticks, crept out of town. Just near the remains of those earth-works where Holborn terminated at its intersection with the road to Oxford, a pest-house had been established, and when it had filled up with dead people, another, farther away, to the north of the Tyburn gallows, at Marylebone. Some of the people on the wagons appeared normal, others had reached the stage where the least movement caused them hellish buboe-pain, and so even without the bells and red sticks the approach of these wagons would have been obvious from the fusillade of screams and hot prayers touched off at every bump in the road. Daniel and the very few other pedestrians on Holborn backed into doorways and breathed through scarves when these wagons passed by.

Through Newgate and the stumps of the Roman wall, then, past the Prison, which was silent, but not empty. Towards the square-topped tower of Saint Paul’s, where an immense bell was being walloped by tired ringers, counting the years of the dead. That old tower leaned to one side, and had for a long time, so that everyone in London had stopped noticing that it did. In these circumstances, though, it seemed to lean more, and made Daniel suddenly nervous that it was about to fall over on him. Just a few weeks ago, Robert Hooke and Sir Robert Moray had been up in its belfry conducting experiments with two-hundred-foot-long pendulums. Now the cathedral was fortified within a rampart of freshly tamped earth, the graves piled up a full yard above ground level.

The old front of the church had become half eaten away by coal-smoke, and a newfangled Classical porch slapped onto it some three or four decades ago. But the new columns were already decaying, and they were marred from where shops had been built between them during Cromwell’s time. During those years, Round-head cavalry had pulled the furniture up from the western half of the church and chopped it up for firewood, then used the empty space as a vast stable for nearly a thousand horses, selling their dung as fuel, to freezing Londoners, for 4d a bushel. Meanwhile, in the eastern half Drake and Bolstrood and others had preached three-hour sermons to diminishing crowds. Now King Charles was supposedly fixing the place up, but Daniel could see no evidence that anything had been done.

Daniel went round the south side of the church even though it was not the most direct way, because he wanted to have a look at the south transept, which had collapsed some years ago. Rumor had it that the bigger and better stones were being carted away and used to build a new wing of John Comstock’s house on Piccadilly. Indeed, many of the stones had been removed to somewhere, but of course no one was working there now except for gravediggers.

Into Cheapside, where men on ladders were clambering into upper-story windows of a boarded-up house to remove limp, exhausted children who’d somehow outlived their families. Down in the direction of the river, the only gathering of people Daniel had seen: a long queue before the house of Dr. Nathaniel Hodges, one of the only physicians who hadn’t fled. Not far beyond that, on Cheapside, the house of John Wilkins himself. Wilkins had sent Daniel a key, which turned out not to be necessary, as his house had already been broken into. Floorboards pried up, mattresses gutted so that the place looked like a barn for all the loose straw and lumber on the floor. Whole ranks of books pawed from the shelves to see if anything was hidden behind. Daniel went round and re-shelved the books, holding back two or three newish ones that Wilkins had asked him to fetch.

Then to the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry.[*] “Follow the Drainpipes, find the Amphib’ns,” Wilkins had written. Daniel walked round the churchyard, which was studded with graves, but had not reached the graves-on-top-of-graves stage—Wilkins’s parishioners were mostly prosperous mercers who’d fled to their country houses. At one corner of the roof, a red copper vein descended from the downhill end of a rain-gutter, then ducked into a holed window beneath. Daniel entered the church and traced it down into a cellar where dormant God-gear was cached to expect the steady wheeling of the liturgical calendar (Easter and Christmas stuff, e.g.) or sudden reversals in the prevailing theology (High Church people like the late Bishop Laud wanted a fence round the altar so parish dogs couldn’t lift their legs on the Lord’s Table, Low Church primitives like Drake didn’t; the Rev. Wilkins, more in the Drake mold, had stashed the fence and rail down here). This room hummed, almost shuddered, as if a choir of monks were lurking in the corners intoning one of their chants, but it was actually the buzzing of a whole civilization of flies, so large that many of them seemed to be singing bass—these had grown from the corpses of rats, which carpeted the cellar floor like autumn leaves. It smelled that way, too.

The drain-pipe came into the cellar from a hole in the floor above, and emptied into a stone baptismal Font—a jumbo, total-baby-immersion style of Font—that had been shoved into a corner, probably around the time that King Henry VIII had kicked out the Papists. Daniel guessed as much from the carvings, which were so thick with symbols of Rome that to remove them all would have destroyed it structurally. When this vessel filled with rain-water from the drain-pipe it would spill excess onto the floor, and it would meander off into a corner and seep into the earth—perhaps this source of drinking-water had attracted the sick rats.

In any case the top of the font was covered with a grille held down by a couple of bricks—from underneath came contented croaking sounds. A gout of pink shot through an interstice and speared a fly out of midair, paused humming-taut for an instant, then snapped back. Daniel removed the bricks and pulled up the grille and looked at, and was looked at by, half a dozen of the healthiest frogs he’d ever seen, frogs the size of terriers, frogs that could tongue sparrows out of the air. Standing there in the City of Death, Daniel laughed. The generative spirit ran amok in the bodies of rats, whose corpses were transmuted into flies, which gave up their spirit to produce happy blinking green frogs.

Faint ticks, by the thousands, merged into a sound like wind-driven sleet against a windowpane. Daniel looked down to see it was just hordes of fleas who had abandoned the rat corpses and converged on him from all across the cellar, and were now ricocheting off his leather boots. He rummaged until he found a bread-basket, packed the frogs into it, imprisoned them loosely under a cloth, and walked out of there.

Though he could not see the river from here, he could infer that the tide was receding from the trickle of Thames-water that was beginning to probe its way down the gutter in the middle of Poultry Lane, running downhill from Leadenhall. Normally this would be a slurry of paper-scraps discarded by traders at the ’Change, but today it was lumpy with corpses of rats and cats.

He gave that gutter as wide a berth as he could, but proceeded up against the direction of its flow to the edge of the goldsmiths’ district, whence Threadneedle and Poultry and Lombard and Cornhill sprayed confusingly. He continued up Cornhill to the highest point in the City of London, where Cornhill came together with Leadenhall (which carried on eastwards, but downhill from here) and Fish Street (downhill straight to London Bridge) and Bishops-gate (downhill towards the city wall, and Bedlam, and the plague-pit they’d dug next to it). In the middle of this intersection a stand-pipe sprouted, with one nozzle for each of those streets, and Thames-water rushed from each nozzle to flush the gutters. It was connected to a buried pipe that ran underneath Fish Street to the northern terminus of London Bridge. During Elizabeth’s time some clever Dutchmen had built water-wheels there. Even when the men who tended them were dead or run away to the country, these spun powerfully whenever the tide went out and high water accumulated on the upstream side of the bridge. They were connected to pumps that pressurized the Fish Street pipe and (if you lived on this hill) carried away the accumulated waste, or (if you lived elsewhere) brought a twice-daily onslaught of litter, turds, and dead animals.

He followed said onslaught down Bishopsgate, watching the water get dirtier as he went, but didn’t go as far as the wall—he stopped at the great house, or rather compound, that Sir Thomas (“Bad money drives out good”) Gresham had built, a hundred years ago, with money he’d made lending to the Crown and reforming the coinage. Like all old half-timbered fabricks it was slowly warping and bending out of true, but Daniel loved it because it was now Gresham’s College, home of the Royal Society.

And of Robert Hooke, the R.S.’s Curator of Experiments, who’d moved into it nine months ago—enabling him to do experiments all the time. Hooke had sent Daniel a list of odds and ends that he needed for his work at Epsom. Daniel deposited his frog-basket and other goods on the high table in the room where the Royal Society had its meetings and, using that as a sort of base-camp, made excursions into Hooke’s apartment and all of the rooms and attics and cellars that the Royal Society had taken over for storage.

He saw, and rummaged through, and clambered over, slices of numerous tree-trunks that someone had gathered in a bid to demonstrate that the thin parts of the rings tended to point towards true north. A Brazilian compass-fish that Boyle had suspended from a thread to see if (as legend had it) it would do the same (when Daniel came in, it was pointing south by southeast). Jars containing: powder of the lungs and livers of vipers (someone thought you could produce young vipers from it), something called Sympathetic Powder that supposedly healed wounds through a voodoo-like process. Samples of a mysterious red fluid taken from the Bloody Pond at Newington. Betel-nut, camphire-wood, nux vomica, rhino-horn. A ball of hair that Sir William Curtius had found in a cow’s belly. Some experiments in progress: a number of pebbles contained in glass jars full of water, the necks of the jars just barely large enough to let the pebbles in; later they would see if the pebbles could be removed, and if not, it would prove that they had grown in the water. Very large amounts of splintered lumber of all types, domestic and foreign—the residue of the Royal Society’s endless experiments on the breaking-strength of wooden beams. The Earl of Balcarres’s heart, which he had thoughtfully donated to them, but not until he had died of natural causes. A box of stones that various people had coughed up out of their lungs, which the R.S. was saving up to send as a present to the King. Hundreds of wasps’ and birds’ nests, methodically labeled with the names of the proud patrons who had brought them in. A box of baby vertebrae which had been removed from a large abscess in the side of a woman who’d had a failed pregnancy twelve years earlier. Stored in jars in spirits of wine: various human foetuses, the head of a colt with a double eye in the center of its forehead, an eel from Japan. Tacked to the wall: the skin of a seven-legged, two-bodied, single-headed lamb. Decomposing in glass boxes: the Royal Society’s viper collection, all dead of starvation; some had their heads tied to their tails as part of some sort of Uroburos experiment. More hairballs. The heart of an executed person, superficially no different from that of the Earl of Balcarres. A vial containing seeds that had supposedly been voided in the urine of a maid in Holland. A jar of blue pigment made from tincture of galls, a jar of green made from Hungarian vitriol. A sketch of one of the Dwarves who supposedly inhabited the Canary Islands. Hundreds of lodestones of various sizes and shapes. A model of a giant crossbow that Hooke had designed for flinging harpoons at whales. A U-shaped glass tube that Boyle had filled with quicksilver to prove that its undulations were akin to those of a pendulum.

Hooke wanted Daniel to bring various parts and tools and materials used in the making of watches and other fine mechanisms; some of the stones that had been found in the Earl’s heart; a cylinder of quicksilver; a hygroscope made from the beard of a wild oat; a burning-glass in a wooden frame; a pair of deep convex spectacles for seeing underwater; his dew-collecting glass,[*] and selections from his large collection of preserved bladders: carp, pig, cow, and so on. He also wanted enormous, completely impractical numbers of different-sized spheres of different materials such as lead, amber, wood, silver, and so forth, which were useful in all manner of rolling and dropping experiments. Also, various spare parts for his air-compressing engine, and his Artificial Eye. Finally, Hooke asked him to collect “any puppies, kittens, chicks, or mice you might come across, as the supply hereabouts is considerably diminished.”

Some mail had piled up here, despite the recent difficulties, much of it addressed simply “GRUBENDOL London.” Following Wilkins’s instructions, Daniel gathered it all up and added it to the pile. But the GRUBENDOL stuff he culled out, and tied up into a packet with string.

Now he was ready to leave London, and wanted only money, and some way to carry all of this stuff. Back down Bishopsgate he went (leaving everything behind at Gresham College, except for the frogs, who demanded close watching) and turned on Thread-needle, which he followed westwards as it converged on Cornhill. Close to their intersection stood a series of row-houses that fronted on both of these streets. As even the illiterate might guess from the men with muskets smoking pipes on the rooftops, all were goldsmiths. Daniel went to the one called HAM BROS. A few trinkets and a couple of gold plates were displayed in a window by the door, as if to suggest that the Hams were still literally in the business of fabricating things out of gold.

A face in a grate. “Daniel!” The grate slammed and latched, the door growled and clanged as might works of ironmongery were slid and shot on the inside. Finally it was open. “Welcome!”

“Good day, Uncle Thomas.”

“Half-brother-in-law actually,” said Thomas Ham, out of a stubborn belief that pedantry and repetitiveness could through some alchemy be forged into wit. Pedantry because he was technically correct (he’d married Daniel’s half-sister) and repetitive because he’d been making the same joke for as long as Daniel had been alive. Ham was more than sixty years old now, and he was one of those who is fat and skinny at the same time—a startling pot-belly suspended from a lanky armature, waggling jowls draped over a face like an edged weapon. He had been lucky to capture the fair Mayflower Waterhouse, or so he was encouraged to believe.

“I was affrighted when I came up the street—thought you were burying people,” Daniel said, gesturing at several mounds of earth around the house’s foundations.

Ham looked carefully up and down Threadneedle—as if what he was doing could possibly be a secret from anyone. “We are making a Crypt of a different sort,” he said. “Come, enter. Why is that basket croaking?”

“I have taken a job as a porter,” Daniel said. “Do you have a hand-cart or wheelbarrow I could borrow for a few days?”

“Yes, a very heavy and strong one—we use it to carry lock-boxes back and forth to the Mint. Hasn’t moved since the Plague started. By all means take it!”

The parlor held a few more pathetic vestiges of a retail jewelry business, but it was really just a large writing-desk and some books. Stairs led to the Ham residence on the upper floors—dark and silent. “Mayflower and the children are well in Buckinghamshire?” Daniel asked.

“God willing, yes, her last letter quite put me to sleep. Come downstairs!” Uncle Thomas led him through another fortress-door that had been left wedged open, and down a narrow stair into the earth—for the first time since leaving his father’s house, Daniel smelled nothing bad, only the calm scent of earth being disturbed.

He’d never been invited into the cellar, but he’d always known about it—from the solemn way it was talked about, or, to be precise, talked around, he’d always known it must be full of either ghosts or a large quantity of gold. Now he found it to be absurdly small and homely compared to its awesome reputation, in a way that was heart-warmingly English—but it was full of gold, and it was getting larger and less ditch-like by the minute. At the end nearest the base of the stairway, piled simply on the dirt floor, were platters, punch-bowls, pitchers, knives, forks, spoons, goblets, ladles, candlesticks, and gravy-boats of gold—also sacks of coins, boxed medallions stamped with visages of Continental nobles commemorating this or that battle, actual gold bars, and irregular sticks of gold called pigs. Each item was somehow tagged: 367-11/32 troy oz. depos. by my Lord Rochester on 29 Sept. 1662 and so on. The stuff was piled up like a dry-stone wall, which is to say that bits were packed into spaces between other bits in a way calculated to keep the whole formation from collapsing. All of it was spattered with dirt and brick-fragments and mortar-splats from the work proceeding at the other end of the cellar: a laborer with pick and shovel, and another with a back-basket to carry the dirt upstairs; a carpenter working with heavy timbers, doing something Daniel assumed was to keep the House of Ham from collapsing; and a bricklayer and his assistant, giving the new space a foundation and walls. It was a tidy cellar now; no rats in here.

“Your late mother’s candlesticks are, I’m afraid, not on view just now—rather far back in the, er, Arrangement—” said Thomas Ham.

“I’m not here to disturb the Arrangement,” Daniel said, producing the Note from his father.

“Oh! Easily done! Easily and cheerfully done!” announced Mr. Ham after donning spectacles and shaking his jowls at the Note for a while, a hound casting after a scent. “Pocket money for the young scholar—the young divine—is it?”

“Cambridge is very far from re-opening, they say—need to be applying myself elsewhere,” Daniel said, merely dribbling small talk behind him as he went to look at a small pile of dirty stuff that was not gold. “What are these?”

“Remains of the house of some Roman that once stood here,” Mr. Ham said. “Those who follow these things—and I’m sorry to say I don’t—assure me that something called Walbrook Stream flowed just through here, and spilled into the Thames at the Provincial Governor’s Palace, twelve hundred odd years ago—the Roman mercers had their houses along its banks, so that they could ferry goods up and down from the River.”

Daniel was using the sole of one boot to sweep loose dirt away from a hard surface he’d sensed underneath. Wee polygons—terra-cotta, indigo, bone-white, beige—appeared. He was looking at a snatch of a mosaic floor. He swept away more dirt and recognized it as a rendering of a naked leg, knee flexed and toe pointed as if its owner were on the run. A pair of wings sprouted from the ankle. “Yes, the Roman floor we’ll keep,” said Mr. Ham, “as we need a barrier—to discourage clever men with shovels. Jonas, where are the loose bits?”

The digger kicked a wooden box across the floor towards them. It was half-full of small bits of dirty junk: a couple of combs carved out of bone or ivory; a clay lantern; the skeleton of a brooch, jewels long since missing from their sockets; fragments of glazed pottery; and something long and slender: a hairpin, Daniel reckoned, rubbing the dirt away. It was probably silver, though badly tarnished. “Take it, my lad,” said Mr. Ham, referring not only to the hairpin but also to a rather nice silver one-pound coin that he had just quarried from his pocket. “Perhaps the future Mrs. Waterhouse will enjoy fixing her coif with a bauble that once adorned the head of some Roman trader’s wife.”

“Trinity College does not allow us to have wives,” Daniel reminded him, “but I’ll take it anyway—perhaps I’ll have a niece or something who has pretty hair, and who isn’t squeamish about a bit of paganism.” For it was clear now that the hairpin was fashioned in the shape of a caduceus.

“Paganism? Then we are all pagans! It is a symbol of Mercury—patron of commerce—who has been worshipped in this cellar—and in this city—for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adopts the shape of any container—and someday, Daniel, you’ll meet a young lady who is just as adaptable. Take it.” Putting the silver coin next to the caduceus in Daniel’s palm, he folded Daniel’s fingers over the top and then clasped the fist—chilled by the touch of the metal—between his two warm hands in benediction.

DANIEL PUSHED HIS HAND-CART westwards down Cheapside. He held his breath as he hurried around the reeking tumulus that surrounded St. Paul’s, and did not breathe easy again until he’d passed out of Ludgate. The passage over Fleet Ditch was even worse, because it was strewn with bodies of rats, cats, and dogs, as well as quite a few plague-corpses that had simply been rolled out of wagons, and not even dignified with a bit of dirt. He kept a rag clamped over his face, and did not take it off until he had passed out through Temple Bar and gone by the little Watch-house that stood in the middle of the Strand in front of Somerset House. From there he could glimpse green fields and open country between certain of the buildings, and smell whiffs of manure on the breeze, which smelled delightful compared to London.

He had worried that the wheels of his cart would bog down in Charing Cross, which was a perpetual morass, but summer heat, and want of traffic, had quite dried the place up. A pack of five stray dogs watched him make his way across the expanse of rutted and baked dirt. He was worried that they would come after him until he noticed that they were uncommonly fat, for stray dogs.

Oldenburg lived in a town-house on Pall Mall. Except for a heroic physician or two, he was the only member of the R.S. who’d stayed in town during the Plague. Daniel took out the GRUBEN-DOL packet and put it on the doorstep—letters from Vienna, Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow.

He knocked thrice on the door, and backed away to see a round face peering down at him through obscuring layers of green window-glass, like a curtain of tears. Oldenburg’s wife had lately died—not of Plague—and some supposed that he stayed in London hoping that the Black Death would carry him off to wherever she was.

On his long walk out of town, Daniel had plenty of time to work out that GRUBENDOL was an anagram for Oldenburg.

Epsom

1665–1666

By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see, but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

JOHN COMSTOCK’S SEAT was at Epsom, a short journey from London. It was large. That largeness came in handy during the Plague, because it enabled his Lordship to stable a few Fellows of the Royal Society (which would enhance his already tremendous prestige) without having to be very close to them (which would disturb his household, and place his domestic animals in extreme peril). All of this was obvious enough to Daniel as one of Comstock’s servants met him at the gate and steered him well clear of the manor house and across a sort of defensive buffer zone of gardens and pastures to a remote cottage with an oddly dingy and crowded look to it.

To one side lay a spacious bone-yard, chalky with skulls of dogs, cats, rats, pigs, and horses. To the other, a pond cluttered with the wrecks of model ships, curiously rigged. Above the well, some sort of pulley arrangement, and a rope extending from the pulley, across a pasture, to a half-assembled chariot. On the roof of the cottage, diverse small windmills of outlandish design—one of them mounted over the mouth of the cottage’s chimney and turned by the rising of its smoke. Every high tree-limb in the vicinity had been exploited as a support for pendulums, and the pendulum-strings had all gotten twisted round each other by winds, and merged into a tattered philosophickal cobweb. The green space in front was a mechanical phant’sy of wheels and gears, broken or never finished. There was a giant wheel, apparently built so that a man could roll across the countryside by climbing inside it and driving it forward with his feet.

Ladders had been leaned against any wall or tree with the least ability to push back. Halfway up one of the ladders was a stout, fair-haired man who was not far from the end of his natural life span—though he apparently did not entertain any ambitions of actually reaching it. He was climbing the ladder one-handed in hard-soled leather shoes that were perfectly frictionless on the rungs, and as he swayed back and forth, planting one foot and then the next, the ladder’s feet, down below him, tiptoed backwards. Daniel rushed over and braced the ladder, then forced himself to look upwards at the shuddering battle-gammoned form of the Rev. Wilkins. The Rev. was carrying, in his free hand, some sort of winged object.

And speaking of winged objects, Daniel now felt himself being tickled, and glanced down to find half a dozen honeybees had alighted on each one of his hands. As Daniel watched in empirical horror, one of them drove its stinger into the fleshy place between his thumb and index finger. He bit his lip and looked up to see whether letting go the ladder would lead to the immediate death of Wilkins. The answer: yes. Bees were now swarming all round—nuzzling the fringes of Daniel’s hair, playing crack-the-whip through the ladder’s rungs, and orbiting round Wilkins’s body in a humming cloud.

Reaching the highest possible altitude—flagrantly tempting the LORD to strike him dead—Wilkins released the toy in his hand. Whirring and clicking noises indicated that some sort of spring-driven clockwork had gone into action—there was fluttering, and skidding through the air—some sort of interaction with the atmosphere, anyway, that went beyond mere falling—but fall it did, veering into the cottage’s stone wall and spraying parts over the yard.

“Never going to fly to the moon that way,” Wilkins grumbled.

“I thought you wanted to be shot out of a cannon to the Moon.”

Wilkins whacked himself on the stomach. “As you can see, I have far too much vis inertiae to be shot out of anything to anywhere. Before I come down there, are you feeling well, young man? No sweats, chills, swellings?”

“I anticipated your curiosity on that subject, Dr. Wilkins, and so the frogs and I lodged at an inn in Epsom for two nights. I have never felt healthier.”

“Splendid! Mr. Hooke has denuded the countryside of small animals—if you hadn’t brought him anything, he’d have cut you up.” Wilkins was coming down the ladder, the sureness of each footfall very much in doubt, massy buttocks approaching Daniel as a spectre of doom. Finally on terra firma, he waved a hundred bees off with an intrepid sweep of the arm. They wiped bees away from their palms, then exchanged a long, warm handshake. The bees were collectively losing interest and seeping away in the direction of a large glinting glass box. “It is Wren’s design, come and see!” Wilkins said, bumbling after them.

The glass structure was a model of a building, complete with a blown dome, and pillars carved of crystal. It was of a Gothickal design, and had the general look of some Government office in London, or a University college. The doors and windows were open to let bees fly in and out. They had built a hive inside—a cathedral of honeycombs.

“With all respect to Mr. Wren, I see a clash of architectural styles here—”

“What! Where?” Wilkins exclaimed, searching the roofline for aesthetic contaminants. “I shall cane the boy!”

“It’s not the builder, but the tenants who’re responsible. All those little waxy hexagons—doesn’t fit with Mr. Wren’s scheme, does it?”

“Which style do you prefer?” Wilkins asked, wickedly.

“Err—”

“Before you answer, know that Mr. Hooke approaches,” the Rev. whispered, glancing sidelong. Daniel looked over toward the house to see Hooke coming their way, bent and gray and transparent, like one of those curious figments that occasionally floats across one’s eyeball.

“Is he all right?” Daniel asked.

“The usual bouts of melancholy—a certain peevishness over the scarcity of adventuresome females—”

“I meant is he sick.”

Hooke had stopped near Daniel’s luggage, attracted by the croaking of frogs. He stepped in and seized the basket.

“Oh, he ever looks as if he’s been bleeding to death for several hours—fear for the frogs, not for Hooke!” Wilkins said. He had a perpetual knowing, amused look that enabled him to get away with saying almost anything. This, combined with the occasional tactical master-stroke (e.g., marrying Cromwell’s sister during the Interregnum), probably accounted for his ability to ride out civil wars and revolutions as if they were mere theatrical performances. He bent down in front of the glass apiary, pantomiming a bad back; reached underneath; and, after some dramatic rummaging, drew out a glass jar with an inch or so of cloudy brown honey in the bottom. “Mr. Wren provided sewerage, as you can see,” he said, giving the jar to Daniel. It was blood-warm. The Rev. now headed in the direction of the house, and Daniel followed.

“You say you quarantined yourself at Epsom town—you must have paid for lodgings there—that means you have pocket-money. Drake must’ve given it you. What on earth did you tell him you were coming here to do? I need to know,” Wilkins added apologetically, “only so that I can write him the occasional letter claiming that you are doing it.”

“Keeping abreast of the very latest, from the Continent or whatever. I’m to provide him with advance warning of any events that are plainly part of the Apocalypse.”

Wilkins stroked an invisible beard and nodded profoundly, standing back so that Daniel could dart forward and haul open the cottage door. They went into the front room, where a fire was decaying in a vast hearth. Two or three rooms away, Hooke was crucifying a frog on a plank, occasionally swearing as he struck his thumb. “Perhaps you can help me with my book…”

“A new edition of the Cryptonomicon?”

“Perish the thought! Damn me, I’d almost forgotten about that old thing. Wrote it a quarter-century ago. Consider the times! The King was losing his mind—his Ministers being lynched in Parliament—his own drawbridge-keepers locking him out of his own arsenals. His foes intercepting letters abroad, written by that French Papist wife of his, begging foreign powers to invade us. Hugh Peters had come back from Salem to whip those Puritans into a frenzy—no great difficulty, given that the King, simply out—out—of money, had seized all of the merchants’ gold in the Tower. Scottish Covenanters down as far as Newcastle, Catholics rebelling in Ulster, sudden panics in London—gentlemen on the street whipping out their rapiers for little or no reason. Things no better elsewhere—Europe twenty-five years into the Thirty Years’ War, wolves eating children along the road in Besançon, for Christ’s sake—Spain and Portugal dividing into two separate kingdoms, the Dutch taking advantage of it to steal Malacca from the Portuguese—of course I wrote the Cryptonomicon! And of course people bought it! But if it was the Omega—a way of hiding information, of making the light into darkness—then the Universal Character is the Alpha—an opening. A dawn. A candle in the darkness. Am I being disgusting?”

“Is this anything like Comenius’s project?”

Wilkins leaned across and made as if to box Daniel’s ears. “It is his project! This was what he and I, and that whole gang of odd Germans—Hartlib, Haak, Kinner, Oldenburg—wanted to do when we conceived the Invisible College[*] back in the Dark Ages. But Mr. Comenius’s work was burned up in a fire, back in Moravia, you know.”

“Accidental, or—”

“Excellent question, young man—in Moravia, one never knows. Now, if Comenius had listened to my advice and accepted the invitation to be Master of Harvard College back in ’41, it might’ve been different—”

“The colonists would be twenty-five years ahead of us!”

“Just so. Instead, Natural Philosophy flourishes at Oxford—less so at Cambridge—and Harvard is a pitiable backwater.”

“Why didn’t he take your advice, I wonder—?”

“The tragedy of these middle-European savants is that they are always trying to apply their philosophick acumen in the political realm.”

“Whereas the Royal Society is—?”

“Ever so strictly apolitical,” Wilkins said, and then favored Daniel with a stage-actor’s hugely exaggerated wink. “If we stayed away from politics, we could be flying winged chariots to the Moon within a few generations. All that’s needed is to pull down certain barriers to progress—”

“Such as?”

“Latin.”

“Latin!? But Latin is—”

“I know, the universal language of scholars and divines, et cetera, et cetera. And it sounds so lovely, doesn’t it. You can say any sort of nonsense in Latin and our feeble University men will be stunned, or at least profoundly confused. That’s how the Popes have gotten away with peddling bad religion for so long—they simply say it in Latin. But if we were to unfold their convoluted phrases and translate them into a philosophical language, all of their contradictions and vagueness would become manifest.”

“Mmm…I’d go so far as to say that if a proper philosophical language existed, it would be impossible to express any false concept in it without violating its rules of grammar,” Daniel hazarded.

“You have just uttered the most succinct possible definition of it—I say, you’re not competing with me, are you?” Wilkins said jovially.

“No,” Daniel said, too intimidated to catch the humor. “I was merely reasoning by analogy to Cartesian analysis, where false statements cannot legally be written down, as long as the terms are understood.”

“The terms! That’s the difficult part,” Wilkins said. “As a way to write down the terms, I am developing the Philosophical Language and the Universal Character—which learned men of all races and nations will use to signify ideas.”

“I am at your service, sir,” Daniel said. “When may I begin?”

“Immediately! Before Hooke’s done with those frogs—if he comes in here and finds you idle, he’ll enslave you—you’ll be shovelling guts or, worse, trying the precision of his clocks by standing before a pendulum and counting…its…alternations…all…day…long.”

Hooke came in. His spine was all awry: not only stooped, but bent to one side. His long brown hair hung unkempt around his face. He straightened up a bit and tilted his head back so that the hair fell away to either side, like a curtain opening up to reveal a pale face. Stubble on the cheeks made him look even gaunter than he actually was, and made his gray eyes look even more huge. He said: “Frogs, too.”

“Nothing surprises me now, Mr. Hooke.”

“I put it to you that all living creatures are made out of them.”

“Have you considered writing any of this down? Mr. Hooke? Mr. Hooke?” But Hooke was already gone out into the stable-yard, off on some other experiment.

“Made out of what??” Daniel asked.

“Lately, every time Mr. Hooke peers at something with his Microscope he finds that it is divided up into small compartments, each one just like its neighbors, like bricks in a wall,” Wilkins confided.

“What do these bricks look like?”

“He doesn’t call them bricks. Remember, they are hollow. He has taken to calling them ‘cells’…but you don’t want to get caught up in all that nonsense. Follow me, my dear Daniel. Put thoughts of cells out of your mind. To understand the Philosophical Language you must know that all things in Earth and Heaven can be classified into forty different genera…within each of those, there are, of course, further subclasses.”

Wilkins showed him into a servant’s room where a writing desk had been set up, and papers and books mounded up with as little concern for order as the bees had shown in building their honeycomb. Wilkins moved a lot of air, and so leaves of paper flew off of stacks as he passed through the room. Daniel picked one up and read it: “Mule fern, panic-grass, hartstongue, adderstongue, moon-wort, sea novelwort, wrack, Job’s-tears, broomrope, toothwort, scurvy-grass, sowbread, golden saxifrage, lily of the valley, bastard madder, stinking ground-pine, endive, dandelion, sowthistle, Spanish picktooth, purple loose-strife, bitter vetch.”

Wilkins was nodding impatiently. “The capsulate herbs, not campanulate, and the bacciferous sempervirent shrubs,” he said. “Somehow it must have gotten mixed up with the glandiferous and the nuciferous trees.”

“So, the Philosophical Language is some sort of botanical—”

“Look at me, I’m shuddering. Shuddering at the thought. Botany! Please, Daniel, try to collect your wits. In this stack we have all of the animals, from the belly-worm to the tyger. Here, the terms of Euclidean geometry, relating to time, space, and juxtaposition. There, a classification of diseases: pustules, boils, wens, and scabs on up to splenetic hypochondriacal vapours, iliac passion, and suffocation.”

“Is suffocation a disease?”

“Excellent question—get to work and answer it!” Wilkins thundered.

Daniel, meanwhile, had rescued another sheet from the floor: “Yard, Johnson, dick…”

“Synonyms for ‘penis,’” Wilkins said impatiently.

“Rogue, mendicant, shake-rag…”

“Synonyms for ‘beggar.’ In the Philosophical Language there will only be one word for penises, one for beggars. Quick, Daniel, is there a distinction between groaning and grumbling?”

“I should say so, but—”

“On the other hand—may we lump genuflection together with curtseying, and give them one name?”

“I—I cannot say, Doctor!”

“Then, I say, there is work to be done! At the moment, I am bogged down in an endless digression on the Ark.”

“Of the Covenant? Or—”

“The other one.”

“How does that enter into the Philosophical Language?”

“Obviously the P.L. must contain one and only one word for every type of animal. Each animal’s word must reflect its classification—that is, the words for perch and bream should be noticeably similar, as should the words for robin and thrush. But bird-words should be quite different from fish-words.”

“It strikes me as, er, ambitious…”

“Half of Oxford is sending me tedious lists. My—our—task is to organize them—to draw up a table of every type of bird and beast in the world. I have entabulated the animals troublesome to other animals—the louse, the flea. Those designed for further transmutation—the caterpillar, the maggot. One-horned sheathed winged insects. Testaceous turbinated exanguious animals—and before you ask, I have subdivided them into those with, and without, spiral convolutions. Squamous river fish, phytivorous birds of long wings, rapacious beasts of the cat-kind—anyway, as I drew up all of these lists and tables, it occurred to me that (going back to Genesis, sixth chapter, verses fifteen through twenty-two) Noah must have found a way to fit all of these creatures into one gopher-wood tub three hundred cubits long! I became concerned that certain Continental savants, of an atheistical bent, might misuse my list to suggest that the events related in Genesis could not have happened—”

“One could also imagine certain Jesuits turning it against you—holding it up as proof that you harbored atheistical notions of your own, Dr. Wilkins.”

“Just so! Daniel! Which makes it imperative that I include, in a separate chapter, a complete plan of Noah’s Ark—demonstrating not only where each of the beasts was berthed, but also the fodder for the herbivorous beasts, and live cattle for the carnivorous ones, and more fodder yet to keep the cattle alive, long enough to be eaten by the carnivores—where, I say, ’twas all stowed.”

“Fresh water must have been wanted, too,” Daniel reflected.

Wilkins—who tended to draw closer and closer to people when he was talking to them, until they had to edge backwards—grabbed a sheaf of paper off a stack and bopped Daniel on the head with it. “Tend to your Bible, foolish young man! It rained the entire time!”

“Of course, of course—they could’ve drunk rainwater,” Daniel said, profoundly mortified.

“I have had to take some liberties with the definition of ‘cubit,’” Wilkins said, as if betraying a secret, “but I think he could have done it with eighteen hundred and twenty-five sheep. To feed the carnivores, I mean.”

“The sheep must’ve taken up a whole deck!?”

“It’s not the space they take up, it’s all the manure, and the labor of throwing it overboard,” Wilkins said. “At any rate—as you can well imagine—this Ark business has stopped all progress cold on the P.L. front. I need you to get on with the Terms of Abuse.”

“Sir!”

“Have you felt, Daniel, a certain annoyance, when one of your semi-educated Londoners speaks of ‘a vile rascal’ or ‘a miserable caitiff’ or ‘crafty knave,’ ‘idle truant,’ or ‘flattering parasite’?”

“Depends upon who is calling whom what…”

“No, no, no! Let’s try an easy one: ‘fornicating whore.’ ”

“It is redundant. Hence, annoying to the cultivated listener.”

“‘Senseless fop.’ ”

“Again, redundant—as are ‘flattering parasite’ and the others.”

“So, clearly, in the Philosophical Language, we needn’t have separate adjectives and nouns in such cases.”

“How about ’filthy sloven?”

“Excellent! Write it down, Daniel!”

“‘Licentious blade’…‘facetious wag’…‘perfidious traitor’…” As Daniel continued in this vein, Wilkins bustled over to the writing-desk, withdrew a quill from an inkwell, shook off redundant ink, and then came over to Daniel; wrapped his fingers around the pen; and guided him over to the desk.

And so to work. Daniel exhausted the Terms of Abuse in a few short hours, then moved on to Virtues (intellectual, moral, and homiletical), Colors, Sounds, Tastes and Smells, Professions, Operations (viz. carpentry, sewing, alchemy), and so on. Days began passing. Wilkins became fretful if Daniel, or anyone, worked too hard, and so there were frequent “seminars” and “symposia” in the kitchen—they used honey from Christopher Wren’s Gothic apiary to make flip. Frequently Charles Comstock, the fifteen-year-old son of their noble host, came to visit, and to hear Wilkins or Hooke talk. Charles tended to bring with him letters addressed to the Royal Society from Huygens, Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, Spinoza. Frequently these turned out to contain new concepts that Daniel had to fit into the Philosophical Language’s tables.

Daniel was hard at work compiling a list of all the things in the world that a person could own (aquæducts, axle-trees, palaces, hinges) when Wilkins called him down urgently. Daniel came down to find the Rev. holding a grand-looking Letter, and Charles Comstock clearing the decks for action: rolling up large diagrams of the Ark, and feeding-schedules for the eighteen hundred and twenty-five sheep, and stowing them out of the way to make room for more important affairs. Charles II, by the Grace of God of England King, had sent them this letter: His Majesty had noticed that ant eggs were bigger than ants, and demanded to know how that was possible.

Daniel ran out and sacked an ant-nest. He returned in triumph carrying the nucleus of an anthill on the flat of a shovel. In the front room Wilkins had begun dictating, and Charles Comstock scribbling, a letter back to the King—not the substantive part (as they didn’t have an answer yet), but the lengthy paragraphs of apologies and profuse flattery that had to open it: “With your brilliance you illuminate the places that have long, er, languished in, er—”

“Sounds more like a Sun King allusion, Reverend,” Charles warned him.

“Strike it, then! Sharp lad. Read the entire mess back to me.”

Daniel slowed before the door to Hooke’s laboratory, gathering his courage to knock. But Hooke had heard him approaching, and opened it for him. With an outstretched hand he beckoned Daniel in, and aimed him at a profoundly stained table, cleared for action. Daniel entered the room, upended the ant-nest, set the shovel down, and only then worked up the courage to inhale. Hooke’s laboratory didn’t smell as bad as he’d always assumed it would.

Hooke ran his hands back through his hair, pulling it away from his face, and tied it back behind his neck with a wisp of twine. Daniel was perpetually surprised that Hooke was only ten years older than he. Hooke just turned thirty a few weeks ago, in June, at about the same time that Daniel and Isaac had fled plaguey Cambridge for their respective homes.

Hooke was now staring at the mound of living dirt on his table-top. His eyes were always focused on a narrow target, as if he peered out at the world through a hollow reed. When he was out in the broad world, or even in the house’s front room, that seemed strange, but it made sense when he was looking at a small world on a tabletop—ants scurrying this way and that, carrying egg-cases out of the wreckage, establishing a defensive perimeter. Daniel stood opposite and looked at, but apparently did not see, the same things.

Within a few minutes Daniel had seen most of what he was going to see among the ants, within five minutes he was bored, within ten he had given up all pretenses and begun wandering round Hooke’s laboratory, looking at the remnants of everything that had passed beneath the microscope: shards of porous stone, bits of moldy shoe-leather, a small glass jar labelled WILKINS URINE, splinters of petrified wood, countless tiny envelopes of seeds, insects in jars, scraps of various fabrics, tiny pots labelled SNAILS TEETH and VIPERS FANGS. Shoved back into a corner, a heap of dusty, rusty sharp things: knife-blades, needles, razors. There was probably a cruel witticism to be made here: given a razor, Hooke would sooner put it under his microscope than shave with it.

As the wait went on, and on, and on, Daniel decided that he might as well be improving himself. So with care he reached into the sharp-things pile, drew out a needle, and carried it over to a table where sun was pouring in (Hooke had grabbed all of the south-facing rooms in the cottage, to own the light). There, mounted to a little stand, was a tube, about the dimensions of a piece of writing-paper rolled up, with a lens at the top for looking through, and a much smaller one—hardly bigger than a chick’s eye—at the bottom, aimed at a little stand that was strongly illuminated by the sunlight. Daniel put the needle on the stand and peered through the Microscope.

He expected to see a gleaming, mirrorlike shaft, but it was a gnawed stick instead. The needle’s sharp point turned out to be a rounded and pitted slag-heap.

“Mr. Waterhouse,” Hooke said, “when you are finished with whatever you are doing, I will consult my faithful Mercury.”

Daniel stood up and turned around. He thought for a moment that Hooke was asking him to fetch some quicksilver (Hooke drank it from time to time, as a remedy for headaches, vertigo, and other complaints). But Hooke’s giant eyes were focused on the Microscope instead.

“Of course!” Daniel said. Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods—bringer of information.

“What think you now of needles?” Hooke asked.

Daniel plucked the needle away and held it up before the window, viewing it in a new light. “Its appearance is almost physically disgusting,” he said.

“A razor looks worse. It is all kinds of shapes, except what it should be,” Hooke said. “That is why I never use the Microscope any more to look at things that were made by men—the rudeness and bungling of Art is painful to view. And yet things that one would expect to look disgusting become beautiful when magnified—you may look at my drawings while I satisfy the King’s curiosity.” Hooke gestured to a stack of papers, then carried a sample ant-egg over to the microscope as Daniel began to page through them.

“Sir. I did not know that you were an artist,” Daniel said.

“When my father died, I was apprenticed to a portrait-painter,” Hooke said.

“Your master taught you well—”

“The ass taught me nothing,” Hooke said. “Anyone who is not a half-wit can learn all there is to know of painting, by standing in front of paintings and looking at them. What was the use, then, of being an apprentice?”

“This flea is a magnificent piece of—”

“It is not art but a higher form of bungling,” Hooke demurred. “When I viewed that flea under the microscope, I could see, in its eye, a complete and perfect reflection of John Comstock’s gardens and manor-house—the blossoms on his flowers, the curtains billowing in his windows.”

“It’s magnificent to me,” Daniel said. He was sincere—not trying to be a Flattering Parasite or Crafty Knave.

But Hooke only became irritated. “I tell you again. True beauty is to be found in natural forms. The more we magnify, and the closer we examine, the works of Artifice, the grosser and stupider they seem. But if we magnify the natural world it only becomes more intricate and excellent.”

Wilkins had asked Daniel which he preferred: Wren’s glass apiary, or the bees’ honeycomb inside of it. Then he had warned Daniel that Hooke was coming into earshot. Now Daniel understood why: for Hooke there could only be one answer.

“I defer to you, sir.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But without seeming to be a Cavilling Jesuit, I should like to know whether Wilkins’s urine is a product of Art or Nature.”

“You saw the jar.”

“Yes.”

“If you take the Rev.’s urine and pour off the fluid and examine what remains under the Microscope, you will see a hoard of jewels that would make the Great Mogul swoon. At lower magnification it seems nothing more than a heap of gravel, but with a better lens, and brighter light, it is revealed as a mountain of crystals—plates, rhomboids, rectangles, squares—white and yellow and red ones, gleaming like the diamonds in a courtier’s ring.”

“Is that true of everyone’s urine?”

“It is more true of his than of most people’s,” Hooke said. “Wilkins has the stone.”

“Oh, God!”

“It is not so bad now, but it grows within him, and will certainly kill him in a few years,” Hooke said.

“And the stone in his bladder is made of the same stuff as these crystals that you see in his urine?”

“I believe so.”

“Is there some way to—”

“To dissolve it? Oil of vitriol works—but I don’t suppose that our Reverend wants to have that introduced into his bladder. You are welcome to make investigations of your own. I have tried all of the obvious things.”

WORD ARRIVED THAT FERMAT had died, leaving behind a theorem or two that still needed proving. King Philip of Spain died, too, and his son succeeded him; but the new King Carlos II was sickly, and not expected to live to the end of the year. Portugal was independent. Someone named Lubomirski was staging a rebellion in Poland.

John Wilkins was trying to make horse-drawn vehicles more efficient; to test them, he had rigged up a weight on a rope, above a well, so that when the weight fell down into the well, it would drag his chariots across the ground. Their progress could then be timed using one of Hooke’s watches. That duty fell to Charles Comstock, who spent many days standing out in the field making trials or fixing broken wheels. His father’s servants needed the well to draw water for livestock, and so Charles was frequently called out to move the contraption out of the way. Daniel enjoyed watching all of this, out the window, while he worked on Punishments:

PUNISHMENTS CAPITAL

ARE THE VARIOUS MANNERS OF PUTTING MEN TO DEATH IN A JUDICIAL WAY, WHICH IN SEVERAL NATIONS ARE, OR HAVE BEEN, EITHER SIMPLE; BY

Separation of the parts;

Head from Body: BEHEADING, strike of one’s head

Member from Member: QUARTERING, Dissecting.

Wound

At distance, whether

from hand: STONING, Pelting

from Instrument, as Gun, Bow, &c.: SHOOTING.

At hand, either by

Weight;

of something else: PRESSING.

of one’s own: PRECIPITATING, Defenestration, casting headlong.

Weapon;

any way: STABBING

direct upwards: EMPALING

Taking away necessary Diet: or giving that which is noxious

STARVING, famishing

POISONING, Venom, envenom, virulent

Interception of the air
at the Mouth

in the air: stifling, smother, suffocate.

in the Earth: BURYING ALIVE

in water: DROWNING

in fire: BURNING ALIVE

at the Throat

by weight of a man’s own body: HANGING

by the strength of others: STRANGLING, throttle, choke, suffocate

MIXED OF WOUNDING AND STARVING; THE BODY BEING

Erect: CRUCIFYING

Lying on a Wheel: BREAKING ON THE WHEEL

PUNISHMENTS NOT CAPITAL

ARE DISTINGUISHED BY THE THINGS OR SUBJECTS RECEIVING DETRIMENT BY THEM, AS BEING EITHER OF THE BODY;
according to the General name; signifying great pain: TORTURE
according to special kinds:

by Striking;

with a limber instrument: WHIPPING, lashing, scourging, leashing, rod, slash, switch, stripe, Beadle

with a stiff instrument: CUDGELLING, bastinado, baste, swinge, swaddle, shrubb, slapp, thwack;

by Stretching of the limbs violently;

the body being laid along: RACK

the body lifted up into the Air: STRAPPADO

LIBERTY; OF WHICH ONE IS DEPRIVED, BY RESTRAINT
into

a place: IMPRISONMENT, Incarceration, Durance, Custody, Ward, clap up, commit, confine, mure, Pound, Pinfold, Gaol, Cage, Set fast an Instrument: BONDS, fetters, gyves, shackles, manicles, pinion, chains.

Out of a place or country, whether

with allowance of any other: EXILE, banishment

confinement to one other: RELEGATION

REPUTE, WHETHER

more gently: INFAMIZATION, Ignominy, Pillory

more severely by burning marks in one’s flesh: STIGMATIZATION, Branding, Cauterizing

ESTATE; WHETHER

in part: MULCT, fine, sconce

in whole: CONFISCATION, forfeiture

DIGNITY AND POWER; BY DEPRIVING ONE OF

his degree: DEGRADING, deposing, depriving

his capacity to bear office: INCAPACITATING, cashier, disable, discard, depose, disfranchize.

As Daniel scourged, bastinadoed, racked, and strappadoed his mind, trying to think of punishments that he and Wilkins had missed, he heard Hooke striking sparks with flint and steel, and went down to investigate.

Hooke was aiming the sparks at a blank sheet of paper. “Mark where they strike,” he said to Daniel. Daniel hovered with a pen, and whenever an especially large spark hit the paper, he drew a tight circle around it. They examined the paper under the Microscope, and found, in the center of each circle, a remnant: a more or less complete hollow sphere of what was obviously steel. “You see that the Alchemists’ conception of heat is ludicrous,” Hooke said. “There is no Element of Fire. Heat is really nothing more than a brisk agitation of the parts of a body—hit a piece of steel with a rock hard enough, and a bit of steel is torn away—”

“And that is the spark?”

“That is the spark.”

“But why does the spark emit light?”

“The force of the impact agitates its parts so vehemently that it becomes hot enough to melt.”

“Yes, but if your hypothesis is correct—if there is no Element of Fire, only a jostling of internal parts—then why should hot things emit light?”

“I believe that light consists of vibrations. If the parts move violently enough, they emit light—just as a struck bell vibrates to produce sound.”

Daniel supposed that was all there was to that, until he went with Hooke to collect samples of river insects one day, and they squatted in a place where a brook tumbled over the brink of a rock into a little pool. Bubbles of water, forced beneath the pool by the falling water, rose to the surface: millions of tiny spheres. Hooke noticed it, pondered for a few moments, and said: “Planets and stars are spheres, for the same reason that bubbles and sparks are.”

“What!?”

“A body of fluid, surrounded by some different fluid, forms into a sphere. Thus: air surrounded by water makes a sphere, which we call a bubble. A tiny bit of molten steel surrounded by air makes a sphere, which we call a spark. Molten earth surrounded by the Cœlestial Æther makes a sphere, which we call a planet.”

And on the way back, as they were watching a crescent moon chase the sun below the horizon, Hooke said, “If we could make sparks, or flashes of light, bright enough, we could see their light reflected off the shadowed part of that moon later, and reckon the speed of light.”

“If we did it with gunpowder,” Daniel reflected, “John Comstock would be happy to underwrite the experiment.”

Hooke turned and regarded him for a few moments with a cold eye, as if trying to establish whether Daniel, too, was made up out of cells. “You are thinking like a courtier,” he said. There was no emotion in his voice; he was stating, not an opinion, but a fact.

The chief Design of the aforementioned Club, was to propagate new Whims, advance mechanic Exercises, and to promote useless, as well as useful Experiments. In order to carry on this commendable Undertaking, any frantic Artist, chemical Operator, or whimsical Projector, that had but a Crotchet in their Heads, or but dream’d themselves into some strange fanciful Discovery, might be kindly admitted, as welcome Brethren, into this teeming Society, where each Member was respected, not according to his Quality, but the searches he had made into the Mysteries of Nature, and the Novelties, though Trifles, that were owing to his Invention: So that a Mad-man, who had beggar’d himself by his Bellows and his Furnaces, in a vain pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone; or the crazy Physician who had wasted his Patrimony, by endeavouring to recover that infallible Nostrum, Sal Graminis, from the dust and ashes of a burnt Hay-cock, were as much reverenc’d here, as those mechanic Quality, who, to shew themselves Vertuoso’s, would sit turning of Ivory above in their Garrets, whilst their Ladies below Stairs, by the help of their He-Cousins, were providing Horns for their Families.

—NED WARD, The Vertuoso’s Club

THE LEAVES WERE TURNING, the Plague in London was worse. Eight thousand people died in a week. A few miles away in Epsom, Wilkins had finished the Ark digression and begun to draw up a grammar, and a system of writing, for his Philosophical Language. Daniel was finishing some odds and ends, viz. Nautical Objects: Seams and Spurkets, Parrels and Jears, Brales and Bunt-Lines. His mind wandered.

Below him, a strange plucking sound, like a man endlessly tuning a lute. He went down stairs and found Hooke sitting there with a few inches of quill sticking out of his ear, plucking a string stretched over a wooden box. It was far from the strangest thing Hooke had ever done, so Daniel went to work for a time, trying to dissolve Wilkins’s bladder-gravel in various potions. Hooke continued plucking and humming. Finally Daniel went over to investigate.

A housefly was perched on the end of the quill that was stuck in Hooke’s ear. Daniel tried to shoo it away. Its wings blurred, but it didn’t move. Looking more closely Daniel saw that it had been glued down.

“Do that again, it gives me a different pitch,” Hooke demanded.

“You can hear the fly’s wings?”

“They drone at a certain fixed pitch. If I tune this string”—pluck, pluck—“to the same pitch, I know that the string, and the fly’s wings, are vibrating at the same frequency. I already know how to reckon the frequency of a string’s vibration—hence, I know how many times in a second a fly’s wings beat. Useful data if we are ever to build a flying-machine.”

Autumn rain made the field turn mucky, and ended the chariot experiments. Charles Comstock had to find other things to do. He had matriculated at Cambridge this year, but Cambridge was closed for the duration of the Plague. Daniel reckoned that as a quid pro quo for staying here at Epsom, Wilkins was obliged to tutor Charles in Natural Philosophy. But most of the tutoring was indistinguishable from drudge work on Wilkins’s diverse experiments, many of which (now that the weather had turned) were being conducted in the cottage’s cellar. Wilkins was starving a toad in a jar to see if new toads would grow out of it. There was a carp living out of water, being fed on moistened bread; Charles’s job was to wet its gills several times a day. The King’s ant question had gotten Wilkins going on an experiment he’d wanted to try for a long time: before long, down in the cellar, between the starving toad and the carp, they had a maggot the size of a man’s thigh, which had to be fed rotten meat, and weighed once a day. This began to smell and so they moved it outside, to a shack downwind, where Wilkins had also embarked on a whole range of experiments concerning the generation of flies and worms out of decomposing meat, cheese, and other substances. Everyone knew, or thought they knew, that this happened spontaneously. But Hooke with his microscope had found tiny motes on the undersides of certain leaves, which grew up into insects, and in water he had found tiny eggs that grew up into gnats, and this had given him the idea that perhaps all things that were believed to be bred from putrefaction might have like origins: that the air and the water were filled with an invisible dust of tiny eggs and seeds that, in order to germinate, need only be planted in something moist and rotten.

From time to time, a carriage or wagon from the outside world was suffered to pass into the gate of the manor and approach the big house. On the one hand, this was welcome evidence that some people were still alive out there in England. On the other—

“Who is that madman, coming and going in the midst of the Plague,” Daniel asked, “and why does John Comstock let him into his house? The poxy bastard’ll infect us all.”

“John Comstock could not exclude that fellow any more than he could ban air from his lungs,” Wilkins said. He had been tracking the carriage’s progress, at a safe distance, through a prospective glass. “That is his money-scrivener.”

Daniel had never heard the term before. “I have not yet reached that point in the Tables where ‘money-scrivener’ is defined. Does he do what a goldsmith does?”

“Smite gold? No.”

“Of course not. I was referring to this new line of work that goldsmiths have got into—handling notes that serve as money.”

“A man such as the Earl of Epsom would not suffer a money-goldsmith to draw within a mile of his house!” Wilkins said indignantly. “A money-scrivener is different altogether! And yet he does something very much the same.”

“Could you explain that, please?” Daniel said, but they were interrupted by Hooke, shouting from another room:

“Daniel! Fetch a cannon.”

In other circumstances this demand would have posed severe difficulties. However, they were living on the estate of the man who had introduced the manufacture of gunpowder to Britain, and provided King Charles II with many of his armaments. So Daniel went out and enlisted that man’s son, young Charles Comstock, who in turn drafted a corps of servants and a few horses. They procured a field-piece from John Comstock’s personal armoury and towed it out into the middle of a pasture. Meanwhile, Mr. Hooke had caused a certain servant, who had long been afflicted with deafness, to be brought out from the town. Hooke bade the servant stand in the same pasture, only a fathom away from the muzzle of the cannon (but off to one side!). Charles Comstock (who knew how to do such things) charged the cannon with some of his father’s finest powder, shoved a longish fuse down the touch-hole, lit it, and ran away. The result was a sudden immense compression of the air, which Hooke had hoped would penetrate the servant’s skull and knock away whatever hidden obstructions had caused him to become deaf. Quite a few window-panes in John Comstock’s manor house were blown out of their frames, amply demonstrating the soundness of the underlying idea. But it didn’t cure the servant’s deafness.

“As you may know, my dwelling is a-throng, just now, with persons from the city,” said John Comstock, Earl of Epsom and Lord Chancellor of England.

He had appeared, suddenly and unannounced, in the door of the cottage. Hooke and Wilkins were busy hollering at the deaf servant, trying to see if he could hear anything at all. Daniel noticed the visitor first, and joined in the shouting: “Excuse me! Gentlemen! REVEREND WILKINS!”

After several minutes’ confusion, embarrassment, and makeshift stabs at protocol, Wilkins and Comstock ended up sitting across the table from each other with glasses of claret while Hooke and Waterhouse and the deaf servant held up a nearby wall with their arses.

Comstock was pushing sixty. Here on his own country estate, he had no patience with wigs or other Court foppery, and so his silver hair was simply queued, and he was dressed in plain simple riding-and-hunting togs. “In the year of my birth, Jamestown was founded, the pilgrims scurried off to Leyden, and work commenced on the King James version of the Bible. I have lived through London’s diverse riots and panics, plagues and Gunpowder Plots. I have escaped from burning buildings. I was wounded at the Battle of Newark and made my way, in some discomfort, to safety in Paris. It was not my last battle, on land or at sea. I was there when His Majesty was crowned in exile at Scone, and I was there when he returned in triumph to London. I have killed men. You know all of these things, Dr. Wilkins, and so I mention them, not to boast, but to emphasize that if I were living a solitary life in that large House over yonder, you could set off cannonades, and larger detonations, at all hours of day and night, without warning, and for that matter you could make a pile of meat five fathoms high and let it fester away beneath my bedchamber’s window—and none of it would matter to me. But as it is, my house is crowded, just now, with Persons of Quality. Some of them are of royal degree. Many of them are female, and some are of tender years. Two of them are all three.”

“My lord!” Wilkins exclaimed. Daniel had been carefully watching him, as who wouldn’t—the opportunity to watch a man like Wilkins being called on the carpet by a man like Comstock was far more precious than any Southwark bear-baiting. Until just now, Wilkins had pretended to be mortified—though he’d done a very good job of it. But now, suddenly, he really was.

Two of them are all three—what could that possibly mean? Who was royal, female, and of tender years? King Charles II didn’t have any daughters, at least legitimate ones. Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, had littered Europe with princes and princesses until she’d passed away a couple of years ago—but it seemed unlikely that any Continental royalty would be visiting England during the Plague.

Comstock continued: “These persons have come here seeking refuge, as they are terrified to begin with, of the Plague and other horrors—including, but hardly limited to, a possible Dutch invasion. The violent compression of the air, which you and I might think of as a possible cure for deafness, is construed, by such people, entirely differently…”

Wilkins said something fiendishly clever and appropriate and then devoted the next couple of days to abjectly humbling himself and apologizing to every noble person within ear- and nose-shot of the late Experiments. Hooke was put to work making little wind-up toys for the two little royal girls. Meanwhile Daniel and Charles had to dismantle all of the bad-smelling experiments, and oversee their decent burials, and generally tidy things up.

It took days’ peering at Fops through hedges, deconstructing carriage-door scutcheons, and shinnying out onto the branches of diverse noble and royal family trees for Daniel to understand what Wilkins had inferred from a few of John Comstock’s pithy words and eyebrow-raisings. Comstock had formal gardens to one side of his house, which for many excellent reasons were off-limits to Natural Philosophers. Persons in French clothes strolled in them. That was not remarkable. To dally in gardens was some people’s life-work, as to shovel manure was a stable-hand’s. At a distance they all looked the same, at least to Daniel. Wilkins, much more conversant with the Court, spied on them from time to time through a prospective-glass. As a mariner, seeking to establish his bearings at night, will first look for Ursa Major, that being a constellation of exceptional size and brightness, so Wilkins would always commence his obs’v’ns. by zeroing his sights, as it were, on a particular woman who was easy to find because she was twice the size of everyone else. Many furlongs of gaily dyed fabrics went into her skirts, which shewed bravely from a distance, like French regimental standards. From time to time a man with blond hair would come out and stroll about the garden with her, moon orbiting planet. He reminded Daniel, from a distance, of Isaac.

House of Stuart

House of Orange-Nassau

Daniel did not reck who that fellow was, and was too abashed to discover his ignorance by asking, until one day a carriage arrived from London and several men in admirals’ hats climbed out of it and went to talk to the same man in the garden. Though first they all doffed those hats and bowed low.

“That blond man who walks in the garden, betimes, on the arm of the Big Dipper—would that be the Duke of York?”

“Yes,” said Wilkins—not wishing to say more, as he was breathing shallowly, his eye peeled wide open and bathed in a greenish light from the eyepiece of his prospective-glass.

“And Lord High Admiral,” Daniel continued.

“He has many titles,” Wilkins observed in a level and patient tone.

“So those chaps in the hats would be—obviously—”

“The Admiralty,” Wilkins said curtly, “or some moiety or faction thereof.” He recoiled from the scope. Daniel phant’sied he was being proffered a look-see, but only for a moment—Wilkins lifted the instrument out of the tree-crook and collapsed it. Daniel collected that he had seen something Wilkins wished he hadn’t.

The Dutch and the English were at war. Because of the Plague, this had been a desultory struggle thus far, and Daniel had forgotten about it. It was midwinter. Cold had brought the Plague to a stand. Months would pass before the weather permitted resumption of the sea-campaign. But the time to lay plans for such campaigns was now. It ought to surprise no one if the Admiralty met with the Lord High Admiral now. It would be surprising if they didn’t. What struck Daniel was that Wilkins cared that he, Daniel, had seen something. The Restoration, and Daniel’s Babylonian exile and subjugation at Cambridge, had led him to think of himself as a perfect nobody, except perhaps when it came to Natural Philosophy—and it was more obvious every day that even within the Royal Society he was nothing compared to Wren and Hooke. So why should John Wilkins give a fig whether Daniel spied a flotilla of admirals and collected, from that, that John Comstock was hosting James, Duke of York, brother of Charles II and next in line to the throne?

It must be (as Daniel realized, walking back through a defoliated orchard alongside the brooding Wilkins) because he was the son of Drake. And though Drake was a retired agitator of a defeated and downcast sect, at bay in his house on Holborn, someone was still afraid of him.

Or if not of him, then of his sect.

But the sect was shattered into a thousand claques and cabals. Cromwell was gone, Drake was too old, Gregory Bolstrood had been executed, and his son Knott was in exile—

That was it. They were afraid of Daniel.

“What is funny?” Wilkins demanded.

“People,” Daniel said, “and what goes on in their minds sometimes.”

“I say, you’re not referring to me by that—?—!”

“Oh, perish the thought. I would not mock my betters.”

“Pray, who on this estate is not your better?”

A hard question that. Daniel’s answer was silence. Wilkins seemed to find even that alarming.

“I forget you are a Phanatique born and bred.” Which was the same as saying, You recognize no man as your better, do you?

“On the contrary, I see now that you have never forgotten it.”

But something seemed to have changed in Wilkins’s mind. Like an Admiral working his ship to windward, he had suddenly come about and, after a few moments’ luffing and disarray, was now on an altogether novel tack: “The lady used to be called Anne Hyde—a close relation of John Comstock. So, far from common. Yet too common for a Duke to marry. And yet still too noble to send off to a Continental nunnery, and too fat to move far, in any case. She bore him a couple of daughters: Mary, then Anne. The Duke finally married her, though not without many complications. Since Mary or Anne could conceivably inherit the throne one day, it became a State matter. Various courtiers were talked, bribed, or threatened into coming forward and swearing on stacks of Bibles that they’d fucked Anne Hyde up and down, fucked her in the British Isles and in France, in the Low Countries and the Highlands, in the city and in the country, in ships and palaces, beds and hammocks, bushes, flower-beds, water-closets, and garrets, that they had fucked her drunk and fucked her sober, from behind and in front, from above, below, and both the right and left sides, singly and in groups, in the day and in the night and during all phases of the moon and signs of the Zodiac, whilst also intimating that any number of blacksmiths, Vagabonds, French gigolos, Jesuit provocateurs, comedians, barbers, and apprentice saddlers had been doing the same whensoever they weren’t. But despite all of this the Duke of York married her, and socked her away in St. James’s Palace, where she’s grown like one of our entomologickal prodigies in the cellar.”

Daniel had heard a good bit of this before, of course, from men who came to the house on Holborn to pay court to Drake—which gave him the odd sense that Wilkins was paying court to him. Which could not be, for Daniel had no real power or significance at all, and no prospects of getting any.

It seemed more plausible that Wilkins felt sorry for Daniel, than afraid of him; and as such was trying to shield him from those dangers that were avoidable while tutoring him in how to cope with the rest.

Which meant, if true, that Daniel ought at least to attend to the lesson that Wilkins was trying to give him. The two Princesses, Mary and Anne, would, respectively, be three and one years old now. And as their mother was related to John Comstock, it was entirely plausible that they might be visitors in the house. Which explained Comstock’s remark to Wilkins: “Two of them are all three.” Female, of tender years, and royal.

The burdensome restrictions imposed on their Natural-Philosophic researches by the host made it necessary to convene a very long Symposium in the Kitchen, where Hooke and Wilkins dictated a list (written by Daniel in a loosening hand) of experiments that were neither noisy nor smelly, but (as the evening wore on) increasingly fanciful. Hooke put Daniel to work mending his Condensing Engine, which was a piston-and-cylinder arrangement for compressing or rarefying air. He was convinced that air contained some kind of spirit that sustained both fire and life, which, when it was used up, caused both to be extinguished. So there was a whole range of experiments along the lines of: sealing up a candle and a mouse in a glass vessel, and watching to see what happened (mouse died before candle). They fixed up a huge bladder so that it was leak-proof, and put it to their mouths, and took turns breathing the same air over and over again, to see what would happen. Hooke used his engine to produce a vacuum in a large glass jar, then set a pendulum swinging in the vacuum, and set Charles there to count its swings. On the first really clear night at the onset of winter, Hooke had gone outside with a telescope and peered at Mars: he had found some light and dark patches on its surface, and ever since had been tracking their movements so that he could figure out how long it took that planet to rotate on its axis. He put Charles and Daniel to work grinding better and better lenses, or else bought them from Spinoza in Amsterdam, and they took turns looking at smaller and smaller structures on the moon. But here again, Hooke saw things Daniel didn’t. “The moon must have gravity, like the earth,” he said.

“What makes you say so?”

“The mountains and valleys have a settled shape to them—no matter how rugged the landforms, there is nothing to be seen, on that whole orb, that would fall over under gravitation. With better lenses I could measure the Angle of Repose and calculate the force of her gravity.”

“If the moon gravitates, so must everything else in the heavens,” Daniel observed.[*]

A long skinny package arrived from Amsterdam. Daniel opened it up, expecting to find another telescope—instead it was a straight, skinny horn, about five feet long, with helical ridges and grooves. “What is it?” he asked Wilkins.

Wilkins peered at it over his glasses and said (sounding mildly annoyed), “The horn of a unicorn.”

“But I thought that the unicorn was a mythical beast.”

“I’ve never seen one.”

“Then where do you suppose this came from?”

“How the devil should I know?” Wilkins returned. “All I know is, you can buy them in Amsterdam.”

Kings most commonly, though strong in legions, are but weak in Arguments; as they who have ever accustom’d from the Cradle to use thir will onely as thir right hand, thir reason alwayes as thir left. Whence unexpectedly constrain’d to that kind of combat, they prove but weak and puny Adversaries.

—MILTON, PREFACE TO Eikonoklastes

DANIEL GOT USED TO SEEING the Duke of York out riding and hunting with his princely friends—as much as the son of Drake could get used to such a sight. Once the hunters rode past within a bow-shot of him, near enough that he could hear the Duke talking to his companion—in French. Which gave Daniel an impulse to rush up to this French Catholic man in his French clothes, who claimed to be England’s next king, and put an end to him. He mastered it by recalling to mind the way that the Duke’s father’s head had plopped into the basket on the scaffold at the Banqueting House. Then he thought to himself: What an odd family!

Too, he could no longer muster quite the same malice towards these people. Drake had raised his sons to hate the nobility by wasting no opportunity to point out their privileges, and the way they profited from those privileges without really being aware of them. This sort of discourse had wrought extraordinarily, not only in Drake’s sons but in every Dissident meeting-house in the land, and led to Cromwell and much else; but Cromwell had made Puritans powerful, and as Daniel was now seeing, that power—as if it were a living thing with a mind of its own—was trying to pass itself on to him, which would mean that Daniel was a child of privilege too.

The tables of the Philosophical Language were finished: a vast fine-meshed net drawn through the Cosmos so that everything known, in Heaven and Earth, was trapped in one of its myriad cells. All that was needed to identify a particular thing was to give its location in the tables, which could be expressed as a series of numbers. Wilkins came up with a system for assigning names to things, so that by breaking a name up into its component syllables, one could know its location in the Tables, and hence what thing it referred to.

Wilkins drained all the blood out of a large dog and put it into a smaller dog; minutes later the smaller dog was out chasing sticks. Hooke built a new kind of clock, using the Microscope to examine some of its tiny parts. In so doing he discovered a new kind of mite living in the rags in which these parts had been wrapped. He drew pictures of them, and then performed an exhaustive three-day series of experiments to learn what would and wouldn’t kill them: the most effective killer being a Florentine poison he’d been brewing out of tobacco leaves.

Sir Robert Moray came to visit, and ground up a bit of the unicorn’s horn to make a powder, which he sprinkled in a ring, and placed a spider in the center of the ring. But the spider kept escaping. Moray pronounced the horn to be a fraud.

Wilkins hustled Daniel out of bed one night in the wee hours and took him on a dangerous nighttime hay-wain ride to the gaol in Epsom town. “Fortune has smiled on our endeavours,” Wilkins said. “The man we are going to interview was condemned to hang. But hanging crushes the parts that are of interest to us—certain delicate structures in the neck. Fortunately for us, before the hangman could get to him, he died of a bloody flux.”

“Is this going to be a new addition to the Tables, then?” Daniel asked wearily.

“Don’t be foolish—the anatomical structures in question have been known for centuries. This dead man is going to help us with the Real Character.”

“That’s the alphabet for writing down the Philosophical Language?”

“You know that perfectly well. Wake up, Daniel!”

“I ask only because it seems to me you’ve already come up with several Real Characters.”

“All more or less arbitrary. A natural philosopher on some other world, viewing a document written in those characters, would think that he were reading, not the Philosophical Language, but the Cryptonomicon! What we need is a systematic alphabet—made so that the shapes of the characters themselves provide full information as to how they are pronounced.”

These words filled Daniel with a foreboding that turned out to be fully justified: by the time the sun rose, they had fetched the dead man from the gaol, brought him back out to the cottage, and carefully cut his head off. Charles Comstock was rousted from bed and ordered to dissect the corpse, as a lesson in anatomy (and as a way of getting rid of it). Meanwhile, Hooke and Wilkins connected the head’s wind-pipe to a large set of fireplace-bellows, so that they could blow air through his voice-box. Daniel was detailed to saw off the top of the skull and get rid of the brains so that he could reach in through the back and get hold of the soft palate, tongue, and other meaty bits responsible for making sounds. With Daniel thus acting as a sort of meat puppeteer, and Hooke manipulating the lips and nostrils, and Wilkins plying the bellows, they were able to make the head speak. When his speaking-parts were squished into one configuration he made a very clear “O” sound, which Daniel (very tired now) found just a bit unsettling. Wilkins wrote down an O-shaped character, reflecting the shape of the man’s lips. This experiment went on all day, Wilkins reminding the others, when they showed signs of tiredness, that this rare head wouldn’t keep forever—as if that weren’t already obvious. They made the head utter thirty-four different sounds. For each one of them, Wilkins drew out a letter that was a sort of quick freehand sketch of the positions of lips, tongue, and other bits responsible for making that noise. Finally they turned the head over to Charles Comstock, to continue his anatomy-lesson, and Daniel went to bed for a series of rich nightmares.

Looking at Mars had put Hooke in mind of cœlestial affairs; for that reason he set out with Daniel one morning in a wagon, with a chest of equipment. This must have been important, because Hooke packed it himself, and wouldn’t let anyone else near it. Wilkins kept trying to persuade them to use the giant wheel, instead of borrowing one of John Comstock’s wagons (and further wearing out their welcome). Wilkins claimed that the giant wheel, propelled by the youthful and vigorous Daniel Waterhouse, could (in theory) traverse fields, bogs, and reasonably shallow bodies of water with equal ease, so they could simply travel in a perfectly straight line to their destination, instead of having to follow roads. Hooke declined, and chose the wagon.

They traveled for several hours to a certain well, said to be more than three hundred feet deep, bored down through solid chalk. Hooke’s mere appearance was enough to chase away the local farmers, who were only loitering and drinking anyway. He got Daniel busy constructing a solid, level platform over the mouth of the well. Hooke meanwhile took out his best scale and began to clean and calibrate it. He explained, “For the sake of argument, suppose it really is true that planets are kept in their orbits, not by vortices in the æther, but by the force of gravity.”

“Yes?”

“Then, if you do some mathematicks, you can see that it simply would not work unless the force of gravity got weaker, as the distance from the center of attraction increased.”

“So the weight of an object should diminish as it rises?”

“And increase as it descends,” Hooke said, nodding significantly at the well.

“Aha! So the experiment is to weigh something here at the surface, and then to…” and here Daniel stopped, horror-stricken.

Hooke twisted his bent neck around and peered at him curiously. Then, for the first time since Daniel had met him, he laughed out loud. “You’re afraid that I’m proposing to lower you, Daniel Waterhouse, three hundred feet down into the bottom of this well, with a scale in your lap, to weigh something? And that once down there the rope will break?” More laughing. “You need to think more carefully about what I said.”

“Of course—it wouldn’t work that way,” Daniel said, deeply embarrassed on more than one level.

“And why not?” Hooke asked, Socratically.

“Because the scale works by balancing weights on one pan against the object to be weighed, on the other…and if it’s true that all objects are heavier at the bottom of the well, then both the object, and the weights, will be heavier by the same amount…and so the result will be the same, and will teach us nothing.”

“Help me measure out three hundred feet of thread,” Hooke said, no longer amused.

They did it by pulling the thread off a reel, and stretching it alongside a one-fathom-long rod, and counting off fifty fathoms. One end of the thread Hooke tied to a heavy brass slug. He set the scale up on the platform that Daniel had improvised over the mouth of the well, and put the slug, along with its long bundle of thread, on the pan. He weighed the slug and thread carefully—a seemingly endless procedure disturbed over and over by light gusts of wind. To get a reliable measurement, they had to devote a couple of hours to setting up a canvas wind-screen. Then Hooke spent another half hour peering at the scale’s needle through a magnifying lens while adding or subtracting bits of gold foil, no heavier than snowflakes. Every change caused the scale to teeter back and forth for several minutes before settling into a new position. Finally, Hooke called out a weight in pounds, ounces, grains, and fractions of grains, and Daniel noted it down. Then Hooke tied the free end of the thread to a little eye he had screwed to the bottom of the pan, and he and Daniel took turns lowering the weight into the well, letting it drop a few inches at a time—if it got to swinging, and scraped against the chalky sides of the hole, it would pick up a bit of extra weight, and ruin the experiment. When all three hundred feet had been let out, Hooke went for a stroll, because the weight was swinging a little bit, and its movements would disturb the scale. Finally it settled down enough that he could go back to work with his magnifying glass and his tweezers.

Daniel, in other words, had a lot of time to think that day. Cells, spiders’ eyes, unicorns’ horns, compressed and rarefied air, dramatic cures for deafness, philosophical languages, and flying chariots were all perfectly fine subjects, but lately Hooke’s interest had been straying into matters cœlestial, and that made Daniel think about his roommate. Just as certain self-styled philosophers in minor European courts were frantic to know what Hooke and Wilkins were up to at Epsom, so Daniel wanted only to know what Isaac was doing up at Woolsthorpe.

“It weighs the same,” Hooke finally pronounced, “three hundred feet of altitude makes no measurable difference.” That was the signal to pack up all the apparatus and let the farmers draw their water again.

“This proves nothing,” Hooke said as they rode home through the dark. “The scale is not precise enough. But if one were to construct a clock, driven by a pendulum, in a sealed glass vessel, so that changes in moisture and baroscopic pressure would not affect its speed…and if one were to run that clock in the bottom of a well for a long period of time…any difference in the pendulum’s weight would be manifest as a slowing, or quickening, of the clock.”

“But how would you know that it was running slow or fast?” Daniel asked. “You’d have to compare it against another clock.”

“Or against the rotation of the earth,” Hooke said. But it seemed that Daniel’s question had thrown him into a dark mood, and he said nothing more until they had reached Epsom, after midnight.

THE TEMPERATURE AT NIGHT began to fall below freezing, and so it was time to calibrate thermometers. Daniel and Charles and Hooke had been making them for some weeks out of yard-long glass tubes, filled with spirits of wine, dyed with cochineal. But they had no markings on them. On cold nights they would bundle themselves up and immerse those thermometers in tubs of distilled water and then sit there for hours, giving the tubs an occasional stir, and waiting. When the water froze, if they listened carefully enough, they could hear a faint searing, splintering noise come out of the tub as flakes of ice shot across the surface—then they’d rouse themselves into action, using diamonds to make a neat scratch on each tube, marking the position of the red fluid inside.

Hooke kept a square of black velvet outside so that it would stay cold. When it snowed during the daytime, he would take his microscope outside and spread the velvet out on the stage and peer at any snowflakes that happened to fall on it. Daniel saw, as Hooke did, that each one was unique. But again Hooke saw something Daniel missed: “in any particular snowflake, all six arms are the same—why does this happen? Why shouldn’t each of the six arms develop in a different and unique shape?”

“Some central organizing principle must be at work, but—?” Daniel said.

“That is too obvious to even bother pointing out,” Hooke said. “With better lenses, we could peer into the core of a snowflake and discover that principle at work.”

A week later, Hooke opened up the thorax of a live dog and removed all of its ribs to expose the beating heart. But the lungs had gone flaccid and did not seem to be doing their job.

The screaming sounded almost human. A man with an expensive voice came down from John Comstock’s house to enquire about it. Daniel, too bleary-eyed to see clearly and too weary to think, took him for a head butler or something. “I shall write an explanation, and a note of apology to him,” Daniel mumbled, looking about for a quill, rubbing his blood-sticky hand on his breeches.

“To whom, prithee? asked the butler, amused. Though he seemed young for a head-butler. In his early thirties. He was in a linen night-dress. His scalp glistered with a fine carpet of blond stubble, the mark of a man who always wore a periwig.

“The Earl of Epsom.”

“Why not write it to the Duke of York?”

“Very well then, I’ll write it to him.”

“Then why not dispense with writing altogether and simply tell me what the hell you are doing?”

Daniel took this for insolence until he looked the visitor in the face and realized it was the Duke of York in person.

He really ought to bow, or something. Instead of which he jerked. The Duke made a gesture with his hand that seemed to mean that the jerk was accepted as due obeisance and could they please get on with the conversation now.

“The Royal Society—” Daniel began, thrusting that word Royal out in front of him like a shield, “has brought a dead dog to life with another’s blood, and has now embarked on a study of artificial breath.”

“My brother is fond of your Society,” said James, “or his Society I should say, for he made it Royal.” This, Daniel suspected, was to explain why he was not going to have them all horsewhipped. “I do wonder at the noise. Is it expected to continue all night?”

“On the contrary, it has already ceased,” Daniel pointed out.

The Lord High Admiral preceded him into the kitchen, where Hooke and Wilkins had thrust a brass pipe down the dog’s windpipe and connected it to the same trusty pair of bellows they’d used to make the dead man’s head speak. “By pumping the bellows they were able to inflate and deflate the lungs, and prevent the dog from asphyxiating,” explained Charles Comstock, after the experimenters had bowed to the Duke. “Now it only remains to be seen how long the animal can be kept alive in this way. Mr. Waterhouse and I shall spell each other at the bellows until Mr. Hooke pronounces an end to the experiment.”

At the mention of Daniel’s family name, the Duke flicked his eyes towards him for a moment.

“If it must suffer in the name of your inquiry, thank Heaven it does so quietly,” the Duke remarked, and turned to leave. The others would follow; but the Duke stopped them with a “Do carry on, as you were.” But to Daniel he said, “A word, if you please, Mr. Waterhouse,” and so Daniel escorted him out onto the lawn half wondering whether he was about to be carved up worse than the dog.

A few moments previously, he’d mastered a daft impulse to tackle his royal highness before his royal highness reached the kitchen, for fear that his royal highness would be disgusted by what was going on in there. But he’d not reckoned on the fact that the Duke, young though he was, had fought in a lot of battles, both at sea and on land. Which was to say that as bad as this business with the dog was, the Duke of York had seen much worse done to humans. The R.S., far from seeming like a band of mad ruthless butchers, were dilettantes by his standards. Further grounds (as if any were wanted!) for Daniel to feel queasy.

Daniel really knew of no way to regulate his actions other than to be rational. Princes were taught a thing or two about being rational, as they were taught to play a little lute and dance a passable ricercar. But what drove their actions was their own force of will; in the end they did as they pleased, rational or not. Daniel had liked to tell himself that rational thought led to better actions than brute force of will; yet here was the Duke of York all but rolling his eyes at them and their experiment, seeing naught that was new.

“A friend of mine brought back something nasty from France,” his royal highness announced.

It took Daniel a long time to decrypt this. He tried to understand it in any number of different ways, but suddenly the knowledge rumbled through his mind like a peal of thunder through a coppice. The Duke had said: I have syphilis.

“Shame, that,” Daniel said. For he was not sure, yet, that he had translated it correctly. He must be ever so careful and vague lest this conversation degenerate into a comedy of errors ending with his death by rapier-thrust.

“Some are of the opinion that mercury cures it.”

“It is also a poison, though,” Daniel said.

Which was common knowledge; but it seemed to confirm, in the mind of James Stuart, Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, that he was talking to just the right chap. “Surely with so many clever Doctors in the Royal Society, working on artificial breath and such, there must be some thought of how to cure a man such as my friend.”

And his wife and his children, Daniel thought, for James must have either gotten it from, or passed it on to, Anne Hyde, who had therefore probably given it to the daughters, Mary and Anne. To date, James’s older brother the King had not been able to produce any legitimate children. There were plenty of bastards like Monmouth. But none eligible to inherit the throne. And so this nasty thing that James had brought back from France was really a matter of whether the Stuart dynasty was to survive.

This raised a fascinating side question. With a whole cottage full of Royal Society Fellows to choose from, why had James carefully chosen to speak with the one who happened to be the son of a Phanatique?

“It is a sensitive matter,” the Duke remarked, “the sort of thing that stains a man’s honor, if it is bandied about.”

Daniel readily translated this as follows: If you tell anyone, I’ll send someone round to engage you in a duel. Not that anyone would pay any notice, anyway, if the son of Drake were to level an accusation of moral turpitude against the Duke of York. Drake had been doing such things without letup for fifty years. And so the Duke’s strategy was now plain to Daniel: he had chosen Daniel to hear about his syphilis because if Daniel were so foolish as to spread rumors, no one would hear them above the roar of obloquy produced at all times by Drake. In any case, Daniel would not be able to keep it up for very long before he was found in a field outside of London with a lot of rapier wounds in his body.

“You will let me know, won’t you, if the Royal Society learns anything on this front?” said James, making to leave.

“So that you can pass the information on to your friend? Of course,” Daniel said. Which was the end of that conversation. He returned to the kitchen to get an idea of how much longer the experiment was going to go on.

The answer: longer than any of them really wanted. By the time they were finished, dawn-light was beginning to come in the windows, giving them a premonition of just how ghastly the kitchen was going to look when the sun actually rose. Hooke was sitting crookedly in a chair, shocked and morose, appalled by himself, and Wilkins was hunched forward supporting his head on a smeared fist.

They’d come here supposedly as refugees from the Black Death, but really they were fleeing their own ignorance—they hungered for understanding, and were like starving wretches who had broken into a lord’s house and gone on an orgy of gluttonous feasting, wolfing down new meals before they could digest, or even chew, the old ones. It had lasted for the better part of a year, but now, as the sun rose over the aftermath of the artificial breath experiment, they were scattered around, blinking stupidly at the devastated kitchen, with its dog-ribs strewn all over the floor, and huge jars of preserved spleens and gall-bladders, specimens of exotic parasites nailed to planks or glued to panes of glass, vile poisons bubbling over on the fire, and suddenly they felt completely disgusted with themselves.

Daniel gathered the dog’s remains up in his arms—messy, but it scarcely mattered—all their clothes would have to be burned anyway—and walked out to the bone-yard on the east side of the cottage, where the remains of all Hooke’s and Wilkins’s investigations were burned, buried, or used to study the spontaneous generation of flies. Notwithstanding which, the air was relatively clean and fresh out here. Having set the remains down, Daniel found that he was walking directly towards a blazing planet, a few degrees above the western horizon, which could only be Venus. He walked and walked, letting the dew on the grass cleanse the blood from his shoes. The dawn was making the fields shimmer pink and green.

Isaac had sent him a letter: “Require asst. w/obs. of Venus pls. come if you can.” He had wondered at the time if this might be something veiled. But standing there in that dew-silvered field with his back to the house of carnage and nothing before him but the Dawn Star, Daniel remembered what Isaac had said years ago about the natural harmony between the heavenly orbs and the orbs we view them with. Four hours later he was riding north on a borrowed horse.

Aboard Minerva, Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

DANIEL WAKES UP WORRIED. The stiffness in his masseter muscles, the aching in his frontalis and temporalis, tells him he’s been worrying about something in his sleep. Still, being worried is preferable to being terrified, which he was until yesterday, when Captain van Hoek finally gave up on the idea of trying to sail Minerva into the throat of a gale and turned back to calmer waters along the Massachusetts coast.

Captain van Hoek would probably have called it “a bit of chop” or some other nautical euphemism, but Daniel had gone to his cabin with a pail to catch his vomit, and an empty bottle to receive the notes he’d been scratching out in the last few days. If the weather had gotten any worse, he’d have tossed these down the head. Perhaps some Moor or Hottentot would have found them in a century or two and read about Dr. Waterhouse’s early memories of Newton and Leibniz.

The planks of the poop deck are only a few inches above Daniel’s face as he lies on his sack of straw. He’s learned to recognize the tread of van Hoek’s boots on those boards. On a ship it is bad manners to approach within a fathom of the captain, so even when the poop deck is crowded, van Hoek’s footsteps are always surrounded by a large empty space. As Minerva’s quest for a steady west wind has stretched out to a week and then two, Daniel has learned to read the state of the captain’s mind from the figure and rhythm of his movements—each pattern like the steps of a courtly dance. A steady long stride means that all is well, and van Hoek is merely touring the precincts. When he’s watching the weather he walks about in small eddies, and when he’s shooting the sun with his back-staff he stands still, grinding the balls of his feet against the planks to keep his balance. But this morning (Daniel supposes it is early in the morning, though the sun hasn’t come up yet) van Hoek is doing something Daniel’s never observed before: flitting back and forth across the poop deck with brisk angry steps, pausing at one rail or another for a few seconds at a time. The sailors, he senses, are mostly awake, but they are all belowdecks shushing one another and tending to small, intense, quiet jobs.

Yesterday they had sailed into Cape Cod Bay—the shallow lake held in the crook of Cape Cod’s arm—to ride out the tail end of that northeast gale, and to make certain repairs, and get the ship more winter-ready than it had been. But then the wind shifted round to the north and threatened to drive them against the sandbanks at the southern fringe of said Bay, and so they sailed toward the sunset, and maneuvered the big ship with exquisite care between rocks to starboard and sunken islands to port, and thus entered Plymouth Bay. As night fell they dropped anchor in an inlet, well sheltered from the weather, and (as Daniel supposed) prepared to tarry there for a few days and await more auspicious weather. But van Hoek was obviously nervous—he doubled the watch, and put men to work cleaning and oiling the ship’s surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of small firearms.

A distant boom rattles the panes in Daniel’s cabin window. He rolls out of bed like a fourteen-year-old and scurries to the exit, flailing one hand over his head in the dark so he won’t brain himself on the overhead beam. When he emerges onto the quarter-deck he seems to hear answering fire from all the isles and hillside around them—then he understands that they are merely echoes of the first explosion. With a good pocket-watch he could map their surroundings by the timing of those echoes—

Dappa, the first mate, sits crosslegged on the deck near the wheel, reviewing charts by candle-light. This is an odd place for such work. Diverse feathers and colored ribbons dangle from a string above his head—Daniel supposes it to be a tribal fetish (Dappa is an African) until a fleck of goose-down crawls in a breath of cold air, and he understands that Dappa is trying to guess what the wind will do as the sun rises. He holds up one hand to silence Daniel before Daniel’s had a chance to speak. There is shouting on the water, but it is all distant—Minerva is silent as a ghost ship. Stepping farther out onto the quarter-deck, Daniel can see yellow stars widely scattered across the water, blinking as they are eclipsed by rolling seas.

“You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” Dappa observes.

“I’ll rise to that bait—what have I gotten myself into?”

“You’re on a ship whose captain refuses to have anything to do with pirates,” Dappa says. “Hates ’em. He nailed his colors to the mast twenty years ago, van Hoek did—he would burn this ship to the waterline before handing over a single penny.”

“Those lights on the water—”

“Whaleboats mostly,” Dappa says. “Possibly a barge or two. When the sun comes up we may expect to see sails—but before we concern ourselves with those, we shall have to contend with the whaleboats. Did you hear the shouting, an hour ago?”

“I must have slept through it.”

“A whaleboat stole up towards us with muffled oars. We let her suppose that we were asleep—waited until she was alongside, then dropped a comet into her.”

“Comet?”

“A small cannonball, wrapped in oil-soaked rags and set aflame. Once it lands in such a boat, it’s difficult to throw overboard. Gave us a good look, while it lasted: there were a dozen Englishmen in that boat, and one of ’em was already swinging a grappling-hook.”

“Do you mean that they were English colonists, or—”

“That’s one of the things we aim to find out. After we chased that lot off, we sent some men out in our own whaler.”

“The explosion—?”

“‘Twas a grenade. We have a few retired grenadiers in our number—”

“You threw a bomb into someone else’s boat?”

“Aye, and then—if all went according to plan—our Filipinos—former pearl divers, excellent swimmers—climbed over the gunwales with daggers in their teeth and cut a few throats—”

“But that’s mad! This is Massachusetts!”

Dappa chuckles. “Aye. That it is.”

An hour later the sun rises gorgeously over Cape Cod Bay. Daniel is pacing around the ship, trying to find a place where he won’t have to listen to the screams of the pirates. Two open boats are now thudding against Minerva’s hull: the ship’s own longboat, freshly caulked and painted, and the pirate whaler, which was evidently in poor condition even before this morning’s action. Splinters of fresh blond wood show where a bench was snapped by the grenade, and an inch or two of blood sloshes back and forth in the bottom as the empty boat is tossed around by a rising wind. Five pirates survived, and were towed back to Minerva by the raiding party. Now (judging from the sounds) they are all down in the bilge, where two of Minerva’s largest sailors are holding their heads beneath the filthy water. When they are hauled out, they scream for air, and Daniel thinks about Hooke and Wilkins with their poor dogs.

Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire

SPRING 1666

He discovereth the depe & secret things: he knoweth what is in the darkenes, and the light dwelleth with him.

—DANIEL 2:22

FROM ISAAC’S INSTRUCTIONS (“Turn left at Grimethorpe Ruin”) he’d been expecting a few hovels gripping the rim of a wind-burned scarp, but Woolsthorpe was as pleasant a specimen of English countryside as he’d ever seen. North of Cambridge it was appallingly flat, a plain scratched with drainage ditches. But beyond Peterborough the coastal fens fell away and were replaced by pastures of radiant greenness, like stained-glass windows infested with sheep. There were a few tall pine trees that made the place seem farther north than it really was. Another day north, the country began to roll, and the earth turned brown as coffee, with cream-colored stone rising out of the soil here and there: once-irregular croppings rationalized to squared-off block-heaps by the efforts of quarrymen. Woolsthorpe gave an impression of being high up in the world, close to the sky, and the trees that lined the lane from the village all had the same telltale skewage, suggesting that the place might not be as pleasant all year round as it was on the morning Daniel arrived.

Woolsthorpe Manor was a very simple house, shaped like a fat T with its crossbar fronting on the lane, made of the soft pale stone that was used for everything around here—its roof a solid mass of lichens. It was built sideways to a long slope that rose as it went northwards, and so, on its southern end, the land fell away from it, giving it a clear sunny exposure. But this opportunity had been wasted by the builders, who had put almost no windows there—just a couple of them, scarcely larger than gun-slits, and one tiny portal up in the attic that made no sense to Daniel at first. As Daniel noted while his horse toiled up the hill through the grasping spring mud, Isaac had already taken advantage of this south-facing wall by carving diverse sundials into it. Sprawling away from there, down the hill and away from the lane, were long stables and barns that marked the place as an active farmstead, and that Daniel didn’t have to concern himself with.

He turned off the lane. The house was set back from it not more than twenty feet. Set above the door was a coat of arms carved into the stone: on a blank shield, a pair of human thigh-bones crossed. A Jolly Roger, minus skull. Daniel sat on his horse and contemplated its sheer awfulness for a while and savored the dull, throbbing embarrassment of being English. He was waiting for a servant to notice his arrival.

Isaac had mentioned in his letter that his mother was away for a few weeks, and this was perfectly acceptable to Daniel—all he knew of the mother was that she had abandoned Isaac when he’d been three years old, and gone to live with a rich new husband several miles away, leaving the toddler to be raised in this house by his grandmother. Daniel had noticed that there were some families (like the Waterhouses) skilled at presenting a handsome façade to the world, no matter what was really going on; it was all lies, of course, but at least it was a convenience to visitors. But there were other families where the emotional wounds of the participants never healed, never even closed up and scabbed over, and no one even bothered to cover them up—like certain ghastly effigies in Papist churches, with exposed bleeding hearts and gushing stigmata. Having dinner or even polite conversation with them was like sitting around the table participating in Hooke’s dog experiment—everything you did or said was another squeeze of the bellows, and you could stare right in through the vacancies in the rib cage and see the organs helplessly responding, the heart twitching with its own macabre internal power of perpetual motion. Daniel suspected that the Newtons were one of those families, and he was glad Mother was absent. Their coat of arms was a proof, of Euclidean certainty, that he was right about this.

“Is that you, Daniel?” said the voice of Isaac Newton, not very loud. A little bubble of euphoria percolated into Daniel’s bloodstream: to re-encounter anyone, after so long, during the Plague Years, and find them still alive, was a miracle. He looked uphill. The northern end of the house looked into, and was sheltered by, rising terrain. A small orchard of apple trees had been established on that side. Seated on a bench, with his back to Daniel and to the sun, was a man or woman with long colorless hair spilling down over a blanket that had been drawn round the shoulders like a shawl.

“Isaac?”

The head turned slightly. “It is I.”

Daniel rode up out of the mud and into the apple-garden, then dismounted and tethered the horse to the low branch of an apple tree—a garland of white flowers. The petals were coming down from the apple-blossoms like snow. Daniel swung round Isaac in a wide Copernican arc, peering at him through the fragrant blizzard. Isaac’s hair had always been pale, and prematurely streaked with gray, but in the year since Daniel had seen him, he’d gone almost entirely silver. The hair fell about him like a hood—as Daniel came around to the front, he was expecting to see Isaac’s protruding eyes, but instead he saw two disks of gold looking back at him, as if Isaac’s eyes had been replaced by five-guinea coins. Daniel must have shouted, because Isaac said, “Don’t be alarmed. I fashioned these spectacles myself. I’m sure you know that gold is almost infinitely malleable—but did you know that if you pound it thin enough, you can see through it? Try them.” He took the spectacles off with one hand while clamping the other over his eyes. Daniel bobbled them because they were lighter than he’d expected—they had no lenses, just membranes of gold stretched like drum-heads over wire frames. As he raised them towards his face, their color changed.

“They are blue!”

“It is another clue about the nature of light,” Isaac said. “Gold is yellow—it reflects the part of light that is yellow, that is, but allows the remnant to pass through—which being deprived of its yellow part, appears blue.”

Daniel was peering out at a dim vision of blue-blossomed apple trees before a blue stone house—a blue Isaac Newton sitting with his back to a blue sun, one blue hand covering his eyes.

“Forgive me their rude construction—I made them in the dark.”

“Is there something the matter with your eyes, Isaac?”

“Nothing that cannot heal, God willing. I have been staring into the sun too much.”

“Oh.” Daniel was semi-dumbstruck by Puritan guilt for having left Isaac alone for so long. It was fortunate he hadn’t killed himself.

“I can still work in a dark room, with the spectra that are cast through the prism by the Sun. But the spectra of Venus are too faint.”

“Of Venus?!”

“I have made observations concerning the nature of Light that contradict the theories of Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens,” Isaac said. “I have divided the white light of the Sun into colors, and then recombined these rays to make white light again. I have done the experiment many times, changing the apparatus to rule out possible sources of error. But there is one I have yet to eliminate: the Sun is not a point source of light. Its face subtends a considerable arc in the heavens. Those who will seek to find fault with my work, and to attack me, will claim that this—the fact that the light entering my prism, from different parts of the Sun’s disk, strikes it from slightly different angles—renders my conclusions suspect, and therefore worthless. In order to defeat these objections I must repeat the experiments using light, not from the Sun, but from Venus—an almost infinitely narrow point of light. But the light from Venus is so faint that my burned eyes cannot see it. I need you to make the observations with your good eyes, Daniel. We begin tonight. Perhaps you’d care to take a nap?”

The house was divided in half, north/south: the northern part, which had windows but no sunlight, was the domain of Newton’s mother—a parlor on the ground floor and a bedchamber above it, both furnished in the few-but-enormous style then mandatory. The southern half—with just a few tiny apertures to admit the plentiful sunlight—was Isaac’s: on the ground floor, a kitchen with a vast walk-in fireplace, suitable for alchemical work, and above it a bedchamber.

Isaac persuaded Daniel to lie down in, or at least on, his mother’s bed for a bit of a nap—then made the mistake of mentioning that it was the same bed in which Isaac had been born, several weeks premature, twenty-four years earlier. So after half an hour of lying in that bed, as rigid as a tetanus victim, looking out between his feet at the first thing Isaac had ever laid eyes on (the window and the orchard), Daniel got up and went outside again. Isaac was still sitting on the bench with a book in his lap, but his gold spectacles were aimed at the horizon. “Defeated them soundly, I should say.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“When it started it was close to shore—but it has steadily moved away.”

“What on earth can you you talking about, Isaac?”

“The naval battle—we are fighting the Dutch in the Narrow Seas. Can you not hear the sound of the cannons?”

“I’ve been lying quietly in bed and heard nothing.”

“Out here, it is very distinct.” Isaac reached out and caught a fluttering petal. “The winds favor our Navy. The Dutch chose the wrong time to attack.”

A fit of dizziness came over Daniel just then. Partly it was the thought that James, Duke of York, who a couple of weeks ago had been standing arm’s length from Daniel discoursing of syphilis, at this moment stood on the deck of a flagship, firing on, and taking fire from, the Dutch fleet; and the booms rolled across the sea and were gathered in by the great auricle of the Wash, the Boston and the Lynn Deeps, the Long Sand and the Brancaster Roads perhaps serving as the greased convolutions of an ear, and propagated up the channel of the Welland, fanned out along its tributary rivers and rills into the swales and hills of Lincolnshire and into the ears of Isaac. It was partly that, and partly the vision that filled his eyes: thousands of white petals were coming off the apple trees and following the same diagonal path to the ground, their descent skewed by a breeze that was blowing out toward the sea.

“Do you remember when Cromwell died, and Satan’s Wind came along to carry his soul to Hell?” Isaac asked.

“Yes. I was marching in his funeral procession, watching old Puritans getting blown flat.”

“I was in the schoolyard. We happened to be having a broad-jumping competition. I won the prize, even though I was small and frail. In fact, perhaps I won because I was so—I knew that I should have to use my brains. I situated myself so that Satan’s Wind was at my back, and then timed my leap so that I left the ground during an especially powerful gust. The wind carried my little body through space like one of these petals. For a moment I was gripped by an emotion—part thrill and part terror—as I imagined that the wind might carry me away—that my feet might never touch the earth again—that I would continue to skim along, just above the ground, until I had circumnavigated the globe. Of course I was just a boy. I didn’t know that projectiles rise and fall in parabolic curves. Be those curves ever so flat, they always tend to earth again. But suppose a cannonball, or a boy caught up in a supernatural wind, flew so fast that the centrifugal force (as Huygens has named it) of his motion around the earth just counteracted his tendency to fall?”

“Er—depends on what you assume about the nature of falling,” Daniel said. “Why do we fall? In what direction?”

“We fall towards the center of the earth. The same center on which the centrifugal force pivots—like a rock whirled on the end of a string.”

“I suppose that if, somehow, you could get the forces to balance just so, you’d keep going round and round, and never fall or fly away. But it seems terrifically improbable—God would have to set it up just so—as He set the planets in their orbits.”

“If you make certain assumptions about the force of gravity, and how the weight of an object diminishes as it gets farther away, it’s not improbable at all,” Isaac said. “It just happens. You would keep going round and round forever.”

“In a circle?”

“An ellipse.”

“An ellipse…” and here the bomb finally went off in his head, and Daniel had to sit down on the ground, the moisture of last year’s fallen apples soaking through his breeches. “Like a planet.”

“Just so—if only we could jump fast enough, or had a strong enough wind at our backs, we could all be planets.”

It was so pure and obviously Right that it did not occur to Daniel to question Isaac about the details for several hours, as the Sun was going down, and they were preparing for Venus to wheel round into the southern sky. “I have developed a method of fluxions that renders it all perfectly obvious,” Isaac said.

Daniel’s first thought had been I have to tell Wilkins because Wilkins, who had written a novel in which men flew to the moon, would be delighted with Isaac’s phrase: We could all be planets. But that put him in mind of Hooke, and the experiment at the deep well. Some premonition told him that he had best keep Newton and Hooke in separate cells for now.

Isaac’s bedroom might have been designed specifically for doing prism experiments, because one wanted an opening just big enough to admit a ray of light in which to center the prism, but otherwise the room needed to be dark so that the spectrum could be clearly viewed where it struck the wall. The only drawback for Daniel was stumbling over debris. This was the room where Isaac had lived in the years before going to Cambridge. Daniel inferred that they had been lonely years. The floor was cluttered with stuff Isaac had made but been too busy to throw away, and the white plaster walls were covered with graffiti he had sketched with charcoal or scratched with nails: designs for windmills, depictions of birds, geometrickal proofs. Daniel shuffled through the darkness, never lifting a foot off the floor lest it come down on an old piece of doll-furniture or jagged remains of a lens-grinding experiment, the delicate works of a water-clock or the papery skull of a small animal, or a foamy crucible crowned with frozen drips of metal.

Isaac had worked out during which hours of the night Venus would be shining her perfectly unidirectional light on Wools-thorpe Manor’s south wall, and he’d done it not only for tonight but for every night in the next several weeks. All of those hours were spoken for: he had planned out a whole program of experiments. It was clear to Daniel that Isaac had been arguing his case against a whole court full of imaginary Jesuits hurling Latin barbs at him from every quarter, objecting to his methods in ways that were often ridiculous—that Isaac fancied himself as a combination of Galileo and St. Anne, but that unlike Galileo he had no intention of knuckling under, and unlike St. Anne he would not end up riddled with his tormentors’ arrows—he was getting ready to catch the arrows, and fling them back.

It was the sort of thing that Hooke never bothered with—because for Hooke being right was enough, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him or his ideas.

When Isaac had got his prisms situated in the window and blown out the candle, Daniel was blind, and painfully embarrassed, for several minutes—he was anxious that, lacking Isaac’s acute senses, he would not be able to see the spectrum cast against the wall by the light shining from Venus. “Have due patience,” Isaac said with a tenderness Daniel hadn’t heard from him in years. The thought stole upon Daniel, as he sat there in the dark with Isaac, that Isaac might have more than one reason for wearing those golden spectacles all the time. They shielded his burnt eyes from the light, yes. But as well, might they hide his burnt heart from the sight of Daniel?

Then Daniel noticed a multicolored blur on the wall—a sliver, red on one end and violet on the other. He said, “I have it.”

He was startled by a heavy rustling directly above them, in the attic, a scrabbling of claws.

“What was that?”

“There is a tiny window up there—an invitation for owls to build nests in the attic,” Isaac said. “So vermin don’t eat the grain stored up there.”

Daniel laughed at it. For a moment he and Isaac were boys up past bedtime playing with their toys, the complications of their past forgotten and the perils of the future unthought of.

A deep hooing noise, like the resonant tone of an organ pipe. Then the rustle of feathers as the bird squeezed through the opening, and the rhythm of powerful wings, like the beating of a heart, receding into the sky. The spectrum of Venus flashed off, then on, as the owl momentarily eclipsed the planet. When Daniel looked, he realized that he could now see not only the spectrum from Venus, but tiny, ghostly streaks of color all over the wall: the spectra cast by the stars that surrounded Venus in the southern sky. But spectra were all he could see. The earth spun and the ribbons of color migrated across the invisible wall, an inch a minute, pouring across the rough plaster like shining puddles of quicksilver driven before a steady wind, revealing, in gorgeous colors, tiny strips of the pictures that Isaac had drawn and scratched on those walls. Each of the little rainbows showed only a fragment of a picture, and each picture in turn was only part of Isaac’s tapestry of sketchings and scratchings, but Daniel supposed that if he stood there through a sufficient number of long cold nights and concentrated very hard, he might be able to assemble, in his mind, a rough conception of the entire thing. Which was the way he had to address Isaac Newton in any case.

But I did believe, and do still, that the end of our City will be with fire and brimstone from above, and therefore I have made mine escape.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

CAMBRIDGE TRIED TO RESUME that spring, but Daniel and Isaac had only just settled back into their chamber when someone died of the Plague and they had to move out again—Isaac back to Wools-thorpe, Daniel back to a wandering life. He spent some weeks with Isaac working on the colors experiment, others with Wilkins (now back in London, running regular meetings of the Royal Society again) working on the Universal Character manuscript, others with Drake or with his older half-siblings, who’d returned to London at Drake’s command, to await the Apocalypse. The Year of the Beast, 1666, was halfway through, then two-thirds. Plague had gone away. War continued, and it was more than just an Anglo-Dutch war now, for the French had made a league with the Dutch against the English. But whatever plans the Duke of York had hatched with his Admirals on that chilly day at Epsom must not have been altogether worthless, because it was going well for them. Drake must be torn between patriotic ardor, and a feeling of disappointment that it showed no sign whatever of developing into an Armageddon sort of war. It was merely a string of naval engagements, and the gist of it was that the English fleet was driving the Dutch and French from the Channel. All in all, there was a failure of events to match up with the program laid out in the Books of Daniel and of Revelation, which forced Drake to re-read them almost every day, working out interpretations new and ever more strained. For Daniel’s part, he sometimes went for days without thinking about the End of the World at all.

One evening early in September he was riding back toward London from the north. He’d been up in Woolsthorpe helping Isaac run the numbers on his planetary orbit theory, but with inconclusive results, because they did not know exactly how far from the center of the Earth they were when they stood on the ground and weighed things. He had stopped in at that plague-ridden town of Cambridge to fetch a new book that claimed to specify the crucial figure: how big around was the Earth? and now he was going down to visit his father, who’d sent him an alarming letter, claiming that he had just calculated a different crucial figure: the exact date (early in September, as it happened) that the world would end.

Daniel was still twenty miles outside of the city, riding along in the late afternoon, when a messenger came galloping up the road toward him and shouted, “London has been burning for a day and is burning still!” as he hurtled past.

Daniel knew this, in a way, but he had been denying it. The air had had a burnt smell about it all day long, and a haze of smoke had clung about the trees and the sheltered hollows in the fields. The sun had been a glaring patch that seemed to fill half the southern sky. Now, as the day went on and it sank toward the horizon, it turned orange and then red, and began to limn vast billows and towers of smoke—portents and omens that seemed incomparably vaster than the (still unknown) radius of the Earth. Daniel rode into the night, but not into darkness. A vault of orange light had been thrown about a mile high up into the sky above London. Thuds propagated through the earth—at first he supposed they must be the impacts of buildings falling down, but then they began coming in slow premeditated onslaughts and he reckoned that they must be blowing up whole buildings with powder-kegs, trying to gouge fire-breaks through the city.

At first he’d thought it was impossible for any fire to reach as far as Drake’s house outside of town on Holborn, but the number of explosions, the diameter of the arch of light, told him nothing was safe. He was working upstream against a heavy traffic of soot-faced wretches now. It made for slow going, but there was nothing to do about it. The folds of his clothing, and even the porches of his ears, were collecting black grit, nodules and splinters and flakes of charcoal that rained down tickingly on everything.

“Cor, look, it’s snowing!” exclaimed a boy with his face turned upwards to catch reflected light. Daniel—not wanting to see it, really—raised his eyes slowly, and found the sky filled with some kind of loose chaff, swirling in slow vortices here and there but heading generally downwards. He grabbed a piece of it from the air: it was page 798 of a Bible, all charred round the margins. He reached again and snared a hand-written leaf from a goldsmith’s account-book, still glowing at one corner. Then a handbill—a libel attacking Free Coinage. A personal letter from one Lady to another. They accumulated on his shoulders like falling leaves and he stopped reading them after a while.

It took so long to get there that when he actually saw a house burning by the roadside, he was shocked. Solid beams of flame protruded from the windows, silhouetting people with leather buckets, jewels of water spinning off their rims. Refugees had flooded the fields along Gray’s Inn Road and, tired of watching the fire, had begun throwing up shelters out of whatever stuff they could find.

Not far from Holborn, the road was nearly blocked by a rampart of shattered masonry that had spilled across it when buildings to either side had been blown up—even above the smell of burning London, Daniel could detect the brimstone-tang of the gunpowder. Then a building just to his right exploded—to Daniel, an instant’s warning, a yellow flare in the corner of his eye, and then gravel embedded in one side of his face (but it felt like that side of his head had simply been sheared off) and deafness. His horse bolted and instantly broke a leg in the rubble-pile, then threw Daniel off—he came down hard on stones and splinters, and got up after lying there for he had no idea how long. There had been more explosions, coming faster now as the main front of the fire drew closer, its heat drawing curtains of steam and smoke out of walls, rooves, and the clothing on the living and dead persons in the street. Daniel took advantage of the fire’s light to stumble over the rubble-wall and into a stretch of the road that was still clear, but doomed to burn.

Reaching Holborn, he turned his back to the fire and ran toward the sound of the explosions. Some part of his mind had been doing geometry through all of this, plotting the points of the explosions and extrapolating them, and he was more and more certain that the curve was destined to pass near Drake’s house.

There was another rubble-heap on Holborn, so fresh that it was still sledding toward its angle of repose. Daniel charged up it, almost afraid to look down lest he should discover Drake’s furniture beneath his feet. But from the top of the heap he obtained a perfect view of Drake’s house, still standing, but standing alone now, in a sag-shouldered posture, as the houses to either side of it had been blown up. The walls had begun to smoke, and firebrands were raining down around it like meteors, and Drake Waterhouse was up on the roof holding a Bible above his head with both hands. He was bellowing something that could not be heard, and did not need to be.

The street below was crowded with an uncommon number of Gentlemen, and better, brandishing swords—their gay courtiers’ clothing burnt and blackened—and musketeers, too, looking somewhat unhappy to be standing in such a place with containers of gunpowder strapped to their midsections. Very wealthy and prominent men were looking up at Drake, shouting and pointing at the street, insisting he come down. But Drake had eyes only for the fire.

Daniel turned round to see what his father was seeing, and was nearly slapped to the ground by the heat and the spectacle of it—the Fire. Everything between East and South was flame, and everything below the stars. It fountained and throbbed, jetted and pulsed, and buildings went down beneath it as blades of grass beneath John Wilkins’s giant Wheel.

And it was approaching, so fast that it overtook some persons who were trying to run away from it—they were blurring into ghosts of smoke and bursting into flames, their sprinting forms dissolving into light: the Rapture. This had not escaped Drake’s notice—he was pointing at it—but the crowd of Court fops below were not interested. To Drake, these particular men had been demons from Hell even before London had caught fire, because they were the personal bootlicks of King Charles II, an arch-daemon of King Louis XIV himself. Now, here they were, perversely convened in front of his house.

Daniel had been waving his arms over his head trying to get Drake’s attention, but he understood now that he must be an indistinct black shape against a vast glare, the least interesting thing in Drake’s panorama.

All of the courtiers had turned inward, attent on the same man—even Drake was looking at him. Daniel caught sight of the Lord Mayor, and thought perhaps he was the center of attention—but the Lord Mayor had eyes only to look at another. Sidestepping to a new position on the heap, Daniel finally saw a tall dark man in impossibly glorious clothing and a vast wig, which was shaking from side to side in exasperation. This man suddenly moved forward, seized a torch from a toady, looked up one last time at Drake, then bent down and touched the fire to the street. A bright smoking star rolled across the pavement toward Drake’s front door, which had been smashed open.

The man with the torch turned around, and Daniel recognized him as England.

There was a kind of preliminary explosion of humanity away from the house. Courtiers and musketeers formed a crowd behind the King to shield his back from flying harpsichords. Up on the roof, Drake aimed a finger at His Majesty and raised his Bible on high to call down some fresh damnation. From the burning timbers that were now coming down from Heaven like flaming spears hurled by avenging angels, he might have thought, in these moments, that he’d played an important part in Judgment Day. But nothing hit the King.

The spark was climbing the front steps. Daniel plunged forward down the piled house-guts, because he was fairly certain that he could outrun the spark, reach the fuse, and jerk it loose before it touched whatever powder-kegs had been rolled into Drake’s parlor. His path was blocked by members of the King’s personal bodyguard who were running the other way. They looked at Daniel curiously while Daniel changed course to swing round them. In the corner of his eye he saw one of them understand what Daniel was doing—that slackening of the face, the opening of the features, that came over the faces of students when, suddenly, they knew. This man stepped clear from the group and raised a yawning tube to his shoulder. Daniel looked at his father’s house and saw the star snaking down the dark hallway. He was tense for the explosion, but it came from behind him—at the same moment he was bitten in a hundred places and slammed face-down into the street.

He rolled over on his back, trying to snuff the fires of pain burning all over him, and saw his father ascending into heaven, his black clothes changing into a robe of fire. His table, books, and grandfather clock were not far behind.

“Father?” he said.

Which was senseless, if the only kind of sense you heeded was that of Natural Philosophy. Even supposing Drake was alive at the moment Daniel spoke to him—a daring supposition indeed, and not the sort of thing that contributed to a young man’s reputation in the Royal Society—he was far away, and getting farther, washed in apocalyptic roar and tumult, beset by many distractions, and probably deaf from the blast. But Daniel had just seen his house exploded and been shot with a blunderbuss in the same instant, and all sense of the Natural-Philosophic kind had fled from him. All that remained to shape his actions was the sentimental logic of a five-year-old bewildered that his father seemed to be leaving him: which was hardly the natural and correct order of things. Moreover, Daniel had another twenty years’ important things to say to his father. He had sinned against Drake and would make confession and be absolved, and Drake had sinned against him and must needs be brought to account. Determined to put a stop to this heinous, unnatural leaving, he used the only means of self-preservation that God had granted to five-year-olds: the voice. Which by itself did naught but wiggle air. In a loving home, that could raise alarms and summon help. “Father?” he tried again. But his home was a storm of bricks and a spray of timbers, each tracing its own arc to the smoking and steaming earth, and his father was a glowing cloud. Like a theophany of the Old Testament. But whereas fiery clouds were for YHWH a manifestation, a means of revealing Himself to His children below, this one swallowed Drake up and did not spit him out but made him one with the Mysterium Tremendum. He was hidden from Daniel now forever.

Aboard Minerva, Plymouth Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

HIS MIND HAS QUITE RUN ahead of his quill; his pen has gone dry, but his face is damp. Alone in his cabin, Daniel indulges himself for a minute in another favorite pastime of five-year-olds. Some say that crying is childish. Daniel—who since the birth of Godfrey has had more opportunities than he should have liked to observe crying—takes a contrary view. Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.

There’s a rhythmical chant down on the gundeck that slowly builds and then explodes into a drumming of many feet on mahogany stair-steps, and suddenly Minerva’s deck is crowded with sailors, running about and colliding with each other, like a living demonstration of Hooke’s ideas about heat. Daniel wonders if perhaps a fire has been noticed down in the powder-magazine, and the sailors have all come up to abandon ship. But this is a highly organized sort of panic.

Daniel pats his face dry, stoppers his ink-well, and goes out onto the quarter-deck, chucking his ink-caked quill overboard. Most of the sailors have already ascended into the rigging, and begun to drop vast white curtains as if to shield landlubber Daniel’s eyes from the fleet of sloops and whaleboats that seems now to be converging on them from every cove and inlet on Plymouth Bay. Rocks and trees ashore are moving, with respect to fixed objects on Minerva, in a way that they shouldn’t. “We’re moving—we are adrift!” he protests. Weighing anchor on a ship of Minerva’s bulk is a ludicrously complicated and lengthy procedure—a small army of chanting sailors pursuing one another round the giant capstan on the upperdeck, boys scrubbing slime off, and sprinkling sand onto, the wet anchor cable to afford a better purchase for the messenger cable—an infinite loop, passed three times round the capstan, that nimble-fingered riggers are continually lashing alongside the anchor cable in one place and unlashing in another. None of this has even begun to happen in the hour since the sun rose.

“We are adrift!” Daniel insists to Dappa, who’s just vaulted smartly off the edge of the poop deck and nearly landed on Daniel’s shoulders.

“But naturally, Cap’n—we’re all in a panic, don’t you see?”

“You are being unduly harsh on yourself and your crew, Dappa—and why are you addressing me as Captain? And how can we be adrift, when we haven’t weighed anchor?”

“You’re wanted on the poop deck, Cap’n—that’s right, just step forward—”

“Let me fetch my hat.”

“None of it, Cap’n, we want every pirate in New England—for they’re all out there, at the moment—to see your white hair shining in the sun, your bald pate, pale and pink, like that of a Cap’n who ain’t been abovedecks in years—this way, mind the wheel, sir—that’s right—could you dodder just a bit more? Squint into the unaccustomed sunlight—well played, Cap’n!”

“May the Good Lord save us, Mr. Dappa, we’ve lost our anchors! Some madman has cut the anchor cables!”

“I told you we were in a panic—steady up the stairs, there, Cap’n!”

“Let go my arm! I’m perfectly capable of—”

“Happy to be of service, Cap’n—as is that lopsided Dutchman at the top o’ the stairs—”

“Captain van Hoek! Why are you dressed as an ordinary seaman!? And what has become of our anchors!?”

“Dead weight,” van Hoek says, and then goes on to mutter something in Dutch.

“He said, you are showing just the sort of impotent choler that we need. Here, take a spyglass! I’ve an idea—why don’t you peer into the wrong end of it first—then look befuddled, and angry, as if some subordinate had stupidly reversed the lenses.”

“I’ll have you know, Mr. Dappa, that at one time I knew as much of opticks as any man alive, save one—possibly two, if you count Spinoza—but he was only a practical lens-grinder, and generally more concerned with atheistical ruminations—”

“Do it!” grunts the one-armed Dutchman. He is still the captain, so Daniel steps to the railing of the poop deck, raises the spyglass, and peers through the objective lens. He can actually hear pirates on distant whaleboats laughing at him. Van Hoek plucks the glass from Daniel, spins it around on the knuckles of his only hand, and thrusts it at him. Daniel accepts it and tries to hold it steady on an approaching whaler. But the forward end of that boat is fogged in a bank of smoke, rapidly dispersing in the freshening breeze. For the last few minutes, Minerva’s sails have been inflating, frequently with brisk snapping noises, almost like gunshots—but—

“Damn me,” he says, “they fired on us!” He can see, now, the swivel-gun mounted in the whaleboat’s prow, an unsavory-looking fellow feeding a neatly bound cluster of lead balls into its small muzzle.

“Just a shot across the bow,” Dappa says. “That panicky look on your face—the gesticulating—perfect!”

“The number of boats is incredible—are these all pirating together?”

“Plenty of time for explanations later—now’s the moment to look stricken—perhaps get wobbly in the knees and clutch your chest like an apoplectic—we’ll assist you to your cabin on the upperdeck.”

“But my cabin, as you know, is on the quarter-deck…”

“Today only, you’re being given a complimentary upgrade—Cap’n. Come on, you’ve been in the sun too long—best retire and break open a bottle of rum.”

“DON’T BE MISLED BY THESE exchanges of cannon-fire,” Dappa reassures him, thrusting his woolly and somewhat grizzled head into the Captain’s cabin. “If this were a true fight, sloops and whaleboats’d be simply exploding all round us.”

“Well, if it’s not a fight, what would you call it when men on ships shoot balls of lead at each other?”

“A game—a dance. A theatrickal performance. Speaking of which—have you practiced your role recently?”

“Didn’t seem safe, when grapeshot was flying—but—as it’s only an entertainment—well…” Daniel gets up from his squatting position underneath the Captain’s chart-table and sidles over toward the windows, moving in a sort of Zeno’s Paradox mode—each step only half as long as the previous. Van Hoek’s cabin is as broad as the entire stern of the ship—two men could play at shuttlecocks in here. The entire aft bulkhead is one gently curved window commanding (now that Daniel’s in position to see through it) a view of Plymouth Bay: wee cabins and wigwams on the hills, and, on the waves, numerous scuttling boats all flocked with gunpowder-smoke, occasionally thrusting truncated bolts of yellow fire in their general direction. “The critical reaction seems hostile,” Daniel observes. Off to his left, a small pane gets smashed out of its frame by what he takes to have been a musket-ball.

“Excellent cringing! The way you raise your hands as if to clap them over your ears, then arrest them in midair, as if already seized in rigor mortis—thank God you were delivered into our hands.”

“I am meant to believe that all of these goings-on are nothing more than an elaborate manipulation of the pirates’ mental state?”

“No need to be haughty—they do it to us, too. Half of the cannon on those boats are carved out of logs, painted to look real.”

A large meteor-like something blows the head door off its hinges and buries itself in an oaken knee-brace, knocking it askew and bending the entire cabin slightly out of shape—wreaking some sort of parallelogram effect on Daniel’s Frame o’ Reference, so it appears that Dappa’s now standing up at an angle—or perhaps the ship’s beginning to heel over. “Some of the cannon are, of course, real,” Dappa admits before Daniel can score any points there.

“If we are playing with the pirates’ minds, what is the advantage in making the ship’s captain out as a senile poltroon—which, if I may read ’tween the lines, would appear to be my role? Why not fling open every gunport, run out every cannon, make the hills ring with broadsides, set van Hoek up on the poop waving his hook in the air?”

“We’ll get round to all that later, in all likelihood. For now we must pursue a multilayered bluffing strategy.”

“Why?”

“Because we have more than one group of pirates to contend with.”

“What!?”

“This is why we captured and questioned—”

“Some would say tortured—”

“—several pirates before dawn. There are simply too many pirates in this Bay to make sense. Some of them would appear to be mutually hostile. Indeed, we’ve learned that the traditional, honest, hardworking Plymouth Bay pirates—the ones in the small boats—get over, Cap’n, I say! Two paces over to larboard, if you please!”

Dappa’s adverting on something outside the window. Daniel turns round to see a taut manila line dangling vertically just outside—not an unusual sight in and of itself, but it wasn’t there a few seconds ago. The stretched line shudders, tattooing a beat on the window-pane. A pair of blistered hands appears, then a broad-brimmed hat, then a head with a dagger clenched in its teeth. Then behind Daniel a tremendous FOOM while something unsightly happens to the climber’s face—clearly visible through a suddenly absent pane. A gout of smoke roils and rebounds against the panes that are still there, and by the time it’s cleared away the pirate is gone. Dappa’s in the middle of the cabin holding a hot smoky shooting-iron.

He rummages in van Hoek’s chest and pulls out a hook with various straps and stump-cups all a-dangle. “That was one of the sort I was speaking of. Never would’ve tried anything so foolhardy if the newer breed hadn’t brought such hard times down on ’em.”

“What newer breed?”

Dappa, wearing a fastidious and disgusted look, threads the hook out through the missing window-pane and catches the dangling pirate-rope, then draws it inside the cabin and severs it with a smart swing of his cutlass. “Lift your head toward the horizon, Cap’n, and behold the flotilla of coasting craft—sloops and topsail schooners, and a ketch—that is forming up there in Plymouth Bay. Half a dozen or more vessels. Strange information glancing from one to the next embodied in pennants, guns, and flashes of sunlight.”

“It is because of them that the riffraff in the small craft cannot make a living?”

“Just so, Cap’n. Now, if we’d put up a brave front, as you suggested, they’d’ve known their cause was hopeless, and might’ve been tempted to make common cause with Teach.”

“Teach?”

“Cap’n Edward Teach, the Admiral of yonder pirate-fleet. But as it is, these small-timers have spent themselves in a futile try at seizing Minerva before Teach could make sail and form up. Now we can address the Teach matter separately.”

“There was a Teach in the Royal Navy—”

“He is the same fellow. He and his men fought on the Queen’s side in the War, helping themselves to Spanish shipping. Now that the treaty is signed and we are friendly with Spain, these fellows are at loose ends, and have crossed the Atlantic to seek a home port for American piracy.”

“So I ween it’s not our cargo that Teach wants, so much as—”

“If we threw every last bale overboard, still he would come after us. He wants Minerva for his flagship. And a mighty raider she would be.”

There’s been no gunfire recently, so Daniel crosses over to the window and watches sail after sail unfurling, Teach’s fleet developing into a steady cloud on the bay. “They look like fast ships,” he says. “We’ll be seeing Teach soon.”

“He’s easily recognized—according to them we questioned, he’s a master of piratical performances. Wears smoking punks twined about his head, like burning dreadlocks, and, at night, burning tapers in his thick black beard. He’s got half the people in Plymouth convinced he’s the Devil incarnate.”

“What think you, Dappa?”

“I think there never was a Devil so fierce as Cap’n van Hoek, when pirates are after his Lady.”

Charing Cross

1670

Sir ROBERT MORAY produced a discourse concerning coffee, written by Dr. GODDARD at the King’s command; which was read, and the author desired to leave a copy of it with the society.

Mr. BOYLE mentioned, that he had been informed, that the much drinking of coffee produced the palsy.

The bishop of Exeter seconded him, and said, that himself had found it dispose to paralytical effects; which however he thought were caused only in hot constitutions, by binding.

Mr. GRAUNT affirmed, that he knew two gentlemen, great drinkers of coffee, very paralytical.

Dr. WHISTLER suggested, that it might be inquired, whether the same persons took much tobacco.

—THE HISTORY OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON FOR IMPROVING OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE, JAN. 18, 1664/5[*]

HAVING NO DESIRE to be either palsied, or paralytical, Daniel avoided the stuff until 1670, when he got his first taste of it at Mrs. Green’s Coffee-House, cunningly sited in the place where the western end of the Strand yawned into Charing Cross. The Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields lay to the west.[†] To the east was the New Exchange—this was the nucleus of a whole block of shops. North was Covent Garden, and South, according to rumor and tradition, was the River Thames, a few hundred yards distant—but you couldn’t see it because noble Houses and Palaces formed a solid levee running from the King’s residence (Whitehall Palace) all the way round the river-bend to Fleet Ditch, where the wharves began.

Daniel Waterhouse walked past Mrs. Green’s one summer morning in 1670, a minute after Isaac Newton had done so. It had a little garden in the front, with several tables. Daniel went into it and stood for a moment, checking out his lines of sight. Isaac had risen early, sneaked out of his bedchamber, and taken to the streets without eating any breakfast—not unusual for Isaac. Daniel had followed him out the front door of the (rebuilt, and dramatically enlarged) Waterhouse residence; across Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where a few fashionable early risers were walking dogs, or huddling in mysterious conferences; and (coincidentally) right past the very place at Drury Lane and Long Acre where those two Frenchmen had died of the Black Death six years earlier, inaugurating the memorable Plague Years. Thence into the dangerous chasm of flying earth and loose paving-stones that was St. Martin’s Lane—for John Comstock, Earl of Epsom, acting in his capacity as Commissioner of Sewers, had decreed that this meandering country cowpath must be paved, and made over into a city street—the axis of a whole new London.

Daniel had been keeping his distance so that Isaac wouldn’t notice him if he turned around—though you never knew with Isaac, who had better senses than most wild animals. St. Martin’s Lane was crowded with heavy stone-carts drawn by teams of mighty horses, just barely under the control of their teamsters, and Daniel was forced to dodge wagons, and to scurry around and over piles of dirt and cobbles, in order to keep sight of Isaac.

Once they had reached the open spaces of Charing Cross, and the adjoining Yard where Kings of Scotland had once come to humble themselves before their liege-lord in Whitehall, Daniel could afford to maintain more distance—Isaac’s silver hair was easy to pick out in a crowd. And if Isaac’s destination was one of the shops, coffee-houses, livery stables, gardens, markets, or noblemen’s houses lining the great Intersection, why, Daniel could sit down right about here and spy on him at leisure.

Why he was doing so, Daniel had no idea. It was just that by getting up and leaving so mysteriously, Isaac begged to be followed. Not that he was doing a good job of being sneaky. Isaac was accustomed to being so much brighter than everyone else that he really had no idea of what others were or weren’t capable of. So when he got it into his head to be tricky, he came up with tricks that would not deceive a dog. It was hard not to be insulted—but being around Isaac was never for the thin-skinned.

They continued to live together at Trinity, though now they shared a cottage without the Great Gate. They performed experiments with lenses and prisms, and Isaac went to a hall twice a week and lectured to an empty room on mathematical topics so advanced that no one else could understand them. So in that sense nothing was different. But lately Isaac had obviously lost interest in optics (probably because he knew everything about the subject now) and become mysterious. Then three days ago he had announced, with studied nonchalance, that he was going to nip down to London for a few days. When Daniel had announced that he was planning to do the same—to pay a visit to poor Oldenburg, and attend a Royal Society meeting—Isaac had done a poor job of hiding his annoyance. But he had at least tried to hide it, which was touching.

Then, halfway to London, Daniel (as a sort of experiment) had professed to be shocked that Isaac intended to lodge in an inn. Daniel would not hear of it—not when Raleigh had put so many Waterhouse assets into constructing a large new house on Hol-born. At this point Isaac’s eyes had bulged even more than usual and he had adopted his suffering-martyr look, and relented only when Daniel mentioned that Raleigh’s house was so large, and had so many empty rooms, that Daniel wasn’t sure if they would ever see each other.

Daniel’s hypothesis, based on these observations, was that Isaac was committing Sins Against Nature with someone, but then certain clues (such as that Isaac never received any mail) argued against this.

As he stood there in front of the coffee-house, a gentleman[*] rode out of St. Martin’s Lane, reined in his horse, stood up in the stirrups, and surveyed the ongoing low-intensity riot that was Charing Cross, looking anxious until he caught sight of whatever he was looking for. Then he relaxed, sat down, and rode slowly in the general direction of—Isaac Newton. Daniel sat down in that wee garden in front of Mrs. Green’s, and ordered coffee and a newspaper.

King Carlos II of Spain was both feeble and sick, and not expected to live out the year. Comenius was dying, too. Anne Hyde, the Duke of York’s wife, was very ill with what everyone assumed to be syphilis. John Locke was writing a constitution for Carolina, Stenka Razin’s Cossack rebellion was being crushed in the Ukraine, the Grand Turk was taking Crete away from Venice with his left hand and declaring war on Poland with his right. In London, the fall of pepper prices was sending many City merchants into bankruptcy—while a short distance across the Narrow Seas, the V.O.C.—the Dutch East India Company—was paying out a dividend of 40 percent.

But the news was of the doings of the CABAL[†] and the courtiers. John Churchill was one of the few courtiers who actually did things like go to Barbary and go mano a mano with heathen corsairs, and so there was plenty concerning him. He and most of the rest of the English Navy were blockading Algiers, trying to do something, at long last, about the Barbary Pirates.

The gentleman on horseback had a courtier look about him, though unfashionably battered and frayed. He had nearly ridden Daniel down a few minutes previously when Daniel had emerged from Raleigh’s house and foolishly planted himself in the middle of the road trying to catch sight of Isaac. He had the general look of a poor baron from some slaty place in the high latitudes who wanted to make a name for himself in London but lacked the means. He was dressed practically enough in actual boots, rather than the witty allusions to boots worn by young men about town. He wore a dark cassock—a riding garment loosely modeled after a priest’s tent-like garment—with numerous silver buttons. He had an expensive saddle on a mediocre horse. The horse thus looked something like a fishwife dressed up in a colonel’s uniform. If Isaac was looking for a mistress (or a master or whatever the sodomitical equivalent of a mistress was), he could’ve done worse and he could’ve done better.

Daniel had brought a Valuable Object with him—not because he’d expected to use it, but out of fear that one of Raleigh’s servants would wreck or steal it. It was in a wooden case buckled shut, which he had set on the table. He undid the buckles, raised the lid, and peeled back red velvet to divulge a tubular device about a foot long, fat enough that you could insert a fist, closed at one end. It was mounted on a wooden sphere the size of a large apple, and the sphere was held in a sort of clamp that gave it freedom to rotate around all axes—i.e., you could set it down on a tabletop and then point the open end of the tube in any direction, which was how Daniel used it. Bored through the tube’s wall near the open end was a finger-sized hole, and mounted below this, in the center of the tube, was a small mirror, angled backwards at a concave dish of silvered glass that sealed the butt of the tube. The design was Isaac’s, certain refinements and much of the construction were Daniel’s. Putting an eye to the little hole, he saw a colored blur. Adjusting a thumbscrew at the mirror end, and thereby collapsing the tube together a bit, he resolved the blur into a chunk of ornamented window-frame with a lace curtain being sucked out of it, down at the other end of Charing Cross. Daniel was startled to realize that he was looking all the way across the Great Court that lay before Whitehall Palace, and peering in through someone’s windows—unless he was mistaken, these were the apartments of Lady Castlemaine, the King of England’s favorite mistress.

Nudging it round to a slightly different bearing, he saw the end of the Banqueting House, where King Charles I had been beheaded, back when Daniel had been small—Divine Right of Kings demolished, the Commonwealth founded, Free Enterprise introduced, Drake happy for once, and Daniel sitting on his shoulders, watching the King’s head rock. In those days, all of Whitehall’s windows that faced the outside had been bricked up to keep musket-balls out, and many superstitious fopperies, e.g., paintings and sculptures, had been crated up and sold to Dutchmen. But now the windows were windows again, and the artworks had been bought back, and there wasn’t a decapitated King in sight.

So it was not a good time to reminisce about Drake. Daniel swiveled the Reflecting Telescope around until the ragged plume in the horseman’s hat showed up as a bobbing white blur, like the tail of a hustling rabbit. Once he’d focused on that, a couple of tiny adjustments brought Isaac’s waterfall of argent hair into view—just in time, for he was ascending a few steps into a building across from the Haymarket, along the convergence of traffic that eventually became Pall Mall. Daniel played the telescope around the front of the building, expecting it to be a coffee-house or pub or inn where Isaac would await his gentleman friend. But he was completely wrong. To begin with, this place was apparently nothing more than a town-house. And yet well-dressed men came and went occasionally, and when they emerged, they (or their servants) were carrying packages. Daniel reckoned it must be some sort of shop too discreet to announce itself—hardly unusual in this part of London, but not Isaac’s sort of place.

The horseman did not go inside. He rode past the shop once, twice, thrice, looking at it sidelong—just as baffled as Daniel was. Then he seemed to be talking to a pedestrian. Daniel recalled, now, that this rider had been pursued by a couple of servants on foot. One of these pages, or whatever they were, now took off at a run, and weaved between hawkers and hay-wains all the way across Charing Cross and finally vanished into the Strand.

The horseman dismounted, handed the reins to another page, and made a vast ceremony of unbuttoning his sleeves so that the cassock devolved into a cloak. He peeled off spatterdashes to reveal breeches and stockings that were only outmoded by six months to a year, and then found a coffee-house of his own, just across Pall Mall from the mysterious shop, along (therefore) the southern limit of St. James’s Fields—one of those Fields that the Church of St. Martin had formerly been in the middle of. But now houses were being built all around it, enclosing a little rectangle of farmland rapidly being gardenized.

Daniel could do nothing but sit. As a way of paying rent on this chair, he kept having more coffee brought out. The first sip had been tooth-looseningly unpleasant, like one of those exotic poisons that certain Royal Society members liked to brew. But he was startled to notice after a while that the cup was empty.

This whole exercise had begun rather early in the day when no one of quality was awake, and when it was too cold and dewy to sit at the outdoor tables anyway. But as Daniel sat and pretended to read his newspaper, the sun swung up over York House and then Scotland Yard, the place became comfortable, and Personages began to occupy seats nearby, and to pretend to read their newspapers. He even sensed that in this very coffee-house were some members of the cast of characters he had heard about while listening to his siblings talk over the dinner table. Actually being here and mingling with them made him feel like a theatregoer relaxing after a performance with the actors—and in these racy times, actresses.

Daniel spent a while trying to spy into the upper windows of the mystery-shop with his telescope, because he thought he’d glimpsed silver hair in one of them, and so for a while he was only aware of other customers’ comings and goings by their bow-waves of perfume, the rustling of ladies’ crinolines, the ominous creaking of their whalebone corset-stays, the whacking of gentlemen’s swords against table-legs as they misjudged distances between furniture, the clacking of their slap-soled booties.

The perfumes smelled familiar, and he had heard all of the jokes before, while dining at Raleigh’s house. Raleigh, who at this point was fifty-two years old, knew a startling number of dull persons who evidently had nothing else to do but roam around to one another’s houses, like mobs of Vagabonds poaching on country estates, and share their dullness with each other. Daniel was always startled when he learned that these people were Knights or Barons or merchant-princes.

“Why, if it isn’t Daniel Waterhouse! God save the King!”

“God save the King!” Daniel murmured reflexively, looking up into a vast bursting confusion of clothing and bought hair, within which, after a brief search, he was able to identify the face of Sir Winston Churchill—Fellow of the Royal Society, and father of that John Churchill who was making such a name for himself in the fighting before Algiers.

There was a moment of exquisite discomfort. Churchill had remembered, a heartbeat too late, that the aforementioned King had personally blown up Daniel’s father. Churchill himself had many anti-Royalists in his family, and so he prided himself on being a little defter than that.

Now Drake’s pieces had never been found. Daniel’s vague recollection (vague because he’d just been shot with a blunderbuss, at the time) was that the explosion had flung him in the general direction of the Great Fire of London, so it was unlikely that anything was left of him except for a stubborn film of greasy ash deposited on the linens and windowsills of downwind neighbors. Discovery of shattered YOU AND I ARE BUT EARTH crockery in remains of burnt houses confirmed it. John Wilkins (still distraught over the burning of his Universal Character books in the Fire) had been good enough to preside over the funeral, and only a bridge-builder of his charm and ingenuity could have prevented it from becoming a brawl complete with phalanxes of enraged Phanatiques marching on Whitehall Palace to commit regicide.

Since then—and since most of Drake’s fortune had passed to Raleigh—Daniel hadn’t seen very much of the family. He’d been working on optics with Newton and was always startled, somehow, to find that the other Waterhouses were doing things when he wasn’t watching. Praise-God, Raleigh’s eldest son, who had gone to Boston before the Plague, had finally gotten his Harvard degree and married someone, and so everyone (Waterhouses and their visitors alike) had been talking about him—but they always did so mischievously, like naughty children getting away with something, and with occasional furtive glances at Daniel. He had to conclude that he and Praise-God were now the last vestiges of Puritanism in the family and that Raleigh was discreetly admired, among the coffee-house set, for having stashed one of them away at Cambridge and the other at Harvard where they could not interfere in whatever it was that the other Waterhouses were up to.

In this vein: he had gotten the impression, from various tremendously significant looks exchanged across tables at odd times by his half-siblings, their extended families, and their overdressed visitors, that the Waterhouses and the Hams and perhaps a few others had joined together in some kind of vast conspiracy the exact nature of which wasn’t clear—but to them it was as huge and complicated as, say, toppling the Holy Roman Empire.

Thomas Ham was now called Viscount Walbrook. All of his gold had melted in the Fire, but none had leaked out of his newly refurbished cellar—when they came back days later they found a slab of congealed gold weighing tons, the World’s Largest Gold Bar. None of his depositors lost a penny. Others hastened to deposit their gold with the incredibly reliable Mr. Ham. He began lending it to the King to finance the rebuilding of London. Partly in recognition of that, and partly to apologize for having blown up his father-in-law, the King had bestowed an Earldom on him.

All of which was Context for Daniel as he sat there gazing upon the embarrassed face of Sir Winston Churchill. Now if Churchill had only asked, Daniel might have told him that blowing up Drake was probably the correct action for the King to have taken under the circumstances. But Churchill didn’t ask, he assumed. Which was why he’d never make a real Natural Philosopher. Though the Royal Society would tolerate him as long as he continued paying his dues.

Daniel for his part was aware, now, that he was surrounded by the Quality, and that they were all peering at him. He had gotten himself into a Complicated Situation, and he did not like those. The Reflecting Telescope was resting on the table right in front of him, as obvious as a severed head. Sir Winston was too embarrassed to’ve noticed it yet, but he would, and given that he’d been a member of the Royal Society since before the Plague, he would probably be able to guess what it was—and even if Daniel lied to him about it, the lie would be discovered this very evening when Daniel presented it, on Isaac’s behalf, to the Royal Society. He felt an urge to snatch it away and hide it, but this would only make it more conspicuous.

And Sir Winston was only one of the people Daniel recognized here. Daniel seemed to have inadvertently sat down along a major game trail: persons coming up from Whitehall Palace and Westminster to buy their stockings, gloves, hats, syphilis-cures, et cetera at the New Exchange, just a stone’s throw up the Strand, all passed by this coffee-house to get a last fix on what was or wasn’t in fashion.

Daniel hadn’t moved or spoken in what seemed like ten minutes…he was (glancing at the telltale coffee cup here) paralyzed, in fact! Then he solved Sir Winston’s etiquette jam by blurting something like “I say!” and attempting to stand up, which came out as a palsied spasm of the entire body—he got into a shin-kicking match with his own table and produced a disturbance that sheared cups off their saucers. Everyone looked.

“Ever the diligent Natural Philosopher, Mr. Waterhouse pursues an experiment in Intoxication by Coffee!” Sir Winston announced roundly. Simply tremendous laughter and light applause.

Sir Winston was of Raleigh’s generation and had fought in the Civil War as a Cavalier—he was a serious man and so was dressed in a way that passed for dignified and understated here, in a black velvet coat, flaring out to just above the knee, with lace handkerchiefs trailing from various openings like wisps of steam, and a yellow waistcoat under that, and God only knew what else beneath the waistcoat—the sleeves of all these garments terminated near the elbows in huge wreaths of lace, ruffles, et cetera, and that was to show off his tan kid gloves. He had a broad-brimmed Cavalier-hat fringed with fluffy white stuff probably harvested from the buttocks of some bird that spent a lot of time sitting on ice floes, and a very thin mustache, and a wig of yellow hair, expensively disheveled and formed into bobbling ringlets. He had black stockings fashionably wrinkled up his calves, and high-heeled shoes with bows of a wingspan of eight inches. The stocking/breech interface was presumably somewhere around his knees and was some sort of fantastically complex spraying phenomenon of ribbons and gathers and skirtlets designed to peek out under the hems of his coat, waistcoat, and allied garments.

Mrs. Churchill, for her part, was up to something mordant involving a Hat. It had the general outlines of a Puritan-hat, a Pilgrimish number consisting of a truncated cone mounted on a broad flat brim, but enlivened with colorful bands, trailing ribbons, jeweled badges, curious feathers, and other merchandise—a parody, then, a tart assertion of non-pilgrimhood. Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel’s eye to comprehend—he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible—but he did notice that the little boy carrying her train was dressed as a Leprechaun (Sir Winston did a lot of business for the King in Ireland).

It was a lot to put on, just to nip out for a cup of coffee, but the Churchills must have known that everyone was going to be fawning over them today because of their gallant son, and decided they ought to dress for it.

Mrs. Churchill was looking over Daniel’s shoulder, toward the street. This left Daniel free to stare at her face, to which she had glued several spots of black velvet—which, since the underlying skin had been whitened with some kind of powerful cosmetic, gave her a sort of Dalmatian appearance. “He’s here,” she said to whomever she was looking at. Then, confused: “Were you expecting your half-brother?”

Daniel turned around and recognized Sterling Waterhouse, now about forty, and his wife of three years, Beatrice, and a whole crowd of persons who’d apparently just staged some type of pillaging-raid on the New Exchange. Sterling and Beatrice were shocked to see him. But they had no choice but to come over, now that Mrs. Churchill had done what she’d done. So they did, cheerfully enough, and then there was a series of greetings and introductions and other formalities (including that all parties congratulated the Churchills on the dazzling qualities of their son John, and promised to say prayers for his safe return from the shores of Tripoli) extending to something like half an hour. Daniel wanted to slash his own throat. These people were doing what they did for a living. Daniel wasn’t.

But he did achieve one insight that would prove useful in later dealings with his own family. Because Raleigh was involved in the mysterious Conspiracy of which Daniel had, lately, become vaguely aware, it probably had something to do with land. Because Uncle Thomas (“Viscount Walbrook”) Ham was mixed up in it, it must have something to do with putting rich people’s money to clever uses. And because Sterling was involved, it probably had something to do with shops, because ever since Drake had ascended into the flames over London, Sterling had been moving away from Drake’s style of business (smuggling, and traveling around cutting private deals away from markets) and towards the newfangled procedure of putting all the merchandise in a fixed building and waiting for customers to transport themselves to it. The whole thing came together complete in Daniel’s head when he sat in that coffeehouse in Charing Cross and looked at the courtiers, macaronis, swells, and fops streaming in from the new town-houses going up on land that had been incinerated, or that had been open pastures, four years earlier. They were planning some sort of real estate development on the edge of the city—probably on that few acres of pasture out back of the Waterhouse residence. They would put up town-houses around the edges, make the center into a square, and along the square Sterling would put up shops. Rich people would move in, and the Waterhouses and their confederates would control a patch of land that would probably generate more rent than any thousand square miles of Ireland—basically, they would become farmers of rich people.

And what made it extraordinarily clever—as only Sterling could be—was that this project would not even be a struggle as such. They would not have to defeat any adversary or overcome any obstacle—merely ride along with certain inexorable trends. All they—all Sterling—had to do was notice these trends. He’d always had a talent for noticing—which was why his shops were so highly thought of—so all he needed was to be in the right place to do the necessary noticing, and the right place was obviously Mrs. Green’s coffee-house.

But it was the wrong place for Daniel, who only wanted to notice what Isaac was up to. A lively conversation was underway all round him, but it might as well’ve been in a foreign language—in fact, frequently it was. Daniel divided his time between looking at the telescope and wondering when he could snatch it off the table without attracting attention; staring at the mystery-shop and at the gentleman-rider; fraternal staredowns with Sterling (who was in his red silk suit with silver buttons today, and had numerous scraps of black glued to his face, though not as many as Beatrice); and watching Sir Winston Churchill, who looked equally bored, distracted, and miserable.

At one point he caught Sir Winston gazing fixedly at the telescope, his eyes making tiny movements and focusings as he figured out how it worked. Daniel waited until Sir Winston looked up at him, ready with a question—then Daniel winked and shook his head minutely. Sir Winston raised his eyebrows and looked thrilled that he and Daniel now had a small Intrigue of their own—it was like having a pretty seventeen-year-old girl unexpectedly sit on his lap. But this exchange was fully noticed by someone of Sterling’s crowd—one of Beatrice’s young lady friends—who demanded to know what the Tubular Object was.

“Thank you for reminding me,” Daniel said, “I’d best put it away.”

“What is it?” the lady demanded.

“A Naval Device,” Sir Winston said, “or a model of one—pity the Dutch Fleet when Mr. Waterhouse’s invention is realized at full scale!”

“How’s it work?”

“This is not the place,” said Sir Winston significantly, eyes rattling back and forth in a perfunctory scan for Dutch spies. This caused all of the other heads to turn, which led to an important Sighting: an entourage was migrating out of the Strand and into Charing Cross, and someone frightfully significant must be in the middle of it. While they were all trying to figure out who, Daniel put the telescope away and closed the box.

“It’s the Earl of Upnor,” someone whispered, and then Daniel had to look, and see what had become of his former roommate.

The answer: now that Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, was in London, freed from the monastic constraints of Cambridge, and a full twenty-two years of age, he was able to live, and dress, as he pleased. Today, walking across Charing Cross, he was wearing a suit that appeared to’ve been constructed by (1) dressing him in a blouse with twenty-foot-long sleeves of the most expensive linen; (2) bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms; (3) painting most of him in glue; (4) shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies; and (5) (because King Charles II, who’d mandated, a few years earlier, that all courtiers wear black and white, was getting bored with it, but had not formally rescinded the order) adding dashes of color here and there, primarily in the form of clusters of elaborately gathered and knotted ribbons—enough ribbon, all told, to stretch all the way to whatever shop in Paris where the Earl had bought all of this stuff. The Earl also had a white silk scarf tied round his throat in such a way as to show off its lacy ends. Louis XIV’s Croatian mercenaries, les Cravates, had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel, and this had become a fashion in Paris, and the Earl of Upnor, always pushing the envelope, was now doing the cravate thing with a scarf instead of an (as of ten minutes ago) outmoded collar. He had a wig that was actually wider than his shoulders, and a pair of boots that contained enough really good snow-white leather that, if pulled on straight, they would have reached all the way to his groin, at which point each one of them would have been larger in circumference than his waist; but he had of course folded the tops down and then (since they were so long) folded them back up again to keep them from dragging on the ground, so that around each knee was a complex of white leather folds about as wide as a bushel-basket, filled with a froth of lace. Gold spurs, beset with jewels, curved back from each heel to a distance of perhaps eight inches. The heels themselves were cherry-red, four inches high, and protected from the muck of Charing Cross by loose slippers whose flat soles dragged on the ground and made clacking noises with each step. Because of the width of his boot-tops, the Earl had to swing his legs around each other with each step, toes pointed, rolling so violently from side to side that he could only maintain balance with a long, encrusted, beribboned walking-stick.

For all that, he made excellent headway, and his admirers in the garden of the coffee-house had only a few moments in which to memorize the details. Daniel secured the Reflecting Telescope and then looked across the square, wanting to regain sight of the strange gentleman who’d been following Isaac.

But that fellow was no longer sitting in the coffee-house opposite. Daniel feared that he’d lost the man’s trail—until he happened to glance back at the Earl of Upnor, and noticed that his entourage was parting to admit, and swallow up, none other than the same gentleman rider.

Daniel, unencumbered by sword, giant flaring boots, or clacking boot-protectors, very quickly rose and stepped out of Mrs. Green’s without bothering to excuse himself. He did not walk directly towards Upnor, but plotted a course to swing wide around his group, as if going to an errand on the other side of Charing Cross.

As he drew close, he observed the following: the gentleman dismounted and approached the Earl, smiling confidently. Proud of himself, showing big mossy teeth.

While the rider bowed, Upnor glanced, and nodded, at one of his hangers-on. This man stepped in from the side, bending low, and made a sweeping gesture aimed at one of Upnor’s boots. Something flew from his hand and struck the top of the boot. In the same moment, this fellow extended his index finger and pointed to it: a neat dollop of brown stuff the size of a guinea coin. Everyone except the Earl of Upnor and the gentleman rider gasped in horror. “What is it?” the Earl inquired.

“Your boot!” someone exclaimed.

“I cannot see it,” the Earl said, “the boot-tops obstruct my view.” Supporting himself with the walking-stick, he extended one leg out in front of himself and pointed the toe. Everyone in Charing Cross could see it now, including the Earl. “You have got shit on my boot!” he announced. “Shall I have to kill you?”

The rider was nonplussed; he hadn’t come close enough to get shit on anyone—but the only other people who could testify to that were the Earl’s friends. Looking around, all he could see were the rouged and black-patched faces of the Earl’s crowd glowering at him.

“Whyever would you say such a thing, my lord?”

“Fight a duel with you, I should say—which would presumably mean killing you. Everyone I fight a duel with seems to die—why should you be any exception?”

“Why a…duel, my lord?”

“Because to extract an apology from you seems impossible. Even my dog is apologetic. But you! Why can you not show that you are ashamed of your actions?”

“My actions…”

“You have got shit on my boot!”

“My lord, I fear you have been misinformed.”

Very ugly noises now from the entourage.

“Meet me tomorrow morning at Tyburn. Bring a second—someone strong enough to carry you away when I’m finished.”

The rider finally understood that claiming innocence was getting him nowhere. “But I can show that I am ashamed, my lord.”

“Really? E’en like a dog?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“When my dog gets shit in the wrong place, I rub his nose in it,” said the Earl, extending his pointed toe again, so it was nearly in the rider’s face.

Daniel was now walking nearly behind the rider, no more than twelve feet distant, and could clearly see a stream of urine form in the crotch of his breeches and pizzle out onto the road. “Please, my lord. I did as you asked. I followed the white-haired man—I sent the message. Why are you doing this to me?”

But the Earl of Upnor fixed his stare on the rider, and raised his boot an inch. The rider bowed his head—lowered his nose toward it—but then the Earl slowly lowered his boot until it was on the ground, forcing the other to bend low, then clamber down onto his knees, and finally to put his elbows into the dirt, in order to put his nose exactly where the Earl wanted it.

Then it was over, and the gentleman rider was running out of Charing Cross with his face buried in his hands, presumably never to be seen in London again—which must have been exactly what the Earl wanted.

The Earl, for his part, shed his entourage at a tavern, and went alone into the same shop as Isaac Newton. Daniel, by that point, wasn’t even certain that Isaac was still in there. He walked by the front of it once and finally saw a tiny sign in the window: MONSIEUR LEFEBURE—CHYMIST.

Daniel roamed around Charing Cross for the next half an hour, glancing into M. LeFebure’s windows from time to time, until he finally caught sight of silver-haired Isaac framed in a window, deep in conversation with Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, who only nodded, and nodded, and (for good measure) nodded again, rapt.

Much as the sun had burnt its face into Isaac’s retinas at Wools-thorpe, this image remained before Daniel long after he had turned his back upon Charing Cross and stalked away. He walked for a long time through the streets, shifting the burden of the telescope from one shoulder to the other from time to time. He was headed generally toward Bishopsgate, where there was a meeting to attend. He was pursued and harried the whole way by a feeling, difficult to identify, until at last he recognized it as a sort of jealousy. He did not know what Isaac was up to in the house/shop/laboratory/salon of M. LeFebure. He suspected Alchemy, Buggery, or some ripe warm concoction thereof: and if not, then a flirtation with same. Which was wholly Isaac’s business and not Daniel’s. Indeed, Daniel had no interest in either of those pastimes. To feel jealous was, therefore, foolish. And yet he did. Isaac had, somehow, found friends in whom he could confide things he hid from Daniel. There it was, simple and painful as a smack in the gob. But Daniel had friends of his own. He was going to see them now. Some were no less fraudulent, or foolish, than Alchemists. Perhaps Isaac was only giving him his just deserts for that.

Royal Society Meeting, Gresham’s College

12 AUGUST 1670

This Club of Vertuoso’s, upon a full Night, when some eminent Maggot-monger, for the Satisfaction of the Society, had appointed to demonstrate the Force of Air, by some hermetical Pot gun, to shew the Difference of the Gravity between the Smoak of Tobacco and that of Colts-foot and Bittany, or to try some other such like Experiment, were always compos’d of such an odd Mixture of Mankind, that, like a Society of Ringers at a quarterly Feast, here sat a fat purblind Philosopher next to a talkative Spectacle-maker; yonder a half-witted Whim of Quality, next to a ragged Mathematician; on the other Side a consumptive Astronomer next to a water-gruel Physician; above them, a Transmutator of Metals, next to a Philosopher-Stone-Hunter; at the lower End, a prating Engineer, next to a clumsy-fisted Mason; at the upper End of all, perhaps, an Atheistical Chymist, next to a whimsy-headed Lecturer; and these the learned of the Wise-akers wedg’d here and there with quaint Artificers, and noisy Operators, in all Faculties; some bending beneath the Load of Years and indefatigable Labour, some as thin-jaw’d and heavyey’d, with abstemious Living and nocturnal Study as if, like Pharaoh’s Lean Kine, they were designed by Heaven to warn the World of a Famine; others looking as wild, and disporting themselves as frenzically, as if the Disappointment of their Projects had made them subject to a Lunacy. When they were thus met, happy was the Man that could find out a new Star in the Firmament; discover a wry Step in the Sun’s Progress; assign new Reasons for the Spots of the Moon, or add one Stick to the Bundle of Faggots which have been so long burthensome to the back of her old Companion; or, indeed, impart any crooked Secret to the learned Society, that might puzzle their Brains, and disturb their Rest for a Month afterwards, in consulting upon their Pillows how to straiten the Project, that it might appear upright to the Eye of Reason, and the knotty Difficulty to be rectify’d, as to bring Honour to themselves, and Advantage to the Public.

—NED WARD, The Vertuoso’s Club

AUGUST 12. AT A MEETING of the SOCIETY,

MR. NICHOLAS MERCATOR and MR. JOHN LOCKE were elected and admitted.

The rest of Mr. BOYLE’s experiments about light were read, with great satisfaction to the society; who ordered, that all should be registered, and that Mr. HOOKE should take care of having the like experiments tried before the society, as soon as he could procure any shining rotten wood or fish.

Dr. CROUNE brought in a dead parakeet.

Sir JOHN FINCH displayed an asbestos hat-band.

Dr. ENT speculated as to why it is hotter in summer than winter.

Mr. POWELL offered to be employed by the society in any capacity whatever.

Mr. OLDENBURG being absent, Mr. WATERHOUSE read a letter from a PORTUGUESE nobleman, most civilly complimenting the society for its successes in removing the spleens of dogs, without ill effect; and going on to enquire, whether the society might undertake to perform the like operation on his Wife, as she was most afflicted with splenetic distempers.

Dr. ENT was put in mind of an account concerning oysters.

Mr. HOOKE displayed an invention for testing whether a surface is level, consisting of a bubble of air trapped in a sealed glass tube, otherwise filled with water.

The Dog, that had a piece of his skin cut off at the former meeting, being enquired after, and the operator answering, that he had run away, it was ordered, that another should be provided against the next meeting for the grafting experiment.

The president produced from Sir WILLIAM CURTIUS a hairy ball found in the belly of a cow.

THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET produced a letter of Mons. HUYGENS, dated at Paris, mentioning a new observation concerning Saturn, made last spring at Rome by one CAMPANI, viz. that the circle of Saturn had been seen to cast a shadow on the sphere: which observation Mons. HUYGENS looked on as confirming his hypothesis, that Saturn is surrounded by a Ring.

A Vagabond presented himself, who had formerly received a shot into his belly, breaking his guts in two: whereupon one end of the colon stood out at the left side of his belly, whereby he voided all his excrement, which he did for the society.

Mr. POVEY presented a skeleton to the society.

Mr. BOYLE reported that swallows live under frozen water in the Baltic.

Dr. GODDARD mentioned that wainscotted rooms make cracking noises in mornings and evenings.

Mr. WALLER mentioned that toads come out in moist cool weather.

Mr. HOOKE related, that he had found the stars in Orion’s belt, which Mons. HUYGENS made but three, to be five.

Dr. MERRET produced a paper, wherein he mentioned, that three skulls with the hair on and brains in them were lately found at Black-friars in pewter vessels in the midst of a thick stone-wall, with certain obscure inscriptions. This paper was ordered to be registered.

Mr. HOOKE made an experiment to discover, whether a piece of steel first counterpoised in exact scales, and then touched by a vigorous magnet, acquires thereby any sensible increase in weight. The event was, that it did not.

Dr. ALLEN gave an account of a person, who had lately lost a quantity of his brain, and yet lived and was well.

Dr. WILKINS presented the society with his book, intitled, An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language.

Mr. HOOKE suggested, that it was worth inquiry, whether there were any valves in plants, which he conceived to be very necessary for the conveying of the juices of trees up to the height of sometimes 200, 300, and more feet; which he saw not how it was possible to be performed without valves as well as motion.

Sir ROBERT SOUTHWELL presented for the repository a skull of an executed person with the moss grown on it in Ireland.

THE BISHOP OF CHESTER moved, that Mr. HOOKE might be ordered to try, whether he could by means of the microscopic moss-seed formerly shewn by him, make moss grow on a dead man’s skull.

Mr. HOOKE intimated that the experiment proposed by THE BISHOP OF CHESTER would not be as productive of new Knowledge, as a great many others that could be mentioned, if there were time enough to mention them all.

Mr. OLDENBURG being absent, Mr. WATERHOUSE read an extract, which the former had received from Paris, signifying that it was most certain, that Dr. DE GRAAF had unravelled testicles, and that one of them was kept by him in spirit of wine. Some of the physicians present intimating, that the like had been attempted in England many years before, but not with that success, that they could yet believe what Dr. DE GRAAF affirmed.

THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET gave of Dr. DE GRAAF an excellent Character; attesting that, while at Paris, this same Doctor had cured the Duke’s son (now the EARL OF UPNOR) of the bite of a venomous spyder.

Occasion being given to speak of tarantulas, some of the members said, that persons bitten by them, though cured, yet must dance once a year: others, that different patients required different airs to make them dance, according to the different sorts of tarantulas which had bitten them.

THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET said, that the Spyder that had bitten his son in Paris, was not of the tarantula sort, and accordingly that the Earl does not under any account suffer any compulsion to dance.

The society gave order for the making of portable barometers, contrived by Mr. BOYLE, to be sent into several parts of the world, not only into the most distant places of England, but likewise by sea into the East and West Indies, and other parts, particularly to the English plantations in Bermuda, Jamaica, Barbados, Virginia, and New England; and to Tangier, Moscow, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and Scanderoon.

Dr. KING was put in mind of dissecting a lobster and an oyster.

Mr. HOOKE produced some plano-convex spherical glasses, as small as pin-heads, to serve for object-glasses in microscopes. He was desired to put some of them into the society’s great microscope for a trial.

THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET produced the skin of a Moor tanned.

Mr. BOYLE remarked, that two very able physicians of his acquaintance gave to a woman desperately sick of the iliac passion above a pound of crude quicksilver which remained several days in her body without producing any fatal symptom; and afterwards dissecting the dead corpse, they found, that part of her gut, where the excrement was stopped, gangrened; but the quicksilver lay all on a heap above it, and had not so much as discoloured the parts of the gut contiguous to it.

Mr. HOOKE was put in mind of an experiment of making a body heavier than gold, by putting quicksilver to it, to see, whether any of it would penetrate into the pores of gold.

Dr. CLARKE proposed, that a man hanged might be begged of the King, to try to revive him; and that in case he were revived, he might have his life granted him.

Mr. WATERHOUSE produced a new telescope, invented by Mr. Isaac NEWTON, professor of mathematics in the university of Cambridge, improving on previous telescopes by contracting the optical path. THE DUKE OF GUNFLEET, Dr. CHRISTOPHER WREN, and Mr. HOOKE, examining it, had so good opinion of it, that they proposed it be shown to the King, and that a description and scheme of it should be sent to Mons. HUYGENS at Paris, thereby to secure this invention to Mr. NEWTON.

The experiment of the opening of the thorax of a dog was suggested. Mr. HOOKE and Mr. WATERHOUSE having made this experiment formerly, begged to be excused for the duration of any such proceedings. Dr. BALLE and Dr. KING made the experiment but did not succeed.

A fifth Cabal, perhaps, would be a Knot of Mathematicians, who would sit so long wrangling about squaring the Circle, till, with Drinking and Rattling, they were ready to let fall a nauseous Perpendicular from their Mouths to the Chamber-Pot. Another little Party would be deeply engaged in a learned Dispute about Transmutation of Metals, and contend so warmly about turning Lead into Gold, till the Bar had a just Claim to all the Silver in their Pockets…

—NED WARD, The Vertuoso’s Club

A FEW OF THEM ENDED UP at a tavern, unfortunately called the Dogg, on Broad Street near London Wall. Wilkins (who was the Bishop of Chester now) and Sir Winston Churchill and Thomas More Anglesey, a.k.a. the Duke of Gunfleet, amused themselves using Newton’s telescope to peer into the windows of the Navy Treasury across the way, where lamps were burning and clerks were working late. Wheelbarrows laden with lockboxes were coming up every few minutes from the goldsmiths’ shops on Thread-needle.

Hooke commandeered a small table, set his bubble-level upon it, and began to adjust it by inserting scraps of paper beneath its legs. Daniel quaffed bitters and thought that this was all a great improvement on this morning.

“To Oldenburg,” someone said, and even Hooke raised his head up on its bent neck and drank to the Secretary’s health.

“Are we allowed to know why the King put him in the Tower?” asked Daniel.

Hooke suddenly became absorbed in table-levelling, the others in viewing a planet that was rising over Bishopsgate, and Daniel reckoned that the reason for Oldenburg’s imprisonment was one of those things that everyone in London should simply know, it was one of those facts Londoners breathed in like the smoke of sea-coal.

John Wilkins brushed significantly past Daniel and stepped outside, plucking a pipe from a tobacco-box on the wall. Daniel joined him for a smoke on the street. It was a fine summer eve in Bishopsgate: on the far side of London Wall, lunaticks at Bedlam were carrying on vigorous disputes with angels, demons, or the spirits of departed relations, and on this side, the rhythmic yelping of a bone-saw came through a half-open window of Gresham’s College as a cabal of Bishops, Knights, Doctors, and Colonels removed the rib-cage from a living mongrel. The Dogg’s sign creaked above in a mild river-breeze. Coins clinked dimly inside the Navy’s lockboxes as porters worried them up stairs. Through an open window they could occasionally glimpse Samuel Pepys, Fellow of the Royal Society, making arrangements with his staff and gazing out the window, longingly, at the Dogg. Daniel and the Bishop stood there and took it in for a minute as a sort of ritual, as Papists cross themselves when entering a church: to do proper respect to the place.

“Mr. Oldenburg is the heart of the R.S.,” Bishop Wilkins began.

“I would give that honor to you, or perhaps Mr. Hooke…”

“Hold—I was not finished—I was launching a metaphor. Please remember that I’ve been preaching to rapt congregations, or at least they are pretending to be rapt—in any case, they sit quietly while I develop my metaphors.”

“I beg forgiveness, and am now pretending to be rapt.”

“Very well. Now! As we have learned by doing appalling things to stray dogs, the heart accepts blood returning from organs, such as the brain, through veins, such as the jugular. It expels blood toward these organs through arteries, such as the carotid. Do you remember what happened when Mr. Hooke cross-plumbed the mastiff, and connected his jugular to his carotid? And don’t tell me that the splice broke and sprayed blood all around—this I remember.”

“The blood settled into a condition of equilibrium, and began to coagulate in the tube.”

“And from this we concluded that—?”

“I have long since forgotten. That bypassing the heart is a bad idea?”

“One might conclude,” said the Bishop helpfully, “that an inert vessel, that merely accepts the circulating Fluid, but never expels it, becomes a stagnant back-water—or to put it otherwise, that the heart, by forcing it outwards, drives it around the cycle that in good time brings it back in from the organs and extremities. Hallo, Mr. Pepys!” (Shifting his focus to across the way.) “Starting a war, are we?”

“Too easy…winding one up, my lord,” from the window.

“Is it going to be finished any time soon? Your diligence is setting an example for all of us—stop it!”

“I detect the beginnings of a lull…”

“Now, Daniel, anyone who scans the History of the Royal Society can see that, at each meeting, Mr. Oldenburg reads several letters from Continental savants, such as Mr. Huygens, and, lately, Dr. Leibniz…”

“I’m not familiar with that name.”

“You will be—he is a mad letter-writer and a protégé of Huygens—a devotee of Pansophism—he has lately been smothering us with curious documents. You haven’t heard about him because Mr. Oldenburg has been passing his missives round to Mr. Hooke, Mr. Boyle, Mr. Barrow, and others, trying to find someone who can even read them, as a first step towards determining whether or not they are nonsense. But I digress. For every letter Mr. Oldenburg reads, he receives a dozen—why so many?”

“Because, like a heart, he pumps so many outwards—?”

“Yes, precisely. Whole sacks of them crossing the Channel—driving the circulation that brings new ideas, from the Continent, back to our little meetings.”

“Damn me, and now the King’s clapped him in the Tower!” said Daniel, unable to avoid feeling a touch melodramatic—this kind of dialog not being, exactly, his metier.

“Bypassing the heart,” said Wilkins, without a trace of any such self-consciousness. “I can already feel the Royal Society coagulating. Thank you for bringing Mr. Newton’s telescope. Fresh blood! When can we see him at a meeting?”

“Probably never, as long as the Fellows persist in cutting up dogs.”

“Ah—he’s squeamish—abhors cruelty?”

“Cruelty to animals.”

“Some Fellows have proposed that we borrow residents of…” said the Bishop, nodding towards Bedlam.

“Isaac might be more comfortable with that,” Daniel admitted.

A barmaid had been hovering, and now stepped into the awkward silence: “Mr. Hooke requests your presence.”

“Thank God,” Wilkins said to her, “I was afraid you were going to complain he had committed an offense against your person.”

The patrons of the Dogg were backed up against the walls in the configuration normally used for watching bar-fights, viz. forming an empty circle around Mr. Hooke’s table, which was (as shown by the bubble instrument) now perfectly level. It was also clean, and empty except for a glob of quicksilver in the middle, with numerous pinhead-sized droplets scattered about in novel constellations. Mr. Hooke was peering at the large glob—a perfect, regular dome—through an optical device of his own manufacture. Glancing up, he twiddled a hog-bristle between thumb and index finger, pushing an invisibly tiny droplet of mercury across the table until it merged with the large one. Then more peering. Then, moving with the stealth of a cat-burglar, he backed away from the table. When he had put a good fathom between himself and the experiment, he looked up at Wilkins and said, “Universal Measure!”

“What!? Sir! You don’t say!”

“You will agree,” Hooke said, “that level is an absolute concept—any sentient person can make a surface level.”

“It is in the Philosophical Language,” said Bishop Wilkins—this signified yes.

Pepys came in the door, looking splendid, and had his mouth open to demand beer, when he realized a solemn ceremony was underway.

“Likewise mercury is the same in all places—in all worlds.”

“Agreed.”

“As is the number two.”

“Of course.”

“Here I have created a flat, clean, smooth, level surface. On it I have placed a drop of mercury and adjusted it so that the diameter is exactly two times its height. Anyone, anywhere could repeat these steps—the result would be a drop of mercury exactly the same size as this one. The diameter of the drop, then, can be used as the common unit of measurement for the Philosophical Language!”

The sound of men thinking.

Pepys: “Then you could build a container that was a certain number of those units high, wide, and deep; fill it with water; and have a standard measure of weight.”

“Just so, Mr. Pepys.”

“From length and weight you could make a standard pendulum—the time of its alternations would provide a universal unit of time!”

“But water beads up differently on different surfaces,” said the Bishop of Chester. “I assume the same sorts of variations occur with mercury.”

Hooke, resentful: “The surface to be used could be stipulated: copper, or glass…”

“If the force of gravity varies with altitude, how would that affect the height of the drop?” asked Daniel Waterhouse.

“Do it at sea-level,” said Hooke, with a dollop of spleen.

“Sea-level varies with the tides,” Pepys pointed out.

“What of other planets?” Wilkins demanded thunderously.

“Other planets!? We haven’t finished with this one!”

“As our compatriot Mr. Oldenburg has said: ‘You will please to remember that we have taken to task the whole Universe, and that we were obliged to do so by the nature of our Design!’ ”

Hooke, very stormy-looking now, scraped most of the quicksilver into a funnel, and thence into a flask; departed; and was sighted by Mr. Pepys (peering through the Newtonian reflector) no more than a minute later, stalking off towards Hounsditch in the company of a whore. “He’s flown into one of his Fits of Melancholy—we won’t see him for two weeks now—then we’ll have to reprimand him,” Wilkins grumbled.

Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together—that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them. But they could not all break free at once: Churchill and others wanted more details from Daniel about this Mr. Newton and his telescope. The Duke of Gun-fleet got Pepys cornered, and interrogated him about dark matters concerning the Navy’s finances. Blood-spattered, dejected Royal Society members stumbled in from Gresham’s College, with the news that Drs. King and Belle had gotten lost in the wilderness of canine anatomy, the dog had died, and they really needed Hooke—where was he? Then they cornered Bishop Wilkins and talked Royal Society politics—would Comstock stand for election to President again? Would Anglesey arrange to have himself nominated?

BUT LATER—too late for Daniel, who had risen early, when Isaac had—the three of them were together in Pepys’s coach, going somewhere.

“I note my Lord Gunfleet has taken up a sudden interest in Naval-gazing,” said Wilkins.

“As our safety from the Dutch depends upon our Navy,” Pepys said carefully, “and most of our Navy is arrayed before the Casbah in Algiers, many Persons of Quality share Anglesey’s curiosity.”

Wilkins only looked amused. “I did not hear him asking you of frigates and cannons,” he said, “but of Bills of Exchange, and pay-coupons.”

Pepys cleared his throat at length, and glanced nervously at Daniel. “Those who are responsible for draining the Navy’s coffers, must answer to those who are responsible for filling them,” he finally said.

Even Daniel, a dull Cambridge scholar, had the wit to know that the coffer-drainer being referred to here was the armaments-maker John Comstock, Earl of Epsom—and that the coffer-filler was Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, and father of Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor.

“Thus C and A,” Wilkins said. “What does the Cabal’s second syllable have to say of Naval matters?”

“No surprises from Bolstrood[*] of course.”

“Some say Bolstrood wants our Navy in Africa, so that the Dutch can invade us, and make of us a Calvinist nation.”

“Given that the V.O.C.[†] is paying out dividends of forty percent, I think that there are many new Calvinists on Threadneedle Street.”

“Is Apthorp one of them?”

“Those rumors are nonsense—Apthorp would rather build his East India Company, than invest in the Dutch one.”

“So it follows that Apthorp wants a strong Navy, to protect our merchant ships from those Dutch East Indiamen, so topheavy with cannons.”

“Yes.”

“What of General Lewis?”

“Let’s ask the young scholar,” Pepys said mischievously.

Daniel was dumbstruck for a few moments—to the gurgling, boyish amusement of Pepys and Wilkins.

The telescope seemed to be watching Daniel, too: it sat in its box across from him, a disembodied sensory organ belonging to Isaac Newton, staring at him with more than human acuteness. He heard Isaac demanding to know what on earth he, Daniel Waterhouse, could possibly be doing, riding across London in Samuel Pepys’s coach—pretending to be a man of affairs!

“Err…a weak Navy forces us to keep a strong Army, to fight off any Dutch invasions,” Daniel said, thinking aloud.

“But with a strong Navy, we can invade the Hollanders!” Wilkins protested. “More glory for General Lewis, Duke of Tweed!”

“Not without French help,” Daniel said, after a few moments’ consideration, “and my lord Tweed is too much the Presbyterian.”

“Is this the same good Presbyterian who enjoyed a secret earldom at the exile court at St. Germaines, when Cromwell ruled the land?”

“He is a Royalist, that’s all,” Daniel demurred.

What was he doing in this carriage having this conversation, besides going out on a limb, and making a fool of himself? The real answer was known only to John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, Author of both the Cryptonomicon and the Philosophical Language, who encrypted with his left hand and made things known to all possible worlds with his right. Who’d gotten Daniel into Trinity College—invited him out to Epsom during the Plague—nominated him for the Royal Society—and now, it seemed, had something else in mind for him. Was Daniel here as an apprentice, sitting at the master’s knee? It was shockingly prideful, and radically non-Puritan, for him to think so—but he could come up with no other hypothesis.

“Right, then, it all has to do with Mr. Oldenburg’s letters abroad…” Pepys said, when some change in the baroscopic pressure (or something) signified it was time to drop pretenses and talk seriously.

Wilkins: “I assumed that. Which one?”

“Does it matter? All of the GRUBENDOL letters are intercepted and read before he even sees them.”

“I’ve always wondered who does the reading,” Wilkins reflected. “He must be very bright, or else perpetually confused.”

“Likewise, all of Oldenburg’s outgoing mail is examined—you knew this.”

“And in some letter, he said something indiscreet—?”

“It is simply that the sheer volume of his foreign correspondence—taken together with the fact that he’s from Germany—and that he’s worked as a diplomat on the Continent—and that he’s a friend of Cromwell’s Puritanickal poet—”

“John Milton.”

“Yes…finally, consider that no one at court understands even a tenth of what he’s saying in his letters—it makes a certain type of person nervous.”

“Are you saying he was thrown into the Tower of London on general principles?”

“As a precaution, yes.”

“What—does that mean he has to stay in there for the rest of his life?”

“Of course not…only until certain very tender negotiations are finished.”

“Tender negotiations…” Wilkins repeated a few times, as if further information could thus be pounded out of the dry and pithy words.

And here the discourse, which, to Daniel, had been merely confusing up to this point, plunged into obscurity perfect and absolute.

“I didn’t know he had a tender bone in his body…oh, wipe that smirk off your face, Mr. Pepys, I meant nothing of the sort!”

“Oh, it is known that his feelings for sa soeur are most affectionate. He’s writing letters to her all the time lately.”

“Does she write back?”

“Minette spews out letters like a diplomat.”

“Keeping his hisness well acquainted—I am guessing—with all that is new with her beloved?”

“The volume of correspondence is such,” Pepys exclaimed, “that His Majesty can never have been so close to the man you refer to as he is today. Hoops of gold are stronger than bands of steel.”

Wilkins, starting to look a bit queasy: “Hmmm…a good thing, then, isn’t it, that formal contacts are being made through those two arch-Protestants—”

“I would refer you to Chapter Ten of your 1641 work,” said Pepys.

House of Bourbon
The Bourbon-Orléans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV. One of the mistresses of Louis XIV produced six children who were made legitimate by fiat, and another produced two.

“Er…stupid me…I’ve lost you…we’re speaking now of Oldenburg?”

“I intended no change in subject—we’re still on Treaties.”

The coach stopped. Pepys climbed out of it. Daniel listened to the whack, whack, whack of his slap-soled boots receding across cobblestones. Wilkins was staring at nothing, trying to decrypt whatever Pepys had said.

Riding in a carriage through London was only a little better than being systematically beaten by men with cudgels—Daniel felt the need for a stretch, and so he climbed out, too, turned round—and found himself looking straight down a lane toward the front of St. James’s Palace, a few hundred yards distant. Spinning round a hundred and eighty degrees, he discovered Comstock House, a stupefying Gothick pile heaving itself up out of some gardens and pavements. Pepys’s carriage had turned in off of Piccadilly and stopped in the great house’s forecourt. Daniel admired its situation: John Comstock could, if he so chose, plant himself in the center of his front doorway and fire a musket across his garden, out his front gate, across Piccadilly, straight down the center of a tree-lined faux-country lane, across Pall Mall, and straight into the grand entrance of St. James’s, where it would be likely to kill someone very well-dressed. Stone walls, hedges, and wrought-iron fences had been cunningly arranged so as to crop away the view of Piccadilly and neighboring houses, and enhance the impression that Comstock House and St. James’s Palace were all part of the same family compound.

Daniel edged out through Comstock’s front gates and stood at the margin of Piccadilly, facing south towards St. James’s. He could see a gentleman with a bag entering the Palace—probably a doctor coming to bleed a few pints from Anne Hyde’s jugular. Off to his left, in the general direction of the river, was an open space—a vast construction site, now—about a quarter of a mile on a side, with Charing Cross on the opposite corner. Since it was night, and no workers were around, it seemed as if stone foundations and walls were growing up out of the ground through some process of spontaneous generation, like toadstools bursting from soil in the middle of the night.

From here, it was possible to see Comstock House in perspective: it was really just one of several noble houses lined up along Piccadilly, facing towards St. James’s Palace, like soldiers drawn up for review. Berkeley House, Burlington House, and Gunfleet House were some of the others. But only Comstock House had that direct Palace view down the lane.

He felt a giant door grinding open, and heard dignified mur-murings, and saw that John Comstock had emerged from his house, arm in arm with Pepys. He was sixty-three years old, and Daniel thought that he was leaning on Pepys, just a bit, for support. But he had been wounded in battles more than once, so it didn’t necessarily mean he was getting feeble. Daniel sprang to the carriage and got Isaac’s telescope out of there and had the driver stow it securely on the roof. Then he joined the other three inside, and the carriage wheeled round and clattered out across Piccadilly and down the lane toward St. James’s.

John Comstock, Earl of Epsom, President of the Royal Society, and advisor to the King on all matters Natural-Philosophic, was dressed in a Persian vest—a heavy coatlike garment that, along with the Cravate, was the very latest at Court. Pepys was attired the same way, Wilkins was in completely outmoded clothing, Daniel as usual was dressed as a penniless itinerant Puritan from twenty years ago. Not that anyone was looking at him.

“Working late hours?” Comstock asked Pepys, apparently reading some clue in his attire.

“The Pay Office has been extraordinarily busy,” Pepys said.

“The King has been preoccupied with concerns of money—until recently,” Comstock said. “Now he is eager to turn his attentions back to his first love—natural philosophy.”

“Then we have something that will delight him—a new Telescope,” Wilkins began.

But telescopes were not on Comstock’s agenda, and so he ignored the digression, and continued: “His Majesty has asked me to arrange a convocation at Whitehall Palace tomorrow evening. The Duke of Gunfleet, the Bishop of Chester, Sir Winston Churchill, you, Mr. Pepys, and I are invited to join the King for a demonstration at Whitehall: Enoch the Red will show us Phosphorus.”

Just short of St. James’s Palace, the carriage turned left onto Pall Mall, and began to move up in the direction of Charing Cross.

“Light-bearer? What’s that?” Pepys asked.

“A new elemental substance,” Wilkins said. “All the alchemists on the Continent are abuzz over it.”

“What’s it made of?”

“It’s not made of anything—that’s what is meant by elemental!”

“What planet is it of? I thought all the planets were spoken for,” Pepys protested.

“Enoch will explain it.”

“Has there been any movement on the Royal Society’s other concern?”

“Yes!” Comstock said. He was looking into Wilkins’s eyes, but he made a tiny glance toward Daniel. Wilkins replied with an equally tiny nod.

“Mr. Waterhouse, I am pleased to present you with this order,” Comstock said, “from my Lord Penistone,”[*] producing a terrifying document with a fat wax seal dangling from the bottom margin. “Show it to the guards at the Tower tomorrow evening—and, even as we are at one end of London, viewing the Phosphorus Demo’, you and Mr. Oldenburg will be convened at the other so that you can see to his needs. I know that he wants new strings for his theorbo—quills—ink—certain books—and of course there’s an enormous amount of unread mail.”

“Unread by GRUBENDOL, that is,” Pepys jested.

Comstock turned and gave him a look that must’ve made Pepys feel as if he were staring directly into the barrel of a loaded cannon.

Daniel Waterhouse exchanged a little glance with the Bishop of Chester. Now they knew who’d been reading Oldenburg’s foreign letters: Comstock.

Comstock turned and smiled politely—but not pleasantly—at Daniel. “You’re staying at your elder half-brother’s house?”

“Just so, sir.”

“I’ll have the goods sent round tomorrow morning.”

The coach swung round the southern boundary of Charing Cross and pulled up before a fine new town-house. Daniel, having evidently out-stayed his relevance, was invited in the most polite and genteel way imaginable to exit the coach, and take a seat on top of it. He did so and realized, without really being surprised, that they had stopped in front of the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure, King’s Chymist—the very same place where Isaac Newton had spent most of the morning, and had had an orchestrated chance encounter with the Earl of Upnor.

The front door opened and a man in a long cloak stepped out, silhouetted by lamplight from within, and approached the coach. As he got clear of the light shining out of the house, and moved across the darkness, it became possible to see that the hem of his cloak, and the tips of his fingers, shone with a strange green light.

“Well met, Daniel Waterhouse,” he said, and before Daniel could answer, Enoch the Red had climbed into the open door of the coach and closed it behind him.

The coach simply rounded the corner out of Charing Cross, which put them at one end of the long paved plaza before Whitehall. They drove directly towards the Holbein Gate, which was a four-turreted Gothic castle, taller than it was wide, that dominated the far end of the space. A huddle of indifferent gables and chimneys hid the big spaces off to their left: first Scotland Yard, which was an irregular mosaic of Wood Yards and Scalding Yards and Cider Houses, cluttered with coal-heaps and wood-piles, and after that, the Great Court of the Palace. On the right—where, during Daniel’s boyhood, there’d been nothing but park, and a view towards St. James’s Palace—there now loomed a long stone wall, twice as high as a man, and blank except for the gun-slits. Because Daniel was up on top of the carriage he could see a few tree-branches over its top, and the rooves of the wooden buildings that Cromwell had thrown up within those walls to house his Horse Guards. The new King—perhaps remembering that this plaza had once been filled with a crowd of people come to watch his father’s head get chopped off—had decided to keep the wall, and the gun-slits, and the Horse Guards.

The Palace’s Great Gate went by on the left, opening a glimpse of the Great Court and one or two big halls and chapels at the far end of it, down towards the river. More or less well-dressed pedestrians were going in and out of that gate, in twos and threes, availing themselves of a public right-of-way that led across the Great Court (it was clearly visible, even at night, as a rutted path over the ground) and that eventually snaked between, and through, various Palace Buildings and terminated at Whitehall Stairs, where water-men brought their little boats to pick up and discharge passengers.

The view through the Great Gate was then eclipsed by the corner of the Banqueting House, a giant white stone snuff-box of a building, which was kept dark on most nights so that torch-and candle-smoke would not blacken the buxom goddesses that Rubens had daubed on its ceiling. One or two torches were burning in there tonight, and Daniel was able to look up through a window and catch a glimpse of Minerva strangling Rebellion. But the carriage had nearly reached the end of the plaza now, and was slowing down, for this was an aesthetic cul-de-sac so miserable that it made even horses a bit woozy: the old quasi-Dutch gables of Lady Castlemaine’s apartments dead ahead; the Holbein Gate’s squat Gothic arch to the right and its medieval castle-towers looming far above their heads; the Italian Renaissance Banqueting House still on their left; and, across from it, that blank, slitted stone wall, which was as close as Puritans had ever come to having their own style of architecture.

The Holbein Gate would lead to King Street, which would take them to a sort of pied-à-terre that Pepys had in that quarter. But instead the driver chivvied his team around a difficult left turn and into a dark downhill passage, barely wider than the coach itself, that cut behind the Banqueting House and drained toward the river.

Now, any Englishman in decent clothing could walk almost anywhere in Whitehall Palace, even passing through the King’s antechamber—a practice that European nobility considered to be far beyond vulgar, deep into the realm of the bizarre. Even so, Daniel had never been down this defile, which had always seemed Not a Good Place for a Young Puritan to Go—he wasn’t even sure if it had an outlet, and always imagined that people like the Earl of Upnor would go there to molest serving-wenches or prosecute sword-duels.

The Privy Gallery ran along the right side of it. Now technically a gallery was just a hallway—in this case, one that led directly to those parts of Whitehall where the King himself dwelt, and toyed with his mistresses, and met with his counselors. But just as London Bridge had, over time, become covered over with houses and shops of haberdashers and glovers and drapers and publicans, so the Privy Gallery, tho’ still an empty tube of air, had become surrounded by a jumbled encrustation of old buildings—mostly apartments that the King awarded to whichever courtiers and mistresses were currently in his favor. These coalesced into a bulwark of shadow off to Daniel’s right, and seemed much bigger than they really were because of being numerous and confusing—as the corpse of a frog, which can fit into a pocket, seems to be a mile wide to the young Natural Philosopher who attempts to dissect it, and inventory its several parts.

Daniel was ambushed, several times, by explosions of laughter from candle-lit windows above: it sounded like sophisticated and cruel laughter. The passage finally bent round to the point where he could see its end. Apparently it debouched into a small pebbled court that he knew by reputation: the King, in theory, listened to sermons from the windows of various chambers and drawing-rooms that fronted on it. But before they reached that holy place the driver reined in his team and the carriage stopped. Daniel looked about, wondering why, and saw nothing except for a stone stairway that descended into a vault or tunnel beneath the Privy Gallery.

Pepys, Comstock, the Bishop of Chester, and Enoch the Red climbed out. Down in the tunnel, lights were now being lit. Consequently, through an open window, Daniel could see a banquet laid: a leg of mutton, a wheel of Cheshire, a dish of larks, ale, China oranges. But this room was not a dining-hall. In its corners he could see the gleam of retorts and quicksilver-flasks and fine balances, the glow of furnaces. He had heard rumors that the King had caused an alchemical laboratory to be built in the bowels of Whitehall, but until now, they had only been rumors.

“My coachman will take you back to Mr. Raleigh Waterhouse’s residence,” Pepys told him, pausing at the lip of the stairway. “Please make yourself comfortable below.”

“You are very kind, sir, but I’m not far from Raleigh’s, and I could benefit from the walk.”

“As you wish. Please give my compliments to Mr. Oldenburg when you see him.”

“I shall be honored to do so,” Daniel answered, and just restrained himself from saying, Please give mine to the King!

Daniel now worked up his courage and walked down into the Sermon Court and gazed up into the windows of the King’s chambers, though not for long—he was trying to look as if he came here all the time. A little side passage, under the end of the Privy Gallery, got him into the corner of the Privy Garden, which was a vast space. Another gallery ran along its edge, parallel to the river, and by going down it he could have got all the way to the royal bowling green and thence down into Westminster. But he’d had enough excitement for just now—instead he cut back across the great Garden, heading towards the Holbein Gate. Courtiers strolled and gossiped all round. Every so often he turned around and gazed back towards the river to admire the lodgings of the King and the Queen and their household rising up above the garden with the golden light of many beeswax candles shining out of them.

If Daniel had truly been the man about town that, for a few minutes, he was pretending to be, he’d have had eyes only for the people in the windows and on the garden paths. He’d have strained to glimpse something—a new trend in the cut of Persian vests, or two important Someones exchanging whispers in a shadowed corner. But as it was, there was one spectacle, and one only, that drew his gaze, like Polaris sucking on a lodestone. He turned his back on the King’s dwellings and looked south across the garden and the bowling green towards Westminster.

There, mounted up high on a weatherbeaten stick, was a sort of irregular knot of stuff, barely visible as a gray speck in the moonlight: the head of Oliver Cromwell. When the King had come back, ten years ago, he’d ordered the corpse to be dug up from where Drake and the others had buried it, and the head cut off and mounted on a pike and never taken down. Ever since then Cromwell had been looking down helplessly upon a scene of unbridled lewdness that was Whitehall Palace. And now Cromwell, who had once dandled Drake’s youngest son on his knee, was looking down upon him.

Daniel tilted his head back and looked up at the stars and supposed that seen from Drake’s perspective up in Heaven it must all look like Hell—and Daniel right in the middle of it.

BEING LOCKED UP in the Tower of London had changed Henry Oldenburg’s priorities all around. Daniel had expected that the Secretary of the Royal Society would jump headfirst into the great sack of foreign mail that Daniel had brought him, but all he cared about was the new lute-strings. He’d grown too fat to move around very effectively and so Daniel fetched necessaries from various parts of the half-moon-shaped room: Oldenburg’s lute, extra candles, a tuning-fork, some sheet-music, more wood on the fire. Oldenburg turned the lute over across his knees like a naughty boy for spanking, and tied a piece of gut or two around the instrument’s neck to serve as frets (the old ones being worn through), then replaced a couple of broken strings. Half an hour of tuning ensued (the new strings kept stretching) and then, finally, Oldenburg got what he really ached for: he and Daniel, sitting face to face in the middle of the room, sang a two-part song, the parts cleverly written so that their voices occasionally joined in chords that resonated sweetly: the curving wall of the cell acting like the mirror of Newton’s telescope to reflect the sound back to them. After a few verses, Daniel had his part memorized, and so when he sang the chorus he sat up straight and raised his chin and sang loudly at those walls, and read the graffiti cut into the stone by prisoners of centuries past. Not your vulgar Newgate Prison graffiti—most of it was in Latin, big and solemn as gravestones, and there were astrological diagrams and runic incantations graven by imprisoned sorcerers.

Then some ale to cool the wind-pipes, and a venison pie and a keg of oysters and some oranges contributed by the R.S., and Oldenburg did a quick sort of the mail—one pile containing the latest doings of the Hotel Montmor salon in Paris, a couple of letters from Huygens, a short manuscript from Spinoza, a large pile of ravings sent in by miscellaneous cranks, and a Leibniz-mound. “This damned German will never shut up!” Oldenburg grunted—which, since Oldenburg was himself a notoriously prolix German, was actually a jest at his own expense. “Let me see…Leibniz proposes to found a Societas Eruditorum that will gather in young Vagabonds and raise them up to be an army of Natural Philosophers to overawe the Jesuits…here are his thoughts on free will versus predestination…it would be great sport to get him in an argument with Spinoza…he asks me here whether I’m aware Comenius has died…says he’s ready to pick up the faltering torch of Pan-sophism[*]…here’s a light, easy-to-read analysis of how the bad Latin used by Continental scholars leads to faulty thinking, and in turn to religious schism, war, bad philosophy…”

“Sounds like Wilkins.”

“Wilkins! Yes! I’ve considered decorating these walls with some graffiti of my own, and writing it in the Universal Character…but it’s too depressing. ‘Look, we have invented a new Philosophickal Language so that when we are imprisoned by Kings we can scratch a higher form of graffiti on our cell walls.’ ”

“Perhaps it’ll lead us to a world where Kings can’t, or won’t, imprison us at all—”

“Now you sound like Leibniz. Ah, here are some new mathematical proofs…nothing that hasn’t been proved already, by Englishmen…but Leibniz’s proofs are more elegant…here’s something he has modestly entitled Hypothesis Physica Nova. Good thing I’m in the Tower, or I’d never have time to read all this.”

Daniel made coffee over the fire—they drank it and smoked Virginia tobacco in clay-pipes. Then it was time for Oldenburg’s evening constitutional. He preceded Daniel down a stack of stone pie-wedges that formed a spiral stair. “I’d hold the door and say ‘after you,’ but suppose I fell—you’d end up in the basement of Broad Arrow Tower crushed beneath me—and I’d be in the pink.”

“Anything for the Royal Society,” Daniel jested, marveling at how Oldenburg’s bulk filled the helical tube of still air.

“Oh, you’re more valuable to them than I am,” Oldenburg said.

“Poh!”

“I am near the end of my usefulness. You are just beginning. They have great plans for you—”

“Until yesterday I wouldn’t’ve believed you—then I was allowed to hear a conversation—perfectly incomprehensible to me—but it sounded frightfully important.”

“Tell me about this conversation.”

They came out onto the top of the old stone curtain-wall that joined Broad Arrow Tower to Salt Tower on the south. Arm in arm, they strolled along the battlements. To the left they could look across the moat—an artificial oxbow-lake that communicated with the Thames—and a defensive glacis beyond that, then a few barracks and warehouses having to do with the Navy, and then the pasture-grounds of Wapping crooked in an elbow of the Thames, dim lights out at Ratcliff and Limehouse—then a blackness containing, among other things, Europe.

“The Dramatis Personae: John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, and Mr. Samuel Pepys Esquire, Admiral’s Secretary, Treasurer of the Fleet, Clerk of Acts of the Navy Board, deputy Clerk of the Privy Seal, Member of the Fishery Corporation, Treasurer of the Tangier Committee, right-hand-man of the Earl of Sandwich, courtier…am I leaving anything out?”

“Fellow of the Royal Society.”

“Oh, yes…thank you.”

“What said they?”

“First a brief speculation about who was reading your mail…”

“I assume it’s John Comstock. He spied for the King during the Interregnum, why can’t he spy for the King now?”

“Rings true…this led to some double entendres about tender negotiations. Mr. Pepys volunteered—speaking of the King of England, here—‘his feelings for sa soeur are most affectionate, he’s writing many letters to her.’ ”

“Well, you know that Minette is in France—”

“Minette?”

“That is what King Charles calls Henrietta Anne, his sister,” Oldenburg explained. “I don’t recommend using that name in polite society—unless you want to move in with me.”

“She’s the one who’s married to the Duc d’Orléans[*]—?”

“Yes, and Mr. Pepys’s lapsing into French was of course a way of emphasizing this. Pray continue.”

“My Lord Wilkins wondered whether she wrote back, and Pepys said Minette was spewing out letters like a diplomat.”

Oldenburg cringed, and shook his head in dismay. “Very crude work on Mr. Pepys’s part. He was letting it be known that this exchange of letters was some sort of diplomatic negotiation. But he did not need to be so coarse with Wilkins…he must have been tired, distracted…”

“He’d been working late—lots of gold going into the Navy Treasury under cover of darkness.”

“I know it—behold!” Oldenburg said, and, tightening his arm, swung Daniel round so that both of them were looking west, across the Inmost Ward. They were near Salt Tower, which was the southeastern corner of the squarish Tower complex. The southern wall, therefore, stretched away from them, paralleling the river, connecting a row of squat round towers. Off to their right, planted in the center of the ward, was the ancient donjon: a freestanding building called the White Tower. A few low walls partitioned the ward into smaller quadrangles, but from this viewpoint the most conspicuous structure was the great western wall, built strong to resist attack from the always difficult City of London. On the far side of that wall, hidden from their view, a street ran up a narrow defile between it and a somewhat lower outer wall. Stout piles of smoke and steam were building from that street—which was lined with works for melting and working precious metals. It was called Mint Street. “Their infernal hammers keep me awake—the smoke of their furnaces comes in through the embrasures.” Walls hereabouts tended to have narrow cross-shaped arrow-slits called embrasures, which was one of the reasons the Tower made a good prison, especially for fat men.

“So that’s why kings live at Whitehall nowadays—to be upwind of the Mint?” Daniel said jestingly.

On Oldenburg’s face, perfunctory amusement stamped out by pedantic annoyance. “You don’t understand. The Mint’s operations are extremely sporadic—it has been cold and silent for months—the workers idle and drunk.”

“And now?”

“Now they are busy and drunk. A few days ago, as I stood in this very place, I saw a three-master, a man of war, heavily laden, drop anchor just around the river-bend, there. Small boats carrying heavy loads began to put in at the water-gate just there, in the middle of the south wall. On the same night, the Mint came suddenly to life, and has not slept since.”

“And gold began to arrive at the Navy Treasury,” Daniel said, “making much work for Mr. Pepys.”

“Now, let us get back to this conversation you were allowed to hear. How did the Bishop of Chester respond to Mr. Pepys’s rather ham-handed revelations?”

“He said something like, ‘So Minette keeps his Majesty well acquainted with the doings of her beau?’”

“Now whom do you suppose he meant by that?”

“Her husband—? I know, I know—my naïveté is pathetic.”

“Philippe, duc d’Orleans, owns the largest and finest collection of women’s underwear in France—his sexual adventures are strictly limited to being fucked up the ass by strapping officers.”

“Poor Minette!”

“She knew perfectly well when she married him,” Oldenburg said, rolling his eyes. “She spent her honeymoon in bed with her new husband’s elder brother: King Louis XIV. That is what Bishop Wilkins meant when he referred to Minette’s beau.”

“I stand corrected.”

“Pray go on.”

“Pepys assured Wilkins that, considering the volume of correspondence, King Charles couldn’t help but be very close to the man in question—an analogy was made to hoops of gold…”

“Which you took to mean, matrimonial bliss?”

“Even I knew what Pepys meant by that,” Daniel said hotly.

“So did Wilkins, I’m sure—how did he seem, then?”

“Ill at ease—he wanted reassurance that ‘the two arch-Dissenters’ were handling formal contacts.”

“It is a secret—but generally known among the sort who rattle around London in private coaches in the night-time—that a treaty with France is being negotiated by the Earl of Shaftesbury, and His Majesty’s old drinking and whoring comrade, the Duke of Buckingham. Chosen for the job not because they are skilled diplomats but because not even your late father would ever accuse them of Popish sympathies.”

A Yeoman Warder was approaching, making his rounds. “Good evening, Mr. Oldenburg. Mr. Waterhouse.”

“Evening, George. How’s the gout?”

“Better today, thank you, sir—the cataplasm seemed to work—where did you get the receipt from?” George then went into a rote exchange of code-words with another Beefeater on the roof of Salt Tower, then reversed direction, bade them good evening, and strolled away.

Daniel enjoyed the view until he was certain that the only creature that could overhear them was a spaniel-sized raven perched on a nearby battlement.

Half a mile upstream, the river was combed, and nearly dammed up, by a line of sloppy, boat-shaped, man-made islands, supporting a series of short and none too ambitious stone arches. The arches were joined, one to the next, by a roadway, made of wood in some places and of stone in others, and the roadway was mostly covered with buildings that sprayed in every direction, cantilevered far out over the water and kept from falling into it by makeshift diagonal braces. Far upstream, and far downstream, the river was placid and sluggish, but where it was forced between those starlings (as the man-made islands were called), it was all furious. The starlings themselves, and the banks of the Thames for miles downstream, were littered with wreckage of light boats that had failed in the attempt to shoot the rapids beneath London Bridge, and (once a week or so) with the corpses and personal effects of their passengers.

A few parts of the bridge had been kept free of buildings so that fires could not jump the river. In one of those gaps a burly woman stopped to fling a jar into the angry water below. Daniel could not see it from here, but he knew it would be painted with a childish rendering of a face: this a charm to ward off witch-spells. The water-wheels constructed in some of those arch-ways made gnashing and clanking noises that forced Waterhouse and Oldenburg, half a mile away, to raise their voices slightly, and put their heads closer together. Daniel supposed this was no accident—he suspected they were coming to a part of the conversation that Oldenburg would rather keep private from those sharp-eared Beefeaters.

Directly behind London Bridge, but much farther away round the river-bend, were the lights of Whitehall Palace, and Daniel almost convinced himself that there was a greenish glow about the place tonight, as Enoch the Red schooled the King, and his court, and the most senior Fellows of the Royal Society, in the new Element called Phosphorus.

“Then Pepys got too enigmatic even for Wilkins,” Daniel said. “He said, ‘I refer you to Chapter Ten of your 1641 work.’”

“The Cryptonomicon ?”

“So I assume. Chapter Ten is where Wilkins explains steganog-raphy, or how to embed a subliminal message in an innocuous-seeming letter—” but here Daniel stopped because Oldenburg had adopted a patently fake look of innocent curiosity. “I think you know this well enough. Now, Wilkins apologized for being thickheaded and asked whether Pepys was speaking, now, of you.”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Oldenburg bellowed, the laughter bouncing like cannon-fire off the hard walls of the Inmost Ward. The raven hopped closer to them and screeched, “Caa, caa, caa!” Both humans laughed, and Oldenburg fetched a bit of bread from his pocket and held it out to the bird. It hopped closer and reared back to peck it out of the fat pale hand—but Oldenburg snatched it back and said very distinctly, “Cryptonomicon.”

The raven cocked its head, opened its beak, and made a long gagging noise. Oldenburg sighed and opened his hand. “I have been trying to teach him words,” he explained, “but that one is too much of a mouthful, for a raven.” The bird’s beak struck the bread out of Oldenburg’s hand, and it hopped back out of reach, in case Oldenburg should change his mind.

“Wilkins’s confusion is understandable—but Pepys’s meaning is clear. There are some suspicious-minded persons upriver” (waving in the general direction of Whitehall) “who think I’m a spy, communicating with Continental powers by means of subliminal messages embedded in what purport to be philosophickal discourses—it being beyond their comprehension that anyone would care as much as I seem to about new species of eels, methods for squaring hyperbolae, et cetera. But Pepys was not referring to that—he was being ever so much more clever. He was telling Wilkins that the not-very-secret negotiations being carried on by Buckingham and Shaftesbury are like the innocuous-seeming message, being used to conceal the truly secret agreement that the two Kings are drawing up, using Minette as the conduit.”

“God in Heaven,” Daniel said, and felt obliged to lean back against a battlement so that his spinning head wouldn’t whirl him off into the moat.

“An agreement whose details we can only guess at—except for this: it causes gold to appear there in the middle of the night.” Oldenburg pointed to the Tower’s water-gate along the Thames. Discretion kept him from speaking its ancient name: Traitor’s Gate.

“Pepys mentioned in passing that Thomas More Anglesey was responsible for filling the Navy’s coffers…I didn’t understand what he meant.”

“Our Duke of Gunfleet has much warmer connections with France than anyone appreciates,” Oldenburg said—but then refused to say any more.

And because silver and gold have their value from the matter itself; they have first this privilege, that the value of them cannot be altered by the power of one, nor of a few commonwealths; as being a common measure of the commodities of all places. But base money, may easily be enhanced, or abased.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

OLDENBURG GENTEELLY KICKED him out not much later, eager to get into that pile of mail. Under the politely curious gaze of the Beefeaters and their semi-tame ravens, Daniel walked down Water Lane, on the southern verge of the Tower complex. He walked past a large rectangular tower planted in the outer wall, above the river, and realized too late that if he’d only turned his head and glanced to the left at that point, he could’ve looked through the giant arch of Traitor’s Gate and out across the river. Too late now—seemed a poor idea to go back. Probably just as well he hadn’t gawked—then whoever was watching him would suspect that Oldenburg had mentioned it.

Was he thinking like a courtier now?

The massive octagonal pile of Bell Tower was on his right. As he got past it he dared to look up a narrow buffer between two layers of curtain-walls no more than fifty feet apart. Half of that width was filled up by the Mint’s indifferent low houses and workshops. Daniel glimpsed furnace-light radiating from windows, warming high stone walls, making silhouettes of a congestion of carts bringing coal to burn. Men with muskets gazed coolly back at him. Mint workers crossed from building to building in the shambling gait of the exhausted.

Then he was underneath the great arch of the Byward Tower, an elevated building thrown over Water Lane to control the Tower’s land approach. A raven perched on a gargoyle and screeched “Cromwell!” at him as he passed through onto the drawbridge that ran from Byward Tower out to Middle Tower, over the moat. Middle Tower gave way to Lion Tower—but the King’s menagerie were all asleep and he did not hear the lions roar. From there he crossed over a last little backwater of the moat, over another drawbridge, and came into a little walled-in yard called the Bulwark—finally, then, through one last gate and into the world, though he had a lonely stroll over an empty moonlit glacis, past a few scavenging rats and copulating dogs, before he was among buildings and people.

But then Daniel Waterhouse was right in the City of London—slightly confused, as some of the streets had been straightened and simplifed after the Fire. He pulled a fat gold egg from his pocket—one of Hooke’s experimental watches, a failed stab at the Longitude Problem, adequate only for landlubbers. It told him that the Phosphorus Demo’ was not quite finished at Whitehall, but that it was not too late to call on his in-laws. Daniel did not especially like to just call on people—seemed presumptuous to think they’d want to open the door and see him—but he knew that this was how men like Pepys got to become men like Pepys. So to the house of Ham.

Lights burned expensively, and a coach and pair dawdled out front. Daniel was startled to discover his own family coat of arms (a castle bestriding a river) painted on the door of this coach. The house was smoking like a heavy forge—it was equipped with oversized chimneys, projecting tubes of orange light into their own smoke. As Daniel ascended the front steps he heard singing, which faltered but did not stop when he knocked: a very current melody making fun of the Dutch for being so bright, hard-working, and successful. Viscount Walbrook’s[*] butler opened the door and recognized Daniel as a social caller—not, as sometimes happened, a nocturnal customer brandishing a goldsmith’s note.

Mayflower Ham, neé Waterhouse—tubby, fair, almost fifty, looking more like thirty—gave him a hug that pulled him up on tiptoe. Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her—disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just plain lapses, hellish cramping fits, mysterious interactions with the Moon and other cœlestial phenomena, shocking imbalances of all four of the humours known to Medicine plus a few known only to Mayflower, seismic rumblings audible from adjoining rooms—cancers reabsorbed—(incredibly) three successful pregnancies culminating in four-day labors that snapped stout bedframes like kindling, vibrated pictures off walls, and sent queues of vicars, mid-wives, physicians, and family members down into their own beds, ruined with exhaustion. Mayflower had (fortunately for her!) been born with that ability, peculiar to certain women, of being able to talk about her womb in any company without it seeming inappropriate, and not only that but you never knew where in a conversation, or a letter, she would launch into it, plunging everyone into a clammy sweat as her descriptions and revelations forced them to consider topics so primal that they were beyond eschatology—even Drake had had to shut up about the Apocalypse when Mayflower had gotten rolling. Butlers fled and serving-maids fainted. The condition of Mayflower’s womb affected the moods of England as the Moon ruled the tides.

“How, er…are you?” Daniel inquired, bracing himself, but she just smiled sweetly, made rote apologies about the house not being finished (but no fashionable house ever was finished), and led him to the Dining-Room, where Uncle Thomas was entertaining Sterling and Beatrice Waterhouse, and Sir Richard Apthorp and his wife. The Apthorps had a goldsmith’s shop of their own, and lived a few doors up Threadneedle. The attire was not so aggressively fine, Daniel not so monstrously out of place, as at the coffee-house. Sterling greeted him warmly, as if saying, Sorry old chap but the other day was business.

They appeared to be celebrating something. Reference was made to all the work that lay ahead, so Daniel assumed it was some milestone in their grand shop-house-project. He wanted someone to ask him where he’d been, so that he could offhandedly let them know he’d been to the Tower waving around a warrant from the Secretary of State. But no one asked. After a while he realized that they probably would not care if they did know. The back door, fronting on Cornhill, kept creaking open, then booming shut. Finally, Daniel caught Uncle Thomas’s eye, and, with a look, inquired what on earth was happening back there. A few minutes later, Viscount Walbrook got up, as if to use the House of Office, but tapped Daniel on the shoulder on his way out of the room.

Daniel rose and followed him down a hall—dark except for a convenient red glow at the far end. Daniel couldn’t see around the tottering Punchinello silhouette of his host, but he could hear shovels crunching into piles of something, ringing as they flung their loads—obviously coal being fed to a furnace. But sometimes there was the icy trill of a coin falling and spinning on a hard floor.

The hall became sooty and extremely warm, and gave way to a brick-lined room where a laborer, stripped to a pair of drawers, was heaving coal into the open door of the House of Ham’s forge—which had been hugely expanded when the house was reconstructed after the Fire. Another laborer was pumping bellows with his feet, climbing an endless ladder. In the old days, this forge had been a good size for baking tarts, which made sense for the sort of goldsmith who made earrings and teaspoons. Now it looked like something that could be used to cast cannon-barrels, and half the weight of the building was concentrated in the chimney.

Several black iron lock-boxes were open on the floor—some full of silver coins and others empty. One of the Hams’ senior clerks sat on the floor by one of these in a pond of his own sweat, counting coins into a dish out loud: “Ninety-eight…ninety-nine…hundred!” whereupon he handed the dish up to Charles Ham (the youngest Ham brother—Thomas being the eldest), who emptied it onto the pan of a scale and weighed the coins against a brass cylinder—then raked them off into a bucket-sized crucible. This was repeated until the crucible was nearly full. Then a glowing door was opened—knives of blue flame probed out into the dark room—Charles Ham donned black gauntlets, heaved a gigantic pair of iron tongs off the floor, thrust them in, hugged, and backed away, drawing out another crucible: a cup shining daffodil-colored light. Turning around very carefully, he positioned the crucible (Daniel could’ve tracked it with his eyes closed, by feeling its warmth shine on his face) and tipped it. A stream of radiant liquid formed in its lip and arced down into a mold of clay. Other molds were scattered about the floor, wherever there was room, cooling down through shades of yellow, orange, red, and sullen brown, to black; but wherever light glanced off of them, it gleamed silver.

When the crucible was empty, Charles Ham set it down by the scales, then picked up the crucible that was full of silver coins and put it into the fire. Through all of this, the man on the floor never paused counting coins out of the lock-box, his reedy voice making a steady incantation out of the numbers, the coins going chink, chink, chink.

Daniel stepped forward, bent down, took a coin out of the lockbox, and angled it to shine fire-light into his eyes, like the little mirror in the center of Isaac’s telescope. He was expecting to see a worn-out shilling with a blurred portrait of Queen Elizabeth on it, or an old piece of eight or thaler that the Hams had somehow picked up in a money-changing transaction. What he saw was in fact the profile of King Charles II, very new and crisp, stamped on a limpid pool of brilliant silver—perfect. Shining that way in firelight, it brought back memories of a night in 1666. Daniel flung it back into the lock-box. Then, not believing his eyes, he thrust his hand in and pulled out a fistful. They were all the same. Their edges, fresh from Monsieur Blondeau’s ingenious machine, were so sharp they almost cut his flesh, their mass blood-warm…

The heat was too much. He was out in the street with Uncle Thomas, bathing in cool air.

“They are still warm!” he exclaimed.

Uncle Thomas nodded.

“From the Mint?”

“Yes.”

“You mean to tell me that the coins being stamped out at the Mint are, the very same night, melted down into bullion on Thread-needle Street?”

Daniel was noticing, now, that the chimney of Apthorp’s shop, two doors up the street, was also smoking, and the same was true of diverse other goldsmiths up and down the length of Threadneedle.

Uncle Thomas raised his eyebrows piously.

“Where does it go then?” Daniel demanded.

“Only a Royal Society man would ask,” said Sterling Waterhouse, who had slipped out to join them.

“What do you mean by that, brother?” Daniel asked.

Sterling was walking slowly towards him. Instead of stopping, he flung his arms out wide and collided with Daniel, embraced him and kissed him on the cheek. Not a trace of liquor on his breath. “No one knows where it goes—that is not the point. The point is that it goes—it moves—the movement ne’er stops—it is the blood in the veins of Commerce.”

“But you must do something with the bullion—”

“We tender it to gentlemen who give us something in return” said Uncle Thomas. “It’s like selling fish at Billingsgate—do the fishwives ask where the fish go?”

“It’s generally known that silver percolates slowly eastwards, and stops in the Orient, in the vaults of the Great Mogul and the Emperor of China,” Sterling said. “Along the way it might change hands hundreds of times. Does that answer your question?”

“I’ve already stopped believing I saw it,” Daniel said, and went back into the house, his thin shoe-leather bending over irregular paving-stones, his dull dark clothing hanging about him coarsely, the iron banister cold under his hand—he was a mote bobbing in a mud-puddle and only wanted to be back in the midst of fire and heat and colored radiance.

He stood in the forge-room and watched the melting for a while. His favorite part was the sight of the liquid metal building behind the lip of the canted crucible, then breaking out and tracing an arc of light down through the darkness.

“Quicksilver is the elementary form of all things fusible; for all things fusible, when melted, are changed into it, and it mingles with them because it is of the same substance with them…”

“Who said that?” Sterling asked—keeping an eye on his little brother, who was showing signs of instability.

“Some damned Alchemist,” Daniel answered. “I have given up hope, tonight, of ever understanding money.”

“It’s simple, really…”

“And yet it’s not simple at all,” Daniel said. “It follows simple rules—it obeys logic—and so Natural Philosophy should understand it, encompass it—and I, who know and understand more than almost anyone in the Royal Society, should comprehend it. But I don’t. I never will…if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than Alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules…”

“Alchemists say that veins of minerals in the earth are twigs and offshoots of an immense Tree whose trunk is the center of the earth, and that metals rise like sap—” Sterling said, the firelight on his bemused face. Daniel was too tired at first to take the analogy—or perhaps he was underestimating Sterling. He assumed Sterling was prying for suggestions on where to look for gold mines. But later, as Sterling’s coach was taking him off towards Charing Cross, he understood that Sterling had been telling him that the growth of money and commerce was—as far as Natural Philosophers were concerned—like the development of that mysterious subterranean Tree: suspected, sensed, sometimes exploited for profit, but, in the end, unknowable.

THE KING’S HEAD TAVERN was dark, but it was not closed. When Daniel entered he saw patches of glowing green light here and there—pooled on tabletops and smeared on walls—and heard Persons of Quality speaking in hushed voices punctuated by outbreaks of riotous giggling. But the glow faded, and then serving-wenches scurried out with rush-lights and re-lit all of the lamps, and finally Daniel could see Pepys and Wilkins and Comstock, and the Duke of Gunfleet, and Sir Christopher Wren, and Sir Winston Churchill, and—at the best table—the Earl of Upnor, dressed in what amounted to a three-dimensional Persian carpet, trimmed with fur and studded with globs of colored glass, or perhaps they were precious gems.

Upnor was explaining phosphorus to three gaunt women with black patches glued all over their faces and necks: “It is known, to students of the Art, that each metal is created when rays from a particular planet strike and penetrate the Earth, videlicet, the Sun’s rays create gold; the Moon’s, silver; Mercury’s, quicksilver; Venus’s, copper; Mars’s, iron; Jupiter’s, tin; and Saturn’s lead. Mr. Root’s discovery of a new elemental substance suggests there may be another planet—presumably of a green color—beyond the orbit of Saturn.”

Daniel edged toward a table where Churchill and Wren were talking past each other, staring ever so thoughtfully at nothing: “It faces to the east, and it’s rather far north, isn’t it? Perhaps His Majesty should name it New Edinburgh…”

“That would only give the Presbyterians ideas!” Churchill scoffed.

“It’s not that far north,” Pepys put in from another table. “Boston is farther north by one and a half degrees of latitude.”

“We can’t go wrong suggesting that he name it after himself…”

“Charlestown? That name is already in use—Boston again.”

“His brother then? But Jamestown was used in Virginia.”

“What are you talking about?” Daniel inquired.

“New Amsterdam! His Majesty is acquiring it in exchange for Surinam,” Churchill said.

“Speak up, Sir Winston, there may be some Vagabonds out in Dorset who didn’t hear you!” Pepys roared.

“His Majesty has asked the Royal Society to suggest a new name for it,” Churchill added, sotto voce.

“Hmmm…his brother sort of conquered the place, didn’t he?” Daniel asked. He knew the answer, but couldn’t presume to lecture men such as these.

“Yes,” Pepys said learnedly, “ ‘twas all part of York’s Atlantic campaign—first he took several Guinea ports, rich in gold, and richer in slaves, from the Dutchmen, and then it was straight down the trade winds to his next prize—New Amsterdam.”

Daniel made a small bow toward Pepys, then continued: “If you can’t use his Christian name of James, perhaps you can use his title…after all, York is a city up to the north on our eastern coast—and yet not too far north…”

“We have already considered that,” Pepys said glumly. “There’s a Yorktown in Virginia.”

“What about ‘New York’?” Daniel asked.

“Clever…but too obviously derivative of ‘New Amsterdam,’” Churchill said.

“If we call it ‘New York,’ we’re naming it after the city of York…the point is to name it after the Duke of York,” Pepys scoffed.

Daniel said, “You are correct, of course—”

“Oh, come now!” Wilkins barked, slapping a table with the flat of his hand, splashing beer and phosphorus all directions. “Don’t be pedantic, Mr. Pepys. Everyone will understand what it means.”

“Everyone who is clever enough to matter, anyway,” Wren put in.

“Err…I see, you are proposing a more subtile approach,” Sir Winston Churchill muttered.

“Let’s put it on the list!” Wilkins suggested. “It can’t hurt to include as many ‘York’ and ‘James’ names as we can possibly think up.”

“Hear, hear!” Churchill harrumphed—or possibly he was just clearing his throat—or summoning a barmaid.

“As you wish—never mind,” Daniel said. “I take it that Mr. Root’s Demonstration was well received—?”

For some reason this caused eyes to swivel, ever so briefly, toward the Earl of Upnor. “It went well,” Pepys said, drawing closer to Daniel, “until Mr. Root threatened to spank the Earl. Don’t look at him, don’t look at him,” Pepys continued levelly, taking Daniel’s arm and turning him away from the Earl. The timing was unfortunate, because Daniel was certain he had just overhead Upnor mentioning Isaac Newton by name, and wanted to eavesdrop.

Pepys led him past Wilkins, who was good-naturedly spanking a barmaid. The publican rang a bell and everyone blew out the lights—the tavern went dark except for the freshly invigorated phosphorus. Everyone said “Woo!” and Pepys wrangled Daniel out into the street. “You know that Mr. Root makes the stuff from urine?”

“So it is rumored,” Daniel said. “Mr. Newton knows more of the Art than I do—he has told me that Enoch the Red was following an ancient recipe to extract the Philosophic Mercury from urine, but happened upon phosphorus instead.”

“Yes, and he has an entire tale that he tells, of how he found the recipe in Babylonia.” Pepys rolled his eyes. “Enthralled the courtiers. Anyway—for this evening’s Demo’, he’d collected urine from a sewer that drains Whitehall, and boiled it—endlessly—on a barge in the Thames. I’ll spare you the rest of the details—suffice it to say that when it was finished, and they were done applauding, and all of the courtiers were groping for a way to liken the King’s splendor and radiance to that of Phosphorus—”

“Oh, yes, I suppose that would’ve been obligatory—?”

Wilkins banged out the tavern door, apparently just to watch the story being related to Daniel.

“The Earl of Upnor made some comment to the effect that some kingly essence—a royal humour—must suffuse the King’s body, and be excreted in his urine, to account for all of this. And when all of the other courtiers were finished agreeing, and marveling at the Earl’s philosophick acumen, Enoch the Red said, ‘In truth, most of this urine came from the Horse Guards—and their horses.’”

“Whereat, the Earl was on his feet! His hand reaching for his sword—to defend His Majesty’s honor, of course,” Wilkins said.

“What was His Majesty’s state of mind?” Daniel asked.

Wilkins made his hands into scale-pans and bobbled them up and down. “Then Mr. Pepys tipped the scales. He related an anecdote from the Restoration, in 1660, when he had been on the boat with the King, and certain members of his household—including the Earl of Upnor, then no more than twelve years old. Also aboard was the King’s favorite old dog. The dog shit in the boat. The young Earl kicked at the dog, and made to throw it overboard—but was stayed by the King, who laughed at it, and said, ‘You see, in some ways, at least, Kings are like other men!’”

“Did he really say such a thing!?” Daniel exclaimed, and instantly felt like an idiot—

“Of course not!” Pepys said, “I merely told the story that way because I thought it would be useful—”

“And was it?”

“The King laughed,” Pepys said with finality.

“And Enoch Root inquired, whether it had then been necessary to give the Earl a spanking, to teach him respect for his elders.”

“Elders?”

“The dog was older than the Earl—come on, pay attention!” Pepys said, giving Daniel a tremendous frown.

“Strikes me as an unwise thing to have said,” Daniel muttered.

“The King said, ‘No, no, Upnor has always been a civil fellow,’ or some such, and so there was no duel.”

“Still, Upnor strikes me as a grudge-holder—”

“Enoch has sent better men than Upnor to Hell—don’t trouble yourself about his future,” Wilkins said. “You need to tend to your own faults, young fellow—excessive sobriety, e.g…”

“A tendency to fret—” Pepys put in.

“Undue chastity—let’s back to the tavern!”

HE WOKE UP SOMETIME THE next day on a hired coach bound for Cambridge—sharing a confined space with Isaac Newton, and a load of gear that Isaac had bought in London: a six-volume set of Theatrum Chemicum,[*] numerous small crates stuffed with straw, the long snouts of retorts poking out—canisters of stuff that smelled odd. Isaac was saying, “If you throw up again, please aim for this bowl—I’m collecting bile.”

Daniel was able to satisfy him there.

“Where Enoch the Red failed, you’re going to succeed—?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Going after the Philosophic Mercury, Isaac?”

“What else is there to do?”

“The R.S. adores your telescope,” Daniel said. “Oldenburg wants you to write more on the subject.”

“Mmm,” Isaac said, lost in thought, comparing passages in three different books to one another. “Could you hold this for a moment, please?” Which was how Daniel came to be a human book-rest for Isaac. Not that he was in any condition to accomplish greater things. In his lap for the next hour was a tome: folio-sized, four inches thick, bound in gold and silver, obviously made centuries before Gutenberg. Daniel was going to blurt, This must have been fantastically expensive, but on closer investigation found a book-plate pasted into it, bearing the arms of Upnor, and a note from the Earl:

Mr. Newton—

May this volume become as treasured by you, as the memory of our fortuitous meeting is to me—

UPNOR

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

WHEN THEY’VE MADE it out of Plymouth and into Cape Cod Bay, van Hoek returns to his cabin and becomes Captain once more. He looks rather put out to find the place so discomposed. Perhaps this is a sign of Daniel’s being a bitter old Atheistical crank, but he nearly laughs out loud. Minerva’s a collection of splinters loosely pulled together by nails, pegs, lashings, and oakum, not even large enough to count as a mote in the eye of the world—more like one of those microscopic eggs that Hooke discovered with his microscope. She floats only because boys mind her pumps all the time, she remains upright and intact only because highly intelligent men never stop watching the sky and seas around her. Every line and sail decays with visible speed, like snow in sunlight, and men must work ceaselessly worming, parceling, serving, tarring, and splicing her infinite network of hempen lines in order to prevent her from falling apart in mid-ocean with what Daniel imagines would be explosive suddenness. Like a snake changing skins, she sloughs away what is worn and broken and replaces it from inner reserves—evoluting as she goes. The only way to sustain this perpetual and necessary evolution is to replenish the stocks that dwindle from her holds as relentlessly as sea-water leaks in. The only way to do that is to trade goods from one port to another, making a bit of money on each leg of the perpetual voyage. Each day assails her with hurricanes and pirate-fleets. To go out on the sea and find a Minerva is like finding, in the desert, a Great Pyramid blanced upside-down on its tip. She’s a baby in a basket—a book in a bonfire. And yet van Hoek has the temerity to appoint his cabin as if it were a gentleman’s drawing-room, with delicate weather-glasses, clocks, optickal devices, a decent library, a painting or two, an enamel cabinet stocked with Chinese crockery, a respectable stock of brandy and port. He’s got mirrors in here, for Christ’s sake. Not only that, but when he enters to discover a bit of broken glass on the deck, and small impact-craters here and there, he becomes so outraged that Dappa doesn’t need to tell Daniel they’d best leave him alone for a while.

“So the curtain has come down on your performance. Now, a man in your position might feel like a barnacle—unable to leave the ship—an annoyance to mariners—but on Minerva there is a job for everyone,” says Dappa, leading him down the midships staircase to the gundeck.

Daniel’s not paying attention. A momentous rearrangement has taken place since Daniel was last here. All of the obstructions that formerly cluttered the space have been moved elsewhere or thrown overboard to create rights-of-way for the cannons. These had been lashed up against the inside of the hull, but now they’ve been swung round ninety degrees and each aimed at its gunport. As they are maneuvering on Cape Cod Bay, miles from the nearest Foe, those gunports are all closed for now. But like stage-hands laboring in the back of a theatre, the seamen are hard at work with diverse arcane tools, viz. lin-stocks, quoins, gunner’s picks, and worming-irons. One man’s got what looks like a large magnifying-glass, except without the glass—it’s an empty circle of iron on a handle. He sits astride a crate of cannonballs, heaving them out one at a time and passing them through the ring to gauge them, sorting them into other crates. Others whittle and file round blocks of wood, called sabots, and strap cannonballs to them. But anyone carrying a steel blade is distinctly unwelcome near the powder-barrels, because steel makes sparks.

One sailor, an Irishman, is talking to one of the Plymouth whaleboat pirates captured this morning. A cannon is between the two men, and when a cannon is between two men, that is what they talk about. “This is Wapping Wendy, or W.W., or dub-dub as we sometimes dub her in the heat of battle, though you may call her ‘darling’ or ‘love of my life’ but never ‘Wayward Wendy’ as that lot—” glowering at the crew of another gun, “Mr. Foote,” “—like to defame her.”

“Is she? Wayward?”

“She’s like any other lass, you must get to know her, and then what might seem inconstant is clearly revealed as a kind of consistency—faithfulness even. And so the first thing you must know about our darling girl is that her bore tends up and to larboard of her centerline. And she’s a tight one, is our virginal Wendy, which is why we on the dub-dub crew must keep a sharp eye for undersized balls and husband ‘em carefully…”

Someone on the crew of “Manila Surprise” nudges that gun’s port open for a moment, and sun shines in. But Manila Surprise is on the larboard side of the ship. “We are sailing southwards!?” Daniel exclaims.

“No better way to run before a north wind,” Dappa says.

“But in that direction, Cape Cod is only a few miles away! What sort of an escape route is that?”

“As you have reckoned, we shall have to work to windwards eventually in order to escape from Cape Cod Bay,” Dappa says agreeably. “When we do, Teach’s fleet will be tacking along with us. But his ships are fore-and-aft rigged and can sail closer to the wind, and make better headway, than our dear Minerva, a square-rigger. Advantage Teach.”

“Shouldn’t we head north while we can, then?”

“He would catch us in a matter of minutes—his entire fleet together, working in concert. We want to fight Teach’s ships one at a time if we can. So southwards it is, for now. Running before the wind in full sail, we are faster than they. So Teach knows that if he pursues us to the south we may lose him. But he also knows that we must wheel about and work northwards before long—so he will spread out a sort of picket-line and wait for us.”

“But will Teach not anticipate all of this, and take pains to keep his fleet together?”

“In a well-disciplined fleet, pursuing Victory, that’s how it would go. But that is a pirate-fleet, in pursuit of plunder, and by the rules and account-books of piracy, the lion’s share goes to the ship that takes the prize.”

“Ah—so the captain of each ship has incentive to split away and attack us individually.”

“Just so, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“But would it not be foolhardy for a little sloop to engage a ship with all—this?” Daniel gestures down the length of the gundeck—a bustling bazaar where cannonballs, sabots, and powder-kegs, lies, promises, and witticisms are being exchanged lustily.

“Not if the ship is undermanned, and the captain a senile poltroon. Now, if you’ll just follow me down into the hold—don’t worry, I’ll get this lantern lit, soon as we are away from the gunpowder—there, that’s it. She’s a tidy ship, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Beg pardon? Tidy? Yes, I suppose, as ships go…” says Dr. Waterhouse, finding Dappa, sometimes, too subtle—an excess of quicksilver in the constitution.

“Thank you, sir. But ‘tis a disadvantage, when we have to fight with blunderbusses. The virtue of a blunderbuss, as you may know, is to make a weapon out of whatever nails, pebbles, splinters, and fragments might be lying about—but here on Minerva we make a practice of sweeping that matter up, and throwing it overboard, several times daily. At times like this we do regret that we neglected to hoard it.”

“I know more than you imagine of blunderbusses. What do you want me to do?”

“In a little while, one of the men’ll be teaching you how to fuze mortar-bombs—but we’re not quite ready for that just yet—now I would ask you to go down into the hold and—”

Dr. Waterhouse doesn’t believe, until he’s down there, what Dappa tells him next. He hasn’t seen the hold yet, and reckons it’ll be like the shambolic Repository at the Royal Society—but no. The great casks and bales are stacked, and lashed in place, with admirable neatness, and there is even a Diagram tacked to the staircase bulkhead in which the location of each object is specified, and notes made as to what’s stored there and when it was done. Underneath, under a subheading labelled BILGE, van Hoek himself has scratched “outmoded china—keep handy.”

Dappa has pulled two sailors away from what they’ve been doing the last half-hour: standing by a gunport carrying on a learned discourse about an approaching pirate-sloop. The sailors considered this to be time well spent, but Dappa felt otherwise. These two spend a minute consulting the Diagram, and Daniel realizes with moderate astonishment that they both know how to read, and interpret figures. They agree that the outmoded china is to be found forward, and so that’s where they go—to the most beautiful part of the ship, where many ribs radiate from the up-curving keel, forming an upside-down vault, so it’s like being a fly exploring the ceiling of a cathedral. The sailors move a few crates out of the way—they never stop talking, each trying to outdo the other in bloodcurdling yarns about the cruelty of certain infamous pirates. They pull up a hatch that gives access to the bilge, and in no time at all two crates of markedly ugly china have been fetched out. The crates themselves are handsome productions of clear-grained red cedar, chosen because it won’t rot in the wet bilge. Into them the china has been thrown with no packing material between items, so part of Daniel’s work is already done. He thanks the two sailors and they look back at him queerly, then return abovedecks. Daniel spreads an old hammock—two yards of sailcloth—on the planking, tips a crate over, and then attacks its spilled contents with a maul.

What is the optimal size (he wonders) of a shard of pottery for firing out of a blunderbuss? When the King’s guards shot him before his father’s house during the Fire, he was knocked down, bruised, cut, but not really penetrated. Probably the larger the better, which makes his job easier—one would like to see great sharp triangles of gaudily-painted porcelain spinning through the air, plunging into pirate-flesh, severing major vessels. But too large and it won’t pack into the barrels. He decides to aim for a mean diameter of half an inch, and mauls the plates accordingly, sweeping chunks that are the right size off into small canvas bags, raking bigger ones toward him for more punishment. It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva’s hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss that’s like the systole and diastole of a beating heart.

Gresham’s College, Bishopsgate, London

1672

The Inquisitive Jesuit RICCIOLI has taken great pains by 77 Arguments to overthrow the Copernican Hypothesis…I believe this one Discovery will answer them, and 77 more, if so many can be thought of and produced against it.

—ROBERT HOOKE

DANIEL SPENT A GOOD PART of two months on the roof of Gresham’s College, working on a hole—making, not mending, one. Hooke could not do it because his vertigo had been acting up, and if it struck while he was on top of the College, he would plunge to the ground like a wormy apple from a tree, his Last Experiment a study into the mysterious power of Gravitation.

For a man who claimed to hate the appearance of sharp things when viewed under a microscope, Hooke spent a great deal of time honing jabs at Inquisitive Jesuits. While Daniel was up on the roof making the hole, and a rain-hatch to cover it, Hooke was safe at ground level, running up and down a gallery. Strapped into his groin was a narrow hard saddle, and projecting from the saddle a strut with a wheel on the end, geared to a clock-work dial: a pedometer of his own design, which enabled him to calculate how much distance he had covered going nowhere. The purpose—as he explained to Daniel and diverse other aghast Fellows of the R.S.—was not to get from point A to point B, but to sweat. In some way, sweating would purge his body of whatever caused his headaches, nausea, and vertigo. From time to time, he would stop and refresh himself by drinking a glass of elemental mercury. He had set up a table at one end of the gallery where he stockpiled that and several of Mons. LeFebure’s fashionable medicines. There were various sorts of quills, too. Some of them he used to tickle the back of his throat and induce vomiting, others he sharpened, dipped in ink, and used to note down data from his pedometer, or to vent his spleen at Jesuits who refused to admit that the Earth revolved around the Sun, or to sketch out plans for Bedlam, or to write diatribes against Oldenburg, or simply to transact the routine business of the City Surveyor.

The Inquisitive Jesuit Riccioli had pointed out that if the heavens were sown with stars, some near and some far, and if the Earth were looping round the Sun in a vast ellipse, then the positions of those stars with respect to one another should shift during the course of the year, as trees in a forest changed their relative positions in the eyes of a traveler moving past. But no such parallax had been observed, which proved (to Riccioli, anyway) that the Earth must be fixed in the center of the Universe. To Hooke it only proved that good enough telescopes hadn’t been built, nor precise enough measurements made. To obtain the level of magnification he needed, he had to construct a telescope 32 feet long. To annull the light-bending effects of the Earth’s atmosphere (which were obvious from the fact that the Sun became an oval when it rose or set), he had to aim it straight up—hence the demand for a vertical shaft to be bored through Gresham’s College. Gresham’s antique mansion was now like an ancient plaster wall that had been mended so many times it consisted entirely of interlocked patches. It was solid scar tissue. This made the work more interesting for Daniel, and taught him more than he’d ever cared to know about how buildings were put up, and what kept them from falling down.

The goal was to gaze straight up into Heaven, and count the miles to the nearest stars. But as Daniel did most of the work during the daytime, he spent most of his idle moments looking down into London—six years since the Fire now—but its reconstruction really just getting underway.

Formerly Gresham’s College had huddled among buildings of about the same height, but the Fire had burnt almost to its front door, and so now it loomed like a manor house over a devastated fiefdom. If Daniel stood on the ridge of the roof, facing south toward London Bridge half a mile away, everything in his field of view bore marks of heat and smoke. Suppose the city were a giant Hooke-watch, with Gresham’s College the central axle-tree, and London Bridge marking twelve o’clock. Then Bedlam was directly behind Daniel at six o’clock. The Tower of London was at about ten o’clock. The easterly wind, and its glacis, had preserved it from the flames. The wedge from the Tower to the Bridge was a tangle of old streets with charred spikes of old church-steeples jutting up here and there, like surveyor’s stakes—literally. This to the chagrin of Hooke, who’d presented the City with a plan to rationalize the streets, only to be frustrated by a few such impediments that had survived the flames; for those who opposed his plans used the carbonized steeples as landmarks to shew where streets had once been, and ought to be remade, be they never so narrow and tortuous. The negative space between construction-sites defined new streets now, only a little wider and straighter than the old. Right in the center of this wedge was the place where the Fire had started—an empty moon-crater cordoned off so that Hooke and Wren could build a monument there.

Directly before Daniel, in the wedge from about noon to one o’clock, was the old goldsmiths’ district of Threadneedle and Cornhill streets, which converged at the site of the Royal Exchange—all so close that Daniel could hear the eternal flame of buying and selling in the courtyard of the ‘Change, fueled by the latest data from abroad, and he could look into the windows of Thomas Ham’s house and see Mayflower (like a matron) plumping pillows and (like a schoolgirl) playing leapfrog with William Ham, her youngest child, her dear heart.

The west-bound street formed by the confluence of Threadnee-dle and Cornhill became Cheapside, which Hooke had insisted on making much wider than it had been before—eliciting screams of agony and near-apocalyptic rantings from many—attacks that Hooke, who cared less than anyone what people thought of him, was uniquely qualified to ignore. It ran straight as Hooke could make it to the once and future St. Paul’s, now a moraine of blackened stones, congealed roofing-lead, and plague-victims’ jumbled bones. Wren was still working on plans and models for the new one. The streets limning St. Paul’s Churchyard were lined with printers’ shops, including the ones that produced most Royal Society publications, so the trip up and down Cheapside had become familiar to Daniel, as he went there to fetch copies of Hooke’s Micrographia or inspect the proofs for Wilkins’s Universal Character.

Raising his sights a notch and gazing over the scab of St. Paul’s (which stood at about two o’clock), he could see Bridewell on the far side of it—a former Royal palace, now tumbledown, where whores, actresses, and Vagabond-wenches picked oakum, pounded hemp, and carried out diverse other character-building chores, until they had become reformed. That marked the place where the Fleet River—which was simply a ditch full of shit—intersected the Thames. Which explained why the Royals had moved out of Bridewell and ceded it to the poor. The fire had jumped the ditch easily, and kept eating through the city until a shortage of fuel, and the King’s and Lord Mayor’s heroic house-bombing campaign, had finally drawn a lasso around it. So whenever he did this Daniel inevitably had to trace the dividing-line between burnt and unburnt parts of the city from the River up across Fleet Street as far as Hol-born (three o’clock). Out back of the place where his father had been blown up six years ago, a quadrangle had been laid out, lined with houses and shops, and filled with gardens, fountains, and statues. Others just like it were going up all around, and starting to crowd in around the edges of those few great Houses along Piccadilly, such as Comstock House. But those developments, and the great successes they had brought to Sterling and Raleigh, were old news to Daniel, and didn’t command his attention as much as certain strange new undertakings around the edges of the city.

If he turned and looked north over the bones of the old Roman wall he could look right into Bedlam less than a quarter of a mile away. It had not been burnt, but the city had hired Hooke to tear it down and rebuild it anyway, as long as they were rebuilding everything else. The joke being that London and Bedlam seemed to have exchanged places: for Bedlam had been emptied out and torn down in preparation for its reconstruction, and was a serene rock-garden now, whereas all of London (save a few special plots such as the Monument site and St. Paul’s) was in the throes of building—stones and bricks and timbers moving through the city on streets so congested that watching them fill up in the morning was like watching sausage casings being stuffed with meat. Wrecked buildings being torn down, cellars being dug, mortar being mixed, paving-stones being flung off carts, bricks and stones being chiselled to fit, iron wheel-rims grinding over cobbles—all of it made noise that merged together into a mad grind, like a Titan chewing up a butte.

So: strange enough. But beyond Bedlam, to the north and northeast, and sweeping round beyond the Tower along the eastern skirts of the city, were several artillery-grounds and army camps. These had been busy of late, because of the Anglo-Dutch War. Not the same Anglo-Dutch war that Isaac had listened to from his orchard in Woolsthorpe six years ago, for that had concluded in 1667. This was a wholly new and different Anglo-Dutch War, the third in as many decades. This time around, though, the English had finally gotten it right: they were allied with the French. Ignoring all considerations of what was really in the best interests of England, and setting aside all questions of moral rightness (and the current King was rarely troubled and little hindered by either), this seemed like a much better plan than fighting against France. Plenty of French gold had entered the country to bring Parliament around to Louis XIV’s side, and to pay for a lot of ships to be built. France had an immense army and needed little help from England on land; what Louis had bought, and paid for several times over, was the Royal Navy, and its guns, and its gunpowder.

It was difficult, therefore, for Daniel to make any sense of the project underway northeast of London. Over several weeks Daniel watched a flat parade-ground develop pits and wrinkles, which slowly grew to ditches and mounds, and shaped and resolved themselves (as if he were adjusting the focus of a prospective glass) into sharp neat earthworks. Daniel had never seen such things because, until now, they had not been built in England, but from books and siege-paintings he knew them as ramparts, a bastion, ravelins, and a demilune work. But if this were a preparation for Dutch invasion, it was poorly thought out, because these works stood in isolation, protecting nothing save a pasture with a few dozen befuddled, but extremely well-defended, cows. Nevertheless, guns were mustered out from the Ordnance storehouses in the Tower, and hauled up onto the ramparts by teams of straining oxen—hernias with legs. The cracks of the teamsters’ whips and the snorts and bellows of the beasts were carried for miles on a sea breeze all the way across Houndsditch and over the Wall and up the pitched roof of Gre-sham’s College into Daniel’s ears. Daniel for his part only stared in amaze.

Nearer the river, in the flat country beyond the Tower, Naval works took over from Military ones: shipyards messy with blond timber from Scotland or Massachusetts, splattered planks drawing themselves up into the curved hulls of ships, dead firs resurrected as masts. Colossal plumes of black smoke spreading downwind, pointing to Comstock-forges where tons of iron were being melted down and poured into subterranean cannon-molds, and windmill-blades rolling on the horizon, turning the gear-trains of mighty Comstock-machines that bored holes down the centers of those cannons.

Which brought Daniel’s gaze back to the Tower, where he’d started: the central mystery, where treasure-ships from (as everyone in London now knew) France brought in the gold to be minted into the guineas that paid for all of those ships and cannons, and for the services of England in its new role as a sort of naval auxiliary to France.

ONE DAY, HEARING CHURCH-BELLS RING two o’clock, Daniel descended the ladder through the telescope-shaft. Hooke had gone out to inspect some new pavement, leaving behind nothing but a faint metallic scent of vomit. Daniel walked directly across the street, dodging uncouth traffic of heavy carts. He climbed into Samuel Pepys’s carriage and made himself comfortable. Several minutes passed. Daniel looked at passers-by out the window. A hundred yards south, the streets would be a-bustle with brokers of East India stocks and goldsmiths’ notes, but this place, tucked up against London wall, was a queer eddy, or backwater, and Daniel observed a jumble of Navy men, Dissident preachers, Royal Society hangers-on, foreigners, and Vagabonds, stirring and shuffling about one another in no steady pattern. It was an inscrutable Gordian knot suddenly cleft by one Chase Scene: a scruffy barefoot boy came bolting up Broad Street, pursued by a bailiff with a cudgel. Glimpsing a side street that ran off to the left, between the Navy Treasury and the Dutch Church, the boy skidded round the corner—paused—considered matters—and freed himself of a burden by heaving a pale brick into the air. It sheared apart, the wind caught it, and it puffed into a cloud of fluttering rectangles, whirling mysteriously round their long axes. By the time Daniel or anyone else thought to look for him, the boy was gone. The bailiff shifted to a straddling gait, as if riding an invisible pony, and began trying to step on all of the libels at once, gathering them in his arms, stuffing them into his pockets. Several members of the Watch stormed up and exchanged monosyllabic gasping noises with the bailiff. They all turned and glared at the façade of the Dutch Church, then went back to rounding up handbills.

Samuel Pepys was preceded by his cologne and his wig, and pursued by a minion embracing a sheaf of giant rolled documents. “I thought it well played, on the boy’s part,” he said, climbing into the coach and handing Daniel one of the libels.

“An old trick of the trade,” Daniel said.

Pepys looked delighted. “Drake put you out on the streets?”

“Of course…‘twas the common rite of passage for all Waterhouse boys.”

The handbill was a cartoon depicting King Louis XIV of France with his breeches piled up round his ankles and hairy buttocks thrust out, shitting an immense turd into the mouth of an English sailor.

“Let’s take it to Wilkins! It’ll cheer him up enormously,” Pepys suggested, and pounded on the ceiling. The coachman drove the horses forward. Daniel made his body go limp so that he would not accrue lacerations from the continual battering onslaughts of the vehicle’s benches and bulkheads.

“Did you bring it?”

“I always have it with me,” Pepys said, producing an irregular nodule about the size of a tennis ball, “as you have all your parts.”

“To remind you of your own mortality?”

“Once a man’s been cut for the stone, ’tis hardly necessary.”

“Why, then?”

“It is my conversation-starter of last resort. It gets anyone talking: Germans, Puritans, Red Indians…” He handed the object to Daniel. It was heavy. Heavy as a stone.

“I cannot believe this came out of your bladder,” Daniel said.

“You see? Never fails!” Pepys answered.

But Daniel got no further response from Pepys, who’d already unrolled one of the large documents, creating a screen that divided the carriage in half. Daniel had assumed that they were all diagrams of men-of-war. But when they turned west on Cheapside the sun came in the carriage window and shone through the paper, revealing a grid of numbers. Pepys muttered things to his assistant, who jotted them down. Daniel was left to rotate the bladder-stone in his hand and gaze out at London, so different when seen at street-level. Passing through St. Paul’s Churchyard, they saw the whole contents of a printer’s shop turned out into the street—several bailiffs, and one of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s lieutenants, pawing through stacks of unbound sheets, and holding wood-blocks up to mirrors.

Within a few minutes, anyway, they were at Wilkins’s house. Pepys left his assistant and his papers below in the carriage and pounded up stairs holding the bladder-stone in his hand like a questing knight brandishing a fragment of the Cross.

He shook it in Wilkins’s face. Wilkins only laughed. But it was good that he did, because his room was otherwise a horror—his dark breeches couldn’t conceal that he had been pissing blood, sometimes sooner than he could get to the chamber-pot. He was both wizened and bloated at the same time, if that were possible, and the smell that came out of his flesh seemed to suggest his kidneys weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain.

While Pepys exhorted the Bishop of Chester to allow himself to be cut for the stone, Daniel looked about, and was dispirited but not surprised to see several empty bottles from the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure. He gave one a sniff. It was Elixir Pro-prietalis LeFebure—the same stuff Hooke swallowed when headaches had brought him to the brink of suicide—the fruits of LeFebure’s researches into certain remarkable properties of the poppy family. It was hugely popular at Court, even among those not afflicted with headaches or the Stone. But when Daniel saw Wilkins go into a bladder spasm—reducing the Lord Bishop of Chester, and Founder of the Royal Society, to a dumb animal for several minutes, convulsing and howling—he decided perhaps Monsieur LeFebure was not such a sinister fellow after all.

When it was over, and Wilkins was Wilkins again, Daniel showed him the handbill, and mentioned L’Estrange’s raid on the printing-shop.

“The same men doing the same things as ten years ago,” Wilkins pronounced.

From that—the same men—Daniel knew that the originator of the handbills, and ultimate target of L’Estrange’s raids, must be Knott Bolstrood.

“And that is why I cannot stop what I am doing to be cut for the Stone,” Wilkins said.

DANIEL ERECTED A BLOCK AND TACKLE above the Gresham shaft, Hooke put the rebuilding of London on hold for a day, and they put the long telescope into place, Hooke cringing and screaming every time it was bumped, as if the instrument were an extension of his own eyeball.

Meanwhile Daniel could never keep his attention fixed on the heavens, for the warm mutterings and nudgings of London would not leave him alone—notes slipped under his door, raised eyebrows in coffee-shops, odd things witnessed in the street all captured his attention more than they should’ve. Outside the city, scaffolding rose up from the glacis of those mysterious fortifications, and long benches began to shingle it.

Then, one afternoon, Daniel and all London’s Persons of Quality and most of her pickpockets were there, sitting on those benches or milling about in the fields. The Duke of Monmouth rode out, in a Cavalier outfit whose magnificence was such as to refute and demolish every sermon ever preached by a Calvinist—because if those sermons were true, Monmouth ought to be struck dead on the spot by a jealous God. John Churchill—possibly the only man in England handsomer than Monmouth—therefore wore slightly less thrilling clothes. The King of France could not attend this event, as he was so busy conquering the Dutch Republic just now, but a strapping actor pranced out in his stead, dressed in royal ermine, and took up a throne on an artificial hillock, and occupied himself with suitable bits of stage-business, viz. peering at events through a glass; pointing things out to diverse jewelled mistresses draped all about his vicinity; holding out his Sceptre to order his troops forward; descending from his throne to speak a few kind words to wounded officers who were brought up to him on litters; standing up and striking a grave defiant pose during moments of crisis, whilst holding out a steady hand to calm his jittery femmes. Likewise an actor had been hired to play the role of D’Artagnan. Since everyone knew what was about to happen to him, he got the most applause when he was introduced—to the visible chagrin of the (real) Duke of Monmouth. In any event: cannons were discharged picturesquely from the ramparts of “Maestricht,” and “Dutchmen” struck defiant poses on the battlements, creating among the spectators a frisson of righteous anger (how dare those insolent Dutchmen defend themselves!?)—rapidly transmuted into patriotic fervor as, at a signal from “Louis XIV,” Monmouth and Churchill led a charge up the slope of the demilune work. After a bit of thrilling swordplay and much spattering-about of stage-blood, they planted French and English flags side by side on the parapet, shook hands with “D’Artagnan,” and exchanged all manner of fond and respectful gestures with the “King” on his hillock.

There was an ovation. Daniel could hear nothing else, but he saw some odd sort of pratfall directly in front of him: a young man in severe dark clothing, who’d been standing in front of Daniel and blocking his view with a sort of Pilgrim-hat, turned round and splayed his limbs out like a squashed bug, let his head loll back on his white collar, stuck his tongue out, and rolled his eyes back in their sockets. He was mocking the pose of several “Dutch” defenders who were now hors de combat up on the demilune. He did not make a very pretty picture. Something was grievously wrong with his face: a dermatological catastrophe about the cheeks.

Behind him, a scene-change was underway: the dead defenders were resurrecting themselves and scurrying round back of the ramparts to prepare for the next act. Likewise the man in front of Daniel now recovered his balance and turned out not to be a dead Dutchman at all, just a young English bloke with a sour look about him. His attire was not just any drab garb but the specific drab garb worn, nowadays, by Barkers. But (now that Daniel thought about it slightly harder) it was very like the clothing worn by the mock-Dutchmen pretending to defend Maestricht. Come to think of it, those “Dutchmen” had looked a great deal more like English religious Dissenters than they had like actual Dutchmen, who (if the grapevine was to be believed) had long ago ditched their old Pil-grimish togs (which had been inspired by Spanish fashions anyway) and now dressed like everyone else in Europe. So in addition to being a re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht, this show was also a parable about well-dressed rakes and blades overcoming dull severe Calvinists in the streets of London town!

The slowness with which Daniel realized all this was infuriating to the young Barker in front of him—who had the cannonball head and mighty jawbone of an authentic Bolstrood.

“Is that Gomer?” Daniel exclaimed, when the ovation had died away into a thrum of thirsty squires calling for beer. Daniel had known the son of Knott Bolstrood as a little boy, but hadn’t set eyes on him in at least a decade.

Gomer Bolstrood answered the question by staring Daniel full in the face. On the front of each of his cheeks, just to either side of his nose, was an old wound: a complex of red trenches and fleshy ramparts, curved round into the crude glyph “S.L.” These marks had been made by a branding iron in the open-air court before the Sessions House at the Old Bailey, a few moments after Gomer had been pronounced guilty of being a Seditious Libeller.

Gomer Bolstrood could not be more than twenty-five years old, but that munition-like head, combined with those brands, gave him the presence of a much older man. He aimed his chin significantly towards a location off behind the stands.

Gomer Bolstrood, son of His Majesty’s Secretary of State Knott, son of ur-Barker Gregory, led Daniel into a Vagabond-camp of tents and wagons set up to serve and support this gala re-enactment. Some of the tents were for the actors and actresses. Gomer led Daniel between a couple of those, which meant fighting their way against a flood tide of “French Mistresses” coming back from the “Sun King’s” throne. Even as the sensitive eyes of Isaac Newton had been semi-permanently branded with the image of the solar disk during his colors experiments, so Daniel’s retinas were now stamped with a dozen or more cleavages. All of those cleavages must have had heads up above them somewhere—but the only one he noticed was speaking to one of the other girls in a French accent. From which he reckoned (in retrospect, somewhat simple-mindedly) that she must be French. But before Daniel could drift off into a full reverie, Gomer Bolstrood had grabbed his upper arm and pulled him ’tween the flaps of an adjoining beer tent.

The beer was Dutch. So was the man sitting at the table. But the waffle that the man was eating was indisputably Belgian.

Daniel sat in the chair indicated, and watched the Dutch gentleman eat the waffle for a while. He aimed his eyes in that direction, anyway. The image that still persisted before his eyes was cleavages, and the face of that “French” lass. But after a while this, sadly, faded, and was replaced by a waffle that had been put in front of him on a Delft china plate. And none of your crude heavy Pilgrim-ware, but the good stuff, export-grade.

He sensed an implicit demand that he should Partake. So he dissected a corner from the waffle, put it in his mouth, and began to chew it. It was good. His eyes were adjusting to the dimness of the tent, and he was noticing stacks of handbills piled up in the corners, neatly wrapped up in old proof-sheets. The words on the proof-sheets were in every language save English—these bills had been printed in Amsterdam and brought over on a beer-ship or perhaps a waffle-barge. Every so often the tent-flaps would part, and Gomer, or one of the taciturn, pipe-smoking Dutchmen in the corners, would peer out and thrust a brick of hand-bills through the gap.

“Whaat doo Belgian waffles and the cleavages of those girls haave in common?” said the Dutch Ambassador; for it was none other. He dabbed butter from his lips with a napkin. He was blond, and pyramidal, as if he consumed a lot of beer and waffles. “I saaw you staaring at them,” he added, apologetically.

“I haven’t the merest idea—sir!”

“Negateev Spaace,” the Dutch Ambassador intoned, letting those double vowels resonate as only a heavyweight Dutchman could. “Have you heard of thees? It is an aart woord. Wee know about negateev spaace because we like peectures soo muuch.”

“Is it anything like negative numbers?”

“Eet ees the spaace between twoo theengs,” said the other, and put his hands on his chest and forced his pectorals together to create a poor impression of cleavage. Daniel watched with polite incredulity, and tried not to shudder. The Dutchman plucked a fresh waffle off a plate and held it up by one corner, like a rag soaked with something unpleasant. “Likewise—the waffle of Belgium is shaaped and defiined, not by its own essential naatuure, but by the hot plaates of haard iron that encloose it on toop and boottom.”

“Oh, I see—you’re making a point about the Spanish Netherlands!”

The Dutch Ambassador rolled his eyes and tossed the waffle back over his shoulder—before it struck the ground, a stout, disconcertingly monkey-like dog sprang into the air and snatched it, and began to masticate it—literally—for the sound it made was like a homunculus squatting on the floor muttering, “masticate masticate masticate.”

“Traaped between Fraance and the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Netherlands is raapidly consuumed by Louis the Quatorze Bourbon. Fine. But when Le Roi du Soleil reaches Maestricht he touches—what?”

“The political and military equivalent of a hot iron plate?”

The Dutch Ambassador probed negative space with a licked finger, seemed to touch something, and drew back sharply, making a sizzling noise through his teeth. Perhaps by Dutch luck, perhaps by some exquisite sense of timing, Daniel felt the atmosphere socking him in the gut. The tent clenched inwards, then inflated. Waffle-irons chattered and buzzed in the dimness, like skeletons’ teeth. The monkey-dog scurried under the table.

Gomer Bolstrood pulled back a tent-flap to provide a clear view to the top of the demilune-work, which had been ruptured by detonation of a vast internal store of gunpowder. It looked like a steaming loaf that had been ripped in half. Resurgent Dutchmen were prancing around on the top, trampling and burning those French and English flags. The spectators were on the brink of riot.

Gomer let the tent-flap fall shut again, and Daniel turned his attention back to the ambassador, who had never taken his gaze off of Daniel.

“Maybe Fraance taakes Maestricht—but not so easily—they lose the hero D’Artagnan. The war will be won by us, however.”

“I am pleased to know that you will have success in Holland—now will you consider changing your tactics in London?” Daniel said this loudly so that Gomer could share in it.

“In whaat waay?”

“You know what L’Estrange has been doing.”

“I know what L’Estrange has been failing to do!” the Dutch Ambassador chortled.

“Wilkins is trying to make London like Amsterdam—and I’m not speaking of wooden shoes.”

“Many churches—no established religion.”

“It is his life’s work. He has given up on Natural Philosophy, these last years, to direct all of his energies toward that goal. He wants it because it is best for England—but the High Anglicans and Crypto-Catholics at Court are against anything that smacks of Dissidents. So Wilkins’s task is difficult enough—but when those same Dissidents are linked, in the public mind, with the Dutch enemy, how can he hope for success?”

“In a year—when the dead are counted, and the true costs of the war are understood—Wilkins’s task will be too easy.”

“In a year Wilkins will be dead of the stone. Unless he has it cut out.”

“I can recommend a chirurgeon-barber, very speedy with the knife—”

“He does not feel that he can devote several months to recovery, when the pressure is so immediate and the stakes so high. He is just on the verge of success, Mr. Ambassador, and if you would let up—”

“We will let up when the French do,” the Ambassador said, and waved at Gomer, who pulled the flap open again to show the demilune being re-conquered by French and English troops, led by Monmouth. To one side, “D’Artagnan” lay wounded in a gap in the wall. John Churchill was supporting the old musketeer’s head in his lap, feeding him sips from a flask.

The tent-flap remained open for rather a long time, and Daniel eventually understood that he was being shown the door. As he walked out he caught Gomer’s elbow and drew him outside onto the dirt street. “Brother Gomer,” he said, “the Dutch are deranged. Understandably. But our situation is not so desperate.”

“On the contrary,” said Gomer, “I say that you are in desperate peril, Brother Daniel.”

Anyone else would have meant physical peril by that, but Daniel had spent enough of his life around Gomer’s—which was to say, Daniel’s—ilk to know that Gomer meant the spiritual kind.

“I don’t suppose that’s just because I was staring at a pretty girl’s bosom just now—?”

Gomer did not much fancy the jest. Indeed, Daniel sensed before those words were out of his mouth that they would only confirm Gomer’s opinion of him as Fallen, or at best, Falling fast. He tried something else: “Your own father is Secretary of State!”

“Then go and speak to my father.”

“The point I am making is that there is no harm—or peril, if that is what you want to call it—in employing tactics. Cromwell used tactics to win battles, did he not? It did not mean he lacked faith. On the contrary—not to use the brains God gave you, and making every struggle into a frontal charge, is sinful—thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God!”

“Wilkins has the stone,” Gomer said. “Whether ’twas placed in his bladder by God, or the Devil, is a question for Jesuits. Anyway, he has it, and shall likely die of it, unless you and your Fellows can gin up a way to transmute it into some watery form that can be pissed out. In dread of his death, you have wrought in your mind this phant’sy that if I, Gomer Bolstrood, leave off distributing handbills in the streets of London, it shall set in motion a lengthy chain of consequences that shall somehow end in Wilkins’s suffering some chirurgeon to cut him for the stone, him surviving the operation, and living happily ever after, as the kind father you never had. And you say that the Dutch are deranged?”

Daniel could not answer. The discourse of Gomer had struck him in the face with no less heat, force, and dumbfounding pain than the branding iron had Gomer’s.

“As you phant’sy yourself a master of tactics, consider this whor-ish spectacle we have been witnessing.” Gomer waved at the demilune-work. Up on the parapet, Monmouth was planting the French and English flags anew, to the cheers of the spectators, who broke into a lusty chorus of “Pikes on the Dikes” even as “D’Artagnan” breathed his last. John Churchill carried him down the slope of the earthwork in his arms and laid him on a litter where his body was bedecked with flowers.

“Behold the martyr!” Gomer brayed. “Who gave his life for the cause, and is fondly remembered by all the Quality! Now there is a tactic for you. I am sorry Wilkins is sick. I would not put him in harm’s way on any account, for he was a friend to us. But it is not in my power to keep Death from his door. And when Death does come, ’twill make of him a Martyr—not so romantick as D’Artagnan perhaps—but of more effect in a better cause. Beg your pardon, Brother Daniel.” Gomer stalked away, tearing open the wrapper on a sheaf of libels.

“D’Artagnan” was being carried along the front of the bleachers in a cortege of gorgeously mussed and tousled Cavaliers, and spectators were doing business with roving flower-girls and showering bouquets and blossoms on those heroes living and “dead.” But even as petals were fluttering down on the mock-Musketeer, Daniel Waterhouse found slips of paper coming down all around him, carried on a breeze from the bleachers. He slapped one out of the air and was greeted with a cartoon of several French cavaliers gang-raping a Dutch milkmaid. Another showed a cravated musketeer, silhouetted in the light of a burning Protestant church, about to catch a tossed baby on the point of his sword. All around Daniel, and up in the stands, spectators were passing these bills hand-to-hand, sometimes wadding them into sleeves or pockets.

So the matter was complicated. And it only become more so ten minutes later, when, during a bombardment of “Maestricht,” a cannon burst in full view of all spectators. Most people assumed it was just a stage-trick until bloody fragments of artillerymen began to shower down all among them, mingling with the continual flurry of handbills.

Daniel walked back to Gresham’s College and worked all night with Hooke. Hooke stayed below, gazing up at various stars, and Daniel remained on the roof, looking at a nova that was flaring in the west end of London: a Mobb of people with torches, milling around St. James’s Fields and discharging the occasional musket. Later, he learned that they had attacked Comstock House, supposedly because they were furious about the cannon that had burst.

John Comstock himself showed up at Gresham’s College the next morning. It took several moments for Daniel to recognize him, so altered was his countenance by shock, by outrage, and even by shame. He demanded that Hooke and the rest drop what they were doing and investigate the remnants of the burst cannon, which he insisted had been tampered with in some way “by mine enemies.”

College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

1672

There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by a fiction.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

Once More into the Breeches

A COMEDY

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MEN: MR. VAN UNDERDEVATER, a Dutchman, founder of a great commercial empire in sow’s-ears and potatoes’-eyes NZINGA, a cannibal Neeger, formerly King of the Congo, now house-slave to Mr. van Underdevater JEHOSHAPHAT STOPCOCK, the Earl of BRIMSTONE, an enthusiast

TOM RUNAGATE, a discharged soldier turned Vagabond THE REV. YAHWEH PUCKER, a Dissident divine EUGENE STOPCOCK, son of Lord Brimstone, a Captain of Foot FRANCIS BUGGERMY, Earl of Suckmire, a foppish courtier DODGE AND BOLT, two of Tom Runagate’s accomplices

WOMEN: MISS LYDIA VAN UNDERDEVATER, the daughter and sole heiress of Mr. van Underdevater, recently returned from a Venetian finishing-school LADY BRIMSTONE, wife to Jehoshaphat Stopcock Miss STRADDLE, Tom Runagate’s companion

SCENE: SUCKMIRE, a rural estate in Kent

ACT I. SCENE I.

SCENE: a Cabin in a Ship at Sea. Thunder heard, flashes of Lightning seen.

Enter Mr. van Underdevater in dressing-gown, with a lanthorn.

VAN UND: Boatswain!

Enter Nzinga wet, with a Sack.

NZINGA: Here, master, what—

VAN UND: Odd’s bodkins! Have you fallen into the tar-pot, boatswain?

NZINGA: It is I, Master—your slave, My Royal Majesty, by the Grace of the tree-god, the rock-god, river-god, and diverse other gods who have slipped my mem’ry, of the Congo, King.

VAN UND: SO it is. What have you in the bag?

NZINGA: Balls.

VAN UND: Balls! Sink me! You have quite forgot your Civilizing Lessons!

NZINGA: Of ice.

VAN UND: Thank heavens.

NZINGA: I gathered ’em from the deck—where they are falling like grape-shot—and for this you thank heaven?

VAN UND: Aye, for it means the boatswain is still in possession of all his Parts. Boatswain!

Enter LYDIA in dressing-gown, dishevelled.

LYDIA: Dear father, why do you shout for the boatswain so?

VAN UND: My dear Lydia, I would fain pay him to bring this infernal storm to an end.

LYDIA: But father, the boatswain can’t stop a tempest!

VAN UND: Perhaps he knows someone who can.

NZINGA: I know a weather-god in Guinea who can—and at rates very reasonable, as he will accept payment in rum.

VAN UND: Rum! You take me for a half-wit? If this is what the weather-god does when he is sober—

NZINGA: Cowrie-shells would do in a pinch. If master would care to despatch My Majesty on the next southbound boat, My Majesty would be pleased to broker the transaction—

VAN UND:You prove yourself a shrewd man of commerce. I am reminded of when I traded the holes in a million cannibals’ ears, for the eyes of a million potatoes, and beat the market at both ends of the deal—

More thunder.

VAN UND: TOO, slow, too slow! Boatswain!

Enter Lord Brimstone.

LORD BRIMSTONE: Here, here, what is this bawling?

LYDIA: Lord Brimstone—your servant.

VAN UND: The price of ending this tempest is too high, the market in Pagan Deities too remote—

LORD B: Then why, sir, do you call for the boatswain?

VAN UND: Why, sir, to tell him to be of good courage and to remain firm in the face of danger.

LYDIA: Oh, too late, father!

VAN UND: What mean you, child?

LYDIA: When the boatswain heard you, he lost what firmness he had, and fled in a panic.

VAN UND: How do you know it? LYDIA: Why, he upset the hammock altogether, and tumbled me onto the deck!

VAN UND: Lydia, Lydia, I have spent a fortune sending you to that school in Venice, where you have been studying to become a virtuous maiden—

LYDIA: And I have studied hard, Father, but it is ever so difficult!

VAN UND: Has all that money been wasted?

LYDIA: Oh, no, Father, I learned some lovely songs from our dancing-master, Signore Fellatio.

Sings.[*]

VAN UND: I’ve heard enough—Boatswain!

Enter Lady Brimstone.

LADY BRIMSTONE: My lord, have you found who is making that dreadful noise yet?

LORD B: M’lady, it’s that Dutchman.

LADY B: SO much for idle investigations—what have you done about it, my lord?

LORD B: Nothing, my lady, for they say that the only way to quiet one of these obstreperous Dutchmen is to drown him.

LADY B: Drown—why, my lord—you’re not thinking of throwing him overboard—?

LORD B: Every soul aboard is thinking of it, M’lady. But with a Dutchman it isn’t necessary, as they live below sea-level to begin with. ’Tis merely a question of getting the sea to go back where the Good Lord put it in the first place—

LADY B: And how d’you propose to effect that, my lord?

LORD B: I have been conducting experiments on a novel engine to make windmills turn backwards, and pump water down-hill—

LADY B: Experiments! Engines! I say the way to put Dutchmen under water’s with French gunpowder and English courage!

Whatever the actor playing Lord Brimstone said was like expectorating into the River Amazon. For the true SCENE of these events was Neville’s Court[*] on a spring evening, and the true Dramatis Personae a roll that would’ve consumed many yards of paper and drams of ink to set it out fully. The script was an unpublished mas-terwork of courtly and collegiate intrigue, comprising hundreds of more or less clever lines being delivered—mostly sotto voce—at the same instant, producing a contrapuntal effect quite intricate but entirely too much for young Daniel Waterhouse to grasp. He had been wondering why persons such as these bothered to go to plays at all, when every day at Whitehall provided more spectacle—now he sensed that they did so because the stories in the theatre were simple, and arrived at fixed conclusions after an hour or two.

Heading up the cast of tonight’s performance was King Charles II of England, situated on the upper floor of Trinity’s miserable wreck of a library, where several consecutive windows had been opened up and converted into temporary opera-boxes. The Queen, one Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess with a famously inoperative womb, was seated to one side of His Majesty, pretending to understand English as usual. The guest of honor, the Duke of Monmouth (King Charles’s son by his mistress Lucy Walter), was on the other side. The windows flanking the King’s contained various elements of his court: one was anchored by Louise de Kéroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth and the King’s mistress. Another by Barbara Villiers, a.k.a. Lady Castlemaine, a.k.a. the Duchess of Cleveland, former lover of John Churchill, and the King’s mistress.

Moving outwards from the three central windows, there was one all filled up with Angleseys: Thomas More Anglesey and his nearly indistinguishable sons, Philip, now something like twenty-seven years old, and Louis, who was twenty-four, but looking younger. For protocol dictated that, as the Earl of Upnor was visiting his alma mater, he had to wear academic robes. Though he’d mobilized a squadron of French tailors to liven them up, they were still academic robes, and the object infesting his wig was unmistakably a mortarboard.

Balancing this Anglesey-window was a window all crowded with Comstocks, specifically the so-called Silver branch of that race: John and his sons Richard and Charles foremost, all dressed likewise in robes and mortarboards. Unlike the Earl of Upnor they seemed comfortable dressed that way. Or at least had until the play had begun, and the character of Jehoshaphat Stopcock, Lord Brimstone, had come tottering out dressed precisely as they were.

The King’s Comedians, performing on a temporary stage that had been erected in Neville’s Court, had decided to plow onwards in spite of the fact that no one could hear a word they were saying. “Lord Brimstone” seemed to be upbraiding his wife about something—presumably, her reference to “French gunpowder,” as opposed to “English,” which, on some other planet, might have been a rhetorical figure, but here seemed very much like a stab at John Comstock. Meanwhile, most of the audience—who, if they had the good fortune to be seated, were seated on chairs and benches arranged in the corner of Neville’s Court, beneath the windows of King and Court—were trying to break out into the opening stanza of “Pikes on the Dikes,” the most widely plagiarized song in England: a rousing ditty about why it was an excellent idea to invade Holland. But the King held out one hand to silence them. Not that he was lacking in belligerence—but down on the stage, “Lydia van Underdevater” was delivering a line that looked like it was meant to be funny. And the King didn’t like it when the buzz of Intrigue drowned out his Mistress.

All of the Comedians suddenly fell down, albeit in dramatickal and actorly ways—and that went double for Nell Gwyn, who wound up draped over a bench with one arm stretched out gracefully, displaying about a square yard of flawless pale armpits and bosoms. The audience were poleaxed. The long-called-for boatswain finally ran in and announced that the ship had run aground in sands just off Castle Suckmire. “Lord Brimstone” sent Nzinga out to fetch his trunk, which arrived with the immediacy that can only happen in stage-plays. The owner pawed through its contents, spilling out a strange mixture of drab outmoded clothing and peculiar equipment, viz. retorts, crucibles, skulls, and microscopes. Meanwhile Lydia was picking up certain of his garments, such as farmers’ breeches and cowherds’ boots, holding them at arm’s length and mugging. Finally, Lord Brimstone stood up, tucking a powder-keg under one arm, and slapping a frayed and bent mortarboard onto his head.

LORD B: What’s wanted to move this ship is Gunpowder!

Among the groundlings in their chairs and on the grass, much uneasy shifting and muttering, and tassels flopping this way and that, as mortarboard-wearing scholars turned to each other to enquire as to just who was being made fun of here, or shook their heads, or bowed them low to pray for the souls of the King’s Comedians, and of whomever had written this play, and of the King who’d insisted he couldn’t make it through a one-night stand at Cambridge without being entertained.

Very different reactions, though, from the windows-cum-opera-boxes: the Duchess of Portsmouth was undone. Her bosom was heaving like a spritsail gone all a-luff, her head was thrown back to expose a whole lot of jewelled throat. These spectacles had already caused diverse groundling scholars to fall out of their chairs. She was being supported by a pair of young blades in huge curled and beribboned wigs, who were wiping tears of mirth away from their eyes with the fingertips of their kid gloves—having already donated their lace hankies to the Duchess.

Meanwhile, mortarboard-wearing gunpowder magnate John Comstock—who’d long opposed the Duchess of Portsmouth’s efforts to introduce French fashions to the English court—was managing a thin, oddly distracted smile. The King—who, until tonight anyway, had generally sided with Comstock—was smiling, and the Angleseys were all having the times of their lives.

An elbow to the kidney forced Daniel to stop gaping at the Duchess’s efforts to rupture her bodice, and to pay some attention to the rather homelier sight of Oldenburg, who was seated next to him. The hefty German had been released from the Tower as suddenly and as inexplicably as he’d been clapped into it. He glanced down toward the far end of Neville’s Court, then frowned at Daniel and said, “Where is he? Or at least it!” meaning Isaac Newton and his paper on tangents, respectively. Then Oldenburg turned the other way and peeked up round the edge of his mortarboard toward the Angleseys’ box, where Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, had somehow gotten his merriment under control and was giving Oldenburg a Significant Glare.

Daniel was glad to have a pretext for leaving. All through the play he had been trying and trying to suspend his disbelief, but the damned thing just wouldn’t suspend. He rose to his feet, bunched his robes up, and sidestepped down a row of chairs, treading on diverse Royal Society feet. Sir Winston Churchill: Cheers on your boy’s Maestricht work, old chap. Christopher Wren: Let’s get that cathedral up, what, no dilly-dallying! Sir Robert Moray: Let’s have lunch and talk about eels. Thank God Hooke had had the temerity to not show up—too busy rebuilding London—so Daniel didn’t have to step on any of his parts. Finally, Daniel was out on open grass. This was really a job for John Wilkins—but the Bishop of Chester was lying on his bed down in London, ill of the stone.

Working his way round back of the stage, Daniel found himself among several wagons that had been used to haul dramaturgickal mysteries up from London. Awnings had been rigged to them and tents pitched in between, so tent-ropes were stretched across the darkness, thick as ship’s rigging, and hitched round splintery wooden stakes piercing the (until the actors had shown up, anyway) flawless lawn. Various items of what he could only assume were ladies’ undergarments (they were definitely garments, but he had never seen their like—Q.E.D.) dangled from the ropes and occasionally surprised the hell out of him by pawing clammily at his face. Daniel had to plot a devious course, then pursue it slowly, to escape the tangle. So it was really—really—just an accident that he found the two actresses, doing whatever the hell it was that females do when they excuse themselves and exchange warm knowing looks and go off in pairs. He caught the very end of it: “What should I do w’th’old one?” said a young lady with a lovely voice, and an accent from some part of England with too many sheep.

“Fling it into the crowd—start a riot,” suggested the other—an Irish girl.

This touched off fiendish whooping. Clearly no one had taught these girls how to titter.

“But they wouldn’t even know what it was,” said the girl with the lovely voice, “we are the first women to set foot in this place.”

“Then neither will they know if you leave it where it lies,” the Irish girl answered.

The other now dropped her rural accent and began talking exactly like a Cambridge scholar from a good family. “I say, what’s this in the middle of my bowling-green? It would appear to be…fox-bait!”

More whooping—cut short by a man’s voice out of a backstage caravan: “Tess—save some of that for the King—you’re wanted on the stage.”

The lasses picked up their skirts and exeunted. Daniel glimpsed them as they transited across a gap between tents, and recognized the one called Tess from the “Siege of Maestricht.” She was the one he had taken for a Frenchwoman, simply because he’d heard her talking that way. He now understood that she was really an Englishwoman who could talk any way she pleased. This might have been obvious, since she was a professional actress; but it was new to him, and it made her interesting.

Daniel emerged from behind the tent where he’d been (it is fair to say) lurking, and—purely in a spirit of philosophical inquiry—approached the spot where Tess of the beautiful voice and many accents had been (fair to say) squatting.

In a sort of hod projecting above the stage, more gunpowder was lit off in an attempt to simulate lightning, and it made a pool of yellow light in front of Daniel for just a moment. Neatly centered in a patch of grass—grass that was almost phosphorus-green, this being Spring—was a wadded-up rag, steaming from the warmth of Tess, bright with blood.

Of sooty coal the Empiric Alchimist Can turn, or holds it possible to turn Metals of drossiest Ore to perfet Gold As from the Mine.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

IT HAD BEEN A FULL DAY for the King. Or perhaps Daniel was being naïve to think so—more likely, it was a typical day for the King, and the only persons feeling exhausted were the Cantabrigians who had been trying to maintain the pretense that they could keep up with him. The entourage had appeared on the southern horizon in mid-morning, looking (Daniel supposed) quite a bit like the invasion that Louis XIV had recently flung into the Dutch Republic: meaning that it thundered and threw up dust-clouds and consumed oats and generated ramparts of manure like any Regiment, but its wagons were all gilded, its warriors were armed with jewelled Italian rapiers, its field-marshalls wore skirts and commanded men, or condemned them, with looks—this fell upon Cambridge, anyway, with more effect than King Louis had achieved, so far, in the Netherlands. The town was undone, dissolved. Bosoms everywhere, bare-assed courtiers spilling out of windows, the good Cambridge smell of fens and grass overcome by perfumes, not just of Paris but of Araby and Rajasthan. The King had abandoned his coach and marched through the streets of the town accepting the cheers of the scholars of Cambridge, who had formed up in front of their several Colleges, robed and arranged by ranks and degrees, like soldiers drawn up for review. He’d been officially greeted by the outgoing Chancellor, who had presented him with a colossal Bible—they said it was possible to see the royal nose wrinkling, and the eyes rolling, from half a mile away. Later the King (and his pack of demented spaniels) had dined at High Table in the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, under the big Holbein portrait of the college’s Founder, King Henry VIII. As Fellows, Daniel and Isaac were accustomed to sitting at High Table, but the town was now stuffed with persons who ranked them, and so they’d been demoted halfway across the room: Isaac in his scarlet robes talking to Boyle and Locke about something, and Daniel shoved off in a corner with several vicars who—in violation of certain Biblical guidelines—plainly did not love one another. Daniel tried to stanch their disputatious drone and to pick up a few snatches of conversation from the High Table. The King had a lot to say about Henry VIII, all of it apparently rather droll.

At first, it was Old Hank’s approach to polygamy: so ham-handed it was funny. All of it was veiled in royal wit, of course—he didn’t come right out and say anything really, but the point seemed to be: why do people call me a libertine? At least I don’t chop their heads off. If Daniel (or any other scholar in this place) had wanted to die instantly, he could have stood up at this point and hollered, “Well, at least he eventually got round to producing a legitimate male heir!” but this did not occur.

Several goblets later, the King moved on to some reflections on what a fine and magnificent and (not to put too fine a point on it) rich place Trinity College was, and how remarkable it was that such results could have been achieved by Henry VIII merely by defying the Pope, and sacking a few monasteries. So perhaps the coffers of Puritans, Quakers, Barkers, and Presbyterians might go, one day, towards building an even finer College! This was said as a jest, of course—he went on to say that of course he was speaking of voluntary contributions. Even so, it made the Dissenters in the room very angry—but (as Daniel later reflected) no more angry, really, than they’d been before. And it was a masterly bit of Catholic-bashing. In other words, all nicely calculated to warm the hearts and ease the fears of all the High Anglicans (such as John Comstock) in the hall. The King had to do a lot of that, because many assumed he was soft on Catholics, and some even thought he was one.

In other words, maybe he had just seen a little slice of Court politics as usual, and nothing of consequence had happened. But since John Wilkins had lost the ability to urinate, Daniel’s job was to pay attention and report all of this to him later.

Then it was off to the chapel where the Duke of Monmouth, now a war hero as well as a renowned scholar and bastard, was installed as Chancellor of the University. After that, finally, the Comedy in Neville’s Court.

DANIEL PAUSED IN THE CENTER of a Gothic arch and looked out over a spread of stone steps that led down into the Great Court of Trinity College: an area about four times the size of Neville’s Court. In a strange way it reminded him of the ’Change in London, except that where the ’Change was a daytime place, all a-sparkle with Thomas Gresham’s golden grasshoppers and vaulting Mercurys, and crowded with lusty shouting traders, this place was Gothickal in the extreme, faintly dusted with the blue light of a half-moon, sparsely populated by robed and/or big-wigged men skulking about the paths and huddling in doorways in groups of two or three. And whereas the ’Change-men made common cause to buy shares in sailing-ships or joint stock companies, and traded Jamaica sugar for Spanish silver, these men were transacting diverse small conspiracies or trading snatches of courtly data. The coming of Court to Cambridge was like Stourbridge Fair—an occasional opportunity for certain types of business, most of which was in some sense occult. He couldn’t get in any trouble simply walking direct across the Great Court to the Gate. As a Fellow, he was allowed to tread on the grass. Most of these lurkers and strollers weren’t. Not that they cared about the College’s pedantic rules, but they preferred shadowy edges, having the courtier’s natural affinity for joints and crevices. Across broad open space Daniel strode, so that no one could accuse him of eavesdropping. A line stretched from where he’d come in, to the Gate, would pass direct through a sort of gazebo in the center of the Great Court: an octagonal structure surmounting a little pile of steps, with a goblet-shaped fountain in the middle. Moonlight slanted in among the pillars and gave it a ghastly look—the stone pale as a dead man’s flesh, streaked with rivulets of blood, pulsing from arterial punctures. Daniel reckoned it had to be some sort of Papist-style Vision, and was just about to lift up his hands to inspect them for Stigmata when he caught a whiff, and recollected that the fountain had been drained of water and filled with claret wine in honor of the King and of the new Chancellor: a decision that begged to be argued with. But no accounting for taste…

“The Africans cannot propagate,” said a familiar voice, startlingly close.

“What do you mean? They can do so as well as anyone,” said a different familiar voice. “Perhaps better!”

“Not without Neeger women.”

“You don’t say!”

“You must remember that the planters are short-sighted. They’re all desperate to get out of Jamaica—they wake up every day expecting to find themselves, or their children, in the grip of some tropical fever. To import female Neegers would cost nearly as much as to import males, but the females cannot produce as much sugar—particularly when they are breeding.” Daniel had finally recognized this voice as belonging to Sir Richard Apthorp—the second A in the CABAL.

“So they don’t import females at all?”

“That is correct, sir. And a newly arrived male is only usable for a few years,” Apthorp said.

“That explains much of the caterwauling that has been emanating lately from the ’Change.”

The two men had been sitting together on the steps of the fountain, facing toward the Gate, and Daniel hadn’t seen them until he’d drawn close enough to hear them. He was just getting ready to shift direction, and swing wide around the fountain, when the man who wasn’t Sir Richard Apthorp stood up, turned around, and dipped a goblet into the fountain—and caught sight of Daniel standing there flat-footed. Now Daniel recognized him—he was only too easy to recognize in a dark Trinity courtyard with blood on his hands. “I say!” Jeffreys exclaimed, “is that a new statue over there? A Puritan saint? Oh, I’m wrong, it is moving now—what appeared to be a Pillar of Virtue, is revealed as Daniel Waterhouse—ever the keen observer—now making an empiric study of us. Don’t worry, Sir Richard, Mr. Waterhouse sees all and does nothing—a model Royal Society man.”

“Good evening, Mr. Waterhouse,” Apthorp said, managing to convey, by the tone of his voice, that he found Jeffreys embarrassing and tedious.

“Mr. Jeffreys. Sir Richard. God save the King.”

“The King!” Jeffreys repeated, raising his dripping goblet and then taking a swallow. “Stand and deliver like a good little scholar, Mr. Waterhouse. Why are Sir Richard’s friends in the ’Change making such a fuss?”

“Admiral de Ruyter sailed down to Guinea and took away all of the Duke of York’s slave-ports,” Daniel said.

Jeffreys—one hand half-covering his mouth, and speaking in a stage-whisper: “Which the Duke of York had stolen from the Dutch, a few years before—but in Africa, who splits hairs?”

“During the years that the Duke’s company controlled Guinea, many slaves were shipped to Jamaica—there they made sugar—fortunes were built, and will endure, as long as the attrition of slaves is replaced by new shipments. But the Dutch have now choked off the supply—so I’d guess that Sir Richard’s clients at the ’Change can read the implications clearly enough—there must be some turmoil in the commodities markets.”

Like a victim of unprovoked Battery looking for witnesses, Jeffreys turned toward Apthorp, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. Now Jeffreys had been a London barrister for some years. Daniel suspected that he knew of these events only as a mysterious influence that caused his clients to go bankrupt. “Some turmoil,” Jeffreys said, in a dramatic whisper. “Rather dry language, isn’t it? Imagine some planter’s family in Jamaica, watching the work-force, and the harvest, dwindle—trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy, yellow fever, and slave rebellion—scanning the horizon for sails, praying for the ships that will be their salvation—some turmoil, you call it?”

Daniel could have said, Imagine a barrister watching his moneybags dwindle as he drinks them away, scanning the Strand for a client who’s got the wherewithal to pay his legal bills…but Jeffreys was wearing a sword and was drunk. So he said: “If those planters are in church, and praying, then they’ve already found salvation. Good evening, gentlemen.”

He headed for the Gate, swinging wide round the fountain so that Jeffreys wouldn’t be tempted to run him through. Sir Richard Apthorp was applauding him politely. Jeffreys was mumbling and growling, but after a few moments he was able to get words out: “You are the same man as you were—or weren’t—ten years ago, Daniel Waterhouse! You were ruled by fear then—and you’d have England ruled by it now! Thank God you are sequestered within these walls, and unable to infect London with your disgusting pusillanimity!”

And more in that vein, until Daniel ducked into the vault of the Great Gate of Trinity College. The gate was a hefty structure with crenellated towers at its four corners: a sort of mock-fortress, just the thing for retreating into when under attack by a Jeffreys. Between it and the side-wall of Trinity’s shotgun chapel was a gap in the College’s perimeter defenses about a stone’s throw wide, patched with a suite of chambers that had a little walled garden in front of it, on the side facing towards the town. These chambers had been used to shield various Fellows from the elements over the years, but lately Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac Newton had been living there. Once those two bachelors had moved in their miserable stock of furniture, there had been plenty of unused space remaining, and so it had become the world’s leading alchemical research facility. Daniel knew this, because he had helped build it—was helping build it, rather, for it was perpetually under construction.

Entering his home, Daniel pulled his robes close to his body so that they would not catch fire brushing against the glowing dome of the Reverberatory Furnace, wherein flames curled against the ceiling to strike downwards against the target. Then he pulled his skirts up so they wouldn’t drag against the heap of coal that (though the room was dark) he knew would be piled on the floor to his right. Or, for that matter, the mound of horse dung on the left (when burnt, it made a gentle moist heat). He maneuvered down a narrow lead among stacks of wooden crates, an egglike flask of quicksilver packed into each one, and came round a corner into another room.

This chamber looked like a miniature city, built by outlandish stone-masons, and just in the act of burning down—for each “building” had a peculiar shape, to draw in the air, channel flame, and carry away fumes in a particular way, and each one was filled with flames. Some of them smoked; some steamed; most gave off queer-smelling vapors. Rather than explaining what the place smelled like, ’twere easier to list what few things could not be smelled here. Lumps of gold lay out on tabletops, like butter in a pastry-shop—it being de rigueur among the higher sort of Alchemists to show a fashionable contempt for gold, as a way of countering the accusation that they were only in it for the money. Not all operations demanded a furnace, and so there were tables, too, sheathed in peened copper, supporting oil-lamps that painted the round bottoms of flasks and retorts with yellow flame.

Smudged faces turned towards Daniel, sequins of perspiration tumbled from drooping eyebrows. He immediately recognized Robert Boyle and John Locke, Fellows of the Royal Society, but, too, there were certain gentlemen who tended to show up at their garden-gate at perverse hours, robed and hooded—as if they really needed to conceal their identities when the King himself was practicing the Art at Whitehall. Viewing their petulant faces by firelight, Daniel wished they’d kept the hoods on. For, alas, they weren’t Babylonian sorcerers or Jesuit warrior-priests or Druidic warlocks after all, but an unmatched set of small-town apothecaries, bored noblemen, and crack-pated geezers, with faces that were either too slack or too spasmodical. One of them was markedly young—Daniel recognized him as Roger Comstock, he of the so-called Golden Comstocks, who’d been a scholar along with Daniel, Isaac, Upnor, Monmouth, and Jeffreys. Isaac had put Roger Comstock to work pumping a bellows, and the strain was showing on his face, but he was not about to complain. Too, there was a small and very trim raptor-faced man with white hair. Daniel recognized him as Monsieur LeFebure, the King’s Chymist, who’d introduced John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey and others—including the King himself—to the Art, when they’d been exiled in St.-Germain during the Cromwell years.

But all of these were satellites, or (like Jupiter’s moons) satellites of satellites. The Sun stood at a writing-desk in the center of the room, quill in hand, calmly making notations in a large, stained, yellowed Book. He was dressed in a long splotched smock with several holes burnt through it, though the hem of a scarlet robe could be seen hanging beneath. His head was encased in a sort of leather sack with a windowpane let into it so that he could see out. Where Daniel stood, that rectangle of glass happened to be reflecting an open furnace-door, so instead of the bulging eyes, he saw a brilliant sheet of streaming flame. A breathing-tube, comprising segments of hollow cane plumbed together by the small intestine of some beast, was sewn through the bag. Isaac had tossed it back over his shoulder. It dangled down his back and ran across the floor to Roger Comstock, who pumped fresh air into it with a bellows. So they must be doing something with mercury this evening. Isaac had observed that quicksilver, absorbed into his body, produced effects like those of coffee or tobacco, only more so, and so he used the breathing apparatus whenever he had begun to feel especially twitchy.

The results of some experiment appeared to be cooling down on one of the tables—a crucible hanging in darkness giving off a sullen glow, like Mars—and Daniel reckoned it was as good a time as any to interrupt. He stepped into the middle of the room and held up the bloody rag. “The menstruum of a human female,” he announced, “only a few minutes old!”

A bit melodramatic. But these men thrived on it. Why else would they conceal their persons in wizard-cloaks, and their knowledge in occult signs? Some of them, anyway, were deeply impressed. Newton turned round and glared significantly at Roger Comstock, who cringed and gave the bellows several brisk strokes. The sack around Isaac’s head bulged and whistled. Isaac glared some more. One of the minions rushed up with a beaker. Daniel dropped the moist rag into it. Monsieur LeFebure approached and began to make calm observations in a fifty-fifty French-Latin mix. Boyle and Locke listened politely, the lesser Alchemists formed up in an outer circle, faces strained with the effort of decrypting whatever the King’s Chymist was saying.

Daniel turned the other way to see Isaac peeling the wet sack off his head, then gathering his silver hair and holding it atop his skull to let the back of his neck cool down. He was gazing back at Daniel with no particular emotion. Of course he knew that the rag was just a diversionary tactic, but this did not affect him one way or the other.

“There’s still time to see the second act of the play,” Daniel said. “We’re holding an empty seat for you—practically had to use muskets and pikes to keep scheming Londoners from it.”

“You are taking the position, then, that God placed me on the earth, and in His wisdom supplied me with the resources that He has, so that I could interrupt my work, and spend my hours, watching a wicked atheistical play?”

“Of course not, Isaac, please don’t impute such things to me, not even in private.”

They were withdrawing to another room—which, therefore, in a more dignified sort of house would be called the w’drawing room—but here it was a workshop, the floor slick with wood-dust and shavings from a lathe, and a-crackle with failures from the glass-blowing bench, and cluttered with various hand-tools that they’d used to construct everything else. Isaac said nothing, only gazed at Daniel, all patient expectation. “From time to time—perhaps once a day—I prevail upon you to eat something,” Daniel pointed out. “Does this mean I believe God put you here to stuff food into your mouth? Of course not. But in order for you to accomplish the work that you, and I, believe God shaped you for, you must put food into your body.”

“Is it really your belief that watching Once More into the Breeches is comparable to eating?”

“To work, you require certain resources—nutrition is only one. A stipend, a workshop, tools, equipment—how do you get them?”

“Behold!” Isaac said, sweeping one arm over his empire of tools and furnaces. This caused the cuff of his robe to fly out from under his smock—catching sight of it, he grasped the smock’s sleeve with the other hand and yanked it back to reveal the scarlet raiment of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Coming from any other man this would have seemed dramatic and insufferably pompous, but from Isaac it was the simplest and most concise answer to Daniel’s question.

“The Fellowship—the chambers—the laboratory—and the Lucasian Chair—all the best that you could hope for. You have all you need—for now. But how did you get those things, Isaac?”

“Providence.”

“By which you mean Divine Providence. But how—”

“You wish to examine the workings of God’s will in the world? I am pleased to hear it. For that is my sole endeavour. You are keeping me from it—let us go back into the other room and pursue an answer to your question together.”

“By diverting your attention from those crucibles—for a few hours—you could gain a clearer understanding of, and a more profound gratitude for, what Providence has given you.” Devising that sentence had required intense concentration on Daniel’s part—he was gratified when it seemed to at least confuse Isaac.

“If there are some data I have overlooked, by all means edify me,” Isaac said.

“Recall the Fellowship competition of several years ago. You’d been busy doing the work God put you here to do—instead of the work that Trinity College expected of you—consequently, your prospects seemed bleak—wouldn’t you agree?”

“I have always placed my faith in—”

“In God, of course. But don’t tell me you weren’t worried you’d be sent packing, and live out your days as a gentleman farmer in Woolsthorpe. There were other candidates. Men who’d curried favor in the right places, and memorized all of the medieval claptrap we were expected to know. Do you remember, Isaac, what became of your competitors?”

“One went insane,” Isaac recited like a bored scholar. “One passed out in a field from too much drink, caught a fever, and died. One fell down stairs drunk and had to withdraw because of injuries suffered. The fourth—” Here Isaac faltered, which was a rare event for him. Daniel seized the moment by stepping closer and adopting a curious and innocent look.

Isaac looked away and said, “The fourth one also fell down stairs drunk and had to withdraw! Now, Daniel, if you’re trying to say that this was incredibly improbable, and fortunate for me, I have already given you my answer: Providence.”

“But in what form did Providence exert itself? Some mysterious action at a distance? Or the earthly mechanics of colliding bodies?”

“Now you have quite lost me.”

“Do you believe that God stretched out a finger from Heaven, and knocked those two down the staircase? Or did he put someone on Earth who arranged for these things to happen?”

“Daniel—surely you didn’t—”

Daniel laughed. “Push them down stairs? No. But I think I know who did. You have the wherewithal to work, Isaac, because of certain Powers that Be—which is not to say that Providence isn’t working through them. But what it all means is that you must, from time to time, pause in your labors, and spend a few hours maintaining friendly relations with those Powers.”

Isaac had been pacing around the chamber during this lecture, and looking generally skeptical. More than one time he opened his mouth to make some objection. But at about the time Daniel finished, Isaac seemed to notice something. Daniel thought it was one of many papers and note-books scattered upon a certain table. Whatever it might have been, the sight of it caused Isaac to reconsider. Isaac’s face slackened, as if the internal flame were being banked. He began stripping off his smock. “Very well,” he said, “please inform the others.”

The others had already squeezed the rag out into a glass retort and were trying to distill from it whatever generative spirit they supposed must be exuded from a woman’s womb. Roger Comstock and the other minions looked crestfallen to learn that Professor Newton would be leaving them, but Locke and Boyle and LeFebure took it in stride. Newton made himself presentable very quickly—this being why academics loved robes, and fops loathed them. A contingent of five Royal Society members—Boyle, Locke, LeFebure, Waterhouse, and Newton—set out across the Great Court of Trinity College. All were in long black robes and mortarboards save Newton, who led the way, a cardinal pursued by a flock of crows, a vivid red mark on the Trinity green.

“I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS PLAY,” Locke said, “but I have seen one or two from which the story and characters of this one were…uh…”

Newton: “Stolen.”

Boyle: “Inspired.”

LeFebure: “Appropriated.”

Locke: “Adapted, and so I can inform you that a ship has run aground in a storm, near a castle, the seat of a foppish courtier probably named something like Percival Kidney or Reginald Mumblesleeve—”

“Francis Buggermy, according to the Playbill,” Daniel put in. Isaac turned around and glared at him.

“So much the better,” Locke said. “But of course the fop’s in London, never comes to the country—so a Vagabond named Roger Thrust or Judd Vault or—”

“Tom Runagate.”

“And his mistress, Madeline Cherry or—”

“Miss Straddle, in this case.”

“Are squatting there. Now, seeing a group of castaways from the ship coming ashore, these two Vagabonds dress up in the fop’s clothing and impersonate Francis Buggermy and his mistress-of-the-moment—much to the surprise of a withered Puritan Bible-pounder who comes upon the scene—”

“The Reverend Yahweh Pucker,” Daniel said.

“The rest we can see for ourselves—”

“Why’s that old fellow all charred black?” Boyle demanded, catching sight of a performer up on the stage.

“He’s a Neeger slave,” Daniel said.

“Which reminds me,” Locke put in, “I need to send a message to my broker—time to sell my stock in the Guinea Company, I fear—”

“No, no!” Boyle said, “I mean black as in charred, burnt, with smoke coming out of his hair!”

“No such thing was in the version I saw,” Locke said.

“Oh…in an earlier scene, there was a hilarious misadventure, having to do with a keg of gunpowder,” Daniel volunteered.

“Er…was this comedy written recently?”

“Since the…um…events?”

“One can only assume,” Daniel said.

Significant chin-stroking and hemming now among the various R.S. Fellows (save Newton), who glanced up towards the Earl of Epsom as they made their way to their seats.

LYDIA: Is this walking, or swimming?

VAN UND: Fine muck—fine hurricanoe—throw up a dike there, and a windmill yonder, and I’ll be able to join it to my estates in Flanders.

LYDIA: But it isn’t yours.

VAN UND: Easily remedied—what’s the name of the place?

LYDIA: That pretty boatswain said we were just off a place called Suckmire.

VAN UND: Don’t pine for him, Lydia—yonder Castle’s sure to house some Persons of Quality—why, I spy some now! Halloo!

TOM RUNAGATE: You see, Miss Straddle, they’ve already marked us as Courtiers. A few stolen rags are as good as Title and Pedigree.

MISS STRADDLE: Aye, Tom, true enough when we’re barely within bowshot—but what’s to come later?

TOM (peering through spyglass): What is to come? I have spied one candidate—

STRADDLE: That lass has breeding, my wayward Tom—she’ll scorn you as a Vagabond, when she hears your voice—

TOM: I can do a fine accent well as any Lord.

STRADDLE:—and observes your uncouth manners.

TOM: Don’t you know that bad manners are high fashion now?

STRADDLE: Stab me!

TOM: ’Tis truth! These fine people insult one another all day long—’tis called wit! Then they poke at one another with swords, and call it honor.

STRADDLE: Then ’tween Wit and Honor, the treasure on that wrack is as good as ours.

VAN UND: Halloo, there, sir! Throw us a line, we are sinking into your garden!

TOM: This one must be daft, he mistakes yonder mud-flat for a garden!

STRADDLE: Daft, or Delft.

TOM: You think he’s Dutch!? Then I might levy a rope-climbing toll…

STRADDLE: What’ll his daughter think of you then?

TOM: ’Tis well considered…

Throws rope.

LORD BRIMSTONE: Who’s that Frenchman on the sea-wall? Has England been conquered? Heaven help us!

LADY B: He is no Frenchman, my lord, but a good English gentleman in modern attire—most likely it is Count Suckmire, and that lady is his latest courtesan.

LORD B: You don’t say!

To Miss Straddle. Good day, madam—I’m informed that you are a Cartesian—here stands another!

STRADDLE: What’s he on about?

TOM: Never mind—remember what I told you.

LORD B: Cogito, ergo sum!

STRADDLE: Air go some? Yes, the air goes some when you flap your jaw, sir—I thought it was a sea-breeze, until I smelled it.

To Tom. Is that the sort of thing?

TOM: Well played, my flower.

LADY B: That whore is most uncivil.

LORD B: NO need to be vulgar, my dear—it means she recognizes us as her equals.

ENTER, from opposite, the Rev. Yahweh Pucker, with

BIBLE and SHOVEL.

PUCKER: Here’s proof the Lord works in mysterious ways—I came expecting to find a ship-wrack, and drownded bodies in need of burying—which service I am ever willing to perform, for a small contribution—group rates available—instead, it is a courtly scene. St. James’s Park on a sunny May morn ne’er was so.

TOM: Between the Dutch mercer, and the English lord, there must be treasure aplenty on that wrack—if you can divert them in the Castle, I’ll get word to our merry friends—they can steal the longboat these rowed in on, and go fetch the goods.

STRADDLE: Whilst you salvage the Dutch girl’s maidenhead?

TOM: Lost at sea already, I fear.

Now THERE WAS A CHANGE of scene to the interior of Castle Suck-mire. As things were being re-arranged upon the stage, Oldenburg leaned close and said, “Is that him, then?”

“Yes, that’s Isaac Newton.”

“Well done—more than one Anglesey will be pleased—how did you flush him into the open?”

“I am not entirely sure.”

“What of the tangents paper?”

“One thing at a time, please, sir…”

“I cannot understand his reticence!”

“He’s only published one thing in his life—”

“The colors paper!? That was two years ago!”

“For you, two years of interminable waiting—for Isaac, two years of siege warfare—fending off Hooke on one front, Jesuits on the other.”

“Perhaps if you would only relate to him how you have passed the last two months—”

Daniel managed not to laugh in Oldenburg’s face.

UP ON THE STAGE IN Neville’s Court, the plot was thickening, or, depending on how you liked your plots, expanding into a froth. Miss Straddle, played by Tess, was flirting with Eugene Stopcock, an infantry officer, who had rushed in from London to rescue his shipwrecked parents. Tom Runagate had already been to bed at least once with Lydia van Underdevater. The courtier Francis Bug-germy had showed up incognito and begun chasing the slave Nzinga around in hopes of verifying certain rumors about the size of African men.

Isaac Newton was pinching the high bridge of his nose and looking mildly nauseated. Oldenburg was glaring at Daniel, and several important personages were glaring from On High at Oldenburg.

The play was entering Act V. Soon it would come to an end, triggering a plan, laid by Oldenburg, in which Isaac was finally going to be introduced to the King, and to the Royal Society at large. If Isaac’s paper were not brought forth tonight, it never would be, and Isaac would be known only as an Alchemist who once invented a telescope. So Daniel excused himself and set out across Trinity’s courtyards one more time.

The lurkers in the Great Court had thinned out, or perhaps he simply was not paying so much attention to them—he had decided what to do, and that gave him liberty, for the first time in months, to tilt his head back and look up at the stars.

It had turned out that Hooke, with his telescope project, had had much more on his mind than countering the ravings of some pedantic Jesuit. Sitting in the dark hole of Gresham’s College, marking down the coordinates of various stars, he’d outlined the rudiments of a larger theory to Daniel: first that all cœlestial bodies attracted all others within their sphere of influence, by means of some gravitating power; second that all bodies put into motion moved forward in a straight line unless acted upon by some effectual power; third that the attractive power became more powerful as the body wrought upon came nearer to the center.

Oldenburg did not yet know the magnitude of Isaac’s powers. Not that Oldenburg was stupid—he was anything but. But Isaac, unlike, say, Leibniz the indefatigable letter-writer or Hooke the Royal Society stalwart, did not communicate his results, and did not appear to socialize with anyone save daft Alchemists. And so in Oldenburg’s mind, Newton was a clever though odd chap who’d written a paper about colors and then got into a fracas over it with Hooke. If Newton would only mingle with the Fellows a bit, Oldenburg seemed to believe, he would soon learn that Hooke had quite put colors out of his mind and moved on to matters such as Universal Gravitation, which of course would not interest young Mr. Newton in the slightest.

This entire plan was, in other words, an embryonic disaster. But it might not occur for another hundred years that most of the Royal Society, and a King with a passion for Natural Philosophy, would spend a night together in Cambridge, within shouting distance of the bed where Isaac slept and the table where he worked. Isaac had to be drawn out, and it had to happen tonight. If this would lead to open war with Hooke, so be it. Perhaps that was inevitable anyway, no matter what Daniel did in the next few minutes.

DANIEL WAS BACK in the chambers. Roger Comstock, left behind, Cinderella-like, to tidy up and tend the furnaces, had apparently gotten bored and sneaked off to an alehouse, because the candles had all been snuffed, leaving the big room lit only by the furnaces’ rosy glow. Here Daniel would’ve been at a stand, if not for the fact that he lived there, and could find his way round in the dark. He groped a candle out of a drawer and lit it from a furnace. Then he went into the room where he’d conversed with Isaac earlier. Rummaging through papers, trying to find the one about tangents—the first practical fruits of Isaac’s old work about fluxions—he was reminded that the sight of something on this table had rattled Isaac, and persuaded him to expose himself to the awful torment of watching a comedy. Daniel kept a sharp eye out, but saw nothing except for tedious alchemical notes and recipes, many signed not “Isaac Newton” but “Jeova Sanctus Unus,” which was the pseudonym Isaac used for Alchemy work.

In any case—without solving the eternal mystery of why Isaac did what he did—he spied the tangents paper on the far corner of the table, and stepped forward to reach for it.

The place was suffused with odd sounds, mostly the seething and hissing of diverse fuels burning in the furnaces, and the endless popping and ticking of the wooden wall panels. Another sound, faint and furtive, had reached Daniel’s ears from time to time, but that surly porter who bestrides the gate of the conscious mind, spurning most of what is brought in by the senses and admitting only perceptions of Import or Quality, had construed this as a mouse sapping and mining the wall, and shouldered it aside. Now, though, it did come to Daniel’s notice, for it grew louder: more rat than mouse. Isaac’s tangents paper was in his hand, but he stood still for a few moments, trying to work out where this rat was busy, so that he could come back in daylight and investigate. The sound was resonating in a partition separating this room from the big laboratory with the furnaces, which was not of regular shape, but had several pop-outs and alcoves, built, by men who’d long since passed away, for heaven only knew what reasons: perhaps to encase a chimney here, or add a bit of pantry space there. Daniel had a good idea of what lay on the opposite side of that wall that was making the grinding noises: it was a little sideboard, set into an alcove in the corner of the laboratory, probably used once by servants when that room had been a dining-hall. Nowadays, Isaac used the cabinets below it to store Alchemical supplies. The counter was stocked with mortars, pestles, &c. For certain of the things Isaac worked with had a marked yearning to burst into flame, and so he was at pains to store them in that particular alcove, as far as possible from the furnaces.

Daniel walked as quietly as he could back into the laboratory. He set the tangents paper down on a table and then picked up an iron bar that was lying next to a furnace door for use as a poker. There was more than one way to get rid of rats; but sometimes the best approach was the simplest, viz. ambush and bludgeon. He stalked down an aisle between furnaces, wiggling the poker in his hand. The alcove had been partitioned from the rest of the room by a free-standing screen such as ladies were wont to dress behind, consisting of fabric (now shabby) pleated and hung on a light wooden frame. This was to stop flying sparks, and to shield Isaac’s fragile scales and fine powders from gusts of wind coming through open windows or down chimneys.

He faltered, for the gnawing had stopped, as if the rat sensed the approach of a predator. But then it started up again, very loud, and Daniel strode forward, stretched one toe out ahead of him, and kicked the screen out of the way. His poker-hand was drawn back behind his head, poised to ring down a death-blow, and the candle was thrust out before him to find and dazzle the rat, which he guessed would be out on the counter.

Instead he found himself sharing a confined space with another man. Daniel was so astonished that he froze, and sprang several inches into the air, at the same instant, if such a combination were possible, and dropped the poker, and fumbled the candle. He had nearly shoved the flame right into the face of this other chap: Roger Comstock. Roger had been working in the dark with a mortar and pestle and so the sudden appearance of this flame in his face not only startled him half out of his wits, but blinded him as well. And on the heels of those emotions came terror. He dropped what he had been working on: a mortar, containing some dark gray powder, which he had been pouring into a cloth bag at the instant Daniel surprised him. Indeed drop did not do justice to Roger’s treatment of these two items; gravity was not nearly quick enough. He thrust them away, and at the same time flung himself backwards.

Daniel watched the flame of his candle grow to the size of a bull’s head, enveloping his hand and arm as far as the elbow. He dropped it. The floor was carpeted with flame that leapt up in a great FOOM and disappeared, leaving the place perfectly dark. Not that all flames had gone, for Daniel could still hear them crackling; the darkness was because of dense smoke filling the whole room. Daniel inhaled some and wished he hadn’t. This was gunpowder that Roger had been playing with.

Roger was out of the house in five heartbeats, notwithstanding that he did it on his hands and knees. Daniel crawled out after him and stood outside the door long enough to purge his lungs with several deep draughts of fresh air.

Roger had already scuttled across the garden and banged out the gate. Daniel went over to pull it closed, looking out first into the way. Some yards down, a couple of porters, shadowed under the vault of the Great Gate, regarded him with only moderate curiosity. It was expected that strange lights and noises would emanate from the residence of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. For shadowy figures to flee the building with smoke coming out of their clothes was only a little remarkable. Failing to close the garden gate was an egregious lapse; but Daniel saw to it.

Then, holding his breath, he ventured back in. He found the windows by grope and hauled them open. The flames had caught and spread in the fabric of the toppled screen, but gone no farther, owing to that Isaac suffered very little that was combustible to abide in the furnace-room. Daniel stomped out a few glowing edges.

In a more genteel setting, the smoke would have been accounted as a kind of damage to all the contents of the room that had been darkened and made noisome by it; but in a place such as this, it was nothing.

What had occurred was not an explosion—for the gunpowder, fortunately, had not been confined—but a very rapid burning. The screen was wrecked. The cabinetry in the alcove was blackened. A scale had been blown off the counter and was probably ruined. The mortar that Roger had dropped lay in fat shards at the epicenter of the black burst, making Daniel think of the cannon that had exploded at the “Siege of Maestricht,” and other such disasters he had heard about lately aboard ships of the Royal Navy. Surrounding it were burnt scraps of linen—the bag into which Roger had been decocting the gunpowder when Daniel had set fire to it. It was, in other words, the least possible amount of devastation that could possibly result from deflagration of a sack of gunpowder inside the house. That said, this corner of the laboratory was a shambles, and would have to be cleaned up—a task that would fall to Roger anyway. Unless, as seemed likely, Isaac fired him.

One would think that being blown up would throw one’s evening’s schedule all awry. But all of this had passed very quickly, and there was no reason Daniel could not accomplish the errand that had brought him here. Indeed, the grave problems that had so burdened him on his walk over here were quite forgotten now, and would appear to be perfectly trivial seen against the stunning adventure of the last few minutes. His hand and, to a lesser degree, his face, were raw and red from flash-burns, and he suspected he might have to do without eyebrows for a few weeks. A quick change of robes and a wash were very much in order; no difficulty, as he lived upstairs.

But having done those, Daniel picked up the tangents paper, shook off the black grit that re-punctuated it, and headed out the door. This was no more than a tenth of everything Isaac had accomplished with fluxions, but it was at least a shred of evidence—better than nothing—and sufficient to keep most Fellows of the Royal Society in bed with headaches for weeks. The night overhead was clear, the view excellent, the mysteries of the Universe all spread out above Trinity College. But Daniel lowered his sights and plodded toward the cone of steamy light where everyone was waiting.

London Bridge

1673

Once the characteristic numbers of most notions are determined, the human race will have a new kind of tool, a tool that will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses helped our eyes, a tool that will be as far superior to microscopes or telescopes as reason is to vision.

—LEIBNIZ, Philosophical Essays, TRANS. BY ARLEW AND GARBER

NEAR THE MIDPOINT of London Bridge, a bit closer to the City than to Southwark, was a firebreak—a short gap in the row of buildings, like a missing tooth in a crowded jawbone. If you were drifting down-river in a boat, so that you could see all nineteen of the squat piers that held the bridge up, and all twenty of the ragstone arches and wooden drawbridges that let the water through, you’d be able to see that this open space—“the square,” it was called—stood directly above an arch that was wider than any of the others—thirty-four feet, at its widest.

As you drew closer to the bridge, and it became more and more obvious that your life was in extreme danger, and your mind, therefore, became focused on practical matters, you’d notice something even more important, namely that the sluice between the starlings—the snowshoe-like platforms of rubble that served as footings for the piers—was also wider, in this place, than anywhere else on the bridge. Consequently the passage through it looked less like a boiling cataract than a river rushing down from mountains during the spring thaw. If you still had the ability to steer for it, you would. And if you were a passenger on this hypothetical boat, and you valued your life, you’d insist that the waterman tie up for a moment at the tip of the starling and let you out, so that you could pick your way over that jammed horde of more or less ancient piles and the in-fill of mucky rubble; take a stair up to the level of the roadway; run across the Square, not forgetting to dodge the carts rushing both ways; descend another stair to the other end of the starling; and then hop, skid, and stagger across it until you reached the end, where your waterman would be waiting to pick you up again if indeed his boat, and he, still existed.

This accounted, anyway, for much that was peculiar about the part of London Bridge called the Square. Persons who went east and west on watermen’s boats on the Thames tended to be richer and more important than those who went north and south across the Bridge, and the ones who actually cared enough about their lives, limbs, and estates to bother with climbing out and hiking over the starling tended to be richer and more important yet, and so the buildings that stood atop the Bridge to either side of the Square constituted location! location! location! to the better sort of retailers and publicans.

Daniel Waterhouse spent a couple of hours loitering in the vicinity of the Square one morning, waiting for a certain man on a certain boat. However, the boat he waited for would be coming the other direction: working its way upstream from the sea.

He took a seat in a coffee-house and amused himself watching flushed and sweaty ferry-passengers appear at the head of the stairs, as if they’d been spontaneously generated from the fœtid waters of the Thames. They’d crawl into the nearby tavern for a pint, fortifying themselves for the traversal of the Bridge’s twelve-foot-wide roadway, where passengers were crushed between carts a few times a week. If they survived that, then they’d pop into the glover’s or the haberdasher’s for a bit of recreational shopping, and then perhaps dart into this coffee-house for a quick mug of java. The remainder of London Bridge was getting down at the heels, because much more fashionable shops were being put up in other parts of the city by the likes of Sterling, but the Square was prosperous and, because of the continual threat of boat-wrack and drowning, the merriest part of town.

And in these days it tended to be crowded, especially when ships came across the Channel, and dropped anchor in the Pool, and their Continental passengers were ferried hither in watermen’s boats.

As one such boat drew near the Bridge, Daniel finished his coffee, settled his bill, and ventured out onto the street. Cartage and drayage had been baffled by a crowd of pedestrians. They all wanted to descend to the starling on the downstream side, and had formed a sort of bung that stopped not only the stairs but the street as well. Seeing that they were by and large City men, intent on some serious purpose, and not Vagabonds intent on his purse, Daniel insinuated himself into this crowd and was presently drawn in to the top of the stairs and flushed down to the top of the starling along with the rest. He supposed at first that all of these well-dressed men had come to greet specific passengers. But as the boat drew within earshot, they began to shout, not friendly greetings, but questions, in several languages, about the war.

“As a fellow Protestant—albeit Lutheran—it is my hoping that England and Holland shall become reconciled and that the war you speak of will no more exist.”

The young German was standing up in a boat, wearing French fashions. But as the boat drew closer to the turbulence downstream of the Bridge, he came to his senses, and sat down.

“So much for hopes—now what of your observations, sir?” someone fired back—one of a few dozen who had by now crowded onto the starling, trying to get as close to the incoming boats and ferries as they could without falling into the deadly chute. Others were perched up on the edge of the Square, like gargoyles, still others were out on the river in boats plotting intercept courses, like bocaneers in the Caribbean. None of them was having any of this Lutheran diplomacy. None even knew who the young German was—just a passenger on a boat from abroad who was willing to talk. There were several other travelers on the same boat, but all of them ignored the shouting Londoners. If these had information, they would take it to the ’Change, and tell the tale with silver, and propagate it through the chthonic channels of the Market.

“What ship were you on, sir?” someone bellowed.

“Ste-Catherine, sir.”

“Where did that ship come from, sir?”

“Calais.”

“Had you any conversation with Naval persons?”

“A little, perhaps.”

“Any news, or rumor, of cannons bursting on English ships?”

“Oh, sometimes it happens. By everyone in the ships of the melee, it is seen, for the whole side of the hull is out-blown, and out the bodies fly, or so they say. To all of the sailors, friend and enemy, it is a lesson of mortality, perhaps. Consequently they all talk about it. But in the present war it happens no more than usual, I think.”

“Were they Comstock cannons?”

The German took a moment to understand that, without even having set foot on English soil yet, he had talked himself into deep trouble. “Sir! The cannons of my lord Epsom are reckoned the finest in the world.”

But no one wanted to hear that kind of talk. The topic had changed.

“Whence came you to Calais?”

“Paris.”

“Did you see troops moving on your journey across France?”

“A few ones, exhausted, south-going.”

The gentlemen on the starling hummed and vibrated for a few moments, assimilating this. One broke away from the crowd, toiling back towards the stairs, and was engulfed in barefoot boys jumping up and down. He scribbled something on a bit of paper and handed it to the one who jumped highest. This one spun, forced a path through the others, took the stairs four at a time, broke loose onto the Square, vaulted over a wagon, spun a fishwife, and then began to build speed up the bridge. From here to the London shore was a hundred and some yards, from there to the ’Change was six hundred—he’d be there in three minutes. Meanwhile the interrogation continued: “Did you see Ships of Force in the Channel, mein Herr? English, French, Dutch?”

“There was—” and here the man’s English gave way. He made a helpless, encompassing gesture.

“Fog!”

“Fog,” he repeated.

“Did you hear guns?”

“A few—but very likely they were only signals. Coded data speeding through the fog, so opaque to light, but so transparent to sound—” and here he lost control of his intellectual sphincters and began to think out loud in French, fortified with Latin, working out a system for sending encrypted data from place to place using explosions, building on ideas from Wilkins’s Cryptonomicon but marrying them to a practical plan that, in its lavish expenditure of gunpowder, would be sure to please John Comstock. In other words, he identified himself (to Daniel anyway) as Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The watchers lost interest and began aiming their questions at another boat.

Leibniz set foot on England. He was closely followed by a couple of other German gentlemen, somewhat older, much less talkative, and (Daniel could only suppose) more important. They in turn were pursued by a senior servant who headed up a short column of porters lugging boxes and bags. But Leibniz had burdened himself with a wooden box he would not let go of. Daniel stepped forward to greet them, but was cut off by some brusque fellow who shouldered in to hand a sealed letter to one of the older gentlemen, and whispered to him for a moment in Low-Dutch.

Daniel straightened up in annoyance. As luck would have it, he looked toward the London shore. His eye lingered on a quay just downstream of the Bridge: a jumbled avalanche of blackened rubble left over from the Fire. It could have been rebuilt years ago, but hadn’t, because it had been judged more important to rebuild other things first. A few men were doing work of a highly intellectual nature, stretching lines about and drawing sketches. One of them—incredibly—just happened to be Robert Hooke, City Surveyor, whom Daniel had quietly abandoned at Gresham’s College an hour ago. Not so incredibly (given that he was Hooke), he’d noticed Daniel standing there on the starling in the middle of the river, greeting what was quite obviously a foreign delegation, and was therefore glaring and brooding.

Leibniz and the others discussed matters in High-Dutch. The interloper turned round to glance at Daniel. It was one of the Dutch Ambassador’s errand-boys-cum-spies. The Germans formed some sort of a plan, and it seemed to involve splitting up. Daniel stepped in and introduced himself.

The other Germans were introduced by their names but what mattered was their ancestry: one of them was the nephew of the Archbishop of Mainz, the other the son of Baron von Boineburg, who was the same Archbishop’s Minister. In other words very important people in Mainz, hence rather important ones in the Holy Roman Empire, which was more or less neutral in the French/English/Dutch broil. It had all the signs of being some sort of peace-brokering mission, i.e.

Leibniz knew who he was, and asked, “Is Wilkins still alive?”

“Yes…”

“Thank God!”

“Though very ill. If you would like to visit him I would suggest doing it now. I’ll escort you gladly, Dr. Leibniz…may I have the honor of assisting you with that box?”

“You are very civil,” Leibniz said, “but I’ll hold it.”

“If it contains gold or jewelry, you’d best hold it tight.”

“Are the streets of London not safe?”

“Let us say that the Justices of the Peace are mostly concerned with Dissenters and Dutchmen, and our cutpurses have not been slow to adapt.”

“What this contains is infinitely more valuable than gold,” Leibniz said, beginning to mount the stairs, “and yet it cannot be stolen.”

Daniel lunged forward in an effort to keep step. Leibniz was slender, of average height, and tended to bend forward when he walked, the head anticipating the feet. Once he had reached the level of the roadway he turned sharply and strode towards the City of London, ignoring the various taverns and shops.

He did not look like a monster.

According to Oldenburg, the Parisians who frequented the Salon at the Hotel Montmor—the closest French equivalent to the Royal Society of London—had begun using the Latin word monstro to denote Leibniz. This from men who’d personally known Descartes and Fermat and who considered exaggeration an unspeakably vulgar habit. It had led to some etymological researches among some members of the R.S. Did they mean Leibniz was grotesquely misshapen? An unnatural hybrid of a man and something else? A divine warning?

“He lives up this way, does he not?”

“The Bishop has had to move because of his illness—he’s at his stepdaughter’s house in Chancery Lane.”

“Then still we go this way—then left.”

“You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?”

“I have been studying London-paintings.”

“I’m afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire—like street-plans of Atlantis.”

“And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way,” Leibniz said. “Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle—all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe—for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient.”

Daniel decided to step back and let Leibniz’s words reverberate, as organ-chords must do in Lutheran churches. Meanwhile they reached the north end of the Bridge, where the racket of the water-wheels, confined and focused in the stone vault of the gatehouse, made conversation impossible. Not until they’d made it out onto dry land, and begun to ascend the Fish Street hill, did Daniel ask, “I note you’ve already been in communication with the Dutch Ambassador. May I assume that your mission is not entirely natural-philosophick in nature?”

“A rational question—in a way,” Leibniz grumbled. “We are about the same age, you and I?” he asked, giving Daniel a quick inspection. His eyes were unsettling. Depending on what kind of monster he was, either beady, or penetrating.

“I am twenty-six.”

“So am I. We were born about sixteen forty-six. The Swedes took Prague that year, and invaded Bavaria. The Inquisition was burning Jews in Mexico. Similar terrible things were happening in England, I assume?”

“Cromwell crushed the King’s army at Newark—chased him out of the country—John Comstock was wounded—”

“And we are speaking only of kings and noblemen. Imagine the sufferings of common people and Vagabonds, who possess equal stature in God’s eyes. And yet you ask me whether my mission is philosophick or diplomatic, as if those two things can neatly be separated.”

“Rude and stupid I know, but it is my duty to make conversation. You are saying that it should be the goal of all natural philosophers to restore peace and harmony to the world of men. This I cannot dispute.”

Leibniz now softened. “Our goal is to prevent the Dutch war from growing into a general conflagration. Please do not be offended by my frankness now: the Archbishop and the Baron are followers of the Royal Society—as am I. They are Alchemists—which I am not, except when it is politic. They hope that through pursuit of Natural Philosophy I may make contacts with important figures in this country, whom it would normally be difficult to reach through diplomatic channels.”

“Ten years ago I might have been offended,” Daniel said. “Now, there’s nothing I’ll not believe.”

“But my interest in meeting the Lord Bishop of Chester is as pure as any human motive can be.”

“He will sense that, and be cheered by it,” Daniel said. “The last few years of Wilkins’s life have been sacrified entirely to politics—he has been working to dismantle the framework of theocracy, to prevent its resurgence, in the event a Papist ascends to the throne—”

“Or already has done so,” Leibniz said immediately.

The offhanded way in which Leibniz suggested that King Charles II might be a crypto-Catholic hinted to Daniel that it was common knowledge on the Continent. This made him feel hopelessly dull, naïve, and provincial. He had suspected the King of many crimes and deceptions, but never of baldly lying about his religion to the entire Realm.

He had plenty of time to conceal his annoyance as they were passing through the heart of the city, which had turned into a single vast and eternal building-site even as the normal business of the ‘Change and the goldsmiths’ shops continued. Paving-stones were whizzing between Daniel and the Doctor like cannonballs, shovels slicing the air around their heads like cutlasses, barrows laden with gold and silver and bricks and mud trundling like munition-carts over temporary walk-ways of planks and stomped dirt.

Perhaps reading anxiety on Daniel’s face, Leibniz said, “Just like the Rue Vivienne in Paris,” with a casual hand-wave. “I go there frequently to read certain manuscripts in the Bibliothèque du Roi.”

“I’ve been told that a copy of every book printed in France must be sent to that place.”

“Yes.”

“But it was established in the same year that we had our Fire—so I ween that it must be very small yet, as it’s had only a few years to grow.”

“A few very good years in mathematics, sir. And it also contains certain unpublished manuscripts of Descartes and Pascal.”

“But none of the classics?”

“I had the good fortune to be raised, or to raise myself, in my father’s library, which contained all of them.”

“Your father was mathematickally inclined?”

“Difficult to say. As a traveler comprehends a city only by viewing pictures of it drawn from differing standpoints, I know my father only by having read the books that he read.”

“I understand the similitude now, Doctor. The Bibliothèque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God’s understanding of the world.”

“And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.”

“But with all due respect, Doctor, I do not understand how this street could be anything less like the Rue Vivienne—we have no such Bibliothèque in England.”

“The Bibliothèque du Roi is just a house, you see, a house Colbert happened to buy on the Rue Vivienne—probably as an investment, because that street is the center of goldsmiths. Every ten days, from ten in the morning until noon, all of the merchants of Paris send their money to the Rue Vivienne to be counted. I sit there in Colbert’s house trying to understand Descartes, working the mathematical proofs that Huygens, my tutor, gives me, and looking out the windows as the street fills up with porters staggering under their back-loads of gold and silver, converging on a few doorways. Are you beginning to understand my riddle now?”

“Which riddle was that?”

“This box! I said it contained something infinitely more valuable than gold, and yet it could not be stolen. Which way do we turn here?”

For they’d come out into the hurricane where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Poultry, and Lombard all collided. Message-boys were flying across that intersection like quarrels from crossbows—or (Daniel suspected) like broad Hints that he was failing to Get.

LONDON CONTAINED A HUNDRED LORDS, bishops, preachers, scholars, and gentlemen-philosophers who would gladly have provided Wilkins with a comfortable sick-bed, but he had ended up in his stepdaughter’s home in Chancery Lane, actually rather close to where the Waterhouses lived. The entrance to the place, and the street in front, were choked with sweating courtiers—not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done.[*] They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone. The house was an old one (the Fire had stopped a few yards short of it). It was one of those slump-shouldered, thatch-roofed, half-timbered Canterbury Tales productions, completely outmoded by the gleaming coach and the whip-thin rapiers.

“You see—despite the purity of your motives, you’re immersed in politics already,” Daniel said. “The lady of the house is Cromwell’s niece.”

“What!? The Cromwell?”

“The same whose skull gazes down on Westminster from the end of a stick. Now, the owner of that excellent coach is Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone—his father founded a sect called the Barkers, normally lumped in with many others under the pejorative term of Puritans. The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however—for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”

“But the gentlemen in front are dressed like courtiers! Are they getting ready to siege the Puritan-house?”

“They are Bolstrood’s hangers-on. You see, Count Penistone is His Majesty’s Secretary of State.”

“I had heard that King Charles the Second made a Phanatique his Secretary of State, but could not believe it.”

“Consider it—could Barkers exist in any other country? Save Amsterdam, that is.”

“Naturally not!” Leibniz said, lightly offended by the very idea. “They would be extinguished.”

“Therefore, whether or not he feels any loyally toward the King, Knott Bolstrood has no choice but to stand for a free and independent England—and so, when Dissenters accuse the King of being too close to France, His Majesty need only point to Bolstrood as the living credential of his independent foreign policy.”

“But it’s all a farce!” Leibniz muttered. “All Paris knows England’s in France’s pocket.”

“All London knows it, too—the difference is that we have three dozen theatres here—Paris has only one of them—”

Leibniz’s turn, finally, to be baffled. “I don’t understand.”

“All I am saying is that we happen to enjoy farces.”

“Why is Bolstrood visiting the niece of Cromwell?”

“He’s probably visiting Wilkins.”

Leibniz stopped and considered matters. “Tempting. But the protocol is impossible. I cannot enter the house!”

“Of course you can—with me,” Daniel said. “Just follow.”

“But I must go back and fetch my companions—for I do not have the standing to disturb the Secretary of State—”

“I do,” Daniel said. “One of my earliest memories is of watching him destroy a pipe organ with a sledgehammer. Seeing me will give him a warm feeling.”

Leibniz stopped and looked aghast; Daniel could almost see, reflected in his eyes, the stained-glass windows and organ-pipes of some fine Lutheran church in Leipzig. “Why would he commit such an outrage!?”

“Because it was in an Anglican cathedral. He would have been about twenty—a high-spirited age.”

“Your family were followers of Cromwell?”

“It is more correct to say that Cromwell was a follower of my father—may God rest both of their souls.” But now they were in the midst of the courtier-mob, and it was too late for Leibniz to obey his instincts, and run away.

They spent several minutes pushing among progressively higher-ranking and better-dressed men, into the house and up the stairs, and finally entered a tiny low-ceilinged bedchamber. It smelled as if Wilkins had already died, but most of him still lived—he was propped up on pillows, with a board on his lap, and a fine-looking document on the board. Knott Bolstrood—forty-two years old—knelt next to the bed. He turned round to look as Daniel entered. During the ten years Knott had survived on the Common-Side of Newgate Prison, living in a dark place among murderers and lunaticks, he had developed a strong instinct for watching his back. It was as useful for a Secretary of State as it had been for a marauding Phanatique.

“Brother Daniel!”

“My lord.”

“You’ll do as well as anyone—better than most.”

“Do for what, sir?”

“Witnessing the Bishop’s signature.”

Bolstrood got a quill charged with ink. Daniel wrapped Wilkins’s puffy fingers around it. After a bit of heavy breathing on the part of its owner, the hand began to move, and a tangle of lines and curves began to take shape on the page, bearing the same relationship to Wilkins’s signature as a ghost to a man. It was a good thing, in other words, that several persons were on hand to verify it. Daniel had no idea what this document was. But from the way it was engrossed he could guess that it was meant for the eyes of the King.

Count Penistone was a man in a hurry, after that. But before he left he said to Daniel: “If you have any stock in the Duke of York’s Guinea Company, sell it—for that Popish slave-monger is going to reap the whirlwind.” Then, for maybe the second or third time in his life, Knott Bolstrood smiled.

“Show it to me, Dr. Leibniz,” Wilkins said, skipping over all of the formalities; he had not urinated in three days and so there was a certain urgency about everything.

Leibniz sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, and opened the box.

Daniel saw gears, cranks, shafts. He thought it might be a new sort of timepiece, but it had no dial and no hands—only a few wheels with numbers stamped on them.

“It owes much to Monsieur Pascal’s machine, of course,” Leibniz said, “but this one can multiply numbers as well as add and subtract them.”

“Make it work for me, Doctor.”

“I must confess to you that it is not finished yet.” Leibniz frowned, tilted the box toward the light, and blew into it sharply. A cockroach flew out and traced a flailing parabola to the floor and scurried under the bed. “This is just a demo’. But when it is finished, it will be magnifique.”

“Never mind,” Wilkins said. “It uses denary numbers?”

“Yes, like Pascal’s—but binary would work better—”

“You needn’t tell me,” Wilkins said, and then rambled for at least a quarter of an hour, quoting whole pages from relevant sections of the Cryptonomicon.

Leibniz finally cleared his throat and said, “There are mechanical reasons, too—with denary numbers, too many meshings of gears are necessary—friction and backlash play havoc.”

“Hooke! Hooke could build it,” Wilkins said. “But enough of machines. Let us speak of Pansophism. Tell me, now—have you met with success in Vienna?”

“I have written to the Emperor several times, describing the French king’s Bibliothèque du Roi—”

“Trying to incite his Envy—?”

“Yes—but in his hierarchy of vices, Sloth would appear to reign unchallenged by Envy or anything else. Have you met with success here, my lord?”

“Sir Elias Ashmole is starting a brave library—but he’s distracted and addled with Alchemy. I have had to attend to more fundamental matters—” Wilkins said, and gestured weakly toward the door through which Bolstrood had departed. “I believe that binary arithmetickal engines will be of enormous significance—Oldenburg, too, is most eager.”

“If I could carry your work forward, sir, I would consider myself privileged.”

“Now we are only being polite—I have no time. Waterhouse!”

Leibniz closed up his box. The Bishop of Chester watched the lid closing over the engine, and his eyelids almost closed at the same moment. But then he summoned up a bit more strength. Leibniz backed out of the way, and Daniel took his place.

“My Lord?”

It was all he could get out. Drake had been his father, but John Wilkins really was his lord in almost every sense of the word. His lord, his bishop, his minister, his professor.

“The responsibility now falls upon you to make it all happen.”

“My Lord? To make what happen?”

But Wilkins was either dead or asleep.

THEY STUMBLED THROUGH a small dark kitchen and out into the maze of yards and alleys behind Chancery Lane, where they drew the attention of diverse roosters and dogs. Pursued by their hue and cry, Mr. Waterhouse and Dr. Leibniz emerged into a district of theatres and coffee-houses. Any one of those coffee-houses would have sufficed, but they were close to Queen Street—another of Hooke’s paving-projects. Daniel had begun to feel like a flea under the Great Microscope. Hooke subtended about half of the cosmos, and made Daniel feel as if he were flitting from one place of refuge to another, even though he had nothing to hide. Leibniz was hale, and seemed to enjoy exploring a new city. Daniel got them turned back in the direction of the river. He was trying to make out what responsibility, specifically, had just been placed on his shoulders by Wilkins. He realized—after a quarter of an hour of being a very poor conversationalist—that Leibniz might have ideas on the subject.

“You said you wanted to carry Wilkins’s work forward, Doctor. Which of his projects were you referring to? Flying to the moon, or—”

“The Philosophical Language,” Leibniz said, as if this should have been obvious.

He knew that Daniel had been involved in that project, and seemed to take the question as a sign that Daniel wasn’t especially proud of it—which was true. Noting Leibniz’s respect for the project, Daniel felt a stab of misgivings that perhaps the Philosophical Language had some wonderful properties that he had been too stupid to notice.

“What more is there to be done with it?” Daniel asked. “You have some refinements—additions—? You wish to translate the work into German—? You’re shaking your head, Doctor—what is it, then?”

“I was trained as a lawyer. Don’t look so horrified, Mr. Waterhouse, it is respectable enough, for an educated man in Germany. You must remember that we don’t have a Royal Society. After I was awarded my Doctor of Jurisprudence, I went to work for the Archbishop of Mainz, who gave me the job of reforming the legal code—which was a Tower of Babel—Roman and Germanic and local common law all mangled together. I concluded that there was little point in jury-rigging something. What was needed was to break everything down into certain basic concepts and begin from first principles.”

“I can see how the Philosophical Language would be useful in breaking things down,” Daniel said, “but to build them back up, you would need something else—”

“Logic,” Leibniz said.

“Logic has a dismal reputation among the higher primates in the Royal Society—”

“Because they associate it with the Scholastic pedants who tormented them in university,” Leibniz said agreeably. “I’m not talking about that sort of thing! When I say logic, I mean Euclidean.”

“Begin with certain axioms and combine them according to definite rules—”

“Yes—and build up a system of laws that is as provable, and as internally consistent, as the theory of conic sections.”

“But you have recently moved to Paris, have you not?”

Leibniz nodded. “Part of the same project. For obvious reasons, I need to improve my knowledge of mathematics—what better place for it?” Then his face got a distracted, brooding look. “Actually there was another reason—the Archbishop sent me as an emissary, to tender a certain proposal to Louis XIV.”

“So today is not the first time you have combined Natural Philosophy with Diplomacy—”

“Nor the last, I fear.”

“What was the proposal you set before the King?”

“I only got as far as Colbert, actually. But it was that, instead of invading her neighbors, La France ought to make an expedition to Egypt, and establish an Empire there—creating a threat to the Turk’s left flank—Africa—and forcing him to move some armies away from his right flank—”

“Christendom.”

“Yes.” Leibniz sighed.

“It sounds—er—audacious,” Daniel said, now on a diplomatic mission of his own.

“By the time I’d arrived in Paris, and secured an appointment with Colbert, King Louis had already flung his invasion-force into Holland and Germany.”

“Ah, well—’twas a fine enough idea.”

“Perhaps some future monarch of France will revive it,” Leibniz said. “For the Dutch, the consequences were dire. For me, it was fortuitous—no longer straining at diplomatic gnats, I could go to Colbert’s house in the Rue Vivienne and grapple with philosophick giants.”

“I’ve given up trying to grapple with them,” Daniel sighed, “and now only dodge their steps.”

They rambled all the way down to the Strand and sat down in a coffee-house with south-facing windows. Daniel tilted the arith-metickal engine toward the sun and inspected its small gears. “Forgive me for asking, Doctor, but is this purely a conversation-starter, or—?”

“Perhaps you should go back and ask Wilkins.”

“Touché.”

Now some sipping of coffee.

“My Lord Chester spoke correctly—in a way—when he said that Hooke could build this,” Daniel said. “Only a few years ago, he was a creature of the Royal Society, and he would have. Now he’s a creature of London, and he has artisans build most of his watches. The only exceptions, perhaps, are the ones he makes for the King, the Duke of York, and the like.”

“If I can explain to Mr. Hooke the importance of this device, I’m confident he’ll undertake it.”

“You don’t understand Hooke,” Daniel said. “Because you are German, and because you have diverse foreign connections, Hooke will assume you are a part of the Grubendolian cabal—which in his mind looms so vast that a French invasion of Egypt would be only a corner of it.”

“Grubendol?” Leibniz said. Then, before Daniel could say it, he continued, “I see—it is an anagram for Oldenburg.”

Daniel ground his teeth for a while, remembering how long it had taken him to decipher the same anagram, then continued: “Hooke is convinced that Oldenburg is stealing his inventions—sending them overseas in encrypted letters. What is worse, he saw you disembarking at the Bridge, and being handed a letter by a known Dutchman. He’ll want to know what manner of Continental intrigues you’re mixed up in.”

“It’s not a secret that my patron is the Archbishop of Mainz,” Leibniz protested.

“But you said you were a Lutheran.”

“And I am—but one of the Archbishop’s objectives is to reconcile the two churches.”

“Here we say there are more than two,” Daniel reminded him.

“Is Hooke a religious man?”

“If you mean ‘does he go to church,’ then no,” Daniel admitted, after some hesitation. “But if you mean ‘does he believe in God’ then I should say yes—the Microscope and Telescope are his stained-glass windows, the animalcules in a drop of his semen, or the shadows on Saturn’s rings, are his heavenly Visions.”

“Is he like Spinoza, then?”

“You mean, one who says God is nothing more than Nature? I doubt it.”

“What does Hooke want?”

“He is busy all day and night designing new buildings, surveying new streets—”

“Yes, and I am busy overhauling the German legal code—but it is not what I want.”

“Mr. Hooke pursues various schemes and intrigues against Oldenburg—”

“But surely not because he wants to?”

“He writes papers, and lectures—”

Leibniz scoffed. “Not a tenth of what he knows is written down, is it?”

“You must keep in mind, about Hooke, that he is poorly understood, partly because of his crookedness and partly because of his difficult personal qualities. In a world where many still refuse to believe in the Copernican Hypothesis, some of Hooke’s more forward ideas would be considered grounds for imprisonment in Bedlam.”

Leibniz’s eyes narrowed. “Is it Alchemy, then?”

“Mr. Hooke despises Alchemy.”

“Good!” Leibniz blurted—most undiplomatically. Daniel covered a smile with his coffee-cup. Leibniz looked horrified, fearing that Daniel might be an Alchemist himself. Daniel put him at ease by quoting from Hooke: “‘Why should we endeavour to discover Mysteries in that which has no such thing in it? And like Rabbis find out Cabalism, and ænigmas in the Figure, and placing of Letters, where no such thing lies hid: whereas in natural forms…the more we magnify the object, the more excellencies and mysteries do appear; and the more we discover the imperfections of our senses, and the Omnipotency and Infinite perceptions of the great Creator.’”

“So Hooke believes that the secrets of the world are to be found in some microscopic process.”

“Yes—snowflakes, for example. If each snowflake is unique, then why are the six arms of a given snowflake the same?”

“If we assume that the arms grew outwards from the center, then there must be something in that center that imbues each of the six arms with the same organizing principle—just as all oak trees, and all lindens, share a common nature, and grow into the same general shape.”

“But to speak of some mysterious nature is to be like the Scholastics—Aristotle dressed up in a doublet,” Daniel said.

“Or in an Alchemist’s robe—” Leibniz returned.

“Agreed. Newton would argue—”

“That fellow who invented the telescope?”

“Yes. He would argue that if you could catch a snowflake, melt it, and distill its water, you could extract some essence that would be the embodiment of its nature in the physical world, and account for its shape.”

“Yes—that is a good distillation, as it were, of the Alchemists’ mental habit—which is to believe that anything we cannot understand must have some physical residue that can in principle be refined from coarse matter.”

“Mr. Hooke, by contrast, is convinced that Nature’s ways are consonant to man’s reason. As the beating of a fly’s wings is consonant to the vibration of a plucked string, so that the sound of one, produces a sympathetic resonance in the other—in the same way, every phenomenon in the world can, in principle, be understood by human ratiocination.”

Leibniz said, “And so with a sufficiently powerful microscope, Hooke might peer into the core of a snowflake at the moment of its creation and see its internal parts meshing, like gears of a watch made by God.”

“Just so, sir.”

“And this is what Hooke wants?”

“It is the implicit goal of all his researches—it is what he must believe and must look for, because that is the nature of Hooke.”

“Now you are talking like an Aristotelian,” Leibniz jested.

Then he reached across the table and put his hand on the box, and said something that was apparently quite serious. “What a watch is to time, this engine is to thought.”

“Sir! You show me a few gears that add and multiply numbers—well enough. But this is not the same as thought!”

“What is a number, Mr. Waterhouse?”

Daniel groaned. “How can you ask such questions?”

“How can you not ask them, sir? You are a philosopher, are you not?”

“A Natural Philosopher.”

“Then you must agree that in the modern world, mathematicks is at the heart of Natural Philosophy—it is like the mysterious essence in the core of the snowflake. When I was fifteen years old, Mr. Waterhouse, I was wandering in the Rosenthal—which is a garden on the edge of Leipzig—when I decided that in order to be a Natural Philosopher I would have to put aside the old doctrine of substantial forms and instead rely upon Mechanism to explain the world. This led me inevitably to mathematicks.”

“When I was fifteen, I was handing out Phanatiqual libels just down the street from here, and dodging the Watch—but in time, Doctor, as Newton and I studied Descartes at Cambridge, I came to share your view concerning the supreme position of mathematics.”

“Then I repeat my question: What is a number? And what is it to multiply two numbers?”

“Whatever it is, Doctor, it is different from thinking.”

“Bacon said, ‘Whatever has sufficient differences, perceptible by the sense, is in nature competent to express cogitations.’ You cannot deny that numbers are in that sense competent—”

“To express cogitation, yes! But to express cogitations is not to perform them, or else quills and printing-presses would write poetry by themselves.”

“Can your mind manipulate this spoon directly?” Leibniz said, holding up a silver spoon, and then setting it down on the table between them.

“Not without my hands.”

“So, when you think about the spoon, is your mind manipulating the spoon?”

“No. The spoon is unaffected, no matter what I think about it.”

“Because our minds cannot manipulate physical objects—cup, saucer, spoon—instead they manipulate symbols of them, which are stored in the mind.”

“I will accept that.”

“Now, you yourself helped Lord Chester devise the Philosophical Language, whose chief virtue is that it assigns all things in the world positions in certain tables—positions that can be encoded by numbers.”

“Again, I agree that numbers can express cogitations, through a sort of encryption. But performing cogitations is another matter entirely!”

“Why? We add, subtract, and multiply numbers.”

“Suppose the number three represents a chicken, and the number twelve the Rings of Saturn—what then is three times twelve?”

“Well, you can’t just do it at random,” Leibniz said, “any more than Euclid could draw lines and circles at random, and come up with theorems. There has to be a formal system of rules, according to which the numbers are combined.”

“And you propose building a machine to do this?”

“Pourquoi non? With the aid of a machine, truth can be grasped as if pictured on paper.”

“But it is still not thinking. Thinking is what angels do—it is a property given to Man by God.”

“How do you suppose God gives it to us?”

“I do not pretend to know, sir!”

“If you take a man’s brain and distill him, can you extract a mysterious essence—the divine presence of God on Earth?”

“That is called the Philosophick Mercury by Alchemists.”

“Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man’s brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?”

Daniel said nothing. Leibniz had imploded his skull. The gears were jammed, the Philosophick Mercury dribbling out his ear-holes.

“You’ve already sided with Hooke, and against Newton, concerning snowflakes—so may I assume you take the same position concerning brains?” Leibniz continued, now with exaggerated politeness.

Daniel spent a while staring out the window at a point far away. Eventually his awareness came back into the coffee-house. He glanced, a bit furtively, at the arithmetical engine. “There is a place in Micrographia where Hooke describes the way flies swarm around meat, butterflies around flowers, gnats around water—giving the semblance of rational behavior. But he thinks it is all because of internal mechanisms triggered by the peculiar vapors arising from meat, flowers, et cetera. In other words, he thinks that these creatures are no more rational than a trap, where an animal seizing a piece of bait pulls a string that fires a gun. A savage watching the trap kill the animal might suppose it to be rational. But the trap is not rational—the man who contrived the trap is. Now, if you—the ingenious Dr. Leibniz—contrive a machine that gives the impression of thinking—is it really thinking, or merely reflecting your genius?”

“You could as well have asked: are we thinking? Or merely reflecting God’s genius?”

“Suppose I had asked it, Doctor—what would your answer be?”

“My answer, sir, is both.”

“Both? But that’s impossible. It has to be one or the other.”

“I do not agree with you, Mr. Waterhouse.”

“If we are mere mechanisms, obeying rules laid down by God, then all of our actions are predestined, and we are not really thinking.”

“But Mr. Waterhouse, you were raised by Puritans, who believe in predestination.”

“Raised by them, yes…” Daniel said, and let it hang in the air for a while.

“You no longer accept predestination?”

“It does not resonate sweetly with my observations of the world, as a good hypothesis ought to.” Daniel sighed. “Now I see why Newton has chosen the path of Alchemy.”

“When you say he chose that path, you imply that he must have rejected another. Are you saying that your friend Newton explored the idea of a mechanically determined brain, and rejected it?”

“It may be he explored it, if only in his dreams and nightmares.”

Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. “This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it—which must have been a great spiritual struggle—and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult.”

“But you claim to know of a third way, Doctor. I should like to hear of it.”

“And I should like to tell of it,” Leibniz said, “but I must part from you now, and make rendezvous with my traveling companions. May we continue on some other day?”

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

HE DISSECTED MORE than his share of dead men’s heads during those early Royal Society days, and knows that the hull of the skull is all wrapped about with squishy rigging: haul-yards of tendon and braces of ligament cleated to pinrails on the jawbone and temple, tugging at the corners of spreading canvases of muscle that curve over the forehead and wrap the old Jolly Roger in as many overlapping layers as there are sails on a ship of the line. As Daniel trudges up out of Minerva’s bilge, dragging a chinking sack of ammunition behind him, he feels all that stuff tightening up, steadily and inexorably, each stairstep a click of the pawls, as if invisible sailors were turning capstans inside his skull. He’s spent the last hour below the water-line—never his favorite place on shipboard, but safe from cannonballs anyway—smashing plates with a hammer and bellowing old songs, and never been so relaxed in all his life. But now he’s climbed back up into the center of the hull, just the sort of bulky bull’s-eye pirates might aim swivel-guns at if they lacked confidence in their ability to pick off small fine targets from their wave-tossed platforms.

Minerva’s got a spacious stairwell running all the way down through the middle of her, just ahead of the mighty creaking trunk of the mainmast, with two flights of stairs spiraling opposite directions so the men descending don’t interfere with those ascending—or so doddering Doctors with sacks of pottery-shards do not hinder boys running up from the hold with—what? The light’s dim. They appear to be canvas sacks—heavy bulging polyhedra with rusty nails protruding from the vertices. Daniel’s glad they’re going up the other stairs, because he wouldn’t want one of those things to bump into him. It’d be certain death from lockjaw.

Some important procedure’s underway on the gundeck. The gunports are all closed, except for one cracked open a hand’s breadth on the starboard side—therefore, not far from Daniel when he emerges from the staircase. Several relatively important officers have gathered in a semicircle around this port, as if for a baptism. There’s a general commotion of pinging and thudding coming from the hull-planks and the deck above. It could be gunfire. And if it could be, it probably is. Someone grabs the sack from Daniel and drags it to the center of the gundeck. Men with empty blunderbusses converge on it like jackals on a haunch.

Daniel’s elbowed hard by a man hauling on a line that enters Minerva through a small orifice above the gunport. This has the effect of (1) knocking Daniel down on his bony pelvis and (2) swinging said gunport all the way open, creating a sudden square of light. Framed in it is part of the rigging of a smaller ship, so close that a younger man could easily jump to it. There is a man—a pirate—on that ship pointing a musket in Daniel’s direction, but he’s struck down by a gaudy spray of outmoded china fragments, fired down from Minerva’s upperdeck. “Caltrops away!” says someone, and boys with sacks lunge toward the open gunport and hurl out a tinkling cosmos, down to the deck of the smaller ship. Moments later the same ceremony’s repeated through a gunport on the larboard side—so there must be a pirate-vessel there, too. The gunports are hauled closed again, sporting new decorations: constellations of lead balls fired into ’em from below.

The screaming/bellowing ratio has climbed noticeably. Daniel (helping himself to his feet, thank you, and hobbling crabwise to a safe haven near the mainmast, to inventory his complaints) reckons that the screaming must originate from shoeless pirates with caltrop-spikes between their metatarsals—until he hears “Fire! Fire!” and notes a curl of smoke invading the gundeck through a cracked gunport, speared on a shaft of sunlight. Then some instinct makes Daniel forget his bruises and sprains—he’s up the last flight of stairs, spry as any eight-year-old powder monkey, and out in the sail-dappled sunlight, where he’ll happily risk musket-balls.

But it’s the pirate-sloop, not Minerva, that’s on fire. Lines are going slack all over the starboard half of the ship. Each of them happens to terminate in a rusty grappling-hook that’s lodged in a ratline or a rail. The pirates are cutting themselves free!

Now comes a general rush of men to larboard, where a whaleboat is still pestering them. Minerva rolls that direction on a sea. The whaleboat comes into view, no longer eclipsed by the hull’s tumblehome, and a score of muskets and blunderbusses fire down into it at once. Daniel only glimpses the result—appalling—then Minerva rolls starboard and hides it from view.

The men throw their weapons into lockers and ascend into the rigging, pursuant to commands from van Hoek, who’s up on the poop deck bellowing into a shiny trumpet of hammered brass. There are plenty of men belowdecks who could be making contributions here, but they don’t come up. Daniel, beginning to get the hang of pirate-fighting, understands that van Hoek wants to hide the true size of his crew from Teach.

They have been running before a north wind (though it seems to’ve shifted a few points westwards) for over an hour. The southern limb of Cape Cod is dead ahead, barring their path. But long before reaching the shore, Minerva would run aground in coarse brown sand. So they have to come about now and begin to work to windward, towards the open Atlantic. These simple terms—“come about,” for example—denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope. Great big strong men are running toward the bow: the foreyard losers and furlers, and the headsail loosers and stowers. They take up positions on the forecastledeck or shinny out onto the bowsprit, but politely step aside for the wiry foretopmen who begin their laborious ascent up the fore shrouds to work the topsails and things higher up the foremast. It is a bristling and tangled thicket of nautical detail. Like watching fifty surgeons dissect fifty different animals at once—the kind of stuff that, half a century ago, would’ve fascinated Daniel, sucked him into this sort of life, made him a sea-captain. But like a captain reefing and striking his sails before too strong a wind, lest it drive his ship onto the shallows, Daniel ignores as much of this as he can get away with, and tries to understand what is happening in its general outlines: Minerva is coming round toward the wind. In her wake, a mile abaft, is the sloop, her sails lying a-shiver, leaving the little ship dead in the water, drifting slowly to leeward, as pirates try to beat out flames with sopped canvas whilst not stepping on any of those caltrops. Several miles north of that, four more ships are spread out on the bay, waiting.

A panic of luffing and shivering spreads through Minerva’s rig as all the sails change their relationship to the wind, then everything snaps tight, just as the sailors knew it would, and she’s running as close-hauled as she can, headed northeast. In just a few minutes she’s drawn abeam of that scorched sloop, which is now steaming, rather than smoking, and attempting to make sail. It’s obvious that caltrops and flying crockery-shards have deranged the crew, in the sense that no man knows what to do when. So the sloop’s movements are inconclusive.

All the more surprising that van Hoek orders a tack, when it isn’t really necessary. Minerva comes about and sails directly toward the meandering sloop. Several minutes later, Minerva bucks once as she rams the sloop amidships, then shudders as her keel drives the wreckage under the sea. Those burly forecastle-men go out with cutlasses and hatchets to cut shreds of the sloop’s rigging away from the bowsprit, where it has become fouled. Van Hoek, strolling on the poop deck, aims a pistol over the rail and, in a sudden lily of smoke, speeds a drowning pirate to Hell.

Royal Society Meeting, Gunfleet House

1673

“I RENEW MY OBJECTION—” said Robert Boyle. “It does not seem respectful to inventory the contents of our Founder’s guts as if they were a few keepsakes left behind in a chest—”

“Overruled,” said John Comstock, still President of the Royal Society—just barely. “Though, out of respect for our remarkably generous host, I will defer to him.”

Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, was seated at the head of his drawing-room, at a conspicuously new gilt-and-white-enamel table in the barock style. Other bigwigs, such as John Comstock, surrounded him, seated according to equally barock rules of protocol. Anglesey withdrew a large watch from the pocket of his Persian vest and held it up to the light streaming in through about half an acre of window-glass, exceptionally clear and colorless and bubble-free and recently installed.

“Can we get through it in fifty seconds?” he inquired.

Inhalations all round. In his peripheral vision, Daniel saw several old watches being stuffed into pockets—pockets that tended to be frayed, and rimmed with that nameless dark shine. But the Earl of Upnor and—of all people—Roger Comstock (who was sitting next to Daniel) reached into clean bright pockets, took out new watches, and managed to hold them up in such a way that most everyone in the room could see that each was equipped, not just with two but three hands, the third moving so quickly that you could see its progress round the dial—counting the seconds!

Many hunched glances, now, toward Robert Hooke, the Hephaestus of the tiny. Hooke managed to look as if he didn’t care about how impressed everyone was—which was probably true. Daniel looked over at Leibniz, sitting there with his box on his lap, who had a soulful, distant expression.

Roger Comstock, noting the same thing: “Is that how a German looks before he bursts into tears?”

Upnor, following Roger’s gaze: “Or before he pulls out his broadsword and begins mowing down Turks.”

“He deserves our credit for showing up at all,” Daniel murmured—hypnotized by the movement of Roger Comstock’s second-hand. “Word arrived yesterday—his patron died in Mainz.”

“Of embarrassment, most likely,” hissed the Earl of Upnor.

A chirurgeon, looking deeply nervous and out of his depth, was chivvied up to the front of the room. It was a big room, this. Its owner, the Duke of Gunfleet, perhaps too much under the spell of his architect, insisted on calling it the Grand Salon. This was simply French for Big Big Room; but it seemed a little bigger, and ever so much grander, when the French nomenclature was used.

Even under the humble appellation of Big Big Room, it was a bit too big and too grand for the chirurgeon. “Fifty seconds!—?” he said.

There was a difficult interlude, lasting much longer than fifty seconds, as a helpful Fellow tried to explain the idea of fifty seconds to the chirurgeon, who had got stuck on the misconception that they were speaking of 1/52S—perhaps some idiom from the gambling world?

“Think of minutes of longitude,” someone called out from the back of the Big Big Room. “One sixtieth of that sort of a minute is called what?”

“A second of longitude,” said the chirurgeon.

“By analogy, then, one sixtieth of a minute of time is—”

“A second…of time,” said the chirurgeon; then was suddenly mortified as he ran through some rough calculations in his head.

“One thirty-six-hundredth of an hour,” called out a bored voice with a French accent.

“Time’s up!” announced Boyle, “Let us move on—”

“The good doctor may have another fifty seconds,” Anglesey ruled.

“Thank you, my lord,” said the chirurgeon, and cleared his throat. “Perhaps those gentlemen who have been the patrons of Mr. Hooke’s horologickal researches, and are now the beneficiaries of his so ingenious handiwork, will be so kind as to keep me informed, during my presentation of the results of Lord Chester’s post-mortem, as to the passage of time—”

“I accept that charge—you have already spent twenty seconds!” said the Earl of Upnor.

“Please, Louis, let us show due respect for our Founder, and for this Doctor,” said his father.

“It seems too late for the former, Father, but I assent to the latter.”

“Hear, hear!” Boyle said. This made the chirurgeon falter—but John Comstock stiffened him up with a look.

“Most of Lord Chester’s organs were normal for a man of his age,” the chirurgeon said. “In one kidney I found two small stones. In the ureter, some gravel. Thank you.”

The chirurgeon sat down very hastily, like an infantryman who has just seen puffs of smoke bloom from the powder-pans of opposing muskets. Buzzing and droning filled the room—suddenly it was like one of Wilkins’s glass apiaries, and the chirurgeon a boy who’d poked it with a stick. But the Queen Bee was dead, and there was disagreement as to who was going to be stung.

“It is what I suspected—there was no stoppage of urine,” Hooke finally announced, “only pain from small kidney-stones. Pain that induced Lord Chester to take solace in opiates.”

Which was as good as flinging a glass of water in the face of Monsieur LeFebure. The King’s Chymist stood up. “To have given comfort to the Lord Bishop of Chester in his time of need is the greatest honor of my career,” he said. “It would be an infamous shame if any of those other medicines he took, led to his demise.”

Now a great deal more buzzing, in a different key. Roger Comstock stood up and cut through it: “If Mr. Pepys would be so kind as to show us his stone…”

Pepys fairly erupted to his feet across the room and shoved a hand into a pregnant pocket.

John Comstock sent both men back down with cast-iron eyes. “It would not be a kindness, Mr., er, Comstock, as we’ve all seen it.”

Daniel’s turn. “Mr. Pepys’s stone is colossal—yet he was able to urinate a little. Considering the smallness of the urinary passages, is it not possible that a small stone might block urine as well as a large one—and perhaps better?”

No more buzzing now, but a deep general murmur—the point was awarded, by acclamation, to Daniel. He sat down. Roger Comstock ejaculated compliments all over him.

“I’ve had stones in the kidney,” Anglesey said, “and I will testify that the pain is beyond description.”

John Comstock: “Like something meted out by the Popish Inquisition?”

“I cannot make out what is going on,” said Daniel, quietly, to his neighbor.

“Well, you’d best make it out before you say anything else,” Roger said. “Just a suggestion.”

“First Anglesey and Comstock are united in disgracing Wilkins’s memory—then next moment, at each other’s throats over religion.”

“Where does that put you, Daniel?” Roger asked.

Anglesey, unruffled: “I’m sure I speak for the entire Royal Society in expressing unbounded gratitude to Monsieur LeFebure for easing Lord Chester’s final months.”

“The Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure is greatly admired at Court—even among young ladies who are not afflicted with exquisitely painful disorders,” said John Comstock. “Some of them like it so well that they have started a new fashion: going to sleep, and never waking up again.”

The conversation had now taken on the semblance of a lawn-tennis match played with sputtering granadoes. There was a palpable shifting of bodies and chairs as Fellows of the R.S. aligned themselves for spectation. Monsieur LeFebure caught Comstock’s lob with perfect aplomb: “It has been known since ancient times that syrup of poppies, in even small doses, cripples the judgment by day and induces frightful dreams by night—would you not agree?”

Here John Comstock, sensing a trap, said nothing. But Hooke answered, “I can attest to that.”

“Your dedication to Truth is an example to us all, Mr. Hooke. In large doses, of course, the medicine kills. The first symptom—destruction of judgment—can lead to the second—death by overdosing. That is why the Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure should only be administered under my supervision—and that is why I have personally taken pains to visit Lord Chester several times each week, during the months that his judgment was crippled by the drug.”

Comstock was annoyed by LeFebure’s resilience. But (as Daniel realized too late) Comstock had another goal in sight besides denting LeFebure’s reputation, and it was a goal that he shared with Thomas More Anglesey—normally his rival and enemy. A look passed between these two.

Daniel stood. Roger got a grip on his sleeve, but was not in a position to reach his tongue. “I saw Lord Chester several times in his final weeks and saw no evidence that his mental faculties were affected! To the contrary—”

“Lest someone come away with the foolish opinion that you are being unkind, Monsieur LeFebure,” Anglesey said—shooting a glare at Daniel—“did Lord Chester not consider this mental impairment a fair price to pay for the opportunity to spend a few last months with his family?”

“Oh, he paid that price gladly,” Monsieur LeFebure said.

“I collect that this is why we’ve heard so little from him in the way of Natural Philosophy of late—” Comstock said.

“Yes—and it is why we should overlook any of his more recent, er…”

“Indiscretions?”

“Enthusiasms?”

“Impulsive ventures into the lower realm of politics—”

“His mental powers dimmed—his heart was as pure as ever—and sought solace in well-meaning gestures.”

That was all the poisoned eulogies Daniel could stand to hear—then he was out in the garden of Gunfleet House watching a white marble mermaid vomit an endless stream of clear babble into a fish-pond. Roger Comstock was right behind him.

There were marble benches a-plenty, but he could not sit. Rage had taken him. Daniel was not especially susceptible to that passion. But he understood, now, why the Greeks had believed that Furies were angels of a sort, winged-swift, armed with whips and torches, rushing up out of Erebus to goad men unto madness. Roger, watching Daniel pace around the garden, might have convinced himself that his friend’s wild lunges and strides were being provoked by invisible lashes, and that his face had been scorched by torches.

“O for a sword,” Daniel said.

“Aw, you’d be dead right away if you tried that!”

“I know that, Roger. Some would say there are worse things than being dead. Thank god Jeffreys wasn’t in the room—to see me running out of it like a thief!” And here his voice choked and tears rushed to his eyes. For this was the worst part. That in the end he had done nothing—nothing—except run out of the Grand Salon.

“You’re clever, but you don’t know what to do,” Roger said. “I’m the other way round. We complement each other.”

Daniel was annoyed. Then he reflected that to be the complement of a man with as many deficiencies as Roger Comstock was a high distinction. He turned and looked the other up and down, perhaps with an eye towards punching him in the nose. Roger was not so much wearing his wig as embedded in its lower reaches, and it was perfect—the sort of wig that had its own staff. Daniel, even if he were the punching sort, could not bring himself to ruin anything so perfect. “You are too modest, Roger—obviously you’ve gone out and done something clever.”

“Oh, you’ve noticed my attire! I hope you don’t think it’s foppish.”

“I think it’s expensive.”

“For one of the Golden Comstocks, you mean…”

Roger came closer. Daniel kept being cruel to Roger, trying to make him go away, but Roger took it as honesty, implying profound friendship.

“Well, in any case it is certainly an improvement on your appearance the last time I saw you.” Daniel was referring to the explosion in the laboratory, which was now far enough in the past that both Daniel and Roger had their eyebrows back. He had not seen Roger since that night because Isaac, upon coming back to find the lab blown up, had fired him, and sent him packing, not just out of the laboratory, but out of Cambridge. Thus had ended a scholarly career that had probably needed to be put out of its misery in any case. Daniel knew not whither their Cinderella had fled, but he appeared to have done well there.

Roger plainly had no idea what Daniel was talking about. “I don’t recall that—did you meet me in the street, before I left for Amsterdam? I probably did look wretched then.”

Daniel now tried the Leibnizian experiment of rehearsing the explosion in the laboratory from Roger’s point of view.

Roger had been working in the dark: a necessity, as any open flame might set fire to the gunpowder. And not much of an inconvenience, since what he’d been up to was dead simple: grinding the powder in a mortar and dumping it into a bag. Both the sound, and the feel of the pestle in his hand, would tell when the powder had been ground to a fine enough consistency for whatever purpose Roger had in mind. So he had worked blind. Light was the one thing he prayed he wouldn’t see, for it would mean a spark that would be certain to ignite the powder. Attent on work and worry, he had never known that Daniel had come back to the house—why should he, since he was supposed to be watching a play? And Roger had not yet heard the applause and the distant murmur of voices that would signal its end. Roger had never heard Daniel’s approach, for Daniel, who’d phant’sied he was stalking a rat, had been at pains to move as quietly as possible. The heavy fabric screen had blocked the light of Daniel’s candle to the point where it was no brighter than the ambient furnace-glow. Suddenly the candle-flame had been in Roger’s face. In other circumstances he’d’ve known it for what it was; but standing there with a sack of gunpowder in his hands, he had taken it for what he’d most dreaded: a spark. He had dropped the mortar and the bag and flung himself back as quick as he could. The explosion had followed in the next instant. He could neither have seen nor heard anything until after he’d fled the building. So there was no ground to suppose he had ever registered as much as the faintest impression of Daniel’s presence. He’d not seen Daniel since.

And so Daniel was presented with a choice between telling Roger the truth, and assenting to the lie that Roger had conveniently proffered: namely, that Daniel had spied Roger in the street before Roger had departed for Amsterdam. Telling the truth held no danger, so far as he could see. The lie was attended with a small peril that Roger—who was cunning, in a way—might be dangling it before him as some sort of test.

“I thought you knew,” Daniel said, “I was in the laboratory when it happened. Had gone there to fetch Isaac’s paper on tangents. Nearly got blown to bits myself!”

Astonishment and revelation came out of Roger’s face like sudden flame. But if Daniel had owned a Hooke watch, he would have counted only a few seconds of time before the old look came back down over his face. As when a candle-snuffer pounces on a wild flame and the errant brilliance that had filled one’s vision a moment ago is in an instant vanished, the only thing left in its place a dull sight of old silver-work, frozen and familiar.

“I phant’sied I’d heard someone moving about in there!” Roger exclaimed. Which was obviously a lie; but it made the conversation move along better.

Daniel was keen to ask Roger what he’d been doing with the gunpowder. But perhaps it would be better to wait for Roger to volunteer something. “So it was to Amsterdam you went, to recuperate from the excitements of that evening,” Daniel said.

“Here first.”

“Here to London?”

“Here to the Angleseys’. Lovely family. And socializing with them has its benefits.” Roger reached up as if to stroke his wig—but dared not touch it.

“What, you’re not in their employ—?”

“No, no! It’s much better. I know things. Certain of the Golden Comstocks immigrated—all right, all right, some would say fled—to Holland in the last century. Settled in Amsterdam. I went and paid them a visit. From them, I knew that de Ruyter was taking his fleet to Guinea to seize the Duke of York’s slave-ports. So I sold my Guinea Company shares while they were still high. Then from the Angleseys I learned that King Looie was making preparations to invade the Dutch Republic—but could never stage a campaign without purchasing grain first—purchasing it you’ll never guess where.”

“No!”

“Just so—the Dutch sold France the grain that King Looie is using to conquer them! At any rate—I took my money from the Guinea Company shares, and took a large position in Amsterdam-grain just before King Looie bid the price up! Voilà! Now I’ve a Hooke-watch, a big wig, and a lot on fashionable Waterhouse Square!”

“You own—” Daniel began, and was well on his way to saying You own some of my family estate!? when they were interrupted by Leibniz, stalking through a flower-bed, hugging his brain-in-a-box.

“Dr. Leibniz—the Royal Society were quite taken with your Arithmetickal Engine,” Roger said.

“But they did not like my mathematickal proofs,” said one dejected German savant.

“On the contrary—they were acknowledged to be unusually elegant!” Daniel protested.

“But there is no honor in elegantly proving a theorem in 1672 that some Scotsman proved barbarously in 1671!”

“You could not possibly have known that,” Daniel said.

“Happens all the time,” said Roger, a-bristle with bogus authority.

“Monsieur Huygens should have known, when he assigned me those problems as exercises,” Leibniz grumbled.

“He probably did,” Daniel said. “Oldenburg writes to him every week.”

“It is well-known that GRUBENDOL is a trafficker in foreign intelligence!” announced Robert Hooke, crashing through a laurel bush and tottering onto a marble bench as vertigo seized him. Daniel gritted his teeth, waiting for a fist-fight, or worse, to break out between Hooke and Leibniz, but Leibniz let this jab at Oldenburg pass without comment, as if Hooke had merely farted at High Table.

“Another way of phrasing it might be that Mr. Oldenburg keeps Monsieur Huygens abreast of the latest developments from England,” Roger said.

Daniel picked up the thread: “Huygens probably heard about the latest English theorems through that channel, and gave them to you, Doctor Leibniz, to test your mettle!”

“Never anticipating,” Roger tidily concluded, “that fortunes of War and Diplomacy would bring you to the Britannic shore, where you would innocently present the same results to the Royal Society!”

“Entirely the fault of Oldenburg—who steals my latest watch-designs, and despatches ’em to that same Huygens!” Hooke added.

“Nonetheless—for me to present theorems to the Royal Society—only to have some gentleman in a kilt stand up in the back of the room, and announce that he proved the same thing a year ago—”

“Everyone who matters knows it was innocent.”

“It is a blow to my reputation.”

“Your reputation will outshine any, when you finish that Arithmetickal Engine!” announced Oldenburg, coming down a path like a blob of mercury in a trough.

“Any on the Continent, perhaps,” Hooke sniffed.

“But all of the Frenchmen who are competent to realize my conception, are consumed with vain attempts to match the work of Mr. Hooke!” Leibniz returned. Which was a reasonably professional bit of flattery, the sort of thing that greased wheels and made reputations in small Continental courts.

Oldenburg rolled his eyes, then straightened abruptly as a stifled belch pistoned up his gorge.

Hooke said, “I have a design for an arithmetickal engine of my own, which I have not had the leisure to complete yet.”

“Yes—but do you have a design for what you shall do with it, when it’s finished?” Leibniz asked eagerly.

“Calculate logarithms, I suppose, and outmode Napier’s bones…”

“But why concern yourself with anything so tedious as logarithms!?”

“They are a tool—nothing more.”

“And for what purpose do you wish to use that tool, sir?” Leibniz asked eagerly.

“If I believed that my answer would remain within the walls of this fair garden, Doctor, I would say—but as matters stand, I fear my words will be carried to Paris with the swiftness—though surely not the grace—of the winged-footed messenger of the gods.” Staring directly at Oldenburg.

Leibniz deflated. Oldenburg stepped closer to him, whilst turning his back on Hooke, and began trying to cheer the Doctor up—which only depressed him more, as being claimed, by Oldenburg, as an ally, would condemn him forever in Hooke’s opinion.

Hooke removed a long slim deerskin wallet from his breast pocket and unrolled it on his lap. It contained a neat row of slim objects: diverse quills and slivers of cane. He selected a tendril of whalebone—set the wallet aside—spread his knees wide—leaned forward—inserted the whalebone deep into his throat—wiggled it—and immediately began to vomit up bile. Daniel watched with an empiric eye, until he had made sure the vomit contained no blood, parasites, or other auspices of serious trouble.

Oldenburg was muttering to Leibniz in High-Dutch, of which Daniel could not understand a single word—which was probably why. But Daniel could make out a few names: first of Leibniz’s late patron in Mainz, and then of various Parisians, such as Colbert.

He turned round hoping to continue his conversation with Roger, but Roger had quietly removed himself to make way for his distant cousin the Earl of Epsom—who was stalking directly toward Daniel looking as if he would be happy to settle matters with a head-butting duel. “Mr. Waterhouse.”

“My Lord.”

“You loved John Wilkins.”

“Almost as a father, my lord.”

“You would have him revered and respected by future generations of Englishmen.”

“I pray that Englishmen will have the wisdom and discernment to give Wilkins his due.”

“I say to you that those Englishmen will dwell in a country with one Established Church. If, God willing, I have my way, it will be Anglican. If the Duke of Gunfleet has his, it will be the Roman faith. Deciding which might require another Civil War, or two, or three. I might kill Gunfleet, Gunfleet might kill me—my sons or grandsons might cross swords with his. And despite these fatal differences, he and I are as one in the conviction that no nation can exist without one Established Church. Do you imagine that a few Phanatiques can overcome the combined power of all the world’s Epsoms and Gunfleets?”

“I was never one for vain imaginings, my lord.”

“Then you admit that England will have an Established Church.”

“I confess it is likely.”

“Then what does that make those who stand in opposition to an Established Church?”

“I don’t know, my lord—eccentric Bishops?”

“On the contrary—it makes them heretics and traitors, Mr. Waterhouse. To change a heretic and a traitor into an eccentric Bishop is no mean task—it is a form of Transmutation requiring many Alchemists—hooded figures working in secret. The last thing they need is for a sorcerer’s apprentice to stumble in and begin knocking things over!”

“Please forgive my ineptitude, my lord. I responded impulsively, because I thought he was being attacked.”

“He was not being attacked, Mr. Waterhouse—you were.”

DANIEL LEFT ANGLESEY HOUSE and wandered blindly along Piccadilly, realized he was in front of Comstock House, veered away from that, and fled into St. James’s Fields—now parted into neat little squares where grass was trying to establish itself on the muck of construction. He sat on a plank bench, and slowly became aware that Roger Comstock had been following him the entire way, and that he’d (presumably) been talking the entire time. But he pointedly declined to bring his breeches into contact with the bench, a splintery improvisation strewn with pasty-flakes, pipe-ashes, and rat-shite.

“What were Leibniz and Oldenburg on about? Is German among the many things that you understand, Daniel?”

“I think it was that Dr. Leibniz has lost his patron, and needs a new one—with any luck, in Paris.”

“Oh, most difficult for such a man to make his way in the world without a patron!”

“Yes.”

“It seems as if John Comstock is cross with you.”

“Very.”

“His son is captain of one of the invasion-ships, you know. He is nervous, irritable just now—not himself.”

“On the contrary, I think I have just seen the real John Comstock. It’s safe to say that my career in the Royal Society is at an end—as long as he remains President.”

“Informed opinion is that the Duke of Gunfleet will be president after the next election.”

“That’s no better—for in their hatred of me, Epsom and Gunfleet are one man.”

“Sounds as though you need a patron, Daniel. One who sympathizes.”

“Is there anyone who sympathizes?”

“I do.”

This took a while to stop seeming funny, and to percolate inwards. The two of them sat there silently for a while.

Some sort of parade or procession seemed to be headed this general direction from Charing Cross, with beating of drums, and either bad singing or melodious jeering. Daniel and Roger got up and began wandering down towards Pall Mall, to see what it was.

“Are you making me some sort of proposal?” Daniel finally asked.

“I made a penny or two this year—still, I’m far from being an Epsom or a Gunfleet! I put most of my liquid capital into buying that parcel of land from your brothers…”

“Which one is it?”

“The large one on the corner there, just next to where Mr. Raleigh Waterhouse built his house…what think you of it, by the way?”

“Raleigh’s house? It’s, er…big, I suppose.”

“Would you like to put it in the shade?”

“What can you possibly mean?”

“I want to erect a bigger house. But I didn’t study my mathematics at Trinity, as you know only too well, Daniel—I need you to design it for me, and oversee the construction.”

“But I’m not an architect—”

“Neither was Mr. Hooke, before he was hired to design Bedlam and diverse other great Fabricks—you can bang out a house as well as he, I wager—and certainly better than that block-head who slapped Raleigh’s together.”

They’d come out into Pall Mall, which was lined with pleasant houses. Daniel was already eyeing their windows and roof-lines, collecting ideas. But Roger kept his eye on the procession, which was nearly upon them: several hundred more or less typical Londoners, albeit with a higher than usual number of Dissident, and even a few Anglican, preachers. They were carrying an effigy, dangling from the top of a long pole: a straw man dressed in ecclesiastical robes, but whorishly colored and adorned, with a huge mitre affixed to his head, and a long bishop’s crook lashed to one mitt. The Pope. Daniel and Roger stood to one side and watched for (according to Roger’s watch) a hundred and thirty-four seconds as the crowd marched by them and drained out of the street into St. James’s Park. They chose a place in clear view of both St. James’s Palace and Whitehall Palace, and planted the pole in the dirt.

Soldiers were already headed toward them from the Horse Guards’ compound between the two Palaces: a few forerunners on horseback, but mostly formations of infantrymen that had spilled out too hastily to form up into proper squares. These were in outlandish fantastickal attire, with long peaked caps of a vaguely Polish style.[*] Daniel at first took them for dragoons, but as they marched closer he could see nippled cannonballs—granadoes!—dangling from their ox-hide belts and bandoliers, thudding against their persons with each step.

That detail was not lost on the crowd of marchers, either. After a few hasty words, they held torches to the hem of the Pope’s robe and set it afire. Then the crowd burst, granadoe-like. By the time those grenadiers arrived, the procession had been re-absorbed by London. There was nothing for the grenadiers to do but knock the
effigy down and stamp out the flames—keeping them well away from the grenades, of course.

“’Twas well-conceived,” was Roger Comstock’s verdict. “Those were Royal Guards—the Duke of York’s new regiment. Oh, they’re commanded by John Churchill, but make no mistake, they are York’s men.”

“What on earth do you mean when you say something like this was well-conceived? I mean, you sound like a connoisseur sipping the latest port.”

“Well, that Mobb could’ve burnt the Pope anywhere, couldn’t they? But they chose here. Why here? Couldn’t’ve chosen a more dangerous place, what with Grenadiers so near to hand. Well, the answer of course is that they wished to send a message to the Duke of York…to wit, that if he doesn’t renounce his Papist ways, next time they’ll be burning him in effigy—if not in person.”

“Even I could see, that night at Cambridge, that Gunfleet and the younger Angleseys are the new favorites at Court,” Daniel said. “While Epsom is lampooned in plays, and his house besieged by the Mobb.”

“Not so remarkable really, given the rumors…”

“What rumors?” Daniel almost added I am not the sort of person who hears or heeds such things, but just now it was difficult to be so haughty.

“That our indifferent fortune in the war is chargeable to faulty cannon, and bad powder.”

“What a marvellously convenient excuse for failure in war!”

Until that moment Daniel had not heard anyone say aloud that the war was going badly. The very idea that the English and the French together could not best a few Dutchmen was absurd on its face. Yet, now that Roger had mentioned it, there was a lack of good news, obvious in retrospect. Of course people would be looking for someone to blame.

“The cannon that burst at the ‘Siege of Maestricht,’” Daniel said, “do you reckon ’twas shoddy goods? Or was it a scheme laid by Epsom’s enemies?”

“He has enemies,” was all Roger would say.

“That I see,” said Daniel, “and, too, I see that the Duke of Gun-fleet is one of them, and that he, and other Papists, like the Duke of York, are a great power in the land. What I do not understand is why those two enemies, Epsom and Gunfleet, a few minutes ago were as one man in heaping obloquy on the memory of John Wilkins.”

“Epsom and Gunfleet are like two captains disputing command of a ship, each calling the other a mutineer,” Roger explained. “The ship, in this similitude, is the Realm with its established church—Anglican or Papist, depending on as Epsom’s or Gunfleet’s faction prevails. There is a third faction belowdecks—dangerous chaps, well organized and armed, but, most unnervingly, under no distinct leader at the moment. When these Dissidents, as they are called, say, ‘Down with the Pope!’ it is music to the ears of the Anglicans, whose church is founded on hostility to all things Romish. When they say, ‘Down with forced Uniformity, let Freedom of Conscience prevail,’ it gladdens the hearts of the Papists, who cannot practice their faith under that Act of Uniformity that Epsom wrote. And so at different times both Epsom’s and Gunfleet’s factions phant’sy the Dissidents as allies. But when the Dissidents question the idea of an Established Church, and propose to make the whole country an Amsterdam, why then it seems to the leaders of both factions that these Dissident madmen are lighting fuzes on powder-kegs to blow up the ship itself. And then they unite to crush the Dissidents.”

“So you are saying that Wilkins’s legacy, the Declaration of Indulgence, is a powder-keg to them.”

“It is a fuze that might, for all they know, lead to a powder-keg. They must stomp it out.”

“Stomping on me as well.”

“Only because you presented yourself to be stomped in the stupidest possible way—by your leave, by your leave.”

“Well, what ought I to’ve done, when they were attacking him so?”

“Bit your tongue and bided your time,” Roger said. “Things can change in a second. Behold this Pope-burning! Led by Dissidents, against Papists. If you, Daniel, had marched at the head of that Mobb, why, Epsom would feel you were on his side against Anglesey.”

“Just what I need—the Duke of Gunfleet as personal enemy.”

“Then prate about Freedom of Conscience! That is the excellence of your position, Daniel—if you would only open your eyes to it. Through nuances and shifts so subtle as to be plausibly deniable, you may have either Epsom or Gunfleet as your ally at any given moment.”

“It sounds cavilling and pusillanimous,” said Daniel, summoning up some words from the tables of the Philosophick Language.

Without disagreeing, Roger said: “It is the key to achieving what Drake dreamed of.”

“How!? When all the power is in the hands of the Angleseys and the Silver Comstocks.”

“Very soon you shall see how wrong you are in that.”

“Oh? Is there some other source of power I am not aware of?”

“Yes,” said Roger, “and your uncle Thomas Ham’s cellar is full of it.”

“But that gold is not his. It is the sum of his obligations.”

“Just so! You have put your finger on it! There is hope for you,” Roger said, and stepped back from the bench preparatory to taking leave. “I hope that you will consider my proposal in any event…Sir.”

“Consider it under consideration, Sir.”

“And even if there is no time in your life for houses—perhaps I could beg a few hours for my theatre—”

“Did you say theatre?”

“I’ve bought part interest in one, yes—the King’s Comedians play there—we produced Love in a Tub and The Lusty Chirurgeon. From time to time, we need help making thunder and lightning, as well as demonic apparitions, angelic visitations, impalements, sex-changes, hangings, live births, et cetera.”

“Well, I don’t know what my family would think of my being involved in such things, Roger.”

“Poh! Look at what they have been up to! Now that the Apocalypse has failed to occur, Daniel, you must find something to do with your several talents.”

“I suppose the least I could to is keep you from blowing yourself to pieces.”

“I can hide nothing from you, Daniel. Yes. You have divined it. That evening in the laboratory, I was making powder for theatrickal squibs. When you grind it finer, you see, it burns faster—more flash, more bang.”

“I noticed,” Daniel said. Which made Roger laugh; which made Daniel feel happy. And so into a sort of spiral they went. “I’ve an appointment to meet Dr. Leibniz at a coffee-house in the theatre district later…so why don’t we walk in that direction now?” Daniel said.

“PERHAPS YOU MIGHT HAVE STUMBLED across my recent monograph, On the Incarnation of God…”

“Oldenburg mentioned it,” Daniel said, “but I must confess that I have never attempted to read it.”

“During our last conversation, we spoke of the difficulty of reconciling a mechanical philosophy with free will. This problem has any number of resonances with the theological question of incarnation.”

“In that both have to do with spiritual essences being infused into bodies that are in essence mechanical,” Daniel said agreeably. All around them, fops and theatre-goers were edging away towards other tables, leaving Leibniz and Waterhouse with a pleasant clear space in the midst of what was otherwise a crowded coffee-house.

“The problem of the Trinity is the mysterious union of the divine and human natures of Christ. Likewise, when we debate whether a mechanism—such as a fly drawn to the smell of meat, or a trap, or an arithmetickal engine—is thinking by itself, or merely displaying the ingenuity of its creator, we are asking whether or not those engines have, in some sense, been imbued with an incorporeal principle or, vulgarly, spirit that, like God or an angel, possesses free will.”

“Again, I hear an echo of the Scholastics in your words—”

“But Mr. Waterhouse, you are making the common mistake of thinking that we must have Aristotle or Descartes—that the two philosophies are irreconcilable. On the contrary! We may accept modern, mechanistic explanations in physics, while retaining Aristotle’s concept of self-sufficiency.”

“Forgive me for being skeptical of that—”

“It is your responsibility to be skeptical, Mr. Waterhouse, no forgiveness is needed. The details of how these two concepts may be reconciled are somewhat lengthy—suffice it to say that I have found a way to do it, by assuming that every body contains an incorporeal principle, which I identify with cogitatio.”

“Thought.”

“Yes!”

“Where is this principle to be found? The Cartesians think it’s in the pineal gland—”

“It is not spread out through space in any such vulgar way—but the organization that it causes is distributed throughout the body—it informs the body—and we may know that it exists, by observing that information. What is the difference between a man who has just died, and one who is going to die in a few ticks of Mr. Hooke’s watch?”

“The Christian answer is that one has a soul, and the other does not.”

“And it is a fine answer—it needs only to be translated into a new Philosophical Language, as it were.”

“You would translate it, Doctor, by stating that the living body is informed by this organizing principle—which is the outward and visible sign that the mechanical body is, for the time being anyway, unified with an incorporeal principle called Thought.”

“That is correct. Do you recall our discussion of symbols? You admitted that your mind cannot manipulate a spoon directly—instead it must manipulate a symbol of the spoon, inside the mind. God could manipulate the spoon directly, and we would name it a miracle. But created minds cannot—they need a passive element through which to act.”

“The body.”

“Yes.”

“But you say that Cogitatio and Computation are the same, Doctor—in the Philosophical Language, a single word would suffice for both.”

“I have concluded that they are one and the same.”

“But your Engine does computation. And so I am compelled to ask, at what point does it become imbued with the incorporeal principle of Thought? You say that Cogitatio informs the body, and somehow organizes it into a mechanical system that is capable of acting. I will accept that for now. But with the Arithmetickal Engine, you are working backwards—constructing a mechanical system in the hopes that it will become impregnated from above—as the Holy Virgin. When does the Annunciation occur—at the moment you put the last gear into place? When you turn the crank?”

“You are too literal-minded,” Leibniz said.

“But you have told me that you see no conflict between the notion that the mind is a mechanickal device, and a belief in free will. If that is the case, then there must be some point at which your Arithmetickal Engine will cease to be a collection of gears, and become the body into which some angelic mind has become incarnated.”

“It is a false dichotomy!” Leibniz protested. “An incorporeal principle alone would not give us free will. If we accept—as we must—that God is omniscient, and has foreknowledge of all events that will occur in the future, then He knows what we will do before we do it, and so—even if we be angels—we cannot be said to have free will.”

“That’s what I was always taught in church. So the prospects for your philosophy seem dismal, Doctor—free will seems untenable both on grounds of theology and of Natural Philosophy.”

“So you say, Mr. Waterhouse—and yet you agree with Hooke that there is a mysterious consonance between the behavior of Nature, and the workings of the human mind. Why should that be?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Doctor. Unless, as the Alchemists have it, all matter—Nature and our brains together—are suffused by the same Philosophick Mercury.”

“A hypothesis neither one of us loves.”

“What is your hypothesis, Doctor?”

“Like two arms of a snowflake, Mind and Matter grew out of a common center—and even though they grew independently and without communicating—each developing according to its own internal rules—nevertheless they grew in perfect harmony, and share the same shape and structure.”

“It is rather Metaphysickal,” was all Daniel could come back with. “What’s the common center? God?”

“God arranged things from the beginning so that Mind could understand Nature. But He did not do this by continual meddling in the development of Mind, and the unfolding of the Universe…rather He fashioned the nature of both Mind and Nature to be harmonious from the beginning.”

“So, I have complete freedom of action…but God knows in advance what I will do, because it is my nature to act in harmony with the world, and God partakes of that harmony.”

“Yes.”

“It is odd that we should be having this conversation, Doctor, because during the last few days, for the first time in my life, I have felt as if certain possibilities have been set before me, which I may reach out and grasp if I so choose.”

“You sound like a man who has found a patron.”

The notion of Roger Comstock as patron made Daniel’s gorge rise a bit. But he could not deny Leibniz’s insight. “Perhaps.”

“I am pleased, for your sake. The death of my patron has left me with very few choices.”

“There must be some nobleman in Paris who appreciates you, Doctor.”

“I was thinking rather of going to Leiden to stay with Spinoza.”

“But Holland is soon to be overrun…you could not pick a worse place to be.”

“The Dutch Republic has enough shipping to carry two hundred thousand persons out of Europe, and around the Cape of Good Hope to the furthermost islands of Asia, far out of reach of France.”

“That is entirely too phantastickal for me to believe.”

“Believe. The Dutch are already making plans for this. Remember, they made half of their land with the labor of their hands! What they did once in Europe, they can do again in Asia. If the last ditch is stormed, and the United Provinces fall under the heel of King Louis, I intend to be there, and I will board ship and go to Asia and help build a new Commonwealth—like the New Atlantis that Francis Bacon described.”

“For you, sir, such an adventure might be possible. For me, it can never be anything more than a romance,” Daniel said. “Until now, I’ve always done what I had to, and this went along very well with the Predestination that was taught me. But now I may have choices to make, and they are choices of a practical nature.”

“Whatever acts, cannot be destroyed,” said the Doctor.

Daniel went out the door of the coffee-house and walked up and down London for the rest of the day. He was a bit like a comet, ranging outwards in vast loops, but continually drawn back toward certain fixed poles: Gresham’s College, Waterhouse Square, Cromwell’s head, and the ruin of St. Paul’s.

Hooke was a greater Natural Philosopher than he, but Hooke was busy rebuilding the city, and half-deranged with imaginary intrigues. Newton was also greater, but he was lost in Alchemy and poring over the Book of Revelation. Daniel had supposed that there might be an opportunity to slip between those two giants and make a name for himself. But now there was a third giant. A giant who, like the others, was distracted by the loss of his patron, and dreams of a free Commonwealth in Asia. But he would not be distracted forever.

It was funny in a painful way. God had given him the desire to be a great Natural Philosopher—then put him on earth in the midst of Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz.

Daniel had the training to be a minister, and the connections to find a nice congregation in England or Massachusetts. He could walk into that career as easily as he walked into a coffee-house. But his ramble kept bringing him back to the vast ruin of St. Paul’s—a corpse in the middle of a gay dinner-party—and not just because it was centrally located.

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep

Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,

Which into hallow Engins long and round

Thick-rammed, at th’ other bore with touch of fire

Dilated and infuriate shall send forth

From far with thundring noise among our foes

Such implements of mischief as shall dash

To pieces, and oerwhelm whatever stands

Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd

The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

SNATCHING A FEW MINUTES’ REST in his cabin between engagements, Daniel’s mood is grave. It is the solemnity, not of a man who’s involved in a project to kill other men (they’ve been doing that all day, for Christ’s sake!), but of one who’s gambling his own life on certain outcomes. Or having it gambled for him by a Captain who shows signs of—what’s a diplomatic way to put it—having a rich and complicated inner life. Of course, whenever you board ship you put your life in the Captain’s hands—but—

Someone is laughing up there on the poop deck. The gaiety clashes with Daniel’s somber mood and annoys him. It’s a derisive and somewhat cruel laugh, but not without sincere merriment. Daniel’s looking about for something hard and massive to thump on the ceiling when he realizes it’s van Hoek, and what has him all in a lather is some sort of technical Dutch concept—the Zog.

Trundling noises from the upperdeck,[*] and all of a sudden Minerva’s a different ship: heeling over quite a bit more than she was, but also rolling from side much more ponderously. Daniel infers that a momentous shifting of weights has occurred. Getting up, and going back out on the quarterdeck, he sees it’s true: there are several short bulbous carronnades here—nothing more or less than multi-ton blunderbusses, with large-bore, short-range, miserable accuracy. But (not to put too fine a point on it) large bores, into which gunners are shoveling all manner of messy ironmongery: pairs of cannonballs chained together, nails, redundant crowbars, clusters of grapeshot piled on sabots and tied together with ostentatiously clever sailors’ knots. Once loaded, the carronnades are being run out to the gunwales—hugely increasing the ship’s moment of inertia, accounting for the change in the roll period—

“Calculating our odds, Dr. Waterhouse?” Dappa inquires, descending a steep stair from the poop deck.

“What means Zog, Dappa, and why’s it funny?”

Dappa gets an alert look about him as if it isn’t funny at all, and points across half a mile of open water toward a schooner flying a black flag with a white hourglass. The schooner is on the weather bow[*] parallelling their course but obviously hoping to converge, and grapple, with Minerva in the near future. “See how miserably they make headway? We are outpacing them, even though we haven’t raised the mainsail.”

“Yes—I was going to inquire—why haven’t we raised it? It is the largest sail on the ship, and we are trying to go fast, are we not?”

“The mainsail is traditionally raised and worked by the gunners. Not raising it will make Teach think we are short-handed in that area, and unable to man all our cannon at one time.”

“But wouldn’t it be worthwhile to tip our hand, if we could outrun that schooner?”

“We’ll outrun her anyway.”

“But she wants us to draw abeam of her, does she not—that is the entire point of being a pirate—so perhaps she has thrown out drogues, and that is why she wallows along so pitiably.”

“She doesn’t need to throw out drogues because of her appalling Zog.”

“There it is again—what, I ask, is the meaning of that word?”

“Her wake, look at her wake!” Dappa says, waving his arm angrily.

“Yes—now that we are so, er, unsettlingly close, I can see that her wake’s enough to capsize a whaleboat.”

“Those damned pirates have loaded so many cannon aboard, she rides far too low in the water, and so she’s got a great ugly Zog.”

“Is this meant to reassure me?”

“It is meant to answer your question.”

“Zog is Dutch for ‘wake,’ then?”

Dappa the linguist smiles yes. Half his teeth are white, the others made of gold. “And a much better word it is, because it comes from zuigen which means ‘to suck.’”

“I don’t follow.”

“Any seaman will tell you that a ship’s wake sucks on her stern, holding her back—the bigger the wake, the greater the suck, and the slower the progress. That schooner, Doctor Waterhouse, sucks.”

Angry words from van Hoek above—Dappa scurries down to the upperdeck to finish whatever errand Daniel interrupted. Daniel follows him, then goes aft, skirts the capstan, and descends a narrow staircase to the aftmost part of the gundeck. Thence he enters the room at the stern where he’s been in the habit of taking his temperature measurements. He commences a perilous traversal of the room, headed towards that bank of undershot windows. To a landlubber the room would look pleasingly spacious, to Daniel it appears desperately short of handholds—meaning that as the ship rolls, Daniel stumbles for a greater distance, and builds up more speed, before colliding with anything big enough to stop him. In any case, he gets to the windows and looks down into Minerva’s Zog. She has one, to be sure, but compared to that schooner to windward, Minerva hardly sucks at all. The Bernoullis would have a field day with this—

There is also a pirate-ketch converging on them from leeward, in much the same way as the schooner is doing from windward, and Daniel is fairly certain that this ketch doesn’t suck much at all. He is certain he saw drogues trailing behind her. Minerva is lying dead upon the wind, which is to say, she’s as close-hauled as possible—she can fall off to leeward but she cannot turn into the wind any farther. Since the ketch is to leeward—downwind of Minerva—falling away from the wind will send Minerva straight into the musket-fire and grappling-irons that are no doubt being readied on her decks and fighting-tops. But the ketch, being fore-and-aft rigged, can sail closer to the wind anyway. So even if Minerva holds her course, the ketch will be able to cut her off—driving her into the sucking (because heavily armed) schooner.

All of which goes to explain Daniel’s second reason for having gone to this room: it’s as far from the fighting as he can get without jumping overboard. But he does not find the solace he wants, because from here he can see two additional pirate-ships gaining on them from astern, and they seem bigger and better than any of the others.

An explosion, then another, then a lot of them at once—obviously something organized. Daniel’s still alive, Minerva’s still afloat. He flings open the door to the gundeck but it’s dark and quiet, the gunners all convened around the cannons on the larboard side—none of which has been fired. It must have been those carronnades on the upperdeck firing their loads of junk.

Daniel turns round and looks out the window to see the ketch being left behind, fine on the lee quarter.[*] It is no longer recognizable as a ketch, though—just a hull heaped with tangled, slack rigging and freshly splintered blond wood. One of her guns sparks and something terrible comes out of it, directly towards him—big and spreading. He begins to fall down, more out of vertigo than any coherent plan. All the glass in all those windows explodes toward him, driven on a wall of buckshot. Only some of it hits him in the face, and none in the eyes—more luck than a natural philosopher can comfortably account for.

The door’s been flung open again, either by the blast of shot or by his falling back into it, so half of him is lying on the gundeck now. Suddenly, radiance warms his tightly closed eyelids. It could be a choir of angels, or a squadron of flaming devils, but he doesn’t believe in any of that stuff. Or it could be Minerva’s powder magazine exploding—but that would involve loud noises, and the only noises he hears are the creaking and grumbling of gun-carriages being hauled forward. There’s a refreshing sea breeze in his nostrils. He takes a big risk and opens his eyes.

All of the gunports on the larboard side have been opened at once, and all of the cannon rolled out. Gunners are hauling on blocks and tackles, slewing their weapons this way or that—others levering the guns’ butts up with crowbars and hammering wedges underneath—there are, in short, as many feverish preparations as for a royal wedding. Then fire is brought out, the roll of the ship carefully timed, and Daniel—poor Daniel doesn’t think to put his hands over his ears. He hears one or two cannon-blasts before going deaf. Then it’s just one four-ton iron tube after another jerking backwards as lightly as shuttlecocks.

He is fairly certain that he is dead now.

Other dead men are around him.

They are lying on the upperdeck.

A couple of sailors are sitting on Daniel’s corpse, while another tortures his deceased flesh with a needle. Sewing his dismembered parts back on, closing up the breaches in his abdomen so stuff won’t leak out. So this is what it felt like to have been a stray dog in the clutches of the Royal Society!

As Daniel is lying flat on his back, his view is mostly skywards, though if he turns his head—an astonishing feat, for a dead man—he can see van Hoek up on the poop deck bellowing through his trumpet—which is aimed nearly straight down over the rail.

“What on earth can he be shouting at?” Daniel asks.

“Apologies, Doctor, didn’t know you’d come awake,” says a Looming Column of Shadow, speaking in Dappa’s voice, and stepping back to block the sun from Daniel’s face. “He’s parleying with certain pirates who rowed out from Teach’s flagship under a flag of truce.”

“What do they want?”

“They want you, Doctor.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re thinking too hard—there’s naught to understand—it is entirely simple,” Dappa says. “They rowed up and said, ‘Give us Dr. Waterhouse and all is forgotten.’”

Dr. Waterhouse now ought to spend a long time being dumbstruck. But his stupefaction lasts only a little while. The sensation of nubby silk thread being drawn briskly through fresh holes in his flesh, makes serious reflection all but impossible. “You’ll do it—of course,” is the best he can come up with.

“Any other captain would—but whoever arranged to put you aboard, must’ve known about Captain van Hoek’s feelings concerning pirates. Behold!” and Dappa steps out of the way to give Daniel an unobstructed view of a sight stranger than anything gawkers would pay to view at St. Bartholomew’s Fair: a hammer-handed man climbing up into the rigging of a ship. That is to say that one of his arms is terminated, not by a hand, and not by a hook, but by an actual hammer. Van Hoek ascends to a suitably perilous altitude, up there alongside the colors that fly from the mizzenmast: a Dutch flag, and below it, a smaller one depicting the Ægis. After getting himself securely tangled in the shrouds—weaving limbs through rope so that his body is spliced into the rigging—he begins to pluck nails out of his mouth and drive them through the hem of each flag into the wood of the mast.

It seems, now, that every sailor who’s not sitting on Daniel is up in the rigging, unfurling a ludicrously vast array of sails. Daniel notes with approval that the mainsail’s finally been hoisted—that charade is over. And now moreover Minerva’s height is being miraculously increased as the topmasts are telescoped upwards. An asymptotic progression of smaller and smaller trapezoids spreads out upon their frail-seeming yards.

“It’s a glorious gesture for the Captain to make—now that he’s sunk half of Teach’s fleet,” Daniel says.

“Aye, Doctor—but not the better half,” Dappa says.

The City of London

1673

A fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the dissolution of a commonwealth, is, that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as excludeth the right of the sovereign.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

DANIEL HAD NEVER been an actor on a stage, of course, but when he went to plays at Roger Comstock’s theatre—especially when he saw them for the fifth or sixth time—he was struck by the sheer oddity of these men (and women!) standing about on a platform prating the words of a script for the hundredth time and trying to behave as if hundreds of persons weren’t a few yards away goggling at them. It was strangely mannered, hollow, and false, and all who took part in it secretly wanted to strike the show and move on to something new. Thus London during this the Third Dutch War, waiting for news of the Fall of Holland.

As they waited, they had to content themselves with such smaller bits of news as from time to time percolated in from the sea. All London passed these rumors around and put on a great pompous show of reacting to them, as actors observe a battle or storm said to be taking place off-stage.

Queerly—or perhaps not—the only solace for most Londoners was going to the theatre, where they could sit together in darkness and watch their own behavior reflected back to them. Once More into the Breeches had become very popular since its Trinity College debut. It had to be performed in Roger Comstock’s theatre after its first and second homes were set on fire owing to lapses in judgment on the part of the pyrotechnicians. Daniel’s job was to simulate lightning-flashes, thunderbolts, and the accidental detonation of Lord Brimstone without burning down Roger’s investment. He invented a new thunder-engine, consisting of a cannonball rolling down a Spiral of Archimedes in a wooden barrel, and he abused his privileges at the world’s leading alchemical research facility to formulate a new variant of gunpowder that made more flash and less bang. The pyrotechnics lasted for a few minutes, at the beginning of the play. The rest of the time he got to sit backstage and watch Tess, who always dazzled him like a fistful of flash-powder going off right in the face, and made his heart feel like a dented cannonball tumbling down an endless hollow Screw. King Charles came frequently to watch his Nellie sing her pretty songs, and so Daniel took some comfort—or amusement at least—in knowing that he and the King both endured this endless Wait in the same way: gazing at the cheeks of pretty girls.

The small bits of news that did come in, while they waited for the big one, took various forms at first, but as the war went on they seemed to consist mostly of death-notices. It was not quite like living in London during the Plague; but more than once, Daniel had to choose between two funerals going on at the same hour. Wilkins had been the first. Many more followed, as if the Bishop of Chester had launched a fad.

Richard Comstock, the eldest son of John, and the model for the stalwart if dim Eugene Stopcock in Breeches, was on a ship that was part of a fleet that fell under the guns of Admiral de Ruyter at Sole Bay. Along with thousands of other Englishmen, he went to David Jones’s Locker. Many of the survivors could now be seen hobbling round London on bloody stumps, or rattling cups on street-corners. Daniel was startled to receive an invitation to the funeral. Not from John, of course, but from Charles, who had been John’s fourth son and was now the only one left (the other two had died young of smallpox). After his stint as laboratory assistant during the Plague Year at Epsom, Charles had matriculated at Cambridge, where he’d been tutored by Daniel. He had been well on his way to being a competent Natural Philosopher. But now he was the scion of a great family, and never could be aught else, unless the family ceased to be great, or he ceased being a part of it.

John Comstock got up in front of the church and said, “The Hollander exceeds us in industry, and in all things else, but envy.”

King Charles shut down the Exchequer one day, which is to say that he admitted that the country was out of money, and that not only could the Crown not repay its debts, but it couldn’t even pay interest on them. Within a week, Daniel’s uncle, Thomas Ham, Viscount Walbrook, was dead—of a broken heart or suicide, no one save Aunt Mayflower knew—but it scarcely made a difference. This led to the most theatrickal of all the scenes Daniel witnessed in London that year (with the possible exception of the re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht): the opening of the Crypt.

Thomas Ham’s reliable basement had been sealed up by court officials immediately upon the death of its proprietor, and musketeers had been posted all round to prevent Ham’s depositors (who had, in recent weeks, formed a small muttering knot that never went away, loitering outside; as others held up libels depicting the atrocities of King Looie’s army in Holland, so these held up Goldsmiths’s Notes addressed to Thomas Ham) from breaking in and claiming their various plates, candlesticks, and guineas. Legal maneuverings began, and continued round the clock, casting a queer shadow over Uncle Thomas’s funeral, and stretching beyond it to two days, then three. The cellar’s owner was already in the grave, his chief associates mysteriously unfindable, and rumored to be in Dunkirk trying to buy passage to Brazil with crumpled golden punch-bowls and gravy-boats. But those were rumors. The facts were in the famously safe and sturdy Ham Bros. Cellar on Threadneedle.

This was finally unsealed by a squadron of Lords and Justices, escorted by musketeers, and duly witnessed by Raleigh, Sterling, and Daniel Waterhouse; Sir Richard Apthorp; and various stately and important Others. It was three days exactly since King Charles had washed his hands of the royal debts and Thomas Ham had met his personal Calvary at the hands of the Exchequer. That statistic was noted by Sterling Waterhouse—as always, noticer of details par excellence. As the crowd of Great and Good Men shuffled up the steps of Ham House, he muttered to Daniel: “I wonder if we shall roll the stone aside and find an empty tomb?”

Daniel was appalled by this dual sacrilege—then reflected that as he was now practically living in a theatre and mooning over an actress every night, he could scarcely criticize Sterling for making a jest.

It turned out not to be a jest. The cellar was empty.

Well—not empty. It was full, now, of speechless men, standing flatfooted on the Roman mosaic.

RALEIGH: “I knew it would be bad. But—my God—there’s not even a potatoe.”

STERLING: “It is a sort of anti-miracle.”

LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF THE REALM: “Go up and tell the musketeers to go and get more musketeers.”

They all stood there for quite a while. Attempts to make conversation flared sporadically all round the cellar and fizzled like flashes in damp pans. Except—strangely—among Waterhouses. Disaster had made them convivial.

RALEIGH: “Our newest tenant informs me you’ve decided to turn architect, Daniel.”

STERLING: “We thought you were going to be a savant.”

DANIEL: “All the other savants are doing it. Just the other day, Hooke figured out how arches work.”

STERLING: “I should have thought that was known by now.”

RALEIGH: “Do you mean to say all existing arches have been built on guesswork?”

SIR RICHARD APTHORP: “Arches—and Financial Institutions.”

DANIEL: “Christopher Wren is going to re-design all the arches in St. Paul’s, now that Hooke has explained them.”

STERLING: “Good! Maybe the new one won’t become all bow-legged and down-at-heels, as the old one did.”

RALEIGH: “I say, brother Daniel—don’t you have some drawings to show us?”

DANIEL: “Drawings?”

RALEIGH: “In the w’drawing room, perhaps?”

Which was a bad pun and a cryptickal sign, from Raleigh the patriarch (fifty-five years comically aged, to Daniel’s eyes seeming like a young Raleigh dressed up in rich old man’s clothes and stage-makeup), that they were all supposed to Withdraw from the cellar. So they did, and Sir Richard Apthorp came with them. They wound up on the upper floor of Ham House, in a bedchamber—the very same one that Daniel had gazed into from his perch atop Gresham’s College. A rock had already come in through a window and was sitting anomalously in the middle of a rug, surrounded by polygons of glass. More were beginning to thud against the walls, so Daniel swung the windows open to preserve the glazing. Then they all retreated to the center of the room and perched up on the bed and watched the stones come in.

STERLING: “Speaking of Guineas, or lack thereof—shame about the Guinea Company, what?”

APTHORP: “Pfft! ’Twas like one of your brother’s theatrickal powder-squibs. Sold my shares of it long ago.”

STERLING: “What of you, Raleigh?”

RALEIGH: “They owe me money, is all.”

APTHORP: “You’ll get eight shillings on the pound.”

RALEIGH: “An outrage—but better than what Thomas Ham’s depositors will get.”

DANIEL: “Poor Mayflower!”

RALEIGH: “She and young William are moving in with me anon—and so you’ll have to seek other lodgings, Daniel.”

STERLING: “What fool is buying the Guinea Company’s debts?”

APTHORP: “James, Duke of York.”

STERLING: “As I said—what dauntless hero is, et cetera…”

DANIEL: “But that’s nonsense! They are his own debts!”

APTHORP: “They are the Guinea Company’s debts. But he is winding up the Guinea Company and creating a new Royal Africa Company. He’s to be the governor and chief shareholder.”

RALEIGH: “What, sinking our Navy and making us slaves to Popery is not sufficient—he’s got to enslave all the Neegers, too?”

STERLING: “Brother, you sound more like Drake every day.”

RALEIGH: “Being surrounded by an armed mob must be the cause of sounding that way.”

APTHORP: “The Duke of York has resigned the Admiralty…”

RALEIGH: “As there’s nothing left to be Admiral of…”

APTHORP: “And is going to marry that nice Catholic girl[*] and compose his African affairs.”

STERLING: “Sir Richard, this must be one of those things that you know before anyone else does, or else there would be rioters in the streets.”

RALEIGH: “There are, you pea-wit, and unless I’m having a Drakish vision, they have set fire to this very house.”

STERLING: “I meant they’d be rioting ’gainst the Duke, not our late bro-in-law.”

DANIEL: “I personally witnessed a sort of riot ’gainst the Duke the other day—but it was about his religious, not his military, political, or commercial shortcomings.”

STERLING: “You left out ‘intellectual and moral.’”

DANIEL: “I was trying to be concise—as we are getting a bit short of that spiritous essence, found in fresh air, for which fire competes with living animals.”

RALEIGH: “The Duke of York! What bootlicking courtier was responsible for naming New York after him? ’Tis a perfectly acceptable city.”

DANIEL: “If I may change the subject…the reason I led us to this room was yonder ladder, which in addition to being an excellent Play Structure for William Ham, will also convey us to the roof—where it’s neither so hot nor so smoky.”

STERLING: “Daniel, never mind what people say about you—you always have your reasons.”

[Now a serio-comical musical interlude: the brothers Waterhouse break into a shouted, hoarse (because of smoke) rendition of a Puritan hymn about climbing Jacob’s Ladder.]

SCENE: The rooftops of Threadneedle Street. Shouts, shattering of glass, musket-shots heard from below. They gather round the mighty Ham-chimney, which is now venting smoke of burning walls and furniture below.

SIR RICHARD APTHORP: “How inspiring, Daniel, to gaze down the widened and straightened prospect of Cheapside and know that St. Paul’s will be rebuilt there anon—’pon mathematick principles—so that it’s likely to stay up for a bit.”

STERLING: “Sir Richard, you sound ominously like a preacher opening his sermon with a commonplace observation that is soon to become one leg of a tedious and strained analogy.”

APTHORP: “Or, if you please, one leg of an arch—the other to be planted, oh, about here.”

RALEIGH: “You want to build, what, some sort of triumphal arch, spanning that distance? May I remind you that first we want some sort of triumph!?”

APTHORP: “It is only a similitude. What Christopher Wren means to do yonder in the way of a Church, I mean to do here with a Banca. And as Wren will use Hooke’s principles to build that Church soundly, I’ll use modern means to devise a Banca that—without in any way impugning your late brother-in-law’s illustrious record—will not have armed mobs in front of it burning it down.”

RALEIGH: “Our late brother-in-law was ruined, because the King borrowed all of his deposits—presumably at gunpoint—and then declined to pay ’em back—what mathematick principle will you use to prevent that?”

APTHORP: “Why, the same one that you and your co-religionists have used in order to maintain your faith: tell the King to leave us alone.”

RALEIGH: “Kings do not love to be told that, or anything.”

APTHORP: “I saw the King yesterday, and I tell you that he loves being bankrupt even less. I was born in the very year that the King seized the gold and silver that Drake and the other merchants had deposited in the Tower of London for safekeeping. Do you recall it?”

RALEIGH: “Yes, ’twas a black year, and made rebels of many who only wanted to be merchants.”

APTHORP: “Your brother-in-law’s business, and the practice of goldsmith’s notes, arose as a result—no one trusted the Tower any more.”

STERLING: “And after today no one will trust goldsmiths, or their silly notes.”

APTHORP: “Just so. And just as the Empty Tomb on Easter led, in the fullness of time, to a Resurrection…”

DANIEL: “I am stopping up mine ears now—if the conversation turns Christian, wave your hands about.”

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THE DUTCH had won the war percolated through London invisibly, like Plague. Suddenly everyone had it. Daniel woke up in Bedlam one morning knowing that William of Orange had opened the sluices and put a large part of his Republic under water to save Amsterdam. But he couldn’t recall whence that knowledge had come.

He and his brothers had worked their way up Threadneedle by assailing one rooftop after another. They’d parted company with Apthorp on the roof of his goldsmith’s shop, which was still solvent—yet there was an armed mob in front of it, too, and in front of the next goldsmith’s, and the next. Far from escaping a riot, they understood, somewhat too late, that they were working their way toward the center of a much larger one. The obvious solution was to turn round and go back the way they’d come—but now a platoon of Quakers was coming toward them over the rooftops gripping matchlocks, each Quaker trailing a long thread of smoke from the smoldering punk in his fingers. Looking north across Threadneedle they could see a roughly equivalent number of infantrymen headed over the rooftops of Broad Street, coming from the direction of Gresham’s College, and it seemed obvious enough that Quakers and Army men would soon be swapping musket-balls over the heads of the mob of Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Diggers, Jews, Huguenots, Presbyterians, and other sects down below.

So it was down to the street and into the stone-throwing fray. But when they got down there, Daniel saw that these were not the young shin-kickers and head-butters of Drake’s glory days. These were paunchy mercers who simply wanted to know where all of their money had got to. The answer was that it had gone to wherever it goes when markets crash. Daniel kept treading on wigs. Sometimes a hundred rioters would turn around and flee en bloc from sudden musket-fire and all of their wigs would fall off at once, as though this were a practiced military drill. Some of the wigs had dollops of brain in them, though, which ended up as pearly skeins on Daniel’s shoes.

They pushed their way up Broad Street, away from the ’Change, which seemed to be the center of all disturbance. Those mock-Polish grenadiers were formed up in front of the building that had been the Guinea, and was soon to be the Royal Africa, Company. So the Waterhouses squirted past on the far side of the street, looking back to see whether any of those fatal spheres were trajecting after them. They tried to get in at Gresham’s College. But many offices of the City of London had been moved into it after the fire, and so it was shut up and almost as well guarded as the Royal Africa Company.

So they had kept moving north and eventually reached Bedlam, and found an evening’s refuge there amid piles of dressed stone and splats of mortar. Sterling and Raleigh had departed the next morning, but Daniel had remained: encamped, becalmed, drained, and feeling no desire to go back into the city. From time to time he would hear a nearby church-bell tolling the years of someone who’d died in the rioting.

Daniel’s whereabouts became known, and messengers began to arrive, several times a day, bearing invitations to more funerals. He attended several of them, and was frequently asked to stand up and say a few words—not about the deceased (he scarcely knew most of them), but about more general issues of religious tolerance. In other words, he was asked to parrot what Wilkins would’ve said, and for Daniel that was easy—much easier than making up words of his own. Out of a balanced respect for his own father, he mentioned Drake, too. This felt like a slow and indirect form of suicide, but after his conversation with John Comstock he did not feel he had much of a life to throw away. He was strangely comforted by the sight of all those pews filled with men in white and black (though sometimes Roger Comstock would show up as a gem of color, accompanied by one or two courtiers who were sympathetic, or at least curious). More mourners would be visible through open doors and windows, filling the church-yard and street.

It reminded him of the time during his undergraduate days when the Puritan had been murdered by Upnor, and Daniel had traveled five miles outside of Cambridge to the funeral, and found his father and brothers, miraculously, there. Exasperating to his mind but comforting to his soul. His words swayed their emotions much more than he wanted, or expected—as two inert substances, mixed in an Alchemist’s mortar, can create a fulminating compound, so the invocation of Drake’s and Wilkins’s memories together.

But this was not what he wanted and so he began to avoid the funerals after that, and stayed in the quiet stone-garden of Bedlam.

Hooke was there, too, for Gresham’s College had become too crowded with scheming fops. Bedlam was years away from being done. The masons hadn’t even begun work on the wings. But the middle part was built, and on top of it was a round turret with windows on all sides, where Hooke liked to retreat and work, because it was lonely and the light was excellent. Daniel for his part stayed down below, and only went out into the city to meet with Leibniz.

DOCTOR GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ picked up the coffee-pot and tipped it into his cup for the third time, and for the third time nothing came out of it. It had been empty for half an hour. He made a little sigh of regret, and then reluctantly stood up. “I beg your pardon, but I begin a long journey tomorrow. First the Channel crossing—then, between Calais and Paris, we shall have to dodge French regiments, straggling home, abject, starving, and deranged.”

Daniel insisted on paying the bill, and then followed the Doctor out the door. They began strolling in the direction of the inn where Leibniz had been staying. They were not far from the ’Change. Paving-stones and charred firebrands still littered the unpaved streets.

“Not much divine harmony in evidence, here in London,” Daniel said. “I can only hang my head in shame, as an Englishman.”

“If you and France had conquered the Dutch Republic, you would have much more to be ashamed of,” Leibniz returned.

“When, God willing, you get back to Paris, you can say that your mission was a success: there is no war.”

“It was a failure,” Leibniz said, “we did not prevent the war.”

“When you came to London, Doctor, you said that your philosophick endeavours were nothing more than a cover for diplomacy. But I suspect that it was the other way round.”

“My philosophick endeavours were a failure, too,” Leibniz said.

“You have gained one adherent…”

“Yes. Oldenburg pesters me every day to complete the Arithmetickal Engine.”

“Make that two adherents, then, Doctor.”

Leibniz actually stopped in his tracks and turned to examine Daniel’s face, to see if he was jesting. “I am honored, sir,” he said, “but I would prefer to think of you not as an adherent but as a friend.”

“Then the honor is all mine.”

They linked arms and walked in silence for a while.

“Paris!” Leibniz said, as if it were the only thing that could get him through the next few days. “When I get back to the Bibliothèque du Roi, I will turn all of my efforts to mathematics.”

“You don’t want to complete the Arithmetickal Engine?”

It was the first time Daniel had ever seen the Doctor show annoyance. “I am a philosopher, not a watchmaker. The philosophickal problems associated with the Arithmetickal Engine have already been solved…I have found my way out of that labyrinth.”

“That reminds me of something you said on your first day in London, Doctor. You mentioned that the question of free will versus predestination is one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What, pray tell, is the other?”

“The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space? Euclid assures us that we can divide any distance in half, and then subdivide each of them into smaller halves, and so on, ad infinitum. Easy to say, but difficult to understand…”

“It is more difficult for metaphysicians than for mathematicians, I think,” Daniel said. “As in so many other fields, modern mathematics has given us tools to work with things that are infinitely small, or infinitely large.”

“Perhaps I am too much of a metaphysician, then,” Leibniz said. “I take it, sir, that you are referring to the techniques of infinite sequences and series?”

“Just so, Doctor. But as usual, you are overly modest. You have already demonstrated, before the Royal Society, that you know as much of those techniques as any man alive.”

“But to me, they do not resolve our confusion, so much as give us a way to think about how confused we are. For example—”

Leibniz gravitated toward a sputtering lamp dangling from the overhanging corner of a building. The City of London’s new program to light the streets at night had suffered from the fact that the country was out of money. But in this riotous part of town, where (in the view of Sir Roger L’Estrange, anyway) any shadow might hide a conspiracy of Dissidents, it had been judged worthwhile to spend a bit of whale-oil on street-lamps.

Leibniz fetched a stick from a pile of debris that had been a goldsmith’s shop a week earlier, and stepped into the circle of brown light cast on the dirt by the lamp, and scratched out the first few terms of a series:

“If you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to approach the value of pi—to reach toward it, but never to grasp it…much as the human mind can approach divine things, and gain an imperfect knowledge of them, but never look God in the face.”

“It is not necessarily true that infinite series must be some sort of concession to the unknowable, Doctor…they can clarify, too! My friend Isaac Newton has done wizardly things with them. He has learned to approximate any curve as an infinite series.”

Daniel took the stick from Leibniz, then swept out a curve in the dirt. “Far from detracting from his knowledge, this has extended his grasp, by giving him a way to calculate the tangent to a curve at any point.” He carved a straight line above the curve, grazing it at one point.

A black coach rattled up the street, its four horses driven onwards by the coachman’s whip, but veering nervously around piles of debris. Daniel and Leibniz backed into a doorway to let it pass; its wheels exploded a puddle and turned Leibniz’s glyphs and Daniel’s curves into a system of strange canals, and eventually washed them away.

“Would that some of our work last longer than that,” Daniel said ruefully. Leibniz laughed—for a moment—then walked silently for a hundred yards or so.

“I thought Newton only did Alchemy,” Leibniz said.

“From time to time, Oldenburg or Comstock or I cajole him into writing out some of his mathematical work.”

“Perhaps I need more cajoling,” Leibniz said.

“Huygens can cajole you, when you get back.”

Leibniz shrugged violently, as if Huygens were sitting astride his neck, and needed to be got rid of. “He has tutored me well, to this point. But if all he can do is give me problems that have already been solved by some Englishman, it must mean that he knows no more mathematics than I do.”

“And Oldenburg is cajoling you—but to do the wrong thing.”

“I shall endeavour to have an Arithmetickal Engine built in Paris, to satisfy Oldenburg,” Leibniz sighed. “It is a worthy project, but for now it is a project for a mechanic.”

They came into the light of another street-lamp. Daniel took advantage of it to look at his companion’s face, and gauge his mood. Leibniz looked a good deal more resolute than he had beneath the previous street-lamp. “It is childish of me to expect older men to tell me what to do,” the Doctor said. “No one told me to think about free will versus predestination. I plunged into the middle of the labyrinth, and became thoroughly lost, and then had no choice but to think my way out of it.”

“The second labyrinth awaits you,” Daniel reminded him.

“Yes…it is time for me to plunge into it. Henceforth, that is my only purpose. The next time you see me, Daniel, I will be a mathematician second to none.”

From any other Continental lawyer these words would have been laughably arrogant; but they had come from the mouth of the monster.

I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

DANIEL WAS AWAKENED one morning by a stifled boom, and supposed it was a piece being tested in the Artillery Yard outside of town. Just as he was about to fall back to sleep he heard it again: thump, like the period at the end of a book.

Dawn-light had flooded the turret of Bedlam and was picking its way down through struts and lashings, plank-decks and scaffolds, dangling ropes and angling braces, to the ground floor where Daniel lay on a sack of straw. He could hear movements above: not blunderings of thieves or vermin, but the well-conceived, precisely executed maneuvers of birds, and of Robert Hooke.

Daniel rose and, leaving his wig behind, so that the cool air bathed his stubbled scalp, climbed up toward the light, ascending the masons’ ladders and ropes. Above his head, the gaps between planks were radiant, salmon-colored lines, tight and parallel as harpsichord-strings. He hoisted himself up through a hatch, rousting a couple of swallows, and found himself within the dome of the turret, sharing a hemispherical room with Robert Hooke. Dust made the air gently luminous. Hooke had spread out large drawings of wings and airscrews. Before the windows he had hung panes of glass, neatly scored with black Cartesian grids, plotted with foreshortened parabolae—the trajectories of actual cannonballs. Hooke liked to watch cannonballs fly from a stand-point next to the cannon, standing inside a contraption he had built, peering through these sheets of glass and tracing the balls’ courses on them with a grease-pencil.

“Weigh out five grains of powder for me,” Hooke said. He was paying attention to part of a rarefying engine: one of many such piston-and-cylinder devices he and Boyle used to study the expansion of gases.

Daniel went over to a tiny scale set up on a plank between two sawhorses. On the floor next to it was a keg branded with the coat of arms of the Silver Comstocks. Its bung was loose, and peppered with grains of coarse powder. Next to it rested a small cylindrical bag of linen, about the diameter of a fist, plump and round as a full sack of flour. This had once been sewn shut, but Hooke had snipped through the uneven stitches and teased it open. Looking in among the petals of frayed fabric, Daniel saw that it, too, was filled with black powder.

“Would you prefer I take it from the keg, or the little bag?” Daniel asked.

“As I value my eyes, and my Rarefying Engine, take it from the keg.”

“Why do you say so?” Daniel drew the loose bung out and found that the keg was nearly full. Taking up a copper spoon that Hooke had left near the scale (copper did not make sparks), he scooped up a small amount of powder from the bung-hole and began sprinkling it onto one of the scale’s frail golden pans. But his gaze strayed towards the linen bag. In part this was because Hooke, who feared so little, seemed to think it was a hazard. Too, there was something about this bag that was familiar to him, though he could not place it in his memory.

“Rub a pinch between your fingers,” Hooke suggested. “Come, there is no danger.”

Daniel probed into the linen bag and got a smudge of the stuff on his fingertips. The answer was obvious. “This is much finer than that in the keg.” And that was the clew that reminded him where he had seen such a bag before. The night that Roger Comstock had blown himself up in the laboratory, he had been grinding gunpowder very fine, and pouring it into a bag just like this one. “Where did this come from? A theatre?”

For once Hooke was flummoxed. “What a very odd question for you to ask. Why do you phant’sy such a thing should come from a theatre, of all places?”

“The nature of the powder,” Daniel said. “Ground so exceedingly fine.” He nodded at the bag, for his hands were busy. Having weighed out five grains of powder from the keg, he poured them from the scale-pan into a cupped scrap of paper and carried it over to Hooke. “Such powder burns much faster than this coarse stuff.” He shook the paper for emphasis and it made a sandy rasp. He handed it to Hooke, who poured it into the cylinder of the Rarefying Engine. Some of these engines were wrought of glass, but this was a heavy brass tube about the size of a tobacco-canister: a very small siege-mortar, in effect. Its piston fit into it like a cannonball.

“I am aware of it,” Hooke said. “That is why I do not wish to put five grains of it into the Rarefying Engine. Five grains of Comstock’s powder burns slow and steady, and drives the piston up in a way that is useful to me. The same weight of that fine stuff from yonder bag would burn in an instant, and explode my apparatus, and me.”

“That is why I supposed the bag might have come from a theatre,” Daniel said. “Such powder may be unsuitable for the Rarefying Engine, but on the stage it makes a pretty flash and bang.”

“That bag,” said Hooke, “came from the magazine of one of His Majesty’s Ships of War. The practice used to be, and still is on some ships, that powder is introduced into the bore of a cannon by scooping it up out of a keg and pouring it in. Similar to how a musketeer charges the barrel of his weapon. But in the heat of battle, our gunners are prone to mis-measure and to spill the powder on the deck. And to have open containers of powder near active cannon is to tempt disaster. A new practice is replacing the old. Before the battle, when it is possible to work calmly, the powder is carefully measured out and placed into bags, such as that one, which are sewn shut. The bags are stockpiled in the ship’s magazine. During battle, as they are needed, they are ferried one at a time to the guns.”

“I see,” Daniel said, “then the gunner need only slash the bag open and pour its contents into the bore.”

Hardly for the first time, Hooke was a bit irked by Daniel’s stupidity. “Why waste time opening it with a knife, when fire will open it for you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Behold, the diameter of the bag is the same as the bore of the gun. Why open it then? No, the entire bag, sewn shut, is introduced into the barrel.”

“The gunners never even see what is inside of it!”

Hooke nodded. “The only powder that the gunners need concern themselves with is the priming-powder that is poured into the touch-hole and used to communicate fire to the bag.”

“Then those gunners are trusting the ones who sew up the bags—trusting them with their lives,” Daniel said. “If the wrong sort of powder were used—” and he faltered, and went over and dipped his fingers once more into the bag before him to feel the consistency of the powder inside. The difference between it and the Comstock powder was like that between flour and sand.

“Your discourse is strangely like that of John Comstock when he delivered that bag and that keg to me,” Hooke said.

“He brought them around in person?”

Hooke nodded. “He said he no longer trusted anyone to do it for him.”

Whereat Daniel must have looked shocked, for Hooke held up a hand as if to restrain him, and continued: “I understood his state of mind too well. Some of us, Daniel, are prone to a sort of melancholy, wherein we are tormented by phant’sies that other men are secretly plotting to do us injury. It is a pernicious state for a man to fall into. I have harbored such notions from time to time about Oldenburg and others. Your friend Newton shows signs of the same affliction. Of all men in the world, I supposed John Comstock least susceptible to this disorder; but when he came here with this bag, he was very far gone with it, which grieved me more than anything else that has happened of late.”

“My lord believes,” Daniel guessed, “that some enemy of his has been salting the magazines of Navy ships with bags filled with finely milled powder, such as this one. Such a bag, sewn shut, would look the same, to a gunner, as an ordinary one; but when loaded into the bore, and fired—”

“It would burst the barrel and kill everyone nearby,” Hooke said. “Which might be blamed on a faulty cannon, or on faulty powder; but as my lord manufactures both, the blame cannot but be laid on him in the end.”

“Where did this bag come from?” Daniel asked.

“My lord said it was sent to him by his son Richard, who found it in the magazine of his ship on the eve of their sailing for Sole Bay.”

“Where Richard was killed by a Dutch broadside,” Daniel said. “So my lord desired that you would inspect this bag and render an opinion that it had been tampered with by some malicious conspirator.”

“Just so.”

“And have you done so?”

“No one has asked my opinion yet.”

“Not even Comstock?”

“Nay, not even Comstock.”

“Why would he bring you such evidence in person, and then not ask?”

“I can only guess,” Hooke said, “that in the meantime he has come to understand that it does not really matter.”

“What an odd thing to think.”

“Not really,” Hooke said. “Suppose I testified that this bag contained powder that was too fine. What would it boot him? Anglesey—for make no mistake, that’s who’s behind this—would reply that Comstock had made up this bag in his own cellar, as false evidence to exonerate himself and his faulty cannons. Comstock’s son is the only man who could testify that it came from a ship’s magazine, and he’s dead. There might be other such bags in other magazines, but they are mostly on the bottom of the sea, thanks to Admiral de Ruyter. We have lost the war, and it must be blamed on someone. Someone other than the King and the Duke of York. Comstock has now come to understand that it is being blamed on him.”

The daylight had become much more intense in the minutes Daniel had been up here. He saw that Hooke had rigged an articulated rod to the back of the piston, and connected the rod to a system of cranks. Now, by means of a tiny touch-hole in the base of the cylinder, he introduced fire to the chamber. Thump. The piston snapped up to the top of the bore much faster than Daniel could flinch away from it. This caused an instant of violent motion in the gear-train, which had the effect of winding a spring that spiraled around in a whirling hoop the size of a dinner-plate. A ratchet stopped this from unwinding. Hooke then re-arranged the gears so that the giant watch-spring was connected, by a string wound around a tapered drum, to the drive-shaft of a peculiar helical object, very light-weight, made of parchment stretched on a frame of steam-bent cane. Like a Screw of Archimedes. The spring unwound slowly, spinning the screw swiftly and steadily. Standing at one end of it, Daniel felt a palpable breeze, which continued for more than a minute—Hooke timed it with his latest watch.

“Properly wrought, and fed with gunpowder at regular intervals, it might generate enough wind to blow itself off the ground,” Hooke said.

“Supplying the gunpowder would be difficult,” Daniel said.

“I only use it because I have some,” Hooke said. “Now that Anglesey has been elected President of the Royal Society, I look forward to experimenting with combustible vapors in its stead.”

“Even if I’ve moved to Massachusetts by then,” Daniel said, “I’ll come back to London to watch you fly through the air, Mr. Hooke.”

A church-bell began ringing not far away. Daniel remarked that it was a bit early for funerals. But a few minutes later another one started up, and another. They did not simply bong a few times and then stop—they kept pealing in some kind of celebration. But the Anglican churches did not seem to be sharing in the joy. Only the queer churches of Dutchmen and Jews and Dissenters.

LATER IN THE DAY, Roger Comstock appeared at the gates of Bedlam in a coach-and-four. The previous owner’s coat of arms had been scraped off and replaced with that of the Golden Comstocks. “Daniel, do me the honor of allowing me to escort you to Whitehall,” Roger said, “the King wants you there for the signing.”

“Signing of what?” Daniel could imagine several possibilities—Daniel’s death warrant for sedition, Roger’s for sabotage, or an instrument of surrender to the Dutch Republic, being three of the more plausible.

“Why, the Declaration! Haven’t you heard? Freedom of conscience for Dissenters of all stripes—almost—just as Wilkins wanted it.”

“That is very good news, if true—but why should His Majesty want me there?”

“Why, next to Bolstrood you are the leading Dissenter!”

“That is not true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Roger said cheerfully. “He thinks it’s true—and after today, it will be.”

“Why does he think it’s true?” Daniel asked, though he already suspected why.

“Because I have been telling everyone so,” Roger answered.

“I haven’t clothes fit to wear to a whorehouse—to say nothing of Whitehall Palace.”

“There is very little practical difference,” Roger said absent-mindedly.

“You don’t understand. My wig’s home to a family of swallows,” Daniel complained. But Roger Comstock snapped his fingers, and a valet sprang out of the coach laden with diverse packages and bundles. Through the open door, Daniel glimpsed women’s clothing, too—with women inside of it. Two different women. A thump from the turret, a muffled curse from Hooke. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing foppish,” Roger said. “For a leading Dissident, it is entirely proper.”

“Can the same be said of the ladies?” Daniel asked, following Roger and the valet into Bedlam.

“These aren’t ladies,” Roger said, and other than that weak jest did not even try to answer the question. “Do London a favor and take those damned clothes off. I shall have my manservant burn them.”

“The shirt is not so bad,” Daniel demurred. “Oh, I agree that it is no longer fit for wearing. But it might be made into a powder-bag for the Navy.”

“No longer in demand,” Roger said, “now that the war is over.”

“On the contrary, I say that a great many of them shall have to be made up now, as so many of the old ones are known to be defective.”

“Hmm, you are well-informed, for a political naif. Who has been filling your head with such ideas? Obviously a supporter of Comstock.”

“I suppose that supporters of Anglesey are saying that the powder-bags are all excellent, and it’s Comstock’s cannons that were made wrong.”

“It is universally known, among the Quality.”

“That may be. But it is known among you, and me, and a few other people, that bags were made up, containing powder that was ground fine.”

Coincidentally or not, Daniel had reached the point of complete nakedness as he was saying these words. He had a pair of drawers on; but Roger tossed him fresh ones, and averted his gaze. “Daniel! I cannot bear to see you in this state, nor can I listen to any more of your needling suspicious discourse. I will turn my back on you, and talk for a while. When I turn round again, I will behold a new man, as well informed as he is attired.”

“Very well, I suppose I’ve very little choice.”

“None whatsoever. Now, Daniel. You saw me grinding the powder fine, and putting it into the bag, and there is no point in denying it. No doubt you think the worst of me, as has been your wont since we first studied together at Trinity. Have you stopped to ask yourself, how a man in my position could possibly manage to introduce bags of powder into the magazines of a ship of the Royal Navy? Quite obviously it is impossible. Someone else must have done it. Someone with a great deal more power and reach than I can even dream of possessing.”

“The Duke of Gunfl—”

“Silence. Silence! And in silence ponder the similitudes between cannons and mouths. The simpleton beholds a cannon and phant’sies it an infallible destroyer of foes. But the veteran artilleryman knows that sometimes, when a cannon speaks, it bursts. Especially when it has been loaded in haste. When this occurs, Daniel, the foe is untouched. He may sense a distant gaseous exhalation, not puissant enough to ruffle his periwig. The eager gunner, and all his comrades, are blown to bits. Ponder it, Daniel. And for once in your life, show a trace of discretion. It does not really matter what the gentleman’s name was who was responsible for causing those cannons to burst. What matters is that I had no idea what I was doing. What do I, of all people, know about naval artillery? All I knew was this: I met certain gentlemen at the Royal Society. Presently they became aware that I worked in Newton’s laboratory as an assistant. One of them approached me and asked if I might do him a favor. Nothing difficult. He wanted me to grind up some gunpowder very fine and deliver it to him in wee bags. This I did, as you know. I made up half a dozen of those bags over the course of a year. One of them blew up on the spot, thanks to you. Of the other five, I now know that one was smuggled into the ‘Siege of Maestricht,’ where it caused a cannon to explode in full view of half of London. The other four went to the Royal Navy. One was detected by Richard Comstock, who sent it to his father. One exploded a cannon during a naval engagement against the Dutch. The other two have since found their way into David Jones’s Magazine. As to my culpability: I did not understand until recently why the gentleman in question had made such an odd request of me. I did not know, when I was filling those bags, that they would be used to do murder.”

Daniel, snaking his limbs through new clothes, believed every word of this. He had long ago lost count of Roger’s moral lapses. Roger, he suspected, had broken as many of the ten commandments and committed as many of the seven deadly sins as it was in his power to do, and was actively seeking ways to break and commit those he had not yet ticked off the list. This had nothing to do with Roger’s character. Someone was responsible for blowing up those poor gunners, as a ploy to dishonor the Earl of Epsom: as vile an act as Daniel could imagine. Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gun-fleet, or one of his sons must have been at the head of the conspiracy, for as Roger had pointed out, Roger couldn’t have done it all himself. The only question then was whether Roger had understood what was being done with those powder-bags. The Angleseys would never have told him, and so he’d have had to figure it out on his own. And Roger’s career at Trinity gave no grounds to expect dazzling flashes of insight.

Believing in Roger’s innocence lifted from Daniel’s shoulders an immense weight that he had not been sensible of until it was gone. This felt so good that it triggered a few moments of Puritanical self-examination. Anything that felt so good might be a trick of the devil. Was he only feigning trust in Roger, because it felt good?

“How can you go on associating with those people when you know the atrocious thing they have done?”

“I was going to ask you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have been associating with them since the Plague Year, Daniel, at every meeting of the Royal Society.”

“But I did not know they were doing murder!”

“On the contrary, Daniel, you have known it ever since that night at Trinity twelve years ago when you watched Louis Anglesey murder one of your brethren.” Had he been a rather different sort of chap, Roger might have mentioned this in a cruelly triumphant way. Had he been Drake, he’d have said it sadly, or angrily. But being Roger Comstock, he proffered it as a witticism. He did it so well that Daniel let out a wee snort of amusement before coming to his senses and stifling himself.

The terms of the transaction finally were clear. Why did Daniel refuse to hate Roger? Not out of blindness to Roger’s faults, for he saw Roger’s moral cowardice as clearly as Hooke peering through a lens at a newt. Not out of Christian forgiveness, either. He refused to hate Roger because Roger saw moral cowardice in Daniel, had done so for years, and yet did not hate Daniel. Fair’s fair. They were brothers.

As much as he had to ponder in the way of moral dilemmas vis-à-vis Roger, ’twas as nothing compared to half an hour later, when Daniel emerged, booted, bewigged, cravated, and jacketed, and equipped with a second-hand watch that Roger somehow begged off of Hooke, and climbed into the coach. For one of the women in there was Tess Charter. Thump.

When she and the other woman were finished laughing at the look on Daniel’s face, she leaned forward and got her fingers all entangled with his. She was shockingly and alarmingly alive—somewhat more alive, in fact, than he was. She looked him in the eyes and spoke in her French accent: “Twooly, Daniel, eet eez ze hrole of a lifetime—portraying ze mistress of a gentlemen who eez too pure—too spiritual—to sink zee thoughts of zee flesh.” Then a middling London accent. “But really I prefer the challenging parts. The ability to do them’s what separates me from Nell Gwyn.”

“I wonder what separates the King from Nell Gwyn?” said the other woman.

“Ten inches of sheepgut with a knot in one end—if the King knows what’s good for him!” Tess returned. Thump.

This led to more in a similar vein. Daniel turned to Roger, who was sitting next to him, and said, “Sir! What on earth makes you believe I wish to appear to have a mistress?”

“Who said anything about appearing to have one?” Roger answered, and when Daniel didn’t laugh, gathered himself up and said, “Poh! You could no more show up at Whitehall without a mistress, than at a duel without a sword! Come, Daniel! No one will take you seriously! They’ll think you’re hiding something!”

“And that he is—though none too effectively,” Tess said, eyeing a new convexity in Daniel’s breeches.

“I loved your work in The Dutch Strumpet,” Daniel tried, weakly.

Thus, down London Wall and westwards, ho!—Daniel’s every attempt to say anything serious pre-empted by a courtly witticism—more often than not, so bawdy he didn’t even understand it, any more than Tess would understand the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Every jest followed by exaltations of female laughter and then a radical, and completely irrational, change in subject.

Just when Daniel thought he had imposed a bit of order on the conversation, the coach rattled into the middle of St. Bartholomew’s Fair. Suddenly, outside the windows, bears were dancing jigs and hermaphrodites were tottering about on stilts. Devout men and well-bred ladies would avert their eyes from such sights, but Tess and the other woman (another Comedian, who gave every indication of being Roger’s authentic, not imaginary, mistress) had no intentions of averting their gazes from anything. They were still chattering about what they’d seen ten minutes later as the coach moved down Holborn. Daniel decided to take his cue from Roger, who rather than trying to talk to the ladies merely sat and watched them, face smeared with a village idiot’s grin.

They stopped by the corner of Waterhouse Square for ritual adoration of Roger’s new lot, and to make sniping comments about Raleigh’s house: that soon-to-be-o’ershadowed pile that Raleigh’s architect had (it was speculated) blown out of his arsehole during an attaque of the bloody phlux. The ladies made comments in a similar vein about the attire of the widow Mayflower Ham, who was descending from same, on her way to Whitehall, too.

Then down past any number of fields, churches, squares, et cetera, named after St. Giles, and a completely gratuitous detour along Piccadilly to Comstock House, where Roger had the coach stop so that he could spend several minutes savoring the spectacle of the Silver Comstocks moving out of the building that had served as their London seat since the Wars of the Roses. Colossal paintings, depicting scenes of hunting and of naval engagements, had been pulled out and leaned against the wrought-iron fence. Below them was a clutter of smaller canvases, mostly portraits, stripped of their gilded frames, which were going to auction. Making it appear that there was a whole crowd of Silver Comstocks, mostly in outmoded doublets or neck-ruffs, milling about down there and peering out grimly through the fence. “All behind bars where they should’ve been a hundred years ago!” Roger said, and then laughed at his own jest, loud enough to draw a look from John Comstock himself, who was standing in his forecourt watching some porters maneuver out the door a mainsail-sized painting of some Continental Siege. Daniel’s eye fixed on this. Partly it was because looking at the Earl of Epsom made him melancholy. But also it was because he had been spending so much time with Leibniz, who often spoke of paintings such as this one when talking about the mind of God. On one piece of canvas, seemingly from one fixed point of view, the artist had depicted skirmishes, sallies, cavalry charges, and the deaths of several of the principals, which had occurred in different places at different times. And this was not the only liberty he had taken with the notion of time and space, for certain events—the digging of a mine beneath a bastion, the detonation of the mine, and the ensuing battle—were shown all together at once. The images stood next to each other like pickled larvae in the Royal Society’s collection, sharing the same time for all time, and yet if you let your eye travel over them in the correct order you could make the story unfold within your mind, each event in its proper moment. This great painting did not, of course, stand alone, but was surrounded by all of the other paintings that had been carried out of the house before; its perceptions were ranged alongside others, this little Siege-world nested within a larger array of other things that the House of Comstock during its long history had perceived, and thought worthy to be set down on canvas. Now they were all being aired out and reshuffled, on a gloomy occasion. But to have this moment—the fall of the Silver Comstocks—embedded in so many old ones made it seem less terrible that it might have seemed if it had happened naked, as it were, and all alone in time and space.

THE EARL OF EPSOM TURNED his head and gazed across Piccadilly at his Golden cousin, but showed no particular emotion. Daniel had shrunk far down into the coach, where he hoped he’d be enshrouded in darkness. To him, John Comstock looked almost relieved. How bad could it be to live in Epsom and go hunting and fishing every day? That’s what Daniel told himself—but later the sadness and haggardness in the Earl’s face would appear in his mind’s eye at the oddest times.

“Do not become stupid now, just because you are seeing his face,” Roger said to him. “That man was a Cavalier. He led cavalry charges against the Parliamentarian foot-soldiers. Do you know what that means? Do you see that great bloody awful painting there of Comstock’s great-uncle and his friends galloping after that fox? Replace the fox with a starving yeoman, unarmed, alone, and you have a fair picture of how that man spent the Civil War.”

“I know all that,” Daniel said. “And yet, and yet, somehow I still prefer him and his family to the Duke of Gunfleet and his family.”

“John Comstock had to be cleared out of the way, and we had to lose a war, before anything could happen,” Roger said. “As to Anglesey and his spawn, I love them even less than you do. Do not fret about them. Enjoy your triumph and your mistress. Leave Anglesey to me.”

Then to Whitehall where they, and various Bolstroods and Waterhouses and many others, watched the King sign the Declaration. As penned by Wilkins, this document had given freedom of conscience to everyone. The version that the King signed today was not quite so generous: it outlawed certain extreme heretics, such as Arians who didn’t believe in the Trinity. Nevertheless, it was a good day’s work. Certainly enough to justify raising several pints, in several Drury Lane taverns, to the memory of John Wilkins. Daniel’s pretend mistress accompanied him on every stage of this epochal pub-crawling campaign, which led eventually to Roger Comstock’s playhouse, and, in particular, to a back-room of that playhouse, where there happened to be a bed.

“Who has been making sausages in here?” Daniel inquired. Which sent Tess into a fit of the giggles. She had just about got his new breeches off.

“I should say you have made a pretty one!” she finally managed to get out.

“I should say you are responsible for making it,” Daniel demurred, and then (now that it was in plain view) added: “and it is anything but pretty.”

“Wrong on both counts!” said Tess briskly. She stood up and grabbed it. Daniel gasped. She gave it a tug; Daniel yelped, and drew closer. “Ah, so it is attached to you. You shall have to accept responsibility for the making of it, then; can’t blame the lasses for everything. And as for pretty—” she relaxed her grip, and let it rest on the palm of her hand, and gave it a good look. “You’ve never seen a nasty one, have you?”

“I was raised to believe they were all quite nasty.”

“That may be true—it is all metaphysickal, isn’t it? Quite. But please know some are nastier than others. And that is why we have sausage-casings in a bedchamber.”

She proceeded to do something quite astonishing with ten inches of knotted sheepgut. Not that he needed ten inches; but she was generous with it, perhaps to show him a kind of respect.

“Does this mean it is not actually coitus?” Daniel asked hopefully. “Since I am not really touching you?” Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

“It is very common for men of your religion to say so,” Tess said. “Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say that we are not touching, and not having sex, if it makes you feel better,” Tess said. “Though, when all is finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep.”

“Please do not make me laugh!” Daniel said. “It hurts somehow.”

“What is funny? I simply speak the truth. What you are feeling is not hurting.”

He understood then that she was right. Hurting wasn’t the word for it.

When Daniel woke up in that bed, sometime in the middle of the following afternoon, Tess was gone. She’d left him a note (who’d have thought she was literate? But she had to read the scripts).

Daniel,

We shall make more sausages later. I am off to act. Yes, it may have slipped your mind that I am an actress.

Yesterday I worked, playing the role of mistress. It is a difficult role, because dull. But now it has become fact, not farce, and so I shall not have to act any more; much easier. As I am no longer professionally engaged, pretending to be your mistress, I shall no longer be receiving my stipend from your friend Roger. As I am now your mistress in fact, some small gift would be appropriate. Forgive my forwardness. Gentlemen know such things, Puritans must be instructed.

Tess

P.S. You want instruction in acting. I shall endeavour to help.

Daniel staggered about the room for some minutes collecting his clothes, and tried to put them on in the right order. It did not escape his notice that he was getting dressed, like an actor, in the backstage of a theatre. When he was done he found his way out among sets and properties and stumbled out onto the stage. The house was empty, save for a few actors dozing on benches. Tess was right. He had found his place now: he was just another actor, albeit he would never appear on a stage, and would have to make up his own lines ad libitum.

His role, as he could see plainly enough, was to be a leading Dissident who also happened to be a noted savant, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Until lately he would not have thought this a difficult role to play, since it was so close to the truth. But whatever illusions Daniel might once have harbored about being a man of God had died with Drake, and been cremated by Tess. He very much phant’sied being a Natural Philosopher, but that simply was not going to work if he had to compete against Isaac, Leibniz, and Hooke. And so the role that Roger Comstock had written for him was beginning to appear very challenging indeed. Perhaps, like Tess, he would come to prefer it that way.

That much had been evident to him on that morning in 1673. But the ramifications had been as far beyond his wits as Calculus would’ve been to Mayflower Ham. He could not have anticipated that his new-launched career as actor on the stage of London would stretch over the next twenty-five years. And even if he had foreseen that, he could never have phant’sied that, after forty, he would be called back for an encore.

Aboard Minerva, Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts

NOVEMBER 1713

BLACKBEARD IS AFTER HIM! Daniel spent the day terrified even before he knew this—now’s the time to be struck dead with fear. But he is calm instead. Partly it’s that the surgeon’s not sewing him together any more, and anything’s an improvement on that. Partly it’s that he lost some blood, and drank some rum, during the operation. But those are mechanistic explanations. Despite all that Daniel said to Wait Still concerning Free Will, et cetera, on the eve of his departure from Boston, he is not willing to believe, yet, that he is controlled by his balance of humours. No, Daniel is in a better mood (once he’s had an hour or two to rest up, anyway) because things are beginning to make sense now. Albeit scantly. Pain scares him, death doesn’t especially (he never expected to live so long!), but chaos, and the feeling that the world is not behaving according to rational laws, put him into the same state of animal terror as a dog who’s being dissected alive but cannot understand why. To him the rolling eyes of those bound and muzzled dogs have ever been the touchstone of fear.

“Out for a stroll so soon, Doctor?”

Dappa’s evidently recognized him by the tread of his shoes and walking-stick on the quarterdeck—he hasn’t taken the spyglass away from his eye in half an hour.

“What about that schooner is so fascinating, Mr. Dappa? Other than that it’s full of murderers.”

“The Captain and I are having a dispute. I say it is a floaty and leewardly Flemish pirate-bottom. Van Hoek sees idioms in its rigging that argue to the contrary.”

“Bottom meaning her hull—floaty meaning she bobs like a cork, with little below the water-line—which is desirable, I gad, for Flemings and pirates alike, as both must slip into shallow coves and harbors—”

“Perfect marks so far, Doctor.”

“Leewardly, then, I suppose, means that because of that faintness in the keel, the wind tends to push her sideways through the water whenever she is sailing close-hauled—as she is now.”

“And as are we, Doctor.”

“Minerva has the same defect, I suppose—”

This slander finally induces Dappa to take the spyglass away from his eye. “Why should you assume any such thing?”

“All these Amsterdam-ships are flat-bottomed of necessity, are they not? For entering the Ijsselmeer…”

“Minerva was built on the Malabar coast.”

“Mr. Dappa!”

“I would not dishonor you with jests, Doctor. It is true. I was there.”

“But how—”

“ ’Tis an awkward time to be telling you the entire Narration,” Dappa observes. “Suffice it to say that she is not leewardly. Her apparent course is as close as it can be to her true course.”

“And you’d like to know, whether the same is true of yonder schooner,” Daniel says. “It is not unlike the problem an astronomer faces, when—imprisoned as he is on a whirling and hurtling planet—he tries to plot the true trajectory of a comet through the heavens.”

“Now it’s my turn to wonder whether you are jesting.”

“The water is like the Cœlestial Æther, a fluid medium through which all things move. Cape Cod, over yonder, is like the distant, fixed stars—by sighting that church-steeple in Provincetown, the High Land of Cape Cod to the south of it, the protruding mast of yonder wrack, and then by doing a bit of trigonometry, we may plot our position, and by joining one point to the next, draw our trajectory. The schooner, then, is like a comet—also moving through the æther—but by measuring the angles she makes with us and with the church-steeple, et cetera, we may find her true course; compare it with her apparent heading; and easily judge whether she is, or is not, leewardly.”

“How long would it take?”

“If you could make sightings, and leave me in peace to make calculations, I could have an answer in perhaps half an hour.”

“Then let us begin without delay,” Dappa says.

Plotting it out on the back of an old chart in the common room, Daniel begins to understand the urgency. To escape the confines of Cape Cod Bay, they must clear Race Point at the Cape’s northernmost tip. Race Point is northeast of them. The wind, for the last few hours, has been steady from northwest by north. Minerva can sail six points[*] from the wind, so she can just manage a northeasterly course. So leaving aside pirate-ships and other complications, she’s in a good position to clear Race Point within the hour.

But as a matter of fact there are two pirate-ships paralleling her course, much as the schooner-that-sucked and the ketch were doing earlier. To windward (i.e., roughly northwest of Minerva) is a big sloop—Teach’s flagship—which has complete freedom of movement under these circumstances. She’s fast, maneuverable, well-armed, capable of sailing four points from the wind, and well to the north of the dangerous shallows, hence in no danger of running aground off of Race Point. The schooner, on the other hand, is to leeward, between Minerva and the Cape. She can also sail four points from the wind—meaning that she should be able to angle across Minerva’s course and grapple with her before Race Point. And if she does, there’s no doubt that Teach’s sloop will come in along the larboard side at the same moment, so that Minerva will be boarded from both sides at once. If that is all true, then Minerva’s best course is to turn her stern into the wind, fall upon the schooner, attack, and then come about (preferably before running aground on the Cape) and contend with the sloop.

But if Dappa is right, and the schooner suffers from the defect of leewardliness, then all’s not as it seems. The wind will push her sideways, away from Minerva and toward the Race Point shallows—she won’t be able to intercept Minerva soon enough, and, to avoid running aground, she’ll have to tack back to the west, taking her out of the action. If that is true, Minerva’s best course is to maintain her present close-hauled state and wait for Teach’s sloop to make a move.

It’s all in the arithmetic—the same sort of arithmetic that Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, is probably grinding through at this very moment at the Observatory in Greenwich, toiling through the night in hopes of proving that Sir Isaac’s latest calculation of the orbit of the moon is wrong. Except here Minerva’s the Earth, that schooner is Luna, and fixed Boston is, of course, the Hub of the Universe. Daniel passes an extraordinarily pleasant half-hour turning Dappa’s steady observations into sines and cosines, conic sections and fluxions. Pleasant because it is imbued with the orderliness that taketh away his fear. Not to mention a fascination that makes him forget the throbbing and pulling stitches in his flesh.

“Dappa is correct. The schooner drifts to leeward, and will soon fall by the wayside or run aground,” he announces to van Hoek, up on the poop deck. Van Hoek puffs once, twice, thrice on his pipe, then nods and goes into Dutch mutterings. Mates and messenger-boys disseminate his will into all compartments of the ship. Minerva forgets about the schooner and bends all efforts to the expected fight against Teach’s wicked sloop-of-war.

In another half-hour, the leewardly schooner provides some coarse entertainment by actually running aground at the very knuckle of Cape Cod’s curled fist. This is ignominious, but hardly unheard-of; these English pirates have only been in Massachusetts for a couple of weeks and can’t expect to have all the sand-banks committed to memory. This skipper would rather run aground in soft sand, and refloat later, than flinch from battle and face Black-beard Teach’s wrath.

Van Hoek immediately has them come about to west by south, as if they were going to sail back to Boston. His intent is to cut behind Teach’s stern and fire a broadside up the sloop’s arse and along her length. But Teach has too much intelligence for that, and so breaks the other way, turning to the east to get clear of Minerva’s broadside, then wearing round to the south, pausing near the grounded schooner to pick up a few dozen men who might come in useful as boarders. After a short time he comes up astern of Minerva.

A tacking duel plays out there off of Race Point for an hour or so, Teach trying to find a way to get within musket-range of Minerva without being blown apart, van Hoek trying to fire just a single well-considered broadside. There are some paltry exchanges of fire. Teach puts a small hole in Minerva’s hull that is soon patched, and a cloud of hurtling junk from one of Minerva’s carronnades manages to carry away one of the sloop’s sails, which is soon replaced. But with time, even van Hoek’s hatred of pirates is worn down by the tedium, and by the need to get away from land while the sun is shining. Dappa reminds him that the Atlantic Ocean is just a mile or two thataway, and that nothing stands any more between them and it. He persuades van Hoek that there’s no better way to humiliate a pirate than to leave him empty-handed, his decks crowded with boarders who have nothing to throw their grappling-hooks at. To out-sail a pirate, he insists, is a sweeter revenge than to out-fight him.

So van Hoek orders Minerva to come about and point herself toward England. The men who’ve been manning the guns are told to make like Cincinnatus, walking away from their implements of war at the very moment of their victory so that they may apply themselves to peaceful toils: in this case, spreading every last sail that the ship can carry. Tired, smoke-smeared men lumber up into the light and, after a short pause to swallow ladles of water, go to work swinging wide the studdingsail booms. This nearly doubles the width of the ship’s mightiest yards. The studdingsails tumble from them and snap taut in the wind. Like an albatross that has endured a long pursuit through a cluttered wilderness, tediously dodging and veering from hazard to hazard, and that finally rises above the clutter, and sees the vast ocean stretching before it, Minerva spreads her wings wide, and flies. The hull has shrunk to a mote, dragged along below a giant creaking nebula of firm canvas.

Teach can be seen running up and down the length of his sloop with smoke literally coming out of his head, waving his cutlass and exhorting his crew, but everyone knows that Queen Anne’s Revenge is a bit crowded, not to mention under-victualled, for a North Atlantic cruise in November.

Minerva accelerates into blue water with power that Daniel can feel in his legs, crashing through the odd rogue swell just as she rammed a pirate-boat earlier today, and, as the sun sets on America, she begins the passage to the Old World sailing large before a quartering wind.

BOOK TWO
King of the Vagabonds

There is, doubtless, as much skill in pourtraying a Dunghill, as in describing the finest Palace, since the Excellence of Things lyes in the Performance; and Art as well as Nature must have some extraordinary Shape or Quality if it come up to the pitch of Human Fancy, especially to please in this Fickle, Uncertain Age.

—Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

The Mud Below London

1665

MOTHER SHAFTOE KEPT TRACK of her boys’ ages on her fingers, of which there were six. When she ran short of fingers—that is, when Dick, the eldest and wisest, was nearing his seventh summer—she gathered the half-brothers together in her shack on the Isle of Dogs, and told them to be gone, and not to come back without bread or money.

This was a typically East London approach to child-rearing and so Dick, Bob, and Jack found themselves roaming the banks of the Thames in the company of many other boys who were also questing for bread or money with which to buy back their mothers’ love.

London was a few miles away, but, to them, as remote and legendary as the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad. The Shaftoe boys’ field of operations was an infinite maze of brickworks, pig yards, and shacks crammed sometimes with Englishmen and sometimes with Irishmen living ten and twelve to a room among swine, chickens, and geese.

The Irish worked as porters and dockers and coal-haulers during the winter, and trudged off to the countryside in hay-making months. They went to their Papist churches every chance they got and frittered away their silver paying for the services of scribes, who would transform their sentiments into the magical code that could be sent across counties and seas to be read, by a priest or another scrivener, to dear old Ma in Limerick.

In Mother Shaftoe’s part of town, that kind of willingness to do a day’s hard work for bread and money was taken as proof that the Irish race lacked dignity and shrewdness. And this did not even take into account their religious practices and all that flowed from them, e.g., the obstinate chastity of their women, and the willingness of the males to tolerate it. The way of the mudlarks (as the men who trafficked through Mother Shaftoe’s bed styled themselves) was to voyage out upon the Thames after it got dark, find their way aboard anchored ships somehow, and remove items that could be exchanged for bread, money, or carnal services on dry land.

Techniques varied. The most obvious was to have someone climb up a ship’s anchor cable and then throw a rope down to his mates. This was a job for surplus boys if ever there was one. Dick, the oldest of the Shaftoes, had learnt the rudiments of the trade by shinnying up the drain-pipes of whorehouses to steal things from the pockets of vacant clothing. He and his little brothers struck up a partnership with a band of these free-lance longshoremen, who owned the means of moving swag from ship to shore: they’d accomplished the stupendous feat of stealing a longboat.

After approaching several anchored ships with this general plan in mind, they learned that the sailors aboard them—who were actually supposed to be on watch for mudlarks—expected to be paid for the service of failing to notice that young Dick Shaftoe was clambering up the anchor cable with one end of a line tied round his ankle. When the captain found goods missing, he’d be sure to flog these sailors, and they felt they should be compensated, in advance, for the loss of skin and blood. Dick needed to have a purse dangling from one wrist, so that when a sailor shone a lantern down into his face, and aimed a blunderbuss at him, he could shake it and make the coins clink together. That was a music to which sailors of all nations would smartly dance.

Of course the mudlarks lacked coins to begin with. They wanted capital. John Cole—the biggest and boldest of the fellows who’d stolen the longboat—hit upon another shrewd plan: they would steal the only parts of ships that could be reached without actually getting aboard first: namely, anchors. They’d then sell them to the captains of ships who had found their anchors missing. This scheme had the added attraction that it might lead to ships’ drifting down the current and running aground on oh, say, the Isle of Dogs, at which point their contents would be legally up for grabs.

One foggy night (but all nights were foggy) the mudlarks set off in the longboat, rowing upstream. The mudlark term for a boat’s oars was a pair of wings. Flapping them, they flew among anchored ships—all of them pointed upriver, since the anchor cables were at their bows, and they weathercocked in the river’s current. Nearing the stern of a tubby Dutch galjoot—a single-masted trader of perhaps twice their longboat’s length, and ten times its capacity—they tossed Dick overboard with the customary rope noosed around his ankle, and a knife in his teeth. His instructions were to swim upstream, alongside the galjoot’s hull, towards the bow, until he found her port side anchor cable descending into the river. He was to lash his ankle-rope to said cable, and then saw through the cable above the lashing. This would have the effect of cutting the galjoot free from, while making the longboat fast to, the anchor, effecting a sudden and silent transfer of ownership. This accomplished, he was to jerk on the rope three times. The mudlarks would then pull on the rope. This would draw them upstream until they were directly over the anchor, and if they hauled hard enough, the prize would come up off the riverbed.

Dick slopped away into the mist. They watched the rope uncoil, in fits and starts, for a couple of minutes—this meant Dick was swimming. Then it stopped uncoiling for a long while—Dick had found the anchor cable and gone to work! The mudlarks dabbled with rag-swathed oars, flapping those wings against the river’s flow. Jack sat holding the rope, waiting for the three sharp jerks that would be Dick’s signal. But no jerks came. Instead the rope went slack. Jack, assisted by brother Bob, pulled the slack into the boat. Ten yards of it passed through their hands before it became taut again, and then they felt, not three sharp jerks, exactly, but a sort of vibration at the other end.

It was plain that something had gone wrong, but Jack Cole was not about to abandon a good rope, and so they hauled in what they could, drawing themselves upstream. Somewhere along the flank of the galjoot, they found a noose in the rope, with a cold pale ankle lodged in it, and out came poor Dick. The anchor cable was knotted to that same noose. While Jack and Bob tried to slap Dick back into life, the mudlarks tried to pull in the anchor. Both failed, for the anchor was as heavy as Dick was dead. Presently, choleric Dutchmen up on the galjoot began to fire blunderbusses into the fog. It was time to leave.

Bob and Jack, who’d been acting as journeyman and apprentice, respectively, to Dick, were left without a Master Rope-Climber to emulate, and with a tendency to have extraordinarily bad dreams. For it was clear to them—if not right away, then eventually—that they had probably caused their own brother’s death by drawing the rope taut, thereby pulling Dick down below the surface of the river. They were out of the mudlark trade for good. John Cole found a replacement for Dick, and (rumor had it) gave him slightly different instructions: take your ankle out of the noose before you cut the anchor cable.

Scarcely a fortnight later, John Cole and his fellows were caught in the longboat in broad daylight. One of their schemes had succeeded, they’d gotten drunk on stolen grog, and slept right through sunrise. The mudlarks were packed off to Newgate.

Certain of them—newcomers to the judicial system, if not to crime—shared their ill-gotten gains with a starving parson, who came to Newgate and met with them in the Gigger. This was a chamber on the lower floor where prisoners could thrust their faces up to an iron grate and be heard, if they shouted loudly enough, by visitors a few inches away. There, the parson set up a sort of impromptu Bible study class, the purpose of which was to get the mudlarks to memorize the 51st Psalm. Or, failing that, at least the first bit:

Have mercie upon me, o God, according to they loving kindenes: according to the multitude of thy compassions put awaie mine iniquities.

Wash me throughly from mine iniquities, and clense me from my sin. For I knowe mine iniquities, & my sinne is ever before me.

Against thee, against thee onely have I sinned, & done evil in thy sight, that thou maiest be just when thou speakest, and pure when thou judgest.

Behold, I was borne in iniquitie, and in sinne hath my mother conceived me.

Quite a mouthful, that, for mudlarks, but these were more diligent pupils than any Clerke of Oxenford. For on the day that they were marched down the straight and narrow passage to the Old Bailey and brought below the magistrate’s balcony, an open Bible was laid in front of them, and they recited these lines. Which, by the evidentiary standards then prevailing in English courts, proved that they could read. Which proved that they were clergymen. Which rendered them beyond the reach of the criminal courts; for clergymen were, by long-hallowed tradition, subject only to the justice of the ecclesiastical courts. Since these no longer existed, the mudlarks were sent free.

It was a different story for John Cole, the oldest of the group. He had been to Newgate before. He had stood in the holding-pen of the Old Bailey before. And in that yard, below that balcony, in the sight of the very same magistrate, his hand had been clamped in a vise and a red-hot iron in the shape of a T had been plunged into the brawn of his thumb, marking him forever as Thief. Which by the evidentiary standards then prevailing, et cetera, made it most awkward for him to claim that he was a clergyman. He was sentenced, of course, to hang by the neck until dead at Tyburn.

Bob and Jack did not actually see any of this. They heard the narration from those who had mumbled a few words of Psalm 51 and been released and made their way back to the Isle of Dogs. To this point it was nothing they had not heard a hundred times before from friends and casual acquaintances in the neighborhood. But this time there was a new twist at the end of the story: John Cole had asked for the two surviving Shaftoe boys to meet him at the Triple Tree on the morning of his execution.

They went out of curiosity more than anything. Arriving at Tyburn and burrowing their way through an immense crowd by artful shin-kicking, instep-stomping, and groin-elbowing, they found John Cole and the others on a cart beneath the Fateful Nevergreen, elbows tied behind their backs, and nooses pre-knotted around their throats, with long rope-ends trailing behind them. A preacher—the Ordinary of Newgate—was there, urgently trying to make them aware of certain very important technicalities in the Rules of Eternity. But the condemnees, who were so drunk they could barely stand up, were saying all manner of rude and funny things back to him, faster than he could talk back.

Cole, more solemn than the others, explained to Jack and Bob that when the executioner “turned him off,” which was to say, body-checked him off the cart and left him to hang by his neck, Cole would very much appreciate it if Jack could grab his left leg and Bob his right, or the other way round if they preferred, and hang there, pulling him down with their combined weight, so that he’d die faster. In exchange for this service, he told them of a loose board in the floor of a certain shack on the Isle of Dogs beneath which they could find hidden treasure. He laid out the terms of this transaction with admirable coolness, as if he were hanged by the neck until dead every Friday.

They accepted the commission. Jack Ketch was now the man to watch. His office, the gallows, was of admirably simple and spare design: three tall pilings supporting a triangle of heavy beams, each beam long enough that half a dozen men could be hanged from it at once, or more if a bit of crowding could be overlooked.

Jack Ketch’s work, then, consisted of maneuvering the cart below a clear space on one of the beams; selecting a loose rope-end; tossing it over the beam; making it fast with a bit of knotwork; and turning off the bloke at the opposing end of the rope. The cart, now one body lighter, could then be moved again, and the procedure repeated.

John Cole was the eighth of nine men to be hanged on that particular day, which meant that Jack and Bob had the opportunity to watch seven men be hanged before the time came for them to discharge their responsibilities. During the first two or three of these hangings, all they really noticed was the obvious. But after they grew familiar with the general outlines of the rite, they began to notice subtle differences from one hanging to the next. In other words, they started to become connoisseurs of the art, like the ten thousand or so spectators who had gathered around them to watch.

Jack noticed very early that men in good clothes died faster. Watching Jack Ketch shrewdly, he soon saw why: when Jack Ketch was getting ready to turn a well-dressed man off, he would arrange the noose-knot behind the client’s left ear, and leave some slack in the rope, so that he’d fall, and gather speed, for a moment before being brought up short with an audible crack. Whereas men in ragged clothing were given a noose that was loose around the neck (at first, anyway) and very little room to fall.

Now, John Cole—who’d looked a bit of a wretch to begin with, and who’d not grown any snappier, in his appearance and toilette, during the months he’d languished in the Stone Hold of Newgate—was the shabbiest bloke on the cart, and obviously destined for the long slow kicking style of hanging. Which explained why he’d had the foresight to call in the Shaftoe boys. But it did not explain something else.

“See here,” Jack said, elbowing the Ordinary out of the way. He was on the ground below the cart, neck craned to look far up at Jack Ketch, who was slinging John Cole’s neck-rope over the beam with a graceful straight-armed hooking movement. “If you’ve got hidden treasure, why didn’t you give it to him?” And he nodded at Jack Ketch, who was now peering down curiously at Jack Shaftoe through the slits in his hood.

“Er—well I din’t have it on me, did I?” returned John Cole, who was a bit surly in his disposition on the happiest of days. But Jack thought he looked a bit dodgy.

“You could’ve sent someone to fetch it!”

“How’s I to know they wouldn’t nick it?”

“Leave off, Jack,” Bob had said. Since Dick’s demise, he had been, technically, the man of the family; at first he’d made little of it, but lately he was more arrogant every day. “He’s s’posed to be saying his prayers.”

“Let him pray while he’s kicking!”

“He’s not going to be doing any kicking, ’cause you and I are going to be hanging on his legs.”

“But he’s lying about the treasure.”

“I can see that, you think I’m stupid? But as long as we’re here, let’s do a right job of it.”

While they argued, Cole was turned off. He sprawled against the sky just above their heads. They dodged instinctively, but of course he didn’t fall far. They jumped into the air, gained hand-holds on his feet, and ascended, hand-over-hand.

After a few moments of dangling from the rope, Cole began to kick vigorously. Jack was tempted to let go, but the tremors coming down Cole’s legs reminded him of what he’d felt in the rope when poor Dick had been dragged down beneath the river, and he held on by imagining that this was some kind of vengeance. Bob must’ve had the same phant’sy, for both boys gripped their respective legs like stranglers until Cole finally went limp. When they realized he was pissing himself, they both let go at once and tumbled into the fœtid dust below the gibbet. There was applause from the crowd. Before they’d had time to dust themselves off, they were approached by the sister of the one remaining condemned man—also a slow-hanging wretch, by his looks—who offered them cash money to perform the same service. The coins were clipped, worn, and blackened, but they were coins.

John Cole’s loose board turned out not to be loose, and when pried up, to cover shit instead of treasure. They were hardly surprised. It didn’t matter. They were prosperous tradesmen now. On the eve of each hanging-day, Jack and Bob could be found in their new place of business: Newgate Prison.

It took them several visits just to understand the place. Gate in their usage meant a sort of wicket by which humans could pass through a fence around a hog-yard without having to vault over—not that vaulting was such a difficult procedure, but it was dangerous when drunk, and might lead to falling, and being eaten by the hogs. So gates they knew.

They had furthermore absorbed the knowledge that in several parts of London town were large fabricks called Gates, viz. Ludgate, Moorgate, and Bishopsgate. They had even passed through Aldgate a few times, that being their usual way of invading the city. But the connexion between gates of that type, and hog-yard-wickets, was most obscure. A gate in the hog-yard sense of the word made no sense unless built in a wall, fence, or other such formal barrier, as its purpose was to provide a means of passage through same. But none of the large London buildings called Gates appeared to have been constructed in any such context. They bestrode important roads leading into the city, but if you didn’t want to pass through the actual gate, you could usually find a way round.

This went for Newgate as well. It was a pair of mighty fortress-turrets built on either side of a road that, as it wandered in from the countryside and crossed over Fleet Ditch, was named Holborn. But as it passed between those turrets, the high road was bottle-necked down to a vaulted passageway just wide enough for a four-horse team to squeeze through. Above, a castle-like building joined the turrets, and bridged the road. An iron portcullis made of bars as thick as Jack’s leg was suspended within that castle so that it could be dropped down to seal the vault, and bar the road. But it was all show. For thirty seconds of scampering along side streets and alleys would take Jack, or anyone else, to the other side. Newgate was not surrounded by walls or fortifications, but rather by buildings of the conventional sort, which was to say, the half-timbered two- and three-story dwellings that in England grew up as quick and as thick as mushrooms. This Gothick fortress of Newgate, planted in the midst of such a neighborhood, was like a pelvis in a breadbasket.

If you actually did come into the city along Holborn, then when you ducked beneath that portcullis and entered the vaulted passageway beneath Newgate you’d see to the right a door leading into a porter’s lodge, which was where new prisoners had their chains riveted on. A few yards farther along, you’d emerge from beneath the castle into the uncovered space of what was now called Newgate Street. To your right you would see a gloomy old building that rose to a height of three or four stories. It had only a few windows, and those were gridded over with bars. This was a separate piece of work from the turret-castle-vault building; rumor had it that it had once done service as an inn for travelers coming into the city along Holborn. But the prison had, in recent centuries, spread up Newgate Street like gangrene up a thigh, consuming several such houses. Most of the doorways that had once welcomed weary travelers were bricked up. Only one remained, at the seam between the castle and the adjoining inn-buildings. Going in there, a visitor could make a quick right turn into the Gigger, or, if he had a candle (for it grew dark immediately), he could risk a trip up or down a stairway into this or that ward, hold, or dungeon. It all depended on what sort of wretch he was coming to visit.

On Jack and Bob’s first visit they’d neglected to bring a light, or money with which to buy one, and had blundered down-stairs into a room with a stone floor that made crackling noises beneath their feet as they walked. It was impossible to breathe the air there, and so after a few moments of blind panic they had found their way out and fled back into Newgate Street. There, Jack had noticed that his feet were bloody, and supposed that he must have stepped on broken glass. Bob had the same affliction. But Bob, unlike Jack, was wearing shoes, and so the blood could not have come from him. On careful inspection of the soles of those shoes, the mystery was solved: the blood was not smeared about, but spotted his soles, an array of little bursts. At the center of each burst was a small fleshy gray tube: the vacant corpse of an engorged louse that Bob had stepped on. This accounted for the mysterious crackling noise that they had heard while walking around in that room. As they soon learned, it was called the Stone Hold, and was accounted one of the lowest and worst wards of the prison, occupied only by common felons—such as the late John Cole—who had absolutely no money. Jack and Bob never returned to it.

Over the course of several later sallies into the prison they learned its several other rooms: the fascinating Jack Ketch his Kitchen; the so-called Buggering Hold (which they avoided); the Chapel (likewise); the Press-Yard, where the richest prisoners sat drinking port and claret with their periwigged visitors; and the Black Dogge Tavern, where the cellarmen—elite prisoners who did a brisk trade in candles and liquor—showed a kind of hospitality to any prisoners who had a few coins in their pockets. This looked like any other public house in England save that everyone in the place was wearing chains.

There were, in other words, plenty of lovely things to discover at the time and to reminisce about later. But they were not making these arduous trips from the Isle of Dogs to Newgate simply for purposes of sightseeing. It was a business proposition. They were looking for their market. And eventually, they found it. For in the castle proper, on the north side of the street, in the basement of the turret, was a spacious dungeon that was called the Condemned Hold.

Here, timing was everything. Hangings occurred only eight times a year. Prisoners were sentenced to hang a week or two in advance. And so most of the time there were no condemned people at all in the Condemned Hold. Rather, it was used as a temporary holding cell for new prisoners of all stripes who had been frog-marched to the Porter’s Lodge across the street and traded the temporary ropes that bound their arms behind their backs, for iron fetters that they would wear until they were released. After being ironed (as this procedure was called) with so much metal that they could not even walk, they would be dragged across the vault and thrown into the Condemned Hold to lie in the dark for a few days or weeks. The purpose of this was to find out how much money they really had. If they had money, they’d soon offer it to the gaolers in exchange for lighter chains, or even a nice apartment in the Press-Yard. If they had none, they’d be taken to some place like the Stone Hold.

If one paid a visit to the Condemned Hold on a day chosen at random, it would likely be filled with heavily ironed newcomers. These were of no interest to Jack and Bob, at least not yet. Instead, the Shaftoe boys came to Newgate during the days immediately prior to Tyburn processions, when the Condemned Hold was full of men who actually had been condemned to hang. There they performed.

Around the time of their birth, the King had come back to England and allowed the theatres, which had been closed by Cromwell, to open again. The Shaftoe boys had been putting their climbing skills to good use sneaking into them, and had picked up an ear for the way actors talked, and an eye for the way they did things.

So their Newgate performances began with a little mum-show: Jack would try to pick Bob’s pocket. Bob would spin round and cuff him. Jack would stab him with a wooden poniard, and Bob would die. Then (Act II) Bob would jump up and ’morphosize into the Long Arm of the Law, put Jack in a hammerlock, (Act III) don a wig (which they had stolen, at appalling risk, from a side-table in a brothel near the Temple), and sentence him to hang. Then (Act IV) Bob would exchange the white wig for a black hood and throw a noose round Jack’s neck and stand behind him while Jack would motion for silence (for by this point all of the Condemned Hold would be in a state of near-riot) and clap his hands together like an Irish child going to First Communion, and (Act V) utter the following soliloquy:

John Ketch’s rope doth decorate my neck.

Though rude, and cruel, this garland chafes me not.

For, like the Necklace of Harmonia,

It brings the one who wears it life eternal.

The hangman draweth nigh—he’ll turn me off

And separate my soul from weak’ning flesh.

And, as I’ve made my peace with God Almighty,

My spirit will ascend to Heaven’s Door,

Where, after brief interrogation, Christ will—

Bob steps forward and shoves Jack, then yanks the rope up above Jack’s head.

HAWKKH! God’s Wounds! The noose quite strangleth me!

What knave conceived this means of execution?

I should have bribed John Ketch to make it quick.

But, with so many lordly regicides

Who’ve lately come to Tyburn to be penalized,

The price of instant, painless death is quite

Inflated—far beyond the humble means

Of common condemnees, who hence must die

As painf’lly as they’ve lived. God damn it all!

And damn Jack Ketch; the late John Turner; and

The judges who hath sent so many rich men to

The gallows, thereby spurring said inflation.

And damn my frugal self. For, at a cost

That scarce exceeds an evening at the pub,

Might I have hired those exc’llent Shaftoe boys,

Young Jack, and Bob, the elder of the pair,

To dangle from my legs, which lacking ballast,

Do flail most ineffectu’lly in the air,

And make a sort of entertainment for

The mobile.

Bob removes the noose from Jack’s neck.

But soft! The end approaches—

Earth fades—new worlds unfold before my eyes—

Can this be heaven? It seemeth warm, as if

A brazier had been fir’d ’neath the ground.

Perhaps it is the warmth of God’s sweet love

That so envelops me.

Bob, dressed as a Devil, approaches with a long pointed Stick.

How now! What sort

Of angel doth sprout Horns upon his pate?

Where is thy Harp, O dark Seraph?

Instead of which a Pike, or Spit, doth seem

To occupy thy gnarled claws?

DEVIL:I am

The Devil’s Turnspit. Sinner, welcome home!

JACK: I thought that I had made my peace with God.

Indeed I had, when I did mount the scaffold.

If I had but died then, at Heaven’s Gate

I’d stand. But in my final agony,

I took God’s name in vain, and sundry mortal

Sins committed, and thus did damn myself

To this!

DEVIL: Hold still!

Devil shoves the point of his Spit up Jack’s arsehole.

JACK: The pain! The pain, and yet,

It’s just a taste of what’s to come.

If only I had hired Jack and Bob!

Jack, by means of a conjuror’s trick, causes the point of the spit, smeared
with blood, to emerge from his mouth, and is led away by the Devil, to violent
applause and foot-stomping from the Crowd.

After the applause had died down, Jack, then, would circulate among the condemned to negotiate terms, and Bob, who was bigger, would watch his back, and mind the coin-purse.

The Continent

LATE SUMMER 1683

When a woman is thus left desolate and void of counsel, she is just like a bag of money or a jewel dropt on the highway, which is a prey to the next comer.

—DANIEL DEFOE, Moll Flanders

JACK HAD KEPT A SHREWD eye on the weather all spring and summer. It had been perfect. He was living in unaccustomed comfort in Strasbourg. This was a city on the Rhine, formerly German and, as of quite recently, French. It lay just to the south of a country called the Palatinate, which, as far as Jack could make out, was a moth-eaten rag of land straddling the Rhine. King Looie’s soldiers would overrun the Palatinate from the West, or the Emperor’s armies would rape and pillage it from the East, whenever they couldn’t think of anything else to do. The person in charge of the Palatinate was called an Elector, which in this part of the world meant a very noble fellow, more than a Duke but less than a King. Until quite recently the Electors Palatinate had been of a very fine and noble family, consisting of too many siblings to keep track of, most quite magnificent; but since only one (the oldest) could be Elector, all of the rest of them had gone out of that country, and found better things to do, or gotten themselves killed in more or less fascinating ways. Eventually the Elector had died and turned matters over to his son: an impotent madman named Charles, who liked to stage mock battles around an old Rhine-castle that wasn’t good for much else. The fighting was imaginary, but the trenches, siege-works, dysentery, and gangrene were real.

Now Jack had been making a sort of living, for several years, from being a fake soldier in France—a line of work that had been brought to ruin by many tiresome reforms that had recently been introduced to the French Army by one Martinet. When he’d heard about this crazy Elector he’d wasted no time in going to the Palatinate and finding gainful employment as a pretend musketeer.

Not long afterwards, King Louis XIV of France had attacked the nearby city of Strasbourg and made it his, and as frequently happened in sacked cities in those days, there had been a bit of the old Black Death. At the first appearance of buboes in the groins and armpits of the poor, the rich of Strasbourg had boarded up their houses and fled to the country. Many had simply climbed aboard boats and headed downstream on the Rhine, which had naturally taken them past that old wrack of a castle where Jack and others were playing at war for the amusement of the crazy Elector Palatine. One rich Strasbourgeois, there, had disembarked from his river-boat and struck up a conversation with none other than Jack Shaftoe. It was not customary for rich men to speak to the likes of Jack, and so the whole business seemed a mystery until Jack noticed that, no matter how he moved about, the rich man always found some pretext to stay well upwind of him.

This rich man had hired Jack and arranged for him to get something called a Plague Pass: a large document in that Gothickal German script with occasional excursions into something that looked like either Latin (when it was desirable to invoke the mercy and grace of God) or French (for sucking up to King Looie, only one rung below God at this point).[*] By flourishing this at the right times, Jack was able to carry out his mission, which was to go into Strasbourg; proceed to the rich man’s dwelling; wash off the red chalk crosses that marked it as a plague-house; pry off the deals he’d nailed over the doors and windows; chase out any squatters; fend off any looters; and live in it for a while. If, after a few weeks, Jack hadn’t died of the plague, he was to send word to this rich man in the country that it was safe to move back in.

Jack had accomplished the first parts of this errand in about May, but by the beginning of June had somehow forgotten about the last. In about mid-June, another Vagabond-looking fellow arrived. The rich man had hired him to go to the house and remove Jack’s body so that it wouldn’t draw vermin and then live in it for a while and, after a few weeks, if he hadn’t died of the plague, send word. Jack, who was occupying the master bedchamber, had accommodated this new fellow in one of the children’s rooms, showed him around the kitchen and wine-cellar, and invited him to make himself at home. Late in July, another Vagabond had showed up, and explained he’d been hired to cart away the bodies of the first two, et cetera, et cetera.

All spring and summer, the weather was ideal: rain and sun in proportions suitable for the growing of grain. Vagabonds roamed freely in and out of Strasbourg, giving wide berths to those mounds of decomposing plague-victims. Jack sought out the ones who’d come from the east, treated them to the rich man’s brandy, conducted broken conversations with them in the zargon, and established two important facts: one, that the weather had been just as fine, if not finer, in Austria and Poland. Two, that Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha was still besieging the city of Vienna at the head of an army of two hundred thousand Turks.

Round September, he and his fellow-squatters found it necessary to depart from that fine house. It did not make him unhappy. Pretending to be dead was not a thing that came naturally to Vagabonds. The population of the house had swollen to a dozen and a half, most of them were tedious people, and the wine-cellar was nearly empty. One night Jack caused the window-shutters to be thrown open and the candles to be lit, and played host and lord over a grand squatters’ ball. Vagabond-musicians played raucous airs on shawms and pennywhistles, Vagabond-actors performed a comedy in zargon, stray dogs copulated in the family chapel, and Jack, presiding over all at the head of the table, dressed in the rich man’s satin, almost fell asleep. But even through the commotion of the ball, his ears detected the sound of hoofbeats approaching, swords being whisked from scabbards, firelocks being cocked. He was vanishing up the stairs even as the owner and his men were smashing down the door. Sliding down an escape-rope he’d long ago fixed to a balcony’s rail, he dropped neatly into the rich man’s saddle, still warm from thrashing the master’s chubby ass. He galloped to a potter’s field on the edge of town where he had stored some provisions against this very sort of event, and took to the road well supplied with salt-cod and biscuit. He rode southwards through the night until the horse was spent, then stripped off its fine saddle and threw it into a ditch, and traded the horse itself to a delighted ferryman for passage east across the Rhine. Finding the Munich road, he struck out for the East.

The barley harvest was underway, and most of it was destined for the same place as Jack. He was able to ride along on barley-carts, and to talk his way across the Neckar and the Danube, by telling people he was off to join the legions of Christendom and beat back the Turkish menace.

This was not precisely a lie. Jack and brother Bob had come to the Netherlands more than once to soldier under John Churchill, who was in the household of the Duke of York. York spent a lot of time abroad because he was Catholic and most everyone in England hated him. But in time he had returned home anyway. John Churchill had gone with him and Bob, dutiful soldier that he was, had gone home with Churchill. Jack had stayed on the Continent, where there were more countries, more Kings, and more wars.

Great big dark mounds were visible off to his right, far away. After they continued to be there for several days in a row, he realized that they must be mountains. He’d heard of them. He had fallen in with a cart-train belonging to a barley-merchant of Augsburg, who was contemptuous of the low grain prices in Munich’s great market and had decided to take his goods closer to the place where they were needed. They rode for days through rolling green country, dotted with bent peasants bringing in the barley-harvest. The churches were all Papist, of course, and in these parts they had a queer look, with domes shaped like ripe onions perched atop slender shafts.

Over days those mountains rose up to meet them, and then they came to a river named Salz that pierced the mountain-wall. Churches and castles monitored the valley from stone cliffs. Endless wagon-trains of barley came together, and clashed and merged with the Legions of the Pope of Rome who were coming up from Italy, and Bavarians and Saxons, too: mile-long parades of gentleman volunteers, decorated like knights of old with the Crusaders’ red cross, bishops and archbishops with their jeweled shepherd’s-hooks, cavalry-regiments that beat the earth as if it were a hollow log—each horseman accompanied by his cheval de bataille, a fresh cheval de marche or two, a cheval de poursuite for hunting stags or Turks, and a cheval de parade for ceremonial occasions, and the grooms to care for them. There were armies of musketeers, and finally a vast foaming, surging rabble of barefoot pikemen, marching with their twenty-foot-long weapons angled back over their shoulders, giving those formations the look of porcupines when they are in a mellow and complacent mood and have flattened their quills.

Here the barley-merchant of Augsburg had at last found a market, and might have sold his goods at a handsome profit. But the sight of Christendom at war had inflamed both his avarice and his piety, and he was seized with a passion to ride farther and see what more wonders lay to the east. Likewise Jack, sizing up those pike-men, and comparing their rags and bare feet to his stolen traveling-togs and excellent leather boots, suspected he could strike a better deal closer to Vienna. So they joined together with the general flood and proceeded, in short confused marches, to the city of Linz, where (according to the merchant) there was a very great Messe. Jack knew that Messe was the German word for a Mass, and reckoned that Herr Augsburg meant to attend church in some great cathedral there.

At Linz they grazed the south bank of the River Danube. In the plain along the river was a fine market that had been swallowed and nearly digested by a vast military camp—but no cathedral. “Die Messe!” Herr Augsburg exclaimed, and this was when Jack understood something about the German language: having a rather small number of words, they frequently used one word to mean several different things. Messe meant not only a Mass but a trade-fair.

Another army had marched down from the north and was laboriously crossing the Danube here, trickling across Linz’s bridges and keeping Linz’s watermen busy all day and all night, poling their floats across the stream laden with artillery-pieces, powder-kegs, fodder, rations, luggage, horses, and men. Jack Shaftoe spoke a few words of German. He had picked up quite a bit of French, and of course he knew English and the zargon. These men who had ridden down out of the north did not speak any of those tongues, and he could not guess whether they might be Swedes or Russians or of some other nation. But one day cheering came up from the bridges and the ferries, mingled with the thunder of thousands of war-horses, and from the woods on the north bank emerged the mightiest cavalry that Jack, in all his travels in England, Holland, and France, had ever seen. At its head rode a man who could only be a King. Now this wasn’t Jack’s first King, as he’d seen King Looie more than once during French military parades. But King Looie was only play-acting, he was like a whoreson actor in a Southwark theatre, got up in a gaudy costume, acting the way he imagined that a warrior King might act. This fellow from the north was no play-actor, and he rode across the bridge with a solemn look on his face that spoke of bitter days ahead for Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha. Jack wanted to know who it was, and finally locating someone who spoke a bit of French he learned that what he was looking at, here, was the army of Poland-Lithuania, and their terrible King was John Sobieski, who had made an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor to drive the Turks all the way back to Asia, and his mighty, gleaming cavalry were called the Winged Hussars.

Once King John Sobieski and the Winged Hussars had crossed the Danube and made camp, and a Messe in the religious sense had been said, and the thrill had died down a little, both Herr Augsburg the barley-merchant and Jack Shaftoe the vagabond-soldier made their own private calculations as to what it all meant for them. Two or (according to rumor) three great cavalry forces were now encamped around Linz. They were the spearheads of much larger formations of musketeers and pikemen, all of whom had to eat. Their rations were carried on wagons and the wagons were drawn by teams of horses. All of it was useless without the artillery, which was, as well, drawn by teams of horses. What it all amounted to, therefore, was the world’s richest and most competitive Messe for barley. Prices were thrice what they’d been at the crossing of the Salz and ten times what they’d been in Munich. Herr Augsburg, having chosen the moment carefully, now struck, playing John Sobieski’s barley-buyers off against those of the Bavarian, Saxon, and Austrian lords.

For his part, Jack understood that no force of cavalry as lordly, as magnificent, as the Winged Hussars could possibly exist, even for a single day, without a vast multitude of especially miserable peasants to make it all possible, and that peasants in such large numbers could never be kept so miserable for so long unless the lords of Poland-Lithuania were unusually cruel men. Indeed, after John Sobieski’s vivid crossing of the Danube a gray fog of wretches filtered out of the woods and congealed on the river’s northern bank. Jack didn’t want to be one of ’em. So he went and found Herr Augsburg, sitting on an empty barley-cart surrounded by his profits: bills of exchange drawn on trading-houses in Genoa, Venice, Lyons, Amsterdam, Seville, London, piled up high on the cart’s plankage and weighed down with stones. Mounting up onto the wagon, Jack the Soldier became, for a quarter of an hour, Jack the Actor. In the bad French that Herr Augsburg more or less understood, he spoke of the impending Apocalypse before the gates of Vienna, and of his willingness, nay, eagerness, to die in the midst of same, and his prayerful hope that he might at least take a single Turk down with him, or barring that, perhaps inflict some kind of small wound on a Turk, viz. by jabbing at him with a pointed stick or whatever he might have handy, so that said Turk might be distracted or slowed down long enough for some other soldier of Christendom, armed with a real weapon, such as a musket, to actually take aim at, and slay, that selfsame Turk. This was commingled with a great deal of generally Popish-sounding God-talk and Biblical-sounding quotations that Jack claimed he’d memorized from the Book of Revelation.

In any case it had the desired effect, which was that Herr Augsburg, as his contribution to the Apocalypse, went with Jack to an armaments-market in the center of Linz and purchased him a musket and various other items.

Thus equipped, Jack marched off and offered his services to an Austrian regiment. The captain paid equal attention to Jack’s musket and to his boots. Both were impressive in the highest degree. When Jack demonstrated that he actually knew how to load and fire his weapon, he was offered a position. Jack thus became a musketeer.

He spent the next two weeks staring at other men’s backs through clouds of dust, and stepping on ground that had already been stepped on by thousands of other men and horses. His ears were filled with the tromping of feet, boots, and hooves; the creaking of overladen barley-carts; nonsensical teamsters’ exhortations; marching-songs in unknown languages; and the blowing of trumpets and beating of drums of regimental signal-men desperately trying to keep their throngs from getting all mixed up with alien throngs.

He had a gray-brown felt hat with a gigantic round brim that needed to be pinned up on one or both sides lest it flop down and blind him. More established musketeers had fine feathered brooches for this purpose—Jack made do with a pin. Like all English musketeers, Jack called his weapon Brown Bess. It was of the latest design—the lock contained a small clamp that gripped a shard of flint, and when Jack pulled the trigger, this would be whipped around and skidded hard against a steel plate above the powder-pan, flooding the pan with sparks and igniting it in most cases. Half of the musketeer-formations were impaired by older, flintless weapons called matchlocks. Each of these matchlock-men had to go around with a long fuzzy rope twined through his fingers, one end of which was forever smouldering—as long as it didn’t get wet and he remembered to blow on it frequently. Clamped into the same sort of mechanism that held Jack’s flint-shard, it would ignite the powder, more often than not, by direct contact.

Jack, like all the other musketeers, had a leather belt over one shoulder whence dangled a dozen thumb-sized and -shaped wooden flasks, each sealed with its own stopper, each big enough to contain one charge of powder for the weapon. They clinked together musically when he walked. There was a powder-horn for refilling these during lulls. At the lowest point of the bandolier was a small pouch containing a dozen lead balls.

A company was a couple of hundred men like Jack walking around packed into a tight square, not because they liked crowds but because this made it harder for an opponent to ride up with an edged weapon and cut pieces off of them. The reason it was harder was because in the center of the square was a smaller square of men carrying extremely long pointed sticks called pikes. The dimensions of the squares and the length of the pikes were worked out so that when the pikes were levelled at the enemy (passing between the surrounding musketeers) their points would project some distance beyond the edge of the formation—provided the musketeers stood close together—discouraging enemy horsemen from simply galloping up and having at the musketeers as they went through their loading rituals, which, even under ideal conditions, seemed to take as long as a Mass.[*]

That was the general plan. Exactly what would happen when the Turks strung their outlandish recurved bows and began to shower iron-tipped arrows into these formations had not been specified. From Linz onwards, anyway, Jack walked in the midst of such an organization. It made many, many noises, each traceable to something like the wooden powder-flasks. Unlike a company of matchlocks, it did not smolder, nor make huffing and puffing noises.

They turned away from the Danube, leaving it off to their left, and then the formations piled into one another because they were going uphill now, assaulting the tail of that mountain range. The drums and trumpets, muffled now by trees, echoed along river-valleys as formations split again and again, finding passes over the hills. Jack was frequently confused, but when he wasn’t, he sensed that the Poles were on his right, the Bavarians and Saxons on his left.

Compared to the hills of England, these were high, steep, and well-forested. But between them lay broad valleys that made for easy marching, and even when they had to go over hills, instead of between them, the going was easier than it looked—the trees were tall handsome ones with bare white trunks, and what little undergrowth there was had long since been trampled down by others when Jack reached it.

The only way he knew that they’d reached the environs of Vienna was that they stopped marching and began camping. They made a bivouac in a narrow steep valley where the sun rose late and set early. Some of Jack’s brothers in arms were impatient to get on with it, but he appreciated that the Army of Christendom had become an immense machine for turning barley into horseshit and that the barley would fast run out. Something had to happen soon.

After they’d bivouacked for two nights, Jack slipped away one morning before dawn and clambered uphill until the ground became level under his feet. He did this partly to get away from the stink of the camp and partly because he wanted to get a look at the city from a high place. Red sunlight was weaving among white tree-trunks as he wandered to a high bluff from which he had a clear view several miles down into the city.

Vienna was a small town dwarfed by its own defenses, in turn engulfed by a larger Turkish city only a few months old. The town itself was, then, the smallest part of what he saw, but it was to the rest as a chalice was to a cathedral. Even from miles off he could see it was a miserable place—actual streets were visible nowhere, just the red tile roofs of long skinny buildings heaped up six and seven stories, wending black crevices between them indicating streets, which he could tell would be sunless trenches, thick with hurtling shit and echoing voices. He could see the foaming stain of the city spreading across the adjacent canal and, farther downstream, into the Danube itself, and from its color he could almost guess that there was a major flux epidemic underway—as indeed there was in the Turkish camp.

Just off-center in the heart of Vienna stood the tallest building Jack had ever seen—a cathedral with a dunce-cap tower topped by a curious symbol, a star wedged in the craw of a crescent moon, like a stick jammed into a shark’s mouth. It seemed a prophetic map of the entire scene. Vienna was protected on the north by a canal that split away from the Danube, moated the city on that side, and later rejoined it. The bridges had been wrecked so no one could enter or leave that way. The entire remainder of the city was enveloped by the Turkish camp, narrowest at the two points where it touched the river, and, in the middle, as fat as Vienna itself—therefore, a crescent with the city trapped between its horns. It was a fluttering world of heathenishly colored tents and flags and streamers, with the ruins of Vienna’s burnt suburbs poking out here and there like ribs of wrecked ships from a foaming sea.

Between Turkish camp and Christian city was a belt of what a naïve person would identify as empty (albeit curiously sculpted and chiseled) terrain. Jack, a trained professional, by squinting and tilting his head this way and that, could imagine that it was as densely crisscrossed with sight-lines and cannonball-arcs and other geometrickal phant’sies of engineers as the space above a ship’s deck was with ropes and rigging. For this corridor between camp and fort had been claimed by the engineers—as anyone who stepped into it would learn in as little time as it took a musket-ball to cover the distance. The Engineer-Empire, Jack’d been noticing, waxed as older ones waned. Just as Turks and Franks had their own styles of building, so did Engineers rehearse, again and again, the same shapes: sloping walls, backed up by earth (to deflect and absorb cannonballs) laid out in nested zig-zags, a bastion at each corner from which to shoot at anyone who tried to climb the neighboring stretches of wall. Oh, Vienna had a traditional pre-Engineer wall: a thin curtain of masonry, crenellated on top. But that was nothing but an antiquarian curiosity now, enveloped and shamed by the new works.

Besides that cathedral, there was only one building in Vienna worth a second look, and that was a great big cream-colored, many-windowed building, five stories high and a crossbow-shot in length, constructed right on the edge of the city and rising high above the wall, with wings behind it enclosing courtyards he’d never see. It was obviously the Palace of the Holy Roman Emperor. It had a steep high roof—plenty of attic space—with a row of tiny dormers surmounted by funny copper domes like spiked helmets. Each dormer had a little window, and through one of them (though the distance was very great) Jack convinced himself he could see a figure dressed in white peering out. He wanted to arrange something involving a trapped princess, a dashing rescue, and a reward; however, in between him and whomever was peering out that window were certain complications, viz. directly below the Palace, a huge bastion was thrust out into the glacis, like a giant’s plowshare parting an empty field, and against this very stronghold the Grand Vizier had chosen to mount his attack.

Apparently the Turks had been in too much of a hurry to trundle siege artillery all the way across Hungary and so they were undoing the work of the Engineers one shovel-load at a time. Vienna’s walls and bastions had been smooth regular shapes, so the Turks’ handiwork was as obvious as a mole-hill in a Duke’s bowling-green. They had dug a metropolis of trenches in what had been a perfectly flat glacis. Each trench was surrounded by the dirt that had been flung out of it, giving it the swollen look of an infected wound. A few of these trenches led straight from the heart of the Turkish camp toward the Emperor’s Palace, but these were just the great avenue-trenches from which countless street-trenches branched off left and right, running generally parallel to the city’s walls, and spaced as closely together as they could be without collapsing. These trenches were as rungs in a horizontal ladder by which the Turks had advanced until they’d reached the foot of the first ravelins: outlying, arrowhead-shaped earthworks between bastions. Here they had gone underground and undermined the ravelins, packed the mines with black powder, and blown them up, creating avalanches where walls had stood—as when molten wax spills from the top of a candle and mars its regular shape with a lumpy cataract. Fresh trenches, then, had been cut across those irregular debris-piles, bringing the Turks into a position whence they could bring musketry to bear on the city walls, to protect their sappers and miners as they advanced, ditch by ditch, across the dry moat. Now they were attacking the great bastion directly before the Palace in the same way. But it was a gradual sort of war, like watching a tree absorb a stone fence, and nothing was happening at the moment.

All well and good; but the question on Jack’s mind was: where was the best looting to be found? He chose some likely targets, both in the Turk’s camp and in the city of Vienna itself, and committed to memory a few landmarks, so that he could find what he desired when things were smoky and confused.

When he turned to go back to the camp, he discovered that there was another man up on this hill, a stone’s throw away: some kind of monk or holy man, perhaps, as he was dressed in a rough sackcloth robe, with no finery. But then the bloke whipped out a sword. It was not one of your needle-thin rapiers, such as fops pushed at each other in the streets of London and Paris, but some kind of relic of the Crusades, a two-handed production with a single crossbar instead of a proper guard—the sort of thing Richard the Lionhearted might’ve used to slay camels in the streets of Jerusalem. This man went down on one knee in the dirt, and he did it with verve and enthusiasm. You see your rich man kneeling in church and it takes him two or three minutes, you can hear his knees popping and sinews creaking, he totters this way and that, creating small alarums amongst the servants who are gripping his elbows. But this brute knelt easily, even lustily if such a thing were possible, and facing toward the city of Vienna, he planted his sword in the ground so that it became a steel cross. The morning light was shining directly into his grizzled face and glinting from the steel of the blade and glowing in some indifferent colored jewels set into the weapon’s hilt and crossbar. The man bowed his head and took to mumbling in Latin. The hand that wasn’t holding the sword was thumbing through a rosary—Jack’s cue to exit stage right. But as he was leaving he recognized the man with the broadsword as King John Sobieski.

LATER IN THE MORNING, a ration of brandy was issued to each man—it being a military axiom that a drunk soldier was an effective soldier. The brandy gave the men, at last, something to gamble with, and so dice and cards came out of pockets. This led to Jack having half a dozen brandy-rations in his belly, and his comrades-in-arms glaring at him suspiciously and muttering foul accusations in barbarous tongues. But then there was more trumpet-blowing and drum-beating and they were up on their feet (Jack barely so), and now another few hours of tromping around staring at the backs of the men in front of them, the horizon in all directions a fur of bayonets and pikes.

Like a storm that has fallen upon the mountains, the companies and regiments drained through trees into ravines and down ravines into valleys, coming together into black thundering floods that foamed out across the plain, finally, and rushed toward Vienna.

The artillery began to fire, first on one side, then the other. But if men were being cut down in swathes by Turkish grape-shot, it was not happening anywhere near Jack. They were moving double-time. They marched from hot, clear air into dust-clouds, then from dust-clouds into permanent banks of gunpowder-smoke.

Then the earth seemed to quail beneath their feet and their entire formation shied back, men piling into one another’s backs, and the smoke roiled and parted. Glints of gold and polished brass bobbed through it, and Jack understood that right along their flank, King John Sobieski was charging into the Turks at the head of the Winged Hussars.

Divots of earth continued to rain down for long moments after they had passed. In the Poles’ wake, an empty corridor was left across the battlefield, and suddenly there was no man in front of Jack. A yard of open space was more inviting than a pitcher of beer. He couldn’t not bolt forward. The other men did likewise. The formation was broken and men of various regiments were simply boiling into the beaten path of the Polish cavalry. Jack followed along, as much out of a desire not to be trampled by the men behind him as to reach the looting. He was listening carefully for the sounds of Turkish cannonades from the front, or the rumble of retreating hussars, coming back toward them in panic, but he heard no such thing. There was plenty of musket-fire, but not in the sputtering waves of organized combat.

He nearly tripped over a severed arm, and saw that it was clad in a curious Oriental fabric. After limbs came bodies—mostly Turkish ones, some clad in vests of fine mail studded with jeweled badges and gold stars. The men around him saw the same thing, and a cheer went up. They were all running now, and they kept getting farther and farther apart, dispersing into some place that, in the dust and smoke, Jack knew as a city, maybe not so great as London, but much bigger, say, than Strasbourg or Munich. It was a city of tents: huge cones supported by central poles and guyed off to the sides with many radiating lines, and curtains hanging down from the rims of the cones to form the walls. The tents were not of rude canvas but of embroidered stuff, all decorated with crescents and stars and spidery words.

Jack ran into a tent and found thick carpet under his feet, a pattern like twining flowers woven into the pile, and then discovered a cat the size of a wolf, with spotted golden fur, chained to a post, a jewelled collar round its neck. He had never seen a cat large enough to eat him before and so he backed out of that tent and continued to wander. At an intersection of great ways, he discovered a tiled fountain with huge golden fish swimming in it. The overflow spilled into a ditch that led to a garden planted with sweet white flowers.

A tree grew in a pot on wheels, its branches burdened with strange fruit and inhabited by emerald-green and ruby-red birds with hooked beaks, which screamed sophisticated curses at him in some tongue he had never heard. A dead Turk with an enormous waxed mustache and a turban of apricot silk lay in a marble bath full of blood. Other pikemen and musketeers wandered about, too flabbergasted to loot.

Jack tripped and landed face-first on red cloth, then stood up to find that he had stepped on a scarlet flag twenty feet on a side, embroidered with swords and heathen letters in gold thread. This was too big to carry away and so he let it lie, and wandered down tent-streets and tent-avenues scattered with collapsible lanterns; wrought-silver incense burners; muskets with stocks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, lapis, and gold; grapefruit-sized hand grenades; turbans clasped with jeweled badges; hand-drums; and vatlike siege mortars, their bombs nearby, half-covered by spiderwebs of fuse. Standards with long horsehair tassels topped by copper crescent moons gaping like dead men at the sky. Embroidered quivers and discarded ramrods, both wooden and iron. Stray Bavarian matchlock men ran to and fro, smouldering ropes still tangled in their fingers, glowing red from the wind of their movement so that they appeared as bobbing red sparks in the smoke and dust, trailing long wavy tendrils of finer smoke behind them.

Then there was the sound of hooves nearby, coming closer, and Jack spun around and stared into face of a horse, in glowing armor. Above it an armed man in a winged helmet, shouting at him in what he now recognized as Polish, holding up some reins. The reins belonged to a second horse, a cheval de bataille, also richly armored and saddled, but in a wholly different style, adorned with crescents rather than crosses, and boxlike metal stirrups. It must be the war-horse of some Turkish lord. The Winged Hussar was thrusting its reins toward Jack and bellowing orders in his thick, sneering language. Jack reached out and accepted a fistful of reins.

Now what? Did this Polish lord want Jack to mount the other horse and ride with him through the camp? Not likely! He was pointing at the ground, repeating the same words over and over until Jack nodded, pretending to understand. Finally he drew his sword and pointed it at Jack’s chest and said something very impolite and galloped away.

Jack now understood: this Winged Hussar had very grand ambitions for the day’s looting. He had found this horse early in the day. It was a prize worth keeping, but it would only hinder him if he tried to lead it around. If he tied it to a tree it would be looted by someone else. So he had looked for an armed peasant (to him, anyone on foot would be a peasant) and enlisted him as a sort of flesh-and-blood hitching-post. Jack’s job was to stand still holding these reins until the Winged Hussar came back—all day if need be.

Jack had scarcely had time to reflect on the fundamental unsoundness of this plan when a beast darted out of the smoke, headed right for him, then changed direction and ran past. It was the strangest thing Jack had ever seen, certainly one for the Book of Revelation: two-legged, feathered, therefore, arguably, a bird. But taller than a man, and apparently not capable of flight. It ran in the gait of a chicken, pecking the air with each stride to keep its balance. Its neck was as long and bare as Jack’s arm and as wrinkled as his Jolly Roger.

A small mob of infantrymen came running after it.

Now, Jack did not have the faintest idea what the giant trotting bird (supposing it was a bird) was. It hadn’t occurred to him to chase it, except perhaps out of curiosity. And yet the sight of other men chasing it, working so hard, with such desperate looks on their faces, gave him a powerful urge to do the same. They must be chasing it for a reason. It must be worth something, or else good to eat.

The bird had gone by very fast, easily out-loping the scrambling, miserably shod pursuers. They’d never catch it. On the other hand, Jack was holding the reins of a horse, and (he began to notice) a magnificent horse it was, with a saddle the likes he’d never seen, decorated in golden thread.

It probably had not even occurred to that Winged Hussar that Jack would know how to ride. In his part of the world, a serf could no more ride on horseback than he could speak Latin or dance a minuet. And disobeying the command of an armed lord was even less likely than riding around on a horse.

But Jack was not Polish scum of the earth, barefoot and chained to the land, or even French scum of the earth, in wooden clogs and in thrall to the priest and the tax-farmer, but English scum of the earth in good boots, equipped with certain God-given rights that were (as rumor had it) written down in a Charter somewhere, and armed with a loaded gun. He mounted the horse like a lord, spun it round smartly, reached back and slapped it on the ass, and he was off. In a few moments he had ridden through the middle of that knot of men who were hoping to catch the giant bird. Their only hope had been that their prey would forget that it was being chased, and stop running. Jack had no intention of letting that happen and so he jabbed his boot-heels into his mount’s sides and lit out after the bird in a way that was calculated to make it run like hell. Which it did, and Jack galloped after it, far outdistancing his competition. But the bird was astoundingly swift. As it ran, its wings splayed this way and that like an acrobat’s balancing-pole. Seeing into those wings from behind, Jack was reminded of decorations he’d seen in the hats of fine French gentlemen, and their mistresses, during military parades: those were the plumes of the, what’s it called the, the…the ostrich.

The reason for this merry chase was plain now: the ostrich, if caught, could be plucked, and its plumes taken to markets where fine things from exotic lands were sold, and exchanged for silver.

Now, Jack calculated. If he scoured the entire Turkish camp, he might find finer things to loot—but the legions of Christendom were all running wild through this place and others were likely to have found them first. The finest things of all would be taken by lords on horseback, and the musketeers and pikemen would be left to brawl over trifles. The plumes of this ostrich were not the finest prize to be had in this camp, but a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, and this one was almost in his hand. Ostrich-plumes were small and light, easy to conceal from the prying fingers and eyes of customs men, no burden to carry all the way across Europe if need be. And as the chase continued, his odds only improved, because this ostrich was speeding away from all noise and commotion, tending toward parts of the Grand Turk’s camp where nothing was going on. If only it would hold still long enough for him to bring it down with a musket-shot.

The ostrich flailed, squawked, and vanished. Jack reined in his mount and proceeded carefully, and arrived at the lip of a trench. He hadn’t the faintest idea where he was, but this trench looked like a big one. He nudged the horse forward, expecting it to balk, but it cheerfully set to work, planting its hooves carefully in the loose earth of the trench’s sloping wall and picking its way down. Jack saw fresh ostrich prints in the muck on the bottom, and set the horse to trotting that direction.

Every few yards a smaller trench intersected this one at right-angles. None of these trenches had the palisades of sharpened outward-pointing sticks that the Turks would’ve installed if they’d been expecting an attack, and so Jack reckoned that these trenches did not belong to the camp’s outer works, which had been put up to defend it from encircling armies of Christians. These trenches must, instead, be part of the assault against Vienna. The smoke and dust were such that Jack could not see whether the city was ahead of, or behind, him and the ostrich. But by looking at the way that the earth had been piled up to one side of those trenches, to protect the inhabitants from musket-balls, any fool could make out in which direction the city lay. The ostrich was going towards Vienna, and so was Jack.

The walls of the big trench steadily became higher and steeper, to the point where they’d had to be shored up with pilings and retaining walls of split logs. Then all of a sudden the walls curved together above him, forming an arch. Jack reined the horse in and stared forward into a dark tunnel, large enough for two or three horsemen to ride abreast. It was cut into the foundation of a steep hill that rose abruptly from generally flat land. Through a momentary parting in the drifting clouds of smoke, Jack looked up and saw the mutilated face of the great bastion looming up above him, and glimpsed the high roof of the Emperor’s Palace beyond and above that.

This must be a mine, an enormous one, that the Turks had dug beneath the bastion in the hopes of blowing it to kingdom come. The tunnel floor had been paved with logs that had been mostly driven down into the mud by the weight of oxen and wagons as they hauled dirt out, and gunpowder in. In the mud, Jack could see ostrich-prints. Why should that bird settle for merely burying its head in the sand when it could go wholly underground, and not even have to bend over? Jack did not love the idea of following it, but the die was cast; loot-wise, it was the ostrich or nothing.

As one would expect in any well-organized mining operation, torches were available near the entrance, soaking head-down in a pot of oil. Jack grabbed one, shoved it into the coals of a dying fire until flames emerged, then rode his horse forward into the tunnel.

It had been carefully timbered to keep it from collapsing. The tunnel descended gently for some distance, until it pierced the water table and became a sort of unpleasant mire, and then it began to climb again. Jack saw lights burning ahead of him. He noticed that the floor of the tunnel was striped with a bright line of steaming blood. This triggered what little Jack had in the way of prudent instincts: he threw the torch into a puddle and nudged the horse along at a slow walk.

The lights ahead of him illuminated a space larger than the tunnel: a room that had been excavated, deep underneath—where? Thinking back on the last few minutes’ ride, Jack understood that he had covered a considerable distance—he must have passed all the way beneath the bastion—at least as far as the city’s inner wall. And as he drew closer to the lights (several large torchières), he could see that the Turks’ tunnel-work, and its supporting timbers, were all involved with things that had been planted in the earth hundreds of years ago: tarred pilings, driven in one alongside the next, and footings of mortared stone and of brick. The Turks had burrowed straight through the foundations of something enormous.

Following the rivulet of blood into the illuminated space, Jack saw a few small, bright, billowing tents that had been pitched, for some unfathomable Turkish reason, in the middle of this chamber. Some were standing, others had collapsed into the dirt. A pair of men were striking those gay tents with curt sword-blows. The ostrich stood to one side, cocking its head curiously. The tents tumbled to the floor with blood flying out of them.

There were people in those tents! They were being executed, one by one.

It would be easy to kill the ostrich here with a musket-shot, but this would certainly draw the attention of those Turkish executioners. They were formidable-looking fellows with handsome sabers, the only Turks Jack had laid eyes on today who were actually alive, and the only ones who were in any condition to conduct violence against Christians. He preferred to leave them be.

A saber struck at the top of one of those colorful tents, and a woman screamed. A second blow silenced her.

So, they were all women. Probably one of those famous harems. Jack wondered, idly, whether the mudlarks of East London would ever believe him if he went home and claimed he had seen a live ostrich, and a Turk’s harem.

But thoughts of this sort were chased away by others. One of those moments had arrived: Jack had been presented with the opportunity to be stupid in some way that was much more interesting than being shrewd would’ve been. These moments seemed to come to Jack every few days. They almost never came to Bob, and Bob marveled that two brothers, leading similar lives, could be so different that one of them had the opportunity to be reckless and foolish all the time while the other almost never did. Jack had been expecting such a moment to arrive today. He’d supposed, until moments ago, that it had already come: namely, when he decided to mount the horse and ride after the ostrich. But here was a rare opportunity for stupidity even more flagrant and glorious.

Now, Bob, who’d been observing Jack carefully for many years, had observed that when these moments arrived, Jack was almost invariably possessed by something that Bob had heard about in Church called the Imp of the Perverse. Bob was convinced that the Imp of the Perverse rode invisibly on Jack’s shoulder whispering bad ideas into his ear, and that the only counterbalance was Bob himself, standing alongside, counseling good sense, prudence, caution, and other Puritan virtues.[*]

But Bob was in England.

“Might as well get this over with, then,” Jack muttered, and gave his Turkish steed some vigorous heel-digs, and galloped forward. One of the Turks was just raising his saber to strike down the last of the tent-wearing women. And he would’ve done just that, except that this woman suddenly darted away (as much as a person in such a garment could dart), forcing a postponement of the attack. He shuffled forward—directly into the path of Jack and Jack’s horse. They simply rode the Turk down. It was clear that the horse was well-trained in this maneuver—Jack made a mental note to treat the animal kindly.

Then with one hand Jack gave a stiff tug on a rein while unslinging his musket from the opposite shoulder. The horse wheeled around, giving Jack a view of the ground he’d just ridden over. One of the Turks was flattened into the ground, crushed in two or three places under the horse’s hooves, and the other was actually striding towards Jack and sort of wiggling his saber in the way of a man limbering up his wrist for a display of swordsmanship. Not wanting to see any such thing, Jack aimed his musket carefully at this Turk and pulled the trigger. The Turk stared calmly into Jack’s eyes, up the barrel of the weapon. He had brown hair and green eyes and a bushy mustache flecked with gold, all of which vanished in a smoky flash when the powder in the pan ignited. But the musket did not kick. He heard the foosh of the flash in the pan, but not the boom of the barrel.

This was known as a hang fire. The fire in the pan had not traveled into the barrel—perhaps the touch-hole had become blocked by a bit of dirt. Nonetheless, Jack kept the weapon aimed in the general direction of the Turk (which involved some guesswork because the Turk was hidden behind the cloud of smoke from the pan). There might still be a slow fire working its way through the touch-hole—the musket was likely to fire, without warning, at any point during the next couple of minutes.

By the time Jack could see again, the Turk had grabbed the horse’s bridle with one hand and raised the other to strike. Jack, peering out sidelong through burning eyes, wheeled his musket about to make some kind of barrier between him and the bloody saber and felt a mighty shock when the two weapons connected, instantly followed by a hot blast that knocked his hands apart and spat metal into his face. The horse reared up. Under other circumstances, Jack might’ve been ready for this. As it was, blind, shocked, and burnt, he performed a reverse-somersault down the animal’s muscular ass, plunged to the ground, and then rolled away blindly, terrified that the hind hooves might come down on top of him.

At no time during these acrobatics did Jack stop holding the stock of the musket very firmly with his right hand. He staggered up, realized his eyes were clenched shut, buried his face in the crook of his left arm, and tried to wipe away the heat and pain. The raw feel of his sleeve against his eyelids told him that he had been burnt, but not badly. He took the arm away and opened his eyes, then spun around like a drunk, trying to bring the enemy in view. He raised his musket again, to defend himself from any more sword-blows. But it moved far too easily. The weapon had been broken in half only a few inches past the flintlock—a yard of barrel was simply gone.

The female in the tent had already stepped forward and seized the horse’s reins and was now speaking to it in soothing tones. Jack couldn’t see the second Turk at all, which panicked him for a moment, until he finally saw him on the ground, arms wrapped around his face, rolling from side to side and making muffled cries. That much was good, but the situation was, in general, not satisfactory: Jack had lost his weapon to some sort of accident, and his mount to some Saracen female, and had not acquired any loot yet.

He ran forward to seize the horse’s reins, but a glitter on the ground caught his eye: the Turk’s sword. Jack snatched it up, then shouldered the woman out of the way, mounted the horse again, and got it turned around to where he could keep a good eye on matters. Where was the damned ostrich? Over there—cornered. Jack rode over to it, cutting the air a few times to learn the balance of the saber. Striking heads off, from the back of a moving horse, was normally a job for highly trained specialists, but only because the neck of a man was a small target. Decapitating an ostrich, which consisted almost entirely of neck, was almost too easy to be satisfying. Jack did the deed with one swift backhand slash. The head fell into the dirt and lay there, eyes open, making swallowing motions. The rest of the ostrich fell down, then climbed up and began to stalk around the chamber with blood spraying out of its severed neck. It fell down frequently. Jack did not especially want to get blood sprayed on him and so he guided the horse away from the bird—but the bird changed direction and came after him! Jack rode the other way and the ostrich once again changed tack and plotted an intercept course.

The woman was laughing at him. Jack glared at her. She stifled herself. Then a voice came out of that tent, saying something in a barbarian tongue. Jack circumvented another blind ostrich-charge, moving the horse around smartly.

“Sir knight, I know none of the tongues of Christendom, save French, English, Qwghlmian, and a dash of Hungarian.”

IT WAS THE FIRST TIME that Jack Shaftoe had been called “sir” or mistaken for a knight. He glared meanly at the ostrich, which was staggering around in circles and losing the strength to stand. The woman had meanwhile switched into yet another strange language. Jack interrupted her: “My Qwghlmian is rusty,” he announced. “Wandered up to Gttr Mnhrbgh once when I was a boy, as we’d heard a rumor that a Spanish Treasure-Galleon had been wrecked, and pieces of eight scattered up and down the shore, as thick as mussels. But all we found was a few drunken Frenchmen, stealing the chickens and burning the houses.”

He was prepared to relate many more dramatic details, but at this point he faltered because there’d been a violent shifting-around of the contents of the tent, exposing, up towards its summit, a complex arrangement of silk handkerchiefs: one tied over the bridge of the nose, hiding everything below, and another tied round the forehead, hiding everything above. Between them, a slit through which a pair of eyes was looking up at him. They were blue eyes. “You are an Englishman!” she exclaimed.

Jack noted that this one was not preceded by a “Sir knight.” To begin with, Englishmen were not accorded the respect given naturally to the men of great countries, such as France or Poland-Lithuania. Among Englishmen, Jack’s way of speaking, of course, marked him out as No Gentleman. But even if he spoke like an Archbishop, from the nature of the yarn he’d just been relating to her, concerning his scavenging-trip to Qwghlm, it was now obvious that he had been at some point an actual Vagabond. Damn it! Not for the first time, Jack imagined cutting his own tongue out. His tongue was admired by that small fraction of mankind who, owing to some want of dignity or wit, were willing to let it be known that they admired any part of Jack Shaftoe. And yet if he had merely held it back, reined it in, this blue-eyed woman might still be addressing him as Sir Knight.

That part of Jack Shaftoe that, up until this point in his life, had kept him alive, counseled him to pull sharply on one rein or the other, wheel the horse around, and gallop away from Trouble here. He looked down at his hands, holding those reins, and noted that they failed to move—evidently, the part of Jack that sought a merry and short life was once again holding sway.

Puritans came frequently to Vagabond-camps bearing the information that at the time of the creation of the Universe—thousands of years ago!—certain of those present had been predestined by God to experience salvation. The rest of them were doomed to spend eternity burning in hellfire. This intelligence was called, by the Puritans, the Good News. For days, after the Puritans had been chased away, any Vagabond boy who farted would claim that the event had been foreordained by the Almighty, and enrolled in a cœlestial Book, at the dawn of time. All in good fun. But now here Jack Shaftoe sat astride a Turkish charger, willing his hands to pull one rein or the other, willing his boot-heels to dig into the sides of the beast, so that it would carry him away from this woman, but nothing happened. It must have been the Good News at work.

The blue eyes were downcast. “I thought you were a Knight at first,” she said.

“What, in these rags?”

“But the horse is magnificent, and it blocks my view somewhat,” Trouble said. “The way you fought those Janissaries—like a Galahad.”

“Galahad—he’s the one who never got laid?” Again with the tongue. Again the sense that his movements were predestined, that his body was a locked carriage running out of control down a hill, directly towards the front entrance of Hell.

“That is one of the few things that I have in common with that legendary Knight.”

“No!”

“I was gozde, which means that the Sultan had taken note of me; but before I was made ikbal which means bedded, he gave me to the Grand Vizier.”

“Now I am not a learned fellow,” said Jack Shaftoe, “but from what little I know of the habits of Turkish Viziers, it is not usual for them to keep beautiful, saucy young blonde slaves about their camps—as virgins.”

“Not forever. But there is something to be said for saving a few virgins up to celebrate a special occasion—such as the sacking of Vienna.”

“But wouldn’t there be plenty of virgins to be rustled in Vienna?”

“From the tales told by the secret agents that the Wazir sent into the city, he feared that there would be none at all.”

Jack was inclined to be suspicious. But it was no less plausible for the Vizier, or the Wazir as Blue Eyes called him, to have English virgins than it was for him to have ostriches, giant bejeweled cats, and potted fruit-trees. “These soldiers haven’t gotten to you?” asked Jack. He waved the saber around at the dead Turks, inadvertently flicking bullets of blood from the tip.

“They are Janissaries.”

“I’ve heard of ’em,” Jack said. “At one point I considered going to Constantinople, or whatever they’re calling it now, and joining ’em.”

“But what about their Oath of Celibacy?”

“Oh, that makes no difference to me, Blue Eyes—look.” He was struggling with his codpiece.

“A Turk would already be finished,” the woman said, patiently observing. “They have, in the front of their trousers, a sort of sallyport, to expedite pissing and raping.”

“I’m no Turk,” he said, finally rising up in the stirrups to afford her a clear view.

“Is it supposed to look like that?”

“Oh, you’re a sly one.”

“What happened?”

“A certain barber-surgeon in Dunkirk put out the word that he had learnt a cure for the French Pox from a traveling alchemist. My mates and I—we had just got back from Jamaica—went there one night—”

“You had the French Pox?”

“I only wanted a beard trim,” Jack said. “My mate Tom Flinch had a bad finger that needed removal. It had bent the wrong way during a naval engagement with French privateers, and begun to smell so badly that no one would sit near him, and he had to take his meals abovedecks. That was why we went, and that was why we were drunk.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We had to get Tom drunk so he’d make less of a fuss when the finger went flying across the barber-shop. The rules of etiquette stated that we must therefore be as drunk as he.”

“Pray continue.”

“But when we learned that this Barber could also cure the French Pox, why, codpieces were flying around the place like cannonballs.”

“So you did have the said Pox.”

“So this barber, whose eyes had gotten as big as doubloons, stoked up his brazier and began to heat the irons. While he was performing the amputation of Tom Flinch’s digit, the irons were waxing red- and then yellow-hot. Meantimes his young apprentice was mixing up a poultice of herbs, as dictated by the alchemist. Well, to make a long story short, I was the last of the group to have the afflicted member cauterized. My mates were all lying in a heap on the floor, holding poultices over their cocks and screaming, having completed the treatment. The barber and his apprentice tied me into the chair with a large number of stout lines and straps, and jammed a rag into my mouth—”

“They robbed you!?”

“No, no, missy, this was all part of the treatment. Now, the afflicted part of my member—the spot that needed cauterizing, you understand—was on the top, about halfway along. But my Trouser-Snake was all shrunk into m’self by this point, from fear. So the apprentice grasped the tip of my Johnson with a pair of tongs and stretched old One-Eyed Willie out with one hand—holding a candle with the other so that the site of the disease was plainly visible. Then the barber rummaged in his brazier and chose just the right sort of iron—methinks they were all the same, but he wanted to put on a great show of discretion, to justify his price. Just as the barber was lowering the glowing iron into position, what should happen but the tax-man and his deputies smashed down both front and back door at the same instant. ’Twas a raid. Barber dropped the iron.”

“ ’Tis very sad—a strapping fellow such as you—strong and shapely—buttocks like the shell-halves of an English walnut—a fine set of calves—handsome, after a fashion—never to have children.”

“Oh, the barber was too late—I already have two little boys—that’s why I’m chasing ostriches and killing Janissaries—got a family to support. And as I still have the French Pox, there’s only a few years left before I go crazy and die. So now’s the time for building up a handsome legacy.”

“Your wife is lucky.”

“My wife is dead.”

“Too bad.”

“Nah, I didn’t love her,” Jack said bravely, “and after the Barber dropped the iron I’d no practical use for her. Just as I have no practical use for you, Trouble.”

“How do you suppose?”

“Well, just take a look. I can’t do it.”

“Maybe not as the English do. But certain arts have been taught to me from Books of India.”

Silence.

“I’ve never had high regard for book-learning,” Jack said, his voice sounding a bit as though a noose were drawing tight around his neck. “Give me practical experience any day.”

“I have that, too.”

“Aha, but you said you were a virgin?”

“I did my practicing on women.”

“What!?”

“You don’t think the entire harem just sits around waiting for the master to stiffen up?”

“But what’s the point—what is the very meaning—of doing it when there is no penis available?”

“It is a question you might even have asked yourself,” said Blue Eyes.

Jack had the feeling now—hardly for the first time—that a Change of Subject was urgently called for. He said, “I know that you were lying when you said that I was handsome, when really I’m quite bashed, gouged, pox-marked, rope-burned, weather-tanned, and so on.”

“Some women like it,” Blue Eyes said, and actually batted her eyelashes. Her eyes, and a few patches of skin in their vicinity, were the only parts of her that Jack could actually see, and this magnified the effect.

It was important that he put up some kind of defense. “You look very young,” he said, “and you talk like a girl who is in need of a spanking.”

“Books of India,” she said coolly, “have entire chapters about that.”

Jack began riding the horse around the chamber, inspecting its walls. Scraping away packed earth with one hand, he observed the staves of a barrel, branded with Turkish letters, and with more digging and scraping he found more barrels stacked around it—a whole cache of them, jammed into a niche in the chamber wall and mortared together with dirt.

In the center of the chamber was a pile of timbers and planks where the Turkish carpenters had built the reinforcements to prevent the chamber from caving in. Diverse tools were strewn around, wherever the Turks had dropped them when they’d decided to flee. “Here, make yourself useful, lass, and bring me that axe,” Jack said.

Blue Eyes brought him the axe, staring him coolly in the eyes as she handed it over. Jack rose in the stirrups and swung it round so it bit into one of those Turkish kegs. A stave crumpled. Another blow, and the wood gave way entirely, and black powder poured out and hissed onto the ground.

“We’re in the cellar of that Palace,” Jack said. “Directly above us is the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor, and all around us are his vaults, full of treasure. Do you know what we could get, if we touched this off?”

“Premature deafness?”

“I intend to plug my ears.”

“Tons of rock and earth collapsing atop us?”

“We can lay a powder-trail up the tunnel, put fire to it, and watch from a safe distance.”

“You don’t think that the sudden explosion and collapse of the Holy Roman Emperor’s Palace will draw some attention?”

“ ’Twas just an idea.”

“If you do that, you’re going to lose me, brother…besides, that is not how you become ennobled. Blowing a hole in the palace floor and slinking in like a rat, with smoke coming out of your clothes…”

“I’m supposed to take advice on ennoblement from a slave?”

“A slave who has lived in palaces.”

“How would you propose to do it, then? If you’re so clever—let’s hear your plan.”

The blue eyes rolled. “Who is noble?”

Jack shrugged. “Noblemen.”

“How do most of them get that way?”

“By having noble parents.”

“Oh. Really.”

“Of course. Is it different in Turkish courts?”

“No different. But from the way you were talking, I thought that, in the courts of Christendom, it had something to do with being clever.”

“I don’t believe it has any connection at all to cleverness,” Jack said, and prepared to relate a story about Charles the Elector Palatine. But before he could do this, Blue Eyes asked:

“Then we don’t need a clever plan at all, do we?”

“This is an idle conversation, lass, but I am an idle man, and so I don’t mind it. You say we do not need any clever plan to become ennobled. But we lack noble birth—so how do you propose to become noble?”

“It’s easy. You buy your way in.”

“That requires money.”

“Let’s get out of this hole and get us some money, then.”

“How do you propose to do that?”

“I’ll need an escort,” the slave-girl said. “You have a horse and a sword.”

“Blue Eyes, this is a battlefield. Many do. Find a knight.”

“I’m a slave,” she said. “A knight will take what he wants and then leave me.”

“So it’s matrimony you’re after?”

“Some kind of partnership. Needn’t be matrimonial.”

“I’m to ride in front, slaying Janissaries, dragons, knights, and you’ll tag behind and do—what, exactly? And don’t speak to me about Books of India any more.”

“I’ll handle the money.”

“But we have no money.”

“That is why you need someone to handle it.”

Jack didn’t follow, but it sounded clever, and so he nodded sagely, as if he’d taken her meaning very clearly. “What’s your name?”

“Eliza.”

Rising in his stirrups, doffing his hat, and bowing slightly at the waist. “And I am Half-Cocked Jack at the lady’s service.”

“Find me a Christian man’s clothes. The bloodier the better. I’ll pluck the bird.”

Erstwhile Camp of Grand Vizier Khan Mustapha

SEPTEMBER 1683

“AND ANOTHER THING—” JACK SAID.

“What, yet another!?” said Eliza, in an officer’s bloody coat, her head swaddled in ripped shirts, slumped over in the saddle so that her head wasn’t far from that of Jack, who was directing the horse.

“If we make it as far as Paris—and that’s by no means easily done—and if you’ve given me so much as a blink of trouble—one cross look, one wifely crossing of the arms—cutting thespian-like asides, delivered to an imaginary audience—”

“Have you had many women, Jack?”

“—pretending to be shocked by what’s perfectly normal—calculated moods—slowness to get underway—murky complaints about female trouble—”

“Now that you mention it, Jack, this is my time of the month and I need you to stop right here in the middle of the battlefield for, oh, half an hour should suffice—”

“Not funny at all. Do I look amused?”

“You look like the inside of a handkerchief.”

“Then I’ll inform you that I don’t look amused. We are skirting what’s left of Khan Mustapha’s camp. Over to the right, captive Turks stand in file in a trench, crossing themselves—that’s odd—”

“I can hear them, uttering Christian prayers in a Slavic tongue—those are Janissaries, most likely Serbs. Like the ones you saved me from.”

“Can you hear the cavalry-sabers whipping into their necks?”

“Is that what that is?”

“Why d’you think they’re praying? Those Janissaries are being put to the sword by Polish hussars.”

“But why?”

“Ever stumble into a very old family dispute? It wears that face. Some kind of ancient grievance. Some Janissaries must’ve done something upsetting to some Poles a hundred years ago.”

Echelons of cavalry traversed the ruins of the Grand Vizier’s camp like ripples snapped across a bedsheet. Though ’twere best not to begin thinking of bedsheets. “What was I just saying?”

“Oh, you were adding another codicil to our partnership agreement. Just like some Vagabond-lawyer.”

“That’s another thing—”

“Yet still another?”

“Don’t call me a Vagabond. I may call myself one, from time to time, as a little joke—to break the ice, charm the ladies, or whatnot. All in good fun. But you must never direct that notorious epithet my way.” Jack noticed that with one hand he was rubbing the base of the other hand’s thumb, where a red-hot iron, shaped like a letter V, had once been pressed against his flesh, and held down for a while, leaving a mark that itched sometimes. “But to return to what I was trying to say, before all of your uncouth interruptions—the slightest trouble from you, lass, and I’ll abandon you in Paris.”

“Oh, horror! Anything but that, cruel man!”

“You’re as naïve as a rich girl. Don’t you know that in Paris, any woman found on her own will be arrested, cropped, whipped, et cetera, by that Lieutenant of Police—King Looie’s puissant man, who has an exorbitant scope of powers—a most cruel oppressor of beggars and Vagabonds.”

“But you’d know nothing of Vagabonds, O lordly gentleman.”

“Better, but still not good.”

“Where do you get this stuff like ‘notorious epithet’ and ‘exorbitant scope’ and ‘puissant’?”

“The thyuhtuh, my dyuh.”

“You’re an actor?”

“An actor? An actor!?” A promise to spank her later was balanced on the tip of his tongue like a ball on a seal’s nose, but he swallowed it for fear she’d come back at him with some flummoxing utterance. “Learn manners, child. Sometimes Vagabonds might, if in a generous Christian humour, allow actors to follow them around at a respectful distance.”

“Forgive me.”

“Are you rolling your eyes, under those bandages? I can tell, you know—but soft! An officer is nearby. Judging from heraldry, a Neapolitan count with at least three instances of bastardy in his ancestral line.”

Following the cue, Eliza, who fortunately had a deep, unsettlingly hoarse alto, commenced moaning.

“Monsieur, monsieur,” Jack said to her, in attempted French, “I know the saddle must pain those enormous black swellings that have suddenly appeared in your groin the last day or two, since you bedded that pair of rather ill-seeming Gypsy girls against my advice—but we must get you to a Surgeon-Barber, or, failing that, a Barber-Surgeon, so that the Turkish ball can be dug out of your brains before there are any more of those shuddering and twitching fits…” and so on until the Neapolitan count had retreated.

This led to a long pause during which Jack’s mind wandered—though, in retrospect, Eliza’s apparently didn’t.

“Jack, is it safe to talk?”

“For a man, talking to a woman is never precisely safe. But we are out of the camp now, I no longer have to step over occasional strewn body-parts, the Danube is off to the right, Vienna rises beyond that. Men are spreading out to set up camp, queuing before heavily guarded wagons to receive their pay for the day’s work—yes, safe as it’ll ever be.”

“Wait! When will you get paid, Jack?”

“Before the battle we were issued rations of brandy, and worthless little scraps of paper with what I take to’ve been letters inscribed on them, to be redeemed (or so the Captain claimed) in silver at the end of the day. They did not fool Jack Shaftoe. I sold mine to an industrious Jew.”

“How much did you get for it?”

“I drove an excellent bargain. A bird in the hand is worth two in the—”

“You got only fifty percent!?”

“Not so bad, is it? Think, I’m only getting half of the proceeds from those ostrich plumes—because of you.”

“Oh, Jack. How do you suppose it makes me feel when you say such things?”

“What, am I speaking too loudly? Hurting your ears?”

“No…”

“Need to adjust your position?”

“No, no, Jack, I’m not speaking of my body’s feelings.”

“Then what the hell are you on about?”

“And, when you say ‘one funny look and I’ll drop you off among the Poles who brand runaway serfs on the forehead’ or ‘just wait until King Looie’s Lieutenant of Police gets his hands on you…’”

“You’re only cherry-picking the worst ones,” Jack complained. “Mostly I’ve just threatened to drop you off at nunneries and the like.”

“So you do admit that threatening to brand me is more cruel than threatening to make me into a nun.”

“That’s obvious. But—”

“But why be cruel to any degree, Jack?”

“Oh, excellent trick. I’ll have to remember it. Now who is playing the Vagabond-lawyer?”

“Is it that you feel worried that, perhaps, you erred in salvaging me from the Janissaries?”

“What kind of conversation is this? What place do you come from, where people actually care about how everyone feels about things? What possible bearing could anyone’s feelings have on anything that makes a bloody difference?”

“Among harem-slaves, what is there to pass the long hours of the day, except to practice womanly arts, such as sewing, embroidery, and the knotting of fine silk threads into elaborate lace undergarments—”

“Avast!”

“—to converse and banter in diverse languages (which does not go unless close attention is paid to the other’s feelings). To partake of schemes and intrigues, to haggle in souks and bazaars—”

“You’ve already boasted of your prowess there.”

“—”

“Was there something else you were going to mention, girl?”

“Well—”

“Out with it!”

“Only what I alluded to before: using all the most ancient and sophisticated practices of the Oriental world to slowly drive one another into frenzied, sweaty, screaming transports of concupiscent—”

“That’s quite enough!”

“You asked.”

“You led me to ask—schemes and intrigues, indeed!”

“Second nature to me now, I’m afraid.”

“What of your first nature, then? No one could look more English.”

“It is fortunate my dear mother did not hear that. She took extravagant pride in our heritage—pure Qwghlmian.”

“Unadulterated mongrel, then.”

“Not a drop of English blood—nor of Celtic, Norse, or what-have-you.”

“A hundred percent what-have-you is more likely. At what age were you abducted, then?”

“Five.”

“You know your age very clearly,” Jack said, impressed. “Of a noble family, are you?”

“Mother maintains that all Qwghlmians—”

“Stay. I already know your ma better than I knew mine. What do you remember of Qwghlm?”

“The door of our dwelling, glowing warmly by the light of a merry guano-fire, and all hung about with curious picks and hatchets so that Daddy could chip us out of the place after one of those late June ice-storms, so vigorous and bracing. A clifftop village of simple honest folk who’d light bonfires on moonless nights to guide mariners to safety—Jack, why the noises? Phlegmatical trouble of some kind?”

“They light those fires to lure the mariners.”

“Why, to trade with them?”

“So that they’ll run aground and spill their cargoes on Caesar’s Reef, or Viking’s Grief, or Saracen’s Doom, or Frenchie’s Bones, or the Galleon-Gutter, or Dutch-Hammer, or any of the other Hazards to Navigation for which your home is ill-famed.”

“Aah—” Eliza said, in melodious tones that nearly struck Jack dead on his feet, “puts a new light on some of their other practices.”

“Such as?”

“Going out in the night with great big long knives to ‘put stranded sailors out of their suffering…’”

“At their own request, I’m sure?”

“Aye, and coming back with chests and bales of goods offered as payment for the service. Yes, Jack, your explanation’s much more reasonable—how lovely of my sainted Mummy to shield my tender ears from this awkward truth.”

“Now, then, d’you understand why the Kings of England have long suffered—nay, encouraged, and possibly even bribed—the Barbary Corsairs to raid Qwghlm?”

“It was the second week of August. Mother and I were walking on the beach—”

“Wait, you’ve beaches there?”

“In memory, all is golden—perhaps it was a mud-flat. Yes, it was on the way to Snowy Rock, which gleamed a radiant white—”

“Ha! Even in summer?”

“Not with snow. ’Twas the gifts of seagulls, by which Qwghlm is ever nourished. Mother and I had our slx and sktl—”

“Again?”

“The former is a combined hammering, chopping, scraping, and poking tool consisting of an oyster shell lashed to a thigh-bone.”

“Why not use a stick?”

“Englishmen came and took all of the trees. The sktl is a hopper or bucket. We were halfway out to the Rock when we became conscious of a rhythm. Not the accustomed pounding of mountainous waves on jagged rocks—this was faster, sharper, deeper—a beating of savage African drums! North-, not Sub-Saharan, but African anyway, and not typical of the area. Qwghlmian music makes very little use of percussion—”

“It being difficult to make drum-heads of rat-hides.”

“We turned towards the sun. Out on the cove—a wrinkled sheet of hammered gold—a shadow like a centipede, its legs swinging fore and aft to the beating of the drum—”

“Wait, a giant bug was walking on water?”

“ ’Twas a many-oared coastal raiding-galley of the Barbary Corsairs. We tried to run back towards the shore, but the mud sucked at our bare feet so avidly that we had skwsh for a week thereafter—”

“Skwsh?”

“Heel-hickeys. The pirates launched a long-boat and ran it up on the mud-flat before us, cutting off our escape. Several men—turbaned silhouettes so strange and barbarous to my young eyes—vaulted out and made for us. One of them went straight into quicksand—”

“Haw! Stop! Now, that, as we say in Wapping, is Entertainment!”

“Only a Qwghlmian born and bred could have found her way across that flat without perishing. In a trice, he’d sunk down to his neck and was thrashing about in exactly the wrong way, hollering certain key verses of the Holy Qur’an.”

“And your mother said, ‘We could escape now, but we have a Christian duty to this poor sailor; we must sacrifice our freedom to save his life’ and you stayed there to help him out.”

“No, Mummy said something more like, ‘We could try to struggle away through all of this mud, but those darkies have muskets—so I’ll pretend to stay behind to help that stupid wog—maybe we can rack up some brown-nosing points.’”

“What a woman!”

“She commandeered an oar and extended it to the trapped sailor. Seeing she’d found solid footing, others made bold to leave the boat and haul this fellow in. Mummy and I were then subjected to a curious sniffing procedure administered by an officer who did not speak English, but who made it plain, by his posture and expressions, that he was embarrassed and apologetic. We were taken aboard the long-boat and then to the galley, and then rowed out to a rendezvous with a forty-gun pirate-galleon cruising offshore. Not some ramshackle barge but a proper ship of the line, captured or perhaps bought, leased, or borrowed from a European navy.”

“Where your mother was cruelly used by horny Mahometans.”

“Oh, no. These men seemed to be of that sort who only desire women for that which they have in common with men.”

“What—eyebrows?”

“No, no!”

“Toenails then? Because—”

“Stop it!”

“But the mercy that your Mum showed to the poor sailor was richly repaid later on, right? When, in a moment of crisis, unlooked-for, he appeared and showed her some favor, and thus saved the day—right?”

“He died a couple of days later, from bad fish, and was tossed overboard.”

“Bad fish? On a ship? In the ocean? I thought those Mussulmen were ever so particular about their victuals.”

“He didn’t eat it—just touched it while preparing a meal.”

“Why would anyone—”

“Don’t ask me,” Eliza said, “ask the mysterious Personage who subjected my Mummy to his unnatural vice.”

“I thought you said—”

“You asked me if she’d been used by Mahometans. The Personage was not a Mahometan. Or a Jew. Or any other sort that practices circumcision.”

“Er—”

“Would you like to stop, so that I can draw you a picture?”

“No. What sort of man was he, then?”

“Unknown. He never left his cabin in that high-windowed castle at the stern of the ship. It seemed he had a fear of sunlight, or at least of tanning. When Mummy was taken into that place, that curved expanse of glass was carefully shuttered, and the curtains drawn—heavy curtains they were, in a dark green shade like the skin of the aguacate, which is a fruit of New Spain. But with thread of gold woven through, here and there, to produce a sparkling effect. Before my mother could react, she was thrown back against the carpet—”

“You mean, down onto the carpet.”

“Oh, no. For the walls, and even the ceiling, of the cabin were lined, every inch of them, in carpet. Hand-knotted wool, with a most deep and luxurious pile (or so it seemed to Mummy, who’d never seen or touched a carpet before), all in a hue that recalled the gold of fields ripe for harvest—”

“I thought you said it was dark.”

“She came back from these trysts with the fibers all over her. And even in the dark she could feel, with the skin of her back, that cunning artisans had sculpted the golden carpet into curious patterns.”

“Doesn’t sound that bad, so far—that is, by the standards of white women abducted and enslaved by Barbary Corsairs.”

“I haven’t gotten to the part about the smell yet.”

“The world smells bad, lass. Best to hold your nose and get on with it.”

“You are a child in the world of bad smells, until—”

“Excuse me. Have you ever been to Newgate Prison? Paris in August? Strasbourg after the Black Death?”

“Think about fish for a moment.”

“Now you’re on about fish again.”

“The only food that the Personage would eat was fish that had gone bad—quite some time ago.”

“That’s it. No more. I’ll not be made a fool of.” Jack put his fingers in his ears and sang a few merry madrigal tunes with a great deal of “fa la la” material in them.

A FEW DAYS might have passed here—the road West was long. But in time she inevitably resumed. “The Barbary Corsairs were no less incredulous than you, Jack. But it was evident that the Personage was a man of tremendous power, whose wishes must be obeyed. Every day, some sailor who’d committed an infraction would be sentenced to dress the rotten fish for this man’s private table. He’d drop to his knees and beg to be flogged, or keel-hauled, rather than carry out that duty. But always one would be chosen, and sent over the side, and down the ladder—”

“How’s that?”

“The fish was ripened in an open long-boat towed far, far behind the ship. Once a day, it would be pulled up alongside, and the luckless sailor would be forced, at pistols drawn, to descend a rope-ladder, clutching a scrap of paper in his teeth on which was inscribed whatever receipt the Personage had selected. Then the tow-rope was hastily paid out again by a gagging team of sailors, and the chef would go to work, preparing the meal on a little iron stove in the long-boat. When he was finished, he’d wave a skull and crossbones in the air and be pulled in until he was just astern. A rope would be thrown out the windows of that gaudy castle—below, the chef would tie it to a basket containing the finished meal. The basket would be drawn up and in through the window. Later, the Personage would ring a bell and a cabin-boy would be heartily bastinadoed until he agreed to go aft to recover the china, and toss it overboard.”

“Fine. The cabin smelled bad.”

“Oh, this Personage tried to mask it with all the spices and aromatic gums of the East. The place was all a-dangle with small charms, cleverly made in the shape of trees, impregnated with rare perfumes. Incense glowered through the wrought-gold screens of exotic braziers, and crystalline vials of perfumed spirits, dyed the colors of tropical blossoms, sloshed about with great sodden wicks hanging out of ’em to disperse the scent into the air. All for naught, of course, for—”

“The cabin smelled bad.”

“Yes. Now, to be sure, Mummy and I had noticed an off odor about the ship from about a mile out, as we were being rowed to it, and had chalked it up to the corsairs’ barbarous ways and overall masculinity. We had watched the spectacle of the dinner preparation twice without understanding it. The second time, the chef—who, that day, was the very man Mummy had saved—never waved the Jolly Roger, but seemed to fall asleep in the long-boat. Efforts were made to rouse him by blowing horns and firing cannon-salvos, to no avail. Finally they pulled him in, and the ship’s physician descended the rope-ladder, breathing through a compress soaked in a compound of citrus oil, myrrh, spearmint, bergamot, opium, rose-water, camphor, and anise-seed, and pronounced the poor man dead. He had nicked his hand while chopping some week-old squid-meat, and some unspeakable residue had infected his blood and slain him, like a crossbow bolt ’tween the eyes.”

“Your description of the Personage’s cabin was suspiciously complete and particular,” Jack observed.

“Oh, I was taken there, too—after Mummy failed the sniff-test, he flew into a rage, and in desperation they offered me up as a sacrifice. He got no satisfaction from me, as I’d not, at that age, begun to exude the womanly humours that—”

“Stop. Only stop. My life, since I approached Vienna, is become some kind of Bartholomew-Fair geek-baiting.”

HOURS, OR A DAY or two, might’ve passed.

“So, then, I suppose I’m meant to believe that you and dear Mummy were originally taken from the mud-flats simply in hopes that Mummy would pass the sniff-test.”

“ ’Twas thought she had passed it—but the officer who administered that olfactory examination was deceived—his sensorium overwhelmed—by—”

“By the miasma of those Qwghlmian mud-flats and guano-mountains. My God, it is the worst thing I have ever heard—to think I feared that you would be appalled by my story.” Jack waved his arms in the air, gaining the attention of an approaching friar, and shouted: “Which way is Massachusetts? I’m become a Puritan.”

“Later in the voyage, finally, the Personage had his way with poor Mummy on one or two occasions, but only because no other choices were available to him, and we did not pass near any more remote settlements where women could be easily abducted.”

“Well, c’mon, let’s have it—what’d he do in that carpeted castle?”

Eliza then became uncharacteristically shy. Now, by this time they were several days out of Vienna. She had taken off the wounded-officer disguise and was sitting in the saddle with a blanket wrapped around her, covering the tent she’d been wearing the first time Jack had seen her. From time to time she’d offer to dismount and walk, but she was barefoot, and Jack didn’t want to be slowed down. Her head, anyway, projected from a vast whorl of fabric, and Jack could therefore turn round and look at it anytime he chose. Generally he didn’t, because he knew that only trouble could come of paying undue attention to that visage—its smooth symmetry, its fine set of teeth, and all of those ever-so-important Feelings flickering across it, supple and quick and mesmerizing as fire-light. But at this particular moment he did turn round to look, because her silence was so sudden that he supposed she’d been punched out of the saddle by a stray cannon-ball. She was there, gazing at some other travelers just ahead of them: four nuns.

They overtook the nuns shortly and left them behind. “Now you can say it,” Jack said. But Eliza just set her jaw and gazed into the distance.

A quarter of an hour later they passed the actual nunnery. And a quarter of an hour after that suddenly she was back to normal, relating the details of what had gone on behind those aguacate-colored curtains on the carpet of harvest gold. Several odd practices were described—Books of India stuff, Jack suspected.

The high points of Eliza’s story were, in sum, curiously synchronized with the appearance of nunneries and towns along their route. At a certain point Jack had heard all he wanted to—a bawdy tale, when told in so much detail, became monotonous, and then started to seem calculated to inspire Feelings of profound guilt and self-loathing in any male listeners who happened to be nearby.

Reviewing his memories of the last few days’ journey from Vienna, Jack observed that, when they’d been in open country or forest, Eliza had kept to herself. But whenever they’d neared any kind of settlement, and especially nunneries (which were thick as fleas in this Popish land), the tongue would go into action and reach some highly interesting moment in the tale just as they were passing by the town’s gate or the nunnery’s door. The story would never resume until they’d passed some distance onwards.

“Next stop: the Barbary Coast. As we’d proven unsatisfactory to the Personage, we were added to the general pool of European slaves there—some tens of thousands of ’em.”

“Damn, I’d no idea!”

“Their plight is ignored by all Europe!” Eliza said, and Jack realized too late he’d set her off. A torrential rant ensued. If only her head was still wrapped in those fake bandages—some tightening and knotting and his troubles would be over. Instead, by paying out the reins Jack was able to lead the noble horse, which he’d named, or re-named, Turk, from a distance, much as the Corsair-ship in Eliza’s ridiculous fable had towed the unspeakable fish-boat. Snatches and fragments of the Rant occasionally drifted his way. He learned that Mummy had been sold into the harem of an Ottoman military official at the Qasbah of Algiers, and in her copious spare time had founded the Society of Britannic Abductees, which now had branches in Morocco, Tripoli, Bizerta, and Fez; which met on a fortnightly rotation except during Ramadan; which had bylaws running to several hundred pages, which Eliza had to copy out by hand on filched Ottoman stationery whenever a new chapter was founded…

They were close to Linz. Monasteries, nunneries, rich men’s houses, and outlying towns came frequently. In the middle of Eliza’s sermon about the plight of white slaves in North Africa, Jack (just to see what would happen) slowed, then stopped before the gates of an especially gloomy and dreadful Gothickal convent. Eerie Papist chanting came out of it. Suddenly Eliza was off on a new topic.

“Now, when you started that sentence,” Jack observed, “you were telling me about the procedure for amending the bylaws of the Society of Britannic Abductees, but by the time you got to the end of it, you had begun telling me about what happened when the ship packed to the gunwales with Hindoostani dancing-girls ran aground near a castle of the Knights of Malta—you’re not worried that I’m going to drop you off, or sell you to some farmer, are you?”

“Why should you care about my feelings?”

“Now has it never occurred to you that you might be better off in a nunnery?”

Clearly it hadn’t, but now it did. A most lovely consternation flooded into her face, and she turned her head, slightly, toward the nunnery.

“Oh, I’ll hold up my end of the partnership. Years of dangling from hanged men’s feet taught me the value of honest dealings.” Jack stopped talking for a moment to stifle his mirth. Then, “Yes, the advantages of being on the road with Half-Cocked Jack are many: no man is my master. I have boots. A sword, axe, and horse, too. I cannot be but chaste. Secret smugglers’ roads are all known to me. I know the zargon and the code-signs of Vagabonds, who, taken together, constitute a sort of (if I may speak poetically) network of information, spreading all over the world, functioning smoothly even when damaged, by which I may know which pays offer safe haven and passage, and which oppress wandering persons. You could do worse.”

“Why then did you say I might be better off there?” Eliza said, nodding toward the great nunnery with its wings curling around toward the road like a beetle’s tongs.

“Well, some would say I should’ve mentioned this to you earlier, but: you’ve taken up with a man who can be hanged on arrival in most jurisdictions.”

“Ooh, you’re an infamous criminal?”

“Only some places—but that’s not why.”

“Why then?”

“I’m of a particular type. The Devil’s Poor.”

“Oh.”

“Shames me to say it—but when I was drunk and battle-flushed I showed you my other secret and so now I’ve no way, I’m sure, to fall any lower in your esteem.”

“What is the Devil’s Poor? Are you a Satan-worshipper?”

“Only when I fall in among Satan-worshippers. Haw! No, it is an English expression. There are two kinds of poor—God’s and the Devil’s. God’s poor, such as widows, orphans, and recently escaped white slave-girls with pert arses, can and should be helped. Devil’s poor are beyond help—charity’s wasted on ’em. The distinction ’tween the two categories is recognized in all civilized countries.”

“Do you expect to be hanged down there?”

They’d stopped on a hill-top above the Danube’s flood-plain. Linz was below. The departure of the armies had shrunk it to a tenth of its recent size, leaving a scar on the earth like the pale skin after a big scab has fallen away. “Things will be loose there just now—many discharged soldiers will be passing through. They can’t all be hanged—not enough rope in Austria for that. I count half a dozen corpses hanging from trees outside the city gate, half a dozen more heads on pikes along the walls—low normal, for a town of that size.”

“Let’s to market, then,” Eliza said, peering down into Linz’s square with eyes practically shooting sparks.

“Just ride in, find the Street of Ostrich-Plume Merchants, and go from one to the next, playing ’em off against each other?”

Eliza deflated.

“That’s the problem with specialty goods,” Jack said.

“What’s your plan then, Jack?”

“Oh, anything can be sold. In every town is a street where buyers can be found for anything. I make it my business to know where those streets are.”

“Jack, what sort of price do you suppose we’ll fetch at a thieves’ market? We could not conceivably do worse.”

“But we’ll have silver in our pockets, lass.”

“Perhaps the reason you’re the Devil’s Poor is that, having gotten something, you slip into town like a man who expects ill-treatment—possibly including capital punishment—and go straight to the thieves’ market and sell it to a middleman’s middleman’s middleman.”

“Please note that I am alive, free, that I have boots, most of my bodily parts—”

“And a pox that’ll make you demented and kill you in a few years.”

“Longer than I’d live if I went into a town like that one pretending to be a merchant.”

“But my point is—as you yourself said—you need to build up a legacy for your boys now.”

“Precisely what I just proposed,” Jack said. “Unless you’ve a better idea?”

“We need to find a fair where we can sell the ostrich plumes directly to a merchant of fine clothes—someone who’ll take them home to, say, Paris, and sell them to rich ladies and gentlemen.”

“Oh, yes. Such merchants are always eager to deal with Vagabonds and slave-girls.”

“Oh, Jack—that’s simply a matter of dressing up instead of down.”

“There are sensitive men—touchy blokes—who’d find something disparaging in that remark. But I—”

“Haven’t you wondered why, whenever I move, I make all of these rustling and swishing noises?” She demonstrated.

“I’m too much the gentleman to make inquiries about the construction of your undergarments—but since you mentioned it—”

“Silk. I’ve about a mile of silk wrapped around me, under this black thing. Stole it from the Vizier’s camp.”

“Silk! I’ve heard of it.”

“A needle, some thread, and I’ll be every inch a lady.”

“And what will I be? The imbecile fop?”

“My manservant and bodyguard.”

“Oh, no—”

“It’s just play-acting! Only while we’re in the fair! The rest of the time, I’m as ever your obedient slave, Jack.”

“Since I know you like to tell fables, I’ll play-act with you briefly. Now begging your pardon, but doesn’t it take time to sew fine costumes out of Turkish silk?”

“Jack, many things take time. This will only take a few weeks.”

“A few weeks. And you’re aware that you are now in a place that has winters? And that this is October?”

“Jack?”

“Eliza?”

“What does your zargon-network tell you of fairs?”

“Mostly they are in spring or autumn. We want the Leipzig one.”

“We do?” Eliza seemed impressed. Jack was gratified by this—a bad sign. No man was more comprehensively doomed than him whose chief source of gratification was making favorable impressions on some particular woman.

“Yes, because it is where goods of the East, coming out of Russia and Turkey, are exchanged for goods of the West.”

“For silver, more likely—no one wants Western stuff.”

“That’s correct, actually. Your elder Vagabonds will tell you that the Parisian merchants are best robbed on the road to Leipzig, as that’s when they carry silver, whereas on the way back they have goods that must be tediously hauled around and fenced. Though your young fellows will take issue with that, and say that no one carries silver anymore—all business is done with bills of exchange.”

“At any rate, Leipzig is perfect.”

“Except for the small matter that the autumn fair’s already over, and we’ll have a winter to survive before the next one.”

“Keep me alive through that winter, Jack, and come spring, in Leipzig, I’ll fetch you ten times what you’d get down there.”

This was not a proper Vagabond method—making a plan six months in advance. The error was compounded a thousandfold by the prospect of spending so much time with one particular woman. But Jack had already trapped himself by mentioning his sons.

“Still thinking about it?” Eliza asked, some time later.

“Stopped thinking about it long ago,” Jack said. “Now I’m trying to remember what I know of the country between here and Leipzig.”

“And what have you remembered thus far?”

“Only that we’ll see nothing alive that is more than fifty years old.” Jack began walking toward a Danube ferry. Turk followed and Eliza rode in silence.

Bohemia

AUTUMN 1683

THREE DAYS NORTH of the Danube, the road focused to a rut in a crowd of scrawny trees that were striving to rise clear from a haze of grasping weeds. The weeds seethed with bugs and stirred with small unseen beasts. Paving-blocks skewed out of pounded ground, forming a sort of shoal that unsettled Turk, who straightened, blinked suspiciously, and slowed. Jack drew the Janissary’s sword out of the rolled blanket where it had been hid since Vienna and washed the dried blood off in a creek-bend. When it was clean, he stood in a buttress of sunlight, thigh-deep in brown water, nervously wiping it and swinging it in the air.

“Something troubling you, Jack?”

“Since the Papists slew all the decent folk, this is a country of bandits, haiduks, and Vagabonds—”

“I guessed that. I meant, something about the sword?”

“Can’t seem to get it dry—that is, it’s dry to the touch, but it ripples like a brook in the sun.”

Eliza answered with a scrap of verse:

Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,

Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.

Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;

And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.

“…or so says the Poet.”

“What manner of poet speaketh such barbarities?” Jack scoffed.

“One who knew more of swords than you. For that is Damascus steel, more than likely. It might be more valuable than Turk and the ostrich plumes summed.”

“Save for this defect,” Jack said, fitting the ball of his thumb into a notch in the edge, not far from the point. Around it the steel was blackened. “I wouldn’t’ve thought it could happen.”

“That’s where it cut into your musket’s soft belly?”

“Soft? You saw only the wooden stock. But concealed within was an iron ramrod, running the whole length of the weapon through a skinny hole augered into the wood, alongside the musket-barrel itself. This sword cut through the wood—no great feat—but then it must’ve sliced clean through the ramrod, and then well into the barrel—deep enough to make it weak there. When the powder finally caught, it shoved the ball up only as far as the weak place, and then the barrel burst—that was the end of the Janissary, for he had his face up practically—”

“I saw it. You’re rehearsing the story, aren’t you, to entertain your friends?”

“I have no friends. It’s to cow mine enemies.” Jack thought this sounded formidable, but Eliza stared at the horizon and heaved a sigh.

“Or,” she said, “it could entice a buyer who was in the market for a legendary blade…”

“I know it’s difficult, but put all thoughts of markets out of your mind. As the Grand Vizier recently learned, all the riches in the world are of no use if you can’t defend ’em. This is wealth, and the means to defend it, combined into one—perfection.”

“Do you suppose that a man with a sword and a horse will be defense enough, in a place like this?”

“No highwayman of standing would situate himself in a waste.”

“Are all the forests of Christendom like this? From Mummy’s færy-tales I was expecting great majestic trees.”

“Two or three generations ago, ’twas a wheat-field,” Jack said, using the sword to harvest a sheaf of overripe stalks growing wild in a sunny break on the bank of the stream. He sheathed the sword and smelled the grain. “The good peasants would come here during the harvest with their dulled whistles slung over their tired shoulders.” Before Jack had waded in he had kicked off his boots. He waded around the swirling pool, groping at the bottom with his bare toes, and after a minute bent down, reached in, and brought up a long curved scythe-blade, notched from striking rocks—just a solid crescent of rust now, a few fingers of slimy black wood projecting from the handle-socket. “They would whet their whistles using rocks that had been worn smooth by the river.” He brought up one such rock in his other hand and scrubbed it against the blade for a moment, then tossed it up on the bank. “And while they were doing so they might not be above taking a bit of refreshment.” Still probing with his feet, he bent down again and produced an earthenware drinking-jug, turned it over, and poured out a green-brown tube of stagnated water. The jug he tossed also onto the bank. Still holding the long rusty arc of the whistle in one hand, he turned round and waded back in search of an exhibit he had detected earlier. He found it again, and nearly fell over, the stream’s current dividing round his thigh as he stood flamingo-style and passed the other foot over something down there. “And so went their simple, happy lives—until something intervened—” Jack now swung the whistle-blade slowly and (he liked to suppose) dramatically across the surface of the pool, a pantomime Grim Reaper.

“Plague? Famine?”

“Religious controversy!” Jack said, and produced from the pool a browned human skull, jaw-bone absent, an obvious sword-dent caving in one of the temples. Eliza (he thought) seemed quite struck by his presentation—not by the skull (she’d seen worse) so much as by the cleverness of the performance. He posed with whistle and skull, extending the moment. “Ever seen a morality play?”

“Mummy told me about ’em.”

“The intended audience: Vagabonds. The purpose: to impress on their feeble and degenerate minds some idiotic moral.”

“What is the moral of your play, Jack?”

“Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they’ve got Bibles, too.”

“Sound advice.”

“Even if it means giving up things.”

Eliza laughed like a wench. “Ah, now we are coming to a moral, I can sense it.”

“Laugh all you like at this poor fellow,” Jack said, hefting the skull. “If he’d left his wheat-harvest behind, and taken to the road, instead of clinging to his land and his hut like a miser, why he might be alive today.”

“Are there such things as fourscore-year-old Vagabonds?”

“Probably not,” Jack admitted, “they just look twice as old as they are.”

THEY WENT NORTH into the dead country of Bohemia, following spoors and traces of old roads, and the trails of the game that had flourished here in the absence of hunters. Jack lamented the loss of Brown Bess, which would have brought down all the deer they might have wanted, or at least scared the hell out of them.

Sometimes they would come down out of the wooded hills to cross over plains—probably old pastures that had grown up into vast thickets. Jack would put Eliza up into the saddle so that thorns, nettles, and bugs wouldn’t make a mess of her—not that he cared—but her chief reason for existence was to give him something pleasant to look at. Sometimes he’d put the Damascus blade to the ignoble purpose of hacking through brush. “What do you and Turk see?” he’d say, because all he could see was useless vegetation, gone all brown in preparation for winter.

“To the right, the ground rises to a sort of shelf, high dark hills behind it—on the shelf the walls of a castle, thick and ill-made compared to Moorish ones, which are so elegant—but not thick enough to resist whatever destroying force knocked it down—”

“Artillery, lass—the doom of all ancient forts.”

“The Pope’s artillery, then, breached the walls in several places—creating spills of rock across the dry-moat. White mortar clings to the dark stones like shards of bleached bone. Then fire burnt out the insides, and took all but a few blackened rafters from the roof—all the windows and gunports have spreading smoke-stains above them, as if flames jetted from those openings for hours—it is like an Alchemist’s furnace in which a whole town was purified of heresy.”

“You have alchemists in Barbary?”

“You have them in Christendom?”

“It is very poetickal—as were the previous half-dozen ruined-castle-descriptions—but I was more interested in practical matters: do you see the smoke of cook-fires anywhere?”

“I’d have mentioned it. Trails in the brush, trampled down by men or horses, I’d have mentioned, too.”

“Anything else?”

“To the left a pond—rather shallow-looking.”

“Let’s go there.”

“Turk’s been taking us thither—he’s thirsty.”

They found several such ponds, and after the third or fourth (all of them near ruins) Jack understood that these ponds had been excavated, or at least enlarged and rounded out, by (safe to say) thousands of wretches with picks and shovels. It recalled to his mind some bit of zargon-lore he’d picked up from a gypsy in Paris, who’d ranted to him about lakes, far to the East, but not so far as Romania, where big fish were raised just as herdsman raised beef-cattle in pastures. From the fish skeletons scattered along the shores of these ponds, Jack could see others had been here, harvesting the vestiges of those dead Protestants’ clammy flocks. It made his mouth water.

“Why’d the Papists hate this country so much?” Eliza inquired. “Mummy told me there are many Protestant lands.”

“It is not the sort of thing I would bother to know about, as a rule,” Jack said, “but, as it happens, I’ve just come from an almost equally ruined land where every peasant knows the tale, and won’t leave off telling it. That country is called the Palatinate and its lords, for a few generations anyway, were Protestant heroes. One of those lords married an English girl, name of Elizabeth—the sister of Chuck the First.”

“Charles the First—isn’t he the one who ran afoul of Cromwell, and got his head chopped off in Charing Cross?”

“The same—and his sister fared little better, as you’ll soon see. Because right here in Bohemia, some Protestants got weary of being ruled by Papists, and threw several of ’em out a castle window into a dung-heap, and declared this country free of Popery. But unlike the Dutchmen, who have little use for royalty, these Bohemians couldn’t imagine having a country without monarchs. As Protestant monarchs were in short supply hereabouts, they invited Elizabeth and this Palatine fellow to come here and rule them. Which they did—for a single winter. Then the Pope’s legions came up here and made it what it is today.”

“What of Elizabeth and her husband?”

“The Winter Queen and the Winter King, as they were called after that, ran away. They couldn’t go to the Palatinate because that had likewise been invaded (which is why the people who live there won’t shut up about it, even today), so they roamed about like Vagabonds for a while and finally ended up at The Hague, where they sat out the war that had been started by all this.”

“Did she have children?”

“She wouldn’t stop having ’em. My god. To hear people talk, she must’ve been punching them out, nine and a half months apart, all through the war…I cannot remember how many.”

“You cannot remember? How long was this war?”

“Thirty years.”

“Oh.”

“She had at least a dozen. The eldest became Elector Palatinate after the war, and the others scattered to the four winds, as far as I know.”

“You speak very callously of them,” Eliza sniffed, “but I am certain that each bears in his or her heart the memory of what was done to the parents.”

“Forgive me, lass, but now I’m confused: are you talking about those Palatine whelps, or yourself?”

“Both,” Eliza admitted.

He and Eliza had hit on a new way of subsisting, mostly on wheat. As Jack liked to remind Eliza several times a day, he was not the sort who accumulated possessions. But he had a sharp eye for what might be useful in a pinch, and so had filched a hand-mill from a military baggage-train when the cooks had gone off to loot. Wheat poured into the top would become flour if one only turned the crank a few thousand times. All they needed, then, was an oven. Or so Jack had supposed until one evening between Vienna and Linz when Eliza had thrust a couple of sticks into the ashes of their fire and pulled out a flat blackened disk. Brushed off, it proved to be brown and tan underneath—torn apart, it steamed and smelled more or less like bread. It was, Eliza said, a Mohametan style of bread, requiring no oven, and reasonably good to eat if you didn’t mind grinding a few cinders between your teeth. They’d now been eating it for upwards of a month. Compared to real viands it was miserable, compared to starvation it was extremely palatable. “Bread and water, bread and water—it’s like being in the brig again. I’m for some fish!” Jack said.

“When were you in a brig?”

“It’s just like you to ask. Er, I believe it was after we sailed from Jamaica, but before the pirate attack.”

“What were you doing in Jamaica?” Eliza asked suspiciously.

“Worked my extensive military connections to stow away on a ship bringing balls and powder to His Majesty’s fortifications there.”

“Why?”

“Port Royal. I wanted to see Port Royal, which is to pirates as Amsterdam is to Jews.”

“You wanted to become a pirate?”

“I wanted freedom. As a Vagabond, I have it—so long as I keep my wits about me. But a pirate is (or so I thought) like a Vagabond of the seas. They say that all of the seas, put together, are larger than all of the dry land, put together, and I supposed that pirates must be that much freer than Vagabonds. Not to mention a good deal richer—everyone knows that the streets of Port Royal are paved with Spanish silver.”

“Are they?”

“Very near, lass. All of the world’s silver comes from Peru and Mexico—”

“I know it. We used pieces of eight in Constantinople.”

“—and all of it must pass by Jamaica in order to reach Spain. Those Port Royal pirates siphoned off a goodly fraction of it. I reached the place in seventy-six—only a few years since Captain Morgan had personally sacked Portobelo and Panama, and brought all the proceeds back to Port Royal. It was a rich place.”

“I’m pleased that you wanted to be a buccaneer…I was afraid you had ambitions of being a sugar planter.”

“Then, lass, you are the only person in the world who esteems pirates above planters.”

“I know that in the Cape Verde Islands and Madeira, all sugar is cultivated by slaves—the same is true in Jamaica?”

“Of course! The Indians all died, or ran away.”

“Then better to be a pirate.”

“Never mind. A month aboard ship taught me that there’s no freedom at all to be had on the high seas. Oh, the ship might be moving. But all water looks the same, and while you wait for land to crawl over the horizon, you’re locked up in a box with a lot of insufferable fools. And pirate-ships are no different. There is no end of rules as to how booty and swag are to be collected, valued, and divided among the numerous different classes and ranks of pirates. So after a bad month in Port Royal, trying to keep my arsehole away from randy buccaneers, I sailed for home on a sugar-ship.”

Eliza smiled. She did not do this frequently. Jack did not like the effect it had on him when she did. “You have seen much,” she said.

“I’m more than twenty years old, lass. An old gaffer like me, in the twilight of his years, has had plenty of time to live a full life, and to see Port Royal and other wonders—you’re only a child, you’ve a good ten or, God willing, twenty years left.”

“It was on the sugar-ship that you were thrown into the brig?”

“Yes, for some imagined offense. Then pirates attacked. We were holed by a cannonball. The ship’s master saw his profits dissolving. All hands were called on deck, all sins pardoned.”

ELIZA WENT ON WITH FURTHER interrogations. Jack heard not a word of it, as he was making observations of this pond, and of the mostly abandoned village that crowded along one shore of it. He paid particular attention to a gossamer-thread of smoke that rose and piled up against some invisible barrier in the atmosphere above. It was coming from a lean-to thrown up against the wall of an old collapsed house. A dog whined somewhere. The scrub between the pond and a nearby forest was scored with various trails cutting purposefully toward water’s edge, and the forest itself trapped in a miasma of smoke and vapors.

Jack followed the pond-shore, fish-bones crackling beneath the soles of his boots, until he’d come to the village. A man was dragging a faggot as big as himself down a road toward the lean-to. “No axes—they therefore must burn twigs, instead of cordwood, all winter,” Jack said to Eliza, significantly patting the axe that they’d taken from the chamber beneath Vienna.

The man was wearing wooden shoes, and was dressed in rags that had gone the color of ash, and he shimmered in an oily cloud of flies. He was staring lustfully at Jack’s boots, with an occasional, sad glance at the sword and the horse, which told him he would never get the boots.

“J’ai besoin d’une cruche,” Jack offered.

Eliza was amused. “Jack, we’re in Bohemia! Why are you speaking French?”

“Il y a quelques dans la cave de ça—là-bas, monsieur,” said the peasant.

“Merci.”

“De rien, monsieur.”

“You have to look at the shoes,” Jack explained airily, after allowing a minute for Eliza’s embarrassment to ripen. “No one but a Frenchman wears those sabots.”

“But how…?”

“France is a worse than normal place to be a peasant. Some pays especially. They know perfectly well there’s empty land to the east. As do our dinner guests.”

“Guests?”

Jack found a great earthenware jug in a cellar and set Eliza to work dropping pebbles into its open neck until it was so weighed down as to sink. Meanwhile he was working with the contents of his powder-horn, which had been useless weight to him since the destruction of Brown Bess. He tore a long thin strip of linen from a shirt and rolled it in powder until it was nearly black, then sparked one end of it with flint and steel and observed a steady and satisfactory progress of sputtering and smoky flame. The Frenchman’s children had come over to watch. They were so infested with fleas that they rustled. Jack made them stay well back. The fuse demonstration was the most wondrous event of their lives.

Eliza was finished with the pebble work. The rest was simple enough. All the remaining supply of gunpowder, plus a piece of new fuse, went into the jug. Jack lit the fuse, dropped it in, jammed a warm candle-stub into the neck to keep water out, and hurled the apparatus as far as he could into the pond, which swallowed it. A few moments later it belched—the water swelled, foamed, and produced a cloud of dry smoke, like a miracle. A minute later the water became lumpy and thick with dead or unconscious fish.

“Dinner is served!” Jack hollered. But the murky forest had already come alive—queues of people were moving down the paths like flame down the fuse. “Up on the horse, lass,” Jack suggested.

“Are they dangerous?”

“Depends on what’s catching. I have the good fortune to’ve been born immune and impervious to plague, leprosy, impetigo…” but Eliza was up on the horse already, in a performance of a scampering nature that no man alive (excepting sodomites) would not have enjoyed watching. Jack, for lack of other occupations, had taught her what he knew of riding, and she backed Turk off expertly and rode him up onto a little mossy hummock, gaining as much altitude as possible.

“ ’Twas the Year of our Lord sixteen hundred and sixty-five,” Jack said. “I was coming up in the world—having established a thriving business of sorts with brother Bob, providing specialized services to the condemned. My first clew was the scent of brimstone—then heavy yellow smoke of it hanging in the streets, thicker and fouler than the normal fogs of London. People burnt it to purify the air.”

“Of what?”

“Then it was wains trundling down streets piled with corpses of rats, then cats, then dogs, then people. Red chalk crosses would appear on certain houses—armed watchmen stood before them to prevent any of the miserable residents from breaking out of those nailed-shut doors. Now, I couldn’t’ve been more than seven. The sight of all those blokes planted in the brimstone-fog, like hero-statues, with pikes and muskets at the ready—churches’ bells sounding death-knells all round—why, Bob and I had voyaged to another world without leaving London! Public entertainments were outlawed. Irish even stopped having their Popish feasts, and many absconded. The great hangings at Tyburn stopped. Theatres: shut down for the first time since Cromwell. Bob and I had lost both income and the entertainment to spend it on. We left London. We went to the forest. Everyone did. They were infested. The highwaymen had to pack up and move away. Before we—the Londoners fleeing the Plague—even came into those woods, there had been towns of lean-tos and tree-houses there: widows, orphans, cripples, idiots, madmen, journeymen who’d thought better of their contracts, fugitives, homeless reverends, victims of fire and flood, deserters, discharged soldiers, actors, girls who’d gotten pregnant out of wedlock, tinkers, pedlars, gypsies, runaway slaves, musicians, sailors between sailings, smugglers, confused Irishmen, Ranters, Diggers, Levellers, Quakers, feminists, midwives. The normal Vagabond population, in other words. To this was added, now, any Londoner fleet enough to outrun the Black Death. Now, a year later London burnt to the ground—there was yet another exodus. Same year, the Naval Pay Office went into default—thousands of unpaid sailors joined us. We moved around the South of England like Christmas Carolers from Hell. More’n half of us expected the Apocalypse within a few weeks, so we didn’t trouble with planning. We broke down walls and fences, undoing Enclosure, poached game in forests of some extremely worshipful lords and bishops. They weren’t happy.”

By this time, the Vagabonds had mostly come out into the open. Jack didn’t look at them—he knew what they’d be—but rather at Eliza, who’d become anxious. Turk the Horse sensed this and looked askance at Jack, showing a white Mohametan crescent-moon in the eye. Jack knew, then, that, as it was with Turk, so it’d be with every person and beast they met along their way: they’d gladly suffer Eliza to climb on their backs and ride them, they’d feel her feelings as if she were an actress on a Southwark stage, and they’d shoot dirty looks at Jack. He’d only have to find a way to use it.

Eliza breathed easier when she saw that the Vagabonds were just people. If anything they were cleaner and less brutish than those peasants who’d settled in the village, especially after they swam out into the pond to retrieve fish. A couple of Gypsy boys drew a crowd as they struggled to wrestle a prodigious carp, the size of a blacksmith, up onto the shore. “Some of these fish must remember the war,” Jack mused.

Several people came near, but not too near, to pay their respects to Jack and (more so) Eliza. One was a stringy fellow with pale green eyes staring out of an anatomical complex that looked like anything but a face—his nose was gone, leaving twin vertical air-holes, and his upper lip was missing, and his ears were perforated baby’s fists stuck to the sides of this head, and angry words were burnt into his forehead. He came toward them, stopped, and bowed deeply. He had an entourage of more complete persons who obviously loved him, and they all grinned at Eliza, encouraging her not to throw up or gallop away screaming.

She was politely aghast. “A leper?” she asked. “But then he wouldn’t be so popular.”

“A recidivist,” Jack said. “When Polish serfs run away, their lords hunt ’em down and brand ’em, or cut off this or that piece—saving the pieces that can do useful work, needless to say—so if they’re seen out on the roads again they’ll be known as runners. That, lass, is what I mean by the Devil’s Poor—one who keeps at it regardless—who won’t be mastered by any man, nor reformed by any church. As you can see, his perseverance has won him a whole Court of admirers.”

Jack’s gaze had drifted to the lakeshore, where Vagabonds were now scooping guts out of carp-bellies by the double handful, exerting a hypnotic power over various mangy dogs. He looked up at Eliza and caught her in the act of examining him. “Trying to picture me without a nose?”

Eliza looked down. He’d never seen her eyes downcast before. It affected him, and made him angry to be affected. “Don’t look at me—I’ll not be the subject of such investigation. The last person who peered at me that way, from the back of a fine horse, was Sir Winston Churchill.”

“Who’s that? Some Englishman?”

“A gentleman of Dorsetshire. Royalist. Cromwell’s men burnt down his ancestral estate and he squatted in the cinders for ten or fifteen years, siring children and fighting off Vagabonds and waiting for the King to come back—that accomplished, he became a man about town in London.”

“Then whyever was he peering at you from horseback?”

“In those days of Plague and Fire, Sir Winston Churchill had the good sense to get himself posted to Dublin on the King’s business. He’d come back from time to time, suck up to the Royals, and inspect what was left of his country estates. On one of those occasions, he and his son came back to Dorset for a visit and rallied the local militia.”

“And you happened to be there?”

“I did.”

“No coincidence, I presume.”

“Bob and I and certain others had come to partake of a charming local custom.”

“Clog-dancing?”

“Clubmen—armies of peasants who’d once roamed that part of the country with cudgels. Cromwell had massacred them, but they were still about—we hoped for a revival of the tradition, as Vagabondage of the meek school had become overly competitive in those dark years.”

“What did Sir Winston Churchill think of your idea?”

“Didn’t want his home burnt again—he’d just gotten a roof on it, finally, after twenty years. He was Lord Lieutenant thereabouts—that’s a job that the King gives to the gents with the brownest noses of all—entitled him to command the local militia. Most Lord Lieutenants sit in London all the time, but after the Plague and the Fire, the countryside was in an uproar because of people like me, as I’ve been explaining, and so they were given the power to search for arms, imprison disorderly persons, and so on.”

“Were you imprisoned, then?”

“What? No, we were mere boys, and we looked younger than we were because of not eating enough. Sir Winston decided to carry out a few exemplary hangings, which was the normal means of persuading Vagabonds to move to the next county. He picked out three men and hanged them from a tree-limb, and as a last favor to them, Bob and I hung from their legs to make ’em perish faster. And in so doing we caught Sir Winston’s eye. Bob and I looked similar, though for all we know we’ve different fathers. The sight of these two matched urchins plying their trade, with coolness born of experience, was amusing to Sir Winston. He called us over and that was when he (and his son John, only ten years older than meself) gave us that look you were giving me just now.”

“And what conclusion did he arrive at?”

“I didn’t wait for him to arrive at conclusions. I said something like, ‘Are you the responsible official here?’ Bob’d already made himself scarce. Sir Winston laughed a little too heartily and allowed as how he was. ‘Well, I’d like to register a complaint,’ I said. ‘You said you were going to carry out one or two exemplary hangings. But is this your notion of exemplary? The rope is too thin, the noose is ill-made, the tree-limb is barely adequate to support the burden, and the proceedings were, if I may say so, carried out with a want of pomp and showmanship that’d have the crowd at Tyburn baying for Jack Ketch’s blood if he ever staged one so shabbily.’”

“But Jack, didn’t you understand that ‘exemplary’ meant that Sir Winston Churchill was making an example of them?”

“Naturally. And just as naturally, Sir Winston began to give me the same tedious explanation I’ve just now had from you, albeit I interrupted with many more foolish jests—and in the middle of it, young John Churchill happened to glance away and said, ‘I say, look, Father, the other chap’s going through our baggage.’”

“What—Bob?”

“My performance was a diversion, girl, to keep them looking at me whilst Bob pilfered their baggage-train. Only John Churchill had a lively enough mind to understand what we were doing.”

“So…what did Sir Winston think of you, then?”

“He had his horsewhip out. But John spoke with him sotto voce, and, as I believe, changed his mind—Sir Winston claimed, then, that he’d seen qualities in us Shaftoe boys that would make us useful in a regimental setting. From that moment on we were boot-polishers, musket-cleaners, beer-fetchers, and general errand-boys for Sir Winston Churchill’s local regiment. We’d been given the opportunity to prove we were God’s, and not the Devil’s, Poor.”

“So that’s where you got your knowledge of matters military.”

“Where I began to get it. This was a good sixteen years ago.”

“And also, I suppose, it’s how you became so sympathetic to the likes of these,” Eliza said, flicking her blue eyes once toward the Vagabonds.

“Oh. You suppose I arranged this carp-feast out of charity?”

“Come to think of it—”

“I—we—need information.”

“From these people?”

“I have heard that in some cities they have buildings called libraries, and the libraries are full of books, and each book contains a story. Well, I can tell you that there never was a library that had as many stories as a Vagabond-camp. Just as a Doctor of Letters might go to a library to read one of those stories, I need to get a certain tale from one of these people—I’m not sure which one, yet—so I drew ’em all out.”

“What sort of tale?”

“It’s about a wooded, hilly country, not far north of here, where hot water spills out of the ground year-round and keeps homeless wanderers from freezing to death. You see, lass, if we wanted to survive a northern winter, we should’ve begun laying in firewood months ago.”

Jack then went among the Vagabonds and, speaking in a none too euphonious stew of zargon, French, and sign language, soon got the information he needed. There were many haiduks—runaway serfs who’d made a living preying on the Turks farther east. They understood the tale told by Jack’s horse and sword, and wanted Jack to join them. Jack thought it wise to slip away before their friendly invitations hardened into demands. Besides which, the entire scene of motley Vagabonds gutting and mutilating these immense fifty-year-old carp had become almost as strange and apocalyptic as anything they’d seen in the Turk’s camp, and they just wanted to put it behind them. Before dark, Jack and Eliza were northbound. That night, for the first time, it got so chilly that they were obliged to sleep curled up next to the fire under the same blanket, which meant Eliza slept soundly and Jack hardly at all.

Bohemia

WINTER OF 1683–1684

FOR THE TWO WEEKS that followed Jack’s Christ-like miracle of feeding a thousand Vagabonds from a small bag of gunpowder, he and Eliza talked very little, except about immediate concerns of staying alive. They passed from the rolling country of burnt castles and carp-ponds, with its broad flat valleys, into a mountainous zone farther north, which either had not suffered so badly during the war, or else had recovered faster. From hill-tops and mountain-passes they looked down upon brown fields where haystacks scattered like bubbles on placid ponds, and tidy prosperous towns whose chimneys bristled like so many pikes and muskets brandished against the cold. Jack tried to compare these vistas against the tales the Vagabonds had told him. Certain nights, they were all but certain they were going to perish, but then they’d find a hut, or cave, or even a cleft in the face of some bluff where they could build a nest of fallen leaves and a fire.

Finally one day they came, sudden as an ambush, into a vale where the tree-branches were grizzled with mist, and steam rose from a smelly rill that trickled down a strangely colored and sculpted river-bed. “We’re here,” Jack said, and left Eliza hidden back in the woods while he rode out into the open to talk to a pair of miners who were working with picks and shovels in the stream, digging up brittle rock that smelled like London in the Plague Years. Brimstone! Jack spoke little German and they spoke no English, but they were thoroughly impressed by his sword, his horse, and his boots, and through grunts and shrugs and signs they made it known they’d make no trouble if he camped for the winter at the headwaters of the hot spring, half a league up the valley.

So they did. The spring emerged from a small cave that was always warm. They could not stay there for very long because of the bad air, but it served as a refuge into which they could retreat, and so kept them alive long enough to reconstitute a tumbledown hut they found on the bank of the steaming creek. Jack cut wood and dragged it back to Eliza, who arranged it. The roof would never keep rain out, but it shrugged off the snow. Jack still had a bit of silver. He used it to buy venison and rabbit from the miners, who set clever snares for game in the woods.

Their first month at the hot springs, then, consisted of small struggles won and forgotten the next day, and nothing passed between them except for the simple plans and affairs of peasants. But eventually things settled to the point where they did not have to spend every moment in toil. Jack did not care one way or the other. But Eliza let it be known that certain matters had been on her mind the entire time.

“Do you mind?” Jack was forced to blurt, one day in what was probably December.

“Pay no attention,” Eliza snuffled. “Weather’s a bit gloomy.”

“If the weather’s gloomy, what’re you?”

“Just thinking of…things.”

“Stop thinking then! This hovel’s scarcely big enough to lie down in—have some consideration—there’s a rivulet of tears running across the floor. Didn’t we have a talk, months ago, about female moods?”

“Your concern is ever so touching. How can I thank you?”

“Stop weeping!”

She drew a few deep quivering breaths that made the hut shudder, and then crucified Jack with a counterfeit smile. “The regiment, then—”

“What’s this?” Jack asked. “Keeping you alive isn’t enough? I’m to provide entertainment as well?”

“You seem reluctant to talk about this. Perhaps you’re a bit melancholy, too?”

“You have this clever little mind that never stops working. You’re going to put my stories to ill-considered purposes. There are certain details, not really important, in which you’ll take an unwholesome interest.”

“Jack, we’re living like brutes in the middle of the wilderness—what could I possibly do with a story as old as I am? And for God’s sake, what else is there to do, when I lack thread and needles?”

“There you go again with the thread and the needles. Where do you suppose a brute in the wilderness would obtain such things?”

“Ask those miners to pick some up when next they go to town. They fetch oats for Turk all the time—why not a needle and thread?”

“If I do that, they’ll know I’ve a woman here.”

“You won’t for long, if you don’t tell me a story, or get me thread and needles.”

“All right, then. The part of the story to which you’re almost certain to over-react is that, although Sir Winston Churchill was not really an important man, his son John was briefly important. He’s not any more. Probably never will be again, except in the world of courtiers.”

“But you made his father out to be one notch above a Vagabond.”

“Yes—and so John never would’ve reached the high position he did had he not been clever, handsome, brave, dashing, and good in the sack.”

“When can you introduce me to him?”

“I know you’re just trying to provoke me with that.”

“Into what ‘high position’ exactly did he get?”

“The bed of the favorite mistress of King Charles the Second of England.”

A brief pause for pressure to build, and then volcanic laughter from Eliza. Suddenly it was April. “You mean for me to believe that you—Half-Cocked ‘don’t call me a Vagabond’ Jack—are personally acquainted with the lover of a mistress of a King?”

“Calm yourself—there are no chirurgeons here, if you should rupture something. And if you knew anything of the world outside of Asiatick Harems, you wouldn’t be surprised—the King’s other favorite mistress is Nell Gwyn—an actress.”

“I sensed all along that you were a Person of Quality, Jack. But pray tell—now that I’ve finally set your tongue in motion—how’d John Churchill get from his papa’s regiment in Dorset to the royal sack?”

“Oh, mind you, John was never attached to that regiment—just visiting with his Dad. The family lived in London. Jack went to some foppish School there. Sir Winston pulled what few strings were available to him—probably whined about his great loyalty during the Interregnum—and got John appointed as a page to James, the Duke of York—the King’s Papist brother—who, last I heard, was up in Edinburgh, going out of his mind and torturing Scotsmen. But back then, of course, round about 1670, the Duke of York was in London, and so John Churchill—being a member of his household—was there, too. Years passed. Bob and I fattened and grew like cattle for the Fair on soldiers’ table-scraps.”

“And so you did!”

“Don’t pretend to admire me—you know my secrets. We plugged away at duties Regimental. John Churchill went to Tangiers for a few years to fight Barbary Pirates.”

“Ooh, why couldn’t he’ve rescued me?”

“Maybe he will, some day. What I’m getting to, though, is the Siege of Maestricht—a city in Holland.”

“That’s nowhere near Tangiers.”

“Try to follow me here: he came back from Tangiers, all covered in glory. Meantimes Charles II had made a pact with, of all people, that King Looie of France, the arch-Papist, so rich that not only did he bribe the English opposition, but the other party, too, just to keep things interesting. So England and France, conjoined, made war, on land and at sea, with Holland. King Looie, accompanied by a mobile city of courtiers, mistresses, generals, bishops, official historians, poets, portrait-painters, chefs, musicians, and the retinues of those people, and the retinues’ retinues, came up to Maestricht and threw a siege the way common kings throw parties. His camp was not quite as handsomely furnished as the Grand Vizier’s before Vienna, but the folk were of higher quality. All the fashionable people of Europe had to be there. And John Churchill was quite fashionable. He came. Bob and I came with him.”

“Now, that’s where I have trouble following. Why invite two naughty lads?”

“First: we hadn’t been naughty recently. Second: even the noblest gathering requires someone to empty piss-pots and (if it’s a battle) stop musket-balls before they reach the better folk.”

“Third?”

“There is no third.”

“You lie. I can tell there was a third. Your lips parted, your finger came halfway up, and then you reconsidered.”

“Very well then. The third was that John Churchill—courtier, sometime gigolo, fashionable blade-about-town—is the best military commander I have ever seen.”

“Oh.”

“Though that John Sobieski was not half bad. Anyway—pains me to admit it.”

“Obviously.”

“But it’s true. And being an excellent commander, about to go into a real battle, he had the wit to bring along a few people who could actually get things done for him. It may seem hard for you to believe, but mark my word—whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

“What did he suppose you and Bob could get done in the real world?”

“Carry messages across battlefields.”

“Was he right?”

“Half right.”

“One of you succeeded, and the other—”

“I didn’t fail. I just found more intelligent ways to use my time.”

“John Churchill gave you an order, and you refused?”

“No, no, no! It came about as follows. Now—did you pay any attention to the Siege of Vienna?”

“I watched with a keen eye, remember my virginity hung in the balance.”

“Tell me how the Grand Vizier did it.”

“Dug one trench after another before the walls, each trench a few yards closer than the last. From the foremost, dug tunnels beneath a sort of arrowhead-shaped fortress that lay outside the city—”

“A ravelin, it’s called. All modern forts have them, including Maestricht.”

“Blew it up. Advanced. And so on.”

“That’s how all sieges are conducted. Including Maestricht.”

“So, then—?”

“All the pick-and-shovel work had been done by the time the swells arrived. The trenches and mines had been dug. Time was ripe to storm a particular outlying work, which an engineer would properly call a demilune, but similar to the ravelins you saw in Vienna.”

“A separate fortress just outside of the main one.”

“Yes. King Louie wanted that the English gentleman-warriors should, at the conclusion of this battle, either be in his debt, or in their graves, and so he gave to them the honor of storming the demilune. John Churchill and the Duke of Monmouth—King Charles’s bastard—led the charge and carried the day. Churchill himself planted the French flag (disgusting to relate) on the parapet of the conquered fort.”

“How splendid!”

“I told you he was important once. Back they came over the trench-scarred glacis, to our ditch-camp, for a night of celebration.”

“So you were never asked to carry messages at all?”

“Next day, I felt the earth turn over, and looked toward that demilune to see fifty French troopers flying into the air. Maestricht’s defenders had exploded a vast countermine beneath the demilune. Dutchmen charged into the gap and engaged the survivors in sword- and bayonet-play. They looked sure to retake the demilune and undo Churchill’s and Monmouth’s glorious deeds. I was not ten feet from John Churchill when it happened. Without a moment’s hesitation he was off and running, sword in hand—it was obvious muskets would be useless. To save time, he ran across the surface—ignoring the trenches—exposing himself to musket-fire from the city’s defenders, in full view of all those historians and poets watching through jeweled opera glasses from the windows of their coaches, just outside of artillery range. I stood there in amazement at his stupidity, until I realized that brother Bob was right behind him, matching him step-for-step.”

“Then?”

“Then I was amazed at Bob’s stupidity, too. Placing me, as I need hardly tell you, in an awkward spot.”

“Always thinking of yourself.”

“Fortunately the Duke of Monmouth appeared before me, that very moment, with a message that he wanted me to take to a nearby company of French musketeers. So I ran down the trench and located Monsieur D’Artagnan, the officer in ch—”

“Oh, stop!”

“What?”

“Even I’ve heard of D’Artagnan! You don’t expect me to believe you—?”

“Is it all right with you if I get on with the story?”

Sigh. “Yes.”

“Monsieur D’Artagnan, whom you don’t appear to realize was a real human being and not just a figure in romantic legends, ordered his Musketeers forward. All of us advanced upon the demilune with conspicuous gallantry.”

“I’m enthralled!” said Eliza, only a little sarcastic. At first she would not believe that Jack had actually met the celebrated D’Artagnan, but now that she did she was caught up in the tale.

“Because we did not bother to use the trenches, as cowards would’ve done, we reached the site of the fighting from a direction where the Dutch hadn’t bothered to post proper defenses. All of us—French Musketeers, English bastards and gigolos, and Vagabond-messengers—got there at the same instant. But we could only advance through an opening just wide enough to admit one man at a time. D’Artagnan got there first and stood in the path of the Duke of Monmouth himself and begged him in the most gallant and polite French way not to go through that dangerous pass. Monmouth insisted. D’Artagnan consented—but only on the condition that he, D’Artagnan, should go through first. He did just that, and got shot in the head. The others advanced over him and went on to win ridiculous glory, while I stayed behind to look after D’Artagnan.”

“He still lived!?”

“Hell no, his brains were all over me.”

“But you stayed behind to guard his body—?”

“Actually, I had my eye on some heavy jewelled rings he was wearing.”

For half a minute or so, Eliza adopted the pose of someone who’d just herself taken a musket-ball to the head and suffered an injury of unknown severity. Jack decided to move on to more glamorous parts of the tale, but Eliza dug in her heels. “While your brother risked all, you were looting D’Artagnan’s corpse? I’ve never heard worse.”

“Why?”

“It’s so…so craven.”

“You don’t need to make it sound cowardly—I was in more danger than Bob was. The musket-balls were going through my hat.”

“Still…”

“The fighting was over. Those rings were the size of doorknockers. They would have buried that famed Musketeer with those rings on his fingers—if someone else hadn’t looted them first.”

“Did you take them, Jack?”

“He’d put them on when he was a younger and thinner man. They were impossible to move. So there I was with my foot planted in his fucking armpit—not the worst place my foot’s ever been, but close—bending my fingernails back trying to get this ring up past the rolls of fat that’d grown up around it during his days of wine and women—asking myself whether I shouldn’t just cut the damn finger off.” Eliza now looked like someone who’d eaten a bad oyster. Jack decided to move on hastily. “When who should show up but brother Bob, with a look of self-righteous horror on his face, like a vicar who’s just surprised an altar boy masturbating in the sacristy—or like you, for that matter—all dressed up in his little drummer boy outfit—carrying a message—frightfully urgent of course—from Churchill to one of King Looie’s generals. He stops to favor me with a lecture about military honor. ‘Ach, you don’t really believe that stuff, do you?’ I ask. ‘Until today I didn’t, Jack, but if you could see what I’ve seen just now—the feats that those brothers in arms, John Churchill and the Duke of Monmouth and Louis Hector de Villars, have performed—you’d believe.’”

“And then he sped onwards to deliver the message,” Eliza said, getting a faraway look in her eye that was somewhat annoying to Jack, who wanted her to remain there in the hut with him. “And John Churchill never forgot Bob’s loyalty and bravery.”

“Yes—why, just a few months later Bob went to Westphalia with him and campaigned under French generals, as a mercenary, against hapless Protestants, sacking the Palatinate for the hundredth time. Can’t remember what that had to do with military honor, exactly.”

“You, on the other hand—”

“I took a few belts of cognac from D’Artagnan’s flask and slunk back to the ditch.”

This, at least, brought her back to the here (hut in Bohemia) and now (end of A.D. 1683). She directed the full power of her blue-eyed gaze against him. “You’re always making yourself out to be such a ne’er-do-well, Jack—saying you’d have cut D’Artagnan’s fingers off—proposing to blow up the Holy Roman Emperor’s palace—but I don’t think you’re as bad as you say you are.”

“My deformity gives me fewer chances to be bad than I should prefer to have.”

“It is funny you should mention that, Jack. If you could find me a length of sound, unbroken deer or sheep intestine—”

“Why?”

“A Turkish practice—easier to show than explain. And if you could devote a few minutes in the hot spring to making yourself quite a bit cleaner than you are at the moment—the chance to be bad might present itself.”

“ALL RIGHT, LET’S REHEARSE IT again. ‘Jack, show the gentleman that bolt of the yellow watered silk.’ Go on—that’s your cue.”

“Yes, milady.”

“Jack, carry me across yonder mud-puddle.”

“With pleasure, milady.”

“Don’t say ‘with pleasure’—sounds naughty.”

“As you wish, milady.”

“Jack, that is very good—there’s been a marked improvement.”

“Don’t suppose it has anything to do with that you’ve got your fist lodged in my arsehole.”

Eliza laughed gaily. “Fist? Jack, this is but two fingers. A fist would be more like—this!”

Jack felt his body being turned outside in—there was some thrashing and screaming that was cut short when his head accidentally submerged in the sulfurous water. Eliza got a grip on his hair and hauled his head back up into the cold air with her other hand.

“You’re sure this is how they do it in India?”

“Would you like to register…a complaint?”

“Aaugh! Never.”

“Remember, Jack: whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.”

There followed a long, long, mysterious procedure—tedious and yet somehow not.

“What’re you groping about for?” Jack muttered faintly. “My gall-bladder is just to the left.”

“I’m trying to locate a certain chakra—should be somewhere around here—”

“What’s a chakra?”

“You’ll know when I find it.”

Some time later, she did, and then the procedure took on greater intensity, to say the least. Suspended between Eliza’s two hands, like a scale in a market-place, Jack could feel his balance-point shifting as quantities of fluids were pumped between internal reservoirs, all in preparation for some Event. Finally, the crisis—Jack’s legs thrashed in the hot water as if his body were trying to flee, but he was staked, impaled. A bubble of numenous light, as if the sun were mistakenly attempting to rise inside his head. Some kind of Hindoo apocalypse played out. He died, went to Hell, ascended into Heaven, was reincarnated as various braying, screeching, and howling beasts, and repeated this cycle many times over. In the end he was reincarnated, just barely, as a Man. Not a very alert one.

“Did you get what you wanted?” she inquired. Very close to him.

Jack laughed or wept soundlessly for a while.

“In some of these strange Gothickal German towns,” he at last said, “they have ancient clocks that are as big as houses, all sealed up most of the time, with a little door where a cuckoo pops out upon the hour to sing. But once a day, it does something special, involving more doors, and once a week, something even specialer, and, for all I know, at the year, decade, and century marks, rows of great doors, all sealed shut by dust and age, creak open, driven by sudden descent of ancient weights on rusted chains, and the whole inner workings of the thing unfold through those openings. Hitherto unseen machines grind into action, strange and surprising things fly out—flags wave, mechanical birds sing—old pigeon-shit and cobwebs raining down on spectators’ heads—Death comes out and does a fandango—Angels blow trumpets—Jesus writhes on the cross and expires—a mock naval battle plays out with repeated discharge of cannons—and would you please take your arm out of my asshole now?”

“I did a long time ago—you nearly broke it!” Peeling off the knotted length of sheep-gut like an elegant lady removing a silken glove.

“So this is a permanent condition?”

“Stop whining. A few moments ago, Jack, unless my eyes deceived me, I observed a startlingly large amount of yellow bile departing your body, and floating away downstream.”

“What are you talking about? I didn’t barf.”

“Think harder, Jack.”

“Oh—that kind. I should not call it yellow but a pearly off-white. Though it has been years since I saw any. Perhaps it has yellowed over time, like cheese. Very well! Let’s say ’twas yellow.”

“Do you know what yellow bile is the humour of, Jack?”

“What am I, a physician?”

“It is the humour of anger and ill-temper. You were carrying a lot of it around.”

“Was I? Good thing I didn’t let it affect my behavior.”

“Actually I was hoping you might have a change of heart concerning needle and thread.”

“Oh, that? I was never opposed to it. Consider it done Eliza.”

Leipzig

APRIL 1684

From all I hear of Leibniz he must be very intelligent, and pleasant company in consequence. It is rare to find learned men who are clean, do not stink, and have a sense of humour.

—LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE, 30 JULY 1705

“JACQUES, SHOW THE GENTLEMAN THAT bolt of the yellow watered silk…Jacques? Jacques!” Eliza moved on smoothly to some cruel jest about how difficult it was to find reliable and hard-working varlets nowadays, speaking in a French that was too good for Jack to understand. The gentleman in question—evidently a Parisian in the rag trade—took his nose out of Eliza’s cleavage long enough to glance up into her eyes and chuckle uncertainly—he sensed a bon mot had been issued but he hadn’t heard it.

“Cor, he’s surprised your tits come wi’ a head attached,” Jack observed.

“Shut up…one of these days, we’re going to meet someone who speaks English,” Eliza returned, and nodded at the bolt. “Would you please stay awake?”

“Haven’t been so awake in half a year—that’s the difficulty,” Jack said, stooping down to unroll an arm’s length of silk, and drawing it through the air like a flag, trying to make it waft. A shaft of sunlight would’ve been useful. But the only radiant heavenly body shedding light into this courtyard was Eliza’s—turned out in one of a few dresses she’d been working on for months. Jack had watched them come together out of what looked to him like scraps, and so the effect on him was not as powerful. But when Eliza walked through the market, she drew such looks that Jack practically had to bind his right arm to his side, lest it fly across his body and whip out the Damascus blade and teach the merchants of Leipzig some manners.

She got into a long difference of opinion with this Parisian, which ended when he handed her an old limp piece of paper that had been written on many times, in different hands, and then collected the bolt of yellow silk from Jack and walked away with it. Jack once again had to restrain his sword-hand. “This kills me.”

“Yes. You say that every time.”

“You’re certain that those scraps are worth something.”

“Yes! Says so right here,” Eliza said. “Would you like me to read it to you?” A dwarf came by selling chocolates.

“Won’t help. Nothing will, but silver in my pocket.”

“Are you worried I’m going to cheat you—being that you can’t read the numbers on these bills of exchange?”

“I’m worried something’ll happen to ’em before we can turn ’em into real money.”

“What is ‘real’ money, Jack? Answer me that.”

“You know, pieces of eight, or, how d’you say it, dollars—”

“Th—it starts with a T but it’s got a breathy sound behind it—‘thalers.’”

“D-d-d-dollars.”

“That’s a silly name for money, Jack—no one’ll ever take you seriously, talking that way.”

“Well, they shortened ‘Joachimsthaler’ to ‘thaler,’ so why not reform the word even further?”

A KIND OF STEADILY WAXING madness had beset them after a month or so at their hot-springs encampment—Jack had assumed it was the slow-burning fuse of the French Pox finally reaching significant parts of his mind, until Eliza had pointed out they’d been on bread and water and the occasional rasher of carp jerky for months. A soldier’s pay was not generous, but put together with what Jack had previously looted from the rich man’s house in Strasbourg, it would supply not only Turk with oats but also them with cabbages, potatoes, turnips, salt pork, and the occasional egg—as long as Jack didn’t mind spending all of it. As his commission-agents, he employed those two brimstone-miners, Hans and Hans. They were not free agents, but employees of one Herr Geidel of Joachimsthal, a nearby town where silver was dug out of the ground. Herr Geidel hired men like Hans and Hans to dig up the ore and refine it into irregular bars, which they took to a mint in the town to be coined into Joachimsthalers.

Herr Geidel, having learned that a strange armed man was lurking in the woods near his brimstone mine, had ridden out with a few musketeers to investigate, and discovered Eliza all alone, at her sewing. By the time Jack returned, hours later, Eliza and Herr Geidel had, if not exactly become friends, then at least recognized each other as being of the same type, and therefore as possible business partners, though it was by no means clear what kind of business. Herr Geidel had the highest opinion of Eliza and voiced confidence that she would make out handsomely at the Leipzig Fair. His immediate opinion of Jack was much lower—the only thing Jack seemed to have going for him was that Eliza was willing to partner up with him. Jack, for his part, put up with Herr Geidel because of the flabbergasting nature of what he did for a living: literally making money. The first several times this was explained to Jack, he put it down to a translation error. It couldn’t be real. “That’s all there is? Dig up some dirt, run it through a furnace, stamp a face and some words on it?”

“That’s what he seems to be saying,” Eliza had answered, puzzled for once. “In Barbary, all the coins were pieces of eight from Spain—I’ve never been anywhere near a mint. I was about to say ‘wouldn’t know a mint from a hole in the ground,’ but apparently that’s just what it is.”

When it had gotten warm enough to move, they’d gone down into Joachimsthal and confirmed that it was little more than that. In essence the mint was a brute with a great big hammer and a punch. He was supplied with blank disks of silver—these were not money—put the punch on each one and bashed it with the hammer, mashing the portrait of some important hag, and some incantations in Latin, into it—at which point it was money. Officials, supervisors, assayers, clerks, guards, and, in general, the usual crowd of parasitical gentlefolk clustered around the brute with the hammer, but like lice on an ox they could not conceal the simple nature of the beast. The simplicity of money-making had fascinated Jack into a stupor. “Why should we ever leave this place? After all my wanderings I’ve found Heaven.”

“It can’t be that easy. Herr Geidel seems depressed—he’s branching out into brimstone and other ores—says he can’t make any money making money.”

“Obvious nonsense. Just trying to scare away competition.”

“Did you see all those abandoned mines, though?”

“Ran out of ore,” Jack had attempted.

“Then why were the great mining-engines still bestriding the pit-mouths? You’d think they’d’ve moved them to shafts that were still fruitful.”

Jack had had no answer. When next they’d seen Herr Geidel, Eliza had subjected him to a round of brutal questioning that would’ve gotten Jack into a duel had he done it, but coming from Eliza had only given Herr Geidel a heightened opinion of her. Geidel’s French was as miserable as Jack’s and so the discussion had gone slowly enough for Jack to follow: for reasons that no one around here fathomed, the Spanish could mine and refine silver in Mexico, and ship it halfway round the world (in spite of the most strenuous efforts by English, Dutch, French, Maltese, and Barbary pirates) cheaper than Herr Geidel and his drinking buddies could produce it in Joachimsthal and ship it a few days’ journey to Leipzig. Consequently, only the very richest mines in Europe were still operating. Herr Geidel’s strategy was to put idle miners to work digging up brimstone (before the European silver mines had crashed, this never would’ve worked because they had a strong guild, but now miners were cheap), then ship the brimstone to Leipzig and sell it cheap to gunpowder-makers, in hopes of bringing the cost of gunpowder, and hence of war, down.[*] Anyway, if war got cheap enough, all hell would break loose, some Spanish galleons might even get sunk, and the cost of silver would climb back to a more wholesome level.

“But won’t that also make it cheaper for highwaymen to attack you on the way to Leipzig?” Jack had asked, always working the violent crime angle.

Eliza had given him a look that promised grim penalties the next time she got her hand on the chakra. “‘What if war breaks out between here and Leipzig?’ is what Jack meant to say.”

But Herr Geidel had been completely unfazed. Wars broke out all the time, all over the place, with no effect on the Leipzig Fair. If all of this came to pass, he’d be a rich merchant again. And for five hundred years the Leipzig fairs had operated under a decree from the Holy Roman Emperor stating that as long as the merchants stuck to certain roads and paid a nominal fee to local princes whose lands they traversed, they could pass freely to and from Leipzig, and must not be molested even if they were traipsing across an active battlefield. They were above wars.

“But what if you were carrying gunpowder to sell to the enemy?” Eliza had tried, but for once Herr Geidel had looked impatient and waved her off, as if to say that wars were mere diversions for bored princes, but trade fairs were serious.

It turned out to be perfectly all right that Jack had mentioned highwaymen, because Herr Geidel had been doing a lot of thinking on that very subject. His wagon-train had been forming up in the open places of Joachimsthal. Harnessed pairs of draft-horses were being walked down streets by teamsters leaning back to put tension on the traces, talking the animals into place before wagons. Mule-drivers were pretending to be flabbergasted when their animals balked after testing the weight of their loads: the first act of a timeless play that would eventually lead to profanity and violence. Herr Geidel was not a rich merchant now, and for the first part of the journey, he would not be taking any of those roads where armed escorts were for hire anyway, and so the trip to the Easter fair in Leipzig might be exciting. Herr Geidel had a few men who could go through the motions needed to charge and discharge a musket, but he wouldn’t mind adding Jack to his escort, and of course Eliza was welcome to ride along in one of the wagons.

Jack, wotting that Eliza and his boys’ inheritance were at stake, had taken this soldiering job more seriously than most. From time to time he had sallied ahead of the cart-train to look for ambushes. Twice he’d found rabbles of unemployed miners loitering sheepishly in narrow parts of the way, armed with pikes and cudgels, and gotten them to disperse by explaining Herr Geidel’s plan to restore vigor to the silver mining business. In truth it wasn’t his oratory that moved them out of the way so much as that he and his comrades were carrying flintlocks and pistols. Jack, who knew his wretches, could tell at a glance that these men weren’t hungry enough, or persuasively led enough, to buy loot with their lives—particularly when the loot was brimstone, which, he reminded them, would be difficult to turn into silver—they’d have to lug it to a fair and sell it, unless there was an Alchemist among them. He did not mention that buried under the rubble of brimstone in one of Herr Geidel’s wagons was a chest full of freshly minted Joachimsthalers. He did think about mentioning it, and then leading an ambush himself, but he knew that in that event he’d ride away without Eliza, the one woman in the world, or at least the only one he personally knew, capable of providing him with carnal satisfaction. He understood then why Herr Geidel had observed his conversations with Eliza so intently—trying to see whether Jack could be trusted. Apparently he’d concluded Eliza had Jack well in hand. This did not sit well with Jack—but he’d be rid of Herr Geidel soon enough, though not of Eliza.

Anyway, they had ridden north out of those mountains, which Herr Geidel had referred to in his tongue simply as the Ore Range, and into Saxony, about which there was nothing to say except that it was flat. They joined up with a very great and old road that according to Herr Geidel ran from Verona all the way north to Hamburg. Jack was impressed by the mileposts: ten-foot-high stone spikes, each ornately carved with the arms of some dead King, each giving the number of miles to Leipzig. This road was congested with many other merchants’ wagon-trains.

In a moist flat basin scribbled all over with the courses of aimless rivers, it intersected another great road that was said to run from Frankfurt to the Orient, and Leipzig was that intersection. Jack had most of a day to ramble around and view it from its outskirts, which he did on the general principle of wanting to know where the exits were before entering any confined place. The wagon-trains were backed up for half a mile waiting to get in at the south gate. Leipzig, he found, was smaller and lower-slung than Vienna—a city of several modest spires, not one sky-raking cathedral, which Jack guessed was a sign of its being a Lutheran burg. Of course it was surrounded by the obligatory ramparts and bastions. Outside these were estates and gardens, several of ’em larger than the entire city, all of them belonging not to nobles but to merchants.[*] Between these estates lay the usual embarrassing swine-crowded suburbs cowering in makeshift barricades that were more like baskets than walls. A few lazily turning mill-wheels took advantage of the nearly imperceptible stirring of the rivers, but millers scarcely ranked above peasants in a town so topheavy with merchants.

JACK AND ELIZA HAD PAID ten pfennigs each at the town gate, then had their silks weighed, and paid duty on them (Eliza had sewn the ostrich-plumes between layers of petticoats, and they were not detected). From the gate a broad street ran north to the center of the town, no more than a musket-shot away. Climbing down from the saddle, Jack was startled by the feel of cobblestones under his feet for the first time in half a year. He was treading on ground that pushed back now, and he knew that his boots needed re-soling. The street was lined with vaulted orifices spewing noise; he felt continually under ambush from left and right, and kept patting his sword-pommel, then hating himself for behaving like a stupid peasant on his first trip to Paris. But Eliza was no less amazed, and kept backing into him, liking to feel his pressure against her back. Queer signs and effigies, frequently in gold leaf, loomed on the fronts of the buildings: a golden snake, a Turk’s head, a red lion, a golden bear. So they were a bit like English taverns, which had effigies instead of names, so that people like Jack, who could not read, could know them. But they were not taverns. They were like large town-houses, with many windows, and each had this large vaulted opening giving way to a courtyard full of Bedlam.

Jack and Eliza had kept moving out of an unvoiced fear that if they stopped they’d appear just as lost and stupid as they in fact were. Within a few minutes they’d entered into the town square, and drawn up near a scaffold with the usual selection of dead men hanging from it: a place of comforting familiarity to Jack, even if Eliza did make shrewish comments about the thrumming clouds of flies. Notwithstanding the odd dangling corpse, Leipzig didn’t even smell that bad: there was the sewage and smoke of any big town, but it was amazing what a few tons of saffron, cardamom, star anise, and black pepper, distributed round in sacks and bales, would do to freshen a place up.

The town hall ran along one side of the square, and sported Dutch-looking gables above and an arcade of vaulted brown stone at ground level, where well-dressed men were working quietly and intensely. Narrow ditches were incised across the square to channel sewage, and planks had been thrown over them so carts could roll across, or ladies, and fat or lame men, pass over without having to make spectacles of themselves. Jack turned around a couple of times. It was plain that buildings were limited by law to four stories because none (save church towers) had more than that. But clearly the law said nothing about roofs and so these were all extremely high and steep—frequently as high as the four-story buildings that supported them—so seen from the street each roof looked like a mountain ridge seen from the valley: a vast terrain densely settled and built up with dormers, towers, gables, cupolas, balconies, and even miniature castles; vegetation (in window-boxes) and statues—not of Jesus or some saint but of Mercury in his winged slippers and hat. Sometimes he was paired against Minerva with her snaky shield, but most of the time Mercury appeared alone and it didn’t take a Doctor of Letters to understand that he, and not some dolorous martyr, had been chosen as Patron of Leipzig.

Looking up at vast rooves had been Jack’s way to relieve his eyes and mind from the strain of following the action on the ground. There were Eastern men in felt hats with giant rims of rich gleaming fur, talking to long-bearded Jews about racks of animal pelts—the faces of small nasty critters gaping blankly at the sky. Chinese carrying crates of what he had to assume was China, coopers repairing busted casks, bakers hawking loaves, blonde maidens with piles of oranges, musicians everywhere, grinding hurdy-gurdys or plucking at mutant lutes with huge cantilevers projecting asymmetrically from their necks to support thumping bass halyards. Armenian coffee-sellers carrying bright steaming copper and brass tanks on their persons, bored guards with pikes or halberds, turbaned Turks attempting to buy back strange goods that (Jack realized with a shock) had also been looted from the Vienna siege-camp—he was amused but, actually, embarrassed and irritated that others had had the same idea. A hookah-smoking area where Turkish boys in pointy-toed slippers scurried from one small table to the next carrying smouldering braziers of ornately wrought silver from which they selected individual coals with silver tongs and placed them carefully atop the hookahs’ tobacco-bowls to keep them burning. Everywhere, goods: but here in the square they were in casks, or wrapped up in square bales held together by rope-nets, all marked with curious initials and monograms: trade-marks of diverse merchants.

They’d found a place to stable Turk, then gone down a street, worked up their courage, and entered into one of those broad vaulted portals—wide and high enough for three or four horsemen to ride abreast—and entered the courtyard of one of those buildings. This yard was only some ten by twenty paces, and hemmed in on all sides by the four-story-high walls of the building, which were painted a merry yellow so that what sun did enter the yard cast a symbolic golden radiance on all. The court itself was stuffed with people displaying spices, metal goods, jewels, books, fabric, wine, wax, dried fish, hats, boots, gloves, weapons, and porcelain, frequently standing cheek-to-cheek and talking directly into each other’s ears. One whole side of the courtyard, then, gave way to a line of open-sided vaults: an arcade a couple of steps above courtyard level, separated from the courtyard only by a row of stout pillars, and tucked in underneath the actual house. In each vault a grave man in good clothes sat at a mighty desk, or banca, with several immense Books, strapped, buckled, and padlocked shut when not in use; an inkwell; quills; and on the floor next to him, a black chest all wrapped about with bronze or iron straps, hinges, chains, and locks of a weight and quality normally seen on arsenal-gates. Sometimes bales and casks of goods were mounded up next to him. More often, the stuff was piled out in the courtyard. Sixty or eighty feet above, stout beams projected from the tops of dormers, thrusting pulleys out over the yard, and by means of ropes through those pulleys, laborers hoisted the goods up for storage in the cavernous attics.

“They are betting prices will rise,” Eliza said, observing this, and this was the first inkling Jack received that this was more than a country swap-meet, and that there were layers of cleverness at work here that went far beyond simply knowing how many thalers should buy a tub of butter.

Jack saw so much that was strange in Leipzig, and saw it so fast, that he had to put most of it out of his mind immediately to make room for new material, and didn’t remember it until later, when taking a piss or trying to go to sleep, and when he did remember it, it seemed so strange to him that he couldn’t be sure whether it was a dream, or something that had really happened, or proof that the mines that the French Pox had (he suspected) been patiently excavating under his brain for the last several years, had finally begun to detonate.

There had been, for example, a trip inside one of the factories[*] to exchange some odd coins that Jack had picked up along his travels and been unable to spend, as no one recognized them. In this room, men sat behind desks with books in whose pages were circular cut-outs made to hold coins—two of each coin, so both heads and tails could be viewed in the same glance, and each coin labeled with various cryptic numbers and symbols in different colors of ink. The money-changer paged steadily through this book until he found a page holding coins just like Jack’s, though crisper and shinier. He took out a færy-sized scale made out of gold, whose pans, no larger than dollars, were suspended from its fragile crossbar by blue silken cords. He put Jack’s coins on one pan and then, using tweezers, piled featherweight scraps of marked gold foil on the other pan until they balanced. Then he put the scale back into its wooden carrying-case, which was smaller than Eliza’s hand; did some calculations; and offered Jack a couple of Leipziger Rats-marken (Leipzig minted its own coins). Eliza insisted they visit a couple of other money-changers and repeat the ceremony, but the results were always the same. So finally they accepted the Leipziger coins and then watched the money-changer fling Jack’s old coins into a box in the corner, half full of assorted coins and fragments of jewelry, mostly black from tarnish. “We’ll melt it down,” he explained when he saw the look on Jack’s face. Eliza, meanwhile, was staring at a wall-chart of exchange rates, reading the names of the coins that had been chalked up there: “Louis d’or, Maximilian d’or, souverain d’or, rand, ducat, Louis franc, Breslau ducat, Schildgroschen, Hohlheller, Schwertgroschen, Oberwehr groschen, Hellengroschen, pfennig, Goldgulden, hal-berspitzgroschen, Engelsgroschen, Real, Ratswertmark, 2/3 thaler, English shilling, ruble, abassid, rupiah…”

“Just goes to prove we have to get into the money-making business,” Jack said when they left.

“To me it proves that the business is crowded and hard-fought,” Eliza said. “Better to get into silver-mining. All the coiners must buy from miners.”

“But Herr Geidel would rather have burning splints under his nails than own another silver mine,” Jack reminded her.

“It would seem to me better to buy into something when it is cheap, and wait for it to become dear,” Eliza said. “Think of those trading-houses with their attics.”

“We don’t have an attic.”

“I meant it as a figure of speech.”

“So did I. We have no way to purchase a silver mine and sew it into your skirts and carry it round until the price goes up.” This sounded to Jack like a sure-fire conversation ender but only produced a thoughtful expression on Eliza’s face.

Consequently they found themselves at the Bourse, a small tidy rectangular building of white stone packed with well-dressed men screaming at each other in all the languages of Christendom but bound together by some Pentecostal faith in the Holy Spirit of the Messe that made all tongues one. There were no goods in evidence, only bits of paper, which was so odd that Jack would’ve stayed up all night wondering over it if he hadn’t forgotten immediately in light of later developments. After a brief conversation with a trader who was taking a breather on the edge of the floor, smoking a clay-pipe and quaffing some of that fine golden beer from Pilsen, Eliza returned to Jack with a triumphant and determined look about her that boded ill. “The word is Kuxen,” she said, “we wish to buy Kuxen in a silver mine.”

“We do?”

“Isn’t that what we just decided?” She was joking, perhaps.

“First tell me what Kuxen are.”

“Shares. The mine is divided in half. Each half into quarters. Each quarter into eighths, and so on—until the number of shares is something like sixty-four or one twenty-eight—that number of shares is then sold. Each share is called a kux.”

“And by share, I suppose you mean—?”

“Same as when thieves divvy up their swag.”

“I was going to liken it to how sailors partake of a voyage’s proceeds, but you stooped lower, faster.”

“That man nearly shot beer from his nostrils when I said I wished to invest in a silver mine,” Eliza said proudly.

“Always a positive omen.”

“He said only one man’s even trying to sell them at this fair—the Doctor. We need to talk to the Doctor.”

Through involved and tedious investigations that little improved the balance of Jack’s humours, they tracked the Doctor down in the general quarter of the Jahrmarkt, which (never mind what the German words literally meant) was a fun fair—a sideshow to the Messe. “Eeeyuh, I hate these things—loathsome people exhibiting all manner of freakish behaviors—like a morality play depicting my own life.”

“The Doctor is in there,” Eliza said grimly.

“Why not let’s wait until we actually have money to buy kuxen with?” Jack pleaded.

“Jack, it is all the same—if we want kuxen, why pass through the intermediate step of exchanging silk or ostrich-plumes for coin, and then coin for kuxen, when we could simply exchange silk or plumes for kuxen?”

“Ow, that one was like a stave to the bridge of the nose. You’re saying—”

“I’m saying that at Leipzig all goods—silk, coins, shares in mines—lose their hard dull gross forms and liquefy, and give up their true nature, as ores in an alchemist’s furnace sweat mercury—and all mercury is mercury and can be freely swapped for mercury of like weight—indeed cannot be distinguished from it.”

“That’s lovely, but DO WE REALLY WANT TO OWN SHARES IN A MINE?”

“Oh, who knows?” Eliza said with an airy tossing movement of the hand. “I just like to shop for things.”

“And I’m doomed to follow you, carrying your purse,” Jack muttered, shifting the burden of silk-bolts from one shoulder to the other.

SO TO THE FUN FAIR—indistinguishable (to Jack) from a hospital for the possessed and deformed and profoundly lost: contortionists, rope-walkers, fire-eaters, foreigners, and mystical personalities, a few of whom Jack recognized from Vagabond-camps here and there. They knew the Doctor from his clothing and his wig, about which they’d been warned. He was trying to initiate a philosophickal dispute with a Chinese fortune-teller, the subject of the debate being a diagram on a book-page consisting of a stack of six short horizontal lines, some of which were continuous (—) and others interrupted (– –) The Doctor was trying various languages out on the Chinese man, who only looked more aggrieved and dignified by the moment. Dignity was a clever weapon to use against the Doctor, who did not have very much of it at the moment. On his head was the largest wig Jack had ever seen, a thunderhead of black curls enveloping and dwarfing his head and making him look, from behind, as if a yearling bear-cub had dropped from a tree onto his shoulders and was trying to wrench his head off. His attire was no less formidable. Now, during the long winter, Jack had learned that a dress had more parts, technical zargon, and operating procedures associated with it than a flintlock. The Doctor’s outfit mocked any dress: between Leipzig and his skin there had to be two dozen layers of fabric belonging to Christ knew how many separate garments: shirts, waistcoats, vests, and things of which Jack did not know the names. Rank upon rank of heavy, close-spaced buttons, containing, in the aggregate, enough brass to cast a swivel-gun. Straps and draw-strings, lace gushing from the openings around throat and wrists. But the lace needed washing, the wig needed professional maintenance, and the Doctor himself was not, at root, a good-looking man. And despite the attire, Jack ended up suspecting he was not a vain one; he was dressed that way to a purpose. In particular, perhaps, to make himself seem older—when he turned around at the sound of Eliza’s voice, it was evident he was no more than about forty years old.

He was up on his three-inch platform heels right away, favoring Eliza with a deep, courtly bow and shortly moving on to hand-kissing. For a minute all was in French that Jack couldn’t quite follow, and so he went by appearances: Eliza looked uncharacteristically nervous (though she was trying to be plucky), and the Doctor, a lively and quick sort, was observing with polite curiosity. But there was no drooling or leering. Jack reckoned him for a eunuch or sodomite.

Suddenly the Doctor broke into English—making him the first person, other than Eliza, whom Jack had heard speaking in the tongue of that remote Isle in a couple of years. “I assumed, from your attire, that you were a fashionable Parisian lady. But I judged too hastily, for I perceive, on closer enjoyment, that you have something that such women typically lack: genuine taste.”

Eliza was speechless—flattered by the words, but flustered by the choice of language. The Doctor splayed a hand across his breast and looked apologetic. “Have I made the wrong guess? I thought I detected that the lady’s superb French was enlivened and invigorated by the firm sure tread of an Anglo-Saxon cadence.”

“Bullseye,” Jack said, drawing a raised eyebrow from the Doctor and a glare from Eliza. Now that he knew the Doctor spoke English, it was all Jack could do to limit himself to that one word—he wanted to talk, talk, talk—to make jests[*] and to voice his opinions on diverse subjects, relate certain anecdotes, et cetera. He said “Bullseye” because he was afraid Eliza might try to brazen it out by claiming to be from some odd corner of France, and Jack, who had much experience in brazening, and attempting to sustain elaborate lies, sensed that this would be a losing bet with the annoyingly perceptive Doctor.

“When you have resolved your differences with the Oriental gentleman, I should like to take you up on the subject of Kuxen,” said Eliza.

A double eye-brow raise greeted this news, causing the topheavy wig to pitch alarmingly. “Oh, I’m free immediately,” he said, “this Mandarin seems to have no desire to refine his philosophickal position—to disentangle the worthy science of number theory from the base superstition of numerology—most unfortunate for him and the rest of his race.”

“I am not well versed in any of those subjects,” Eliza began, obviously (to Jack) making an heroic bid to change the subject, and obviously (to the Doctor) begging to be given an advanced course of instruction.

“Fortune-tellers frequently make use of a random element, such as cards or tea-leaves,” the Doctor began. “This fellow tosses sticks on the ground and reads them, never mind exactly how—all I’m interested in is the end result—a set of half a dozen lines, each of which is either solid or broken. We could do the same thing by flipping six coins—videlicet…” and here he went into a performance of slapping himself all over, like a man who has a mouse in his clothing, and whenever he detected a coin in one of the manifold pockets of his many garments, he scooped it out and flipped it into the air, letting it clang like a Chinese gong (for the coins tended to be big ones—many of them gold) on the paving-stones. “He’s rich,” Jack muttered to Eliza, “or connected with rich persons.”

“Yes—the clothes, the coins…”

“All fakeable.”

“How do you know him to be rich, then?”

“In the wilderness, only the most terrible beasts of prey cavort and gambol. Deer and rabbits play no games.”

“Very well, then,” said the Doctor, bending to peer at the fallen coins. “We have heads, tails, tails, tails, heads, and tails.” He straightened up. “To the Chinese mystic this pattern has some great significance which he will, for a small fee, look up in a book, jammed with heathen claptrap, and read to you.” The Doctor had forgotten about the coins, and about the circle of fun-fair habitués closing in on it like a noose, each making his best guess (as they lacked scales and books) as to which of them was most valuable. Jack stepped in, using his thumb to nudge his sword a hand’s breadth out of its scabbard. Their reaction made it plain they were all keeping one eye on him. He picked up the coins, which he would return to the Doctor in a tremendously impressive display of honesty and sound moral character whenever he snapped out of his rant. “To me, on the other hand, this pattern means: seventeen.”

“Seventeen?” Jack and Eliza said in unison—both of them had to step lively, now, to keep pace with the Doctor as he stomped out of the Jahrmarkt making good time on those high heels. He wasn’t a big man but he had a fine set of calves on him, which his stockings showed off nicely.

“Dyadic, or binary numbers—old news,” the Doctor said, waving a hand in the air so that the lace cuff flopped around. “My late friend and colleague Mr. John Wilkins published a cryptographic system based on this more than forty years ago in his great Crypto-nomicon—unauthorized Dutch editions of it are still available over yonder in the Booksellers’ Quarter should you desire. But what I take away from the Chinese method of fortune-telling is the notion of producing random numbers by the dyadic technique, and by this Wilkins’s system could be incomparably strengthened.” All of which was like the baying of hounds to Jack.

“Crypto, graphy…writing of secrets?” Eliza guessed.

“Yes—an unfortunate necessity in these times,” the Doctor said.

About now, they escaped the closeness of the Fun Fair and stopped in an open square near a church. “Nicolaikirche—I was baptized there,” the Doctor said. “Kuxen! A topic strangely related to dyadic numbers in that the number of Kuxen in a particular mine is always a power of two, videlicet: one, two, four, eight, sixteen…But that is a mathematical curiosity in which you’ll have little interest. I am selling them. Should you buy them? Formerly a prosperous industry, upon which the fortunes of great families such as the Fuggers and Hacklhebers were founded, silver mining was laid low by the Thirty Years’ War and the discovery, by the Spaniards, of very rich deposits at Potosí in Peru and Guanajuato in Mexico. Buying Kuxen in a European mine that is run along traditional lines, as is done in the Ore Range, would be a waste of the lady’s money. But my mines or I should say the mines of the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which I have been given the responsibility to manage, will be, I think, a better investment.”

“Why?” Eliza asked.

“It is extremely difficult to explain.”

“Oh, but you’re so good at explaining things…”

“You really must leave the flattery to me, milady, as you are more deserving of it. No, it has to do with certain new sorts of engines, of my own design, and new techniques for extracting metal from ore, devised by a very wise and, as alchemists go, non-fraudulent alchemist of my acquaintance. But a woman of your conspicuous acumen would never exchange her coins—”

“Silk, actually,” Jack inserted, turning half round to flash the goods.

“Er…lovely silks, then, for Kuxen in my mine, just because I said these things in a market.”

“Probably true,” Eliza admitted.

“You would have to inspect the works first. Which I invite you to do…we leave tomorrow…but if you could exchange your goods for coin first it would be—”

“Wait!” Jack said, it being his personal duty to play the role of coarse, armed bumpkin. Giving Eliza the opportunity to say: “Good Doctor, my interest in the subject was just a womanish velleity—forgive me for wasting your time—”

“But why bother talking to me at all then? You must’ve had some reason. Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“Where is it?” Jack asked.

“The lovely Harz Mountains—a few days’ journey west of here.”

“That’d be in the general direction of Amsterdam, then?”

“Young sir, when I spied your Turkish sword, I took you for some sort of Janissary, but your knowledge of the lands to the West proves otherwise—even if your East London accent hadn’t already given you away.”

“Uh, okay, so that’s a yes, then,” Jack mumbled, leading Eliza a few paces away. “A free ride in the Doctor’s train—can’t be too much wrong with that.”

“He’s up to something,” Eliza protested.

“So are we, lass—it’s not a crime.”

Eventually she wafted back over to the Doctor and allowed as how she’d be willing to “leave my entourage behind” for a few days, with the exception of “my faithful manservant and bodyguard,” and “detour to the Harz Mountains” to inspect the works. They talked, for a while, in French.

“He says a lot in a hurry sometimes,” Eliza told Jack as they followed the Doctor, at a distance, down a street of great trading-houses. “I tried to find out approximately what a kux would cost—he said not to worry.”

“Funny, from a man who claims he’s trying to raise money…”

“He said that the reason he first took me for Parisian was that ostrich plumes, like the sample in my hat, are in high fashion there just now.”

“More flattery.”

“No—his way of telling me that we should ask a high price.”

“Where’s he taking us?”

“The House of the Golden Mercury, which is the factory of the von Hacklheber family.”

“We’ve already been kicked out of there.”

“He’s going to get us in.”

AND THAT HE DID, by means of a mysterious conversation that took place inside the factory, out of their view. This was the biggest courtyard they’d seen in Leipzig: narrow but long, lined with vaulted arcades on both sides, a dozen cranes active at once elevating goods that the von Hacklhebers expected to rise in price, and letting down ones they thought had reached their peak. At the end nearest the street, mounted to the wall above the entry arch, was a skinny three-story-high structure cantilevered outwards over the yard, like balconies on three consecutive floors all merged into one tower. It was enclosed with windows all round except on the top floor, where a golden roof sheltered an open platform and supported a pair of obscenely long-necked gargoyles poised to vomit rain (should it rain) out onto the traders below. “Reminds me of the castle on the butt-end of a galleon,” was Eliza’s comment, and it wasn’t for a few minutes that Jack understood that this was a reminder of the naughty business off Qwghlm years ago, and (therefore) her oblique female way of saying she didn’t like it. This despite the gold-plated Mercury, the size of a man, bracketed to it, which seemed to be springing into flight above their heads, holding out a golden stick twined about with snakes and surmounted by a pair of wings. “No, it’s a Cathedral of Mercury,” Jack decided, trying to get her mind off the galleon. “Your Cathedral of Jesus is cross-shaped. This one takes its plan from that stick in his hand—long and slender—the vaults on the sides like the snakes’ loops. The wings of the factory spreading out from the head of it, where is mounted the bishop’s pulpit, and all of us believers crowded in below to celebrate the Messe.”

Eliza sold the stuff. Jack assumed she sold it well. He knew they were soon to leave Leipzig and so amused himself by looking around. Watching the bales and casks ascend and descend on their ropes, his eye was drawn to a detail: from many of the countless windows that lined the courtyard, short rods projected horizontally into the air, and mounted to their ends, on ball-joints like the one where the thigh-bone meets the pelvis, were mirrors about a foot square, canted at diverse angles. When he first noticed them Jack supposed that they were a clever trick for reflecting sunlight into those many dim offices. But looking again he saw that they shifted frequently, and that their silvered faces were always aimed down toward the courtyard. There were scores of them. Jack never glimpsed the watchers who lurked in the dark rooms.

Later he chanced to look up at the highest balcony, and discovered a new gargoyle looking back at him: this was made of flesh and blood, a stout man who hadn’t bothered to cover his partly bald, partly grizzled head. He had battled smallpox and won at the cost of whatever good or even bad looks he might ever have had. Quite a few decades of good living had put a lot of weight into his face and drawn the pocked flesh downwards into jowls and wattles and chins, lumpy as cargo nets. He was giving Eliza a look that Jack did not find suitable. Up there on that balcony he was such an arresting presence that Jack did not notice, for a few minutes, that another man, much more finely turned out, was up there, too: the Doctor, talking in the relentless way of one who’s requesting a favor, and gesturing so that those white lace cuffs seemed to flit around him like a pair of doves.

Like a couple of peasants huddled together in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Jack and Eliza performed their role in the Mass and then departed, leaving no sign that they’d ever been there, save perhaps for a evanescent ripple in the coursing tide of quicksilver.

Saxony

LATE APRIL 1684

LEAVING LEIPZIG WITH THE DOCTOR did not happen at any one particular moment—it was a ceremonial procession that extended over a day. Even after Jack and Eliza and Turk the Horse had located the Doctor’s entourage, several hours of wandering around the town still awaited them: there was a mysterious call at the von Hacklheber factory, and a stop at the Nicolaikirche so that the Doctor could make devotions and take communion, and then it was over to the University (which like all else in Leipzig was small and serious as a pocket-pistol), where the Doctor simply sat in his carriage for half an hour, chatting with Eliza in French, which was the language he preferred for anything of a high-flown nature. Jack, restlessly circling the carriage—which was chocolate-brown, and painted all over with flowers—put his ear to the window once and heard them talking about some noble lady named Sophie, a second time, a few minutes later, it was dressmaking, then Catholic vs. Lutheran views on transubstantiation…Finally Jack pulled the door open. “Pardon the interruption, but I had a notion to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, crawling there and back on my hands and knees, and wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t delay our departure…”

“Ssh! The Doctor’s trying to make a very difficult decision,” Eliza said.

“Just make it—that’s what I say—doesn’t get easier if you think about it,” Jack advised. The Doctor had a manuscript on his lap, and a quill poised above it, a trembling drop of ink ready to break loose, but his hand would not move. His head teetered and tottered through a ponderous arc (or maybe it was the wig that magnified all movements) as he read the same extract over and over, under his breath, each time adopting a different sequence of facial expressions and emphasizing different words, like an actor trying to make sense of some ambiguous verse: should this be read as a jaded pedant? A dim schoolmaster? A skeptical Jesuit? But since the words had been written by the Doctor himself, that couldn’t be it—he was trying to imagine how the words would be received by different sorts of readers.

“Would you like to read it out loud, or—”

“It is in Latin,” Eliza said.

More waiting. Then: “Well, what is the decision that wants making?”

“Whether or not to heave it over the transom of yonder doorway,” Eliza said, pointing to the front of one of those Leipziger houses-that-weren’t-houses.

“What’s it say on that door?”

“Acta Eruditorum—it is a journal that the Doctor founded two years ago.”

“I don’t know what a journal is.”

“Like a gazette for savants.”

“Oh, so that stack of papers is something he wants to have printed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if he founded it, it’s his journal, so why’s he got leeches in his breeches?”

“Ssh! All the savants of Europe will read the words on that page—they must be perfect.”

“Then why doesn’t he take it with him and work on it some more? This is no place to make anything perfect.”

“It has been finished for years,” the Doctor said, sounding unusually sad. “The decision: should I publish it at all?”

“Is it a good yarn?”

“It is not a narrative. It is a mathematical technique so advanced that only two people in the world understand it,” the Doctor said. “When published, it will bring about enormous changes in not only mathematics, but all forms of natural philosophy and engineering. People will use it to build machines that fly through the air like birds, and that travel to other planets, and its very power and brilliance will sweep old, tottering, worn-out systems of thought into the dustbin.”

“And you invented it, Doctor?” Eliza asked, as Jack was occupied making finger-twirling movements in the vicinity of his ear.

“Yes—seven or eight years ago.”

“And still no one knows about it, besides—”

“Me, and the other fellow.”

“Why haven’t you told the world about it?”

“Because it seems the other fellow invented it ten years before I did, and didn’t tell anyone.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve been waiting for him to say something. But it’s been almost twenty years since he did it, and he doesn’t show the slightest inclination to let anyone else in on it.”

“You’ve waited eight years—why today? It’s well after midday,” Jack said. “Take it with you—give it another two or three years’ thought.”

“Why today? Because I do not believe God put me on this earth, and gave me either the best or second-best mind currently in existence, so that I could spend my days trying to beg money from the likes of Lothar von Hacklheber, so that I could dig a large hole in the ground,” the Doctor said. “I don’t want my epitaph to be, ‘He brought the price of silver down one-tenth of one percent.’”

“Right! Sounds like a decision to me,” Jack said. Reaching into the carriage he gathered up the manuscript, carried it up the walk to the door in question, and heaved it through the transom. “And now, off to the mountains!”

“One more small errand in the Booksellers’ Quarter,” the Doctor said, “as long as I’m getting myself into trouble.”

THE BOOKSELLERS’ QUARTER LOOKED AND worked like the rest of Leipzig except all the goods were books: they tumbled out of casks, rose in unsteady stacks, or were arranged into blocks that were wrapped and tied and then stacked into larger blocks. Bent porters carried them around in hods and back-baskets. The Doctor, never one to accomplish anything in a hurry, devoted several minutes to arranging his carriage and escort-train before the widest and clearest of the Book-Fair’s exits. In particular he wondered if Jack wouldn’t mind mounting Turk and (for lack of a better word) posing between the booksellers and the carriage. Jack did so, and was reasonably merry about it, having given up any hope that they’d escape the city before nightfall.

The Doctor squared his shoulders, adjusted numerous subsystems of clothing (today he wore a coat embroidered with flowers, just like the ones painted on his carriage), and walked into the Book-Fair. Jack couldn’t see him any more, but he could hear him. Not his voice, actually, but rather the effect that the Doctor’s appearance had on the overall sound of the fair. As when a handful of salt is thrown into a pot that’s about to boil: a hush, then a deep steady building.

The Doctor came running. He moved well for a man on high heels. He was pursued by the booksellers of[*] Königsberg, Basel, Rostock, Kiel, Florence, Strasbourg, Edinburgh, Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Seville, Paris, and Danzig, with a second echelon not far behind. The Doctor made it past Jack well before any of them. The sight of a mounted man with a heathen saber brought them to a jagged halt. They contented themselves after that with flinging books: any book that was handy. They gang-tackled porters, molested promotional displays, kicked over casks to get ammunition, and the air above and around Jack grew rather dark with books, as when a flock passes overhead. They fell open on cobblestones and spilled out their illustrative woodcuts: portraits of great men, depictions of the Siege of Vienna, diagrams of mining-engines, a map of some Italian city, a dissection of the large bowel, vast tables of numbers, musketeer drills, geometers’ proofs, human skeletons in insouciant poses, the constellations of the Zodiac, rigging of foreign barkentines, design of alchemical furnaces, glaring Hottentots with bones in their noses, thirty flavors of Baroque window-frames. This entire scene was carried out with very little bellowing, as if ejection of the Doctor was a routine matter for the booksellers. At the crack of the coachman’s whip, they made a few desultory final heaves and then turned back to resume whatever conversations the Doctor had interrupted. Jack for his part adopted a ceremonial rear-guard position behind the Doctor’s baggage-cart (inadvertently laden, now, with a few random books). The brittle sparking impacts of horse-shoes and wheel-rims against cobblestones were like heavenly chimes to his Vagabond-ears.

HE COULD NOT GET AN explanation until hours later, when they had put Leipzig’s north gate a few miles behind them, and stopped at an inn on the road to Halle. By this time Eliza had been thoroughly saturated with the Doctor’s view of events as well as his gloomy and resentful mood. She stayed in the Ladies’ Bedchamber, he stayed in the Men’s, they met in the Common-Room. “He was born in Leipzig—educated himself in Leipzig—went to school in Leipzig—”

“Why’d he go to school if he educated himself? Which is it?” “Both. His father was a professor who died when he was very young—so he taught himself Latin at the same age when you were hanging from dead men’s legs.”

“That’s funny—you know, I tried to teach myself Latin, but what with the Black Death, the Fire, et cetera…”

“In lieu of having a father, he read his father’s library—then went to school. And you saw for yourself how they treated him.”

“Perhaps they had an excellent reason,” Jack said—he was bored, and getting Eliza steamed up would be as good an entertainment as any.

“There is no reason for you to be gnawing at the Doctor’s ankles,” Eliza said. “He is one of that sort of man who forms very profound friendships with members of the gentler sex.”

“I saw what sort of friendship he had with you when he was pointing out your gentle bosom to Lothar von Hacklheber,” Jack returned.

“There was probably a reason—the Doctor is a tapestry of many threads.”

“Which thread brought him to the Book-Fair?”

“For some years he and Sophie have been trying to persuade the Emperor in Vienna to establish a grand library and academy for the entire Empire.”

“Who is Sophie?”

“Another one of the Doctor’s woman friends.”

“What fair did he pick her up at?”

Eliza arched her eyebrows, leaned forward, and spoke in a whisper that could etch glass: “Don’t speak of her that way—Sophie is none other than the daughter of the Winter Queen herself. She is the Duchess of Hanover!”

“Jeezus. How’d a man like the Doctor end up in such company?”

“Sophie inherited the Doctor when her brother-in-law died.”

“What do you mean by that? Is he a slave?”

“He is a librarian. Sophie’s brother-in-law hired him in that capacity, and when he died, Sophie inherited the library, and the Doctor along with it.”

“But that’s not good enough—the Doctor has ambitions—he wants to be the Emperor’s librarian?”

“As it is now, a savant in Leipzig may never become aware of a book that’s been published in Mainz, and so the world of letters is fragmented and incoherent—not like in England, where all the savants know each other and belong to the same Society.”

“What!? A Doctor here wants to make things more like England?”

“The Doctor proposed to the Emperor that a new decree be drawn up, ordering that all booksellers at the Leipzig and Frankfurt fairs must write up a description of every book they publish, and send these, along with copies of each book, to—”

“Let me guess—to the Doctor?”

“Yes. And then he would make them all part of some vast, hard-to-understand thing he wants to build—he couldn’t restrain himself from breaking into Latin here, so I don’t know exactly—part library, part academy, part machine.”

“Machine?” Jack was imagining a mill-wheel assembled from books.

But they were interrupted by ribald, helpless, snorting laughter from the corner of the Common-Room, where the Doctor himself was sitting on a stool, reading (as they saw when they came over and joined him) one of the hurled books that had lodged in the baggage-cart. As usual their progress across the room, or to be specific Eliza’s, was carefully tracked by lonely merchants whose eyeballs were practically growing out of their heads on stalks. Jack had at first been surprised, and was now growingly annoyed, that other men were capable of noticing Eliza’s beauty—he suspected that they did so in some base way altogether different from how he did it.

“I love reading novels,” the Doctor exclaimed. “You can understand them without thinking too much.”

“But I thought you were a philosopher,” Eliza said, apparently having waxed close enough to him now that she could get away with teasing and pouting maneuvers.

“But when philosophizing, one’s mind follows its natural inclination—gaining profit along with pleasure—whereas following another philosopher’s meditations is like stumbling through a mine dug by others—hard work in a cold dark place, and painful if you want to zig where they decided to zag. But this—” holding up the book “—you can read without stopping.”

“What’s the story about?”

“Oh, all these novels are the same—they are about picaroons—that means a sort of rogue or scoundrel—could be male or female—they move about from city to city like Vagabonds (than whom, however, they are much more clever and resourceful)—getting into hilarious scrapes and making fools—or trying to—out of Dukes, Bishops, Generals, and

“…Doctors.”

Lengthy silence, then, followed by Jack saying, “Errr…is this the chapter where I’m supposed to draw my weapon?”

“Oh, stop!” the Doctor said. “I didn’t bring you all this way to have an imbroglio.”

“Why, then?” Jack asked—quickly, as Eliza was still so red-faced he didn’t think it would be clever or resourceful to give her a chance to speak.

“For the same reason that Eliza sacrified some of your silk to make some dresses, and thereby fetched a higher price. I need to draw some attention to the mine project—make it seem exciting—fashionable even—so that people will at least think about investing.”

“I’m guessing, then,” Jack said, “that my role will be to hide behind a large piece of furniture and not emerge until all rich fashionable persons have departed?”

“I gratefully accept your proposal,” the Doctor said. “Meanwhile, Eliza—well—have you ever seen how mountebanks ply their trade in Paris? No matter what they are selling, they always have an accomplice in the crowd, attired like the intended victims—”

“That means, like an ignorant peasant,” Jack informed Eliza. “And at first this accomplice seems to be the most skeptical person in the whole crowd—asking difficult questions and mocking the entire proceedings—but as it continues he is conspicuously won over, and gladly makes the first purchase of whatever the mountebank is selling—”

“Kuxen, in this case?” Eliza said.

The Doctor: “Yes—and in this case the audience will be made up of Hacklhebers, wealthy merchants of Mainz, Lyons bankers, Amsterdam money-market speculators—in sum, wealthy and fashionable persons from all over Christendom.”

Jack made a mental note to find out what a money-market speculator was. Looking at Eliza, he found her looking right back at him, and reckoned that she was thinking the same thing. Then the Doctor distracted her with: “In order to blend in with that crowd, Eliza, we shall only have to find some way to make you seem half as intelligent as you really are, and to dim your natural radiance so that they’ll not be blinded by awe or jealousy.”

“Oh, Doctor,” Eliza said, “why is it that men who desire women can never speak such words?”

“You’ve only been in the presence of men who are in the presence of you, Eliza,” Jack said, “and how can they pronounce fine words when the heads of their yards are lodged in their mouths?”

The Doctor laughed, much as he’d been doing earlier.

“What’s your excuse, Jack?” Eliza responded, eliciting some sort of violent thoracic Incident in the Doctor.

Tears of joy came to Jack’s eyes. “Thank God women have no way to rid themselves of the yellow bile,” he said.

At this same inn they joined up with a train of small but masty ore-wagons carrying goods that the Doctor had acquired at Leipzig and sent on ahead to wait for them. Some of these were laden with saltpeter from India, others with brimstone from the Ore Range.[*] The others—though laden only with a few small crates—sagged and screeched like infidels on the Rack. Peering between the boards of same, Jack could see that they contained small earthenware flasks packed in straw. He asked a teamster what was in them: “Quecksilber” was the answer.

Mammon led them on,

Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell

From heav’n, for ev’n in heav’n his looks and thoughts

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of Heav’ns pavement, trod’n Gold,

Then aught divine or holy else enjoy’d

In vision beatific; by him first

Men also, and by his suggestion taught,

Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands

Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth

For Treasures better hid.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

THE ENTIRE TRAIN, amounting to some two dozen wagons, proceeded west through Halle and other cities in the Saxon plain. Giant stone towers with dunce-cap rooves had been raised over city gates so that the burghers could see armies or Vagabond-hordes approaching in time to do something about it. A few days past Halle, the ground finally started to rise up out of that plain and (like one of the Doctor’s philosophical books) to channel them this way and that, making them go ways they were not especially inclined to. It was a slow change, but one morning they woke up and it was no longer disputable that they were in a valley, the most beautiful golden valley Jack had ever seen, all pale green with April’s first shoots, thickly dotted with haystacks even after cattle had been reducing them all winter long. Broad fells rose gently but steadily from this valley and developed, at length, into shapes colder and more mountainous—ramps built by giants, leading upwards to mysterious culminations. The highest ridge-lines were indented with black shapes, mostly trees; but the Saxons had not been slow to construct watch-towers on those heights that commanded the most sweeping views. Jack couldn’t help speculating as to what they were all waiting for. Or perhaps they sparked fires in them at night to speed strange information over the heads of sleeping farmers. They passed a placid lake with what had been a brown stone castle avalanching into it; wind came up and raised goose-bumps on the water, destroying the reflection.

Eliza and the Doctor mostly shared the coach, she amending her dresses according to what he claimed was now in fashion, and he writing letters or reading picaroon-novels. It seemed that Sophie’s daughter, Sophie Charlotte, was fixing to marry the Elector of Brandenburg later this year, and the trousseau was being imported direct from Paris, and this gave occasion for them to talk about clothing for days. Sometimes Eliza would ride in the seat atop the carriage if the weather was fine, giving the teamsters reason to live another day. Sometimes Jack would give Turk a rest by walking alongside, or riding on, or in, the coach.

The Doctor was always doing something—sketching fantastic machines, writing letters, scratching out pyramids of ones and zeroes and rearranging them according to some set of contrived rules.

“What’re you doing there, Doc?” Jack asked one time, just trying to be sociable.

“Making some improvements to my Theory of Matter,” the Doctor said distantly, and then said no more for three hours, at which time he announced to the driver that he had to piss.

Jack tried to talk to Eliza instead. She’d been rather sulky since the conversation at the Inn. “Why is it you’ll perform intimate procedures on one end of me, but you won’t kiss the other end?” he asked one evening when she returned his affections with eye-rolling.

“I’m losing blood—the humour of passion—what do you expect?”

“Do you mean that in the normal monthly sense, or—”

“More than usual this month—besides I only kiss people who care about me.”

“Aw, whatever made you think otherwise?”

“You know almost nothing about me. So any fond emotions you might have, proceed from lust alone.”

“Well, whose fault is that, then? I asked you, months ago, to tell me how you got from Barbary to Vienna.”

“You did? I remember no such thing.”

“Well, p’r’aps it’s just the French Pox going to my brain, lass, but I clearly remember—you gave it a few days’ profound thought, hardly speaking, and then said, ‘I don’t wish to reveal that.’”

“You haven’t asked me recently.”

“Eliza, how’d you get from Barbary to Vienna?”

“Some parts of the story are too sad for me to tell, others too tedious to hear—suffice it to say, that when I reached an age that a horny Moor construes as adulthood, I came, in their minds, to bear the same relationship to my mother as a dividend does to a joint stock corporation—viz. a new piece of wealth created out of the normal functioning of the old. I was liquidated.”

“What?”

“Tendered to a Vizier in Constantinople as part of a trade, no different from the trades that sustain the City of Leipzig—you see, a person can also be rendered into a few drops of mercury, and combine with the mysterious international flow of that substance.”

“What’d that Vizier have to pay for you? Just curious.”

“As of two years ago the price of one me, in the Mediterranean market, was a single horse, a bit slimmer and faster than the one you’ve been riding around on.”

“Seems, er…well, any price would seem too low, of course—but even so—for Christ’s sake…”

“But you’re forgetting that Turk’s an uncommon steed—a bit past his prime, to be sure, and worn round the edges—but, what matters, capable of fathering others.”

“Ah…so the horse that paid for you was a thoroughbred stallion.”

“A strange-looking Arab. I saw it on the docks. It was perfectly white, except for the hooves of course, and its eyes were pink.”

“The Berbers are breeders of racehorses?”

“Through the network of the Society of Britannic Abductees, I learned that this stallion was bound, eventually, for la France. Someone there is connected to the Barbary pirates—I assume it is the same person who caused me and my mother to be made slaves. Because of that man I shall never see Mum again, for she had a cancer when I left her in Barbary. I will find that man and kill him someday.”

Jack counted silently to ten, then said: “Oh, hell, I’ll do it. I’m going to die of the French Pox anyway.”

“First you have to explain to him why you’re doing it.”

“Fine, I’ll try to plan in an extra few hours—”

“It shouldn’t take that long.”

“No?”

“Why would you kill him, Jack?”

“Well, there was your abduction from Qwghlm—perverse goings-on in the ship—years of slavery—forcible separation from an ailing—”

“No, no! That’s why I want to kill him. Why do you?”

“Same reason.”

“But many are involved in the slave trade—will you kill all of them?”

“No, just—oh, I get it—I want to kill this evil man, whoever he is, because of my fierce eternal pure love for you, my own Eliza.”

She did not swoon, but she did get a look on her face that said This conversation is over, which Jack took as a sign he was going in the right direction.

Finally, after a couple of days of skirting and dodging, the Doctor gave the word and they turned north and began straightforwardly ascending into what had plainly become a mountain range. At first this was a grassy rampart. Then strange dark hummocks began to pock the fields. At the same time, they began frequently to see pairs of men turning windlasses, like the ones mounted above wells, but this equipment was stouter and grimier, and it brought up not buckets of water but iron baskets filled with black rock. Jack and Eliza had seen it before at Joachimsthal and knew that the dark mounds were the fœces left behind when the metal (copper here) had been smelted out of the ore. Germans called it schlock. When they were wet with rain (which was frequently, now), the schlock-heaps glistened and gave back light tinged blue or purple. Men collected the ore from the hand-haspels (as the winches were called) into wheelbarrows and staggered behind them, among schlock-piles, to smoking furnaces tended and stirred by coal-smeared men.

Several times they entered into wooded valleys full of smoke, and followed the traces of dragged logs across the ground until they came to gunpowder-mills. Here, tall whip-thin trees, the trunks hairy with miserable scrawny branches,[*] were cut and burnt endlessly until they became charcoal. This was taken to a water-powered mill to be ground to dust and mixed with the other ingredients. Men came out of these mills looking all drawn and nervous from never really knowing when they’d be blown up, and the Doctor supplied them with brimstone and saltpeter from the wagons. Teaching Jack that wars, like great rivers, had their well-springs in numerous high remote valleys.

Eliza was beginning to see some of the enormous trees of Mum’s færy-tales, though many had blown down and could be viewed only as fists of roots thrust into the air still clutching final handfuls of dirt. The air up here was not still for a moment—it was never rainy, cloudy, or sunny for more than a quarter of an hour at a time—but when they were out of those smoky valleys, it was cold and clear. Their progress was slow, but one time the sky cleared as they came through an open place in the woods (it was clear that Harz was a rock and the forest no more substantial than the film of hop-vines that sometimes grew on an ancient schlock-heap), and then it was obvious that they’d risen to a great height above the plains and valleys. Those schlock-heaps like cowls of robed men in a procession. Patrols of black vultures chased and swirled about one another like ashes ascending a flue. Here and there a tower braced itself on a mountain-top or a conspiracy of trees huddled. Crows raided distant fields for the farmers’ seed-corn, and flocks of silver birds wheeled and drilled for some unvoiced purpose on invisible breezes.

So the Doctor decided to cheer them up by taking them down into an old abandoned copper mine.

“Sophie was the first woman to enter a mine,” he said helpfully. “You, Eliza, might be the second.”

This mine’s vein (or the vein-shaped cavity where the vein had once been) was close to the surface and so there was no need to descend numerous ladders in some deep shaft: they pulled up before an old semi-collapsed building, rummaged in a skewed cabinet for lights, sledded down a ramp where once a short staircase had been, and there they were in a tunnel as high as Jack’s head and an arm’s length wide. Their lights were called kienspans: splits of dry resinous wood about the dimensions of a rapier blade, dipped in some kind of wax or pitch, which burnt enthusiastically, and looked like the flame-swords wielded by Biblical standouts. By this means, they could see that the mine-tunnel was lined with logs and timbers: a hefty post-and-beam lintel every couple of yards, and many horizontal logs, as thick as a person’s thigh, laid parallel down the tunnel so as to join each post-and-lintel with the ones before and after it. In this way a long tubular wooden cage was formed, not to keep them in (though it did) but to protect them from a stalled avalanche of loose rubble pressing in from all sides.

The Doctor led them down this tunnel—the entrance quickly lost from view. Frequently, side-tunnels took off to one side or another, but these came up only to mid-thigh on Jack and there was no question of entering them.

Or so he thought until the Doctor stopped before one. The floor all around was strewn with curiously wrought planks, half-moon-shaped pieces of ox-hide, and tabular chunks of black rock. “There is a wonder at the end of this tunnel—no more than half a dozen fathoms back—which you must see.”

Jack took it for a joke until Eliza agreed to scurry down the tunnel without hesitation—which meant that according to Rules that applied even to Vagabonds, Jack had to do it first, in order to scout for danger. The Doctor told him that the pieces of ox-hide were called arsch-leders, which was self-explanatory, so Jack put one on. The Doctor then demonstrated the use of the planks, which miners used to protect elbows and forearms from the stony floor when creeping along on their sides. All of this settled, Jack lay down on the floor and crept into it, wielding the plank with one arm and the kienspan with the other. He found it reasonably easy going as long as he didn’t think about…well, about anything.

The kienspan, lunging ahead of him, shed sparks against the end of the tunnel and dazzled him. When his vision settled he found that he was sharing a confined space with a giant black bird—or something—like the ostrich—but with no wings—pawing at the ore, or maybe at Jack’s face, with talons bigger than fingers—its long bony neck twisted round almost into a knot, an arrowhead of a skull at the end, jaws open with such…big…teeth…

He only screamed once. Twice, actually, but number two didn’t count because it came from smashing his head on the ceiling in a poorly thought-out bid to stand up. He scurried back a couple of fathoms, working on blind fear and pain, stopped, listened, heard nothing but his heart.

Of course it was dead—it was all bones. And the Doctor might be a human oddity in several respects, but he wouldn’t send Jack into a monster’s lair. Jack retreated slowly, trying not to make his head ache any worse. He could hear the Doctor talking to Eliza: “There are shells scattered upon the mountains! See, this rock has a grain like wood—you can split it into layers—and look at what’s between the strata! This creature must’ve been buried in mud—probably the fine dirt that rivers carry—smashed flat, as you can see—its body decomposed leaving a void, later filled in by some other sort of rock—as sculptors cast bronze statues in plaster molds.”

“Where do you get this stuff? Who told you that one?” Jack demanded, a bloody head popping out between their feet, looking up at them.

“I reasoned it out myself,” said the Doctor. “Someone has to come up with new ideas.”

Jack rolled over on his belly to find the floor loosely paved with rock-slabs bearing imprints of sundry other Book-of-Revelation fauna. “What river carried this supposed dirt? We’re in the middle of a mountain of rock. There is no river,” Jack informed the Doctor, after they had gotten Eliza on her way down the tunnel. Jack waited with her traveling-dress slung over his arm while she inched down the tunnel in her knickers and an arsch-leder.

“But there used to be,” the Doctor said, “Just as there used to be such creatures—” playing his light over impressions of fish with fins too many and jaws too big, swimming creatures shaped like grappling-hooks, dragonflies the size of crossbow-bolts.

“A river in a mountain? I don’t think so.”

“Then where did the shells come from?”

FINALLY THEY TRAVELED to the rounded top of a mountain where an old stone tower stood, flanked by schlock-heaps instead of bastions. A half-wit could see that the Doctor had been at work here. Rising from the top of the tower was a curious windmill, spinning round sideways like a top instead of rolling like a wheel, so that it didn’t have to turn its face into the wind. The base of the tower was protected by an old-fashioned stone curtain-wall that had been repaired recently (they were afraid of being attacked by people who, however, did not have modern artillery). Likewise the gate was new, and it was bolted. A musket-toting engineer opened it for them as soon as the Doctor announced himself, and wasted no time bolting it behind them.

The tower itself was not a fit place for people to lodge. The Doctor gave Eliza a room in an adjoining house. Jack put the fear of God into all the rats he could find in her room, then climbed the stone stair that spiraled[*] up the inside of the tower. The tower did its part by moaning in wind-gusts like an empty jug when an idler blows over the top. From the windmill at the top a shaft, consisting of tree-trunks linked one to the next with collars and fittings hammered out of iron, dropped through the center of the tower to an engineering works on the dirt floor. The floor, then, was pierced by a large hole that was obviously the mouth of a mine-shaft. An endless chain of buckets had been rigged so that the windmill’s power raised them up from the shaft laden with water. As they went round a giant pulley they emptied into a long wooden tray: a mill-race that carried the water out through a small arched portal in the tower wall. Then the empty buckets dove back into the shaft for another go-round. In this way water was drained away from some deep part of the mines that would normally be flooded. But up here, the water was a good thing to have. After gathering a bit of head in a system of trenches outside, it powered small mill-wheels that ran bellows and trip-hammers for the smiths, and finally collected in cisterns.

Up top, Jack, who’d wisely spent some of their profits on warm clothes, had a view over a few days’ journey in every direction. The mountains (excepting one big one to the north) were not of the craggy sort, but swelling round-topped things separated by bottomless cleavages. The woods were dappled—partly leaf-trees with pale spring growth and partly needle-trees that were almost black. Here and there, pools of pasture-land lay on south-facing slopes, and of snow on north-facing ones. Villages, with their red tile rooves, were strewn about unevenly, like blood-spatters. There was a big one just below, in the gorge that divided this mountain from an even higher one to the north: a bald crag whose summit was crowned with a curious arrangement of long stones. Clouds whipped overhead, as fast and furious as the Winged Hussars, and this made Jack feel as if the tower were eternally toppling. The strangely curved blades of the Doctor’s windmill hummed over his head like poorly aimed scimitar-cuts.

“JUST A MINUTE, DOCTOR—with all due respect—you’ve replaced miners-on-treadwheels with a windmill to pump out the water—but what happens when the wind stops blowing? The water floods back in? Miners are drowned?”

“No, they simply follow the old underground drainage channel, using small ore-boats.”

“And how do these miners feel about being replaced by machines, Doctor?”

“The increase in productivity should more than—”

“How easy would it be to slip a sabot off one’s foot and ‘accidentally’ let it fall into the gears—”

“Err…maybe I’ll post guards to prevent any such sabotage.”

“Maybe? What will these guards cost? Where will they be housed?”

“Eliza—please—if I may just interrupt the rehearsal,” the Doctor said, “don’t do this job too well, I beg of you—avoid saying anything that will make a lasting impression on the, er, audience…”

“But I thought the whole idea was to—”

“Yes, yes—but remember drinks will be served—suppose some possible investor feels the need to step out and relieve himself at the climax of the performance, when the scales fall from your eyes and you see that this is, after all, a brilliant opportunity—”

Thus the rehearsal. Eliza performed semi-reclining on a couch, looking pale. Crawling down that cold tunnel probably had not been a good idea for one in her delicate state. It occurred to Jack that, since they had a bit of money now, there was no reason not to go down into the town he’d noticed below, find an apothecary, and buy some kind of potion or philtre that would undo the effects of the bleeding and bring pink back to her cheeks and, in general, the humour of passion back to her veins.

Of this town, which was called Bockboden, the Doctor had had little to say, save for a few mild comments such as “I wouldn’t go there,” “Don’t go there,” “It’s not a very good place to be in,” and “Avoid it.” But none of these had been reinforced by the lurid fabrications that a Vagabond would’ve used to drive the point home. It seemed an orderly town from above, but not dangerously so.

Jack set out on foot, as Turk had been favoring one leg the last day or so, and followed an overgrown path that wound among old schlock-heaps and abandoned furnaces down towards Bockboden. As he went, the idea came to him that if he kept a sharp eye out, he might learn a few more things about the money-making trade, perhaps to include: how to profit therefrom without going through the tedious steps of investing one’s own money and waiting decades for the payoff. But the only novel thing he saw on his way into Bockboden was some kind of improvised works, situated well away from dwellings, where foul-smelling steam was gushing from the mouths of iron tubs with Faulbaum-bonfires raging beneath them. It smelled like urine, and so Jack assumed it was a cloth-fulling mill. Indeed, he spied a couple of disgusted workmen pouring something yellow from a cask into one of the boiling-tubs. But there was no cloth in sight. It seemed they were boiling all of this perfectly good urine away to no purpose.

As Jack entered the town, shrewdness came to him belatedly, and he perceived it had not been a good idea—not because anything in particular happened but because of the old terror of arrest, torture, and execution that frequently came upon him in settled places. He reminded himself that he was wearing new clothes. As long as he kept a glove on his hand, where a letter V had been branded years ago, in the Old Bailey, he bore no visible marks of being a Vagabond. Moreover, he was a guest of the Doctor, who must be an important personage hereabouts. So he kept walking. The town gradually embraced and ensnared him. It was all built half-timbered, like most German towns and many English ones—meaning that they began by raising a frame of heavy struts, and then filled in the open spaces between them with whatever they could get. Around here, it looked like they’d woven mats of sticks into the gaps and then slathered them with mud that stiffened as it dried. Each new building borrowed strength, at first, from an older one, i.e., there was hardly an isolated freestanding house in the whole town; Bockboden was a single building of many bodies and tentacles. The frames of the houses—nay, the single frame of the entire town—had probably been level, plumb, and regular at one point, but over centuries it had sagged, warped, and tottered in different ways. The earthen walls had been patched to follow these evolutions. The town no longer looked like something men had built. It looked like the root-ball of a tree, with dirt-colored stuff packed between the roots, and hollowed out to provide a living-place.

Even here there were little schlock-heaps, and dribbles of ore up and down the streets. Jack heard the unsteady ticking of a hand-haspel behind a door. Suddenly the door was rammed open by a wheelbarrow full of rocks, pushed by a man. The man was astonished to find a stranger there staring at him. Jack however did not even have time to become edgy and to adopt an expression of false nonchalance before the miner got an aghast look and made a pitifully abject bowing maneuver, as best he could without letting go the wheelbarrow and precipitating a merry sequence of downhill mishaps. “Apothecary?” Jack said. The man answered in a strangely familiar-sounding kind of German, using his head to point. Behind the door, the hand-haspel stopped ticking for about six heartbeats, then started again.

Jack followed the wheelbarrow-man to the next cross-street, the latter trying to scurry away from him but impeded by his own weight in rocks. Jack wondered whether all of the mines beneath this country might be interconnected so that they all benefited from the Doctor’s project of pumping away the ground-water without having to share in the costs. Perhaps that explained why strangers, coming from the direction of the tower, made them so nervous. Not that one really needed a reason.

The apothecary shop, at least, stood alone, on the edge of a grassy, schlock-mottled yard, cater-corner from a blackened church. The roof was high and steep as a hatchet-blade, the walls armored in overlapping plates of charcoal-colored slate. Each of its stories was somewhat larger than the one below, and sheltered ’neath the overhangs were rows of carved wooden faces: some faithful depictions of nuns, kings, helmeted knights, hairy wild-men, and beady-eyed Turks, but also angels, demons, lycanthropes, and a goatlike Devil.

Jack entered the place and found no one minding the dispensary window. He began to whistle, but it sounded plaintive and feeble, so he stopped. The ceiling was covered with huge grotesque forms molded in plaster—mostly persons changing into other beings. Some of them he recognized, dimly, from hearing the tales referred to in plays—there was for example the poor sap of a hunter who chanced upon the naked hunt-goddess while she was bathing, and was turned to a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. That wretch, caught in mid-metamorphosis, was attached to the ceiling of the dispensary room in life-size.

Perhaps the apothecary was hard of hearing. Jack began to wander about in a loud, obvious, banging way. He entered a big room filled with things he knew it would be a bad idea to touch: glowing tabletop furnaces, murky fluids bubbling in retorts above the flames of spirit-burners, flames as blue as Eliza’s eyes. He tried another door and found the apothecary’s office—jumping a little when he caught sight of a dangling skeleton. He looked up at the ceiling and found more heavy plaster-works, all of female goddesses: the goddess of dawn, the spring-goddess riding a flowery chariot up out of Hell, the one Europe was named after, the goddess of Love preening in a hand-mirror, and in the center, helmeted Minerva (he knew some names at least) with a cold and steady look about her, one arm holding her shield, decorated with the head of a monster whose snaky hair descended almost into the middle of the room.

A big dead fish, all sucked into itself and desiccated, was suspended from a string. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets dense with professional clutter: diverse tongs, in disturbingly specific shapes; a large collection of mortars and pestles with words on them; various animal skulls; capped cylinders made of glass or stone, again with words on them; a huge Gothickal clock out of whose doors grotesque creatures sallied when Jack least expected it, then retreated before he could turn and really see them; green glass retorts in beautifully rounded shapes that reminded him of female body parts; scales with vast arrays of weights, from cannon-balls down to scraps of foil that could be propelled into the next country by a sigh; gleaming silver rods, which on closer inspection turned out to be glass tubes filled, for some reason, with mercury; some kind of tall, heavy, columnar object, shrouded in heavy fabric and producing internal warmth, and expanding and contracting slowly like a bellows—

“Guten Tag, or should I say, good afternoon,” it said.

Jack fell back on his ass and looked up at a man, wrapped in a sort of traveling-cloak or monk’s robe, standing next to the skeleton. Jack was too surprised to cry out—not least because the man had spoken English.

“How’d you know…?” was all Jack could get out. The man in the robe had a silver robe and a look of restrained amusement nestled in his red beard, which suggested that Jack should wait a minute before leaping up, drawing his sword, and running him through.

“…that you were an Englishman?”

“Yes.”

“You may not know this, but you have a way of talking to yourself as you go about—telling yourself a story about what’s happening, or what you suppose is happening—for this reason I already know you are Jack. I’m Enoch. Also, there is something peculiarly English in the way you go about investigating, and amusing yourself with, things that a German or Frenchman would know to be none of his business.”

“There’s much to think about in that speech,” Jack said, “but I don’t suppose it’s too offensive.”

“It’s not meant to be offensive at all,” Enoch said. “How may I help you?”

“I am here on behalf of a Lady who has gone pale and unsteady from too much feminine, er…”

“Menstruation?”

“Yes. Is there anything here for that?”

Enoch gazed out a window at a dim gray sky. “Well—never mind what the apothecary would tell you—”

“You are not the apothecary?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“Down at the town square, where all decent folk should be.”

“Well, what does that make you and me then, brother?”

Enoch shrugged. “A man who wants to help his woman, and a man who knows how.”

“How, then?”

“She wants iron.”

“Iron?”

“It would help if she ate a lot of red meat.”

“But you said iron. Why not have her eat a horseshoe?”

“They are so unpalatable. Red meat contains iron.”

“Thank you…did you say the apothecary was in the town square?”

“Just that way, a short distance,” Enoch said. “There’s a butcher there, too, if you want to get her some red meat…”

“Auf wiedersehen, Enoch.”

“Until we meet again, Jack.”

And thus did Jack extricate himself from the conversation with the madman (who, as he reflected while walking down the street, had a thing or two in common with the Doctor) and go off in search of someone sane. He could see many people in the square—how would he know which one was the apothecary? Should’ve asked old Enoch for a description.

Bockboden had convened in a large open ring around a vertical post fixed in the ground and half buried in a pile of faggots. Jack did not recognize the apparatus at first because he was used to England, where the gallows was customary. By the time he’d figured out what was going on, he had pushed his way into the middle of the crowd, and he could hardly turn around and leave without giving everyone the impression that he was soft on witches. Most of them, he knew, had only showed up for the sake of maintaining their reputations, but those sorts would be the most likely to accuse a stranger of witchcraft. The real witch-haters were up at the front, hollering in the local variant of German, which sometimes sounded maddeningly like English. Jack could not make out what they were saying. It sounded like threats. That was nonsensical, because the witch was about to be killed anyway. But Jack heard snatches like “Walpurgis” and “heute Nacht,” which he knew meant “tonight” and then he knew that they were threatening not the woman who was about to die, but others in the town they suspected of being witches.

The head of the woman had been shaved, but not recently. Jack could guess, from the length of her stubble, that her ordeal had been going on for about a week. They had been going at her feet and legs with the old wedges-and-sledgehammers trick, and so she would have to be burnt in the seated position. When they set her down on the pile of faggots she winced from the pain of being moved, then leaned back against the stake, seeming glad that she was about to leave Bockboden for good. A plank was nailed into place above her, with a piece of paper on it, on which had been written some sort of helpful information. Meanwhile, a man tied her hands behind the stake—then passed the loose end of the rope around her neck a couple of times, and flung the slack away from the stake: a detail that infuriated the front-row crowd. Someone else stepped up with a big earthenware jug and sloshed oil all around.

Jack, as former execution facilitator, watched with professional interest. The man with the rope pulled hard on it while the fire was started, strangling the woman probably within seconds, and ruining the entire execution in the opinion of some. Most of them watched but didn’t see. Jack had found that people watching executions, even if they kept open eyes turned to the entire performance, did not really see the death, and could not remember it later, because what they were really doing was thinking about their own deaths.

But this one affected Jack as if it were Eliza who’d been burnt (the witch was a young woman), and he walked away with shoulders drawn tightly together and watery snot trickling out of his nose. Blurry vision did him no favors vis-à-vis navigation. He walked so fast that by the time he realized he was on the wrong street, the town square—his only star to steer by—was concealed around the bends of Bockboden. And he did not think that aimless wandering, or anything that could be considered suspicious by anyone, was a good idea here. The only thing that was a good idea was to get out of town.

So he did, and got lost in the woods.

The Harz Mountains

WALPURGISNACHT 1684

Me miserable! which way shall I flie

Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?

Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still threatning to devour me opens wide,

To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

JACK SAT ON A DEAD tree in the woods for a time, feeling hungry, and, what was worse, feeling stupid. There was little daylight left and he thought he should use it wisely (he was not above being wise as long as there was no preacher or gentleman demanding that he do so). He walked through the trees over a little rise and down into a shallow basin between hills where he was fairly certain he could light a fire without announcing himself to the citizenry of Bockboden. He spent the remainder of the daylight gathering fallen branches and, just as the sun was setting, lit a fire—having learned that the tedious and exacting work of flint, steel, and tinder could be expedited if you simply used a bit of gunpowder in lieu of the tinder. With some pyrotechnics and a cloud of smoke, he had a fire. Now he need only throw sticks on it from time to time and sit there like the lost fool he was until sleep finally caught him unawares. He did not want to think about the witch he’d seen burnt, but it was hard not to. Instead he tried to make himself think about brother Bob, and his two boys, the twins Jimmy and Danny, and his long- and oft-delayed plan to find them a legacy.

He was startled to find three women and a man, their faces all lit up by firelight, standing nearby. They looked as if they had ventured into the woods in the middle of the night expecting to find some other vagrant sitting by a fire sleeping.[*] Jack’s first thought might’ve been Witch-hunters! if not for that they’d had longer to react to him than he to them, and they looked worried (they’d noticed the sword)—besides, they were mostly females and they were unarmed, unless the fresh-cut tree-branches that they used as leafy walking-sticks were meant as weapons. At any rate, they turned and hustled off, their sticks giving them the look of a group of stout chamber-maids going off to sweep the forest with makeshift brooms.

After that Jack could not sleep. Another group much like the first came by a few minutes later. This forest was damnably crowded. Jack picked up his few belongings and withdrew into the shadows to observe what other moths were attracted to the flame. Within a few minutes, a squadron of mostly women, ranging from girls to hags, had taken over the fire, and stoked it up to a blaze. They’d brought along a black iron kettle that they filled with buckets of water from a nearby creek and set up on the fire to boil. As steam began to rise from the pot—illuminated by firelight down below, vanishing into the cold sky as it ascended—they began to throw in the ingredients of some kind of stew: sacks of some type of fat dark-blue cherries, red mushrooms with white speckles, sprigs of herbs. No meat, or recognizable vegetables, to the disappointment of Jack. But he was hungry enough to eat German food now. The question was: how to secure an invitation to the feast?

In the end, he just went down and got some, which was what everyone else seemed to be doing. Traffic through this part of the woods had become so heavy that he could not rely on going unnoticed anyway. First he used his sword to cut a leafy branch like everyone else’s. None of these persons was armed, and so he stuck the sword and scabbard down his trouser-leg and then, to conceal it better, fashioned a false splint of sticks, and rags torn from his shirt, around the leg so that he would look like a man with a frozen knee, hobbling round with the aid of the staff. Thus disguised, he limped into the firelight and was politely, not to say warmly, greeted by the stew-cookers. One of them offered him a ladle full of the stuff and he swallowed it down fast enough to burn his insides all the way down to his stomach. Probably just as well—it was foul-tasting. On the principle that you never know when you’ll find food again, he gestured for more, and they somewhat reluctantly handed him a second ladle, and uneasily watched him drink it. It was as bad as the first, though it had chunks of mushrooms or something on the bottom that might give some nourishment.

He must have looked lost, then, because after he’d stood near the fire for a few minutes warming himself the stew-makers began helpfully pointing in the direction that all the other people were migrating. This happened to be generally uphill, which was the way Jack planned to travel anyhow (either it would take him to the Doctor’s tower, or to a height-of-land whence he could see the tower come morning) and so off he hobbled.

The next time he was really aware of anything (he seemed to be walking and sleeping at the same time, though everything had a dreamlike quality now, so the whole thing might be a dream) he had evidently covered a couple of miles uphill, judging from that it was much colder and the wind was blowing so hard that he could hear trees being struck down all over, like reports of guns in a battle. Clouds stampeded across the face of a full moon. Occasionally something would rip through the branches overhead and shower him with twigs and brush. Looking up, he saw it was broken-off tree branches, or maybe even small uprooted trees, propelled through the air by the hurricanoe. He was working his way uphill, though not sure why anymore. Others were all around him. The forest was very tall skinny black trees closely packed together like the massed pikes of a military formation, the eruptions of moonlight between fleeing clouds like the bursting of bombs, and Jack heard, or dreamed, the tramping of feet and blowing of trumpets. Forgetting why his leg was splinted, he supposed he must have been wounded in action (possibly in the head as well as the leg) and the wound dressed by a barber. For a while he was almost certain he was still fighting Turks in Vienna and all of the Eliza stuff just a long, elaborate, cruel dream.

But then he was back in the woods above Bockboden. Branches and heavier things were still ripping through space above his head like cannonballs. He looked up at the moon trying to see them, and with the torn clouds streaming by, it was difficult to make out their shapes, but he was fairly certain now that people were riding on those branches, as Winged Hussars rode on chargers. They were charging the hilltop! Jack finally stumbled out onto a path that wound up the mountain, and was nearly run over by the infantry part of the charge: a river of people with cut branches, and other ornaments, such as the forks farmers used to shovel manure. Forgetting about the splinted leg, Jack wheeled and tried to run with them, but fell, and took a while getting up.

He reached the collection of outcroppings that was the mountain-top somewhat after the main group, but in time to see them chasing away half a dozen musketeers who had apparently been posted there, and who were not welcome. None of them fired his weapon, as they had no desire to kill a few people only to be surrounded by hundreds of their stick-brandishing friends. As this occurred, people farther from the action were shouting threats and offering sour comments in much the same vein as the spectators at the witch-burning had earlier, except that they were using the word Wächer, which (Jack’s murderously overtaxed mind guessing wildly here) perhaps meant “Watchers.”

Battle won, the Hexen (no point in denying it any more) quickly lit up the whole mountain-top with fires (many people had carried faggots on their backs), which burnt with white heat in the continuing wind-blast. Jack hobbled around and looked. He could see that many ages ago a tall stone column had risen from the top of the mountain, bifurcated at the top into what might have been shaped like a pair of goat’s horns. It might’ve looked something like a crossbow standing up on end. But it had been toppled so long ago that it was now covered in moss and dirt. A couple of dozen standing-stones had ringed it; most of them had been toppled as well. The Hexen had led a black goat up onto the ruin of the high column and leashed him there to look out over the whole fiery prospect.

People, frequently naked, danced around those bonfires. Many spring flowers had been brought up and used to decorate rocks, or people. A certain amount of fucking went on, as one would expect, but at least some of it seemed to be ceremonial fucking—the participants, actors in a sort of immorality play—the woman always bedecked with garlands of spring wildflowers and the man always donning an eye-patch. Certain small animals might have died unnatural deaths. There was chanting and singing in a language that wasn’t exactly German.

Of course, presiding over the entire thing was Satan the Prince of Darkness, or so Jack assumed—as what else would you call a jet-black figure, horned and bearded, maybe a hundred feet high, dancing in the boiling, smoky, cloudy sky just above the summit, sometimes visible and sometimes not, occasionally seen in profile as he lifted his bearded chin to howl, or laugh, at the moon. Jack fully believed this, and knew beyond doubt that every word the preachers had ever said about Lucifer was true. He decided that running away wasn’t a bad idea. Choosing the direction he happened to be pointed in at the moment he panicked, he ran. The moon came out a few moments later and showed him he had one or two strides left on rock before he would find himself running in midair—a fantastical gorge plunged straight down for farther than could be seen by moonlight. Jack stopped and turned around, having no other choices, and with a forced and none too sincere calmness, looked at the entire panorama of fire and shadow hoping to find a route that wouldn’t take him too near Satan—or actually any of the several Satans of different sizes who seemed to be huddling in council around the mountain-top.

His eye was caught by a tiny black silhouette outlined in a brilliant hairy fringe, elevated above the whole scene: the black goat, tilting its head back to bray. One of the vast Satans duplicated the move precisely. Jack understood that he had been running from shadows of the goat cast against clouds and smoke by the light of the fire.

He sat down at the point where he’d almost hurled himself into the gorge, laughed, and tried to clear his head, and to get his bearings. The cliff, and the somewhat lower bluff across from it, were craggy, with great big shards and flakes of rock angling crazily into the air—and (by the way) exploding the Doctor’s idea of how these rocks had been formed, because the grain of these rocks ran straight up and down. Obviously it was the remains of a giant, killed in some antediluvian rock fight, who’d died on his back with his bony fingers thrust up into the air.

Jack drew nearer to a fire, partly because he was cold and partly because he wanted a closer look at one particular naked girl who was dancing around it—somewhat on the fleshy side and clearly destined to become another broom-wielding hag in the long run, but the least columnar German female Jack had recently seen. By the time he got close enough to have a good look at her, the fire was uncomfortably hot, which should have warned him that the light was very bright, on his face. But he did not consider this important fact at all until he heard the fatal word Wache! Turning towards the voice he saw, almost close enough to touch, one of those women who had woken him up earlier in the evening, down below, when he’d been sleeping by his little fire with his sword in view. His sword was exactly what she was looking for, now that she’d gained everyone’s attention by uttering their least favorite word. Concealing the weapon in a leg-splint had worked when it was dark, and people were not specifically looking for a sword, but here and now it did not work at all—the woman hardly needed do more than glance at Jack before screaming, in a voice that could probably be heard in Leipzig, “Er ist eine Wache! Er hat ein Schwert!”

So the party was over for everyone and most of all Jack. Anyone could’ve given him a smart shove and sent him into the fire and that would’ve been the end, or at least an interesting beginning, but instead they all ran away from him—but, he had to assume, not for long. The only one who stayed behind was the one who’d fingered him. She hovered out of sword-range giving him a piece of her mind, so furious she was sobbing. Jack had no desire to draw his sword and get these people more angry than they were, but (a) they couldn’t possibly get much more angry no matter what he did, and (b) he had to get the damn splint off his leg if he were going to do any serious fleeing. And fleeing was the order of the night. So. Out came his dagger. The woman gasped and jumped back. Jack controlled the urge to tell her to shut up and calm down, and slashed through all the rag bands around his leg so that the splint-sticks fell away from him. Then he freed his leg by pulling out the scabbard and sword. The woman now screamed. People were running towards Jack now, and cries of “Wächer!” were making it difficult to hear anything else—Jack had absorbed enough German by now to understand that this meant not “the Watcher” but “the Watchers.” They’d made up their minds that Jack must be only one of a whole platoon of armed infiltrators, which of course would be the only way his presence there would make any sense. Because to be here alone was suicide.

Jack ran.

He hadn’t been running for long before he understood that the Hexen were generally trying to drive him in the direction of the cliff—an excellent idea. But, as yet, they were not very organized and so there were gaps between them. Jack sallied through one of these and began to lose altitude the slow, safe, and sane way. The commotion had dropped a couple of octaves in pitch. At first it had mostly been shocked females spreading the alarm (which had worked pretty well), and now it was angry males organizing the hunt. Jack had to assume it wasn’t the first time they had hunted for large animals in these woods.

Even so, the hunt lasted for perhaps an hour, making its way generally downhill. Jack’s only hope was to get out in front of them and flee through the darkness. But they had torches and they knew their way around, and had spread the alarm down the mountain and so no matter what Jack achieved in the way of running, he found himself always surrounded. There were any number of near-escapes that ended in failure. The million poky branches of the alder trees clawed his face and threatened to blind him and caused him to make more noise than he wanted to as he moved about.

Toward the end, he got into situations where he could have escaped, or at least added a few minutes to his life, by killing one or two people. But he didn’t—an act of forbearance he wished could have been observed and noted down by some other sort of Watcher, a lurking mystery with a mirror on a stick, so that news of his noble decisions could be provided to Eliza and everyone else who’d ever looked at him the wrong way. Far from earning him universal admiration, this only led to his being surrounded by some half a dozen men with torches, standing just out of sword-range and darting in to sweep flames past his face when they thought they saw an opening. Jack risked a look back over his shoulder and saw no one behind him, which seemed a poor way to surround someone. He wheeled, ran a couple of steps, and hit a wall. A wall. Turning back around, he saw a torch-flame headed right for his face and reflexively parried the blow. Another came in from another direction and he parried that, and when the third came in from yet another direction he parried it with the edge instead of the flat of his blade, and cut the handle of the torch in two. The burning half spun in the air and he snatched it while slashing blindly in the other direction and hurting someone. Now that he’d drawn blood, the other hunters stepped back, knowing that reinforcements were on their way.[*] Jack, keeping his back to the building, crept sideways, sword in one hand and torch in the other, occasionally taking advantage of the latter’s light to glance over his shoulder and gain some knowledge of what he’d run into.

It was an old wooden building. The door was closed by a padlock the size of a ham. Wooden shutters had been pulled shut over the windows and bolted from the inside. A gentleman would’ve been stymied, but Jack knew that the weakest part of any building was usually the roof—so as soon as he found a wood-pile stacked against the wall, he climbed up it and got up on top, and found clay tiles under his boots. These were thick and heavy, made to withstand hail-storms and tree-branches, but Jack with the strength of panic stomped until a few of them cracked. Fist-sized rocks were pelting down around him now. He stopped one that was trying to roll off, and used it as a hammer. Finally he created a hole through the tiles, threw in the torch, squeezed through feet-first between the wooden laths on which the tiles were mounted, and dropped through, landing on a table. He snatched up the torch lest it set fire to the place, and found himself looking at a portrait of Martin Luther.

His hunters—several dozen by now, he guessed—had surrounded the building and begun pounding, in an exploratory way, on its doors and shutters. The booms in the dark gave Jack a general idea of the building’s size and shape. It had several rooms, and was therefore probably not a church, but not a mere cottage either. No one had tried to pursue him through the hole in the roof and he was certain no one would—they’d burn it. It was inevitable. He could even hear axes thudding into trees out in the forest—more fuel.

This particular room was a rude chapel; the thing he’d landed on, the altar. Next to the Luther portrait was an old and not very good rendition of a woman proffering a chalice with a communion wafer levitating above it, suspended by some ongoing miraculous intervention. It made Jack (who’d had enough, for one night, of accepting mystery drinks from eerie females) shudder. But from having spent too much time lately around miners, he recognized the woman as St. Barbara, patron of men who dug holes in the ground, albeit with all of her Catholic insignia filed off. The rest of the room was striped by plank benches. Jack hopped from one to the next to the back, then went sideways and found a kind of sitting-room with a couple of chairs and one of the towering black iron stoves favored by Germans. Turning on his heel and going the other way, he found a very heavy scale dangling from the ceiling; weights for it, the size of cheese-wheels; a cabinet; and, what he most wanted to see, a stairway going down.

It was getting smoky in there, and not just from his torch. Jack mauled the cabinet open and grabbed a handful of kienspans. He’d lost his hat while running through the woods and so he stole one of the miners’: a conical thing of extremely thick felt that would soften impacts of head against stone. Then he was down the stairs, and none too soon as the old wooden building was burning like gunpowder. They’d make a big fire of it, throwing on whole trees: a fire that could be seen by the burghers of Bockboden, sending those Hexen-hunters a powerful message by which they’d be completely baffled.

The stairway went down for perhaps two dozen steps and then levelled off into a tunnel that went at least as far as Jack’s torch (which had consumed most of its fuel) could throw light. He lit a kienspan, which burnt a little brighter, but he still could not see the end of the tunnel, which was good, and to be expected. He began running along in a kind of crouch, not wanting to smash his head on the ceiling timbers, and after a minute, passed by a hand-haspel crammed into a niche in the tunnel wall, its ropes descending into a shaft. A minute later he passed by another, then another, and finally he stopped and decided he should just go down one of those shafts. He’d been down here long enough to stop being so proud of his own cleverness, and he’d begun to worry. The Hexen knew the territory better than he. They couldn’t not know that the building was a mine entrance, and they must have anticipated that he’d find the tunnel. Perhaps the mine had other entrances, and they’d soon be coming down with torches and dogs and God knows what, as when they hunted burrowing vermin with their sausage-shaped dogs.

One of the hand-haspel’s buckets was at the top, the other down below. Jack climbed into the one that was up, and hugged the opposite rope, and by letting it slide through his arms was able to descend smoothly for a short distance: until he relaxed, and the rope slid too fast, and he hugged it tight out of panic, so it burnt him and made him let go, causing the same cycle to repeat, except worse. The only thing that interrupted this round was when, at the halfway mark, the lower bucket came up and caught him under the chin and caused him to let go entirely—which was fine, as he would have been stuck at that point anyway. He dropped, then, with only the empty, ascending bucket as counterweight, and what saved him was that the impact of his chin against same had set it swinging briskly back and forth, its rim biting into the rough wall of the shaft faster and faster as it rose higher and higher, throwing sparks and dislodging fusillades of jagged rock in Jack’s direction with every impact, but also slowing his fall with a corresponding series of violent jerks. Jack kept his head down and his kienspan up in case this shaft terminated in water, a possibility he should have considered earlier.

Actually it terminated in rock—the bucket landed unevenly and ejected Jack. Loose bits of stone continued to clatter down from above for a little while and hurt his legs, which was welcome as proof he hadn’t been paralyzed. The kienspan still burnt; Jack held it in a death-grip and watched the blue flame pour out of it and turn yellow as it moved sideways along the shaft, contrary to the normal habit of flames, which was to tend upwards. Jack kicked the bucket out of the way and did some moving about, and found that there was a rapidly building draft, approaching a breeze, moving toward him along the tunnel. But when he backed up to the other side of the shaft opening in the ceiling, the air was moving the opposite direction. Two flows of air converged at this point and moved up the shaft, starting now to make a certain wailing noise that Jack could not fail to liken to damned souls or whatever. Now he understood why the Hexen had gone to work felling trees up above: they knew that with a sufficiently enormous fire they could suck all of the air out of the mine.

He had to find a way out, which did not seem all that likely now, as he’d made the (in retrospect) mistake of going down to a lower level. But he chose the direction from which there came the strongest flow of air, and began to move as quickly as he could. The faster he ran into the wind, the more brightly his kienspan burnt. But it burnt less brightly as time went on. He tried lighting a fresh one, but it, too, burnt feebly unless he waved it in the air, and then the light flared up and shone between the heavy bars of the wooden cage that kept the rocks from crushing him on all sides, and cast rapidly moving shadows, sometimes looking like angry faces of mangled giants, or huge ostrich-skeleton-monsters with scimitar teeth: all of which went together neatly with the deafening chorus of moans and wails made by all of the passageways as the breath was sucked out of them.

Around this time Jack also noted that he was on his hands and knees skidding the dully glowing kienspan along the floor. From time to time he’d see the low portal of one of those side-tunnels go by him to the left or right. Going by one of these he felt a strong cool breeze, and the kienspan flared up; but when he went past it, the air became dead and the kienspan went out entirely. He was breathing very fast, but it did him no good. With what strength he still had, he backtracked through absolute darkness until he felt the wind from that side-tunnel on his face. Then he lay down flat on the rock for a while and simply breathed.

Some time later his head was working more clearly and he understood that the flow of air implied an exit somewhere. He groped around on the floor until he found one of those elbow-planks, and then crawled sideways, headed upwind. He followed the air for an amount of time impossible to guess at. The low side-tunnel opened out into a smooth-floored space that seemed to be a natural cave. Here the river of air had been broken up into many trickles curving around rocks and stalagmites (tricky to follow), but (nose to floor, tongue out) he followed them for what seemed like a mile, sometimes standing up and walking through spaces that echoed like cathedrals, sometimes squirming on his belly through spaces so close that his head got wedged between the floor and ceiling. He sloshed through a pond of dead water that froze his legs, climbed up the other shore, and entered a mine-tunnel, then passed through tunnels of low and high ceilings, and up-and-down vertical shafts, so many times that he lost track of how many times he had lost track. He wanted badly to sleep, but he knew that if the fire went out while he slumbered, the air-current would stop and he’d lose the thread that, as with that bloke in the myth, was showing him the way out. His eyes, not satisfied with total darkness, fabricated demon-images from all of the bad things he’d seen or thought he’d seen in the last days.

He heard a bubbling, hissing sound, such as a dragon or Worm might make, but followed it, and the air-current, along a slowly descending tunnel until he came to water’s edge. Knocking off a few sparks from his flint and steel he saw that the air he’d been following this whole time was boiling up out of a subterranean lake that filled the tunnel before him and completely blocked his way out. Having nothing else to do, he sat down to die, and fell asleep instead, and had nightmares that were an improvement on reality.

NOISE AND LIGHT, BOTH FAINT, woke him. He refused to take the light seriously: a green glow emanating from the pool (which had stopped bubbling). It was so unearthly that it could only be another of the mind tricks that the broth of the Hexen had been wreaking on him. But the noise, though distant, sounded interesting. Before, it had been drowned out by the seething of the water, but now he could hear a rhythmic hissing and booming sound.

The green light grew brighter. He could see the silhouettes of his hands in front of it.

He’d been dreaming, before he woke up, about the giant water-pipes, the hubbly-bubblies that the Turks smoked in Leipzig. They’d suck on the tube, and smoke from the tobacco bowl would pass down through the water and come back upwards into the tube, cooled and purified. The dream had, he guessed, been inspired by the last sound he’d heard before falling asleep, because the cave had made a similar seething and gurgling noise. As he considered it (having no other way to spend the time), he wondered whether the mine might not have acted like a giant water-pipe, and the fire like a giant Turk sucking on its tube, drawing air downwards, through a water-filled sump, from the outside, so that it bubbled up into this tunnel.

Might it be possible, then, that by swimming for some short distance through this water he would come up into the air? Could the green light be the light of sunrise, filtered through greenish pond-scum? Jack began to work up his courage, a procedure he expected would take several hours. He could think only of poor brother Dick who had drowned in the Thames: how he’d swum off all active and pink, and been pulled up limp and white.

He concluded he’d best do the deed now, while the witch-brew was still impairing his judgment. So he took off most of his clothes. He could come back for them later if this worked. He took only his sword (in case trouble awaited), flint, and steel, and his miner’s hat, which would be good to have if he smashed his head against any underwater ceilings. Then he backed up the tunnel several paces, got a running start downhill, and dove in. The water was murderously cold and he almost screamed out his one lungful of air. He grazed the ceiling once—the light grew brighter—the ceiling wasn’t there any more, and so he kicked against the sump’s floor and burst up into fresh air! The distance had been only three or four yards.

But the light, though brighter, was not the light of the sun. Jack could tell, by the echoes of the trickling waters and of the murmur of voices, that he was still underground. The strange green light shone from around a nearby bend in the cavern, and glinted curiously off parts of the walls.

Before doing anything else, Jack slipped back into the water, swam back through the sump, retrieved his boots and clothes, and then returned to the glowing cavern. He got dressed and then crept toward the light on hands and knees, trying but failing to control a violent shiver. The glint he’d noticed earlier turned out to come from a patch of clear crystals, the size of fingers, growing out of a wall—diamonds! He had entered into some place of fabulous riches. The walls were fuzzy with gems. Perhaps the light was green because it was shining through a giant emerald?

Then he came round a bend and was nearly struck blind by a smooth disk of brilliant green light, flat on the floor of a roundish chamber. As his eyes adjusted he could see that a circle of persons—or of something—stood around the edge, dressed in outlandish and bizarre costumes.

In the center stood a figure in a long robe, a hood drawn over his head, enclosing his face in shadow, though the light shone upwards against chin and cheek-bones to give him a death’s-head appearance, and it glinted in his eyes.

A voice spoke out in French—Eliza’s voice! She was angry, distressed—the others turned towards her. This was Hell, or Hell’s side entrance, and the demons had captured Eliza—or perhaps she was dead—dead because of Jack’s failure to return with medicine—and she was at this moment being inducted—

Jack plunged forth, drawing his sword, but when he set foot on the green disk it gave way beneath him and he burst through it—suddenly he was swimming in green light. But there was solid rock underneath. He jumped back up, knee-deep in the stuff, and hollered, “Let her go, ye demons! Take me instead!”

They all screamed and ran away, including Eliza.

Jack looked down to find his clothes saturated with green light.

The hooded figure was the only one left. He sloshed calmly up out of the pool, opened a dark-lantern, took out a burning match, and went round igniting some torchières stuck into the ground all around. Their light was infinitely brighter, and made the green light vanish. Jack was standing in a brown puddle and his clothes were all wet.

Enoch pulled the hood back from his head and said, “What was really magnificent about that entrance, Jack, was that, until the moment you rose up out of the pool all covered in phosphorus, you were invisible—you just seemed to materialize, weapon in hand, with that Dwarf-cap, shouting in a language no one understands. Have you considered a career in the theatre?”

Jack was still too puzzled to take umbrage at this. “Who, or what, were those—?”

“Wealthy gentlefolk who, until just moments ago, were thinking of buying Kuxen from Doctor Leibniz.”

“But—their freakish attire, their bizarre appearance—?”

“The latest fashions from Paris.”

“Eliza sounded distressed.”

“She was interrogating the Doctor—demanding to know just what this conjuror’s trick, as she called it, had to do with the viability of the mine.”

“But why even bother with mining silver, when the walls of this cavern are encrusted with diamonds?”

“Quartz.”

“What is the glowing stuff anyway, and while I’m on that subject, what does it have to do with the mine?”

“Phosphorus, and nothing. Come, Jack, let’s get you out of those wet clothes before you burst into flame.” Enoch began leading Jack down a side-passage. Along the way they passed a large item of machinery that was making loud booming and sucking noises as it pumped water out of the mine. Here Enoch prevailed on Jack to strip and bathe.

Enoch said, “I don’t suppose that this story shall ever be told in the same admiring way as the Strasbourg Plague House Takeover and the Bohemian Carp Feast.”

“What!? How did you know about those?”

“I travel. I talk to Vagabonds. Word gets around. You might be interested to know that your achievements have been compiled into a picaresque novel entitled L’Emmerdeur, which has already been burnt in Paris and bootlegged in Amsterdam.”

“Stab me!” Jack for the first time began to think that Enoch’s friendly behavior toward him might be well-meaning, and not just an extremely subtle form of mockery. Enoch shouldered a six-inch-thick door open and led Jack into a windowless crypt, a vaulted room with a large table in the middle, candles, and a stove, which happened to look exactly like the sort of place Dwarves would inhabit. They sat down and started smoking and drinking. Presently the Doctor came in and joined them. Far from being outraged, he seemed relieved, as if he’d never wanted to be in the mining business anyway. Enoch gave the Doctor a significant look, which Jack was fairly sure meant I warned you not to involve Vagabonds, and the Doctor nodded.

“What are the, er, investors doing?” Jack asked.

“Standing up above in the sunlight—the females trying to outdo each other in swooning, the males engaging in a learned dispute as to whether you were an enraged Dwarf come to chase us away from his hoard, or a demon from Hell come to seize us.”

“And Eliza? Not swooning I assume.”

“She is too busy receiving the compliments, and credentials, of the others, who are all dumbfounded by her acumen.”

“Ah, then it’s possible she won’t kill me.”

“Far from it, Jack, the girl is blushing, she is radiant, and not in a dipped-in-phosphorus sense.”

“Why?”

“Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I’m mistaken) that any female requires from her man.”

“So that’s what they’re all after,” Jack mused.

Eliza backed through the door, unable to use her arms, which were hugging a bundle of letters of introduction, visiting-cards, bills of exchange, scraps with scrawled addresses, and small purses a-clink with miscellaneous coinage. “We’ve missed you, Jack,” she said, “where’ve you been?”

“Running an errand—meeting some locals—partaking of their rich traditions,” Jack said. “Can we get out of Germany now, please?”

The Place

SUMMER 1684

Trade, like Religion, is what every Body talks of, but few understand: The very Term is dubious, and in its ordinary Acceptation, not sufficiently explain’d.

—DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

“IF NOTHING HAPPENS IN AMSTERDAM, save that everything going into it, turns round and comes straight back out—”

“Then there must be nothing else there,” Eliza finished.

Neither one of them had ever been to Amsterdam—yet. But the amount of stuff moving toward that city, and away from it, on the roads and canals of the Netherlands, was so vast that it made Leipzig seem like a smattering of poor actors in the background of a play, moving back and forth with a few paltry bundles to create the impression of commerce. Jack had not seen such bunching-together of people and goods since the onslaught on Vienna. But that had only happened once, and this was continuous. And he knew by reputation that what came in and out of Amsterdam over land, compared to what was carried on ships, was a runny nose compared to a river.

Eliza was dressed in a severe black ensemble with a high stiff white collar: a prosperous Dutch farmer’s wife to all appearances, except that she spoke no Dutch. During their weeks of almost mortally tedious westing across the Duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, the Duchy of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, the Bishopric of Hildesheim, Duchy of Kalenberg, Landgraviate of something-or-other, County of Lippe, County of Ravensburg, Bishopric of Osnabrück, County of Lingen, Bishopric of Münster, and County of Bentheim, she had mostly gone in man’s attire, booted, sworded, and spurred. Not that anyone really believed she was a man: she was pretending to be an Italian courtesan on her way to a tryst with a Genoese banker in Amsterdam. This made hardly any sense at all, but, as Jack had learned, border guards mostly just wanted something to relieve the tedium. It was easier to flaunt Eliza than to hide her. Trying to predict when they’d reach the next frontier, and whether the people on the far side of it would be Protestant or Catholic, and how serious about being Prot. or Cath. they’d be, was simply too difficult. Much simpler to be saucily irreligious everywhere and, if people got offended, run away. It worked most places. The locals had other concerns: if half the rumors were true, then King Looie—not satisfied with bombarding Genoa, laying siege to Luxembourg, challenging Pope Innocent XI to a staredown, expelling Jewry from Bordeaux, and massing his armies on the Spanish border—had just announced that he owned northwestern Germany. As they happened to be in northwestern Germany, this made matters tense, yet fluid, in a way that was not entirely bad for them.

Great herds of scrawny young cattle were being driven across the plain out of the East to be fattened in the manmade pastures of the Netherlands. Commingled with them were hordes of unemployed men going to look for work in Dutch cities—Holland-gänger, they were called. So the borders were easy, except along the frontier of the Dutch Republic, where all the lines of circumvallation ran across their path: not only the natural rivers but walls, ditches, ramparts, palisades, moats, and pickets: some new and crisp and populated by soldiers, others the abandoned soft-edged memories of battles that must have happened before Jack had been born. But after being chased off a time or two, in ways that would probably seem funny when remembered later, they penetrated into Gelderland: the eastern marches of that Republic. Jack had patiently inculcated Eliza in the science of examining the corpses, heads, and limbs of executed criminals that decorated all city gates and border-posts, as a way of guessing what sorts of behavior were most offensive to the locals. What it came down to, here, was that Eliza was in black and Jack was on his crutch, with no weapons, and as little flesh as possible, in sight.

There were tolls everywhere, but no center of power. The cattle-herds spread out away from the high road and into pastures flat as ponds, leaving them and the strewn parades of Hollandgänger to traipse along for a day or two, until they began joining up with other, much greater roads from the south and east: nearly unbroken queues of carts laden with goods, fighting upstream against as heavy traffic coming from the north. “Why not just stop and trade in the middle of the road?” Jack asked, partly because he knew it would provoke Eliza. But she wasn’t provoked at all—she seemed to think it was a good question, such as the philosophical Doctor might’ve asked. “Why indeed? There must be a reason. In commerce there is a reason for everything. That’s why I like it.”

The landscape was long skinny slabs of flat land divided one from the next by straight ditches full of standing water, and what happened on that land was always something queer: tulip-raising, for example. Individual vegetables being cultivated and raised by hand, like Christmas geese, and pigs and calves coddled like rich men’s children. Odd-looking fields growing flax, hemp, rape, hops, tobacco, woad, and madder. But queerest of all was that these ambitious farmers were doing things that had nothing to do with farming: in many places he saw women bleaching bolts of English cloth in buttermilk, spreading it out in the fields to dry in the sun. People raised and harvested thistles, then bundled their prickly heads together to make tools for carding cloth. Whole villages sat out making lace as fast as their fingers could work, just a few children running from one person to the next with a cup of water for them to sip, or a bread-crust to snap at. Farmers whose stables were filled, not with horses, but with painters—young men from France, Savoy, or Italy who sat before easels making copy after copy of land- and sea-scapes and enormous renditions of the Siege of Vienna. These, stacked and bundled and wrapped into cargo-bales, joined the parade bound for Amsterdam.

The flow took them sometimes into smaller cities, where little trade-fairs were forever teeming. Since none of the farmers in this upside-down country grew food, they had to buy it in markets like city people. Jack and Eliza would jostle against rude boers and haggle against farmers’ wives with silver rings on their fingers trying to buy cheese and eggs and bread to eat along their way. Eliza saw storks for the first time, building their nests on chimneys and swooping down into streets to snatch scraps before the dogs could get them. Pelicans she liked, too. But the things Jack marveled at—four-legged chickens and two-headed sheep, displayed in the streets by boers—were of no interest to her. She’d seen better in Constantinople.

In one of those towns they saw a woman walking about imprisoned in a barrel with neck- and arm-holes, having been guilty of adultery, and after this, Eliza would not rest, nor let Jack have peace or satisfaction, until they’d reached the city. So they drove themselves onwards across lands that had been ruined a dozen years before, when William of Orange had opened the sluices and flooded the land to make a vast moat across the Republic and save Amsterdam from the armies of King Looie. They squatted in remains of buildings that had been wrecked in that artificial Deluge, and followed canals north, skirting the small camps where canal-pirates, the watery equivalent of highwaymen, squatted round wheezing peat-fires. Too, they avoided the clusters of huts fastened to the canal-banks, where lepers lived, begging for alms by flinging ballasted boxes out at passing boats, then reeling them in speckled with coins.

One day, riding along a canal’s edge, they came to a confluence of waters, and turned a perfect right angle and stared down a river that ran straight as a bow-string until it ducked beneath the curvature of the earth. It was so infested with shipping that there seemed to be not enough water left to float a nutshell. Obviously it led straight to Amsterdam.

Their escape from Germany (as that mess of Duchies, Electorates, Landgraviates, Margraviates, Counties, Bishoprics, Archbishoprics, and Principalities was called) had taken much longer than Jack had really wanted. The Doctor had offered to take them as far as Hanover, where he looked after the library of the Duchess Sophia[*] when he wasn’t building windmills atop their Harz silver-mines. Eliza had accepted gratefully, without asking whether Jack might have an opinion on the matter. Jack’s opinion would have been no, simply because Jack was in the habit of going wherever he wished whenever the mood took him. And accompanying the Doctor to Hanover meant that they could not leave Bockboden until the Doctor had settled all of his business in that district.

“WHAT’S HE WASTING TODAY ON?” Jack demanded of Enoch Root one morning. They were riding along a mountain road, followed by a couple of heavy ox-carts. Enoch went on errands like this one every morning. Jack, lacking any other kind of stimulation, had decided to take up the practice.

“Same as yesterday.”

“And that is? Forgive an ignorant Vagabond, but I am used to men of action—so when the Doctor spends all day, every day, talking to people, it seems to me as if he’s doing nothing.”

“He’s accomplishing nothing—that’s very different from doing nothing,” Enoch said gravely.

“What’s he trying to accomplish?”

“He’d persuade the masters of the Duke’s mines not to abandon all of his innovations, now that his latest attempt to sell Kuxen has gone the way of all the others.”

“Well, why should they listen to him?”

“We are going where the Doctor went yesterday,” Enoch said, “and heard what he wanted to from the master of a mine.”

“Beggin’ yer pardon, guv’nor, but that striketh me not as an answer to my question.”

“This entire day will be your answer,” Enoch said, and then looked back, significantly, at a heavy cart following behind them, which was laden with quicksilver flasks packed in wooden crates.

They came to a mine like all the others: schlock-heaps, hand-haspels, furnaces, wheelbarrows. Jack had seen it in the Ore Range and he’d seen it in the Harz, but today (perhaps because Enoch had suggested that there was something to be learned) he saw a new thing.

The shards of ore harvested from the veins growing in the earth, were brought together and dumped out in a pile on the ground, then raked out and beaten up with hammers. The fragments were inspected in the light of day by miners too old, young, or damaged to go down into the tunnels, and sorted into three piles. The first was stone with no silver in it, which was discarded. The second was ore rich in silver, which went straight to the furnaces to be (if what Jack had seen in the Ore Range was any guide) crushed between millstones, mixed with burning-lead, shoveled into a chimney-like furnace blown by great mule-powered bellows, and melted down into pigs of crude silver. The third, which Jack had not seen at Herr Geidel’s mine, was ore that contained silver, but was not as rich as the other. Geidel would have discarded this as not worth the trouble to refine it.

Jack followed a wagon-load of this down the hill to a flat meadow decorated by curious mounds hidden under oiled canvas tarps. Here, men and women were pounding this low-grade ore in big iron mortars and turning the proceeds out into clattering sieves. Boys shook these to sift out powdered ore, then mixed it with water, salt, and the dross from copper-making to produce a sticky clay. This they emptied into large wooden tubs. Then along came an elder, trailed by a couple of stout boys sweating under heavy backloads that looked familiar: they were the quicksilver-flasks that the Doctor had bought in Leipzig, and that Enoch had delivered to them this very morning. The elder stirred through the mud with his hand, checking its quality and consistency, and, if it was right, he’d hug a flask and draw out the wooden bung and tip it, making a bolt of quicksilver strike into the mud like argent lightning. Barefoot boys went to work stomping the mercury into the mud.

Several such vats were being worked at any one time. Enoch explained to Jack that the amalgam had to be mixed for twenty-four hours. Then the vat was upended to make a heap of the stuff on the ground. At this particular mine, there were dozens of such heaps arrayed across the meadow, each one protected from the rain by a canopy of rugged cloth, and each stuck with a little sign scrawled with information about how long it had been sitting there. “This one was last worked ten days ago—it is due,” Enoch told him, reading one of the signs. Indeed, later some of the workers rolled an empty tub up to that pile, shoveled the amalgam into it, added water, and began to work it with their feet again.

Enoch continued to wander about, peeling back canvas to inspect the heaps, and offering suggestions to the elders. Locals had begun filtering out of the woods as soon as visitors had arrived, and were now following him around—greed for knowledge drawing them closer, and fear pushing them back. “This one’s got too much quicksilver,” he said of one, “that’s why it’s black.” But another was the color of bran. More quicksilver was wanted. Most of them were shades of gray, which was apparently desirable—but Enoch thrust his hand into these to check their warmth. Cold ones needed to have more copper dross added, and overly hot ones needed water. Enoch was carrying a basin, which he used to wash samples of the heaps in water until little pools of silver formed in the bottom. One of the heaps, all of a uniform ash color, was deemed ready. Workers shoveled it into wheelbarrows and took it down to a creek, where a cascade had been set up to wash it. The water carried the ashy stuff away as swirling clouds, and left silvery residue. This they packed into conical bags, like the ones used to make sugar-loaves, and hung them up over pots, rows of them dangling like the tits on a sow, except that instead of producing milk they dripped quicksilver, leaving a gleaming semisolid mass inside the bags. This they formed into balls, like boys making snowballs, and put them, a few at a time, into crucibles. Over the top of each crucible they put an iron screen, then flipped the whole thing upside-down and placed it over a like crucible, half-buried in the ground, with water in the bottom, so that the two were fitted rim-to-rim, making a capsule divided in half by the iron screen. Then they buried the whole thing in coal and burned it until it was all red-hot. After it cooled, they raked off the ash and took it all apart to reveal that the quicksilver had been liberated from the balls of amalgam and escaped through the screen, to puddle below, leaving above a cluster of porous balls of pure silver metal all stuck together, and ready to be minted into thalers.

Jack spent most of the ride home pondering what he’d seen. He noticed after a while that Enoch Root had been humming in a satisfied way, evidently pleased with himself for having been able to so thoroughly shut Jack up.

“So Alchemy has its uses,” Enoch said, noting that Jack was coming out of his reverie.

“You invented this?”

“I improved it. In the old days they used only quicksilver and salt. The piles were cold, and they had to sit for a year. But when dross of copper is added, they become warm, and complete the change in three or four weeks.”

“The cost of quicksilver is—?”

Enoch chuckled. “You sound like your lady friend.”

“That’s the first question she’s going to ask.”

“It varies. A good price for a hundredweight would be eighty.”

“Eighty of what?”

“Pieces of eight,” Enoch said.

“It’s important to specify.”

“Christendom’s but a corner of the world, Jack,” Enoch said. “Outside of it, pieces of eight are the universal currency.”

“All right—with a hundredweight of quicksilver, you can make how much silver?”

“Depending on the quality of the ore, about a hundred Spanish marks—and in answer to your next question, a Spanish mark of silver, at the standard level of fineness, is worth eight pieces of eight and six Royals…”

“A PIECE OF EIGHT HAS eight reals—” Eliza said, later, having spent the last two hours sitting perfectly motionless while Jack paced, leaped, and cavorted about her bedchamber relating all of these events with only modest improvements.

“I know that—that’s why it’s called a piece of eight,” Jack said testily, standing barefoot on the sack of straw that was Eliza’s bed, where he had been demonstrating the way the workers mixed the amalgam with their feet.

“Eight pieces of eight plus six royals, makes seventy royals. A hundred marks of silver, then, is worth seven thousand royals…or…eight hundred seventy-five pieces of eight. And the price of the quicksilver needed is—again?”

“Eighty pieces of eight, or thereabouts, would be a good price.”

“So—those who’d make money need silver, and those who’d make silver need quicksilver—and a piece of eight’s worth of quicksilver, put to the right uses, produces enough silver to mint ten pieces of eight.”

“And you can re-use it, as they are careful to do,” Jack said. “You have forgotten a few other necessaries, by the way—such as a silver mine. Mountains of coal and salt. Armies of workers.”

“All gettable,” Eliza said flatly. “Didn’t you understand what Enoch was telling you?”

“Don’t say it!—don’t tell me—just wait!” Jack said, and went over to the arrow-slit to peer up at the Doctor’s windmill, and down at his ox-carts parked along the edge of the stable-yard. Up and down being the only two possibilities when peering through an arrow-slit. “The Doctor provides quicksilver to the mines whose masters do what the Doctor wants.”

“So,” Eliza said, “the Doctor has—what?”

“Power,” Jack finally said after a few wrong guesses.

“Because he has—what?”

“Quicksilver.”

“So that’s the answer—we go to Amsterdam and buy quicksilver.”

“A splendid plan—if only we had money to buy it with.”

“Poh! We’ll just use someone else’s money,” Eliza said, flicking something off the backs of her fingernails.

NOW, STARING DOWN THIS CROWDED canal towards the city, Jack saw, in his mind, a map he’d viewed in Hanover. Sophie and Ernst August had inherited their library, not to mention librarian (i.e., the Doctor), when Ernst August’s Papist brother—evidently, something of a black sheep—had had the good grace to die young without heirs. This fellow must have been more interested in books than wenches, because his library had (according to the Doctor) been one of the largest in Germany at the time of his demise five years ago, and had only gotten bigger since then. There was no place to put it all, and so it only kept getting shifted from one stable to another. Ernst August apparently spent all of his time either fending off King Louis along the Rhine, or else popping down to Venice to pick up fresh mistresses, and never got round to constructing a permanent building for the collection.

In any event, Jack and Eliza had paused in Hanover for a few days on their journey west, and the Doctor had allowed them to sleep in one of the numerous out-buildings where parts of the library were stored. There had been many books, useless to Jack, but also quite a few extraordinary maps. He had made it his business to memorize these, or at least the parts that were finished. Remote islands and continents splayed on the parchment like stomped brains, the interiors blank, the coastlines trailing off into nowhere and simply ending in mid-ocean because no one had ever sailed farther than that, and the boasts and phant’sies of seafarers disagreed.

One of those maps had been of trade-routes: straight lines joining city to city. Jack could not read the labels. He could identify London and a few other cities by their positions, and Eliza helped him read the names of the others. But one city had no label, and its position along the Dutch coast was impossible to read: so many lines had converged on it that the city itself, and its whole vicinity, were a prickly ink-lake, a black sun. The next time they’d seen the Doctor, Jack had triumphantly pointed out to him that his map was defective. The arch-Librarian had merely shrugged.

“The Jews don’t even bother to give it a name,” the Doctor had said. “In their language they just call it mokum, which means ‘the place.’”

From desire, ariseth the thought of some means we have seen produce the like of that which we aim at; and from the thought of that, the thought of means to that mean; and so continually, till we come to some beginning within our own power.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

AS THEY CAME CLOSER to The Place, there were many peculiar things to look at: barges full of water (fresh drinking-water for the city), other barges laden with peat, large flat areas infested with salt-diggers. But Jack could only gawk at these things a certain number of hours of the day. The rest of the time he gawked at Eliza.

Eliza, up on Turk’s back, was staring at her left hand so fixedly that Jack feared she had found a patch of leprosy, or something, on it. But she was moving her lips, too. She held up her right hand to make Jack be still. Finally she held up the left. It was pink and perfect, but contorted into a strange habit, the long finger folded down, the thumb and pinky restraining each other so that only Index and Ring stood out.

“You look like a Priestess of some new sect, blessing or cursing me.”

“D” was all she said.

“Ah, yes, Dr. John Dee, the famed alchemist and mountebank? I was thinking that with some of Enoch’s parlor tricks, we could fleece a few bored merchants’ wives…”

“The letter D,” she said firmly. “Number four in the alphabet. Four is this,” holding up that versatile left again, with only the long finger folded down.

“Yes, I can see you’re holding up four fingers…”

“No—these digits are binary. The pinky tells ones, the ring finger twos, the long finger fours, the index eights, the thumb sixteens. So when the long finger only is folded down, it means four, which means D.”

“But you had the thumb and pinky folded down also, just now…”

“The Doctor also taught me to encipher these by adding another number—seventeen in this case,” Eliza said, displaying her right with the thumb and pinky tip-to-tip. Putting her hand back as it had been, she announced, “Twenty-one, which means, in the English alphabet, U.”

“But what is the point?”

“The Doctor has taught me to hide messages in letters.”

“It’s your intention to be writing letters to this man?”

“If I do not,” she said innocently, “how can I expect to receive any?”

“Why would you want to?” Jack asked.

“To continue my education.”

“Owff!” blurted Jack, and he doubled over as if Turk had kicked him in the belly.

“A guessing-game?” Eliza said coolly. “It’s got to be either: you think I’m already too educated, or: you hoped it would be something else.”

“Both,” Jack said. “You’ve put hours into improving your mind—with nothing to show for it. I’d hoped you had gotten financial backing out of the Doctor, or that Sophie.”

Eliza laughed. “I’ve told you, over and over, that I never came within half a mile of Sophie. The Doctor let me climb a church-steeple that looks down over Herrenhausen, her great garden, so that I could watch while she went out for one of her walks. That’s as close as someone like me could ever come to someone like her.”

“Why bother, then?”

“It was enough for me simply to lay eyes on her: the daughter of the Winter Queen, and great-granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots. You would never understand.”

“It’s just that you are always on about money, and I cannot see how staring at some bitch in a French dress, from a mile away, relates to that.”

“Hanover is a poor country anyway—it’s not as if they have much money to gamble on our endeavours.”

“Haw! If that’s poverty, give me some!”

“Why do you think the Doctor is going through such exertions to find investors for the silver mine?”

“Thank you—you’ve brought me back to my question: what does the Doctor want?”

“To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers—and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy—whatever that means.”

“Speaking for myself, I’d like a pot of beer and, later, to have my face trapped between your inner thighs.”

“It’s a big world—perhaps you and the Doctor can both realize your ambitions,” she said after giving the matter some thought. “I’m finding horseback-riding enjoyable but ultimately frustrating.”

“Don’t look to me for sympathy.”

The canal came together with others, and at some point they were on the river Amstel, which took them into the place, just short of its collision with the river Ij, where it had long ago been dammed up by the beaver-like Dutchmen. Then (as Jack the veteran reader of fortifications could see), as stealable objects, lootable churches, and rapable women had accumulated around this Amstel-Dam, those who had the most to lose had created Lines of Circumvallation. To the north, the broad Ij—more an arm of the sea than a proper river—served as a kind of moat. But on the landward side they’d thrown up walls, surrounding Amstel-Dam in a U, the prongs of the U touching the Ij to either side of where the Amstel joined it, and the bend at the bottom of the U crossing the Amstel upstream of the Dam. The dirt for the walls had to come from somewhere. Lacking hills, they’d taken it from excavations, which conveniently filled with ground-water to become moats. But to the avid Dutch there was no moat that could not be put to work as a canal. As the land inside each U had filled up with buildings, newly arrived strivers had put up buildings outside the walls, making it necessary to create new, larger Us encompassing the old. The city was like a tree, as long as it lived surrounding its core with new growth. Outer layers were big, the canals widely spaced, but in the middle of town they were only a stone’s throw apart, so that Jack and Eliza were always crossing over cleverly counter-weighted drawbridges. As they did so they stared up and down the canals, carpeted with low boats that could skim underneath the bridges, and (on the Amstel, and some larger canals) creaking sloops with collapsible masts. Even the small boats could carry enormous loads below the water-line. The canals and the boats explained, then, why it was possible to move about in Amsterdam at all: the torrent of cargo that clogged roads in the countryside was here transferred to boats, and the streets, for the most part, opened to people.

Long rows of five-story houses fronted on canals. A few ancient timber structures still stood in the middle of town, but almost all of the buildings were brick, trimmed with white and painted over with tar. Jack marvelled like a yokel at the sight of barn doors on the fifth story of a building, opening out onto a sheer drop to a canal. A single timber projected into space above to serve as a cargo hoist. Unlike those Leipziger houses, with storage only in the attic, these were for nothing but.

The richest of those warehouse-streets was Warmoesstraat, and when they’d crossed over it they were in a long plaza called Damplatz, which as far as Jack could tell was just the original Dam, paved over. It had men in turbans and outlandish furry hats, and satin-clad cavaliers sweeping their plumed chapeaus off to bow to each other, and mighty buildings, and other features that might have given Jack an afternoon’s gawking. But before he could even begin, some kind of phenomenon on the scale of a War, Fire, or Biblical Deluge demanded his attention off to the north. He turned his face into a clammy breeze and stared down the length of a short, fat canal to discover a low brown cloud obscuring the horizon. Perhaps it was the pall of smoke from a fire as big as the one that had destroyed London. No, it was a brushy forest, a leafless thicket several miles broad. Or perhaps a besieging army, a hundred times the size of the Turk’s, all armed with pikes as big as pine-trees and aflutter with ensigns and pennants.

In the end, it took Jack several minutes’ looking to allow himself to believe that he was viewing all of the world’s ships at one time—their individual masts, ropes, and spars merging into a horizon through which a few churches and windmills on the other side of it could be made out as dark blurs. Ships entering from, or departing toward, the Ijsselmeer beyond, fired rippling gun-salutes and were answered by Dutch shore-batteries, spawning oozy smoke-clouds that clung about the rigging of all those ships and seemingly glued them all into a continuous fabric, like mud daubed into a wattle of dry sticks. The waves of the sea could be seen as slow-spreading news.

Once Jack had a few hours to adjust to the peculiarity of Amsterdam’s buildings, its water-streets, the people’s aggressive cleanliness, their barking language, and their inability to settle on this or that Church, he understood the place. All of its quarters and neighborhoods were the same as in any other city. The knife-grinders might dress like Deacons, but they still ground knives the same way as the ones in Paris. Even the waterfront was just a stupendously larger rendition of the Thames.

But then they wandered into a neighborhood the likes of which Jack had never seen anywhere—or rather the neighborhood wandered into them, for this was a rambling Mobb. Whereas most of Amsterdam was divided among richer and poorer in the usual way, this roving neighborhood was indiscriminately mixed-up: just as shocking to Vagabond Jack as it would be to a French nobleman. Even from a distance, as the neighborhood came up the street towards Jack and Eliza, he could see that it was soaked with tension. They were like a rabble gathered before palace gates, awaiting news of the death of a King. But as Jack could plainly see when the neighborhood had flowed round them and swept them up, there were no palace gates here, nor anything of that sort.

It would have been nothing more than a passing freak of Creation, like a comet, except that Eliza grabbed Jack’s hand and pulled him along, so that they became part of that neighborhood for half an hour, as it rolled and nudged its way among the buildings of Amsterdam like a blob of mercury feeling its way through a wooden maze. Jack saw that they were anticipating news, not from some external source, but from within—information, or rumors of it, surged from one end of this crowd to the other like waves in a shaken rug, with just as much noise, movement, and eruption of debris as that would imply. Like smallpox, it was passed from one person to the next with great rapidity, usually as a brief furious exchange of words and numbers. Each of these conversations was terminated by a gesture that looked as if it might have been a handshake, many generations in the past, but over time had degenerated into a brisk slapping-together of the hands. When it was done properly it made a sharp popping noise and left the palm glowing red. So the propagation of news, rumors, fads, trends, &c. through this mob could be followed by listening for waves of hand-slaps. If the wave broke over you and continued onwards, and your palm was not red, and your ears were not ringing, it meant that you had missed out on something important. And Jack was more than content to do so. But Eliza could not abide it. Before long, she had begun to ride on those waves of noise, and to gravitate towards places where they were most intense. Even worse, she seemed to understand what was going on. She knew some Spanish, which was the language spoken by many of these persons, especially the numerous Jews among them.

Eliza found lodgings a short distance south and west of the Damplatz. There was an alley just narrow enough for Jack to touch both sides of it at one time, and someone had tried the experiment of throwing a few beams across this gap, between the second, third, and fourth stories of the adjoining buildings, and then using these as the framework of a sort of house. The buildings to either side were being slurped down into the underlying bog at differing rates, and so the house above the alley was skewed, cracked, and leaky. But Eliza rented the fourth story after an apocalyptic haggling session with the landlady (Jack, who had been off stabling Turk, only witnessed the final half-hour of this). The landlady was a hound-faced Calvinist who had immediately recognized Eliza as one who was predestined for Hell, and so Jack’s arrival and subsequent loitering scarcely made any impression. Still, she imposed a strict rule against visitors—shaking a finger at Jack so that her silver rings clanked together like links in a chain. Jack considered dropping his trousers as proof of chastity. But this trip to Amsterdam was Eliza’s plan, not Jack’s, and so he did not consider it meet to do any such thing. They had a place, or rather Eliza did, and Jack could come and go via rooftops and drainpipes.

They lived in Amsterdam for a time.

Jack expected that Eliza would begin to do something, but she seemed content to while away time in a coffee-house alongside the Damplatz, occasionally writing letters to the Doctor and occasionally receiving them. The moving neighborhood of anxious people brushed against this particular coffee-house, The Maiden, twice a day—for its movements were regular. They gathered on the Dam until the stroke of noon, when they flocked down the street to a large courtyard called the Exchange, where they remained until two o’clock. Then they spilled out and took their trading back up to the Dam, dividing up into various cliques and cabals that frequented different coffee-houses. Eliza’s apartment actually straddled an important migration-route, so that between it and her coffee-house she was never out of earshot.

Jack reckoned that Eliza was content to live off what they had, like a Gentleman’s daughter, and that was fine with Jack, who enjoyed spending more than getting. He in the meantime went back to his usual habit, which was to spend many days roaming about any new place he came into, to learn how it worked. Unable to read, unfit to converse with, he learned by watching—and here there was plenty of excellent watching. At first he made the mistake of leaving his crutch behind in Eliza’s garret, and going out as an able-bodied man. This was how he learned that despite all of those Hollandgänger coming in from the East, Amsterdam was still ravenous for labor. He hadn’t been out on the street for an hour before he’d been arrested for idleness and put to work dredging canals—and seeing all the muck that came off the bottom, he began to think that the Doctor’s story of how small creatures got buried in river-bottoms made more sense than he’d thought at first.

When the foreman finally released him and the others from the dredge at day’s end, he could hardly climb up onto the wharf for all the men crowded around jingling purses of heavy-sounding coins: agents trying to recruit sailors to man those ships on the Ij. Jack got away from them fast, because where there was such a demand for sailors, there’d be press-ganging: one blunder into a dark alley, or one free drink in a tavern, and he’d wake up with a headache on a ship in the North Sea, bound for the Cape of Good Hope, and points far beyond.

The next time he went out, he bound his left foot up against his butt-cheek, and took his crutch. In this guise he was able to wander up and down the banks of the Ij and do all the looking he wanted. Even here, though, he had to move along smartly, lest he be taken for a vagrant, and thrown into a workhouse to be reformed.

He knew a few things from talking to Vagabonds and from examining the Doctor’s expansive maps: that the Ij broadened into an inland sea called Ijsselmeer, which was protected from the ocean by the island called Texel. That there was a good deep-water anchorage at Texel, but between that island and Ijsselmeer lay broad sandbanks that, like the ones at the mouth of the Thames, had mired many ships. Hence his astonishment at the size of the merchant fleet in the Ij: he knew that the great ships could not even reach this point.

They had driven lines of piles into the bottom of the Ij to seal off the prongs of the U and prevent French or English warships from coming right up to the Damplatz. These piles supported a boardwalk that swung across the harbor in a flattened arc, with drawbridges here and there to let small boats—ferry kaags, Flemish pleyts, beetle-like water-ships, keg-shaped smakschips—into the inner harbor; the canals; and the Damrak, which was the short inlet that was all that remained of the original river Amstel. Larger ships were moored to the outside of this barrier. At the eastern end of the Inner Harbor, they’d made a new island called Oostenburg and put a shipyard there: over it flew a flag with small letters O and C impaled on the horns of a large V, which meant the Dutch East India Company. This was a wonder all by itself, with its ropewalks—skinny buildings a third of a mile long—windmills grinding lead and boring gun-barrels, a steam-house, perpetually obnubilated, for bending wood, dozens of smoking and clanging smithys including two mighty ones where anchors were made, and a small tidy one for making nails, a tar factory on its own wee island so that when it burnt down it wouldn’t take the rest of the yard with it. A whole warehouse district of its own. Lofts big enough to make sails larger than any Jack had ever seen. And, of course, skeletons of several big ships on the slanted ways, braced with diagonal sticks to keep ’em from toppling over, and all aswarm with workers like ants on a whale’s bones.

Somewhere there must’ve been master wood-carvers and gilders, too, because the stems and sterns of the V.O.C. ships riding in the Ij were decorated like Parisian whorehouses, with carved statues covered in gold-leaf: for example, a maiden reclining on a couch with one shapely arm draped over a globe, and Mercury swooping down from on high to crown her with the laurel. And yet just outside the picket of windmills and watch-towers that outlined the city, the landscape of pastures and ditches resumed. Mere yards from India ships offloading spices and calico into small boats that slipped through the drawbridges to the Damrak, cattle grazed.

The Damrak came up hard against the side of the city’s new weigh-house, which was a pleasant enough building almost completely obscured by a perpetual swarm of boats. On the ground floor, all of its sides were open—it was made on stilts like a Vagabond-shack in the woods—and looking in, Jack could see its whole volume filled with scales of differing sizes, and racks and stacks of copper and brass cylinders engraved with wild snarls of cursive writing: weights for all the measures employed in different Dutch Provinces and the countries of the world. It was, he could see, the third weigh-house to be put up here and still not big enough to weigh and mark all of the goods coming in on those boats. Sloops coming in duelled for narrow water-lanes with canal-barges taking the weighed and stamped goods off to the city’s warehouses, and every few minutes a small heavy cart clattered away across the Damplatz, laden with coins the ships’ captains had used to pay duty, and made a sprint for the Exchange Bank, scattering wigged, ribboned, and turbaned deal-makers out of its path. The Exchange Bank was the same thing as the Town Hall, and a stone’s throw from there was the Stock Exchange—a rectangular courtyard environed by colonnades, like the ones in Leipzig but bigger and brighter.

One afternoon Jack came by the Maiden to pick Eliza up at the end of her hard day’s drinking coffee and spending the Shaftoes’ inheritance. The place was busy, and Jack reckoned he could slip in the door without attracting any bailiffs. It was a rich airy high-ceilinged place, not at all tavernlike, hot and close, with clever people yammering in half a dozen languages. In a corner table by a window, where northern light off the Ij could set her face aglow, Eliza sat, flanked by two other women, and holding court (or so it seemed) for a parade of Italians, Spaniards, and other swarthy rapier-carrying men in big wigs and bright clothes. Occasionally she’d reach for a big round coffee-pot, and at those moments she’d look just like the Maid of Amsterdam on the stern of a ship—or for that matter, as painted on the ceiling of this very room: loosely draped in yards of golden satin, one hand on a globe, one nipple poking out, Mercury always behind and to the right, and below her, the ever-present Blokes with Turbans, and feather-bedecked Negroes, presenting tributes in the form of ropes of pearls and giant silver platters.

She was flirting with those Genoese and Florentine merchants’ sons, and Jack could cope with that, to a point. But they were rich. And this was all she did, every day. He lost the power of sight for a few minutes. But in time his rage cleared away, like the clouds of ash washing away from the amalgam, clearing steadily to reveal a pretty gleam of silver under clear running water. Eliza was staring at him—seeing everything. She glanced at something next to him, telling him to look at it, and then she locked her blue eyes on someone across the table and laughed at a witticism.

Jack followed her look and discovered a kind of shrine against the wall. It was a glass-fronted display case, but all gold-leafed and decked out with trumpet-tooting seraphs, as if its niches had been carved to house pieces of the True Cross and fingernail-parings of Archangels. But in fact the niches contained little heaps of dull everyday things like ingots of lead, scraps of wool, mounds of saltpeter and sugar and coffee-beans and pepper-corns, rods and slabs of iron, copper and tin, and twists of silk and cotton cloth. And, in a tiny crystal flask, like a perfume bottle, there was a sample of quicksilver.

“So, I’m meant to believe that you’re transacting business in there?” he asked, once she had extricated herself, and they were out on the Damplatz together.

“You believed that I was doing what, then?”

“It’s just that I saw no goods or money changing hands.”

“They call it Windhandel.”

“The wind business? An apt name for it.”

“Do you have any idea, Jack, how much quicksilver is stored up in these warehouses all around us?”

“No.”

“I do.”

She stopped at a place where they could peer into a portal of the Stock Exchange. “Just as a whole workshop can be powered by a mill-wheel, driven by a trickle of water in a race, or by a breath of air on the blades of a windmill, so the movement of goods through yonder Weigh-House is driven by a trickle of paper passing from hand to hand in there” (pointing to the Stock Exchange) “and the warm wind that you feel on your face when you step into the Maiden.”

Movement caught Jack’s eye. He imagined for a moment that it was a watch-tower being knocked down by a sudden burst of French artillery. But when he looked, he saw he’d been fooled for the hundredth time. It was a windmill spinning. Then more movement out on the Ij: a tidal swell coming through and jostling the ships. A dredger full of hapless Hollandgänger moved up a canal, clawing up muck—muck that according to the Doctor would swallow and freeze things that had once been quick, and turn them to stone. No wonder they were so fastidious about dredging. Such an idea must be anathema to the Dutch, who worshipped motion above all. For whom the physical element of Earth was too resistant and inert, an annoyance to traders, an impediment to the fluid exchange of goods. In a place where all things were suffused with quicksilver, it was necessary to blur the transition from earth to water, making out of the whole Republic a gradual shading from one to the other as they neared the banks of the Ij, not entirely complete until they got past the sandbanks and reached the ocean at Texel.

“I must go to Paris.”

“Why?”

“Partly to sell Turk and those ostrich plumes.”

“Clever,” she said. “Paris is retail, Amsterdam wholesale—you’ll fetch twice the price there.”

“But really it is that I am accustomed to being the one fluid thing in a universe dumb and inert. I want to stand on the stone banks of the Seine, where here is solid and there is running water and the frontier between ’em is sharp as a knife.”

“As you wish,” Eliza said, “but I belong in Amsterdam.”

“I know it,” Jack said, “I keep seeing your picture.”

The Dutch Republic

1684

JACK RODE WEST OUT OF Amsterdam, through Haarlem, and then found himself suddenly alone, and perilously close to being under water: autumn rains had submerged the pastures, leaving the walled towns as islands. Soon he reached the line of dunes that fenced the country off from the North Sea. Not even Dutchmen could find a use for this much sand. Turk was unsettled by the change in the ground, but then he seemed to remember how to go on it—perhaps his Turkish master had used to take him for gallops in some Mohametan desert. With a plodding and swimming kind of gait he took Jack up to the crest of a dune. Below them, a mile away, Alp-sized green waves were hurling themselves up onto the sand with monstrous roaring and hissing. Jack sat there and stared until Turk grew annoyed. To the horse it was cold and foreign, to Jack it was just this side of cozy. He was trying to count the years since he’d seen open salt water.

There had been the voyage to Jamaica—but after that, his life (he began to think) had been impossibly confusing. Either that, or else the French Pox had amazed and riddled his memories. He had to count on his fingers. Nay, he had to dismount and use his crutch-tip to draw family trees and maps on the sand.

His return from Jamaica was a good place to start: 1678. He had bedded the fair Mary Dolores, six feet of Irish vigor, and then fled to Dunkirk to avoid a warrant, and then there’d been the penis incident. While he’d been recovering from that, Bob had showed up with news: Mary Dolores was pregnant. Also, that John Churchill fellow, improbably, was married, and had been made a Colonel—no, wait, a Brigadier—and had any number of regiments under him now. He was avidly recruiting, and still remembered the Shaftoes—did Jack want a steady job, perhaps, so that he could wed Mary Dolores and raise his offspring?

“Just the sort of tidy plan that Bob would come up with,” Jack shouted at the waves, still annoyed, six or seven years later. Turk was becoming edgy. Jack decided to talk to him, as long as he was speaking out loud anyway. Did horses understand what was going on, when you spoke to people who weren’t there? “So far, simple enough—but here it becomes very deep,” he began. “John Churchill was in the Hague—then he was in Brussels—why? Even a horse can see the contradiction in that—but I forget you’re an Ottoman horse. All right, then: all of this land—” (stomping the dune for emphasis) “was part of Spain—you heard me—Spain! Then these fucking Dutchmen turned Calvinist and revolted, and drove the Spanish away, down south of the Maas and a bunch of other rivers with hard-to-remember names—past Zeeland, anyway—we’ll be seeing more than we want to of those rivers soon. Leaving only a wedge of Papist Spain trapped between the Dutch Republic on its north, and France on its south. This Spain-wedge contains Brussels and Antwerp and a large number of battlefields, basically—it is like the jousting-ground where Europe goes to have its wars. Sometimes the Dutch and the English ally against France, and they have battles in the Spanish Netherlands. Sometimes England and France ally against the Dutch, and they have battles in the Spanish Netherlands. Anyway—at this particular time, I believe, it was England and the Dutch against France, for the reason that all England was up in arms against Popery. Importation of French goods had been outlawed—that’s why I was in Dunkirk—obvious opportunities for smuggling. And that’s also why John Churchill was raising new armies. He went to Holland to parley with William of Orange, who was thought to know more’n anyone about staving off the Catholic hordes, as he’d stopped King Looie at the cost of turning half his country into a moat.

“So far it makes sense, then. But why—an intelligent horse might ask—why was John Churchill also in Brussels—part of Spain’s, and therefore the Pope’s, dominions? Why, it’s because—thanks to the maneuverings of his daddy Winston—ever since John had been just a lad, he’d been in the household of James, King Chuck’s brother, the Duke of York. And York—then, and now, first in line for the throne—was, and is today—you’ll like this—a fanatical Papist! Now do you understand why London was, and probably still is, nervous? The King decided it’d be better if his brother took a long vacation out of the country, and naturally James chose the Catholic city that was closest at hand: Brussels! And John Churchill, being in his household, was obliged to follow him, at least part of the time.

“Anyway—Bob took the King’s shilling and I did not. From Dunkirk, he and I rode together through the no-man’s-land—which, not to repeat myself, you’ll soon be seeing plenty of—by Ypres, Oudenaarde, Brussels, and as far as Waterloo, where we parted ways. I went down to Paris, he went back to Brussels, and probably spent a lot of his time, thereafter, scurrying to and fro carrying messages, as when he was a boy.”

During this recital, Jack had been unwinding his crutch: a curved stick with a padded crossbar at the top to go under his armpit, all lashed together with a mile of crude twine. When he’d undone the windings, he was left with two pieces of wood and some rags he’d used for padding. But protruding from the top of the long crutch-pole was the pommel of a Janissary-sword.

He had searched half of the Harz Mountains to find a stick whose curve matched that of the sword. Having found it, he’d split it in half, and hollowed out a space in the middle big enough to contain the scabbard. The pommel and guard still stuck out the top, but when he added the crutch’s cross-bar, then swaddled it in rags, and bound all in twine, he had a crutch that seemed innocuous enough—and if a border-guard threatened to unmake it, Jack could always cup a hand under his armpit and complain about the painful black swellings that had recently flared up there.

The crutch was a convenience in settled places where only Gentlemen had the right to bear arms—but between here and northern France, he hoped to see as little of that sort of country as possible. He belted on the sword and strapped the crutch-pole alongside Turk’s saddle, and then Jack the crippled vagrant was suddenly Jack the armed rider, galloping down the sea-coast on the back of a Turkish war-horse.

DOWN PAST THE HAGUE, around the Hook of Holland, Jack paid a visit on certain boat-owning fellows of his acquaintance, and learned, from them, that the French had banned the inexpensive cloth coming out of Calicoe in India. Naturally the Dutch were now smuggling it down the coast, and there was a steady traffic of the small cargo-vessels called flutes. Jack’s friends ferried him, Turk, and a ton of Calicoe across Zeeland, which was the name the Dutch gave to the huge sandy morass where such rivers as the Maas and the Schelde emptied into the North Sea. But an autumn storm was blowing up in the Channel, and they had to take shelter in a little privateers’ cove in Flanders. From there, Jack took advantage of a fortuitous low tide to make a night gallop down the coast to Dunkirk, and the hospitality of the dear old Bomb & Grapnel.

But from Mr. Foot, the proprietor of the Bomb, Jack got an earful about how, ever since King Looie had bought Dunkirk from King Chuck, things weren’t the same: the French had enlarged the harbor so that it could harbor the big warships of that arch-privateer Jean Bart, and these changes had driven away the small Channel pirates and smugglers who had once made Dunkirk such a prosperous and merry town.

Disgusted and dismayed, Jack left immediately, striking inland into Artois, where he could still go armed. It was hard up against the frontier of the Spanish Netherlands, and the soldiers who’d been sent up to prosecute King Looie’s wars there had not been slow to grasp that there was more to be made by robbing travelers on the London-Paris route—who were still so grateful to’ve survived the Channel crossing that they practically gave it away—than from dutiful soldiering.

Jack made himself look like one of these highwaymen—no great feat, since he had been one for a year or two—and that brought him swift and more or less safe passage down into Picardy: the home of a famous Regiment, which, since they were not there when Jack arrived, he reckoned that they must be up laying waste to the Spanish Netherlands. A few changes in attire (his old floppy musketeer-hat, e.g.) gave him the look of a deserter, or scout, from same.

In one of those Picard villages the church-bell was clanging without letup. Sensing some kind of disorder, Jack rode toward it, across fields crowded with peasants bringing in the harvest. They rotated their crops so that one-third of the fields had wheat, one-third oats, and the remaining third were fallow, and Jack tended to ride across the ones that were fallow. These wretches looked at him with fear that was abject even by the standard of French peasants. Most of them scanned the northern sky, perhaps looking for clouds of smoke or dust, and some dropped to the ground and put their ears against it, listening for hoofbeats, and Jack concluded that it wasn’t him personally they feared, so much as what might be behind him.

He assessed this village as one where he could get away with being armed, and rode into it, because he needed to buy oats for Turk. The only person he saw was a barefoot boy in coarse dirty linen, visible from the waist down through a low doorway in the base of the bell-tower, his raggedy ass thrusting out rudely with each jerk on the bell-rope.

But then Jack encountered a rider in good but plain clothing who had apparently come up from the direction of Paris. They drew up, a safe distance apart, in the town’s deserted market-square, circled round each other once or twice, and then began shouting at each other over the din of the bell, and settled on a mixture of English and French.

Jack: “Why are they ringing the bell?”

“These Catholics think it wards off thunderstorms,” said the Frenchman. “Why are they so—?” he then asked and, not trusting his English or Jack’s French, pantomimed a furtive cringing peasant.

“They’re afraid that I’m a forerunner of the Picardy Regiment, coming home from the wars,” Jack guessed. He intended this as a wry jest about the tendency of regiments to “live off the land,” as the euphemism went. But it was quite significant to this Huguenot.

“Is it true? Is the regiment coming?”

“How much would it be worth to you?” Jack asked.

Everything about this Huguenot reminded him of the Independent traders of England, who’d ride out to remote districts in harvest-time to buy up goods at better than market price. And both Jack and this trader—who introduced himself as Monsieur Arlanc—understood that the price would drop still further if the sellers believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Picardy Regiment was coming to eat it out from under them.

So there was, inadvertently, a sort of business proposition on the table. Vagabond and Huguenot rode around each other a few more times. All around them, the peasants labored at the harvest. But they were keeping an eye on the two strangers, and soon a village elder came hustling in from the fields on a donkey.

But in the end, Monsieur Arlanc could not bring himself to do it. “We are already hated enough,” he said, apparently meaning the Huguenots, “without spreading false panics. These peasants have enough to be afraid of already—that is why my sons and I ride out to such dangerous marches.”

“Fine. But incidentally, I don’t intend to rob you,” Jack said irritably, “you needn’t make up phant’sies about your supposed pack of heavily armed sons, just over the rise.”

“Tales don’t offer sufficient protection in these times, I’m afraid,” said Monsieur Arlanc, tucking his cloak back to divulge no fewer than four separate firearms: two conventional pistols, and two more cleverly worked into the handle of a tomahawk and the barrel of a walking-stick respectively.

“Well played, Monsieur—Protestant practicality and French savoir-faire united.”

“I say, are you sure you’ll be all right riding to the Inn at Amiens armed with nothing but a sword? The highways—”

“I do not stay at Inns of the French sort, nor do I generally ride on highways,” Jack said. “But if that is your habit, and if you are going that way…”

So they rode to Amiens together, after purchasing oats from the head man of the village. Jack bought enough to fill Turk’s belly, and Monsieur Arlanc bought the rest of the year’s harvest (he would send wagons later to take delivery). Jack told no lies—just lounged on the rim of the town well, looking like a Volunteer, as the local deserters and highwaymen were called. After that it was a good stiff ride to Amiens, where there was a large establishment throttling a crossroads: livery stables nearly buried in hay, and paddocks crowded with oxen; queues of empty wagons lining the road (some soon to be hired by M. Arlanc); several smithys, some geared for shoeing horses, others for putting rims on wagon-wheels. As well, harness-shops, and various carpenters specializing in wheels, ox-yokes, cart-frames, and barrel-making. Trains of harvest-laden carts filling the roadway, waiting to be inspected, and to pay tolls. Somewhere, a lodging for traders and travelers that accounted for its being called an Inn. From a distance, it was a great dark smoking knot, clearly recognizable as not Jack’s sort of place—he unbelted his sword, slid it back into its concealment in the crutch-pole, and began winding it up again.

“You must come to the Inn, and see that I do in fact have sons,” said Monsieur Arlanc. “They are still only boys, but…”

“I have never seen my own—I cannot see yours,” Jack said. “Besides, I cannot tolerate these French Inns—”

Monsieur Arlanc nodded understandingly. “In your country, goods are free to move on the roads—?”

“—and an Inn is a hospitable place for travelers, not a choke-point.”

So he bade good-bye to Monsieur Arlanc, from whom he had learned a thing or two about where in Paris he should sell his ostrich-plumes and his war-horse. In return, the Huguenot had learned some things about phosphorus, silver mines, and Calicoe-smuggling from Jack. Both men had been safer together than they would’ve been apart.

JACK THE ONE-LEGGED TINKER, leading his plow-horse, smelled Paris half a day before he saw it. The fields of grain gave way to market-gardens crowded with vegetables, and pastures for dairy cattle, and dark, heavy carts came endlessly up the road from the city laden with barrels and tubs of human shit collected from the gutters and stoops, which were worked into the vegetable-fields by peasants using rakes and forks. Parisians seemed to shit more than other humans, or perhaps the garlic in their food made it seem that way—in any case Jack was glad when he got clear of those rank vegetable-fields and entered into the suburbs: endless warrens of straw-roofed huts crowded with misplaced country folk, burning whatever sticks and debris they could rake together to cook their food and ward off the autumn chill, and publicly suffering from various picturesque ailments. Jack didn’t stop moving until he reached the perpetual pilgrim-camp around St.-Denis, where almost anyone could get away with loitering for a few hours. He bought some cheese for himself and some hay for Turk from some farmers who were on their way down to the city. Then he relaxed among the lepers, epileptics, and madmen who were hanging around the Basilica, and dozed until a couple of hours before dawn.

When it got light enough to move about, he joined in with the thousands of farmers who came into the city, as they did every morning, bringing vegetables, milk, eggs, meat, fish, and hay into the markets. This crowd was larger than he remembered, and it took longer for them to get into the city. The gate of St.-Denis was impossibly congested, so he tried his luck at the gate of St. Martin, a musket-shot away. By the time he passed under it, dawn-light was glancing prettily off its new stone-work: King Looie as a primordial naked Hercules leaning insouciantly on a tree-sized club, naked except for a periwig the size of a cloud, and a lion skin slung over one arm so that a flapping corner just covered the royal Penis. Victory was swooping down from Heaven, one arm laden with palm-branches and the other reaching out to slap a laurel-wreath atop that wig. The King’s foot rested on the mangled form of someone he’d just apparently beaten the crap out of, and, in the background, a great Tower burnt.

“God damn you, King Looie,” Jack muttered, passing under the gate; because he could feel himself cringing. He’d tried to ride across France as fast as he could, specifically to prevent this: but still, it had taken several days. The sheer vastness of it compared to those tiny German principalities, and the component states of the Dutch Republic, was such that by the time you reached Paris, you’d been traveling across this King’s dominions for so long that as you passed through the gate you couldn’t not cringe beneath his power.

Never mind; he was in Paris. Off to his left the sun was rising over the towers and bastions of the Temple, where those Knights of Malta had their own city within the city—though the old curtain-walls that once enclosed it had lately been torn down. But for the most part his views in all directions were sealed off by vertical walls of white stone: Paris’s six- and seven-story buildings rising on either side of the street, funneling the farmers and the fishwives, and the vendors with their loads of flowers, oranges, and oysters into narrow race-ways wherein they jostled sharply for position, all trying to avoid falling into the central gutter. Not far into the city, much of this traffic angled off to the right, toward the great market-place of Les Halles, leaving a (for Paris) clear vista straight down to the Seine and the Île de la Cité.

Jack had developed a suspicion that he was being tailed by an agent of King Looie’s Lieutenant of Police, who had unfortunately caught his eye for a moment as he’d gone through the gate. Jack knew not to turn around and look. But by watching the faces of oncoming pedestrians—particularly, scum—he could see that they were surprised by, and then scared of, someone. Jack could hardly slip off into the crowd when he was leading a great big horse, but he could try to make himself not worth following. Les Halles would be a good place for that, so he followed the crowd to the right. The dramatickal option—mounting Turk, producing a weapon—would lead to the galleys. In fact, there were very few roads out of Paris that would not end with Jack chained to an oar in Marseille.

Someone behind him came in for brutal tongue-lashings from the fishwives at Les Halles. Jack overheard comparisons between his pursuer’s moustache, and the armpit hair of various infidel races. The hypothesis was floated, and generally agreed upon, that this policeman spent rather too much of his time performing oral sex on certain large farm animals infamous for poor hygiene. Beyond that, Jack’s French simply was not quick or vile enough. He trolled several times through Les Halles, hoping that the crowd, the smell of yesterday’s fish-guts, the fishwives, and sheer boredom would shake this man off his tail, but it didn’t work. Jack bought a loaf, so that he could explain why he’d come here, if someone bothered to ask, and to demonstrate that he was not a penniless vagrant, and also because he was hungry.

He put the sun to his back and began to dodge and maneuver through various streets, headed for the Rue Vivienne. The police wanted to arrest him for being in Paris with no business, which normally would have been the case for him. So much so, that he’d forgotten that this time he actually did have business.

The streets had begun to congest with strolling retailers: a cheese-seller pushing a large wheel of blue-veined stuff on a sort of wheelbarrow, a mustard-seller carrying a small capped pail and a scoop, numerous porteurs d’eau, their stout bodies harnessed into frames all a-dangle with wooden buckets, a butter-seller with baskets of butter-pats strapped to his back. This kind of thing would only get worse, to the point that it would immobilize him. He had to get rid of Turk. No trouble: the horse business was everywhere, he’d already passed by several livery stables, and hay-wains filled narrow streets with their thatched bulk and narcotic fragrance. Jack followed one to a stable and made arrangements to have Turk put up there for a few days.

Then out the other side, and into a large open space: a plaza with (surprisingly enough) a monumental statue of King Looie in the center. On one side of its pedestal, a relief of Looie personally spearheading a cavalry charge across a canal, or perhaps that was the Rhine, into a horizontal forest of muskets. On the other, Looie on the throne with a queue of Kings and Emperors of Europe waiting, crowns in hand, to kneel down and kiss his high-heeled booties.

He must be on the right course, because he was beginning to see a higher class of vendor: sellers of books strolling along holding advertisements over their heads on sign-boards, a candy-man carrying small scales, a seller of eau-de-vie carrying a basket of tiny bottles, and a goblet; a seller of pâtés carrying a sort of painter’s palette with smudges of different varieties, and many orange-girls: all of them crying the particular cries that belonged to that sort of vendor, like birds with their own distinct calls. Jack was on Rue Vivienne. It was starting to look like Amsterdam: finely-dressed men of many lands, strolling along having serious conversations: making money by exchanging words. But it also looked a bit like the Booksellers’ Quarter in Leipzig: whole cart-loads of books, printed but not bound, disappearing into one especially fine House: the King’s Library.

Jack crutched his way up one side of the street and down the other until he found the House of the Golden Frigate, adorned with a sculpture of a warship. This had obviously been made by an artisan who’d never come near the ocean, as it was queerly distorted and had an unlikely profusion of gun-decks. But it looked good. An Italian gentleman was there on the front stoop, worrying a hand-wrought iron key of many curious protuberances into a matching keyhole.

“Signor Cozzi?” Jack inquired.

“Si,” replied he, looking only a little surprised to be accosted by a one-legged wanderer.

“A message from Amsterdam,” Jack said in French, “from your cousin.” But this last was unnecessary, as Signor Cozzi had already recognized the seal. Leaving the key jutting from the lock, he broke it open right there and scanned a few lines of beautiful whirling script. A woman with a cask of ink on her back, noting his interest in written documents, shouted a business proposal to him, and before he could deflect it, there was a second woman with a cask of vastly superior and yet far cheaper ink on her back; the two of them got into an argument, and Signor Cozzi took advantage of it to slip inside, beckoning Jack in with a trick of his large brown eyes. Jack could not resist turning around, now, to look behind him for the first time since he had entered the city. He caught sight of a sworded man in a somber sort of cape, just in the act of turning around to slink away: this policeman had spent half the morning tailing a perfectly legitimate banker’s messenger. “You are being followed?” Signor Cozzi inquired, as if asking Jack whether he was breathing in and out.

“Not now,” Jack answered.

It was another one of those places consisting of bancas with large padlocked books, and heavy chests on the floor. “How do you know my cousin?” Cozzi asked, making it clear he wasn’t going to invite Jack to take a seat. Cozzi himself sat down behind a desk and began to pull quills out of a little jar and examine their points.

“A lady friend of mine has, uh, made his acquaintance. When he learned, through her, that I was about to journey to Paris, he pressed that letter on me.”

Cozzi wrote something down, then unlocked a desk-drawer and began to rummage through it, picking out coins. “It says that if the seal has been tampered with I should send you to the galleys.”

“I assumed as much.”

“If the seal is intact, and you get it to me within fourteen days of the date it was written, I’m to give you a louis d’or. Ten days gets you two. Fewer than ten, an additional louis d’or for each day you shaved off the trip.” Cozzi dropped five gold coins into Jack’s hand. “How the hell did you do it? No one travels from Amsterdam to Paris in seven days.”

“Think of it as a trade secret,” Jack said.

“You are dead on your feet—go somewhere and sleep,” Cozzi said. “And when you are ready to return to Amsterdam, come to me, and maybe I’ll have a message for you to take to my cousin.”

“What makes you think I’m going back?”

Cozzi smiled for the first time. “The look in your eye when you spoke of your lady friend. You are mad with love, no?”

“Mad with syphilis, actually,” Jack said, “but still mad enough to go back.”

WITH THE MONEY HE’D BROUGHT with him, and the money he’d earned, Jack could have stayed somewhere decent—but he didn’t know how to find such a place, or how to behave once he found one. The last year had been an education in how little having money really mattered. A rich Vagabond was a Vagabond still, and ’twas common knowledge that King Charles, during the Interregnum, had lived without money in Holland. So Jack wandered across town to the district called the Marais. Movement was now a matter of forcing his body into narrow, ephemeral gaps between other pedestrians—primarily vendors, as of (in some districts) peaux de lapins (bundles of rabbit-pelts), baskets (these people carried enormous baskets filled with smaller baskets), hats (small uprooted trees with hats dangling from branch-ends), linge (a woman all adrape with lace and scarves), and (as he came into the Marais) chaudronniers with pots and pans impaled by their handles on a stick. Vinegar-sellers with casks on wheels, musicians with bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, cake-sellers with broad flat baskets of steaming confections that made Jack light in the head.

Jack got into the heart of the Marais, found a pissing-corner where he could stand still, and scanned the air above the people’s heads for half an hour or so, and listened, until he heard a particular cry. Everyone in the street was shouting something, usually the name of whatever they were selling, and for the first couple of hours it had just been Bedlam to Jack. But after a while Jack’s ear learned to pick out individual voices—something like hearing drum-beats or bugle-calls in battle. Parisians, he knew, had developed the skill to a high degree, just as the Lieutenant of Police could scan a torrent of people coming in through a gate at dawn and pick out the Vagabond. Jack was just able to hear a high-pitched voice crying “Mort-aux-rats! Mort-aux-rats!” and then it was easy enough to turn his head and see a long pole, like a pike, being carried at an angle over someone’s shoulder, the corpses of a couple of dozen rats dangling from it by their tails, their freshness an unforgeable guarantee that this man had been working recently.

Jack shoved his way into the throng, using the crutch now like a burglar’s jimmy to widen small openings, and after a few minutes’ rattling pursuit caught up with St.-George and clapped him on the shoulder, like a policeman. Many would drop everything and sprint away when so handled, but one did not become a legend in the rat-killer’s trade if one was easily startled. St.-George turned around, making the rats on his pole swing wide, like perfectly synchronized pole-dancers at a fun-fair, and recognized him. Calmly, but not coldly. “Jacques—so you did escape from those German witches.”

“’Twas nothing,” Jack said, trying to cover his astonishment, then his pride, that word of this had spread as far as Paris. “They were fools. Helpless. Now, if you had been chasing me—”

“Now you have returned to civilization—why?” Steely curiosity being another good rat-killer trait. St.-George had curly hair the color of sand, and hazel eyes, and had probably looked angelic as a boy. Maturity had elongated his cheekbones and (according to legend) other parts of his body in a way that was not so divine—his head was funnel-shaped, tapering to a pair of pursed lips, staring eyes that looked as if they were painted on. “You know that the passe-volante trade has been quashed—why are you here?”

“To renew my friendship with you, St.-George.”

“You have been riding on horseback—I can smell it.”

Jack decided to let this pass. “How can you smell anything except man-shit here?”

St.-George sniffed the air. “Shit? Where? Who has been shitting?” This, being a sort of joke, was a signal that Jack could now offer to buy St.-George something, as a token of friendship. After some negotiations, St.-George agreed to be the recipient of Jack’s generosity—but not because he needed it—only because it was inherent in human nature that one must from time to time give things away, and at such times, one needed someone to give things away to, and part of being a good friend was to be that someone, as needed. Then there were negotiations about what Jack was going to buy. St.-George’s objective was to figure out how much money Jack was carrying—Jack’s was to keep St.-George wanting to know more. In the end, for tactical reasons, St.-George agreed to allow Jack to buy him some coffee—but it had to be from a particular vendor named Christopher.

They were half an hour tracking him down. “He is not a tall man—”

“Hard to find, then.”

“But he wears a red fez with a brave golden tassel—”

“He’s a Turk?”

“Of course! I told you he sold coffee, didn’t I?”

“A Turk named—Christopher?”

“Don’t play the clown, Jacques—remember that I know you.”

“But—?”

St.-George rolled his eyes, and snapped, “All of the Turks who sell coffee in the streets are actually Armenians dressed up as Turks!”

“I’m sorry, St.-George, I didn’t know.”

“I should not be so harsh,” St.-George admitted. “When you left Paris, coffee was not fashionable yet—not until the Turks fled from Vienna, and left mountains of it behind.”

“It’s been fashionable in England since I was a boy.”

“If it is in England, it is not fashionable, but a curiosity,” St.-George said through clenched teeth.

Onwards they searched, St.-George wending like a ferret through the crowd, passing round, e.g., furniture-sellers carrying fantastic complexes of stools and chairs all roped together on their backs, milk-men with pots on their heads, d’oublies carrying unlit lanterns, and bent under enormous dripping barrels of shit; knife-grinders trundling their wheels. Jack had to put the crutch to much rude use, and considered taking out the sword. Eliza had been right—Paris was retail—funny she’d known this without ever having set foot in the city, while Jack, who’d lived here, on and off, for years…

Best to keep his mind on St.-George. Only the rat-pole prevented Jack from losing him. Though it helped that people were always running out of shops, or shouting from windows, trying to engage his services. The only people who could afford to keep fixed shops were members of a few princely trades, viz. makers of dresses, hats, and wigs. But St.-George treated all men alike, asking them a series of penetrating questions and then firmly sending them home. “Even noblemen and savants are as peasants in their understanding of rats,” St.-George said incredulously. “How can I be of service to them when their thinking is so pre-theoretical?”

“Well, as a start, you could get rid of their rats…”

“One does not get rid of rats! You are no better than these people!”

“Sorry, St.-George. I—”

“Does anyone ever get rid of Vagabonds?”

“Individual ones, certainly. But—”

“Individual to you—but to a Gentleman, all the same, like rats, n’est-ce pas? One must live with rats.”

“Except for the ones dangling from your pole—?”

“It is like the exemplary hanging. The heads on the spikes before the city-gates.”

“To scare les autres?”

“Just so, Jacques. These were, to rats, as you, my friend, are to Vagabonds.”

“You are too kind—really, you flatter me, St.-George.”

“These were the cleverest—the ones who would find the smallest of holes, who would explore the drain-pipes, who would say to the common rats: ‘gnaw through this grate, mes amis—it will shorten your teeth to be sure—but once through, such things you will feast on!’ These were the savants, the Magellans—”

“And they’re dead.”

“They displeased me too many times, these did. Many others, I allow to live—to breed, even!”

“No!”

“In certain cellars—unbeknownst to the apothecaries and par-fumiers who live above—I have rat seraglios where my favorites are allowed to procreate. Some lines I have bred for a hundred generations. As a breeder of canines creates dogs fierce against strangers, but obedient to the master—”

“You create rats that obey St.-George.”

“Pourquoi non?”

“But how can you be so certain that the rats are not breeding you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your father was mort-aux-rats, no?”

“And his father before him. Killed in plagues, may God have mercy on their souls.”

“So you believe. But perhaps the rats killed them.”

“You anger me. But your theory is not without promise—”

“Perhaps you, St.-George, are the result of a breeding program—you have been allowed to live, and flourish, and have children of your own, because you have a theory that is congenial to the rats.”

“Still, I kill very many.”

“But those are the stupid ones—without introspection.”

“I understand, Jacques. For you, I would serve as mort-aux-rats and would do it for free. But these—” he made a flicking gesture at a man in an excellent wig who was trying to call him over to a shop. The man looked crestfallen—temporarily. But then St.-George softened, and moved in the direction of a narrow doorway—more hatch than door—set into the wall of this wig-maker’s shop, next to his open shop-window. This suddenly burst open, and a round-bodied five-foot-tall man with a vigorous moustache and curly-toed slippers emerged from a stairway no wider than he was, preceded by a smoking and steaming apparatus of hammered copper that was strapped to his body.

When Christopher (for it was none other) stood in the sun, which he always tried to do, the golden light gleamed off the copper and hung in the steam and glittered off his golden fez-tassel and shone in his embroidered slippers and brass buttons and made him very magnificent, a walking mosque. He switched among French, Spanish, and English in mid-sentence, and he claimed to know all about Jack Shaftoe (whom he addressed as l’Emmerdeur), and tried to give him coffee for free. He had just refilled his tanks upstairs, he explained, and was heavy burdened. St.-George had warned that Christopher would make this offer “because he will want to calculate how much money you are carrying,” and together they had rehearsed a few scenarios of how the coffee-price negotiation might play out. The plan was that Jack would run their side of the dealings, and that St.-George would hover and, at just the right moment, divulge that Jack was looking for a place to stay. Jack had never said as much to St.-George, but then it was not necessary; this was why one approached St.-George upon one’s arrival in the Marais. His work took him into every building—especially to the parts of buildings where people like Jack were apt to stay.

To accept coffee for free was to demean oneself; to overpay was to publicly shame Christopher, by implying that he was the sort of man who cared about something as low and dirty as money; to merely agree on a fair price was to proclaim oneself a simpleton, and accuse Christopher of the same. Arduous haggling, however, laid bare the soul and made the participants blood-brothers. In any event the matter was settled—to the relief of the wig-maker, who stood wringing his hands as this one-legged Vagabond, fat pseudo-Turk, and rat-catcher shouted at each other directly in front of his shop, scaring away business. Meanwhile St.-George was striking a deal of his own with the wig-maker. Jack was too busy to eavesdrop, but he gathered that St.-George was using his influence to get Jack a room, or at least a corner, upstairs.

Just so: after a ceremonial cup of coffee in the street, Jack bid adieu to St.-George (who had immediate responsibilities in the cellar) and to Christopher (who had coffee to vend), stepped through the tiny door, and began to ascend stairs—past the wig-maker’s shop on the ground level, and then, on the first story, his dwelling—the fine parts of it anyway, such as parlour and dining-room. Then a story for the family bedchambers. Then a story where his servants had their quarters. Then one he had rented out to a tradesman of lesser rank. As the storys mounted, the quality plunged. In the bottom levels the walls and steps alike were solid stone, but this gave way to wooden steps and plaster walls. As Jack continued to climb, the plaster developed cracks, then began to bulge and flake off the lath. At the same time, the stair-steps became creaky, and began to flex beneath his weight. In the top story there was no plaster on the walls at all, just birds’ nests of straw and wattle spanning gaps among timbers. Here, in one large room interrupted by a few struts to shore up the roof, lived Christopher’s family: countless Armenians sleeping and sitting on squarish bales of coffee-beans. A ladder in the corner gave access to the roof, whereupon a sort of lean-to shack, called by the grand name of entresol, had been improvised. A sailor-hammock hung corner-to-corner. Several bricks were shoved together to form a pad where a fire could be lit. On the tile roof downhill of the entresol, a tissue of brown streakage gave a hint as to where previous occupants had done their shitting and pissing.

Jack vaulted into the hammock and discovered that previous tenants had thoughtfully punched various peep-holes through the adjoining walls. It would be a drafty hovel in winter, but Jack liked it: he had clear views, and open escape-routes, across roof-tops in several directions. The building across the street had a garret, no farther away from Jack’s entresol than one room in a house was from another, but separated from him by a crevasse sixty or seventy feet deep. This was more typical of the sort of place Jack would expect to dwell (though he could almost hear St.-George telling him that, now that he was a man of wealth, he must set his sights higher). So he could hear the conversations, and smell the food and the bodies, of the people across the way. But, lying there in his hammock, he got to watch them as if their life were a play, and he in the audience. It appeared to be the usual sort of high-altitude bolt-hole for prostitutes on the run from pimps, runaway servants, women pregnant out of wedlock, and youthful peasants who’d walked to Paris expecting to find something.

Jack tried to nap, but it was the middle of the afternoon and he could not sleep with Paris happening all around him. So he set out across the roof-tops, memorizing the turns he’d take, the leaps he’d make, the crevices he’d hide in, the places he’d stand and fight, if the Lieutenant of Police ever came for him. This led to his tromping over numerous roof-tops, setting off great commotions and panics among many garret-dwellers who lived in fear of raids. Mostly he had the roof-tops to himself. There were a few Vagabondish-looking children moving in packs, and a large number of roof-rats. On almost every block there were tattered ropes, or frail tree-branches, bridging gaps over streets, not strong enough for humans, but enthusiastically used by rats. In other places the ropes lay coiled neatly on roofs, the sticks rested in rain-gutters. Jack reckoned that they must have been put up by St.-George, who used them to channel and control the migrations of rats, as a general might tear down bridges in one part of a disputed territory while improvising new ones elsewhere.

Eventually Jack descended to street-level, and found that he’d arrived in a better part of town, near the river. He headed, without thinking about it, toward his old playground, the Pont-Neuf. The street was a wiser place for him to be—persons who clambered about on roof-tops were not well thought of—but it was dark, and confined between the stone walls of the buildings. Even the view down the street was closed off by balconies jutting out more than halfway across it from either side. The houses all had great arched portals closed off by ironbound fortress-doors. Sometimes a servant would have one open just at the moment Jack happened by. He’d slow down and look through and get a glimpse down a cool shaded passageway into a courtyard lit with sun, half filled in by landslides of flowers, watered by gurgling fountains. Then the door would be shut. Paris to Jack and most others, then, was a network of deep trenches with vertical walls, and a few drafty battlements atop those walls—otherwise, the world’s largest collection of closed and locked doors.

He walked by a statue of King Looie as Roman general in stylish Classical armor with exposed navel. On one side of the pedestal, Winged Victory was handing out loaves to the poor, and on the other, an angel with a flaming sword, and a shield decorated with a trinity of fleur-de-lis, backed up by a cross-swinging, chalice-and-wafer-brandishing Holy Virgin, was assaulting and crushing diverse semi-reptilian demons who were toppling backwards onto a mess of books labelled (though Jack could not read, he knew this) with such names as M. Luther, J. Wycliffe, John Hus, John Calvin.

The sky was opening. Sensing he was near the Seine, Jack lunged forward and finally reached the Pont-Neuf. “Pont” was French for an artificial isthmus of stone, spanning a river, with arches beneath to let the water flow through—pylons standing in the flow, dividing it with their sharp blades; atop, a paved street lined with buildings like any other in Paris, so that you wouldn’t know you were crossing over a river unless a Parisian told you so. But in this one respect the Pont-Neuf was different: it had no buildings, just hundreds of carved heads of pagan gods and goddesses, and so you could see from there. Jack went and did some seeing. Many others had the same idea. Upstream, late-afternoon sunlight set the backs of the buildings on the Pont au Change to glowing; a steady rain of shit flew out of the windows, and was swallowed by the Seine. The river’s crisp stone banks were occluded by a permanent jam of small boats and barges. Newly arriving ones attracted surging riots of men hoping to be hired as porters. Some boats carried blocks of stone that had been cut to shape by freemasons working out in the open, somewhere upstream; these boats pulled up along special quays equipped with cranes powered by pairs of large stepped wheels in which men climbed forever without ascending, turning a gear-train that reeled in a cable that passed over a pulley at the end of a tree-sized arm, hoisting the blocks up out of the boats. The entire crane—wheels, men, and all—could be rotated around and the block dropped into a heavy cart.

Elsewhere, the same amount of labor might’ve made a keg of butter or a week’s worth of firewood; here it was spent on raising a block several inches, so that it could be carted into the city and raised by other workers, higher and higher, so that Parisians could have rooms higher than they were wide, and windows taller than the trees they looked out at. Paris was a city of stone, the color of bone, beautiful and hard—you could dash yourself against it and never leave a mark. It was built, so far as Jack could tell, on the principle that there was nothing you couldn’t accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years. Off to the right, as he looked upstream, was the Île de la Cité, crowded and looming with important stuff: the twin, square towers of Notre Dame, and the twin, round towers of the Conciergerie, holding out prospects of salvation and damnation like a mountebank telling him to pick a card, any card. The Palais de Justice was there, too, a white stone monster decorated with eagles, ready to pounce.

A dog ran down the bridge trying to escape from a length of chain that had been tied to its tail. Jack strolled to the other side of the river, shrugging off innumerable mountebanks, beggars, and prostitutes. Turning around, he was able to look downstream and across the river toward the Louvre, where the King had lived until Versailles had gotten finished. In the garden of Tuileries, which was now falling into the long shadow of the city’s western wall, trees, planted in neat rows, were being tortured and racked by the King’s gardeners for any deviation from correct form.

Jack was leaning back against a stone wall that had been warmed by the sun, when he heard a faint rustling just behind his head. Turning around, he saw the impression of a small creature, crushed flat, and suspended in the rock—a common enough sight in this type of stone, and known to be a trick of Nature, as when animals were born joined at the hip, or with limbs growing out of the wrong places. The Doctor had another theory: that these had been living beings, trapped and immobilized, imprisoned forever. Now with the weight of all the stone in Paris seeming to press down on him, Jack believed it. He heard that faint rustle again, and scanning the wall carefully, finally saw movement there: between a couple of old scallop-shells and fish-bones, he saw a small human figure, half trapped in the stone, and struggling to get out of it. Peering carefully at this creature, no larger than his little finger, he saw that it was Eliza.

Jack turned away and walked back across the Pont-Neuf toward his entresol in the Marais. He tried to stare only at the stone paving-blocks below his feet, but sometimes there were moving creatures trapped in them, too. So he would look up and see peddlers selling human heads—then avert his gaze into the bright sky and see an angel with a flaming sword, like a kienspan, bearing down on the city—then he’d try to concentrate instead on the carved gods’ heads that adorned the Pont-Neuf, and they would come alive, and cry out to him for release from this gibbet of stone.

Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he’d picked the right city for it.

Paris

WINTER OF 1684–1685

THE ARMENIANS LIVING ABOVE THE wig-maker and below Jack did not appear to have any intermediate settings between killing strangers and adopting them into the family. As Jack had come recommended by St.-George, and had further established his bona fides by bargaining shrewdly with Christopher over coffee, they could not very well kill him—so: Jack became the thirteenth of thirteen brothers. Albeit something of an estranged, idiot half-brother, who lived in the entresol, came and went at odd times and in odd ways, and did not speak the language. But this did not trouble the matriarch, Madame Esphahnian. Nothing troubled her, except for suggestions that anything was troubling her, or could theoretically trouble her—if you suggested that anything was troubling her, she would look taken aback, and remind you that she had borne and raised twelve sons—so what, again, was the difficulty? Christopher and the others had learned simply not to bother her. Jack, likewise, quickly got into the habit of entering and leaving his shack via roof-tops so that he would not have to say good-bye to Madame Esphahnian when he left, and hello when he returned. She spoke no English, of course, and just enough French to enable Jack to impregnate her mind with colorful, grotesque misunderstandings whenever he tried to say anything.

His stay in Paris was typical of his wanderings: the first day was a great event, but next thing he knew it was a month later, then two months. By the time he thought seriously about leaving, it was not a good time of year to travel northwards. The streets had become even more crowded, now with an influx of hairy firewood-sellers, from parts of France where being torn apart by wild beasts was still a major cause of mortality. The wood-sellers knocked people down like bowling-pins, and were a danger to everyone, especially when they were fighting with each other. The garret-dwellers across the street from Jack began selling themselves as galley-slaves, just to get warm.

The strange visions that had made Jack’s first day in Paris so memorable, went away after he had gotten a night’s sleep, and usually did not come back unless he got very tired, or drunk. Lying in his hammock and peering across at the garret, he had reason, every day, to thank St.-George for having put him up in a place that did not have so many outbreaks of typhus, sudden raids by the Lieutenant of Police, stillborn babies, and other annoyances: he saw young women—runaway servants—showing up one day only to be dragged out the next, and (he assumed) taken to the city gates to be cropped, whipped, and spat out into the countryside. Either that, or else some private arrangement would be made, and then Jack would be subjected to the sounds and (depending on wind) aromas of some police inspector satisfying himself carnally, in a way no longer attainable to Jack.

He put the ostrich plumes up for sale, and went about it in his favorite way: getting someone else to do it. After he’d been hanging around for a fortnight, and showed no signs of getting ready to leave, Artan (oldest of the Esphahnian brothers who was actually resident there at the time) inquired as to what Jack intended to do, actually, in Paris—making it clear that if the answer was “cat-burglary” or “serial rape” the Esphahnians would not think any the less of him—they just needed to know. To demonstrate this open-mindedness, Artan brought Jack up to date on the family saga.

It seemed that Jack, here, had blundered into the fourth or fifth act of a drama—neither a comedy nor a tragedy, but a history—that had begun when Monsieur Esphahnian père had sailed the first ship of coffee, ever, into Marseille in 1644. It was worth a lot of money. The larger Esphahnian family, which was headquartered in Persia, had plowed a lot of their India trading profits into buying this boat-load of beans in Mocha and getting it up the Red Sea and the Nile to Alexandria and thence to France. Anyway—Pa Esphahnian sold the beans, realized a handsome profit, but realized it in reals—Spanish money—pieces of eight. Why? Because there was an extreme currency shortage in France and he couldn’t have taken payment in French money if he’d wanted to—there was none. And why was that? Because (and here it was necessary to imagine an Armenian pounding himself on the head with both hands—imbécile!) the Spanish mines in Mexico were producing ludicrous amounts of silver—

“Yeah, I know about this,” Jack said, but Artan could not be stopped: there were piles of silver lying on the ground in Porto Belo, he insisted—consequently its value, compared to that of gold, was plunging—so in Spain (where they used silver money) there was inflation, because it was not worth as much as it had been, whereas in France all gold coins were being hoarded, because gold was expected to be worth more in the future. So now Monsieur Esphahnian had lots of rapidly depreciating silver. He should have sailed to the Levant where silver was always in demand, but he didn’t. Instead he sailed for Amsterdam expecting to make some kind of unspecified, brilliant commodities deal that would more than recoup his exchange-rate losses. But (as luck would have it) his ship ran aground, and he got his nuts caught in the mangle of the Thirty Years’ War. Sweden happened to be just in the act of conquering Holland when Monsieur Esphahnian’s ship eased up onto the sandbank and stopped moving; and, to make a long story short, the Esphahnian dynastic fortune was last seen northbound, strapped to the ass of a Swedish pack-horse.

This, by the way, was all first-act material—before the first act, really—if it were a play, it would open with the young Monsieur Esphahnian, huddled in the beached wreckage of a ship, spewing expository pentameter, gazing miserably off into the audience as he pretended to watch the Swedish column dwindle into the distance.

The upshot, anyway, was that Monsieur Esphahnian, at that point, fell from the graces of his own family. He somehow made his way back to Marseille, collected Madame Esphahnian and her (already!) three sons, and perhaps a daughter or two (daughters tended to be shipped east at puberty), and, in time, drifted as far as Paris (end of Act I), where, ever since, they’d all been trying to work their way off the shit list of the rest of the family in Isfahan. Primarily they did this by retailing coffee, but they would move just about anything—

“Ostrich plumes?” Jack blurted, not really trusting himself to be devious and crafty around such as the Esphahnians. And so at that point the selling of those ostrich plumes, which Jack could’ve accomplished in a trice a year and a half ago in a thieves’ market in Linz, became a global conspiracy, yoking together Esphahnians as far away as London, Alexandria, Mocha, and Isfahan, as letters were sent to all of those places and more inquiring as to what ostrich-plumes were selling for, whether the trend was up or down, what distinguished a Grade A ostrich-plume from a B, how a B could be made to look like an A, et cetera. While they waited for the intelligence to come back, Jack had very little to do on the plume front.

His addled brain forgot about Turk for a while. When he finally went back to the livery stable, the owner was just about to sell him off to pay for all the hay he’d been eating. Jack paid the debt, and began to think seriously about how to turn the war-horse into cash.

NOW IN THE OLD DAYS it was like this: he would go and loiter around the Place Dauphine, which was the sharp downstream tip of the Île de la Cité, spang in the center of the Pont-Neuf. It was the royal execution grounds and so there was always something to see there. Even when there were no executions underway, there were mountebanks, jugglers, puppeteers, fire-eaters; failing that, you could at least gawk at the dangling remains of people who’d been executed last week. But on days of big military parades, the aristocrats who were supposedly in command—at least, who were being paid by King Looie to be in command—of various regiments would issue from their pieds-à-terre and hôtels particuliers on the Right Bank and come across the Pont-Neuf, recruiting vagrants along the way to bring their regiments up to strength. The Place Dauphine would become a vigorous body-market for a few hours. Rusty firelocks would be passed out, money would change hands, and the new-made regiments would march south over to the Left Bank, to the cheers of the patriotic onlookers. They’d follow those aristocrats’ high-stepping chargers out through the city gates, there at the carrefours where the meaner sorts of criminals dangled unconscious from the whipping-posts, and they would come into St. Germain des Pres, outside the walls: a large quadrangle of monks’ residences surrounded by open land, where huge fairs of rare goods would sometimes convene. Following the Seine downstream, they’d pass by a few noble families’ hotels, but in general the buildings got lower and simpler and gave way to vegetable- and flower-patches tended by upscale peasants. The river was mostly blocked from view by the piles of timber and baled goods that lined the Left Bank. But after a while, it would bend around to the south, and they would cross the green before Les Invalides—surrounded by its own wall and moat—and arrive at the Champs de Mars where King Looie would be, with all of his pomp, having ridden up from Versailles to inspect his troops—which, in those pre-Martinet days, basically meant counting them. So the passe-volantes (as people like Jack were called) would stand up (or if unable to stand, prop themselves up on someone who could) and be counted. The aristocrats would get paid off, and the passe-volantes would fan out into innumerable Left Bank taverns and bordellos and spend their money. Jack had become aware of this particular line of work during a ride from Dunkirk to Waterloo with Bob, who had spent some time campaigning under John Churchill, alongside the French, in Germany, laying waste to various regions that had the temerity to lie adjacent to La France. Bob had complained bitterly that many French regiments had practically zero effective strength because of this practice. To Jack it had sounded like an opportunity only a half-wit would pass up.

In any case, this procedure was the central tent-pole holding up Jack’s understanding of how Paris worked. Applied to the problem of selling Turk, it told him that somewhere in the southern part of the Marais, near the river, there lived rich men who had no choice to be in the market for war-horses—or, if they had any brains in their heads at all, for stud-horses capable of siring new ones. Jack talked to the man who managed the livery stable, and he followed hay-wains coming in from the countryside, and he tailed aristocrats riding back from the military parades at the Champs de Mars, and learned that there was a horse-market par excellence at the Place Royale.

Now this was one of those places that Jack’s kind of person knew only as a void in the middle of the city, sealed off by gates through which an attentive loiterer could sometimes get a flash of sunlit green. By trying to penetrate it from all sides, Jack learnt that it was square, with great barn-doors at the four cardinal compass-points, and high grand buildings rising above each of these gates. Around its fringes were a number of hôtels, which in Paris meant private compounds of rich nobles. Twice a week, the gates were jammed solid with carts bringing hay and oats in, and manure out, and an astounding number of fine horses being burnished by grooms. Some horse-trading went on in surrounding streets, but Jack could plainly see that this was little more than a flea-market compared to whatever was going on in the Place Royale.

He bribed a farmer to smuggle him into the place in a hay-wain. When it was safe to get out, the farmer poked him in the ribs with the handle of a pitchfork, and Jack wriggled and slid out onto the ground—the first time he had stood on growing grass since he’d reached Paris.

The Place Royale was found to be a park shaded by chestnut trees (in theory, that is; when Jack saw it the leaves had fallen, and been raked off). In the center was a statue of King Looie’s dear old pop, Looie the Thirteenth—on horseback, naturally. The whole square was surrounded by vaulted colonnades, like the trading-courts at Leipzig and the Stock Exchange at Amsterdam, but these were very wide and high, with barn-doors giving way to private courtyards beyond. All of the gates, and all of the arcades, were large enough, not merely for a single rider, but for a coach drawn by four or six horses. It was, then, like a city within the city, built entirely for people so rich and important that they lived on horseback, or in private coaches.

Only that could explain the size of the horse-market that was raging all around him when Jack climbed out of the hay-wain. It was as crowded with horses as the streets of Paris were with people—the only exceptions being a few roped-off areas where the merchandise could prance around and be judged and graded by the buyers. Every horse that Jack saw, he would’ve remembered as the finest horse he’d ever seen, if he’d encountered it on a road in England or Germany. Here, not only were such horses common, but they were meticulously groomed and brushed almost to the point of being polished, their manes and tails coiffed, and they’d been taught to do tricks. There were horses meant to be saddled, horses in matched sets of two and four and even six, for drawing coaches, and—in one corner—chargers: war-horses for parading beneath the eyes of the King on the Champ de Mars. Jack went thataway and had a look. He did not see a single mount there that he would’ve traded Turk for, if he were about to ride into battle. But these were in excellent condition and well shod and groomed compared to Turk, who had been languishing in a livery stable for weeks, with only the occasional walk round the stable-yard for exercise.

Jack knew how to fix that. But before he left the Place Royale, he raised his sights for a few minutes, and spent a while looking at the buildings that rose over the park—trying to learn something about his customers-to-be.

Unlike most of Paris, these were brick, which warmed Jack’s heart strangely, reminding him of Merry England. The four great buildings rising over the gates at the cardinal points of the compass had enormous steep rooves, two and three stories high, with balconies and lace-curtained dormers, currently all shut up against the cold—but Jack could well imagine how a wealthy horse-fancier would have his Paris pied-à-terre here, so that he could keep an eye on the market by gazing out his windows.

In one of the great squares hereabouts—Jack had lost track of all of them—he’d seen a statue of King Looie riding off to war, with blank spaces on the pedestal to chisel the names of victories he hadn’t won yet, and of countries he hadn’t captured. Some buildings, likewise, had empty niches: waiting (as everyone in Paris must understand) to receive the statues of the generals who would win those victories for him. Jack needed to find a man whose ambition was to stand forever in one of those niches, and he needed to convince him that he was more likely to win battles with Turk, or Turk’s offspring, between his legs. But first he needed to get Turk in some kind of decent physical condition, and that meant riding him.

He was on his way out of the Place Royale, walking under the gate on its south side, when behind him a commotion broke out. The hiss of iron wheel-rims grinding over paving-stones, the crisp footfalls of horses moving in unnatural unison, the shouts of footmen and of bystanders, warning all to make way. Jack was still getting about with the crutch (he daren’t let the sword out of his sight, and couldn’t bear it openly). So when he didn’t move fast enough, a burly servant in powder-blue livery crushed him out of the way and sent him tumbling across the pavement so that his “good” leg plunged knee-deep in a gutter filled with stagnating shit.

Jack looked up and saw the Four Horses of the Apocalypse bearing down on him—or so he imagined for a moment, because it seemed that they all had glowing red eyes. But as they went past, this vision cleared from his mind, and he decided that their eyes, actually, had been pink. Four horses, all white as clouds, save for pink eyes and mottled hooves, harnessed in white leather, pulling a rare coach, sculpted and painted to look like a white sea-shell riding a frothy wave over the blue ocean, all encrusted with garlands and laurels, cherubs and mermaids, in gold.

Those horses put him in mind of Eliza’s story; for she had been swapped for one such, back in Algiers.

Jack proceeded crosstown to Les Halles where the fishwives—pretending to be dismayed by the shit on his leg—flung fish-heads at him while shouting some sort of pun on par fume.

Jack inquired whether it ever happened that some rich man’s servant would come around specifically to purchase rotten fish for his master.

It was clear, from the looks on their faces, that he had struck deep with this question—but then, looking him up and down, one of them made a certain guttural jeering noise, and then the fishwives all sneered and told him to hobble back to Les Invalides with his ridiculous questions. “I am not a veteran—what idiot goes out and fights battles for rich men?” Jack answered.

They liked that, but were in a cautious mood. “What are you then?” “Passe-volante!” “Vagabond!”

Jack decided to try what the Doctor would call an experiment: “Not any Vagabond,” Jack said, “here stands Half-Cocked Jack.”

“L’Emmerdeur!” gasped a younger, and not quite so gorgon-like, fishwife, almost before he’d gotten it out of his mouth.

There was a moment of radical silence. But then the guttural noise again. “You are the fourth Vagabond to make that claim in the last month—”

“And the least convincing—”

“L’Emmerdeur is a King among Vagabonds. Seven feet tall.”

“Goes armed all the time, like a Gentleman.”

“Carries a jeweled scimitar he tore from the hands of the Grand Turk himself—”

“Has magic spells to burn witches and confound Bishops.”

“He’s not a broken-down cripple with one leg withered and the other dipped in merde!”

Jack kicked off his fouled pants, and then his drawers, revealing his Credential. Then, to prove he wasn’t really a cripple, he flung the crutch down, and began to dance a bare-assed jig. The fishwives could not decide between swooning and rioting. When they recovered their self-possession, they began to fling handfuls of blackened copper deniers at him. This attracted beggars and street-musicians, and one of the latter began to play accompanying music on a cornemuse whilst shuffling around racking the worthless coins into a little pile with his feet, and kicking the beggars in the head as necessary.

Having now verified his identity by personal inspection, each of the fishwives had to prance out, shedding glitt’ry showers of fish-scales from their flouncing, gut-stained skirts, and dance with Jack—who had no patience for this, but did take advantage of it to whisper into any ear that came close enough, that if he ever had any money, he’d give some of it to whomever could tell him the name of the noble personage who liked to eat rotten fish. But before he could say it more than two or three times, he had to grab his drawers and run away, because a commotion at the other end of Les Halles told him that the Lieutenant of Police was on his way to make a show of force, and to extract whatever bribes, sexual favors, and/or free oysters he could get from the fishwives in exchange for turning a blind eye to this unforgivable brouhaha.

From there Jack proceeded to the livery stable, got Turk, and also rented two other horses. He rode to the House of the Golden Frigate on Rue Vivienne, and let it be known that he was on his way down to Lyons—any messages?

This made Signor Cozzi very pleased. His place was crowded today with tense Italians scribbling down messages and bills of exchange, and porters hauling what looked like money-boxes down from the attic and up from the cellar, and there was a sparse crowd of street-messengers and competing bankers in the street outside, exchanging speculations as to what was going on in there—what did Cozzi know that no one else did? Or was it just a bluff?

Signor Cozzi scrawled something on a scrap of paper and did not bother to seal it. He came up and lunged for Jack’s hand, because Jack was not reaching out fast enough, and shoved the message into his palm, saying, “To Lyons! I don’t care how many horses you kill getting there. What are you waiting for?”

Actually Jack was waiting to say he didn’t particularly want to kill his horse, but Signor Cozzi was not in a mood for sentiment. So Jack whirled, ran out of the building, and mounted Turk. “Watch your back!” someone called after him, “word on the street is that L’Emmerdeur is in town!”

“I heard he was on his way,” Jack said, “at the head of a Vagabond-Army.”

It would have been amusing to stay around and continue this, but Cozzi was standing in the doorway glaring at him, and so, riding Turk and leading the rented horses behind him, Jack galloped down Rue Vivienne in what he hoped was dramatic style, and hung the first available left. This ended up taking him right back through Les Halles—so he made a point of galloping through the fish-market, where the police were turning things upside-down searching for a one-legged, short-penised pedestrian. Jack winked at that one young fishwife who’d caught his eye, touching off a thrill that spread like fire through gunpowder, and then he was gone, off into the Marais—right past the Place Royale. He maneuvered round the trundling manure-carts all the way to the Bastille: just one great sweaty rock pocked with a few tiny windows, with grenadiers roaming around on top—the highest and thickest in a city of walls. It sat in a moat fed by a short canal leading up from the Seine. The bridge over the canal was crowded, so Jack rode down to the river and then turned to follow the right bank out of town, and thereby left Paris behind him. He was afraid that Turk would be exhausted already. But when the war-horse saw open fields ahead, he surged forward, yanking on the lead and eliciting angry whinnies from the spare horses following behind.

To Lyons was a long journey, almost all the way to Italy (which was, he reckoned, why the Italian banks were situated there), or, if you wanted to look at it that way, almost all the way to Marseille. The countryside was divided up into innumerable separate pays with their own tolls, which were commonly exacted at inns controlling the important cross-roads. Jack, changing horses from time to time, seemed to be racing the whole way against a slippery narrow black coach that scuttled down the road like a scorpion, drawn by four horses. It was a good race, meaning that the lead changed hands many times. But in the end, those inns, and the need to change horse-teams frequently, were too much of an impediment for the coach, and Jack was the first to ride down into Lyons with the news—whatever it was.

Another Genoese banker in vivid clothing received Signor Cozzi’s note. Jack had to track him down in a market-place unlike any in Paris, where things like charcoal, bales of old clothing, and rolls of undyed fabric were for sale in large quantities. The banker paid Jack out of his pocket, and read the note.

“You are English?”

“Aye, what of it?”

“Your King is dead.” With that the banker went briskly to his office, whence other messengers galloped away within the hour, headed for Genoa and Marseilles. Jack stabled his horses and wandered round Lyons amazed, munching some dried figs he bought at a retail market. The only King he’d ever known was dead, and England was, somehow, a different country now—ruled by a Papist!

The Hague

FEBRUARY 1685

WEE DRIFTS OF wind-skimming snow had already parenthesized the cherry-red platform soles of the French delegation’s boots, and inch-long snotcicles had grown from the moustaches of the English delegation. Eliza glided up on her skates, and swirled to a halt on the canal to admire what she took (at first) to be some sort of colossal sculpture group. Of course sculptures did not normally wear clothing, but these Ambassadors and their entourages (a total of eight Englishmen facing off against seven French) had been standing long enough that snow had permeated every pore of their hats, wigs, and coats, giving them the appearance (from a distance) of having been butcherously carved out of a large block of some very low-grade, grayish sculptural medium. Much more lively (and more warmly dressed) was the crowd of Dutchmen who had gathered round to watch, and to stake small wagers on which delegation would first succumb to the cold. A rabble of porters and wood-carriers seemed to have taken the English side, and better-dressed men had gathered round the French, and strode to and fro stamping their feet and blowing into their hands and dispatching swift-skating message-boys towards the States-General and the Binnenhof.

But Eliza was the only girl on skates. So as she came to a stop there on the canal’s edge, only a few yards away from, and a foot or two lower than, the two groups of men on the adjoining street, the entire sculpture came to life. Rimes of ice cracked and tinkled as fifteen French and English heads rotated towards her. ’Twas now a standoff of a different nature.

The best-dressed man in the French delegation shuddered. They were all shivering, but this gentleman shuddered. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “do you speak French?”

Eliza regarded him. His hat was the size of a washtub, filled with exotic plumes, now crushed under drifts. His boots had the enormous tongues just coming into fashion, erupting from his instep and spreading and curling up and away from the shin—these had filled with snow, which was melting and trickling down inside the boots and darkening the leather from the inside.

“Only when there is some reason to, monsieur,” she returned.

“What is a reason?”

“How French of you to ask…I suppose that when a gentleman, who has been correctly introduced to me, flatters me with a compliment, or amuses me with a witticism…”

“I humbly beg Mademoiselle’s forgiveness,” the Frenchman said, through gray and stiff lips that ruined his pronunciation. “But as you did not arrive with an escort, there was no one to beg for the favor of a decent introduction.”

“He is yonder,” said Eliza, gesturing half a league down the canal.

“Mon Dieu, he flails his limbs like a lost soul tumbling backwards into the Pit,” the Frenchman exclaimed. “Tell me, mademoiselle, why does a swan venture out on the canals with an orang-utan?”

“He claimed he knew how to skate.”

“But a lass of your beauty, must have heard many brave claims from young men’s lips—and one of your intelligence must have perceived that all of them were rank nonsense.”

“Whereas you, monsieur, are honest and pure of heart?”

“Alas, mademoiselle, I am merely old.”

“Not so old.”

“And yet I may have perished from age or pneumonia before your beau struggles close enough to make introductions, so…Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, your most humble servant.”

“Charmed. My name is Eliza…”

“Duchess of Qwghlm?”

Eliza laughed at this absurdity. “But how did you know I was Qwghlmian?”

“Your native tongue is English—but you skate like one who was born on ice, sans the staggering drunken gait of the Anglo-Saxons who so cruelly oppress your islands,” d’Avaux answered, raising his voice so that the English delegation could hear.

“Very clever—but you know perfectly well that I am no Duchess.”

“And yet blue blood flows in your veins, I cannot but believe…”

“Not half so blue as yours, Monsieur, as I cannot but see. Why don’t you go inside and sit by a warm fire?”

“Now you tempt me cruelly in a second way,” d’Avaux said. “I must stand here, to uphold the honor and glory of La France. But you are bound by no such obligations—why do you go out here, where only harp-seals and polar-bears should be—and in such a skirt?”

“The skirt must be short, lest it get caught in the blades of my skates—you see?” Eliza said, and did a little pirouette. Before she’d gotten entirely turned around, a groaning and cracking noise came from the center of the French delegation as a spindly middle-aged diplomat collapsed dizzily to the ground. The men to either side of him crouched down as if to render assistance, but were straightened up by a brisk idiom from d’Avaux. “Once we begin to make exceptions for those who fall—or who pretend to—the whole delegation will go down like ninepins,” d’Avaux explained, addressing the remark to Eliza, but intending it for his entourage. The fallen man contracted to a fœtal position on the pavement; a couple of sword-wearing Dutchmen scurried in with a blanket. Meanwhile a wench came down out of a side-street bearing a large tray, and walked past the French delegation, letting them smell the flip-aroma, and feel the steam, from eight tankards—which she took direct to the Englishmen.

“Exceptions to what?” Eliza asked.

“To the rules of diplomatic protocol,” d’Avaux answered. “Which state—for example—that when one Ambassador meets another in a narrow way, the junior Ambassador must give way for the senior.”

“Ah, so that’s it. You’re having a dispute as to whether you, or the English Ambassador, has seniority?”

“I represent the Most Christian King,[*] that lot represent King James II of England…or so we can only assume, as we have received word that King Charles II has died, but not that his brother has been properly crowned.”

“Then it’s clear you have seniority.”

“Clear to you and me, mademoiselle. But that fellow has asserted that, since he cannot represent an uncrowned king, he must still be representing the late Charles II, who was crowned in 1651 after the Puritans chopped off the head of his father and predecessor. My King was crowned in 1654.”

“But with all due respect to the Most Christian King, monsieur, doesn’t that mean that Charles II, if he still lived, would have three years’ seniority over him?”

“A rabble of Scots at Scone tossed a crown at Charles’s head,” d’Avaux said, “and then he came and lived here, begging for handouts from Dutchmen, until 1660 when the cheese-mongers paid him to leave. Practically speaking, his reign began when he sailed to Dover.”

“If we are going to be practical, sir,” shouted an Englishman, “let us consider that your King did not practically begin his reign until the death of Cardinal Mazarin on the ninth of March, 1661.” He raised a tankard to his lips and quaffed deeply, pausing between gulps to emit little moans of satisfaction.

“At least my King is alive,” d’Avaux muttered. “You see? And they love to accuse Jesuits of sophistry! I say, is your beau wanted by the Guild of St. George?”

Civic order in the Hague was maintained by two Guilds of civic guards. The part of the city around the market and the town hall, where normal Dutchmen lived, was looked after by the St. Sebastian Guild. The St. George Guild was responsible for the Hofgebied, which was the part of the city containing the royal palace, foreign embassies, houses of rich families, and so on. Both Guilds were represented among the crowd of spectators who had gathered round to partake of the spectacle of d’Avaux and his English counterparts freezing to death. So d’Avaux’s question was partly intended to flatter and amuse the genteel and aristocratic St. George men—perhaps at the expense of the more plebeian St. Sebastian guards, who seemed to be favoring the English delegation.

“Don’t be absurd, monsieur! If he were, those brave and diligent men would have apprehended him long ago. Why do you ask such a question?”

“He has covered up his face like some sort of a volunteer.” Which meant, a soldier-turned-highwayman.

Eliza turned round to see Gomer Bolstrood lurking (there was no other word for it) around a corner of the canal a stone’s throw away with a long strip of tartan wrapped over his face.

“Those who live in northerly climes often do this.”

“It seems extremely disreputable and in the poorest taste. If your beau cannot tolerate a bit of a sea-breeze—”

“He is not my beau—merely a business associate.”

“Then, mademoiselle, you will be free to meet with me here, at this hour, tomorrow, and give me a skating-lesson.”

“But, monsieur! From the way you shuddered when you beheld me, I thought you considered such sports beneath your dignity.”

“Indeed—but I am an Ambassador, and must submit to any number of degradations…”

“For the honor and glory of la France?”

“Pourquoi non?”

“I hope that they widen the street soon, comte d’Avaux.” “Spring is just around the corner—and when I gaze upon your face, mademoiselle, I feel it is already here.”

“’TWAS PERFECTLY INNOCENT, Mr. Bolstrood—I thought they were sculpture until eyes turned my way.”

They were seated before a fire in a stately hunting-lodge. The place was warm enough, but smoky, and bleak, and entirely too filled with heads of dead animals, who seemed also to be turning their eyes Eliza’s way.

“You imagine I’m angry, but I’m not.”

“What’s troubling you, then? I daresay you are the brooding-est fellow I have ever seen.”

“These chairs.”

“Did I hear you correctly, sir?”

“Look at them,” Gomer Bolstrood said, in a voice hollow with despair. “Those who built this estate had no shortage of money, of that you can be sure—but the furniture! It is either stupid and primitive, like this ogre’s throne I’m seated on, or else—like yours—raked together out of kindling, with about as much structural integrity as a faggot. I could make better chairs in an afternoon, drunk, given a shrub and a jackknife.”

“Then I must apologize for having misread you, as I supposed you were angry about that chance encounter, there—”

“My faith teaches me it was inevitable—predestined—that you would enter into a flirtation with the French Ambassador just now. If I’m brooding over that, it’s not because I’m angry, but because I must understand what it means.”

“It means he’s a horny old goat.”

Gomer Bolstrood shook his colossal head hopelessly, and gazed toward a window. The pane shouted as it was hit by a burst of wind-driven slush. “I pray it did not develop into a riot,” he said.

“How much of a riot can eight frozen Englishmen and seven half-dead Frenchmen accomplish?”

“It’s the Dutchmen I’m worried about. The commoners and country folk, as always, side with the Stadholder.[*] The merchants are all Frenchified—and because the States-General are meeting here at the moment, the town’s crowded with the latter—all of ’em wearing swords and carrying pistols.”

“Speaking of Frenchified merchants,” Eliza said, “I have some good news for the Client—whoever he is—from the commodities market. It seems that during the run-up to the 1672 war, an Amsterdam banker committed treason against the Republic—”

“Actually any number of ’em did—but pray continue.”

“Acting as a cat’s-paw for the Marquis de Louvois, this traitor—Mr. Sluys by name—bought up nearly all of the lead in the country to ensure that William’s army would be short of ammunition. No doubt Sluys thought the war would be over in a few days, and that King Louis, after planting the French flag on the Damrak, would reward him personally. But of course that is not how it happened. Ever since, Sluys has had a warehouse full of lead, which he’s been afraid to sell openly, lest word get out, and an Orangist mob burn his warehouses, and tear him apart, as they did so memorably to the de Witt brothers. But now Sluys has to sell it.”

“Why?”

“It’s been thirteen years. His warehouse has been sinking into the Amsterdam-mud twice as fast as the ones to either side of it, because of the weight of all that lead. The neighbors are beginning to complain. He is taking the whole neighborhood down!”

“So Mr. Sluys should offer an excellent price,” Gomer Bolstrood said. “Praise God! The Client will be most pleased. Did this same traitor buy up gunpowder? Matches?”

“All ruined by humidity. But a fleet of Indiamen are expected at Texel any day—they’ll be heavy laden with saltpeter, most likely—powder prices are already dropping.”

“Probably not dropping enough for our purposes,” Bolstrood muttered. “Can we buy up saltpeter, and make our own?”

“Sulfur prices are also agreeable, owing to some fortuitous volcanic eruptions in Java,” Eliza said, “but proper charcoal is very dear—the Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg controls his Faulbaum inventory like a miser counting his coins.”

“We may have to capture an arsenal very early in the campaign,” Bolstrood said, “God willing.”

Talk of campaigns and arsenal-captures made Eliza nervous, so she attempted a change of subject: “When may I have the pleasure of meeting the Client?”

“As soon as we can find him clothed and sober,” Bolstrood answered immediately.

“That should be easy, in a Barker.”

“The Client is nothing of the sort!” Gomer Bolstrood scoffed.

“How very strange.”

“What is strange about it?”

“How came he to oppose Slavery if not through religion?”

“You oppose it, and you’re no Calvinist,” Bolstrood parried.

“I have personal reasons for feeling as I do. But I phant’sied that the Client was one of your co-religionists. He does oppose slavery, does he not?”

“Let us set aside phant’sies, and speak of facts.”

“Can’t help noticing, sir, that my question is unanswered.”

“You appeared at the door of our church in Amsterdam—some felt, like an Angelic visitation—with a most generous donation, and offered to make yourself useful in any way that would further our work ’gainst Slavery. And that is just what you are doing.”

“But if the Client is not opposed to slavery, how does it further the cause to buy him powder and musket-balls?”

“You may not know that my father—God rest his soul—served as the late King’s Secretary of State before he was hounded to exile and death by the Papists who do France’s work in England. He submitted to that degradation because he knew that upright men must sometimes treat with the likes of King Charles II for the greater good. In the same way, we who oppose slavery, and Established religion, and in particular all of the abominations and fopperies of the Romish faith, must give our support to any man who might prevent James, Duke of York, from long remaining on the throne.”

“James is the rightful heir, is he not?”

“As those diplomats just proved, cavilling over the seniority of their Kings,” Bolstrood said, “there is no question that cannot be muddled—and powder-smoke muddles things ’specially well. King Louis stamps Ultima Ratio Regum on all of his cannon—”

“The last argument of kings.”

“You know Latin, too—?”

“I had a Classical education.”

“In Qwghlm!?”

“In Constantinople.”

THE COMTE D’AVAUX MOVED THROUGH the Hague’s canal-network in the gait of a man walking across red-hot coals, but some innate aplomb kept him from falling down even once.

“Would you like to go home now, monsieur?”

“Oh no, mademoiselle—I am enjoying myself,” he returned, biting off the syllables one by one, like a crocodile working its way up an oar.

“You dressed more warmly today—is that Russian sable?”

“Yes, but of an inferior grade—a much finer one awaits you—if you get me back alive.”

“That is quite unnecessary, monsieur—”

“The entire point of gifts is to be unnecessary.” D’Avaux reached into a pocket and pulled out a square of neatly folded black velvet. “Voilà,” he said, handing it over to her.

“What is it?” Eliza asked, taking it from his hand, and using the opportunity to grab his upper arm for a moment and steady him.

“A little nothing. I should like you to wear it.”

The velvet unfolded into a long ribbon about the width of Eliza’s hand, its two ends joined together with a rather nice gold brooch made in the shape of a butterfly. Eliza guessed it was meant to be a sash, and put one arm and her head through it, letting it hang diagonally across her body. “Thank you, monsieur,” she said, “how does it look?”

The comte d’Avaux, for once, failed to offer her a compliment. He merely shrugged, as if how it looked was not the point. Which confirmed Eliza’s suspicion that a black velvet sash over skating-clothes was rather odd-looking.

“How did you escape your predicament yesterday?” she asked him.

“Made arrangements for the Stadholder to summon the English Ambassador back to the Binnenhof. This compelled him to make a volte-face: a maneuver in which the diplomats of perfidious Albion are well practiced. We followed him down the street and made the first available turn. How did you escape yours?”

“What—you mean, being out for a skate with a lug?”

“Naturally.”

“Tormented him for another half an hour—then returned to his place in the country to transact business. You think I’m a whore, don’t you, monsieur? I saw it in your face when I mentioned business. Though you would probably say courtesan.”

“Mademoiselle, in my circles, anyone who transacts business of any sort, on any level, is a whore. Among French nobility, no distinctions are recognized between the finest commerçants of Amsterdam and common prostitutes.”

“Is that why Louis hates the Dutch so?”

“Oh no, mademoiselle, unlike these dour Calvinists, we love whores—Versailles is aswarm with them. No, we have any number of intelligent reasons to hate the Dutch.”

“What sort of whore do you suppose I am, then, monsieur?”

“That is what I am trying to establish.”

Eliza laughed. “Then you should be eager to turn back.”

“Non!” The comte d’Avaux made a doddering, flailing turn onto another canal. Something bulky and grim shouldered its way into a gap ahead of them. Eliza mistook it, at first, for an especially gloomy old brick church. But then she noticed up on the parapet light shining like barred teeth through crenellations, and many narrow embrasures, and realized it had been made for another purpose besides saving souls. The building had tall poky conical spires at the corners, and Gothic decorations along the fronts of the gables that thrust out into the cold air like clenched stone fists. “The Ridderzaal,” she said, getting her bearings; for she had gotten quite lost following d’Avaux along the labyrinth of canals that were laced through the Hofgebied like capillaries through flesh. “So we are on the Spij now, going north.” A short distance ahead of them, the Spij forked in twain, bracketing the Ridderzaal and other ancient buildings of the Counts of Holland between its branches.

D’Avaux careered into the right fork. “Let us go through yonder water-gate, into the Hofvijver!” Meaning a rectangular pond that lay before the Binnenhof, or palace of the Dutch court. “The view of the Binnenhof rising above the ice will be—er—”

“Magical?”

“Non.”

“Magnificent?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Less bleak than anything else we have seen?”

“Now truly you are speaking French,” the ambassador said approvingly. “The princeling[*] is off on another of his insufferable hunting expeditions, but some persons of quality are there.” He had put on a surprising—almost alarming—burst of speed and was several paces ahead of Eliza now. “They will open the gate for me,” he said confidently, tossing the words back over his shoulder like a scarf. “When they do, you put on one of those magnificent accélérations and sail past me into the Hofvijver.”

“Very devious…but why don’t you simply ask them to let me through?”

“This will make for a gayer spectacle.”

The gate was so close to the Binnenhof that they would nearly pass underneath the palace as they went through. It was guarded by musketeers and archers dressed in blue outfits with lace cravats and orange sashes. When they recognized Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, they ventured out onto the ice, skidding on their hard-soled boots, pulled one side of the gate open for him, and bowed—doffing their hats and sweeping the ice with the tips of their orange plumes. The gate was wide enough to admit pleasure-boats during the warmer months, and so Eliza had plenty of room to whoosh past the French Ambassador and into the rectangle of ice that was spread out before William of Orange’s palace. It was a maneuver that would have earned her a broad-headed arrow between the shoulder blades if she were a man. But she was a girl in a short skirt and so the guards took her entrance in the spirit intended—as an amusing courtly plaisanterie of the comte’s devising.

She was going very fast—faster than she needed to, for this had given her an excuse to stretch cold stiff leg-muscles. She’d entered the southeast corner of the Hofvijver, which extended perhaps a hundred yards north–south and thrice that east–west. Slicing up along its eastern bank, she was distracted by musket-fire from open ground off to her right, and had a wild moment of fear that she was about to be cut down by snipers. But not to worry, it was a party of gentlemen honing their markmanship on a target-range spread out between the bank of the pond and an ornate building set farther back. She recognized this, now, as the headquarters of the St. George Guild. Beyond it, wooded land stretched away to the east as far as she could see: the Haagsche Bos, a game-park for the Counts of Holland, where people of all classes went to ride and stroll when the weather was better.

Directly ahead of her was a cobblestone ramp: a street that plunged directly into the water of the pond, when it wasn’t frozen, and where horses and cattle could be taken down and watered. She had to lean hard and make a searing turn to avoid it. Swaying her hips from side to side, she picked up a bit of speed as she glided down the long northern shore of the Hofvijver. The south shore, spreading off to her left, was a hodgepodge of brown brick buildings with black slate rooves, many having windows just above the level of the pond, so that she could have skated right up and conversed with people on the inside. But she wouldn’t have dared, for this was the Binnenhof, the palace of the Stadholder, William of Orange. Her view of it was obscured, for a time, by a tiny round island planted in the center of the Hofvijver like a half-cherry on a slice of cake. Trees and shrubs grew on it, and moss grew on them, though all was brown and leafless now. But above and behind the Binnenhof she could see the many narrow towers of the Ridderzaal jabbing at the sky like a squadron of knights with lances upright.

That was the end of sightseeing. For as she shot clear of the little island, and curled round to swing back towards d’Avaux, she discovered that she was sharing the ice with a slow-moving clique of skaters. She glimpsed both men and women, finely dressed. To knock them down would have been bad form. To stop and introduce herself would have been infinitely worse. She spun round to face towards d’Avaux, skating backwards now, letting her momentum carry her past the group. She carved a long sweeping U round the west end of the Hofvijver, spun round to face forward again, built more speed without lifting her skates from the ice, by means of sashaying hip-movements that took her down the long front of the Binnenhof, in a serpentine path, and finally stopped just before running into d’Avaux by planting the blades sideways and shaving up a glittering wall of ice. Nothing very acrobatic really—but it was enough to draw applause from Blue Guards, St. George Guildsmen, and noble skaters alike.

“I learnt defencing at the Academy of Monsieur du Plessis in Paris, where the finest swordsmen of the world gather to flaunt their prowess—but none of them can match your grace with a pair of steel blades, mademoiselle,” said the prettiest man Eliza had ever seen, as he was raising her gloved hand to smooch it.

D’Avaux had been making introductions. The gorgeous man was the Duke of Monmouth. He was escorting a tall, lanky, yet jowly woman in her early twenties. This was Mary—the daughter of the new King of England, and William of Orange’s wife.

As d’Avaux had announced these names and titles, Eliza had come close to losing her nerve for the first time in memory. She was remembering Hanover, where the Doctor had planted her in a steeple near the Herrenhausen Palace, so that she could gaze upon Sophie through a field-glass. Yet this d’Avaux—who didn’t know Eliza nearly as well as the Doctor did—had taken her straight into the Dutch court’s inner sanctum. How could d’Avaux introduce her to persons of royal degree—when he didn’t have the first idea who she was in the first place?

In the end it couldn’t have been simpler. He had leaned in towards Monmouth and Mary and said, discreetly: “This is—Eliza.” This had elicited knowing nods and winks from the others, and a little buzz of excitement from Mary’s entourage of English servants and hangers-on. These were apparently not even worth introducing—and that went double for the Negro page-boy and the shivering Javanese dwarf.

“No compliments for me, your Grace?” d’Avaux asked, as Monmouth was planting multiple kisses on the back of Eliza’s glove.

“On the contrary, monsieur—you are the finest skater of all France,” Monmouth returned with a smile. He still had most of his teeth. He had forgotten to let go of Eliza’s hand.

Mary nearly fell off her skates, partly because she was laughing at Monmouth’s jest a little harder than was really warranted, and partly because she was a miserable skater (in the corner of Eliza’s eye, earlier, she’d looked like a windmill—flailing without moving). It had been obvious from the first moment Eliza had seen her that she was infatuated with the Duke of Monmouth. Which to some degree was embarrassing. But Eliza had to admit that she’d chosen a likely young man to fall in love with.

Mary of Orange started to say something, but d’Avaux ran her off the road. “Mademoiselle Eliza has been trying valiantly to teach me how to skate,” he said commandingly, giving Eliza a wet look. “But I am like a peasant listening to one of the lectures of Monsieur Huygens.” He glanced over toward the water-gate through which he and Eliza had just passed, for the house of the Huygens family lay very nearby that corner of the palace.

“I should’ve fallen ever so many times without the Duke to hold me up,” Mary put in.

“Would an Ambassador do as well?” d’Avaux said, and before Mary could answer, he sidled up to her and nearly knocked her over. She flailed for the Ambassador’s arm and just got a grip on it in time. Her entourage closed in to get her back on her blades, the Javanese dwarf getting one hand on each buttock and pushing up with all his might.

The Duke of Monmouth saw none of this drama, engaged as he was in a minute inspection of Eliza. He began with her hair, worked his way down to her ankles, then back up, until he was startled to discover a pair of blue eyes staring back at him. That led to a spell of disorientation just long enough for d’Avaux (who had pinned Mary’s hand between his elbow and ribcage) to say, “By all means, your Grace, go for a skate, stretch your legs—we novices will just totter around the Vijver for a few minutes.”

“Mademoiselle?” said the Duke, proffering a hand.

“Your grace,” said Eliza, taking it.

Ten heartbeats later they were out on the Spij. Eliza let go Monmouth’s hand and spun round backwards to see the water-gate being closed behind them, and, through the bars, Mary of Orange, looking as if she’d been punched in the stomach, and Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, looking as if he did this kind of thing several times a day. Once, in Constantinople, Eliza had helped hold one of the other slave-girls down while an Arab surgeon took out her appendix. It had taken all of two minutes. She’d been astonished that a man with a sharp knife and no hesitation about using it could effect such changes so rapidly. Thus d’Avaux and Mary’s heart.

Once they got clear of the Spij the canal broadened and Monmouth executed a dramatic spin—lots of flesh and bone moving fast—not really graceful, but she couldn’t not look. If anything, he was a more accomplished skater than Eliza. He saw Eliza watching, and assumed she was admiring, him. “During the Interregnum I divided my time between here and Paris,” he explained, “and spent many hours on these canals—where did you learn, mademoiselle?”

Struggling across heaving floes to chip gull shit off rocks struck Eliza as a tasteless way to answer the question. She might have come up with some clever story, given enough time—but her mind was too busy trying to fathom what was going on.

“Ah, forgive me for prying—I forget that you are incognito,” said the Duke of Monmouth, his eyes straying momentarily to the black sash that d’Avaux had given her. “That, and your coy silence, speak volumes.”

“Really? What’s in those volumes?”

“The tale of a lovely innocent cruelly misused by some Germanic or Scandinavian noble—was it at the court of Poland-Lithuania? Or was it that infamous woman-beater, Prince Adolph of Sweden? Say nothing, mademoiselle, except that you forgive me my curiosity.”

“Done. Now, are you that same Duke of Monmouth who distinguished himself at the Siege of Maestricht? I know a man who fought in that battle—or who was there, anyway—and who spoke at length of your doings.”

“Is it the Marquis de—? Or the comte d’—?”

“You forget yourself, Monsieur,” said Eliza, stroking the velvet sash.

“Once again—please accept my apology,” said the Duke, looking wickedly amused.

“You might be able to redeem yourself by explaining something to me: the Siege of Maestricht was part of a campaign to wipe the Dutch Republic off the map. William sacrificed half his country to win that war. You fought against him. And yet here you are enjoying the hospitality of that same William, in the innermost court of Holland, only a few years later.”

“That’s nothing,” Monmouth said agreeably, “for only a few years after Maestricht I was fighting by William’s side, against the French, at Mons, and William was married to that Mary—who as you must know is the daughter of King James II, formerly the Duke of York, and Admiral of the English Navy until William’s admirals blew it out of the water. I could go on in this vein for hours.”

“If I had such an enemy I would not rest until he was dead,” Eliza said. “As a matter of fact, I do have an enemy, and it has been a long time since I have rested…”

“Who is it?” Monmouth asked eagerly, “the one who taught you to skate and then—”

“It is another,” Eliza said, “but I know not his name—our encounter was in a dark cabin on a ship—”

“What ship?”

“I know not.”

“What flag did it fly?”

“A black one.”

“Stab me!”

“Oh, ’twas the typical sort of heathen pirate-galleon—nothing remarkable.”

“You were captured by heathen pirates!?”

“Only once. Happens more often than you might appreciate. But we are digressing. I will not rest until my enemy’s identity is known, and I’ve put him in the grave.”

“But suppose that when you learn his identity, he turns out to be your great-uncle, and your cousin’s brother-in-law, and your best friend’s godfather?”

“I’m only speaking of one enemy—”

“I know. But royal families of Europe are so tangled together that your enemy might bear all of those relations to you at once.”

“Eeyuh, what a mess.”

“On the contrary—’tis the height of civilization,” Monmouth said. “It is not—mind you—that we forget our grievances. That would be unthinkable. But if our only redress were to put one another into graves, all Europe would be a battleground!”

“All Europe is a battleground! Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“Fighting at Maestricht and Mons and other places has left me little time for it,” Monmouth said drily. “I say to you it could be much worse—like the Thirty Years’ War, or the Civil War in England.”

“I suppose that is true,” Eliza said, remembering all of those ruined castles in Bohemia.

“In the modern age we pursue revenge at Court. Sometimes we might go so far as to fight a duel—but in general we wage battles with wit, not muskets. It does not kill as many people, and it gives ladies a chance to enter the lists—as it were.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Have you ever fired a musket, mademoiselle?”

“No.”

“And yet in our conversation you have already discharged any number of verbal broadsides. So you see, on the courtly battleground, women stand on an equal footing with men.”

Eliza coasted to a stop, hearing the bells of the town hall chiming four o’clock. Monmouth overshot her, then swooped through a gallant turn and skated back, wearing a silly grin.

“I must go and meet someone,” Eliza said.

“May I escort you back to the Binnenhof?”

“No—d’Avaux is there.”

“You no longer take pleasure in the Ambassador’s company?”

“I am afraid he will try to give me a fur coat.”

“That would be terrible!”

“I don’t want to give him the satisfaction…he has used me, somehow.”

“The King of France has given him orders to be as offensive as possible to Mary. As Mary’s in love with me today…”

“Why?”

“Why is she in love with me? Mademoiselle, I am offended.”

“I know perfectly well why she is in love with you. I meant, why would the King of France send a Count up to the Hague simply to behave offensively?”

“Oh, the comte d’Avaux does many other things besides. But the answer is that King Louis hopes to break up the marriage between William and Mary—destroying William’s power in England—and making Mary available for marriage to one of his French bastards.”

“I knew it had to be a family squabble of some sort—it’s so mean, so petty, so vicious.”

“Now you begin to understand!”

“Doesn’t Mary love her husband?”

“William and Mary are a well-matched couple.”

“You say little but mean much…what do you mean?”

“Now it is my turn to be mysterious,” Monmouth said, “as it’s the only way I can be sure of seeing you again.”

He went on in that vein, and Eliza dodged him elaborately, and they parted ways.

But two hours later they were together again. This time Gomer Bolstrood was with them.

A COUPLE OF MILES NORTH of the Hague, the flat polder-land of the Dutch Republic was sliced off by the sea-coast. A line of dunes provided a meager weather-wall. Sheltering behind it, running parallel to the coast, was a strip of land, frequently wooded, but not wilderness, for it had been improved with roads and canals. In that belt of green had grown up diverse estates: the country retreats of nobles and merchants. Each had a proper house with a formal garden. The bigger ones also had wooded game-parks, and hunting-lodges where men could seek refuge from their women.

Eliza still knew little about Gomer Bolstrood and his scheme; but it was obvious enough that he was in league with some merchant or other, who was the owner of one such estate, and that he had gotten permission to use the hunting-lodge as a pied-à-terre. A canal ran along one side of the game-park and connected it—if you knew which turns to take—to the Haagsche Bos, that large park next to the Binnenhof. The distance was several miles, and so it might have been a morning’s or an afternoon’s journey in the summer. But when ice was on the canals, and skates were on the traveler’s feet, it could be accomplished in very little time.

Thus Monmouth had arrived, by himself, incognito. He was seated on the chair that Bolstrood had likened to an ogre’s throne, and Eliza and Bolstrood were on the creaking faggot-chairs. Bolstrood tried to make a formal introduction of the Client, but—

“So,” Eliza said, “as you were saying a short time ago: fighting battles with muskets and powder is an outmoded practice and…”

“It suits my purposes for people to think that I actually believe such nonsense,” Monmouth said, “and women are ever eager to believe it.”

“Why—because in battle, women become swag, and we don’t like being swag?”

“I suppose so.”

“I’ve been swag. It didn’t suit me. So, for me, your little lecture about modernity was inspiring in a way.”

“As I said—women are eager to believe it.”

“The two of you are acquainted—?—!” Bolstrood finally forced out.

“As my late Dad so aptly demonstrated, those of us who are predestined to burn in Hell must try to have a bit of fun while we are alive,” Monmouth said. “Men and women—ones who are not Puritans, anyway—know each other in all sorts of ways!” Regarding Eliza warmly. Eliza gave him a look that was intended to be like a giant icicle thrust through his abdomen—but Monmouth responded with a small erotic quiver.

Eliza said, “If you play into the comte d’Avaux’s hands so easily, by diverting your affections from Mary—what use will you be when you sit on the throne of England?”

Monmouth drooped and looked at Bolstrood.

“I didn’t tell her, exactly,” Gomer Bolstrood protested, “I only told her what commodities we wish to purchase.”

“Which was enough to make your plan quite obvious,” Eliza said.

“Doesn’t matter, I suppose,” Monmouth said. “As we cannot make the purchases anyway without putting up some collateral—and in our case the collateral is the throne.”

“That’s not what I was told,” Eliza said. “I’ve been assuming the account would be settled with gold.”

“And so it will be—after.”

“After what?”

“After we’ve conquered England.”

“Oh.”

“But most of England is on our side, so—a few months at most.”

“Does most-of-England have guns?”

“It’s true what he says,” put in Gomer Bolstrood. “Everywhere this man goes in England, people turn out into the streets and light bonfires for him, and burn the Pope in effigy.”

“So in addition to purchasing the required commodities, you require a bridge loan, for which your collateral will be—”

“The Tower of London,” Monmouth said reassuringly.

“I am a trader, not a shareholder,” Eliza said. “I cannot be your financier.”

“How can you trade, without being a shareholder?”

“I trade ducat shares, which have one-tenth the value of proper V.O.C. shares and are far more liquid. I hold them—or options—only long enough to eke out a small profit. You will need to skate about forty miles that way, your grace,” Eliza said, pointing northeast, “and make connections with Amsterdam moneylenders. There are great men there, princes of the market, who’ve accumulated stacks of V.O.C. stock, and who will lend money out against it. But as you cannot put the Tower of London in your pocket and set it on the table as security for the loan, you’ll need something else.”

“We know that,” Bolstrood said. “We are merely letting you know that when time comes to effect the transaction, the payment will come, not from us, but—”

“From some credulous lender.”

“Not so credulous. Important men are with us.”

“May I know who those men are?”

A look between Bolstrood and Monmouth. “Not now. Later, in Amsterdam,” Bolstrood said.

“This is never going to work—those Amsterdammers have more good investments than they know what to do with,” Eliza said. “But there might be another way to get the money.”

“Where do you propose to get it from, if not the moneylenders of Amsterdam?” Monmouth asked. “My mistress has already pawned all of her jewels—that resource is exhausted.”

“We can get it from Mr. Sluys,” Eliza said, after a long few minutes of staring into the fire. She turned to face the others. The air of the lodge was suddenly cool on her brow.

“The one who betrayed his country thirteen years ago?” Bolstrood asked warily.

“The same. He has many connections with French investors and is very rich.”

“You mean to blackmail him, then—?” Monmouth asked.

“Not precisely. First we’ll find some other investor and tell him of your plan to invade England.”

“But the plan is a secret!”

“He’ll have every incentive to keep it secret—for as soon as he knows, he will begin selling V.O.C. stock short.”

“That, ‘selling short,’ is a bit of zargon I have heard Dutchmen and Jews bandy about, but I know not what it means,” Monmouth said.

“There are two factions who war with each other in the market: liefhebberen or bulls who want the stock to rise, and contremines or bears who want it to fall. Frequently a group of bears will come together and form a secret cabal—they will spread false news of pirates off the coast, or go into the market loudly selling shares at very low prices, trying to create a panic and make the price drop.”

“But how do they make money from this?”

“Never mind the details—there are ways of using options so that you will make money if the price falls. It is called short selling. Our investor—once we tell him about your invasion plans—will begin betting that V.O.C. stock will drop soon. And rest assured, it will. Only a few years ago, mere rumors about the state of Anglo/Dutch relations were sufficient to depress the price by ten or twenty percent. News of an invasion will plunge it through the floor.”

“Why?” Monmouth asked.

“England has a powerful navy—if they are hostile to Holland, they can choke off shipping, and the V.O.C. drops like a stone.”

“But my policies will be far more congenial to the Hollanders than King James’s!” Monmouth protested.

Bolstrood meanwhile had a look on his face as if he were being garrotted by an invisible cord.

Eliza composed herself, breathed deeply, and smiled at Monmouth—then leaned forward and put her hand on his forearm. “Naturally, when it becomes generally understood that your rebellion is going to succeed, V.O.C. stock will soar like a lark in the morning. But at first the market will be dominated by ignorant ninehammers who’ll foolishly assume that King James will prevail—and that he will be ever so annoyed at the Dutch for having allowed their territory to serve as spring-board for an invasion of his country.”

Bolstrood relaxed a bit.

“So at first the market will drop,” Monmouth said distractedly.

“Until the true situation becomes generally known,” Eliza said, patted his arm firmly, and drew back. Gomer Bolstrood seemed to relax further. “During that interval,” Eliza continued, “our investor will have the opportunity to reap a colossal profit, by selling the market short. And in exchange for that opportunity he’ll gladly buy you all the lead and powder you need to mount the invasion.”

“But that investor is not Mr. Sluys—?”

“In any short-selling transaction there is a loser as well as a winner,” Eliza said. “Mr. Sluys is to be the loser.”

“Why him specifically?” Bolstrood asked. “It could be any liefhebber.”

“Selling short has been illegal for three-quarters of a century! Numerous edicts have been issued to prevent it—one of them written in the time of the Stadholder Frederick Henry. Now, if a trader is caught short—that is, if he has signed a contract that will cause him to lose money—he can ‘appeal to Frederick.’”

“But Frederick Henry died ages ago,” Monmouth protested.

“It is an expression—a term of art. It simply means to repudiate the contract, and refuse to pay. According to Frederick Henry’s edict, that repudiation will be upheld in a court of law.”

“But if it’s true that there must always be a loser when selling short, then Frederick Henry’s decree must’ve stamped out the practice altogether!”

“Oh, no, your grace—short selling thrives in Amsterdam! Many traders make their living from it!”

“But why don’t all of the losers simply ‘appeal to Frederick’?”

“It all has to do with how the contracts are structured. If you’re clever enough you can put the loser in a position where he dare not appeal to Frederick.”

“So it is a sort of blackmail after all,” Bolstrood said, gazing out the window across a snowy field—but hot on Eliza’s trail. “We set Sluys up to be the loser—then if he appeals to Frederick, the entire story comes out in a court of law—including the warehouse full of lead—and he’s exposed as a traitor. So he’ll eat the loss without complaint.”

“But—if I’m following all of this—it relies on Sluys not knowing that there is a plan to invade England,” Monmouth said. “Otherwise he’d be a fool to enter into the short contract.”

“That is certainly true,” Eliza said. “We want him to believe that V.O.C. stock will rise.”

“But if he’s selling us the lead, he’ll know we’re planning something.”

“Yes—but he needn’t know what is being planned, or when. We need only manipulate his mental state, so that he has reason to believe that V.O.C. shares are soon to rise.”

“And—as I’m now beginning to understand—you are something of a virtuoso when it comes to manipulating men’s mental states,” Monmouth said.

“You make it sound ever so much more difficult than it really is,” Eliza answered. “Mostly I just sit quietly and let the men manipulate themselves.”

“Well, if that’s all for now,” Monmouth said, “I feel a powerful urge to go and practice some self-manipulation in private—unless—?”

“Not today, your grace,” Eliza said, “I must pack my things. Perhaps I’ll see you in Amsterdam?”

“Nothing could give me greater pleasure.”

France

EARLY 1685

But know that in the Soule

Are many lesser Faculties that serve

Reason as chief; among these Fansie next

Her office holds; of all external things,

Which the five watchful Senses represent,

She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,

Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames

All what we affirm or what deny, and call

Our knowledge or opinion; then retires

Into her private Cell when Nature rests.

Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes

To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,

Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,

Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

JACK RODE BETWEEN PARIS and Lyons several times in the early part of 1685, ferrying news. Paris: the King of England is dead! Lyons: some Spanish governorships in America are up for sale. Paris: King Looie has secretly married Mademoiselle de Maintenon, and the Jesuits have his ear now. Lyons: yellow fever is slaying mine-slaves by the thousands in Brazil—the price of gold ought to rise.

It was disconcertingly like working for someone—just the sort of arrangement he’d given up, long ago, as being beneath his dignity. It was, to put it more simply, too much like what Bob did. So Jack had to keep reminding himself that he was not actually doing it, but pretending to do it, so that he could get his horse ready to sell—then he would tell these bankers to fuck themselves.

He was riding back toward Paris from Lyons one day—an unseasonably cold day in March—when he encountered a column of three score men shuffling toward him. Their heads were shaved and they were dressed in dirty rags—though most had elected to tear up whatever clothes they had, and wrap them around their bleeding feet. Their arms were bound behind their backs and so it was easy to see their protruding ribs, mottled with sores and whip-marks. They were accompanied by some half-dozen mounted archers who could easily pick off stragglers or runaways.

In other words, just another group of galley slaves on their way down to Marseille. But these were more miserable than most. Your typical galley slave was a deserter, smuggler, or criminal, hence young and tough. A column of such men setting out from Paris in the winter might expect to lose no more than half its number to cold, disease, starvation, and beatings along the way. But this group—like several others Jack had seen recently—seemed to consist entirely of old men who had no chance whatever of making it to Marseille—or (for that matter) to whatever inn their guards expected to sleep in tonight. They were painting the road with blood as they trudged along, and they moved so slowly that the trip would take them weeks. But this was a journey you wanted to finish in as few days as possible.

Jack rode off to the side and waited for the column to pass him by. The stragglers were tailed by a horseman who, as Jack watched, patiently uncoiled his nerf du boeuf, whirled it round his head a time or two (to make a scary noise and build up speed), and then snapped it through the air to bite a chunk out of a slave’s ear. Extremely pleased with his own prowess, he then said something not very pleasant about the R.P.R. Which made everything clear to Jack, for R.P.R. stood for Religion Pretendue Réformée, which was a contemptuous way of referring to Huguenots. Huguenots tended to be prosperous merchants and artisans, and so naturally if you gave them the galley slave treatment they would suffer much worse than a Vagabond.

Only a few hours later, watching another such column go by, he stared right into the face of Monsieur Arlanc—who stared right back at him. He had no hair, his cheeks were grizzly and sucked-in from hunger, but Monsieur Arlanc it was.

There was nothing for Jack to do at the time. Even if he’d been armed with a musket, one of the archers would’ve put an arrow through him before he could reload and fire a second ball. But that evening he circled back to an inn that lay several miles south of where he’d seen Monsieur Arlanc, and bided his time in the shadows and the indigo night for a few hours, freezing in clouds of vapor from the nostrils of his angry and uncomfortable horses, until he was certain that the guards would be in bed. Then he rode up to that inn and paid a guard to open the gate for him, and rode, with his little string of horses, into the stable-yard.

Several Huguenots were just standing there, stark naked, chained together in the open. Some jostled about in a feeble effort to stay warm, others looked dead. But Monsieur Arlanc was not in this group. A groom shot back a bolt on a stable door and allowed Jack to go inside, and (once Jack put more silver in his pocket) lent him a lantern. There Jack found the rest of the galley slaves. Weaker ones had burrowed into piles of straw, stronger ones had buried themselves in the great steaming piles of manure that filled the corners. Monsieur Arlanc was among these. He was actually snoring when the light from Jack’s lantern splashed on his face.

Now the next morning, Monsieur Arlanc set out with his column of fellow-slaves, not very well-rested, but with a belly full of cheese and bread, and a pair of good boots on his feet. Jack meanwhile rode north with his feet housed in some wooden shoes he’d bought from a peasant.

He’d been ready and willing to gallop out of there with Arlanc on one of the spare horses, but the Huguenot had calmly and with the most admirable French logic explained why this would not work: “The other slaves will be punished if I am found missing in the morning. Most of them are my co-religionists and might accept this, but others are common criminals. In order to prevent it, these would raise the alarm.”

“I could just kill ’em,” Jack pointed out.

Monsieur Arlanc—a disembodied, candlelit head resting on a great misty dung-pile—got a pained look. “You would have to do so one at a time. The others would raise the alarm. It is most gallant of you to make such an offer, considering that we hardly know each other. Is this the effect of the English Pox?”

“Must be,” Jack allowed.

“Most unfortunate,” Arlanc said.

Jack was irritated to be pitied by a galley slave. “Your sons—?”

“Thank you for asking. When le Roi began to oppress us—”

“Who the hell is Leroy?”

“The King, the King!”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

“I smuggled them to England. And what of your boys, Jack?”

“Still waiting for their legacy,” Jack said.

“Did you manage to sell your ostrich plumes?”

“I’ve got some Armenians on it.”

“I gather you have not parted with the horse yet—”

“Getting him in shape.”

“To impress the brokers?”

“Brokers! What do I want with a broker? It’s to impress the customers.”

Arlanc’s head moved in the lantern-light as if he were burrowing into the manure—Jack realized he was shaking his head in that annoying way that he did when Jack had blurted out something foolish. “It is not possible,” Arlanc said. “The horse trade in Paris is absolutely controlled by the brokers—a Vagabond can no more ride in and sell a horse at the Place Royale than he could go to Versailles and get command of a regiment—it is simply not done.”

If Jack had just arrived in France recently he’d have said, But that’s crazy—why not? but as it was he knew Arlanc spoke the truth. Arlanc recommended such-and-such a broker, to be found at the House of the Red Cat in the Rue du Temple, but then recollected that this fellow was himself a Huguenot, hence probably dead and certainly out of business.

They ended up talking through the night, Jack feeding him bits of bread and cheese from time to time, and tossing a few morsels to the others to shut them up. By the time dawn broke, Jack had given up his boots as well as his food, which was stupid in a way. But he was riding, and Monsieur Arlanc was walking.

He rode north cold, hungry, exhausted, and essentially barefoot. The horses had not been rested or tended to properly and were in a foul mood, which they found various ways to inflict on Jack. He groggily took a wrong turn and ended up approaching Paris by an unfamiliar route. This got him into some scrapes that did nothing to improve his state of mind. One of these misadventures led to Jack’s staying awake through another night, hiding from some nobleman’s gamekeepers in a wood. The rented horses kept whinnying and so he had no choice but to leave them staked out as decoys, to draw his pursuers while he slipped away with stalwart Turk.

So by the time the sun rose on the next day he was just one step away from being a miserable Vagabond again. He had lost two good horses for which he was responsible, and so all the livery stables and horse-brokers in Paris would be up in arms against him, which meant that selling Turk would be even more thoroughly impossible. So Jack would not get his money, and Turk would not get the life he deserved: eating good fodder and being fastidiously groomed in a spacious nobleman’s stable, his only responsibility being to roger an endless procession of magnificent mares. Jack would not get his money, which meant he’d probably never even see his boys, as he couldn’t bring himself to show up on their Aunt Maeve’s doorstep empty-handed…all of Mary Dolores’s brothers and cousins erupting to their feet to pursue him through East London with their shillelaghs…

It would’ve made him mad even if he hadn’t been afflicted with degeneration of the brain, and awake for the third consecutive day. Madness, he decided, was easier.

As he approached Paris, riding through those vegetable-fields where steam rose from the still-hot shit of the city, he came upon a vast mud-yard, within sight of the city walls, streaked with white quick-lime and speckled with human skulls and bones sitting right out on the surface. Rude crosses had been stuffed into the muck here and there, and jutted out at diverse angles, spattered with the shit of the crows and vultures that waited on them. When Jack rode through it, those birds had, however, all flown up the road to greet a procession that had just emerged from the city-gates: a priest in a long cloak, so ponderous with mud that it hung from his shoulders like chain-mail, using a great crucifix as walking-stick, and occasionally hauling off a dolorous clang on a pot-like bell in the opposite hand. Behind him, a small crowd of paupers employing busted shovels in the same manner as the priest did the crucifix, and then a cart, driven by a couple of starveling mules, laden with a number of long bundles wrapped and sewn up in old grain-sacks.

Jack watched them tilt the wagon back at the blurred brink of an open pit so that the bundles—looked like three adults, half a dozen children, and a couple of babies—slid and tumbled into the ground. While the priest rattled on in rote Latin, his helpers zigzagged showers of quick-lime over the bodies and kicked dirt back into the hole.

Jack began to hear muffled voices: coming from under the ground, naturally. The skulls all around him began to jaw themselves loose from the muck and to rise up, tottering, on incomplete skeletons, droning a monkish sort of chant. But meanwhile those grave-diggers, now pivoting on their shovels, had begun to hum a tune of their own: a jaunty, Irish-inflected hornpipe.

Cantering briskly out onto the road (Turk now positively sashaying), he found himself at the head of a merry procession: he’d become the point man of a flying wedge of Vagabond grave-diggers, whose random shufflings had resolved into dazzling group choreography, and who were performing a sort of close-order drill with their shovels.

Behind them went the priest, walloping his bell and walking ahead of the corpse-wain, where the dead people—who had hopped up out of the pit and back into the wagon—but who were still wrapped up in their shrouds—made throaty moaning noises, like organ-pipes to complement the grim churchly droning of the skeletons. Once all were properly arranged on the road, the skeletons finally broke into a thudding, four-square type of church-hymn:

O wha-at the Hell was on God’s mind,

That sixteen-sixty day,

When he daubed a vagabond’s crude form

From a lump of Thames-side clay?

Since God would ne’er set out to make

A loser of this kind

Jack’s life, if planned in Heaven, doth prove

Jehovah’s lost His mind.

Switching to Gregorian chant for the chorus:

Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

But at this point, as they were all nearing the city gates, they encountered a southbound column of galériens, obviously Huguenots, who were shuffling along in a syncopated gait that made their chains jingle like sleigh-bells; the guards riding behind them cracked their whips in time with a sprightly tune that the Huguenots were singing:

Chained by the necks,

Slaves of Louis the Rex,

You might think that we’ve lost our freedom,

But the Cosmos,

Like clock-work,

No more than a rock’s worth

Of choices, to people, provides!

But now at this point the grave-diggers were greeted by an equal number of fishwives, issuing from the city-gates, who paired up with them, kicked in with trilling soprano and lusty alto voices, and drowned out both the Huguenots and the Skeletons with some sort of merry Celtic reel:

There once was a jolly Vagabond

To the Indies he did sail,

When back to London he did come

He wanted a female.

He found a few in Drury-Lane

In Hounsditch found some more

But cash flow troubles made him long

For a girlfriend, not a whore.

Now Jack he loved the theatre

But didn’t like to pay

He met an Irish actress there

While sneaking in one day.

Now the Priest, far from objecting to this interruption, worked it into his solemn hymnody, albeit with a jarring change of rhythm:

He could have gone to make his peace

With Jesus and the Church

Instead he screwed a

showgirl Then he left her in the lurch.

Now God in Heaven ne’er could wish

That Irish lass so ill

Jack’s life’s proves irrefutably

Th’existence of Free Will

Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

And the irrepressible galériens seemed to pop their heads into the middle of this scene and take it over with the continuation of their song:

Will he, or nill he,

It’s all kinda silly

When predestination prevails!

He can’t make decisions

His will just ain’t his, and

His destiny runs on fix’d rails!

Now the Priest again:

The Pope would say, that he who blames

The Good Lord for his deeds

Is either cursed with shit for brains

Or is lost ’mong Satan’s Weeds.

The former group should take good care

To do as they are told

The latter’d best clean up their act

And come back to the fold.

Quod, erat demonstrandum. Quod, erat demonstrandum…

And then the galériens, obviously wanting to stay and continue the debate, but driven southward, ever southward, by the guards:

We’re off to row boats

Off the Rhone’s sunny côtes

Because God, long ago, said we must

If it makes you feel better

You too, Jack, are fettered

By your bodily humours and lusts.

They were now pulled “offstage,” as it were, in the following comical way: a guard rode to the front of the column, hitched the end of their chain to the pommel of his saddle, and spurred his horse forward. The tightening chain ran free through the neck-loops of the galériens until it jerked the last man in the queue violently forward so that he crashed into the back of the slave in front of him, who likewise was driven forward into the next, et cetera in a chain reaction as it were, until the whole column had accordioned together and was dragged off toward the Mediterranean Sea.

Now at the same time the rest of the procession burst through the city-gates into lovely Paris. The skeletons, who’d been exceptionally gloomy until this point, suddenly began disassembling themselves and bonking themselves and their neighbors with thigh-bones to produce melodious xylophony. The priest jumped up on the corpse-wain and began to belt out a new melody in a comely, glass-shattering counter-tenor.

Oh, Jaaaack—

Can’t say I blame you for feeling like shit

Oh, Jaaaack—

Never seen any one step into it

Like Jaaack—

Corporal punishment wouldn’t suffice

The raaack—

Would be too good for you,

Would simply be

Too slaaack—

Even if all of the skin were whipped off of

Your baaack—

Not only evil,

But stupid to boot,

Not charismatic

And not even cute,

The brains that God granted

You now indisputably gone down the tubes

And you don’t give a hoot,

You stink!

No getting round it,

It’s true, Jack, confound it,

You stink!

And so on; but then here there was a little pause in the music, occasioned by a small and perfectly adorable French girl in a white dress, which Jack recognized as the sort of get-up that young Papists wore to their first communion. Radiant—but gloomy. The priest reined in the mules and vaulted down off the corpse-wain and squatted down next to her.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!” said the little girl.

Awww, gushed all of the skeletons, corpses, grave-diggers, fishwives, et cetera, gathered round in vast circle as if to watch an Irish brawl.

“Believe me, girl, you ain’t alone!” hollered a fishwife through cupped hands; the others grinned and nodded supportively.

The priest hitched up his muddy cassock and scooted even closer to the girl, then turned his ear toward her lips; she whispered something into it; he shook his head in sincere, but extremely short-lived dismay; then stood, drawing himself up to his full height, and said something back to her. She put her hands together, and closed her eyes. All of Paris went silent, and every ear strained to listen as she in her high piping voice said a little Papist prayer in Latin. Then she opened her baby blues and looked up in trepidation at the priest—whose stony face suddenly opened up in a big grin as he made the sign of the cross over her. With a great big squeal of delight, the girl jumped up and turned a cartwheel in the street, petticoats a-flying’, and suddenly the whole procession came alive again: the priest walking along behind the handspringing girl and the dancers, the wrapped corpses up in the cart swinging their hips in time to the music and uttering pre-verbal woo! woo! noises to fill in the chinks in the tune. The grave-diggers and fishwives, plus a number of flower-girls and rat-catchers who joined in along the way, were now dancing to the priest’s song in a medley of different dance steps, viz. high-stepping whorehouse moves, Irish stomping, and Mediterranean tarantellas.

When you have been bad

A naughty young lad

Or lass who has had

A man or two sans—marriage,

When painting the town

Carousing around

You run a child down

While driving your big—carriage,

And so on at considerable length, as they had the whole University to parade through, and then the Roman baths at Cluny. As they came over the Petit Pont, about a thousand wretches emerged from the gates of the Hôtel-Dieu—that colossal poorhouse just by Notre Dame, which was where the priest, grave-diggers, and dead persons had all originated—and, accompanied by Notre Dame’s organ, boomed out a mighty chorus to ring down the curtain on this entire pageant.

Everyone does it—everyone sins

Everyone at the party has egg on their chins

Everyone likes to get, time to time, skin to skin

With a lad or a lass, drink a tumbler of gin.

So confess all your sins and admit you were bad,

It isn’t a fashion, nor is it a fad,

It’s what the Pope says we should do when we’ve had

Just a bit too much fun, and we need to be paddled or spanked on the buttocks (unless we enjoy it)

If there’s sin in our hearts then it’s time to destroy it,

From the poorest of poor all the way to Le Roi, little sins or mass murder, if you made the wrong choice it

Is fine if you say so, and change your bad ways

You can do it in private, only God sees your face

In a church or cathedral, your time and your place

What’s the payoff? UNDESERVED GRACE!

This song developed into a sort of round, meant (Jack supposed) to emphasize the cyclical nature of the procedure: some of the wretches, fishwives, et cetera, engaging in carnal acts right there in the middle of the street, others rushing, in organized infantry-squares, toward the priest to confess, then turning away to genuflect in the direction of the Cathedral, then charging pall-mall back into fornication. In any case, every skeleton, corpse, wretch, grave-digger, fishwife, street-vendor, and priest now had a specific role to play, and part to sing, except for Jack; and so, one by one, all of Jack’s harbingers and outriders peeled away from him, or evaporated into thin air, so that he rode alone (albeit, watched and cheered on by the thousands) into the great Place before the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was as fine and gorgeous a vision as had ever been seen. For all of King Looie’s Regiments were having their colors blessed by some sort of extremely resplendent mitre-wearing Papist authority figure, one or two notches shy of the Pope himself, who stood beneath a canopy of brilliant fleur-de-lis-embroidered cloth that burnt in the sun. The regiments themselves were not present—there wouldn’t’ve been room—but their noble commanders were, and their heralds and color-bearers, carrying giant banners of silk and satin and cloth-of-gold: banners meant to be seen from a mile away through squalls of gunpowder-smoke, designed to look resplendent when planted atop the walls of Dutch or German or English cities and to overawe the populace with the glory, might, and, above all, good taste of Leroy. Each one had its own kind of magickal power over the troops of its regiment, and so to see them drawn up here in rows, all together, was like seeing all Twelve of the Apostles sitting round the same table, or something.

As much as Jack hated Leroy, he had to admit it was a hell of a thing to look at—so much so, that he regretted he hadn’t arrived sooner, for he only caught the terminal quarter-hour of the ceremony. Then it all broke up. The color-bearers rode off toward their regimental headquarters in the territory outside of the city walls, and the nobility generally rode north over the Pont d’Arcole to the Right Bank where some went down in the direction of the Louvre and others went round back of the Hôtel de Ville toward the Place Royale and the Marais. One of the latter group was wearing an Admiral’s hat and riding a white horse with pink eyes—a big one—apparently meant to be some sort of a war-horse.

Jack was not set on what he should do next, but as he (for lack of any other purpose in life) followed this admiral into the narrow streets he began to hear fidgety noises from the walls all around him, like the gnawing of mice, and noticed a lot of radiant dust in the air: on a closer look, he formed the impression that all of the tiny animals trapped in the stones of the city were coming alive and squirming about in their prisons, kicking up dust, as if some invisible tide of quicksilver had seeped up through the walls and brought them back to life; and construing this as an omen, Jack spurred Turk forward with the heels of his wooden sabots and, by taking certain back-streets, ducking beneath those jutting balconies, overtook the Admiral on the pink-eyed horse, and rode out into the street in front of him, just short of the entrance to the Place Royale—in the very street where he’d once been knocked into the shit by (he guessed) the same fellow’s servants.

Those servants were now clearing the way for the Admiral and the large contingent of friends and hangers-on riding with him, and so when Jack rode out into the middle of the street, it was empty. A footman in blue livery came toward him, eyeing Jack’s wooden shoes and his crutch, and probably sizing him up as a peasant who’d stolen a plowhorse—but Jack gave Turk a little twitch of the reins that meant I give you leave and Turk surged toward this man and crushed him straight into the gutter where he ended up stopping turd-rafts. Then Jack drew up to face the Admiral from perhaps half a dozen lengths. Several other footmen were situated in the space between them, but having seen what Turk knew how to do, they were now shrinking back against walls.

The Admiral looked nonplussed. He couldn’t stop looking at Jack’s shoes. Jack kicked off the sabots and they tumbled on the stones with pocking footstep-noises. He wanted to make some kind of insightful point, here, about how the shoe thing was just another example of Frogs’ obsession with form over substance—a point worth making here and now, because it related to their (presumed) inability to appreciate what a fine mount Turk was. But in his present state of mind, he couldn’t even get that out in English.

Someone, anyway, had decided that he was dangerous—a younger man costumed as a Captain of Horse, who now rode out in front of the Admiral and drew his sword, and waited for Jack to do something.

“What’d you pay for that nag?” Jack snarled, and, since he didn’t have time to disassemble his crutch, raised it up like a knight’s lance, bracing the padded cross-piece against his ribs, and spurred Turk forward with his heels. The cold air felt good rushing over his bare feet. The Captain got a look of dignified befuddlement on his face that Jack would always remember, and the others, behind him, got out of the way in a sudden awkward clocking and scraping of hooves—and then at the last moment this Captain realized he was in an impossible situation, and tried to lean out of the way. The crutch-tip caught him in the upper arm and probably gave him a serious bruise. Jack rode through the middle of the Admiral’s entourage and then got Turk turned around to face them again, which took longer than he was comfortable with—but all of those Admirals and Colonels and Captains had to get turned around, too, and their horses were not as good as Jack’s.

One in particular, a pretty black charger with a bewigged and beribboned aristocrat on top of it, was declining to follow orders, and stood broadside to Jack, a couple of lengths away. “And what do I hear for this magnificent Turkish charger?” Jack demanded, spurring Turk forward again, so that after building up some speed he T-boned the black horse just in the ribcage and actually knocked it over sideways—the horse went down in a fusillade of hooves, and the rider, who hadn’t seen it coming, flew halfway to the next arrondissement.

“I’ll buy it right now, Jack,” said an English voice, somehow familiar, “if you stop being such a fucking tosser, that is.”

Jack looked up into a face. His first thought was that this was the handsomest face he had ever seen; his second, that it belonged to John Churchill. Seated astride a decent enough horse of his own, right alongside of Jack.

Someone was maneuvering towards them, shouting in French—Jack was too flabbergasted to consider why until Churchill, without taking his eyes off Jack’s, whipped out his rapier, and spun it (seemingly over his knuckles) so as to deflect a sword-thrust that had been aimed directly at Jack’s heart. Instead it penetrated several inches into Jack’s thigh. This hurt, and had the effect of waking Jack up and forcing him to understand that all of this was really happening.

“Bob sends greetings from sunny Dunkirk,” said Churchill. “If you shut up, there is an infinitesimal chance of my being able to save you from being tortured to death before sundown.”

Jack said nothing.

Amsterdam

APRIL 1685

The Art of War is so well study’d, and so equally known in all Places, that ’tis the longest Purse that conquers now, not the longest Sword. If there is any Country whose people are less martial, less enterprising, and less able for the Field; yet if they have but more Money than their Neighbors, they shall soon be superior to them in Strength, for Money is Power…

—DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

“IT WAS PHANTASTICKAL in the extreme—Mademoiselle, it was beyond French—”

Like a still pond into which a boy has flung a handful of gravel, the Duke of Monmouth’s beauty—aglow in the golden light of an Amsterdam afternoon—was now marred by a thought. The eyebrows steepled, the lips puckered, and the eyes might’ve crossed slightly—it was very difficult to tell, given his and Eliza’s current positions: straight out of a Hindoo frieze.

“What is it?”

“Did we actually achieve sexual, er, congress, at any point during those, er, proceedings?”

“Poh! What’re you, then, some Papist who must draw up a schedule of his sins?”

“You know that I am not, mademoiselle, but—”

“You’re the sort who keeps a tally, aren’t you? Like a tavern-goer who prides himself on the Ps and Qs chalked up on the wall next his name—save in your case it’s wenches.”

Monmouth tried to look indignant. But at the moment his body contained, of the yellow bile, less than at any time since infancy, and so even his indignation was flaccid. “I don’t think there’s anything untoward in wanting to know whom I have, and haven’t, rogered! My father—God rest his soul—rogered simply everyone. I’m merely the first and foremost of a legion of royal bastards! Wouldn’t be proper to lose track.”

“…of your royal bastards?”

“Yes.”

“Then know that no royal bastards can possibly result from what we just did.”

Monmouth got himself worked round to a less outlandish position, viz. sitting up and gazing soulfully into Eliza’s nipples. “I say, would you like to be a Duchess or something?”

Eliza arched her back and laughed. Monmouth shifted his attention to her oscillating navel, and looked wounded.

“What would I have to do? Marry some syphilitic Duke?”

“Of course not. Be my mistress—when I am King of England. My father made all his mistresses into Duchesses.”

“Why?”

Monmouth, scandalized: “Elsewise, ’tweren’t proper!”

“You already have a mistress.”

“It’s common to have one…”

“And noble to have several?”

“What’s the point of being a king if you can’t fuck a lot of Duchesses?”

“Just so, sir!”

“Though I don’t know if ‘fuck’ is le mot juste for what we did.”

“What I did. You just fidgeted and shuddered.”

“Well it’s like some modish dance, isn’t it, where only one knows the steps. You just have to teach me the other part of it.”

“I am honored, Your Grace—does that mean we’ll be seeing each other again?”

Monmouth, miffed and slightly buffaloed: “I was sincere about making you a Duchess.”

“First you have to make yourself a King.”

The Duke of Monmouth sighed and slammed back into the mattress, driving out an evoluting cloud of dust, straw-ends, bedbugs, and mite fœces. All of it hung beautifully in the lambent air, as if daubed on canvas by one of those Brueghels.

“I know it is ever so tiresome,” Eliza said, stroking the Duke’s hair back from his brow and tucking it neatly behind his ear. “Later you’ll be slogging round dreadful battlefields. Tonight we go to the Opera!”

Monmouth made a vile face. “Give me a battlefield any time.”

“William’s going to be there.”

“Eeeyuh, he’s not going to do any tedious acting, is he?”

“What, the Prince of Orange—?”

“After the Peace of Breda he put on a ballet, and appeared as Mercury, bringing news of Anglo-Dutch rapprochement. Embarrassing to see a rather good warrior prancing about with a couple of bloody goose-wings lashed to his ankles.”

“That was a long time ago—he is a grown man, and it is beneath his dignity now. He’ll just peer down from his box. Pretend to whisper bons mots to Mary, who’ll pretend to get them.”

“If he is coming, we can go late,” Monmouth said. “They’ll have to search the place for bombs.”

“Then we must go early,” Eliza countered, “as there’ll be that much more time for plots and intrigues.”

LIKE ONE WHO HAS ONLY read books and heard tales of a foreign land, and finally goes there and sees the real thing—thus Eliza at the Opera. Not so much for the place (which was only a building) as for the people, and not so much for the ones with titles and formal ranks (viz. the Raadspensionary, and diverse Regents and Magistrates with their fat jewelled wives) as for the ones who had the power to move the market.

Eliza, like most of that caterwauling, hand-slapping crowd who migrated between the Dam and the Exchange, did not have enough money to trade in actual V.O.C. shares. When she was flush, she bought and sold ducat shares, and when she wasn’t, she bought and sold options and contracts to buy or sell them. Strictly speaking, ducat shares didn’t even exist. They were splinters, fragments, of actual V.O.C. shares. They were a fiction that had been invented so that people who weren’t enormously wealthy could participate in the market.

Yet even above the level of those who traded full V.O.C. shares were the princes of the market, who had accumulated large numbers of those shares, and borrowed money against them, which they lent out to diverse ventures: mines, sailing-voyages, slave-forts on the Guinea coast, colonies, wars, and (if conditions were right) the occasional violent overthrow of a king. Such a man could move the market simply by showing his face at the Exchange, and trigger a crash, or a boom, simply by strolling across it with a particular expression on his face, leaving a trail of buying and selling in his wake, like a spreading cloud of smoke from a bishop’s censer.

All of those men seemed to be here at the Opera with their wives or mistresses. The crowd was something like the innards of a harpsichord, each person tensed to thrum or keen when plucked. Mostly it was a cacophony, as if cats were lovemaking on the keyboard. But the arrival of certain Personages was a palpable striking of certain chords.

“The French have a word for this: they name it a frisson,” muttered the Duke of Monmouth behind a kid-gloved hand as they made their way toward their box.

“Like Orpheus, I struggle with a desire to turn around and look behind me—”

“Stay, your turban would fall off.”

Eliza reached up to pat the cyclone of cerulean Turkish silk. It was anchored to her hair by diverse heathen brooches, clips, and pins. “Impossible.”

“Anyway, why would you want to look behind you?”

“To see what has caused this frisson.”

“It is we, you silly.” And for once, the Duke of Monmouth had said something that was demonstrably true. Countless sets of jewelled and gilded opera-glasses had been trained on them, making the owners look like so many goggle-eyed amphibians crowded together on a bank.

“Never before has the Duke’s woman been more gloriously attired than he,” Eliza ventured.

“And never again,” Monmouth snarled. “I only hope that your magnificence does not distract them from what we want them to see.”

They stood at the railing of their box as they talked, presenting themselves for inspection. For the proscenium where the actors cavorted was only the most obvious of the Opera House’s stages, and the story that they acted out was only one of several dramas all going on at once. For example, the Stadholder’s box, only a few yards away, was being ransacked by Blue Guards looking for French bombs. That had grown tedious, and so now the Duke of Monmouth and his latest mistress had the attention of most everyone. The gaze of so many major V.O.C. shareholders, through so many custom-ground lenses, made Eliza feel like an insect ’neath a Natural Philosopher’s burning-glass. She was glad that this Turkish courtesan’s get-up included a veil, which hid everything but her eyes.

Even through the veil’s narrow aperture, some of the observers might’ve detected a few moments’ panic, or at least anxiety, in Eliza’s eyes, as the frisson drew out into a general murmur of confusion: opera-goers all nudging one another down below, pointing upwards with flicks of the eyeballs or discreet waftings of gloved and ringed fingers, getting their wigs entangled as they whispered speculations to each other.

It took a few moments for the crowd to even figure out who Eliza’s escort was. Monmouth’s attire was numblingly practical, as if he were going to jump on a war-horse immediately following the Opera and gallop through fen, forest, and brush until he encountered some foe who wanted slaying. Even his sword was a cavalry saber—not a rapier. To that point, at least, the message was clear enough. The question was, in what direction would Monmouth ride, and what sorts of heads, specifically, did he intend to be lopping off with that saber?

“I knew it—to expose your navel was a mistake!” the Duke hissed.

“On the contrary—’tis the keyhole through which the entire riddle will be unlocked,” Eliza returned, the t’s and k’s making her veil ripple gorgeously. But she was not as confident as she sounded, and so, at the risk of being obvious, she allowed her gaze to wander, in what she hoped would be an innocent-seeming way, around the crescent of opera-boxes until she found the one where the comte d’Avaux was seated along with (among other Amsterdammers who had recently gone on shopping sprees in Paris) Mr. Sluys the traitorous lead-hoarder.

D’Avaux removed a pair of golden opera-glasses from his eyes and stared Eliza in the face for a ten-count.

His eyes shifted to William’s box, where the Blue Guards were making an endless thrash.

He looked at Eliza again. Her veil hid her smile, but the invitation in her eyes was clear enough.

“It’s…not…working,” Monmouth grunted.

“It is working flawlessly,” Eliza said. D’Avaux was on his feet, excusing himself from the crowd in that box: Sluys, and an Amsterdam Regent, and some sort of young French nobleman, who must have been of high rank, for d’Avaux gave him a deep bow.

A few moments later he was giving the same sort of bow to the Duke of Monmouth, and kissing Eliza’s hand.

“The next time you grace the Opera, mademoiselle, the Blue Guards will have to search your box, too—for you may be sure that every Lady in this building is shamed by your radiance. None of them will ever forgive you.” But as he was saying these words to Eliza, his gaze was traveling curiously up and down Monmouth, searching for clues.

The Duke was wearing several pins and badges that had to be viewed from close range in order to be properly interpreted: one bearing the simple red cross of a Crusader, and another with the arms of the Holy League—the alliance of Poland, Austria, and Venice that was nudging the wreckage of the Turkish Army back across Hungary.

“Your Grace,” d’Avaux said, “the way East is dangerous.”

“The way West is barred forever, to me anyway,” Monmouth replied, “and my presence in Holland is giving rise to all manner of ugly rumors.”

“There is always a place for you in France.”

“The only thing I’ve ever been any good for is fighting—” Monmouth began.

“Not the only thing…my lord,” Eliza said lasciviously. D’Avaux flinched and licked his lips. Monmouth flushed slightly and continued: “as my uncle[*] has brought peace to Christendom, I must seek glory in heathen lands.”

Something was happening in the corner of Eliza’s eye: William and Mary entering their box. Everyone rose and applauded. It was dry, sparse applause, and it didn’t last. The comte d’Avaux stepped forward and kissed the Duke of Monmouth on both cheeks. Many of the opera-goers did not see the gesture, but some did. Enough, anyway, to strike a new chord in the audience: a baritone commotion that was soon covered up by the opening strains of the overture.

The ladies and gentlemen of Amsterdam were settling into their seats, but their servants and lackeys still stood in the shadows under the boxes and loges, and some of them were now moving as their masters beckoned to them: stepping forward and cocking their heads to hear whispered confidences, or holding out their hands to accept scribbled notes.

The market was moving. Eliza had moved it with her turban and her navel, and d’Avaux had moved it by showing slightly greater than normal affection for the Duke of Monmouth. Together, these clues could only mean that Monmouth had given up his claim to the English throne and was bound for Constantinople.

The market was moving, and Eliza desperately wanted to be out on the Dam, moving with it—but her place was here for now. She saw d’Avaux return to his box and sit down. Actors had begun to sing down on the stage, but d’Avaux’s guests were leaning towards him to whisper and listen. The young French nobleman nodded his head, turned towards Monmouth, crossed himself, then opened his hand as if throwing a prayer to the Duke. Eliza half expected to see a dove fly out of his sleeve. Monmouth pretended to snatch it from the air, and kissed it.

But Mr. Sluys was not in a praying mood. He was thinking. Even in semi-darkness, through a miasma of candle and tobacco smoke, Eliza could read his face: Monmouth slaying Turks in Hungary means he won’t use Holland as a platform to invade England—so there won’t be a catastrophe in Anglo-Dutch relations—so the English Navy won’t be firing any broadsides at the Dutch merchant fleet—so V.O.C. stock will rise. Sluys held his right hand up slightly and caressed the air with two fingers. A servant was suddenly draped over his epaulet, memorizing something, counting on his fingers. He nodded sharply, like a pecking gull, and was gone.

Eliza reached up behind her head, untied her veil, and let it fall down onto her bosom. Then she enjoyed the opera.

A hundred feet away, Abraham de la Vega was hiding in the wings with a spyglass, made of lenses ground, to tolerances of a few thousandths of an inch, by his late second cousin, Baruch de Spinoza. Through those lenses, he saw the veil descend. He was nine years old. He moved through the backstage and out of the opera-house like the moon-shadow of a nightingale. Aaron de la Vega, his uncle, was waiting there astride a swift horse.

“HAS HE OFFERED to make you a Duchess yet?” d’Avaux asked during the intermission.

“He said that he would have—had he not renounced his claim to the throne,” Eliza said.

D’Avaux was amused by her carefulness. “As your gallant is renewing his Platonic friendship with the Princess, may I escort you to Mr. Sluys’s box? I cannot stand to see you neglected.”

Eliza looked at the Stadholder’s box. Mary was there but William had already sneaked out, leaving the field clear for Monmouth, whose brave resolve to go East and fight the Turk had Mary almost in tears.

“I never even saw the Prince,” Eliza said, “just glimpsed him scurrying in at the last minute.”

“Rest assured, mademoiselle, he is nothing to look at.” And he offered Eliza his arm. “If it’s true that your beau is leaving soon for the East, you’ll need new young men to amuse you. Frankly, you are overdue for a change. La France did her best to civilize Monmouth, but the Anglo-Saxon taint had penetrated too deeply. He never developed the innate discretion of a Frenchman.”

“I’m mortified to learn that Monmouth has been indiscreet,” Eliza said gaily.

“All of Amsterdam, and approximately half of London and Paris, have learned of your charms. But, although the Duke’s descriptions were unspeakably vulgar—when they were not completely incoherent—cultivated gentlemen can look beyond ribaldry, and infer that you possess qualities, mademoiselle, beyond the merely gynæcological.”

“When you say ‘cultivated’ you mean ‘French’?”

“I know you are teasing me, mademoiselle. You expect me to say ‘Why yes, all French gentlemen are cultivated.’ But it is not so.”

“Monsieur d’Avaux, I’m shocked to hear you say such a thing.”

They were almost at the door to Sluys’s box. D’Avaux drew back. “Typically only the worst sort of French nobility would be in the box that you and I are about to enter, associating with the likes of Sluys—but tonight is an exception.”

“LOUIS LE GRAND—as he’s now dubbed himself—built himself a new château outside of Paris, at a place called Versailles,” Aaron de la Vega had told her, during one of their meetings in Amsterdam’s narrow and crowded Jewish quarter—which, by coincidence, happened to be built up against the Opera House. “He has moved his entire court to the new place.”

“I’d heard as much, but I didn’t believe it,” Gomer Bolstrood had said, looking more at home among Jews than he ever had among Englishmen. “To move so many people out of Paris—it seems insane.”

“On the contrary—it is a master-stroke,” de la Vega had said. “You know the Greek myth of Antaeus? For the French nobility, Paris is like the Mother Earth—as long as they are ensconced there, they have power, information, money. But Louis, by forcing them to move to Versailles, is like Hercules, who mastered Antaeus by raising him off the ground and slowly strangling him into submission.”

“A pretty similitude,” Eliza had said, “but what does it have to do with our putting a short squeeze on Mr. Sluys?”

De la Vega had permitted himself a smile, and looked over at Bolstrood. But Gomer had not been in a grinning mood. “Sluys is one of those rich Dutchmen who craves the approval of Frenchmen. He has been cultivating them since before the 1672 war—mostly without success, for they find him stupid and vulgar. But now it’s different. The French nobles used to be able to live off their land, but now Louis forces them to keep a household in Versailles, as well as one in Paris, and to go about in coaches, finely dressed and wigged—”

“The wretches are desperate for lucre,” Gomer Bolstrood had said.

AT THE OPERA, before the door to Sluys’s box, Eliza said, “You mean, monsieur, the sort of French nobleman who’s not content with the old ways, and likes to play the markets in Amsterdam, so he can afford a coach and a mistress?”

“You will spoil me, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said, “for how can I return to the common sort of female—stupid and ignorant—after I have conversed with you? Yes, normally Sluys’s box would be stuffed with that sort of French nobleman. But tonight he is entertaining a young man who came by his endowment properly.”

“Meaning—?”

“Inherited it—or is going to—from his father, the Duc d’Arcachon.”

“Would it be vulgar for me to ask how the Duc d’Arcachon got it?”

“Colbert built our Navy from twenty vessels to three hundred. The Duc d’Arcachon is Admiral of that Navy—and was responsible for much of the building.”

The floor around Mr. Sluys’s chair was strewn with wadded scraps. Eliza would have loved to smooth some out and read them, but his hard jollity, and the way he was pouring champagne, told her that the evening’s trading was going well for him, or so he imagined. “Jews don’t go to the Opera—it is against their religion! What a show de la Vega has missed tonight!”

“ ‘Thou shalt not attend the Opera…’ Is that in Exodus, or Deuteronomy?” Eliza inquired.

D’Avaux—who seemed uncharacteristically nervous, all of a sudden—took Eliza’s remark as a witticism, and produced a smile as thin and dry as parchment. Mr. Sluys took it as stupidity, and got sexually aroused. “De la Vega is still selling V.O.C. stock short! He’ll be doing it all night long—until he hears the news tomorrow morning, and gets word to his brokers to stop!” Sluys seemed almost outraged to be making money so easily.

Now Mr. Sluys looked as if he would’ve been content to drink champagne and gaze ’pon Eliza’s navel until any number of fat ladies sang (which actually would not have been long in coming), but some sort of very rude commotion, originating from this very box, forced him to glance aside. Eliza turned to see that young French nobleman—the son of the Duc d’Arcachon—at the railing of the box, where he was being hugged, passionately and perhaps even a little violently, by a bald man with a bloody nose.

Eliza’s dear Mum had always taught her that it wasn’t polite to stare, but she couldn’t help herself. Thus, she took in that the young Arcachon had actually flung one of his legs over the railing, as if he were trying to vault out into empty space. A large and rather good wig balanced precariously on the same rail. Eliza stepped forward and snatched it. It was unmistakably the periwig of Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux, who must, therefore, be the bald fellow wrestling young Arcachon back from the brink of suicide.

D’Avaux—demonstrating a weird strength for such a refined man—finally slammed the other back into a chair, and had the good grace to so choreograph it that he ended up down on both knees. He pulled a lace hanky from a pocket and stuffed it up under his nose to stanch the blood, then spoke through it, heatedly but respectfully, to the young nobleman, who had covered his face with his hands. From time to time he darted a look at Eliza.

“Has the young Arcachon been selling V.O.C. stock short?” she inquired of Mr. Sluys.

“On the contrary, mademoiselle—”

“Oh, I forgot. He’s not the sort who dabbles in markets. But why else would a French duke’s son visit Amsterdam?”

Sluys got a look as if something were lodged in his throat.

“Never mind,” Eliza said airily, “I’m sure it is frightfully complicated—and I’m no good at such things.”

Sluys relaxed.

“I was only wondering why he tried to kill himself—assuming that’s what he was doing?”

“Étienne d’Arcachon is the politest man in France,” Sluys said ominously.

“Hmmph. You’d never know!”

“Sssh!” Sluys made frantic tiny motions with the flesh shovels of his hands.

“Mr. Sluys! Do you mean to imply that this spectacle has something to do with my presence in your box?”

Finally Sluys was on his feet. He was rather drunk and very heavy, and stood bent over with one hand gripping the box’s railing. “It would help if you’d confide in me that, if Étienne d’Arcachon slays himself in your presence, you’ll take offense.”

“Mr. Sluys, watching him commit suicide would ruin my evening!”

“Very well. Thank you, mademoiselle. I am in your debt enormously.”

“Mr. Sluys—you have no idea.”

IT LED TO HUSHED INTRIGUES in dim corners, palmed messages, raised eyebrows, and subtle gestures by candle-light, continuing all through the final acts of the opera—which was fortunate, because the opera was very dull.

Then, somehow, d’Avaux arranged to share a coach with Eliza and Monmouth. As they jounced, heaved, and clattered down various dark canal-edges and over diverse draw-bridges, he explained: “It was Sluys’s box. Therefore, he was the host. Therefore, it was his responsibility to make a formal introduction of Étienne d’Arcachon to you, mademoiselle. But he was too Dutch, drunk, and distracted to perform his proper rôle. I never cleared my throat so many times—but to no avail. Monsieur d’Arcachon was placed in an impossible situation!”

“So he tried to take his own life?”

“It was the only honourable course,” d’Avaux said simply.

“He is the politest man in France,” Monmouth added.

“You saved the day,” d’Avaux said.

“Oh, that—’twas Mr. Sluys’s suggestion.”

D’Avaux looked vaguely nauseated at the mere mention of Sluys. “He has much to answer for. This soirée had better be charmante.”

AARON DE LA VEGA, who was assuredly not going to a party tonight, treated balance-sheets and V.O.C. shares as a scholar would old books and parchments—which is to say that Eliza found him sober and serious to a fault. But he could be merry about a few things, and one of them was Mr. Sluys’s house—or rather his widening collection of them. For as the first one had pulled its neighbors downwards, skewing them into parallelograms, popping window-panes out of their frames, and imprisoning doors in their jambs, Mr. Sluys had been forced to buy them out. He owned five houses in a row now, and could afford to, as long as he was managing the assets of half the population of Versailles. The one in the middle, where Mr. Sluys kept his secret hoard of lead and guilt, was at least a foot lower than it had been in 1672, and Aaron de la Vega liked to pun about it in his native language, saying it was “embarazada,” which meant “pregnant.”

As the Duke of Monmouth handed Eliza down from the carriage in front of that house, she thought it was apt. For—especially when Mr. Sluys was burning thousands of candles at once, as he was tonight, and the light was blazing from all those conspicuously skewed window-frames—hiding the secret was like a woman seven months pregnant trying to conceal her condition with clever tailoring.

Men and women in Parisian fashions were entering the pregnant house in what almost amounted to a continuous queue. Mr. Sluys—belatedly warming to his rôle as host—was stationed just inside the door, mopping sweat from his brow every few seconds, as if secretly terrified that the added weight of so many guests would finally drive his house straight down into the mud, like a stake struck with a maul.

But when Eliza got into the place, and suffered Mr. Sluys to kiss her hand, and made a turn round the floor, gaily ignoring the venomous stares of pudgy Dutch churchwives and overdressed Frenchwomen—she could see clear signs that Mr. Sluys had brought in mining-engineers, or something, to shore the house up. For the beams that crisscrossed the ceiling, though hidden under festoons and garlands of Barock plasterwork, were uncommonly huge, and the pillars that rose up to support the ends of those beams, though fluted and capitalled like those of a Roman temple, were the size of mainmasts. Still she thought she could detect a pregnant convexity about the ceiling…

“Don’t come out and say you want to buy lead—tell him only that you want to lighten his burdens—better yet, that you wish to transfer them, forcefully, onto the shoulders of the Turks. Or something along those lines,” she said, distractedly, into Monmouth’s ear as the first galliard was drawing to a close. He stalked away in a bit of a huff—but he was moving towards Sluys, anyway. Eliza regretted—briefly—that she’d insulted his intelligence, or at least his breeding. But she was too beset by sudden worries to consider his feelings. The house, for all its plaster and candles, reminded her of nothing so much as the Doctor’s mine, deep beneath the Harz: a hole in the earth, full of metal, prevented from collapsing in on itself solely by cleverness and continual shoring-up.

Weight could be transferred from lead to floor-boards, and thence into joists, and thence into beams, and from beams into pillars, then down into footings, and thence into log piles whose strength derived from the “stick” (as Dutchmen called it) between them and the mud they’d been hammered into. The final settling of accounts was there: if the “stick” sufficed, the structure above it was a building, and if it didn’t, it was a gradual avalanche…

“It is very curious, mademoiselle, that the chilly winds of the Hague were balmy breezes to you—yet in this warm room, you alone clutch your arms, and have goose-bumps.”

“Chilly thoughts, Monsieur d’Avaux.”

“And no wonder—your beau is about to leave for Hungary. You need to make some new friends—ones who live in warmer climes, perhaps?”

No. Madness. I belong here. Even Jack, who loves me, said so.

From a corner of the room, clouded with men and pipe-smoke, a trumpeting laugh from Mr. Sluys. Eliza glanced over that way and saw Monmouth plying him—probably reciting the very sentences she’d composed for him. Sluys was giddy with hope that he could get rid of his burden, frantic with anxiety that it might not happen. Meanwhile the market was in violent motion all over Amsterdam as Aaron de la Vega sold the V.O.C. short. It would all lead to an invasion of England. Everything had gone fluid tonight. This was no time to stand still.

A man danced by with an ostrich-plume in his hat, and she thought of Jack. Riding across Germany with him, she’d had nought but her plumes, and his sword, and their wits—yet she’d felt safer then than she did now. What would it take to feel safe again?

“Friends in warm places are lovely to have,” Eliza said distractedly, “but there is no one here who would have me, monsieur. You know very well that I am not of noble, or even gentle, birth—I’m too exotic for the Dutch, too common for the French.”

“The King’s mistress was born a slave,” d’Avaux said. “Now she is a Marquise. You see, nothing matters there save wit and beauty.”

“But wit fails and beauty fades, and I don’t wish to be a house on piles, sinking into the bog a little each day,” Eliza said. “Somewhere I must stick. I must have a foundation that does not always move.”

“Where on this earth can such a miracle be found?”

“Money,” Eliza said. “Here, I can make money.”

“And yet this money you speak of is but a chimæra—a figment of the collective imagination of a few thousand Jews and rabble bellowing at one another out on the Dam.”

“But in the end I may convert it—bit by bit—into gold.”

“Is that all you want? Remember, mademoiselle, that gold only has value because some people say it does. Let me tell you a bit of recent history: My King went to a place called Orange—you’ve heard of it?”

“A principality in the south of France, near Avignon—William’s fiefdom, as I understand it.”

“My King went to this Orange, this little family heirloom of Prince William, three years ago. Despite William’s pretensions of martial glory, my King was able to walk in without a battle. He went for a stroll atop the fortifications. Le Roi paused, there along a stone battlement, and plucked out a tiny fragment of loose masonry—no larger than your little finger, mademoiselle—and tossed it onto the ground. Then he walked away. Within a few days, all the walls and fortifications of Orange had been pulled down by le Roi’s regiments, and Orange had been absorbed into France, as easily as Mr. Sluys over there might swallow a bit of ripe fruit.”

“What is the point of the story, Monsieur, other than to explain why Amsterdam is crowded with Orangish refugees, and why William hates your King so much?”

“Tomorrow, le Roi might pick up a bit of Gouda cheese and throw it to his dogs.”

“Amsterdam would fall, you are saying, and my hard-earned gold would be loot for some drunken regiment.”

“Your gold—and you, mademoiselle.”

“I understand such matters far better than you imagine, monsieur. What I do not understand is why you pretend to be interested in what happens to me. In the Hague, you saw me as a pretty girl who could skate, and who would therefore catch Monmouth’s eye, and make Mary unhappy, and create strife in William’s house. And it all came to pass just as you intended. But what can I do for you now?”

“Live a beautiful and interesting life—and, from time to time, talk to me.”

Eliza laughed out loud, lustily, drawing glares from women who never laughed that way, or at all. “You want me to be your spy.”

“No, mademoiselle. I want you to be my friend.” D’Avaux said this simply and almost sadly, and it caught Eliza up short. In that moment, d’Avaux spun smartly on the balls of his feet and trapped Eliza’s arm. She had little choice but to walk with him—and soon it became obvious that they were walking directly towards Étienne d’Arcachon. In the dimmest and smokiest corner of the room, meanwhile, Mr. Sluys kept laughing and laughing.

Paris

SPRING 1685

Thou hast met with something (as I perceive) already; for I see the dirt of the Slough of Despond is upon thee; but that Slough is the beginning of the sorrows that do attend those that go on in that way; hear me, I am older than thou!

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

JACK WAS BURIED up to his neck in the steaming manure of the white, pink-eyed horses of the duc d’Arcachon, trying not to squirm as a contingent of perhaps half a dozen maggots cleaned away the dead skin and flesh surrounding the wound in his thigh. This itched, but did not hurt, beyond the normal wholesome throbbing. Jack had no idea how many days he’d been in here, but from listening to the bells of Paris, and watching small disks of sunlight prowl around the stable, he guessed it might be five in the afternoon. He heard boots approaching, and a padlock negotiating with its key. If that lock were the only thing holding him in this stable, he would’ve escaped long ago; but as it was, Jack was chained by the neck to a pillar of white stone, with a few yards of slack so that he could, for example, bury himself in manure.

The bolt shot and John Churchill stepped in on a tongue of light. In contrast to Jack, he was not covered in shit—far from it! He was wearing a jeweled turban of shimmering gold cloth, and robes, with lots of costume jewelry; old scuffed boots, and a large number of weapons, viz. scimitar, pistols, and several granadoes. His first words were: “Shut up, Jack, I’m going to a fancy-dress ball.”

“Where’s Turk?”

“I stabled him,” Churchill said, pointing with his eyes toward an adjacent stable. The duc had several stables, of which this was the smallest and meanest, and used only for shoeing horses.

“So the ball you mean to attend is here.”

“At the Hotel d’Arcachon, yes.”

“What’re you supposed to be—a Turk? Or a Barbary Corsair?”

“Do I look like a Turk?” Churchill asked hopefully. “I understand you have personal knowledge of them—”

“No. Better say you’re a Pirate.”

“A breed of which I have personal knowledge.”

“Well, if you hadn’t fucked the King’s mistress, he wouldn’t have sent you to Africa.”

“Well, I did, and he did—send me there, I mean—and I came back.”

“And now he’s dead. And you and the duc d’Arcachon have something to talk about.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Churchill asked darkly.

“Both of you have been in contact with the Barbary Pirates—that’s all I meant.”

Churchill was taken aback—a small pleasure and an insignificant victory for Jack. “You are well-informed,” he said. “I should like to know whether everyone in the world knows of the duc d’Arcachon’s intercourse with Barbary, or is it just that you are special?”

“Am I, then?”

“They say l’Emmerdeur is King of the Vagabonds.”

“Then why didn’t the duc put me up in his finest apartment?”

“Because I have gone to such extravagant lengths to prevent him from knowing who you are.”

“So that’s why I’m still alive. I was wondering.”

“If they knew, they would tear you apart with iron tongs, over the course of several days, at the Place Dauphine.”

“No better place for it—lovely view from there.”

“Is that all you have for me, in the way of thanks?”

Silence. Gates were creaking open all round the Hotel d’Arcachon as it mobilized for the ball. Jack heard the hollow grumbling of barrels being rolled across stone courtyards, and (since his nose had stopped being able to smell shit) he could smell birds roasting, and buttery pastries baking in ovens. There were less agreeable odors, too, but Jack’s nose sought out the good ones.

“You could at least answer my question,” Churchill said. “Does everyone know that the duc has frequent dealings with Barbary?”

“Some small favor would be appropriate at this point,” Jack said.

“I can’t let you go.”

“I was thinking of a pipe.”

“Funny, so was I.” Churchill went to the stable door and flagged down a boy and demanded des pipes en terre and du tabac blond and du feu.

“Is King Looie coming to the duc’s fancy-dress ball, too?”

“So it is rumored—he has been preparing a costume in great secrecy, out at Versailles. Said to be of a radically shocking nature. Impossibly daring. All the French ladies are aflutter.”

“Aren’t they always?”

“I wouldn’t know—I’ve taken a sound, some would say stern, English bride: Sarah.”

“What’s she coming as? A nun?”

“Oh, she’s back in London. This is a diplomatic mission. Secret.”

“You stand before me, dressed as you are, and say that?”

Churchill laughed.

“You take me for an imbecile?” Jack continued. The pain in his leg was most annoying, and shaking away flies had given his neck a cramp, as well as raw sores from the abrasion of his iron collar.

“You are only alive because of your recent imbecility, Jack. L’Emmerdeur is known to be clever as a fox. What you did was so stupid that it has not occurred to anyone, yet, that you could be he.”

“So, then…in France, what’s considered suitable punishment for an imbecile who does something stupid?”

“Well, naturally they were going to kill you. But I seem to have convinced them that, as you are not only a rural half-wit, but an English rural half-wit, the whole matter is actually funny.”

“Funny? Not likely.”

“The duc de Bourbon hosted a dinner party. Invited a certain eminent writer. Became annoyed with him. Emptied his snuff-box into the poor scribbler’s wine when he wasn’t looking, as a joke. The writer drank the wine and died of it—hilarious!”

“What fool would drink wine mixed with snuff?”

“That’s not the point of the story—it’s about what French nobility do, and don’t, consider to be funny—and how I saved your life. Pay attention!”

“Let’s set aside how, and ask: why did you save my life, guv’nor?”

“When a man is being torn apart with pliers, there’s no telling what he’ll blurt out.”

“Aha.”

“The last time I saw you, you were ordinary Vagabond scum. If there happened to be an old connexion between the two of us, it scarcely mattered. Now you are legendary Vagabond scum, a picaroon, much talked of in salons. Now if the old link between us came to be widely known, it would be inconvenient for me.”

“But you could have let that other fellow run me through with his rapier.”

“And probably should have,” Churchill said ruefully, “but I wasn’t thinking. It is very odd. I saw him lunging for you. If I had only stood clear and allowed matters to take their natural course, you’d be dead. But some impulse took me—”

“The Imp of the Perverse, like?”

“Your old companion? Yes, perhaps he leapt from your shoulder to mine. Like a perfect imbecile, I saved your life.”

“Well, you make a most splendid and gallant perfect imbecile. Are you going to kill me now?”

“Not directly. You are now a galérien. Your group departs for Marseille tomorrow morning. It’s a bit of a walk.”

“I know it.”

Churchill sat on a bench and worried off one boot, then the other, then reached into them and pulled out the fancy Turkish slippers that had become lodged inside, and drew the slippers on. Then he threw the boots at Jack and they lodged in the manure, temporarily scaring away the flies. At about the same time, a stable-boy came in carrying two pipes stuffed with tobacco, and a taper, and soon both men were puffing away contentedly.

“I learned of the duc’s Barbary connexions through an escaped slave, who seems to consider the information part of a closely guarded personal secret,” Jack said finally.

“Thank you,” said Churchill. “How’s the leg, then?”

“Someone seems to’ve poked it with a sword…otherwise fine.”

“Might need something to lean on.” Churchill stepped outside the door for a moment, then returned carrying Jack’s crutch. He held it crosswise between his two hands for a moment, weighing it. “Seems a bit heavy on this end—a foreign sort of crutch, is it?”

“Exceedingly foreign.”

“Turkish?”

“Don’t toy with me, Churchill.”

Churchill spun the crutch around and chucked it like a spear so that it stuck in the manure-pile. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it soon and then get the hell out of France. The road to Marseille will take you, in a day or two, through the pays of the Count of Joigny.”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s the fellow you knocked off his horse. Notwithstanding my earlier reassuring statements, he does not find you amusing—if you enter his territory…”

“Pliers.”

“Just so. Now, as insurance, I have a good friend lodging at an inn just to the north of Joigny. He is to keep an eye on the road to Marseille, and if he sees you marching down it, he is to make sure that you never get past that inn alive.”

“How’s he going to recognize me?”

“By that point, you’ll be starkers—exposing your most distinctive feature.”

“You really are worried I’ll make trouble for you.”

“I told you I’m here on a diplomatic mission. It is important.”

“Trying to work out how England is to be divvied up between Leroy and the Pope of Rome?”

Churchill puffed on his pipe a few times in a fine, but not altogether convincing, display of calmness, and then said, “I knew we’d reach this point in the conversation, Jack—the point where you accused me of being a traitor to my country and my religion—and so I’m ready for it, and I’m actually not going to cut your head off.”

Jack laughed. His leg hurt a great deal, and it itched, too.

“Through no volition of my own, I have for many years been a member of His Majesty’s household,” Churchill began. Jack was confused by this until he recollected that “His Majesty” no longer meant Charles II, but James II, the whilom Duke of York. Churchill continued: “I suppose I could reveal to you my innermost thoughts about what it’s like to be a Protestant patriot in thrall to a Catholic King who loves France, but life is short, and I intend to spend as little of it as possible standing in dark stables apologizing to shit-covered Vagabonds. Suffice it to say that it’s better for England if I do this mission.”

“Suppose I do get away, before Joigny…what’s to prevent me from telling everyone about the longstanding connexions between the Shaftoes and the Churchills?”

“No one of Quality will ever believe a word you say, Jack, unless you say it while you are being expertly tortured…it’s only when you are stretched out on some important person’s rack that you are dangerous. Besides, there is the Shaftoe legacy to think of.” Churchill pulled out a little purse and jiggled it to make the coins ring.

“I did notice that you’d taken possession of my charger, without paying for it. Very bad form.”

“The price in here is a fair one—a handsome sum, even,” Churchill said. Then he pocketed the purse.

“Oh, come on—!”

“A naked galérien can’t carry a purse, and these French coins are too big to stuff up even your asshole, Jack. I’ll make sure your spawn get the benefit of this, when I’m back in England.”

“Get it, or get the benefit of it? Because there is a slipperiness in those words that troubles me.”

Churchill laughed again, this time with a cheerfulness that really made Jack want to kill him. He got up and plucked the empty pipe from Jack’s mouth, and—as stables were notoriously inflammable, and he did not wish to be guilty of having set fire to the duc’s—went over to the little horseshoe-forge, now cold and dark, and whacked the ashes out of the pipes. “Try to concentrate. You’re a galley slave chained to a post in a stable in Paris. Be troubled by that. Bon voyage, Jack.”

Exit Churchill. Jack had been meaning to advise him not to sleep with any of those French ladies, and to tell him about the Turkish innovation involving sheep-intestines, but there hadn’t been time—and besides, who was he to give John Churchill advice on fucking?

Equipped now with boots, a sword, and (if he could just reach it, and slay a few stable-boys) a horse, Jack began considering how to get the damned chain off his neck. It was a conventional slave-collar: two iron semicircles hinged together on one side and with a sort of hasp on the other, consisting of two loops that would align with each other when the collar was closed. If a chain was then threaded through the loops, it would prevent the collar from opening. This made it possible for a single length of chain to secure as many collars, and hence slaves, as could be threaded onto it, without the need for expensive and unreliable padlocks. It kept the ironmongery budget to a minimum and worked so handily that no French Château or German Schloss was without a few, hanging on a wall-peg just in case some persons needed enslaving.

The particular chain that went through Jack’s collar-hasp had a circular loop—a single oversized link—welded to one end. The chain had been passed around the stone pillar and its narrow end threaded through this loop, then through Jack’s collar, and finally one of the duc’s smiths had heated up the chain-end in the stable’s built-in forge, and hammered an old worn-out horseshoe onto it, so it could not be withdrawn. Typical French extravagance! But the duc had an infinite fund of slaves and servants, so it cost him nothing, and there was no way for Jack to get it off.

The tobacco-embers from the pipes had formed a little mound on the blackened hearth of the forge and were still glowing, just barely. Jack squirmed free of the manure-pile and limped over to the forge and blew on them to keep them alive.

Normally this whole place was swarming with stable-boys, but now, and for the next hour or two, they’d be busy with ball duty: taking the horses of the arriving guests and leading them to stalls in the duc’s better stables. So a fire in this hearth would be detectable only as a bit of smoke coming out of a chimney, which was not an unusual sight on a cool March evening in seventeenth-century Paris.

But he was getting ahead of himself. This was a long way from being a fire. Jack began looking about for some tinder. Straw would be perfect. But the stable-boys had been careful not to leave anything so tinderlike anywhere near the forge. It was all piled at the opposite end of the stable, and Jack’s chain wouldn’t let him go that far. He tried lying flat on the floor, with the chain stretched out taut behind him, and reaching out with the crutch to rake some straw towards him. But the end of the crutch came a full yard short of the goal. He scurried back and blew on the tobacco some more. It would not last much longer.

His attention had been drawn to the crutch, which was bound together with a lot of the cheapest sort of dry, fuzzy twine. Perfect tinder. But he’d have to burn most of it, and then he’d have no way to hold the crutch together, and therefore to conceal the existence of the sword—so, if the attempt failed tonight, he was doomed. In that sense ’twere safer to wait until tomorrow, when they’d take the chain off of him. But only to chain him up, he supposed, to a whole file of other galériens—doddering Huguenots, most likely. And he wasn’t about to wait for that. He must do it now.

So he unwound the crutch and frizzed the ends of the twine and put it to the last mote of red fire in the pipe-ashes, and blew. The flame almost died, but then one fiber of twine warped back, withered, flung off a little shroud of steam or smoke, then became a pulse of orange light: a tiny thing, but as big in Jack’s vision as whole trees bursting into flames in the Harz.

After some more blowing and fidgeting he had a morsel of yellow flame on the hearth. While supplying it more twine with one hand, he rummaged blindly for kindling, which ought to be piled up somewhere. Finding only a few twigs, he was forced to draw the sword and shave splints off the crutch-pole. This didn’t last long, and soon he was planing splinters off pillars and beams, and chopping up benches and stools. But finally it was big and hot enough to ignite coal, of which there was plenty. Jack began tossing handfuls of it into his little fire while pumping the bellows with the other hand. At first it just lay in the fire like black stones, but then the sharp, brimstony smell of it came into the stable, and the fire became white, and the heat of the coal annihilated the remaining wood-scraps, and the fire became a meteor imprisoned in a chain—for Jack had looped the middle part of his chain around it. The cold iron poisoned the fire, sucked life from it, but Jack heaped on more coal and worked the bellows, and soon the metal had taken on a chestnut color which gave way to various shades of red. The heat of the blaze first dried the moist shit that was all over Jack’s skin and then made him sweat, so that crusts of dung were flaking off of him.

The door opened. “Où est le maréchal-ferrant?” someone asked.

The door opened wider—wide enough to admit a horse—then did just that. The horse was led by a Scot in a tall wig—or maybe not. He was wearing a kiltlike number, but it was made of red satin and he had some sort of ridiculous contrivance slung over one shoulder: a whole pigskin, sewn up and packed with straw to make it look as if it had been inflated, with trumpet-horns, flutes, and pennywhistles dangling from it: a caricature of a bagpipe. His face was painted with blue woad. Pinned to the top of his wig was a tam-o’-shanter with an approximate diameter of three feet, and thrust into his belt, where a gentleman would sheathe his sword, was a sledgehammer. Next to that, several whiskey-jugs holstered.

The horse was a prancing beauty, but it seemed to be favoring one leg—it had thrown a shoe on the ride over.

“Maréchal-ferrant?” the man repeated, squinting in his direction. Jack reckoned that he, Jack, was visible only as a silhouette against the bright fire, and so the collar might not be obvious. He cupped a hand to his ear—smiths were notorious for deafness. That seemed to answer the question—the “Scot” led his horse toward the forge, nattering on about a fer à cheval and going so far as to check his pocket-watch. Jack was irritated. Fer meant “iron,” fer à cheval as he knew perfectly well meant “horseshoe.” But he had just understood that the English word “farrier” must be derived somehow from this—even though “horseshoe” was completely different. He was aware, vaguely—from watching certain historical dramas, and then from roaming round la France listening to people talk—that French people had conquered England at least one time, and thereby confused the English language with all sorts of words such as “farrier,” and “mutton,” which common folk now used all the time without knowing that they were speaking the tongue of the conquerors. Meanwhile, the damned French had a tidy and proper tongue in which, for example, the name of the fellow who put shoes on horses was clearly related to the word for horseshoe. Made his blood boil—and now that James was King, Katie bar the door!

“Quelle heure est-il?” Jack finally inquired. The “Scot” without pausing to wonder why a maréchal-ferrant would need to know the time went once again into the ceremony of withdrawing his pocket-watch, getting the lid open, and reading it. In order to do this he had to turn its face towards the fire, and then he had to twist himself around so that he could see it. Jack waited patiently for this to occur, and then just as the “Scot” was lisping out something involving sept Jack whipped the chain out of the fire and got it round his neck.

It was stranglin’ time in gay Paree. Most awkwardly, the red-hot part of the chain ended up around the throat of the “Scot,” so Jack could not get a grip on it without first rummaging in the tool-box for some tongs. But it had already done enough damage, evidently, that the “Scot” could not make any noise.

His horse was another matter: it whinnied, and backed away, and showed signs of wanting to buck. That was a problem, but Jack had to take things one at a time here. He solved the tong problem and murdered the “Scot” in a great sizzling cloud of grilled neck-flesh—which, he felt sure, must be a delicacy in some part of France. Then he peeled the hot chain off, taking some neck parts with it, and tossed it back into the fire. Having settled these matters, he turned his attention—somewhat reluctantly—to the horse. He was dreading that it might have run out through the open stable doors and drawn attention to itself in the stable-yard beyond. But—oddly—the stable-doors were now closed, and were being bolted shut, by a slender young man in an assortment of not very good clothes. He had evidently seized the horse’s reins and tied them to a post, and had the presence of mind to toss a grain-sack over its head so that it could not see any more of the disturbing sights that were now so abundant in this place.

Having seen to these matters, the gypsy boy—it was certainly a gypsy—turned to face Jack, and made a somber, formal little bow. He was barefoot—had probably gotten here by clambering over rooftops.

“You must be Half-Cocked Jack,” he said, as if this weren’t funny. Speaking in the zargon.

“Who are you?”

“It does not matter. St.-George sent me.” The boy came over, stepping carefully around the glowing coals that had been scattered on the floor when Jack had whipped out the chain, and began to work the bellows.

“What did St.-George tell you to do?” asked Jack, throwing on more coal.

“To see what kind of help you would need, during the entertainment.”

“What entertainment would that be?”

“He did not tell me everything.”

“Why should St.-George care so much?”

“St.-George is angry with you. He says you have shown poor form.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“I will tell him,” the gypsy boy said, and here he smiled for the first time, “that l’Emmerdeur does not need his help.”

“That’s just it,” Jack said, and grabbed the bellows-handle. The boy turned and ran across the stable and vanished through an opening up in the eaves that Jack hadn’t known was there.

While the chain heated, Jack amused himself by going through his victim’s clothing and trying to guess how many gold coins were in his purse. After a couple of minutes (by the pocket-watch, which lay open on the floor) Jack reached into the fire with the tongs and drew out a length of yellow-hot chain. Before it could cool he draped it across an anvil, then smashed it with a heavy chisel-pointed hammer, and then he was free. Except that a yard of hot chain still dangled from his neck, and he could not pull it through his neck-loop without burning himself. So he quenched it in a trough of water. But then he found that in breaking it he’d smashed the last link, and broadened it, so it would no longer pass through the neck-loop. He did not want to spend the time to heat the chain back up, so he was stuck with the collar, and an arm’s length of chain, for now. No matter, really. It was dark outside, he would be seen only as a silhouette, and he needed only that it be a respectable type of silhouette—a shape that people would not discharge weapons at without thinking twice. So he yanked the wig (now wrecked and burnt, but still a wig) off the dead “Scot” and put it on—discarding, however, the unwieldy tam-o’-shanter. He pulled on the boots that John Churchill had donated, and took the long cape that the “Scot” had been wearing. Also his gloves—an old habit to cover the V branded on his thumb. Finally he pilfered the saddle from the horse—it was a magnificent saddle—and carried it out into the stable-yard.

The sight of a supposed Person of Quality toting his own saddle was anomalous, and even if it weren’t, Jack’s dragging one leg, brandishing a scimitar, and muttering out loud in vulgar English also cast uncertainty on his status as a French nobleman. But, as he’d hoped, most of the stable-boys were busy in the main courtyard. The guests were now arriving in force. He barged into the next stable, which was dimly lit by a couple of lanterns, and came face-to-face with a stable-boy who, in an instant, became the most profoundly confused person Jack had ever seen.

“Turk!” Jack called, and was answered by a whinny from several stalls down the line. Jack sidled closer to the stable-boy and allowed the saddle to slide off his shoulders. The boy caught it out of habit, and seemed relieved to have been given a specific job. Then Jack, using his sword as a pointing-device, got him moving in the direction of Turk.

The boy now understood that he was being asked to help steal a horse, and stiffened up in a way that was almost penile. It took no end of prodding to get him to heave the saddle onto Turk’s back. Then Jack socked him in the chin with the guard of the sword, but failed to knock him out. In the end, he had to drag the fool over to a convenient place by the entrance and push him down and practically draw him a picture of how to go about pretending he’d been surprised and knocked unconscious by the English villain.

Then back to Turk, who seemed pleased to see him. As Jack tightened the girth, and made other adjustments, the war-horse’s sinews became taut and vibrant, like the strings of a lute being tuned up. Jack checked his hooves and noted that Churchill had gotten some expert maréchal-ferrant to shoe him. “You and me both,” Jack said, slapping his new boots so that the horse could admire them.

Then he put one of those boots into a stirrup, threw his leg over the saddle, and was hurtling across the duc’s stable-yard before he could even get himself situated properly. Turk wanted out of here as badly as he did. Jack had intended to look for a back exit, but Turk was having none of that, and took him out the way Churchill had ridden him in: straight through a gate into what Jack reckoned must be the main courtyard of the Hôtel d’Arcachon.

Jack sensed quite a few people, but couldn’t really see them because he was dazzled by all of the light: giant torchières like bonfires on pikes, and lanterns strung on colored ropes, and the light of thousands of lanterns and tapers blasting out through the twenty-foot-high windows that constituted most of the front wall of a large noble House directly in front of him. A hundred sperm whales must have given up their bodily fluids to light the lanterns. And as for the tapers in those chandeliers, why, even over the smells of cuisine, fashionable perfume, wood-smoke, and horse-manure, Jack’s nose could detect the fragrance of honey-scented Mauritanian beeswax. All of this sweet-smelling radiance glanced wetly off a large fountain planted in the middle of the court: various Neptunes and Naiads and sea monsters and dolphins cleverly enwrithed to form a support for a naval frigate all speckled with fleurs-de-lis. Wreckage of Dutch and English ships washed up on shores all around, forming benches for French people to put their buttocks on.

The force of the light, and Jack’s hauling back on the reins, had taken the edge off of Turk’s impetuous charge for the exit, but not quite soon enough: the fact remained that Turk, and thus Jack, had effectively burst into the couryard at a near-gallop and then stood agape for several seconds, almost as if demanding to be noticed. And they had been: little knots of Puritans, Færy-Queens, Persians, and Red Indians were looking at them. Jack gave the warhorse an encouraging nudge, while holding fast to the reins so he wouldn’t bolt.

Turk began following a groomed gravel path among flower-beds, which Jack hoped would take them round the fountain eventually and to a place where they could at least see the way out. But they were moving directly toward the light rushing from those banks of windows. Through them Jack saw an immense ballroom, with white walls garlanded with gold, and white polished marble floors where the nobility, in their fancy-dress, were dancing to music from a consort stuffed into a corner.

Then—like anyone else coming towards a grand party—Jack glanced down at his own person. He had been counting on darkness, but had blundered into light, and was shocked at how clearly his shit-covered rags and neck-iron stood out.

He saw a man inside who’d been in the duc’s entourage the other day. Not wanting to be recognized, Jack turned up the collar of the stolen cape, and drew it round to conceal the bottom half of his face.

A few small clusters of party-goers had formed in the lawn between the front of the house and the fountain, and all conversation had been suspended so that all faces could turn to stare at Jack. But they did not raise a hue and cry. They stared for a remarkably long time, as if Jack were a new and extremely expensive sculpture that had just been unveiled. Then Jack sensed a contagious thrill, a frisson like the one that had run through the fish-market at Les Halles when he’d galloped through it. There was a strange pattering noise. He realized they were applauding him. A serving-girl flashed away into the ballroom, hitching up her skirts as she ran, to spread some news. The musicians stopped playing, all faces turned to the windows. The people on the lawn had converged toward Jack, while maintaining a certain respectful distance, and were bowing and curtseying, very low. A pair of footmen practically sprawled out onto the grass in their anxiety to hurl the front doors open. Framed in the arch was a porky gentleman armed with a long Trident, which naturally made Jack flinch when he saw it—this fellow, Jack suspected, was the duc d’Arcachon, dressed up as Neptune. But then the duc held the weapon out towards him, resting crossways on his outstretched hands—offering it to Jack. Neptune then backed out of the way, still doubled over in a deep bow, and beckoned him into the ballroom. Inside, the party-goers had formed up in what he instinctively recognized as a gauntlet to whip all the skin off his back—but then understood must actually be a pair of lines to receive him!

Everything seemed to point to that he was expected to ride into the ballroom on horseback, which was unthinkable. But Jack had become adept (or so he believed) at distinguishing things that were really happening from the waking dreams or phant’sies that came into his head more and more frequently of late, and, reckoning that this was one of the latter, he decided to enjoy it. Accordingly, he now rode Turk (who was extremely reluctant) right past the duc and into the ballroom. Now everyone bowed low, giving Jack the opportunity to look down a large number of white-powdered cleavages. A trumpeter played some sort of fanfare. One cleavage in particular Jack was afraid he might fall into and have to be winched out on a rope. The lady in question, noticing Jack’s fixed stare, seemed to think that he was staring at least partly at the string of pearls around her neck. Something of a complicated nature occurred inside her head, and then she blushed and clasped both hands to her black-spotted face and squealed and said something to the effect of “No, no, please, not my jewels…Emmerdeur,” and then she unclasped the pearls from behind her neck; clasped them back together into a loop; threw it over the point of Jack’s sword, like a farm girl playing ring-toss at the fair; and then expertly swooned back into the waiting arms of her escort: a satyr with a two-foot-long red leather penis.

Another woman shrieked, and Jack raised his weapon in case he was going to have to kill her—but all he saw was another mademoiselle going into the same act—she ran up and pinned a jeweled brooch to the hem of his cloak, muttering “pour les Invalides,” then backed away curtseying before Jack could say what was on his mind, which was: If you want to give this away to charity, lady, you came to the wrong bloke.

Then they were all doing it, the thing was a sensation, the ladies were practically elbowing each other to get near and decorate Jack’s clothes and his sword, and Turk’s bridle, with jewelry. The only person not having a good time was a certain handsome young Barbary Pirate who stood at the back of the crowd, red-faced, staring at Jack with eyes that, had they been pliers…

A stillness now spread across the ballroom like a blast of frigid air from a door blown open by a storm. Everyone seemed to be looking toward the entrance. The ladies were backing away from Jack in hopes of getting a better view. Jack sat up straight in the saddle and got Turk turned around, partly to see what everyone else was staring at and partly because he had the sense it would soon be time to leave.

A second man had ridden into the ballroom on horseback. Jack identified him, at first, as a Vagabond recently escaped from captivity—no doubt well-deserved captivity. But of course it was really some nobleman pretending to be a Vagabond, and his costume was much better than Jack’s—the chain around his neck, and the broken fetters on his wrists and ankles, appeared to’ve been forged out of solid gold, and he was brandishing a gaudy jeweled scimitar, and wearing a conspicuous, diamond-studded, but comically tiny codpiece. Behind him, out in the courtyard, was a whole entourage: Gypsies, jeweled and attired according to some extremely romantic conception of what it was to be a gypsy; ostrich-plume-wearing Moors; and fine ladies dressed up as bawdy Vagabond-wenches.

Jack allowed the cape to fall clear of his face.

There followed the longest period of silence that he had ever known. It was so long that he could have tied Turk’s reins to a candelabra and curled up under the harpsichord for a little nap. He could have run a message down to Lyons during this silence (and, in retrospect, probably should have). But instead he just sat there on his horse and waited for something to happen, and took in the scene.

Silence made him aware that the house was a hive of life and activity, even when all of the Persons of Quality were frozen up like statues. There was the normal dim clattering of the kitchen, for example. But his attention was drawn to the ceiling, which was (a) a hell of a thing to look at, and (b) making a great deal of noise—he thought perhaps a heavy rain had begun to thrash the roof, partly because of this scrabbling, rushing noise that was coming from it, and partly because it was leaking rather badly in a number of places. It had been decorated both with plaster relief-work and with paint, so that if you could lie on your back and stare at it you would see a vast naval Tableau: the gods of the four winds at the edges of the room, cheeks all puffed as they blew out billowy plaster clouds, and the Enemies of France angling in from various corners, viz. English and Dutch frigates riding the north wind, Spanish and Portuguese galleons the south, as well as pirates of Barbary and Malta and the Turk, and the occasional writhing sea-monster. Needless to say, the center was dominated by the French Navy in massive three-dimensional plasterwork, guns pointing every which way, and on the poop-deck of the mightiest ship, surrounded by spyglass-toting Admirals, stood a laurel-wreath-crowned Leroy, one hand fingering an astrolabe and the other resting on a cannon. And as if to add even greater realism, the entire scene was now running and drizzling, as if there really were an ocean up above it trying to break through and pay homage to the living King who had just rode in. From this alarming leakage, and from the rustling noise, Jack naturally suspected a sudden violent storm coming through a leaky roof. But when he looked out the windows into the courtyard he saw no rain. Besides (he remembered with some embarrassment), the Hôtel d’Arcachon was not some farmhouse, where the ceiling was merely the underside of the roof. Jack well knew, from having broken into a few places like this, that the ceiling was a thin shell of plaster troweled over horizontal lath-work, and that there would be a crawl space above it, sandwiched between ceiling and roof, with room for dull, dirty things like chandelier-hoists and perhaps cisterns.

That was it—there must be a cistern full of collected rainwater up there, which must have sprung a leak—in fact, had probably been encouraged to do so by St.-George or one of his friends, just to create a distraction that might be useful to Jack. The water must be gushing out across the top of the plaster-work, percolating down between the laths, saturating the plaster, which was darkening in several large irregular patches—gathering storm-clouds besetting the French Navy and darkening the sea from robin’s-egg blue to a more realistic iron-gray. Gray, and heavy, and no longer flat and smooth—the ceiling was swelling and bulging downwards. In several places around the room, dirty water had begun to spatter down onto the floor. Servants were fetching mops and buckets, but dared not interrupt the Silence.

Turk complained of something, and Jack looked down to discover that the satyr with the very long, barbed, red leather penis had sidled up and grabbed Turk’s bridle.

“That’s an incredibly bad idea,” Jack said in English (there was no point in even trying his French among this crowd). He said it sotto voce, not wanting to officially break the Silence, and indeed most people could not hear him over the odd scrabbling noises and muffled squeaks emanating from above. The squeaks might be the sound of lath-nails being wrenched out of old dry joists by the growing weight of the ceiling. Anyway, it was good that Jack glanced down, because he also noticed John Churchill striding round the back of the crowd, examining the flintlock mechanism on a pistol, very much in the manner of an experienced slayer of men who was looking forward to a moment soon when he’d fire the weapon. Jack didn’t have a firearm, only a sword, freighted with jewelry at the moment. He shoved its tip through the satin lining of the riding-cloak, cutting a small gash, and then allowed all of the goods to avalanche into it.

The satyr responded in better English than Jack would ever speak: “It is a dreadful thing for me to have done—life is not long enough for me to make sufficient apologies. Please know that I have simply tried to make the best of an awkward—”

But then he was interrupted by King Louis XIV of France, who, in a mild yet room-filling voice, delivered some kind of witticism. It was only a sentence, or phrase, but it said more than any bishop’s three-hour Easter homily. Jack could scarcely hear a word, and wouldn’t’ve understood it anyway, but he caught the word Vagabond, and the word noblesse, and inferred that something profoundly philosophical was being said. But not in a dry, fussy way—there was worldly wisdom here, there was irony, a genuine spark of wit, droll but never vulgar. Leroy was amused, but would never be so common as to laugh aloud. That was reserved for the courtiers who leaned in, on tiptoe, to hear the witticism. Jack believed, just for a moment, that if John Churchill—who had no sense of humor at all—had not been homing in on him with that loaded pistol, all might have been forgiven, and Jack might have stayed and drunk some wine and danced with some ladies.

He could not move away from Churchill when the satyr was gripping Turk’s bridle. “Are you going to make me cut that off?” he inquired.

“I freely confess that I deserve no better,” said the satyr. “In fact—I am so humiliated that I must do it myself, to restore my, and my father’s, honor.” Whereupon he pulled a dagger from his belt and began to saw through the red leather glove on the hand that was gripping the bridle—attempting to cut off his left hand with his right. In doing so he probably saved Jack’s life, for this spectacle—the man sawing at his own arm, blood welling out of the glove and dribbling onto the white floor—stopped Churchill in his curly-toed tracks, no more than a fathom away. It was the only time Jack had ever seen Churchill hesitate.

There was a ripping and whooshing noise from one end of the room. The East Wind had been split open by a sagging crevice that unloaded a sheet of dirty, lumpy water onto the floor. A whole strip of ceiling, a couple of yards wide, peeled away now, like a plank being ripped away from the side of a boat. It led straight to the French Navy—half a ton of plaster, bone dry—which came off in a single unified fleet action and seemed to hang in space for a moment before it started accelerating toward the floor. Everyone got out of the way. The plaster exploded and splayed snowballs of damp crud across the floor. But stuff continued to rain down from above, small dark lumps that, when they struck the floor, shook themselves and took off running.

Jack looked at Churchill just in time to see the flint whipping round on the end of its curved arm, a spray of sparks, a preliminary bloom of smoke from the pan. Then a lady blundered in from one side, not paying attention to where she was going because she had realized that there were rats in her wig—but she didn’t know how many (Jack, at a quick glance, numbered them at three, but more were raining down all the time and so he would’ve been loath to commit himself to a specific number). She hit Churchill’s arm. A jet of fire as long as a man’s arm darted from the muzzle of Churchill’s pistol and caught Turk in the side of the face, though the ball apparently missed. The polite satyr was lucky to be alive—it had gone off inches from his head.

Turk was stunned and frozen, if only for a moment. Then a Barbary pirate-galley, driven downwards by a gout of water/rat slurry, exploded on the floor nearby. Some of the water, and some of the rats, poured down on Turk’s neck—and then he detonated. He tried to rear up and was held down by the satyr’s bloody but steadfast clutch, so he bucked—fortunately Jack saw this coming—and then kicked out with both hind-legs. Anyone behind him would’ve been decapitated, but the center of the ballroom had been mostly given over to rats now. A few more of those bucks and Jack would be flung off. He needed to let Turk run. But Churchill was now trying to get round the satyr to lay a second hand on Turk’s bridle. “This is the worst fucking party I’ve ever been to!” Jack said, whirling his sword-arm around like a windmill.

“Sir, I am sorry, but—”

The polite satyr did not finish the apology, because Jack delivered a cut to the middle of his forearm. The blade passed through sweetly. The dangling hand balled itself into a fist and maintained its grip on the bridle, even as the now one-armed satyr was falling back on top of Churchill. Turk sensed freedom and reared up. Jack looked down at Churchill and said, “Next time you want one of my horses—pay in advance, you rogue!”

Turk tried to bolt for the front door, but his hard fers de cheval slipped and scrabbled on the marble, and he could not build up speed. A sea-monster came down across his path, shedding a hundred rats from its crushed entrails. Turk wheeled and scrambled off toward a crowd of ladies who were doing a sort of tarantella, inspired by the belief that rats were scaling their petticoats. Then, just as Jack was convinced that the charger was going to crush the women under his hooves, Turk seemed to catch sight of a way out, and veered sideways, his hooves nearly sliding out from under him, and made for a doorway set into the back corner of the ballroom. It was a low doorway. Jack had little time to react—seeing the lintel headed for his face, decorated in the middle with a plaster d’Arcachon coat of arms,[*] and not wanting to have it stamped on his face forever, he flung himself backwards and fell off the horse.

He managed to get his right foot, but not his left, out of the stirrup, and so Turk simply dragged him down the ensuing corridor (which had a smooth floor, but not smooth enough for Jack). Nearly upside-down, Jack pawed desperately against that floor with the hand that wasn’t gripping the sword, trying to pull himself sideways so that Turk’s hooves wouldn’t come down on him. Time and again his hand slammed down onto the backs of rats, who all seemed to be fleeing down this particular corridor—drawn by some scent, perhaps, that struck them as promising. Turk outpaced the rats, of course, and was making his own decisions. Jack knew that they were passing into diverse rooms because the thresholds barked his hips and ribs and he got fleeting views of servants’ breeches and skirts.

But then, suddenly, they were in a dimly lit room, alone, and Turk wasn’t running anymore. Nervous and irritable to be sure, though. Jack cautiously wiggled his left foot. Turk startled, then looked at him.

“Surprised to see me? I’ve been with you the whole way—loyal friend that I am,” Jack announced. He got his boot out of that stirrup and stood. But there was no time for additional banter. They were in a pantry. Squealing noises heralded the approach of the rats. Pounding of boots was not far behind, and where there were boots, there’d be swords. There was a locked door set into the wall, opposite to where they had come in, and Turk had gone over to sniff at it curiously.

If this was not a way out, Jack was dead—so he went over and pounded on it with the pommel of his sword, while looking significantly at Turk. It was a stout door. Curiously, the crevices between planks had been sealed with oakum, just like a ship’s planking, and rags had been stuffed into the gaps round the edges.

Turk wheeled around to face away from it. Jack hopped out of the way. The war-horse’s hindquarters heaved up as he put all weight on his forelegs, and then both of his rear hooves smashed into the door with the force of cannonballs. The door was half caved in, and torn most of the way loose from its upper hinge. Turk gave it a few more, and it disappeared.

Jack had sunk to his knees by that point, though, and wrapped a manure-plastered sleeve up against his nose and mouth, and was trying not to throw up. The stench that had begun to leak from the room beyond, after the first blow, had nearly felled him. It nearly drove Turk away, too. Jack just had the presence of mind to slam the other door and prevent the horse’s fleeing into the hallway.

Jack grabbed the candle that was the pantry’s only illumination, and stepped through, expecting to find a sepulchre filled with ripe corpses. But instead it was just another small kitchen, as tidy a place as Jack had ever seen.

There was a butcher’s block in the center of the room with a fish stretched out on it. The fish was so rotten it was bubbling.

At the other end of this room was a small door. Jack opened it and discovered a typical Parisian back-alley. But what he saw in his mind’s eye was the moment, just a few minutes ago, when he had ridden right past the duc d’Arcachon while carrying an unsheathed sword. One twitch of the wrist, and the man who (as he now knew) had taken Eliza and her mother off into slavery would be dead. He could run back into the house now, and have a go at it. But he knew he’d lost the moment.

Turk planted his head in Jack’s back and shoved him out the door, desperate to reach the comparative freshness of a Paris alley choked with rotting kitchen-waste and human excrement. Back inside, Jack could hear men battering at the pantry door.

Turk was eyeing him as if to say, Shall we? Jack mounted him and Turk began to gallop down the alley without being told to. The alarm had gone up. So as Jack thundered out into the Place Royale, sparks flying from his mount’s new shoes, the wind blowing his cape out behind him—in other words, cutting just the silhouette he’d intended—he turned round and pointed back into the alley with his sword and shouted: “Les Vagabonds! Les Vagabonds anglaises!” And then, catching sight of the bulwark of the Bastille rising above some rooftops, under a half-moon, and reckoning that this would be a good place to pretend to summon reinforcements—not to mention a way out of town—he got Turk pointed in that direction, and gave him free rein.

Amsterdam

1685

Must businesse thee from hence remove?

Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,

The poore, the foule, the false, love can

Admit, but not the busied man.

He which hath businesse, and makes love, doth doe

Such wrong, as when a maryed man doth wooe.

—JOHN DONNE, “Breake of Day”

“WHO IS YOUR GREAT BIG tall, bearded, ill-dressed, unmannerly, harpoon-brandishing, er—?” asked Eliza, and ran out of adjectives. She was peering out the windows of the Maiden coffee-house at a loitering Nimrod who was blotting out the sun with an immense, motley fur coat. The management had been reluctant to let even Jack come into the place, but they had drawn the line at the glaring wild man with the harping-iron.

“Oh, him?” Jack asked, innocently—as if there were more than one such person who owned that description. “That’s Yevgeny the Raskolnik.”

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“Beats me—all I know is they’re all getting out of Russia as fast as they can.”

“Well, then…how did you meet him?”

“I’ve no idea. Woke up in the Bomb & Grapnel—there he was, snuggled up against me—his beard thrown over my neck like a muffler.”

Eliza shuddered exquisitely. “But the Bomb & Grapnel’s in Dunkirk…”

“Yes?”

“How’d you get there from Paris? Weren’t there adventures, chases, duels—?”

“Presumably. I’ve no idea.”

“What of the leg wound?”

“I was fortunate to engage the services of a fine, lusty crew of maggots along the way—they kept it clean. It healed without incident.”

“But how can you simply forget about a whole week’s journey?”

“It’s how my mind works now. As in a play, where only the most dramatic parts of the story are shown to the audience, and the tedious bits assumed to happen offstage. So: I gallop out of the Place Royale; the curtain falls, there is a sort of intermission; the curtain rises again, and I’m in Dunkirk, in Mr. Foot’s finest bedchamber, upstairs of the Bomb & Grapnel, and I’m with Yevgeny, and stacked around us on the floor are all of his furs and skins and amber.”

“He’s some sort of commodities trader, then?” Eliza asked.

“No need to be waspish, lass.”

“I’m simply trying to work out how he found his way into the drama.”

“I’ve no idea—he doesn’t speak a word of anything. I went down stairs and asked the same question of Mr. Foot, the proprietor, a man of parts, former privateer—”

“You’ve told me, and told me, and told me, about Mr. Foot.”

“He said that just a week or two earlier, Yevgeny had rowed a longboat into the little cove where the Bomb & Grapnel sits.”

“You mean—rowed ashore from some ship that had dropped anchor off Dunkirk.”

“No—that’s just it—he came from over the horizon. Rode a swell up onto the beach—dragged the longboat up as far as it would go—collapsed on the threshold of the nearest dwelling, which happened to be the old Bomb. Now, Mr. Foot has been lacking for customers these last few years—so, instead of throwing him back like a fish, as he might’ve done in the B & G’s heyday, and discovering, furthermore, that the longboat was filled to the gunwales with Arctic valuables, he toted it all upstairs. Finally he rolled Yevgeny himself onto a cargo net, and hoisted him up through the window with a block and tackle—thinking that when he woke up, he might know how to obtain more of the same goods.”

“Yes, I can see his business strategy very clearly.”

“There you go again. If you’d let me finish, you wouldn’t judge of Mr. Foot so harshly. At the cost of many hours’ backbreaking labor, he gave a more or less Christian burial to the remains—”

“Which? There has been no discussion of remains.”

“I may’ve forgotten to mention that Yevgeny was sharing the longboat with several comrades who’d all succumbed to the elements—”

“—or possibly Yevgeny.”

“The same occurred to me. But then, as the Good Lord endowed me with more brains, and less bile, than some, I reckoned that if this had been the case, the Raskolnik would’ve thrown the victims overboard—especially after they waxed gruesome. Mr. Foot—and I only tell you this, lass, in order to clear Yevgeny’s name—said that the meatier parts of these corpses had been picked clean to the bone by seagulls.”

“Or by a peckish Yevgeny,” Eliza said, lifting a teacup to her lips to conceal a certain triumphal smile, and looking out the window toward the furry Russian, who was whiling away the time by puffing on a rude pipe and honing the flukes of his harping-iron with a pocket-whetstone.

“Making a good character for my Raskolnik friend—though he truly has a heart of gold—will be impossible when, tidy and stylish girl that you are, you are gaping at his rude exterior form. So let us move on,” Jack said. “Next thing Mr. Foot knows, I show up, all decorated with baubles from France, nearly as spent as Yevgeny. So he took me in, in the same way. And finally, a French gentleman approached him and let it be known that he’d like to purchase the Bomb & Grapnel—proving the rule that things tend to happen in threes.”

“Now you’ve amazed me,” Eliza said. “What do those events have in common with each other, that you should conceive of them as a group of three?”

“Why, just as Yevgeny and I were wandering lost—yet, in possession of things of great value—Mr. Foot was cast out into the wilderness—I am making a similitude, here—”

“Yes, you have the daft look you always get, when you are.”

“Dunkirk’s not the same since Leroy bought it from King Chuck. It is a great base navale now. All the English, and other, privateers who used to lodge, drink, gamble, and whore at the Bomb & Grapnel have signed on with Monsieur Jean Bart, or else sailed away to Port Royal, in Jamaica. And despite these troubles, Mr. Foot had something of value: the Bomb & Grapnel itself. An opportunity began to take shape in Mr. Foot’s mind, like a stage-ghost appearing from a cloud of smoke.”

“Much as a profound sense of foreboding is beginning to take shape in my bosom.”

“I had a vision in Paris, Eliza—rather of a complex nature—there was considerable singing and dancing in it, and ghastly and bawdy portions in equal measure.”

“Knowing you as I do, Jack, I’d expect nothing less from one of your visions.”

“I’ll spare you the details, most of which are indelicate for a lady of your upbringing. Suffice it to say that on the strength of this heavenly apparition, and other signs and omens, such as the Three Similar Events at the Bomb & Grapnel, I have decided to give up Vagabonding, and, along with Yevgeny and Mr. Foot, to go into Business.”

Eliza faltered and shrank, as if a large timber, or something, had snapped inside of her.

“Now why is it,” Jack said, “then when I suggest you reach in and grab me by the chakra, it’s nothing to you, and yet, when the word business comes out of my mouth, you get a wary and prim look about you, like a virtuous maiden who has just had lewd proposals directed her way by a bawdy Lord?”

“It’s nothing. Pray continue,” Eliza said, in a colorless voice.

But Jack’s nerve had faltered. He began to digress. “I’d hoped brother Bob might be in town, as he commonly traveled in John Churchill’s retinue. And indeed Mr. Foot said he had been there very recently, inquiring after me. But then the Duke of Monmouth had surprised them all by coming to Dunkirk incognito, to meet with certain disaffected Englishmen, and proceeding inland toward Brussels in haste. Bob, who knows that terrain so well, had been dispatched by one of Churchill’s lieutenants to follow him and report on his doings.”

At the mention of the Duke of Monmouth, Eliza began to look Jack in the face again—from which he gathered that one of two things might be the case: either she was looking for a romantic fling with a claim (highly disputable) to the English throne, or else she numbered political intrigues among her interests now. Indeed, when he had surprised her by coming into the Maiden, she’d been writing a letter with her right hand while doing that binary arithmetic on her left, according to the Doctor’s practice.

At any rate—as long as he had her attention—he decided to strike. “And that is when I was made aware, by Mr. Foot, of the Opportunity.”

Eliza’s face became a death mask, as when a physician says, Please sit down…

“Mr. Foot has many contacts in the shipping industry—”

“Smugglers.”

“Most shipping is smuggling to some degree,” Jack said learnedly. “He had received a personal visit from one Mr. Vliet, a Dutch fellow who was in the market for a seaworthy vessel of moderate size, capable of crossing the Atlantic with a cargo of such-and-such number of tons. Mr. Foot was not slow in securing the God’s Wounds, a well-broken-in double-topsail brig.”

“Do you even know what that means?”

“It is both square, and fore-and-aft rigged, hence well-suited for running before the trade winds, or plying the fickle breezes of coastlines. She has a somewhat lopsided but seasoned crew—”

“And only needed to be victualled and refitted—?”

“Some capital was, of course, wanted.”

“So Mr. Vliet went to Amsterdam and—?”

“To Dunkirk went Mr. Vliet, and explained to Mr. Foot, who then explained to me and, as best he could, Yevgeny, the nature of the proposed trading voyage: of lapidary simplicity, yet guaranteed to be lucrative. We agreed to cast in our lots together. Fortunately, it is not difficult to sell goods quickly in Dunkirk. I liquidated the jewelry, Yevgeny sold his furs, whale-oil, and some fine amber, and Mr. Foot has sold the Bomb & Grapnel to a French concern.”

“It seems a farfetched way for this Mr. Vliet to raise money,” Eliza said, “when there is a large and extremely vigorous capital market right here in Amsterdam.”

This was (as Jack figured out later, when he had much time to consider it) Eliza’s way of saying that she thought Mr. Vliet was a knave, and the voyage not fit for persons in their right minds to invest in. But having been in Amsterdam for so long, she said it in the zargon of bankers.

“Why not just sell the jewels and give the money to your boys?” she continued.

“Why not invest it—as they have no immediate need for money—and, in a few years, give them quadruple the amount?”

“Quadruple?”

“We expect no less.”

Eliza made a face as if she were being forced to swallow a whole English walnut. “Speaking of money,” she murmured, “what of the horse, and the ostrich plumes?”

“That noble steed is in Dunkirk, awaiting the return of John Churchill, who has voiced an intention of buying him from me. The plumes are safe in the hands of my commission-agents in Paris,” Jack said, and gripped the table-edge with both hands, expecting a thorough interrogation. But Eliza let the matter drop, as if she couldn’t stand to come any nearer to the truth. Jack realized she’d never expected to see him, or the money, again—that she’d withdrawn, long ago, from the partnership they’d formed beneath the Emperor’s palace in Vienna.

She would not look him in the eye, nor laugh at his jokes, nor blush when he provoked her, and he thought that chill Amsterdam had frozen her soul—sucked the humour of passion from her veins. But in time he persuaded her to come outside with him. When she stood up, and the Maiden’s proprietor helped her on with a cape, she looked finer than ever. Jack was about to compliment her on her needle-work when he noticed rings of gold on her fingers, and jewels round her neck, and knew she probably had not touched needle and thread since reaching Amsterdam.

“Windhandel, or gifts from suitors?”

“I did not escape slavery to be a whore,” she answered. “You might wake up next to a Yevgeny and jest about it—I would be of a different mind.”

Yevgeny, unaware that he was being abused in this way, followed them through the scrubbed streets of the town, thumping at the pavement with the butt of his harping-iron. Presently they came to a southwestern district not so well scrubbed, and began to hear a lot of French and Ladino, as Huguenots and Sephardim had come to live here—even a few Raskolniks, who stopped Yevgeny to exchange rumors and stories. The houses became cracked and uneven, settling into the muck so fast you could practically see them moving, and the canals became narrow and scummed-over, as if rarely troubled by commerce.

They walked up such a street to a warehouse where heavy sacks were being lowered into the hold of a sloop. “There it is—our Commodity,” Jack said. “Good as—and in some parts of the world, preferable to—gold.”

“What is it—hazelnuts?” Eliza asked. “Coffee beans?” Jack had no particular reason to keep the secret from her, but this was the first time she’d shown any interest at all in his venture, and he wanted to make it last.

The sloop’s hold was full. So even as Jack, Eliza, and Yevgeny were approaching, the lines were cast off and sails raised, and she began to drift down the canal ahead of a faint breeze, headed for the inner harbor, a few minutes’ walk away.

They followed on foot. “You have insurance?” she asked.

“Funny you should ask,” Jack said, and at this Eliza rolled her eyes, and then slumped like one of those sinking houses. “Mr. Foot says that this is a great adventure, but—”

“He means that you have made Mr. Vliet a loan à la grosse aventure, which is a typical way of financing trading-voyages,” Eliza said. “But those who make such loans always buy insurance—if they can find anyone to sell it to them. I can point you to coffee-houses that specialize in just that. But—”

“How much does it cost?”

“It depends on everything, Jack, there is no one fixed price. Are you trying to tell me you don’t have enough money left to buy insurance?”

Jack said nothing.

“If so, you should withdraw now.”

“Too late—the victuals are paid for and stowed in the hold of God’s Wounds. But perhaps there is room for one more investor.”

Eliza snorted. “What’s come over you? Vagabonding you do very well, and you cut a fine figure doing it. But investing—it’s not your métier.”

“I wish you had mentioned that before,” Jack said. “From the first moment Mr. Foot mentioned it to me, I saw this trading-voyage as a way I might become worthy in your eyes.” Then Jack nearly toppled into a canal, as recklessly telling the truth had given him an attack of giddiness. Eliza, for her part, looked as if she’d been butt-stroked by Yevgeny’s harpoon—she stopped walking, planted her feet wide, and crossed her arms over her bodice as if nursing a stomach-ache; looked up the canal with watery eyes for a moment; and sniffled once or twice.

Jack ought to’ve been delighted. But all he felt, finally, was a dull sense of doom. He hadn’t told Eliza about the rotten fish or the pink-eyed horses. He certainly had not mentioned that he could have killed, but had idiotically spared, the villain who had once made her a slave. But he knew that someday she would find out, and when that happened, he did not want to be on the European continent.

“Let me see the ship,” she said finally.

They came round a bend and were greeted by one of those sudden surprising Amsterdam-vistas, down the canal to the ship-carpeted Ijsselmeer. Planted on the Ij-bank was the Herring-Packers’ Tower, a roundish brick silo rising above a sloppy, fragrant quay where three vessels were tied up: a couple of hulks that were shuttling victuals out to bigger ships in the outer harbor, and God’s Wounds, which looked as if she were being disassembled. All her hatches were removed for loading, and what remained had a structurally dubious look—especially when great sweating barrels of herring, and these mysterious sacks from the warehouse, were being dropped into it.

But before Jack could really dwell on the topic of sea-worthiness, Eliza—moving with a decisiveness he could no longer muster—had gone out onto the quay, her skirts sweeping up all manner of stuff that she would later regret having brought home. A sack had split open and spilled its contents, which snapped, crackled, and popped beneath the soles of her shoes as she drew up close. She bent over and thrust her hand into the hole, somewhat like doubting Thomas, and raised up a handful of the cargo, and let it spill in a colorful clinking shower.

“Cowrie shells,” she said distractedly.

Jack thought, at first, that she was dumbfounded—probably by the brilliance and magnificence of the plan—but on a closer look he saw that she was showing all the symptoms of thinking.

“Cowrie shells to you,” Jack said. “In Africa, this is money!”

“Not for long.”

“What do you mean? Money’s money. Mr. Vliet has been sitting on this hoard for twenty years, waiting for prices to drop.”

“A few weeks ago,” said Eliza, “news arrived that the Dutch had acquired certain isles, near India, called the Maldives and Laccadives, and that vast numbers of cowrie shells had been found there. Since that news arrived, these have been considered worthless.”

It took Jack some time to recover from this.

He had a sword, and Mr. Vliet, a pudgy flaxen-haired man, was just a stone’s throw away, going over some paperwork with a ship’s victualer, and it was natural to imagine simply running over and inserting the tip of the sword between any two of Mr. Vliet’s chins and giving it a hard shove. But this, he supposed, would simply have proved Eliza’s point (viz. that he was not cut out to be a businessman), and he did not want to give her such satisfaction. Jack wasn’t going to get the kind of satisfaction he had been craving for the last six months, and so why should she get any? As a way of keeping his body occupied while the mind worked, he helped roll some barrels over the plank to the deck of the ship.

“Now I understand the word Windhandel in a new way,” was all that he could come up with. “This is real,” he said, slapping a barrel-head, “and this” (stomping the deck of God’s Wounds) “is real, and these” (lofting a double handful of cowrie shells) “are real, and all of them every bit as real, now, as they were, ten minutes ago, or before this rumor arrived from the Maldives and the Laccadives…”

“The news came over land—faster than ships normally travel, when they have to round the Cape of Good Hope. So it is possible that you will reach Africa in advance of the great cargo-ships of cowrie-shells that, one can only presume, are headed that way now from the Maldives.”

“Just as Mr. Vliet had it planned, I’m sure.”

“But when you get to Africa, what will you buy with your cowrie-shells, Jack?”

“Cloth.”

“Cloth!?”

“Then we sail west—there is said to be a great market for African cloth in the West Indies.”

“Africans do not export cloth, Jack. They import it.”

“You must be mistaken—Mr. Vliet is very clear on this—we will sail to Africa and exchange our cowrie-shells for pieces of India, which as I’m sure you know means India cloth, and then carry it across the Atlantic…”

“A piece of India is an expression meaning a male African slave between fifteen and forty years of age,” Eliza said. “India cloth—just like cowrie shells—is money in Africa, Jack, and Africans will sell other Africans for one piece of it.”

Now a silence nearly as long as the one at the duc d’Arcachon’s party. Jack standing on the slowly moving deck of the God’s Wounds, Eliza on the quay.

“You are going into the slave trade,” she said, in a dead voice.

“Well…I had no idea, until now.”

“I believe you. But now you have to get off that boat and walk away.”

This was a superb idea, and part of Jack was thrilled by it. But the Imp of the Perverse prevailed, and Jack decided to take Eliza’s suggestion in a negative and resentful spirit.

“And simply throw away my investment?”

“Better than throwing away your immortal soul. You threw away the ostrich plumes and the horse, Jack, I know you did—so why not do the same now?”

“This is more valuable by far.”

“What about the other item you looted from the Grand Vizier’s camp, Jack?”

“What, the sword?”

Eliza shook her head no, looked him in the eye, and waited.

“I remember that item,” Jack allowed.

“Will you throw her away, too?”

“She is far more valuable, true…”

“And worth more money,” Eliza put in slyly.

“You’re not proposing to sell yourself—?”

Eliza went into a strange amalgam of laughing and crying. “I mean to say that I have already made more money than the plumes, sword, and horse were worth, and stand to make far more, soon—and so if it is money that concerns you, walk away from the God’s Wounds and stay with me, here in Amsterdam—soon you’ll forget this ship ever existed.”

“It does not seem respectable—being supported by a woman.”

“When in your life have you ever cared about respect?”

“Since people began to respect me.”

“I am offering you safety, happiness, wealth—and my respect,” Eliza said.

“You would not respect me for long. Let me take this one voyage, and get my money back, then—”

“One voyage for you. Eternal wretchedness for the Africans you’ll buy, and their descendants.”

“Either way I’ve lost my Eliza,” Jack said with a shrug. “So that makes me something of an authority when it comes to eternal wretchedness.”

“Do you want your life?”

“This life? Not especially.”

“Get off the boat, if you want to have a life at all.”

Eliza had noticed what Jack hadn’t, which was that God’s Wounds had finished being loaded. The hatch-covers were back in place, the herring was paid for (in silver coins, not cowrie-shells), and the sailors were casting off lines. Only Mr. Vliet, and Yevgeny, remained on the quay—the former haggling with an apothecary over a medicine-chest, and the latter being blessed by an outlandish Raskolnik priest in a towering hat. This scene was so curious that it diverted Jack’s attention completely, until all of the sailors began to holler. Then he looked at them. But they were all looking at some apparently horrid spectacle on the quay, putting Jack suddenly in fear that ruffians, or something, were assaulting Eliza.

Jack turned around just in time to discover that Eliza had seized the harpoon, which Yevgeny had left leaning against a stack of crates, and was just in the act of launching it toward Jack. She was not, of course, a professional harpooneer, but she had the womanly knack of aiming for the heart, and so the weapon came at him straight as Truth. Jack, recalling a dim bit of sword-fighting lore from his Regimental days, twisted sideways to present a narrower target, but lost his balance and fell toward the mainmast and threw out his left arm to break his fall. The broad flukes of the harpoon made a slashing attack across the breadth of his chest and glanced off a rib, or something, so that its point struck his forearm and passed sideways through the narrow space between the two bones and buried itself in the mast—pinning him. He felt all of this before he saw it because he was looking for Eliza. But she’d already turned her back on him and was walking away, not even caring whether she had hit him or not.

Amsterdam

JUNE 1685

D’AVAUX AND A PAIR OF tall, uncommonly hard-bitten “valets” saw her to the brink of a canal, not far from the Dam, that ran westwards toward Haarlem. A vessel was tied up there, accepting passengers, and from a distance Eliza thought it a tiny one, because it had an amusing toylike look, with the stem and the stern both curved sharply upwards—giving it the profile of a fat boy doing a bold belly-flop. But as they drew closer she saw it was a large (albeit lightly built) ship, at least twenty yards long, and narrower of beam than she’d expected—a crescent moon.

“I do not mean to belabor you with tedious details—that sort of thing is the responsibility of Jacques, here, and Jean-Baptiste…”

“These are coming with me!?”

“The way to Paris is not devoid of perils, mademoiselle,” d’Avaux said drily, “even for the weak and the innocent.” Then he turned his head in the direction of the still lightly smoking wrack of Mr. Sluys’s string of houses, only a musket-shot away along this very canal.

“Evidently you think I am neither,” Eliza sniffed.

“Your practice of harpooning sailors along the waterfront would make it difficult for even the most lubrique to harbor illusions as to your true nature—”

“You’ve heard about that?”

“Miracle you weren’t arrested—here, in a city where kissing someone is a misdemeanour.”

“Have you had me followed, monsieur?” Eliza looked indignantly at Jacques and Jean-Baptiste, who pretended, for the time being, to be deaf and blind, and busied themselves with a cartload of rather good luggage. She’d never seen most of these bags before, but d’Avaux had implied, more than once, that they and their contents all belonged to her.

“Men will ever follow you, mademoiselle, you’d best adapt. In any event—setting aside the odd harpooning—in this town are certain busybodies, scolds, and cancaniers who insist that you were involved in the financial implosion of Mr. Sluys; the invasion fleet that sailed for England, from Texel, the other day, flying the Duke of Monmouth’s colors; and the feral mob of Orangist patriots who, some say, set Mr. Sluys’s dwelling afire. I, of course, do not believe in any of these nonsenses—and yet I worry about you—”

“Like a fretful uncle. Oh, how dear!”

“So. This kaag will take you, and your escorts—”

“Over the Haarlemmermeer to Leiden, and thence to Den Briel via the Hague.”

“How did you guess?”

“The coat of arms of the City of Den Briel is carved on the taffrail, there, opposite that of Amsterdam,” Eliza said, pointing up at the stern. D’Avaux turned to look, and so did Jacques and Jean-Baptiste; and in the same moment Eliza heard behind her a weird sighing, whistling noise, like a bagpipe running out of wind, and was jostled by a passing boer headed for the gangplank. As this rustic clambered up onto the kaag she saw his oddly familiar humpbacked profile, and caught her breath for a moment. D’Avaux turned to peer at her. Something told Eliza that this would be an awkward time to make a fuss, and so she let her mouth run: “She carries more sail than the usual canal-barge—presumably for crossing the Haarlemmermeer. She is a slender vessel, made to pass through that narrow lock between Leiden and the Hague. And yet she’s too flimsy to traverse Zeeland’s currents and tides—she could never afford the insurance.”

“Yes,” d’Avaux said, “at Den Briel you must transfer to a more insurable ship that will take you to Brussels.” He was looking at Eliza queerly—so suspicious! The boer, meanwhile, had disappeared into the clutter of passengers and cargo on the kaag’s deck. “From Brussels you will travel over land to Paris,” d’Avaux continued. “The inland route is less comfortable during summer—but much safer during an armed rebellion against the King of England.”

Eliza sighed deeply, trying to hold in her mind the phant’sy of a million slaves being released from bondage. But it was a frail gauzy construction ripped apart by the strong summer-light of Amsterdam, the hard clear shapes of black buildings and white windows. “My lovely Dukie,” she said, “so impetuous.”

“Étienne d’Arcachon—who asks about you, by the way, in every one of his letters—suffers from a similar fault. In his case it is tempered by breeding and intelligence; yet he has lost a hand to a Vagabond because of it!”

“Oh, nasty Vagabonds!”

“They say he is recovering as well as can be expected.”

“When I get to Paris, I’ll send you news of him.”

“Send me news of everything, especially what does not appear to be news,” d’Avaux insisted. “If you can learn to read the comings and goings at Versailles as well as you do the taffrails and insurance-policies of Dutch boats, you’ll be running France in a trice.”

She kissed the cheeks of the comte d’Avaux and he kissed hers. Jacques and Jean-Baptiste escorted her up the plank and then, as the kaag began to drift down the canal, busied themselves storing her luggage away in the small cabin d’Avaux had procured for her. Eliza meanwhile stood at the kaag’s railing, along with many other passengers, and enjoyed the view of Amsterdam’s canal-front. When you were on dry land in that city you could never slow down, never stop moving, and so it was strange and relaxing to be so close to it, yet so still and placid—like a low-flying angel spying on the doings of men.

Too, that she was escaping cleanly from Amsterdam, after all that had happened of late, was something akin to a miracle. D’Avaux was right to wonder why she had not been arrested for the matter of the harpoon. She had stumbled away from the scene—the Herring Packers’ Tower—weeping with anger at Jack. But soon anger had been shouldered aside by fear as she’d realized she was being followed, rather obviously, by several parties at once. Looking back wouldn’t’ve done her any good and so she’d kept walking, all the way across the Dam and then through the Exchange, which was as good a place as any to lose pursuers—or at least to remind them that they could be doing more profitable things with their time. Finally she’d gone to the Maiden and sat by a window for several hours, watching—and had seen very little. A couple of tall loiterers, whom she now knew to’ve been Jacques and Jean-Baptiste, and one lolling Vagabond-beggar, identifiable by his humpbacked posture and insistent hacking cough.

The kaag was being towed in the direction of Haarlem by a team of horses on the canal-bank, but on deck the crew were making preparations to swing her side-boards down into the water and deploy her clever folding mast, so that they could hoist a sail or two. The horses faltered as they came to a section of pavement that was broken and blackened, and ridged with trails of lead that had flowed molten from Mr. Sluys’s house, and spread across the paving-stones in glowing rivers that had divided and combined as they crept toward the bank. Finally the streams of molten lead had plunged gorgeously over the stone quay and dropped into the canal, where they’d flung up a column of steam that dwarfed and enveloped the pillar of smoke from Mr. Sluys’s burning houses. By that time, of course, those who’d set the fire had long since disappeared. It was up to the drost to interrogate the very few witnesses and to figure out whether it had really been done by infuriated Orangers, taking revenge on Sluys for backing the French, or by arsonists in the pay of Mr. Sluys. Sluys had lost so much, so fast, in the recent crash of V.O.C. stock[*] that his only way of getting any liquidity would have been to set fire to everything he still owned and then make claims against those who’d been rash enough to sell him insurance. This morning—three days since the fire—salvagers in the pay of those insurers were busy with pry-bars and hoists, pulling congealed rivulets and puddles of lead from the canal.

She heard that whining sound next to her again, but it suddenly crescendoed, as if a cart-wheel were rolling over that leaky bagpipe and forcing the last bit of air through its drones. Then it broke open into a croaking, hacking laugh. That humpbacked boer had taken up a spot on the kaag’s rail not far from Eliza, and was watching the salvagers. “The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion has made lead a valuable commodity again,” he said (Eliza could understand that much Dutch, anyway). “It’s as valuable as gold.”

“I beg your pardon, meinheer, but—though it’s true the price of lead has risen—it is nowhere near as valuable as gold, or even silver.” Eliza said this in stumbling Dutch.

The wheezing boer startled her by coming back in passable English. “That depends on where you are. An army, surrounded by the enemy, running low on balls, will happily exchange coins of gold for an equal weight of lead balls.”

Eliza didn’t doubt the truth of this, but it struck her as an oddly bleak point of view, and so she broke off the conversation, and spoke no more to that boer as the kaag passed through a water-gate in Amsterdam’s western wall and entered flat Dutch countryside, diced by drainage ditches into pea-green bricks that were arrayed by the canal-side as if on a table in the market. The other passengers likewise gave the fellow a wide berth, partly because they didn’t want to catch whatever was afflicting his lungs, and mostly because they tended to be prosperous mercers and farmers coming back from Amsterdam with bags of gold and silver coins; they did not want to come anywhere near a man who would contemplate using florins as projectiles. The boer seemed to understand this all too well, and spent the first couple of hours of the voyage regarding his fellow-passengers with a glum knowingness that verged on contempt, and that would have earned him a challenge to a duel in France.

Aside from that, he did nothing noteworthy until much later in the day, when, all of a sudden, he murdered Jacques and Jean-Baptiste.

It came about like this: the kaag sailed down the canal to Haarlem, where it stopped to pick up a few more passengers, and then it raised more sails and set out across the Haarlemmermeer, a fairly sizable lake ventilated by a stiff maritime breeze. The fresh air had an obvious effect on the boer. The pitiable wheezing and hacking stopped with miraculous speed. His ribcage no longer labored with each breath. He stood up straighter, bringing him to average height, and seemed to shed a decade or two. He now appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He lost his dour expression and, instead of lurking at the stern glowering at the other passengers, began striding round the deck almost cheerfully. By the time he’d made several laps around the deck, all the other passengers had gotten used to this, and paid him no mind—which is how he was able to walk up behind Jacques, grab both of his ankles, and pitch him overboard.

This happened so quickly, and with so little ado, that it might have been easy to believe it had never happened at all. But Jean-Baptiste believed it, and rushed at the boer with sword drawn. The boer had no sword, but the Antwerp merchant standing nearby had a perfectly serviceable one, and so the boer simply yanked it out of the owner’s scabbard and then dropped neatly into a defencing stance.

Jean-Baptiste stopped to think, which probably did him no good, and much harm. Then he charged anyway. The pitching of the kaag ruined his attack. When he actually stumbled close enough to cross swords with the boer, it was obvious that Jean-Baptiste was the inferior swordsman—miserably so. But even setting aside these differences, the boer would have prevailed anyway, because to him, killing other men in close combat was as kneading dough was to a baker. Jean-Baptiste considered it to be an important matter, requiring certain formalities. A ring of dark windmills, ranged around the shore of the Haarlemmermeer, looked on like grim Dutch eminences, chopping the air. Rather soon, Jean-Baptiste had a couple of feet of bloody steel protruding from his back, and a jeweled hilt fixed to his chest like an awkward piece of jewelry.

That was all that Eliza was allowed to take in before the gunny sack descended over her head, and was made snug—but not tight—around her neck. Someone hugged her around the knees and lifted her feet off the deck while another caught her by the armpits. She feared, only for a moment, that she was about to be thrown overboard like Jacques (and—to judge from a booming splash audible through the gunny sack—Jean-Baptiste). As she was being carried belowdecks she heard a terse utterance in Dutch, then, all around the kaag, a storm of thudding and rustling: passengers’ knees hitting the deck, and hats being whipped off their heads.

When the sack came off her head, she was in her little cabin with two men: a brute and an angel. The brute was a thick-set boer, who had managed the gunny sack and borne most of her weight. He was immediately dismissed and sent out by the angel: a blond Dutch gentleman, so beautiful that Eliza was more inclined to be jealous of, than attracted to, him. “Arnold Joost van Keppel,” he explained curtly, “page to the Prince of Orange.” He was looking at Eliza with the same coolness as she was showing him—obviously he had little interest in women. And yet rumor had it that William kept an English mistress—so perhaps he was the sort who could love anything.

William, Prince of Orange, Stadholder, Admiral-General, and Captain-General of the United Provinces, Burgrave of Besançon, and Duke or Count or Baron of diverse other tiny fragments of Europe,[*] entered the cabin a few minutes later, ruddy and unshaven, slightly blood-flecked, and, in general, looking anything but Dutch. As d’Avaux never got tired of pointing out, he was a sort of European mongrel, with ancestors from all corners of the Continent. He looked as comfortable in that rough boer’s get-up as Monmouth had in Turkish silk. He was too excited and pleased with himself to sit down—which anyway would have led to a tedious welter of protocol, since there was only one place to sit in this cabin, and Eliza had no intention of vacating it. So William shooed Arnold Joost van Keppel out of the place, then braced his shoulder against a curving overhead knee-brace and remained on his feet. “My god, you’re but a child—not even twenty yet? That’s in your favor—it excuses your foolishness, while giving hope that you may improve.”

Eliza was still too angry about the gunny sack to speak, or even to give any sign that she’d heard him.

“Don’t delay writing a thank-you note to the Doctor,” said William, “if it weren’t for him, you’d be on a slow boat to Nagasaki.”

“You are acquainted with Doctor Leibniz?”

“We met at Hanover about five years ago. I traveled there, and to Berlin—”

“Berlin?”

“A town in Brandenburg, of little significance, save that the Elector has a palace there. I have various relations among the Electors and Dukes of that part of the world—I was making the rounds, you see, trying to bring them into an alliance against France.”

“Evidently, without success—?”

“They were willing. Most Dutchmen were, too—but Amsterdam was not. In fact, the Regents of Amsterdam were plotting with your friend d’Avaux to go over to the French so that Louis could wield their fleet against England.”

“Also without success, or someone would’ve heard about it.”

“I like to flatter myself that my efforts in northern Germany—aided to no small degree by your friend Doctor Leibniz—and d’Avaux’s exertions here, produced a stalemate,” William announced. “I was pleased to have fared so well, and Louis was furious to have made out so poorly.”

“Is that the reason he raped Orange?”

This made William of Orange very angry, which Eliza considered to be fair exchange for the gunny sack. But he mastered his rage, and answered in a tight voice: “Understand: Louis is not like us—he does not trifle with reasons. He is a reason. Which is why he must be destroyed.”

“And it’s your ambition to do the destroying?”

“Humor me, girl, by using the word ‘destiny’ instead of ‘ambition.’”

“But you don’t even have control over your own territory! Louis has Orange, and here in Holland you skulk about in disguise, for fear of French dragoons—”

“I am not here to rehearse these facts with you,” William said, now much calmer. “You are right. Furthermore, I cannot dance or write poetry or entertain a company at dinner. I’m not even a particularly good general, never mind what my supporters will tell you. All I know is that nothing that opposes me endures.”

“France seems to be enduring.”

“But I will see to it that France’s ambitions fail, and in some small way, you will help me.”

“Why?”

“You should be asking how.”

“Unlike le Roi, I need reasons.”

William of Orange thought it was amusing that she thought she needed reasons, but killing a couple of French dragoons had put him into a playful mood. “The Doctor says you hate slavery,” he offered. “Louis wants to enslave all of Christendom.”

“Yet, all of Africa’s great slave-forts belong to the Dutch or the English.”

“Only because the duc d’Arcachon’s navy is still too incompetent to take them away from us,” William returned. “Sometimes in life it is necessary to do things incrementally, and that goes double for a Vagabond girl-child who is trying to do away with a universal institution such as slavery.”

Eliza said, “How remarkable that a Prince would dress up like a farmer and go on a boat-trip only to edify a Vagabond girl-child.”

“You glorify yourself. First: as you have already pointed out, I always go incognito in Amsterdam, for d’Avaux has assassins all over the city. Second: I was going back to the Hague anyway, since your lover’s invasion of England has imposed certain obligations on me. Third: I have got rid of your escorts, and brought you to this cabin, not to edify you or anyone else, but to intercept the messages d’Avaux hid in your baggage.”

Eliza now felt her face getting hot. William eyed her bemusedly for a few moments, and decided, perhaps, not to press his advantage. “Arnold!” he shouted. The cabin door opened. Through it, Eliza could see her things spread out all over the deck, stained with tar and bilge-water, some of the more complicated garments ripped into pieces. The luggage given to her by d’Avaux had been broken up into fragments, now being peeled apart layer by layer. “Two letters so far,” Arnold said, stepping into the cabin and, with a little bow, handing over sheets covered with writing.

“Both encyphered,” William observed. “No doubt he’s had the wit to change over to a new code since last year.”

Like a rock that had been struck by a cannon-ball, Eliza’s mind split into a few large independent pieces about now. One piece understood that the existence of these letters made her a French spy in the eyes of Dutch law, and presumably gave William the right to inflict any imaginable punishment on her. Another part was busily trying to figure out what d’Avaux’s plan had been (this seemed an over-elaborate way of mailing some letters!—or perhaps not?), and yet a third part seemed to be carrying on polite conversation without really thinking (maybe not such a good idea, but—). “What happened last year?”

“I had d’Avaux’s previous dupe arrested. The messages he was carrying to Versailles were deciphered by my cryptologist. They had to do with all the fine things Sluys and certain Amsterdam Regents were doing on behalf of Louis.”

This remark, at least, gave Eliza something to think about other than Doom and Rage. “Étienne d’Arcachon was visiting Sluys several weeks ago—but apparently not to discuss investments…”

“She stirs—the eyelids flutter—I do believe she is about to Wake Up, sire,” said Arnold Joost van Keppel.

“Would you get that man out of my cabin now, please?” said Eliza to William, with evenness that surprised everyone. William made some subliminal gesture and van Keppel was gone, the door closed—though the shredding and seam-popping noises now redoubled.

“Is he going to leave me with any clothing at all?”

William considered it. “No—except for one garment—the one you are wearing now. You will sew this letter into the corset, after Arnold has made a copy. When you arrive in Paris—exhausted, dishevelled, sans escort or luggage—you’ll have a magnificent tale to tell, of how the cheese-mongers molested you, slew your traveling-companions, rifled your bags—and yet you’ll be able to produce one letter that you cleverly secreted in your undergarments.”

“It is a beautiful romance.”

“It will create a sensation at Versailles—much better, for you, than if you’d showed up fresh and well-dressed. Duchesses and Countesses will pity you, instead of fearing you, and take you under their wings. It is such an excellent plan that I wonder why d’Avaux didn’t come up with it himself.”

“Perhaps d’Avaux never intended for me to find a place in the French court. Perhaps I was to deliver these messages, and then be discarded.”

This remark was meant to be a self-pitying trifle. William was supposed to object vehemently. Instead he seemed to weigh it seriously—which did nothing to steady Eliza’s nerves.

“Did d’Avaux introduce you to anyone?” he asked thoughtfully.

“That same Étienne d’Arcachon.”

“Then d’Avaux has plans for you—and I know what they are.”

“You have a smug look about you, O Prince, and I don’t doubt that you have read Monsieur d’Avaux’s mind, just as you’ll read those letters. But since you have me at such a disadvantage, I would fain know of your plans for me.”

“Doctor Leibniz has taught you cyphers that put these French ones quite to shame,” said William, rattling d’Avaux’s letter. “Use them.”

“You want me to spy for you, at Versailles.”

“Not only for me but for Sophie and all of the others who oppose Louis. For now, that’s how you can be useful. Later, perhaps, I will require something else.”

“Now I am in your power—but when I reach France, and those Duchesses begin fawning over me, I’ll have all of le Roi’s armies and navies to protect me…”

“So how can I trust you, girl-child, not to tell the entire tale to the French, and become a double-agent?”

“Just so.”

“Isn’t it sufficient that Louis is repellent, and I stand for freedom?”

“Perhaps…but you’d be foolish if you trusted me to act accordingly…and I won’t spy for a fool.”

“Oh? You did for Monmouth.”

Eliza gasped. “Sir!”

“You should not joust if you are afraid to be punched out of the saddle, girl-child.”

“Monmouth is no scholar, admitted—but he’s a fine warrior.”

“He is adequate—but he’s no John Churchill. You don’t really believe he’ll overthrow King James, do you?”

“I wouldn’t have abetted him if I didn’t think so.”

William laughed very grimly. “Did he offer to make you a Duchess?”

“Why does everyone ask me that?”

“He addled your brain when he did that. Monmouth is doomed. I have six English and Scottish regiments garrisoned in the Hague, as part of a treaty with England…as soon as I get there, I’ll send them back across the narrow seas to help put down Monmouth’s rebellion.”

“But why!? James is almost a vassal to Louis! You should be supporting Monmouth!”

“Eliza, did Monmouth skulk about Amsterdam incognito?”

“No, he cut a brave swath.”

“Did he continually watch his back for French assassins?”

“No, he was carefree as a jay-bird.”

“Were bombs with sputtering fuses found in his carriage?”

“No bombs—only bon-bons.”

“Is d’Avaux an intelligent man?”

“Of course!”

“Then—since he must have known what Monmouth was planning—as you made it so obvious—why did he make no effort to assassinate Monmouth?”

Nothing from poor Eliza.

“Monmouth has landed, of all places, in Dorset—John Churchill’s home ground! Churchill is riding out from London to engage him, and when that happens the rebellion will be crushed. My regiments will arrive much too late…I despatch them only for the sake of appearances.”

“Don’t you want a Protestant King of England?”

“Of course! In order to defeat Louis, I’ll need Britain.”

“You say it ever so casually.”

“It is a simple truth.” William shrugged. Then, an idea. “I rather like simple truths. Arnold!”

Once again, Arnold was in the cabin—he’d found another two letters. “Sire?”

“I need a witness.”

“A witness to what, sire?”

“This girl fears that I’d be a fool to trust her, as matters stand. She is a Qwghlmian girl…so I’m going to make her Duchess of Qwghlm.”

“But…Qwghlm is part of the King of England’s domains, sire.”

“That’s just the point,” William said. “This girl will be a duchess, secretly, and in name only, until such time as I sit upon the Throne of England…at which time she’ll become a duchess in fact. So I can trust her to take my side—and she won’t think I’m a fool for doing so.”

“It’s either this, or the slow boat to Nagasaki?” Eliza asked.

“It’s not so very slow,” Arnold said. “By the time you arrive, you should still have one or two teeth remaining.”

Eliza ignored this, and kept her gaze on William’s eyes. “On your knees!” he commanded.

Eliza gathered her skirts—the only intact clothes she had left—rose from her chair, and fell to her knees in front of the Prince of Orange, who said: “You cannot be ennobled without a ceremony that demonstrates your submission to your new liege-lord. This has been the tradition since ancient times.”

Arnold drew a small-sword from its sheath and held it out in both hands, making it available to the Prince; but not without striking several braces, bulkheads, and items of furniture with elbows, hilt, sword-tip, et cetera, for the cabin was tiny and crowded. The Prince watched with sour amusement. “Sometimes the lord taps the vassal on the shoulder with his sword,” he allowed, “but there is no room in here to wield such a weapon safely; besides, I am trying to make a Duchess here, not a Knight.”

“Would you prefer a dagger, my lord?” Arnold asked.

“Yes,” said the Prince, “but don’t concern yourself with it, I have one handy.” Whereupon he peeled his belt open with a quick movement of the hand, and dropped his breeches. A hitherto concealed weapon popped up into view, so close to Eliza’s face that she could feel its heat. It was neither the longest nor the shortest such blade she had ever seen. She was pleased to note that it was clean—a Dutch virtue—and well-maintained. It oscillated with the beating of the Prince’s heart.

“If you are going to tap me on the shoulder with that, you are going to have to step a bit closer, my lord,” Eliza said, “for, as splendid as it is, it does not compete with the other for length.”

“On the contrary, you shall have to approach closer to me,” said the Prince. “And as you know perfectly well, it is not your shoulder that I am aiming for: neither the left one, nor the right, but a softer and more welcoming berth in between. Do not feign ignorance, I know your history, and that you learned this and many other practices in the Harim of the Sultan.”

“There, I was a slave. Here, it is how I become a Duchess?”

“As it was with Monmouth, and as it shall be in France, so it is here and now,” William said agreeably. His hand came down on the top of her head, and grabbed a handful of hair. “Perhaps you can teach Arnold a trick or two. Arnold, witness carefully.” William pulled Eliza forward. Eliza’s eyes clenched shut. What was about to happen wasn’t so very bad, in and of itself; but she couldn’t stand to have that other man watching.

“There now,” the Prince said, “ignore him. Open your eyes, and stare into mine, boldly, as befits a Duchess.”

Coast of Europe and of Northern Africa

1685

And Midas joyes our Spanish journeys give,

We touch all gold, but find no food to live.

And I should be in the hott parching clyme,

To dust and ashes turn’d before my time.

To mew me in a Ship, is to inthrall

Mee in a prison, that weare like to fall;

Or in a Cloyster; save that there men dwell

In a calme heaven, here in a swaggering hell.

Long voyages are long consumptions,

And ships are carts for executions.

Yea they are Deaths; Is’t not all one to flye

Into an other World, as t’is to dye?

—JOHN DONNE, “Elegie XX: Loves Warre”

JACK SOBBED FOR THE FIRST time since he’d been a boy, and brother Dick had been pulled up, all stiff and white, from the Thames.

The crew was not especially surprised. The moment of a ship’s departure was commonly a time for the colorful venting of emotions, and that went double or triple for young women being left behind at dockside. Mr. Vliet was obviously worried that it would lead to some kind of legal ensnarements, and fled over the plank onto the ship, followed shortly by the duly blessed and sacramentalized Yevgeny. God’s Wounds cast off without any ceremonies and skulked out of the harbor into the Ijsselmeer, where the sails were raised to drive her through ragged, swelling seas. Yevgeny came and planted a giant mukluk against the mast and pulled his harpoon out of it, and of Jack’s arm, muttering in what sounded like embarrassment. One of the crew, who was said to have some experience as a barber-surgeon, stoked up the galley-fire to heat some irons. As Jack had been slashed deeply across the chest, as well as pierced through the forearm, there was much cauterizing to be done. Half the ship’s crew, it seemed, sat on Jack to make him be still while the irons were applied, reheated, applied, reheated, seemingly all the way across the Ijsselmeer. At the beginning of this interminable cattle-branding, Jack screamed for mercy. Some of the men who were sitting on him looked disgusted and some looked amused, but none looked merciful—which made sense when Jack recalled he was on a slaver-ship. So after that he just screamed until he lost his voice and could hear only the wet sizzle of his own flesh.

When it was done, Jack sat, wrapped in blankets, out on the bowsprit, as sort of a Vagabond-wretch-figurehead, and smoked a pipe that Yevgeny had brought him. Queerly, he felt nothing at all. Big merchant ships, locked into huge air-filled boxes to lift them higher in the water, were being towed over the sand-banks, which were all cluttered with old spidery wrecks. Beyond that, the rhythm of the ocean subtly changed, as before a play, when a frilly overture gives way to the booming music of a Tragedy or History. It got darker and palpably colder, and those ships were set free from their boxes, and began to spread cloth before the wind, like canvas-merchants displaying their wares to an important buyer. The offerings were grudgingly accepted—the sails filled with air, became taut and smooth, and the ships accelerated toward the sea. Later, they came to Texel, and all the sailors paused in their chores to view the immense Ships of the Line of the Dutch Navy riding on the huge waves of the North Sea, their flags and banners swirling like colored smoke-clouds and their triple gun-decks frowning at England.

Then finally they were at sea, bringing a certain kind of solace to Jack, who felt that he must be a condemned man, now, on every scrap of dry land in the world. They put in briefly at Dunkirk to recruit a few more hands. His brother Bob came out to visit Jack, who was in no condition to leave the ship, and they exchanged a few stories, which Jack forgot immediately. This last encounter with his brother was like a dream, a sweeping-together of fragments, and he heard someone telling Bob that Jack was not in his right mind.

Then south. Off St.-Malo they were overhauled and boarded by French privateers, who only laughed when they learned of the worthless cargo, and let them go with only token pilfering. But one of these Frenchmen, as he left the deck of God’s Wounds, walked up to Mr. Vliet, who cringed. And in response to that cringing, more than anything else, the privateer slapped the Dutchman on the side of the head so hard that he fell down.

Even with his mind impaired in several ways, Jack understood that this action was more damaging to his investment than if the French had fired a broadside of cannonballs through their hull. The sailors became more surly after that, and Mr. Vliet began to spend most of his time closeted in his wardroom. The only thing that kept God’s Wounds from becoming an ongoing mutiny was Mr. Foot, who (with Yevgeny as his muscle) became the real captain of the ship after that, stepping easily into the role, as if his twenty-year hiatus tending bar at the Bomb & Grapnel had never happened.

Following the coast, they rounded the various capes of Brittany and then steered a southwesterly rhumb-line across the Bay of Biscay, coming in view of the Galician coast after a number of anxious days. Jack did not really share in the anxiety because his wounds had become infected. Between the fevers, and the relentless bleedings meted out by the ship’s barber to cure them, he lacked the faintest idea of where they were, and sometimes even forgot he was aboard ship. Mr. Vliet refused to move from the best wardroom, which was probably a savvy position for him to take, as there was sentiment among the crew for tossing him overboard. But he was the only man on the ship who knew how to navigate. So Jack was tucked into a hammock belowdecks, peering up day after day at blue needles of light between the deck-planks, hearing little but the merry clink of cowrie-shells being sifted to and fro by the ship’s pitching and rolling.

When he finally got well enough to come abovedecks again, it was hot, and the sun was higher in the sky than he’d ever seen it. He was informed that they had, for a time, dropped anchor in the harbor of Lisbon, and since moved on. Jack regretted missing that, for there was said to be a very great Vagabond-camp outside that city, and if he’d managed to slip away, he might be on dry land again, reigning as Vagabond-king. But that was only the crack-pated phant’sy of a condemned man chained by the neck to a wall, and he soon made himself forget it.

According to Mr. Vliet, who spent hours taking measurements with a back-staff and making laborious calculations with numbers and tables, they had passed through the latitude of Gibraltar, and so the land they glimpsed off to port from time to time was Africa. But the Slave Coast was yet far, far to the south, and many weeks of sailing lay ahead of them.

But he was wrong about that. Later on the same day there was a commotion from the lookouts, and coming abovedecks Jack and the others saw two strange vessels approaching from abaft, seeming to crawl across the water on countless spindly legs. These were galleys, the typical warships of the Barbary Corsairs. Mr. Vliet watched them through his spyglass for a time, making certain geometrickal calculations on a slate. Then he commenced vomiting, and retreated to his cabin. Mr. Foot broke open some chests and began to pass out rusty cutlasses and blunderbusses.

“But why fight for cowrie-shells?” one of the English sailors asked. “It’ll be just like the Frenchies at St.-Malo.”

“They are not hunting us for what is in our hold,” Mr. Foot explained. “Do you think free men would pull oars like that?”

Now Jack was not the first or last man aboard God’s Wounds to question the wisdom of nailing their colors to the mast, but when he understood that those Barbary Corsairs intended to make galley-slaves out of them, his view changed. As when powder-smoke is driven away from a battle by a sea-breeze, he saw with clarity that he would die that day. He saw also that the arrival of the corsairs was fortunate for him, since his death was not long in coming anyway, and better to die in fighting for his liberty, than in scheming to take away some other man’s.

So he went down belowdecks and opened up his sea-chest and took out his Janissary-sword in its gaudy sheath, and brought it up abovedecks. The crew had formed up into a few distinct clusters, obviously the beginnings of mutinous conspiracies. Jack climbed up onto the prow of a longboat that was lashed to the deck, and from there vaulted up onto the roof of a pilot-house that stood just aft of the foremast. From this height, he had a view up and down the length of God’s Wounds and was struck (as usual) by what a narrow sliver of a thing she was. And yet she, or any other European cargo-vessel, was a wallowing pig compared to those galleys, which slid over the top of the water like Dutch ice-skates hissing over the top of a frozen canal. They had enormous saffron-colored triangular sails to drive them forward as well as the oars, and they were approaching in single file from directly astern, so that God’s Wounds’s few paltry cannon could not fire a broadside. There was a single swivel-gun astern that might have pelted the lead galley with a tangerine-sized cannonball or two, but the men near it were arguing, instead of loading the weapon.

“What a world!” Jack hollered.

Most everyone looked at him.

“Year after year at home, chopping wood and drawing water and going to church, nothing to divert us save the odd hailstorm or famine—and yet all a man need do is board ship and ride the wind for a few days, and what’ve you got? Barbary Corsairs and pirate-galleys off the coast of Morocco! Now, Mr. Vliet, he has no taste for adventure. But as for myself, I would rather cross swords with corsairs than pull oars for them—so I’m for fighting!” Jack pulled out the Janissary-sword, which, compared to Mr. Foot’s pitted relics, burnt and glittered beneath the African sun. Then he flung the scabbard away. It fup-fup-fupped off to port and then stopped in midair and dove vertically into the waves. “This is the only thing they’re going to get from Half-Cocked Jack!”

This actually wrung a cheer from the approximately half of the crew who’d made up their minds to fight anyway. The other half only looked embarrassed on Jack’s behalf. “Easy for you to say—everyone knows you’re dying,” said one of the latter group, one Henry Flatt, who until this moment had been on easy terms with Jack.

“And yet I’ll live longer’n you,” Jack said, then jumped down from the pilot-house and began to approach Flatt—who stood and watched dumbly at first, perhaps not aware that all of his fellows had fled to other parts of the ship. When Jack drew closer, and turned sideways, and bent his knees, and showed Flatt the edge of his blade, Flatt went en garde for just a moment, then seemed to come to his senses, backpedaled several yards, then simply turned and ran. Jack could hear men laughing—satisfying in a way, but, on second thought, vexing. This was serious work, not play-acting. The only way to make these half-wits understand that weighty matters were at stake was probably to kill someone. So Jack cornered Flatt up at the bow, and pursued him, actually, out onto the very bowsprit, weaving and dodging around the points of the inner jib, the outer jib, and the flying jib, all of which were quivering and snapping in the wind as no one was paying attention to keeping them trimmed. Finally the wretch Flatt was perched on the tip of the bowsprit, gripping the last available line[*] to keep from being tossed away by the routine pitching of the ship. With the other hand he raised a cutlass in a feeble threat. “Be killed now by a Christian or in ten minutes by a heathen—it’s all one to me—but if you choose to be a slave, your life is worthless, and I’ll flick you into the ocean like a turd,” Jack said.

“I’ll fight,” Flatt said. Jack could see plainly that he was lying. But everyone was watching now—not just the crew of God’s Wounds, but a startlingly large crowd of armed men who had emerged onto the decks of the galleys. Jack had to observe proper form. So he made a great show of turning his back on Henry Flatt, and began to work his way back down the bowsprit, with the intent of whirling around and striking Flatt down when Flatt inevitably came after him. In fact, he was just about to do so when he saw Mr. Foot swinging his cutlass at a taut line that had been made fast to a pinrail at the bow: the sheet that held the obtuse corner of the flying jib, and transferred all of its power into the frame of the ship. The jib went slack above him. Jack dove, and grabbed at a line. He heard a sort of immense metallic fart as the shivering canvas wrapped around Flatt like a shroud, held him for a moment, and then dropped him into the sea, where he was immediately driven under by the onrushing hull.

Jack nearly fell overboard himself, as he ended up dangling by a rope with one hand, maintaining a grip on the sword with the other—but Yevgeny’s big hand seized his forearm and hauled him up to safety.

That is, if this could be considered safety: the two galleys, which until now had been idling along in single file, had, during the dispute with Flatt, forked apart so that they could come up on both flanks of God’s Wounds at the same time. For some minutes it had been possible to hear, from those galleys, a faint musick: an eerie chaunt sung by many voices, in a strange keening melody, that, somewhat like an Irish tune, struck Jack’s English ears as being Not from Around Here. Though, come to think of it, it probably was from around here. Anyway, it was a strange alien melody sung in some barbarous tongue. And until very recently, it had been sung slowly, as the crashing of the galleys’ many oar-blades into the brine had served as the drum-beat marking the time.

But now that the galleys had got themselves sorted out into parallel courses, they emitted a sudden fusillade of snapping noises—Jack thought, some sort of outlandish gunfire. Immediately the singing grew louder. Jack could just make out the heathen syllables:

Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah!

Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah.

“It is like the bagpipes of the Scots,” he announced, “a sort of shrill noise that they make before battle, to cover the sound of their knees knocking together.”

One or two men laughed. But even these were shushed by others, who were now listening intently to the song of the corsairs. Rather than proceeding to a steady beat, as good Christian music always did, it seemed to be getting faster.

Uru, uru achim

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Havah nagilah…

It was most certainly getting faster; and as the oars bit into the water on each beat of the song, this meant that they were now rowing as well as singing faster. And indeed the gap between the bow of the foremost galley, and the stern of God’s Wounds, was getting rapidly narrower.

Uru, uru achim

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Havah nagilah.

Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah!

Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, Havah nagilah, v’nism’chah.

The corsairs were singing and rowing with abandon now, easily coming up along both flanks, maintaining just enough distance to give their oars the freedom to claw at the waves. Even not counting the unseen oar-slaves, the number of men aboard was insane, reckless, as if a whole pirate-city had crowded into each galley.

The one to port came alongside soonest, its sails and rigging struck and furled for the attack, its rail, and the poop deck, crowded with corsairs, many of them swinging grappling-hooks on the ends of ropes, others brandishing boarding-ladders with vicious curved spikes on the ends. Jack—and all of the others aboard God’s Wounds—saw, and understood, the same thing at the same time. They saw that almost none of the fighting men were Arabs except for the agha shouting the orders. They were, instead, white men, black Africans, even a few Indians. They understood that all of them were Janissaries, which is to say non-Turks who did the Turks’ fighting for them.

Having understood that, they would not be slow to grasp that becoming a Barbary Corsair might, for men such as them, constitute a fine opportunity.

Jack, being half a step quicker than the average sea-scum, understood this a moment sooner than anyone else, and decided that he would blurt it out, so that everyone would think it had been his idea. He picked up a grappling-hook and coil of rope that had been rattling around in the bottom of the weapons-chest, and returned to his former podium atop the pilot-house, and hollered, “All right! Who’s for turning Turk?”

A lusty cheer came up from the crew. It seemed to be unanimous, with the single exception of Yevgeny, who as usual had no idea what was being said. While the others were all shaking hands and congratulating one another, Jack clenched his sword in his teeth, tossed the rope-coil over his shoulder, and began ascending the ladderlike web of rigging—the fore shrouds, so called—that converged on the fore-top: a platform about halfway up the mast. Reaching it, he jammed the point of the sword into the planking, and regarded the galleys from above. The singing had sped up into a frenzy now, and the movements of the oars were beginning to get into disarray, as not all of the slaves could move their implements fast enough!

Uru, uru achim

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach!

Havah nagilah…

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Uru achim b’lev sa me ach

Both of the galleys had moved half a length ahead of God’s Wounds now. Upon a signal from one of the aghas, both suddenly folded their oars and steered inwards, falling back and converging on God’s Wounds. The oar-slaves collapsed onto their benches, and the only thing that kept all of them from landing flat on their backs was that they were packed into the hull too tightly to lie down.

“You men are only seeing the turbans and jewels and polished weapons of the Janissaries!” Jack hollered. “I can see the slaves pulling the oars now—she’s a coffin packed with half-dead wretches. Did you hear those snapping noises before? ’Twas not gunfire—’twas the long bullwhips of the slave-drivers! I see a hundred men with fresh stripes torn from their backs, slumped over their oars. We’ll all be slaves in half an hour’s time—unless we show the agha that we know how to fight, and deserve to be Janissaries instead!”

As Jack was delivering this oration, he was laying his rope-coil out on the planking of the fore-top, so it would unfurl cleanly. A grappling-hook flung from the rail of the port galley nearly struck him in the face. Jack ducked and shrugged. It bit into the planking at his feet, which popped and groaned as some Janissary put his weight on the attached line. Jack jerked his sword loose and chopped through it, sending a corsair down to be crushed between the converging hulls of the two ships.

The engagement, which had been miraculously quiet—almost serene—until now, became a cacophony of booms as the Barbary pirates fired all of their guns. Then it became silent again, as no one would have time to reload before it was all over. Jack’s view below was temporarily clouded by smoke. He was looking almost level across to the port galley’s tall mainmast, which had a narrow crow’s nest near the top. It was an obvious target for a grappling-hook and indeed Jack snagged it on the first throw—then, pulling the slack out of the line, was almost torn off the fore-top as the ships rocked in opposite directions and their masts suddenly spread apart. Jack decided to construe this as an opportunity, and quickly wrapped the rope round his left forearm several times. The next movement of the ships ripped him off the fore-top, putting a few thousand splinters into his abdomen, and sent him plunging into space. The rope broke his fall, by nearly pulling his arm off. He whizzed across the middle of the galley in an instant, seeing just a blur of crimson and saffron, and a moment later found himself hanging out over the blue ocean, ponderously changing direction. Looking back the way he’d just come, and was shortly to go again, he saw a few non-combatants staring back at him curiously—including one of those slave-drivers. When Jack’s next pendulum-swing took him back over the galley’s deck, he reached out with the sword and cut that man’s head in two. But the impact of sword on skull sent him spinning round, out of control. Flailing, he swung back over the deck of God’s Wounds and slammed into the base of the foremast hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs and make him let go of the rope. He slid to the deck and looked around at a number of men’s legs—but not legs he recognized. The whole ship was covered with Janissaries, and Jack was the only one who’d done any fighting at all.

The one exception to that rule was Yevgeny, who had got the gist of Jack’s stirring first speech, but not understood the more pragmatic second one. Accordingly, he had harpooned the rais, or captain of the starboard galley, right through the throrax.

This and other statistics of the battle (such as it was) were conveyed to Jack by Mr. Foot later, after they had been stripped of all clothes and possessions and moved onto a galley, where a blacksmith was stoking up his forge and making ready to weld fetters around narrow parts of their bodies.

The corsairs rifled the holds of God’s Wounds in all of about fifteen minutes, and obviously lacked enthusiasm for the cowrie shells. The only captive who wasn’t transferred to a galley was Mr. Vliet, who had been ferreted out of the bilge, where he had concealed himself. The Dutchman was brought up abovedecks, stripped naked, and tied over a barrel. An African was roundly fucking him now.

“What was all that nonsense you were raving from the fore-top?” Mr. Foot asked. “No one could understand a word you were saying. We were all just looking at each other—” Mr. Foot pantomimed a bewildered shrug.

“That you’d all better show what magnificent fighters you were,” Jack summarized, “or else they’d have you chained up straight off.”

“Hmph,” Mr. Foot said, too diplomatic to point out that it hadn’t worked in Jack’s case. Though a few discreet winks from some of the bleeding sunburned wretches told Jack that his partial decapitation of that one slave-driver might make him as popular among galley-slaves as he’d formerly been among Vagabonds.

“Why should you care?” Mr. Foot asked a few minutes later, as the anal violation of his erstwhile business partner showed no sign of coming to a climax any time soon. The barrel supporting Mr. Vliet had slowly worked its way across the deck of God’s Wounds until it lodged against a rail, and was now booming like a drum. “You’re not long for this world anyway.”

“If you ever visit Paris, you can take this question up with St.-George, mort-aux-rats,” Jack said. “He taught me a few things about correct form. I have a reputation, you know—”

“So they say.”

“I hoped that you, or one of the younger men, might show some valor, and become a Janissary, and one day make his way back to Christendom, and tell the tale of my deeds ’gainst the Barbary Corsairs. So that all would know how my story came out, and that it came out well. That’s all.”

“Well, next time enunciate,” Mr. Foot said, “because we literally could not make out a word you were saying.”

“Yes, yes,” Jack snapped—hoping he would not be chained to the same oar as Mr. Foot, who was already becoming a bore. He sighed. “That is one prodigious butt-fucking!” he marveled. “Like something out of the Bible!”

“There’s no butt-fucking in the Good Book!” said the scandalized Mr. Foot.

“Well, how should I know?” Jack said. “Back off! Soon, I’ll be in a place where everyone reads the Bible all the time.”

“Heaven?”

“Does it sound like heaven to you?”

“Well, it appears they are leading me off to a different oar, Jack,” Mr. Foot said. Indeed, a dead man was being cut loose from an oar at the stern, and Mr. Foot was being signalled for. “So if we never speak again—as seems likely—Godspeed!”

“Godspeed? Godspeed! What kind of a thing is that to say to a fucking galley slave?” were Jack’s last words, or so he supposed, to Mr. Foot.

Mr. Vliet was being pushed overboard by a couple of Janissaries. Jack heard the splash just as he was sitting down on the shit-stained bench where he would row until he died.

BOOK THREE
Odalisque

In all times kings, and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms; and continual spies upon their neighbors; which is a posture of war.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

Whitehall Palace

FEBRUARY 1685

LIKE A HORSEMAN WHO REINS in a wild stallion that has borne him, will he, nill he, across several counties; or a ship’s captain who, after scudding before a gale through a bad night, hoists sail, and gets underway once more, navigating through unfamiliar seas—thus Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, anno domini 1685, watching King Charles II die at Whitehall Palace.

Much had happened in the previous twelve years, but nothing was really different. Daniel’s world had been like a piece of caoutchouc that stretched but did not rupture, and never changed its true shape. After he’d gotten his Doctorate, there’d been nothing for him at Cambridge save lecturing to empty rooms, tutoring dull courtiers’ sons, and watching Isaac recede further into the murk, pursuing his quest for the Philosophic Mercury and his occult studies of the Book of Revelation and the Temple of Solomon. So Daniel had moved to London, where events went by him like musket-balls.

John Comstock’s ruin, his moving out of his house, and his withdrawal from the Presidency of the Royal Society had seemed epochal at the time. Yet within weeks Thomas More Anglesey had not only been elected President of the Royal Society but also bought and moved into Comstock’s house—the finest in London, royal palaces included. The upright, conservative arch-Anglican had been replaced with a florid Papist, but nothing was really different—which taught Daniel that the world was full of powerful men but as long as they played the same roles, they were as interchangeable as second-rate players speaking the same lines in the same theatre on different nights.

All of the things that had been seeded in 1672 and 1673 had spent the next dozen years growing up into trees: some noble and well-formed, some curiously gnarled, and some struck down by lightning. Knott Bolstrood had died in exile. His son Gomer now lived in Holland. Other Bolstroods had gone over the sea to New England. This was all because Knott had attempted to indict Nell Gwyn as a prostitute in 1679, which had seemed sensational at the time. The older King Charles II had grown, the more frightened London had become of a return to Popery when his brother James ascended to the throne, and the more the King had needed to keep a nasty bleak Protestant—a Bolstrood—around to reassure them. But the more power Bolstrood acquired, the more he was able to whip people up against the Duke of York and Popery. Late in 1678, they’d gotten so whipped up that they’d commenced hanging Catholics for being part of a supposed Popish Plot. When they’d begun running low on Catholics, they had hanged Protestants for doubting that such a Plot existed.

By this point Anglesey’s sons Louis, the Earl of Upnor, and Philip, Count Sheerness, had gambled away most of the family’s capital anyway, and had little to lose except their creditors, so they had fled to France. Roger Comstock—who had been ennobled, and was now the Marquis of Ravenscar—had bought Anglesey (formerly Comstock) House. Instead of moving in, he had torn it down, plowed its gardens under, and begun turning it into “the finest piazza in Europe.” But this was merely Waterhouse Square done bigger and better. Raleigh had died in 1678, but Sterling had stepped into his place just as easily as Anglesey had stepped into John Comstock’s, and he and the Marquis of Ravenscar had set about doing the same old things with more capital and fewer mistakes.

The King had dissolved Parliament so that it could not murder any more of his Catholic friends, and had sent James off to the Spanish Netherlands on the “out of sight, out of mind” principle, and, for good measure, had gotten James’s daughter Mary wedded to the Protestant Defender himself: William of Orange. And in case none of that sufficed, the Duke of Monmouth (who was Protestant) had been encouraged to parade around the country, tantalizing England with the possibility that he might be de-bastardized through some genealogical sleight-of-hand, and become heir to the throne.

King Charles II could still dazzle, entertain, and confuse, in other words. But his alchemical researches beneath the Privy Gallery had come to naught; he could not make gold out of lead. And he could not levy taxes without a Parliament. The surviving goldsmiths in Threadneedle Street, and Sir Richard Apthorp in his new Bank, had been in no mood to lend him anything. Louis XIV had given Charles a lot of gold, but in the end the Sun King turned out to be no different from any other exasperated rich in-law: he had begun finding ways to make Charles suffer in lieu of paying interest. So the King had been forced to convene Parliament. When he had, he had found that it was controlled by a City of London/friends of Bolstrood alliance (Foes of Arbitrary Government, as they styled themselves) and that the first item on their list had been, not to raise taxes, but rather to exclude James (and every other Catholic) from the throne. This Parliament had instantly become so unpopular with those who loved the King that the whole assembly—wigs, wool-sacks, and all—had had to move up to Oxford to be safe from London mobs whipped up by Sir Roger L’Estrange—who’d given up trying to suppress others’ libels, and begun printing up his own. Safe (or so they imagined) at Oxford, these Whigs (as L’Estrange libelled them) had voted for Exclusion, and cheered for Knott Bolstrood as he proclaimed Nellie a whore.

A crier marching up Piccadilly had related this news to Daniel as he and Robert Hooke had stood in what had once been Com-stock’s and then Anglesey’s ballroom and was by that point a field of Italian marble rubble open to a fine blue October sky. As a work table they had been using the capital of a Corinthian column that had plunged to earth when the column had been jerked out from under it by Ravenscar’s merry Irish demolition men. The capital had half-embedded itself in the soil and now rested at a convenient angle; Hooke and Waterhouse had unrolled large sheets and weighed down the corners with stray bits of marble: tips of angels’ wings and shards of acanthus leaves. These were surveyor’s plats laying out Ravenscar’s scheme to embed a few square blocks of Cartesian rationality on the pot-bound root-ball that was the London street system. Surveyors and their apprentices had stretched cords and hammered in stakes plotting the axes of three short parallel streets that, according to Roger, would sport the finest shops in London: one was labeled Anglesey, one Comstock, and one Ravenscar. But that afternoon, Roger had showed up, armed with an inky quill, and scratched out those names and written in their stead Northumbria,[*] Richmond,[†] and St. Alban’s.[‡]

A month after that there’d been no Parliament and no more Bolstroods in Britain. James had come home from exile, Monmouth had been removed from the King’s service, and England had become, effectively, a department of France, with King Charles openly accepting a hundred thousand pounds a year, and most of the politicians in London—Whigs and Tories alike—receiving bribes from the Sun King as well. Quite a few Catholics who’d been tossed into the Tower for supposed involvement in the Popish Plot had been released, making room for as many Protestants who had supposedly been involved in a Rye House Plot to put Monmouth on the throne. Just like many Popish Plotters before them, these had promptly begun to “commit suicide” in the Tower. One had even managed the heroic feat of cutting his own throat all the way to the vertebrae!

So Wilkins’s work had been undone, at least for a while. Thirteen hundred Quakers, Barkers, and other Dissenters had been clapped into prison. Thus had Daniel spent a few months in a smelly place listening to angry men sing the same hymns he’d been taught as a boy by Drake.

It had been—in other words—a reign. Charles II’s reign. He was the King, he loved France and hated Puritans and was always long on mistresses and short on money, and nothing ever really changed.

NOW DR. WATERHOUSE WAS STANDING on the King’s Privy Stairs: a rude wooden platform clinging to a sheer vertical wall of limestone blocks that plunged straight into the Thames. All of the Palace buildings that fronted on the river were built this way, so as he gazed downriver, keeping watch for the boat that carried the chirurgeons, he found himself sighting down a long, continuous, if somewhat motley wall, interrupted by the occasional window or mock bastion. Three hundred feet downstream, a dock was thrust out into the river, and several intrepid watermen were walking to and fro on it in the lock-kneed gait of men trying to avoid freezing to death. Their boats were tied up alongside, awaiting passengers, but the hour was late, the weather cold, the King was dying, and no Londoners were availing themselves of the old right-of-way that ran through the Palace.

Beyond that dock, the river curved slowly around to the right, towards London Bridge. As the midday twilight had faded to an ashy afternoon, Daniel had seen a boat shove off from the Old Swan: a tavern at the northern end of the bridge that drew its clientele from those who did not like to gamble their lives by penetrating its turbulent arches. The boat had been struggling upstream ever since, and it was close enough now that, with the aid of the spyglass in Daniel’s pocket, he could see it carried only two passengers.

Daniel had been remembering the night in 1670 when he’d come to Whitehall in Pepys’s carriage, and wandered around the Privy Garden trying to act natural. At the time he’d thought it was cheeky and romantic, but now, remembering that he had ever been that fatuous made him grind his teeth, and thank God that the only witness had been Cromwell’s severed head.

Recently he had spent a lot of time at Whitehall. The King had decided to relax his grip just a bit, and had begun letting a few Barkers and Quakers out of prison, and had decided to nominate Daniel as a sort of unofficial secretary for all matters having to do with mad Puritans: Knott Bolstrood’s successor, that is, with all the same burdens, but much less power. Of Whitehall’s two thousand or so rooms, Daniel had probably set foot in a few hundred—enough to know that it was a dirty, mildewed jumble, like the map of the inside of a courtier’s mind, a slum in all but name. Whole sections had been taken over by the King’s pack of semi-feral spaniels, who’d become inbred even by Royal standards and thus hare-brained even by Spaniel standards. Whitehall Palace was, in the end, a House: the house of a Family. It was a very strange old family. As of one week ago Daniel had already been somewhat better acquainted with that Family than anyone in his right mind would want to be. And now, Daniel was waiting here on the Privy Stairs only as an excuse to get out of the King’s bedchamber—nay, his very bed—and to breathe some air that did not smell like the royal body fluids.

After a while the Marquis of Ravenscar came out and joined him. Roger Comstock—the least promising, and so far the most successful, of the men Daniel had gone to Cambridge with—had been in the north when the King had fallen ill on Monday. He was overseeing the construction of his manor house, which Daniel had designed for him. The news must’ve taken a day or two to reach him, and he must’ve set out immediately: it was now Thursday evening. Roger was still in his traveling-clothes, looking more drab than Daniel had ever seen him—almost Puritanical.

“My lord.”

“Dr. Waterhouse.”

From the expression on Roger’s face, Daniel knew that he had stopped by the King’s bedchamber first. In case there was any doubt of that, Roger tucked the long skirts of his coat behind him, clambered down onto both knees, bent forward, and threw up into the Thames.

“Will you please excuse me.”

“Just like College days.”

“I didn’t imagine that a man could contain so many fluids and whatnot in his entire body!”

Daniel nodded toward the approaching boat. “Soon you’ll witness fresh marvels.”

“I could see from looking at His Majesty that the physicians have been quite busy?”

“They have done their utmost to hasten the King’s departure from this world.”

“Daniel! Lower your voice, I say,” Roger huffed. “Some may not understand your sense of humor—if that is the correct word for it.”

“Funny you should bring up the subject of Humours. It all began with an apoplectical fit on Monday. The King, hardy creature that he is, might’ve recovered—save that a Doctor happened to be in the very room, armed with a full complement of lancets!”

“Ugh! Worse luck!”

“Out came a blade—the Doctor found a vein—the King bade farewell to a pint or two of the Humour of Passion. But of course, he’s always had plenty of that to go round—so he lived on through Tuesday, and had the strength to fend off the gathering swarm of Doctors on into yesterday. Then, alas, he fell into an epileptical fit, and all of the Doctors burst in at once. They’d been camped in his anterooms, arguing as to which humours, and how much of ’em, needed to be removed. After going for a whole night and a day without sleep, a sort of competition had arisen among them as to who advocated the most heroic measures. When the King—after a valorous struggle—finally lost his senses, and could no longer keep ’em at bay, they fell on him like hounds. The Doctor who had been insisting that the King suffered from an excess of blood, had his lancet buried in the King’s left jugular before the others had even unpacked their bags. A prodigious quantity of blood spewed forth—”

“I believe I saw it.”

“Stay, I’m only beginning. The Doctor who had diagnosed an excess of bile, now pointed out that said imbalance had only been worsened by the loss of so much blood, and so he and a pair of bulky assistants sat the King up in bed, hauled his mouth open, and began tickling his gorge with diverse feathers, scraps of whalebone, et cetera. Vomiting ensued. Now, a third Doctor, who had been insisting, most tiresomely, that all the King’s problems were owed to an accumulation of colonic humours, rolled his Majesty over and shoved a prodigious long-necked calabash up the Royal Anus. In went a mysterious, very expensive fluid—out came—”

“Yes.”

“Now a fourth Doctor set to work cupping him all over to draw out other poisons through the skin—hence those gargantuan hickeys, ringed by circular burns. The first doctor was now in a panic, seeing that the adjustments made by the other three had led to an excess of blood—it being all relative, you know. So he opened the other jugular, promising to let out just a little. But he let out quite a bit. The other doctors became indignant now, and demanded the right to repeat all of their treatments. But here’s where I stepped in, and, exercising—some would say, abusing—my full authority as Secretary of the Royal Society, recommended a purging of Doctors rather than humours and kicked them out of the bedchamber. Threats were made against my reputation and my life, but I ejected them anon.”

“But I heard news, as I came into London, that he was on the mend.”

“After the Sons of Asclepius were finished with him, he did not really move for a full twenty-four hours. Some might’ve construed this as sleeping. He lacked the strength to pitch a fit—some might call it recovery. Occasionally I’d hold an ice-cold mirror in front of his lips and the reflection of the King’s face would haze. In the middle of the day today, he began to stir and groan.”

“His Majesty can scarcely be blamed for that!” Roger said indignantly.

“Nevertheless, more physicians got to him, and diagnosed a fever. They gave him a royal dose of the Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure.”

“Now that must’ve improved the King’s mood to no end!”

“We can only speculate. He has gotten worse. The sorts of Doctors who prescribe powders and elixirs have, consequently, fallen from favor, and the bleeders and purgers are upon us!”

“Then I’ll add my weight as President, to yours as Secretary, of the Royal Society, and we’ll see how long we can keep the lancets in their sheathes.”

“Interesting point you raise there, Roger…”

“Oh, Daniel, you have got that Waterhousian brooding look about you now, and so I fear you do not mean a literal point, as in lancets—”

“I was thinking—”

“Help!” Roger cried, waving his arms. But the watermen on yonder dock had all turned their backs on the Privy Stairs to watch the approach of the boat carrying those chirurgeons.

“D’you recall when Enoch Root made phosphorus from horse urine? And the Earl of Upnor made a fool of himself supposing that it must have come from royal piss?”

“I’m terrified that you’re about to say something banal, Daniel, about how the King’s blood, bile, et cetera are no different from yours. So is it all right with you if I just stipulate that Republicanism makes perfect sense, seems to work well in Holland, and thereby exempt myself from this part of the conversation?”

“That is not precisely where I was going,” Daniel demurred. “I was thinking about how easily your cousin was replaced with Anglesey—how disappointingly little difference it made.”

“Before you corner yourself, Daniel, and force me to drag you out as usual, I would discourage any further usage of this similitude.”

“Which similitude?”

“You are about to say that Charles is like Comstock and James is like Anglesey and that it will make no difference, in the end, which one is king. Which would be a dangerous thing for you to say—because the House where Comstock and Anglesey lived has been razed and paved over.” Roger jerked his head upwards towards Whitehall. “Which is not a fate we would wish on yonder house.”

“But that is not what I was saying!”

“What were you saying, then? Something not obvious?”

“As Anglesey replaced Comstock, and Sterling replaced Raleigh, I replaced Bolstrood, in a way…”

“Yes, Dr. Waterhouse, we live in an orderly society and men replace each other.”

“Sometimes. But some can’t be replaced.”

“I don’t know that I agree.”

“Suppose that, God forbid, Newton died. Who would replace him?”

“Hooke, or maybe Leibniz.”

“But Hooke and Leibniz are different. I put it to you that some men really have unique qualities and cannot be replaced.”

“Newtons come along so rarely. He is an exception to any rule you might care to name—really a very cheap rhetorical tactic on your part, Daniel. Have you considered running for Parliament?”

“Then I should have used a different example, for the point I’m wanting to make is that all round us, in markets and smithys, in Parliament, in the City, in churches and coal-mines, there are persons whose departure really would change things.”

“Why? What makes these persons different?”

“It is a very profound question. Recently Leibniz has been refining his system of metaphysics—”

“Wake me up when you are finished.”

“When I first saw him at Lion Quay these many years ago, he was showing off his knowledge of London, though he’d never been here before. He’d been studying views of the city drawn by diverse artists from differing points of view. He went off on a rant about how the city itself has one form but it is perceived in different ways by each person in it, depending on their unique situation.”

“Every sophomore thinks this.”

“That was more than a dozen years ago. In his latest letter to me he seems to be leaning towards the view that the city does not have one absolute form at all…”

“Obvious nonsense.”

“…that the city is, in some sense, the result of the sum total of the perceptions of it by all of its constituents.”

“I knew we never should have let him into the Royal Society!”

“I am not explaining it very well,” Daniel admitted, “because I do not quite understand it, yet.”

“Then why are you belaboring me with it now of all times?”

“The salient point has to do with perceptions, and how different parts of the world—different souls—perceive all of the other parts—the other souls. Some souls have perceptions that are confused and indistinct, as if they are peering through poorly ground lenses. Whereas others are like Hooke peering through his Microscope or Newton through his Reflecting Telescope. They have superior perceptions.”

“Because they have better opticks!”

“No, even without lenses and parabolic mirrors, Newton and Hooke see things that you and I don’t. Leibniz is proposing a strange inversion of what we normally mean when we describe a man as distinguished, or unique. Normally when we say these things, we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man’s uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity—to distinguish one thing from another more effectively than ordinary souls.”

Roger sighed. “All I know is that Dr. Leibniz has been saying some very rude things about Descartes lately—”

“Yes, in his Brevis Demonstratio Erroris Memorabilis Cartesii et Alio-rum Circa Legem Naturalem—”

“And the French are up in arms.”

“You said, Roger, that you would add your weight as President, to mine as Secretary, of the Royal Society.”

“And I shall.”

“But you flatter me by saying so. Some men are interchangeable, yes. Those two chirurgeons could be replaced with any other two, and the King would still die this evening. But could I—could anyone—fill your shoes so easily, Roger?”

“Why, Daniel, I do believe this is the first time in your life you’ve actually exhibited something akin to respect for me!”

“You are a man of parts, Roger.”

“I am touched and of course I agree with the point you were trying to make—whatever the hell it might have been.”

“Good—I am pleased to hear you agree with me in believing that James is no replacement for Charles.”

Before Roger could recover—but after he mastered his anger—the boat was in earshot and the conversation, therefore, over.

“Long live the King, m’Lord, and Doctor Waterhouse,” said one Dr. Hammond, clambering over the boat’s gunwale onto the Privy Stairs. Then they all had to say it.

Hammond was followed by Dr. Griffin, who also greeted them with “Long live the King!” which meant that they all had to say it again.

Daniel must have said it with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, for Dr. Hammond gave him a sharp look—then turned toward Dr. Griffin as if trolling for eyewitnesses. “It is very good that you have come in time, m’Lord,” said Hammond to Roger Comstock, “as, between Jesuits on the one hand, and Puritans on t’other” (squirting long jets of glowing vitriol out of the pupils of his eyes, here, at Daniel), “some would say the King has had enough of bad advice.”

Now Roger tended to say things after long pauses. When he’d been a clownish sizar at Trinity, this had made him seem not very intelligent; but now that he was a Marquis, and President of the Royal Society, it made him seem exceedingly sober and grave. So after they’d all climbed up the steps to the balcony that led into the part of Whitehall called the King’s Apartments, he said: “A King’s mind should never want for the counsel of learned or pious men, just as his body should never want for a bountiful supply of the diverse humours that sustain life and health.”

Waving an arm at the shambling Palace above them, Dr. Hammond said to Roger, “This place is such a bazaar of rumor and intrigue, that your presence, m’Lord, will go far towards quelling any whisperings should the worst happen which Almighty God forbid.” Favoring Daniel with another fearsome over-the-shoulder glare, as he followed the Marquis of Ravenscar into the King’s Apartments.

“It sounds as if some have already gone far beyond whispering,” Daniel said.

“I’m certain that Dr. Hammond is solely concerned with preserving your reputation, Dr. Waterhouse,” Roger said.

“What—it’s been nigh on twenty years since His Majesty blew up my father—do people suppose I am still nursing a grudge?”

“That’s not it, Daniel—”

“On the contrary! Father’s departure from this plane was so brisk, so hot—leaving behind no physical remains—that it has been a sort of balm to my spirit to sit up with the King, night after night, imbrued in the royal gore, breathing it into my lungs, sopping it up with my flesh, and many other enjoyments besides, that

I missed out on when my Father ascended…”

The Marquis of Ravenscar and the two other Doctors had slowed almost to a standstill and were now exchanging deeply significant looks. “Yes,” Roger finally said, after another grand pause, “too much sitting up, in such a fœtid atmosphere, is not healthful for one’s body, mind, or spirit…perhaps an evening’s rest is in order, Daniel, so that when these two good Doctors have restored the King to health, you’ll be ready to offer his Majesty your congratulations, as well as to re-affirm the profound loyalty you harbor, and have always harbored, in your breast, notwithstanding those events of two decades hence, which some would say have already been alluded to more than enough…”

He did not finish this sentence for a quarter of an hour. Before putting it to a merciful death, he’d managed to work in several enconiums for both Drs. Hammond and Griffin, likening one to Asclepius and the other to Hippocrates, while not failing to make any number of cautiously favorable remarks about every other Doctor who had come within a hundred yards of the King during the last month. He also (as Daniel noted, with a kind of admiration) was able to make it clear, to all present, just what a morbid catastrophe it would be if the King died and turned England over into the hands of that mad Papist the Duke of York whilst, practically in the same phrases—with the same words—asserting that York was really such a splendid fellow that it was almost imperative that all of them rush straight-away to the King’s Bedchamber and smother Charles II under a mattress. In a sort of recursive fugue of dependent clauses he was, similarly, able to proclaim Drake Waterhouse to’ve been the finest Englishman who’d ever boiled beef whilst affirming that blowing him up with a ton of gunpowder had been an absolute touchstone of (depending on how you looked at it) monarchical genius that made Charles II such a colossal figure, (or) rampant despotism that augured so favorably for his brother’s reign.

All of this as Daniel and the physicians trailed behind Roger through the leads, halls, galleries, antechambers, and chapels of Whitehall, rupturing stuck doors with shoulder-thrusts and beating back tons of dusty hangings. The Palace must have been but a single building at some point, but no one knew which bit had been put up first; anyway, other buildings had been scabbed onto that first one as fast as stones and mortar could be ferried in, and galleries strung like clothes-lines between wings of it that were deemed too far apart; this created courtyards that were, in time, subdivided, and encroached upon by new additions, and filled in. Then the builders had turned their ingenuity to bricking up old openings, and chipping out new ones, then bricking up the new ones and re-opening the old, or making newer ones yet. In any event, every closet, hall, and room was claimed by one nest or sect of courtiers, just as every snatch of Germany had its own Baron. Their journey from the Privy Stairs to the King’s Bedchamber would, therefore, have been fraught with difficult border-crossings and protocol disputes if they’d made it in silence. But as the Marquis of Ravenscar was leading them surely through the maze, he went on, and on, with his Oration, a feat akin to threading needles while galloping on horseback through a wine cellar. Daniel lost track of the number of claques and cabals they burst in on, greeted, and left behind; but he did notice a lot of Catholics about, and more than a few Jesuits. Their route took them in a sort of jagged arc circumventing the Queen’s Apartments, which had been turned into a sort of Portuguese nunnery quite a long time ago, furnished with prayer-books and ghastly devotional objects; yet it buzzed with its own conspiracies. Whenever they spied a door ajar, they heard brisk steps approaching it from the opposite side and saw it slammed and locked in their faces. They passed by the King’s little chapel, which had been turned into a base-camp for this Catholic invasion, which didn’t really surprise Daniel but would have ignited riots over nine-tenths of England had it been widely known.

Finally they arrived at the door to the King’s Bedchamber, and Roger startled them all by finishing his sentence. He somehow contrived to separate Daniel from the physicians, and spoke briefly to the latter before showing them in to see the patient.

“What’d you tell them?” Daniel asked, when the Marquis came back.

“That if they unsheathed their lancets, I’d have their testicles for tennis-balls,” Roger said. “I have an errand for you, Daniel: go to the Duke of York and report on his brother’s condition.”

Daniel took a breath, and held it. He could scarcely believe, all of a sudden, how tired he was. “I could say something obvious here, such as that anyone could do that, and most would do it better than I, and then you’d answer with something that’d make me feel a bit dim, such as—”

“In our concern for the previous king we must not forget to maintain good relations with the next.”

“ ‘We’ meaning—in this case—?”

“Why, the Royal Society!” said Roger, miffed to have been asked.

“Righto. What shall I tell him?”

“That London’s finest physicians have arrived—so it shouldn’t be much longer.”

HE MIGHT HAVE SHIELDED HIMSELF from the cold and the wind by walking up the length of the Privy Gallery, but he’d had quite enough of Whitehall, so instead he went outside, crossed a couple of courts, and emerged at the front of the Banqueting House, directly beneath where Charles I had had his head lopped off, lo these many years ago. Cromwell’s men had kept him prisoner in St. James’s and then walked him across the Park for his decapitation. Four-year-old Daniel, sitting on Drake’s shoulders in the plaza, had watched every one of the King’s steps.

This evening, thirty-nine-year-old Daniel would be retracing that King’s final walk—except backwards.

Now, Drake, twenty years ago, would have been the first to admit that most of Cromwell’s work had been rolled back by the Restoration. But at least Charles II was a Protestant—or had the decency to pretend to be one. So Daniel oughtn’t to make too much of an omen out of this walk—God forbid he should start thinking like Isaac, and find occult symbols in every little thing. But he couldn’t help imagining that time was being rolled back even farther now, even past the reign of Elizabeth, all the way back to the days of Bloody Mary. In those days John Waterhouse, Drake’s grandfather, had fled over the sea to Geneva, which was a hornets’ nest of Calvinists. Only after Elizabeth was on the throne had he returned, accompanied by his son Calvin—Drake’s father—and many other English and Scottish men who thought the way he did about religion.

In any event, now here was Daniel crossing the old Tilt Yard and descending the stairs into St. James’s Park, going to fetch the man who had all the earmarks of the next Bloody Mary. James, the Duke of York, had lived at Whitehall Palace with the King and Queen until the tendency of Englishmen to riot and burn large objects in the streets at the least mention of his name had given the King the idea to pack him off to places like Brussels and Edinburgh. Since then he’d been a political comet, spending almost all of his time patrolling the liminal dusk, occasionally swooping back to London and scaring the hell out of everyone until the blaze of bonfires and burning Catholic churches drove him off into the darkness. After the King had finally lost patience, suspended Parliament, kicked out all the Bolstroods, and thrown the remaining Dissenters into jail, James had been suffered to come back and settle his household—but at St. James’s Palace.

From Whitehall it was five minutes’ walk across several gardens, parks, and malls. Most of the big old trees had been uprooted by the Devil’s Wind that had swept over England on the day Cromwell had died. As a lad wandering up and down Pall Mall handing out libels, Daniel had watched new saplings being planted. He was dismayed, now, to see how large some of them had grown.

In spring and summer, royals and courtiers wore ruts in the paths that wound between these trees, going out for strolls that had become ritualized into processions. Now the terrain was empty, an unreadable clutter of brown and gray: a crust of frozen mud floating on a deep miasma of bog and horse-manure. Daniel’s boots kept breaking through and plunging him into the muck. He learned to avoid stepping near the crescent-shaped indentations that had been made a few hours ago by the hooves of John Churchill’s regiment of Guards drilling and parading on this ground, galloping hither and yon and cutting the heads off of straw men with sabers. Those straw men had not been dressed up as Whigs and Dissenters, but even so the message had been clear enough, for Daniel and for the crowds of Londoners gathered along the limit of Charing Cross burning bonfires for their King.

One Nahum Tate had recently translated into English a hundred-and-fifty-year-old poem by the Veronese astronomer Hieronymus Fracastorius, entitled (in the original) Syphilis, Sive Morbvs Gallicvs or (as Tate had it) “Syphilis: or, a poetical history of the French Disease.” Either way, the poem told the tale of a shepherd named Syphilus who (like all shepherds in old myths) suffered a miserable and perfectly undeserved fate: he was the first person to be struck down by the disease that now bore his name. Inquiring minds might wonder why Mr. Tate had troubled himself to translate, at this moment, a poem about a poxy shepherd that had languished in Latin for a century and a half without any Englishman’s feeling its lack: a poem about a disease, by an astronomer! Certain Londoners of a cynical turn of mind believed that the answer to this riddle might be found in certain uncanny similarities between the eponymous shepherd and James, the Duke of York. Viz. that all of said Duke’s lovers, mistresses, and wives ended up with the said pestilence; that his first wife, Anne Hyde, had apparently died of it; that Anne Hyde’s daughers, Mary and Anne, both had difficulties with their eyes, and with their wombs; that the Duke had obvious sores on his face and that he was either unbelievably stupid or out of his fucking mind.

Now (as Daniel the Natural Philosopher understood only too well) people had a habit of over-burdening explanations, and to do so was a bad habit—a kind of superstition. And yet the parallels between Syphilus the Shepherd and James the Heir to the English Throne were hard to ignore—and as if that weren’t enough, Sir Roger L’Estrange had recently been leaning on Nahum Tate, asking him to perhaps find some other mildewy old Latin poems to translate. And everyone knew that L’Estrange was doing so, and understood why.

James was Catholic, and wanted to be a Saint, and that all fit together because he had been born in the Palace of St. James’s some fifty-two years ago. It had always been his true home. In his tender years he’d been taught princely rudiments in this yard: fencing and French. He had been spirited up to Oxford during the Civil War, and more or less raised himself from that point on. Occasionally Dad would swing by and swoop him up and take him off to some battle-front to get creamed by Oliver Cromwell.

James had spent quite a bit of time hanging about with his cousins, the offspring of his aunt Elizabeth (the Winter Queen), a fecund but hapless alternate branch of the family. When the Civil War had been lost, he’d gone back to St. James’s and lived there as a pampered hostage, wandering about this park and mounting the occasional boyish escape attempt, complete with encyphered letters spirited out to loyal confederates. One of those letters had been intercepted, and John Wilkins had been called in to decypher it, and Parliament had threatened to send James off to live in the decidedly less hospitable Tower. Eventually he’d slipped out across this park, disguised himself as a girl, and fled down the river and across the sea to Holland. Therefore he’d been out of the country when his father had been marched across this park to have his head lopped off. As the English Civil War had slowly ground to a halt, James had grown into a man, bouncing around between Holland, the Island of Jersey, and St. Germain (a royal suburb of Paris) and busying himself with the princely pastimes of riding, shooting, and screwing high-born Frenchwomen. But as Cromwell had continued to crush the Royalists at every turn, not only in England but Ireland and France as well, James had finally run out of money and become a soldier—a rather good one—under Marshal Turenne, the incomparable French general.

AS HE TRUDGED ALONG Daniel occasionally swiveled his head to gaze north across Pall Mall. The view was different every time, as per the observations of Dr. Leibniz. But when the parallax of the streets was just right, he could see between the bonfires built there by nervous Protestants, up the lengths of the streets-named-after-royal-bastards, and all the way up to the squares where Roger Comstock and Sterling Waterhouse were putting up new houses and shops. Some of the larger ones were being made with great blocks of stone taken from the rubble of John Comstock’s house—blocks that Comstock, in turn, had salvaged from the collapsed south transept of Old St. Paul’s. Lights were burning in windows up there, and smoke drifting from chimneys. Mostly it was the mineral smoke of coal, but on the north wind Daniel caught the occasional whiff of roasting meat. Crunching and squelching across this wasted park, stepping over stuffed heads that had been lopped from straw men a few hours before, had given Daniel his appetite back. He wanted to be up there with a tankard in one hand and a drumstick in the other—but here he was, doing the sort of thing that he did. Which was what, exactly?

St. James’s Palace was getting close, and he really ought to have an answer before he got there.

AT SOME POINT CROMWELL HAD, improbably, formed an alliance with the French, and then young James had had to go north to an impoverished, lonely, boring existence in the Spanish Netherlands. In the final years before the Restoration he’d knocked about Flanders with a motley army of exiled Irish, Scottish, and English regiments, picking fights with Cromwell’s forces around Dunkirk. After the Restoration he’d come into his hereditary title of Lord High Admiral, and taken part in some rousing and bloody naval engagements against the Dutch.

However: the tendency of his siblings to die young, and the failure of his brother Charles to produce a legitimate heir, had made James the only hope for continuance of his mother’s bloodline. While Mother had been living a good life in France, her sister-in-law, the Winter Queen, had been kicked around Europe like a stuffed pig’s bladder at a county fair. Yet Elizabeth had pumped out babies with inhuman efficiency and Europe was bestrewn with her offspring. Many had come to naught, but her daughter Sophie seemed to have bred true, and was carrying on the tradition with seven surviving children. So, in the royal propagation sweepstakes, Henrietta Maria of France, the mother of James and Charles, seemed to be losing, in the long run, to the miserable Winter Queen. James was her only hope. And consequently, during James’s various adventures she had used all of her wiles and connexions to keep him out of danger—leaving James with a simmering feeling of never having destroyed as many armies or sunk as many fleets as he could have.

Stymied, he’d spent much of the time since about 1670 doing—what, exactly? Mining Africa for gold, and, when that failed, Negroes. Trying to persuade English noblemen to convert to Catholicism. Sojourning in Brussels, and then in Edinburgh, where he had made himself useful by riding out to wild parts of Scotland to suppress feral Presbyterians in their rustic conventicles. Really he had been wasting his time, just waiting.

Just like Daniel.

A dozen years had flown by, dragging him along like a rider with one foot caught in the stirrup.

What did it mean? That he had best take matters in hand and get his life in order. Find something to do with his allotted years. He had been too much like Drake, waiting for some Apocalypse that would never come.

The prospect of James on the throne, working hand-in-glove with Louis XIV, was just sickening. This was an emergency, every bit as pressing as when London had burnt.

The realizations just kept coming—or rather they’d all appeared in his mind at once, like Athena jumping out of his skull in full armor, and he was merely trying to sort them out.

Emergencies called for stern, even desperate measures, such as blowing up houses with kegs of gunpowder (as King Charles II had personally done) or flooding half of Holland to keep the French out (as William of Orange had done). Or—dare he think it—overthrowing Kings and chopping their heads off as Drake had helped to. Men such as Charles and William and Drake seemed to take such measures without hesitation, while Daniel was either (a) a miserably pusillanimous wretch or (b) wisely biding his time.

Maybe this was why God and Drake had brought him into this world: to play some pivotal role in this, the final struggle between the Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. the Roman Catholic Church, and Free Trade, Freedom of Conscience, Limited Government, and diverse other good Anglo-Saxon virtues, which was going to commence in about ten minutes.

Romanists now swarming at Court with greater confidence than had ever been seen since the Reformation.

—John Evelyn’s Diary

ALL OF THESE THOUGHTS terrified him so profoundly as to nearly bring him to his knees before the entrance of St. James’s Palace. This wouldn’t have been as embarrassing as it sounded; the courtiers circulating in and out of the doors, and the Grenadier Guards washing their hands in the blue, wind-whipped flames of torchières, probably would have pegged him as another mad Puritan taken in a Pentecostal fit. However, Daniel remained on his feet and slogged up stairs and into the Palace. He made muddy footprints on the polished stone: making a mess of things as he went and leaving abundant evidence, which seemed a poor beginning for a conspirator.

St. James’s was roomier than the suite in Whitehall where James had formerly dwelt, and (as Daniel only now apprehended) this had given him the space and privacy to gather his own personal Court, which could simply be marched across the Park and swapped for Charles’s at the drop of a crown. They’d seemed a queer swarm of religious cultists and second-raters. Daniel now cursed himself for not having paid closer attention to them. Some of them were players who’d end up performing the same roles and prattling the same dialogue as the ones they were about to replace, but (if Daniel’s ruminations on the Privy Stairs were not completely baseless) others had unique perceptions. It would be wise for Daniel to identify these.

As he worked his way into the Palace he began to see fewer Grenadier Guards and more shapely green ankles scissoring back and forth beneath flouncing skirts. James had five principal mistresses, including a Countess and a Duchess, and seven secondary mistresses, typically Merry Widows of Important Dead Men. Most of them were Maids of Honour, i.e., members of the ducal household, therefore entitled to loiter around St. James’s all they wanted. Daniel, who made a sporting effort to keep track of these things, and who could easily list the King’s mistresses from memory, had entirely lost track of the Duke’s. But it was known empirically that the Duke would pursue any young woman who wore green stockings, which made it much easier to sort things out around St. James’s, just by staring at ankles.

From the mistresses he could learn nothing, at least, until he learned their names and gave them further study. What of the courtiers? Some could be described exhaustively by saying “courtier” or “senseless fop,” but others had to be known and understood in the full variety of their perceptions. Daniel recoiled from the sight of a fellow who, if he had not been clad in the raiments of a French nobleman, might have been taken for a shake-rag. His head seemed to have been made in some ghastly Royal Society experiment by taking two different men’s heads and dividing them along the centerline and grafting the mismatched halves together. He jerked frequently to one side as if the head-halves were fighting a dispute over what they should be looking at. From time to time the argument would reach some impasse and he’d stand frozen and mute for a few seconds, mouth open and tongue exploring the room. Then he’d blink and resume speaking again, rambling in accented English to a younger officer—John Churchill.

The better half of this strange Frenchman’s head looked to be between forty and fifty years of age. He was Louis de Duras, a nephew of Marshal Turenne but a naturalized Englishman. He had, by marrying the right Englishwoman and raising a lot of revenue for Charles, acquired the titles Baron Throwley, Viscount Sondes, and the Earl of Feversham. Feversham (as he was generally called) was Lord of the Bedchamber to King Charles II, which meant that he really ought to have been over in Whitehall just now. His failure to be there might be seen as proof that he was grossly incompetent. But he was also a Commander of Horse Guards. This gave him an excuse for being here, since James, as a highly unpopular but healthy king-to-be, needed a lot more guarding than Charles, a generally popular king at death’s door.

Around a corner and into another hall, this one so chilly that steam was coming from people’s mouths as they talked. Daniel caught sight of Pepys and veered towards him. But then a wind-gust, leaking through an ill-fitting window-frame, blew a cloud of vapor away from the face of the man Pepys was talking to. It was Jeffreys. His beautiful eyes, now trapped in a bloated and ruddy face, fixed upon Daniel, who felt for a moment like a small mammal paralyzed by a serpent’s hypnotic glare. But Daniel had the good sense to look the other way and duck through an opportune doorway into a gallery that connected several of the Duke’s private chambers.

Mary Beatrice d’Este, a.k.a. Mary of Modena—James’s second wife—would be sequestered back in these depths somewhere, presumably half out of her mind with misery. Daniel tried not to think of what it would be like for her: an Italian princess raised midway between Florence, Venice, and Genoa, and now stuck here, forever, surrounded by the mistresses of her syphilitic husband, surrounded in turn by Protestants, surrounded in turn by cold water, her only purpose in life to generate a male child so that a Catholic could succeed to the throne, but her womb barren so far.

Looking quite a bit more cheerful than that was Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, who’d been rich to begin with and had now secured her pension by producing two of James’s innumerable bastard sons. She was not an attractive woman, she was not Catholic, and she hadn’t even bothered to pull on green stockings—yet she had some mysterious unspecified hold over James exceeding that of any of his other mistresses. She was strolling down the gallery tête-à-tête with a Jesuit: Father Petre, who among other duties was responsible for bringing up all of James’s bastards to be good Catholics. Daniel caught a moment of genuine amusement on Miss Sedley’s face and guessed that the Jesuit was relating some story about her boys’ antics. In this windowless gallery, lit feebly by some candles, Daniel could not have been more than a dim apparition to them—a pale face and a lot of dark clothing—a Puritan Will-o’-the-wisp, the sort of bad memory that forever haunted the jumpy Royals who’d survived the Civil War. The affectionate smiles were replaced by alert looks in his direction: was this an invited guest, or a Phanatique, a hashishin? Daniel was grotesquely out of place. But his years at Trinity had made him accustomed to it. He bowed to the Countess of Dorchester and exchanged some sort of acrid greeting with Father Petre. These people did not like him, did not want him here, would never be friendly to him in any sense that counted. And yet there was a symmetry here that unnerved him. He’d seen wary curiosity on their faces, then recognition, and now polite masks had fallen over their covert thoughts as they wondered why he was here, and tried to fit Daniel Waterhouse into some larger picture.

But if Daniel had held a mirror up to his own face he’d have seen just the same evolution.

He was one of them. Not as powerful, not as highly ranked—in fact, completely unranked—but he was here, now, and for these people that was the only sort of rank that amounted to anything. To be here, to smell the place, to bow to the mistresses, was a sort of initiation. Drake would have said that merely to set foot in such people’s houses and show them common courtesy was to be complicit in their whole system of power. Daniel and most others had scoffed at such rantings. But now he knew it was true, for when the Countess had acknowledged his presence and known his name, Daniel had felt important. Drake—if he’d had a grave—would have rolled over in it. But Drake’s grave was the air above London.

An ancient ceiling beam popped as the Palace was hit by another gust.

The Countess was favoring Daniel with a knowing smile. Daniel had had a mistress, and Miss Sedley knew it: the incomparable Tess Charter, who had died of smallpox five years ago. Now he didn’t have a mistress, and Catherine Sedley probably knew that, too.

He had slowed almost to a stop. Steps rushed toward him from behind and he cringed, expecting a hand on his shoulder, but two courtiers, then two more—including Pepys—divided around him as if he were a stone in a stream, then converged on a large Gothic door whose wood had turned as gray as the sky. Some protocol of knocking, throat-clearing, and doorknob-rattling got underway. The door was opened from inside, its hinges groaning like a sick man.

St. James’s was in better upkeep than Whitehall, but still just a big old house. It was quite a bit shabbier than Comstock/Anglesey House. But that House had been brought down. And what had brought it down had not been revolution, but the movings of markets. The Comstocks and Angleseys had been ruined, not by lead balls, but by golden coins. The neighborhood that had been built upon the ruins of their great House was now crowded with men whose vaults were well-stocked with that kind of ammunition.

To mobilize those forces, all that was needed was some of that kingly ability to decide, and to act.

He was being beckoned forward. Pepys stepped toward him, holding out one hand as if to take Daniel’s elbow. If Daniel were a Duke, Pepys would be offering sage advice to him right now.

“What should I say?” Daniel asked.

Pepys answered immediately, as if he’d been practicing the answer for three weeks in front of a mirror. “Don’t fret so much over the fact that the Duke loathes and fears Puritans, Daniel. Think instead of those men that the Duke loves: Generals and Popes.”

“All right, Mr. Pepys, I am thinking of them…and it is doing me no good.”

“True, Roger may have sent you here as a sacrificial lamb, and the Duke may see you as an assassin. If he does, then any attempt you make to sweeten and dissemble will be taken the wrong way. Besides, you’re no good at it.”

“So…if my head’s to be removed, I should go lay my head on the chopping-block like a man…”

“Belt out a hymn or two! Kiss Jack Ketch and forgive him in advance. Show these fops what you’re made of.”

“Do you really think Roger sent me here to…”

“Of course not, Daniel! I was being jocular.”

“But there is a certain tradition of killing the messenger.”

“Hard as it might be for you to believe, the Duke admires certain things about Puritans: their sobriety, their reserve, their flinty toughness. He saw Cromwell fight, Daniel! He saw Cromwell mow down a generation of Court fops. He has not forgotten it.”

“What, you’re suggesting I’m to emulate Cromwell now!?”

“Emulate anything but a courtier,” said Samuel Pepys, now gripping Daniel’s arm and practically shoving him through the doorway.

Daniel Waterhouse was now in the Presence of James, the Duke of York.

The Duke was wearing a blond wig. He had always been pale-skinned and doe-eyed, which had made him a bonny youth, but a somewhat misshapen and ghastly adult. A dim circle of courtiers ringed them, hemming into their expensive sleeves and shuffling their feet. The occasional spur jingled.

Daniel bowed. James seemed not to notice. They looked at each other for a few moments. Charles would already have made some witty remark by this point, broken the ice, let Daniel know where he stood, but James only looked at Daniel expectantly.

“How is my brother, Dr. Waterhouse?” James asked.

Daniel realized, from the way he asked it, that James had no idea just how sick his brother really was. James had a temper; everyone knew it; no one had the courage to tell him the truth.

“Your brother will be dead in an hour,” Daniel announced.

Like a barrel’s staves being drawn together in a cooper’s shop, the ring of courtiers tensed and drew inwards.

“He has taken a turn for the worse, then!?” James exclaimed.

“He has been at death’s door the whole time.”

“Why was this never said plainly to me until this instant?”

The correct answer, most likely, was that it had been, and he simply hadn’t gotten it; but no one could say this.

“I have no idea,” Daniel answered.

ROGER COMSTOCK, SAMUEL PEPYS, AND Daniel Waterhouse were in the antechamber at Whitehall.

“He said, ‘I am surrounded by men who are afraid to speak truth to my face.’ He said, ‘I am not as complicated as my brother—not complicated enough to be a king.’ He said, ‘I need your help and I know it.’”

“He said all of that!?” Roger blurted.

“Of course not,” Pepys scoffed, “but he meant it.”

The antechamber had two doors. One led to London, and half of London seemed to be gathered on the other side of it. The other door led to the King’s bedchamber, where, surrounding the bed of the dying monarch, were James, Duke of York; the Duchess of Portsmouth, who was Charles’s primary mistress; Father Huddle-stone, a Catholic priest; and Louis de Duras, the Earl of Feversham.

“What else did he say?” Roger demanded. “Or more to the point, what else did he mean?”

“He is dim and stiff, and so he needs someone clever and flexible. Apparently I have a reputation for being both.”

“Splendid!” Roger exclaimed, showing a bit more merriment than was really appropriate in these circumstances. “You have Mr. Pepys to thank for it—the Duke trusts Mr. Pepys, and Mr. Pepys has been saying good things about you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pepys…”

“You’re welcome, Dr. Waterhouse!”

“…for telling the Duke that I have a cowardly willingness to bend my principles.”

“As much as it offends me to tell such beastly lies about you, Daniel, I’m willing to do it, as a personal favor to a good friend,” Pepys answered instantly.

Roger ignored this exchange, and said: “Did his royal highness ask you for any advice?”

“I told him, as we trudged across the park, that this is a Protestant country, and that he belongs to a religious minority. He was astounded.”

“It must have come as a grievous shock to him.”

“I suggested that he turn his syphilitic dementia into an asset—it shows off his humane side while providing an excuse for some of his behavior.”

“You didn’t really say that!”

“Dr. Waterhouse was just seeing if you were paying attention, m’Lord,” Pepys explained.

“He told me he had syphilis twenty years ago at Epsom,” Daniel said, “and the secret—it was a secret in those days—did not get out immediately. Perhaps this is why he trusts me.”

Roger had no interest whatever in such old news. His eyes were trained to the opposite corner of the room, where Father Petre was shoulder-to-shoulder with Barrillon, the French Ambassador.

One of the doors opened. Beyond it, a dead man was lying in a stained bed. Father Huddlestone was making the sign of the cross, working his way through the closing stanzas of the rite of extreme unction. The Duchess of Portsmouth was weeping into a hanky and the Duke of York—no, the King of England—was praying into clasped hands.

The Earl of Feversham tottered out and steadied himself against the doorjamb. He looked neither happy nor sad, but vaguely lost. This man was now Commander in Chief of the Army. Paul Barrillon had a look on his face as if he were sucking on a chocolate truffle and didn’t want anyone to know. Samuel Pepys, Roger Com-stock, and Daniel Waterhouse shared an uneasy look.

“M’Lord? What news?” Pepys said.

“What? Oh! The King is dead,” Feversham announced. His eyes closed and he leaned his head on his upraised arm for a moment, as if taking a brief nap.

“Long live…” Pepys prompted him.

Feversham awoke. “Long live the King!”

“Long live the King!” everyone said.

Father Huddlestone finished the rite and turned towards the door. Roger Comstock chose that moment to cross himself.

“Didn’t know you were Catholic, m’lord,” Daniel said.

“Shut up, Daniel! You know I’m a Freedom of Conscience man—have I ever troubled you about your religion?” said the Marquis of Ravenscar.

Versailles

SUMMER 1685

For the market is against our sex just now; and if a young woman has beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all to an extreme, yet if she has not money she’s nobody, she had as good want them all; nothing but money now recommends a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands.

—DANIEL DEFOE, Moll Flanders

To M. le comte d’Avaux

12 July 1685

Monseigneur,

As you see I have encyphered this letter according to your instructions, though only you know whether this is to protect it from the eyes of Dutch spies, or your rivals at Court. Yes, I have discovered that you have rivals.

On my journey I was waylaid and ill-used by some typically coarse, thick Dutchmen. Though you would never have guessed it from their looks and manners, these had something in common with the King of France’s brother: namely, a fascination with women’s undergarments. For they went through my baggage thoroughly, and left it a few pounds lighter.

Shame, shame on you, monseigneur, for placing those letters among my things! For a while I was afraid that I would be thrown into some horrid Dutch work-house, and spend the rest of my days scrubbing sidewalks and knitting hose. But from the questions they asked me, it soon became obvious that they were perfectly baffled by this French cypher of yours. To test this, I replied that I could read those letters as well as they could; and the dour looks on the faces of my interrogators demonstrated that their incompetence had been laid bare, and my innocence proved, in the same moment.

I will forgive you, monseigneur, for putting me through those anxious moments if you will forgive me for believing, until quite recently, that you were utterly mad to send me to Versailles. For how could a common girl such as I find a place in the most noble and glorious palace in the world?

But now I know things and I understand.

There is a story making the rounds here, which you must have heard. The heroine is a girl, scarcely better than a slave—the daughter of a ruined petty noble fallen to the condition of a Vagabond. Out of desperation this waif married a stunted and crippled writer in Paris. But the writer had a salon that attracted certain Persons of Quality who had grown bored with the insipid discourse of Court. His young wife made the acquaintance of a few of these noble visitors. After he died, and left this girl a penniless widow, a certain Duchess took pity on her, brought her out to Versailles, and made her a governess to some of her illegitimate children. This Duchess was none other than the maîtresse déclarée to the King himself, and her children were royal bastards. The story goes that King Louis XIV, contrary to the long-established customs of Christian royalty, considers his bastards to be only one small step beneath the Dauphin and the other Enfants de France. Protocol dictates that the governess of les Enfants de France must be a duchess; accordingly, the King made the governess of his bastards into a marquise. In the years since then, the King’s maîtresse déclarée has gradually fallen from favor, as she has grown fat and histrionic, and it has been the case for some time that when the King went every day to call upon her at one o’clock in the afternoon, just after Mass, he would simply walk through her apartment without stopping, and go instead to visit this widow—the Marquise de Main-tenon, as she was now called. Finally, Monseigneur, I have learned what is common knowledge at Versailles, namely that the King secretly married the Marquise de Maintenon recently and that she is the Queen of France in all but name.

It is plain to see that Louis keeps the powerful of France on a short leash here, and that they have nothing to do but gamble when the King is absent and ape his words and actions when he is present. Consequently every Duke, Count, and Marquis at Versailles is prowling through nurseries and grammar-schools, disrupting the noble children’s upbringing in the hunt for nubile governesses. No doubt you knew this when you made arrangements for me to work as a governess to the children of M. le comte de Béziers. I cringe to think what awful debt this poor widower must have owed you for him to consent to such an arrangement! You might as well have deposited me in a bordello, Monseigneur, for all the young blades who prowl around the entrance of the count’s apartment and pursue me through the gardens as I try to carry out my nominal duties—and not because of any native attractiveness I may possess but simply because it is what the King did.

Fortunately the King has not seen fit to grace me with a noble title yet or I should never be left alone long enough to write you letters. I have reminded some of these loiterers that Madame de Maintenon is a famously pious woman and that the King (who could have any woman in the world, and who ruts with disposable damsels two or three times a week) fell in love with her because of her intelligence. This keeps most of them at bay.

I hope that my story has provided you with a few moments’ diversion from your tedious duties in the Hague, and that you will, in consequence, forgive me for not saying anything of substance.

Your obedient servant,

Eliza

P.S. M. le comte de Béziers’ finances are in comic disarray—he spent fourteen percent of his income last year on wigs, and thirty-seven percent on interest, mostly on gambling debts. Is this typical? I will try to help him. Is this what you wanted me to do? Or did you want him to remain helpless? That is easier.

My dark and cloudy words they do but hold The truth, as cabinets enclose the gold.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

To Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

4 August 1685

Dear Doctor Leibniz,

Difficulty at the beginning[*] is to be expected in any new venture, and my move to Versailles has been no exception. I thank God that I lived for several years in the harim of the Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, being trained to serve as a consort to the Sultan, for only this could have prepared me for Versailles. Unlike Versailles, the Sultan’s palace grew according to no coherent plan, and from the outside looks like a jumble of domes and minarets. But seen from the inside both palaces are warrens of stuffy windowless rooms created by subdividing other rooms. This is a mouse’s-eye view, of course; just as I was never introduced to the domed pavilion where the Grand Turk deflowers his slave-girls, so I have not yet been allowed to enter the Salon of Apollo and view the Sun King in his radiance. In both Palaces I have seen mostly the wretched closets, garrets, and cellars where courtiers dwell.

Certain parts of this Palace, and most of the gardens, are open to anyone who is decently dressed. At first this meant they were closed to me, for William’s men ripped up all of my clothes. But after I arrived, and word of my adventures began to circulate, I received cast-offs from noblewomen who either sympathized with my plight or needed to make room in their tiny closets for next year’s fashions. With some needle-work I have been able to make these garments over into ones that, while not quite fashionable, will at least not expose me to ridicule as I lead the son and daughter of M. le comte de Béziers through the gardens.

To describe this place in words is hopeless. Indeed I believe it was meant to be so, for then anyone who wants to know it must come here in person, and that is how the King wants it. Suffice it to say that here, every dram of water, every leaf and petal, every square inch of wall, floor, and ceiling bear the signature of Man; all have been thought about by superior intellects, nothing is accidental. The place is pregnant with Intention and wherever you look you see the gaze of the architects—and by extension, Louis—staring back at you. I am contrasting this to blocks of stone and beams of wood that occur in Nature and, in most places, are merely harvested and shaped a bit by artisans. Nothing of that sort is to be found at Versailles.

At Topkapi there were magnificent carpets everywhere, Doctor, carpets such as no one in Christendom has ever seen, and all of them were fabricated thread by thread, knot by knot, by human hands. That is what Versailles is like. Buildings made of plain stone or wood are to this place what a sack of flour is to a diamond necklace. Fully to describe a routine event, such as a conversation or a meal, would require devoting fifty pages to a description of the room and its furnishings, another fifty to the clothing, jewelry, and wigs worn by the participants, another fifty to their family trees, yet another to explaining their current positions in the diverse intrigues of the Court, and finally a single page to setting down the words actually spoken.

Needless to say this will be impractical; yet I hope you will bear with me if I occasionally go on at some length with florid descriptions. I know, Doctor, that even if you have not seen Versailles and the costumes of its occupants, you have seen crude copies of them in German courts and can use your incomparable mind to imagine the things I see. So I will try to restrain myself from describing every little detail. And I know that you are making a study of family trees for Sophie, and have the resources in your library to investigate the genealogy of any petty nobleman I might mention. So I will try to show restraint there as well. I will try to explain the current state of Court intrigue, since you have no way of knowing about such things. For example, one evening two months ago, my master M. le comte de Béziers was given the honor of holding a candle during the King’s going-to-bed ceremony, and consequently was invited to all the best parties for a fortnight. But lately his star has been in eclipse, and his life has been very quiet.

If you are reading this it means you detected the key from the I Ching. It appears that French cryptography is not up to the same standard as French interior decoration; their diplomatic cypher has been broken by the Dutch, but as it was invented by a courtier highly thought of by the King, no one dares say anything against it. If what they say about Colbert is true, he never would have allowed such a situation to arise, but as you know he died two years ago and cyphers have not been upgraded since. I am writing in that broken cypher to d’Avaux in Holland on the assumption that everything I write will be decyphered and read by the Dutch. But as is probably obvious already, I write to you on the assumption that your cypher affords us a secure channel.

Since you employ the Wilkins cypher, which uses five plaintext letters to encrypt one letter of the actual message, I must write five words of drivel to encypher one word of pith, and so you may count on seeing lengthy descriptions of clothing, etiquette, and other tedious detail in future letters.

I hope I do not seem self-important by presuming that you may harbor some curiosity concerning my position at Court. Of course I am a nothing, invisible, not even an ink-speck in the margin of the Register of Ceremonies. But it has not escaped the notice of the nobles that Louis XIV chose most of his most important ministers (such as Colbert, who bought one of your digital computers!) from the middle class, and that he has (secretly) married a woman of low degree, and so it is fashionable in a way to be seen speaking to a commoner if she is clever or useful.

Of course hordes of young men want to have sex with me, but to relate details would be repetitious and in poor taste.

Because M. le comte de Béziers’ bolt-hole in the south wing is so uncomfortable, and the weather has been so fine, I have spent several hours each day going on walks with my two charges, Beatrice and Louis, who have 9 and 6 years of age, respectively. Versailles has vast gardens and parks, most of which are deserted except when the King goes to hunt or promenade, and then they are crowded with courtiers. Until very recently they were also filled with common people who would come all the way from Paris to see the sights, but these pressed around the King so hotly, and made such a shambles of the statues and waterworks, that recently the King banned the mobile from all of his gardens.

As you know, it is the habit of all well-born ladies to cover their faces with masks whenever they venture out of doors, so that they will not be darkened by the sun. Many of the more refined men do likewise—the King’s brother Philippe, who is generally addressed as Monsieur, wears such a mask, though he frets that it smears his makeup. On such warm days as we have had recently, this is so uncomfortable that the ladies of Versailles, and by extension their attendants, households, and gallants, prefer simply to remain indoors. I can wander for hours through the park with Beatrice and Louis in train and encounter only a few other people: mostly gardeners, occasionally lovers on their way to trysts in secluded woods or grottoes.

The gardens are shot through with long straight paths and avenues that, as one steps into certain intersections, provide sudden unexpected vistas of fountains, sculpture groups, or the château itself. I am teaching Beatrice and Louis geometry by having them draw maps of the place.

If these children are any clue as to the future of the nobility, then France as we know it is doomed.

Yesterday I was walking along the canal, which is a cross-shaped body of water to the west of the château; the long axis runs east–west and the crossbar north–south, and since it is a single body of water its surface is, of course, level, that being a known property of water. I put a needle in one end of a cork and weighted the other end (with a corkscrew, in case you are wondering!) and set it afloat in the circular pool where these canals intersect, hoping that the needle would point vertically upwards—trying (as you have no doubt already perceived) to acquaint Beatrice and Louis with the idea of a third spatial dimension perpendicular to the other two. Alas, the cork did not float upright. It drifted away and I had to lie flat on my belly and reach out over the water to rake it in, and the sleeves of my hand-me-down dress became soaked with water. The whole time I was preoccupied with the whining of the bored children, and with my own passions as well—for I must tell you that tears were running down my sunburned cheeks as I remembered the many lessons I was taught, as a young girl in Algiers, by Mummy and by the Ladies’ Volunteer Sodality of the Society of Britannic Abductees.

At some point I became aware of voices—a man’s and a woman’s—and I knew that they had been conversing nearby for quite some time. With all of these other concerns and distractions I had taken no note of them. I lifted my head to gaze directly across the canal at two figures on horseback: a tall magnificent well-built man in a vast wig like a lion’s mane, and a woman, built something like a Turkish wrestler, dressed in hunting clothes and carrying a riding crop. The woman’s face was exposed to the sun, and had been for a long time, for she was tanned like a saddlebag. She and her companion had been talking about something else, but when I looked up I somehow drew the notice of the man; instantly he reached up and doffed his hat to me, from across the canal! When he did, the sun fell directly on his face and I recognized him as King Louis XIV.

I simply could not imagine any way to recover from this indignity, and so I pretended I had not seen him. As the crow flies we were not far apart, but by land we were far away—to reach me, the King and his Diana-like hunting-companion would have had to ride west for some distance along the bank of the canal; circumnavigate the large pool at that end; and then go the same distance eastwards along the opposite bank. So I convinced myself that they were far away and I pretended not to see them; God have mercy on me if I chose wrong. I tried to cover my embarrassment by ranting to the children about Descartes and Euclid.

The King put his hat back on and said, “Who is she?”

I closed my eyes and sighed in relief; the King had decided to play along, and act as if we had not seen each other. Finally I had coaxed the floating cork back into my hands. I drew myself up and sat on the brink of the canal with my skirts spread out around me, in profile to the King, and quietly lectured the children.

Meanwhile I was praying that the woman would not know my name. But as you will have guessed, Doctor, she was none other than his majesty’s sister-in-law, Elisabeth Charlotte, known to Versailles as Madame, and known to Sophie—her beloved aunt—as Liselotte.

Why didn’t you tell me that the Knight of the Rustling Leaves was a clitoriste? I suppose this should come as no surprise given that her husband Philippe is a homosexual, but it caught me somewhat off guard. Does she have lovers? Hold, I presume too much; does she even know what she is?

She gazed at me for a languid moment; at Versailles, no one of importance speaks quickly and spontaneously, every utterance is planned like a move in a chess game. I knew what she was about to say: “I do not know her.” I prayed for her to say it, for then the King would know that I was not a person, did not exist, was no more worthy of his attention than a fleeting ripple in the surface of the canal. Then finally I heard Madame’s voice across the water: “It looks like that girl who was duped by d’Avaux and molested by the Dutchmen, and showed up dishevelled and expecting sympathy.”

It strikes me as unlikely that Liselotte could have recognized me in this way without another channel of information; did you write a letter to her, Doctor? It is never clear to me how much you are acting on your own and how much as a pawn—or perhaps I should say “knight” or “rook”—of Sophie.

These cruel words would have brought me to tears if I’d been one of those rustic countesses who flock to Versailles to be deflowered by men of rank. But I had already seen enough of this place to know that the only truly cruel words here are “She is nobody.” And Madame had not said that. Consequently, the King had to look at me for a few moments longer.

Louis and Beatrice had noticed the King, and were frozen with a mixture of awe and terror—like statues of children.

Another one of those pauses had gone by. I heard the King saying, “That story was told in my presence.” Then he said, “If d’Avaux would only put his letters into the bodice of some poxy old hag he could be assured of absolute secrecy, but what Dutchman would not want to break the seal on that envelope?”

“But, Sire,” said Liselotte, “d’Avaux is a Frenchman—and what Frenchman would?”

“He is not as refined in his tastes as he would have you think,” the King returned, “and she is not as coarse as you would have me think.”

At this point little Louis stepped forward so suddenly that I was alarmed he would topple into the Canal and oblige me to swim; but he stopped on the brink, thrust out one leg, and bowed to the King just like a courtier. I pretended now to notice the King for the first time, and scrambled to my feet. Beatrice and I made curtseys across the canal. Once more the King acknowledged us by doffing his hat, perhaps with a certain humorous exaggeration.

“I see that look in your eye, vôtre majesté,” said Liselotte.

“I see it in yours, Artemis.”

“You have been listening to gossip. I tell you that these girls of low birth who come here to seduce noblemen are like mouse droppings in the pepper.”

“Is that what she wants us to believe? How banal.”

“The best disguises are the most banal, Sire.”

This seemed to be the end of their strange conversation; they rode slowly away.

The King is said to be a great huntsman, but he was riding in an extremely stiff posture—I suspect he is suffering from hemorrhoids or possibly a bad back.

I took the children back straightaway and sat down to write you this letter. For a nothing like me, today’s events are the pinnacle of honor and glory, and I wanted to memorialize them before any detail slipped from my memory.

To M. le comte d’Avaux

1 September 1685

Monseigneur,

I have as many visitors as ever (much to the annoyance of M. le comte de Béziers), but since I got a deep tan and took to wearing sackcloth and quoting from the Bible a lot, they are not as interested in romance. Now they come asking me about my Spanish uncle. “I am sorry that your Spanish uncle had to move to Amsterdam, mademoiselle,” they say, “but it is rumored that hardship has made him a wise man.” The first time some son of a marquis came up to me spouting such nonsense I told him he must have me mixed up with some other wench, and sent him packing! But the next one dropped your name and I understood that he had in some sense been dispatched by you—or, to be more precise, that his coming to me under the delusion of my having a wise Spanish uncle was a consequence or ramification of some chain of events that had been set in motion by you. On that assumption, I began to play along, quite cautiously, as I did not know what sort of game might be afoot. From the way this fellow talked I soon understood that he believes me to be a sort of crypto-Jew, the bastard offspring of a swarthy Spanish Kohan and a butter-haired Dutchwoman, which might actually seem plausible as the sun has bleached my hair and darkened my skin.

These conversations are all the same, and their particulars are too tedious to relate here. Obviously you have been spreading tales about me, Monseigneur, and half the petty nobles of Versailles now believe that I (or, at any rate, my fictitious uncle) can help them get out from under their gambling debts, pay for the remodeling of their châteaux, or buy them splendid new carriages. I can only roll my eyes at their avarice. But if the stories are to be believed, their fathers and grandfathers used what money they had to raise private armies and fortify their cities against the father and grandfather of the present King. I suppose it’s better for the money to go to dressmakers, sculptors, painters, and chefs de cuisine than to mercenaries and musket-makers.

Of course it is true that their gold would fetch a higher rate of return wisely invested in Amsterdam than sitting in a strong-box under their beds. The only difficulty lies in the fact that I cannot manage such investments from a closet in Versailles while at the same time teaching two motherless children how to read and write. My Spanish uncle is a fiction of yours, presumably invented because you feared that these French nobles would never entrust their assets to a woman. This means that I must do the work personally, and this is impossible unless I have the freedom to travel to Amsterdam several times a year…

To Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

12 Sept. 1685

This morning I was summoned to the comparatively spacious and splendid apartments of a Lady in Waiting to the Dauphine, in the South Wing of the palace adjacent to the apartments of the Dauphine herself.

The lady in question is the duchesse d’Oyonnax. She has a younger sister who is the marquise d’Ozoir and who happens to be visiting Versailles with her daughter of nine years.

The girl seems bright but is half dead with asthma. The marquise ruptured something giving birth to her and cannot have any more children.

The d’Ozoirs are one of the rare exceptions to the general rule that all French nobles of any consequence must dwell at Versailles—but only because the Marquis has responsibilities at Dunkirk. In case you have not been properly maintaining your family trees of the European nobility, Doctor, I will remind you that the Marquis d’Ozoir is the bastard son of the duc d’Arcachon.

Who, when he was a stripling of fifteen, begat the future marquis off his grandmama’s saucy maid-companion—the poor girl had been dragooned into teaching the young Duke his first love-lesson.

The duc d’Arcachon did not actually take a wife until he was twenty-five, and she did not produce a viable child (Étienne d’Arcachon) for three years after that. So the bastard was already a young man by the time his legitimate half-brother was born. He was shipped off to Surat as an aide to Boullaye and Beber, who tried to establish the French East India Company there around 1666.

But as you may know the French E.I.C. did not fare quite as well as the English and Dutch have done. Boullaye and Beber began to assemble a caravan in Surat but had to depart before all preparations had been made, because the city was in the process of falling to the Mahratta rebels. They traveled into the interior of Hindoostan, hoping to establish trade agreements. As they approached the gates of a great city, a delegation of banyans—the richest and most influential commerçants of that district—came out to greet them, carrying small gifts in bowls, according to the local custom. Boullaye and Beber mistook them for beggars and thrashed them with their riding-whips as any self-respecting upper-caste Frenchmen would do when confronted by panhandling Vagabonds on the road.

The gates of the city were slammed in their faces. The French delegation were left to wander through the hinterland like out-castes. Quickly they were abandoned by the guides and porters they had hired at Surat, and began to fall prey to highwaymen and Mahratta rebels. Eventually they found their way to Shahjahanabad, where they hoped to beg for succor from the Great Mogul Aurangzeb, but they were informed he had retired to the Red Fort at Agra. They traveled to Agra only to be told that the officials they needed to prostrate themselves before, and to shower with gifts, in order to gain access to the Great Mogul, were stationed in Shahjahanabad. In this way they were shuttled back and forth along one of Hindoostan’s most dangerous roads until Boullaye had been strangled by dacoits and Beber had succumbed to disease (or perhaps it was the other way round) and most of their expedition had fallen victim to more or less exotic hazards.

The bastard son of the duc d’Arcachon survived all of them, made his way out to Goa, talked his way aboard a Portuguese ship bound for Mozambique, and pursued a haphazard course to the slave coast of Africa, where finally he spied a French frigate flying the coat of arms of the Arcachon family: fleurs-de-lis and Neeger-heads in iron collars. He persuaded some Africans to row him out to that ship in a long-boat and identified himself to her captain, who of course was aware that the duc’s illegitimate son was lost, and had been ordered to keep an ear to the ground for any news. The young man was brought aboard the ship.

And the Africans who had brought him out were rewarded with baptisms, iron jewelry, and a free trip to Martinique to spend the rest of their lives working in the agricultural sector.

This led to a career running slaves to the French West Indies. During the course of the 1670s the young man amassed a modest fortune from this trade and purchased, or was rewarded by the King with, the title of Marquis. Immediately he settled in France and married. For several reasons he and his wife have not established themselves near Versailles. For one thing, he is a bastard whom the duc d’Arcachon prefers to keep at arm’s length. For another, his daughter has asthma and needs to breathe sea-air. Finally, he has responsibilities along the sea-coast. You may know, Doctor, that the people of India believe in the perpetual reincarnation of souls; likewise, the French East India Company might be thought of as a soul or spirit that goes bankrupt every few years but is always re-incarnated in some new form. Recently it has happened one more time. Naturally many of its operations are centered at Dunkirk, le Havre, and other sea-ports, and so that is where the Marquis and his family spend most of their time. But the Marquise comes to visit her sister the duchesse d’Oyonnax frequently, and brings the daughter with her.

As I mentioned, Oyonnax is a lady-in-waiting to the Dauphine, which is looked on as an extremely desirable position. The Queen of France died two years ago, and had been estranged from the King for many years at the time of her death. The King has Mme. de Maintenon now, but she is not officially his wife. Therefore, the most important woman at Versailles not really, but nominally, according to the rules of precedence is the Dauphine, wife of the King’s eldest son and heir apparent. Competition among the noble ladies of France for positions in her household is intense…

So intense that it has resulted in no fewer than four poisonings. I do not know if the sister of d’Ozoir poisoned anyone herself, but it is generally understood that she did allow her naked body to be used as a living altar during black masses held at an abandoned country church outside of Versailles. This was before the King became aware that his court was infested with homicidal Satanists, and instituted the chambre ardente to investigate these doings. She was indeed among the 400-odd nobles arrested and interrogated, but nothing was ever proved against her.

All of which is to say that Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax is a great lady indeed, who entertains her sister Mme. la marquise d’Ozoir in grand style.

When I entered her salon I was surprised to see my employer, M. le comte de Béziers, seated on a stool so low and tiny it seemed he was squatting on his haunches like a dog. And indeed he had hunched his shoulders and was gazing sidelong at the Marquise like an old peasant’s cur anticipating the descent of the cudgel. The Duchess was in an armchair of solid silver and the Marquise was in a chair without arms, also in silver.

I remained standing. Introductions were made—here I elide all of the tedious formalities and small talk—and the Marquise explained to me that she had been looking for a tutor to educate her daughter. The girl already has a governess, mind you, but that woman is quite close to being illiterate and consequently the child’s mental development has been retarded or perhaps she is simply an imbecile. Somehow she had settled on me as being the most likely candidate this is the work of d’Avaux.

I was pretended to be astonished, and went on at some length protesting the decision on grounds that I was not equal to such a responsibility. I wondered aloud who would look after poor little Beatrice and Louis. M. le comte de Béziers gave me the happy news that he’d found an opportunity in the south and would soon be leaving Versailles.

You may not know that one of the only ways for a French nobleman to make money without losing caste is by serving as an officer on a merchant ship. Béziers has taken such a position on a French E.I.C. vessel that will be sailing out of the Bassin d’Arcachon come spring, bound for the Cape of Good Hope; points east; and if I’m any judge of such matters, David Jones’s Locker.

Although, if Mme. de Maintenon opens her school for poor girls of the French nobility at St. Cyr next year her personal obsession—St. Cyr lies within sight of Versailles, to the southwest, just beyond the walls, then Beatrice might be shipped there to be groomed for life at Court.

Under the circumstances I could hardly show the tiniest degree of reluctance, let alone decline this offer, and so I write you this letter from my new lodging in an attic room above the Duchess’s apartments. Only God in Heaven knows what new adventures await me now! The Marquise hopes to remain at Versailles until the end of the month the King will spend October at Fontainebleu as is his custom, and there is no point remaining at Versailles when he is not here and then repair to Dunkirk. I shall, of course, go with her. But I will certainly write another letter to you before then.

To M. le comte d’Avaux

25 September 1685

It is two weeks since I entered the service of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir, and another week until we leave for Dunkirk, so this is the last letter I will send from Versailles.

If I am reading your intentions correctly, I’ll remain in Dunkirk only as long as it takes to walk across the gangplank of a Holland-bound ship. If that comes to pass, any letters I send after today will reach Amsterdam after I do.

When I came down here some months ago, I stopped over in Paris for a night and witnessed the following from my window: in the market-square before that pied-à-terre where you were so kind as to let me stay, some common people had erected a cantilever, a beam projecting out into space, like the cranes used by merchants to hoist bales up into their warehouses. On the pavement beneath the end of this beam they kindled a bonfire. A rope was thrown over the end of the beam.

These preparations had drawn a crowd and so it was difficult for me to see what happened next; but from the laughter of the crowd and the thrashing of the rope, I inferred that some antic, hilarious struggle was taking place on the street. A stray cat dashed away and was half-heartedly pursued by a couple of boys. Finally the other end of the rope was drawn tight, hoisting a great, lumpy sack into the air; it swung to and fro high above the fire. I guessed it was full of some sausages to be cooked or smoked.

Then I saw that something was moving inside the sack.

The rope was let out and the writhing bag descended until its underside glowed red from the flames underneath. A horrible yowling came out of it and the bag began to thrash and jump. I understood now that it was filled with dozens of stray cats that had been caught in the streets of Paris and brought here to amuse the crowd. And believe me, Monseigneur, they were amused.

If I had been a man, I could have ridden out into that square on horseback and severed that rope with a sword-blow, sending those poor animals down to perish quickly in the roaring flames. Alas, I am not a man, I lack a mount and a sword, and even if I had all of these I might lack courage. In all my life I have only known one man brave or rash enough to do such a deed, but he lacked moral fiber and probably would have reveled in the spectacle along with all those others. All I could do was to close up the shutters and plug my ears; though as I did, I noticed that many windows around the square were open. Merchants and persons of quality were watching it, too, and even bringing their children out.

During the dismal years of the Fronde Rebellion, when the young Louis XIV was being hounded through the streets of Paris by rebellious princes and starving mobs, he must have witnessed one of these cat-burnings, for at Versailles he has created something similar: all the nobles who tormented him when he was a scared little mouse have been rounded up and thrown into this bag and suspended in the air; and the King holds the end of the rope. I am in the sack now, Monseigneur, but as I am only a kitten whose claws have not grown in, all I can do is remain as close as possible to much bigger and more dangerous cats.

Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax runs her household like a Ship of the Line: everything trim, all the time. I have not been out of doors since I entered the service of her sister. My tan has faded, and all of the patched-together clothes in my wardrobe have been torn up for rags and replaced with better. I will not call it finery, for it would never do to outshine these two sisters in their own apartment. But neither would it do to embarrass them. So I will venture to say that the Duchess no longer cringes and grimaces when she catches sight of me.

In consequence I am now catching the eyes of the young blades again. If I still served M. le comte de Béziers I would never get a moment’s peace, but Mme. la duchesse d’Oyon-nax has claws—some would say, poison-tipped ones—and fangs. So the lust of the courtiers has been channelled into spreading the usual rumors and speculations about me: that I am a slut, that I am a prude, that I am a Sapphist, that I am an untutored virgin, that I am a past mistress of exotic sexual practices. An amusing consequence of my notoriety is that men come to call on the Duchess at all hours, and while most of them only want to bed me, some bring bills of exchange or little purses of diamonds, and instead of whispering flattery and lewd suggestions they say, “What rate of return could this bring in Amsterdam?” I always answer, “Why, it all depends on the whim of the King; for do the markets of Amsterdam not fluctuate according to the wars and treaties that only His Majesty has the power to make?” They think I am only being coy.

Today the King came to see me; but it is not what you think.

I had been warned of His Majesty’s coming by the cousin of the Duchess: a Jesuit priest named Édouard de Gex, who has come here on a visit from the pays in the southeast where this family maintains its ancestral seat. Father Édouard is a very pious man. He had been invited to play a minor role in the King’s getting-out-of-bed ceremony, and had overheard a couple of courtiers speculating as to which man would claim my maidenhead. Then another offered to wager that I didn’t have a maidenhead, and yet another wagered that if I did it would be claimed by a woman, not a man—two likely candidates being the Dauphine, who is having an affair with her maid, and Liselotte.

At some point, according to Father Édouard, the King took notice of this conversation and inquired as to what lady was being talked about. “It is no lady, but the tutor of the daughter of the d’Ozoirs,” said one of them; to which the King replied, after a moment’s thought, “I have heard of her. They say she is beautiful.”

When Father Édouard told me this story I understood why not a single young courtier had come sniffing around after me that day. They thought the King had conceived an interest in me, and were now afraid to come anywhere near!

Today the Duchess, the Marquise, and all their household took the unusual measure of attending Mass at half past noon. I was left alone in the apartment under the pretext that I needed to pack some things for the upcoming journey to Dunkirk.

At one o’clock the chapel bells rang, but my mistresses did not return to the apartment. Instead a gentleman—the most famous chirurgeon in Paris—let himself in through the servants’ entrance, followed by a retinue of assistants, as well as a priest: Father Édouard de Gex. Moments later King Louis XIV of France entered solus through the front, slamming a gilded door in the faces of his courtiers, and greeted me in a very polite way.

The King and I stood in a corner of the Duchess’s salon and (as bizarre as this must sound) exchanged trivial conversation while the surgeon’s assistants worked furiously. Even one who is as unschooled in Court etiquette as I knew that in the presence of the King no other person may be acknowledged, and so I pretended not to notice as the assistants dragged the massive silver chairs to the edges of the room, rolled up the carpets, laid down canvas drop-cloths, and carried in a heavy wooden bench. The chirurgeon was arranging some very unpleasant-looking tools on a side table, and muttering occasional commands; but all of this took place in nearly perfect silence.

“D’Avaux says you are good with money,” the King said.

“I say d’Avaux is good at flattering young ladies,” I answered.

“It is an error for you to feign modesty when you are talking to me,” the King said, firmly but not angrily.

I saw my error. We use humility when we fear that someone will consider us a rival or a threat; and while this may be true of common or even noble men, it can never be true of le Roi and so to use humility in His Majesty’s presence is to imply that the King shares the petty jealousies and insecurities of others.

“Forgive me for being foolish, Sire.”

“Never; but I forgive you for being inexperienced. Colbert was a commoner. He was good with money; he built everything you see. He did not know how to speak to me at first. Have you ever experienced a sexual climax, mademoiselle?”

“Yes.”

The King smiled. “You have learned quickly how to answer my questions. That pleases me. You will please me more by now making the sounds that you made when you had this climax. You may have to make those sounds for a long time—possibly a quarter of an hour.”

I must have clutched my hands together in front of my bosom, or put on some such show of girlish anxiety. The King shook his head and smiled in a knowing way. “To see a certain déshabille, in a quarter of an hour, would please me—only that it might be glimpsed, through the door, by the ones who wait in the gallery.” The King nodded toward the door through which he had entered. “Now if you will excuse me, mademoiselle. You may begin at any time.” He turned away from me, doffing his coat and handing it to one of the chirurgeon’s assistants as he moved toward the heavy bench, now draped in white linen, that sat in the middle of the room on a carpet of sailcloth. The chirurgeon and his assistants closed in on the King like flies on a piece of meat. Suddenly—to my indescribable shock—the King’s breeches were down around his ankles. He lay down on his stomach on the bench. For a moment I fancied he was one of those men who likes to be struck on the buttocks. But then he spread his legs apart, bracing his feet against the floor to either side of the bench, and I saw a frightful purplish swelling in the crevice of his buttocks.

“Father Édouard,” the King said quietly, “you are among the most learned men of France. Even among your fellow Jesuits you are respected as one to whom no detail is unnoticed. Since I cannot view the operation, you will please me by paying the closest attention, and telling me the story later, so that I will know whether this chirurgeon is to be counted a friend or an enemy of France.”

Father Édouard nodded and said something I could not hear.

“Your Majesty!” the chirurgeon exclaimed. “To perfect my skills, I have performed a hundred of these operations, in the last six months, since I was made aware of your complaint—”

“Those hundred are not of interest to me.”

Father Édouard had noticed me standing in the corner. I prefer not to speculate what sort of expression was on my face! He locked his dark eyes on mine—he is a handsome man—and then glanced significantly toward the door, through which I could hear a low hubbub of ribald conversation among the dozen or so courtiers biding their time.

I moved closer to that door—not too close—and let out a throaty sigh. “Mmm, Vôtre Majesté!” The courtiers outside began shushing one another. In my other ear I heard a faint ringing noise as the chirurgeon picked a knife up off his table.

I let out a groan.

So did the King.

I let out a scream.

So did the King.

“Oh, gentle, it is my first time!” I shouted, as the King shouted curses at the chirurgeon, muffled by a silken pillow Father Édouard was holding to his face.

So it went. For a while I continued screaming as if suffering great discomfort, but as the minutes wore on, I changed over to moans of pleasure. It seemed to go on for much longer than a quarter of an hour. I lay down on a rolled-up carpet and tore at my own clothes, pulled the ribbons and braids from my hair, and breathed as heavily as I could, to make my face flushed and sweaty. Towards the end, I closed my eyes: partly to block out the hellish things I was beginning to see in the middle of the room, and partly to play my role more convincingly. Now I could clearly hear the courtiers in the gallery.

“She’s a screamer,” said one of them admiringly. “I like that, it makes my blood hot.”

“It is most indiscreet,” said another scornfully.

“The mistress of a King does not have to be discreet.”

“Mistress? He’ll throw her away soon, then where will she be?”

“In my bed, I hope!”

“Then you had best invest in a set of earplugs.”

“He had best learn to fuck like a King before he’ll need them!”

A drop of moisture struck me on the forehead. Fearing that it was a splash of blood, I opened my eyes and looked vertically upwards into the face of Father Édouard de Gex. He was indeed all spattered with the blood royal, but what had fallen on me was a bead of sweat from his brow. He was glaring straight down into my face. I have no idea how long he had been watching me thus. I glanced over towards the bench and saw blood everywhere. The chirurgeon was sitting on the floor, drained. His assistants were packing rags between the King’s buttocks. To stop all of a sudden would be to give the ruse away, and so I closed my eyes again and brought myself to a screaming—if simulated—climax, then exhaled one long last moan, and opened my eyes again.

Father Édouard was still standing there above me, but his eyes were closed and his face slack. It is an expression I have seen before.

The King was standing up, flanked between a pair of assistants who stood ready to catch him if he should faint. He was deathly pale and tottering from side to side, but—somewhat incredibly—he was alive, and awake, and buttoning up his own breeches. Behind him other assistants were bundling up the bloody sheets and drop-cloths and rushing them out through the back door.

Here is what the King said to me as he was leaving:

“Nobles of France enjoy my esteem and confidence as a birthright, and make themselves common by their failures. Commoners may earn my esteem and confidence by pleasing me, and thereby ennoble themselves. You may please me by showing discretion.”

“What of d’Avaux?” I asked.

“You may tell him everything,” said the King, “so that he may feel pride, inasmuch as he is my friend, and fear, inasmuch as he is my foe.”

Monseigneur, I do not know what His Majesty meant by this, but I am sure you do…

To Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

29 September 1685

Doctor,

The season has turned and brought a noticeable darkening of the light.[*] In two days the sun will sink farther beneath the southern horizon as I journey with Mme. la marquise d’Ozoir to Dunquerque at the extreme northern limit of the King’s realm and thence God willing to Holland. I have heard that the sun has been shining very hot in the South, in the country of Savoy more on this later.

The King is at war—not only with the Protestant heretics who infest his realms, but with his own doctors. A few weeks ago he had a tooth pulled. Any tooth-puller chosen at random from the Pont-Neuf could have handled this operation, but d’Aquin, the King’s doctor, got it wrong, and the resulting wound became abscessed. D’Aquin’s solution to this problem was to pull out every last one of the King’s upper teeth. But while he was doing this he somehow managed to rip out part of the King’s palate, creating a horrendous wound which he then had to close up by the application of red-hot irons. Nonetheless, it too abscessed and had to be cauterized several more times. There is another story, too, concerning the King’s health, which I will have to tell you some other time.

It is nearly beyond comprehension that a King should suffer so, and if these facts were generally known among the peasantry they would doubtless be misconstrued as an omen of Divine misfavor. In the corridors of Versailles, where most but not all! of the King’s sufferings are common knowledge, there are a few weak-minded ninehammers who think this way; but fortunately this château has been graced, for the last few weeks, by the presence of Father Édouard de Gex, a vigorous young Jesuit of a good family when Louis seized the Franche-Comté in 1667 this family betrayed their Spanish neighbors and flung open their gates to his army; Louis has rewarded them with titles and a great favorite of Mme. de Maintenon, who looks to him as a sort of spiritual guide. Where most of our fawning courtier-priests would prefer to avoid the theological questions raised by the King’s sufferings, Father Édouard has recently taken this bull by the horns, and both asked and answered these questions in a most forthright and public way. He has given lengthy homilies at Mass, and Mme. de Maintenon has arranged for his words to be printed and distributed around Versailles and Paris. I will try to send you a copy of his booklet. The gist of it is that the King is France and that his ailments and sufferings are reflections of the condition of the realm. If various pockets of his flesh have become abscessed it is a sort of carnal metaphor for the continued existence of heresy within the borders of France—meaning, as everyone knows, the R.P.R., the religion prétendue réformée, or Huguenots as they are known by some. The points of similarity between R.P.R. communities and suppurating abscesses are many, viz…

Forgive this endless homily, but I have much to tell and am weary of writing endless descriptions of gowns and jewels to cover my traces. This family of Fr. de Gex, Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, and Mme. la marquise d’Ozoir have long dwelt in the mountains of Jura between Burgundy and the southern tip of the Franche-Comté. It is a territory where many things come together and accordingly it is a sort of cornucopia of enemies. For generations they looked on with envy as their neighbor the Duke of Savoy reaped a harvest of wealth and power by virtue of sitting astride the route joining Genoa and Lyons—the financial aorta of Christendom. And from their châteaux in the southern Jura they can literally gaze down into the cold waters of Lake Geneva, the wellspring of Protestantism, where the English Puritans fled for refuge during the reign of Bloody Mary and where the French Huguenots have enjoyed a safe haven from the repressions of their Kings. I have seen much of Father Édouard lately because he pays frequent visits to the apartments of his cousines, and I have witnessed in his dark eyes a hatred of the Protestants that would make your flesh crawl if you saw it.

This family’s opportunity finally came when Louis conquered the Franche-Comté, as I said, and they have not failed to take full advantage of it. Last year brought them more good fortune: the Duke of Savoy was forced to take as his wife Anne Marie, the daughter of Monsieur by his first wife, Minette of England, and hence the niece of King Louis XIV. So the Duke—hitherto independent—became a part of the Bourbon family, and subject to the whims of the patriarch.

Now Savoy also borders on that troublesome Lake and it has long been the case that Calvinist proselytizers would come up the valleys to preach to the common folk, who have followed the example of their Duke in being independent-minded and have been receptive to the rebel creed.

You can almost finish the story yourself now, Doctor. Father Édouard has been telling his disciple, Mme. de Maintenon, all about how Protestants have been running rampant in Savoy, and spreading the infection to their R.P.R. brethren in France. De Main-tenon repeats all of this to the suffering King, who even in the best of times has never hesitated to be cruel to his subjects, or even his own family, for the good of the realm. But these are not the best of times for the King—there has been a palpable darkening of the light, which is why I chose this hexagram as my encryption key. The King has told the Duke of Savoy that the “rebels” as he considers them are not merely to be suppressed—they are to be exterminated. The Duke has temporized, hoping that the King’s mood will improve as his ailments heal. He has proffered one excuse after another. But very recently the Duke made the error of claiming that he cannot carry out the King’s commands because he does not have enough money to mount a military campaign. Without hesitation the King generously offered to undertake the operation out of his own pocket.

As I write this Father Édouard is preparing to ride south as chaplain of a French army with Maréchal de Catinat at its head. They will go into Savoy whether the Duke likes it or not, and enter the valleys of the Protestants and kill everyone they see. Do you know of any way to send warnings to that part of the world?

The King and all who know of his late sufferings take comfort in the understanding that Father Édouard has brought us: namely that the measures taken against the R.P.R., cruel as they might seem, are more painful to the King than to anyone; but that this pain must be endured lest the whole body perish. I must go—I have responsibilities below. My next letter will come from Dunquerque, God willing.

Your most affectionate student and servant,

Eliza

London

SPRING 1685

Philosophy is written in this immense book that stands ever open before our eyes (I speak of the Universe), but it cannot be read if one does not first learn the language and recognize the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without the means of which it is humanly impossible to understand a word; without these philosophy is confused wandering in a dark labyrinth.

—GALILEO GALILEI, Il Saggiatore

(THE ASSAYER) IN Opere, v. 6, p. 197,

TRANSLATION BY JULIAN BARBOUR

THE AIR IN THE COFFEE-HOUSE made Daniel feel as if he’d been buried in rags.

Roger Comstock was peering down the stem of his clay pipe like a drunken astronomer drawing a bead on something. In this case the target was Robert Hooke, Fellow of the Royal Society, visible only barely (because of gloom and smoke) and sporadically (because of table-flitting patrons). Hooke had barricaded himself behind a miniature apothecary shop of bottles, purses, and flasks, and was mixing up his dinner: a compound of mercury, iron filings, flowers of sulfur, purgative waters from diverse springs, many of which were Lethal to Waterfowl; and extracts of several plants, including the rhubarb and the opium poppy. “He is still alive, I see,” Roger mused. “If Hooke spent any more time lingering at Death’s door, Satan himself would have the man ejected for vagrancy. Yet just as I am wondering whether I can make time for his funeral, I learn from Sources that he is campaigning like a French regiment through every whorehouse in Whitechapel.”

Daniel could think of nothing to add.

“What of Newton?” Roger demanded. “You said he was going to die.”

“Well, I was the only way he ever got food,” Daniel said weakly. “From the time we began rooming together until my ejection in ’77, I kept him alive like a nursemaid. So I had good reasons for making that prediction.”

“Someone else must have been bringing him food since then—one of his students?”

“He has no students,” Daniel pointed out.

“But he must eat,” Roger countered.

Daniel glimpsed Hooke stirring up his concoction with a glass rod. “Perhaps he has concocted the Elixir Vitae and is immortal now.”

“Judge not lest ye be judged! I believe that is your third helping of usquebaugh,” Roger said sternly, glaring at the amber dram in front of Daniel. Daniel reached out to guard it in the curled fingers of his left hand.

“I am entirely serious,” Roger continued. “Who looks after him?”

“Why does it matter, as long as someone does?”

“It matters who the someone is,” Roger said. “You told me that when he was a student Newton would lend out money, and keep track of his loans like a Jew!”

“Actually I believe that Christian lenders also prefer to be paid back…”

“Never mind, you know what I mean. In the same way, Daniel, if someone is providing for Newton’s upkeep and maintenance, they may be expecting favors in return.”

Daniel sat up straighter. “You think it’s the esoteric brotherhood.”

Roger raised his eyebrows in a cruel parody of innocence. “No, but evidently you think so.”

“For a while Upnor was trying to get his barbs into Isaac,” Daniel admitted, “but that was a long time ago.”

“Let me remind you that among people who keep track of debts—as opposed to forgiving ’em—‘a long time ago’ means ‘lots and lots of compound interest.’ Now, you told me he vanishes several weeks out of each year.”

“Not necessarily for sinister purposes. He has land in Lincolnshire that needs looking after.”

“You made it sound sinister, when you told me of it.”

Daniel sighed, forsook his dram, clamped his temples between the thumb and fingertips of one hand. All he could see now was his pink palm—cratered from smallpox, now. The disease had converted perhaps a quarter of Tess’s body to pustules, and removed most of the skin from her face and torso, before she’d finally given up the ghost. “To be quite honest with you, I do not care,” he said. “I tried to hold him back. Tried to turn his attention toward astronomy, dynamics, physics—natural philosophy as opposed to unnatural theology. I failed; I left; here I am.”

“You left? Or were ejected?”

“I misspoke.”

“Which time?”

“I meant it in a sort of metaphorical way, when I used the word ‘ejected.’ ”

“You are a damned liar, Daniel!”

“What did you say!?”

“Oh, sorry, I was speaking in a sort of metaphorical way.”

“Try to understand, Roger, that the circumstances of my break with Isaac were—are—complicated. As long as I try to express it with a single verb, videlicet, ‘to leave,’ ‘to be ejected,’ I’ll be in some sense a liar, and inasmuch as a liar, damnable.”

“Give me more verbs, then,” said Roger, catching the eye of a serving-girl and giving her a look that meant I have him going now, keep it coming and keep the sleeve-tuggers away from us. Then he leaned forward, looming in an alarming way through the smoke above the table, catching the light of a candle on the underside of his chin. “It is sixteen seventy-six!” Roger thundered. “Leibniz has come to London for the second time! Oldenburg is furious with him because he has failed to bring the digital computer, as promised! Instead Leibniz has devoted the last four years to fooling around with mathematics in Paris! Now he is asking extremely awkward questions about some maths work that Newton did years ago. Something mysterious is afoot—Newton has you, Doctor Waterhouse, copying out papers and encrypting arcane mathematical formulae—Oldenburg is beside himself—Enoch Root is mixed up in it somehow—there are rumors of letters, and even conversations, between Newton and Leibniz. Then Oldenburg dies. Not long afterwards there is a fire in your chambers at Trinity, and many of Newton’s alchemical papers go up in particolored flames. Then you move to London and refuse to say why. What is the correct verb? ‘To leave’ or ‘to be ejected?’ ”

“There was simply no room for me there—my bed took up space that could have been used for another furnace.”

“To conspire? To plot?”

“The mercury fumes were making me jumpy.”

“To burn? To torch?”

Daniel now gripped the arms of his chair, threatening to get up and leave. Roger held up a hand. “I’m President of the Royal Society—it is my duty to be curious.”

“I’m Secretary, and it is my duty to hold it all together when the President is being a fool.”

“Better a fool in London than fuel in Cambridge. You will forgive me for wondering what went on.”

“Since you’re pretending to be a Catholic now, you may expect cheap grace from your French priests, but not from me.”

“You are showing the self-righteousness I associated with upright men who’ve secretly done something very wrong—which is not to assert that you have any dark secrets, Daniel, only that you act that way.”

“Does this conversation have any purpose other than to make me want to kill you, Roger?”

“I simply want to know what the hell Newton is doing.”

“Then why harry me with these questions about what happened in ’77?”

Roger shrugged. “You won’t talk about now, so I thought I would try my luck with then.”

“Why the sudden interest in Isaac?”

“Because of De Motu Corporum in Gyrum. Halley says it is stupendous.”

“No doubt.”

“He says that it is only a sketch for a vast work that is consuming all of Newton’s energies now.”

“I am pleased that Halley has an explanation for the orbit of his comet, and even more pleased that he has taken over responsibility for the care and feeding of Isaac. What do you want of me?”

“Halley is blinded by comet-light,” Roger scoffed. “If Newton decides to work out the mysteries of gravity and of planetary motion then Halley cares not why—he is a happy astronomer! And with Flamsteed around to depress the statistics, we need more happiness in the astronomical profession.”

In anno domini 1674, the Sieur de St. Pierre (a French courtier, never mind the details) had been at some excellent Royal soiree when Louise de Kéroualle and her cleavage had hove into view above the rim of his goblet. Like most men who found themselves in her presence, the Sieur had been seized by an unaccountable need to impress her, somehow, some way. Knowing that Natural Philosophy was a big deal at the Court of Charles II, he had employed the following gambit: he had remarked that one could solve the problem of finding the Longitude by plotting the motions of the moon against the stars and using the heavens as a big clock. Kéroualle had relayed this to the King during some sort of Natural-Philosophic pillow talk, and his majesty had commissioned four Fellows of the Royal Society (the Duke of Gunfleet, Roger Comstock, Robert Hooke, and Christopher Wren) to find out if such a thing were really possible. They had asked one John Flamsteed. Flamsteed was the same age as Daniel. Too sickly to attend school, he had stayed home and taught himself astronomy. Later his health had improved to the point where he’d been able to attend Cambridge and learn what could be taught there, which was not much, at the time. When he had received this inquiry from the aforementioned four Fellows of the Royal Society, he had been just finishing up his studies, and looking for something to do. He had shrewdly written back saying that the proposal of the Sieur de St. Pierre, though it might be possible in theory, was perfectly absurd in practice, owing to a want of reliable astronomical data—which could only be remedied by a lengthy and expensive research program. It was the first and the last politic thing that Flamsteed had ever done. Without delay Charles II had appointed him Astronomer Royal and founded the Royal Observatory.

Flamsteed’s temporary quarters, for the first couple of years, were in the Tower of London, atop the round turret of the White Tower. He made his first observations there while a permanent facility was being constructed on a patch of disused royal property at Greenwich.

Henry VIII, not satisfied with six wives, had maintained any number of mistresses, storing them, when not in use, in a sort of bolt-hole on the top of a hill above Greenwich Palace. His successors had not shared his appetites, and so the royal fuck-house had largely fallen into ruin. The foundations, however, were still sound. Atop them, Wren and Hooke, working in a hurry, and on a tiny budget, had built some apartments, which served as plinth for an octagonal salt-box. Atop that was a turret, an allusion in miniature to the Norman turrets of the Tower of London. The apartments were for Flamsteed to live in. The octagon above was constructed essentially so that the court-fop contingent of the Royal Society would have a place to go and peer learnedly through telescopes. But because it had been built on the foundations of Henry VIII’s hilltop love shack, the whole building was oriented the wrong way. To make real observations, it had been necessary to construct an alienated limestone wall in the garden out back, oriented north–south. This was partly sheltered by a sort of roofless shack. Bolted to it were a pair of Hooke-designed quadrants, one looking north and the other looking south, each equipped with a sighting-tube. Flamsteed’s life, thereafter, consisted of sleeping all day, then going out at night, leaning against this wall, peering through the sighting-tubes at stars swinging past, and noting their positions. Every few years, the work was enlivened by the appearance of a comet.

“What was Newton doing one year ago, Daniel?”

“Sources tell me he was calculating the precise date and hour of the Apocalypse, based upon occult shreds of data from the Bible.”

“We must have the same sources,” Roger said agreeably. “How much do you pay them?”

“I say things to them in return. It is called having conversations, and for some it is payment enough.”

“You must be right, Daniel. For, several months ago, Halley shows up and has a conversation with Newton: ‘Say, old chap, what about comets?’ And Newton drops the Apocalypse and turns to Euclid. Within a few months he’s got De Motu out.”

“He worked out most of it in ’79, during his last feud with Hooke,” Daniel said, “and mislaid it, and had to work it out a second time.”

“What—Doctor Waterhouse—do alchemy, the Apocalypse, and the elliptical orbits of heavenly bodies have in common? Other than that Newton is obsessed with all of them.”

Daniel said nothing.

“Anything? Everything? Nothing?” Roger demanded, and slapped the edge of the table. “Is Newton a billiard ball or a comet?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, come here, Daniel,” Roger clucked, going into sudden motion. Rather than standing up first, then walking, he lowered his wig, raised his hindquarters, and lunged off into the crowd like a bull, and in spite of bulk, middle age, gout, and drink, forged a path through the coffee-house faster than Daniel could follow. When Daniel next caught sight of Roger, the Marquis was shouldering his way past a fop. The fop was gripping a wooden implement shaped vaguely like a long-handled flour-scoop, and taking aim at a painted wooden sphere at rest on a green baize firmament. “Behold!” Roger exclaimed, and shoved at the ball with his bare hand. It rolled into another ball and stopped; the second ball rolled away. The fop was gripping his stick with both hands and winding up to break it over Roger’s head, when Roger adroitly turned his back on the table, giving the fop a clear view of his face. The stick fell from the fop’s hands. “Excellent shot, m’Lord,” he began, “though not wholly in line with the spirit or the letter of the rules…”

“I am a Natural Philosopher, and my Rules are the God-given Rules of the Universe, not the arbitrary ones of your insipid sport!” Roger thundered. “The ball transfers its vis viva into another ball, the quantity of motion is conserved, all is more or less orderly.” Roger now opened one hand to reveal that he had snatched another ball. “Or, I may toss it into the air thus—” he did so “—and it describes a Galilean trajectory, a parabola.” The ball plonked down squarely into a mug of chocolate, halfway across the room; its owner recovered quickly, raising the mug to Roger’s health. “But comets adhere to no laws, they come from God only knows where, at unpredictable times, and streak through the cosmos on their own unfathomable trajectories. So, I ask you, Daniel: Is Newton like a comet? Or, like a billiard ball, is he following some rational trajectory I have not the wit to understand?”

“I understand your question now,” Daniel said. “Astronomers used to explain the seeming retrograde movements of the planets by imagining a phantastic heavenly axle-tree fitted out with crystalline spheres. Now we know that in fact the planets move in smooth ellipses and that retrograde motion is an illusion created by the fact that we are making our observations from a moving platform.”

“Viz. the Earth.”

“If we could see the planets from some fixed frame of reference, the retrograde motion would disappear. And you, Roger, observing Newton’s wandering trajectory—one year devising new receipts for the Philosophic Mercury, the next hard at work on Conic Sections—are trying to figure out whether there might be some Reference Frame within which all of Isaac’s moves make some kind of damned sense.”

“Spoken like Newton himself,” Roger said.

“You want to know whether his recent work on gravitation is a change of subject, or merely a new point of view—a new way of perceiving the same old Topic.”

“Now you are talking like Leibniz,” Roger said grumpily.

“And with good reason, for Newton and Leibniz are both working on the same problem, and have been since at least ’77,” Daniel said. “It is the problem that Descartes could not solve. It comes down to whether the collisions of those billiard balls can be explained by geometry and arithmetic—or do we need to go beyond pure thought and into Empirical and/or Metaphysical realms?”

“Shut up,” Roger said, “I’m working on a murderous headache as it is. I do not want to hear of metaphysics.” He seemed partly sincere—but he was keeping one eye on someone who was coming up behind Daniel. Daniel turned around and came face to face with—

“Mr. Hooke!” Roger said.

“M’lord.

“You, sir, taught this fellow to make thermometers!”

“So I did, m’lord.”

“I was just explaining to him that I wanted him to go up to Cambridge and gauge the heat of that town.”

“The entire country seems warm to me, m’lord,” said Hooke gravely, “in particular the eastern limb.”

“I hear that the warmth is spreading to the West country.”

“Here is a pretext,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, stuffing a sheaf of papers into Daniel’s right hip pocket, “and here is something for you to peruse on your journey—the latest from Leipzig.” He shoved something rather heavier into the left pocket. “Good night, fellow Philosophers!”

“Let us go and walk in the streets of London,” Hooke said to Daniel. He did not need to add: Most of which I laid out personally.

“RAVENSCAR HATED HIS COUSIN John Comstock, ruined him, bought his house, and tore it down,” Hooke said, as if he’d been backed into a corner and forced to admit it, “but learned from him all the same! Why did John Comstock back the Royal Society in its early days? Because he was curious as to Natural Philosophy? Perhaps. Because Wilkins talked him into it? In part. But it cannot have escaped your notice that most of our experiments in those days—”

“Had something to do with gunpowder. Obviously.” “Roger Comstock owns no gunpowder-factories. But his interest in the doings of our Society is no less pragmatic. Make no mistake. The French and the Papists are running the country now—are they running Newton?”

Daniel said nothing. After years of sparring with Hooke over gravitation, Isaac had soared far beyond Hooke’s reach since Halley’s visit.

“I see,” Daniel said finally. “Well, I must go north anyway, to play at being the Puritan Moses.”

“It would be worth an excursion to Cambridge, then, in order to—”

“In order to clear Newton’s name of any scurrilous accusations that might be made against him by jealous rivals,” Daniel said.

“I was going to say, in order to disentangle him from the foreign supporters of a doomed King,” Hooke said. “Good night, Daniel.” And with a few dragging steps he was swallowed up in the sulfurous fog.

THE ENTIRE COUNTRY SEEMS WARM to me…in particular the eastern limb. Hooke might throw accusations carelessly, but not words. Among men who peered through telescopes, “limb” meant the edge of a heavenly body’s disk, such as the moon’s crescent when it was illumined from the side. Setting out to the northeast the next day, Daniel glanced at a map of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk and noticed that they formed a semicircular limb, bounded by the Thames on the south and the Wash on the north, and in between them, bulging eastwards into the North Sea. A bright light kindled above the Hague would shine a hundred nautical miles across the sea and light up that entire sweep of coastline, setting it aglow like a crescent moon, like the alchemist’s symbol for silver. Silver was the element of the Moon, the complement and counterpart of the Sun, whose element was gold. And as the Sun King was now pouring much gold into England, the possible existence of a silvery lunar crescent just to the north of London had import. Roger had no patience with alchemical suppositions and superstitions, but politics he knew well.

The fifty-second parallel ran directly from Ipswich to the Hague, so any half-wit with a back-staff and an ephemeris could sail unerringly from one to the other and back. Daniel knew the territory well—the North Sea infiltrated the Suffolk coast with so many spreading rays of brackish water that when you gazed east at sunrise the terrain seemed to be crazed with rivers of light. It was impossible to travel up the coast proper. The road from London was situated ten to twenty miles inland, running more or less straight from Chelmsford to Colchester to Ipswich, and everything to the right side—between it and the sea—was hopeless, from the point of view of a King or anyone else who wanted to rule it: a long strip of fens diced up by estuaries and therefore equally impassable to horses and boats, easier to reach from Holland than from London. Staying there wasn’t so bad, and staying out was even better, but movement was rarely worth the trouble. Objects would not move in a resistive medium unless impelled by a powerful force—ergo, any travelers in that coastal strip had to be smugglers, drawn by profit and repulsed by laws, shipping England’s rude goods to Holland and importing Holland’s finished ones. So Daniel, like his brothers Sterling and Oliver and Raleigh before him, had spent much time in this territory as a youth, loading and unloading flat-bottomed Dutch boats lurking beneath weeping willows in dark river-courses.

The first part of the journey was like being nailed, with several other people, into a coffin borne through a coal-mine by epileptic pallbearers. But at Chelmsford some passengers got out of the carriage and thereafter the way became straight and level enough that Daniel could attempt to read. He took out the printed document that Roger had given him in the coffee-house. It was a copy of Acta Eruditorum, the scholarly rag that Leibniz had founded in his home town of Leipzig.

Leibniz had been trying for a long time to organize the smart Germans. The smart Britons tended to see this as a shabby mockery of the Royal Society, and the smart Frenchmen viewed it as a mawkish effort by the Doctor (who’d been living in Hanover since ’77) to hold up a flawed and tarnished mirror to the radiant intellectual life of Paris. While Daniel (reluctantly) saw some justice in these opinions, he suspected that Leibniz was mostly doing it simply because it was a good idea. At any rate Acta Eruditorum was Leibniz’s (hence Germany’s) answer to Journal des Savants, and it tended to convey the latest and best ideas coming from Germany—i.e., whatever Leibniz had been thinking about lately.

This particular issue had been printed several months earlier and contained an article by Leibniz on mathematics. Daniel began skimming it and right away saw distinctly familiar terms—the likes of which he had not glimpsed since ’77—

“Stab me in the vitals,” Daniel muttered, “he’s finally done it!”

“Done what!?” demanded Exaltation Gather, who was sitting across from Daniel hugging a large box full of money.

“Published the calculus!”

“And what, pray tell, is that, Brother Daniel? Other than something that grows on one’s teeth.” The hoard of coins in Exaltation Gather’s strong-box made dim muffled chinking noises as the carriage rocked from side to side on its Suspension—one of those annoyingly good French ideas.

“New mathematics, based upon the analysis of quantities that are infinitesimal and evanescent.”

“It sounds very metaphysical,” said the Reverend Gather. Daniel looked up at him. No one and nothing had ever been less metaphysical than he. Daniel had grown up in the company of men like this and for a while had actually considered them to be normal-looking. But several years spent in London coffee-houses, theatres, and royal palaces had insensibly altered his tastes. Now when he gazed upon a member of a Puritan sect he always cringed inside. Which was just the effect that the Puritans were aiming for. If the Rev. Gather’s Christian name had been Exultation his garb would have been wildly inappropriate. But Exaltation it was, and for these people exaltation was a grim business.

Daniel had finally convinced King James II that His Majesty’s claims to support all religious dissidents would seem a lot more convincing if he would take Cromwell’s skull down from the stick where it had been posted all through Charles II’s quarter-century-long reign, and put it back in the Christian grave with the rest of Cromwell. To Daniel and certain others, a skull on a stick was a conspicuous object and the request to take it down wholly reasonable. But His Majesty and every courtier within earshot had looked startled: they’d forgotten it was there! It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on a windowpane you never notice. Daniel’s request, James’s ensuing decree, and the fetching down and re-interment of the skull had only drawn attention to it. Attention, in a modern Court, meant cruel witticisms, and so it had been a recent vogue to address wandering Puritan ministers as “Oliver,” the joke being that many of them—being wigless, gaunt, and sparely dressed—looked like skulls on sticks. Exaltation Gather looked so much like a skull on a stick that Daniel almost had to physically restrain himself from knocking the man down and shoveling dirt on him.

“Newton seems to agree with you,” Daniel said, “or else he’s afraid that some Jesuit will say so, which amounts to the same thing.”

“One need not be a Jesuit to be skeptical of vain imaginings—” began the now miffed Gather.

“Something must be there,” Daniel said. “Look out the window, yonder. That fen is divided into countless small plots by watercourses—some natural, some carved out by industrious farmers. Each rectangle of land could be made into two smaller ones—just drag a stick across the muck and the water will fill up the scratch in the ground, like the æther filling the void between particles of matter. Is that metaphysical yet?”

“Why no, it is a good similitude, earthy, concrete, like something from the Geneva Bible. Have you looked into the Geneva Bible recently, or—”

“What happens then if we continue subdividing?” Daniel asked. “Is it the same all the way down? Or is it the case that something happens eventually, that we reach a place where no further subdivision is possible, where fundamental properties of Creation are brought into play?”

“Er—I have no idea, Brother Daniel.”

“Is it vanity for us to consider the question? Or did God give us brains for a reason?”

“No religion, with the possible exception of Judaism, has ever been more favorably disposed towards education than ours,” said Brother Exaltation, “so that question is answered before ’twas asked. But we must consider these, er, infinitesimals and evanes-cents in a way that is rigorous, pure, free from heathenish idolatry or French vanity or the metaphysical infatuations of the Papists.”

“Leibniz agrees—and the result of applying just the approach you have prescribed, in the mathematical realm, is here, and it is called the calculus,” said Daniel, patting the document on his knee.

“Does Brother Isaac agree?”

“He did twenty years ago, when he invented all of this,” Daniel said. “Now I have no idea.”

“I have heard from one of our brethren in Cambridge that Brother Isaac’s comportment in church has raised questions as to his faith.”

“Brother Exaltation,” said Daniel sharply, “before you spread rumors that may get Isaac Newton thrown into prison, let’s see about getting a few of our brethren out—shall we?”

IPSWICH HAD BEEN A CLOTH port forever, but that trade had fallen on hard times because of the fatal combination of cheap stuff from India and Dutch shipping that could bring it to Europe. It was the prototype of the ridiculously ancient English town, situated at the place where the River Orwell broadened into an estuary, the obvious spot where anyone from a cave-man to a Cavalier would drive a stake into the muck and settle. Daniel judged that the gaol had been the first structure to go up, some five or six thousand years ago perhaps, and that the rats had moved in a week or two later. Ipswich was the county seat, and so when Charles II had whimsically decided to enforce the Penal Laws, all of Suffolk’s most outstanding Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the odd Jew had been rounded up and been deposited here. They might just as well have been released a month ago, but it was important to the King that Daniel, his chosen representative, come out and handle the matter in person.

The carriage pulled up in front of the gaol and Exaltation Gather sat in it nervously gripping his strong-box while Daniel went inside and scared the gaoler half to death by brandishing a tablecloth-sized document with a wax seal as big as a man’s heart dangling from it. Then Daniel went into the gaol, interrupting a prayer meeting, and spouted an oration he’d already used in half a dozen other gaols, a wrung-out rag of a speech so empty and banal that he had no idea whether he was making any sense at all, or just babbling in tongues. The startled, wary looks on the faces of the imprisoned Puritans suggested that they were extracting some meaning from Daniel’s verbalizations—he had no idea what exactly. Daniel did not really know how his speech was being interpreted until later. The prisoners had to be released one at a time. Each of them had to pay the bill for his meals and other necessaries—and many had been here for years.

Hence Exaltation Gather and his box of money. The King’s gesture would fall flat if half the prisoners remained in pokey for debts accumulated during their (unjust and un-Christian) imprisonment and so the King had (through Daniel) encouraged special collections to be taken up in sympathetic churches and had (though this was supposed to be grievously secret) supplemented that money with some from his own reserves to make sure it all came off well. In practice it meant that the nonconformists of London and the King of England had used Exaltation Gather’s strongbox as a dust-bin for disposal of all their oldest, blackest, lightest in weight, most clipped, worn, filed-down, and adulterated coins. The true value of each one of these objects had to be debated between the gaoler of Ipswich on one hand, and on the other, Exaltation Gather and any recently freed Puritans who (a) were sharp when it came to money and (b) enjoyed verbal disputes—i.e., all of them.

Daniel staged an orderly retreat to a church-yard with a view down to the harbor, where the sound of the argument was partly masked by the rushing and slapping of the surf. Various Puritans found him, and lined up to give him pieces of their minds. This went on for most of the day—but as an example, Edmund Palling came up and shook Daniel’s hand.

Edmund Palling was a perpetual old man. So it had always seemed to Daniel. Admittedly his strategy of radical hairlessness made it difficult to guess his age. But he’d seemed an old man running around with Drake during the Civil War, and as an old man he had marched in Cromwell’s funeral procession. As an old trader he had frequently showed up at Stourbridge Fair peddling this or that, and had walked into Cambridge to inflict startling visitations on Daniel. Old Man Palling had attended the memorial service for Drake, and during his years living in London, Daniel had occasionally bumped into this elderly man on the streets of London.

Now here he was: “Which is it, Daniel, stupid or insane? You know the King.”

Edmund Palling was a sensible man. He was, as a matter of fact, one of those Englishmen who was so sensible that he was daft. For as any French-influenced courtier could explain, to insist on everything’s being reasonable, in a world that wasn’t, was, in itself, unreasonable.

“Stupid,” Daniel said. Until now he had been every inch the Court man, but he could not dissimulate to such as Edmund Palling. To be with this old man was to be thrown back four decades, to a time when it had become common for ordinary sensible Englishmen to speak openly the widely agreed-upon, but previously unmentionable fact that monarchy was a load of rubbish. The fact that, since those days, the Restoration had occurred and that Europe was in fact ruled by great Kings was of no consequence. At any rate, Daniel felt perfectly at home and at peace among these men, which was a bit alarming given that he was a close advisor to King James II. He could no more defend that King, or any monarch, to Edmund Palling than go to a meeting of the Royal Society and assert that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Edmund Palling was fascinated, and nodded sagely. “Some have been saying insane, you know—because of the syphilis.”

“Not true.”

“That is extraordinary, because everyone is convinced he has syphilis.”

“He does. But having gotten to know His Majesty reasonably well, Mr. Palling, it is my opinion, as Secretary of the Royal Society, that when he, er…”

“Does something that is just amazingly ludicrous.”

“As some would say, Mr. Palling, yes.”

“Such as letting us out of gaol in the hopes that we’ll not perceive it as a cynical ploy, and supposing that we’ll rally about his standard as if he really gives a farthing for Freedom of Conscience!”

“Without staking myself to any position concerning what you’ve just said, Mr. Palling, I would encourage you to look towards mere stupidity in your quest for explanations. Not to rule out fits of syphilitic insanity altogether, mind you…”

“What’s the difference then? Or is it a distinction without a difference?”

“This sort of thing,” Daniel said, waving towards the Ipswich gaol, “is stupidity. By contrast, a fit of syphilitic insanity would lead to results of a different character entirely: spasms of arbitrary violence, mass enslavements, beheadings.”

Mr. Palling shook his head, then turned toward the water. “One day soon the sun will rise from across yonder sea and chase the fog of stupidity and the shadows of syphilitic insanity away.”

“Very poetic, Mr. Palling—but I have met the Duke of Monmouth, I have roomed with the Duke of Monmouth, I have been vomited on by the Duke of Monmouth, and I am telling you that the Duke of Monmouth is no Charles II! To say nothing of Oliver Cromwell.”

Mr. Palling rolled his eyes. “Very well, then—if Monmouth fails I’m on the next ship to Massachusetts.”

STRETCH A LINE, and another intersecting it, and rotate the former about the latter and it will sweep out a cone. Now shove this cone through a plane (fig. 1) and mark every point on the plane where the cone touches it. Commonly the result is an ellipse (fig. 2), but if the cone’s slope is parallel to the plane it makes a parabola (fig. 3), and if it’s parallel to the axis it makes a two-part curve called a hyperbola (fig. 4).

An interesting feature of all of these curves—the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola—was that they were generated by straight things, viz. two lines and a plane. An interesting feature of the hyperbola was that far away its legs came very close to being straight lines, but near the center there was dramatic curvature.

Greeks, e.g., Euclid, had done all of these things long ago and discovered various more or less interesting properties of conic sections (as this family of curves was called) and of other geometric constructions such as circles and triangles. But they’d done so as an exploration of pure thought, as a mathematician might compute the sum of two numbers. Every assertion that Euclid, et al., made concerning geometry was backed up by a chain of logical proofs that could be followed all the way back to a few axioms that were obviously true, e.g., “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” The truths of geometry were necessary truths; the human mind could imagine a universe in which Daniel’s name was David, or in which Ipswich had been built on the other side of the Orwell, but geometry and math had to be true, there was no conceivable universe in which 2 + 3 was equal to 2 + 2.

LIBRI I. CONICORVM APOLLONII

Occasionally one discovered correspondences between things in the real world and the figments of pure math. For example: Daniel’s trajectory from London to Ipswich had run in nearly a straight line, but after every one of the Dissenters had been let out of gaol, Daniel had executed a mighty change in direction and the next morning began riding on a rented horse towards Cambridge, following a trajectory that became straighter the farther he went. He was, in other words, describing a hyperbolic sort of path across Essex, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire.

But he was not doing so because it was a hyperbola, or (to look at it another way) it was not a hyperbola because he was doing so. This was simply the route that traders had always taken, going from market to market as they traveled up out of Ipswich with wagon-loads of imported or smuggled goods. He could have followed a zigzag course. That it looked like a hyperbola when plotted on a map of England was luck. It was a contingent truth.

It did not mean anything.

In his pocket were some notes that his patron, the good Marquis of Ravenscar, had stuffed into his pocket with the explanation “Here is a pretext.” They’d been written out by John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, apparently in response to inquiries sent down by Isaac. Daniel dared not unwrap and read this packet—the uncannily sensitive Isaac would smell Daniel’s hand-prints on the pages, or something. But the cover letter was visible. Wedged into the chinks between its great blocks of Barock verbiage were a few dry stalks of information, and by teasing these out and plaiting them together Daniel was able to collect that Newton had requested information concerning the comet of 1680; a recent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn; and the ebb and flow of tides in the ocean.

If any other scholar had asked for data on such seemingly disparate topics he’d have revealed himself to be a crank. The mere fact that Isaac was thinking about all of them at the same time was as good as proof that they were all related. Tides obviously had something to do with the moon because the formers’ heights were related to the latter’s phase; but what influence could connect the distant sphere of rock to every sea, lake, and puddle on the earth? Jupiter, orbiting along an inside track, occasionally raced past Saturn, lumbering along on the outer boundary of the solar system. Saturn had been seen to slow down as Jupiter caught up with it, then to speed up after Jupiter shot past. The distance separating Jupiter from Saturn was, at best, two thousand times that between the moon and the tides; what influence could span such a chasm? And comets, almost by definition, were above and outside of the laws (whatever they might be) that governed moons and planets—comets were not astronomical bodies, or indeed natural phenomena at all, so much as metaphors for the alien, the exempt, the transcendent—they were monsters, thunderbolts, letters from God. To bring them under the jurisdiction of any system of natural laws was an act of colossal hubris and probably asking for trouble.

But a few years earlier a comet had come through inbound, and a bit later an outbound one had been tracked, each moving on a different line, and John Flamsteed had stuck his neck out by about ten miles and asked the question, What if this was not two comets but one?

The obvious rejoinder was to point out that the two lines were different. One line, one comet; two lines, two comets. Flamsteed, who was as painfully aware of the vagaries and limitations of observational astronomy as any man alive, had answered that comets didn’t move along lines and never had; that astronomers had observed only short segments of comets’ trajectories that might actually be relatively straight excerpts of vast curves. It was known, for example, that most of a hyperbola was practically indistinguishable from a straight line—so who was to say that the supposed two comets of 1680 might not have been one comet that had executed a sharp course-change while close to the Sun, and out of astronomers’ view?

In some other era this would have ranked Flamsteed with Kepler and Copernicus, but he was living now, and so it had made him into a sort of data cow to be kept in a stall in Greenwich and milked by Newton whenever Newton became thirsty. Daniel was serving in the role of milk-maid, rushing to Cambridge with the foaming pail.

There was much in this that demanded the attention of any European who claimed to be educated.

(1) Comets passed freely through space, their trajectories shaped only by (still mysterious) interactions with the Sun. If they moved on conic sections, it was no accident. A comet following a precise hyperbolic trajectory through the æther was a completely different thing from Daniel’s just happening to trace a roughly hyperbolic course through the English countryside. If comets and planets moved along conic sections, it had to be some kind of necessary truth, an intrinsic feature of the universe. It did mean something. What exactly?

(2) The notion that the Sun exerted some centripetal force on the planets was now becoming pretty well accepted, but by asking for data on the interactions of moon and sea, and of Jupiter and Saturn, Isaac was as much as saying that these were all of a piece, that everything attracted everything—that the influences on (say) Saturn of the Sun, of Jupiter, and of Titan (the moon of Saturn that Huygens had discovered) were different only insofar as they came from different directions and had different magnitudes. Like the diverse goods piled up in some Amsterdam merchant’s warehouse, they might come from many places and have different values, but in the end all that mattered was how much gold they could fetch on the Damplatz. The gold that paid for a pound of Malabar pepper was melted and fused with the gold that paid for a boatload of North Sea herring, and all of it was simply gold, bearing no trace or smell of the fish or the spice that had fetched it. In the case of Cœlestial Dynamics, the gold—the universal medium of exchange, to which everything was reduced—was force. The force exerted on Saturn by the Sun was no different from that exerted by Titan. In the end, the two forces were added together to make a vector, a combined resultant force bearing no trace of its origins. It was a powerful kind of alchemy because it took the motions of heavenly bodies down from inaccessible realms and brought them within reach of men who had mastered the occult arts of geometry and algebra. Powers and mysteries that had been the exclusive province of Gods, Isaac was now arrogating to himself.

A SAMPLE CONSEQUENCE OF THIS alchemical fusing of forces would be that a comet fleeing the Sun on the out-bound limb of a hyperbola, traveling an essentially straight line, would, if it happened to pass near a planet, be drawn towards it. The Sun was not an absolute monarch. It did not have any special God-given power. The comet did not have to respect its force more than the forces of mere planets—in fact, the comet could not even perceive these two influences as being separate, they’d already been converted to the universal currency of force, and fused into a single vector. Far from the Sun, close to the planet, the latter’s influence would predominate, and the comet would change course smartly.

And so did Daniel, after riding almost straight across the fenny country northeast of Cambridge for most of a day, and traversing the pounded, shit-permeated mud flat where Stourbridge Fair was held, suddenly swing round a bend of the Cam and drop into an orbit whose center was a certain suite of chambers just off to the side of the Great Gate of Trinity College.

Daniel still had a key to the old place, but he did not want to go there just yet. He stabled his horse out back of the college and came in through the rear entrance, which turned out to be a bad idea. He knew that Wren’s library had started building, because Trinity had dunned him, Roger, and everyone else for contributions. And from the witty or despairing status reports that Wren gave the R.S. at every meeting, he was aware that the project had stopped and started more than once. But he hadn’t thought about the practical consequences. The formerly smooth greens between the Cam and the back of the College were now a rowdy encampment of builders, their draft-animals, and their camp-followers (and not just whores but itinerant publicans, tool-sharpeners, and errand-boys, too). So there was a certain amount of wading through horse-manure, wandering into blind alleys that had once been bowling-greens, tripping over hens, and declining more or less attractive carnal propositions before Daniel could even get a clear view of the library.

Most of Cambridge had fallen into twilight while Daniel had been seeking a route through the builders’ camp. Not that it made much of a difference, since the skies had looked like hammered lead all day. But the upper story of the Wren Library was high enough to look west into tomorrow’s weather, which would be fine and clear. The roof was mostly on, and where it wasn’t, its shape was lofted by rafters and ridge-beams of red oak that seemed to resonate in the warm light of the sunset, not merely blocking the rays but humming in sympathy with their radiance. Daniel stood and looked at it for a while because he knew that any moment of such beauty could never last, and he wanted to describe it to the long-suffering Wren when he got back to London.

The bell began to toll, calling the Fellows to the dining hall, and Daniel slogged forward through the Library’s vacant arches and across Neville’s Court just in time to throw on a robe and join his colleagues at the High Table.

The faces around that table were warmed by port and candlelight, and exhibiting a range of feelings. But on the whole they looked satisfied. The last Master who’d tried to enforce any discipline on the place had suffered a stroke while hollering at some rowdy students. There was no preventing students and faculty from drawing weighty conclusions from such an event. His replacement was a friend of Ravenscar, an Earl who’d showed up reliably for R.S. meetings since the early 1670s and reliably fallen asleep halfway through them. He came up to Cambridge only when someone more important than he was there. The Duke of Monmouth was no longer Chancellor; he’d been stripped of all such titles during one of his banishments, and replaced by the Duke of Tweed—a.k.a. General Lewis, the L in Charles II’s CABAL.

Not that he or any other Chancellor made any difference. The college was run by the Senior Fellows. Twenty-five years earlier, just at the moment Daniel and Isaac had entered Trinity, Charles II had kicked out the Puritan scholars who had nested there under Wilkins and replaced ’em with Cavaliers who could best be described as gentlemen-scholars—in that order. While Daniel and Isaac had been educating themselves, these men had turned the college into their own personal termite-mound. Now they were Senior Fellows. The High Table diet of suet, cheese, and port had had its natural effect, and it was a toss-up as to whether their bodies or their minds had become softer.

No one could recollect the last time Isaac had set foot in this Hall. His lack of interest was looked on as proving not that something was wrong with Trinity but that something was wrong with Isaac. And in a way, this was just; if a College’s duty was to propagate a certain way of being to the next generation, this one was working perfectly, and Isaac would only have disrupted the place by bothering to participate.

The Fellows seemed to know this (this was how Daniel thought of them: not as a roomful of individuals but as The Fellows, a sort of hive or flock, an aggregate. The question of aggregates had been vexing Leibniz to no end. A flock of sheep consisted of several individual sheep and was a flock only by convention—the quality of flockness was put on it by humans—it existed only in some human’s mind as a perception. Yet Hooke had found that the human body was made up of cells—therefore, just as much an aggregate as a flock of sheep. Did this mean that the body, too, was just a figment of perception? Or was there some unifying influence that made those cells into a coherent body? And what of High Table at Trinity College? Was it more like a flock of sheep or a body? To Daniel it seemed very much like a body at the moment. To carry out the assignment given him by Roger Comstock he’d have to interrupt that mysterious unifying principle somehow, disaggregate the College, then cut a few sheep from the flock). The aggregate called Trinity noticed that Isaac only came to church once a week, on Sunday, and his behavior in the chapel was raising Trinity’s eyebrows, though unlike Puritans these High Church gentles would never come out and say what they were thinking about religion. That was all right with Daniel, who knew perfectly well what Newton was doing and what these men were thinking about it.

But later, after Daniel and several of the Fellows had filed out of the Hall and gone upstairs to a smaller room, to sit around a smaller table and drink port, Daniel used this as a sort of lure, dragging it through the pond to see if anything would rise up out of the murk and snap at it: “Given the company Newton’s been known to keep, I can’t help but wonder if he has become attracted to Popery.”

Silence.

“Gentlemen!” Daniel continued, “there’s nothing wrong with it. Remember, our King is a Catholic.”

There were thirteen other men in the room. Eleven of them found his remark to be in unspeakably poor taste (which was true) and said nothing. Daniel did not care; they’d forgive him on grounds that he’d been drinking and was well-connected. One of them understood immediately what Daniel was up to: this was Vigani, the alchemist. If Vigani had been following Isaac as closely, and listening to him as intently, as he had followed and listened to Daniel this evening, he would know a lot. For now, the ends of his mustache curled up wickedly and he hid his amusement in a goblet.

But one man, the youngest and drunkest in the room—a man who’d made no secret of the fact that he desperately wanted to get into the Royal Society—rose to the bait.

“I’d sooner expect all of Mr. Newton’s nocturnal visitors to convert to his brand of religion than he to theirs!”

This produced a few stiff chuckles, which only encouraged him. “Though God help ’em if they tried to get back into France afterwards—considering what King Louis does to Huguenots, imagine what kind of welcome he’d give to a full-blown—”

“To say nothing of Spain with the Inquisition,” said Vigani drolly. Which was a heroic and well-executed bid to change the topic to something so banal as to be a complete waste of breath—after all, the Spanish Inquisition had few defenders locally.

But Daniel had not endured years among courtiers without developing skills of his own. “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for an English Inquisition to find out what our friend was just about to say!”

“That should be coming along any day now,” someone muttered.

They were beginning to break ranks! But Vigani had recovered: “Inquisition? Nonsense! Freedom of Conscience is the King’s byword—or so Dr. Waterhouse has been telling everyone.”

“I have been a mere conduit for what the King says.”

“But you have just come from releasing a lot of Dissenters from prison, have you not?”

“Your knowledge of my pastimes is uncanny, sir,” Daniel said. “You are correct. There are plenty of empty cells available just now.”

“Shame to waste ’em,” someone offered.

“The King will find some use for those vacancies,” predicted someone else.

“An easy prediction to make. Here’s a more difficult: what will that King’s name be?”

“England.”

“I meant his Christian name.”

“You’re assuming he’s going to be a Christian, then?”

“You’re assuming he’s one now?”

“Are we speaking of the King who lives in Whitehall, or the one who has been spotted in the Hague?”

“The one in Whitehall has been spotted ever since his years in France: spotted on his face, on his hands, on his—”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, this room is too warm and close for your wit, I beg you,” said the most senior of the Fellows present, who looked as if he might be on the verge of having a stroke of his own. “Dr. Waterhouse was merely enquiring about his old friend, our colleague, Newton—”

“Is this the version we’re all going to relate to the English Inquisition?”

“You are merry, too merry!” protested the Senior Fellow, now red in the face, and not with embarrassment. “Dr. Newton might serve as an example to you, for he goes about his work with gravity, and it is sound work in geometry, mathematics, astronomy…”

“Eschatology, astrology, alchemy…”

“No! No! Ever since Mr. Halley came up to enquire on the subject of Comets, Newton has had many fewer visitors from outside, and Signore Vigani has had to seek companionship in the Hall.”

“I need only enter the Hall and companionship is found,” said Vigani smoothly, “there is never seeking.”

“Please excuse me,” Daniel said, “it sounds as if Newton might welcome a visitor.”

“He might welcome a crust of bread,” someone said, “lately he has been scratching in his garden like a peckish hen.”

I cannot choose but condemn those Persons, who suffering themselves to be too much dazzled with the Lustre of the noble Actions of the Ancients, make it their Study to Extol them to the Skies; without reflecting, that these later Ages have furnished us with others more Heroick and Wonderful.

—GEMELLI CARERI

PASSING THROUGH the Great Gate, he borrowed a lantern from a porter and exited onto a walkway that led to the street, hemmed in by crenellated walls. The wall to his left had a narrow gate let into it. Using his old key, Daniel opened the lock on this gate and stepped through into a sizable garden. It was laid out as a grid of gravel walkways with squares of greenery between. Some of the squares were planted with small fruit trees, others with shrubs or grass. To his left a line of taller trees screened the windows of the row of chambers that filled the space between the Great Gate and the Chapel. The buds in their branches were just evolving to nascent leaves, and where light shone from Isaac’s windows they glowed like stopped explosions, phosphorus-green. But most of the windows were dark, and the stars above the muzzles of the chimneys were sharp and crystalline, not blurred by heat or dimmed by smoke. Isaac’s furnaces were cold, the stuff in their crucibles congealed. Their heat had all gone into his skull.

Daniel let his lantern-hand fall to his side so that the light shone across the gravel path from the altitude of his knee. This made Isaac’s chicken-scratchings stand out in high relief.

Every one had started the same way: with Isaac slashing the toe of his shoe, or the point of his stick, across the ground to make a curve. Not a specific curve—not a circle or a parabola—but a representative curve. Everything in the universe was curved, and those curves were evanescent and fluxional, but with this gesture Isaac snatched a particular curve—it didn’t matter which—down from the humming cosmos, like a frog flicking its tongue out to filch a gnat from a swarm. Once trapped in the gravel, it was frozen and helpless. Isaac could stand and look at it for as long as he wanted, like Sir Robert Moray gazing at a stuffed eel in a glass box. After a while Isaac would begin to slash straight lines into the gravel, building up a scaffold of rays, perpendiculars, tangents, chords, and normals. At first this would seem to grow in a random way, but then lines would intersect with others to form a triangle, which would miraculously turn out to be an echo of another triangle in a different place, and this fact would open up a sort of sluice-gate that would free information to flood from one part of the diagram to another, or to leap across to some other, completely different diagram—but the results never came clear to Daniel’s mind because here the diagram would be aborted and a series of footsteps—lunar craters in the gravel—would plot Isaac’s hasty return to his chambers, where it could be set down in ink.

Daniel followed these footsteps into the chambers he had once shared. The ground floor was cluttered with alchemical droppings, but not as dangerous as usual, since everything was cold. Daniel shone his lantern around one quiet room and then another. Everything that gave light back was hard mineral stuff, the inert refractory elements to which nature always returned: crusty crucibles, sooty retorts, corroded tongs, black crystals of charcoal, globs of quicksilver trapped in floor-cracks, a box of golden guineas left open next to a window as if to prove to all passers-by that the man who lived here cared nothing for gold.

On a desk he saw letters in Latin from gentlemen in Prague, Naples, St.-Germain, addressed to JEOVA SANCTUS UNUS. Through gaps between them Daniel saw parts of a large drawing that had been pinned down to the surface of the table. It looked like a floor plan of a building. Daniel moved some papers and books out of the way to expose more of it. He was wondering whether Isaac—like Wren, Hooke, and Daniel himself—had gone into Architecture.

Isaac appeared to be designing a square, walled court with a rectangular structure in the middle. Sweeping a trapezoid of lantern-light over a block of writing, Daniel read the following: The same God gave the dimensions of the Tabernacle to Moses and Temple with its Courts to David & Ezekiel & altered not the proportion of the areas but only doubled them in the Temple…So then Solomon and Ezekiel agree, and are double to Moses.

“I am only trying to recover what Solomon knew,” Isaac said.

Knowing that the lantern would blind Isaac’s burnt eyes, Daniel raised it up and blew it out before turning around. Isaac had come in silence down a stone staircase. His atelier on the first story had candles burning, and these warmed the stone behind Isaac with orange light. He was a black silhouette robed in a dressing-gown, his head cloaked with silver. He had not grown any heavier since College days, which was no surprise if the rumors about his dining habits were to be credited.

“I can’t help but wonder if you—perhaps even I—don’t know a hell of a lot more about practically every subject than Solomon ever did,” Daniel said.

Isaac said nothing for a moment, but something about his silhouette looked wounded, or sad.

“It’s right there in the Bible, Daniel. First chapter: the Garden of Eden. Last chapter: the Apocalypse.”

“I know, I know, the world started out perfectly good and has gotten worse and worse since then, and the only question is how bad will it get before God brings down the curtain. I was raised to believe that this tendency was as fixed and unavoidable as gravity, Isaac. But the Apocalypse did not come in 1666.”

“It will occur not long after 1867,” Isaac said. “That is the year when the Beast will fall.”

“Most Anglican cranks are guessing 1700 for the demise of the Catholic Church.”

“It is not the only way that the Anglicans are wrong.”

“Could it be, Isaac, that things are getting better, or at worst remaining more or less the same, rather then getting worse all the time? Because I really think you may know certain things that never entered Solomon’s head.”

“I am working out the System of the World upstairs,” Isaac said offhandedly. “It is not beyond reason to think that Solomon and other ancients knew that System, and encrypted it in the design of their Temples.”

“But according to the Bible those designs were given to them directly by God.”

“But go outside and look up at the stars and you see God trying to give you the same thing, if only you will pay attention.”

“If Solomon knew all of this, why didn’t he just come out and say, ‘The sun is in the middle of the solar system and planets go round about it in ellipses?’”

“I believe he did say so, in the design of his temple.”

“Yes, but why are God and Solomon alike so damned oblique in everything? Why not just come out and say it?”

“It is good that you do not waste my time with tedious letters,” Isaac said. “When I read a letter I can follow the words, but I cannot fathom the mind, of him who sent it. It is better that you come to visit me in the night-time.”

“Like an alchemist?”

“Or an early Christian in pagan Rome…”

“Scratching curves in the dust?”

“…or any Christian who dares oppose the idolators. If you were to use me thus in a letter, I would conclude you were in the employ of the Beast, as some say you are.”

“What, merely for suggesting that the world does something other than rot?”

“Of course it rots, Daniel. There is no perpetual motion machine.”

“Except for the heart.”

“The heart rots, Daniel. Sometimes it even begins to rot while its owner still lives.”

Daniel dared not follow that one up. After a silence Isaac continued, in a throatier voice: “Where do we find God in the world? That is all I want to know. I have not found Him yet. But when I see anything that does not rot—the workings of the solar system, or a Euclidean proof, or the perfection of gold—I sense I am drawing nearer to the Divine.”

“Have you found the Philosophick Mercury yet?”

“In ’77, Boyle was certain he had it.”

“I remember.”

“I agreed with him for a short time—but it was wishful thinking. I am seeking it in geometry now—or rather I am seeking it where geometry fails.”

“Fails?”

“Come upstairs with me Daniel.”

DANIEL RECOGNIZED THE first proof as easily as his own signature. “Objects governed by a centripetal force conserve angular momentum and sweep out equal areas in equal times.”

“You have read my De Motu Corporum in Gyrum?”

“Mr. Halley has made its contents known to the Royal Society,” Daniel said drily.

“Some supporting lemmas come out of this,” Isaac said, pulling another diagram over the first.

“and thence we can move on immediately to” “That is the great one,” Daniel said. “If the centripetal force is governed by an inverse-square law, then the body moves on an ellipse, or at any rate a conic section.”

“I would say, ‘That heavenly bodies do move on conic sections proves the inverse-square law.’ But we are only speaking of fictions, so far. These proofs only apply to infinitesimal concentrations of mass, which do not exist in the real world. Real heavenly bodies possess geometry—they comprise a vast number of tiny particles arranged in the shape of a sphere. If Universal Gravitation exists, then each of the motes that make up the Earth attracts every other, and attracts the moon as well, and vice versa. And each of the moon’s particles attracts the water in Earth’s oceans to create tides. But how does the spherical geometry of a planet inform its gravity?”

Isaac produced another sheet, much newer-looking than the rest.

Daniel did not recognize this one. At first he thought it was a diagram of an eyeball, like the ones Isaac had made as a student. But Isaac was speaking of planets, not eyes.

A few awkward moments followed.

“Isaac,” Daniel finally said, “you can draw a diagram like this one and say, ‘Behold!’ and the proof is finished. I require a bit of explanation.”

“Very well.” Isaac pointed to the circle in the middle of the diagram. “Consider a spherical body—actually an aggregate of countless particles, each of which produces gravitational attraction according to an inverse square law.” Now he reached for the nearest handy object—an inkwell—and set it on the corner of the page, as far away from the “spherical body” as it could go. “What is felt by a satellite, here, on the outside, if the separate attractions of all of those particles are summed and fused into one aggregate force?”

“Far be it from me to tell you how to do physics, Isaac, but this strikes me as an ideal problem for the integral calculus—so why are you solving it geometrically?”

“Why not?”

“Is it because Solomon didn’t have the calculus?”

“The calculus, as some call it, is a harsh method. I prefer to develop my proofs in a more geometric way.”

“Because geometry is ancient, and everything ancient is good.”

“This is idle talk. The result, as anyone can see from contemplating my diagram, is that a spherical body—a planet, moon, or star—having a given quantity of matter, produces a gravitational attraction that is the same as if all of its matter were concentrated into a single geometric point at the center.”

“The same? You mean exactly the same?”

“It is a geometrical proof,” Isaac merely said. “That the particles are spread out into a sphere doesn’t make any difference because the geometry of the sphere is what it is. The gravity is the same.”

Daniel now had to locate a chair; all the blood in his legs seemed to be rushing into his brain.

“If that is true,” he said, “then everything you proved before about point objects—for example that they move along conic section trajectories—”

“Applies without alteration to spherical bodies.”

“To real things.” Daniel had a queer vision just then of a shattered Temple reconstituting itself: fallen columns rising up from the rubble, and the rubble re-aggregating itself into cherubim and seraphim, a fire sparking on the central altar. “You’ve done it then…created the System of the World.”

“God created it. I have only found it. Rediscovered what was forgot. Look at this diagram, Daniel. It is all here, it is Truth made manifest, epiphanes.”

“Now you said before that you were looking for God where Geometry failed.”

“Of course. There is no choice in this,” Isaac said, patting his diagram with a dry hand. “Not even God could have made the world otherwise. The only God here—” Isaac slammed the page hard “—is the God of Spinoza, a God that is everything and therefore nothing.”

“But it seems as if you’ve explained everything.”

“I’ve not explained the inverse square law.”

“You’ve a proof right there saying that if gravity follows an inverse square law, satellites move on conic sections.”

“And Flamsteed says that they do,” Isaac said, yanking the sheaf of notes out of Daniel’s hip pocket. Ignoring the cover letter, he tore the ribbon from the bundle and began to scan the pages. “Therefore gravity does indeed follow an inverse square law. But we may only say so because it is consistent with Flamsteed’s observations. If tonight Flamsteed notices a comet moving in a spiral, it shows that all my work is wrong.”

“You’re saying, why do we need Flamsteed at all?”

“I’m saying that the fact that we do need him proves that God is making choices.”

“Or has made them.”

This caused a sort of queasy sneer to come across Isaac’s face. He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I am not one of those who believes that God made the world and walked away from it, that He has no further choices to make, no ongoing presence in the world. I believe that He is everywhere, making choices all the time.”

“But only because there are certain things you have not explained yet with geometric proofs.”

“As I told you, I seek God where Geometry fails.”

“But perhaps there is an undiscovered proof for the inverse square law. Perhaps it has something to do with vortices in the æther.”

“No one has been able to make sense of vortices.”

“Some interaction of microscopic particles, then?”

“Particles traversing the distance from the Sun to Saturn and back, at infinite speed, without being hindered by the æther?”

“You’re right, it is impossible to take seriously. What is your hypothesis, Isaac?”

“Hypothesis non fingo.”

“But that’s not really true. You begin with a hypothesis—I saw several of them scratched in the gravel out there. Then you come up with one of these diagrams. I cannot explain how you do that part, unless God is using you as a conduit. When you are finished, it is no longer a hypothesis but a demonstrated truth.”

“Geometry can never explain gravity.”

“Calculus then?”

“The calculus is just a convenience, a short-hand way of doing geometry.”

“So what is beyond geometry is also beyond calculus.”

“Of course, by definition.”

“The inner workings of gravity, you seem to be saying, are beyond the grasp, or even the reach, of Natural Philosophy. To whom should we appeal, then? Metaphysicians? Theologians? Sorcerers?”

“They are all the same to me,” Isaac said, “and I am one.”

Beach North of Scheveningen

OCTOBER 1685

IT WAS AS IF WILLIAM of Orange had searched the world over to find the place most different from Versailles, and had told Eliza to meet him there. At Versailles, everything had been designed and made by men. But here was nothing to see but ocean and sand. Every grain of sand had been put where it was by waves that formed up in the ocean according to occult laws that might have been understood by the Doctor, but not by Eliza.

She had dismounted and was leading her horse northwards up the beach. The sand was hard-packed and solid and wet, speckled all over with cockle shells in colors and patterns of such profusion and variety that they must have given the first Dutchmen the idea to go out into the sea and bring back precious things from afar. They made a welcome contrast against the extreme flatness and sameness of beach, water, and misty sky, and exerted a hypnotic effect on her. She forced herself to look up from time to time. But the only feature of the view that ever changed was the signatures of foam deposited on the beach by the waves.

Each breaker, she supposed, was as unique as a human soul. Each made its own run up onto the shore, being the very embodiment of vigor and power at the start. But each slowed, spread thin, faltered, dissolved into a hissing ribbon of gray foam, and got buried under the next. The end result of all their noisy, pounding, repetitious efforts was the beach. Seen through a lens, the particular arrangement of sand-grains that made up the beach presumably was complicated, and reflected the individual contributions of every single wave that had ended its life here; but seen from the level of Eliza’s head it was unspeakably flat, an “abomination of desolation in a dark place,” as the Bible would put it.

She heard a ripping noise behind her and turned around to look to the south, toward the dent in the beach, several miles distant, that formed the harbor of Scheveningen. The last time she’d looked back, a few minutes ago, there had been nothing between her and the anchorage but a few clam-diggers. But now there was a sail on the sand: a triangle of canvas, stretched drum-tight by the wet wind off the sea. Below it hovered a spidery rig of timbers with spoked wagon-wheels at their ends. One wheel was suspended in the air by the heeling of the vehicle. Taken together with the speed of its progress up the beach, this created the impression that it was flying. The wheel spun slowly in the air, dripping clots of wet sand from its rim, which was very wide so that it rolled over, instead of cutting into, the sand and its gay mosaic of cockle shells. The opposite wheel was scribing a long fat track down the beach, slaloming between the dark hunched forms of the diggers; though, a hundred yards in its wake, this trace had already been erased by the waves.

A fishing-boat had eased in to shore as the tide ebbed, pulled up her sideboards, and allowed herself to be stranded there. The fishermen had chocked her upright with baulks of wood, brought their catch up out of the hold, and laid it out on the sand, creating a little fish-market that would last until the tide flowed in again, chased away the customers, and floated the boat. People had carried baskets out from town, or driven out in carriages, to carry out disputes with the fishermen over the value of what they’d brought back from the deep.

Some of them turned to look at the sand-sailer. It rushed past Eliza, moving faster than any horse could gallop. She recognized the man operating the tiller and manipulating the lines. Some of the fish-buyers did, too, and a few of those bothered to doff their hats and bow. Eliza mounted her horse and rode in pursuit.

The view inland was blocked by dunes. Not dunes such as Eliza had once seen in the Sahara, but hybrids of dunes and hedges. For these were covered by, and anchored in, vegetation that was light green in the lower slopes, but in other places deepened to a bluish cast, and formed up into great furry dark eyebrows frowning at the sea.

A mile or so north of where the fishing-boat had been beached, the sight-line from the town was severed by a gradual bend in the coastline, and a low spur flung seawards by a dune. From here, the only sign that Holland was a settled country was a tall watchtower with a conical roof, built atop a dune, perhaps half a mile distant. The sand-sailer had come to rest, its sheets loosened so that the sail reached and weathercocked.

“I am probably meant to ask, ‘Where is your Court, O Prince, your entourage, your bodyguards, your train of painters, poets, and historians?’ Whereupon you’d give me a stern talking-to about the decadence of France.”

“Possibly,” said William, Prince of Orange and Stadholder of the Dutch Republic. He had extricated himself from the canvas seat of the sailer and was standing on the beach facing out to sea, layers of sand-spattered leather and spray-soaked wool giving his body more bulk than it really had. “Or perhaps I like to go sand-sailing by myself, and your reading so much into it is proof you’ve been too long at Versailles.”

“Why is this dune here, I wonder?”

“I don’t know. Tomorrow it may not be. Why do you mention it?”

“I look at all these waves, spending so much effort to accomplish so little, and wonder that from time to time they can raise something as interesting as a dune. Why, this hill of sand is equivalent to Versailles—a marvel of ingenuity. Waves from the Indian Ocean, encountering waves of Araby off the Malabar Coast, must gossip about this dune, and ask for the latest tidings from Scheveningen.”

“It is normal for women, at certain times of the month, and in certain seasons of the year, to descend into moods such as this one,” the prince mused.

“A fair guess, but wrong,” Eliza said. “There are Christian slaves in Barbary, you know, who expend vast efforts to accomplish tiny goals, such as getting a new piece of furniture in their banyolar…”

“Banyolar?”

“Slave-quarters.”

“What a pathetic story.”

“Yes, but it is all right for them to achieve meager results because they are in a completely hopeless and desperate situation,” Eliza said. “In a way, a slave is fortunate, because she has more head-room for her dreams and phant’sies, which can soar to dizzying heights without bumping up ’gainst the ceiling. But the ones who live at Versailles are as high as humans can get, they practically have to go about stooped over because their wigs and head-dresses are scraping the vault of heaven—which consequently seems low and mean to them. When they look up, they see, not a vast beckoning space above, but rather—”

“The gaudy-painted ceiling.”

“Just so. You see? There is no head-room. And so, for one who has just come from Versailles, it is easy to look at these waves, accomplishing so little, and to think that no matter what efforts we put forth in our lives, all we’re really doing is rearranging the sand-grains in a beach that in essence never changes.”

“Right. And if we’re really brilliant, we can cast up a little dune or hummock that will be considered the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

“Just so!”

“Lass, it’s very poetic, albeit in a bleak Gothic sort of way, but, begging your pardon, I look up and I don’t see the ceiling. All I see is a lot of damned Frenchmen looking down their noses at me from a mile high. I must pull them all down to my level, or draw myself up to theirs, before I can judge whether I have succeeded in making a dune, or what-have-you. So let us turn our attentions thither.”

“Very well. There is little to hold our attention here.”

“What do you imagine was the point of the King’s admonition, at the end of your most recent letter?”

“What—you mean, what he said to me after his operation?”

“Yes.”

“Fear me inasmuch as you are my foe, be proud inasmuch as my friend? That one?”

“Yes, that one.”

“Seems self-explanatory to me.”

“But why on earth would the King feel the need to deliver such a warning to d’Avaux?”

“Perhaps he has doubts as to the count’s loyalty.”

“That is inconceivable. No man could be more his King’s creature than d’Avaux.”

“Perhaps the King is losing his grip, and perceiving enemies where none exist.”

“Very doubtful. He has too many real enemies to indulge himself so—and besides, he is very far from losing his grip!”

“Hmph. None of my explanations is satisfactory, it seems.”

“Now that you are out of France you must shed the habit of pouting, my Duchess. You do it exquisitely, but if you try it on a Dutchman he’ll only want to slap you.”

“Will you share your explanation with me, if I promise not to pout?”

“Obviously the King’s admonition was intended for someone other than the comte d’Avaux.”

This left Eliza baffled for a minute. William of Orange fussed with the rigging of his sand-sailer while she turned it over in her head. “You are saying then that the King knows my letters to d’Avaux are being decyphered and read by Dutch agents…and that his warning was intended for you. Have I got it right?”

“You are only starting to get it right…and this is becoming tedious. So let me explain it, for until you understand this, you will be useless to me. Every letter posted abroad from Versailles, whether it originates from you, or Liselotte, or the Maintenon, or some chambermaid, is opened by the Postmaster and sent to the cabinet noir to be read.”

“Heavens! Who is in the cabinet noir?”

“Never mind. The point is that they have read all of your letters to d’Avaux and conveyed anything important to the King. When they are finished they give the letters back to the Postmaster, who artfully re-seals them and sends them north…my Postmaster then re-opens them, reads them, re-seals them, and sends them on to d’Avaux. So the King’s admonition could have been intended for anyone in that chain: d’Avaux (though probably not), me, my advisors, the members of his own cabinet noir…or you.”

“Me? Why would he want to admonish a little nothing like me?”

“I simply mention you for the sake of completeness.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The Prince of Orange laughed. “Very well. Louis’ entire system is built on keeping the nobility poor and helpless. Some of them enjoy it, others don’t. The latter sort look for ways of making money. To whatever degree they succeed, they threaten the King. Why do you think the French East India Company fails time and again? Because Frenchmen are stupid? They are not stupid. Or rather, the stupid ones get despatched to India, because Louis wants that company to fail. A port-city filled with wealthy commerçants—a London or an Amsterdam—is a nightmare to him.”

“Now, some of those nobles who desire money have turned their attentions toward Amsterdam and begun to engage the services of Dutch brokers. This was how your former business associate, Mr. Sluys, made his fortune. The King is pleased that you ruined Sluys, because he took some French counts down with him, and they serve as object lessons to any French nobles who try to build fortunes in the market of Amsterdam. But now you are being approached, yes? Your ‘Spanish Uncle’ is the talk of the town.”

“You can’t possibly expect me to believe that the King of France views me as a threat.”

“Of course not.”

“You, William of Orange, the Protestant Defender, are a threat.”

“I, William, whatever titles you wish to hang on me, am an enemy, but not a threat. I may make war on him, but I will never imperil him, or his reign. The only people who can do that are all living at Versailles.”

“Those dreadful dukes and princes and so on.”

“And duchesses and princesses. Yes. And insofar as you might help these do mischief, you are to be watched. Why do you imagine d’Avaux put you there? As a favor? No, he put you there to be watched. But insofar as you may help Louis maintain his grip, you are a tool. One of many tools in his toolbox—but a strange one, and strange tools are commonly the most useful.”

“If I am so useful to Louis—your enemy—then what am I to you?”

“To date, a rather slow and unreliable pupil,” William answered.

Eliza heaved a sigh, trying to sound bored and impatient. But she could not help shuddering a bit as the air came out of her—a premonition of sobs.

“Though not without promise,” William allowed.

Eliza felt better, and hated herself for being so like one of William’s hounds.

“None of what I have written in any of my letters to d’Avaux has been of any use to you at all.”

“You have only been learning the ropes, so far,” William said, plucking like a harp-player at various lines and sheets in the rigging of his sand-sailer. He climbed aboard and settled himself into the seat. Then he drew on certain of those ropes while paying out others, and the vehicle sprang forward, rolling down the slope of the dune, and building speed back towards Scheveningen.

ELIZA MOUNTED HER HORSE and turned around. The wind off the sea was in her face now, like a fine mixture of ice and rock salt fired out of blunderbusses. She decided to cut inland to get out of the weather. Riding up over the crest of the dune was something of a project, for it had grown to a considerable height here.

In the scrubby plants of the beach—shrubs as tall as a man, with wine-colored leaves and red berries—spiders had spun their webs. But the mist had covered them with strings of gleaming pearls so that she could see them from a hundred feet away. So much for being stealthy. Though a stealthy human, crouching among those same shrubs to look down on the beach, would be perfectly invisible. Farther up the slopes grew wind-raked trees inhabited by raucous, irritable birds, who made it a point to announce, to all the world, that Eliza was passing through.

Finally she reached the crest. Not far away was an open sea of grass that would take her to the polders surrounding the Hague. To reach it, she’d have to pass through a forest of scrubby gnarled trees with silvery gray foliage, growing on the lee side of the dune. She stopped for a moment there to get her bearings. From here she could see the steeples of the Hague, Leiden, and Wassenaar, and dimly make out the etched rectangles of formal gardens in private compounds built in the countryside along the coast.

As she rode down into the woods the susurration of the waves was muted, and supplanted by the hissing of a light, misty rain against the leaves. But she did not enjoy the sudden peace for very long. A man in a hooded cloak rose up from behind one of those trees and clapped his hands in the horse’s face. The horse reared. Eliza, completely unready, fell off and landed harmlessly in soft sand. The cloaked man gave the horse a resounding slap on the haunches as it returned to all fours, and it galloped off in the direction of home.

This man stood with his back to Eliza for a moment, watching the horse run away, then looked up at the crest of the dune, and down the coast to that distant watch-tower, to see if anyone had seen the ambuscade. But the only witnesses were crows, flapping into the air and screaming as the horse charged through their sentry-lines.

Eliza had every reason to assume that something very bad was planned for her now. She had barely seen this fellow coming in the corner of her eye, but his movements had been brisk and forceful—those of a man accustomed to action, without the affected grace of a gentleman. This man had never taken lessons in dancing or fencing. He moved like a Janissary—like a soldier, she corrected herself. And that was rather bad news. A fair proportion of the murder, robbery, and rape committed in Europe was the work of soldiers who had been put out of work, and just now there were thousands of those around Holland.

Under the terms of an old treaty between England and Holland, six regiments of English and Scottish troops had long been stationed on Dutch soil, as a hedge against invasion from France (or, much less plausibly, the Spanish Netherlands). A few months earlier, when the Duke of Monmouth had sailed to England and mounted his rebellion, his intended victim, King James II, had sent word from London that those six regiments were urgently required at home. William of Orange—despite the fact that his sympathies lay more with Monmouth than with the King—had complied without delay, and shipped the regiments over. By the time they had arrived, the rebellion had been quashed, and there had been nothing for them to do. The King had been slow to send them back, for he did not trust his son-in-law (William of Orange) and suspected that those six regiments might one day return as the vanguard of a Dutch invasion. He had wanted to station them in France instead. But King Louis—who had plenty of his own regiments—had seen them as an unnecessary expense, and William had insisted that the treaty be observed. So the six regiments had come back to Holland.

Shortly thereafter, they had been disbanded. So now the Dutch countryside was infested with unpaid and unled foreign soldiers. Eliza guessed that this was one of them; and since he had not bothered to steal her horse, he must have other intentions.

She rolled onto her elbows and knees and gasped as if she’d had the wind knocked out of her. One arm was supporting her head, the other clutching at her abdomen. She was wearing a long cape that had spread over her like a tent. Propping her forehead against her wrist, she gazed upside-down into the hidden interior of that tent, where her right hand was busy in the damp folds of her waist-sash.

One of the interesting bits of knowledge she had picked up in the Topkapi Palace was that the most feared men in the Ottoman Empire were not the Janissaries with their big scimitars and muskets, but rather the hashishin: trained murderers who went unarmed except for a small dagger concealed in the waistband. Eliza did not have the skills of a hashishin, but she knew a good idea when she saw one, and she was never without the same kind of weapon. To whip it out now would be a mistake, though. She only made sure it was ready to hand.

Then she lifted her head, pushed herself up to a kneeling position, and gazed at her attacker. At the same moment, he turned to face her and threw back his hood to reveal the face of Jack Shaftoe.

ELIZA WAS PARALYZED for several moments.

Since Jack was almost certainly dead by now, it would be conventional to suppose that she was looking upon his ghost. But this was the reverse of the truth. A ghost ought to be paler than the original, a drawn shadow. But Jack—at least, the Jack she’d most recently seen—had been like the ghost of this man. This fellow was heavier, steadier, with better color and better teeth…

“Bob,” she said.

He looked slightly startled, then made a little bow. “Bob Shaftoe it is,” he said, “at your service, Miss Eliza.”

“You call knocking me off my horse being at my service?”

“You fell off your horse, begging your pardon. I apologize. But I did not wish that you would gallop away and summon the Guild.”

“What are you doing here? Was your regiment one of those that was disbanded?”

His brain worked. Now that Bob had begun talking, and reacting to things, his resemblance to Jack was diminishing quickly. The physical similarity was strong, but this body was animated by a different spirit altogether. “I see Jack told you something of me—but skipped the details. No. My regiment still exists, though it has a new name now. It’s guarding the King in London.”

“Then why’re you not with it?”

“John Churchill, the commander of my regiment, sends me on odd errands.”

“This one must be very odd indeed, to bring you to the wrong shore of the North Sea.”

“It is a sort of salvage mission. No one expected the regiments here to be disbanded. I am trying to track down certain sergeants and corporals who are well thought of, and recruit them into the service of my master before they get hanged in Dutch towns for stealing chickens, or press-ganged on India ships, or recruited by the Prince of Orange…”

“Do I looked like a grizzled sergeant to you, Bob Shaftoe?”

“I am laying that charge to one side for a few hours to speak to you about a private matter, Miss Eliza. The time it will take to walk back to the Hague should suffice.”

“Let’s walk, then, I am getting cold.”

Dorset

JUNE 1685

I never justify’d cutting off the King’s Head, yet the Disasters that befel Kings when they begun to be Arbitrary, are not without their use, and are so many Beacons to their Successors to mark out the Sands which they are to avoid.

—The Mischiefs That Ought Justly
to Be Apprehended from a

Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS,

ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

IF POOR JACK’S RAVINGS have any color of truth in them, then you have been among Persons of Quality. So you have learnt how important Family is to such people: that it gives them not only name but rank, a house, a piece of land to call home, income and food, and that it is the windowpane through which they look out and perceive the world. It brings them troubles, too: for they are born heirs to superiors who must be obeyed, roofs that want fixing, and diverse local troubles that belong to them as surely as their own names.

Now, in place of “Persons of Quality” substitute “common men of soldier type” and in place of “Family” say “Regiment,” and you will own a fair portrait of my life.

You seem to’ve spent a lot of time with Jack and so I’ll spare you the explanation of how two mudlark boys found themselves in a regiment in Dorset. But my career has been like his in a mirror, which is to say, all reversed.

The regiment he told you of was like most old English ones, which is to say, ’twas militia. The soldiers were common men of the shire and the officers were local gentlemen, and the big boss was a Peer, the Lord Lieutenant—in our case, Winston Churchill—who got the job by living in London, wearing the right clothes, and saying the right things.

Those militia regiments once came together to form Cromwell’s New Model Army, which defeated the Cavaliers, slew the King, abolished Monarchy, and even crossed the Channel to rout the Spaniards in Flanders. None of this was lost on Charles II. After he came back, he made a practice of keeping professional soldiers on his payroll. They were there to keep the militias in check.

You may know that the Cavaliers who brought Charles II back made their landfall in the north and came down from Tweed, crossing the Cold Stream with a regiment under General Lewis. That regiment is called the Coldstream Guards, and General Lewis was made the Duke of Tweed for his troubles. Likewise King Charles created the Grenadier Guards. He probably would have abolished the militia altogether if he could have—but the 1660s were troublous times, what with Plague and Fire and bitter Puritans roaming the country. The King needed his Lords Lieutenant to keep the people down—he granted ’em the power to search homes for arms and to throw troublesome sorts in prison. But a Lord Lieutenant could not make use of such powers save through a local militia and so the militias endured. And ’twas during those times that Jack and I were plucked out of a Vagabond-camp and made into regimental boys.

A few years later John Churchill reached an age—eighteen years—when he was deemed ready to accept his first commission, and was given a regiment of Grenadier Guards. It was a new regiment. Some men and armaments and other necessaries were made available to him, but he had to raise the rest himself, and so he did the natural thing and recruited many soldiers and noncommissioned officers from his father’s militia regiment in Dorset—including me and Jack. For there is a difference ’twixt Families and Regiments, which is that the latter have no female members and cannot increase in the natural way—new members must be raised up out of the soil like crops, or if you will, taxes.

Now I’ll spare you a recitation of my career under John Churchill, as you’ve no doubt heard a slanderous version of it from brother Jack. Much of it consisted of long marches and sieges on the Continent—very repetitive—and the rest has been parading around Whitehall and St. James, for our nominal purpose is to guard the King.

Lately, following the death of Charles II, John Churchill spent some time on the Continent, going down to Versailles to meet with King Louis and biding in Dunkirk for a time to keep a weather eye on the Duke of Monmouth. I was there with him and so when Jack came through aboard his merchant-ship full of cowrie-shells I went out to have a brotherly chat with him.

Here the tale could turn ghastly. I’ll not describe Jack. Suffice it to say I have seen better and worse on battle-fields. He was far gone with the French Pox and not of sound mind. I learnt from him about you. In particular I learnt that you have the strongest possible aversion to Slavery—whereof I’ll say more anon. But first I must speak of Monmouth.

There was a Mr. Foot aboard God’s Wounds, one of those pleasant and harmless-seeming fellows to whom anyone will say anything, and who consequently knows everyone and everything. While I was waiting for Jack to recover his senses I passed a few hours with him and collected the latest gossip—or, as we say in the military, intelligence—from Amsterdam. Mr. Foot told me that Monmouth’s invasion-force was massing at Texel and that it was certainly bound for the port of Lyme Regis.

When I was finished saying my good-byes to poor Jack I went ashore and tried to seek out my master, John Churchill, to give him this news. But he had just sailed for Dover, London-bound, and left orders for me to follow on a slower boat with certain elements of the regiment.

Now I’ve probably given you the impression that the Grenadier Guards were in Dunkirk, which is wrong. They were in London guarding the King. Why was I not with my regiment? To answer I would have to explain what I am to John Churchill and what he is to me, which would take more time than it would be worth. Owing to my advanced age—almost thirty—and long time in service, I am a very senior non-commissioned officer. And if you knew the military this would tell you much about the peculiar and irregular nature of my duties. I do the things that are too difficult to explain.

Not very clear, is it? Here is a fair sample: I ignored my orders, cast off my uniform, borrowed money on my master’s good name, and took passage on a west-bound ship that brought me eventually to Lyme Regis. Before I embarked I sent word to my master that I was making myself useful in the West, where I had heard that some Vagabonds wanted hanging. As I’m certain you have perceived, this was both a prophecy of what was soon to come, and a reminder of events long past. Monmouth had set sail for Dorset because it was a notorious hotbed of Protestant rebellion. Ashe House, which was the seat of the Churchill family, looked down into the harbor of Lyme Regis, which had been the site of a dreary siege during the Civil War. Some of the Churchills had been Roundheads, others Cavaliers. Winston had taken the Cavalier side, had brought this riotous place to heel, and he and his son had been made important men for their troubles. Now Monmouth—John’s old comrade-in-arms from Siege of Maestricht days—was coming to make a bloody mess of the place. It would make Winston look either foolish or disloyal in the eyes of the rest of Parliament, and it would cast doubts on John’s loyalty.

For some years, John has been in the household of the Duke of York—now King James II—but his wife Sarah is now Lady of the Bedchamber to the Duke’s daughter, the Princess Anne: a Protestant who might be Queen someday. And among those Londoners who whisper into each other’s ears for a living, this has been taken to mean that John’s merely putting on a show of loyalty to the King, biding his time until the right moment to betray that Papist and bring a Protestant to the throne. Nothing more than Court gossip—but if Monmouth used John’s very home ground as the beach-head of a Protestant rebellion, how would it look?

Monmouth’s little fleet dropped anchor in the harbor of Lyme Regis two days after I had arrived. The town was giddy—they thought Cromwell had been re-incarnated. Within a day, fifteen hundred men had rallied to his standard. Almost the only one who did not embrace him was the Mayor. But I had already warned him to keep his bags packed and horses saddled. I helped him and his family slip out of town, following covert trails of Vagabonds, and he despatched messengers to the Churchills in London. This way Winston could go to the King and say, “My constituents are in rebellion and here is what my son and I are doing about it” rather than having the news sprung on him out of the blue.

It would be a week at the earliest before my regiment could come out from London—which amounts to saying that Monmouth had a week to raise his army, and that I had a week in which to make myself useful. I waited in a queue in the market-square of Lyme Regis until the clerk could prick my name down in his great book; I told him I was Jack Shaftoe and under that name I joined Monmouth’s army. The next day we mustered in a field above the town and I was issued my weapon: a sickle lashed to the end of a stick.

The next week’s doings were of some moment to John Churchill, when I told him the tale later, but would be tedious to you. There is only one part you might take an interest in, and that is what happened at Taunton. Taunton is an inland town. Our little army reached it after several days’ straggling through the countryside. By that time we were three thousand strong. The town welcomed us even more warmly than Lyme Regis; the school girls presented Monmouth with a banner they had embroidered for him, and served us meals in a mess they had set up in the town square. One of these girls—a sixteen-year-old named Abigail Frome…

Shall I devote a thousand words, or ten thousand, to how I fell in love with Abigail Frome? “I fell in love with her” does not do it justice, but ten thousand words would be no better, and so let us leave it at that. Perhaps I loved her because she was a rebel girl, and my heart was with the rebellion. My mind could see it was doomed, but my heart was listening to the Imp of the Perverse. I had chosen the name of Jack Shaftoe because I reckoned my brother was dead by now and would not be needing it. But being “Jack Shaftoe” had awakened a lust I had long forgotten: I wanted to go a-vagabonding. And I wanted to take Abigail Frome with me.

That was true the first and possibly the second day of my infatuation. But in between those long sunny June days were short nights of broken and unrestful sleep, when fretful thoughts would dissolve into strange dreams that would end with me shocked upright in my bed, like a sailor who has felt his ship hit a reef, and who knows he ought to be doing somewhat other than just lying there. I’d not bedded the girl or even kissed her. But I believed we were joined together now, and that I needed to make preparations for a life altogether different. Vagabonding and rebellion could not be part of that life—they are fit for men, but men who try to bring their women and children along on that life are bastards plain and simple. If you spent any time on the road with Jack, you will take my meaning.

So my Vagabond-passion for this rebel girl made me turn against the rebellion finally. I could flirt with one or the other but not with both; and flirting with Abigail was more rewarding.

Now came word that the militia—my old regiment of local commoners—was being called up to perform its stated function, namely, to put down the rebellion. I deserted my rebel regiment, crept out of Taunton, and went to the mustering-place. Some of the men were ready to throw in their lot with Monmouth, some were loyal to the King, and most were too scared and amazed to do anything. I rallied a company of loyal men, little better than stragglers, and marched them to Chard, where John Churchill had at last arrived and set up an encampment.

This is as good a time as any to mention that while sneaking through the rebel lines at Taunton I had been noticed—not by the sentry, a dozing farmhand, but by his dog. The dog had come after me and seized me by the leg of my breeches and held me long enough for the farmer to come after me with a pitchfork. As you can see, I had let things get out of hand. It was because I have a fatuous liking for dogs, and always have, ever since I was a mudlark boy and Persons of Quality would call me a dog. I had removed the sickle from the end of my stick and left it in Taunton, but the stick I still had, so I raised it up and brought the butt down smartly between the dog’s brown eyes, which I remember clearly glaring up at me. But it was a dog of terrier-kind and would on no account loosen its bite. The farmer thrust at me with his pitchfork. I spun away. One tine of the fork got under the skin of my back and tunneled underneath for about a hand’s breadth and then erupted somewhere else. I made a backhand swing of my stick and caught him across the bridge of the nose. He let go the pitchfork and put his hands to his face. I pulled the iron out of my flesh, raised it up above the dog, and told the farmer that if he would only call the damned creature off I would not have to spill any blood here, other than my own.

He saw the wisdom of this. But now he had recognized me. “Shaftoe!” he said, “have you lost your nerve so soon?” I recognized him now as a fellow I had passed time with while we waited in the queue in Lyme Regis to enlist in Monmouth’s army.

I am accustomed to the regular and predictable evolutions of the march, the drill, and the siege. Yet now within a few days of my conceiving a boyish infatuation with Abigail Frome, I had worked my way round to one of those farcical muddles you see in the fourth act of a comedy. I was forsaking the rebellion in order to forge a new life with a rebel lass, who had fallen in love, not with me, but with my brother, who was dead. I who have slain quite a few men had been caught and recognized because I would not hurt a mongrel. And I who was—if I may say so—doing something that demanded a whiff of courage or so, and that demonstrated my loyalty, would now be denounced as a coward and traitor, and Abigail would consider me in those terms forever.

A civilian—by your leave—would have been baffled, amazed. My soldier’s mind recognized this immediately as a screw-up, a cluster-fuck, a Situation Normal. This sort of thing happens to us all the time, and generally has worse consequences than a pretty girl deciding that she despises you. Fermented beverages and black humor are how we cope. I extricated myself without further violence. But by the time I made my way into the camp of John Churchill, the pitchfork-wound on my back had suppurated, and had to be opened up and aired out by a barber. I could not see it myself, but all who gazed upon it were taken a-back. Really ‘twas a shallow wound, and it healed quickly once I became strong enough to fend off the barber. But that I had staggered into the camp bleeding and feverish at the head of a column of loyal militia troops was made into something bigger than it really was. John Churchill heaped praise and honor upon me, and gave me a purse of money. When I related the entire tale to him, he laughed and mused, “I am doubly indebted to your brother now—he has furnished me with an excellent horse and a vital piece of intelligence.”

Jack tells me you are literate and so I will let you read about the details of the fighting in a history-book. There are a few particulars I will mention because I doubt that historians will consider them meet to be set down in print.

The King declined to trust John Churchill, for the reasons I stated earlier. Supreme command was given to Feversham, who despite his name is a Frenchman. Years ago Feversham undertook to blow up some houses with gunpowder, supposedly to stop a fire from spreading, but really, I suspect, because he was possessed of that urge, common to all men, to blow things up for its own sake. Moments after he satisfied that urge, he was brained by a piece of flying debris, and left senseless. His brain swelled up. To make room for it, the chirurgeons cut a hole in his skull. You can imagine the details for yourself—suffice it to say that the man is a living and breathing advertisement for the Guild of Wigmakers. King James II favors him, which, if you knew nothing else about His Majesty, would give you knowledge sufficient to form an opinion about his reign.

It was this Feversham who had been placed in command of the expedition to put down the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, and he who received credit for its success, but it was John Churchill who won the battles, and my regiment, as always, that did the fighting. The Duke of Grafton came out at the head of some cavalry and did battle with Monmouth at one point. The engagement was not all that important, but I mention it to add some color to the story, for Grafton is one of Charles II’s bastards, just like Monmouth himself!

The campaign was made exciting only by Feversham’s narcolepsy. That, combined with his inability to come to grips with matters even when he was awake, made it seem for a day or two as if Monmouth had a chance. I spent most of the time lying on my stomach recovering from the pitchfork-wound. And I count myself fortunate in that, because I had, and have, no love for the King, and I liked those rustic Nonconformists with their sickles and blunderbusses.

In the end Monmouth deserted those men even as they were fighting and dying for him. We found him cowering in a ditch. He was shipped off to the Tower of London and died groveling.

The farmers and tradesmen of Lyme Regis and Taunton who had made up Monmouth’s army were Englishmen through and through, which is to say not only were they level-headed decent sensible moderate folk, but they could not conceive of, and did not know about, any other way of being. It simply did not occur to them that Monmouth would abandon them and try to flee the island. But it had occurred to me, because I had spent years fighting on the Continent.

Likewise they never imagined the repression that followed. Living in that open green countryside or settled in their sleepy market-towns, they had no understanding of the feverish minds of the Londoners. If you go to a lot of plays, as Jack and I used to do, you notice, soon enough, that the playwrights only have so many stories to go around. So they use them over and over. Oftimes when you sneak into a play that has just opened, the characters and situations will seem oddly familiar, and by the time the first scene has played out, you will recall that you’ve already seen this one several times before—except that it was in Tuscany instead of Flanders, and the schoolmaster was a parson, and the senile colonel was a daft admiral. In like manner, the high and mighty of England have the story of Cromwell stuck in their heads, and whenever anything the least bit upsetting happens—especially if it’s in the country, and involves Nonconformists—they decide, in an instant, that it’s the Civil War all over again. All they want is to figure out which one is playing the role of Cromwell, and put his head on a stick. The rest must be put down. And so it will continue until the men who run England come up with a new story.

Worse, Feversham was a French nobleman to whom peasants (as he construed these people) were faggots to be stuffed into the fireplace. By the time he was finished, every tree in Dorset had dead yeomen, wheelwrights, coopers, and miners hanging from its branches.

Churchill wanted no part of this. He got himself back to London as directly as possible, along with his regiments—myself included. Feversham had not been slow to spread tales of the glorious fight. He had already made himself into a hero, and every other part of the tale was likewise made into something much grander than it really was. The ditch in which we captured Monmouth was swollen, by the tale-tellers, into a raging freshet called the Black Torrent. The King was so taken with this part of the story that he has given my regiment a new name: we are now, and forever, the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards.

Now at last I can speak to you of slavery, which according to Jack is a practice on which you harbor strong opinions.

The Lord Chief Justice is a fellow name of Jeffreys, who was reputed for cruelty and bloody-mindedness even in the best of times. He has spent his life currying favor with the Cavaliers, the Catholics, and the Frenchified court, and when King James II came to the throne Jeffreys got his reward and became the highest judge of England. Monmouth’s rebellion brought a whiff of blood on the west wind, and Jeffreys followed it like a slavering hound and established a Court of Assizes in that part of the country. He has executed no fewer than four hundred persons—that is, four hundred in addition to those slain in battle or strung up by Feversham. In some parts of the Continent, four hundred executions would go nearly unnoticed, but in Dorset it is reckoned a high figure.

As you can see, Jeffreys has been ingenious in finding grounds for putting men to death. But there are many cases where not even he could justify capital punishment, and so instead the defendants were sentenced to slavery. It says something about his mind that he considers slavery a lighter punishment than death! Jeffreys has sold twelve hundred ordinary West Country Protestants into chattel slavery in the Caribbean. They are on their way to Barbados even now, where they and their descendants will chop sugar cane forever among neegers and Irishmen, with no hope of ever knowing freedom.

The girl I love, Abigail Frome, has been made a slave. All the schoolgirls of Taunton have been. For the most part these girls have not been sold to sugar plantations; they would never survive the voyage. Instead they have been parceled out to various courtiers in London. Lord Jeffreys gives ‘em away like oysters in a pub. Their families in Taunton then have no choice but to buy them back, at whatever price their owners demand.

Abigail is now the property of an old college chum of Lord Jeffreys: Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor. Her father has been hanged and her mother died years ago; of her cousins, aunts, and uncles, many have been sent to Barbados, and the ones who remain do not have the money to buy Abigail back. Upnor has amassed heavy gambling debts, which drove his own father to bankruptcy and forced him to sell his house years ago; now Upnor hopes to repay some of those debts by selling Abigail.

It goes without saying that I want to kill Upnor. One day, God willing, I shall. But this would not help Abigail—she’d only be inherited by Upnor’s heirs. Only money will buy her freedom. I think that you are skilled where money is concerned. I ask you now to buy Abigail. In return, I give you myself. I know you hate slavery and do not want a slave, but if you do this for me I will be your slave in all but name.

AS BOB SHAFTOE HAD TOLD his story, he had led Eliza through a maze of paths through the lee woods, which he appeared to know quite well. Before long they had reached the edge of a canal that ran from the city out to the shore at Scheveningen. This canal was not lined with sharp edges of stone, as in the city, but was soft and sloping at the edges, and in some places lined with rushes. Cows stood chewing on these, and watched Bob and Eliza walk by, interrupting him from time to time with their weird, pointless lamentations. As they had drawn closer to the Hague, Bob had begun to show uncertainty at certain canal-intersections, and Eliza had stepped into the lead. The scenery did not change very much, except that houses and small feeder canals become more frequent. Woods appeared to their left side, and continued for some distance. The Hague sneaked up on them. For it was not a fortified city, and at no point did they pass through anything like a wall or gate. But suddenly Eliza turned to the right on the bank of another canal—a proper stone-edged one—and Bob realized that they had penetrated into something that could be called a neighborhood. And not just any neighborhood, but the Hofgebied. Another few minutes’ walk would take them to the very foundations of the Binnenhof.

In the woods by the sea, it might have been foolhardy for Eliza to speak frankly; but here she could summon the St. George Guild from their clubhouse with a shout. “Your willingness to repay me is of no account,” she told Bob.

This was a cold answer, but it was a cold day, and William of Orange had treated her coldly, and Bob Shaftoe had knocked her off her horse. Now Bob looked dismayed. He was not accustomed to being beholden to anyone save his master, John Churchill, and now he was in the power of two girls not yet twenty: Abigail, who owned his heart, and Eliza, who (or so he imagined) had it in her power to own Abigail. A man more accustomed to helplessness would have put up more of a struggle. But Bob Shaftoe had gone limp, like the Janissaries before Vienna when it had come clear to them that their Turkish masters were all dead. All he could do was look with watery eyes at Eliza and shake his head amazed. She kept walking. He had no choice but to follow.

“I was taken a slave just like your Abigail,” Eliza said. “ ‘Twas as if Mummy and I’d been plucked off the beach by a rogue wave and swallowed by the Deep. No man came forward to ransom me. Does that mean it was just that I was so taken?”

“Now you’re talking nonsense. I don’t—”

“If ‘tis evil for Abigail to be a slave—as I believe—then your offer of service to me is neither here nor there. If she should be free, all the others should be as well. That you’re willing to do me a favor or two should not advance her to the head of the queue.”

“I see, now you’re making it into a grand moral question. I am a soldier and we have good reasons to be suspicious of those.”

They had entered into a broad square on the east side of the Binnenhof, called the Plein. Bob was looking about alertly. A stone’s throw from here was a guard-house that served as a gaol; he might have been wondering whether Eliza was trying to lead him straight into it.

But instead she stopped in front of a house: a large place, grand after the Barock style, but a little odd in its decorations. For atop the chimneys, where one would normally expect to see crosses or statues of Greek gods, there were armillary spheres, weathercocks, and swivel-mounted telescopes. Eliza fished in the folds of her waistband, nudged the stiletto out of the way, found the key.

“What’s this, a convent?”

“Don’t be absurd, do I look like some French mademoiselle who stays at such places?”

“A rooming-house?”

“It is the house of a friend. A friend of a friend, really.”

Eliza swung the key round on the end of the red ribbon to which she had tied it. “Come in,” she finally said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Come inside this house with me that we may continue our conversation.”

“The neighbors—”

“Nothing that could happen here could possibly faze this gentleman’s neighbors.”

“What of the gentleman himself?”

“He is asleep,” Eliza said, unlocking the front door. “Be quiet.”

“Asleep, at noon?”

“He stirs at night—to make observations of the stars,” Eliza said, glancing upwards. Mounted to the roof of the house, four stories above their heads, was a wooden platform with a tubular device projecting over the edge—too frail to shoot cannonballs.

The first floor’s main room might have been grand, for its generous windows looked out over the Plein and the Binnenhof. But it was cluttered with the debris of lens- and mirror-grinding—always messy, sometimes dangerous—and with thousands of books. Though Bob would not know this, these were not only about Natural Philosophy but history and literature as well, and nearly all of them were in French or Latin.

To Bob these artifacts were only moderately strange, and he learned to overlook them after a few moments’ nervous glancing around the room. What really paralyzed him was the omnipresent noise—not because it was loud, but because it wasn’t. The room contained at least two dozen clocks, or sub-assemblies of clocks, driven by weights or springs whose altitude or tension stored enough energy, summed, to raise a barn. That power was restrained and disciplined by toothy mechanisms of various designs: brass insects creeping implacably around the rims of barbed wheels, constellations of metal stars hung on dark stolid axle-trees, all marching or dancing to the beat of swinging plumb-bobs.

Now a man in Bob Shaftoe’s trade owed his longevity, in part, to his alertness—his sensitivity to (among other things) significant noises. Even the dimmest recruits could be relied on to notice the loud noises. A senior man like Bob was supposed to scrutinize the faint ones. Eliza got the impression that Bob was the sort of bloke who was forever shushing every man in the room, demanding absolute stillness so that he could hold his breath and make out whether that faint sporadic itching was a mouse in the cupboard, or enemy miners tunnelling under the fortifications. Whether that distant rhythm was a cobbler next door or an infantry regiment marching into position outside of town.

Every gear and bearing in this room was making the sort of sound that normally made Bob Shaftoe freeze like a startled animal. Even after he’d gotten it through his head that they were all clocks, or studies for clocks, he was hushed and intimidated by a sense of being surrounded by patient mechanical life. He stood at attention in the middle of the big room, hands in his pockets, blowing steam from his mouth and darting his eyes to and fro. These clocks were made to tell time precisely and nothing else. There were no bells, no chimes, and certainly no cuckoos. If Bob was waiting for such entertainments, he’d wait until he was a dusty skeleton surrounded by cobweb-clogged gears.

Eliza noted that he had shaved before going out on this morning’s strange errand, something that would never have entered Jack’s mind, and she wondered how it all worked—what train of thoughts made a man say, “I had better scrape my face with a blade before undertaking this one.” Perhaps it was some sort of a symbolic love-offering to his Abigail.

“It is all a question of pride, isn’t it?” Eliza said, stuffing a cube of peat into the iron stove. “Or honor, as you’d probably style it.”

Bob looked at her instead of answering; or maybe his look was his answer.

“Come on, you don’t have to be that quiet,” she said, setting a kettle on the stove to heat.

“What Jack and I have in common is an aversion to begging,” he said finally.

“Just as I thought. So, rather than beg Abigail’s ransom from me, you are proposing a sort of financial transaction—a loan, to be paid back in service.”

“I don’t know the words, the terms. Something like that is what I had in mind.”

“Then why me? You’re in the Dutch Republic. This is the financial capital of the world. You don’t need to seek out one particular lender. You could propose this deal to anyone.”

Bob had clutched a double handful of his cloak and was wringing it slowly. “The confusions of the financial markets are bewildering to me—I prefer not to treat with strangers…”

“What am I to you if not a stranger?” Eliza asked, laughing. “I am worse than a stranger, I threw a spear at your brother.”

“Yes, and that is what makes you not a stranger to me, it is how I know you.”

“It is proof that I hate slavery, you mean?”

“Proof of that and of other personal qualities—qualities that enter into this matter.”

“I am no Person of Quality, or of qualities—do not speak to me of that. It is proof only that my hatred of slavery makes me do irrational things—which is what you are asking me to do now.”

Bob lost his grip on his cloak-wad and sat down unsteadily on a stack of books.

Eliza continued, “She threw a harpoon at my brother—she’ll throw some money at me—is that how it goes?”

Bob Shaftoe put his hands over his face and began to cry, so quietly that any sounds he made were drowned out by the whirring and ticking of the clocks.

Eliza retreated into the kitchen, and went back to a cool corner where some sausage-casings had been rolled up on a stick. She unrolled six inches—on second thought, twelve—and cut it off. Then she tied a knot in one end. She fit the little sock of sheep-gut over the handle of a meat-axe that was projecting firmly into the air above a chopping-block, then, with her fingertips, coaxed the open end of it to begin rolling up the handle. Once it was started, with a quick movement of her hand she rolled the whole length up to make a translucent torus with the knotted end stretched across the middle like a drum-head. Gathering her skirts up one leg, she tucked the object into the hem of her stocking, which came up to about mid-thigh, and finally went back into the great room where Bob Shaftoe was weeping.

There was not much point in subtlety, and so she forced her way in between his thighs and stuffed her bosom into his face.

After a few moment’s hesitation he took his hands away from between his wet cheeks and her breasts. His face felt cold for a moment, but only a moment. Then she felt his hands locking together behind the small of her back, where her bodice was joined to her skirt.

He held her for a moment, not weeping anymore, but thinking. Eliza found that a bit tedious and so she left off stroking his hair and began going to work on his ears in a way he would not tolerate for long. Then, finally, Bob knew what to do. She could see that for Bob, knowing what to do was always the hard part, and the doing was easy. All those years Vagabonding with Jack, Bob had been the older and wiser brother preaching sternly into Jack’s one ear while the Imp of the Perverse whispered into the other, and it had made him a stolid and deliberate sort. But having made up his mind, he was a launched cannonball. Eliza wondered what the two of them had been like, partnered together, and pitied the world for not allowing it.

Bob cinched an arm around the narrowest part of her waist and hoisted her into the air with a thrust of rather good thigh-muscles. Her head grazed a dusty ceiling-beam and she ducked and hugged his head. He yanked a blanket from a couch; the books that had been scattered all over the blanket ended up differently scattered on the couch. Carrying Eliza and dragging the blanket, he trudged in a mighty floorboard-popping cadence to an elliptical dining-table scattered with the remains of a scholarly dinner: apple-peels and gouda-rinds. Making a slow orbit of this he flipped the corners of the tablecloth into the center. Gathering them together turned the tablecloth into a bag of scraps, which he let down gently onto the floor. Then he broadcast the blanket onto the table, slapped it once with his palm to stop it from skimming right off, and rolled Eliza’s body out into the middle of the woolly oval.

Standing above her, he’d already begun fumbling with his breeches, which she deemed premature—so bringing a knee up smartly between his thighs and pulling down on a grabbed handful of his hair, she obliged him to get on top of her. They lay there for a while with thighs interlocked, like fingers of two hands clutching each other, and Eliza felt him get ready as she was getting ready. But long after that they ground away at each other, as if Bob could somehow force his way through all those layers of masculine and feminine clothing. They did this because it felt good, and they were together in a cold echoing house in the Hague and had no other demands on their time. Eliza learned that Bob was not a man who felt good very often and that it took him a long time to relax. His whole body was stiff at first, and it took a long time for that stiffness to drain out of his limbs and his neck, and concentrate in one particular Member, and for him to agree that this did not all have to happen in an instant. At the beginning his face was planted between her breasts, and his feet were square on the floor, but inch by inch she coaxed him upwards. At first he showed a fighting man’s reluctance to sever his connection with the ground, but in time she made it understood that additional delights were to be found toward the head of the table, and so he kicked his boots off and got his knees, and eventually his toes, up on the tabletop.

For a long time then they were face-to-face, which Eliza thought was as pleasant as this was likely to get. But after a while she got Bob to raise his chin and entrust her with his throat. While she was exploring that terrain she was undoing the top few buttons of his shirt, pulling it down off his shoulders as she did so, pinning his arms to his sides and exposing his nipples.

She locked her right knee behind his left, then shoved her tongue through a protective nest of hair, found his right nipple, and carefully nipped it. He twisted up and away from her. Pulling down hard on his trapped knee she drew her left leg up, planted her foot on the raised blade of his pelvis, and shoved. Bob rolled over onto his back. She came up from under him and wound up sitting on his thighs. A hard yank down on his breeches freed his erect penis while binding his thighs together. She pulled the knotted sheepgut from her stocking, stripped it down over him, straddled him, and sat down hard. He was distracted with pretending to be angry, and the sudden pleasure ambushed him. The sudden pain astonished her, for this was the first time a man had ever been inside Eliza. She let out an angry yell and tears spurted from her eyes; she shoved clenched fists into her eye-sockets and tried to control her leg-muscles, which were convulsively trying to climb up and off of him. She felt that he was rocking her up and down, which made her angry, but her knees were grinding steadily into the hard wood of the table, and so the sensation of movement must arise from light-headedness: a swoon that needed to be fought off.

She did not want him looking up at her like this and so she fell forward and struck the table to either side of his head with the flats of both palms, then bowed her head so that her hair fell down in a curtain, hiding her face, and everything below his chest, from Bob’s view. Not that he was doing a lot of sightseeing; he had apparently decided that there were worse situations he could be in.

She moved up and down on him for a while, very slowly, partly because she was in pain and partly because she did not know how close he might be to reaching his climax—all men were different, a particular man would be different according to the time of day, and the only way to judge it was by the rhythm of his breathing (which she could hear) and the slackness of his face (which she could monitor through a narrow embrasure between dangling locks of hair). By those measures, she was nowhere near finished, and a lengthy and painful grind awaited her. But finally he came complete, in a long ordeal of back-arching and head-thumping.

He took the first breath, the one that meant he was finished, and opened his eyes. She was staring directly back at him.

“I hurt like hell,” she announced. “I have inflicted this on myself as a demonstration.”

“Of what?” he asked, bewildered, stuporous, but pleased with himself.

“To show you what I think of honor, as you style it. Where was Abigail just now?”

Bob Shaftoe now tried to become angry, without much success. An Englishman of higher class would have huffed “Now see here!” but Bob set his jaw and tried to sit up. He had more success in that—at first—because Eliza was not a large girl. But then from behind the dazzling hair curtain came a hand, and the hand was holding a small Turkish dagger—very nice, a wriggling blade of watered steel—which closed on his left eyeball and obliged him to lie flat again.

“The demonstration is very important,” Eliza said—or growled, rather, for she really was very uncomfortable. “You come with high talk of honor and expect me to swoon and buy Abigail back for you. I have heard many men speak of honor while ladies are in the room, and then seen them abandon all thought of it when the lusts and terrors of the body overcame their noble pretensions. Like cavaliers throwing down their polished armor and bright battle-flags to flee a charging Vagabond-host. You are no worse—but no better. I will not help you because I am touched by your love for Abigail or stirred by your prating about honor. I will help you because I wish to be somewhat more than another wave spreading and spending itself on a godforsaken beach. Monsieur Mansart may build kingly châteaux to prove that he once existed, and you may marry your Abigail and raise up a clan of Shaftoes. But if I am to make a mark on this world, it will have something to do with slavery. I will help you only insofar as it serves that end. And buying the freedom of one maiden does not serve it. But Abigail may be of use to me in other ways…I shall have to think on it. While I think, she’ll be a slave to this Upnor. If she remembers you at all, it will be as a turncoat and a coward. You will be a miserable wretch. In the fullness of melancholy time, perhaps you’ll come to see the wisdom of my position.”

Now the conversation—if it could be called that—was interrupted by a mighty throat-clearing from the opposite end of the room, gallons of air shifting dollops of phlegm out of the main channel. “Speaking of Positions,” said a husky Dutch voice, “would you and your gentleman friend please find a different one? For since you’ve made sleep quite impossible I should like to eat.”

“With pleasure, meinheer, I would, but your lodger has a poniard at my eye,” said Bob.

“You are much cooler in dealing with men than with women,” Eliza observed, sotto voce.

“A woman such as you has never seen a man in a cool condition, unless you were spying on him through a knot-hole,” Bob returned.

More throat-clearing from the owner: a hearty, grizzled man in his middle fifties, with all that that implied in the way of eyebrows. He had hoisted one of them like a furry banner and was peering out from under it at Eliza; typically for an astronomer who did his best seeing through a single eye. “The Doctor warned me to expect odd callers…but not business transactions.”

“Some would call me a whore, and some shall,” Eliza admitted, giving Bob a sharp look, “but in this case you are assuming too much, Monsieur Huygens. The transaction we are discussing is not related to the act we have performed…”

“Then why do both at the same time? Are you in such a hurry? Is this how it is done in Amsterdam?”

“I am trying to clear this fellow’s mind so that he can think straighter,” said Eliza, straightening up herself as she said it, for her back was getting tired and her bodice was griping her stomach.

Bob knocked her dagger-hand aside and sat up violently, throwing her into a backward somersault. She’d have landed on her head except that he caught her upper arms in his hands and spun her over—or something rather complicated and dangerous—all she knew was that, when it was over, she was dizzy, and her heart had skipped a few beats, her hair was in her face and her dagger-hand was empty. Bob was behind her, using her as a screen while he pulled his breeches up with one hand. His other hand had a grip on her laces, which he was exploiting as a sort of bridle. “You should never have straightened your arm,” he explained quietly, “It tells the opponent that you are unable to make a thrust.”

Eliza thanked him for the fencing-lesson by pirouetting in a direction calculated to bend his fingers backwards. He cursed, let go of her laces, and yanked his breeches up finally.

“Mr. Huygens, Bob Shaftoe of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Bob, meet Christiaan Huygens, the world’s foremost Natural Philosopher.”

“Hooke would bite you for saying so…Leibniz is brighter than I…Newton, though confused, is said to be talented. So let us say only that I am the foremost Natural Philosopher in thisroom,” Huygens said, taking a quick census of the occupants: himself, Bob, Eliza, and a skeleton hanging in the corner.

Bob had not noticed the skeleton before, and its sudden inclusion in the conversation made him uneasy. “I beg your pardon, sir, ‘twas disgraceful—”

“Oh, stop!” Eliza hissed, “he is a Philosopher, he cares not.”

“Descartes used to come up here when I was a young man, and sit at that very table, and drink too much and discourse of the Mind-Body Problem,” Huygens mused.

“Problem? What’s the problem? I don’t see any problem,” Bob muttered parenthetically, until Eliza crowded back against him and planted a heel on his instep.

“So Eliza’s attempt to clarify your mental processes by purging you of imbalancing humours could not have been carried out in a more appropriate location,” Huygens continued.

“Speaking of humours, what am I to do with this?” Bob muttered, dangling a narrow bulging sac from one finger.

“Put it in a box and post it to Upnor as a down payment,” Eliza said.

The sun had broken through as they spoke, and golden light suddenly shone into the room from off the Plein. It was a sight to gladden most any Dutch heart; but Huygens reacted to it strangely, as if he had been put in mind of some tiresome obligation. He conducted a poll of his clocks and watches. “I have a quarter of an hour in which to break my fast,” he remarked, “and then Eliza and I have work to do on the roof. You are welcome to stay, Sergeant Shaftoe, though—”

“You have already been more than hospitable enough,” Bob said.

HUYGENS’S WORK CONSISTED OF STANDING very still on his roof as the clock-towers of the Hague bonged noon all around him, and squinting into an Instrument. Eliza was told to stay out of his way, and jot down notes in a waste-book, and hand him small necessaries from time to time.

“You wish to know where the sun is at noon—?” “You have it precisely backwards. Noon is when the sun is in a particular place. Noon has no meaning otherwise.” “So, you wish to know when noon is.”

“It is now!” Huygens said, and glanced quickly at his watch. “Then all of the clocks in the Hague are wrong.” “Yes, including all of mine. Even a well-made clock drifts, and must be re-set from time to time. I do it here whenever the sun shines. Flamsteed will be doing it in a few minutes on top of a hill in Greenwich.”

“It is unfortunate that a person may not be calibrated so easily,” Eliza said.

Huygens looked at her, no less intensely than he had been peering at his instrument a moment earlier. “Obviously you have some specific person in mind,” he said. “Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.”

“Obviously you have someone in mind, Monsieur Huygens,” Eliza said, “and I fear it is I.”

“You were referred to me by Leibniz,” Huygens said. “A shrewd judge of intellects. Perhaps a bit less shrewd about character, for he always wants to think the best of everyone. I made some inquiries around the Hague. I was assured by persons of the very best quality that you would not be a political liability. From this I presumed that you would know how to behave.”

Suddenly feeling very high and exposed, she took a step back, and reached out with a hand to steady herself against a heavy telescope-tripod. “I am sorry,” she said. “It was stupid, what I did down there. I know it was, for I do know how to behave. Yet I was not always a courtier. I came to this place in my life by a roundabout path, which shaped me in ways that are not always comely. Perhaps I should be ashamed. But I am more inclined to be defiant.”

“I understand you better than you suppose,” Huygens said. “I was raised and groomed to be a diplomat. But when I was thirteen years old, I built myself a lathe.”

“Pardon me, a what?”

“A lathe. Down below, in this very house. Imagine my parents’ consternation. They had taught me Latin, Greek, French, and other languages. They had taught me the lute, the viol, and the harpsichord. Of literature and history I had learned everything that was in their power to teach me. Mathematics and philosophy I learned from Descartes himself. But I built myself a lathe. Later I taught myself how to grind lenses. My parents feared that they had spawned a tradesman.”

“No one is more pleased than I that matters turned out so well for you,” Eliza said, “but I am too thick to understand how your story is applicable to my case.”

“It is all right for a clock to run fast or slow at times, so long as it is calibrated against the sun, and set right. The sun may come out only once in a fortnight. It is enough. A few minutes’ light around noon is all that you need to discover the error, and re-set the clock—provided that you bother to go up and make the observation. My parents somehow knew this, and did not become overly concerned at my strange enthusiasms. For they had confidence that they had taught me how to know when I was running awry, and to calibrate my behavior.”

“Now I think I understand,” Eliza said. “It remains only to apply this principle to me, I suppose.”

“If I come down in the morning to find you copulating on my table with a foreign deserter, as if you were some sort of Vagabond,” Huygens said, “I am annoyed. I admit it. But that is not as important as what you do next. If you posture defiantly, it tells me that you have not learned the skill of recognizing when you are running awry, and correcting yourself. And you must leave my house in that case, for such people only go further and further astray until they find destruction. But if you take this opportunity to consider where you have gone wrong, and to adjust your course, it tells me that you shall do well enough in the end.”

“It is good counsel and I thank you for it,” Eliza said. “In principle. But in practice I do not know what to make of this Bob.”

“There is something that you must settle with him, or so it would appear to me,” Huygens said.

“There is something that I must settle with the world.”

“Then by all means apply yourself to it. Then you are welcome to stay. But from now on please go to your bedchamber if you want to roger someone.”

The Exchange [Between Threadneedle and Cornhill]

SEPTEMBER 1686

I find that men (as high as trees) will write

Dialogue-wise; yet no man doth them slight

For writing so; indeed if they abuse

Truth, cursed be they, and the craft they use

To that intent; but yet let truth be free

To make her sallies upon thee, and me,

Which way it pleases God.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

DANIEL WATERHOUSE, a Puritan.

SIR RICHARD APTHORP, a former Goldsmith, proprietor of Apthorp’s Bank.

A DUTCHMAN.

A JEW.

ROGER COMSTOCK, Marquis of Ravenscar, a courtier. JACK KETCH, chief Executioner of England.

A HERALD.

A BAILIFF.

EDMUND PALLING, an old man.

TRADERS.

APTHORP’S MINIONS.

APTHORP’S HANGERS-ON AND FAVOR-SEEKERS.

JACK KETCH’S ASSISTANTS. SOLDIERS.

MUSICIANS.

Scene: A court hemmed in by colonnades. Discover DANIEL WATERHOUSE, seated on a Chair amid scuffling and shouting TRADERS. Enter SIR RICHARD APTHORP, with Minions, Hangers-on, and Favor-seekers.

APTHORP: It couldn’t be—Dr. Daniel Waterhouse!

WATERHOUSE: Well met, Sir Richard!

APTHORP: Sitting in a chair, no less!

WATERHOUSE: The day is long, Sir Richard, my legs are tired.

APTHORP: It helps if you keep moving—which is the whole point of the ‘Change, by the by. This is the Temple of Mercury—not of Saturn!

WATERHOUSE: Did you think I was beingSaturnine? Saturn is Cronos, the God of Time. For your truly Saturnine character you had better look to Mr. Hooke, world’s foremost clockmaker…

Enter Dutchman.

DUTCHMAN: Sir! Our Mr. Huygens taught your Mr. Hooke everything he knows!

Exits.

WATERHOUSE: Different countries revere the same gods under different names. The Greeks had Cronos, the Romans Saturn. The Dutch have Huygens and we have Hooke.

APTHORP: If you are not Saturn, what are you, then, to bide in a chair, so gloomy and pensive, in the middle of the ‘Change? WATERHOUSE: I am he who was born to be his family’s designated participant in the Apocalypse; who was named after the strangest book in the Bible; who rode Pestilence out of London and Fire into it. I escorted Drake Waterhouse and King Charles from this world, and I put Cromwell’s head back into its grave with these two hands.

APTHORP: My word! Sir!

WATERHOUSE: Of late I have been observed lurking round Whitehall, dressed in black, affrighting the courtiers.

APTHORP: What brings Lord Pluto to the Temple of Mercury?

Enter Jew.

JEW: By’re leave, by’re leave, Señor—pray—where stands the tablero?

Wanders off.

APTHORP: He sees that you have a Chair, and hopes you know where is the Table.

WATERHOUSE: That would be mesa. Perhaps he means banca, desk…

APTHORP: Every other man in this ‘Change, who is seated upon a chair, is in front of such a banca. He wants to know where yours has got to!

WATERHOUSE: I meant that perhaps he is looking for the bank.

APTHORP: You mean, me?

WATERHOUSE: That is the new title you have given your goldsmith’s shop now, is it not? A bank?

APTHORP: Why, yes; but why doesn’t he just ask for me then?

WATERHOUSE: Señor! A moment, I beg you!

Jew returns with a paper.

JEW: Like this, like this!

APTHORP: What is he holding up there, I do not have my spectacles.

WATERHOUSE: He has drawn what a Natural Philosopher would identify as a Cartesian coordinate plane, and what you would style a ledger, and scrawled words in one column, and numerals in the next.

APTHORP: Tablero—he means the board where the prices of something are billed. Commodities, most likely.

JEW: Commodities, yes!

WATERHOUSE: ‘Sblood, it’s right over there in the corner, is the man blind?

APTHORP: Rabbi, do not take offense at my friend’s irritable tone, for he is the Lord of the Underworld, and known for his moods. Here in Mercury’s temple all is movement, flux—which is why we name it the ‘Change. Knowledge and intelligence flow like the running waters spoken of in the Psalms. But you have made the mistake of asking Pluto, the God of Secrets. Why is Pluto here? ‘Tis something of a mystery—I myself was startled to see him just now, and supposed I was looking at a ghost.

WATERHOUSE: The tablero is over yonder.

JEW: That is all!?

APTHORP: You have come from Amsterdam?

JEW: Yes.

APTHORP: How many commodities are billed on the tablero in Amsterdam now?

JEW: This number…

Writes.

APTHORP: Daniel, what has he written there?

WATERHOUSE: Five hundred and fifty.

APTHORP: God save England, the Dutchmen have a tablero with near six hundred commodities, and we’ve a plank with a few dozen.

WATERHOUSE: No wonder he did not recognize it.

Exit Jew in the direction of said Plank, rolling his eyes and scoffing.

APTHORP (TO MINION): Follow that Kohan and learn what he is on about—he knows something.

Exit Minion.

WATERHOUSE: Now who is the God of Secrets?

APTHORP: You are, for you still have not told me why you are here.

WATERHOUSE: As Lord of the Underworld, I customarily sit enthroned in the Well of Souls, where departed spirits whirl about me like so many dry leaves. Arising this morning at my lodgings in Gresham’s College and strolling down Bishopsgate, I chanced to look in ‘tween the columns of the ‘Change here. It was deserted. But a wind-vortex was picking up all the little scraps of paper dropped by traders yesterday and making ‘em orbit round past all of the bancas like so many dry leaves…I became confused, thinking I had reached Hell, and took my accustomed seat.

APTHORP: Your discourse is annoying.

Enter Marquis of Ravenscar, magnificently attired.

RAVENSCAR: “The hypothesis of vortices is pressed with many difficulties!”

WATERHOUSE: God save the King, m’lord.

APTHORP: God save the King—and damn all riddlers—m’lord.

WATERHOUSE: ‘Twere redundant to damn Pluto.

RAVENSCAR: He’s damning me, Daniel, for prating about vortices.

APTHORP: The mystery is resolved. For now I perceive that the two of you have arranged to meet here. And since you are speaking of vortices, m’lord, I ween it has to do with Natural Philosophy.

RAVENSCAR: I beg leave to disagree, Sir Richard. For ‘twas this fellow in the chair who chose the place of our meeting. Normally we meet in the Golden Grasshopper.

APTHORP: So the mystery endures. Why the ‘Change today, then, Daniel?

WATERHOUSE: You will see soon enough.

RAVENSCAR: Perhaps it is because we are going to exchange some documents. Voilà!

APTHORP: What is that you have whipped out of your pocket m’lord, I do not have my spectacles.

RAVENSCAR: The latest from Hanover. Dr. Leibniz has favored you, Daniel, with a personalized and autographed copy of the latest Acta Eruditorum. Lots of mathematickal incantations are in here, chopped up with great stretched-out S marks—extraordinary!

WATERHOUSE: Then the Doctor has finally dropped the other shoe, for that could only be the Integral Calculus.

RAVENSCAR: Too, some letters addressed to you personally, Daniel, which means they’ve only been read by a few dozen people so far.

WATERHOUSE: By your leave.

APTHORP: Good heavens, m’lord, if Mr. Waterhouse had snatched ‘em any quicker they’d’ve caught fire. One who dwells in the Underworld ought to be more cautious when handling Inflammable Objects.

WATERHOUSE: Here, m’lord, fresh from Cambridge, as promised, I give you Books I and II of Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton—have a care, some would consider it a valuable document.

APTHORP: My word, is that the cornerstone of a building, or a manuscript?

RAVENSCAR: Err! To judge by weight, it is the former.

APTHORP: Whatever it is, it is too long, too long!

WATERHOUSE: It explains the System of the World.

APTHORP: Some sharp editor needs to step in and take that wretch in hand!

RAVENSCAR: Will you just look at all of these damned illustrations…do you realize what this will cost, for all of the woodcuts?

WATERHOUSE: Think of each one of them as saving a thousand pages of tedious explanations full of great stretched-out S marks.

RAVENSCAR: None the less, the cost of printing this is going to bankrupt the Royal Society!

APTHORP: So that is why Mr. Waterhouse is seated at a chair, with no banca—it is a symbolic posture, meant to express the financial condition of the Royal Society. I very much fear that I am to be asked for money at this point. Say, can either one of you hear a word I am saying?

Silence.

APTHORP: Go ahead and read. I don’t mind being ignored. Are those documents terribly fascinating, then?

Silence.

APTHORP: Ah, like a salmon weaving a devious course up-torrent, slipping round boulders and leaping o’er logs, my assistant is making his way back to me.

Enter Minion.

MINION: You were right concerning the Jew, Sir Richard. He wants to purchase certain commodities in large amounts.

APTHORP: At this moment on a Board in Amsterdam, those commodities must be fetching a higher price than is scribbled on our humble English Plank. The Jew wants to buy low here, and sell high there. Pray tell, what sorts of commodities are in such high demand in Amsterdam?

MINION: He takes a particular interest in certain coarse, durable fabrics…

APTHORP: Sailcloth! Someone is building a navy!

MINION: He specifically does not want sailcloth, but cheaper stuff.

APTHORP: Tent cloth! Someone is building an army! Come, let us go and buy all the war-stuff we can find.

Exit Apthorp and entourage.

RAVENSCAR: So this is the thing Newton’s been working on?

WATERHOUSE: How could he have produced that without working on it?

RAVENSCAR: When I work on things, Daniel, they come out in disjoint parts, a lump at a time; this is a unitary whole, like the garment of Our Saviour, seamless…what is he going to do in Book III? Raise the dead and ascend into Heaven?

WATERHOUSE: He is going to solve the orbit of the moon, provided Flamsteed will part with the requisite data.

RAVENSCAR: If Flamsteed doesn’t, I’ll see to it he parts with his fingernails. God! Here’s a catchy bit: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction…if you press a stone with your finger, the finger is also pressed by the stone.” The perfection of this work is obvious even to me, Daniel! How must it look to you?

WATERHOUSE: If you are going down that road, then ask rather how it looks to Leibniz, for he is as far beyond me as I am beyond you; if Newton is the finger, Leibniz is the stone, and they press against each other with equal and opposite force, a little bit harder every day.

RAVENSCAR: But Leibniz has not read it, and you have, so there would be little point in asking him.

WATERHOUSE: I have taken the liberty of conveying the essentials to Leibniz, which explains why he is writing so many of these damned letters.

RAVENSCAR: But certainly Leibniz would not dare to challenge a work of such radiance!

WATERHOUSE: Leibniz is at the disadvantage of not having seen it. Or perhaps we should count this as an advantage, for anyone who sees it is dumbfounded by the brilliance of the geometry, and it is difficult to criticize a man’s work when you are down on your knees shielding your eyes.

RAVENSCAR: You believe that Leibniz has discovered an error in one of these proofs?

WATERHOUSE: No, proofs such as Newton’s cannot have errors.

RAVENSCAR: Cannot?

WATERHOUSE: As a man looks at an apple on a table and says, “There is an apple on the table,” you may look at these geometrical diagrams of Newton’s and say, “Newton speaks the truth.”

RAVENSCAR: Then I’ll convey a copy to the Doctor forthwith, so that he may join us on his knees.

WATERHOUSE: Don’t bother. Leibniz’s objection lies not in what Newton has done but in what he has not done.

RAVENSCAR: Perhaps we can get Newton to do it in Book III, then, and remove the objection! You have influence with him…

WATERHOUSE: The ability to annoy Isaac is not to be confused with influence.

RAVENSCAR: We will convey Leibniz’s objections to him directly, then.

WATERHOUSE: You do not grasp the nature of Leibniz’s objections. It is not that Newton left some corollary unproved, or failed to follow up on some promising line of inquiry. Turn back, even before the Laws of Motion, and read what Isaac says in his introduction. I can quote it from memory: “For I here design only to give a mathematical notion of these forces, without considering their physical causes and seats.”

RAVENSCAR: What is wrong with that?

WATERHOUSE: Some would argue that as Natural Philosophers we are supposed to consider their physical causes and seats! This morning, Roger, I sat in this empty courtyard, in the midst of a whirlwind. The whirlwind was invisible; how did I know ‘twas here? Because of the motion it conferred on innumerable scraps of paper, which orbited round me. Had I thought to bring along my instruments I could have taken observations and measured the velocities and plotted the trajectories of those scraps, and if I were as brilliant as Isaac I could have drawn all of those data together into a single unifying picture of the whirlwind. But if I were Leibniz I’d have done none of those things. Instead I’d have asked, Why is the whirlwind here?

ENTR’ACTE

Noises off: A grave Procession ascending Fish Street Hill, coming from the TOWER OF LONDON.

Traders exhibit startlement and dismay as the Procession marches into the Exchange, disrupting Commerce.

Enter first two platoons of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, armed with muskets, affixed to the muzzles whereof are long stabbing-weapons in the style recently adopted by the French Army, and nominated by them bayonets. Leveling these, the soldiers clear all traders from the center of the ‘Change, and compel them to form up in concentric ranks, like spectators gathered round an impromptu Punchinello-show at a fair.

Enter now trumpeters and drummers, followed by a HERALD bellowing legal gibberish.

As drummers beat a slow and dolorous cadence, enter JACK KETCH in a black hood. The assembled traders are silent as the dead.

Jack Ketch walks slowly into the center of the empty space and stands with arms folded.

Enter now a wagon drawn by a black horse and loaded with faggots and jars, flanked by the ASSISTANTS of Jack Ketch. Assistants pile the wood on the ground and then soak it with oil poured from the jars.

Enter now BAILIFF carrying a BOOK bound up in chains and padlocks.

JACK KETCH: In the name of the King, stop and identify yourself!

BAILIFF: John Bull, a bailiff.

JACK KETCH: State your business.

BAILIFF: It is the King’s business. I have here a prisoner to be bound over for execution.

JACK KETCH: What is the prisoner’s name?

BAILIFF: A History of the Late Massacres and Persecutions of the French Huguenots; to which is appended a brief relation of the bloody and atrocious crimes recently visited upon blameless Protestants dwelling in the realms of the Duke of Savoy, at the behest of King Louis XIV of France.

JACK KETCH: Has this prisoner been accused of a crime?

BAILIFF: Not only accused, but justly convicted, of spreading contumacious falsehoods, attempting to arouse civil discord, and leveling many base slanders against the good name of The Most Christian King Louis XIV, a true friend of our own King and a loyal ally of England.

JACK KETCH: Vile crimes, indeed! Has a sentence been pronounced?

BAILIFF: Indeed, as I mentioned before, it has been ordered by Lord Jeffreys that the prisoner is to be bound over to you for immediate execution.

JACK KETCH: Then I’ll welcome him as I did the late Duke of Monmouth.

Jack Ketch advances toward the Bailiff and grips the end of the chain. The bailiff drops the Book and dusts off his hands. To a slow cadence of muffled drums, Jack Ketch marches to the wood-pile, dragging the book across the pavement behind him. He heaves the book onto the top of the pile, steps back, and accepts a torch from an assistant.

JACK KETCH: Any last words, villainous Book? No? Very well, then to hell with thee!

Lights the fire.

Traders, Soldiers, Musicians, Executioner’s Staff, &c. watch silently as the Book is consumed by the flames.

Exeunt Bailiff, Herald, Executioners, Musicians, and Soldiers, leaving behind a smouldering heap of coals.

Traders resume commerce as if nothing had happened, save for EDMUND PALLING, an old man.

PALLING: Mr. Waterhouse! From the fact that you are the only one who brought something to sit on, may I assume you knew that this shameful poppet-show would disgrace the ‘Change today?

WATERHOUSE: That would appear to be the unspoken message.

PALLING: Unspoken is an interesting word…what of the truths that were spoken in the late Book, concerning the persecutions of our brethren in France and Savoy? Have they now been unspoken because the pages were burnt?

WATERHOUSE: I have heard many a sermon in my life, Mr. Palling, and I know where this one is bound…you’re going to say that just as the immortal spirit departs the body to be one with God, so the contents of the late Book are now going to wherever its smoke is distributed by the four winds…say, weren’t you Massachusetts-bound?

PALLING: I am only bating until I have raised money for the passage, and would probably be finished by now if Jack Ketch had not muddied and stirred the subtle currents of the market.

Exits. Enter Sir Richard Apthorp.

APTHORP: Burning books…is that not a favorite practice of the Spanish Inquisition?

WATERHOUSE: I have never been to Spain, Sir Richard, and so the only way I know that they burn books is because of the vast number of books that have been published on the subject.

APTHORP: Hmmm, yes…I take your meaning.

WATERHOUSE: I beg of you, do not say ‘I take your meaning’ with such ponderous significance…I do not wish to be Jack Ketch’s next guest. You have asked, sir, over and over, why I am sitting here in a chair. Now you know the answer: I came to see justice done.

APTHORP: But you knew ‘twould happen—you had aught to do with it. Why did you set it in the ‘Change? At Tyburn tree, during one of the regularly scheduled Friday hangings, ‘twould’ve drawn a much more appreciative crowd—why, you could burn a whole library there and the Mobb would be stomping their feet for an encore.

WATERHOUSE: They don’t read books. The point would’ve been lost on ‘em.

APTHORP: If the point is to put the fear of God into literate men, why not burn it at Cambridge and Oxford?

WATERHOUSE: Jack Ketch hates to travel. The new carriages have so little leg-room, and his great Axe does not fit into the luggage bins…

APTHORP: Could it be because College men do not have the money and power to organize a rebellion?

WATERHOUSE: Why, yes, that’s it. No point intimidating the weak. Threaten the dangerous.

APTHORP: To what end? To keep them in line? Or to put thoughts of rebellion into their minds?

WATERHOUSE: Your question, sir, amounts to asking whether I am a turncoat against the cause of my forebears—corrupted by the fœtid atmosphere of Whitehall—or a traitorous organizer of a secret rebellion.

APTHORP: Why, yes, I suppose it does.

WATERHOUSE: Then would you please ask easier questions or else go away and leave me alone? For whether I’m a back-stabber or a Phanatique, I am in either case no longer a scholar to be trifled with. If you must ply someone with such questions, ask them of yourself; if you insist on an answer, unburden your secrets to me before you ask me to trust you with mine. Assuming I have any.

APTHORP: I think that you do, sir.

Bows.

WATERHOUSE: Why do you doff your hat to me thus?

APTHORP: To honor you, sir, and to pay my respects to him who made you.

WATERHOUSE: What, Drake?

APTHORP: Why, no, I refer to your Mentor, the late John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester—or as some would say, the living incarnation of Janus. For that good fellow penned the Cryptonomicon with one hand and the Universal Character with the other; he was a good friend of high and mighty Cavaliers at the same time he was wooing and marrying Cromwell’s own sister; and, in sum, was Janus-like in diverse ways I’ll not bother enumerating to you. For you are truly his pupil, his creation: one moment dispensing intelligence like a Mercury, the next keeping counsel like Pluto.

WATERHOUSE: Mentor was a guise adopted by Minerva, and her pupil was great Ulysses, and so by hewing to a strict Classical interpretation of your words, sir, I’ll endeavour not to take offense.

APTHORP: Endeavour and succeed, my good man, for no offense was meant. Good day.

Exits.

Enter Ravenscar, carrying Principia Mathematica.

RAVENSCAR: I’m taking this to the printer’s straightaway, but before I do, I was pondering this Newton/Leibniz thing…

WATERHOUSE: What!? Jack Ketch’s performance made no impression on you at all?

RAVENSCAR: Oh, that? I assume you arranged it that way in order to buttress your position as the King’s token Puritan bootlick—whilst in fact stirring rebellious spirits in the hearts and minds of the rich and powerful. Forgive me for not tossing out a compliment. Twenty years ago I’d have admired it, but by my current standards it is only a modestly sophisticated ploy. The matter of Newton and Leibniz is much more interesting.

WATERHOUSE: Go ahead, then.

RAVENSCAR: Descartes explained, years and years ago, that the planets move round the sun like slips of paper caught up in a wind-vortex. So Leibniz’s objection is groundless—there is no mystery, and therefore Newton did not gloss over any problems.

WATERHOUSE: Leibniz has been trying to make sense of Descartes’ dynamics for years, and finally given up. Descartes was wrong. His theory of dynamics is beautiful in that it is purely geometrical and mathematical. But when you compare that theory to the world as it really is, it proves an unmitigated disaster. The whole notion of vortices does not work. There is no doubt that the inverse square law exists, and governs the motions of all heavenly bodies along conic sections. But it has nothing to do with vortices, or the cœlestial æther, or any of that other nonsense.

RAVENSCAR: What brings it about, then?

WATERHOUSE: Isaac says it is God, or God’s presence in the physical world. Leibniz says it has to be some sort of interaction among particles too tiny to see…

RAVENSCAR: Atoms?

WATERHOUSE: Atoms—to make a long story short and leave out all the good bits—could not move and change fast enough. Instead Leibniz speaks of monads, which are more fundamental than atoms. If I try to explain we’ll both get headaches. Suffice it to say, he is going at it hammer and tongs, and we will hear more from him in due course.

RAVENSCAR: That is very odd, for he avers in a personal letter to me that, having published the Integral Calculus, he’ll now turn his attention to genealogical research.

WATERHOUSE: That sort of work entails much travel, and the Doctor does his best work when he’s rattling round the Continent in his carriage. He can do both things, and more, at the same time.

RAVENSCAR: In the decision to study history, some will see an admission of defeat to Newton. I myself cannot understand why he should want to waste his time digging up ancient family trees.

WATERHOUSE: Perhaps I’m not the only Natural Philosopher who can put together a “moderately sophisticated ploy” when he needs to.

RAVENSCAR: What on earth are you talking about?

WATERHOUSE: Dig up some ancient family trees, stop assuming that Leibniz is a defeated ninehammer, and consider it. Put your philosophick acumen to use: know, for example, that the children of syphilitics are often syphilitic themselves, and unable to bear viable offspring.

RAVENSCAR: Now you are swimming out into the deep water, Daniel. Monsters are there—bear it in mind.

WATERHOUSE: ‘Tis true, and when a man has got to a point in his life when he needs to slay a monster, like St. George, or be eaten by one, like Jonah, I think that is where he goes a-swimming.

RAVENSCAR: Is it your intention to slay, or be eaten?

WATERHOUSE: I have already been eaten. My choices are to slay, or else be vomited up on some bit of dry land somewhere—Massachusetts, perhaps.

RAVENSCAR: Right. Well, before you make me any more alarmed, I’m off to the printer’s.

WATERHOUSE: It may be the finest errand you ever do, Roger.

Exit Marquis of Ravenscar. Enter Sir Richard Apthorp solus.

APTHORP: Woe. Bad tidings and alarums! Fear for England…O miserable island!

WATERHOUSE: What can possibly have happened, in the Temple of Mercury, to alter your mood so? Did you lose a lot of money?

APTHORP: No, I made a lot, buying low and selling high.

WATERHOUSE: Buying what?

APTHORP: Tent-cloth, saltpeter, lead, and other martial commodities.

WATERHOUSE: From whom?

APTHORP: Men who knew less than I did.

WATERHOUSE: And you sold it to—?

APTHORP: Men who knew more.

WATERHOUSE: A typical commercial transaction, all in all.

APTHORP: Except that I acquired knowledge as part of the bargain. And the knowledge fills me with dread.

WATERHOUSE: Share it with Pluto, then, for he knows all secrets, and keeps most of ‘em, and basks in Dread as an old dog lies in the sun.

APTHORP: The buyer is the King of England.

WATERHOUSE: Good news, then! Our King is bolstering our defences.

APTHORP: But why d’you suppose the Jew braved the North Sea to come and buy it here?

WATERHOUSE: Because ‘tis cheaper here?

APTHORP: It isn’t. But he saves money to buy it in England, because then there are no expenses for shipping. For these warlike commodities are supposed to be delivered, not to some foreign battle-ground, but here—to England—which is where the King intends to use ‘em.

WATERHOUSE: That is extraordinary, since there are no foreigners here to practise war upon.

APTHORP: Only Englishmen, as far as the eye can see!

WATERHOUSE: Perhaps the King fears a foreign invasion.

APTHORP: Does it give you comfort to think so?

WATERHOUSE: To think of being invaded? No. To think of the Coldstream Guards, the Grenadiers, and the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards fighting foreigners, ‘stead of Englishmen, why yes.

APTHORP: Then it follows, does it not, that all good Englishmen should bend their efforts to bringing it about.

WATERHOUSE: Let us now choose our words carefully, for Jack Ketch is only just round the corner.

APTHORP: No man has been choosing his words more carefully than you, Daniel.

WATERHOUSE: Lest native arms fraternal blood might shed,

For want of alien foes and righteous broil,

We’d fain see foreign canvas off our shores,

And English towns beset by armèd Boers. Our soldiers,
if they love by whom they’re led,

May then let foreign blood on English soil.

And if they don’t, and let their colors fall,

Their leader never was their King at all.

Versailles

1687

To d’Avaux, March 1687

Monseigneur,

Finally, a real spring day—my fingers have thawed out and I am able to write again. I would like to be out enjoying the flowers, but instead I am despatching letters to tulip-land.

You will be pleased to know that as of last week there are no beggars in France. The King has declared beggary illegal. The nobles who live at Versailles are of two minds concerning this. Of course they all agree that it is magnificent. But many of them are scarcely above beggars themselves, and so they are wondering whether the law applies to them.

Fortunately—for those who have daughters, anyway—Mme. de Maintenon has got her girls’ school open at St.-Cyr, just a few minutes’ ride from the château of Versailles. This has complicated my situation a little. The girl I have supposedly been tutoring—the daughter of the Marquise d’Ozoir—has begun attending the school, which makes my position redundant. So far, there has been no talk of letting me go. I have been putting my free time to good use, making two trips to Lyons to learn about how commerce works in that place. But apparently Édouard de Gex has been spreading tales of my great skills as a tutor to the Maintenon, who has begun making noises about bringing me to St.-Cyr as a teacher.

Did I mention that the teachers are all nuns?

De Maintenon and de Gex are so shrouded in outward Godliness that I cannot make out their motives. It is almost conceivable that they believe, sincerely, that I am a good candidate for the convent—in other words, that they are too detached from worldly matters to understand my true function here. Or perhaps they know full well that I am managing assets for twenty-one different French nobles, and they wish to neutralize me—or bring me under their control by threatening to do so.

To business: returns for the first quarter of 1687 have been satisfactory, as you know since you are a client. I pooled all of the money into a fund and invested it mostly through sub-brokers in Amsterdam, who specialize in particular commodities or species of V.O.C. derivatives. We are still making money on India cloth, thanks to King Louis who made it contraband and thereby drove up the price. But V.O.C. shares fell after William of Orange declared the League of Augsburg. William may be full of bluster about how the Protestant alliance is going to rein in the power of France, but his own stock market seems to take an extremely dim view of the project! As does the court here—tout le monde finds it tremendously amusing that William, and Sophie of Hanover, and a grab-bag of other frostbitten Lutherans believe they can stand up to La France. There is brave talk about how Father de Gex and Maréchal de Catinat, who suppressed the Protestants in Savoy with such force, ought now to ride North and and give the same treatment to the Dutch and the Germans.

For now it is my rôle to set aside any personal feelings I may have concerning politics, and to think only of how this might affect markets. My footing here is soft—I am like a mare galloping down a mucky beach, afraid to falter, out of fear that she may be treading on quicksand. With markets in Amsterdam fluctuating hourly, I cannot really manage assets from Versailles—the day-to-day buying and selling is carried out by my associates in the north.

But French nobles will not be seen doing business with Dutch hereticks and Spanish Jews. So I am a sort of figurehead, like the pretty mermaid on the bow of a ship that is laden with other people’s treasure and manned by swarthy corsairs. The only thing to be said in favor of being a figurehead is that the position gives one an excellent view ahead, and plenty of time to think. Help me, Monseigneur, to have as clear a view as possible of the seas we are about to plow up. I cannot help but think that in a year or two I shall be forced to gamble all of my clients’ assets on the outcome of great events. Investing round the time of Monmouth’s rebellion was not difficult because I knew Monmouth, and knew how it would come out. But I know William, too—not as well—but well enough to know I cannot gamble against him with certainty. Monmouth was a hobbyhorse and William is a stallion. Experience gained riding the first can only misinform me as to what it shall be like to ride the second.

So inform me, Monseigneur. Tell me things. You know your intelligence will be safe in transit, because of the excellence of this cypher, and you know it will be safe with me, for I have no friends here to whisper it to.

Only small minds want always to be right.

—LOUIS XIV

To d’Avaux, June 1687

Monseigneur,

When I complained that Fr. de Gex and Mme. de Maintenon were trying to make me over into a nun, I never imagined you would respond by making me out to be a whore! Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax has practically had to post Swiss guards at the entrance of her apartments to keep the young blades away from me. What sorts of rumors have you been spreading? That I am a nymphomaniac? That a thousand louis d’or will go to the first Frenchman who beds me?

At any rate, now I have some idea as to who belongs to the cabinet noir. One day, all of a sudden, Fr. de Gex was very cool to me, and Étienne d’Arcachon, the one-armed son of the Duke, called on me to say that he did not believe any of the rumors that were being spread about me. I think I was meant to be bowled over by his nobility—with him, it is difficult to tell. For on the one hand he is so excessively polite that some affirm he is not in his right mind, and on the other (though he has no other!) he saw me at the opera with Monmouth and knows some of my history. Otherwise why would a Duke’s son even give the time of day to a common servant?

The only circumstance under which a man of his rank and a woman of mine could ever be seen conversing with each other is a fancy-dress ball, when ranks are of no account and all the normal rules of precedence are suspended for a few hours. The other evening, Étienne d’Arcachon escorted me to one at Dampierre, the château of the duc de Chevreuse. He dressed as Pan and I as a Nymph. Here any proper Court lady would devote several pages to describing the costumes, and the intrigues and machinations that went into their making, but since I am not a proper Court lady and you are a busy man, I will leave it at that—pausing only to mention that Étienne had a special prosthetic hand carved out of boxwood and strapped to his stump. The hand was gripping a silver Pan-pipe all twined about with ivy (emerald leaves, of course, and ruby berries) and from time to time he would raise this to his lips and pipe a little melody that he had Lully compose for him.

As we rode in the carriage to Dampierre, Étienne mentioned to me, “You know, our host the duc de Chevreuse is the son-in-law of a commoner: Colbert, the late Contrôleur-Général, who built Versailles among other accomplishments.”

As you know, this is not the first such veiled remark that has been directed my way by a Frenchman of high rank. The first time it happened I became ever so excited, thinking I was about to be ennobled at any minute. Then for a time I affected a cynical view, supposing that this was like a snatch of meat dangled high above a dog’s nose to make it do tricks. But on this evening, riding to the splendid château of Dampierre on the arm of a future Duke, the burden of my low rank lifted for a few hours by a mask and costume, I phant’sied that Étienne’s remark really meant something, and that if I could use my skills to achieve some great accomplishment, I might be rewarded as Colbert had been.

Pretend now that I have dutifully described all of the costumes, the table-settings, the food, and the entertainments that the duc de Chevreuse had brought together at Dampierre. This will spare enough pages to make a small book. At first the mood was somewhat gloomy, for Mansart—the King’s architect—was there, and he had just received news that the Parthenon in Athens has been blown up. Apparently the Turks had been using it as a powder-magazine and the Venetians, who are trying to bring that city back into Christendom, bombarded it with mortars and touched off a great explosion. Mansart—who had always harbored an ambition of making a pilgrimage to Athens to see that building with his own eyes—was inconsolable. There was some blustery talk from Étienne to the effect that he would personally lead a squadron of his father’s Mediterranean fleet to Athens to take that city back into Christendom. This was a faux pas of sorts because Athens is not actually located on the water. Therefore it led to a few moments’ awkward silence.

I decided to strike. No one knew who I was, and even if they found out, my status and my reputation (thanks to you!) could scarcely sink lower. “So gloomy are we because of this news from abroad,” I exclaimed, “and yet what is news but words, and what are words but air?”

Now this produced only a few titters because everyone was assuming that I was just another empty-headed Duchess who had read too much Pascal. But I had their attention (if you could see my gown, Monseigneur, you would know I had their attention; my face was hidden, everything else was getting a good airing-out).

I continued, “Why should we not conjure up some news more to our liking, and throw our enemies the Dutchmen into a gloomy mood, so that we may be infused with gaiety and joy?”

Now most of them were nonplussed, but several took an interest—including one chap who was dressed up as Orion after he had been blinded by Oenopion, so that his mask had blood running out of the eye-sockets. Orion asked me to say more, and so I did: “Here, we are susceptible to emotion, because we are people of great feeling and passion, and accordingly we are saddened by the destruction of the Parthenon, for we value beauty. In Amsterdam, they have investments instead of emotions, and all they value is their precious V.O.C. stock. We could destroy all the treasures of the Classical world and they would not care; but if they hear bad news that touches the V.O.C., they are plunged into despair—or rather the price of the stock falls, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Since you appear to know so much about it, tell us what would be the worst news they could hear,” said blind Orion.

“Why, the fall of Batavia—for that is the linch-pin of their overseas empire.”

By now Orion had come face-to-face with me and we were in the middle of a ring of costumed nobles who were all leaning forward to listen. For it was obvious to everyone that the man dressed as Orion was none other than the King himself. He said, “The doings of the cheese-mongers are a vulgar muddle to us—trying to understand them is like watching muddy English peasants at one of their shin-kicking contests. If it is so easy to bring about a crash in the Amsterdam market, why doesn’t it crash all the time? For anyone could spread such a rumor.”

“And many do—it is very common for a few investors to get together and form a cabal, which is a sort of secret society that manipulates the market for profit. The machinations of these cabals have grown exceedingly complex, with as many moves and variations as dance steps. But at some point they all rely upon spreading false news into the ears of credulous investors. Now these cabals form and join, split and vanish like clouds in the summer sky, and so the market has become resistant to news, especially bad news; for most investors now assume that any bad news from abroad is false information put out by a cabal.”

“Then what hope have we of convincing these skeptical hereticks that Batavia has fallen?” asked Orion.

“My answering your question is complicated somewhat by the fact that everyone here is wearing a disguise,” I said, “but it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the Grand Admiral of the French Navy (the duc d’Arcachon) and the Contrôleur of the French East India Company (the Marquis d’Ozoir) are present, and able to hear my words. For men of such eminence, it would be no great thing to make it believed and understood, from the top to the bottom of the French naval and merchant fleets, and in every port from Spain to Flanders, that a French expeditionary force had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and fallen suddenly upon Batavia and seized it from the V.O.C. The news would spread north up the coast like fire along a powder-trail, and when it reached the Damplatz—”

“The Damplatz is the powder-keg,” Orion concluded. “This plan has beauty, for it would require little risk or expenditure from us, yet would cause more damage to William of Orange than an invasion by fifty thousand of our dragoons.”

“While at the same time bringing profit to anyone who knew in advance, and who took the right positions in the market,” I added.

Now, Monseigneur, I know for a fact that on the next morning Louis XIV went on a trip to his lodge at Marly, and invited the Marquis d’Ozoir and the duc d’Arcachon to join him.

Speaking for myself, I have spent all the time since talking to French nobles who are desperate to know what “the right position” is. I have lost track of the number of times I have had to explain the concept of selling short, and that when V.O.C. stock falls it tends to bring about a rise in commodity prices as capital flies from one to the other. Above all, I’ve had to make it clear that if a lot of Frenchmen, new to the markets, suddenly sell the V.O.C. short while investing in commodities futures, it will make it obvious to the Dutch that a cabal has formed at the court of the Sun King. That (in other words) the ground-work must be laid with great care and subtlety—which amounts to saying that I must do it.

In any event, a lot of French gold is going to be making its way north in the next week. I will send details in another letter.

The diligent Dutch seeing the Easiness of the managing and curing the Berry, and how that Part had no Dependence, either upon the Earth, the Air, the Water, or anything else more there, than in another Place, took the Hint, and planted the Coffee Tree in the Island of Java, near their City of Batavia, there it thrives, bears, and ripens every jot as well as at Mocha; and now they begin to leave off the Red Sea, and bring 20 to 30 Tons of Coffee, at a time, from Batavia, in the Latitude of 5 Deg. S.

—DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

To Leibniz, August 1687

Doctor,

Increase is the order of the day here;[*] the gardens, orchards, and vineyards are buried in their own produce and the country roads crowded with wagons bringing it to market. France is at peace, her soldiers at home, mending and building and getting maidens pregnant out of wedlock so that there will be a next generation of soldiers. New construction is going on all over Versailles, and many here have become modestly wealthy or at least paid off part of their gambling debts in the wake of the stock market crash in Amsterdam.

I am sorry not to have written in so many weeks. This cypher is extremely time-consuming and I have been too busy with all of the machinations surrounding the “fall of Batavia.”

Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax threw a garden party the other evening; the highlight was a re-enactment of the Fall of Batavia—which, as everyone knows by now, never really happened—played out on the Canal. A fleet of French “frigates,” no bigger than rowboats, and trimmed and decorated phantastically, like dream-ships, besieged a model “Batavia” built on the brink of the canal. The Dutchmen in the town were drinking beer and counting gold until they fell asleep. Then the dream-fleet made its attack. The Dutchmen were alarmed at first, until they woke up and understood it had all been a dream…but when they returned to their counting-tables, they found that their gold was really gone! The vanishing of the gold was accomplished through some sleight-of-hand so that everyone in the party was completely surprised. Then the dream-fleet cruised up and down the canal for the better part of an hour, and everyone crowded along the banks to admire it. Each vessel represented some virtue that is representative of la France, e.g., Fertility, Martial Prowess, Piety, et cetera, et cetera, and the captain of each one was a Duke or Prince, dressed up in costumes to match. As they drifted up and down the Canal they threw the captured coins in showers of gold into the ranks of the party-goers.

The Dauphin wore a golden frock embroidered with…I have seen this man Upnor now. He enjoys a high rank in the court of James II and has many friends in France, for he was a boy here during the time of Cromwell. Everyone wants to hear about his Protestant slave-girl and he is not slow to talk about her. He is too well-bred to gloat openly, but it is obvious that he takes great pleasure in owning her. Here, the enslavement of rebels in England is likened to the French practice of sending Huguenots to the galleys, and rated as more humane than simply killing them all as was done in Savoy. I had not been sure whether to credit Bob Shaftoe’s tale and so I was quite startled to see Upnor in the flesh, and to hear him talking about this. It seems shameful to me—a scandal that the guilty would wish to hide from the world. But to them it is nothing. While sympathizing with poor Abigail Frome, I rejoice that this has come to pass. If the slavers had shown more discretion and continued to take their victims only from black Africa, no one would notice or care—why, I am as guilty as the next person of putting sugar in my coffee without considering the faraway Negroes who made it for me. For James and his ilk to take slaves from Ireland entails more risk, even when they are criminals. But to take English girls from farm-towns is repugnant to almost everyone (the population of Versailles excepted) and an invitation to rebellion. After listening to Upnor I am more certain than ever that England will soon rise up in arms—and James apparently agrees with me, for word has it that he’s built great military camps on the edge of London and lavished money on his prize regiments. I fear only that in the chaos and excitement of rebellion, the people of that country will forget about the Taunton schoolgirls and what they signify about slavery in general…the tiller and rudder of which were all overgrown with living grape-vines.

Forgive me this endless description of the various Dukes and their dream-boats, I look back over the preceding several pages and see I quite forgot myself.

To Leibniz, October 1687

Doctor,

Family, family, family[*] is all anyone wants to talk about. Who is talking to me, you might ask, given that I am a commoner? The answer is that in certain recesses of this immense château there are large salons that are given over entirely to gambling, which is the only thing these nobles can do to make their lives interesting. In these places the usual etiquette is suspended and everyone talks to everyone. Of course the trick is gaining admission to such a salon in the first place—but after my success with the “Fall of Batavia”some of these doors were opened to me (back doors, anyway—I must come in through the servants’ entrances) and so it is not unusual for me now to exchange words with a Duchess or even a Princess. But I don’t go to these places as often as you might think, for when you are there you have no choice but to gamble, and I don’t enjoy it I loathe it and the people who do it is more accurate. But some of the men who will read this letter are heavy gamblers and so I will be demure.

More and more frequently people ask me about my family. Someone has been spreading rumors that I have noble blood in my veins! I hope that during your genealogical research you can turn up some supporting evidence…turning me into a Countess should be easy compared to making Sophie an Electress. Enough people here now depend on me that my status as a commoner is awkward and inconvenient. They need a pretext to give me a title so that they can have routine conversations with me without having to set up elaborate shams, such as fancy-dress balls, to circumvent the etiquette.

Just the other day I was playing basset with M. le duc de Berwick, who is the bastard of James II by Arabella Churchill, sister of John. This places him in excellent company since as you know this means his paternal grandmother was Henrietta Maria of France, the sister of Louis XIII…again, forgive the genealogical prattle. Will you please sort out everything to do with sorcerers, alchemists, Templars, and Satan-worshippers? I know that you got your start in life by bamboozling some rich alchemists into thinking you actually believed their nonsense. And yet you appear to be a sincere friend of the man called Enoch the Red, who is apparently an alchemist of note. From time to time, his name comes up around a gambling table. Most are nonplussed but certain men will cock an eyebrow or cough into a hand, exchange tremendously significant looks, et cetera, conspicuously trying not to be conspicuous. I have observed the same behaviors in connection with other subjects that are of an esoteric or occult nature. Everyone knows that Versailles was infested with Satan-worshippers, poisoners, abortionists, et cetera, in the late 1670s and that most but not all of them were purged; but this only makes it seem murkier and more provocative now. The father of the Earl of Upnor—the Duke of Gun-fleet—died suddenly in those days, after drinking a glass of water at a garden party thrown by Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, whose own husband died in similar fashion a fortnight later, leaving all his titles and possessions to her. There is not a man or woman here who does not suspect poisoning in these and other cases. Upnor and Oyonnax would probably come in for closer scrutiny if there weren’t so many other poisonings to distract people’s attention. Anyway, Upnor is obviously one of those gentlemen who takes an interest in occult matters, and keeps making dark comments about his contacts at Trinity College in Cambridge. I am tempted to dismiss all of this as a faintly pathetic hobby for noble toffs bored out of their minds by the ingenious tedium, the humiliating inconsequence, of Versailles. But since I have picked out Upnor as an enemy I would like to know if it amounts to anything…can he cast spells on me? Does he have secret brethren in every city? What is Enoch Root?

I am going to spend much of the winter in Holland and will write to you from there.

Eliza

Bank of Het Kanaal, Between Scheveningen and the Hague

DECEMBER 1687

No man goes so high as he who knows not where he is going.

—CROMWELL

“WELL MET, BROTHER WILLIAM,” said Daniel, getting a boot up on the running-board of the carriage, vaulting in through the door, and surprising the hell out of a dumpling-faced Englishman with long stringy dark hair. The passenger snatched the hem of his long black frock coat and drew it up; Daniel could not tell whether he was trying to make room, or to avoid being brushed against by Daniel. Both hypotheses were reasonable. This man had spent a lot more time in ghastly English prisons than Daniel had, and learned to get out of other men’s way. And Daniel was mud-spattered from riding, whereas this fellow’s clothes, though severe and dowdy, were immaculate. Brother William had a tiny mouth that was pursed sphincter-tight at the moment.

“Recognized your arms on the door,” Daniel explained, slamming it to and reaching out the window to give it a familiar slap. “Flagged your coachman down, reckoning we must be going to the same lodge to see the same gentleman.”

“When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the Gentleman?”

“Forgive me, I should have said chap, bloke…how are things in your Overseas Possession, Mr. Penn? Did you ever settle that dispute with Maryland?”

William Penn rolled his eyes and looked out the window. “It will take a hundred years and a regiment of Surveyors to settle it! At least those damned Swedes have been brought to heel. Everyone imagines that, simply because I own the Biggest Pencil in the World, that my ticket is punched, my affairs settled once and for all…but I tell you, Brother Daniel, that it has been nothing but troubles…if it is a sin to lust after worldly goods, videlicet a horse or a door-knocker, then what have I got myself into now”? It is a whole new universe of sinfulness.”

“‘Twas either accept Pennsylvania, or let the King continue owing you sixteen thousand pounds, yes?”

Penn did not take his gaze away from the window, but squinted as if trying to hold back a mighty volume of flatulence, and shifted his focal point to a thousand miles in the distance. But this was coastal Holland and there was nothing out that window save the Curvature of the World. Even pebbles cast giant shadows in the low winter sun. Daniel could not be ignored.

“I am chagrined, appalled, mortified that you are here! You are not welcome, Brother Daniel, you are a problem, and obstacle, and if I were not a pacifist I would beat you to death with a rock.”

“Brother William, meeting as we so often do at Whitehall, in the King’s Presence, to have our lovely chats about Religious Toleration, it is most difficult for us to hold frank exchanges of views, and so I am pleased you’ve at last found this opportunity to hose me down with those splenetic humours that have been so long pent up.”

“I am a plain-spoken fellow, as you can see. Perhaps you should say what you mean more frequently, Brother Daniel—it would make everything so much simpler.”

“It is easy for you to be that way, when you have an estate the size of Italy to go hiding in, on the far side of an ocean.”

“That was unworthy of you, Brother Daniel. But there is some truth in what you say…it is…distracting…at the oddest times…my mind drifts, and I find myself wondering what is happening on the banks of the Susquehanna…”

“Right! And if England becomes completely unlivable, you have someplace to go. Whereas I…”

Finally Penn looked at him. “Don’t tell me you haven’t considered moving to Massachusetts.”

“I consider it every day. Nonetheless, most of my constituency does not have that luxury available and so I’d like to see if we can avoid letting Olde Englande get any more fouled up than ‘tis.”

Penn had disembarked from a ship out at Scheveningen less than an hour ago. That port-town was connected to the Hague by several roads and a canal. The route that Penn’s driver had chosen ran along a canal-edge, through stretches of Dutch polder-scape and fields where troops drilled, which extended to within a few hundred yards of the spires of the Binnenhof.

The carriage now made a left turn onto a gravel track that bordered an especially broad open park, called the Malieveld, where those who could afford it went riding when the weather was pleasant. No one was there today. At its eastern end the Malieveld gave way to the Haagse Bos, a carefully managed forest laced through with riding-paths. The carriage followed one of these through the woods for a mile, until it seemed that they had gone far out into the wild. But then suddenly cobblestones, instead of gravel, were beneath the wheel-rims, and they were passing through guarded gates and across counterweighted canal-bridges. The formal gardens of a small estate spread around them. They rolled to a stop before a gate-house. Daniel glimpsed a hedge and the corner of a fine house before his view out the carriage-window was blocked by the head, and more so by the hat, of a captain of the Blue Guards. “William Penn,” said William Penn. Then, reluctantly, he added: “And Dr. Daniel Waterhouse.”

THE PLACE WAS BUT a small lodge, close enough to the Hague to be easily reached, but far enough away that the air was clean. William of Orange’s asthma did not trouble him when he was here, and so, during those times of the year when he had no choice but to stick at the Hague, this was where he abided.

Penn and Waterhouse were ushered to a parlor. It was a raw day outside, and even though a new fire was burning violently on the hearth, making occasional lunges into the room, neither Penn nor Waterhouse made any move to remove his coat.

There was a girl there, a petite girl with large blue eyes, and Daniel assumed she was Dutch at first. But after she’d heard the two visitors conversing in English she addressed them in French, and explained something about the Prince of Orange. Penn’s French was much better than Daniel’s because he had spent a few years exiled to a Protestant college (now extirpated) in Saumur, so he exchanged a few sentences with the girl and then said to Daniel: “The sand-sailing is excellent today.”

“Could’ve guessed as much from the wind, I suppose.”

“We’ll not be seeing the Prince for another hour.”

The two Englishmen stood before the fire until well browned on both sides, then settled into chairs. The girl, who was dressed in a rather bleak Dutch frock, set a pan of milk there to heat, then busied herself with some kitchen-fuss. It was now Daniel’s turn to be distracted, for there was something in the girl’s appearance that was vaguely disturbing or annoying to him, and the only remedy was to look at her some more, trying to figure it out; which made the feeling worse. Or perhaps better. So they sat there for a while, Penn brooding about the Alleghenies and Waterhouse trying to piece together what it was that provoked him about this girl. The feeling was akin to the nagging sense that he had met a person somewhere before but could not recall the particulars. But that was not it; he was certain that this was the first time. And yet he had that same unscratchable itch.

She said something that broke Penn out of his reverie. Penn fixed his gaze upon Daniel. “The girl is offended,” he said. “She says that there may be women, of an unspeakable nature, in Amsterdam, who do not object to being looked at as you are looking at her; but how dare you, a visitor on Dutch soil, take such liberties?”

“She said a lot then, in five words of French.”

“She was pithy, for she credits me with wit. I am discursive, for I can extend you no such consideration.”

“You know, merely knuckling under to the King, simply because he waves a Declaration of Indulgence in front of your eyes, is no proof of wit—some would say it proves the opposite.”

“Do you really want another Civil War, Daniel? You and I both grew up during such a war—some of us have elected to move on—others want to re-live their childhoods, it seems.”

Daniel closed his eyes and saw the image that had been branded onto his retinas thirty-five years ago: Drake hurling a stone saint’s head through a stained-glass window, the gaudy image replaced with green English hillside, silvery drizzle reaching in through the aperture like the Holy Spirit, bathing his face.

“I do not think you see what we can make of England now if we only try. I was brought up to believe that an Apocalypse was coming. I have not believed that for many years. But the people who believe in that Apocalypse are my people, and their way of thinking is my way. I have only just come round to a new way of looking at this, a new view-point, as Leibniz would have it. Namely that there is something to the idea of an Apocalypse—a sudden changing of all, an overthrow of old ways—and that Drake and the others merely got the particulars wrong, they fixed on a date certain, they, in a word, idolized. If idolatry is to mistake the symbol for the thing symbolized, then that is what they did with the symbols that are set down in the Book of Revelation. Drake and the others were like a flock of birds who all sense that something is nigh, and take flight as one: a majestic sight and a miracle of Creation. But they were confused, and flew into a trap, and their revolution came to naught. Does that mean that they were mistaken to have spread their wings at all? No, their senses did not deceive them…their higher minds did. Should we spurn them forever because they erred? Is their legacy to be laughed at only? On the contrary, I would say that we might bring about the Apocalypse now with a little effort…not precisely the one they phant’sied but the same, or better, in its effects.”

“You really should move to Pennsylvania,” Penn mused. “You are a man of parts, Daniel, and certain of those parts, which will only get you half-hanged, drawn, and quartered in London, would make you a great man in Philadelphia—or at least get you invited to a lot of parties.”

“I’ve not given up on England just yet, thank you.”

“England may prefer that you give up, rather than suffer another Civil War, or another Bloody Assizes.”

“Much of England sees it otherwise.”

“And you may number me in that party, Daniel, but a scattering of Nonconformists does not suffice to bring about the changes you seek.”

“True…but what of the men whose signatures are on these letters?” said Daniel, producing a sheaf of folded parchments, each one beribboned and wax-sealed.

Penn’s mouth shrank to the size of a navel and his mind worked for a minute. The girl came round and served chocolate.

“For you to surprise me in this way was not the act of a gentleman.”

“When Adam delved and Eve span…”

“Shut up! Do not trifle with me. Owning Pennsylvania does not make me any better than a Vagabond in the eyes of God, Daniel, but it serves as a reminder that I’m not to be trifled and toyed with.”

“And that, Brother William, is why I nearly killed myself to cross the North Sea on the front of a wind-storm, and galloped through frost and muck to intercept you—before you met with your next King.” Daniel drew out a Hooke-watch and turned its ivory face toward the fire-light. “There is still time for you to write a letter of your own, and put it on the top of this stack, if you please.”

“I WAS GOING TO ASK, do you have any idea how many people in Amsterdam want to kill you…but by coming up here, you seem to’ve answered the question: no,” said William, Prince of Orange.

“You had fair warning in my letter to d’Avaux, did you not?”

“It barely reached me in time…the brunt of the blow was absorbed by some big shareholders there, whom I held off from warning.”

“Francophiles.”

“No, the bottom has quite fallen out of that market, very few Dutchmen are selling themselves to the French nowadays. My chief enemies nowadays are what you would call Dutchmen of limited vision. At any rate, your Batavia charade caused no end of headaches for me.”

“Establishing a first-rate intelligence source at the Court of Louis XIV cannot come cheaply.”

“That insipid truism can be turned around easily: when it comes so dear, then I demand first-rate intelligence. What did you learn from the two Englishmen, by the way?” William glanced at a dirty spoon and flared his nostrils. A Dutch houseboy, fairer and more beautiful than Eliza, bustled over and began to clear away the gleaming, crusted evidence of a long chocolate binge. The clattering of the cups and spoons seemed to irritate William more than gunfire on a battlefield. He leaned back deep into his armchair, closed his eyes, and turned his face toward the fire. To him the world was a dark close cellar with a net-work of covert channels strung through it, frail and irregular as cobwebs, transmitting faint cyphers of intelligence from time to time, and so a fire broadcasting clear strong radiance all directions was a sort of miracle, a pagan god manifesting itself in a spidery Gothick chapel. Eliza did not speak until the boy was finished and the room had gone quiet again and the folds and creases in the prince’s face had softened. He was a couple of years shy of forty, but time spent in sun and spray had given him the skin, and battles had given him the mentality, of an older man.

“Both believe the same things, and believe them sincerely,” Eliza said, referring to the two Englishmen. “Both have been tested by suffering. At first I thought the fat one had been corrupted. But the slender one did not think so.”

“Maybe the slender one is naïve.”

“He is not naïve in that way. No, those two belong to a common sect, or something—they knew and recognized each other. They dislike each other and work at cross-purposes but betrayal, corruption, any straying from whatever common path they have chosen, these are inconceivable. Is it the same sect as Gomer Bolstrood?”

“No and yes. The Puritans are like Hindoos—impossibly various, and yet all of a type.”

Eliza nodded.

“Why are you so fascinated by the Puritans?” William asked.

It was not asked in a friendly way. He suspected her of some weakness, some occult motive. She looked at him like a little girl who had just been run over by a cart-wheel. It was a look that would cause most men to fall apart like stewed chickens. It didn’t work. Eliza had noticed that William of Orange had a lot of gorgeous boys around him. But he also had a mistress, an Englishwoman named Elizabeth Villiers, who was only moderately beautiful, but famously intelligent and witty. The Prince of Orange would never make himself vulnerable by relying on one sex or the other; any lust he might feel for Eliza he could easily channel towards that houseboy, as Dutch farmers manipulated their sluice-gates to water one field instead of another. Or at least that was the message he wanted to convey, by keeping the company he did.

Eliza sensed that she had quite inadvertently gotten into danger. William had found an inconsistency in her, and if it weren’t explained to his satisfaction, he’d brand her as Enemy. And while Louis XIV kept his enemies in the gilded cage of Versailles, William probably had more forthright ways of dealing with his.

The truth wasn’t so bad after all. “I think they are interesting,” she said, finally. “They are so different from anyone else. So peculiar. But they are not ninehammers, they are formidable in the extreme; Cromwell was only a prelude, a practice. This Penn controls an estate that is stupefyingly vast. New Jersey is a place of Quakers, too, and different sorts of Puritans are all over Massachusetts. Gomer Bolstrood used to say the most startling things…overthrowing monarchy was the least of it. He said that Negroes and white men are equal before God and that all slavery everywhere must be done away with, and that his people would never let up until everyone saw it their way. ‘First we’ll get the Quakers on our side, for they are rich,’ he said, ‘then the other Nonconformists, then the Anglicans, then the Catholics, then all of Christendom.’”

William had turned his gaze back to the fire as she spoke, signalling that he believed her. “Your fascination with Negroes is very odd. But I have observed that the best people are frequently odd in one way or another. I have got in the habit of seeking them out, and declining to trust anyone who has no oddities. Your queer ideas concerning slavery are of no interest to me whatever. But the fact that you harbor queer ideas makes me inclined to place some small amount of trust in you.”

“If you trust my judgment, the slender Puritan is the one to watch,” Eliza said.

“But he has no vast territories in America, no money, no followers!”

“That is why. I would wager he had a father who was very strong, probably older brothers, too. That he has been checked and baffled many times, never married, never enjoyed even the small homely success of having a child, and has come to that time in his life when he must make his mark, or fail. This has become all confused, in his thinking, with the coming rebellion against the English King. He has decided to gamble his life on it—not in the sense of living or dying, but in the sense of making something of his life, or not.”

William winced. “I pray you never see that deep into me.”

“Why? Perhaps ‘twould do you good.”

“Nay, nay, you are like some Fellow of the Royal Society, dissecting a living dog—there is a placid cruelty about you.”

“About me? What of you? To fight wars is kindness?”

“Most men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.”

Eliza could not help laughing. “I do not think my description of the slender one is at all cruel. On the contrary, I believe he will succeed. To judge from that pile of letters, he has many powerful Englishmen behind him. To rally that many supporters while remaining close to the King is very difficult.” Eliza was hoping, now, that the Prince would let slip some bit of information about who those letter-writers were. But William perceived the gambit almost before she uttered the words, and looked away from her.

“It is very dangerous,” he said. “Rash. Insane. I wonder if I should trust a man who conceives such a desperate plan.”

A bit of a silence now. Then one of the logs in the fireplace gave way in a cascading series of pops and hisses.

“Are you asking me to do something about it?”

More silence, but this time the burden of response was on William. Eliza could relax, and watch his face. His face showed that he did not like being put in this position.

“I have something important for you to do at Versailles,” he admitted, “and cannot afford to send you to London to tend to Daniel Waterhouse. But, where he is concerned, you might be more useful in Versailles anyway.”

“I don’t understand.”

William opened his eyes wide, took a deep breath, and sighed it out, listening clinically to his own lungs. He sat up straighter, though his small hunched body was still overwhelmed by the chair, and looked alertly into the fire. “I can tell Waterhouse to be careful and he will say, ‘yes, sire,’ but it is all meaningless. He will not really be careful until he has something to live for.” William looked Eliza straight in the eye.

“You want me to give him that?”

“I cannot afford to lose him, and the men who put their signatures on these letters, because he suddenly decides he cares not whether he lives or dies. I want him to have some reason to care.”

“It is easily done.”

“Is it? I cannot think of a pretext for getting the two of you in the same room together.”

“I have another oddity, sire: I am interested in Natural Philosophy.”

“Ah yes, you stay with Huygens.”

“And Huygens has another friend in town just now, a Swiss mathematician named Fatio. He is young and ambitious and desperate to make contacts with the Royal Society. Daniel Waterhouse is the Secretary. I’ll set up a dinner.”

“That name Fatio is familiar,” William said distantly. “He has been pestering me, trying to set up an audience.”

“I’ll find out what he wants.”

“Good.”

“What of the other thing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said you had something important for me to do at Versailles.”

“Yes. Come to me again before you leave and I’ll explain it. Now I am tired, tired of talking. The thing you must do there for me is pivotal, everything revolves around it, and I want to have my wits about me when I explain it to you.”

M. Descartes had found the way to have his conjectures and fictions taken for truths. And to those who read his Principles of Philosophy something happened like that which happens to those who read novels which please and make the same impression as true stories. The novelty of the images of his little particles and vortices are most agreeable. When I read the book…the first time, it seemed to me that everything proceeded perfectly; and when I found some difficulty, I believe it was my fault in not fully understanding his thought…But since then, having discovered in it from time to time things that are obviously false and others that are very improbable, I have rid myself entirely of the prepossession I had conceived, and I now find almost nothing in all his physics that I can accept as true…

—HUYGENS, P. 186 OF WESTFALL’S 1971

The Concept of Force in Newton’s Physics:

The Science of Dynamics in
the Seventeenth Century

CHRISTIAAN HUYGENS SAT at the head of the table, the perihelion of the ellipse, and Daniel Waterhouse sat at the opposite end, the aphelion. Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers and Eliza sat across from each other in between. A dinner of roast goose, ham, and winter vegetables was served up by various members of a family that had long been servants in this house. Eliza was the author of the seating plan. Huygens and Waterhouse must not sit next to each other or they’d fuse together and never say a word to the others. This way was better: Fatio would only want to talk to Waterhouse, who would only want to talk to Eliza, who would pretend she had ears only for Huygens, and so the guests would pursue each other round the table clockwise, and with a bit of luck, an actual conversation might eventuate.

It was near the time of the solstice, the sun had gone down in the middle of the afternoon, and their faces, lit up by a still-life of candles thrust into wax-crusted bottles, hung in the darkness like Moons of Jupiter. The ticking of Huygens’s clock-work at the other end of the room was distracting at first, but later became part of the fabric of space; like the beating of their hearts, they could hear it if they wanted to, its steady process reassured them that all was well while reminding them that time was moving onwards. It was difficult to be uncivilized in the company of so many clocks.

Daniel Waterhouse had arrived first and had immediately apologized to Eliza for having taken her for a house-servant earlier. But he had not dropped the other shoe and asked what she really was. She’d accepted his apology with tart amusement and then declined to offer any explanation. This was light flirtation of the most routine sort—at Versailles it would have elicited a roll of the eyes from anyone who had bothered to notice it. But it had been more than enough to plunge Waterhouse into utter consternation. Eliza found this slightly alarming.

He had tried again: “Mademoiselle, I would be less than…”

“Oh, speak English!” she’d said, in English. This had practically left him senseless: first, with surprise that she could speak English at all, then with alarm that she’d overheard his entire conversation with William Penn. “Now, what was it you were saying?”

He scrambled to remember what he had been saying. In a man half his age, to’ve been so flustered would have been adorable. As it stood, she was dismayed, wondering what would happen to this man the first time some French-trained countess got her talons into him. William had been right. Daniel Waterhouse was a Hazard to Navigation.

“Err…I’d be less than honest if, er…” he winced. “It sounded gallant in French. Pompous in English. I was wondering…the state of international relations being so troublous and relations ‘tween the sexes more so, and etiquette being an area in which I am weak…whether there was any pretext at all under which I might converse with you, or send letters, without giving offense.”

“Isn’t this dinner good enough?” she’d asked, flirtatiously mock-offended, and just then Fatio had arrived. In truth, she’d seen him coming across the Plein, and adjusted her timing accordingly. Waterhouse was obliged to stand off to one side and stew and draw up a great mental accompt of his failures and shortcomings while Eliza and Fatio enacted a greeting-ritual straight out of the Salon of Apollo at Versailles. This had much in common with a courtly dance, but with overtones of a duel; Eliza and Fatio were probing each other, emanating signals coded in dress, gesture, inflection, and emphasis, and watching with the brilliant alertness of sword-fighters to see whether the other had noticed, and how they’d respond. As one who’d lately come from the Court of the Sun King, Eliza held the high ground; the question was, what level of esteem should she accord Fatio? If he’d been Catholic, and French, and titled, this would have been settled before he came in the door. But he was Protestant, Swiss, and came from a gentle family of no particular rank. He was in his early twenties, Eliza guessed, though he tried to make himself older by wearing very good French clothes. He was not a handsome man: he had giant blue eyes below a high domelike forehead, but the lower half of his face was too small, his nose stuck out like a beak, and in general he had the exhausting intensity of a trapped bird.

At some point Fatio had to tear those eyes away from Eliza and begin the same sort of dance-cum-duel with Waterhouse. Again, if Fatio had been a Fellow of the Royal Society, or a Doctor at some university, Waterhouse would have had some idea what to make of him; as it was, Fatio had to conjure his credentials and bona fides out of thin air, as it were, by dropping names and scattering references to books he’d read, problems he’d solved, inflated reputations he had punctured, experiments he had performed, creatures he had seen. “I had half expected to see Mr. Enoch Root here,” he said at one point, looking about, “for a (ahem) gentleman of my acquaintance here, an amateur of (ahem) chymical studies, has shared with me a rumor—only a rumor, mind you—that a man owning Root’s description was observed, the other day, debarking from a canal-ship from Brussels.” As Fatio stretched this patch of news thinner and thinner, he flinched his huge eyes several times at Waterhouse. Certain French nobles would have winked or stroked their moustaches interestedly; Waterhouse offered up nothing but a basilisk-stare.

That was the last time Fatio had anything to say concerning Alchemy; from that point onwards it was strictly mathematics, and the new work by Newton. Eliza had heard from both Leibniz and Huygens that this Newton had written some sort of discourse that had left all of the other Natural Philosophers holding their heads between their knees, and quite dried up the ink in their quills, and so she was able to follow Fatio’s drift here. Though from time to time he would turn his attention to Eliza and revert to courtly posturing for a few moments. Fatio prosecuted all of these uphill strugglings with little apparent effort, which spoke well of his training, and of the overall balance of his humours. At the same time it made her tired just to watch him. From the moment he came in the door he controlled the conversation; everyone spent the rest of the evening reacting to Fatio. That suited Eliza’s purposes well enough; it kept Daniel Waterhouse frustrated, which was how she liked him, and gave her leisure to observe. All the same, she wondered what supplied the energy to keep a Fatio going; he was the loudest and fastest clock in the room, and must have an internal spring keyed up very tight. He had no sexual interest whatever in Eliza, and that was a relief, for she could tell that he would be relentless and probably tiresome in wooing.

Why didn’t they just eject Fatio and have a peaceful dinner? Because he had genuine merit. Confronted by a nobody so desperate to establish his reputation, Eliza’s first impulse (and Waterhouse’s, too, she inferred) was to assume he was a poseur. But he was not. Once he figured out that Eliza wasn’t Catholic he had interesting things to say concerning religion and the state of French society. Once he figured out that Waterhouse was no alchemist, he began to discourse of mathematical functions in a way that snapped the Englishman awake. And Huygens, when he finally woke up and came downstairs, made it obvious by his treatment of Fatio that he rated him as an equal—or as close to equal as a man like Huygens could ever have.

“A man of my tender age and meager accomplishments cannot give sufficient honor to the gentleman who once dined at this table—”

“Actually Descartes dined here many times—not just once!” Huy-gens put in gruffly.

“—and set out his proposal to explain physical reality with mathematics,” Fatio finished.

“You would not speak of him that way unless you were about to say something against him,” Eliza said.

“Not against him, but some of his latter-day followers. The project that Descartes started is finished. Vortices will never do! I am surprised that Leibniz still holds out any hope for them.”

Everyone sat up straighter. “Perhaps you have heard from Leibniz more recently than I have, sir,” Waterhouse said.

“You give me more credit than I deserve, Doctor Waterhouse, to suggest that Doctor Leibniz would communicate his freshest insights to me, before despatching them to the Royal Society! Please correct me.”

“It is not that Leibniz has any particular attachment to vortices, but that he cannot bring himself to believe in any sort of mysterious action at a distance.” Hearing this, Huygens raised a hand momentarily, as if seconding a motion. Fatio did not fail to notice. Waterhouse continued, “Action at a distance is a sort of occult notion—which may appeal to a certain sort of mentality—”

“But not to those of us who have adopted the Mechanical Philosophy that Monsieur Descartes propounded at this very table!”

“In that very chair, sir!” said Huygens, pointing at Fatio with a drumstick.

“I have my own Theory of Gravitation that should account for the inverse square relation,” Fatio said. “As a stone dropped into water makes spreading ripples, so a planet makes concentric disturbances in the cœlestial æther, which press upon its satellites…”

“Write it down,” Waterhouse said, “and send it to me, and we will print it alongside Leibniz’s account, and may the better one prevail.”

“Your offer is gratefully accepted!” Fatio said, and glanced at Huygens to make sure he had a witness. “But I fear we are boring Mademoiselle Eliza.”

“Not at all, Monsieur, any conversation that bears on the Doctor is of interest to me.”

“Is there any topic that does not relate to Leibniz in some way?”

“Alchemy,” Waterhouse suggested darkly.

Fatio, whose chief object at the moment was to draw Eliza into the conversation, ignored this. “I can’t but wonder whether we may discern the Doctor’s hand in the formation of the League of Augsburg.”

“I would guess not,” Eliza said. “It has long been Leibniz’s dream to re-unite the Catholic and Lutheran churches, and prevent another Thirty Years’ War. But the League looks to me like a preparation for war. It is not the conception of the Doctor, but of the Prince of Orange.”

“The Protestant Defender,” Fatio said. Eliza was accustomed to hearing that phrase drenched in French sarcasm, but Fatio uttered it carefully, like a Natural Philosopher weighing an unproven hypothesis. “Our neighbors in Savoy could have used some defending when de Catinat came through with his dragoons. Yes, in this matter I must disagree with the Doctor, as well-meaning as he is…we do need a Defender, and William of Orange will make a good one, provided he stays out of the clutches of the French.” Fatio was staring at Eliza while he said this.

Huygens chuckled. “That should not be difficult, since he never leaves Dutch soil.”

“But the coast is long, and mostly empty, and the French could put a force ashore anywhere they pleased.”

“French fleets do not sail up and down the Dutch coast without drawing attention,” Huygens said, still amused by the idea.

Continuing to watch Eliza, Fatio replied, “I said nothing about a fleet. A single jacht would suffice to put a boat-load of dragoons on the beach.”

“And what would those dragoons do against the might of the Dutch army?”

“Be destroyed, if they were stupid enough to encamp on the beach and wait for that army to mobilize,” Fatio answered. “But if they happened to light on the particular stretch of beach where William goes sand-sailing, at the right time of the morning, why, they could redraw the map, and rewrite the future history, of Europe in a few minutes’ work.”

Now nothing could be heard for a minute or so except the clocks. Fatio still held Eliza fast with his vast eyes, giant blue lenses that seemed to take all the light in the room. What might they not have noticed, and what might the mind in back of them not know?

On the other hand, what tricks could the mind not conjure up, and with those eyes, whom couldn’t he draw into his snares?

“It is a clever conceit, like a chapter from a picaroon-romance,” Eliza said. Fatio’s high brow shriveled, and the eyes that had seemed so penetrating a moment ago now looked pleading. Eliza glanced toward the stairs. “Now that Fatio has provided us with entertainment, will you elevate us, Monsieur Huygens?”

“How should I translate that word?” Huygens returned. “The last time one of your guests became elevated in my house, I had to look the other way.”

“Elevate us to the roof, where we may see the stars and planets, and then elevate our minds by showing us some new phenomenon through your telescope,” Eliza answered patiently.

“In company such as this we must all elevate one another, for I carry no advantage on these men,” Huygens said. This triggered a long tedious volley of self-deprecations from Fatio and Waterhouse. But soon enough they all got their winter coats on and labored up a staircase devious and strait, and emerged into starlight. The only clouds in this sky were those that condensed in front of their lips as they breathed. Huygens lit up a clay pipe. Fatio, who had assisted Huygens before, took the wraps off the big Newtonian reflector with the tense precision of a hummingbird, keeping an ear cocked toward Huygens and Waterhouse, who were talking about optics, and an eye on Eliza, who was strolling around the parapet enjoying the view: to the east, the Haagse Bos, woolly and black with trees. To the south, the smoking chimneys and glowing windows of the Hofgebied. To the west, the windy expanse of the Plein, stretching to the Grenadier’s Gate on the far side, which controlled access to the Binnenhof. A lot of wax and whale-oil was being burnt there tonight, to illuminate a soiree in the palace’s Ballroom. To the young ladies who had been invited, it must have seemed never so glamorous. To Huygens it was a damnable nuisance, for the humid air snared the radiance of all those tapers and lamps, and glowed faintly, in a way that most people would never notice. But it ruined the seeing of his telescope.

Within a few minutes the two older men had gotten embroiled in the work of aiming the telescope at Saturn: a body that would show up distinctly no matter how many candles were burning at the Binnenhof. Fatio glided over to keep Eliza company.

“Now let us set aside formalities and speak directly,” she said.

“As you wish, Mademoiselle.”

“Is this notion of the jacht and the dragoons a phant’sy of yours or—”

“Say if I am wrong: on mornings when the weather is not perfectly abominable, and the wind is off the sea, the Prince of Orange goes to his boat-house on the beach at Scheveningen at ten o’clock, chooses a sand-sailer, and pilots it northwards up the beach to the dunes near Katwijk—though on a clear day he’ll venture as far as Noordwijk—then turns round and is back in Scheveningen by midday.”

Not wanting to give Fatio the satisfaction of telling him he was right, Eliza answered, “You have made a study of the Prince’s habits?”

“No, but Count Fenil has.”

“Fenil—I have heard his name in the salon of the Duchess of Oyonnax—he originates in that place where Switzerland and Savoy, Burgundy, and the Piedmont are all convolved, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And he is Catholic, and a Francophile.”

“He is Savoyard in name, but he saw very early that Louis XIV would eclipse the Duke of Savoy, and swallow up his dominions, and so he became more French than the French, and served in the army of Louvois. That alone should prove his bona fides to the King of France. But after the recent show of force by the French Army next door to his lands, Fenil evidently feels some further demonstration of his loyalty is needed. So he has devised the plan I mentioned, of abducting William from the beach and carrying him back to France in chains.”

They had now paused at a corner where they could look out over the Plein toward the Binnenhof. To Eliza this had seemed grand (at least by European standards) when d’Avaux had taken her skating there. Now that she’d grown accustomed to Versailles, it looked like a woodshed. Lit up for this evening’s fête, it was as grand as it would ever be. William Penn would be there, and various members of the diplomatic corps—including d’Avaux, who had invited her to attend it on his arm. She had accepted, then changed her mind so that she could organize the present dinner. D’Avaux had not been happy about it and had asked questions that were difficult to answer. Once d’Avaux had recruited her, and sent her down to Versailles, their relationship had changed to that of lord and vassal. He had allowed her to see his hard, cruel, vengeful aspects, mostly as an implicit warning of what would come if she disappointed him. Eliza supposed it must have been d’Avaux who had supplied intelligence to Fenil concerning William’s routine.

It had been a mild winter so far, and the Hofvijver, in front of the Binnenhof, was a black rectangle, not yet frozen, reflecting gleams of candlelight from the party as gusts of wind wrinkled its surface. Eliza recalled her own abduction from a beach, and felt like crying. Fatio’s yarn might or might not be true, but in combination with some cutting remarks that d’Avaux had made to her earlier, it had put real melancholy into her heart. Not connected with any one particular man, or plan, or outcome, but melancholy like the black water that ate up the light.

“How do you know the mind of M. le comte de Fenil?”

“I was visiting my father at Duillier—our seat in Switzerland—a few weeks ago. Fenil came on a visit. I went for a stroll with him and he told me what I have told you.”

“He must be an imbecile to talk about it openly.”

“Perhaps. Inasmuch as the purpose is to enhance his prestige, the more he talks about it, the better.”

“‘Tis an outlandish plan. Has he suggested it to anyone who could realize it?”

“Indeed, he proposed it to the Maréchal Louvois, who wrote back to him and directed him to make preparations.”

“How long ago?”

“Long enough, mademoiselle, for the preparations to have been made by now.”

“So you have come here to warn William?”

“I have been striving to warn him,” Fatio said, “but he will not grant me an audience.”

“It is very strange, then, that you should approach me. What makes you believe that I have the ear of the Prince of Orange? I live at Versailles and I invest money for members of the Court of the King of France. I journey up this way from time to time to consult with my brokers, and to meet with my dear friend and client the comte d’Avaux. What on earth makes you believe that I should have any connection to William?”

“Suffice it to say, I know that you do,” Fatio returned placidly.

“Who else knows?”

“Who knows that bodies in an inverse square field move on conic sections? Who knows that there is a division between the Rings of Saturn?”

“Anyone who reads Principia Mathematica, or looks through a telescope, respectively.”

“And who has the wit to understand what he has read, or seen.”

“Yes. Anyone can possess Newton’s book, few can understand it.”

“Just so, mademoiselle. And likewise anyone may observe you, or listen to gossip about you, but to interpret those data and know the truth requires gifts that God hoards jealously and gives out to very few.”

“Have you learned much of me, then, from talking to your brethren? For I know that they are to be found in every Court, Church, and College, and that they know each other by signs and code-words. Please do not be coy with me, Fatio, it is ever so tedious.”

“Coy? I would not dream of so insulting a woman of your sophistication. Yes, I tell you without reserve that I belong to an esoteric brotherhood that numbers many of the high and the mighty among its members; that the very raison d’être of that brotherhood is to exchange information that should not be spread about promiscuously; and that I have learned of you from that source.”

“Are you saying that my lord Upnor, and every other gentleman who pisses in the corridors of Versailles, knows of my connexion to William of Orange?”

“Most of them are poseurs with very limited powers of understanding. Do not change your plans out of some phant’sy that they will penetrate what I have penetrated,” Fatio said.

Eliza, who did not find this a very satisfying answer, said nothing. Her silence caused Fatio to get that pleading look again. She turned away from him—the only alternative being to scoff and roll her eyes—and gazed down into the Plein. There something caught her eye: a long figure darkly cloaked, silver hair spilling out onto his shoulders. He had lately emerged from the Grenadiers’ Gate, as if he had just excused himself from the party. A gust of steam flourished from his mouth as he shouted, “How is the seeing tonight?”

“Much better than I should like,” returned Eliza.

“Bad, very bad, Mr. Root, because of our troublesome neighbor!”

“Do not be disheartened,” said Enoch the Red, “I believe that Pegasus, to-night, shall be adorned by a meteor; turn your telescope thither.”

Eliza and Fatio both turned and looked towards the telescope, which was situated cater-corner from them, meaning that Huygens and Waterhouse could neither hear nor see Enoch Root. When they turned back around, Root had turned his back on them, and was vanishing into one of the many narrow side-streets of the Hofgebied.

“Most disappointing! I was going to invite him up here…he must have come from the fête at the Binnenhof,” Fatio said.

Eliza finished the thought herself: Where he was hobnobbing with my brethren of the Dutch court—the same ones who cannot keep their mouths shut concerning you, Eliza.

Fatio looked toward Polaris. “It is half past midnight, never mind what the church-bells say…”

“How can you tell?”

“By reading the positions of the stars. Pegasus is far to the west, there. It shall descend beneath the western horizon within two hours. A miserable place to make observations! And in any case, meteors come and go too quickly for one to aim a telescope at ‘em…what did he mean?”

“Is this a fair sample of the esoteric brotherhood’s discourse? No wonder that Alchemists are famed mostly for blowing up their own dwellings,” Eliza said, feeling somewhat relieved to get this glimpse into the mystery, and to find nothing but bafflement there.

They spent the better part of an hour looking at, and arguing about, the gap in Saturn’s rings, which was named after Cassini, the French royal astronomer, and which Fatio could explain mathematically. Which was to say that Eliza was cold, bored, and ignored. Only one person could peer into the telescope’s eyepiece at a time, and these men quite forgot their manners, and never offered her a turn.

Then Fatio persuaded the others to point the telescope into Pegasus, or those few stars of it that had not yet been drowned in the North Sea. The search of Pegasus was not nearly so interesting to them as Saturn had been, and so they let Eliza look all she wanted, sweeping the instrument back and forth, hoping to catch the predicted meteor.

“Have you found something, Mademoiselle?” Fatio asked at one point, when he noticed Eliza’s stiff fingers pawing at the focusing-screw.

“A cloud, just peeking over the horizon.”

“Weather as fine as today’s could never last,” said Huygens, in a fair sample of Dutch pessimism; for the weather had been wretched.

“Does it have the appearance of a rain-cloud or…”

“That is what I am trying to establish,” Eliza said, trying to bring it into focus.

“Enoch was having you on a bit,” Huygens said, for the others had by now told him the story of Enoch’s enigmatic turn in the Plein. “He felt his joints aching and knew a change in the weather was in the offing! And he knew it would come out of Pegasus since that is in the west, and that is where the wind is from. Very clever.”

“A few wisps of cloud, indeed…but what I first mistook for heavy rain-clouds, is actually a ship under sail…taking advantage of the moonlight to raise her sails, and make a run up the coast,” Eliza said.

“Cloth-smugglers,” Waterhouse predicted, “coming in from round Ipswich.” Eliza stepped back and he took a turn at the eyepiece. “No, I’m wrong, ‘tis the wrong sail-plan for a smuggler.”

“She is rigged for speed, but proceeding cautiously just now,” Huygens pronounced. Then it was Fatio’s turn: “I would wager she is bringing contraband from France—salt, wine, or both.” And so they continued, more and more tediously, until Eliza announced that she was going down to bed.

SHE WAS AWAKENED BY THE tolling of a church-bell. For some reason she felt it was terribly important to count the strokes, but she woke up too late to be sure. She had left her long winter coat across the foot of her bed to make her toes a little warmer and she now sat up and snatched it and drew it round her shoulders in one quick movement, before the chill could rush through the porous linen of her nightgown. She swung her feet out of bed, poked at the pair of rabbit-pelt slippers on the floor to chase away any mice that might be using them as beds, and then pushed her feet into them.

For in somewhat the same way as rodents may quietly set up house-keeping in one’s clothing during the hours of darkness, an idea had established itself in Eliza’s mind while she had been asleep. She did not become fully conscious of this idea until a few minutes later when she went into the great room to stoke up the fire, and saw all of Huygens’s clocks reading the same time: a few minutes past nine o’clock in the morning.

She looked out a window over the Plein and saw high white clouds. From the myriad chimneys of the Binnenhof, plumes of smoke trailed eastwards before a steady onshore breeze. Perfect day for sand-sailing.

She went to the door of Huygens’s bedchamber and raised a fist, then held off. If she were wrong, it were foolish to disturb him. If she were right, it were foolish to spend a quarter of an hour waking him up and trying to convince him.

Huygens kept only a few horses here. The riding-fields of the Malieveld and the Koekamp lay only a musket-shot from the house, and so when he or any of his guests felt like going riding, they need only stroll to one of the many livery-stables that surrounded those places.

Eliza ran out a back door of the house, nearly knocking down a Dutch woman out sweeping the pavement, and took off round the corner running in her rabbit-slippers.

Then she faltered, remembering she’d not brought any money.

“Eliza!” someone shouted.

She turned around to see Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers running up the street after her.

“Do you have money?” she called.

“Yes!”

Eliza ran away from him and did not stop until she reached the nearest livery stable, a couple of hundred long strides away, far enough to get her heart pounding and her face flushed. By the time Fatio caught up with her she had wrapped up a negotiation with the owner; the Swiss mathematician came in the gate just in time to see Eliza thrusting a finger at him and shouting, “and he pays!”

Saddling the horses would take several minutes. Eliza felt on the verge of throwing up. Fatio was agitated, too, but breeding was at war with common sense in him, and breeding prevailed; he attempted to make conversation.

“I infer, Mademoiselle, that you too have received some communication from Enoch the Red on this morning?”

“Only if he came and whispered in my ear while I was sleeping!”

Fatio didn’t know what to make of that. “I encountered him a few minutes ago at my usual coffee-house…he elaborated on his cryptic statement of last night…”

“What we saw last night was enough for me,” Eliza answered. A sleepy stable-boy dropped a saddle, and instead of bending to pick it up, tried to make some witty comment. The owner was doing sums with a quill-pen that wouldn’t hold its ink. Tears of frustration came to Eliza’s eyes. “Damn it!”

“RIDING BARE-BACK IS LIKE RIDING, only more so,” Jack Shaftoe had said to her once. She preferred to remember Jack as little and as infrequently as possible, but now this memory came to her. Until the day they had met underneath Vienna, Eliza had never ridden a horse. Jack had taken obvious pleasure in teaching her the rudiments, more so when she seemed uncertain, or fell off, or let Turk run away with her. But after she had become expert, Jack had turned peevish and haughty, and lost no opportunity to remind her that riding well in a saddle was no accomplishment, and that until one learned to ride bare-back, one didn’t know how to ride at all. Jack knew all about it, of course, because it was how Vagabonds stole horses.

Choosing the proper mount was of the utmost importance (he had explained). Given a string or stable of horses to choose from, one wanted to pick a mount with a flat back, and yet not too wide-bodied or else it wouldn’t be possible to get a good grip with the knees. The wither, or bony hump at the base of the neck, should not be too large (which would make it impossible to lie flat while galloping) nor too small (which gave no purchase for the hands), but somewhere in between. And the horse should be of a compliant disposition, for at some point it was bound to happen that the horse-thief would become disarranged on the horse’s back, as the outcome of some bump or swerve, and then it would be entirely up to the horse whether the Vagabond would be flung off into space or coaxed back into balance.

Now it might have been pure chance that Eliza’s favorite horse in this stable—the mare she asked for by name whenever she called—possessed a flat but not overly broad back, a medium-sized wither, and a sweet disposition. Or perhaps Jack Shaftoe’s advice on the finer points of horse-thievery had subtly informed her choice. At any rate, the mare’s name was Vla (“cream”), and Eliza rated it as unlikely she would ever try to pitch Eliza off her bare back. The stable-boy was attempting to saddle up a different mare, but Vla was in a stall only a few paces away.

Eliza walked over and opened the gate to that stall, greeting Vla by name, and then stepped forward until her nose was caressing the mare’s, and breathed very gently into Vla’s nostrils. This prompted Vla to raise her enormous head slightly, trying to draw closer to that warmth. Eliza cupped the mare’s chin in her hand and exhaled into those nostrils again, and Vla responded with a little shudder of gratitude. Giant overlapping slabs of muscle twitched here and there, coming awake. Eliza now stepped into the stall, trailing a hand along the mare’s side, and then used the stall’s side-planks as a ladder, climbing to a level from which she was able to dive across Vla’s back. Then, by gripping that convenient medium-sized wither with one hand, she was able to spin herself round on her belly and get her legs wrapped around Vla’s body—this required pulling the narrow skirts of her nightgown up round her hips, but her coat hung down to either side and covered her legs. Her bare buttocks, thighs, and calves were pressed directly against the mare’s body, which was exquisitely warm. Vla took this all calmly enough. She did not respond the first time Eliza pinched her bottom, but on the second pinch she walked out into the stable-yard, and when Eliza told her what a good girl she was and pinched her a third time she broke into a trot that nearly bounced Eliza straight off. Eliza flung herself full-length onto the mare’s back and neck, and buried her face in the mane, and clenched a hank of the coarse hair in her teeth. All her attention was concentrated for those few moments on not falling off. The next time she looked around, they had trotted out into the street, pursued none too effectively by a few grooms and stable-hands who still could not make out whether they were witnessing a bizarre mishap or a criminal act.

They were headed northwards along the edge of the riding-ground called Koekamp, which was limned on this side by the big canal that ran straight to Scheveningen. Vla wanted to turn her nose out of the stinging sea-wind and stray off into the Koekamp, which was what she did for a living. Every time her nose bent that way, Eliza gave her a sharp reprimand, and a dig on that side with her foot. So progress was balky, and relations between horse and rider were tense, as long as the Koekamp and then the Malieveld beckoned to their right. But once they had ridden clear of such temptations, Vla seemed to understand that they were riding up the canal to Scheveningen, and settled down noticeably. Another pinch caused Vla to break into a canter, which was both smoother and faster. Very soon after that Eliza was galloping down the canal-side hollering “Make way in the name of the Stadholder!” whenever she saw anyone in the way. But this was rarely, for by now they were out in open country, and cows were more common than people.

Jack had been right, she decided—remaining on the back of a galloping horse without benefit of saddle was a question of balance, and of anticipating the horse’s movements, while also relying on some cooperation from the horse! Soon Vla began to sweat, which made her slippery, and then Eliza had to abandon all pretense of holding on by brute force and rely entirely on a very complicated and ever-changing sort of sympathy between her and the mare.

Fatio did not catch up with her until she was most of the way to Scheveningen. They were being pursued, at a distance, by two men who were presumably members of the St. George Guild. As long as these did not draw close enough to loose any pistol-balls in their direction, they did not especially care. It could all be explained later.

“The ship…we saw…” Eliza shouted, forcing out the occasional word when not gasping for breath or being jolted by the mare. “‘Twas the jacht?”

“The same…It is…Météore, the flagship…of the Duc…d’Arcachon! We may…assume it…to be full…of dragoons!” Fatio returned.

Behind them, someone had begun blowing a horn from the top of a watch-tower in the Hague. It was a signal to the sheriff in Scheveningen, who was answerable to the town council of the Hague; very soon Fatio and Eliza would find out how diligent this sheriff was, and how well he had organized his watchmen.

They reached the boat-house at Scheveningen at ten minutes past ten o’clock. As they approached, Eliza saw a sand-sailer out on the beach, being worked on by a ship-wright, and cried “Aha!” thinking they’d arrived in time. But then she noticed wheel-tracks in the sand, and followed them north up the beach until she saw another sailer, already a mile away, heeled over by the sea-breeze.

The boat-house was not really a single house, but a horseshoe-shaped compound of diverse sheds, shacks, and workshops scabbed on to one another, crammed with distracting detail: tools, forges, lathes, lofts…Eliza got lost in that detail for a few moments, then turned around to look behind them, and discovered a landscape of pandemonium in their wake: breathless Guildsmen from the Hague, Blue Guards, marines from ships in the harbor, enraged members of Scheveningen’s Watch, all seemingly contending with one another to lay hands first on Fatio—who was trying to explain everything in French. He was throwing unreadable looks at Eliza, half pleading for assistance, half wanting to defend her from the mob.

“Fire guns!” Eliza shouted in Dutch. “The Prince is in danger.” Then she explained what she could, in what little Dutch she had. Nodding his head the whole time was the Captain of the Blue Guards, who, she collected, had always taken a dim view of the Prince’s beach-sailing anyway. At some point he decided he had heard plenty. He fired a pistol in the air to silence the crowd and tossed the empty, smoking weapon to a guardsman, who tossed him a loaded one back. Then he uttered a few words in Dutch and everyone scattered.

“What did he say, mademoiselle?” Fatio asked.

“He said, ‘Guards, ride! Watchmen, fire! Sailors, launch! Others, get out of the way!’ ”

Fatio watched in fascination: a squadron of mounted Blue Guards took off hell-for-leather up the beach, galloping in pursuit of the Prince. Sailors were sprinting down towards the waterfront, the gunners on the harbor batteries were loading their cannons. Anyone with a loaded firearm was shooting in the air; but the Prince, far away in a cosmos of wind and surf, could not hear them. “I suppose we belong in the category of ‘others,’” Fatio said, a bit dejectedly. “It will be all right, I suppose…those cavalrymen will catch up to him anon.”

The sun had found a rift in the high clouds and illuminated veils of steam rising from the sweaty coats of their horses. “They’ll never catch him,” Eliza demurred, “in this wind he can out-sail them with ease.”

“Perhaps the Prince will take notice of that!” Fatio said, startled by a ragged volley of cannon-fire.

“He’ll only assume it is a salute, for some ship approaching the harbor.”

“What can we do, then?”

“Follow orders. Leave,” Eliza said.

“Then pray tell why are you dismounting?”

“Fatio, you are a gentleman,” Eliza called over her shoulder, kicking off the rabbit-pelts and stepping barefoot across the sand towards the other sailer. “You grew up near Lake Geneva. Do you know how to sail?”

“Mademoiselle,” said Fatio, dismounting, “on a rig of this plan I can out-sail a Dutchman. I want only one thing.”

“Name it.”

“The craft will heel over. The sail will spill wind and I will lose speed. Unless I had someone small, nimble, tenacious, and very brave, to lean out of the vehicle on the windward side, and act as a counterweight.”

“Let us go and defend the Defender then,” Eliza said, climbing aboard.

THEY COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE moving as fast as it seemed, or so Eliza told herself until they caught up with the squadron of Blue Guards. With a twitch of the tiller Fatio could have veered round them as if they were standing still. Instead he let out the main-sheet and spilled a huge dollop of air, causing the sailer to drop to what felt like a slow walking pace—and yet they were staying abreast of the galloping Guards. The sailer dropped back onto all three wheels and Eliza, leaning way out on what had been the high side, nearly planted her head in the sand. Fortunately she was gripping with both hands a line that Fatio had hitched round the mast, and by pulling hard on this she was able to draw herself up faster than the zooming sand could lunge at her. And now she had a few moments to wipe spray and grit out of her face, and to tie her hair into a sodden knot that lay cold and rough against her neck. Fatio had got the attention of some of the Blue Guards by gesticulating and shouting in a hotchpotch of languages. Something came flying towards them, tumbling end-over-end, plopped into the mainsail, and slid down the curved canvas into Fatio’s lap: a musket. Then another, flung by a different Guard, whirled just over their heads and embedded itself barrel-first in the sand, surf swirling around its stock, and fell away aft. Now a pistol came flying toward them and Eliza, finally ready, was able to reach up and slap it out of the air with one hand.

Instantly Fatio hauled in on the sheet and the sailer hurled itself forward. He got in front of the foremost of the Guards and then veered up away from the surf onto drier and firmer sand. Eliza had had time to shove the pistol into her coat-sash now, and to get that rope wrapped securely round her hands; Fatio hauled the sheet in recklessly, and the sailer bit so fiercely into the wind that it nearly capsized. One of its wheels was spinning in the air, flinging sand and water at Eliza, who clambered over its rim, planted both of her bare feet on the end of the axle, and let the rope slither through her numb hands until she was leaning back almost horizontally and gazing (when she could see anything) at the undercarriage of the sand-sailer.

It occurred to her to wonder whether they were now traveling faster than any human beings had ever gone. For a minute she fancied it was so—then the Natural Philosopher in her weighed in with the observation that ice-boats had less friction to contend with and probably went even faster.

Then why was she so exhilarated? Because despite the cold and the danger and the uncertainty of what they might find at the end of the journey, she had a kind of freedom here, a wildness she had not known since her Vagabond days with Jack. All the cares and intrigues of Versailles were forgotten.

Craning her neck around, she was able to look out to sea. There was the normal clutter of coastal traffic, but mostly these vessels had triangular sails. The square-rigged jacht of the duc d’Arcachon should be conspicuous. Indeed, she thought she could see a square-rigger standing off several leagues from shore, a short distance to the north—that must be Météore! The longboat would have come in at dawn and been hauled up on the beach so that the Prince would not notice it until too late.

Fatio had been raving for some minutes about the Bernoullis—Swiss mathematicians, therefore friends and colleagues of his. “Sail-makers of a hundred years ago phant’sied that sails worked as literal wind-bags, which is why ships in old pictures all have a big-bellied appearance that is very odd to our modern eyes, as if they need to be taken in…now we have learned that sails develop force by virtue of air-currents to either side, shaping, and shaped by, the curve of the canvas…but we understand not the particulars…the Bernoullis are making this their field of specialization…soon we’ll be able to use my calculus to loft sails according to rational principles…”

“ Your calculus!?”

“Yes…and it will enable us to attain speeds even…better…than…this!”

“I see him!” Eliza shouted.

Fatio’s view ahead was blocked by sail and rigging, but Eliza was in the clear, and she could see the top of William’s mast protruding above a low hummock of sand and beach-scrub. The Prince’s sailer was heeled over, but not so much as theirs, since he lacked a human counter-weight. He was perhaps half a mile ahead. Halfway between them, but coming up on them rapidly, was the said hummock, which (Eliza realized) was just the sort of visual obstacle behind which the dragoons would want to set up their ambuscade. And indeed she could see the mast of William’s sailer swinging up to vertical as he faltered and lost speed…

“It is happening now,” she shouted.

“Would you like me to stop and let you off, mademoiselle, or—”

“Don’t be foolish.”

“Very well!” Fatio now steered the sailer in a slashing arc around the end of the hummock. In that moment a mile of open beach was revealed to them.

Straight ahead and alarmingly close was a longboat, still cluttered with branches that had been laid over it as camouflage. This had just been dragged out of a hiding place on the north face of the hummock and was now being hauled and shoved down toward the water by half a dozen hefty French dragoons. At the moment its keel was slicing directly across the tracks that had been laid in the sand by William’s sailer a few seconds ago. It was cutting off the Prince’s line of retreat—and it barred Eliza and Fatio’s advance. Fatio jerked on the tiller and steered up-slope, round behind the boat. Eliza could only hold her rope. She clenched her teeth so that she would not bite off her tongue, and kept her eyes closed through a series of jolts. The wheels that were on the ground plunged across the furrow that had been cut by the longboat’s keel, and the one that was in the air smashed into the head of a startled dragoon and felled him like a statue.

The trim of the sails and balance of the vehicle were now all awry, and there was some veering and bouncing as Fatio brought matters in hand again. Sheer speed was not as important as it had been, and so Eliza put her whole weight on the hand-rope, raised her knees, and swung inwards far enough to plant her feet near the mast of the sailer. Fatio settled into a slower pace. They both looked up the beach.

A bow-shot ahead of them, another contingent of half a dozen dragoons were running in pursuit of the Prince of Orange’s sand-sailer. This had come to a stop before a barrier consisting of a chain stretched along a row of pilings that the Frenchmen had apparently pounded into the sand. The ambushers all had their backs to Eliza and Fatio, and their attention fixed upon the Prince, who had clambered out of his sailer and turned round to face the attackers.

William strode free of his sailer, shrugged his cape off into the sand, reached round himself, and drew his sword.

Fatio sailed into the line of dragoons, taking two of them, including their captain, from behind. But this was the end of his and Eliza’s sand-sailing career, for the vehicle planted its nose in the sand and tumbled over smartly. Eliza landed face-first in wet sand and sensed wreckage slamming down near her, but nothing touched her save a few snarled wet ropes. Still, these were an impediment to getting up. When she struggled to her feet, all water-logged, sand-covered, cold, and battered, she discovered that she’d lost the pistol; and by the time she’d pulled it up out of the sand, the action at this end of the beach was over—William’s sword, which had been bright a moment ago, was red now, and two dragoons were lying on sand clutching at their vitals. Another was being held at bay by Fatio with his musket, and the sixth member of the squad was running toward the longboat, waving his arms over his head and shouting.

The longboat was in the surf now, ready to convey the dragoons and their prisoner back out to Météore. After a short discussion, four of the men who’d dragged it down the beach detached themselves and took off running towards the stopped sand-sailers while another stayed behind to mind the boat’s bow-rope. The sixth member of that contingent was still face-down in the sand with a wheel-track running over his back.

Eliza had not been noticed yet.

She crouched down behind the broken frame of the sand-sailer and devoted a few moments to examining the firing-mechanism of the pistol, trying to brush out the sand while leaving some powder in the pan.

Hearing a scream, she looked up to see that William had simply walked up to the captured dragoon and run him through with his sword. Then the prince took the musket from Fatio, dropped to one knee, took careful aim, and fired toward the five dragoons now running toward them.

Not a one of them seemed to take any notice.

Eliza lay down on her belly and began crawling south down the beach. In a moment the dragoons ran past her, about ten paces off to her left. As she’d hoped, none of them noticed her. They had eyes only for the two men, William and Fatio, who now stood, swords drawn, back to back, waiting.

Eliza clambered to her feet and shed her long heavy coat. Before boarding the sand-sailer at Scheveningen, she’d borrowed Fatio’s dagger and used it to slit the skirt of her nightgown and cut off the bottom few inches, freeing her legs. She sprinted toward the longboat. She was dreading the sound of pistols or muskets, which would mean that the dragoons had decided to drop William and Fatio on the spot. But she heard nothing except surf. The Frenchmen must have orders to bring the Prince back alive. Fatio was unknown to them and wholly expendable, but they could not shoot at him without hitting William of Orange.

The solitary dragoon holding the longboat’s bow-rope watched, dumbfounded, as Eliza ran towards him. Even if he hadn’t been dumbfounded there was nothing he could have done save stand there; if he dropped the rope, the boat would be lost, and he lacked the strength to beach it unaided. As Eliza drew closer she observed that this fellow had a pistol stuck in his waistband. But since the troughs of the waves were around his hips, and the crests wrapped themselves around his chest, the weapon was no cause for concern.

Eliza planted herself on the shore, took out the pistol, cocked the hammer, and took dead aim at the dragoon from perhaps ten paces. “This may fire or it may not,” she said in French. “You have until I count to ten to decide whether you’ll gamble your life and your immortal soul on it. One…two…three…did I mention I’m on the rag? Four…”

He lasted until seven. It was not the pistol that concerned him so much as her overall jaggedness, the look in her eye. He dropped the rope in the sea, raised his hands, and sidled up onto the beach, keeping well clear of Eliza, then turned and took off running toward the other group. ‘Twas not a bad play. If he’d stayed, the pistol might have fired, and he’d be dead and they’d lose the boat for certain. But there was a good chance that they could get it back from Eliza if he got help from the others.

Eliza let the hammer down gently, tossed the pistol into the longboat, waded out a few steps, reached up over her head to grip the boat’s transom, and hauled herself up. After a few kicks she was able to get an ankle hooked over the top of the transom, and then she brought herself up out of the water and rolled sideways over the stern and dropped into the bottom of the boat.

Her first view was of a caulked sea-chest. Pulling herself up on it, she saw that it was one of several massive lockers that rested on the deck. Presumably they contained weapons. But if it came to gunplay they were all lost.

The weapons she needed were oars, and these were lying out in plain sight on the boat’s simple plank benches. She tried to snatch one up and was dismayed to find it was twice as long as she was tall, too heavy and unwieldy to be snatched; but at any rate she heaved it up off the benches and rotated its blade down into the water. Standing in the stern, where the water under the keel was shallowest, she stabbed down through the surf and into the firm sand. The longboat was reluctant to move, and one who had not recently familiarized herself with the contents of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica might have given up. But the elemental precepts of that work were certain laws of motion that stated that, if she pushed on the oar, the boat had to move; at first it might move too slowly to be perceived, but it had to be moving. Eliza ignored the unreliable evidence of her senses, which were telling her that the boat was not moving at all, and pushed steadily with all her might. Finally she felt the oar’s angle change as the boat moved out from shore.

The moment she pulled the oar out, wind and surf began pushing her back, sapping the vis inertiae she had imparted to the longboat. She planted the oar a second time. The water seemed very little deeper than the first time around.

She wanted in the worst way to look up the beach, but looking would not do any good. Only getting the boat clear of the beach would serve their purposes. And so she waited until she had planted the oar half a dozen times, and doubled her distance from the surf-line, before she dared to look up.

Fatio was down. A dragoon was sitting on him, holding something near his head. William was at bay, sword still drawn, but surrounded by four dragoons who were leveling guns at him. One of these seemed, from his stance and his gestures, to be talking to the Prince—negotiating terms of surrender, Eliza guessed. The dragoon who had been left behind to hold the longboat’s bow-rope had finally reached the others and was gesticulating, trying to get their attention. The ones who surrounded William ignored him, but the one who was sitting on Fatio took notice, and looked at Eliza.

Eliza glanced toward shore and perceived that the surf had pushed her back in a few yards; the water below the longboat was only waist-deep. In a hurry now, she planted the oars in their locks, sat down, and began to row. Her first several strokes were useless, as the seas, summing and subtracting chaotically, exposed the blades of one or both oars so that they flailed and skittered across the surface. But the dragoons were re-deploying themselves with admirable coolness and she decided she’d better learn from their example. She half-stood and raised the oar-handles high, driving the blades deep, and fell back, thrusting with her legs and arching her body backwards, and felt the boat move. Then she did it again.

Fatio was unguarded and unmoving. William was bracketed between two dragoons who were leveling muskets at his head. The remaining four Frenchmen had run down the beach and were now staring at Eliza across perhaps fifty feet of rough water. One of them had already stripped off most of his clothes, and as Eliza stood up for another oar-stroke she saw him race out into the surf several paces and dive in. The remaining three knelt in the sand, aimed their muskets at the boat, and waited for Eliza to show herself again.

By crouching in the bilge she could remain out of their line of fire—but she couldn’t row the longboat.

A hand gripped the gunwale. Eliza smashed it with the butt of the pistol and it went away. But a minute later it reappeared, bleeding, somewhere else—followed by another hand, then elbows, then a head. Eliza aimed the pistol between the blinking eyes and pulled the trigger; the flint whipped around and cast off a feeble spark but nothing further happened. She turned the weapon around, thinking to smash him on the head, but he raised a hand to parry the blow, and she thought better of it. Instead she stood up, gripped the handles of a gun-chest, heaved it up off the deck, and, just as he was whipping one leg over the gunwale, launched it into his face with a thrust of her hips. He fell off the boat. The dragoons on the shore opened fire and splintered a bench, but they missed Eliza. Still, the sight of those craters of fresh clean wood that had been torn into the benches crushed any sense of relief she might have felt over getting rid of the swimmer.

She had an opportunity now to pull on the oars several times while the dragoons re-loaded. As she stood up for an oar-stroke, movement caught her eye off to the south. She turned that way to see a dozen of the Prince’s Blue Guards cresting the hummock, or circumventing it along the beach, all riding at a dead gallop on foaming and exhausted chargers. As they took in the scene ahead they stood up in their stirrups, raised sabers high, and erupted in shouts of mixed indignation and triumph. Disgustedly, the French dragoons all flung their weapons down into the sand.

“YOU MUST NOT COME NEAR me now for a good long while,” said William of Orange. “I shall make arrangements to spirit you out of this place, and my agents shall spread some story or other that shall account for your whereabouts this morning.”

The Prince paused, distracted by shouts from the far side of a dune. One of the Blue Guards ran up onto its crest and announced he had found fresh horse-tracks. A rider had tarried for some time recently there (the manure of his horse was still warm) and smoked some tobacco, and then galloped away only moments ago (the sand disturbed by his horse’s hooves was still dry). On hearing this news three of the Blue Guards spurred their horses into movement and took off in pursuit. But those mounts were exhausted, whereas the spy’s had been well rested—everyone knew the pursuit would be bootless.

“‘Twas d’Avaux,” William said. “He would be here, so that he could come out of hiding and taunt me after I had been put in chains.”

“Then he knows about me!”

“Perhaps, and perhaps not,” said the Prince, showing a lack of concern that did nothing for Eliza’s peace of mind. He glanced curiously at Fatio, who was sitting up now, having a bloody head-wound bandaged. “Your friend is a Natural Philosopher? I shall endow a chair for him at the university here. You, I will proclaim a Duchess, when the time is right. But now you must return to Versailles, and make love to Liselotte.”

“What!?”

“Do not put on this show of outrage, it is very tedious. You know what I am, I think, and so you must know what she is.”

“But why?”

“That is a more intelligent question. What you have just witnessed here, Eliza, is the spark that ignites the pan, that fires the musket, that ejects the ball, that fells the king. If you do nothing else today, fix that clearly in your mind. Now I have no choice but to make Britain mine. But I shall require troops, and I dare not pull so many of them from my southern marches while Louis menaces me there. But if, as I expect, Louis decides to enlarge his realms at the expense of the Germans, he’ll draw off his forces on his Dutch flank, and free me to send mine across the North Sea.”

“But what has this to do with Liselotte?”

“Liselotte is the grand-daughter of the Winter Queen—who, some say, sparked the Thirty Years’ War by accepting the crown of Bohemia. At any rate the said Queen spent most of those Thirty Years just yonder, in the Hague—my people sheltered her, for Bohemia was by then a shambles, and the Palatinate, which was rightfully hers, had fallen to the Papists as a spoil of that war. But when the Peace of Westphalia was finally signed, some forty years ago now, the Palatinate was returned to that family; the Winter Queen’s eldest son, Charles Louis, became Elector Palatinate. Various of his siblings, including Sophie, moved there, and set up housekeeping in Heidelberg Castle. Liselotte is the daughter of that same Charles Louis, and grew up in that household. Charles Louis died a few years ago and passed the crown to the brother of Liselotte, who was demented—he died not long ago conducting a mock-battle at one of his Rhine-castles. Now the succession is in dispute. The King of France has very chivalrously decided to take the side of Liselotte, who, after all, is his sister-in-law now.”

“It is very adroit,” Eliza said. “By extending a brotherly hand to Madame, Le Roi can add the Palatinate to France.”

“Indeed, it would be a pleasure to watch Louis XIV go about his work, if he were not the Antichrist,” William said. “I cannot help Liselotte and I can do nothing for the poor people of the Palatinate. But I can make France pay for the Rhine with the British Isles.”

“You need to know if Le Roi intends to move his regiments away from your borders, towards the Rhine.”

“Yes. And no one is in a better position to know that than Liselotte—if not precisely a pawn, she is a sort of captured queen, on France’s side of the board.”

“If the stakes are that high, then I suppose the least I can do is contrive some way to get close to Liselotte.”

“I don’t want you to get close to her, I want you to seduce her, I want you to make her your slave.”

“I was trying to be delicate.”

“My apologies!” William said with a courtly bow, looking her up and down. Covered in salt and sand, and wrapped up in a bloody dragoon-coat, Eliza couldn’t have looked delicate at all. William looked as if he were on the verge of saying as much. But he thought better of it, and looked away.

“You have ennobled me, my prince. It was done some years ago. You have grown used to thinking of me as a noblewoman, even if that is only a secret between you and me. To Versailles I am still a commoner, and a foreigner to boot. As long as this remains true you may be assured that Liselotte will have nothing to do with me.”

“In public.”

“Even in private! Not everyone there is as much of a hypocrite as you seem to think.”

“I did not say it would be easy. This is why I am asking you to do it.”

“As I said, I am willing to give it a try. But if d’Avaux has seen me here today, going back to Versailles would seem unwise.”

“D’Avaux prides himself on playing a deep and subtle game, and that is his weakness,” William announced. “Besides, he depends on your financial advice. He will not crush you immediately.”

“Later, then?”

“He’ll try to,” William corrected her.

“And he will succeed.”

“No. For by that point you will be the mistress of Madame—Liselotte—the King’s sister-in-law. Who has her rivals and her weaknesses, true—but who is of infinitely higher rank than d’Avaux.”

Versailles

EARLY 1688

To Leibniz, February 3, 1688

Doctor,

Madame has graciously offered to send this letter to Hanover along with some others that her friend is carrying personally to Sophie, and so I’ll dispense with the cypher.

You may wonder why Madame is offering such courtesies to me now, since in the past she has always viewed me as a mouse turd in the pepper.

It seems that as the King of France was rising one day recently, he remarked, to the nobles who were attending his getting-out-of-bed ceremony, that he had heard that “the woman from Qwghlm” was secretly of noble blood.

It was a secret even to me until an hour or so later, when I heard someone calling for “Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur,” which (as I slowly figured out) is their way of trying to pronounce Sghr. As you may know, my island is a well-known Hazard to Navigation, recognizable, to terrified sailors, by its three towers of rock, which we denote by that name. Evidently some courtier, who had been so reckless as to sail within view of Qwghlm at some point, remembered this detail and concocted a title for me. To the Court ladies here, especially those of ancient families, it has a savage ring to it. Fortunately there are many foreign princesses here who do not have such exacting standards, and they have already sent minions around to invite me to parties.

Of course Kings may ennoble commoners whenever they please, and so it isn’t clear to me why someone has gone to the trouble of making me out to be a hereditary noble. Here is a clue, though: Father Édouard de Gex has been asking me questions about the Qwghlmian Church, which is not technically Protestant in that it was founded before the Roman Catholic Church was established (or at least before anyone notified the Qwghlmians). The Father speaks of going to visit Qwghlm to seek out proofs that our faith is really no different from his and that the two should be merged.

Meanwhile I keep hearing expressions of sympathy from various French nobles, who cluck their tongues over the barbaric occupation of my homeland by England. In fact, every Qwghlmian would be pleased if Englishmen did come and occupy our Island, for presumably they would bring some food and warm clothes. I suspect that Louis knows he may soon see a sworn enemy sitting on the throne of England, and is making ready to out-flank that foe by shoring up relations with places such as Ireland, Scotland, and that flyspeck of rock where I was born. It has been ages since Qwghlm had hereditary nobles (nine hundred years ago the Scots rounded them all up and sealed them into a cave with some bears), but now they have decided I am one. Mother would have been so proud!

According to the date at the top of your last letter, you penned it while you were paying a visit to Sophie’s daughter at the Court of Brandenburg around the time of Christmas. Please tell me what Berlin is like! I know that many Huguenots have ended up there. It is strange to consider that only a few years ago Sophie and Ernst August were offering their daughter’s hand in marriage to Louis XIV. Yet now Sophie Charlotte is Electress of Brandenburg instead, and (if the rumors are to be believed) presiding over a salon of religious dissidents and free-thinkers in Berlin. If the marriage had gone the other way she would bear a measure of responsibility for putting the very same men to death or slavery. I can’t help but suppose she is happier where she is.

They say that Sophie Charlotte participates in the discussions of those savants with ever so much poise and confidence. I can’t help but suppose that this is because she grew up around you, Doctor, and listened to the conversations you had with her mother. Now that I am reckoned a Countess, and am considered fit to exchange chit-chat with Madame, I have begged her to tell me what you and Sophie talk about at Hanover. But she only rolls her eyes and claims that erudite talk makes no sense to her. I believe that she has spent too much time around self-styled Alchemists, and suspects that all such talk is rubbish.

The Star Chamber, Westminster Palace

APRIL 1688

For to accuse, requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution more resembles justice.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

“HOW DOES THE SAYING GO? ‘All work and no play…a dull boy,” said a disembodied voice. It was the only perception that Daniel’s brain was receiving at the moment. Vision, taste, and the other senses were dormant, and memory did not exist. This made it possible for him to listen with more-than-normal acuteness to the voice, and to appreciate its fine qualities—of which there were many. It was a delicious voice, belonging to an upper-class man who was used to being listened to, and who liked it that way.

“This boy’s lucubrations have made him very dull indeed, he is a very sluggard!” the voice continued.

A few men chuckled, and shifted bodies sheathed in silk. The sounds echoed from a high and hard ceiling.

Daniel’s mind now recollected that it was attached to a body. But like a regiment that has lost contact with its colonel, the body had not received any orders in a long time. It had gone all loose and discomposed, and had stopped sending signals back to headquarters.

“Give him more water!” commanded the beautiful voice.

Daniel heard boots moving on a hard floor to his left, felt blunt pressure against numbed lips, heard the rim of a bottle crack against one of his front teeth. His lungs began to fill up with some sort of beverage. He tried to move his head back but it responded sluggishly, and something cold hit him on the back of the neck hard enough to stop him. The fluid was flooding down his chin now and trickling under his clothes. His whole thorax clenched up trying to cough the fluid out of his lungs, and he tried to move his head forward—but now something cold caught him across the throat. He coughed and vomited at the same moment and sprayed hot humours all over his lap.

“These Puritans cannot hold their drink—really one cannot take them anywhere.”

“Save, perhaps, to Barbados, my Lord!” offered up another voice.

Daniel’s eyes were bleary and crusted. He tried raising his hands to his face, but halfway there each one of them collided with a bar of iron that was projecting across space. Daniel groped at these, but dire things happened to his neck when he did, and so he ended up feeling around them to paw at his eyes and wipe grit and moisture away from his face. He could make out now that he was sitting on a chair in the middle of a large room; it was night, and the place was lit up by only a modest number of candles. The light gleamed from white lace cravats round the throats of several gentlemen who were arranged round Daniel in a horseshoe.

The light wasn’t bright enough, and his vision wasn’t clear enough, to make sense of this ironmongery that was about his neck, so he had to explore that with his hands. It seemed to be a band of iron bent into a neck-ring. From four locations equally spaced around its circumference rods of iron projected outwards like spokes from a wheel-hub, to a radius of perhaps half a yard, where each split into a pair of back-curved barbs, like the flukes of grappling-hooks.

“While you were sleeping off the effects of M. LeFebure’s draught, I took the liberty of having you fitted out with new neckwear,” said the voice, “but as you are a Puritan, and have no use for vanity, I called upon a blacksmith instead of a tailor. You’ll find that this is all the mode in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.”

The barbs sticking out behind had gotten lodged in the back of the chair when Daniel had unwisely tried to sit forward. Now he gripped the ones in front and pushed himself back hard, knocking the rear ones free. Momentum carried him and the collar back; his spine slammed into the chair and the collar kept moving and tried to shear his head off. He ended up with his head tilted back, gazing almost straight up at the ceiling. His first thought was that candles had somehow been planted up there, or burning arrows shot at random into the ceiling by bored soldiery, but then his eyes focused and he saw that the vault had been decorated with painted stars that gleamed in the candle-light from beneath. Then he knew where he was.

“The Court of Star Chamber is in session—Lord Chancellor Jeffreys presiding,” said another excellent voice, husky with some kind of precious emotion. And what sort of man got choked up over this?

Now just as Daniel’s senses had recovered one at a time, beginning with his ears, so his mind was awakening piece-meal. The part of it that warehoused ancient facts was, at the moment, getting along much better than the part that did clever things. “Nonsense…the Court of Star Chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641…five years before I was born, or you were, Jeffreys.”

“I do not recognize the self-serving decrees of that rebel Parliament,” Jeffreys said squeamishly. “The Court of Star Chamber was ancient—Henry VII convened it, but its procedures were rooted in Roman jurisprudence—consequently, ‘twas a model of clarity, of effiency, unlike the time-encrusted monstrosity of Common Law, that staggering, cobwebbed Beast, that senile compendium of folklore and wives’ tales, a scabrous Colander seiving all the chunky bits out of the evanescent flux of Society and compacting ‘em into legal head-cheese.”

“Hear, hear!” said one of the other Judges, who apparently felt that Jeffreys had now encompassed everything there was to be said about English Common Law. Daniel assumed they must all be judges, at any rate, and that they’d been hand-picked by Jeffreys. Or, more like it, they’d simply gravitated to him during his career, they were the men that he always saw, whenever he troubled to glance around him.

Another one of them said, “The late Archbishop Laud found this Chamber to be a convenient facility for the suppression of Low Church dissidents, such as your father, Drake Waterhouse.”

“But the entire point of my father’s story is that he was not suppressed—Star Chamber cut his nose and his ears off and it only made him more formidable.”

“Drake was a man of exceptional strength and resilience,” Jeffreys said. “Why, he haunted my very nightmares when I was a boy. My father told me tales of him as if he were a bogey-man. I know that you are no Drake. Why, you stood by and watched one of your own kind be murdered, under your window, at Trinity, by my lord Upnor, twenty-some years ago, and you did nothing—nothing! I remember it well, and I know that you do as well, Waterhouse.”

“Does this sham have a purpose, other than to reminisce about College days?” Daniel inquired.

“Give him a revolution,” Jeffreys said.

The fellow who had poured water into Daniel’s mouth earlier—some sort of armed bailiff—stepped up, grabbed one of the four grappling-hooks projecting from Daniel’s collar, and gave it a wrench. The whole apparatus spun round, using Daniel’s neck as an axle, until he could get his arms up to stop it. A simpler man would have guessed—from the sheer amount of pain involved—that his head had been half sawed away. But Daniel had dissected enough necks to know where all the important bits were. He ran a few quick experiments and concluded that, as he could swallow, breathe, and wiggle his toes, none of the main cables had been severed.

“You are charged with perverting the English language,” Jeffreys proclaimed. “To wit: that on numerous occasions during idle talk in coffee-houses, and in private correspondence, you have employed the word ‘revolution,’ heretofore a perfectly innocent and useful English word, in an altogether new sense, conceived and propagated by you, meaning radical and violent overthrow of a government.”

“Oh, I don’t think violence need have anything to do with it.”

“You admit you are guilty then!”

“I know how the genuine Star Chamber worked…I don’t imagine this sham one is any different…why should I dignify it by pretending to put up a defense?”

“The defendant is guilty as charged!” Jeffreys announced, as if, by superhuman effort, he’d just brought an exhausting trial to a close. “I shan’t pretend to be surprised by the outcome—while you were asleep, we interrogated several witnesses—all agreed you have been using ‘revolution’ in a sense that is not to be found in any treatise of Astronomy. We even asked your old chum from Trinity…”

“Monmouth? But didn’t you chop his head off?”

“No, no, the other one. The Natural Philosopher who has been so impertinent as to quarrel with the King in the matter of Father Francis…”

“Newton!?”

“Yes, that one! I asked him, ‘You have written all of these fat books on the subject of Revolutions, what does the word signify to you?’ He said it meant one body moving about another—he uttered not a word about politics.”

“I cannot believe you have brought Newton into this matter.”

Jeffreys abruptly stopped playing the rôle of Grand Inquisitor, and answered in the polite, distracted voice of the busy man-about-town: “Well, I had to grant him an audience anyway, on the Father Francis matter. He does not know you are here…just as you, evidently, did not know he was in London.”

In the same sort of tone, Daniel replied, “Can’t blame you for finding it all just a bit bewildering. Of course! You’d assume that Newton, on a visit to London, would renew his acquaintance with me, and other Fellows of the Royal Society.”

“I have it on good authority he has been spending time with that damned Swiss traitor instead.”

“Swiss traitor?”

“The one who warned William of Orange of the French dragoons.”

“Fatio?”

“Yes, Fatio de Duilliers.”

Jeffreys was absent-mindedly patting his wig, puzzling over this fragment re Newton. The sudden change in the Lord Chancellor’s affect had engendered, in Daniel, a giddiness that was probably dangerous. He had been trying to stifle it. But now Daniel’s stomach began to shake with suppressed laughter.

“Jeffreys! Fatio is a Swiss Protestant who warned the Dutch of a French plot, on Dutch soil…and for this you call him a traitor?”

“He betrayed Monsieur le comte de Fenil. And now this traitor has moved to London, for he knows that his life is forfeit anywhere on the Continent…anywhere Persons of Quality observe a decent respect for justice. But here! London, England! Oh, in other times his presence would not have been tolerated. But in these parlous times, when such a man comes and takes up residence in our city, no one bats an eye…and when he is seen buying alchemical supplies, and talking in coffee-houses with our foremost Natural Philosopher, no one thinks of it as scandalous.”

Daniel perceived that Jeffreys was beginning to work himself up into another frenzy. So before the Lord Chancellor completely lost his mind, Daniel reminded him: “The real Star Chamber was known for pronouncing stern sentences, and executing them quickly.”

“True! And if this assembly had such powers, your nose would be lying in the gutter, and the rest of you would be on a ship to the West Indies, where you would chop sugar cane on my plantation for the rest of your life. As it stands, I cannot punish you until I’ve convicted you of something in the common-law court. Shouldn’t be all that difficult, really.”

“How do you suppose?”

“Tilt the defendant back!”

The Star Chamber’s bailiffs, or executioners or whatever they were, converged on Daniel from behind, gripped the back of his chair, and yanked, raising its front legs up off the floor and leaving Daniel’s feet a-dangle. His weight shifted from his buttocks to his back, and the iron collar went into motion and tried to fall to the floor. But it was stopped by Daniel’s throat. He tried to raise his hands to take the weight of the iron off his wind-pipe, but Jeffreys’ henchmen had anticipated that: each of them had a spare hand that he used to pin one of Daniel’s hands down to the chair. Daniel could see nothing but stars now: stars painted on the ceiling when his eyes were open, and other stars that zoomed across his vision when his eyes were closed. The face of the Lord Chancellor now swam into the center of this firmament like the Man in the Moon.

Now Jeffreys had been an astonishingly beautiful young man, even by the standards of the generation of young Cavaliers that had included such Adonises as the Duke of Monmouth and John Churchill. His eyes, in particular, had been of remarkable beauty—perhaps this accounted for his ability to seize and hold the young Daniel Waterhouse with his gaze. Unlike Churchill, he had not aged well. Years in London, serving as solicitor general to the Duke of York, then as a prosecutor of supposed conspirators, then Lord Chief Justice, and now Lord Chancellor, had put leaves of lard on him, as on a kidney in a butcher-stall. His eyebrows had grown out into great gnarled wings, or horns. The eyes were beautiful as ever, but instead of gazing out from the fair unblemished face of a youth, they peered out through a sort of embrasure, between folds of chub below and snarled brows above. It had probably been fifteen years since Jeffreys could list, from memory, all the men he had murdered through the judicial system; if he hadn’t lost count while extirpating the Popish Plot, he certainly had during the Bloody Assizes.

At any rate Daniel could not now tear his eyes away from those of Jeffreys. In a sense Jeffreys had planned this spectacle poorly. The drug must have been slipped into Daniel’s drink at the coffeehouse and Jeffreys’s minions must have abducted him after he’d fallen asleep in a water-taxi. But the elixir had made him so groggy that he had failed to be afraid until this moment.

Now, Drake wouldn’t have been afraid, even fully awake; he’d sat in this room and defied Archbishop Laud to his face, knowing what they would do to him. Daniel had been brave, until now, only insofar as the drug had made him stupid. But now, looking up into the eyes of Jeffreys, he recalled all of the horror-stories that had emanated from the Tower as this man’s career had flourished: Dissidents who “committed suicide” by cutting their own throats to the vertebrae; great trees in Taunton decorated with hanged men, dying slowly; the Duke of Monmouth having his head gradually hacked off by Jack Ketch, five or six strokes of the axe, as Jeffreys looked on with those eyes.

The colors were draining out of the world. Something white and fluffy came into view near Jeffreys’s face: a hand surrounded by a lace cuff. Jeffreys had grasped one of the hooks projecting up from Daniel’s collar. “You say that your revolution does not have to involve any violence,” he said. “I say you must think harder about the nature of revolution. For as you can see, this hook is on top now. A different one is on the bottom. True, we can raise the low one up by a simple revolution—” Jeffreys wrenched the collar around, its entire weight bearing on Daniel’s adam’s apple—giving Daniel every reason to scream. But he made no sound other than a pitiable attempt to suck in some air. “Ah, but observe! The one that was high is now low! Let us raise it up then, for it does not love to be low.” Jeffreys wrenched it back up. “Alas, we are back to where we started; the high is high, the low is low, and what’s the point of having a revolution at all?” Jeffreys now repeated the demonstration, laughing at Daniel’s struggle for air. “Who could ask for a better career!” he exclaimed. “Slowly decapitating the men I went to college with! We made Monmouth last as long as ‘twas possible, but the axe is imprecise, Jack Ketch is a butcher, and it ended all too soon. But this collar is an excellent device for a gradual sawing-off, I could make him last for days!” Jeffreys sighed with delight. Daniel could not see any more, other than a few pale violet blotches swimming in turbulent gray. But Jeffreys must have signalled the bailiffs to right the chair, for suddenly the weight of the collar was on his collarbones and his efforts to breathe were working. “I trust I have disabused you of any ludicrous ideas concerning the true nature of revolutions. If the low are to be made high, Daniel, then the high must be made low—but the high like to be high—and they have an army and a navy. ‘Twill never occur without violence. And ‘twill fail given enough time, as your father’s failed. Have you quite learnt the lesson? Or shall I repeat the demonstration?”

Daniel tried to say something: namely to beg that the demonstration not be repeated. He had to because it hurt too much and might kill him. To beg for mercy was utterly reasonable—and the act of a coward. The only thing that prevented him from doing it was that his voice-box was not working.

“It is customary for a judge to give a bit of a scolding to a guilty man, to help him mend his ways,” Jeffreys reflected. “That part of the proceedings is now finished—we move on to Sentencing. Concerning this, I have Bad News, and Good News. ‘Tis an ancient custom to give the recipient of Bad and Good News, the choice of which to hear first. But as Good News for me is Bad for you, and vice versa, allowing you to make the choice will only lead to confusion. So: the Bad News, for me, is that you are correct, the Star Chamber has not been formally re-constituted. ‘Tis just a pastime for a few of us Senior Jurists and has no legal authority to carry out sentences. The Good News, for me, is that I can pronounce a most severe sentence upon you even without legal authority: I sentence you, Daniel Waterhouse, to be Daniel Waterhouse for the remainder of your days, and to live, for that time, every day with the knowledge of your own disgusting cravenness. Go! You disgrace this Chamber! Your father was a vile man who deserved what he got here. But you are a disfigurement of his memory! Yes, that’s right, on your feet, about face, march! Get out! Just because you must live with yourself does not mean we must be subjected to the same degradation! Out, out! Bailiffs, throw this quivering mound of shite out into the gutter, and pray that the piss running down his legs will wash him down into the Thames!”

THEY DUMPED HIM like a corpse in the open fields upriver from Westminster, between the Abbey and the town of Chelsea. When they rolled him out the back of the cart, he came very close to losing his head, as one of the collar-hooks caught in a slat on the wagon’s edge and gave him a jerk at the neck so mighty it was like to rip his soul out of his living body. But the wood gave way before his bones did, and he fell down into the dirt, or at least that was what he inferred from evidence near to hand when he came to his senses.

His desire at this point was to lie full-length on the ground and weep until he died of dehydration. But the collar did not permit lying down. Having it round his neck was a bit like having Drake stand over him and berate him for not getting up. So up he got, and stumbled round and wept for a while. He reckoned he must be in Hogs-den, or Pimlico as men in the real estate trade liked to name it: not the country and not the city, but a blend of the most vile features of both. Stray dogs chased feral chickens across a landscape that had been churned up by rooting swine and scraped bald by scavenging goats. Nocturnal fires of bakeries and breweries shot rays of ghastly red light through gaps in their jumble-built walls, spearing whores and drunks in their gleam.

It could have been worse: they could have dumped him in a place with vegetation. The collar was designed to prevent slaves from running away by turning every twig, reed, vine, and stalk into a constable that would grab the escapee by the nape as he ran by. As Daniel roamed about, he explored the hasp with his fingers and found it had been wedged shut with a carven peg of soft wood which had been hammered through the loops. By worrying this back and forth he was able to draw it out. Then the collar came loose on his neck and he got it off easily. He had a dramatical impulse to carry it over to the river-bank and fling it into the Thames, but then coming to his senses he recollected that there was a mile of dodgy ground to be traversed before he reached the edge of Westminster, and any number of dogs and Vagabonds who might need to be beaten back in that interval. So he kept a grip on it, swinging it back and forth in the darkness occasionally, to make himself feel better. But no assailant came for him. His foes were not of the sort that could be struck down with a rod of iron.

ON THE SOUTHERN EDGE of the settled and civilized part of Westminster, a soon-to-be-fashionable street was under construction. It was the latest project of Sterling Waterhouse, who was now Earl of Willesden, and spent most of his days on his modest country estate just to the northwest of London, trying to elevate the self-esteem of his investors.

One of the people who’d put money into this Westminster street was the woman Eliza, who was now Countess of Zeur. Eliza occupied something like fifty percent of all Daniel’s waking thoughts now. Obviously this was a disproportionate figure. If it’d been the case that Daniel continually come up with new and original thoughts on the subject of Eliza, then he might have been able to justify thinking about her ten or even twenty percent of the time. But all he did was think the same things over and over again. During the hour or so he’d spent in the Star Chamber, he’d scarcely thought of her at all, and so now he had to make up for that by thinking about nothing else for an hour or so.

Eliza had come to London in February, and on the strength of personal recommendations from Leibniz and Huygens, she had talked her way into a Royal Society meeting—one of the few women ever to attend one, unless you counted Freaks of Nature brought in to display their multiple vaginas or nurse their two-headed babies. Daniel had escorted the Countess of Zeur into Gresham’s College a bit nervously, fearing that she’d make a spectacle of herself, or that the Fellows would get the wrong idea and use her as a subject for vivisection. But she had dressed and behaved modestly and all had gone well. Later Daniel had taken her out to Willesden to meet Sterling, with whom she gotten along famously. Daniel had known they would; six months earlier both had been commoners, and now they strolled in what was to become Sterling’s French garden, deciding where the urns and statues ought to go, and compared notes as to which shops were the best places to buy old family heirlooms.

At any rate, both of them now had money invested in this attempt to bring civilization to Hogs-den. Even Daniel had put a few pounds into it (not that he considered himself much of an investor; but British coinage had only gotten worse in the last twenty years, if that was imaginable, and there was no point in keeping your money that way). To prevent the site from being ravaged every night by the former inhabitants (human and non-), a porter was stationed there, in a makeshift lodge, with a large number of more or less demented dogs. Daniel managed to wake all of them up by stumbling over the fence at 3:00 A.M. with his neck half sawn through. Of course the porter woke up last, and didn’t call the dogs off until half of Daniel’s remaining clothes had been torn away. But by that point in the evening, those clothes could not be accounted any great loss.

Daniel was happy just to be recognized by someone, and made up the customary story about having been set upon by blackguards. To this, the porter responded with the obligatory wink. He gave Daniel ale, an act of pure kindness that brought fresh tears to Daniel’s eyes, and sent his boy a-running into Westminster to summon a hackney-chair. This was a sort of vertical coffin suspended on a couple of staves whose ends were held up by great big taciturn men. Daniel climbed into it and fell asleep.

When he woke up it was dawn, and he was in front of Gresham’s College, on the other end of London. A letter was waiting for him from France.

THE LETTER BEGAN,

Is the weather in London still quite dismal? From the vantage point of Versailles, I can assure you that spring approaches London. Soon, I will be approaching, too.

Daniel (who was reading this in the College’s entrance hall) stopped there, stuffed the letter into his belt, and stumbled into the penetralia of the Pile. Not even Sir Thomas Gresham his own self would be able to find his way around the place now, if he should come back to haunt it. The R.S. had been having its way with the building for almost three decades and it was just about spent. Daniel scoffed at all talk of building a new Wren-designed structure and moving the Society into it. The Royal Society was not reducible to an inventory of strange objects, and could not be re-located by transporting that inventory to a new building, any more than a man could travel to France by having his internal organs cut out and packed in barrels and shipped across the Channel. As a geometric proof contained, in its terms and its references, the whole history of geometry, so the piles of stuff in the larger Pile that was Gresham’s College encoded the development of Natural Philosophy from the first meetings of Boyle, Wren, Hooke, and Wilkins up until to-day. Their arrangement, the order of stratifications, reflected what was going on in the minds of the Fellows (predominantly Hooke) in any given epoch, and to move it, or to tidy it up, would have been akin to burning a library. Anyone who could not find what he needed there, didn’t deserve to be let in. Daniel felt about the place as a Frenchman felt about the French language, which was to say that it all made perfect sense once you understood it, and if you didn’t understand it, then to hell with you.

He found a copy of the I Ching in about a minute, in the dark, and carrying it over to where rosy-fingered Dawn was clawing desperately at a grime-caked window, found the hexagram 19, Lin, Approach. The book went on at length concerning the bottomless significance of this symbol, but the only meaning that mattered to Daniel was 000011, which was how the pattern of broken and unbroken lines translated to binary notation. In decimal notation this was 3.

It would have been perfectly all right for Daniel to have crawled up to his garret atop the College and fallen asleep, but he felt that having been stupefied with opium for a night and a day ought to have enabled him to catch up on his sleep, and events in the Star Chamber and later in Hogs-den had got him rather keyed up. Any one of these three things sufficed to prevent sleep: the raw wounds around his neck, the commotion of the City coming awake, and his beastly, uncontrollable lust for Eliza. He went up-stairs to a room that was optimistically called the Library, not because it had books (every room did) but because it had windows. Here he spread out Eliza’s letter on a table all streaked and splotched with disturbing stains. Next to it he set down a rectangle of scrap paper (actually a proof of a woodcut intended for Volume III of Newton’s Principia Mathematica). Examining the characters in Eliza’s letter one by one, he assigned each to either the 0 alphabet or the 1 alphabet and wrote a corresponding digit on the scrap paper, arranging them in groups of five. Thus

DOCTO RWATE RHOUS E

01100 00100 10000 0

The first group of binary digits made the number 12, the second 4, the next 16, and the one after that 6. So writing these out on a new line, and subtracting a 3 from each, he got

Which made the letters I A M C

The light got better as he worked.

Leibniz was building a splendid library in Wolfenbüttel, with a high rotunda that would shed light down onto the table below…

His forehead was on the table. Not a good way to work. Not a good way to sleep either, unless your neck was so torn up as to make lying down impossible, in which case it was the only way to sleep. And Daniel had been sleeping. The pages under his face were a sea of awful light, the unfair light of noon.

“Truly you are an inspiration to all Natural Philosophers, Daniel Waterhouse.”

Daniel sat up. He was stiff as a grotesque. He could feel and hear the scab-work on his neck cracking. Seated two tables away, quill in hand, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.

“Sir!”

Fatio held up a hand. “I do not mean to disturb you, there is no need for—”

“Ah, but there is a need for me to express my gratitude. I have not seen you since you saved the life of the Prince of Orange.”

Fatio closed his eyes for a moment. “‘Twas like a conjunction of planets, purely fortuitous, reflecting no distinction on me, and let us say no more of it.”

“I learned only recently that you were in town—that your life was in danger so long as you remained on the Continent. Had I known as much earlier, I’d have offered you whatever hospitality I could—”

“And if I were worthy of the title of gentleman, I’d have waited for that offer before making myself at home here,” Fatio returned.

“Isaac of course has given you the run of the place and that is splendid.”

Daniel now noticed Fatio gazing at him with a penetrating, analytical look that reminded him of Hooke peering through a lens. From Hooke it was not objectionable, somehow. From Fatio it was mildly offensive. Of course Fatio was wondering how Daniel knew that he’d been hobnobbing with Isaac. Daniel could have told him the story about Jeffreys and the Star Chamber, but it would only have confused matters more.

Fatio now appeared to notice, for the first time, the damage to Daniel’s neck. His eyes saw all, but they were so big and luminous that it was impossible for him to conceal what he was gazing at; unlike the eyes of Jeffreys, which could secretly peer this way and that in the shadow of their deep embrasures, Fatio’s eyes could never be used discreetly.

“Don’t ask,” Daniel said. “You, sir, suffered an honorable wound on the beach. I’ve suffered one, not so honorable, but in the same cause, in London.”

“Are you quite all right, Doctor Waterhouse?”

“Splendid of you to inquire. I am fine. A cup of coffee and I’ll be as good as new.”

Whereupon Daniel snatched up his papers and repaired to the coffee-house, which was full of people and yet where he felt more privacy than under the eyes of Fatio.

The binary digits hidden in the subtleties of Eliza’s handwriting became, in decimal notation,

4 16 6 18 16 12 17 10
which when he subtracted 3 from each (that being the key hidden in the I Ching reference) became

9 1 13 3 15 13 9 14 7… which said,

I AM COMING…

THE FULL DECIPHERMENT took a while, because Eliza provided details concerning her travel plans, and wrote of all she wanted to do while she was in London. When he was finished writing out the message he came alive to the fact that he had sat for a long time, and consumed much coffee, and needed to urinate in the worst way. He could not recall the last time he had made water. And so he went back to a sort of piss-hole in the corner of the tiny court in back of the coffeehouse.

Nothing happened, and so after about half a minute he bent forward as if bowing, and braced his forehead against the stone wall. He had learned that this helped to relax some of the muscles in his lower abdomen and make the urine come out more freely. That stratagem, combined with some artful shifting of the hips and deep breathing, elicited a few spurts of rust-colored urine. When it ceased to work, he turned round, pulled his garments up around his waist, and squatted to piss in the Arab style. By shifting his center of gravity just so, he was able to start up a kind of gradual warm seepage that would provide relief if he kept it up for a while.

This gave him lots of time to think of Eliza, if spinning phant’sies could be named thinking. It was plain from her letter that she expected to visit Whitehall Palace. Which signified little, since any person who was wearing clothes and not carrying a lighted granadoe could go in and wander about the place. But since Eliza was a Countess who dwelt at Versailles, and Daniel (in spite of Jeffreys) a sort of courtier, when she said she wanted to visit Whitehall it meant that she expected to stroll and sup with Persons of Quality. Which could easily be arranged, since the Catholic Francophiles who made up most of the King’s court would fall all over themselves making way for Eliza, if only to get a look at the spring fashions.

But to arrange it would require planning—again, if the dreaming of fatuous dreams could be named planning. Like an astronomer plotting his tide-tables, Daniel had to project the slow wheeling of the seasons, the liturgical calendar, the sessions of Parliament and the progress of various important people’s engagements, terminal diseases, and pregnancies into the time of the year when Eliza was expected to show up.

His first thought had been that Eliza would be here at just the right time: for in another fortnight the King was going to issue a new Declaration of Indulgence that would make Daniel a hero, at least among Nonconformists. But as he squatted there he began to count off the weeks, tick, tick, tick, like the drops of urine detaching themselves one by one from the tip of his yard, and came aware that it would be much longer before Eliza actually got here—she’d be arriving no sooner than mid-May. By that time, the High Church priests would have had several Sundays to denounce Indulgence from their pulpits; they’d say it wasn’t an act of Christian toleration at all, but a stalking-horse for Popery, and Daniel Waterhouse a dupe at best and a traitor at worst. Daniel might have to go live at Whitehall around then, just to be safe.

It was while imagining that—living like a hostage in a dingy chamber at Whitehall, protected by John Churchill’s Guards—that Daniel recalled another datum from his mental ephemeris, one that stopped up his pissing altogether.

The Queen was pregnant. To date she’d produced no children at all. The pregnancy seemed to have come on more suddenly than human pregnancies customarily did. Perhaps they’d been slow to announce it because they’d expected it would only end in yet another miscarriage. But it seemed to have taken, and the size of her abdomen was now a matter of high controversy around Whitehall. She was expected to deliver in late May or early June—just the same time that Eliza would be visiting.

Eliza was using Daniel to get inside the Palace so that she, Eliza, could know as early as possible whether King James II had a legitimate heir, and adjust her investments accordingly. This should have been as obvious as that Daniel had a big stone in his bladder, but somehow Daniel managed to finish what he was doing and go back into the coffee-house without becoming aware of either.

The only person who seemed to understand matters was Robert Hooke, who was in the same coffee-house. He was talking, as usual, to Sir Christopher Wren. But he had been observing Daniel, this whole time, through an open window. He had the look on his face of a man who was determined to speak plainly of unpleasant facts, and Daniel managed to avoid him.

Versailles

JULY 1688

To d’Avaux

Monsieur,

As you requested, I have changed over to the new cypher. To me it seems preposterous to imagine that the Dutch had broken the old one and read all of your letters! But, as always, you are the soul of discretion, and I will follow whatever precautions you demand of me.

It was good that you wrote me that lovely, if vaguely sarcastic, letter of congratulations on the occasion of my being accorded my rightful hereditary title (since we are now of equal rank—whatever doubts you may harbor as to the legitimacy of my title—I hope you are not offended that I address you as Monsieur instead of Monseigneur now). Until your letter arrived, I had not heard from you in many months. At first, I assumed that the Prince of Orange’s vulgar over-reaction to the so-called abduction attempt had left you isolated in the Hague, and unable to send letters out. As months went by, I began to worry that your affection for your most humble and obedient servant had cooled. Now I can see that this was all just idle phant’sy—the sort of aimless fretting to which my sex is so prone. You and I are as close as ever. So I will try to write a good letter and entice you to write me back.

Business first: I have not tallied the numbers for the second quarter of 1688, and so please keep what follows in confidence from the other investors, but I am confident that we have made out better than anyone suspects. True, V.O.C. stock has been performing miserably, and yet the market has been too volatile to make a winning proposition out of selling it short or playing derivatives. Yet a few things—all in London, strangely enough—have saved our investments from disaster. One is traffic in commodities, particularly silver. England’s coinage is becoming more debased every day, counterfeiters are a plague on the land, and, not to bore you with details, this entails flows of gold and silver in and out of that island from which we can profit if we make the right bets.

You may wonder how I can possibly know which bets to make, living as I do in Versailles. Let me ease your concerns by explaining to you that I have made two visits to London since I last saw you, one in February and one in May, around the time that the son of King James II was born. The second visit was mandatory, of course, for everyone knew that the Queen of England was pregnant, and that the future of Britain and of Europe hinged upon her producing a legitimate male heir. The markets in Amsterdam were bound to react strongly to any news from Whitehall and so I had to be there. I have seduced an Englishman who is close to the King—so close that he was able to get me into Whitehall during the time that the Queen went into labor. Since this is a business report, Monsieur, I’ll say no more here; but allow me to mention that there are certain peculiarities surrounding the delivery of this infant with which I’ll entertain you some other time.

The Englishman is a figure of some note in the Royal Society. He has an older half-brother who makes money in more ways than I can enumerate. The family has old connections to the goldsmith’s shops that used to be situated around Cornhill and Threadneedle, and newer connections to the banca that was set up by Sir Richard Apthorp after Charles II put many of the goldsmiths out of business. If you are not familiar with a banca, it means something akin to a goldsmith, except that they have dropped any pretense of goldsmithing per se; they are financiers dealing in metal and paper. Odd as it might sound, this type of business actually makes sense, at least in the context of London, and Apthorp is doing well by it. It was through this connexion that I became aware of the trends in silver and gold mentioned earlier, and was able to make the right bets, as it were.

Lacking the refinement of the French, the English have no equivalent of Versailles, so the high and mighty, the adherents of diverse religions, commerçants, and Vagabonds are all commingled in London. You’ve spent time in Amsterdam, which may give you some idea of what London is like, except that London is not nearly as well organized. Much of the mixing takes place in coffee-houses. Surrounding the ‘Change are diverse coffee- and chocolate-houses that, over time, have come to serve specific clientele. Birds of a feather flock together and so those who trade in East India Company stocks go to one place and so forth. Now as the overseas trade of England has waxed, the business of under-writing ships and other risky ventures has become a trade of some significance in and of itself. Those who are in the market for insurance have recently begun going to Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, which has, for whatever reason, become the favorite haunt of the underwriters. This arrangement works well for buyer and seller alike: the buyer can solicit bids from diverse underwriters simply by strolling from table to table, the sellers can distribute the risks by spontaneously forming associations. I hope I am not boring you to death, Monsieur, but it is a fascinating thing to watch, and you yourself have now made a bit of money from this quarter, which you can use to buy yourself a picaroon-romance if my discourse is too tedious. Tout le monde at Versailles agree that L’Emmerdeur in Barbary is a good read, and I have it on high authority that a copy was spied in the King’s bedchamber.

Enough of business; now, gossip.

Madame deigns to recognize me now that I am known to be a Countess. For the longest time, she regarded me as a parasite, a strangling vine, and so I expected she would be the last person at Court to accept me as a noblewoman. But she astonished me with a welcome that was courteous and almost warm, and begrudged me a few moments’ polite conversation, when I encountered her in the gardens the other day. I believe her previous coldness toward me came from two reasons. One is that like all the other foreign royals, la Palatine (as Liselotte is sometimes referred to here) is insecure about her rank, and tends to exalt herself by belittling those whose bloodlines are even more questionable than hers. This is not an attractive feature but it is all too human! The second reason is that her chief rival at Court is de Main-tenon, who came up from a wretched state to become the unofficial Queen of France. And so whenever Madame sees a woman at Court who has aspirations, it reminds her of the one she hates.

Many nobles of ancient families sneer at me because I handle money. Liselotte is not, however, one of these. On the contrary, I believe it explains why she has accepted me.

Now that I have spent two years in the household of Mme. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, surrounded by the very type of ambitious young woman Madame despises so much, I can understand why she takes such care to avoid them. Those girls have very few assets: their names, their bodies, and (if they are lucky enough to have been born with any) their wits. The first of these—their names, and the pedigrees attached—suffice to get them in the gates. They are like an invitation to the ball. But most of those families have more liabilities than assets. Once one of those girls has found a position in some household at Versailles, she has only a few years to make arrangements for the remainder of her life. She is like a plucked rose in a vase. Every day at dawn she looks out the window to see a gardener driving a wagon loaded with wilted flowers that are taken out to the countryside to be used for mulch, and the similitude to her own future is clear. In a few years she will be outshined, at all the parties, by younger girls. Her brothers will inherit any assets the family might have. If she can marry well, as Sophie did, she may have a life to look forward to; if not, she will be shipped off to some convent, as two of Sophie’s beautiful and brilliant sisters were. When that desperation is combined with the heedless irresponsible nature of young persons generally, cruelty becomes mundane.

It’s only reasonable for Madame to want to avoid young women of that type. She has always assumed that I was one of them—having no way to distinguish me from the others. But lately, as I mentioned, she has become aware that I handle investments. This sets me apart—it tells her that I have interests and assets outside of the intrigues of Court and so am not as dangerous as the others. In effect, she is treating me as if I had just married a rich handsome Duke, and gotten all my affairs in order. Instead of a cut rose in a vase, I am a rosebush with living roots in rich soil.

Or perhaps I’m reading too much into a brief conversation!

She asked me if the hunting was good on Qwghlm. Knowing how much she loves to hunt, I told her it was miserable, unless throwing stones at rats qualified—and how, pray tell, was the hunting here at Versailles? Of course I meant the vast game parks that the King has constructed around the château, but Liselotte shot back, “Indoors or out?”

“I have seen game taken indoors,” I allowed, “but only through trapping or poisoning, which are common peasant vices.”

“Qwghlmians are more accustomed to the outdoor life?”

“If only because our dwellings keep getting blown down, madame.”

“Can you ride, mademoiselle?” she asked.

“After a fashion—for I learned bareback style,” I answered.

“There are no saddles where you come from?”

“In olden days there were, for we would suspend them from tree-branches overnight, to prevent them from being eaten by small creatures in the night-time. But then the English cut down the trees, and so now it is our custom to ride bareback.”

“I should like to see that,” she returned, “but it is hardly proper.”

“We are guests in the King’s house and must abide by his standards of propriety,” I said dutifully.

“If you can ride well in a saddle here, I shall invite you to St. Cloud—that is my estate, and you may abide by my rules there.”

“Do you think Monsieur would object?”

“My husband objects to everything I do,” she said, “and so he objects to nothing.”

In my next letter, I’ll let you know whether I passed the riding-test, and got the invitation to St. Cloud.

And I will send the quarterly figures as well!

Eliza de la Zeur

Tower of London

SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1688

Therefore it happeneth commonly, that such as value themselves by the greatness of their wealth, adventure on crimes, upon hope of escaping punishment, by corrupting public justice, or obtaining pardon by money, or other rewards.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

Now as England was a country of fixed ways, they imprisoned him in the same chamber where they had put Oldenburg twenty years before.

But some things changed even in England; James II was peevish and fitful where his older brother had been merry, and so Daniel was kept closer than Oldenburg had been, and allowed to leave the chamber to stroll upon the walls only rarely. He spent all his time in that round room, encircled by the eldritch glyphs that had been scratched into the stone by condemned alchemists and sorcerers of yore, and pathetic Latin plaints graven by Papists under Elizabeth.

Twenty years ago he and Oldenburg had made idle jests about carving new graffiti in the Universal Character of John Wilkins. The words he had exchanged with Oldenburg still seemed to echo around the room, as if the stone were a telescope mirror that forever recurved all information towards the center. The idea of the Universal Character now seemed queer and naïve to Daniel, and so it didn’t enter his mind to begin scratching at the stone for the first fortnight or so of his imprisonment. He reckoned that it would take a long time to make any lasting mark, and he assumed he would not live long enough. Jeffreys could only have put him in here to kill him, and when Jeffreys set his mind to killing someone there was no stopping him, he did it the way a farmer’s wife plucked a chicken. But no specific judicial proceedings were underway—a sign that this was not to be a judicial murder (meaning a stately and more or less predictable one), but the other kind.

It was marvelously quiet at the Tower of London, the Mint being shut down at the moment, and people never came to visit him, and this was good—rarely was a murder victim afforded such an opportunity to get his spiritual house in order. Puritans did not go to confession or have a special sacrament before dying, as Papists did, but even so, Daniel supposed there must be a bit of tidying-up he could do, in the dusty corners of his soul, before the men with the daggers came.

So he spent a while searching his soul, and found nothing there. It was as sparse and void as a sacked cathedral. He did not have a wife or children. He lusted after Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, but something about being locked up in this round room made him realize that she neither lusted after nor particularly liked him. He did not have a career to speak of, because he was a contemporary of Hooke, Newton, and Leibniz, and therefore predestined for rôles such as scribe, amanuensis, sounding-board, errand-boy. His thorough training for the Apocalypse had proved a waste, and he had gamely tried to redirect his skills and his energies towards the shaping of a secular Apocalypse, which he styled Revolution. But prospects for such a thing looked unfavorable at the moment. Scratching something on the wall might enable him to make a permanent mark on the world, but he would not have time.

All in all, his epitaph would be: DANIEL WATERHOUSE 1646-1688 SON OF DRAKE. It might have made an ordinary man just a bit melancholy, this, but something about its very bleakness appealed to the spirit of a Puritan and the mind of a Natural Philosopher. Suppose he’d had twelve children, written a hundred books, and taken towns and cities from the Turks, and had statues of himself all over, and then been clapped in the Tower to have his throat cut? Would matters then stand differently? Or would these be meaningless distractions, a clutter of vanity, empty glamour, false consolation?

Souls were created somehow, and placed in bodies, which lived for more or fewer years, and after that all was faith and speculation. Perhaps after death was nothing. But if there was something, then Daniel couldn’t believe it had anything to do with the earthly things that the body had done—the children it had spawned, the gold it had hoarded—except insofar as those things altered one’s soul, one’s state of consciousness.

Thus he convinced himself that having lived a bleak spare life had left his soul no worse off than anyone else’s. Having children, for example, might have changed him, but only by providing insights that would have made it easier, or more likely, to have accomplished some internal change, some transfiguration of the spirit. Whatever growth or change occurred in one’s soul had to be internal, like the metamorphoses that went on inside of cocoons, seeds, and eggs. External conditions might help or hinder those changes, but could not be strictly necessary. Otherwise it simply was not fair, did not make sense. Because in the end every soul, be it never so engaged in the world, was like Daniel Waterhouse, alone in a round room in a stone tower, and receiving impressions from the world through a few narrow embrasures.

Or so he told himself; either he would be murdered soon, and learn whether he was right or wrong, or be spared and left to wonder about it.

On the twentieth day of his imprisonment, which Daniel reckoned to be August 17th, 1688, the perceptions coming in through his embrasures were of furious argument and wholesale change. The soldiers he’d been glimpsing out in the yard were gone, replaced by others, in different uniforms. They looked like the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, but that couldn’t be, for they were a household regiment, stationed at Whitehall Palace, and Daniel couldn’t imagine why they would be uprooted from their quarters there and moved miles down-river to the Tower of London.

Unfamiliar men came to empty his chamber-pot and bring him food—better food than he’d become accustomed to. Daniel asked them questions. Speaking in Dorsetshire accents, they said that they were indeed the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and that the food they were bringing him had been piling up for quite some time in a porter’s lodge. Daniel’s friends had been bringing it. But the men who’d been running the Tower until yesterday—a distinctly inferior foot regiment—had not been delivering it.

Daniel then moved on to questions of a more challenging nature and the men stopped supplying answers, even after he shared a few oysters with them. When he became insistent, they allowed as how they would relay his questions to their sergeant, who (as they warned him) was very busy just now, taking an inventory of the prisoners and of the Tower’s defenses.

It was two days before the sergeant came to call on Daniel. They were trying days. For just when Daniel had convinced himself that his soul was a disembodied consciousness in a stone tower, perceiving the world through narrow slits, he had been given oysters. They were of the best: Roger Comstock had sent them. They made his body happy when he ate them, and affected his soul much more than seemed proper, for a disembodied consciousness. Either his theory was wrong, or the seductions of the world were more powerful than he’d remembered. When Tess had got the smallpox she’d got it bad, and the pustules had all joined together and her whole skin had fallen off, and her guts had shot out of her anus into a bloody pile on the bed. After that she had somehow remained alive for a full ten and a half hours. Considering the carnal pleasures she had brought him during the years she’d been his mistress, Daniel had taken this the same way Drake would’ve: as a cautionary parable about fleshly delights. Better to perceive the world as Tess had during those ten and a half hours than as Daniel had while he’d been fucking her. But the oysters were extraordinarily good, their flavor intense and vaguely dangerous, their consistency clearly sexual.

Daniel shared some with the sergeant, who agreed that they were extraordinary but had little else to say—most of Daniel’s questions caused him to go shifty-eyed, and some even made him cringe. Finally he agreed to take the matter up with his sergeant, giving Daniel a nightmare vision of some endless regression of sergeants, each more senior and harder to reach than the last.

Robert Hooke showed up with a firkin of ale. Daniel assaulted it in much the same way as the murderers would him. “I was apprehensive that you would spurn my gift, and pour it into the Thames,” Hooke said irritably, “but I see that the privations of the Tower have turned you into a veritable satyr.”

“I am developing a new theory of bodily perceptions, and their intercourse with the soul, and this is research,” said Daniel, quaffing vigorously. He huffed ale-foam out of his whiskers (he’d not shaved in weeks) and tried to adopt a searching look. “Being condemned to die is a mighty stimulus to philosophick ratiocination, all of which is however wasted at the instant the sentence is carried out—fortunately I’ve been spared—”

“So that you may pass on your insights to me,” Hooke finished dourly. Then, with ponderous tact: “My memory has become faulty, pray just write it all down.”

“They won’t allow me pen and paper.”

“Have you asked again recently? They would not allow me, or anyone, to visit you until today. But with the new regiment, a new regimen.”

“I’ve been scratching on yonder wall instead,” Daniel announced, waving at the beginnings of a geometric diagram.

Hooke’s gray eyes regarded it bleakly. “I spied it when I came in,” he confessed, “and supposed ‘twas something very ancient and time-worn. Very recent and in progress would never have crossed my mind.”

Daniel was flummoxed for a few moments—just long enough for his pulse to rouse, his face to flush, and his vocal cords to constrict. “It is difficult not to take that as a rebuke,” he said. “I am merely trying to see if I can reconstruct one of Newton’s proofs from memory.”

Hooke looked away. The sun had gone down a few minutes ago. A westerly embrasure reflected in his eyes as an identical pair of vertical red slits. “It is a perfectly defensible practice,” he admitted. “If I’d spent more of my youth learning geometers’ tricks and less of it looking at things, and learning how to see, perhaps I’d have written the Principia instead of him.”

This was an appalling thing to say. Envy was common as pipe-smoke at Royal Society meetings, but to voice it so baldly was rare. But then Hooke had never cared, or even noticed, what people thought of him.

It took a few moments for Daniel to collect himself, and to give Hooke’s utterance the ceremonial silence it demanded. Then he said, “Leibniz has much to say on the subject of perceptions which I have but little understood until recently. And you may love Leibniz or not. But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well—what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So, all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind. Now, consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert—by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who’ve not perceived a thousandth part of what you have. Newton makes his discoveries in geometrickal realms where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you, Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ‘tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword-fights.”

Hooke was silent for a time. The room had gone darker, and he’d faded to a gray ghost, that vivid pair of red sparks still marking his eyes. After a while, he sighed, and the sparks winked out for a few moments.

“I shall have to fetch you quill and paper, if this is to be the nature of your discourse, sir,” he said finally.

“I am certain that in the fullness of time, the opinion I have just voiced will be wide spread among learned persons,” Daniel said. “This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. There is no reason why I should conceal my opinions. But I warn you that I may express them all I like without bringing you fame or fortune.”

“It is enough you’ve expressed them to me in the aweful privacy of this chamber, sir,” Hooke returned. “I declare that I am indebted to you, and will repay that debt one day, by giving you something of incalculable value when you least expect it. A pearl of great price.”

LOOKING AT THE MASTER SERGANT made Daniel feel old. From the way that lower ranks had alluded to this man, Daniel had expected some sort of graybearded multiple amputee. But under the scars and weathering was a man probably no more than thirty years of age. He entered Daniel’s chamber without knocking or introducing himself, and inspected it as if he owned the place, taking particular care to learn the field of fire commanded by each of its embrasures. Moving sideways past each of those slits, he seemed to envision a fan-shaped territory of dead enemies spread across the ground beyond.

“Are you expecting to fight a war, sergeant?” said Daniel, who’d been scratching at some paper with a quill and casting only furtive dart-like glances at the sergeant.

“Are you expecting to start one?” the sergeant answered a minute later, as if in no especial hurry to respond.

“Why do you ask me such an odd question?”

“I am trying to conjure up some understanding of how a Puritan gets himself clapped in Tower just now, at a time when the only friends the King has are Puritans.”

“You have forgotten the Catholics.”

“No, sir, the King has forgotten ‘em. Much has changed since you were locked up. First he locked up the Anglican bishops for refusing to preach toleration of Catholics and Dissenters.”

“I know that much—I was a free man at the time,” Daniel said.

“But the whole country was like to rise up in rebellion, Catholic churches were being put to the torch just for sport, and so he let ‘em go, just to quiet things down.”

“But that is very different from forgetting the Catholics, sergeant.”

“Ah but since—since you’ve been immured here—why, the King has begun to fall apart.”

“So far I’ve learned nothing remarkable, sergeant, other than that there is a sergeant in the King’s service who actually knows how to use the word ‘immured.’ ”

“You see, no one believes his son is really his son—that’s what has him resting so uneasy.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Why, the story’s gotten out that the Queen was never pregnant at all—just parading around with pillows stuffed under her dress—and that the so-called Prince is just a common babe snatched from an orphanage somewhere, and smuggled into the birth-chamber inside a warming-pan.”

Daniel contemplated this, dumbfounded. “I saw the baby emerge from the Queen’s vagina with my own eyes,” he said.

“Hold on to that memory, Professor, for it may keep you alive. No one in England thinks the child is anything but a base smuggled-in changeling. And so the King is retreating on every front now. Consequently the Anglicans no longer fear him, while the Papists cry that he has abandoned the only true faith.”

Daniel pondered. “The King wanted Cambridge to grant a degree to a Benedictine monk named Father Francis, who was viewed, around Cambridge, as a sort of stalking-horse for the Pope of Rome,” he said. “Any news of him?”

“The King tried to insinuate Jesuits and such-like everywhere,” said the sergeant, “but has withdrawn a good many of ‘em in the last fortnight. I’d wager Cambridge can stand down, for the King’s power is ebbing—ebbing halfway to France.”

Daniel now went silent for a while. Finally the sergeant resumed speaking, in a lower, more sociable tone: “I am not learned, but I’ve been to many plays, which is where I picked up words like ‘immured,’ and it oftimes happens—especially in your newer plays—that a player will forget his next line, and you’ll hear a spear-carrier or lutenist muttering ‘im a prompt. And in that spirit, I’ll now supply you with your next line, sir: something like ‘My word, these are disastrous tidings, my King, a true friend to all Nonconformists, is in trouble, what shall become of us, how can I be of service to his Majesty?’”

Daniel said nothing. The sergeant seemed to have become provoked, and could not now contain himself from prowling and pacing around the room, as if Daniel were a specimen about whom more could be learned by peering at it from diverse angles. “On the other hand, perhaps you are not a run-of-the-mill Nonconformist, for you are in the Tower, sir.”

“As are you, sergeant.”

“I have a key.”

“Poh! Do you have permission to leave?”

This shut him up for a while. “Our commander is John Churchill,” he said finally, trying a new tack. “The King no longer entirely trusts him.”

“I was wondering when the King would begin to doubt Churchill’s loyalty.”

“He needs us close, as we are his best men—yet not so close as the Horse Guards, hard by Whitehall Palace, within musket-shot of his apartments.”

“And so you have been moved to the Tower for safe-keeping.”

“You’ve got mail,” said the sergeant, and flung a letter onto the table in front of Daniel. It bore the address: GRUBENDOL LONDON.

It was from Leibniz.

“It is for you, isn’t it? Don’t bother denying it, I can see it from the look on your face,” the sergeant continued. “We had a devil of a time working out who it was supposed to be given to.”

“It is intended for whichever officer of the Royal Society is currently charged with handling foreign correspondence,” Daniel said indignantly, “and at the moment, that is my honor.”

“You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one who conveyed certain letters to William of Orange.”

“There is no incentive for me to supply an answer to that question,” said Daniel after a brief interval of being too appalled to speak.

“Answer this then: do you have friends named Bob Carver and Dick Gripp?”

“Never heard of them.”

“That’s funny, for we have come upon a page of written instructions, left with the warder, saying that you’re to be allowed no visitors at all, except for Bob Carver and Dick Gripp, who may show up at the oddest hours.”

“I do not know them,” Daniel insisted, “and I beg you not to let them into this chamber under any circumstances.”

“That’s begging a lot, Professor, for the instructions are written out in my lord Jeffreys’s own hand, and signed by the same.”

“Then you must know as well as I do that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp are just murderers.”

“What I know is that my lord Jeffreys is Lord Chancellor, and to disobey his command is an act of rebellion.”

“Then I ask you to rebel.”

“You first,” said the sergeant.

Hanover, August 1688

Dear Daniel,

I haven’t the faintest idea where you are, so I will send this to good old GRUBENDOL and pray that it finds you in good health.

Soon I depart on a long journey to Italy, where I expect to gather evidence that will sweep away any remaining cobwebs of doubt that may cling to Sophie’s family tree. You must think me a fool to devote so much effort to genealogy, but be patient and you’ll see there are good reasons for it. I’ll pass through Vienna along the way, and, God willing, obtain an audience with the Emperor and tell him of my plans for the Universal Library (the silver-mining project in the Harz has failed—not because there was anything wrong with my inventions, but because the miners feared that they would be thrown out of work, and resisted me in every imaginable way—and so if the Library is to be funded, it will not be from silver mines, but from the coffers of some great Prince).

There is danger in any journey and so I wanted to write down some things and send them to you before leaving Hanover. These are fresh ideas—green apples that would give a stomach-ache to any erudite person who consumed them. On my journey I shall have many hours to recast them in phrasings more pious (to placate the Jesuits), pompous (to impress the scholastics), or simple (to flatter the salons), but I trust you will forgive me for writing in a way that is informal and plain-spoken. If I should meet with some misfortune along the way, perhaps you or some future Fellow of the Royal Society may pick up the thread where I’ve dropped it.

Looking about us we can easily perceive diverse Truths, viz. that the sky is blue, the moon round, that humans walk on two legs and dogs on four, and so on. Some of those truths are brute and geometrickal in nature, there is no imaginable way to avoid them, for example that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. Until Descartes, everyone supposed that such truths were few in number, and that Euclid and the other ancients had found almost all of them. But when Descartes began his project, we all got into the habit of mapping things into a space that could be described by numbers. We now cross two of Descartes’ number-lines at right angles to define a coordinate plane, to which we have given the name Cartesian coordinates, and this conceit appears to be catching on, for one can hardly step into a lecture-room anywhere without seeing some professor drawing a great + on the slate. At any rate, when we all got into the habit of describing the size and position and speed of everything in the world using numbers, lines, curves, and other constructions that are familiar, to erudite men, from Euclid, I say, then it became a sort of vogue to try to explain all of the truths in the universe by geometry. I myself can remember the very moment that I was seduced by this way of thinking: I was fourteen years old, and was wandering around in the Rosenthal outside of Leipzig, ostensibly to smell the blooms but really to prosecute a sort of internal debate in my own mind, between the old ways of the Scholastics and the Mechanical Philosophy of Descartes. As you know I decided in favor of the latter! And I have not ceased to study mathematics since.

Descartes himself studied the way balls move and collide, how they gather speed as they go down ramps, et cetera, and tried to explain all of his data in terms of a theory that was purely geometrical in nature. The result of his lucubrations was classically French in that it did not square with reality but it was very beautiful, and logically coherent. Since then our friends Huygens and Wren have expended more toil towards the same end. But I need hardly tell you that it is Newton, far beyond all others, who has vastly expanded the realm of truths that are geometrickal in nature. I truly believe that if Euclid and Eratosthenes could be brought back to life they would prostrate themselves at his feet and (pagans that they were) worship him as a god. For their geometry treated mostly simple abstract shapes, lines in the sand, while Newton’s lays down the laws that govern the very planets.

I have read the copy of Principia Mathematica that you so kindly sent me, and I know better than to imagine I will find any faults in the author’s proofs, or extend his work into any realm he has not already conquered. It has the feel of something finished and complete. It is like a dome—if it were not whole, it would not stand, and because it is whole, and does stand, there’s no point trying to add things on to it.

And yet its very completeness signals that there is more work to be done. I believe that the great edifice of the Principia Mathematica encloses nearly all of the geometrickal truths that can possibly be written down about the world. But every dome, be it never so large, has an inside and an outside, and while Newton’s dome encloses all of the geometrickal truths, it excludes the other kind: truths that have their sources in fitness and in final causes. When Newton encounters such a truth—such as the inverse square law of gravity—he does not even consider trying to understand it, but instead says that the world simply is this way, because that is how God made it. To his way of thinking, any truths of this nature lie outside the realm of Natural Philosophy and belong instead to a realm he thinks is best approached through the study of alchemy.

Let me tell you why Newton is wrong.

I have been trying to salvage something of value from Descartes’ geometrickal theory of collisions and have found it utterly devoid of worth.

Descartes holds that when two bodies collide, they should have the same quantity of motion after the collision as they had before. Why does he believe this? Because of empirical observations? No, for apparently he did not make any. Or if he did, he saw only what he wanted to see. He believes it because he has made up his mind in advance that his theory must be geometrickal, and geometry is an austere discipline—there are only certain quantities a geometer is allowed to measure and to write down in his equations. Chief among these is extension, a pompous term for “anything that can be measured with a ruler.” Descartes and most others allow time, too, because you can measure time with a pendulum, and you can measure the pendulum with a ruler. The distance a body travels (which can be measured with a ruler) divided by the time it took covering it (which can be measured with a pendulum, which can be measured with a ruler) gives speed. Speed figures into Descartes’ calculation of Quantity of Motion—the more speed, the more motion.

Well enough so far, but then he got it all wrong by treating Quantity of Motion as if it were a scalar, a simple directionless number, when in fact is is a vector. But that is a minor lapse. There is plenty of room for vectors in a system with two orthogonal axes, we simply plot them as arrows on what I call the Cartesian plane, and lo, we have geometrickal constructs that obey geometrickal rules. We can add their components geometrickally, reckon their magnitudes with the Pythagorean Theorem, &c.

But there are two problems with this approach. One is relativity. Rulers move. There is no fixed frame of reference for measuring extension. A geometer on a moving canal-boat who tries to measure the speed of a flying bird will get a different number from a geometer on the shore; and a geometer riding on the bird’s back would measure no speed at all!

Secondly: the Cartesian Quantity of Motion, mass multiplied by velocity (mv), is not conserved by falling bodies. And yet by doing, or even imagining, a very simple experiment, you can demonstrate that mass multiplied by the square of velocity (mv^2) is conserved by such bodies.

This quantity mv^2 has certain properties of interest. For one, it measures the amount of work that a moving body is capable of doing. Work is something that has an absolute meaning, it is free from the problem of relativity that I mentioned a moment ago, a problem unavoidably shared by all theories that are founded upon the use of rulers. In the expression mv^2 the velocity is squared, which means that it has lost its direction, and no longer has a geometrickal meaning. While mv may be plotted on the Cartesian plane and subjected to all the tricks and techniques of Euclid, mv^2 may not be, because in being squared the velocity v has lost its directionality and, if I may wax metaphysical, transcended the geometrickal plane and gone into a new realm, the realm of Algebra. This quantity mv^2 is scrupulously conserved by Nature, and its conservation may in fact be considered a law of the universe—but it is outside Geometry, and excluded from the dome that Newton has built, it is another contingent, non-geometrickal truth, one of many that have been discovered, or will be, by Natural Philosophers. Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek such truths in the occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature.

To me this notion is offensive; it seems to cast God in the rôle of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us. In some things, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, God may not have had any choice when He created the world. In others, such as the inverse square law of gravity, He may have had choices; but in such cases, I like to believe he would have chosen wisely and according to some coherent plan that our minds—insofar as they are in God’s image—are capable of understanding.

Unlike the Alchemists, who see angels, demons, miracles, and divine essences everywhere, I recognize nothing in the world but bodies and minds. And nothing in bodies but certain observable quantities such as magnitude, figure, situation, and changes in these. Everything else is merely said, not understood; it is sounds without meaning. Nor can anything in the world be understood clearly unless it is reduced to these. Unless physical things can be explained by mechanical laws, God cannot, even if He chooses, reveal and explain nature to us.

I am likely to spend the rest of my life explaining these ideas to those who will listen, and defending them from those who won’t, and anything you hear from me henceforth should probably be viewed in that light, Daniel. If the Royal Society seems inclined to burn me in effigy, please try to explain to them that I am trying to extend the work that Newton has done, not to tear it down.

Leibniz

P.S. I know the woman Eliza (de la Zeur, now) whom you mentioned in your most recent letter. She seems to be attracted to Natural Philosophers. It is a strange trait in a woman, but who are we to complain?

“DR. WATERHOUSE.”

“Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Your visitors have arrived—Mr. Bob Carver and Mr. Dick Gripp.”

Daniel rose from his bed; he had never come awake so fast. “Please, I beg you, Sergeant, do not—” he began, but he stopped there, for it had occurred to him that perhaps Sergeant Shaftoe’s mind was already made up, the deed was all but done, and that Daniel was merely groveling. He got to his feet and shuffled over the wooden floor towards Bob Shaftoe’s face and his candle, which hung in darkness like a poorly resolved binary star: the face a dim reddish blob, the flame a burning white point. The blood dropped from Daniel’s head and he tottered, but did not hesitate. He’d be nothing more than a bleating voice in the darkness until he entered the globe of light balanced on that flame; if Bob Shaftoe had thoughts of letting the murderers into this room, let him look full on Daniel’s face first. The brilliance of the light was governed by an inverse square law, just like gravity.

Shaftoe’s face finally came into focus. He looked a little sea-sick. “I’m not such a black-hearted bastard as’d admit a pair of hired killers to spit a helpless professor. There is only one man alive whom I hate enough to wish such an end on him.”

“Thank you,” Daniel said, drawing close enough now that he could feel the candle’s faint warmth on his face.

Shaftoe noticed something, turned sideways to Daniel, and cleared his throat. This was not your delicate pretentious upper-class ’hem but an honest and legitimate bid to dislodge an actual phlegm-ball that had sprung into his gorge.

“You’ve noticed me pissing myself, haven’t you?” Daniel said. “You imagine that it’s your fault—that you put such a terror into me, just now, that I could not hold my urine. Well, you did have me going, it is true, but that’s not why piss is running down my leg. I have the stone, Sergeant, and cannot make water at times of my own choosing, but rather I leak and seep like a keg that wants caulking.”

Bob Shaftoe nodded and looked to have been somewhat relieved of his burden of guilt. “How long d’you have then?”

He asked the question so offhandedly that Daniel did not get it for a few moments. “Oh—you mean, to live?” The Sergeant nodded. “Pardon me, Sergeant Shaftoe, I forget that your profession has put you on such intimate terms with death that you speak of it as sea-captains speak of wind. How long have I? Perhaps a year.”

“You could have it cut out.”

“I have seen men cut for the stone, Sergeant, and I’ll take death, thank you very much. I’ll wager it is worse than anything you may have witnessed on a battlefield. No, I shall follow the example of my mentor, John Wilkins.”

“Men have been cut for the stone, and lived, have they not?”

“Mr. Pepys was cut nigh on thirty years ago, and lives still.”

“He walks? Talks? Makes water?”

“Indeed, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Then, by your leave, Dr. Waterhouse, being cut for the stone is not worse than anything I have seen on battlefields.”

“Do you know how the operation is performed, Sergeant? The incision is made through the perineum, which is that tender place between your scrotum and your anus—”

“If it comes down to swapping blood-curdling tales, Dr. Waterhouse, we shall be here until this candle has burnt down, and all to no purpose; and if you really intend to die of the stone, you oughtn’t to be wasting that much time.”

“There is nothing to do, here, but waste time.”

“That is where you are wrong, Dr. Waterhouse, for I have a lively sort of proposition to make you. We are going to help each other, you and I.”

“You want money in exchange for keeping Jeffreys’s murderers out of my chamber?”

“That’s what I should want, were I a base, craven toad,” Bob Shaftoe said. “And if you keep mistaking me for that sort, why, perhaps I shall let Bob and Dick in here.”

“Please forgive me, Sergeant. You are right in being angry with me. It is only that I cannot imagine what sort of transaction you and I could…”

“Did you see that fellow being whipped, just before sundown? He would’ve been visible to you out in the dry-moat, through yonder arrow-slit.”

Daniel remembered it well enough. Three soldiers had gone out, carrying their pikes, and lashed them together close to their points, and spread their butts apart to form a tripod. A man had been led out shirtless, his hands tied together in front of him, and the rope had then been thrown over the lashing where the pikes were joined, and drawn tight so that his arms were stretched out above his head. Finally his ankles had been spread apart and lashed fast to the pikes to either side of him, rendering him perfectly immobile, and then a large man had come out with a whip, and used it. All in all it was a common rite around military camps, and went a long way towards explaining why people of means tried to live as far away from barracks as possible.

“I did not observe it closely,” Daniel said, “I am familiar with the general procedure.”

“You might’ve watched more carefully had you known that the man being whipped calls himself Mr. Dick Gripp.”

Daniel was at a loss for words.

“They came for you last night,” said Bob Shaftoe. “I had them clapped into separate cells while I decided what to do with ’em. Talked to ’em separately, and all they gave me was a deal of hot talk. Now. Some men are entitled to talk that way, they have been ennobled, in a sense, by their deeds and the things they have lived through. I did not think that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp were men of that kind. Others may be suffered to talk that way simply because they entertain the rest of us. I once had a brother who was like that. But not Bob and Dick. Unfortunately I am not a magistrate and have no power to throw men in prison, compel them to answer questions, et cetera. On the other hand, I am a sergeant, and have the power to recruit men into the King’s service. As Bob and Dick were clearly idle fellows, I recruited them into the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards on the spot. In the next instant, I perceived that I’d made a mistake, for these two were discipline problems, and wanted chastisement. Using the oldest trick in the book, I had Dick—who struck me as the better man—whipped directly in front of Bob Carver’s cell window. Now Dick is a strong bloke, he is unbowed, and I may keep him in the regiment. But Bob feels about his chastisement—which is scheduled for dawn—the same way you feel about being cut for the stone. So an hour ago he woke up his guards, and they woke me, and I went and had a chat with Mr. Carver.”

“Sergeant, you are so industrious that I almost cannot follow everything you are about.”

“He told me that Jeffreys personally ordered him and Mr. Gripp to cut your throat. That they were to do it slow-like, and that they were to explain to you, while you lay dying, that it had been done by Jeffreys.”

“It is what I expected,” Daniel said, “and yet to hear it set out in plain words leaves me dizzy.”

“Then I shall wait for you to get your wits back. More to the point, I shall wait for you to become angry. Forgive me for presuming to instruct a fellow of your erudition, but at a moment like this, you are supposed to be angry.”

“It is a very odd thing about Jeffreys that he can treat people abominably and never make them angry. He influences his victims’ minds strangely, like a glass rod bending a stream of water, so that we feel we deserve it.”

“You have known him a long time.”

“I have.”

“Let’s kill him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Slay, murder. Let us bring about his death, so he won’t plague you any more.”

Daniel was shocked. “It is an extremely fanciful idea—”

“Not in the least. And there is something in your tone of voice that tells me you like it.”

“Why do you say ‘we’? You have no part in my problems.”

“You are high up in the Royal Society.”

“Yes.”

“You know many Alchemists.”

“I wish I could deny it.”

“You know my lord Upnor.”

“I do. I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jeffreys.”

“Upnor owns my lady love.”

“I beg your pardon—did you say he owns her?”

“Yes—Jeffreys sold her to him during the Bloody Assizes.”

“Taunton—your love is one of the Taunton schoolgirls!”

“Just so.”

Daniel was fascinated. “You are proposing some sort of pact.”

“You and I’ll rid the world of Jeffreys and Upnor. I’ll have my Abigail and you’ll live your last year, or whatever time God affords you, in peace.”

“I do not mean to quail and fret, Sergeant—”

“Go ahead! My men do it all the time.”

“—but may I remind you that Jeffreys is the Lord Chancellor of the Realm?”

“Not for long,” Shaftoe answered.

“How do you know?”

“He’s as much as admitted it, by his actions! You were thrown in Tower why?”

“For acting as go-between to William of Orange.”

“Why, that is treason—you should’ve been half-hanged, drawn, and quartered for it! But you were kept alive why?”

“Because I am a witness to the birth of the Prince, and as such, may be useful in attesting to the legitimacy of the next King.”

“If Jeffreys has now decided to kill you, what does that signify then?”

“That he is giving up on the King—my God, on the entire dynasty—and getting ready to flee. Yes, I understand your reasoning now, thank you for being so patient with me.”

“Mind you, I’m not asking you to take up arms, or do anything else that ill suits you.”

“Some would take offense at that, Sergeant, but—”

“E’en though my chief grievance may lie with Upnor, the first cause of it was Jeffreys, and I would not hesitate to swing my spadroon, if he should chance to show me his neck.”

“Save it for Upnor,” Daniel said, after a brief pause to make up his mind. In truth, he’d long since made it up; but he wanted to put on a show of thinking about it, so that Bob Shaftoe would not view him as a man who took such things lightly.

“You’re with me, then.”

“Not so much that I am with you as that we are with most of England, and England with us. You speak of putting Jeffreys to death with the strength of your right arm. Yet I tell you that if we must rely on your arm, strong as it is, we would fail. But if, as I believe, England is with us, why, then we need do no more than find him and say in a clear voice, ‘This fellow here is my lord Jeffreys,’ and his death will follow as if by natural law, like a ball rolling down a ramp. This is what I mean when I speak of revolution.”

“Is that a French way of saying ‘rebellion’?”

“No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”

“Then I’d best go find a man of discrimination,” muttered Bob Shaftoe, “and stop wasting the night with a hapless wretch.”

“I simply have not understood, until now, how I might benefit from the revolution. I have done all for England, naught for myself, and I have lacked any organizing principle by which to shape my plans. Never would I have dared to imagine I might strike Jeffreys down!”

“As a mudlark, Vagabond soldier, I am always at your service, to be a bringer of base, murderous thoughts,” said Bob Shaftoe.

Daniel had receded to the outer fringes of the light and worried a candle out of a bottle on his writing-table. He hustled back and lit it from Bob’s candle.

Bob remarked, “I’ve seen lords die on battlefields—not as often as I’d prefer, mind you—but enough to know it’s not like in paintings.”

“Paintings?”

“You know, where Victory comes down on a sunbeam with her tits hanging out of her frock, waving a laurel for said dying lord’s brow, and the Virgin Mary slides down on another to—”

“Oh, yes. Those paintings. Yes, I believe what you say.” Daniel had been working his way along the curving wall of the Tower, holding the candle close to the stone, so that its glancing light would deepen the scratchings made there by prisoners over the centuries. He stopped before a new one, a half-finished complex of arcs and rays that cut through older graffiti.

“I do not think I shall finish this proof,” he announced, after gazing at it for a few moments.

“We’ll not leave tonight. You shall likely have a week—maybe more. So there’s no cause for breaking off work on whatever that is.”

“It is an ancient thing that used to make sense, but now it has been turned upside-down, and seems only a queer, jumbled bag of notions. Let it bide here with the other old things,” Daniel said.

Château Juvisy

NOVEMBER 1688

From Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol, Château Juvisy

To His Majesty Louis XIV, Versailles

21 November 1688

Sire,

It was my father’s honor to serve your majesty and your majesty’s father as cryptanalyst to the Court. Of the art of decipherment, he endeavoured to teach me all that he knew. Moved by a son’s love for his father as well as by a subject’s ardent desire to be of service to his King, I strove to learn as much as my lesser faculties would permit; and if, when my father died six years ago, he had imparted to me a tenth part of what he knew, why then it sufficed to make me more nearly fit to serve as your majesty’s cryptanalyst than any man in Christendom; a measure, not of my eminence (for I cannot claim to possess any) but of my father’s, and of the degraded condition of cryptography in the uncouth nations that surround France as barbarian hordes once hemmed in mighty Rome.

Along with some moiety of his knowledge, I have inherited the salary your beneficent majesty bestowed upon him, and the château that Le Nôtre built for him at Juvisy, which your majesty knows well, as you have more than once

honored it with your presence, and graced it with your wit, as you journeyed to and from Fontainebleau. Many affairs of state have been discussed in the petit salon and the garden; for your father of blessed memory, and Cardinal Richelieu, also were known to ennoble this poor house with their presences during the days when my father, by decyphering the communications passing into and out of the fortifications of the Huguenots, was helping to suppress the rebellions of those heretics.

Than your majesty no monarch has been more keenly alive to the importance of cryptography. It is only to this acuity on your majesty’s part, and not to any intrinsic merit of mine, that I attribute the honors and wealth that you have showered upon me. And it is only because of your majesty’s oft-demonstrated interest in these affairs that I presume to pick up my quill and to write down a tale of cryptanalysis that is not without certain extraordinary features.

As your majesty knows, the incomparable château at Versailles is adorned by several ladies who are indefatigable writers of letters, notably my friend Madame de Sévigné; la Palatine; and Eliza, the Countess de la Zeur. There are many others, too; but we who have the honor of serving in your majesty’s cabinet noir spend as much time reading the correspondence of these three as of all the other ladies of Versailles combined.

My narrative chiefly concerns the Countess de la Zeur. She writes frequently to M. le comte d’Avaux in the Hague, using the approved cypher to shield her correspondence from my Dutch counterparts. As well she carries on a steady flow of correspondence to certain Jews of Amsterdam, consisting predominantly of numbers and financial argot that, read, cannot be decyphered, and decyphered, cannot be understood, unless one is familiar with the workings of that city’s commodities markets, as vulgar as they are complex. These letters are exceptionally pithy, and of no interest to anyone save Jews, Dutchmen, and other persons who are motivated by money. Her most voluminous letters by far go to the Hanoverian savant Leibniz, whose name is known to your majesty—he made a computing machine for Colbert some years ago, and now toils as an advisor to the Duke and Duchess of Hanover, whose exertions on behalf of united Protestantism have been the cause of so much displeasure to your majesty. Ostensibly the letters of the Countess de la Zeur to this Leibniz consist of interminable descriptions of the magnificence of Versailles and its inhabitants. The sheer volume and consistency of this correspondence have caused me to wonder whether it was not a channel of encrypted communications; but my poor efforts at finding any hidden patterns in her flowery words have been unavailing. Indeed, my suspicion of this woman is grounded, not on any flaw in her cypher—which, assuming it exists at all, is a very good one—but on what little understanding I may claim to possess of human nature. For during my occasional visits to Versailles I have sought this woman out, and engaged her in conversation, and found her to be highly intelligent, and conversant with the latest work of mathematicians and Natural Philosophers both foreign and domestic. And of course the brilliance and erudition of Leibniz is acknowledged by all. It is implausible to me that such a woman could devote so much time to writing, and such a man so much time to reading, about hair.

Perhaps two years ago, M. le comte d’Avaux, on one of his visits to your majesty’s court, sought me out, and, knowing of my position in the cabinet noir, asked many pointed questions about the Countess’s epistolary habits. From this it was plain enough that he shared some of my suspicions. Later he told me that he had witnessed with his own eyes an incident in which it was made obvious that this woman was an agent of the Prince of Orange. D’Avaux at this time mentioned a Swiss gentleman of the name of Fatio de Duilliers, and intimated that he and the Countess de la Zeur were in some way linked.

D’Avaux seemed confident that he knew enough to crush this woman. Instead of doing so outright, he had decided that he could better serve your majesty by pursuing a more complex and, by your majesty’s leave, risky strategy. As is well known, she makes money for many of your majesty’s vassals, including d’Avaux, by managing their investments. The price of liquidating her outright would be high; not a consideration that would ever confound your majesty’s judgment, but telling among men of weak minds and light purses. Moreover, d’Avaux shared my suspicion that she was communicating over some encrypted channel with Sophie and, through Sophie, with William, and hoped that if I were to achieve a cryptological break of this channel the cabinet noir might thereafter read her despatches without her being aware of it; which would be altogether more beneficial to France and pleasing to your majesty than locking the woman up in a nunnery and keeping her incommunicado to the end of her days, as she deserves.

There had been during the first part of this year a sort of flirtation between the Countess de la Zeur and la Palatine, which appeared to culminate in August when the Countess accepted an invitation from Madame to join her (and your majesty’s brother) at St. Cloud. Everyone who knew of this assumed that it was a common, albeit Sapphic, love affair: an interpretation so obvious that it ought by its nature to have engendered more skepticism among those who pride themselves on their sophistication. But it was summer, the weather was warm, and no one paid it any heed. Not long after her arrival at St. Cloud, the Countess sent a letter to d’Avaux in the Hague, which has subsequently found its way back to my writing desk. Here it is.

St. Cloud

AUGUST 1688

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, to d’Avaux

16 August 1688

Monsieur,

Summer has reached its pinnacle here and for those, such as Madame, who like to hunt wild animals, the best months lie in the future. But for those, such as Monsieur, who prefer to hunt (or be hunted by) highly cultivated humans, this is the very best time of the year. So Madame endures the heat, and sits with her lap-dogs and writes letters, while Monsieur’s only complaint is that the torrid weather causes his makeup to run. St. Cloud is infested with young men, aficionados of fencing, who would give anything to sheathe their blades in his scabbard. To judge from the noises emanating from his bedchamber, his chief lover is the Chevalier de Lorraine. But when the Chevalier is spent, the Marquis d’Effiat is never far behind; and behind him (as it were) is a whole queue of handsome cavaliers. In other words, here as at Versailles, there is a strict pecking-order (though one must imagine a different sort of pecking), and so most of these young blades can never hope to be anything more than ornaments. Yet they are continually lustful like any other men. Since they cannot satiate themselves on Monsieur inside the château, they practice on one another in the gardens. One cannot go for a stroll or a ride without breaking into the middle of a tryst. And when these young men are interrupted, they do not slink away meekly, but (emboldened by the favor shown them by Monsieur) upbraid one in the most abusive way imaginable. Wherever I go, my nose detects the humour of lust wafted on every draught and breeze, for it is spilled about the place like wine-slops in a tavern.

Liselotte has been putting up with this for seventeen years now, ever since the day when she crossed over the Rhine, never to cross back. And so it’s no wonder that she ventures out into society only rarely, and prefers the company of her dogs and her ink-well. Madame has been known to grow very attached to members of her household—she used to have a lady-in-waiting named Théobon who was a great comfort to her. But the lovers of Monsieur—who are supported by him, and who have nothing to do all day long but hatch plots—began to whisper vile rumors into Monsieur’s ear, and caused him to send this Théobon away. Madame was so angry that she complained to the King himself. The King reprimanded Monsieur’s lovers but balked at intervening in the household affairs of his own brother, and so Théobon has presumably ended up in a convent somewhere, and will never return.

From time to time they entertain guests here, and then, as you know, protocol dictates that everyone dress up in the sort of costume known as en manteau, which is even stiffer and less comfortable (if you can imagine it) than dressing en grand habit as is done at Versailles. As an ambassador, you see women dressed in that manner all the time, but as a man, you never see machinations that go on in ladies’ private chambers for hours ahead of time, to make them look that way. Dressing en manteau is an engineering project at least as complicated as rigging a ship. Neither can even be contemplated without a large and well-trained crew. But Madame’s household has been reduced to a skeleton crew by the ceaseless petty intrigues of the lovers of Monsieur. And in any case she has no patience with female vanities. She is old enough, and foreign enough, and intelligent enough, to understand that Fashion (which lesser women view as if it were Gravity) was merely an invention, a device. It was devised by Colbert as a way to neutralize those Frenchmen and Frenchwomen who, because of their wealth and independence, posed the greatest threat to the King. But Liselotte, who might have been formidable, has already been neutralized by marrying Monsieur and joining the royal family. The only thing that prevents her country from being annexed to France is a dispute as to whether she, or another descendant of the Winter Queen, should succeed her late brother.

At any rate, Liselotte refuses to play the game that Colbert devised. She has a wardrobe, of course, and it includes several costumes that are worthy of the names grand habit and manteau. But she has had them made up in a way that is unique. In Madame’s wardrobe, all the layers of lingerie, corsetry, petticoats, and outer garments that normally go on one at a time are sewn together into a single construct, so heavy and stiff that it stands by itself, and slit up the back. When Monsieur throws a grand party, Liselotte plods naked into her closet and walks into one of these and stands for a few moments as a lady-in-waiting fastens it in the back with diverse buttons, hooks, and ties. From there she goes straight to the party, without so much as a glance in the mirror.

I will complete this little portrait of life at St. Cloud with a story about dogs. As I mentioned, la Palatine, like Artemis, is never far from her pack of dogs. Of course these are not swift hounds, but tiny lap-dogs that curl up on her feet in the winter to keep her toes warm. She has named them after people and places she remembers from her childhood in the Palatinate. They scurry about her apartments all day long, getting into absurd feuds and controversies, just like so many courtiers. Sometimes she herds them out onto the lawn and they run around in the sunshine interrupting the amours of Monsieur’s hangers-on, and then the peace of these exquisite gardens is broken by the angry shouts of the lovers and the yelps of the dogs; the cavaliers, with their breeches down around their ankles, chase them out from their trysting-places, and Monsieur comes out onto his balcony in his dressing-gown and damns them all to hell and wonders aloud why God cursed him to marry Liselotte.

The King has a pair of hunting-dogs named Phobos and Deimos who are very aptly named, for they have been fed on the King’s own table-scraps and have grown enormous. The King has indulged them terribly and so they want discipline, and feel they are entitled to attack whatever strikes their fancy. Knowing how much Liselotte loves hunting and dogs, and knowing how lonely and isolated she is, the King has tried to interest her in these beasts—he wants Liselotte to think of Phobos and Deimos as her own pets and to look upon them with affection, as the King does, so that they can go hunting for large game in the east when the season comes around. So far this is nothing more than a proposal. Madame is more than a little ambivalent. Phobos and Deimos are too big and unruly to be kept at Versailles any more, and so the King prevailed upon his brother to keep them at St. Cloud, in a paddock where they can run around loose. The beasts have long since killed and eaten all of the rabbits who used to dwell in that enclosure, and now they devote all their energies to searching for weak places in the fence where they might tunnel out or jump over and go marauding in the territory beyond. Recently they broke through the southeast corner and got loose in the yard beyond and killed all the chickens. That hole has been repaired. As I write this I can see Phobos patrolling the northern fence-line, looking for a way to jump over into the neighboring property, which is owned by another nobleman who has never had good relations with my hosts. Meanwhile Deimos is working on an excavation under the eastern wall, hoping to tunnel through and run amok in the yard where Madame exercises her lap-dogs. I have no idea which of them will succeed first.

Now I must lay down my pen, for some months ago I promised Madame that I would one day give her a demonstration of bareback riding, Qwghlmian-style, and now the time is finally at hand. I hope that my little description of life at St. Cloud has not struck you as overly vulgar, but since you, like any sophisticated man, are a student of the human condition, I thought you might be fascinated to learn what peasant-like noise and rancor prevail behind the supremely elegant façade of St. Cloud.

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur

Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

NOVEMBER 1688

Your majesty will already have perceived that Phobos and Deimos are metaphors for the armed might of France; their chicken-killing escapade is the recent campaign in which your majesty brought the rebellious Protestants of Savoy to heel; and the question of where they might attack next, a way of saying that the Countess could not guess whether your majesty intended to strike north into the Dutch Republic or east into the Palatinate. Just as obviously, these sentences were written as much for William of Orange—whose servants would read the letter before it reached d’Avaux—as for the recipient.

Perhaps less transparent is the reference to bareback riding. I would have assumed it signified some erotic practice, except that the Countess is never so vulgar in her letters. In time I came to understand that it was meant literally. As hard as it might be for your majesty to believe, I have it on the authority of several of Monsieur’s friends that Madame and the Countess de la Zeur did indeed go riding that day, and moreover that the latter requested that no saddle be placed on her horse. They rode off into the park thus, escorted by two of Madame’s young male cousins from Hanover. But when they returned, the Countess’s horse was bare, not only of saddle, but of rider, too; for, as the story went, she had fallen off after the horse had been startled, and suffered an injury that made it impossible for her to ride back. This had occurred near the banks of the river. Fortunately they had been able to summon a passing boat, which had taken the injured Countess upriver to a nearby convent that is generously supported by Madame. There, or so the story went, the Countess would be tended to by the nuns until her bones had mended.

Needless to say, no one but the smallest child would believe such a story; everyone assumed the obvious, which is that the Countess had become pregnant and that her period of recuperation in the nunnery was to last only long enough for her to arrange an abortion, or to deliver the baby. I myself gave it no further thought until I received a communication from d’Avaux several weeks later. This was, of course, encyphered. I enclose the plaintext, shorn of pleasantries, formalities, and other impedimenta.

French Embassy, the Hague

17 SEPTEMBER 1688

From Jean Antoine de Mesmes, comte d’Avaux

French Embassy, the Hague

To Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol

Château Juvisy, France

Monsieur Rossignol,

You and I have had occasion to speak of the Countess de la Zeur. I have known for some time that her true allegiance lay with the Prince of Orange. Until today she has been at pains to conceal this. Now she has at last run her true colors up the mast. Everyone believes she is in a nunnery near St. Cloud having a baby. But today, below the very battlements of the Binnenhof, she disembarked from a canal-boat that had just come down from Nijmegen. Most of the heretics who came pouring out of it had originated from much farther upstream, for they are people of the Palatinate who, knowing that an invasion was imminent, have lately fled from that place as rats are said to do from a house in the moments before an earthquake. To give you an idea of their quality, among them were at least two Princesses (Eleanor of Saxe-Eisenach and her daughter Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach), as well as any number of other persons of rank; though as much could never have been guessed from their degraded and bedraggled appearance. Consequently the Countess de le Zeur—who was even more dishevelled than most—attracted less notice than is her wont. But I know that she was there, for my sources in the Binnenhof inform me that the Prince of Orange ordered a suite to be made available to her, for a stay of indefinite duration. Previously she has been coy about her dealings with the said Prince; today she lives in his house.

I shall have more to say on this later, but for now I should like to ask the rhetorical question of how this woman was able to get from St. Cloud to the Hague, via the Rhine, in one month, during the preparations for a war, without anyone’s having noticed? That she was working as a spy for the Prince of Orange is too obvious to mention; but where did she go, and what is she now telling William in the Binnenhof ?

Yours in haste, d’Avaux

Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

NOVEMBER 1688

Your majesty will already have understood how fascinated I was by this news from d’Avaux. The letter had reached me after a considerable delay, as, owing to the war, d’Avaux had been forced to show some ingenuity in finding a way to have it delivered to Juvisy. I knew that I could not expect to receive any more, and to attempt to respond in kind would have been a waste of paper. Accordingly, I resolved to travel in person, and incognito, to the Hague. For to be of service to your majesty is my last thought as I go to bed in the night-time and my first upon waking in the morning; and it was plain that where this matter was concerned I was useless so long as I remained at home.

Of my journey to the Hague, much could be written in a vulgar and sensational vein, if I felt that I could better serve your majesty by producing an entertainment. But it is all beside the point of this report. And as better men than I have sacrificed their lives in your service with no thought of fame, or of reward beyond a small share in the glory of la France, I do not think it is meet for me to relate my tale here; after all, what an Englishman (for example) might fancy to be a stirring and glorious adventure is, to a gentleman of France, altogether routine and unremarkable.

I arrived in the Hague on the 18th of October and reported to the French embassy, where M. le comte d’Avaux saw to it that what remained of my clothing was burned in the street; that the body of my manservant was given a Christian burial; that my horse was destroyed so that he would not infect the others; and that my pitchfork-wounds and torch-burns were tended to by a French barber-surgeon who dwells in that city. On the following day I began my investigation, which naturally was erected upon the solid foundation that had been laid by d’Avaux during the weeks since his letter to me. As it happened, it was on this very day—the 19th of October, anno domini 1688—that an unfortunate change in the wind made it possible for the Prince of Orange to set sail for England at the head of five hundred Dutch ships. As distressing as this event was for the small colony of French in the Hague, it militated to our advantage in that the heretics who engulfed us were so beside themselves (for to them, invading other countries is a new thing, and a tremendous adventure) that they paid me little heed as I went about my work.

My first task, as I have suggested, was to familiarize myself with all that d’Avaux had learned of the matter during the previous weeks. The Hofgebied, or diplomatic quarter of the Hague, may not contain as many servants and courtiers as its counterpart in France, but there are more than enough; those who are venal, d’Avaux has bought, and those who are venereal, he has compromised in one way or another, so that he may know practically anything he wishes to of what goes on in that neighborhood, provided only that he has the diligence to interview his sources, and the wit to combine their fragmentary accounts into a coherent story. Your majesty will in no way be surprised to learn that he had done so by the time of my arrival. D’Avaux imparted to me the following:

First, that the Countess de la Zeur, unlike all of the other refugees on the canal-ship, had not taken it all the way from Heidelberg. Rather, she had embarked at Nijmegen, filthy and exhausted, and accompanied by two young gentlemen, also much the worse for wear, whose accents marked them as men of the Rhineland.

This in itself told me much. It had already been obvious that on that August day at St. Cloud, Madame had made some arrangement to spirit the Countess aboard a boat on the Seine. By working its way upstream to Paris, such a vessel could take the left fork at Charenton and go up the Marne deep into the northeastern reaches of your majesty’s realm, within a few days’ overland journey of Madame’s homeland. It is not the purpose of this letter to cast aspersions on the loyalty of your sister-in-law; I suspect that the Countess de la Zeur, so notorious for her cunning, had preyed upon Madame’s natural and humane concern for her subjects across the Rhine, and somehow induced her to believe that it would be beneficial to despatch the Countess on a sightseeing expedition to that part of the world. Of course this would take the Countess into just that part of France where preparations for war would be most obvious to a foreign spy.

Your majesty during his innumerable glorious campaigns has devoted many hours to studying maps, and contemplating all matters of logistics, from grand strategy down to the smallest detail, and will recollect that there is no direct connection by water from the Marne to any of the rivers that flow down into the Low Countries. The Argonne Forest, however, nurses the headwaters, not only of the Marne, but also of the Meuse, which indeed passes to within a few miles of Nijmegen. And so, just as d’Avaux had already done before me, I settled upon the working hypothesis that after taking a boat from St. Cloud up the Marne, the Countess had disembarked in the vicinity of the Argonne—which as your majesty well knows was an active theatre of military operations during these weeks—and made some sort of overland journey that had eventually taken her to the Meuse, and via the Meuse to Nijmegen where we have our first report of her from d’Avaux’s informants.

Second, all who saw her on the Nijmegen-Hague route agree that she had practically nothing with her. She had no luggage. Her personal effects, such as they were, were stored in the saddlebag of one of her German companions. Everything was soaked through, for in the days before her appearance at Nijmegen the weather had been rainy. During the voyage on the canal-ship, she and the two Germans emptied the saddlebags and spread out their contents on the deck to dry. At no time were any books, papers, or documents of any kind observed, and no quills or ink. In her hands she carried a small bag and an embroidery frame with a piece of crewel-work mounted on it. There was nothing else. All of this is confirmed by d’Avaux’s informants in the Binnenhof. The servants who furnished the Countess’s suite there insist that nothing came off the canal-boat save:

(Item) The dress on the Countess’s back. Mildewed and creased from (one assumes) a lengthy journey in the bottom of a saddlebag, this was torn up for rags as soon as she peeled it off. Nothing was hidden beneath.

(Item) A set of boy’s clothing approximately the Countess’s size, badly worn and filthy.

(Item) The embroidery frame and crewel-work, which had been ruined by repeated soakings and dryings (the colors of the thread had run into the fabric).

(Item) Her handbag, which turned out to contain nothing but a scrap of soap, a comb, an assortment of rags, a sewing-kit, and a nearly empty coin-purse.

Of the items mentioned, all were removed or destroyed save the coins, the sewing-kit, and the embroidery project. The Countess showed a curiously strong attachment to the latter, mentioning to the servants that they were not to touch it, be it never so badly damaged, and even keeping it under her pillow when she slept, for fear that it might be taken away by mistake and used as a rag.

Third, after she had recuperated for a day, and been supplied with presentable clothing, she went to the forest-hut of the Prince of Orange that is out in the wilderness nearby, and met with him and his advisors on three consecutive days. Immediately thereafter the Prince withdrew his regiments from the south and set in motion his invasion of England. It is said that the Countess produced, as if by sorcery, a voluminous report filled with names, facts, figures, maps, and other details difficult to retain in the memory.

So much for d’Avaux’s work. He had given me all that I could have asked for as a cryptologist. It remained only for me to apply Occam’s Razor to the facts that d’Avaux had amassed. My conclusion was that the Countess had made her notes, not with ink on paper, but with needle and thread on a work of embroidery. The technique, though extraordinary, had certain advantages. A woman who is forever writing things down on paper makes herself extremely conspicuous, but no one pays any notice to a woman doing needle-work. If a person is suspected of being a spy, and their possessions searched, paper is the first thing an investigator looks for. Crewel-work will be ignored. Finally, paper-and-ink documents fare poorly in damp conditions, but a textile document would have to be unraveled thread by thread before its information was destroyed.

By the time of my arrival in the Hague, the Countess had vacated her chambers in the Binnenhof and moved across the Plein to the house of the heretic “philosopher” Christiaan Huygens, who is her friend. On the day of my arrival she departed for Amsterdam to pay a call on her business associates there. I paid a cat-burglar, who has done many such jobs for d’Avaux in the past, to enter the house of Huygens, find the embroidery, and bring it to me without disturbing anything else in the room. Three days later, after I had conducted an analysis detailed below, I arranged for the same thief to put the embroidery back just where he had found it. The Countess did not return from her sojourn to Amsterdam until several days afterwards.

It is a piece of coarsely woven linen, square, one Flemish ell on a side. She has left a margin all round the edges of about a hand’s breadth. The area in the center, then, is a square perhaps eighteen inches on a side: suitable for an opus pulvinarium or cushion-cover. This area has been almost entirely covered in crewel-work. The style is called gros-point, a technique that is popular among English peasants, overseas colonists, and other rustics who amuse themselves sewing naïve designs upon the crude textiles they know how to produce. As it has been superseded, in France, by petit-point, it may be unfamiliar to your majesty, and so I will permit myself the indulgence of a brief description. The fabric or matrix is always of a coarse weave, so that the warp and weft may be seen by the naked eye, forming a regular square grid à la Descartes. Each of the tiny squares in this grid is covered, during the course of the work, by a stitch in the shape of a letter x, forming a square of color that, seen from a distance, becomes one tiny element of the picture being fashioned. Pictures formed in this manner necessarily have a jagged-edged appearance, particularly where an effort has been made to approximate a curve; which explains why such pieces have been all but banished from Versailles and other places where taste and discrimination have vanquished sentimentality. In spite of which your majesty may easily envision the appearance of one of these minute x-shaped stitches when viewed closely: one leg running from northwest to southeast, as it were, and the other southwest to northeast. The two legs cross in the center. One must lie over the other. Which lies on top is a simple matter of the order in which they were laid down. Some embroiderers are creatures of habit, always performing the stitches in the same sequence, so that one of the legs invariably lies atop the other. Others are not so regular. As I examined the Countess’s work through a magnifying lens, I saw that she was one of the latter—which I found noteworthy, as she is in other respects a person of the most regular and disciplined habits. It occurred to me to wonder whether the orientations of the overlying legs might be a hidden vector of information.

The pitch of the canvas’s weave was about twenty threads per inch. A quick calculation showed that the total number of threads along each side would be around 360, forming nearly 130,000 squares.

A single square by itself could only convey a scintilla of information, as it can only possess one of two possible states: either the northwest-southeast leg is on top, or the southwest-northeast. This might seem useless; as how can one write a message in an alphabet of only two letters?

Mirabile dictu, there is a way to do just that, which I had recently heard about because of the loose tongue of a gentleman who has already been mentioned: Fatio de Duilliers. This Fatio fled to England after the Continent became a hostile place for him, and befriended a prominent English Alchemist by the name of Newton. He has become a sort of Ganymede to Newton’s Zeus, and follows him wherever he can; when they are perforce separated, he prates to anyone who will listen about his close relationship to the great man. I know this from Signore Vigani, an Alchemist who is at the same college with Newton and so is often forced to break bread with Fatio. Fatio is prone to irrational jealousy, and he endlessly schemes to damage the reputation of anyone he imagines may be a rival for Newton’s affections. One such is a Dr. Waterhouse, who shared a room with Newton when they were boys, and for all I know buggered him; but the facts do not matter, only Fatio’s imaginings. In the library of the Royal Society, Fatio recently happened upon Dr. Waterhouse sleeping over some papers on which he had been working out a calculation consisting entirely of ones and zeroes—a mathematical curiosity much studied by Leibniz. Dr. Waterhouse woke up before Fatio could get a closer look at what he had been doing; but as the document in question appeared to be a letter from abroad, he inferred that it might be some sort of cryptographic scheme. Not long after, he went to Cambridge with Newton and let this story drop at High Table so that all could know how clever he was, and that Waterhouse was certainly a dolt and probably a spy.

From my records of the cabinet noir I knew that the Countess de la Zeur had sent a letter to the Royal Society at the same time, and that she has had business contacts with the brother of Dr. Waterhouse. And I have already mentioned her suspiciously voluminous and inane correspondence with Leibniz. And so once again applying Occam’s Razor I formulated the hypothesis that the Countess uses a cypher, probably invented by Leibniz, based upon binary arithmetic, which is to say consisting of ones and zeroes: an alphabet of two letters, perfectly suited to representation in cross-stitch embroidery, as I have explained.

I enlisted a clerk from the Embassy, who had keen eyesight, to go over the embroidery stitch by stitch, marking down a numeral 1 for each square in which the northwest-to-southeast leg lay on top, and a 0 otherwise. I then applied myself to the problem of breaking the cypher.

A series of binary digits can represent a number; for example, 01001 is equal to 9. Five binary digits can represent up to 32 different numbers, sufficient to encypher the entire Roman alphabet. My early efforts assumed that the Countess’s cypher was of that sort; but alas, I found no intelligible message, and no patterns tending to give me hope that my fortunes would ever change.

Presently I departed from the Hague, taking the transcript of ones and zeroes with me, and bought passage on a small ship down the coast to Dunquerque. Most of the crew on this vessel were Flemish, but there were a few who looked different from the rest and who spoke to one another in a pithy, guttural tongue unlike any I had ever heard. I asked where they were from—for they were redoubtable seamen all—and they answered with no little pride that they were men of Qwghlm. At this moment I knew that Divine Providence had led me to this boat. I asked them many questions concerning their extraordinary language and their way of writing: a system of runes that is as primitive as an alphabet can possibly be and yet be worthy of the name. It contains no vowels, and sixteen consonants, several of which cannot be pronounced by anyone who was not born on that rock.

As it happens, an alphabet of sixteen letters is perfectly suited to translation into a binary cypher, for only four binary digits—or four stitches of embroidery—are required to represent a single letter. The Qwghlmian language is almost unbelievably pithy—one of these people can say with a few grunts, gags, and stutters what would take a Frenchman several sentences—and little known outside of that God-cursed place. Both of which made it perfectly suited to the purposes of the Countess, who need communicate, in this case, only with herself. In sum, the Qwghlmian language need not be encyphered, for it is already a nearly perfect cypher to begin with.

I tried the experiment of breaking down the transcribed 1s and 0s into groups of four and translating each group into a number between 1 and 16, and shortly began to see patterns of the sort that give a cryptographer great confidence that he is progressing rapidly to a solution. Upon my return to Paris I was able to find in the Bibliothèque du Roi a scholarly work about Qwghlmian runes, and thereby to translate the list of numbers into that alphabet—some 30,000 runes in all. A cursory comparison of the results against the word-list in the back of this tome suggested that I was on the correct path to a full solution; but to translate it was beyond my powers. I consulted with Father Édouard de Gex, who has lately taken an interest in Qwghlm, hoping to convert it to the True Faith and make it a thorn in the side of the heretics. He referred me to Father Mxnghr of the Society of Jesus in Dublin, who is a Qwghlmian born and bred, and known to be absolutely loyal to your majesty as he travels frequently to Qwghlm, at great risk, to baptize the people there. I sent him the transcript and he replied, some weeks later, with a translation of the text into Latin that ran to almost forty thousand words; which is to say that it requires more than one word in Latin to convey what is signified by a single rune in Qwghlmian.

This text is so pithy and fragmentary as to be nearly unreadable, and makes use of many curious word substitutions—“gun” written as “England stick” and so on. Much of its bulk consists of tedious lists of names, regiments, places, et cetera, which are of course staples of espionage, but of little interest now that the war has begun and everything become fluid. Some of it, however, is personal narrative that she apparently set down in crewel when she was bored. This material solves the riddle of how she got from St. Cloud to Nijmegen. I have taken the liberty of translating it into a more elevated style and redacting it into a coherent, if episodic narrative, which is copied out below for your majesty’s pleasure. From place to place I have inserted a note supplying additional information about the Countess’s activities which I have gleaned from other sources in the meantime. At the end, I have attached a postscript as well as a note from d’Avaux.

If I had to read romances for long stretches at a time, I should find them tiresome; but I only read three or four pages in the mornings and evenings when I sit (by your leave) on my close-stool, and then it is neither fatiguing nor dull.

—LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE, 1 MAY 1704

JOURNAL ENTRY 17 AUGUST 1688

Dear reader,

There is no way for me to guess whether this scrap of linen will, on purpose or through some calamity, be destroyed; or be made into a cushion; or, by some turn of events, fall under the scrutiny of some clever person and be decyphered, years or centuries from now. Though the fabric is new, clean, and dry as I sew these words into it, I cannot but expect that by the time anyone reads them, it will have become streaked with rain or tears, mottled and mildewed from age and damp, perhaps stained with smoke or blood. In any event I congratulate you, whoever you may be and in whatever era you may live, for having been clever enough to read this.

Some would argue that a spy should not keep a written account of her actions lest it fall into the wrong hands. I would answer that it is my duty to find out detailed information, and supply it to my lord, and if I do not learn more than I can recite from memory, then I have not been very industrious.

On 16 August 1688, I met Liselotte von der Pfalz, Elisabeth Charlotte, duchesse d’Orleans, who is known to the French Court as Madame or La Palatine, and to her loved ones in Germany as the Knight of the Rustling Leaves, at the gate of a stable on her estate at St. Cloud on the Seine, just downstream of Paris. She ordered her favorite hunting-horse brought out and saddled, while I went from stall to stall and selected a mount that would be suitable for riding bareback; that being the outward purpose of the expedition. Together we rode off into the woods that line the bank of the Seine for some miles in the neighborhood of the château. We were accompanied by two young men from Hanover. Liselotte maintains close relations with her family in that part of the world, and from time to time some nephew or cousin will be sent out to join her household for a time, and be “finished” in the society of Versailles. The personal stories of these boys are not devoid of interest, but, reader, they do not pertain to my narration, and so I will tell you only that they were German Protestant heterosexuals, which meant that they could be trusted within the environment of St. Cloud, if only because they were utterly isolated.

In a quiet backwater of the Seine, shielded from view by overhanging trees, a small flat-bottomed boat was waiting. I climbed aboard and burrowed under a tangle of fishing-nets. The boatman shoved off and poled the craft out into the main stream of the river, where we shortly made rendezvous with a larger vessel making its way upstream. I have been on it ever since. We have already passed up through the middle of Paris, keeping to the north side of the Île de la Cité. Just outside the city, at the confluence of the rivers Seine and Marne, we took the left fork, and began to travel up the latter.

JOURNAL ENTRY 20 AUGUST 1688

For several days we have been working our languid way up the Marne. Yesterday we passed through Meaux, and [as I believed] left it many miles behind us, but today we came again close enough to hear its church-bells. This is because of the preposterous looping of the river, which turns in on itself like the arguments of Father Édouard de Gex. This vessel is what they call a chaland, a long, narrow, cheaply made box with but a single square sail that is hoisted whenever the wind happens to come from astern. But most of the time the mast is used only as a hitching-place for tow-ropes by which the chaland is pulled against the current by animals on the banks.

My captain and protector is Monsieur LeBrun, who must live in mortal terror of Madame, for whenever I venture near the gunwale or do anything else the least bit dangerous he begins to sweat, and holds his head in his hands as if it were in danger of falling off. Mostly I sit on a keg of salt near the stern and watch France go by, and observe traffic on the river. I wear the clothes of a boy and keep my hair under my hat, which is sufficient to hide my sex from men on other boats and on the riverbank. If anyone hails me, I smile and say nothing, and after a few moments they falter and take me for an imbecile, perhaps a son of M. LeBrun who has been hit on the head. The lack of activity suits me, for I have been menstruating most of the time I’ve been on the chaland, and am in fact sitting on a pile of rags.

It is obvious that this countryside produces abundant fodder. In a few weeks’ time the barley will be ripe and then it will be easy to march an army through here. If an invasion of the Palatinate is being planned, the armies will come from the north [for they are stationed along the Dutch border] and the food will come from here; so there is nothing for a spy to look for, except, perhaps, shipments of certain military stocks. The armies would carry many of their own supplies with them, but it would not be unreasonable to expect that certain items, such as gunpowder, and especially lead, might be shipped up the river from arsenals in the vicinity of Paris. For to move a ton of lead in wagons requires teams of oxen, and many more wagon-loads of fodder, but to move the same cargo in the bilge of a chaland is easy. So I peer at the chalands making their way upriver and wonder what is stored down in their holds. To outward appearances they are all carrying the same sort of cargo as the chaland of M. LeBrun, viz. salted fish, salt, wine, apples, and other goods that originated closer to where the Seine empties into the sea.

JOURNAL ENTRY 25 AUGUST 1688

Sitting still day after day has its advantages. I am trying to view my surroundings through the eye of a Natural Philosopher. A few days ago I was gazing at another chaland making its way up-stream about a quarter of a mile ahead of us. One of the boatmen needed to reach a lashing on the mast that was too high for him. So he gripped the rim of a large barrel that was standing upright on the deck, tipped it back towards himself, and rolled it over to where he wanted it, then climbed up onto its end. From the way he managed this huge object and from the sound that it made under his feet, I could tell that it must be empty. Nothing terribly unusual in and of itself, since empty barrels are commonly shipped from place to place. But it made me wonder whether there was any outward sign by which I could distinguish between a chaland loaded as M. LeBrun’s is, and one that had a few tons of musket-balls in the bilge with empty barrels above to disguise the true nature of its cargo from spies?

Even from a distance it is possible to observe the sideways rocking of one of these chalands by watching the top of its mast-----for being long, the mast magnifies the small movements of the hull, and being high, it can be seen from far off.

I borrowed a pair of wooden shoes from M. LeBrun and set both of them afloat in the stagnant water that has accumulated in the bilge. Into one of these, I placed an iron bar, which rested directly upon the sole of the shoe. Into the other, I packed an equal weight of salt, which had spilled out of a fractured barrel. Though the weights of the shoes’ cargoes were equal, the distributions of those weights were not, for the salt was evenly distributed through the whole volume of the shoe, whereas the iron bar was concentrated in its “bilge.” When I set the two shoes to rocking, I could easily observe that the one laden with iron rocked with a slower, more ponderous motion, because all of its weight was far from the axis of the movement.

After re-uniting M. LeBrun with his shoes I returned to my position on the deck of the chaland, this time carrying a watch that had been given to me by Monsieur Huygens. First I timed one hundred rockings of the chaland I was on, and then I began to make the same observation of other chalands on the river. Most of them rocked at approximately the same frequency as the one of M. LeBrun. But I noticed one or two that rocked very slowly. Naturally I then began to scrutinize these chalands more carefully, whensoever they came into view, and familiarized myself with their general appearance and their crews. Somewhat to my disappointment, the first one turned out to be laden with quarried stones. Of course, no effort had been made to conceal the nature of its cargo. But later I saw one that had been filled up with barrels.

M. LeBrun really does think I am an imbecile now, but it is of no concern as I shall not be with him for very much longer.

JOURNAL ENTRY 28 AUGUST 1688

I have now passed all the way across Champagne and arrived at St.-Dizier, where the Marne comes very near the frontier of Lorraine and then turns southwards. I need to go east and north, so here is where I disembark. The journey has been slow, but I have seen things I would have overlooked if it had been more stimulating, and to sit in the sun on a slow boat in quiet country has hardly been a bad thing. No matter how strongly I hold to my convictions, I feel my resolve weakening after a few weeks at Court. For the people there are so wealthy, powerful, attractive, and cocksure that after a while it is impossible not to feel their influence. At first it induces a deviation too subtle to detect, but eventually one falls into orbit around the Sun King.

The territory I have passed through is flat, and unlike western France, it is open, rather than being divided up into hedgerows and fences. Even without a map one can sense that a vast realm lies beyond to the north and east. The term “fat of the land” is almost literal here, for the grain-fields are ripening before my eyes, like heavy cream rising up out of the very soil. As one born in a cold stony place, I think it looks like Paradise. But if I view it through the eyes of a man, a man of power, I see that it demands to be invaded. It is spread thick with the fodder and fuel of war, and war is bound to come across it in one direction or the other; so best have it go away from you at a time of your choosing than wait for it to darken the horizon and come sweeping towards you. Anyone can see that France will ever be invaded across these fields until she extends her border to the natural barrier of the Rhine. No border embedded in such a landscape will endure.

Fortune has presented Louis with a choice: he can try to maintain his influence over England, which is a very uncertain endeavour and does not really add to the security of France, or he can march on the Rhine, take the Palatinate, and secure France against Germany forever. It seems obvious that this is the wiser course. But as a spy it is not my charge to advise Kings how they ought to rule, but to observe how they do.

St.-Dizier, where I am about to disembark, is a river-port of modest size, with some very ancient churches and Roman ruins. The dark forest Argonne rises up behind it, and somewhere through those woods runs the border separating France from Lorraine. A few leagues farther to the east lies the vale of the river Meuse, which runs north into the Spanish Netherlands, and then becomes convolved with the shifting frontiers that separate Spanish, Dutch, and German states.

Another ten leagues east of the Meuse lies the city of Nancy, which is on the river Moselle. That river likewise flows north, but it sweeps eastwards after skirting the Duchy of Luxembourg, and empties into the Rhine between Mainz and Cologne. Or at least that is what I recollect from gazing at the maps in the library at St. Cloud. I did not think it politic to take any of them with me!

Continuing east beyond Nancy toward the Rhine, then, the maps depicted twenty or thirty leagues of jumbled and confused territory: an archi pelago of small isolated counties and bishoprics, crumbs of land that belonged to the Holy Roman Empire until the Thirty Years’ War. Eventually one reaches Strasbourg, which is on the Rhine. Louis XIV seized it some years ago. In some sense this event created me, for the plague and chaos of Strasbourg drew Jack there, and later the prospects of a fine barley-harvest and its inevitable result-----war-----drew him to Vienna where he met me. I wonder if I will complete the circle by journeying as far as Strasbourg now. If so, I shall complete another circle at the same time, for it was from that city that Liselotte crossed into France seventeen years ago to marry Monsieur, never to return to her homeland.

JOURNAL ENTRY 30 AUGUST 1688

At St.-Dizier I changed back into the clothes of a gentlewoman and lodged at a convent. It is one of those convents where women of quality go to live out their lives after they’ve failed, or declined, to get married. In its ambience it is closer to a bordello than a nunnery. Many of the inmates are not even thirty years old, and never so lusty; when they cannot sneak men inside, they sneak out, and when they cannot sneak out, they practice on one another. Liselotte knew some of these girls when they were at Versailles and has continued to correspond with them. She sent letters ahead telling them that I was a sort of shirt-tail relative of hers, a member of her household, and that I was traveling to the Palatinate to pick up certain art-objects and family curios that Liselotte was supposed to have inherited upon the death of her brother, but which had been the subject of lengthy haggling and disputation with her half-siblings. Since it is inconceivable for a woman to undertake such a journey herself, I was to bide at the convent in St.-Dizier until my escort arrived: some minor nobleman of the Palatinate who would journey to this place with horses and a carriage to collect me, then convey me northeastwards across Lorraine, and the incomprehensible tangle of borders east of it, to Heidelberg. My identity and mission are false, but the escort is real-----for needless to say, the people of the Palatinate are as eager to know their fate as their captive Queen, Liselotte.

As of this writing my escort has not arrived, and no word has been heard of him. I am anxious that they have been detained or even killed, but for now there is nothing for me to do but go to Mass in the morning, sleep in the afternoon, and carouse with the nuns in the night-time.

I was making polite conversation with the Mother Superior, a lovely woman of about threescore who turns a blind eye to the young women’s comings and goings. She mentioned in passing that there are iron works nearby, and this caused me to doubt my own judgment concerning those slow-rolling chalands. Perhaps they were only carrying iron, and not lead. But later I went out on the town with some of the younger girls, and we passed within view of the river-front, where a chaland was being unloaded. Barrels were being rolled off and stacked along the quay, and heavy ox-carts were standing by waiting. I asked these girls if this was typical, but they affect complete ignorance of practical matters and were of no use at all.

Later I claimed I was tired, and went to my allotted cell as if to sleep. But instead I changed into my boy-clothes and sneaked out of the convent using one of the well-worn escape-routes used by nuns going to trysts in the town. This time I was able to get much closer to the quay, and to observe the chaland from between two of the barrels that had been taken from it earlier. And indeed I saw small but massive objects being lifted up out of its bilge and loaded onto those ox-carts. Overseeing the work was a man whose face I could not see, but of whom much could be guessed from his clothing. About his boots were certain nuances that I had begun to notice in the boots of Monsieur’s lovers shortly before my departure from St. Cloud. His breeches-----

No. By the time anyone reads these words, fashions will have changed, and so it would be a waste of time for me to enumerate the details-----suffice it to say that everything he wore had to have been sewn in Paris within the last month.

My observations were cut short by the clumsiness of a few Vagabonds who had crept down to the quay hoping to pilfer something. One of them leaned against a barrel, assuming it was full and would support his weight, but being empty it tilted away from him and then, when he sprang back, came down with a hollow boom. Instantly the courtier whipped out his sword and pointed it at me, for he had spied me peering at him between barrels, and several men came running towards me. The Vagabonds took off at a run and I followed them, reasoning that they would know better than I how to disappear into this town. And indeed by vaulting over certain walls and crawling down certain gutters they very nearly disappeared from me, who was but a few paces behind them.

Eventually I followed them as far as a church-yard, where they had set up a little squat in a tangle of vines growing up the side of an ancient mausoleum. They made no effort either to welcome me or to chase me away, and so I hunkered down in the darkness a few paces off, and listened to them mutter. Much of their zargon was incomprehensible, but I could discern that there were four of them. Three seemed to be making excuses, as if resigned to whatever fate awaited them. But the fourth was frustrated, he had the energy to be critical of the others, and to desire some improvement in their situation. When this one got up and stepped aside for a piss, I rose and drew a little closer to him and said, “Meet me alone at the corner of the convent where the ivy grows,” and then I darted away, not knowing whether he might try to seize me.

An hour later I was able to observe him from the parapet of the convent. I threw him a coin and told him that he would receive ten more of the same if he would follow the ox-carts, observe their movements, and report back to me in three days. He receded into the darkness without saying a word.

The next morning the Mother Superior delivered a letter to one of the girls, explaining that it had been left at the gate the night before. The recipient took one look at the seal and exclaimed, “Oh, it is from my dear cousin!” She opened it with a jerk and read it then and there, pronouncing half the words aloud, as she was barely literate. The import seemed to be that her cousin had passed through St.-Dizier the night before but very much regretted he’d not been able to stop in for a visit, as his errand was very pressing; however, he expected to be in the area for some time, and hoped that he would have the opportunity to see her soon.

When she pulled the letter open, the disc of wax sealing it shut popped off and rolled across the floor under a chair. As she was reading the letter I went over and picked it up. The coat of arms pressed into that seal was one I did not fully recognize, but certain elements were familiar to me from my time at Versailles-----I could guess that he was related to a certain noble family of Gascony, well known for its military exploits. It seemed safe to assume he was the gentleman I’d spied on the quay the night before.

JOURNAL ENTRY 2 SEPTEMBER 1688

CRYPTANALYST’S NOTE: In the original, the section below contains consid erable detail about the cargoes being unloaded from the chalands at St.-Dizier, and the coats of arms and insignias of persons that the Countess observed there, all of which were no doubt of greater interest to the Prince of Orange than they can be to your majesty. I have elided them.-----B.R.

A slow three days at the convent of St.-Dizier have given me more than enough time to catch up on my embroidery! With any luck my Vagabond will come back tonight with news. If I have received no word from the Palatinate by tomorrow I shall have little choice but to strike out on my own, though I have no idea how to manage it.

I have tried to make what use I could of this fallow time, as I did on the chaland. During the days I have tried to make conversation with Eloise, the girl who received the letter. This has been difficult because she is not very intelligent and we have few interests in common. I let it be known that I have been at Versailles and St. Cloud recently. In time, word reached her of this, and she began to sit near me at meals, and to ask if I knew this or that person there, and what had become of so-and-so. So at last I have learned who she is, and who her well-dressed cousin is: the Chevalier d’Adour, who has devoted his last several years to currying favor with Maréchal Louvois, the King’s commander-in-chief. He distinguished himself in the recent massacres of Protestants in the Piedmont and, in sum, is the sort who might be entrusted with a mission of some importance.

In the evenings I have tried to keep an eye on the river-front. Several more chalands have been unloaded there, in the same style as the first.

JOURNAL ENTRY 5 SEPTEMBER 1688

Suddenly so much happened I could not tend to my embroidery for a few days. I am catching up on it now, in a carriage on a bumpy road in the Argonne. This type of writing has more advantages to a peripatetic spy than I appreciated at first. It would be impossible for me to write with pen and ink here. But needlework I can just manage.

To say it quickly, my young Vagabond came back and earned his ten silver pieces by informing me that the heavy ox-carts carrying the cargo from the chalands were being driven east, out of France and into Lorraine, circumventing Toul and Nancy on forest tracks, and then continuing east to Alsace, which is France again [the Duchy of Lorraine being flanked by France to both east and west]. My Vagabond had been forced, for lack of time, to turn round and come back before he could follow the carts all the way to their destination, but it is obvious enough that they are bound towards the Rhine. He heard from a wanderer he met on the road that such carts were converging from more than one direction on the fortress of Haguenau, which lately had been a loud and smoky place. This man had fled the area because the troops had been press-ganging any idlers they could find, putting them to work chopping down trees-----little ones for firewood and big ones for lumber. Even the shacks of the Vagabonds were being chopped up and burnt.

After hearing this news I did not sleep for the rest of the night. If my recollection of the maps was right, Haguenau is on a tributary of the Rhine, and is part of the barrière de fer that Vauban built to protect France from the Germans, Dutch, Spanish, and other foes. Supposing that I was right in thinking that the cargo was lead; then the meaning of what I’d just been told was that it was being melted down at Haguenau and made into musket- and cannonballs. This would explain the demand for firewood. But why did they also require lumber? I guessed it was to build barges that could carry the ammunition down to the Rhine. The current would then take them downstream into the Palatinate in a day or two.

Certain things I had noticed at Court now became imbued with new meanings. The Chevalier de Lorraine-----lord of the lands over which the ox-carts passed en route to Haguenau-----has long been the most senior of Monsieur’s lovers, and the most cruel and implacable of Madame’s tormentors. In theory he is a vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor, of which Lorraine is still a tributary state, but in practice he has become completely surrounded by France-----one cannot enter or leave Lorraine without traveling over territory that is ruled from Versailles. This explains why he spends all his time in the French Court instead of Vienna.

Conventional wisdom has it that the duc d’Orleans was raised to be effeminate and passive so that he would never pose a threat to his older brother’s kingship. One might suppose that the Chevalier de Lorraine, who routinely penetrates Monsieur, and who rules his affections, has thereby exploited a vulnerability in the ruling dynasty of France. That, again, is the conventional wisdom at Court. But now I was seeing it in a different light. One cannot penetrate without being encompassed, and the Chevalier de Lorraine is encompassed by Monsieur just as his territory has been encompassed by France. Louis invades and penetrates, his brother seduces and surrounds, they share a common will, they complement each other as brothers should. I see a homosexual who makes a sham marriage and spurns his wife for the love of a man. But Louis sees a brother who will fight a sham war in the Palatinate, supposedly to defend his wife’s claim on that territory, while using his lover’s fiefdom as a highway to transport matériel to the front.

When these three-----Monsieur, Madame, and the Chevalier-----were packed off to St. Cloud on short notice a few weeks ago, I assumed it was because the King had grown sick of their squabbling. But now I perceive that the King thinks in metaphors, and that he had to put them all together, like animals in a baiting-ring, to bring their conflict to a head, before undertaking his military campaign. Just as the domestic squabbles of Jupiter and Juno were thought by the Romans to be manifested in thunderstorms, so the squalid triangle of St. Cloud will be manifested as war in the Palatinate. Louis’ empire, which now is interrupted in the Argonne, will be extended across and down the Rhine, as far as Mannheim and Heidelberg, and when domestic tranquillity is finally restored to St. Cloud, France will be two hundred miles wider, and the barrière de fer will run across burnt territory where German-speaking Protestants used to dwell.

All of this came together in my head in an instant, but then I lay awake until dawn fretting over what I should do. Weeks before, I had made up a little metaphor of my own, concerning two dogs named Phobos and Deimos, and put it in a letter to d’Avaux in the hopes that the Prince of Orange’s spies would read it, and understand its message. At the time I’d thought myself very clever. But now my metaphor seemed childish and inane compared to that of Louis. Worse, its message was ambiguous-----for its entire point was that I could not be sure, yet, whether Louvois intended to attack northwards into the Dutch Republic, or draw back, wheel round to the east, and launch himself across the Rhine. Now I felt sure I knew the answer, and needed to get word to the Prince of Orange. But I was stuck in a convent in St.-Dizier and had nothing to base my report on, save Vagabond hearsay, as well as a conviction in my own mind that I had understood the mentality of the King. And even this might evaporate like dew in a few hours, as the fears of the night-time so often do in the morning.

I was on the verge of becoming a Vagabond myself, and striking out on the eastern road, when a spattered and dusty carriage pulled up in front of the convent, just before morning Mass, and a gentleman knocked on the door and asked for me under the false name I’d adopted.

That gentleman and I were on our way as soon as his team could be fed and watered. He is Dr. Ernst von Pfung, a long-suffering gentleman scholar of Heidelberg. When he was a boy, his homeland was occupied and ravaged by the Emperor’s armies; at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Palatinate was handed over to the Winter Queen in the peace settlement, his family helped them establish their royal household in what remained of Heidelberg Castle. So he has known Sophie and her siblings for a long time. He got all of his education, including a doctorate of jurisprudence, at Heidelberg. He served as an advisor to Charles Louis [the brother of Sophie, and father of Liselotte] when he was Elector Palatinate, and later tried to exert some sort of steadying influence on Liselotte’s elder brother Charles when he succeeded to the Electoral throne. But this Charles was daft, and only wanted to conduct mock-sieges at his Rhine castles, using rabble like Jack as his “soldiers.” At one of these, he caught a fever and died, precipitating the succession dispute on which the King of France now hopes to capitalize.

Dr. von Pfung, whose earliest and worst memories are of Catholic armies burning, raping, and pillaging his homeland, is beside himself with worry that the same thing is about to happen all over again, this time with French instead of Imperial troops. The events of the last few days have done nothing to reassure him.

Between Heidelberg and the Duchy of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Empire forms a hundred-mile-wide salient that protrudes southwards into France, almost as far as the River Moselle. It is called the Saarland and Dr. von Pfung, as a petty noble of the Empire, is accustomed to being able to travel across it freely and safely. As it gets closer to Lorraine, this territory becomes fragmented into tiny principalities. By threading his way between them Dr. von Pfung had intended to make safe passage to Lorraine, which is technically part of the Empire. A brief transit across Lorraine would have brought him across the French border very close to St.-Dizier.

Fortunately Dr. von Pfung has the wisdom and foresight one would expect in a man of his maturity and erudition. He had not simply assumed that his plan would work out, but had sent riders out a few days in advance to scout the territory. When they had not returned, he had set out anyway, hoping for the best; but very shortly he had met one of them on the road, returning with gloomy tidings. Certain obstacles had been discovered, of a complicated nature that Dr. von Pfung declined to explain. He had ordered a volte-face and ridden south down the east bank of the Rhine as far as the city of Strasbourg, where he had crossed over into Alsace, and from there he made his way as fast as he could. As a gentleman he is entitled to bear arms, and he has not been slow to take advantage of that right, for in addition to the rapier on his hip he has a pair of pistols and a musket inside the carriage. We are accompanied by two out-riders: young gentlemen similarly armed. At every inn and river-crossing they have had to force their way through by bluff and bluster, and the strain is showing on Dr. von Pfung’s face; after we left the precincts of St.-Dizier he very courteously excused himself, removed his wig to reveal a bald pate fringed with gray, leaned back next to an open window, and rested his eyes for a quarter of an hour.

The journey has left him suspecting much but knowing nothing, which puts him in the same predicament as I. When he had revived, I put a suggestion to him: “I hope you will not think me forward, Doctor, but it seems to me that vast consequences balance on the intelligence that we collect, or fail to, in the next days. You and I have each used all the craft and wit that we could muster, and only skirted the matter. Could it be that we must now relax our grip on Subtlety, and fling our arms around Courage, and strike for the heart of this thing?”

Contrary to what I had expected, these words eased and softened the face of Dr. von Pfung. He smiled, revealing a finely carven set of teeth, and nodded once, in a sort of bow. “I had already resolved to gamble my life on it,” he admitted. “If I have seemed nervous or distracted to you, it is because I could not see my way clear to risking yours as well. And it makes me uneasy still, for you have much more life ahead of you than I do. But-----”

“Say no more, we must not waste our energies on this sort of idle talk,” I said. “It is decided-----we’ll roll the dice. What of your escorts?”

“Those young men are officers of a cavalry regiment-----probably the first to be cut down when Louvois invades. They are men of honor.”

“Your driver?”

“He has been in the service of my family his whole life and would never permit me to journey, or to die, alone.”

“Then I propose we strike out for the Meuse, which ought to lie two or three days’ hard riding east of here, on the far side of the forest Argonne.”

As quickly as that, Dr. von Pfung rapped on the ceiling and instructed the driver to keep the sun on his right hand through most of the coming day. The driver naturally fell onto those eastward roads that seemed most heavily traveled, and so we ended up following the deep wheel-ruts that had been scored across the ground by the heavy ox-carts in preceding days.

We’d not been on the road for more than a few hours before we overtook a whole train of them, laboring up a long grade between the valleys of the Marne and the Ornain. By taking advantage of occasional wide places in the road, our driver was able to pass these carts one at a time. Peering out through the carriage windows, Dr. von Pfung and I could now plainly see that the carts were laden with pigs of a gray metal that might have been iron-----but as there was not a speck of rust on any of them, they must have been lead. Reader, I hope you will not think me silly and girlish if I confess that I was pleased and excited to see my suspicions borne out and my cleverness proven at last. But a glance at the face of Dr. von Pfung crushed any such emotions, for he looked like a man who has returned home in the night-time to discover flames and smoke billowing from the windows of his own house.

At the head of the train rode a French cavalry officer, looking as if he had just been condemned to serve a hundred-year stint in Purgatory. He made no effort to hail us and so we quickly left him and his column far to the rear. But our hopes of making up for lost time were quashed by the nature of the terrain. The Argonne is a broad ridge running from north to south, directly across our path, and in many places the ground drops away into deep river-courses. Where the terrain is level, it is densely forested. So one has no choice but to follow the roads and to make use of the fords and bridges provided, be they never so congested and tumbledown.

But the sight of that miserable young officer had given me an idea. I asked Dr. von Pfung to close his eyes, and made him promise not to peek. This intimidated him to such a degree that he simply climbed down out of the carriage and walked alongside it for a while. I changed out of the drab habit of the nunnery and into a dress I had brought along. At Versailles this garment would scarce have been fit to mop the floor with. Here in the Argonne Forest, though, it rated as a significant Fire Hazard.

A few hours later, as we descended into the valley of a smaller river called the Ornain, we overtook another train of lead-bearing ox-carts, which was picking its way down the grade with an infinity of cursing, collisions, and splintering wood. Just as before, there was a young officer riding at the head. He looked every bit as miserable as the first one-----until I popped out of the carriage window, and almost out of my dress. Once he got over his astonishment, he almost wept with gratitude. It made me happy to give this poor man such pleasure, and by nothing more than putting on a dress and opening a window. His mouth fell open in a way that reminded me of a fish; so I resolved to go fishing. “Excuse me, Monsieur, but can you tell me where I might find my uncle?”

At this his mouth opened a little wider, and his face reddened. “Mademoiselle, I am ever so sorry, but I do not know him.”

“That is impossible! Every officer knows him!” I tried.

“Pardon me, Mademoiselle, but you have mistaken my meaning. No doubt, your uncle is a great man whose name I would recognize, and honor, if I heard it-----but I am too foolish and ignorant to know who you are, and consequently I do not know which great man has the privilege of being your uncle.”

“I thought you would know who I was!” I pouted. The officer looked extremely dismayed. “I am-----” Then I turned around and slapped Dr. von Pfung lightly on the arm. “Stop it!” Then, to the officer: “My chaperone is an old fart who will not allow me to introduce myself.”

“Indeed, Mademoiselle, for a young lady to introduce herself to a young man would be unpardonable.”

“Then we shall have to conduct our conversation incognito, and say it never happened-----as if it were a lovers’ tryst,” I said, leaning a bit farther out the window, and beckoning him to ride a little closer. I was afraid he would swoon and get himself wrapped around the axle of our carriage. He maintained his balance with some effort, though, and drew so close that I was able to reach out and steady myself by putting my hand on the pommel of his saber. In a lower voice I continued: “You have probably guessed that my uncle is a man of very high rank who has been sent out to these parts to execute the will of the King, in coming days.”

The officer nodded.

“I was on my way up from Oyonnax, returning to Paris, when I learned he was in these parts, and I have decided to find his camp and pay him a surprise visit, and neither you nor my chaperone nor anyone else can prevent it! I just need to know where to find his headquarters.”

“Mademoiselle, is your uncle the Chevalier d’Adour?”

I adopted the look of one who has been gagged with the handle of a spoon.

“Of course not, I didn’t really think so…neither are you of the House of Lorraine, I gather, or you would not need directions…is it Étienne d’Arcachon? No, forgive me, he has no siblings and could not have a niece. But I see from the softening of your beautiful face, Mademoiselle, that I am drawing nearer the truth. The only one in these parts who is above the young Arcachon in rank is the Maréchal de Louvois himself. And I do not know whether he has yet come south from the Dutch front…but when he does, you may look for him along the banks of the Meuse. Provided, that if you ask for him there, and learn that he has already disembarked, you will have to follow his track eastwards into the Saarland.”

That conversation occurred the day before yesterday, and we have done nothing since then but toil eastwards through the woods. It has had the air of a funeral procession, for as soon as Dr. von Pfung heard the name of Louvois, all doubt vanished that the Palatinate was to be invaded. But the officer who uttered that name might have been guessing, or passing on a baseless rumor, or telling me what he thought I wanted to hear. We must see this thing through and view incontrovertible evidence with our own eyes.

As I write this we are descending another long tedious grade into what must be the valley of the Meuse. From here that river flows up through the Ardennes and across the Spanish Netherlands into the territory along the Dutch border where the best regiments of the French Army have long been encamped to menace William’s flank and pin down the Dutch Army.

CRYPTANALYST’S NOTE: At this point the account becomes badly disjointed. The countess blundered into the midst of your majesty’s army and had an adventure, which she did not have the leisure to write down. Later, as she was fleeing north in the direction of Nijmegen, she made a few cryptic notes as to what had happened. These are intermingled with more lengthy espionage reports listing the regiments and officers she observed moving south to join your majesty’s forces along the Rhine. I have been able to reconstruct the Countess’s actions, and thereby to make some sense of her notes, by interviewing several of the persons who saw her in the French camp. The narrative that follows is incomparably more discursive than what appears in her needlework but I believe that it is accurate, and I hope that it will be more informative, and therefore more pleasing, to your majesty than the original. At the same time, I have removed all of the Countess’s tedious lists of battalions, et cetera.

—B.R.

JOURNAL ENTRY 7 SEPTEMBER 1688

I am riding north post-haste and can only jot down a few words during pauses to change horses. The carriage is lost. The driver and Dr. von Pfung are dead. I am traveling with the two cavalrymen from Heidelberg. As I write these words we are in a village beside the Meuse, near Verdun I believe. Now I’m told we must ride again.

It is later, and I think we are near where France, the Duchy of Luxembourg, and the Spanish Netherlands come together. We have had to strike up away from the Meuse and into the forest. Between here and Liège, which lies some hundred miles to the north, the river does not run in a direct line, but makes a lengthy excursion to westward, running for much of the way through French lands. This makes it perfectly suited to serve as a conduit for French military traffic from the north, but bad for us. Instead we shall attempt to traverse the Ardennes [as these woods are called] northwards.

JOURNAL ENTRY 8 SEPTEMBER 1688

Catching our breath and rubbing our saddle-sores along a riverbank while Hans looks for a ford. Will try to explain as I go along.

When we at last reached the Meuse, three days ago [had to count on my fingers, as it seems nearer three weeks!], we immediately saw the evidence we had been looking for. Thousands of ancient trees felled, valley full of smoke, landing-stages improvised on the riverbank. Vanguards of the regiments from the Dutch front had come upriver, made rendezvous with officers sent out from Versailles, and begun preparations to receive the regiments themselves.

For many hours Dr. von Pfung did not say a word. When he did, only slurred meaningless sounds came from his mouth, and I understood that he had suffered a stroke.

I asked him if he wanted to turn back and he only shook his head no, pointed to me, and then pointed north.

Everything had fallen apart. Until that moment I had presumed that we were operating according to some coherent plan of Dr. von Pfung’s, but now in retrospect I understood that we had been plunging into danger heedlessly, like a man carried into a battlefield by a wild horse. I could not think at all for a while. I am ashamed to report that because of this failure we blundered into the camp of a cavalry regiment. A captain rapped on the door of the carriage and demanded that we explain ourselves.

It was already obvious to them that most of our party were German-speaking, and it would not take long for them to understand that Dr. von Pfung and the others were of the Palatinate; this would mark us as enemy spies and lead to the worst imaginable consequences.

During my long journey up the Marne on the chaland I had had plenty of time to imagine bad outcomes, and had concocted and rehearsed several false stories to tell my captors in the event I should be caught spying. But looking into the face of that captain, I was no more able to tell tales than the stricken Dr. von Pfung. The problem lay in that this operation was on a much vaster scale than either Liselotte or I had imagined, and many more people of Court rank were involved; for all I knew, some Count or Marquis might be nearby, with whom I had dined or danced at Versailles, and who would recognize me the moment I got out of the carriage. To adopt some made-up name and elaborate some tale would amount to confessing that I was a spy.

So I told the truth. “Do not look to this man to make introductions, for he has suffered a stroke, and lost the faculty of speech,” I said to the astonished captain. “I am Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, and I am here in the service of Elisabeth Charlotte, the Duchess of Orleans and rightful inheritor of the Palatinate. It is in her name you are about to invade that land. It is she whom my escorts serve, for they are Court officials of Heidelberg. And it is she who has sent me here, as her personal representative, to look into your operations and ensure that the right thing is done.”

This bit of nonsense, “that the right thing is done,” was a list of dead words I tacked on to the end of the sentence because I did not know what to say, and was losing my nerve. For even when I stood beneath the Emperor’s palace in Vienna, waiting to feel the blade of a Janissary’s scimitar biting into my neck, I had not felt so uncertain as I did there. But I think the very vagueness of my words had a great effect on this captain, for he stepped back from the window and bowed deeply, and proclaimed that he would send word of my arrival to his superiors without delay.

Hans has come back saying he has found a place where we may attempt to ford this river and so I will only narrate that in due course, word of our arrival was passed up the chain of command until it reached a man whose rank at Court was high enough that he could entertain me without violating any rules of precedence. That man turned out to be Étienne d’Arcachon.

JOURNAL ENTRY 10 SEPTEMBER 1688

They think we are somewhere around Bastogne. Have been unable to do needlework for some while as our day-to-day affairs have pressed in on us sorely. The Ardennes Forest is crowded with Vagabonds and highwaymen [and, some say, witches and goblins] at the best of times. To these have now been added a large number of deserters from the French regiments that are being moved southwards. They jump off the slow-moving barges and wade to the bank and infiltrate the forest. We have had to move carefully and to post watches all night long. I am making these notes on my watch. To sit by a crackling fire would be folly and so I am perched up in the fork of a tree, wrapped up in blankets, sewing by moonlight.

Men who have weathered terrible trials are wont to have dull and useless children to demonstrate their power, as rich Arabs grow their fingernails long. So with the duc d’Arcachon and his only legitimate son, Étienne. The Duke survived the bad dream of the Fronde Rebellion and built a navy for the King. Étienne has chosen a career in the Army; this is his notion of youthful rebellion.

It is said of some men that “he would cut off his right arm before doing thus-and-such.” Of Étienne, it used to be said that he would sacrifice a limb before violating the smallest rule of etiquette. But now people say, rather, that he actually did cut off his right arm out of politeness, for several years ago something happened at a party to that general effect-----accounts vary, for I get the impression it was in some way disgraceful to his family. At any rate the details are unknown to me, but the tale rings true. He has become a great patron of woodcarvers and silversmiths, whom he pays to make artificial hands for him. Some of them are shockingly lifelike. The hand he extended to help me down out of the carriage was carved of ivory with fingernails fashioned from mother-of-pearl. When we dined on roast grouse in his quarters, he had switched to a hand of carven ebony, permanently gripping a serrated knife, which he used to cut his meat, though it looked as if it would have made an excellent weapon, too! And after dinner, when he undertook to seduce me, he wore a special hand carved out of jade, with an extremely oversized middle finger. That digit was, in fact, a perfect reproduction of a man’s erect phallus. As such it was nothing I had not already seen in various private “art” collections in and around Versailles, for lords, and even ladies, love to have such things in their private chambers, as proof of their sophistication, and many of their rooms are veritable Shrines to the god Priapus. But I was caught unawares by a hidden feature of this hand: it must have been hollow, and stuffed with clockwork, for when Étienne d’Arcachon tripped a hidden lever, it suddenly came alive, and began to hum and buzz like a hornet in a bottle. Inside, it seemed, was a coil spring that had been tightly wound in advance.

I need hardly tell you, reader, that events of the past few days had left me rather tightly wound myself, and I can assure you that the tension was gone from my body long before it was gone from the spring.

You may despise me for having reveled in fleshly pleasure while Dr. von Pfung was laid out with a stroke, but to have been pent up in a stifling carriage with a dying man for all that time had left me with a ravening to partake of life. I closed my eyes at the moment of climax and fell back onto the bed, exhausting my lungs in a long cry, and feeling all tension drain from my body. Étienne executed some deft maneuver of which I was scarcely aware. When I opened my eyes, I found that the jade phallus had been withdrawn and replaced by a real one, that of Étienne d’Arcachon. Again, you may well doubt my judgment in allowing myself to be taken in this way. That is your prerogative. Indeed, to marry such a man would be a grievous error. But in looking for a lover, one could do worse than a man who is clean, extremely polite, and has a madly vibrating jade phallus for a right forefinger. The warmth of his trunk felt good against my thighs; it did not occur to me to object; before I could really consider my situation, I realized that he was already climaxing inside of me.

JOURNAL ENTRY 12 SEPTEMBER 1688

Still in the damnable Ardennes, creeping northwards, pausing from time to time to observe the movements of the French battalions. These woods cannot possibly go on much farther. At least we have grown accustomed to the territory now, and know how to make our way. But at times we seem to move no faster than mice chewing their way through wood.

When I woke up in the bed of Étienne d’Arcachon the next morning, he had, in typical fashion, already left; but somewhat less typically, he had written me a love-poem and left it on the bedside table.

Some ladies boast of ancient pedigrees

And prate about their ancestors a lot

But cankers flourish on old family trees

Whose mossy trunks do oft conceal rot.

My lady’s blood runs pure as mountain streams

>So I don’t care if her high rank was bought

Her beauty lends fresh vigor to my dreams

Of children free of blemish and of blot.

His quarters was a little château on the east bank of the Meuse. Out the window I could see Belgian river-boats-----variously leased, borrowed, bought, or commandeered-----coming upstream, their decks crowded with French soldiers. I dressed and went downstairs to find Dr. von Pfung’s carriage-driver waiting for me.

The night before, I had explained my friend’s plight to Étienne d’Arcachon, who had made arrangements for his own personal physician to administer treatment. Having personally witnessed the violence inflicted upon no less a personage than the King of France himself by the Royal Physician, I had assented to this with some ambivalence. Indeed, Dr. von Pfung’s driver now informed me that the poor man had been bled twice during the night and was now very weak. He had signalled his desire to return to the Palatinate without delay, in hopes that he might look upon Heidelberg Castle one last time before he went to his long home.

The driver and I both understood that this would be impossible. According to the tale I had told my host, we were there as forward observers representing Liselotte. If that were true, we should either stay with the main body, or retire westwards towards St. Cloud-----never run ahead of the invasion force. Yet Dr. von Pfung wanted to do just that, whereas I needed to strike out for the north and inform the Prince of Orange that his southern flank was soon to be free of French troops. And so we devised a plan, which was that our little group would leave that day on the pretext of taking Dr. von Pfung back to the west, but that when conditions were right, the carriage would break eastwards towards Heidelberg while I would go north accompanied by the two cavalrymen [who have imposing names and titles but whom I now call by their Christian names, Hans and Joachim]. When eyebrows were raised about this later, as seemed more than likely, I would claim that the others had turned out to be Protestant spies, working for William of Orange, and that I had been borne along against my will.

The plan unfolded correctly at first; we crossed the Meuse again as if going back into the west, but then began to make our way northwards up the bank, fighting against an increasing stream of south-bound military traffic. For since the boats were coming up against the river’s current, most of them were drawn by teams of animals on the banks. After we had traveled north for about half a day we came to a ferry, where we resolved to part ways. I went into the carriage and kissed Dr. von Pfung and said some words to him-----though all words, especially ones improvised in haste, seemed inadequate, and the doctor managed to say more with his eyes and his one good hand than I did with my entire faculties. I changed once again into a man’s clothes, hoping to pass myself off as a page to Hans and Joachim, and mounted a pony we’d borrowed from the stables of Étienne d’Arcachon. After some haggling with the ferryman-----who was loath to venture across through the regimental traffic-----the carriage was driven onto the ferry, its wheels were chocked, the horses hobbled, and the short voyage across the Meuse began.

They had almost reached the eastern bank when they were hailed by a French officer on one of the south-bound vessels. He had perceived, through his spyglass, Dr. von Pfung’s coat of arms painted on the door of the carriage, and recognized him as coming from the Palatinate.

Now, the driver had a letter from Étienne d’Arcachon giving him permission to travel west-----but he had now been observed crossing the Meuse eastwards. His only hope was therefore to make a run for it. That is what he attempted to do when the ferry reached the east bank. The only available road ran parallel to the bank for some distance before turning away from the river into a village. He therefore had to drive along in full view of all the boats crowding the river, whose decks were thronged with French musketeers. Some of the boats were armed with swivel-guns as well. By this time a hue and cry had gone up among the boats, and there was plenty of time for them to load their guns as the carriage disembarked from the ferry. The officer had traded his spyglass for a saber, which he raised high, then brought down as a signal. Instantly, the French boats were completely obscured in clouds of powder-smoke. The valley of the Meuse was filled with flocks of birds that erupted from the trees, startled by the sound of the guns. The carriage was reduced to splinters, the horses torn apart, and the fates of the brave driver and his stricken passenger perfectly obvious.

I could have tarried on the spot and wept for a long time, but on this bank were several locals who had seen us arrive in the company of the carriage, and it would not be long before one of them sold that intelligence to the Frenchmen on the river. So we struck out for the north, beginning the journey that continues even as I write these words.

JOURNAL ENTRY 13 SEPTEMBER 1688

The peasants around here say that the lord of the manor is a Bishop. This gives me hope that we are now in the Bishopric of Liège, not terribly far from one of the outlying tendrils of the Dutch Republic. Hans and Joachim have been having a long discussion in German, which I understand but meagerly. One thinks he ought to strike out alone to the East, go to the Rhine, and then double back to the South and warn the Palatinate. The other fears it is too late; there is nothing they can do now for their homeland; it is better to seek revenge by throwing all of their energies behind the Protestant Defender.

Later. The dispute was resolved as follows: we shall ride north past French lines to Maestricht and take passage on a canal-boat down the river to Nijmegen, where the Meuse and the Rhine almost kiss each other. That is some hundred miles north of here, yet it may be a quicker way to reach the Rhine than to cut east cross-country through God knows what perils and complications. In Nijmegen, Hans and Joachim can get the latest news from passengers and boatmen who have lately come down the Rhine from Heidelberg and Mannheim.

It did not take long, once we left our camp near Liège, to pass out of the zone of French military control. We rode over an area of torn-up ground that, until a few days ago, was the permanent camp of a French regiment. Ahead of us are a few French companies left along the border as a façade. They stop and interrogate travelers trying to come in, but ignore those like us who are only trying to pass out towards Maestricht.

JOURNAL ENTRY 15 SEPTEMBER 1688

On a canal-boat bound from Maestricht to Nijmegen. Conditions not very comfortable, but at least we do not have to ride or walk any more. Am renewing my acquaintance with soap.

JOURNAL ENTRY 16 SEPTEMBER 1688

I am in a cabin of a canal-ship making its way west across the Dutch Republic.

I am surrounded by slumbering Princesses.

The Germans have a fondness for faery-tales, or Märchen as they call them, that is strangely at odds with their orderly dispositions. Ranged in parallel with their tidy Christian world is the Märchenwelt, a pagan realm of romance, wonders, and magical beings. Why they believe in the Märchenwelt has ever been a mystery to me; but I am closer to understanding it today than I was yesterday. For yesterday we reached Nijmegen. We went direct to the bank of the Rhine and I began looking for a canal-boat bound in the direction of Rotterdam and the Hague. Hans and Joachim meanwhile canvassed travelers debarking from boats lately come from upstream. I had no sooner settled myself in a comfortable cabin on a Hague-bound canal-ship when Joachim found me; and he had in tow a pair of characters straight out of the Märchenwelt. They were not gnomes, dwarves, or witches, but Princesses: one full-grown [I believe she is not yet thirty] and one pint-sized [she has told me three different times that she is five years old]. True to form, the little one carries a doll that she insists is also a princess.

They do not look like princesses. The mother, whose name is Eleanor, has something of a regal bearing. But this was not obvious to me at first, for when they joined me, and Eleanor noticed a clean bed [mine] and saw that Caroline-----for that is the daughter’s name-----was under my watch, she fell immediately into [my] bed, went to sleep, and did not awaken for some hours, by which time the boat was well underway. I spent much of that time chatting with little Caroline, who was at pains to let me know she was a princess; but as she made the same claim of the dirty lump of stuffed rags she bore around in her arms, I did not pay it much mind.

But Joachim insisted that the disheveled woman snoring under my blankets was genuine royalty. I was about to chide him for having been deluded by mountebanks, when I began to recollect the tales I had been told of the Winter Queen, who after being driven out of Bohemia by the Pope’s legions, wandered about Europe as a Vagabond before finding safe haven at the Hague. And my time at Versailles taught me more than I wished to know about the desperate financial straits in which many nobles and royals live their whole lives. Was it really so unthinkable that three Princesses-----mother, daughter, and doll-----should be wandering about lost and hungry on the Nijmegen riverfront? For war had come to this part of the world, and war rends the veil that separates the everyday world from the Märchenwelt.

By the time Eleanor woke up, I had mended the doll, and I had been looking after little Caroline for long enough that I felt responsible for her, and would have been willing to snatch her away from Eleanor if the latter had proved, upon awakening, to be some sort of madwoman [this is by no means my usual response to small children, for at Versailles, playing my role as governess, I had been put in charge of many a little snot-nose whose names I have long since forgotten. But Caroline was bright, and interesting to talk to, and a welcome relief from the sorts of people I had been spending time with for the last several weeks].

When Eleanor had arisen, and washed, and eaten some of my provisions, she told a story that was wild but, by modern standards, plausible. She claims to be the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach. She married the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The daughter is properly called Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Ansbach. But this Margrave died of smallpox a few years ago and his title passed to a son by an earlier wife, who had always considered Eleanor to be a sort of wicked stepmother [this being a Märchen, after all] and so cast her and little Caroline out of the Schloβ. They drifted back to Eisenach, Eleanor’s place of birth. This is a place on the edge of the Thüringer Wald, perhaps two hundred miles east of where we are now. Her position in the world at that time, a few years ago, was the reverse of mine: she had a lofty title, but no property at all. Whereas I had no titles other than Slave and Vagabond, but I did have some money. At any rate, she and Caroline were suffered to dwell in what sounds like a family hunting-lodge in the Thüringer Wald. But she does not seem to have been much more welcome in Eisenach than she had been at Ansbach following the death of her husband. And so, while spending part of each year at Eisenach, it has been her practice to roam about and pay extended visits to shirttail relatives all over northern Europe, moving from time to time lest she wear out her welcome in any one place.

Recently she paid a brief visit to Ansbach in an effort to patch things up with her hostile stepson. Ansbach is within striking distance of Mannheim on the Rhine, and so she and Caroline next went there to look in on some cousins who had shown them charity in the past. They arrived, naturally, at the worst possible moment, a few days ago, just as the French regiments were swarming over the Rhine on the barges built at Haguenau, and bombarding the defensive works. Someone there had the presence of mind to pack them on a boat full of well-heeled refugees, bound down the river. And so they passed quickly out of the area of danger, though they continued to hear cannon-fire for a day or more, echoing up the valley of the Rhine. They reached Nijmegen without incident, though the boat was so crowded with refugees-----some of them with suppurating wounds-----that she was unable to take more than the occasional catnap. When they debarked, Joachim-----who is a Person of Quality in the Palatinate-----recognized them as they stumbled down the gangplank, and brought them to me.

Now the current of the Rhine slowly flushes us, and a lot of other war-flotsam, downstream towards the sea. I have oft heard French and Germans alike speak disparagingly of the Netherlands, likening the country to a gutter that collects all the refuse and fœces of Christendom, but lacks the vigor to force it out to sea, so that it piles up in a bar around Rotterdam. It is a cruel and absurd way to talk about a noble and brave little country. Yet as I look on my condition, and on that of the Princesses, and review our recent travels [blundering about in dark and dangerous parts until we stumbled upon running water, then drifting downstream], I can recognize a kind of cruel truth in that slander.

We shall not, however, let ourselves be flushed out to sea. At Rotterdam we divert from the river’s natural course and follow a canal to the Hague. There the Princesses can find refuge, just as did the Winter Queen at the end of her wanderings. And there I shall try to deliver a coherent report to the Prince of Orange. This bit of embroidery is ruined before it was finished, but it contains the information that William has been waiting for. When I have finished my report I may make it into a pillow. Everyone who sees it will wonder at my foolishness for keeping such a dirty, stained, faded thing around the house. But I will keep it in spite of them. It is an important thing to me now. When I started it, I only intended to use it to record details of French troop movements and the like. But as the weeks went on and I frequently found myself with plenty of time on my hands to tend to my needlework, I began to record some of my thoughts and feelings about what was going on around me. Perhaps I did this out of boredom; but perhaps it was so that some part of me might live on, if I were killed or made a captive along the way. This might sound like a foolish thing to have done, but a woman who has no family and few friends is forever skirting the edges of a profound despair, which derives from the fear that she could vanish from the world and leave no trace she had ever existed; that the things she has done shall be of no account and the perceptions she has formed [as of Dr. von Pfung for example] shall be swallowed up like a cry in a dark woods. To write out a full confession and revelation of my doings, as I’ve done here, is not without danger; but if I did not do so I would be so drowned in melancholy that I would do nothing at all, in which event my life truly would be of no account. This way, at least, I am part of a story, like the ones Mummy used to tell me in the banyolar in Algiers, and like the ones that were told by Shahrazad, who prolonged her own life for a thousand and one nights by the telling of tales.

But given the nature of the cypher that I am using, chances are that you, reader, will never exist, and so I cannot see why I should continue running this needle through the dirty old cloth when I am so tired, and the rocking of the boat invites me to close my eyes.

Rossignol to Louis XIV Continued

NOVEMBER 1688

Your majesty will have been dismayed by the foregoing tale of treason and perfidy. If it were generally known, I fear it would do grave damage to the reputation of your majesty’s sister-in-law the duchesse d’Orléans. She is said to be prostrate with grief, and ungrateful for all that your majesty’s legions have done in order to secure her rights in the Palatinate. Out of a gentleman’s respect for her rank, and humane compassion for her feelings, I have been as discreet as possible with this intelligence which could only bring her further suffering if it were known. I have shared the foregoing account only with your majesty. D’Avaux has importuned me for a copy, but I have deflected his many requests and will continue to do so unless your majesty instructs me to send the document to him.

In the weeks that I have spent in the decypherment of this document, Phobos and Deimos have been unleashed on the east bank of the Rhine. The lead that the Countess so assiduously followed to the banks of the Meuse has been conveyed in bulk to the Palatinate, and ended its long journey traveling at inconceivable velocities through the bodies and the buildings of heretics. Half the young blades of Court have quit Versailles to go hunting in Germany, and many of them write letters, which it is my duty to read. I am told that Heidelberg Castle burnt brilliantly for days, and that everyone is looking forward to repeating the experiment in Mannheim. Philippsburg, Mainz, Speier, Trier, Worms, and Oppenheim are scheduled for later in the year. As winter draws on, your majesty will be troubled to learn of all the brutality. You will draw your forces back, and give Louvois a firm scolding for having acted so excessively. Historians will record that the Sun King cannot be held responsible for all of the unpleasantness.

From your majesty’s many excellent sources in England, your majesty will know that the Prince of Orange is now there, commanding an army made up not only of Dutchmen, but of the English and Scottish regiments that were stationed on Dutch soil by treaty; Huguenot scum who filtered up from France; mercenaries and freebooters from Scandinavia; and Prussians who’ve been lent to the cause by Sophie Charlotte—the daughter of the cursed Hanoverian bitch Sophie.

All of which only seems to prove that Europe is a chessboard. Even your majesty cannot gain (say) the Rhine without sacrificing (say) England. Likewise, whatever Sophie and William may gain from their ceaseless machinations they’ll have to pay for in the end. And as for the Countess de la Zeur, why, the new King of England might make her Duchess of Qwghlm, but in return your majesty will no doubt see to it that her sacrifices are commensurate.

M. le comte d’Avaux has redoubled his surveillance of the Countess in the Hague. He has received assurances from the laundresses who work in the house of Huygens that she has not bled a single drop of menstrual blood in the nearly two months she’s been there. She is pregnant with a bastard of Arcachon. She is therefore now a part of the family of France, of which your majesty is the patriarch. As it is become a family matter, I will refrain from any further meddling unless your majesty instructs me otherwise.

I have the honour to be, your majesty’s humble and obedient servant, Bonaventure Rossignol

Sheerness, England

11 DECEMBER 1688

Then the Kings countenance was changed, and his thoghts troubled him, so that the joyntes of his loines were loosed, and his knees smote one against the other.

—DANIEL 5:6

ON ANY OTHER DAY, DANIEL did not have a thing in common with anyone else at the Court of St. James. Indeed, that was the very reason he was allowed to bide there. Today, though, he had two things in common with them. One, that he had spent most of the preceding night, and most of this day, traipsing all over Kent trying to figure out where the King had got to. And two, that he stood in utmost need of a pint.

Finding himself alone on a boat-flecked mudflat, and happening on a tavern, he entered it. The only thing he sought in that place was that pint and maybe a banger. In additition to which, he found James (by the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the occasional odd bit of France) Stuart being beaten up by a couple of drunken English fishermen. It was just the sort of grave indignity absolute monarchs tried at all costs to avoid. In normal times, procedures and safeguards were in place to prevent it. One could imagine one of the ancient Kings of England, say, your Sven Forkbeard, or your Ealhmund the Under-King of Kent, wandering into an inn somewhere and throwing a few punches. But barroom brawling had been pushed off the bottom of the list of Things Princes Should Know How to Do during the great Chivalry vogue of five centuries back. And it showed: King James II had a bloody nose. To be fair, though, he’d been having an epic one for weeks. As past generations sang of Richard Lionheart’s duels against Saladin before Jerusalem, future ones would sing of James Stuart’s nosebleed.

It was, in sum, not a scenario that had ever been contemplated by the authors of the etiquette-books that Daniel had perused when he’d gone into the Courtier line of work. He’d have known just how to address the King during a masque at the Banqueting House or a hunt in a royal game-park. But when it came to breaking up a royal bar-fight in a waterfront dive at the mouth of the Medway, he was at a loss, and could only order himself that pint, and consider his next move.

His Majesty was standing up to the treatment surprisingly well. Of course, he’d fought in battles on land and at sea; no one had ever accused him of being a ninehammer. And this altercation was really more of a cuffing and slapping about: not so much fight as improvised entertainment by and for men who got out to Punchinello shows only infrequently. This was a very old tavern, half sunk into the riverside muck, and the ceiling was so close to the floor that the fishermen scarcely had room to draw their fists back properly. There were flurries of jabs that failed to connect with any part of the King’s body. The blows that did land were open-handed, roundhouse slaps. Daniel sensed that if the King would only stop flinching, say something funny, and buy a round for the house, everything would change. But if he were that sort of King he wouldn’t have ended up here in the first place.

At any rate Daniel was immensely relieved that it was not a serious beating. Otherwise he would’ve been obliged to draw the sword hanging from his belt, which he had no idea how to use. King James II most certainly would know what to do with it, of course. As Daniel plunged his upper lip through the curtain of foam on his pint, he had a moment’s phant’sy of unbelting the weapon and tossing it across the room to the sovereign, who’d snatch it from the air, whip it out, and commence slaying subjects. Then Daniel could perhaps embroider ’pon his deed by smashing a bit of crockery over someone’s head—better yet, sustain an honorable wound or two. This would guarantee him a free, all-expenses paid, but strictly one-way trip to France, where he’d probably be rewarded with an English earldom that he’d never be able to visit, and get to lounge around in James’s exile court all day.

This phant’sy did not last for very long. One of the King’s attackers had felt something in His Majesty’s coat-pocket and yanked it out: a crucifix. A moment of silence. Those here who were conscious enough to see the object, felt obliged to give it due reverence; either because it was an emblem of Our Lord’s passion, or because it was made predominantly out of gold. Through the tavern’s atmosphere, which had approximately the mass and consistency of aspic, the artifact gleamed attractively, and even cast off a halo. Descartes had abhorred the idea of a vacuum, and held that what we took to be empty space was really a plenum, a solidly packed ocean of particles, swirling and colliding, trading and trafficking in a fixed stock of movement that had been imparted to the universe at its creation by the Almighty. He must have come up with that idea in a tavern like this one; Daniel wasn’t sure a pistol-ball would be able to dig a tunnel through this air from one side of the room to the other.

“What’s this, then!?” the fellow holding up the crucifix wanted to know.

James II looked suddenly exasperated. “Why, it is a crucifix!”

Another blank moment passed. Daniel had completely let go of the idea of being an exiled earl at Versailles, and was now feeling uncomfortably rabble-like himself, and strongly tempted to go and take a poke at His Majesty—if only for the sake of Drake, who’d never have hesitated.

“Well, if you’re not a bleeding Jesuit spy, then why’re you bearing this bit o’ idolatry about!?” demanded the fellow with the quick hands, shaking the crucifix just out of the King’s reach. “Didjer loot it? Didjer steal this holy object from a burnin’ church, didjer?”

They had no idea who he was. At this the scene made sense for the first time. Until then Daniel had wondered just who was suffering from syphilitic hallucinations around here!

James had surprised all London by galloping away from Whitehall Palace after midnight. Someone had caught sight of him hurling the Great Seal of the Realm into the Thames, which was not a wholly usual thing for the Sovereign to do, and with that he’d pelted off into the night, east-bound, and no person of gentle or noble rank had seen him since, until the moment Daniel had blundered into this tavern in search of refreshment.

Mercifully, the urge to sprint over and take a swing at the royal gob had passed. A semi-comatose man, slumped on a bench against the wall, was eyeing Daniel in a way that was not entirely propitious. Daniel reflected that if it was considered meet and proper for a well-heeled stranger to be beaten up and robbed on the mere suspicion that he was a Jesuit, things might not go all that well for Daniel Waterhouse the Puritan.

He drained about half the pint and turned round in the middle of the tavern so that his cloak fell open, revealing the sword. The weapon’s existence was noted, with professional interest, by the tavernkeeper, who didn’t look directly at it; he was one of those blokes who used peripheral vision for everything. Give him a spyglass, he’d raise it to his ear, and see as much as Galileo. His nose had been broken at least twice and he’d endured a blowout fracture of the left eye-socket, which made it seem as if his face were a clay effigy squirting out between the fingers of a clenching fist. Daniel said to him, “Let your friends understand that if serious harm comes to that gentleman, there lives a witness who’ll tell a tale to make a judge’s wig uncurl.”

And then Daniel stepped out onto a deal boardwalk that might’ve answered to the name of verandah or pier, depending on whence you looked at it. In theory boats of shallow draught might be poled up to it and made fast, in practice they’d been drawn up on the muck about a horseshoe-throw away from the crusty ankles of its pilings. The tracks of the boatmen were swollen wounds in the mudflat, and spatterings across the planks. Half a mile out, diverse ships were riding at anchor in the wide spot where the Medway exhausted into the Thames. It was low tide! James, the sea-hero, the Admiral who’d fought the Dutch, and occasionally beaten ’em, who’d made Isaac Newton’s ears ring with the distant roar of his cannons, had galloped out from London at exactly the wrong moment. Like King Canute, he would have to wait for the tide. It was simply too awful. Exhausted from the ride, left with no choice but to kill a few hours, the King must’ve wandered into this tavern—and why not? Every place he’d ever entered into, people had served him on bended knee. But James, who did not drink and did not curse, who stuttered, who couldn’t speak the English of fishermen, might as well have been in a Hindoo temple. He’d switched to a dark wig from the usual blond one, and it had been knocked from his head early in the scuffle, revealing a half-bald head, thin yellow-white hair in a Caesar cut, shellacked to his pocked pate by sweat and grease. Wigs enabled one to avert one’s attention from the fact of the wearer’s age. Daniel had seen an odd-looking chap, fifty-five years old, lost.

Daniel was beginning to feel he had more in common with this syphilitic Papist despot than with the people of Sheerness. He did not like where his feelings were taking him. So he had his feet take him elsewhere—to what passed for the high street of Sheerness, to an inn, where an uncommon number of well-dressed gentlemen were milling about, wringing their hands and kicking at the chickens. These men, Daniel included, had come out from London post-haste, only a few hours behind their fleeing King, on the presumption that if the Sovereign had left London, then they must all be missing something important by tarrying in the city. Wrong!

HE WENT IN AND TOLD the tale to Ailesbury, the Gentleman of the Bedchamber, then turned to leave; but practically ended up with spur-marks in his back, as every courtier wanted to be first on the spot. In the stable-yard a horse was brought out for Daniel. Climbing into the saddle, and ascending to the same plane as all the other equestrians, he noted diverse faces turned his way, none of them looking very patient. So without sharing in any of the sense of romantic drama that animated all of the others, he rode out into the street, and led them on a merry gallop back down to the river. To uninformed bystanders, it must have looked like a Cavalier hunting-party pursuing a Roundhead, which Daniel hoped was no prefiguring of events to follow.

When they reached the tavern, an astounding number of Persons of Quality packed themselves inside, and commenced making stentorian announcements. One might’ve expected drunks and ne’er-do-wells to flood out through windows and trap-doors, like mice fleeing when the lantern is lit, but not a soul left the building, even after it was made known that they were all in the Presence. There seemed, in other words, to be a general failure, among the waterfront lowlives of Sheerness, to really take the notion of monarchy seriously.

Daniel lingered outside for a minute or two. The sun was setting behind a gapped cloud-front and shoving fat rays of gaudy light across the estuary of the Medway: a big brackish sump a few miles across, with a coastline as involuted as a brain, congested with merchant and naval traffic. Most of the latter huddled sheepishly down at the far end, behind the chain that was stretched across the river, below the sheltering guns of Upnor Castle. James had for some reason expected William of Orange’s fleet to attack there, in the worst possible place. Instead the Protestant Wind had driven the Dutchman all the way to Tor Bay, hundreds of miles to the west—almost Cornwall. Since then the Prince had been marching steadily eastwards. English regiments marched forth to stand in his path, only to defect and about-face. If William was not in London yet, he would be soon.

The waterfront people were already reverting to a highly exaggerated Englishness: womenfolk were scurrying toward the tavern, hitching up their skirts to keep ’em out of the muck, so that they glissaded across the tidelands like bales on rails. They were bringing victuals to the King! They hated him and wanted him gone. But that was no reason to be inhospitable. Daniel had reasons to tarry—he felt he should go in and say good-bye to the King. And, to be pragmatic, he was fairly certain he could be charged with horse-thievery if he turned this mount towards London.

On the other hand, he had another hour of twilight, and the low tide could cut a few hours off the time it would take him to work his way round the estuary, cross the river, and find the high road to London. He had the strongest feeling that important things were happening there; and as for the King, and his improvised Court here at Sheerness: if the local pub scum couldn’t bring themselves to take him seriously, why should the Secretary of the Royal Society? Daniel aimed his horse’s backside at the King of England and then spurred the animal forward into the light.

Since the time of the Babylonian astronomers, solar eclipses had from time to time caused ominous shadows to fall upon the land. But England in winter sometimes afforded its long-suffering populace a contrary phenomenon, which was that after weeks of dim colorless skies, suddenly the sun would scythe in under the clouds after it had seemed to set, and wash the landscape with pink, orange, and green illumination, clear and pure as gems. Empiricist though he was, Daniel felt free to ascribe meaning to this when it went his way. Ahead all was clear light, as if he were riding into stained glass. Behind (and he only bothered to look back once) the sky was a bruise-colored void, the land a long scrape of mud. The tavern rose up from the middle of the waste on a sheave of pilings that leaned into each other like a crowd of drunks. Its plank walls pawed a bit of light out of the sky, its one window glowed like a carbuncle. It was the sort of grotesque sky-scape that Dutchmen would come over to paint. But come to think of it, a Dutchman had come over and painted it.

MOST TRAVELERS WOULD TAKE LITTLE note of Castle Upnor. It was but a stone fort, built by Elizabeth a hundred years ago, but looking much older—its vertical stone walls obsolete already. But since the Restoration it had been the nominal seat of Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, and owner of the fair Abigail Frome (or at least Daniel presumed she was fair). As such it gave Daniel the shudders; he felt like a little boy riding past a haunted house. He’d have gone wide of it if he could, but the ferry next to it was by far the most expeditious way of crossing the Medway, and this was no time to let superstition take him out of his way. The alternative would’ve been to ride a few miles up the east bank to the huge naval shipyard of Chatham, where there were several ways of getting across. But passing through a naval base did not seem the most efficient way of getting around, during a foreign invasion.

He pretended to give his horse a few minutes’ rest at the ferry landing, and did what half-hearted spying he could. The sun was positively down now and everything was dark blue on a backdrop of even darker blue. The Castle fronted on the west bank of the river and was buried in its own shadow. However, lights were burning in some of the windows, and particularly in the outbuildings. A sharp two-masted vessel was anchored in the dredged channel nearby.

When the Dutch had sailed up here in ’67 and, over the course of a leisurely three-day rampage, stolen some of Charles II’s warships and burned diverse others, Castle Upnor had acquitted itself reasonably well, declining to surrender and taking pot-shots at any Dutchmen who’d come anywhere near close enough. The Earl of Upnor, whose travails with gambling debts and Popish Plot hysteria still lay in the future, had picked up some reflected luster. But to have one’s chief Navy Yard infested with Dutchmen was embarrassing even to a foreign-policy slut like Charles II. So modern defenses with proper earthworks had since been put up in the neighborhood, and Upnor had been demoted to the status of a giant powder-magazine, sort of an outlying gunpowder depot for the Tower of London—the unspoken message being that no one cared if it blew up. Powder-barges came hither frequently from the Tower and moored in the place claimed, tonight, by that two-master. Daniel knew only a little of ships, but even a farmer could see that this one had several cabins astern, well-appointed with windows, and lights burning behind their drawn curtains and closed shutters. Louis Anglesey hardly ever came to this place, as why should any Earl in his right mind go to a dank stone pit to sit upon powder-kegs? And yet in times of trouble there were worse places to bolt. Those stone walls might not stop Dutch cannonballs, but they would keep Protestant mobs at bay for weeks, and the river was only a few steps away; once he stepped off the quay and boarded his boat, Upnor was as good as in France.

There were a few watchmen posted about the place, hugging their pikes to their chests so they could keep their hands stuffed into their armpits, shooting the breeze, mostly gazing outwards towards the Roman road, occasionally turning round to enjoy some snatch of domestic comedy playing itself out within the walls. Potato peels and chicken feathers were bobbing in the river’s backwaters, and he caught whiffs of yeast on the breeze. There was, in other words, a functioning household there. Daniel decided that Upnor was not here at the moment, but that he was expected. Perhaps not tonight, but soon.

He left Castle Upnor behind him and went back to riding around England by himself in the dark, which seemed to be how he had spent half of his life. Now that he’d crossed over the Medway there were no real barriers between him and London, which was something like twenty-five miles away. Even if there hadn’t been a Roman road to follow, he probably would have been able to find the route by riding from one fire to the next. The only hazard was that some mob might take him for an Irishman. That Daniel bore no resemblance to an Irishman was of no account—rumors had spread that James had shipped in a whole legion of Celtic avengers. No doubt many an Englishman would agree, tonight, that strange riders should be burnt first and identified on the basis of their dental peculiarities after the ashes had cooled.

So it was boredom and terror, boredom and terror, all the way. The boring bits gave Daniel some leisure to ponder the quite peculiar family curse he seemed to be living under, namely, this marked tendency to be present at the demise of English Kings. He’d literally seen Charles I’s head roll, and he’d watched Charles II being done in by his physicians, and now this. If the next Sovereign knew what was good for him, he’d make sure Daniel was assigned, by the Royal Society, to spend the rest of his life taking daily measurements of the baroscopic pressure in Barbados.

The last bit of his route ran within view of the river, which was a pleasant sight, a snaking constellation of ships’ lanterns. By contrast the flat countryside was studded with pylons of streaming fire that warmed Daniel’s face from half a mile away, like the first uncontrollable flush of shame. Mostly these were simply bonfires, which were the only way Englishmen had of showing emotion. But in one town that he rode through, the Catholic church was being not merely burnt but pulled down, its very bricks prised apart by men with sharpened bars—men made orange by the fire-light, not people he recognized, any more, as countrymen.

The river attracted him. At first he told himself that it did so because it was cool and serene. When he got finally to Greenwich he turned aside from the road and rode onto the lumpy pasture of the Park. He couldn’t see a damned thing, which was funny because the place was supposed to be an Observatory. But he kept to a policy of insisting that his horse go the way it didn’t want to—which meant uphill. This had more than a little in common with trying to get a large and basically prosperous country to revolt.

A saltbox of a building perched on the edge of a precipice in the midst of this little range of hills out in the middle of nowhere: a house, queer-looking and haunted. Haunted by philosophers. Its pedestal—a brick of living-space—was surrounded by trees in a way that obscured the view out its windows. Any other tenant would have chopped them down. But Flamsteed had let them grow; they made no difference to him, as he slept all day, and his nights were devoted to looking not out but up.

Daniel reached a place where he could see the light of London shining through gaps among trees. The lambent sky was dissected by the spidery black X of the sixty-foot refracting telescope, supported by a mast scavenged from a tall ship. As he neared the crest he diverted to the right, instinctively avoiding Flamsteed, who exerted a mysterious repulsive force all his own. He was likely to be awake, but unable to make observations because of the light in the sky, therefore more irritable than usual, perhaps scared. His apartment’s windows had solid wooden shutters that he had clapped shut for safety. He was holed up in one of the tiny rooms, probably unable to hear anything save the ticking of diverse clocks. Upstairs, in the octagonal saltbox, were two Hooke-designed, Tompion-built clocks with thirteen-foot pendulums that ticked, or rather clunked, every two seconds, slower than the human heartbeat, a hypnotic rhythm that could be felt everywhere in the building.

Daniel led his horse on a slow traverse round the top of the hill. Below, along the riverbank, the brick ruins of Placentia, the Tudor palace, swung gradually into view. Then the new stone buildings that Charles II had begun to put up there. Then the Thames: first the Greenwich bend, then a view straight upriver all the way into the east end. Then all of London was suddenly unrolled before him. Its light shone from the wizened surface of the river, interrupted only by the silhouettes of the anchored ships. If he had not long ago seen the Fire of London with his own eyes, he might have supposed that the whole city was ablaze.

He had entered into the upper reaches of a little wood of oak and apple trees that gripped the steepest part of the hill. Flamsteed’s apartments were only a few yards above and behind him along the Prime Meridian. The fragrance of fermenting apples was heady, for Flamsteed had not bothered to collect them as they dropped from the trees during the autumn. Daniel did not bother to tie his horse, but let it forage there, getting fed and drunk on the apples. Daniel moved to a place where he could see London between trees, dropped his breeches, squatted down on his haunches, and began experimenting with various pelvic settings in hopes of allowing some urine to part with his body. He could feel the boulder in his bladder, shifting from side to side like a cannonball in a poke.

London had never been so bright since it had burned to the ground twenty-two years ago. And it had never sounded thus in all its ages. As Daniel’s ears adjusted themselves to this quiet hill-top he could hear a clamor rising up from the city, not of guns or of cart-wheels but of human voices. Sometimes they were just babbling, each to his own, but many times they came together in dim choruses that swelled, clashed, merged, and collapsed, like waves of a tide probing and seeking its way through the mazy back-waters of an estuary. They were singing a song, Lilliburlero, that had become universal in the last few weeks. It was a sort of nonsense-song but its meaning was understood by all: down with the King, down with Popery, out with the Irish.

If the scene in the tavern hadn’t made it clear enough, the very appearance of the city tonight told him that the thing had happened—the thing that Daniel had been calling the Revolution. The Revolution was done, it had been Glorious, and what made it glorious was that it had been an anticlimax. There’d been no Civil War this time, no massacres, no trees bent under the weight of hanged men, no slave-ships. Was Daniel flattering himself to suppose that this could be put down to his good work?

All his upbringing had taught him to expect a single dramatic moment of apocalypse. Instead this had been slow evolution spread all round and working silently, like manure on a field. If anything important had happened, it had done so in places where Daniel wasn’t. Buried in it somewhere was an inflection point that later they’d point to as the Moment It All Happened.

He was not such an old tired Puritan that he didn’t get joy out of it. But its very anticlimactitude, if that was a word, its diffuseness, was a sort of omen to him. It was like being an astronomer, up in that tower behind him, at the moment that the letter arrived from the Continent in which Kepler mentioned that the earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. Like that astronomer, Daniel had much knowledge, and only some of it was wrong—but all of it had to be gone over now, and re-understood. This realization settled him down a bit. As when a queer wind-gust comes down chimney and fills a room of merry-makers with smoke, and covers the pudding with a black taste. He was not quite ready for life in this England.

Now he understood why he’d felt so attracted to the river earlier: not because it was serene, but because it had the power to take him somewhere else.

He left the horse there, with an explanatory note for Flamsteed, who’d be apoplectic. He walked down to the Thames and woke up a waterman he knew there, a Mr. Bhnh, the patriarch of a tiny Qwghlmian settlement lodged in the south bank. Mr. Bhnh had grown so accustomed to the nocturnal crossings of Natural Philosophers that someone had nominated him, in jest, as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He agreed to convey Daniel across to the Isle of Dogs on the north bank.

Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders such as Sterling (the Earl of Willesden) Waterhouse and Roger (the Marquis of Ravenscar) Comstock had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun “shop” had been verbed; people went “shopping” now. Daniel of course never lowered himself to this newfangled vice—except that as he crossed the river he seemed to be doing it with ships. And he was a discriminating shopper. The watermen’s boats, the smacks and barges of the estuary were beneath his notice altogether, and the coasting vessels—anything with a fore-and-aft rig—were scarcely more than impediments. He raised his eyes up out of the clutter to scan for the great ships thrusting their yards up, like High Church priests exalting the sacraments above the rabble, into the sky where the wind blew straight and brave. The sails hung from those yards like vestments. There were not many such ships in the Pool tonight, but Daniel sought them all out and appraised each one shrewdly. He was shopping for something to take him away; he wanted to voyage out of sight of land for once in his life, to die and be buried on another continent.

One in particular caught his eye: trim, clean-lined, and sharply managed. She was taking advantage of the in-coming tide to make her way up-stream, ushered forward by a faint southerly breeze. The movement of the air was too faint for Daniel to feel it, but the crew of this ship, Hare, had seen flickers of life in the streamers dangling from her mastheads, and spread out her topsails. These stopped a bit of air. They stopped some of the fire-light from the city, too, projecting long prismatic shadows off into the void. The sails of Hare hovered above the black river, glowing like curtained windows. Mr. Bhnh tracked them for half a mile or so, taking advantage of the lead that the great ship forced among the smaller vessels. “She’s fitted out for a long voyage,” he mused, “probably sailing for America on the next tide.”

“Would I had a grapnel,” Daniel said, “I’d climb aboard like a pirate, and stow away on her.”

This startled Mr. Bhnh, who was not used to hearing such flights of fancy from his clientele. “Are you going to America, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“Someday,” Daniel allowed, “there is tidying-up to do in this country yet.”

Mr. Bhnh was loath to discharge Daniel in the fiery wilds of East London, which tonight was thronged with drunken mudlarks lighting out in torrid pursuit of real or imaginary Jesuits. Daniel gave no heed to this good man’s worries. He had made it all the way from Sheerness without any trouble. Even in the tavern there, he had been left alone. Those who took any notice of him at all, soon lost their interest, or (strange to relate) lost their nerve and looked away. For Daniel carried now the unstudied nonchalance of a man who knew he’d be dead in a year no matter what; people seemed to smell the grave about him, and were happy to leave him alone.

On the other hand, a man with little time to live, and no heirs, need not be so miserly. “I shall give you a pound if you take me direct to the Tower,” Daniel said. Then, observing a wary look on Mr. Bhnh’s face, he teased his purse open and tossed a handful of coins beside the boat’s lantern until he found one that shone a little, and was nearly round. In the center was a battered and scratched plop of silver that with careful tilting and squinting and use of the imagination could be construed as a portrait of the first King James, who had died sixty-some odd years ago, but who was held to have managed the Mint competently. The waterman’s hand closed over this artifact and almost as quickly Daniel’s eyelids came to with an almost palpable slamming noise. He was remotely aware of massive wool blankets being thrown over his body by the solicitous Mr. Bhnh, and then he was aware of nothing.

For the King of the North shal returne, and shal set forthe a greater multitude then afore, and shal come forthe (after certeine yeres) with a mightie armie, & great riches.

And at the same time there shal manie stand up against the King of the South: also the rebellious children of thy people shal exalte them selves to establish the vision, but they shal fall.

So the King of the North shal come, and cast up a mounte, & take the strong citie: and the armes of the South shal not resist, neither his chosen people, neither shal there be anie strength to withstand.

—DANIEL 11:13–15

HAVING GONE TO SLEEP in that boat on that night he should on no account have been surprised to wake up in the same boat on the same night; but when it happened he was perfectly amazed, and had to see and understand everything afresh. His body was hot on the top and cold on the bottom, and on the whole, not happy with its management. He tried closing and opening his eyes a few times to see if he could conjure up a warm bed, but a mightier conjuration had been wrought on him, and condemned him to this place and time. To call it nightmarish was too easy, for it had all the detail, the lively perversity that nightmares wanted. London—burning, smoking, singing—was still all around. However, he was confronted by a sheer wall of stone that rose up out of the Thames, and was thickly jacketed in all of the unspeakables that flowed in it. Atop that wall was a congeries of small buildings, hoists, large guns, a few relatively small and disciplined bonfires, armed men, but snarls of running boys, too. There was the smell of coal, iron, and sulfur, reminding Daniel of Isaac’s laboratory. And because the sense of smell is plumbed into the mind down in the cellar, where dark half-formed notions lurk and breed, Daniel entertained a momentary phant’sy that Isaac had come to London and set his mind to the acquisition of temporal power, and constructed a laboratory the size of Jerusalem.

Then he perceived stone walls and towers rising up behind this wharf, and taller ones rising up behind them, and an even higher fort of pale stone above and behind those, and he understood that he lay before the Tower of London. The roar of the artificial cataracts between the starlings of London Bridge, off to his left, confirmed it.

The wharf-wall was pierced by an arch whose floor was a noisome back-water of the Thames. The boat of Mr. Bhnh was more or less keeping station before that arch, though the current was flowing one way and the tide striving against it, so they were being ill-used by marauding vortices and pounced upon by rogue waves. The waterman, in other words, was using every drowning-avoidance skill he’d practised in the rocky flows off Qwghlm, and more than earning his pound. For in addition to duelling those currents he had been prosecuting a negotiation with a figure who stood on the top of the wharf, just above the arch. That man in turn was exchanging shouts through a speaking trumpet with a periwigged gentleman up on the parapet of the wall behind: a crenellated medieval sort of affair with a modern cannon poking out through each slot, and each cannon conspicuously manned.

Some of the men on the wharf were standing near enough to bonfires that Daniel could make out the colors of their garments. These were the Black Torrent Guards.

Daniel rose up against the gravity of many stout damp blankets, his body reminding him of every injustice he had dealt it since he had been awakened, twenty-four hours ago, with news that the King had gone on the lam. “Sergeant!” he hollered to the man on the wharf, “please inform yonder officer that the escaped prisoner has returned.”

THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had gone into the west country with King James just long enough for their commander, John Churchill, to sneak away from camp and ride to join up with William of Orange. This might have surprised some of the Guards, but it had not surprised Daniel, for almost a year ago he had personally conveyed letters from John Churchill, among others, to the Prince of Orange in the Hague; and though he hadn’t read those letters, he could guess what they had said.

Within a few days, Churchill and his regiment had been back in London. But if they’d hoped to be stationed back at their old haunt of Whitehall, they’d been disappointed. William, still trying to sort out his newly acquired Kingdom, was posting his own Dutch Blue Guards at the royal palaces of Whitehall and St. James, and was happy to keep Churchill and the Black Torrent Guards at arm’s length in the Tower—which needed defending in any case, as it housed the Royal Mint, and controlled the river with its guns, and was the chief arsenal of the Realm.

Now Daniel was known, to the men of that regiment, as a wretch who’d been imprisoned there by King James II; one cheer for Daniel! Jeffreys had sent murderers to slay him—two cheers! And he had arrived at some untalked-about agreement with Sergeant Bob: three cheers! So in the last weeks before his “escape” Daniel had become a sort of regimental mascot—as Irish regiments kept giant wolf-hounds, this one had a Puritan.

And so the long and the short of it was that Mr. Bhnh was suffered to bring his boat through that tunnel under the wharf. After they passed under the arch, the sky appeared again briefly, but a good half of it was occulted by that out-thrust bulwark: St. Thomas’s Tower, a fortress unto itself, grafted to the outer wall of the Tower complex, straddling another stone arch-way paved with fœtid moat-water. Their progress was barred by a water-gate filling that arch. But as they approached, the gates were drawn open, each vertical bar leaving an arc of oily vortices in its wake. Mr. Bhnh hesitated, as any sane man would, and tilted his head back for a moment, in case he never got a chance to see the sky again. Then he probed for the bottom with his pole.

“This is my family coat of arms, such as it is,” Daniel remarked, “a stone castle bestriding a river.”

“Don’t say that!” Mr. Bhnh hissed.

“Why ever not?”

“We are entering into Traitor’s Gate!”

PAST THE NARROW APERTURE OF THE Gate lay a pool vaulted over with a vast, fair stone arch. Some engineer had lately constructed a tide-driven engine there for raising water to a cistern in some higher building back in the penetralia of the citadel, and its fearsome grinding—like a troll gnashing its teeth in a cave—appalled Mr. Bhnh more than anything he’d seen all night. He took his leave gladly. Daniel had disembarked onto some ancient slime-covered stairs. He ascended, carefully, to the level of the Water Lane, which ran between the inner and outer fortifications. This had become the scene of a makeshift camp: several hundred Irish people at least were here, taking their ease on blankets or thin scatterings of straw, smoking pipes if they were lucky, playing hair-raising plaints on penny-whistles. No celebratory bonfires here: just a few brooding cook-fires setting kettle-bottoms aglow, and begrudging faint red warmth on the hands and faces of the squatters. There had to be a rational explanation for their being here, but Daniel could not conjure one up. But that was what made city life interesting.

Bob Shaftoe approached, harried by a couple of boys who were running around barefoot even though this was December. He ordered them away gruffly, even a bit cruelly, and as they turned to run off, Daniel got a look at one of their faces. He thought he saw a familial resemblance to Bob.

Sergeant Shaftoe was headed down the lane in the direction of the Byward Tower, which was the way out to London. Daniel fell into step beside him and in a few paces they’d left the water-engine far enough behind that they could talk without shouting.

“I was ready to set off without you,” Bob said somewhat bitterly.

“For where?”

“I don’t know. Castle Upnor.”

“He’s not there yet. I’d wager he’s still in London.”

“Let’s to Charing Cross, then,” Bob said, “as I think he has a house near there.”

“Can we get horses?”

“You mean, is the Lieutenant of the Tower going to supply you, an escaped prisoner, with a free horse—?”

“Never mind, there are other ways of getting down the Strand. Any news concerning Jeffreys?”

“I have impressed ’pon Bob Carver the grave importance of his providing useful information to us concerning that man’s whereabouts,” Bob said. “I do not think his fear was affected; on the other hand, he has a short memory, and London contains many diversions to-night, most appealing to a man of his character.”

Passing through the Byward Tower they came out into the open and began to traverse the causeway over the moat: first a plank bridge that could be moved out of the way, then a stone ramp onto the permanent causeway. Here they encountered John Churchill, smoking a pipe in the company of two armed gentlemen whom Daniel recognized well enough that he could have recalled their names, had it been worth the effort. Churchill broke away from them when his eyes fell on Daniel, and pursued for a few steps, glaring at Bob Shaftoe in a way that meant “keep walking.” So Daniel ended up isolated in mid-causeway, face to face with Churchill.

“In truth I have no idea whether you’re about to embrace and thank me, or stab me and shove me into the moat,” Daniel blurted, because he was nervous, and too exhausted to govern his tongue.

Churchill appeared to take Daniel’s words with utmost gravity—Daniel reckoned he must’ve said something terribly meaningful, out of blind luck. Daniel had encountered Churchill many times at Whitehall, where he had always been surrounded by a sort of aura or nimbus of Import, of which his wig was only the innermost core. You could feel the man coming. He had never been more important than he was tonight—yet here on this causeway all that remained of his aura was his wig, which stood sore in need of maintenance. It was easy to see him as Sir Winston’s lad, a Royal Society whelp who had gone to sojourn in the world of affairs.

“So it’ll be for everyone, from now on,” Churchill said. “The old schemes by which we reckoned a man’s virtue have now been o’erthrown along with Absolute Monarchy. Your Revolution is pervasive. It is tricky, too. I don’t know whether you will run afoul of its tricks in the end. But if you do, it shall not be by my hand…”

“Your face seems to say, ‘provided…’”

“Provided you continue to be the enemy of my enemies—”

“Alas, I’ve little choice.”

“So you say. But when you walk through yonder gate,” Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, “you’ll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. ’Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You’re a Bishop, and I’m a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light ’tis difficult to make out your true shade.”

“I have been awake for twenty-four hours and cannot follow your meaning when you speak in figures.”

“It is not that you are tired, but that you are a Puritan and a Natural Philosopher; neither group is admired for its grasp of the subtle and the ambiguous.”

“I am defenseless against your japes. But as we are not within earshot of anyone, please avail yourself of this opportunity to speak plainly.”

“Very well. I know many things, Mr. Waterhouse, because I make it my business to converse with fellows like those—we trade news as fervidly as traders swapping stocks on the ’Change. And one thing I know is that Isaac Newton is in London to-night.”

It struck Daniel as bizarre that John Churchill should even know who Isaac was. Until Churchill continued, “Another thing I know is that Enoch turned up in our city a few days ago.”

“Enoch the Red?”

“Don’t act like an imbecile. It makes me distrustful, as I know you are not one.”

“I take such a dim view of the Art that my heart denies what my mind knows.”

“That is just the sort of thing you would say if you were one of them, and wished to hide it.”

“Ah. Now I perceive what you meant with your talk of chess-pieces and colors—you think I am hiding the red robes of an Alchemist beneath these weeds?! What a thought!”

“You’d have me just know that the notion is absurd? Pray tell, sir, how should I know it? I’m not learned as you are, I’ll admit it; but no one has yet accused me of being stupid. And I say to you that I do not know whether you are mixed up in Alchemy or no.”

“It is vexing to you,” Daniel thought aloud, “not to follow it.”

“More than that, it is alarming. In a given circumstance, I know what a soldier will do, what a Puritan will do, what a French cardinal or a Vagabond will do—certain ones excepted—but the motives of the esoteric brotherhood are occult to me, and I do not love that. And as I look forward to being a man of moment in the new order—”

“Yes, I know, I know.” Daniel sighed and tried to gather himself. “Really, I think you make too much of them. For never have you seen such a gaggle of frauds, fops, ninehammers, and mountebanks.”

“Which of these is Isaac Newton?”

The question was like a bung hammered into Daniel’s gob.

“What of King Charles II? Which was His Majesty, ninehammer or mountebank?”

“I have to go and talk to them anyway,” Daniel finally said.

“If you can penetrate that cloud, Mr. Waterhouse, I shall consider myself obliged to you.”

“How obliged?”

“What is on your mind?”

“If an earl dies on a night such as this, might it be overlooked?”

“Depends on the earl,” Churchill said evenly. “There will be someone, somewhere, who’ll not be of a mind to overlook it. You must never forget that.”

“I entered from the river tonight,” Daniel said.

“This is an oblique way of saying, you came in through the Traitor’s Gate—?”

Daniel nodded.

“I arrived from the land, as you can see, but there shall be many who shall say that I passed through the same portal as you.”

“Which puts us in the same boat,” Daniel proclaimed. “Now they say that there’s no honor among thieves—I wouldn’t know—but perhaps there may be a kind of honor among traitors. If I’m a traitor, I’m an honorable one; my conscience is clear, if not my reputation. So now I am holding my hand out to you, John Churchill, and you may stand there eyeing it all night long if you please. But if you would care to stand behind me and shore me up as I look into this question of Alchemy, I should like it very much if you took that hand in yours and shook it, as a gentleman; for as you have noticed the esoteric brotherhood is powerful, and I cannot work against it without a brotherhood of sorts to stand with me.”

“You have entered into contracts before, Mr. Waterhouse?” asked Churchill, still appraising Daniel’s out-stretched hand. Daniel could sense Bob Shaftoe looking at them from one end of the causeway.

“Yes, as when working as an architect, et cetera.”

“Then you know every contract involves obligations reciprocal. I might agree to ‘shore you up’ when you are undermined—but in return I may call upon you from time to time.”

Daniel’s hand did not move.

“Very well, then,” said Churchill, reaching out across smoke, damp, and dark.

CHARING CROSS was strewn with bonfires. But it was the green one that caught Daniel’s eye.

“M’Lord Upnor’s town-house lies this way,” shouted Bob Shaftoe, pointing insistently in the direction of Piccadilly.

“Work with me, Sergeant,” Daniel said, “as if I were a guide taking you on a hunt for strange game of which you know nothing.” They began to push their way across the vast cosmos of the square, which was crowded with dark matter: huge mobs pressing in round bonfires, singing Lilliburlero, and diverse knaves who’d come up out of Hogs-den to prey upon ’em, and patchwork mutts fighting over anything that escaped the attention of the knaves. Daniel lost sight of the green flames for a while and was about to give up when he saw red flames shooting up in the same place—not the usual orange-red but an unnatural scarlet. “If we should become separated, I shall meet you at the northern end of the Tilt Yard where King Street loses itself in the Cross.”

“Right you are, Guv.”

“Who was that boy I saw you talking to before the Bulwark, as we were leaving the Tower?”

“A messenger from Bob Carver.”

“Ah, what news from him?”

“The house of Jeffreys is boarded up, and dark.”

“If he went to the trouble of having it boarded up, then he’s done a proper job.”

“It’s as we reckoned it, these many weeks ago, Guv,” Bob answered, “Jeffreys planned his departure well.”

“Well for us. If he fled in a panic, how would we find him? Has Mr. Carver any other news?”

“The intent was not to supply us with news, so much as to impress on us what a hard-working and diligent bloke he is.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Daniel said, distracted by a rage of blue flame up ahead.

“Fireworks?” Bob guessed.

“Some plan their departures better than others,” Daniel answered.

Finally they reached the southwestern margin of the square, where King Street bent round into Pall Mall, and the view of the park and the Spring Garden was screened by an arc of town-houses that seemed to bulge out into Charing Cross, like a dam holding back pressure behind. The bonfire that kept changing its color was planted before those houses, a bow-shot away. This one was not surrounded by any crowd. This might’ve been because the true center of drinking, singing, and sociability lay elsewhere, up towards Hay-market, or perhaps it could be laid to the fact that this fire sputtered evilly and let off vile smells. Daniel fell into orbit round it, and saw books, maps, and wooden boxes being dismantled and dissolved in the flames. A chest was being devoured, and small glass phials spilled out of it a few at a time, bursting in the heat to release jets of vapor that sometimes exploded in brilliant-colored flames.

Bob Shaftoe nudged him and pointed toward one of the town-houses. The front door was being held open by a servant. Two younger servants were lugging a portmanteau out and down the front steps. The lid was half open and papers and books were spilling out. The servant who had held the door open let it fall to and then scurried after the others, picking up what they’d let drop, and stuffing it all together in a great wad, a double armload, which rested comfortably on his belly as he waddled across the dirt towards the fire. It looked as if he were planning to fling himself headlong into the particolored inferno, but he stopped just short and with a final grand belly-thrust projected the load of goods into the flames. A moment later the other two caught up with him and heaved the portmanteau right into perdition. The fire dimmed for a minute, seeming taken aback, but then the flames began to get their teeth into the new load of fuel, and to whiten as they built heat.

Still circling round, Daniel stopped to stare at a map, drawn with inks of many colors upon excellent vellum. The hottest part of the fire was behind it, so the light shone through the empty places on the map—which were many, as it was a map of some mostly uncharted sea, the voids decorated with leviathans and dread-locked cannibals. There was a scattering of islands literally gilded onto the page with some sort of golden ink, labelled “Ye Islands of King Solomon.” As Daniel gazed at them, the ink finally burst into flames and burnt like trails of gunpowder; the words vanished from the world but were committed to his memory in letters of fire.

“It is the house of M. LeFebure,” Daniel explained, walking towards it with Bob in tow. “Mark those three great windows above the entrance, glowering blood-red as the light shines through their curtains. Once I spied on Isaac Newton through those windows, using his own telescope.”

“What was he doing?”

“Making the acquaintance of the Earl of Upnor—who wanted to meet him so badly that he’d made arrangements for him to be followed.”

“What is that house, then? A den of sodomites?”

“No. It has been the chief nest of Alchemists in the city ever since the Restoration. I’ve never set foot in it, but I go there now; if I fail to come out, go to the Tower and tell your master the time has come to make good on his end of our contract.”

The big-bellied servant had seen Daniel approaching and was standing warily at the door. “I am here to join them,” Daniel snapped, brushing past into the entrance hall.

The place had been decorated in the Versailles way, all magnificent, as expensive as possible, and calculated to overawe the Persons of Quality who came here to buy powders and philtres from M. LeFebure. He was not here, having fled the country already. This went a long way toward explaining the fact that the house, tonight, was about as elegant as a fish-market. Servants, and two gentlemen, were bringing goods down from the upper floors, and up from the cellar, dumping them out on tables or floors, and messing through them. After a few moments Daniel realized that one of the gentleman was Robert Boyle and the other Sir Elias Ash-mole. Nine things out of ten were tossed in the general direction of the entrance to be hauled out to the fire. The rest were packed in bags and boxes for transport. Transport where, was the question. In the kitchen, a cooper was at work, sealing ancient books up inside of barrels, which suggested a sea-voyage was contemplated by someone.

Daniel ascended the stairs, moving purposefully, as if he actually knew his way around the place. In fact, all he had to go on was vague memories of what he’d spied through the telescope twenty years ago. If they served, the room where Upnor and Newton had met was dark-paneled, with many books. Daniel had been having odd dreams about that room for two decades. Now he was finally about to enter it. But he was dead on his feet, so exhausted that everything was little different from a dream anyway.

At least a gross of candles were burning in the stairs and the upstairs hall: little point in conserving them now. Cobwebby candelabras had been dragged out of storage, and burdened with mismatched candles, and beeswax tapers had been thrust into frozen wax-splats on expensive polished banisters. A painting of Hermes Trismegistus had been pulled down from its hook and used to prop open the door of a little chamber, a sort of butler’s pantry at the top of the stairs, which was mostly dark; but enough light spilled in from the hall that Daniel could see a gaunt man with a prominent nose, and large dark eyes that gave him a sad preoccupied look. He was conversing with someone farther back in the room, whom Daniel could not see. He had crossed his arms, hugging an old book to himself with an index finger thrust into it to save his place. The big eyes turned Daniel’s way and regarded him without surprise.

“Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“Good morning, Mr. Locke. And welcome back from Dutch exile.”

“What news?”

“The King is run to ground at Sheerness. And what of you, Mr. Locke, shouldn’t you be writing us a new Constitution or something?”

“I await the pleasure of the Prince of Orange,” said John Locke patiently. “In the meantime, this house is no worse a place to wait than any other.”

“It is certainly better than where I have been living.”

“We are all in your debt, Dr. Waterhouse.”

Daniel turned round and walked five paces down the hall, moving now towards the front of the house, and paused before the large door at the end.

He could hear Isaac Newton saying, “What do we know, truly, of this Viceroy? Supposing he does succeed in conveying it to Spain—will he understand its true value?”

Daniel was tempted to stand there for a while listening, but he knew that Locke’s eyes were on his back and so he opened the door.

Opposite were the three large windows that looked over Charing Cross, covered with scarlet curtains as big as mainsails, lit up by many tapers in sconces and candelabras curiously wrought, like vine-strangled tree-branches turned to solid silver. Daniel had a dizzy sensation of falling into a sea of red light, but his eyes adjusted, and with a slow blink his balance recovered.

In the center of the room was a table with a top of black marble shot through with red veins. Two men were seated there, looking up at him: on Daniel’s left, the Earl of Upnor, and on his right, Isaac Newton. Posed nonchalantly in the corner of the room, pretending to read a book, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.

Daniel immediately, for some reason, saw this through the suspicious eyes of a John Churchill. Here sat a Catholic nobleman who was more at home in Versailles than in London; an Englishman of Puritan upbringing and habits, lately fallen into heresy, the smartest man in the world; and a Swiss Protestant famous for having saved William of Orange from a French plot. Just now they’d been interrupted by a Nonconformist traitor. These differences, which elsewhere sparked duels and wars, counted for naught here; their Brotherhood was somehow above such petty squabbles as the Protestant Reformation and the coming war with France. No wonder Churchill found them insidious.

Isaac was a fortnight shy of his forty-sixth birthday. Since his hair had gone white, his appearance had changed very little; he never stopped working to eat or drink and so he was as slender as he had always been, and the only symptom of age was a deepening translucency of his skin, which brought into view tangles of azure veins strewn around his eyes. Like many College dwellers he found it a great convenience to hide his clothing—which was always in a parlous state, being not only worn and shabby but stained and burnt with diverse spirits—underneath an academic robe; but his robe was scarlet, which made him stand out vividly at the College, and here in London all the more so. He did not wear it in the street, but he was wearing it now. He had not affected a wig, so his white hair fell loose over his shoulders. Someone had been brushing that hair. Probably not Isaac. Daniel guessed Fatio.

For the Earl of Upnor it had been a challenging couple of decades. He’d been banished once or twice for slaying men in duels, which he did as casually as a stevedore picked his nose. He had gambled away the family’s great house in London and been chased off to the Continent for a few years during the most operatic excesses of the so-called Popish Plot. He had, accordingly, muted his dress somewhat. To go with his tall black wig and his thin black moustache he was wearing an outfit that was, fundamentally, black: the de rigueur three-piece suit of waistcoat, coat, and breeches, all in the same fabric—probably a very fine wool. But the whole outfit was crusted over with embroidery done in silver thread, and thin strips of parchment or something had been involved with the needle-work to lift it off the black wool underneath and give it a three-dimensional quality. The effect was as if an extremely fine network of argent vines had grown round his body and now surrounded him and moved with him. He was wearing riding-boots with silver spurs, and was armed with a Spanish rapier whose guard was a tornadic swirl of gracefully curved steel rods with bulbous ends, like a storm of comets spiraling outwards from the grip.

Fatio’s attire was relatively demure: a many-buttoned sort of cassock, a middling brown wig, a linen shirt, a lace cravat.

They were only a little surprised to see him, and no more than normally indignant that he’d burst in without knocking. Upnor showed no sign of wanting to run him through with that rapier. Newton did not seem to think that Daniel’s appearing here, now, was any more bizarre than any of the other perceptions that presented themselves to Isaac in a normal day (which was probably true), and Fatio, as always, just observed everything.

“Frightfully sorry to burst in,” Daniel said, “but I thought you’d like to know that the King’s turned up in Sheerness—not above ten miles from Castle Upnor.”

The Earl of Upnor now made a visible effort to prevent some strong emotion from assuming control of his face. Daniel couldn’t be certain, but he thought it was a sort of incredulous sneer. While Upnor was thus busy, Daniel pressed his advantage: “The Gentleman of the Bedchamber is in the Presence as we speak, and I suppose that other elements of Court will travel down-river tomorrow, but for now he has nothing—food, drink, a bed are being improvised. As I rode past Castle Upnor yesterday evening, it occurred to me that you might have the means, there, to supply some of His Majesty’s wants—”

“Oh yes,” Upnor said, “I have all.”

“Shall I make arrangements for a messenger to be sent out then?”

“I can do it myself,” said the Earl.

“Of course I am aware, my lord, that you have the power to dispatch messages. But out of a desire to make myself useful I—”

“No. I mean, I can deliver the orders myself, for I am on my way to Upnor at daybreak.”

“I beg your pardon, my lord.”

“Is there anything else, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“Not unless I may be of assistance in this house.”

Upnor looked at Newton. Newton—who’d been gazing at Daniel—seemed to detect this in the corner of his eye, and spoke: “In this house, Daniel, a vast repository of alchemical lore has accumulated. Nearly all of it is garbled nonsense. Some of it is true wisdom—secrets that ought rightly to be kept secret from them in whose hands they would be dangerous. Our task is to sort out one from the other, and burn what is useless, and see to it that what is good and true is distributed to the libraries and laboratories of the adept. It is difficult for me to see how you could be of any use in this, since you believe that all of it is nonsense, and have a well-established history of incendiary behavior in the presence of such writings.”

“You continue to view my 1677 actions in the worst possible light.”

“Not so, Daniel. I am aware that you thought you were showering favors on me. Nonetheless, I say that what happened in 1677 must be looked on as permanently disqualifying you from being allowed to handle alchemical literature around open flames.”

“Very well,” said Daniel. “Good night, Isaac. M’Lord. Monsieur.” Upnor and Fatio were both looking a bit startled by Isaac’s cryptic discourse, so Daniel bowed perfunctorily and backed out of the room.

They resumed their previous conversation as if Daniel were naught more than a servant who’d nipped in to serve tea. Upnor said, “Who can guess what notions have got into his head, living for so many years in that land, over-run with the cabals of crypto-Jews, and Indians sacrificing each other atop Pyramids?”

“You could just write him a letter and ask him,” suggested Fatio, in a voice so bright and reasonable that it annoyed even Daniel, who was rapidly backing out of earshot. He could tell, just from this, that Fatio was no alchemist; or if he was, he was new to it, and not yet inculcated to make everything much more obscure and mysterious than it needed to be.

He turned around finally, and nearly bumped into a fellow whom he identified, out of the corner of his eye, as a merry monk who had somehow got grievously lost: it was a robed figure gripping a large stoneware tankard that he had evidently taken out on loan from one of the local drinking establishments. “Have a care, Mr. Waterhouse, you look too little, for listening so well,” said Enoch Root affably.

Daniel started away from him. Locke was still standing there embracing his book; Root was the chap he’d been talking to earlier. Daniel was caught off guard for a few moments; Root took advantage of the lull to down a mouthful of ale.

“You are very rude,” Daniel said.

“What did you say? Root?”

“Rude, to drink alone, when others are present.”

“Each man finds his own sort of rudeness. Some burst into houses, and conversations, uninvited.”

“I was bearing important news.”

“And I am celebrating it.”

“Aren’t you afraid that drink will shorten your longevity?”

“Is longevity much on your mind, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“It is on the mind of every man. And I am a man. Who or what are you?”

Locke’s eyes had been going back and forth, as at a tennis match. Now they fixed on Enoch for a while. Enoch had got a look as if he were trying to be patient—which was not the same as being patient.

“There’s a certain unexamined arrogance to your question, Daniel. Just as Newton presumes that there is some absolute space by which all things—comets even!—are measured and governed, you presume it is all perfectly natural and pre-ordained that the earth should be populated by men, whose superstitions ought to be the ruler by which all things are judged; but why might I not ask of you, ‘Daniel Waterhouse, who or what are you? And why does Creation teem with others like you, and what is your purpose?’ ”

“I’ll remind you, sirrah, that All Hallows’ Eve was more than a month since, and I am not of a humour to be baited with hobgoblin-stories.”

“Nor am I of a humour to be rated a hobgoblin or any other figment of the humane imagination; for ’twas God who imagined me, just as He did you, and thereby brought us into being.”

“Your tankard brims over with scorn for our superstitions and imaginings; yet here you are, as always, in the company of Alchemists.”

“You might have said, ‘Here you are in the center of the Glorious Revolution conversing with a noted political philosopher,’” Root returned, glancing at Locke, who flicked his eyes downward in the merest hint of a bow. “But I am never credited thus by you, Daniel.”

“I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. Do you deny it?”

“Daniel, I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. But I am aware that you do other things. I know you have oft been at Bedlam with Hooke. Perhaps you have seen priests there who go to converse with madmen. Do you suppose those priests to be mad?”

“I’m not sure if I approve of the similitude—” Locke began.

“Stay, ’tis just a figure!” Root laughed rather winningly, reaching out to touch Locke’s shoulder.

“A faulty one,” Daniel said, “for you are an alchemist.”

“I am called an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who studied what I—and you—study was called by that name. And most persons even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club.”

“I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well,” Daniel said.

“God save you, Mr. Waterhouse.”

“And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke. As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely, a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is Alchemy. It is good that it burnt, and fitting that it burnt tonight, the eve of a Revolution that I will be so bold as to call my life’s work. In a few years Mr. Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr. Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid—what we call a Cartesian grid, though ’twas not his idea—and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters—and that will be the end of Alchemy.”

“ ’Tis a noble pursuit and I wish you Godspeed,” Root said, “but remember the poles.”

“The poles?”

“The north and south poles, where your meridians will come together—no longer parallel and separate, but converging, and all one.”

“That is nothing but a figment of geometry.”

“But when you build all your science upon geometry, Mr. Waterhouse, figments become real.”

Daniel sighed. “Very well, perhaps we’ll get back to Alchemy in the end—but for now, no one can get near the poles—unless you can fly there on a broom, Mr. Root—and I’ll put my trust in geometry and not in the books of fables that Mr. Boyle and Sir Elias are sorting through below. ’Twill work for me, for the short time I have remaining. I have not time to-night.”

“Further errands await you?”

“I would fain bid a proper farewell to my dear old friend Jeffreys.”

“He is an old friend of the Earl of Upnor as well,” Enoch Root said, a bit distractedly.

“This I know, for they cover up each other’s murders.”

“Upnor sent Jeffreys a box a few hours ago.”

“Not to his house, I’ll wager.”

“He sent it in care of the master of a ship in the Pool.”

“The name of the ship?”

“I do not know it.”

“The name of the messenger, then?”

Enoch Root leaned over the baluster and peered down the middle of the stairwell. “I do not know that, either,” he said, then shifted his tankard to the other hand so that he could reach out. He pointed at a young porter who was just on his way out the door, bearing another pile of books to the bonfire. “But it was him.”

HARE RODE AT ANCHOR, LANTERNS a-blaze, before Wapping: a suburb crooked in an elbow of the Thames just downstream of the Tower. If Jeffreys had already boarded her, there was nothing they could do, short of hiring a pirate-ship to overhaul her when she reached blue water. But a few minutes’ conversation with the watermen loitering round the Wapping riverfront told them that no passengers had been conveyed to that ship yet. Jeffreys must be waiting for something; but he would wait close by, within view of Hare, so that he could bolt if he had to. And he would choose a place where he could get strong drink, because he was a drunkard. That narrowed it down to some half a dozen taverns, unevenly spaced along the riverbank from the Tower of London down to Shadwell, mostly clustered around the stairs and docks that served as gate-ways ’tween the Wet and the Dry worlds. Dawn was approaching, and any normal business ought to’ve been closed half a dozen hours ago. But these dockside taverns served an irregular clientele at irregular hours; they told time by the rise and fall of the tides, not by the comings and goings of the sun. And the night before had been as wild as any in England’s history. No sane tavernkeeper would have his doors closed now.

“Let’s be about it smartly then, guv’nor,” said Bob Shaftoe, striding off the boat they’d hired near Charing Cross and lighting on King Henry’s Stairs. “This may be nigh on the longest night of the year, but it can’t possibly be much longer; and I believe that my Abigail awaits me at Upnor.”

This was a gruff way of speaking to a tired sick old Natural Philosopher, yet an improvement on the early days in the Tower, when Bob had been suspicious and chilly, or recent times when he’d been patronizing. When Bob had witnessed John Churchill shaking Daniel’s hand on the Tower causeway a few hours earlier, he’d immediately begun addressing him as “guv’nor.” But he’d persisted in his annoying habit of asking Daniel whether he was tired or sick until just a quarter of an hour ago, when Daniel had insisted that they shoot one of the flumes under London Bridge rather than take the time to walk around.

It was the first time in Daniel’s life that he’d run this risk, the second time for Bob, and the fourth time for the waterman. A hill of water had piled up on the upstream side of the bridge and was finding its way through the arches like a panicked crowd trying to bolt from a burning theatre. The boat’s mass was but a millionth part of it, and was of no account whatever; it spun around like a weathercock at the brink of the cataract, bashed against the pilings below Chapel Pier hard enough to stave in the gunwale, spun round the opposite way from the recoil, and accelerated through the flume sideways, rolling toward the downstream side so that it scooped up a ton or so of water. Daniel had imagined doing this since he’d been a boy, and had always wondered what it would be like to look up and see the Bridge from underneath; but by the time he thought to raise his gaze outside the narrow and dire straits of the boat, they’d been thrust half a mile downstream and were passing right by the Traitor’s Gate once more.

This act had at last convinced Bob that Daniel was a man determined to kill himself this very night, and so he now dispensed with all of the solicitous offers; he let Daniel jump off the boat under his own power, and did not volunteer to bear him piggy-back up King Henry’s Stairs. Up they trudged into Wapping, river-water draining in gallons from their clothes, and the waterman—who’d been well paid—was left to bail his boat.

They tried four taverns before they came to the Red Cow. It was half wrecked from the past night’s celebrations, but efforts were underway to shovel it out. This part of the riverfront was built up only thinly, with one or two strata of inns and warehouses right along the river, crowding in against a main street running direct to the Tower a mile away. Beyond that ’twas green fields. So the Red Cow offered Daniel juxtapositions nearly as strange as what he’d witnessed in Sheerness: viz. one milkmaid, looking fresh and pure as if angels had just borne her in from a dewy Devonshire pasture-ground, carrying a pail of milk in the back door, stepping primly over a peg-legged Portuguese seaman who’d passed out on a heap of straw embracing a drained gin-bottle. This and other particulars, such as the Malay-looking gent smoking bhang by the front door, gave Daniel the feeling that the Red Cow merited a thoroughgoing search.

As on a ship when exhausted sailors climb down from the yards and go to hammocks still warm from the men who replace them, so the late-night drinkers were straggling out, and their seats being taken by men of various watery occupations who were nipping in for a drink and a nibble.

But there was one bloke in the back corner who did not move. He was dark, saturnine, a lump of lead on a plank, his face hidden in shadow—either completely unconscious or extremely alert. His hand was curled round a glass on the table in front of him, the pose of one who needs to sit for many hours, and who justifies it by pretending he still nurses his drink. Light fell onto his hand from a candle. His thumb was a-tremble.

Daniel went to the bar at the opposite corner of the room, which was little bigger than a crow’s nest. He ordered one dram, and paid for ten. “Yonder bloke,” he said, pointing with his eyes, “I’ll lay you a quid he is a common man—common as the air.”

The tavernkeeper was a fellow of about three score, as pure-English as the milkmaid, white-haired and red-faced. “It’d be thievery for me to take that wager, for you’ve only seen his clothes—which are common—while I’ve heard his voice—which is anything but.”

“Then, a quid says he has a disposition sweet as clotted cream.”

The tavernkeeper looked pained. “It slays me to turn your foolish bets away, but again, I have such knowledge to the contrary as would make it an unfair practice.”

“I’ll bet you a quid he has the most magnificent set of eyebrows you’ve ever seen—eyebrows that would serve for pot-scrubbers.”

“When he came in he kept his hat pulled down low, and his head bowed—I didn’t see his eyebrows—I’d say you’ve got yourself a wager, sir.”

“Do you mind?”

“Be at your ease, sir, I’ll send my boy round to be the judge of it—if you doubt, you may send a second.”

The tavernkeeper turned and caught a lad of ten years or so by the arm, bent down, and spoke to him for a few moments. The boy went directly to the man in the corner and spoke a few words to him, gesturing toward the glass; the man did not even deign to answer, but merely raised one hand as if to cuff the boy. A heavy gold ring caught the light for an instant. The boy came back and said something in slang so thick Daniel couldn’t follow.

“Tommy says you owe me a pound then,” the tavernkeeper said.

Daniel sagged. “His eyebrows were not bushy?”

“That wasn’t the wager. His eyebrows are not bushy, that was the wager. Were not bushy, that’s neither here nor there!”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’ve a blackthorn shillelagh behind this counter that was witness to our wager, and it says you owe me that quid, never mind your weasel-words!”

“You may let your shillelagh doze where it is, sir,” Daniel said, “I’ll let you have that quid. I only ask that you explain yourself.”

“Bushy eyebrows he might have had yesterday, for all I know,” the tavernkeeper said, calming down a little, “but as we speak, he has no eyebrows at all. Only stubble.”

“He cut them off!”

“It is not my place to speculate, sir.”

“Here’s your pound.”

“Thank you, sir, but I would prefer one of full weight, made of silver, not this counterfeiter’s amalgam…”

“Stay. I can give you better.”

“A better coin? Let’s have it then.”

“No, a better circumstance. How would you like this place to be famous, for a hundred years or more, as the place where an infamous murderer was brought to justice?”

Now it was the tavernkeeper’s turn to deflate. It was clear from his face that he’d much rather not have any infamous murderers at all in the house. But Daniel spoke encouraging words to him, and got him to send the boy running up the street toward the Tower, and to stand at the back exit with the shillelagh. A look sufficed to get Bob Shaftoe on his feet, near the front door. Then Daniel took a fire-brand out of the hearth and carried it across the room, and finally waved it back and forth so that it flared up and filled the dark corner with light.

“Damned be to Hell, you shit, Daniel Waterhouse! Traitorous, bastard whore, pantaloon-pissing coward! How dare you impose on a nobleman thus! By what authority! I’m a baron, as you are a sniveling turncoat, and William of Orange is no Cromwell, no Republican, but a prince, a nobleman like me! He’ll show me the respect I merit, and you the contempt you deserve, and ’tis you who’ll feel Jack Ketch’s blade on his neck, and die like a whipped bitch in the Tower as you should’ve done!”

Daniel turned to address the other guests in the tavern—not so much the comatose dregs of last night as the breakfasting sailors and watermen. “I apologize for the disruption,” he announced. “You have heard of Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge, the one who decorated trees in Dorset with bodies of ordinary Englishmen, who sold English schoolgirls into chattel slavery?”

Jeffreys got to his feet, knocking his table over, and made for the closest exit, which was at the rear; but the tavernkeeper raised the shillelagh in both hands and wound up like a woodman preparing to swing his axe at a tree. Jeffreys shambled to a stop and reversed direction, heading for the front of the room. Bob Shaftoe let him build to full speed, and let him enjoy a few seconds’ hope, before side-stepping in front of the doorway and whipping a dagger out of his boot. It was all Jeffreys could do to stop before impaling himself on it; and the casual look on Bob’s face made it clear he would not have turned the point aside.

The men in the tavern had all got to their feet now and begun reaching into their clothes, betraying locations of various daggers, coshes, and other necessaries. But they did this because they were confused, not because they’d formed any clear intentions. For that, they were still looking to Daniel.

“The man I speak of, whose name you have all heard, the man who is responsible for the Bloody Assizes and many other crimes besides—judicial murders, for which he has never dreamed he would be made to pay, until this moment—George Jeffreys, Baron of Wem, is he.” And Daniel pointed his finger like a pistol into the face of Jeffreys, whose eyebrows would have shot up in horror, if he still had any. As it was, his face was strangely devoid of expression, of its old power to stir Daniel’s emotions. Nothing he could do with that face could now make Daniel fear him, or pity him, or be charmed by him. This was attributing more power to a set of eyebrows than was really sensible, and so it had to be something else instead; some change in Jeffreys, or in Daniel.

The daggers and coshes had begun to come out—not to be used, but to keep Jeffreys hemmed in. Jeffreys was speechless for the first time since Daniel had known him. He could not even curse.

Daniel met Bob’s eyes, and nodded. “Godspeed, Sergeant Shaftoe, I hope you rescue your princess.”

“So do I,” Bob said, “but whether I live or die in the attempt, do not forget that I have helped you; but you have not helped me yet.”

“I have not forgotten it, nor will I ever. Chasing armed men cross-country is not something I am very good at, or I would come with you now. I await a chance to return the favor.”

“It is not a favor, but one side of a contract,” Bob reminded him, “and all that remains is for us to choose the coin in which I shall be repaid.” He turned and bolted into the street.

Jeffreys looked around, taking a quick census of the men and weapons closing in around him, and finally turned his gaze on Daniel: not fierce any more, but offended, and bewildered—as if asking why? Why go to the trouble? I was running away! What is the point of this?

Daniel looked him in the eye and said the first thing that entered his mind:

“You and I are but earth.”

Then he walked out into the city. The sun was coming up now, and soldiers were running down the street from the Tower, led by a boy.

Venice

JULY 1689

The Venetian Republick began thus; a despicable Croud of People flying from the Fury of the Barbarians which over-run the Roman Empire, took Shelter in a few inaccessible Islands of the Adriatic Gulph…THEIR City we see raised to a prodigious Splendour and Magnificence, and their rich Merchants rank’d among the ancient Nobility, and all this by Trade.

—DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce

To Eliza, Countess de la Zeur and Duchess of Qwghlm

From G. W. Leibniz

July 1689

Eliza,

Your misgivings about the Venetian Post Office have once again proved unfounded—your letter reached me quickly and without obvious signs of tampering. Really, I think that you have been spending too much time in the Hague, for you are becoming as prim and sanctimonious as a Dutch-woman. You need to come here and visit me. Then you would see that even the most debauched people in the world have no difficulty delivering the mail on time, and doing many other difficult things besides.

As I write these words I am seated near a window that looks out over a canal, and two gondoliers, who nearly collided a minute ago, are screaming murderous threats at each other. This sort of thing happens all the time here. The Venetians have even given it a name: “Canal Rage.” Some say that it is a new phenomenon—they insist that gondoliers never used to scream at each other in this way. To them it is a symptom of the excessively rapid pace of change in the modern world, and they make an analogy to poisoning by quicksilver, which has turned so many alchemists into shaky, irritable lunatics.

The view from this window has changed very little in hundreds of years (God knows that my room could use some maintenance), but the letters scattered across my table (all delivered punctually by Venetians) tell of changes the like of which the world has not seen since Rome fell and the Vagabond Emperor moved his court to this city. Not only have William and Mary been crowned at Westminster (as you and several others were so kind as to inform me), but in the same post I received word from Sophie Charlotte in Berlin that there is a new Tsar in Russia, named Peter, and that he is as tall as Goliath, as strong as Samson, and as clever as Solomon. The Russians have signed a treaty with the Emperor of China, fixing their common border along some river that does not even appear on the maps—but from all accounts, Russia now extends all the way to the Pacific, or (depending on which set of maps you credit) to America. Perhaps this Peter could march all the way to Massachusetts without getting his feet wet!

But Sophie Charlotte says that the new Tsar’s gaze is fixed westwards. She and her incomparable mother are already scheming to invite him to Berlin and Hanover so that they can flirt with him in person. I would not miss that for the world; but Peter has many rivals to crush and Turks to slay before he can even consider such a journey, and so I should have plenty of time to make my way back from Venice.

Meanwhile this city looks to the east—the Venetians and the other Christian armies allied with them continue to press the Turks back, and no one here will talk about anything else but the news that came in the latest post, or when the next post is expected. For those of us more interested in philosophy, it makes for tedious dinners! The Holy League have taken Lipova, which as you must know is the gateway to Transylvania, and there is hope of driving the Turks all the way to the Black Sea before long. And in a month I’ll be able to write you another letter containing the same sentence with a different set of incomprehensible place names. Woe to the Balkans.

Pardon me if I seem flippant. Venice seems to have that effect on me. She finances her wars the old-fashioned way, by levying taxes on trade, and this naturally limits their scope. By contrast, the reports I hear from England and from France are most disquieting. First you tell me that (according to your sources at Versailles) Louis XIV is melting down the silver furniture in the Grands Appartements to pay for the raising of an even vaster army (or perhaps he wanted to redecorate). Next, Huygens writes from London that the Government there has hit upon the idea of financing the Army and Navy by creating a national debt—using all of England as collateral, and levying a special tax that is earmarked for paying it back. I can scarcely picture the upheaval that these innovations must have created in Amsterdam! Huygens also mentioned that the ship he took across the North Sea was crowded with Amsterdam Jews who appeared to be bringing their entire households and estates with them to London. No doubt some of the silver that used to be part of Louis’ favorite armchair has by this route made its way via the ghetto of Amsterdam to the Tower of London where it has been minted into new coins bearing the likeness of William and Mary, and then been sent out to pay for the building of new warships at Chatham.

Thus far, in these parts, Louis’ declaration of war against England seems to have had little effect. The duc d’Arcachon’s navy is dominant in the Mediterranean, and is rumored to have taken many Dutch and English merchantmen around Smyrna and Alexandria, but there have not been any pitched sea-battles that I know of. Likewise, James II is said to have landed in Ireland whence he hopes to launch attacks on England, but I have no news thence.

My chief concern is for you, Eliza. Huygens gave me a good description of you. He was touched that you and those royals you have befriended—the Princess Eleanor and little Caroline—went to the trouble of seeing him off on his voyage to London, especially given that you were quite enormously pregnant at the time. He used various astronomical metaphors to convey your roundness, your hugeness, your radiance, and your beauty. His affection for you is obvious, and I believe he is a touch saddened that he is not the father (who is, by the way? Remember I am in Venice, you may tell me anything and I cannot be shocked by it).

At any rate—knowing how strongly you are attracted to the financial markets, I fret that the recent upheavals have drawn you into the furor of the Damplatz, which would be no place for one in a delicate condition.

But there is little point in my worrying about it now, for by this time you must have entered into your confinement, and you and your baby must have emerged dead or alive, and gone to the nursery or the grave; I pray both of you are in the nursery, and whenever I see a picture of the Madonna and child (which in Venice is about three times a minute) I phant’sy it is a fair portrait of you and yours.

Likewise I send my prayers and best wishes to the Princesses. Their story was pathetic even before they were made into refugees by the war. It is good that in the Hague they have found a safe harbor, and a friend such as you to keep them company. But the news from the Rhine front—Bonn and Mainz changing hands, &c.—suggests that they shall not soon be able to return to that place where they were living out their exile.

You ask me a great many questions about Princess Eleanor, and your curiosity has aroused mine; you remind me of a merchant who is considering a momentous transaction with someone she does not know very well, and who is casting about for references.

I have not met Princess Eleanor, only heard strangely guarded descriptions of her beauty (e.g., “she is the most beautiful German princess”). I did know her late husband, the Margrave John Frederick of Brandenburg-Ansbach. As a matter of fact I was thinking of him the other day, because the new Tsar in Russia is frequently described in the same terms as were once applied to Eleanor’s late husband: forward-thinking, modern-minded, obsessed with securing his country’s position in the new economic order.

Caroline’s father went out of his way to welcome Huguenots or anyone else he thought had unusual skills, and tried to make Ansbach into a center of what your friend and mine, Daniel Waterhouse, likes to call the Technologickal Arts. But he wrote novels too, did the late John Frederick, and you know of my shameful weakness for those. He loved music and the theatre. It is a shame that smallpox claimed him, and a crime that his own son made Eleanor feel so unwelcome there that she left town with little Caroline.

Beyond those facts, which are known to all, all I can offer you concerning these two Princesses is gossip. However, my gossip is copious, and of the most excellent quality. For Eleanor figures into the machinations of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, and so her name is mentioned from time to time in the letters that fly to and fro between Hanover and Berlin. I do believe that Sophie and Sophie Charlotte are trying to organize some sort of North German super-state. Such a thing can never exist without princes; German Protestant princes and princesses are in short supply, and getting shorter as the war goes on; beautiful princesses who lack husbands are, therefore, exceptionally precious.

If precious Eleanor were rich she could command, or at least influence, her own destiny. But because her falling-out with her stepson has left her penniless, her only assets are her body and her daughter. Because her body has shown the ability to manufacture little princes, it is enfeoffed to larger powers. I shall be surprised if a few years from now, your friend Princess Eleanor is not dwelling in Hanover or Brandenburg, married to some more or less hideous German royal. I would advise her to seek out one of the madly eccentric ones, as this will at least make her life more interesting.

I hope that I do not sound callous, but these are the facts of the matter. It is not as bad as it sounds. They are in the Hague. They will be safe there from the atrocities being committed against Germans by the army of Louvois. More dazzling cities exist, but the Hague is perfectly serviceable, and a great improvement over the rabbit-hutch in the Thüringer Wald where, according to gossip, Eleanor and Caroline have been holed up for the last few years. Best of all, as long as they remain in the Hague, Princess Caroline is being exposed to you, Eliza, and learning how to be a great woman. Whatever may befall Eleanor at the hands of those two redoubtable match-makers, Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, Caroline will, I believe, learn from you and from them how to manage her affairs in such a way that, when she reaches a marriageable age, she shall be able to choose whatever Prince and whatever Realm are most suitable to her. And this will provide comfort to Eleanor in her old age.

As for Sophie, she will never be satisfied with Germany alone—her uncle was King of England and she would be its Queen. Did you know she speaks perfect English? So here I am, far away from home, trying to track down every last one of her husband’s ancestors among the Guelphs and the Ghi-bellines. Ah, Venice! Every day I get down on my knees and thank God that Sophie and Ernst August are not descended from people who lived in some place like Lipova.

At any rate, I hope you, Eleanor, Caroline, and, God willing, your baby are all well, and being looked after by officious Dutch nurses. Do write as soon as you feel up to it.

Leibniz

P.S. I am so annoyed by Newton’s mystical approach to force that I am developing a new discipline to study that subject alone. I am thinking of calling it “dynamics,” which derives from the Greek word for force—what do you think of the name? For I may know Greek backwards and forwards, but you have taste.

The Hague

AUGUST 1689

Dear Doctor,

“Dynamics” makes me think not only of force, but of Dynasties, which use forces, frequently concealed, to maintain themselves—as the Sun uses forces of a mysterious nature to make the planets pay court to him. So I think that the name has a good ring to it, especially since you are becoming such an expert on Dynasties new and old, and are so adept at balancing great forces against each other. And insofar as words are names for things, and naming gives a kind of power to the namer, then you are very clever to make your objections to Newton’s work a part of the very name of your new discipline. I would only warn you that the frontier between “ingenious” (which is held to be a good quality) and “clever” (which is looked at askance) is as ill-defined as most of the boundaries in Christendom are today. Englishmen are particularly distrustful of cleverness, which is odd, because they are so clever, and they are wont to draw the boundary in such a way as to encompass all the works of Newton (or any other Englishman) in the country called “ingenious” while leaving you exiled to “clever.” And the English must be attended to because they seem to be drawing all the maps. Huygens went to be among the Royal Society because he felt it was the only place in the world (outside of whatever room you happen to be in) where he could have a conversation that would not bore him to death. And despite the never-ending abuse from Mr. Hooke, he never wants to leave.

I have been slow to write about myself. This is partly because the very existence of this letter proves, well enough, that I live. But it is also because I can hardly bring myself to write about the baby—may God have mercy on his little soul. For by now, he is with the angels in Heaven.

After several false starts my labor began in the evening of the 27th of June, which I think was extremely late—certainly I felt as if I had been pregnant for two years! It was early the next morning that my bag of waters broke and poured out like a flood from a broken dam.[*] Now things became very busy at the Binnenhof as the apparatus of labor and delivery swung into action. Doctors, nurses, midwives, and clergy were summoned, and every gossip within a radius of five miles went to the highest state of alert.

As you have guessed, the incredibly tedious descriptions of labors and deliveries that follow are nothing but the vessel for this encrypted message. But you should read them anyway because it took me several drafts and a gallon of ink to put into words one one-hundredth of the agony, the endless rioting in my viscera as my body tried to rip itself open. Imagine swallowing a melon-seed, feeling it grow in your belly to full size, and then trying to vomit it up through the same small orifice. Thank God the baby is finally out. But pray for God to help me, for I love him.

Yes, I say “love,” not “loved.” Contrary to what is written in the unencrypted text, the baby lives. But I get ahead of myself.

For reasons that will shortly become obvious, you must destroy this letter.

That is, if I don’t destroy it first by dissolving the words with my tears. Sorry about the unsightly blotching.

To the Dutch and the English, I am the Duchess of Qwghlm. To the French, I am the Countess de la Zeur. But neither a Protestant Duchess nor a French Countess can get away with bearing and rearing a child out of wedlock.

My pregnancy I was able to conceal from all but a few, for once I began to show, I ventured out in public only rarely. For the most part I confined myself to the upper storys of the house of Huygens. So it has been a tedious spring and summer. The Princesses of Ansbach, Eleanor and Caroline, have been staying as honored guests of the Prince of Orange at the Binnenhof, which as you know is separated from the Huygens house by only a short distance. Almost every day they strolled across the square to pay a call on me. Or rather Eleanor strolled, and Caroline sprinted ahead. To give a curious six-year-old the run of such a place, cluttered as it is with Huygens’s clocks, pendulums, lenses, prisms, and other apparatus, is a joy for the little one and a deadly trial for all adults within the sound of her voice. For she can ask a hundred questions about even the least interesting relic that she digs up from some corner. Eleanor, who knows practically nothing of Natural Philosophy, quickly wearied of saying “I don’t know” over and over again, and became reluctant to visit the place. But I had nothing better to do with my time as the baby grew, and was hungry for their company, and so attended closely to Caroline and tried as best I could to give some answer to every one of her questions. Perceiving this, Eleanor got in the habit of withdrawing to a sunny corner to do embroidery or write a letter. Sometimes she would leave Caroline with me and go out riding or attend a soiree. So the arrangement worked out well for all three of us. You mentioned to me, Doctor, that the late Margrave John Frederick, Caroline’s father, had a passion for Natural Philosophy and Technologickal Arts. I can now assure you that Caroline has inherited this trait; or perhaps she has dim memories of her father showing off his fossil collection or his latest pendulum-clock, and so feels some communion with his departed soul when I show her the wonders of Huygens’s house. If so it is a tale that will seem familiar to you, who knew your father only by exploring his library.

Thus Eliza and Caroline. But too Eliza and Eleanor have been talking, late at night, when Caroline is asleep in her bedchamber in the Binnenhof. We have been talking about Dynamics. Not the dynamics of rolling balls on inclined planes, but the dynamics of royal and noble families. She and I are both a little bit like mice scurrying around on a bowling-green, trying not to be crushed by the rolling and colliding balls. We must understand dynamics in order to survive.

Only a few months before I became pregnant, I visited London. I was at Whitehall Palace with Daniel Waterhouse when the son of James II—now Pretender to the throne—was supposedly born. Was Mary of Modena really pregnant, or only stuffing pillows under her dress? If she was pregnant, was it really by the syphilitic King James II, or was a healthy stud brought in to the royal apartments to father a robust heir? Supposing she was really pregnant, did the baby survive childbirth? Or was the babe brought forth from that room really an orphan, smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan, and triumphantly brought forth so that the Stuart line could continue to reign over England? In one sense it does not matter, since that king is deposed, and that baby is being reared in Paris. But in another sense it matters very much, for the latest news from across the sea is that the father has taken Derry, and is on the march elsewhere in Ireland, trying to win his kingdom back for his son. All because of what did or did not happen in a certain birthing-room at Whitehall.

But I insult your intelligence by belaboring this point. Have you found any changelings or bastards in Sophie’s line? Probably. Have you made these facts known? Of course not. But burn this anyway, and sift the ashes into that canal you are always writing about, making sure beforehand that there are no ill-tempered gondoliers beneath your window.

As a Christian noblewoman, never married, I could not be pregnant, and could not have a child. Eleanor knew this as well as I. We talked about it for hours and hours as my belly grew larger and larger.

My pregnancy was hardly a secret—various servants and women of the household knew—but I could deny it later. Gossips would know I was lying, but in the end, they are of no account. If, God forbid, the baby was stillborn, or died in infancy, then it would be as if it had never happened. But if the baby throve, then matters would be complicated.

Those complications did not really daunt me. If there was one thing I learned at Versailles, it was that Persons of Quality have as many ways of lying about their affairs, perversions, pregnancies, miscarriages, births, and bastards as sailors have of tying knots. As the months of my pregnancy clunked past, ponderous but inexorable, like one of Huygens’s pendulums, I had some time to consider which lie I would choose to tell when my baby was born.

Early, when my belly was just a bit swollen, I considered giving the baby away. As you know, there are plenty of well-funded “orphanages” where illegitimate children of the Quality are raised. Or if I searched long enough I might find some decent mother and father who were barren, and would be more than happy to welcome a healthy infant into their house.

But on the first day that the baby began to kick inside of me, the idea of giving him away faded to an abstraction, and shortly vanished from my mind.

When I reached my seventh month, Eleanor sent to Eisenach for a certain Frau Heppner. Frau Heppner arrived some weeks later, claiming to be a nurse who would look after Princess Caroline and teach her the German language. And this she did; but in truth, Frau Heppner is a midwife. She delivered Eleanor, and has delivered many other noble and common babies since then. Eleanor said that she was loyal and that her discretion could be relied on.

The Binnenhof, though far from luxurious by the standards of French palaces, contains several suites of apartments, each appointed in such a way that a royal house guest can dwell there in the company of her ladies-in-waiting, Lady of the Bedchamber, &c. As you will understand from my earlier letters, Princess Eleanor did not have enough of a household to occupy a suite fully; she had a couple of servants who had come out from Eisenach, and two Dutch girls who’d been assigned to her, by William’s household staff, as an act of charity. And now she had Frau Heppner. This still left an empty room in her suite. And so, when Frau Heppner was not giving Caroline lessons, she began organizing the bedsheets and other necessaries of the midwife’s art, making that extra room into a birthing-chamber.

The plan was that when I went into labor I would be carried across the square into the Binnenhof in a sedan-chair, and taken direct to Eleanor’s suite. We practiced this, if you can believe such a thing: I hired a pair of brawny Dutchmen to serve as porters, and once a day, during the final weeks of my pregnancy, had them carry me from Huygens’s house to the Binnenhof, not stopping or slowing until they had set the sedan chair down inside Eleanor’s bedchamber.

These dress rehearsals seemed a good idea at the time, because I did not know the strength of my enemy, and the number of his spies in the Binnenhof. In retrospect, I was telling him everything about my plan, and giving him all he needed to lay a perfect ambush.

But again I get ahead of myself. The plan was that Frau Heppner would preside over the delivery. If the baby died and I lived, no word of it need ever leave that chamber. If I died and the infant lived, it would become a ward of Eleanor, and inherit my wealth. If both I and the baby survived, then I would recuperate for a few weeks and then move to London as soon as the obvious symptoms of childbirth were gone from my body. I would bring the infant along with me, and pass it off as an orphaned niece or nephew, the sole survivor of some massacre in the Palatinate. There is no shortage of massacres to choose from, and no want of Englishmen who would be eager to credit such a tale be it never so patchy—particularly if the tale came from a Duchess who had been of great service to their new King.

Yes, it all sounds absurd. I never would have dreamed such things went on if I had not gone to Whitehall and seen (from a distance) the retinue of high and mighty persons gathered there for no reason other than to stand in the Queen’s bedchamber and stare fixedly at her vagina all day, like villagers at a magic-show, determined to catch the magician out in some sleight-of-hand.

I supposed that my own vagina, so humble and common, would never draw such a large and distinguished audience. So by making some simple arrangements ahead of time, I should be able to adjust matters to my satisfaction after it was over.

You may refer to the plaintext now, doctor, to become acquainted with all of the delightful sensations that preoccupied me during my first several hours of labor (I assume it was several hours; at first ’twas dark outside and then light). When my bag of waters broke, and I knew that the time had come, I sent word for the porters. Between contractions, I made my way carefully downstairs and climbed into the sedan chair, which was kept waiting in a room at the side of the house, at street-level. Once I was inside the box, I closed the door, and drew the curtains across the little windows, so that curious eyes should not look in on me as I was taken across the square. The darkness and confinement did not really trouble me, considering that the baby inside my womb had been living with far worse for many weeks, and had suffered it patiently, aside from a few kicks.

Presently I heard the familiar voices of the porters outside, and felt the sedan being lifted into the air, and rotated around in the street for the short journey to the Binnenhof. This passed without incident. I believe that I may have dozed a little bit. Certainly I lost track of the twists and turns, after a while, as they carried me down the long galleries of the Binnehof. But soon enough I felt the sedan being set down on a stone floor, and heard the porters walking away.

I reached up, flipped the door-latch, and pushed it open, expecting to see the faces of Frau Heppner, Eleanor, and Caroline.

Instead I was looking at the face of Dr. Alkmaar, the court physician, a man I had seen once or twice, but never spoken to.

I was not in Eleanor’s apartment. It was an unfamiliar bedchamber, somewhere else in the Binnenhof. A bed was ready—ready for me!—and a steaming vat of water rested on the floor, and piles of torn sheets had been put in position. There were some women in the room, whom I knew a little, and a young man I’d never seen at all.

It was a trap; but so shocking that I did not know what to do. Would that I could tell you, Doctor, that I kept my wits about me, and perceived all that was going on, and jumped out of the sedan chair and ran down the gallery to freedom. But in truth, I was perfectly dumbfounded. And at the moment that I found myself in this unfamiliar room, I was taken by a strong contraction, which made me helpless.

By the time that the pangs had subsided, I was lying in that bed; Dr. Alkmaar and the others had pulled me out of the sedan chair. The porters were long since gone. Whoever had arranged this ambush—and I had a good idea of who it was—had either paid them to take me to the wrong room, or somehow talked them into believing that this was what I wanted. I had no way to send out a message. I could scream for help, but women in labor always scream for help. There was plenty of help already in the room.

Dr. Alkmaar was far from being a warm person, but he was reputed competent and (almost as important) loyal. If he spied on me (which was only to be expected) he would tell my secrets to William of Orange, who knows my secrets anyway. Dr. Alkmaar was assisted by one of his pupils (the young man) and by two girls who had no real business being in this room. When I had arrived in the Hague almost nine months before, in a canal-boat with Eleanor and Caroline, William had tried to furnish me with the rudiments of a household, befitting my exalted rank. The Prince of Orange did this not because I desired it but because it is how things are done, and it seemed absurd to have a Duchess in residence at a royal palace who was bereft of servants and staff. He sent me two young women. Both were daughters of minor nobles, serving time at Court, awaiting husbands, and wishing they were at Versailles instead. Since being spied on by members of one’s household is the staple of palace intrigue, I had been careful to have all of my conversations with Eleanor in places where neither of these two girls could possibly overhear us. Later I had moved to Huygens’s house, dismissed them from my service, and forgotten about them. But by some narrow definition of Court protocol, they were still technically members of my household, whether I wanted them or not. My fogged mind, trying to make sense of these events, cast that up as an explanation.

Again refer to plaintext for description of various agonies and indignities. The point, for purposes of this narration, is that when the worst fits came over me, I was not really conscious. If you doubt it, Doctor, eat some bad oysters and then try doing some of your calculus at the moment your insides try to turn themselves inside out.

At the conclusion of one of these fits I gazed down through half-closed eyes at Dr. Alkmaar, who was standing between my thighs with his sleeve rolled up and his armhairs plastered to his skin by some sort of wetness. I inferred that he had been inside me, doing a little exploration.”

“It’s a boy,” he announced, more for the benefit of the spectators than for me—I could tell from the way they looked at me that they thought I was asleep or delirious.

I opened my eyes slightly, thinking that it was all over, wanting to see the baby. But Dr. Alkmaar was empty-handed and he was not smiling.

“How do you know?” asked Brigitte—one of those two girls who made up my household. Brigitte looked like she belonged in a Dutch farm-yard operating a butter churn. In Court dress she looked big and out of place. She was harmless.

“He is trying to come out buttocks-first,” Dr. Alkmaar said distractedly.

Brigitte gasped. Despite the bad news, I took comfort from this. I had found Brigitte tedious and stupid because of her sweetness. Now, she was the only person in the room feeling sympathy for me. I wanted to get out of bed and hug her, but it did not seem practical.

Marie—the other girl—said, “That means both of them will die, correct?”

Now, Doctor, since I am writing this letter, there is no point in my trying to keep you in suspense—obviously I did not die. I mention this as a way of conveying something about the character of this girl Marie. In contrast to Brigitte, who was always warm (if thick-seeming), Marie had an icy soul—if a mouse ran into the room, she would stomp it to death. She was the daughter of a baron, with a pedigree pieced together from the dribs, drabs, fag-ends, and candle-stubs of diverse Dutch and German principalities, and she struck me (by your leave) as one who had issued from a family where incest was practiced often and early.

Dr. Alkmaar corrected her: “It means I must reach up and rotate the baby until it is head-down. The danger is that the umbilical cord will squirt out while I am doing this, and get throttled later. The chief difficulty is the contractions of her uterus, which bear down on the infant with more strength than my arms, or any man’s, can match. I must wait for her womb to relax and then try it.”

So we waited. But even in the intervals between my contractions, my womb was so tense that Dr. Alkmaar could not budge the infant. “I have drugs that might help,” he mused, “or I could bleed her to make her weaker. But it would be better to wait for her to become completely exhausted. Then I might have a better chance.”

More delay now—for them it was a matter of standing around waiting for time to pass, for me it was to be a victim of bloody murder and then to return to life again, over and over; but a lower form of life each time.

By the time the messenger burst in, I could only lie there like a sack of potatoes and listen to what was said.

“Doctor Alkmaar! I have just come from the bedside of the Chevalier de Montluçon!”

“And why is the new ambassador in bed at four in the afternoon?”

“He has suffered an attack of some sort and urgently requires your assistance to bleed him!”

“I am occupied,” said Dr. Alkmaar, after thinking about it. But I found it disturbing that he had to mull it over in this way.

“A midwife is on her way to take over your work here,” said the messenger.

As if on cue, there was a knock at the door. Showing more vitality than she had all day, Marie dashed over and flung it open to reveal a certain crone of a midwife, a woman with a very mixed reputation. Peering out through a haze of eyelashes I could see Marie throwing her arms around the midwife’s neck with a little cry of simulated joy, and muttering something into her ear. The midwife listened and said something back, listened and said something back, three times before she ever turned her colorless gray eyes towards me, and when she did, I felt death reaching for me.

“Tell me more of the symptoms,” said Dr. Alkmaar, beginning to take an interest in this new case. The way he was looking at me—staring without seeing—I sensed he was giving up.

I mustered the strength to lever myself up on one elbow, and reached out to grab the bloody cravat around Dr. Alkmaar’s neck. “If you think I am dead, explain this!” I said, giving him a violent jerk.

“It will be hours before you will have become exhausted enough,” he said. “I shall have time to go and bleed the Chevalier de Montluçon—”

“Who will then suffer another attack, and then another!” I replied. “I am not a fool. I know that if I become so exhausted that you are able to turn the baby around in my womb, I shall be too weak to push her out. Tell me of the drug you mentioned before!”

“Doctor, the French Ambassador may be dying! The rules of precedence dictate that—” began Marie, but Dr. Alkmaar held up one hand to stay her. To me, he said, “It is but a sample. It relaxes certain muscles for a time, then it wears off.”

“Have you experimented with it yet?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“It made me unable to hold in my urine.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“A wandering alchemist who came to visit two weeks ago.”

“A fraud or—”

“He is well reputed. He remarked that, with so many pregnant women in the house, I might have need of it.”

“’Twas the Red?”

Dr. Alkmaar’s eyes darted from side to side before he answered with a very slight nod.

“Give me the drug.”

It was some sort of plant extract, very bitter, but after about a quarter of an hour it made me go all loose in the joints, and I became light-headed even though I had not lost that much blood yet. So I was not fully conscious when Dr. Alkmaar did the turning, and that suited me, as it was not anything I wanted to be conscious of. My passion for Natural Philosophy has its limits.

I heard him saying to the midwife, “Now the baby is head down, as it should be. God be praised, the cord did not emerge. The baby is crowning now, and when the drug wears off in a few hours, the contractions will resume and, God willing, she will deliver normally. Know that she is delivering late; the baby is well-developed; as frequently occurs in such cases, it has already defecated inside the womb.”

“I have seen it before,” said the midwife, a little bit insulted.

Dr. Alkmaar did not care whether she was insulted or not: “The baby has got some of it into his mouth. There is danger that when he draws his first breath he shall aspirate it into his lungs. If that happens he shall not live to the end of the week. I was able to get my finger into the little one’s mouth and clear out a good deal of it, but you must remember to hold him head-down when he emerges and clear the mouth again before he inhales.”

“I am in debt to your wisdom, Doctor,” said the midwife bitterly.

“You felt around in his mouth? The baby’s mouth?” Marie asked him.

“That is what I have just said,” Dr. Alkmaar replied.

“Was it…normal?”

“What do you mean?”

“The palate…the jaw…?”

“Other than being full of baby shit,” said Dr. Alkmaar, picking up his bag of lancets and handing it to his assistant, “it was normal. Now I go to bleed the French Ambassador.”

“Take a few quarts for me, Doctor,” I said. Hearing this weak jest, Marie turned and gave me an indescribably evil look as she closed the door behind the departing Doctor.

The crone took a seat next to me, used the candle on the night-stand to light up her clay-pipe, and set to work replacing the air in the room with curls of smoke.

The words of Marie were an encrypted message that I had understood as soon as it had reached my ears. Here is its meaning:

Nine months ago I got into trouble on the banks of the Meuse. As a means of getting out of this predicament I slept with Étienne d’Arcachon, the scion of a very ancient family that is infamous for passing along its defects as if they were badges and devices on its coat of arms. Anyone who has been to the royal palaces in Versailles, Vienna, or Madrid has seen the cleft lips and palates, the oddly styled jaw-bones, and the gnarled skulls of these people; King Carlos II of Spain, who is a cousin to the Arcachons in three different ways, cannot even eat solid food. Whenever a new baby is born into one of these families, the first thing everyone looks at, practically before they even let it breathe, is the architecture of the mouth and jaw.

I was pleased to hear that my son would be free of these defects. But that Marie had asked proved that she had an opinion as to who the father was. But how could this be possible? “It is obvious,” you might say, “this Étienne d’Arcachon must have boasted, to everyone who would listen, of his conquest of the Countess de la Zeur, and nine months was more than enough time for the gossip to have reached the ears of Marie.” But you do not know Étienne. He is an odd duck, polite to a fault, and not the sort to boast. And he could not know that the baby in my womb was his. He knew only that he’d had a single opportunity to roger me (as Jack would put it). But I traveled for weeks before and weeks after in the company of other men; and certainly I had not impressed Étienne with my chastity!

The only possible explanation was that Marie—or, much more likely, someone who was controlling her—had read a decyphered version of my personal journal, in which I stated explicitly that I had slept with Étienne and only Étienne.

Clearly Marie and the midwife were working as cat’s-paws of some Frenchman or other of high rank. M. le comte d’Avaux had been recalled to Versailles shortly after the Revolution in England, and this Chevalier de Montluçon had been sent out to assume his role. But Montluçon was a nobody, and there was no doubt in my mind that he was a meat marionette whose strings were being pulled by d’Avaux, or some other personage of great power at Versailles.

Suddenly I felt sympathy with James II’s queen, for here I was flat on my back in a foreign palace with a lot of strangers gazing fixedly at my vagina.

Who had arranged this? What orders had been given to Marie?

Marie had made it obvious that one of her tasks was to find out whether the baby was sound.

Who would care whether Étienne’s bastard child had a well-formed skull?

Étienne had written me a love poem, if you can call it that:

Some ladies boast of ancient pedigrees

And prate about their ancestors a lot

But cankers flourish on old family trees

Whose mossy trunks do oft conceal rot.

My lady’s blood runs pure as mountain streams

So I don’t care if her high rank was bought

Her beauty lends fresh vigor to my dreams

Of children free of blemish and of blot.

Étienne d’Arcachon wanted healthy children. He knew that his line had been ruined. He needed a wife of pure blood. I had been made a Countess; but everyone knew that my pedigree was fake and that I was really a commoner. Étienne did not care about about that—he had nobility enough in his family to make him a Duke thrice over. And he did not really care about me, either. He cared about one thing only: my ability to breed true, to make children who were not deformed. He, or someone acting on his behalf, was controlling Marie. And Marie was now effectively controlling me.

That explained Marie’s unseemly curiosity about what Dr. Alkmaar had felt when he had put his fingers into the baby’s mouth. But what other tasks might Marie have been given?

The baby trying to escape from my womb, healthy as he might be, could never be anything other than Étienne’s bastard: a trivial embarrassment to him (for many men had bastards) but a gross one to me.

I had bred true, and proved my ability to make healthy Arcachon babies. When Étienne heard this news, he would want to marry me, so that I could make other babies who were not bastards. But what did it all portend for today’s baby, the inconvenient and embarrassing bastard? Would he be sent to an orphanage? Raised by a cadet branch of the Arcachon family? Or—and forgive me for raising this terrible image, but this is the way my mind was working—had Marie been ordered to make certain that the child was stillborn?

I looked around the room between contractions and thought of the possibilities. I had to get away from these people and deliver my baby among friends. A day of labor had left me too weak to get up, so I could hardly get up and run away from them.

But perhaps I could rely upon the strength of some, and the weakness of others. I have already mentioned that Brigitte was built like a stallion. And I could tell she was good. Sometimes I am not the best judge of character, it is true, but when you are in labor, confined with certain people for what seems like a week, you come to know them very well.

“Brigitte,” I said, “it would do my heart good if you would get up and find Princess Eleanor.”

Brigitte squeezed my sweaty hand and smiled, but Marie spoke first: “Dr. Alkmaar has strictly forbidden visitors!”

“Is Eleanor far away?” I asked.

“Just at the other end of the gallery,” Brigitte said.

“Then go there quickly and tell her I shall have a healthy baby boy very soon.”

“That is by no means assured yet,” Marie pointed out, as Brigitte stormed out of the room.

Marie and the midwife immediately went into the corner, turned their backs to me, and began to whisper. I had not anticipated this, but it suited my purposes. I reached over to the nightstand and wrenched the candle out of its holder. The nightstand had a lace tablecloth draped over it. When I held the flame of the candle beneath its fringe, it caught fire like gunpowder. By the time Marie and the midwife had turned around to see what was happening, the flames had already spread to the fringe of the canopy over my bed.

This is what I meant when I said I must rely on the weakness of some, for as soon as Marie and the midwife perceived this, it was a sort of wrestling-match between the two of them to see which would be out the door first. They did not even bother to cry “Fire!” on their way out of the building. This was done by a steward who had been walking up the gallery with a basin of hot water. When he saw the smoke boiling out of the open door, he cried out, alerting the whole palace, and ran into the room. Fortunately he had the presence of mind to keep the basin of water steady, and he flung its whole contents at the biggest patch of flames that caught his eye, which was on the canopy. This scalded me but did not really affect the most dangerous part of the fire, which had spread to the curtains.

Mind you, I was lying on my back staring up through the tattered and flaming canopy, watching a sort of thunder-storm of smoke-clouds clashing and gathering against the ceiling. Quickly it progressed downwards, leaving a diminishing space of clear air between it and the floor. All I could do was wait for it to reach my mouth.

Then suddenly Brigitte was filling the doorway. She dropped into a squat so that she could peer under the smoke and lock her eyes on mine. Did I call her stupid before? Then I withdraw the accusation, for after a few heartbeats she got a fierce look on her face, stomped forward, and gripped the end-seam of my mattress—a flat sack of feathers—with both hands. Then she kicked off her shoes, planted her bare feet against the floor, and flung herself backwards towards the door. The mattress was practically ripped out from under me—but I came with it, and shortly felt the foot of the bed sliding under my spine. My buttocks fell to the floor and my head rapped against the bed-frame, both cushioned only a little by the mattress. I felt something giving way inside my womb. But it hardly mattered now. It felt as if my whole body were coming apart like a ship dashed on rocks—each contraction another sea heaving me apart. I have a distinct memory of the stone floor sliding along inches from my eyes, boots of the staff running the other way with buckets and blankets, and—gazing forward, between my upraised knees—the huge bare feet and meaty calves of Brigitte flashing out from under her bloody skirt hem, left-right-left-right, as implacably she dragged me on the mattress down the length of the gallery to where the air was clear enough for me to see the frescoes on the ceiling. We came to a stop underneath a fresco of Minerva, who peered down at me from under the visor of her helmet, looking stern but (as I hoped) approving. Then the door gave way under Brigitte’s pounding and she dragged me straight into Eleanor’s bedchamber.

Eleanor and Frau Heppner were sitting there drinking coffee. Princess Caroline was reading a book aloud. As you might imagine, they were all taken aback; but Frau Heppner, the midwife, took one look at me, muttered something in German, and got to her feet.

Eleanor’s face appeared above me. “Frau Heppner says, ‘At last, the day becomes interesting!’”

People who are especially bad, and know that they are, such as Father Édouard de Gex, may be drawn to religion because they harbor a desperate hope that it has some power to make them virtuous—to name their demons and to cast them out. But if they are as clever as he is, they can find ways to pervert their own faith and make it serve whatever bad intentions they had to begin with. Doctor, I have come to the conclusion that the true benefit of religion is not to make people virtuous, which is impossible, but to put a sort of bridle on the worst excesses of their viciousness.

I do not know Eleanor well. Not well enough to know what vices may be lurking in her soul. She does not disdain religion (as did Jack, who might have benefited from it). Neither does she cling to it morbidly, like Father Édouard de Gex. This gives me hope that in her case religion will do what it is supposed to do, namely, stay her hand when she falls under the sway of some evil impulse. I have no choice but to believe that, for I let her take my baby. The child passed straightaway from the midwife’s hands to Eleanor’s arms, and she gathered it to her bosom as if she knew what she was doing. I did not try to fight this. I was so exhausted I could scarcely move, and afterwards I slept as if I did not care whether I ever woke up or not.

In the plaintext version of my story of labor and delivery, Doctor, I tell the version that everyone at the Binnenhof believes, which is that because of the disgraceful cowardice of Marie and of that midwife, my baby died, and that I would have died, too, if brave Brigitte had not taken me to the room where the good German nurse, Frau Heppner, saw to it that the afterbirth was removed from my womb so that the bleeding stopped, and thereby saved my life.

That is all nonsense. But one paragraph of it is true, and that is where I speak of the physical joy that comes over one’s body when the burden it has borne for nine months is finally let go—only to be replaced a few moments later by a new burden, this one of a spiritual nature. In the plaintext story it is a burden of grief over the death of my child. But in the real story—which is always more complicated—it is a burden of uncertainty, and sadness over tragedies that may never happen. I have gone back to live by myself at the house of Huygens, and the baby remains at the Binnenhof in the care of Frau Heppner and Eleanor. We have already begun to circulate the story that he is an orphan, born to a woman on a canal-boat on the Rhine as she escaped from a massacre in the Palatinate.

It seems likely that I shall live. Then I will take up this baby and try to make my way to London, and build a life for both of us there. If I should sicken and die, Eleanor will take him. But sooner or later, whether tomorrow or twenty years from now, he and I shall be separated in some way, and he shall be out in the world somewhere, living a life known to me only imperfectly. God willing, he will outlive me.

In a few weeks or months, there shall be a parting of ways here at the Hague. The baby and I will go west. Eleanor and Caroline will journey east and enjoy the hospitality, and take part in the schemes of, the women whom you serve.

When, God willing, I reach London I shall write you a letter. If you receive no such letter, it means that while I was recuperating I fell victim to some larger scheme of d’Avaux. He may or may not want the baby dead. He certainly wants me at Versailles, where I shall be none the less in his power for being the unwilling wife of Étienne d’Arcachon. The next few weeks, when I am too weak to move, are the most dangerous time.

There remain only two loose ends to clear up: one, if Étienne is the father, why is the baby flawless? And two, if my cypher has been broken, and my private writings are being read by the cabinet noir, why am I telling you all of these secrets?

Actually there is a third loose end, of a sort, which may have been troubling you: why would I sleep with Étienne in the first place, when I had my pick of ten million horny Frenchmen?

All three of these loose ends may be neatly tied up by a single piece of information. During my time at Versailles I got to know Bonaventure Rossignol, the King’s cryptanalyst. Rossignol, or Bon-bon as I like to call him (hello, Bon-bon!) was sent out to the Rhine front last autumn during the build-up to the invasion of the Palatinate. When I blundered in to the middle of it all, and got into trouble, Bon-bon became aware of it within a few hours, for he was reading everyone’s despatches, and came galloping—literally—to my rescue. It is difficult to tell the story right under present circumstances, and so I’ll jump to the end of it, and admit that his gallantry made my blood hot in a way I had never known before. It seems very crude and simple when I set it down thus, but at root it is a crude and simple thing, no? I attacked him. We made love several times. It was very sweet. But we had to devise a way out for me. Choices were few. The best plan we could come up with was that I seduced Étienne d’Arcachon, or rather stood by numbly in a sort of out-of-body trance while he seduced me. This I then parlayed into an escape north. I wrote it all down in a journal. When I got to the Hague, d’Avaux became aware of the existence of that journal and prevailed upon the King’s cryptanalyst to translate it—which he did, though he left out all the best parts, namely, those passages in which he himself played the romantic hero. He could not make me out to be innocent, for d’Avaux already knew too much, and too many Frenchmen had witnessed my deeds. Instead Bon-bon contrived to tell the story in such as way as to make me into the paramour of Étienne: the true-breeding woman of his, and his family’s, dreams.

I must stop writing now. My body wants to suckle him, and when at night I hear him cry out from across the square, my breasts let down a thin trickle of milk, which I then wash away with a heavier flood of tears. If I were a man, I’d say I was unmanned. As I am a woman, I’ll say I am over-womanned. Good-bye. If when you go back to Hanover you meet a little girl named Caroline, teach her as well as you have taught Sophie and Sophie Charlotte, for I prophesy that she will put both of them in the shade. And if Caroline is accompanied by a little orphan boy, said to have been born on the Rhine, then you shall know his story, and who is his father, and what became of his mother.

Eliza

Bishopsgate

OCTOBER 1689

Thou art too narrow, wretch, to comprehend

Even thy selfe: yea though thou wouldst but bend

To know thy body. Have not all soules thought

For many ages, that our body’is wrought

Of Ayre, and Fire, and other Elements?

And now they thinke of new ingredients,

And one Soule thinkes one, and another way

Another thinkes, and ’tis an even lay.

Knowst thou but how the stone doth enter in

The bladders cave, and never break the skinne?

—JOHN DONNE, Of the Progresse of the Soule, The Second Anniversarie

THE VISITOR—FIFTY-SIX YEARS old, but a good deal more vigorous than the host—feigned aloofness as he watched his bookish minions fan out among the stacks, boxes, shelves, and barrels that now constituted the personal library of Daniel Waterhouse. One of them strayed towards an open keg. His master warned him away with a barrage of clucking, harrumphing, and finger-snaps. “We must assume that anything Mr. Waterhouse has placed in a barrel, is bound for Boston!”

But when the assistants had all found ways to make themselves busy cataloguing and appraising, he turned towards Daniel and foamed up like a bottle of champagne. “Can’t say what an immense pleasure it is to see you, old chap!”

“Really, I do not think my countenance is all that pleasing at the moment, Mr. Pepys, but it is extraordinarily decent of you to fake it so vigorously.”

Samuel Pepys straightened up, blinked once, and parted his lips as if to follow up on the Conversational Opportunity Daniel had just handed him. The hand trembled and crept toward the Pocket where the Stone had lurked these thirty years. But some gentlemanly instinct averted him; he’d not crash the conversation onto that particular Hazard just yet. “I’d have thought you would be in Massachusetts by now, from the things the Fellows were saying.”

“I should have begun making my preparations immediately following the Revolution,” Daniel admitted, “but I delayed until after Jeffreys had his encounter with Mr. Jack Ketch at the Tower—by then, ’twas April, and I discovered that in order to leave London I should have to liquidate my life—which has proved much more of a bother than I had expected. Really, ’tis much more expedient simply to drop dead and let one’s mourners see to all of these tedious dispositions.” Daniel waved a hand over his book-stacks, which were dwindling rapidly as Pepys’s corps of librarian-mercenaries carried them towards their master and piled them at his feet. Pepys glanced at the cover of each and then flicked his eyes this way or that to indicate whether they should be returned, or taken away; the latter went to a hard-bitten old computer who had set himself up with a lap-desk, quill, and inkwell, and was scratching out a bill of particulars.

Daniel’s remark on the convenience of dropping dead laid a second grievous temptation in the way of Mr. Pepys, who had to clench his fist to keep it from stabbing into the pocket. Fortunately he was distracted by an assistant who held before him a large book of engravings of diverse fishes. Pepys frowned at it for a moment. Then he recognized and rejected in the same instant, with revulsion. The R.S. had printed too many copies of it several years ago. Ever since, Fellows had been fobbing copies off on each other, trying to use them as legal tender for payment of old debts, employing them as doorstops, table-levelers, flower-presses, et cetera.

Daniel was not normally a cruel man, but he had been laid flat by nausea for days, and could not resist tormenting Pepys yet a third time: “Thy judgment is swift and remorseless, Mr. Pepys. Each book goes to thy left hand or thy right. When a ship founders in a hurricano, and Saint Peter is suddenly confronted with a long queue of soggy souls, not even he could despatch ’em to their deserved places as briskly as thee.”

“You are toying with me, Mr. Waterhouse; you have penetrated my deception, you know why I have come.”

“Not at all. How goes it with you since the Revolution? I have heard nothing of you.”

“I am retired, Mr. Waterhouse. Retired to the life of a gentleman scholar. My aims now are to assemble a library to rival Sir Elias Ashmole’s, and to try to fill the void that shall be left by your departure from the day-to-day affairs of the Royal Society.”

“You must have been tempted to plunge into the new Court, the new Parliament—”

“Not in the slightest.”

“Really?”

“To move in those circles is a bit like swimming. Swimming with rocks in one’s pockets! It demands ceaseless exertions. To let up is to die. I bequeath that sort of life to younger and more energetic strivers, like your friend the Marquis of Ravenscar. At my age, I am happy to stand on dry land.”

“What about those rocks in your pockets?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I am giving you a cue, Mr. Pepys—the segue you have been looking for.”

“Ah, well done!” said Pepys, and in a lunge he was by Daniel’s bedside, holding the auld Stone right up in his face.

Daniel had never seen it quite this close before, and he noticed now that it had a pair of symmetrically placed protrusions, like little horns, where it had begun growing up into the ureters leading down from Pepys’s kidneys. This made him queasy and so he shifted his attention to Pepys’s face, which was nearly as close.

“BEHOLD! My Death—premature, senseless, avoidable Death—mine, and yours, Daniel. But I hold mine in my hand. Yours is lodged thereabouts—do not flinch, I shall not lay hands on you—I wish only to demonstrate, Daniel, that thy Stone is only two inches or so from my hand when I hold it thus. My Stone is in my hand. A distance of only two inches! Yet for me that small interval amounts to thirty years of added life—three decades and God willing one or two more, of wenching, drinking, singing, and learning. I beg you to make the necessary arrangements, Daniel, and have that rock in your bladder moved two inches to your pocket, where it may lodge for another twenty or thirty years without giving you any trouble.”

“They are a very significant two inches, Mr. Pepys.”

“Obviously.”

“During the Plague Year, when we lodged at Epsom, I held candles for Mr. Hooke while he dissected the bodies of diverse creatures—humans included. By then I had enough skill that I could dissect most parts of most creatures. But I was always baffled by necks, and by those few inches around the bladder. Those parts had to be left to the superior skill of Mr. Hooke. All those orifices, sphincters, glands, frightfully important bits of plumbing—”

At the mention of Hooke’s name, Pepys brightened as if he had been put in mind of something to say; but as Daniel’s anatomy lesson drew on, his expression faded and soured.

“I of course know this,” Pepys finally said, cutting him off.

“Of course.”

“I know it of my own knowledge, and I have had occasion to review and refresh my mastery of the subject whenever some dear friend of mine has died of the Stone—John Wilkins comes to mind—”

“That is low, a very low blow, for you to mention him now!”

“He is gazing down on you from Heaven saying, ‘Can’t wait to see you up here Daniel, but I don’t mind waiting another quarter-century or so, by all means take your time, have that Stone out, and finish your work.’”

“I really think you cannot possibly be any more disgraceful now, Mr. Pepys, and I beg you to leave a sick man alone.”

“All right…let’s to the pub then!”

“I am unwell, thank you.”

“When’s the last time you ate solid food?”

“Can’t remember.”

“Liquid food, then?”

“I’ve no incentive to take on liquids, lacking as I do the means of getting rid of ’em.”

“Come to the pub anyway, we are having a going-away party for you.”

“Call it off, Mr. Pepys. The equinoctial gales have begun. To sail for America now were foolish. I have entered into an arrangement with a Mr. Edmund Palling, an old man of my long acquaintance, who has for many years longed to migrate to Massachusetts with his family. It has been settled that in April of next year we shall board the Torbay, a newly built ship, at Southend-on-Sea; and after a voyage of approximately—”

“You’ll be dead a week from now.”

“I know it.”

“Perfect time for a going-away party then.” Pepys clapped his hands twice. Somehow this caused loud thumping noises to erupt in the hall outside.

“I cannot walk to your carriage, sir.”

“No need,” Pepys said, opening the door to reveal two porters carrying a sedan-chair—one of the smallest type, little more than a sarcophagus on sticks, made so that its occupant could be brought from the street all the way into a house before having to climb out, and therefore popular among shy persons, such as prostitutes.

“Ugh, what will people think?”

“That the Fellows of the Royal Society are entertaining someone extremely mysterious—business as usual!” Pepys answered. “Do not think of our reputations, Daniel, they cannot sink any lower; and we shall have plenty of time, after you are gone, to sort that out.”

Under a flood of mostly non-constructive criticism from Mr. Pepys, the two porters lifted Daniel up out of his bed, turning gray-green as they worked. Daniel remembered the odor that had filled Wilkins’s bedchamber during his final weeks, and supposed that he must smell the same way now. His body was as light and stiff as a fish that has been dried on a rack in the sun. They put him into that black box and latched the door on him, and Daniel’s nostrils filled with the scent of perfumes and powders left behind by the usual clientele. Or maybe that was what ordinary London air smelt like compared to his bed. His Reference Frame began to tilt and sway as they maneuvered him down-stairs.

They took him north beyond the Roman wall, which was the wrong way. But inasmuch as Daniel was facing his own death, it seemed illogical to fret over something as inconsequential as being kidnapped by a couple of sedan-chair carriers. When he wrenched his rigid neck around to peer out through the screened aperture in the back of the box, he saw Pepys’s coach stealing along behind.

As they maneuvered through streets and alleys, diverse views, prospects, and more or less pathetic spectacles presented themselves. But one large, newly-completed, stone building with a cupola kept presenting itself square in their path, closer and closer. It was Bedlam.

Now at this point any other man in London would have commenced screaming and trying to kick his way out, as he’d have realized that he was about to be sent into that place for a stay of unknown duration. But Daniel was nearly unique among Londoners in that he thought of Bedlam not solely as a dumping-ground for lunatics but also as the haunt of his friend and colleague Mr. Robert Hooke. Calmly he allowed himself to be carried in through its front door.

That said, he was a bit relieved when the porters turned away from the locked rooms and conveyed him towards Hooke’s office under the cupola. The howls and screams of the inmates faded to a sort of dim background babble, then were drowned out by more cheerful voices coming through a polished door. Pepys scurried round in front of the sedan chair and flung that door open to reveal everyone: not only Hooke, but Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Isaac’s little shadow Fatio, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Roger Comstock, Christopher Wren, and twenty others—mostly Royal Society regulars, but a few odd men out such as Edmund Palling and Sterling Waterhouse.

They took him out of his sedan chair like a rare specimen being unpacked from its shipping-crate and held him up to accept several waves of cheers and toasts. Roger Comstock (who, since England’s Adult Supervision had all run away to France, was becoming more terribly important every day) stood up on Hooke’s lens-grinding table (Hooke became irate, and had to be restrained by Wren) and commanded silence. Then he held up a beaker of some fluid that was more transparent than water.

“We all know of Mr. Daniel Waterhouse’s high regard and admiration for Alchemy,” Roger began. This was made twice as funny by the exaggerated pomposity of his voice and manner; he was using his speaking-to-Parliament voice. After the laughter and Parliamentary barking noises had died down, he continued, just as gravely: “Alchemy has created many a miracle in our time, and I am assured, by some of its foremost practitioners, that within a few years they will have accomplished what has, for millennia, been the paramount goal of every Alchemist: namely, to bring us immorality!”

Roger Comstock now affected a look of extreme astonishment as the room erupted into true Bedlam. Daniel could not help glancing over at Isaac, who was the last man in the world to find anything amusing in a joke about Alchemy or immorality. But Isaac smiled and exchanged a look with Fatio.

Roger cupped a hand to his ear and listened carefully, then appeared taken aback. “What!? You say, instead, immortality?” Now he waxed indignant, and pointed a finger at Boyle. “Sirrah, my solicitor will call upon you in the morning to see about getting my money back!”

The audience had now been rendered completely helpless, which was the way Roger liked his audiences. They could only wait for him to continue, which he was only too happy to do: “The Chymists have accomplished smaller miracles along their way. Among those who frequent drinking establishments—or so I am told—it is known, empirically, that spiritous liquors are frequently contaminated by unwanted and unwholesome by-products. Of these, the most offensive by far is water, which gorges the bladder and obliges the drinker to step outside, where he is subject to cold, rain, wind, and the disapproving glares of neighbors and passers-by until such time as the bladder has become empty—which in the case of our Guest of Honor may be as long as a fortnight!”

“I can only say in my defense that I have time to sober up during those fortnights,” Daniel returned, “and when I go back inside I find that you have left all the glasses empty, my lord.”

Roger Comstock answered, “It is true. I give the contents of those glasses to our Alchemical brethren, who use them in their lucubrations. They have learnt how to remove water from wine and produce the pure spirit. But this is beginning to sound like a theologickal discourse, and so let me turn to practical matters.” Roger hoisted the beaker up above his head. “Pray, gentlemen, extinguish all smoking materials! We do not wish to set fire to Mr. Hooke’s edifice. The inmates will be so terrified that they will be driven sane, to a man. I hold in my hand the pure spirit I spoke of, and it could burn the place down like Greek fire. It will remain a grave hazard until our Guest of Honor has been so prudent as to sequester it in his belly. Cheers to you, Daniel; and rest assured that this libation will surely go to your head, but not a drop of it will trouble your kidneys!”

Under the center of the cupola they had set up a very stout oaken chair on a platform like a throne, which Daniel thought extremely considerate, as it put his head at or above the level of everyone else’s. It was the first time in ages he’d been able to talk to anyone without feeling as if he were being peered down at. Once he was mounted in that chair, and wedged more or less upright by a few pillows, he did not have to move anything save his jaw and his drinking-arm. The others came round in ones and twos to pay court to him.

Wren spoke of the progress building the great Dome of St. Paul’s. Edmund Palling related details of the voyage to Massachusetts planned for April. Hooke, when not arguing with Huygens about clocks (and fending off bawdy puns on “horology” from Roger Comstock), discoursed of his work on artificial muscles. He did not say that they were for use in flying machines, but Daniel already knew it. Isaac Newton was living in London now, sharing lodgings with Fatio, and had become Member of Parliament for Cambridge. Roger was bursting with scandalous gossip. Sterling was devising some sort of plot with Sir Richard Apthorp, some colossal scheme for financing the eternal follies of Government. Spain might have mines in America and France might have an infinite supply of taxable peasants, but Sterling and Sir Richard seemed to think that England could overcome her lack of both with some metaphysical sleight-of-hand. Huygens came over and told him the melancholy news that the Countess de la Zeur had got pregnant out of wedlock, then lost her baby. In a way, though, Daniel was pleased to hear that she was getting on with her life. He had dreamed once of proposing marriage to her. Looking at his condition now, it was hard to imagine a worse idea.

But thinking about her put him into a sort of reverie from which he did not return. He did not lose consciousness at any one certain point; consciousness slowly leaked out of him, rather, over the course of the evening. Every friend who came to greet him raised his glass, and Daniel raised his beaker in return. The liquor did not trickle down his throat but raced like panic across his mucous membranes, burning his eye-sockets and his eustachian tubes, and seeping direct from there into his brain. His vision faded. The babble and roar of the party put him gently to sleep.

The quiet woke him up. The quiet, and the light. He phant’sied for a moment that they had carried him out to face the Sun. But there were several suns ranged about him in a constellation. He tried to raise first one arm, then the other, to shield his eyes from the glare, but neither limb would move. His legs, too, were frozen in place.

“Perhaps you imagine you are having a cerebral anomaly, a near-death, or even a post-death, experience,” said a voice quietly. It emanated from down low, between Daniel’s knees. “And that several arch-angels are arrayed before you, burning your eyes with their radiance. In that case I would be a shade, a poor gray ghost, and the screams and moans you hear from far off would be the complaints of other departed souls being taken off to Hell.”

Hooke was indeed too dim to see clearly, for the lights were behind him. He was sorting through some instruments and tools on a table that had been set in front of the chair.

Now that Daniel had stopped looking into the bright lights, his eyes had adjusted well enough to see what was restraining him: white linen cord, miles of it, spiraled around his arms and legs, and cunningly interwoven into a sort of custom-built web or net. This was clearly the work of the meticulous Hooke, for even Daniel’s fingers and thumbs had been individually laced down, knuckle by knuckle, to the arms of this chair, which were as massive as the timbers of a gun-carriage.

His mind went back to Epsom during the Plague Year, when Hooke would sit in the sun for an hour watching through a lens as a spider bound up a horse-fly with whorls of gossamer.

The other detail that caught his eye was the gleaming of the small devices that Hooke was sorting out on the table. In addition to the various magnifiers that Hooke always had with him, there was the crooked probe that would be inserted up the length of the patient’s urethra to find and hold the stone. Next to it was the lancet for making the incision through the scrotum and up into the bladder. Then a hook for reaching up through that opening and pulling the stone down and out between the testicles, and an assortment of variously sized and shaped rakes for scraping the inside of the bladder and probing up into the ureters to find and withdraw any smaller stones that might be a-building in the crannies. There was the silver pipe that would be left in his urethra so that the uproar of urine, blood, lymph, and pus would not be dammed up by the inevitable swelling, and there was the fine sheep-gut for sewing him back together, and the curved needles and pliers for drawing it through his flesh. But for some reason none of these sights perturbed him so much as the scale standing by at the end of the table, its polished brass pans flashing inscrutable signals to him as they oscillated on the ends of their gleaming chains. Hooke, ever the empiricist, would of course weigh the stone when it came out.

“In truth you are still alive and will be for many years—more years than I have remaining. There are some who die of shock, it is true, and perhaps that is why all of your friends wished to come and pass time time with you before I started. But, as I recollect, you were shot with a blunderbuss once, and got up and walked away from it. So I am not afraid on that ’count. The bright lights you see are sticks of burning phosphorus. And I am Robert Hooke, than whom no man was ever better suited to perform this work.”

“No, Robert.”

Hooke took advantage of Daniel’s plea to jam a leather strap into his mouth. “You may bite down on that if you wish, or you may spit it out and scream all you like—this is Bedlam, and no one will object. Neither will anyone take heed, or show mercy. Least of all Robert Hooke. For as you know, Daniel, I am utterly lacking in the quality of mercy. Which is well, as it would render me perfectly incompetent to carry out this operation. I told you a year ago, in the Tower, that I would one day repay your friendship by giving you something—a pearl of great price. Now the time has come for me to make good on that promise. The only question left to answer is how much will that pearl weigh, when I have washed your blood off it and let it clatter onto the pan of yonder scale. I am sorry you woke up. I shall not insult you by suggesting that you relax. Please do not go insane. I will see you on the other side of the Styx.”

When he and Hooke and Wilkins had cut open live dogs during the Plague Year, Daniel had looked into their straining brown eyes and tried to fathom what was going on in their minds. He’d decided, in the end, that nothing was, that dogs had no conscious minds, no thought of past or future, living purely in the moment, and that this made it worse for them. Because they could neither look forward to the end of the pain, nor remember times when they had chased rabbits across meadows.

Hooke took up his blade and reached for Daniel.

Dramatis Personae

MEMBERS OF THE NOBILITY went by more than one name: their family surnames and Christian names, but also their titles. For example, the younger brother of King Charles II had the family name Stuart and was baptized James, and so might be called James Stuart; but for most of his life he was the Duke of York, and so might also be referred to, in the third person anyway, as “York” (but in the second person as “Your Royal Highness”). Titles frequently changed during a person’s lifetime, as it was common during this period for commoners to be ennobled, and nobles of lower rank to be promoted. And so not only might a person have several names at any one moment, but certain of those names might change as he acquired new titles through ennoblement, promotion, conquest, or (what might be considered a combination of all three) marriage.

This multiplicity of names will be familiar to many readers who dwell on the east side of the Atlantic, or who read a lot of books like this. To others it may be confusing or even maddening. The following Dramatis Personae may be of help in resolving ambiguities.

If consulted too early and often, it may let cats out of bags by letting the reader know who is about to die, and who isn’t.

The compiler of such a table faces a problem similar to the one that bedeviled Leibniz when trying to organize his patron’s library. The entries (books in Leibniz’s case, personages here) must be arranged in a linear fashion according to some predictable scheme. Below, they are alphabetized by name. But since more than one name applies to many of the characters, it is not always obvious where the entry should be situated. Here I have sacrificed consistency for ease of use by placing each entry under the name that is most commonly used in the book. So, for example, Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, is under “A” rather than “L” because he is almost always called simply the duc d’Arcachon in the story. But Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone, is under “B” because he is usually called Bolstrood. Cross-references to the main entries are spotted under “L” and “P,” respectively.

Entries that are relatively reliable, according to scholarly sources, are in Roman type. Entries in italics contain information that is more likely to produce confusion, misunderstanding, severe injury, and death if relied upon by time travelers visiting the time and place in question.

ANGLESEY, LOUIS: 1648–. Earl of Upnor. Son of Thomas More Anglesey. Courtier and friend of the Duke of Monmouth during the Interregnum and, after the Restoration, at Trinity College, Cambridge.

ANGLESEY, PHILLIP: 1645–. Count Sheerness. Son of Thomas More Anglesey.

ANGLESEY, THOMAS MORE: 1618–1679. Duke of Gunfleet. A leading Cavalier and a member of Charles II’s court in exile during the Interregnum. After the Restoration, one of the A’s in Charles II’s CABAL (which see). Relocated to France during the Popish Plot troubles, died there.

ANNE I OF ENGLAND: 1665–1714. Daughter of James II by his first wife, Anne Hyde.

APTHORP, RICHARD: 1631–. Businessman and banker. One of the A’s in Charles II’s CABAL (which see). A founder of the Bank of England.

D’ARCACHON, DUC: 1634–. Louis-François de Lavardac. A cousin to Louis XIV. Builder, and subsequently Admiral, of the French Navy.

D’ARCACHON, ÉTIENNE: 1662–. Étienne de Lavardac. Son and heir of Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.

D’ARTAGNAN, CHARLES DE BATZ-CASTELMORE: C. 1620–1673. French musketeer and memoirist.

ASHMOLE, SIR ELIAS: 1617–1692. Astrologer, alchemist, autodidact, Comptroller and Auditor of the Excise, collector of curiosities, and founder of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.

D’AVAUX, JEAN-ANTOINE DE MESMES, COMTE: French ambassador to the Dutch Republic, later an advisor to James II during his campaign in Ireland.

BOLSTROOD, GOMER: 1645–. Son of Knott. Dissident agitator, later an immigrant to New England and a furniture maker there.

BOLSTROOD, GREGORY: 1600–1652. Dissident preacher. Founder of the Puritan sect known as the Barkers.

BOLSTROOD, KNOTT: 1628–1682. Son of Gregory. Ennobled as Count Penistone and made Secretary of State by Charles II. The B in Charles II’s CABAL (which see).

BOYLE, ROBERT: 1627–1691. Chemist, member of the Experimental Philosophical Club at Oxford, Fellow of the Royal Society.

VON BOYNEBURG, JOHANN CHRISTIAN: 1622–1672. An early patron of Leibniz in Mainz.

CABAL, THE: unofficial name of Charles II’s post-Restoration cabinet, loosely modeled after Louis XIV’s Conseil d’en-Haut, which is to say that each member had a general area of responsibility, but the boundaries were vague and overlapping (see table, p. 920).

CAROLINE, PRINCESS OF BRANDENBURG-ANSBACH: 1683–1737. Daughter of Eleanor, Princess of Saxe-Eisenach.

CASTLEMAINE, LADY: see Villiers, Barbara.

CATHERINE OF BRAGANZA: 1638–1705. Portuguese wife of Charles II of England.

CHARLES I OF ENGLAND: 1600–1649. Stuart king of England, decapitated at the Banqueting House after the victory of Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell.

CHARLES II OF ENGLAND: 1630–1685. Son of Charles I. Exiled to France and later the Netherlands during the Interregnum. Returned to England 1660 and re-established monarchy (the Restoration).

CHARLES LOUIS, ELECTOR PALATINATE: 1617–1680. Eldest surviving son of the Winter King and Queen, brother of Sophie, father of Liselotte. Re-established his family in the Palatinate following the Thirty Years’ War.

CHARLES, ELECTOR PALATINATE: 1651–1685. Son and heir to Charles Louis. War-gaming enthusiast. Died young of disease contracted during a mock siege.

CHESTER, LORD BISHOP OF: see Wilkins, John.

CHURCHILL, JOHN: 1650–1722. Courtier, warrior, duellist, cocks-man, hero, later Duke of Marlborough.

CHURCHILL, WINSTON: Royalist, Squire, courtier, early Fellow of the Royal Society, father of John Churchill.

CLEVELAND, DUCHESS OF: see Villiers, Barbara.

COMENIUS, JOHN AMOS (JAN AMOS KOMENSKY): 1592–1670. Moravian Pansophist, an inspiration to Wilkins and Leibniz among many others.

THE CABAL

| Responsible party | General area[s] of responsibility | Corresponding roughly to formal position of[*]
C | COMSTOCK, JOHN (EARL OF EPSOM) | (Early in the reign) domestic affairs and justice. Later retired | Lord High Chancellor

A

ANGLESEY, LOUIS (DUKE OF GUNFLEET)

(Early) the Exchequer and (covertly) foreign affairs, especially vis-a-vis France. Later Apthorp came to dominate the former. After Comstock’s retirement, but before the Popish Plot, domestic affairs, and the Navy.

Various, including Lord High Admiral

B | BOLSTROOD, KNOTT (COUNT PENISTONE) | Foreign affairs (ostensibly) | Secretary of State
A | APTHORP, SIR RICHARD | Finance | Chancellor of the Exchequer
L | LEWIS, HUGH (DUKE OF TWEED) | Army | Marshal, or (though no such position existed at the time) Defense Minister

COMSTOCK, CHARLES: 1650–1708. Son of John. Student of Natural Philosophy. After the retirement of John and the death of his elder brother, Richard, an immigrant to Connecticut.

COMSTOCK, JOHN: 1607–1685. Leading Cavalier, and member of Charles II’s court in exile in France. Scion of the so-called Silver branch of the Comstock family. Armaments maker. Early patron of the Royal Society. After the Restoration, the C in Charles II’s CABAL (which see). Father of Richard and Charles Comstock.

COMSTOCK, RICHARD: 1638–1673. Eldest son and heir of John Comstock. Died at naval battle of Sole Bay.

COMSTOCK, ROGER: 1646–. Scion of the so-called Golden branch of the Comstock family. Classmate of Newton, Daniel Waterhouse, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Upnor, and George Jeffreys at Trinity College, Cambridge, during the early 1660s. Later, a successful developer of real estate, and Marquis of Ravenscar.

DE CRÉPY: French family of gentlemen and petty nobles until the Wars of Religion in France, during which time they began to pursue a strategy of aggressive upward mobility. They intermarried in two different ways with the older but declining de Gex family. One of them (Anne Marie de Crépy, 1653–) married the much older duc d’Oyonnax and survived him by many years. Her sister (Charlotte Adélaide de Crépy 1656–) married the Marquis d’Ozoir.

CROMWELL, OLIVER: 1599–1658. Parliamentary leader, general of the anti-Royalist forces during the English Civil War, scourge of Ireland, and leading man of England during the Commonwealth, or Interregnum.

CROMWELL, ROGER: 1626–1712. Son and (until the Restoration) successor of his much more formidable father, Oliver.

EAUZE, CLAUDE: see d’Ozoir, Marquis.

ELEANOR, PRINCESS OF SAXE-EISENACH: D. 1696. Mother (by her first husband, the Margrave of Ansbach) of Caroline, Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach. Late in life, married to the Elector of Saxony.

ELISABETH CHARLOTTE: 1652–1722. Liselotte, La Palatine. Known as Madame in the French court. Daughter of Charles Louis, Elector Palatinate, and niece of Sophie. Married Philippe, duc d’Orléans, the younger brother of Louis XIV. Spawned the House of Orléans.

EPSOM, EARL OF: see Comstock, John.

FREDERICK V, ELECTOR PALATINATE: 1596–1632. King of Bohemia (“Winter King”) briefly in 1618, lived and died in exile during the Thirty Years’ War. Father of many princes, electors, duchesses, etc., including Sophie.

FREDERICK WILLIAM, ELECTOR OF BRANDENBURG: 1620–1688. Known as the Great Elector. After the Thirty Years’ War created a standing professional army, small but effective. By playing the great powers of the day (Sweden, France, and the Hapsburgs) against each other, consolidated the scattered Hohenzollern fiefdoms into a coherent state, Brandenburg-Prussia.

DE GEX: A petty-noble family of Jura, which dwindled until the early seventeenth century, when the two surviving children of Henry, Sieur de Gex (1595–1660), Francis and Louise-Anne, each married a member of the more sanguine family de Crépy. The children of Francis carried on the de Gex name. Their youngest was Édouard de Gex. The children of Louise-Anne included Anne Marie de Crépy (later duchesse d’Oyonnax) and Charlotte Adélaide de Crépy (later marquise d’Ozoir).

DE GEX, FATHER ÉDOUARD: 1663–. Youngest offspring of Marguerite Diane de Crépy (who died giving birth to him) and Francis de Gex, who was thirty-eight years old and in declining health. Raised at a school and orphanage in Lyons by Jesuits, who found in him an exceptionally gifted pupil. Became a Jesuit himself at the the age of twenty. Was posted to Versailles, where he became a favorite of Mademoiselle. de Maintenon.

GREAT ELECTOR: see Frederick William.

GUNFLEET, DUKE OF: see Anglesey, Thomas More.

GWYN, NELL: 1650–1687. Fruit retailer and comedienne, one of the mistresses of Charles II.

HAM, THOMAS: 1603–. Money-goldsmith, husband of Mayflower Waterhouse, leading man of Ham Bros. Goldsmiths. Created Earl of Walbrook by Charles II.

HAM, WILLIAM: 1662–. Son of Thomas and Mayflower.

HENRIETTA ANNE: 1644–1670. Sister of Charles II and James II of England, first wife of Philippe, duc d’Orléans, Louis XIV’s brother.

HENRIETTA MARIA: 1609–1669. Sister of King Louis XIII of France, wife of King Charles I of England, mother of Charles II and James II of England.

HOOKE, ROBERT: 1635–1703. Artist, linguist, astronomer, geometer, microscopist, mechanic, horologist, chemist, optician, inventor, philosopher, botanist, anatomist, etc. Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society, Surveyor of London after the fire. Friend and collaborator of Christopher Wren.

HUYGENS, CHRISTIAAN: 1629–1695. Great Dutch astronomer, horologist, mathematician, and physicist.

HYDE, ANNE: 1637–1671. First wife of James, Duke of York (later James II). Mother of two English queens: Mary (of William and Mary) and Anne.

JAMES I OF ENGLAND: 1566–1625. First Stuart king of England.

JAMES II OF ENGLAND: 1633–1701. Duke of York for much of his early life. Became King of England upon the death of his brother in 1685. Deposed in the Glorious Revolution, late 1688–early 1689.

JAMES VI OF SCOTLAND: see James I of England.

JEFFREYS, GEORGE: 1645–1689. Welsh gentleman, lawyer, solicitor general to the Duke of York, lord chief justice, and later lord chancellor under James II. Created Baron Jeffreys of Wem in 1685.

JOHANN FRIEDRICH: 1620–1679. Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, book collector, a patron of Leibniz.

JOHN FREDERICK: see Johann Friedrich.

KÉROUALLE, LOUISE DE: 1649–1734. Duchess of Portsmouth. One of the mistresses of Charles II.

KETCH, JACK: Name given to executioners.

LAVARDAC: A branch of the Bourbon family producing various hereditary dukes and peers of France, including the duc d’Arcachon (see).

LEFEBURE: French alchemist/apothecary who moved to London at the time of the Restoration to provide services to the Court.

LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM: 1646–1716. Refer to novel.

LESTRANGE, SIR ROGER: 1616–1704. Royalist pamphleteer and (after the Restoration) Surveyor of the Imprimery, hence chief censor for Charles II. Nemesis of Milton. Translator.

LEWIS, HUGH: 1625–. General. Created Duke of Tweed by Charles II after the Restoration, in recognition of his crossing the River Tweed with his regiment (thenceforth called the Coldstream Guards) in support of the resurgent monarchy. The L in Charles II’s CABAL (which see).

LISELOTTE: see Elisabeth Charlotte.

LOCKE, JOHN: 1632–1704. Natural Philosopher, physician, political advisor, philosopher.

DE MAINTENON, MME.: 1635–1719. Mistress, then second and last wife of Louis XIV.

MARY: 1662–1694. Daughter of James II and Anne Hyde. After the Glorious Revolution (1689), Queen of England with her husband, William of Orange.

MARY OF MODENA: 1658–1718. Second and last wife of James II of England. Mother of James Stuart, aka “the Old Pretender.”

MAURICE: 1621–1652. One of the numerous princely offspring of the Winter Queen. Active as a Cavalier in the English Civil War.

DE MESMES, JEAN-ANTOINE: see d’Avaux.

MINETTE: see Henrietta Anne.

MONMOUTH, DUKE OF (JAMES SCOTT): 1649–1685. Bastard of Charles II by one Lucy Walter.

MORAY, ROBERT: C. 1608–1673. Scottish soldier, official, and courtier, a favorite of Charles II. Early Royal Society figure, probably instrumental in securing the organization’s charter.

NEWTON, ISAAC: 1642–1727. Refer to novel.

OLDENBURG, HENRY: 1615–1677. Emigrant from Bremen. Secretary of the Royal Society, publisher of the Philosophical Transactions, prolific correspondent.

D’OYONNAX, ANNE MARIE DE CRÉPY, DUCHESSE: 1653–. Lady in Waiting to the Dauphine, Satanist, poisoner.

D’OZOIR, CHARLOTTE ADÉLAIDE DE CRÉPY, MARQUISE: 1656–. Wife of Claude Eauze, Marquis d’Ozoir.

D’OZOIR, CLAUDE EAUZE, MARQUIS: 1650–. Illegitimate son of Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, by a domestic servant, Luce Eauze. Traveled to India in late 1660s as part of ill-fated French East India Company expedition. In 1674, when noble titles went on sale to raise funds for the Dutch war, he purchased the title Marquis d’Ozoir using a loan from his father secured by revenues from his slaving operations in Africa.

PENISTONE, COUNT: see Bolstrood, Knott.

PEPYS, SAMUEL: 1633–1703. Clerk, Administrator to the Royal Navy, Member of Parliament, Fellow of the Royal Society, diarist, man about town.

PETERS, HUGH: 1598–1660. Fulminant Puritan preacher. Spent time in Holland and Massachusetts, returned to England, became Cromwell’s chaplain. Poorly thought of by Irish for his involvement with massacres at Drogheda and Wexford. For his role in the regicide of Charles I, executed by Jack Ketch, using a knife, in 1660.

PHILIPPE, DUC D’ORLÉANS: 1640–1701. Younger brother of King Louis XIV of France. Known as Monsieur to the French Court. Husband first of Henrietta Anne of England, later of Liselotte. Progenitor of the House of Orléans.

PORTSMOUTH, DUCHESS OF: see Kéroualle, Louise de.

QWGHLM: Title bestowed on Eliza by William of Orange.

RAVENSCAR, MARQUIS OF: see Comstock, Roger.

ROSSIGNOL, ANTOINE: 1600–1682. “France’s first full-time cryptologist” (David Kahn, The Codebreakers, which buy and read). A favorite of Richelieu, Louis XIII, Mazarin, and Louis XIV.

ROSSIGNOL, BONAVENTURE: D. 1705. Cryptanalyst to Louis XIV following the death of his father, teacher, and collaborator Antoine.

RUPERT: 1619–1682. One of the numerous princely offspring of the Winter Queen. Active as a Cavalier in the English Civil War.

DE RUYTER, MICHIEL ADRIAANSZOON: 1607–1676. Exceptionally gifted Dutch admiral. Particularly effective against the English.

VON SCHÖNBORN, JOHANN PHILIPP: 1605–1673. Elector and Archbishop of Mainz, statesman, diplomat, and early patron of Leibniz.

SHEERNESS, COUNT: see Anglesey, Phillip.

SOPHIE: 1630–1714. Youngest daughter of the Winter Queen. Married Ernst August, who later became duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg. Later the name of this principality was changed to Hanover, and Ernst August and Sophie elevated to the status of Elector and Electress. From 1707 onwards, she was first in line to the English throne.

SOPHIE CHARLOTTE: 1668–1705. Eldest daughter of Sophie. Married Frederick III, elector of Brandenburg and son of the Great Elector. In 1701, when Brandenburg-Prussia was elevated to the status of a kingdom by the Holy Roman Emperor, she became the first Queen of Prussia and spawned the House of Prussia.

STUART, ELIZABETH: 1596–1662. Daughter of King James I of England, sister of Charles I. Married Frederick, Elector Palatinate. Proclaimed Queen of Bohemia briefly in 1618, hence her sobriquet “the Winter Queen.” Lived in exile during the Thirty Years’ War, mostly in the Dutch Republic. Outlived her husband by three decades. Mother of many children, including Sophie.

STUART, JAMES: 1688–1766. Controversial but probably legitimate son of James II by his second wife, Mary of Modena. Raised in exile in France. Following the death of his father, styled James III by the Jacobite faction in England and “the OId Pretender” by supporters of the Hanoverian succession.

UPNOR, EARL OF: see Anglesey, Louis.

VILLIERS, BARBARA (LADY CASTLEMAINE, DUCHESS OF CLEVELAND): 1641–1709. Indefatigable mistress of many satisfied Englishmen of high rank, including Charles II and John Churchill.

WALBROOK, EARL OF: see Ham, Thomas.

WATERHOUSE, ANNE: 1649–. Née Anne Robertson. English colonist in Massachusetts. Wife of Praise-God Waterhouse.

WATERHOUSE, BEATRICE: 1642–. Née Beatrice Durand. Huguenot wife of Sterling.

WATERHOUSE, CALVIN: 1563–1605. Son of John, father of Drake.

WATERHOUSE, DANIEL: 1646–. Youngest (by far) child of Drake by his second wife, Hortense.

WATERHOUSE, DRAKE: 1590–1666. Son of Calvin, father of Raleigh, Sterling, Mayflower, Oliver, and Daniel. Independent trader, political agitator, leader of Pilgrims and Dissidents.

WATERHOUSE, ELIZABETH: 1621–. Née Elizabeth Flint. Wife of Raleigh Waterhouse.

WATERHOUSE, EMMA: 1656–. Daughter of Raleigh and Elizabeth.

WATERHOUSE, FAITH: 1689–. Née Faith Page. English colonist in Massachusetts. (Much younger) wife of Daniel, mother of Godfrey.

WATERHOUSE, GODFREY WILLIAM: 1708–. Son of Daniel and Faith in Boston.

WATERHOUSE, HORTENSE: 1625–1658. Née Hortense Bowden. Second wife (m. 1645) of Drake Waterhouse, and mother of Daniel.

WATERHOUSE, JANE: 1599–1643. Née Jane Wheelwright. A pilgrim in Leiden. First wife (m. 1617) of Drake, mother of Raleigh, Sterling, Oliver, and Mayflower.

WATERHOUSE, JOHN: 1542–1597. Devout early English Protestant. Decamped to Geneva during reign of Bloody Mary. Father of Calvin Waterhouse.

WATERHOUSE, MAYFLOWER: 1621–. Daughter of Drake and Jane, wife of Thomas Ham, mother of William Ham.

WATERHOUSE, OLIVER I: 1625–1646. Son of Drake and Jane. Died in Battle of Newark during English Civil War.

WATERHOUSE, OLIVER II: 1653–. Son of Raleigh and Elizabeth.

WATERHOUSE, PRAISE-GOD: 1649–. Eldest son of Raleigh and Elizabeth. Immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony. Father of Wait Still Waterhouse.

WATERHOUSE, RALEIGH: 1618–. Eldest son of Drake, father of Praise-God, Oliver II, and Emma.

WATERHOUSE, STERLING: 1630–. Son of Drake. Real estate developer. Later ennobled as Earl of Willesden.

WATERHOUSE, WAIT STILL: 1675–. Son of Praise-God in Boston. Graduate of Harvard College. Congregational preacher.

WEEM, WALTER: 1652–. Husband of Emma Waterhouse.

WHEELWRIGHT, JANE: see Waterhouse, Jane.

WILHELMINA CAROLINE: see Caroline, Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach.

WILKINS, JOHN (BISHOP OF CHESTER): 1614–1672. Cryptographer. Science fiction author. Founder, first chairman, and first secretary of the Royal Society. Private chaplain to Charles Louis, Elector Palatinate. Warden of Wadham (Oxford) and Master of Trinity (Cambridge). Prebendary of York, Dean of Ripon, holder of many other ecclesiastical appointments. Friend of Nonconformists, Supporter of Freedom of Conscience.

WILLESDEN, EARL OF: see Waterhouse, Sterling.

WILLIAM II OF ORANGE: 1626–1650. Father of the better-known William III of Orange. Died young (of smallpox).

WILLIAM III OF ORANGE: 1650–1702. With Mary, daugher of James II, co-sovereign of England from 1689.

WINTER KING: see Frederick V.

WINTER QUEEN: see Stuart, Elizabeth.

WREN, CHRISTOPHER: 1632–1723. Prodigy, Natural Philosopher, and Architect, a member of the Experimental Philosophical Club and later Fellow of the Royal Society.

YORK, DUKE OF: The traditional title of whomever is next in line to the English throne. During much of this book, James, brother to Charles II.

DE LA ZEUR: Eliza was created Countess de la Zeur by Louis XIV.

Acknowledgments

A WORK LIKE THIS ONE hangs in an immense web of dependencies that cannot be done justice by a brief acknowledgments page. Such a project would be inconceivable were it not for the efforts of scholars and scientists dating back to the era of Wilkins and Comenius, and extending into the present day. Not to say as much would be unjust. But in a work of fiction, which necessarily strays from historical and scientific truth, acknowledgments can backfire. Serious scholars mentioned below should be applauded for their good work, never blamed for my tawdry divagations.

The project would not have happened it all were it not for serendipitous conversations several years ago with George Dyson and Steven Horst.

The following scholars (again in alphabetical order) have published work that was essential to the completion of this project. While eager to give them due credit, I am aware that they may be chagrined by my work’s many excursions from historical truth. Readers who want to know what really happened should buy and read their books, while blaming the errors herein on me: Julian Barbour, Gale E. Christianson, A. Rupert Hall, David Kahn, Hans Georg Schulte-Albert, Lee Smolin, Richard Westfall, D. T. Whiteside.

Particular mention must go to Fernand Braudel, to whose work this book may be considered a discursive footnote. Many other scholarly works were consulted during this project, and space does not permit mentioning them here. Of particular note is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough, which people who are really interested in this period of history should read, and people who think that I am too long-winded should weigh.

Special thanks to Béla and Gabriella Bollobás, Doug Carlston, and Tomi Pierce for providing me with access to places I could not have seen (Bollobás) or worked in (Carlston/Pierce) otherwise. George Jewsbury and Catherine Durandin and Hugo Durandin DeSousa provided timely assistance. Greg Bear lent me two books; I promise to return them! And for talking to me about gunpowder, and listening equably to the occasional rant about Alchemy, thanks to Marco Kaltofen, P. E., of the Natick Indian Plantation and Needham West Militia Companies.

Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience, were Jennifer Hershey, Liz Darhansoff, Jennifer Brehl, and Ravi Mirchandani.

Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate draft and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees. More detail is to be found on the website BaroqueCycle.com.

Copyright

Refracting sphere illustration from the facsimile edition of Robert Hooke’s Philosophical Experiments and Observations, edited by W. Derham.

Published by Frank Cass & Co., Ltd., London, 1967.

Flea illustration from Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia reproduced by permission of Octavo, www.octavo.com.

Illustrations from Isaac Newton’s 1729 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy courtesy of Primary Source Microfilm.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

QUICKSILVER. Copyright © 2003 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780061792779

Version 12132013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

FIRST EDITION

Stephenson, Neal.

Quicksilver / Neal Stephenson.—
p. cm.—(The Baroque cycle; v. 1)

ISBN 978-0-380-97742-0

1. Adventures and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Seventeenth century—Fiction.

3. Eighteenth century—Fiction. 4. Scientists—Fiction. 5. Alchemists—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3569.T3868 Q53 2003

813’.54—dc21 2002035752

Map

Dedication

To Maurine

Thanks

THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE TO BE THANKED
for their help in the creation of the Baroque Cycle of which this book, The Confusion, is the second volume. Accordingly, please see the acknowledgments in Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle.

Author’s Note

THIS VOLUME CONTAINS two novels, Bonanza and Juncto, that take place concurrently during the span 1689–1702. Rather than present one, then the other (which would force the reader to jump back to 1689 in mid-volume), I have interleaved sections of one with sections of the other so that the two stories move forward in synchrony. It is hoped that being thus con-fused shall render them the less confusing to the Reader.

Epigraph

When at the first I took my pen in hand,

Thus for to write, I did not understand

That I at all should make a little book

In such a mode; nay, I had undertook

To make another, which when almost done,

Before I was aware, I this begun.

—JOHN BUNYAN,The Pilgrim’s Progress,
THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY FOR HIS BOOK

Contents

Map

Dedication

Thanks

Author’s Note

Epigraph

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Barbary Coast

Book 5: The Juncto

Dundalk, Ireland

The Dunkerque Residence of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Throne Room of the Pasha, the Kasba, Algiers

Book 5: The Juncto

Château Juvisy

Dunkerque Residence of the d’Ozoirs

Cap Gris-Nez, France

Letter from Daniel Waterhouse to Eliza

Letter from Eliza to Daniel

La Dunette

BOOK 4: BONANZA

The Gulf of Cadiz

Off Malta

Book 5: The Juncto

Eliza to Leibniz

Leibniz to Eliza

Schloß Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony

Ireland

A Hay-rick, St.-Malo, France

Château d’Arcachon, St.-Malo, France

Eliza to Lothar von Hacklheber

Eliza to King William III of England

Eliza to Monsieur le Chevalier d’Erquy

Café Esphahan, Rue de l’Orangerie, Versailles

Daniel Waterhouse to Eliza

Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar, to Eliza

Leibniz to Eliza

Eliza to Samuel de la Vega

Eliza to the Marquis of Ravenscar

Eliza to Samuel Bernard

Samuel Bernard to Eliza

Cabin of Météore, off Cherbourg, France

London

Gresham’s College

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Ahmadabad, the Mogul Empire

The Surat-Broach Road, Hindoostan

Book 5: The Juncto

Mrs. Bligh’s Coffee-house, London

Bonaventure Rossignol to Eliza

Eliza to Rossignol

Eliza to Pontchartrain

Rossignol to Eliza

Pretzsch, Saxony

Pontchartrain to Eliza

Eliza to Pontchartrain

The Dower-house of Pretzsch

Jean Bart to Eliza

Leipzig

Eliza to Jean Bart

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Southern Fringes of the Mogul Empire

Malabar

Book 5: The Juncto

The Thames

Dunkirk

An Abandoned Church in France

Winter Quarters of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards Near Namur

The Track to Pretzsch

A House Overlooking the Meuse Valley

Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Japan

Book 5: The Juncto

Berlin

BOOK 4: BONANZA

The Pacific Ocean

Book 5: The Juncto

Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin

BOOK 4: BONANZA

Mexico City, New Spain

Mexico City

Qwghlm

Book 5: The Juncto

Hôtel Arcachon

BOOK 4: BONANZA

En Route from Paris to London

Credits

Copyright

Book 4

Bonanza

So great is the dignity and excellency of humane nature, and so active those sparks of heavenly fire it partakes of, that they ought to be look’d upon as very mean, and unworthy the name of men, who thro’ pusillanimity, by them call’d prudence, or thro’ sloth, which they stile moderation, or else through avarice, to which they give the name of frugality, at any rate withdraw themselves from performing great and noble actions.

—GIOVANNI FRANCESCO GEMELLI CARERI,
A Voyage Round the World

Barbary Coast

OCTOBER 1689

HE WAS NOT MERELY AWAKENED, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream. He could not remember any of the details of the dream now that it was over. But he had the idea that it had entailed much rowing and scraping, and little else; so he did not object to being roused. Even if he had been of a mind to object, he’d have had the good sense to hold his tongue, and keep his annoyance well-hid beneath a simpering merry-Vagabond façade. Because what was doing the waking, today, was the most tremendous damned noise he’d ever heard—it was some godlike Force not to be yelled at or complained to, at least not right away.

Cannons were being fired. Never so many, and rarely so large, cannons. Whole batteries of siege-guns and coastal artillery discharging en masse, ranks of ’em ripple-firing along wall-tops. He rolled out from beneath the barnacle-covered hull of a beached ship, where he had apparently been taking an afternoon nap, and found himself pinned to the sand by a downblast of bleak sunlight. At this point a wise man, with experience in matters military, would have belly-crawled to some suitable enfilade. But the beach all round him was planted with hairy ankles and sandaled feet; he was the only one prone or supine.

Lying on his back, he squinted up through the damp, sand-caked hem of a man’s garment: a loose robe of open-weave material that laved the wearer’s body in a gold glow, so that he could look directly up into the blind eye of the man’s penis—which had been curiously modified. Inevitably, he lost this particular stare-down. He rolled back the other way, performing one and a half uphill revolutions, and clambered indignantly to his feet, forgetting about the curve of the hull and therefore barking his scalp on a phalanx of barnacles. Then he screamed as loud as he could, but no one heard him. He didn’t even hear himself. He experimented with plugging his ears and screaming, but even then he heard naught but the sound of the cannons.

Time to take stock of matters—to bring the situation in hand. The hull was blocking his view. Other than it, all he could see was a sparkling bay, and a stony break-water. He strode into the sea, watched curiously by the man with the mushroom-headed yard, and, once he was out knee-deep, turned around. What he saw then made it more or less obligatory to fall right on his arse.

This bay was spattered with bony islets, close to shore. Rising from one of them was a squat round fortress that (if he was any judge of matters architectural) had been built at grand expense by Spaniards in desperate fear of their lives. And apparently those fears had been well founded because the top of that fort was all fluttery with green banners bearing silver crescent moons. The fort had three tiers of guns on it (more correctly, the fort was three tiers of guns) and every one of ’em looked, and sounded, like a sixty-pounder, meaning that it flung a cannonball the size of a melon for several miles. This fort was mostly shrouded in powder-smoke, with long bolts of flame jabbing out here and there, giving it the appearance of a thunderstorm that had been rammed and tamped into a barrel.

A white stone breakwater connected this fort to the mainland, which, at first glance, impressed him as a sheer stone wall rising forty or feet from this narrow strip of muddy beach, and crowded with a great many more huge cannons, all being fired just as fast as they could be swabbed out and stuffed with powder.

Beyond the wall rose a white city. Being as he was at the base of a rather high wall, he wouldn’t normally expect to be able to see anything on the opposite side thereof, save the odd cathedral-spire poking out above the battlements. But this city appeared to’ve been laboriously spackled onto the side of a precipitous mountain whose slopes rose directly from the high-tide mark. It looked a bit like a wedge of Paris tilted upwards by some tidy God who wanted to make all the shit finally run out of it. At the apex, where one would look for whatever crowbar or grapple the hypothetical God would’ve used to accomplish this prodigy, was, instead, another fortress—this one of a queer Moorish design, surrounded with its own eight-sided wall that was, inevitably, a-bristle with even more colossal cannons, as well as mortars for heaving bombs out to sea. All of those were being fired, too—as were all of the guns spraying from the several additional fortresses, bastions, and gun-platforms distributed around the city’s walls.

During rare intervals between the crushing thuds of the sixty-pounders, he could hear peppery waves of pistol-and musket-fire rolling around the place, and now (beginning to advert on smaller things) he saw a sort of smoky, crowded lawn growing out of the wall-tops—save instead of grass-blades this lawn was made up of men. Some were dressed in black, and some in white, but most wore more colorful costumes: baggy white trousers belted with brilliantly hued swathes of silk, and brightly embroidered vests—frequently, several such vests nested—and turbans or red cylindrical hats. Most of those who were dressed after this fashion had a pistol in each hand and were firing them into the air or reloading.

The man with the outlandish johnson—swarthy, with wavy black hair in a curious ’do, and a knit skullcap—hitched up his robe, and sloshed out to see if he was all right. For he still had both hands clamped over the sides of his head, partly to stanch the bleeding of the barnacle-gashes, and partly to keep the sound from blowing the top of his skull out to sea. The man peered down and looked into his eyes and moved his lips. The look on his face was serious, but ever so slightly amused.

He reached up and grabbed this fellow’s hand and used it to haul himself up to his feet. Both men’s hands were so heavily callused that they could practically catch musket-balls out of the air, and their knuckles were either bleeding, or else recently scabbed over.

He had stood up because he wanted to see what was the target of all of this shooting, and how it could possibly continue to exist. A fleet of three or four dozen ships was arrayed in the harbor, and (no surprise here) they were all firing their guns. But the ones that looked like Dutch frigates were not firing at the ones that looked like heathen galleys, nor vice versa, and none of them seemed to be firing at the vertiginous white city. All of the ships, even the ones that were of European design, flew crescent-moon banners.

Finally his eye settled on one ship, which was unique in that she was the only vessel or building in sight that was not vomiting smoke and spitting flame in all directions. This one was a galley, very much in the Mohametan style, but extraordinarily fine, at least to anyone who found whorish decoration appealing—her non-functioning bits were a mess of gold-leafed gewgaws that glowed in the sun, even through drifting banks of powder-smoke. Her lateen sail had been struck and she was proceeding under oar-power, but in a stately manner. He found himself examining the movements of her oars just a bit too closely, and admiring the uniformity of the strokes more than was healthy for a Vagabond in his right mind: leading to the questions, was he still a Vagabond, and was he in his right mind? He recalled—dimly—that he had lived in Christendom during one part of his sorry life, and had been well advanced in the losing of his mind to the French Pox—but he seemed all right now, save that he couldn’t recall where he was, how he’d gotten there, or anything at all of recent events. And the very meaning of that word “recent” was called into question by the length of his beard, which reached down to his stomach.

The intensity of the cannonade waxed, if such a thing were possible, and reached a climax as the gold-plated galley drew up alongside a stone pier that projected into the harbor not awfully far away. Then, all of a sudden, the noise stopped.

“What in Christ’s name—” he began, but the rest of his utterance was drowned out by a sound that—compared to hundreds of cannons firing at once—made up in shrillness what it lacked in volume. Listening to it in amazement, he began to detect certain resemblances between it and musick. Rhythm was there, albeit of an overly complicated and rambunctious nature, and melody, too, though it was not cast in any civilized mode, but had the wild keening intonations of Irish tunes—and then some. Harmony, sweetness of tone, and other qualities normally associated with musick, were absent. For these Turks or Moors or whatever they were had no interest in flutes, viols, theorbos, nor anything else that made a pleasing sound. Their orchestra consisted of drums, cymbals, and a hideous swarm of giant war-oboes hammered out of brass and fitted with screeching, buzzing reeds, the result sounding like nothing so much as an armed assault on a belfry infested with starlings.

“I owe an ’umble apology to every Scotsman I’ve ever met,” he shouted, “for it isn’t true, after all, that their music is the most despicable in the world.” His companion cocked an ear in his direction but heard little, and understood less.

Now, essentially all of the city was protected within that wall, which shamed any in Christendom. But on this side of it there were various breakwaters, piers, gun-emplacements, and traces of mucky beach, and everything that was capable of bearing a man’s weight, or a horse’s, was doing so—covered by ranks of men in divers magnificent and outlandish uniforms. In other words, all the makings of a parade were laid out here. And indeed, after a lot of bellowing back and forth and playing of hellish musicks and firing of yet more guns, various important Turks (he was growingly certain that these were Turks) began to ride or march through a large gate let into the mighty Wall, disappearing into the city. First went an impossibly magnificent and fearsome warrior on a black charger, flanked by a couple of kettledrum-pounding “musicians.” The beat of their drums filled him with an unaccountable craving to reach out and grope for an oar.

“That, Jack, is the Agha of the Janissaries,” said the circumcised one.

This handle of “Jack” struck him as familiar and, in any case, serviceable. So Jack he was.

Behind the kettledrums rode a graybeard, almost as magnificent to look at as the Agha of the Janissaries, but not so heavily be-weaponed. “The First Secretary,” said Jack’s companion. Next, following on foot, a couple of dozen more or less resplendent officers (“the aghabashis”) and then a whole crowd of fellows with magnificent turbans adorned with first-rate ostrich plumes—“the bolukbashis,” it was explained.

Now it had become plain enough that this fellow standing next to Jack was the sort who never tired of showing off his great knowledge, and of trying to edify lowlives such as Jack. Jack was about to say that he neither wanted nor needed edification, but something stopped him. It might’ve been the vague, inescapable sense that he knew this fellow, and had for quite a while—which, if true, might mean that the other was only trying to make conversation. And it might’ve been that Jack didn’t know quite where to begin, language-wise. He knew somehow that the bolukbashis were equivalent to captains, and that the aghabashis were one rank above the bolukbashis, and that the Agha of the Janissaries was a General. But he was not sure why he should know the meanings of such heathen words. So Jack shut up, long enough for various echelons of odabashis (lieutenants) and vekilhardjis (sergeants-major) to form up and concatenate themselves onto the end of the parade. Then diverse hocas such as the salt-hoca, customs-hoca, and weights-and-measures-hoca, all following the hoca-in-chief, then the sixteen cavuses in their long emerald robes with crimson cummerbunds, their white leather caps, their fantastickal upturned moustaches, and their red hobnailed boots tromping fearsomely over the stones of the quay. Then the kadis, muftis, and imams had to do their bit. Finally a troop of gorgeous Janissaries marched off the deck of the golden galley, followed by a solitary man swathed in many yards of chalk-white fabric that had been gathered by means of diverse massive golden jeweled brooches into a coherent garment, though it probably would’ve fallen off of him if he hadn’t been riding on a white war-horse with pink eyes, bridled and saddled with as much in the way of silver and gems as it could carry without tripping over the finery.

“The new Pasha—straight from Constantinople!”

“I’ll be damned—is that why they were firing all those guns?”

“It is traditional to greet a new Pasha with a salute of fifteen hundred guns.”

“Traditional where?”

“Here.”

“And here is—?”

“Forgive me, I forget you have not been right in the head. The city that rises up on yonder mountain is the Invincible Bastion of Islam—the Place of Everlasting Vigil and Combat against the Infidel—the Whip of Christendom, Terror of the Seas, Bridle of Italy and Spain, Scourge of the Islands: who holds the sea under her laws and makes all nations her righteous and lawful prey.”

“Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it?”

“The English name is Algiers.”

“Well, in Christendom I have seen entire wars prosecuted with less expenditure of gunpowder than Algiers uses to say hello to a Pasha—so perhaps your words are not mere bravado. What language are we speaking, by the way?”

“It is called variously Franco, or Sabir, which in Spanish means ‘to know.’ Some of it comes from Provençe, Spain, and Italy, some from Arabic and Turkish. Your Sabir has much French in it, Jack, mine has more Spanish.”

“Surely you’re no Spaniard—!”

The man bowed, albeit without doffing his skullcap, and his forelocks tumbled from his shoulders and dangled in space. “Moseh de la Cruz, at your service.”

“ ‘Moses of the Cross?’ What the hell kind of name is that?”

Moseh did not appear to find it especially funny. “It is a long story—even by your standards, Jack. Suffice it to say that the Iberian Peninsula is a complicated place to be Jewish.”

“How’d you end up here?” Jack began to ask; but he was interrupted by a large Turk, armed with a bull’s penis, who was waving at Jack and Moseh, commanding them to get out of the surf and return to work—the siesta was finis and it was time for trabajo now that the Pasha had ridden through the Beb and entered into the cité.

The trabajo consisted of scraping the barnacles from the hull of the adjacent galley, which had been beached and rolled over to expose its keel. Jack, Moseh, and a few dozen other slaves (for there was no getting round the fact that they were slaves) got to work with various rude iron tools while the Turk prowled up and down the length of the hull brandishing that ox-pizzle. High above them, behind the wall, they could hear a sort of rolling fusillade wandering around the city as the parade continued; the thump of the kettledrums, and the outcry of the siege-oboes and assault-bassoons was, mercifully, deflected heavenwards by the city walls.

“It is true, I think—you are cured.”

“Never mind what your Alchemists and Chirurgeons will tell you—there is no cure for the French Pox. I’m having a brief interval of sanity, nothing more.”

“On the contrary—it is claimed, by certain Arab and Jewish doctors of great distinction, that the aforesaid Pox may be purged from the body, completely and permanently, if the patient is suffered to run an extremely high fever for several consecutive days.”

“I don’t feel good, mind you, but I don’t feel feverish.”

“But a few weeks ago, you and several others came down with violent cases of la suette anglaise.”

“Never heard of any such disease—and I’m English, mind you.”

Moseh de la Cruz shrugged, as best a man could when hacking at a cluster of barnacles with a pitted and rusted iron hoe. “It is a well-known disease, hereabouts—whole neighborhoods were laid low with it in the spring.”

“Perhaps they’d made the mistake of listening to too much musick—?”

Moseh shrugged again. “It is a real enough disease—perhaps not as fearsome as some of the others, such as Rising of the Lights, or Ring-Booger, or the Laughing Kidney, or Letters-from-Venice…”

“Avast!”

“In any event, you came down with it, Jack, and had such a fever that all the other tutsaklars in the banyolar were roasting kebabs over your brow for a fortnight. Finally one morning you were pronounced dead, and carried out of the banyolar and thrown into a wain. Our owner sent me round to the Treasury to notify the hoca el-pencik so that your title deed could be marked as ‘deceased,’ which is a necessary step in filing an insurance claim. But the hoca el-pencik knew that a new Pasha was on his way, and wanted to make sure that all the records were in order, lest some irregularity be discovered during an audit, which would cause him to fall under the bastinado at the very least.”

“May I infer, from this, that insurance fraud is a common failing of slave-owners?”

“Some of them are completely unethical,” Moseh confided. “So I was ordered to lead the hoca el-pencik back to the banyolar and show him your body—but not before I was made to wait for hours and hours in his courtyard, as midday came and went, and the hoca el-pencik took a siesta under the lime-tree there. Finally we went to the banyolar—but in the meantime your wagon had been moved to the burial-ground of the Janissaries.”

“Why!? I’m no more a Janissary than you are.”

“Sssh! So I had gathered, Jack, from several years of being chained up next to you, and hearing your autobiographical ravings: stories that, at first, were simply too grotesque to believe—then, entertaining after a fashion—then, after the hundredth or thousandth repetition—”

“Stay. No doubt you have tedious and insufferable qualities of your own, Moseh de la Cruz, but you have me at a disadvantage, as I cannot remember them. What I want to know is, why did they think I was a Janissary?”

“The first clew was that you carried a Janissary-sword when you were captured.”

“Proceeds of routine military corpse-looting, nothing more.”

“The second: you fought with such valor that your want of skill was quite overlooked.”

“I was trying to get myself killed, or else would’ve shown less of the former, and more of the latter.”

“Third: the unnatural state of your penis was interpreted as a mark of strict chastity—”

“Correct, perforce!”

“—and assumed to’ve been self-administered.”

“Haw! That’s not how it happened at all—”

“Stay,” Moseh said, shielding his face behind both hands.

“I forgot, you’ve heard.”

“Fourth: the Arabic numeral seven branded on the back of your hand.”

“I’ll have you know that’s a letter V, for Vagabond.”

“But sideways it could be taken for a seven.”

“How does that make me a Janissary?”

“When a new recruit takes the oath and becomes yeni yoldash, which is the lowliest rank, his barrack number is tattooed onto the back of his hand, so it can be known which seffara he belongs to, and which bash yoldash is responsible for him.”

“All right—so ’twas assumed I’d come up from barracks number seven in some Ottoman garrison-town somewhere.”

“Just so. And yet you were clearly out of your mind, and not good for much besides pulling on an oar, so it was decided you’d remain tutsaklar until you died, or regained your senses. If the former, you’d receive a Janissary funeral.”

“What about the latter?”

“That remains to be seen. As it was, we thought it was the former. So we went to the high ground outside the city-walls, to the burial-ground of the ocak—”

“Come again?”

“Ocak: a Turkish order of Janissaries, modeled after the Knights of Rhodes. They rule over Algiers, and are a law and society unto themselves here.”

“Is that man coming over to hit us with the bull’s penis a part of this ocak?”

“No. He works for the corsair-captain who owns the galley. The corsairs are yet another completely different society unto themselves.”

After the Turk had finished giving Jack and Moseh several bracing strokes of the bull’s penis, and had wandered away to go beat up on some other barnacle-scrapers, Jack invited Moseh to continue the story.

“The hoca el-pencik and several of his aides and I went to that place. And a bleak place it was, Jack, with its countless tombs, mostly shaped like half-eggshells, meant to evoke a village of yurts on the Transoxianan Steppe—the ancestral homeland for which Turks are forever homesick—though, if it bears the slightest resemblance to that burying-ground, I cannot imagine why. At any rate, we roamed up and down among these stone yurts for an hour, searching for your corpse, and were about to give up, for the sun was going down, when we heard a muffled, echoing voice repeating some strange incantation, or prophecy, in an outlandish tongue. Now the hoca el-pencik was on edge to begin with, as this interminable stroll through the graveyard had put him in mind of daimons and ifrits and other horrors. When he heard this voice, coming (as we soon realized) from a great mausoleum where a murdered agha had been entombed, he was about to bolt for the city gates. So were his aides. But as they had with them one who was not only a slave, but a Jew to boot, they sent me into that tomb to see what would happen.”

“And what did happen?”

“I found you, Jack, standing upright in that ghastly, but delightfully cool space, pounding on the lid of the agha’s sarcophagus and repeating certain English words. I knew not what they meant, but they went something like this: ‘Be a good fellow there, sirrah, and bring me a pint of your best bitter!’ ”

“I must have been out of my head,” Jack muttered, “for the light lagers of Pilsen are much better suited to this climate.”

“You were still daft, but there was a certain spark about you that I had not seen in a year or two—certainly not since we were traded to Algiers. I suspected that the heat of your fever, compounded with the broiling radiance of the midday sun, under which you’d lain for many hours, had driven the French Pox out of your body. And indeed you have been a little more lucid every day since.”

“What did the hoca el-pencik think of this?”

“When you walked out, you were naked, and sunburnt as red as a boiled crab, and there was speculation that you might be some species of ifrit. I have to tell you that the Turks have superstitions about everything, and most especially about Jews—they believe we have occult powers, and of late the Cabbalists have done much to foster such phant’sies. In any event, matters were soon enough sorted out. Our owner received one hundred strokes, with a cane the size of my thumb, on the soles of his feet, and vinegar was poured over the resulting wounds.”

“Eeyeh, give me the bull’s penis any day!”

“It’s expected he may be able to stand up again in a month or two. In the meanwhile, as we wait out the equinoctial storms, we are careening and refitting our galley, as is obvious enough.”

DURING THIS NARRATION Jack had been looking sidelong at the other galley-slaves, and had found them to be an uncommonly diverse and multi-cultural lot: there were black Africans, Europeans, Jews, Indians, Asiatics, and many others he could not clearly sort out. But he did not see anyone he recognized from the complement of God’s Wounds.

“What of Yevgeny, and Mr. Foot? To speak poetically: have insurance claims been paid on them?”

“They are on the larboard oar. Yevgeny pulls with the strength of two men, and Mr. Foot pulls not at all—which makes them more or less inseparable, in the context of a well-managed galley.”

“So they live!”

“Live, and thrive—we’ll see them later.”

“Why aren’t they here, scraping barnacles like the rest of us?” Jack demanded peevishly.

“In Algiers, during the winter months, when galleys dare not venture out on the sea, oar-slaves are permitted—nay, encouraged—to pursue trades. Our owner receives a share of the earnings. Those who have no skills scrape barnacles.”

Jack found this news not altogether pleasing, and assaulted a barnacle-cluster with such violence that he nearly stove in the boat’s hull. This quickly drew a reprimand—and not from the Turkish whip-hand, but from a short, stocky, red-headed galley-slave on Jack’s other side. “I don’t care if you’re crazy—or pretend to be—you keep that hull seaworthy, lest we all go down!” he barked, in an English that was half Dutch. Jack was a head taller than this Hollander, and considered making something of it—but he didn’t imagine that their overseer would look kindly on a fracas, when mere talking was a flogging offense. Besides, there was a rather larger chap standing behind the carrot-top, who was eyeing Jack with the same expression: skeptical bordering on disgusted. This latter appeared to be a Chinaman, but he was not of the frail, cringing sort. Both he and the Hollander looked troublingly familiar.

“Put some slack into your haul-yards, there, shorty—you ain’t the owner, nor the captain—as long as she stays afloat, what’s a little dent or scratch to us?”

The Dutchman shook his head incredulously and went back to work on a single barnacle, which he was dissecting off a hull-clinker as carefully as a chirurgeon removing a stone from a Grand Duke’s bladder.

“Thank you for not making a scene,” Moseh said, “it is important that we maintain harmony on the starboard oar.”

“Those are our oar-mates?”

“Yes, and the fifth is in town pursuing his trade.”

“Well, why is it so important to remain on good terms with them?”

“Other than that we must share a crowded bench with them eight months out of the year, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“We must all pull together if we are to maintain parity with the larboard oar.”

“What if we don’t?”

“The galley will—”

“Yes, yes, it’ll go in circles. But why should we care?”

“Aside from that the skin will be whipped off our ribcages by that bull’s pizzle?”

“I take that as a given.”

“Oars come in matched sets. As matters stand, we have parity with the larboard oar, and therefore constitute a matched set of ten slaves. We were traded to our current owner as such. But if Yevgeny and his bench-mates begin to out-pull us, we’ll be split up—your friends will end up in different galleys, or even different cities.”

“It’d serve ’em right.”

“Pardon me?”

“Pardon me,” Jack said, “but here we are on this fucking beach. And I may be a crazy Vagabond, but you appear to be an educated Jew, and that Dutchman is a ship’s officer if ever there was one, and God only knows about that Chinaman—”

“Nipponese actually, but trained by the Jesuits.”

“All right, then—this only supports my point.”

“And your point is—?”

“What can Yevgeny and Mr. Foot possibly have that we don’t?”

“They’ve formed a sort of enterprise wherein Yevgeny is Labor, and Mr. Foot is Management. Its exact nature is difficult to explain. Later, it will become clear to you. In the meantime, it’s imperative that the ten of us remain together!”

“What possible reason could you have for giving a damn whether we stay together?”

“During the last several years of touring the Mediterranean behind an oar, I have been developing, secretly, in my mind, a Plan,” said Moseh de la Cruz. “It is a plan that will bring all ten of us wealth, and then freedom, though possibly not in that order.”

“Does armed mutiny enter into this plan? Because—”

Moseh rolled his eyes.

“I was simply trying to imagine what rôle a man such as myself could possibly have in any Plan—leastways, any Plan that was not invented by a raving Lunatick.”

“It is a question I frequently asked myself, until today. Some earlier versions of the Plan, I must admit, involved throwing you overboard as soon as it was practicable. But today when fifteen hundred guns spoke from the three-tiered batteries of the Peñon and the frowning towers of the Kasba, some lingering obstructions were, it seems, finally knocked loose inside your head, and you were put back into your right mind again—or as close to it as is really possible. And now, Jack, you do have a rôle in the Plan.”

“And am I allowed to know the nature of this rôle?”

“Why, you’ll be our Janissary.”

“But I am not a—”

“Hold, hold! You see that fellow scraping barnacles?”

“Which one? There must be a hundred.”

“The tall fellow, Arab-looking with a touch of Negro; which is to say Egyptian.”

“I see him.”

“That is Nyazi—one of the larboard crew.”

“He’s a Janissary?”

“No, but he’s spent enough time around them that he can teach you to fake your way through it. Dappa—the black man, there—can teach you a few words of Turkish. And Gabriel—that Nipponese Jesuit—is a brave swordsman. He’ll bring you up to par in no time.”

“Why, exactly, does this plan demand a fake Janissary?”

“Really it demands a real one,” Moseh sighed, “but in life one must make do with the materials at hand.”

“My question is not answered.”

“Later—when we are all together—I’ll explain.”

Jack laughed. “You speak like a courtier, in honeyed euphemisms. When you say ‘together,’ it means what? Chained together by our neck-irons in some rat-filled dungeon ’neath that Kasba?”

“Run your hand over the skin of your neck, Jack, and tell me: Does it feel like you’ve been wearing an iron collar recently?”

“Now that you mention it—no.”

“Quitting time is nigh—then we’ll go into the city and find the others.”

“Haw! Just like that? Like free men?” Jack said, as well as much more in a similar vein. But an hour later, a strange wailing arose from several tall square towers planted all round the city, and a single gun was fired from the heights of the Kasba, and then all of the slaves put their scrapers down and began to wander off down the beach in groups of two or three. Seven whom Moseh had identified as belonging to the two Oars of his Plan tarried for a minute until all were ready to depart; the Dutchman, van Hoek, did not wish to leave until he was good and finished.

Moseh noticed a dropped hatchet, frowned, picked it up, and brushed away the damp sand. Then his eyes began to wander about, looking for a place to put it. Meanwhile he began to toss the hatchet absent-mindedly in his hand. Because its weight was all in its head, the handle flailed around wildly as it revolved in the air. But Moseh always caught it neatly on its way down. Presently his gaze fastened on one of the old dried-up tree-trunks that had been jammed into the sand, and used to prop up the galley so that its hull was exposed. He stared fixedly at this target whilst tossing the hatchet one, two, three more times, then suddenly drew the tool far back behind his head, stuck his tongue out, paused for a moment, then let the hatchet fly. It executed a single lazy revolution while hurtling across several fathoms of air, then stopped in an instant, one corner of its blade buried in the wood of the tree-trunk, high and dry.

The seven oar-slaves clambered up onto the footing of the colossal wall and made for the city gate. Jack followed along with the crowd, though he could not help hunching his shoulders, expecting to feel the whip across his back. But no stroke came. As he approached the gates he stood straighter and walked more freely, and sensed a group coalescing around him and Moseh: the irritable Dutchman, the Nipponese Jesuit, a black African with ropy locks of hair, the Egyptian named Nyazi, and a middle-aged Spaniard who seemed to be afflicted with some sort of spasmodic disorder. As they passed through the city gates, this fellow turned and shouted something at the Janissaries who were standing guard there. Jack didn’t get every word of the Spanish, but it was something like, “Listen to me, you boy-fucking heathen scum, we have all formed a secret cabal!” Which was not exactly what Jack would’ve said under the circumstances—but Moseh and the others only exchanged broad, knowing grins with the Janissaries, and into the city they went: Den of Thieves, Nest of Wasps, Scourge of Christendom, Citadel of the Faith.

THE MAIN STREET of Algiers was uncommonly broad, and yet crowded with Turks sitting out smoking tobacco from fountain-sized hubbly-bubblies, but Jack, Moseh, and the other slaves did not spend very much time there. Moseh darted through a pointy keyhole-arch so narrow that he had to turn sideways, and led the others into a roofless corridor of stone that was not much wider, forcing them to go in single file, and to plaster themselves up against walls whenever someone came towards them. It felt much like being in a back-hallway of some ancient building, save that when Jack looked up he could see a splinter of sky glaring between blank walls that rose ten to twenty yards above his head. Ladders and bridges had been set up between rooftops, joining the city’s terraces and roof-gardens into a private net-work strung high up above the ground. Sometimes Jack would see a black-swathed form flit from one side to the other. It was difficult to get a clear look at them, for they were dark and furtive as bats, but they seemed to be wearing the same sort of garment as Eliza had when Jack had met her beneath Vienna, and, in any event, from the way they moved he could tell they were women.

Down in the street—if that word could even be used for a passage as strait as this one—there were no women. Of men there was a marvelous variety. The Janissaries who made up the ocak were easy to recognize—some had a Greek or Slavic appearance, but most had an Asiatic look about the eyes, and all went in splendid clothing: baggy pleated trousers, belted with a sash that supported all manner of pistols, scimitars, daggers, purses, tobacco-pouches, pipes, and even pocket-watches. Over a loose shirt, one or more fancy vests, used as a sort of display-case for ribbons of lace, gold pins, swatches of fine embroidery. A turban on the top, pointy-toed slippers below, sometimes a long cape thrown over the whole. Thus the ocak, who were afforded never so much respect by all who passed them in the street. Algiers was crowded with many other sorts: mostly the Moors and Berbers whose ancestors had lived here before the Turks had come to organize the place. These tended to wear long one-piece cloaks, or else raiments that were just many fathoms of fabric swirled round the body and held in place by clever tricks with pins and sashes. There was a smattering of Jews, always dressed in black, and quite a few Europeans wearing whatever had been fashionable in their homelands when they’d decided to turn Turk.

Some of these white men looked just as à la mode as the young gallants who’d made it their business to pester Eliza at the Maiden in Amsterdam, but too there was the occasional geezer tottering down a staircase in a neck-ruff, Pilgrim-hat, and van Dyck. “Jesus!” Jack exclaimed, observing one of the latter, “why are we slaves, and that old moth a respected citizen?”

The question only befuddled everyone except for the rope-headed African, who laughed and shook his head. “It is very dangerous to ask certain questions,” he said. “I should know.”

“Who’re you then, and how came you to speak better English than I?”

“I am named Dappa. I was—am—a linguist.”

“That means not a thing to me,” Jack said, “but as we are nothing more than a brace of slaves wandering around lost in a heathen citadel, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in hearing some sort of reasonably concise explanation.”

“In fact we are not lost at all, but taking the most direct route to our destination,” Dappa said. “But my story is a simple one—not like yours, Jack—and there will be more than enough time to relate it. All right then: every slave-port along the African coast must have a linguist—which signifies a man skilled in many tongues—or else how could the black slavers, who bring the stock out from the interior, make deals with the ships’ captains who drop anchor off-shore? For those slavers come from many different nations, all speaking different languages, and likewise the captains may be English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, or what-have-you. It all depends on the outcomes of various European wars, of which we Africans never know anything until the castle at the river-head suddenly begins to fly a different flag.”

“Enough on that subject—I’ve fought in some of those wars.”

“Jack, I am from a town on the river that is called, by white men, the Niger. This is an easy place to live—food grows on trees. I could rhapsodize about it but I will refrain. Suffice it to say ’twas a Garden of Eden. Save for the Institution of Slavery, which had always been with us. For as many generations as our priests and elders can remember, Arabs would occasionally come up the great river in boats and trade us cloth, gold, and other goods for slaves—”

“But where’d the slaves come from, Dappa?”

“The question is apt. Prior to my time they mostly came from farther up the river, marching in columns, joined together by wooden yokes. And some persons of my town were made slaves because they could not pay their debts, or as punishment for crimes.”

“So you have bailiffs? Judges?”

“In my town the priests were very powerful, and did many of the things that bailiffs and judges do in your country.”

“When you say priests I don’t imagine you mean men in funny hats, prating in Latin—”

Dappa laughed. “When Arabs or Catholics came to convert us, we would hear them out and then invite them to get back into their boats and go home. No, we followed a traditional religion in my town, whose details I’ll spare you, save one: we had a famous oracle, which means—”

“I know, I’ve heard about ’em in plays.”

“Very well—then the only thing I need to tell you is that pilgrims would come to our town from many miles away to ask questions of the Aro priests who were the oracles in my town. Now: at about the same time that some Portuguese began coming up the river to convert us, others began coming to trade with us for slaves—which was unremarkable, being no different from what the Arabs had been doing forever. But gradually—too gradually for anyone to really see a difference in his lifetime—the prices that were offered for slaves rose higher, and the visits of the buyers came more frequently. Dutch and English and other sorts of white men came wanting ever more slaves. My town grew wealthy from this trade—the temples of the Aro priests shone with gold and silver, the slave-trains from upriver grew longer, and came more frequently. Even then, the supply was not equal to the demand. The priests who served as our judges began to pass the sentence of enslavement on more and more persons, for smaller and smaller offenses. They grew rich and haughty, the priests did, and were carried through the streets on gilded sedan-chairs. Yet this magnificence was viewed, by a certain type of African, as proof that these priests must be very powerful wizards and oracles. So, just as the slave-trains waxed, so did the crowds of pilgrims coming from all over the Niger Delta to have their illnesses healed, or to ask questions of the oracle.”

“Nothing we haven’t seen in Christendom,” Jack observed.

“Yes—the difference being that, after a time, the priests ran out of crimes, and slaves.”

“What do you mean, they ran out of crimes?”

“They reached a point, Jack, where they would punish every crime, no matter how trivial, with enslavement. And still there were not enough slaves to sell down the river. So they decreed that henceforth, any person who appeared before the Aro oracle and asked a stupid question would be immediately seized by the warriors who stood guard in the temple, and flung into slavery.”

“Hmmm…if stupid questions are as common in Africa as they are where I come from, that policy must’ve produced a flood of wretches!”

“It did—yet still the pilgrims flocked to our town.”

“Were you one of those pilgrims?”

“No, I was a fortunate boy—the son of an Aro priest. When I was very young, I talked all the time, so it was decided I would be a linguist. Thereafter, whenever a white or Arab trader came to our town, I would stay in his lodgings and try to learn what I could of his language. And when the missionaries came, too, I would pretend to be interested in their religions, so that I could learn their languages.”

“But how did you become a slave?”

“One time I traveled downriver to Bonny, which is the slave-fort at the mouth of the Niger. En route I passed many towns, and understood for the first time that mine was only one of many feeding slaves down the river. The Spanish missionary I was traveling with told me that Bonny was only one of scores of slave-depots up and down the coast of Africa. For the first time, then, I understood how enormous the slave trade was—and how evil. But since you are a slave yourself, Jack, and have expressed some dissatisfaction with your estate, I’ll not belabor this. I asked the Spanish missionary how such a thing could be justified, given that the religion of Europe is founded on brotherly love. The Spaniard replied that this had been a great controversy in the Church, and much debated—but that in the end, they justified it only by one thing: When white slavers bought them from black slavers, Africans were baptized, and so the good that was done to their immortal souls, in that instant, more than compensated for the evils done to their temporal bodies during the remainder of their lives. ‘Do you mean to tell me,’ I exclaimed, ‘that it would be against the law of God for an African who was already a Christian to be enslaved?’ ‘That is so,’ said the missionary. And so now I was filled with what you call zeal. I love this word. In my zeal I got on the next boat bound upriver—it was a Royal Africa Company longboat carrying pieces of India cloth to trade for slaves. When I reached my town I went straight to the temple and—how do you say it—‘jumped the queue’ of pilgrims, and went before the highest of the high Aro priests. He was a man I had known all my life—he had been a sort of uncle to me, and many times we had eaten from the same bowl. He was sitting there resplendent on his gold throne, with his lion-skin, all draped about with fat garlands of cowrie-shells, and in great excitement, I said ‘Do you realize that this evil could be brought to an end today? The law of the Christian Church states that once a man has been baptized it is unlawful to make him a slave!’ ‘What is your point—or, to put it another way, what is your question?’ asked the oracle. ‘It is very simple,’ I said, ‘why don’t we simply baptize everyone in the whole town—for these Catholics make a specialty of mass baptisms—and furthermore why don’t we baptize every pilgrim and slave who walks into the city-gates?’ ”

“What was the oracle’s answer?”

“After no more than a heartbeat’s hesitation, he turned towards the four spear-men who stood by him, and made a little twitching motion with his fly-whisk. They rushed forward and began to bind my arms behind my back. ‘What is the meaning of this? What are you doing to me, uncle?’ I cried. He answered: ‘That makes two—no, three stupid questions in a row, and so I would enslave you thrice if such a thing were possible.’ ‘My god,’ I said, as I began to understand the full horror of what was being done to me, ‘can you not see the evil of what you are doing? Bonny—and all the other slave-depots—are filled with our brothers, dying of disease and despair before they even get on those hellish slave-ships! Hundreds of years from now, their descendants will live on in faraway lands as outcasts, embittered by the knowledge of what was perpetrated against their forefathers! How can we—how can you—seemingly a decent man—capable of showing love and affection towards your wives and children—perpetrate such unspeakable crimes?’ To which the oracle replied, ‘Now, that is a good question!’ and with another flick of his fly-whisk sent me off to the holding-pit. I returned to Bonny on the same English boat that had brought me up the river, and my uncle had a new piece of India cloth to brighten his household.” Dappa now laughed out loud, his teeth gleaming handsomely in the rapidly deepening dusk of a crevasse-like Algiers back-street.

Jack managed a polite chuckle. Though the other slaves had probably never heard Dappa’s story told in English before, they recognized its rhythms, and grinned on cue. The Spaniard laughed heartily and said, “You have got to be one stupid nigger to think that’s funny!” Dappa ignored him.

“It is a good enough yarn,” Jack allowed, “but it does not explain how you ended up here.”

Dappa responded by pulling his ragged shirt down to expose his right breast. In the gloom Jack could barely make out a pattern of scars. “I don’t know letters,” he said.

“Then I’ll teach you two of them,” said Dappa, reaching out quickly and grasping Jack’s index finger before Jack could flinch away. “This is a D,” he continued, running the tip of Jack’s finger along the ridge of a scar, “for Duke. And this is a Y, for York. They trade-marked me thus with a silver branding-iron when I reached Bonny.”

“Not to rub salt in your wound, there, Dappa, but that same bloke is King of England now—”

“Not any more,” Moseh put in, “he was run off by William of Orange.”

“Well, there’s a bit of good news at least,” Jack muttered.

“From that point my story’s unremarkable,” Dappa said. “I was traded from fort to fort up the coast. Bonny slaves fetch a low price because, since we grew up in paradise, we are unaccustomed to agricultural labor. Otherwise I would’ve been shipped straight to Brazil or the Caribbean. I ended up in the hold of a Portuguese ship bound for Madeira, which was captured by the same Rabat corsairs who’d earlier taken your ship.”

“We must hurry,” Moseh said, bending his neck to stare straight up. Down here it had been night for hours, but fifty feet above them, the corner of a wall was washed in the red light of the sunset. The little slave-column doubled its pace, trotted around several more corners, and came out into a street that was relatively wide (i.e., Jack could no longer touch both sides of it at the same time). Onion-skins and vegetable-trimmings were strewn about, and Jack reckoned it to be some sort of a market, though all of the tables had been cleared and the stalls shuttered. A young, dark-haired man, oddly familiar-looking, was standing there waiting for them, and fell in stride as they passed. His Sabir was infused with an accent that Jack recognized, from his last Paris sojourn, as Armenian.

But before he’d had time to think on this, they’d spilled out into an open space: some sort of public square, difficult to make out in the dusky light, with a public fountain in the center and a few large, but very plain, buildings around the sides. One of these was all lit up, with hundreds of men trying to get in the doors. Quite a few of them were slaves, but there were many members of the ocak, too, as well as the usual Algerine assortment of Berbers, Jews, and Christians. As they came up against the fringes of this crowd, Moseh de la Cruz stepped aside and allowed the Spaniard to lunge past him, suddenly bellowing every vile insult Jack had ever heard, as well as diverse new-made ones, and jabbing various large, heavily armed Turks in the ribs, treading on the curly toes of their slippers, and kicking them in the shins to clear a path towards the building’s entrance. Jack expected to have his head scimitared off merely for being in the general vicinity of this uncivil Spaniard, but all the victims of his jabs and insults grinned and laughed the moment they recognized him, and then derived all manner of entertainment from watching him assail whomever stood in his path next. Moseh and the others, meanwhile, followed along in his wake, so that they arrived at the front door quickly—yet apparently none too soon. For the Turks standing guard there spoke angrily to Moseh and the others, pointing at the western sky, which had faded to a deep and nearly invisible blue now, like candle-light trying to penetrate a porcelain saucer. One of the guards slugged Dappa and the Nipponese Jesuit as they went by, and aimed a blow at Jack, which he dodged.

Moseh had mentioned to him earlier that they lived in something called a banyolar and Jack reckoned this must be it: a courtyard surrounded by galleries divided into many small cells, one ring of galleries piled upon the next to a height of several storeys. To Jack, the overall design was much like certain old-fashioned theatres that stood along Maid Lane between the marshes of Southwark and the right bank of the Thames, viz. the Rose, the Hope, and the Swan. The big difference, of course, was that those Bankside theatres had armed men trying to keep Jack out whereas here they were abusing him for not having entered soon enough.

This, of course, was no theatre, but a slave-quarters. And yet the galleries, up to and including the flat roof of the banyolar, were crowded (at the moment anyway) with free Algerines, and so was most of the courtyard. But one part of that yard, off to one side of its central cistern, had been roped off to form a stage, or ring; and any number of torchères had been planted around it, so close to one another that their flames practically merged into a square window-frame of fire that shed fair illumination on the empty plot in the center.

All of the Turks packed turban-to-turban around the galleries were very excited, and rowdier than any group Jack had ever seen outside of a Vagabond camp. When not jostling for position or transacting elaborate wagers, they were paying close attention to certain preparations underway at the corners of the ring. As far as Jack was concerned, only two attractions could account for this degree of excitement among so many young men; and since sex, for Janissaries, was banned, Jack reckoned that they must be about to witness some form of violence.

Following Moseh towards one of the corners of the fiery square, Jack was struck—but not particularly surprised—to discover Yevgeny, stark naked save for leather underpants and a thick coating of oil, and Mr. Foot, dressed up in scarlet finery and shaking a leather purse bloated with what Jack could only assume was specie. But before Jack could push his way in closer and begin asking questions, Yevgeny went down on his right knee: in and of itself, nothing remarkable. But here it was like setting off a granadoe. Everyone near him flung himself back, making an empty space with Yevgeny in the center. The crowd in the gallery went silent for a moment—then exploded with cheers of “Rus! Rus! Rus!”

Yevgeny spread his arms out to their full seven-foot span, then clapped his hands together, close enough to the ground to raise a puff of dust, then spread his arms again and did the same thing twice more. After the third clap he let his right hand fall to the earth, palm up, then raised it to his face and kissed his fingertips, then touched them to his forehead. During this little ceremony the cheering of “Rus! Rus!” continued at subdued volume—but now Yevgeny got up and vaulted into the square and the cheering rose to a level that made Jack’s ears ring, reminding him of the fifteen-hundred-gun salute. Yevgeny planted his feet in the middle of the square and adopted a strangely insouciant pose: supporting his left elbow in his cupped right hand, he rested his head on his left hand, and froze in that position.

Nothing changed for several minutes, except that the torchères blazed and the cheers rang down from the deepening night sky. Finally another well-lubricated man in leather underpants performed the same series of movements and ended up standing next to Yevgeny in the same pose: this was a very dark-skinned Negro, not as tall as Yevgeny, but heavier. The cheering redoubled. Mr. Foot, who had added an expensive-looking cape to his ensemble, now came into the ring and hollered some sort of announcement up into the galleries, turning slowly round as he did, so that every member of the audience could inspect his tonsils even if hearing him was out of the question. Having concluded this, he scurried out of the ring. Yevgeny and the Negro turned to face each other in the middle of the fiery ring. Soon they had clasped their hands together, palm to palm like children playing at pat-a-cake. Rearing their heads back they smashed their faces together as hard as they could. Jack was startled; then they reared back like vipers preparing to strike, and did it a second time, and he was fascinated. Then they did it a third time, with no less violence, and Jack started to be appalled, wondering whether they would continue it until one of them was left senseless. But then they let go of each other and staggered apart with blood running down their faces from lacerations on their brows.

Now, finally, they got down to the actual business at hand: wrestling. And this was not greatly different from most other wrestling matches Jack had seen, except messier. Immediately both men got oil on their hands, then had to back away from each other and rub their palms on the ground to pick up dirt, which was shortly transferred to their bodies the next time they closed. So within a few minutes Yevgeny and the Negro were covered head-to-toe in a paste of blood, sweat, oil, and Algerian dust. Yevgeny had a wide stance, but the Negro knew how to keep his weight low, and so neither could throw the other. The crisis occurred several minutes into the bout when the African got a grip on Yevgeny’s testicles and squeezed, which was a good idea, while looking up expectantly into Yevgeny’s face, which wasn’t. For Yevgeny accepted the ball-squeezing with a forbearance that made Jack’s blood run a little cool, and paid the Negro back with another vicious downward head-butt that produced a clearly visible explosion of blood and audible splintering noises. The African let go of Yevgeny’s private parts the better to clap both hands over his devastated face, and Yevgeny easily threw him into the dust—which ended the match.

“Rus! Rus! Ruuuuus!” howled the worthies of the ocak. Yevgeny paraded around the ring, looking philosophical, and Mr. Foot pursued him holding up a yawning purse into which Turks flung money—mostly, whole pieces of eight. Jack liked the looks of this—until the whole purse was delivered direct into the hands of a large Turkish gentleman who was sitting on a sort of litter at ringside, his feet mummified in white linen and propped up on an ottoman.

“IN RUSSIA, I BELONGED to a secret society, wherein we trained one another to feel no pain under torture,” Yevgeny said, offhandedly, later.

This remark dampened all conversation for a few minutes, and Jack took stock of his situation.

After a long series of wrestling-bouts, the torchères had been extinguished and the Turks and free Algerines had departed, leaving the banyolar to the slaves. Both the starboard and the larboard oars, in their entirety, had now convened on the roof of the banyolar to smoke pipes. The night was nearly moonless, with only the merest crescent creeping across the sky—out over the Sahara, as Jack supposed. Consequently there were more stars out than Jack had ever seen. A few lights glimmered from the embrasures of the Kasba, but other than that, it seemed that these ten galley-slaves had the night to themselves:

Larboard Oar

YEVGENY THE RASKOLNIK, a.k.a. “Rus”

MR. FOOT, ex-proprietor of the Bomb & Grapnel, Dunkirk,
and now entrepreneur-without-portfolio

DAPPA, a Neeger linguist

JERONIMO, a vile but high-born Spaniard

NYAZI, a camel-trader of the Upper Nile

Starboard Oar

“HALF-COCKED” JACK SHAFTOE, L’Emmerdeur,

King of the Vagabonds

MOSEH DE LA CRUZ, the Kohan with the Plan

GABRIEL GOTO, a Jesuit Priest of Nippon

OTTO VAN HOEK, a Dutch mariner

VREJ ESPHAHNIAN, youngest of the Paris Esphahnians–
for the Armenian they’d picked up in the market was none other*

“We are held captive in this city by the ineffable will of the market,” Moseh de la Cruz began.

These words sounded to Jack like the beginning of a well-rehearsed, and very long presentation, and so he was not slow to interrupt.

“Pah! What market can you possibly be talking about?” But looking around at the others it seemed that he was the only one showing the least bit of skepticism.

“Why, the market in tutsaklar ransom futures, which is three doors down yonder alley-way, on the left,” Moseh said, pointing. “It is a place where anyone with money can buy into the deed of a tutsaklar, which means, captive of war—thereby speculating that one day that person will be ransomed, in which event all of the shareholders divide up the ransom, minus certain duties, taxes, fees, et cetera, levied by the Pasha. It is the city’s primary source of revenue and foreign exchange—”

“All right, pardon me, I did not know that, and supposed you were framing some occult similitude,” Jack said.

“As I watched Yevgeny’s bout this evening,” Moseh continued, “it came to me that said market is a sort of Invisible Hand that grips us all by the testicles—”

“Hold, hold! Are you babbling some manner of Cabbalistic superstition now?”

“No, Jack, now I am using a similitude. For there is no Invisible Hand—but there might as well be.”

“Very good—pray continue.”

“The workings of the market dictate that tutsaklar who are likely to be ransomed, and for large fees, are well-treated—”

“And ones like us end up as galley-slaves,” Jack said. “And ’tis clear enough to me why I am assessed a low value by this market, and my nuts gripped most oppressively by the Invisible Hand of which you spoke. Likewise, Mr. Foot is broke, Yevgeny’s of a daft sect whose members torture one another, Dappa is persona non grata in all lands south of the Sahara, Vrej Esphahnian’s family is chronically ill-funded. Señor Jeronimo, whatever fine qualities he may possess that I haven’t seen evidence of yet, is not the sort that anyone who has spent much time with him would be disposed to pay a lot of ransom for. I know not the tale of Nyazi but can guess it. Gabriel is on the wrong side of the fucking world. All plain enough. But van Hoek is some kind of a naval officer, and you are an intelligent-seeming Jew—why have you two not been ransomed?”

“My parents died of the Plague that ravaged Amsterdam when Cromwell cut off our foreign trade, and so many honest Dutchman were cast out of their homes and took to sleeping in pestilential places—” van Hoek began, rather peevishly.

“Avast, Cap’n! Do I look like a Roundhead? ’Twasn’t my doing!”

“I was suckled by government-issue wet-nurses at the Civic Orphanage. The worthies of the Reformed Church taught me reading and figures, bless them, but in time I grew up into a difficult boy.”

“Fancy that—who would’ve expected it from a short, Dutch, ill-tempered, red-headed step-child?” Jack exclaimed. “Still, I’d think some corsair-captain could find a use for you more exalted than barnacle-scraper.”

“When I was eighteen, the canals froze, and King Louis’s troops swarmed over them on ice-skates, raping everything that moved and burning all else. The Dutch Republic prepared to take ship and move to Asia en masse. Seamen were wanted. I was sprung from jail and compelled to join the V.O.C.* Following the refugees north, I went to Texel, where I was issued a sea-chest containing clothes, pipes, tobacco, a Bible, and a book called The God-Fearing Sailor. Twenty-four hours later I was on a man-o’-war in the Narrow Seas dodging English grape-shot and lugging sacks of gunpowder. That, and a year of manning pumps, made me a sailor. Thrice I sailed to India and back, and that made me an officer.”

“Fine! Why’re you not an officer here?”

“A dozen years I lived in continual fear of pirates. Finally all of my nightmares came true and my ship was stolen from me—you can see her riding at anchor in the harbor some days, flying the Turk’s flag, and if you cock an ear, and the wind’s right, you can hear the lamentations of the captives she has taken, being brought in to wait for ransom.”

“I am beginning to collect that you have a certain dislike of pirates and their works,” Jack said, “as any upright Dutchman should, I suppose.”

“Van Hoek refuses to turn Turk—so he rows alongside us,” Moseh said.

“What of you, Moseh? Reputedly, Jews stick together.”

“I am a crypto-Jew,” Moseh said. “In fact, more Crypto than Jew. I grew up on the Equator. There is an island off the coast of Africa called Sáo Tomé, which is the sovereign soil of whichever European country has most recently sent a fleet down there to bombard it. But for many years only the Portuguese knew where the hell it was and so it was Portuguese. Now, my ancestors were Spanish Jews. But two hundred years ago, in the very same year that the Moors were finally driven from Spain, and America discovered, Queen Isabella threw all of the Jews out. Those who, in retrospect, were intelligent, put on the stockings of Villa Diego—which is an expression meaning that they ran like hell—and settled in Amsterdam. My ancestors simply edged across the border to Portugal. But the Inquisition was there, too. When Alvaro de Caminha went down to Sáo Tomé to be its governor, he took with him two thousand Jewish children whom the Inquisition had torn from the bosoms of their families. Sáo Tomé had a monopoly on the slave trade in that part of the world—Alvaro de Caminha baptized those two thousand and put ’em to work in its management. But in secret they kept their faith alive, performing half-remembered rituals behind locked doors, and muttering in broken Hebrew even as they knelt before the gilded table where the body and blood of Christ were dished up. Those were my ancestors. Almost fifty years ago, the Dutch came and seized Sáo Tomé. But this probably saved my father’s parents’ lives, for, in all the lands controlled by Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition went on a rampage after that. Instead of being roasted alive in some Portuguese auto da fé, my father’s parents moved to New Amsterdam and worked for the Dutch West India Company in the slave trade, which was all they knew how to do. Later the Duke of York’s fleet came and took that city for the English, but not before my father had grown up and taken a Manhatto lass for his wife—”

“What the hell is a Manhatto?”

“A type of local Indian,” Moseh explained.

“I thought there was a certain je ne sais quoi about your nose and eyes,” Jack said.

Moseh’s face—illuminated primarily by the red glow of his pipe-bowl—now took on a sentimental, faraway look that made Jack instinctively queasy. Undoing the top-most button of his ragged shirt, Moseh drew out a scrap of stuff that dangled round his neck on a leather thong: some sort of heathen handicraft-work. “It is probably not easy for you to see this tchotchke, in this wretched light,” he said, “but the third bead from the edge in the fourth row, here—it is a sort of off-white—is one of the very beads that the Dutchman, Peter Minuit, traded to the Manhattoes for their island, some sixty years ago, when Mama was a little papoose.”

“Jesus Christ, you should hang on to that!” Jack exclaimed.

“I have been hanging onto it,” Moseh returned, showing mild irritation for the first time, “as any imbecile can see.”

“Do you have any conception of what it could be worth!?”

“Next to nothing—but to me, it is priceless, because I had it from Mama. At any rate—getting on with the story—my parents put on the stockings of Villa Diego and ended up in Curaçao and there I was born. Mama died of smallpox, Papa of yellow fever. I fell in with a community of crypto-Jews who had collected there, for lack of any other place to go. We decided to strike out for Amsterdam, which was where our ancestors should have simply gone in the first place, and seek our fortunes there. As a group, we bought passage on a slave-ship bringing sugar back to Europe. But this ship was captured by the corsairs of Rabat, and we all ended up galley-slaves together, rowing to the strains of the Hava Negila; which, owing to its tiresome knack for getting stuck in the head, was the only Jewish song we knew.”

“All right,” Jack said, “I am satisfied, now, that it is true what you said: namely that the Invisible Hand of yonder market is gripping our cojones just like that Nubian wrestler did Yevgeny’s. And now I suppose you’re going to say we should all do like the Rus and ignore the pain and swelling and score some sort of magnificent triumph of the human spirit, or some shit like that. Anyway, I am willing to listen, as it seems preferable to bedding down in the banyolar to listen to the antiphonal coughing of a thousand consumptive oar-slaves.”

“The Plan will no doubt strike you as implausible, until Jeronimo, here, has acquainted us with certain amazing facts,” said Moseh, turning toward the twitchy Spaniard, who now stood up and bowed most courteously in Moseh’s direction.

The vain-glory which consisteth in the feigning or supposing of abilities in ourselves, which we know are not, is most incident to young men, and nourished by the histories, or fictions of gallant persons; and is corrected oftentimes by age, and employment.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

“My name is Excellentissimo Domino Jeronimo Alejandro Peñasco de Halcones Quinto, Marchioni de Azuaga et de Hornachos, Comiti de Llerena, Barcarrota, et de Jerez de los Caballeros, Vicecomiti de Llera, Entrín Alto y Bajo, et de Cabeza del Buey, Baroni de Barrax, Baza, Nerva, Jadraque, Brazatortas, Gargantiel, et de Val de las Muertas, Domino Domus de Atalaya, Ordinis Equestris Calatravae Beneficiario de la Fresneda. As you have guessed from my name, I am of a great family of Caballeros who, of old, were mighty warriors for Christendom, and famous Moor-killers even back unto the time of the Song of Roland—but that is another story, and a more glorious one than mine. I have only dim tear-streaked memories of the place of my birth: a castle on a precipitous crag in the Sierra de Machado, built on land of no value, save that my forefathers had paid for it with blood, wresting it from the Moors, inch by inch and yard by yard, at sword-and dagger-point. When I was only a few years of age, and just beginning to talk, I was taken out of that place in a sealed black carriage and brought down the high arroyos of the Guadalquivir and delivered into the hands of certain nuns who took me on board a galleon at Seville. There followed a long and terrifying passage to New Spain, of which I remember little, and will relate less. Suffice it to say that the next time I set foot on dry land I was treading on silver. The ship had taken me and the nuns, as well as many other Spaniards, to Porto Belo. As you may know, this lies on the Caribbean shore of Panama, at the very narrowest part of that isthmus, and directly across from the City of Panama, which shelters on the Pacific side. All of the silver that comes from the fabulous mines of Peru (save what is smuggled over the Andes and down the Río de la Plata to Argentina, that is) is shipped up to Panama and thence borne over the isthmus by mule-train to Porto Belo, where it is loaded on treasure-galleons for the passage back to Spain. So you will understand that when Porto Belo is expecting those galleons—such as the one on which I had arrived—bars of silver are simply piled in heaps on the ground, like cord-wood. Which is how it came to pass that, when I disembarked from the lighter that had brought me and the nuns in from the galleon, the first thing my foot touched was silver—an omen of what was to happen to me later, which in turn, God willing, is only a foreshadowing of the adventure that awaits us ten.”

“I believe I can speak for all the other nine in saying you have our full attention, there, Excellentissimo—” Jack began, amiably enough; but the Spaniard cut him off, saying, “Shut up! Or I’ll cut off what remains of your poxy yard and ram it down your Protestant throat with my hard nine inches!”

Before Jack could take exception to this, Jeronimo continued as if it hadn’t happened: “Not for long did I linger in this El Dorado, for we were met at dockside by a wagon, driven by nuns of the same order, save that these were Indias. We traveled up winding tracks out of the jungle and into the mountains of Darién, and at last came to a convent that, as I then understood, was to be my new home; and my misery at having been torn from the bosom of my family was only made more doloroso by the resemblance of this nunnery to my ancestral home. For this, too, was a vertiginous fortress rising out of a crag, making queer moans and whistles as the trans-isthmian gales blew across its narrow cross-shaped embrasures.

“Those sounds were almost the only ones that reached my ears until I had grown up, for these nuns had taken a vow of silence—and in any case, I soon enough learned that the Indias came from a certain vale in the mountains where in-breeding had been practiced on a scale exceeding even that of the Hapsburg Dynasty, and none of them could hear. The only speech I ever heard was that of the carters and drovers who came up the mountain to bring victuals, and of the several other guests who, like me, were the beneficiaries of the nuns’ Christian hospitality. For at no time were there fewer than half a dozen residents in the guest-house: men and women both—who, judging from their clothes and personal effects, were of gentle or even noble families. My fellow-guests appeared healthy, but behaved strangely: some spoke in garbled words, or remained as mute as the nuns, others were continually tormented by fiendish visions, or were imbeciles, unable to remember events that had occurred a mere quarter of an hour previously. Men who had been kicked in the head by horses, women whose pupils were of different sizes. Some spent all of their time locked in their rooms, or tied into their beds, by the nuns. But I had the run of the place.

“In due time I was taught to read and write, and began to exchange letters with my beloved Mama in Spain. I told her in one such letter that I could not understand why I was being raised in this place. The letter went down the mountain in a donkey-cart and traversed the ocean in the hold of one of a fleet of treasure-galleons, and about eight months later I had my answer: Mama told me that, at the time of my birth, God had blessed me with a gift given only to a few, which was that I fearlessly spoke the truth that was in my heart, and said what everyone else was secretly thinking, but too cowardly to voice. She told me that it was a gift normally given only to the angels, but that I had been granted it in a sort of miracle; but that in this fallen and corrupt world, many were the benighted, who hated and feared aught that was of the angels, and who would surely abuse and oppress me. Hence my dear Mama had broken her own heart by sending me away to be raised by women who were nearer to God than any in Spain, and who, in any case, could not hear me.

“Satisfied, though never happy, with this explanation, I applied myself to the improvement of my mind and spirit: my mind by reading the ancient books that Mama shipped over from the library of our castle in Estremaduras, which told the tales of my ancestors’ wars against the Saracens during the Crusades and the Reconquista, and my spirit by studying catechism and—at the behest of the nuns—praying, an hour a day, for the intercession of a particular Saint who was depicted in a stained-glass window in a side-chapel of the church. This was Saint Étienne de la Tourette, and his emblems were as follows: in his right hand, the sailmaker’s needle and thong with which his lips had been sewn shut by a certain Baron, and in his left, the iron tongs with which his tongue, on a later occasion, had been ripped out by the Bishop of Metz, who was later canonized as St. Absalom the Serene. Though at the time the significance of these tokens did not really penetrate my thoughts.

“But my body was never developed until one day, around the time my voice changed, when a new visitor came to lodge with us: a tall and handsome Caballero with a hole in the center of his forehead, something like a third eye. This was Carlos Olancho Macho y Macho: a great sea-captain renowned throughout New Spain for his magnificent exploits against the boca-neers who infest the Caribbean (which—never mind what the English think of it—is, to us, a pit of vipers lying astride the route from our treasure-ports to Spain; a gantlet of fire, flying lead, and bloody cutlasses that must be run by every one of our galleons). Many were the pirates who had been slain by Carlos Olancho Macho y Macho, or El Torbellino as he was called in less formal settings, and a score of galleons would not carry all the silver he had kept out of the clutches of the Protestants. But in a struggle against the pirate-armada of Captain Morgan, off the Archipiélago de los Colorados, he had taken this pistol-ball between his eyes. Ever since he had been moody to an extent that put all around him—especially his superior officers—in fear of their lives, and he had been unable to put ideas into words, unless he wrote those words backwards, with his left hand, while looking into a mirror—which had proved to be fatally impractical in the heat of battle. And so with great reluctance El Torbellino had agreed to be pensioned off to this nunnery. Every day he knelt beside me in the side-chapel and prayed for the intercession of St. Nicolaas of Frisia, whose emblem was a Viking broad-axe embedded in the exact centerline of his tonsure: a wound that had given him the miraculous gift of understanding the speech of terns.

“Now I will encompass the entirety of several years in one sentence: El Torbellino taught me, of the arts of war, everything he knew; as well as some things I suspect he made up on the spur of the moment. In this way he brought the phant’sies and romance of those musty old books within my reach. But not within my grasp; for never mind my skill with the cutlass, the rapier, the dagger, pistol, and musket. I still lived in a nunnery in Darién. As I grew into the fullness of manhood, I began to make a plan of escaping to the coast, and perhaps raising a crew of sea-dogs, and going out on the Caribbean to hunt for boca-neers, and, after making a name for myself, offering my services as privateer to King Carlos II. That King was in my thoughts every day: El Torbellino and I would kneel before the image of St. Lemuel, whose emblem was the basket he had been carried around in, and pray on His Majesty’s behalf.

“But as it happened, before I could go out and find the pirates, they came to me.

“Even men such as you, so ignorant and stupid, probably know that some years ago Captain Morgan sailed from Jamaica with an armada; sacked and pillaged Porto Belo; and then crossed the isthmus at the head of an army and laid waste to the city of Panama itself. At the time of this atrocity, El Torbellino and I were off on a long hunting trip in the mountains. We were trying to find and kill one of the were-jaguars that are spoken of, with such apparent sincerity, by the Indios…”

“Did you catch one?” Jack asked, unable to contain himself.

“That is another tale,” said Jeronimo with obvious regret, and uncharacteristic self-restraint. “We ranged far down the isthmus, and were a long time returning, because of los parásitos of which the less said the better. During our absence, Morgan’s fleet had fallen upon Porto Belo, and his advance parties had begun to penetrate the interior, searching for the best way over the divide. One of these, comprising perhaps two dozen sea-scum, had come upon the nunnery, and were well advanced in sacking it. As El Torbellino and I approached, we could hear the shattering of the stained-glass windows, and the cries and moans of the nuns who were being dishonored—the only sounds I had ever heard from their lips.

“El Torbellino and I were armed with all of the necessaries that two gentlemen would normally take on a long were-jaguar-hunting campaign in the ravenous and all-destroying jungles of Darién, and we had the advantage of surprise; furthermore, we were on the side of God, and we were very, very angry. Yet these advantages might have gone for naught, at least in my case, for I was untested in battle. And it is universally known that many are the young men who have filled their heads with romantic legends, and who dream of fighting gloriously in battle—but who, when plunged into a real flesh-and-blood conflict, with all of its shock, confusion, and gore, become paralyzed, or else throw down their weapons and flee.

“As it turned out, I was not one of those. El Torbellino and I burst out of the jungle and fell upon those drunken boca-neers like a pair of rabid were-jaguars descending upon a sheep-fold. The violence was exquisite. El Torbellino killed more than I, of course, but many an Inglés tasted my steel on that day, and, to summarize a very disagreeable story, the surviving nuns carred barrow-loads of viscera into the jungle to be torn by the condors.

“We knew that this was no more than an advance-party, and so we then turned our energies to fortifying the place, and teaching the nuns how to load and fire matchlocks. When the main force arrived—several hundred of Captain Morgan’s rum-drenched irregulars—we gave them a warm Spanish welcome, and decorated the court with a few score bodies before they forced their way in. After that it was hand-to-hand combat. El Torbellino died, impaled on thirteen blades as he stood in the infirmary door, and I fought on for some while despite having been butt-stroked in the jaw with a musket. The commander outside ordered his men to withdraw and regroup. Before they could make another attack—which certainly would have killed me—he received word from Captain Morgan that another way over the mountains had been found, and that he should disengage and go via that route. Seeing that there was more profit, and less peril, in sacking a rich city, defended by poltroons, than a modest convent, defended by a single man who was not afraid to die in glory, the pirates left us alone.

“So both Porto Belo and Panama were sacked and destroyed anyway. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the story of how El Torbellino and I had defended the nunnery created a sensation in Lima and Mexico City, and I was made out to be a great hero—perhaps the only hero of the entire episode, for the performance of those who had been charged with defending Panama was too miserable to be related in polite company.

“I knew nothing of this, for I had fallen gravely ill of my wounds, as well as various tropical maladies picked up on the were-jaguar-hunt which only now were coming into their full flower. I had taken leave of my senses, despite the prodigious bleedings, and volcanic purges, administered every day by doctors who came to the convent during the aftermath of the battles I have described. When next I was aware of my surroundings, I was on a galleon coasting along the Bahía de Campeche, approaching Vera Cruz, which, as even bumpkins such as you may understand, is the sea-port most convenient to Mexico City. I could not open my mouth. A Jesuit doctor explained to me that my jaw-bone had been fractured by the blow of the musket-butt, and that bandages had been wound tightly round my head to clench my jaw shut and hold all in place until the bone knit. In the meantime my left front tooth had been punched out to create a small orifice through which a paste of milk and ground maize was injected, using a sort of bellows, three times a day.

“In due time we threaded the Western Channel of Vera Cruz and dropped anchor under the walls of the castle, there, then waited out a sandstorm, then another, and finally went ashore, forcing our way through fog-banks of gnats, and keeping our pistols at the ready in the event of alligators. We parleyed with the crowd of Negro and Mulatto mule-thieves who make up the citizenry, and arranged for transportation to the City. The town was crowded with shabby wooden houses, all boarded up—it was explained to me that these were the property of white men, who flocked to town when the treasure-fleet was forming up around the Castle, but otherwise retired to haciendas up-country, which were more salubrious in every way. The only part of Vera Cruz that can be called civilized is the square of the churches and the Governor’s house, where a company of troops is garrisoned. When the officer in charge there was informed of my arrival, he had his artillery-men fire a salute from their field-pieces, and gladly wrote out a pass for me to travel to the Capital. So we rode out of the landward gate, which had been wedged open by a passing dune, and began our passage west.

“The less said about this journey, the better.

“Mexico City turned out to be everything that Vera Cruz was not in the way of beauty, magnificence, and order. It rises from a lake, joined to the shore by five causeways, each with its own gate. All of the land is owned by the Church and so it is, perforce, a most pious city, in that there is no place to live unless one joins a holy order. There are a score of nunneries and even more monasteries, all of them rich, and besides that a numerous rabble of criollos who sleep in the streets and are forever committing outrages. The Cathedral can only be called stupendous, having a staff of between three and four hundred, headed by an Archbishop who is paid sixty thousand pieces of eight a year. I mention these facts only to convey how impressed I was; had my jaw not been lashed shut by many yards of linen, it would have hung open for a week.

“For several days I was squired around town and fêted by various important men including the Viceroy and his wife: a Duchess of very high birth, who looked like a horse when the lips are pulled back to inspect the teeth. Of course I could not eat any of the fine meals that were set before me, but I learned to drink wine through a hollow reed. Likewise I could not address my hosts, but I could write after-dinner speeches, which I did in the heroic old-fashioned style I’d learned from those family histories. These were very well received.

“Now I am come to the part of my Narration where I must summarize many years’ events quickly. I think you know what occurs next: in time the bandage came off my jaw and I was conveyed to the Cathedral where, in a splendid Mass, I was knighted by the Viceroy.

“When the ceremony was finished, the Archbishop came up to give his compliments to me, and to the Viceroy, and to the Viceroy’s wife, whom he praised for her chastity and her beauty.

“To which I said as follows: that this was certainly the most wretched piece of brown-nosing I had ever heard, for whenever I laid eyes on the Viceroy’s wife I could not decide whether to give her the vigorous butt-fucking she so obviously craved, or to climb on her back and ride her around the zócalo firing pistols in the air.

“The Viceroy clapped me in irons and put me in a bad place for a long time, where I probably should have died.

“Letters made their way down the King’s Highway to Vera Cruz and into the holds of galleons, to Havana and finally to Madrid, and other letters returned, and evidently some sort of explanation was proffered, and an arrangement made. After a while I was moved to an apartment where I recovered my health, and then I was conveyed back down to Vera Cruz and given command of a three-masted ship of thirty-two guns, and a fair crew, and told to go out and kill pirates and come ashore as infrequently as possible until I was given other instructions.

“And here I could cite any amount of statistics concerning tonnage of pirate-ships sunk and pieces of eight recovered for the King and the Church, but for me the highest honor was that, among the boca-neers, I became known as the second coming of El Torbellino. I was given the name El Desamparado, which I will now explain to you ignorant filth who know not its meaning. ‘Desamparado’ is a holy word to those of us who profess the True Faith, for it is the very last word uttered by Our Lord during His agony on the Holy Rood—”

“What’s it mean,” asked Jack, “and why’d they paste it on you, who already had such a surfeit of other names?”

“It means, Forsaken by God. For tales of my struggles, and my confinement in the dungeons of Mexico, had preceded me; from which even one such as you, Jack, who has parts missing both fore and aft, may understand why I was called this. Know that whenever I sailed into Havana I was saluted by many guns, though I was never invited to come ashore.

“Then, two years ago, the treasure-fleet was scattered by a hurricane after it had departed Havana. I was sent out into the Straits of Florida to round up stragglers—”

“Wait a moment there, El Desamparado. Is this going to be one of those yarns about how you, but only you, know the whereabouts of some sunken treasure-ship? Because—”

“No, no, it’s better than that!” the Spaniard exclaimed. “After combing the sea for many days, we found a smaller vessel—a brig of perhaps seventy-five tons’ displacement—trapped among sand-banks in the Muertos Cays, which lie between Cuba and Florida. The storm surge had carried her into a sort of basin whence she could not now escape, for fear of running aground on the shifting sands that encompassed her. We anchored in deeper water nearby and sent out longboats to take soundings. In this manner we discovered an aperture in the sand-bank through which this brig could pass, provided that we waited for high tide, and also offloaded some of her cargo, giving her a shallower draught. The master of this ship was strangely reluctant to follow my advice, but at length I convinced him that this was the only way out. We brought our longboat alongside and set all hands to work lightening the brig’s load. And as any seaman will tell you, the quickest way to get weight off a ship is to remove those objects that are heaviest, but least numerous: typically, the armaments. And so, by means of blocks and tackle rigged to the yards, we raised her cannons up out of the gundeck one by one, lowered them into the longboat, and took them out to my ship. In the meantime other sailors busied themselves carrying cannonballs up from belowdecks. And that was how we discovered that this brig was armed, not with lead and iron, but with silver. For the strong places down below, the shot-lockers built to carry cannonballs, were stacked full of pigs.”

“Pigs?!” exclaimed several; but here Jack for once was able to make himself useful. “El Desamparado means, not the squealing animals with curly tails, but the irregular bars of silver made by the refinery at the head of a mine by pouring the molten ore out into a trough of clay.” And here Jack was prepared to go on at some length about the silver refineries of the Harz Mountains, which he had once visited, and had explained to him, by the Alchemist Enoch Root. But it seemed that his comrades had already heard many of these details from his own lips, and so he moved on to what he assumed was the point of Jeronimo’s story. “Pigs are strictly an intermediate form, meant for one purpose only: to be taken direct to a refining furnace, re-melted, purified, and made into bars, which are assayed and stamped—at which point the King would normally take his rake-off…”

“In New Spain, ten percent for the King and one percent for the overhead, viz. assayers and other such petty officials,” Jeronimo put in.

“And so the presence of pigs aboard this ship proved beyond argument that it was in the act of smuggling silver back to Spain.”

“For once, the Vagabond has spoken truthfully and to the point,” said Jeronimo. “And you will never guess what person we discovered in the best cabin on the ship: the Viceroy’s wife, who still remembered me. She was on her way back to Madrid to go shopping.”

“What did you say to her?”

“It is better not to remember this. Knowing that she would make a full report of these events to her husband in Mexico City, I did not delay in writing the Viceroy a letter, in which I related these events—but obliquely, in case the letter was intercepted. I assured him that his secret was safe with me, for I was a Caballero, a man of honor, and he could rely upon my discretion; my lips, I told him, were sealed forever.”

There was now a long and somewhat agonizing silence there on the roof of the banyolar.

“Some months later, I received a communication from this same Viceroy, inviting me to go to the Governor’s House in Vera Cruz on my next visit to that port, to receive a gift that awaited me there.”

“A lovely new set of neck-irons?”

“A pistol-ball to adorn the nape of your neck?”

“A ceremonial sword, delivered point-first?”

“I have no idea,” said Jeronimo, a bit ruffled, “for I never reached the house of the Gobernador. It is important to mention that our purpose in visiting Vera Cruz was to pick up a shipment of small arms from a merchant I had come to know there—a fellow who had a knack for taking delivery of the King’s armaments before they reached the King’s soldiers. Several of my men and I accomplished this errand first, in a couple of hired wagons, and then we told the teamsters to take us to the Governor’s House via the most direct route, for we were running late even by the standards of New Spain. I was in my finest clothes.

“We entered the central plaza of Vera Cruz from a direction that they did not expect, for instead of proceeding up the main street with its boarded-up houses, we had come in from the depot of the arms merchant, which lay on the other side of the town. Our first hint that something was amiss came from the countless fine tendrils of smoke spiraling up from various places of concealment around the town square—”

“Matchlocks!” Jack said.

“Of course our pistols were already loaded and at the ready, for this was Vera Cruz. But this gave us warning to break out the muskets and to knock the lids from several cases of granadoes. The matchlock-men opened fire on us, but raggedly. We charged them with cutlasses drawn, intending to kill them before they could reload. Which we did—but we were astonished to discover that these were Spanish soldiers of the local garrison! At this point fire came down on us from all around: the windows of the Governor’s House and of the churches and monasteries ringing the square all served as loop-holes for this emboscada.”

“The soldiers had occupied all of those buildings?” exclaimed Mr. Foot, whose capacity for indignation knew no limits.

“So we assumed at first; but when we returned fire, and flung our granadoes, the burnt and dismembered bodies that sprayed out of those windows were those of monks and mid-level government officials. And yet still we were stupid, for our next mistake was to drive the wagons forward, out of the square, and into the main street of the town. Whereupon planks began to fall away from the windows and doors of the sorry wooden houses that the Viceroy’s officials had put up there, and the true battle began. For it was here on this street where they had planned to make the ambush. We overturned both of the wagons, and made a fortification out of them; we shot all of the horses and piled their corpses up as ramparts; we fought from doorway to doorway; we got a runner out to my ship, and she opened fire upon the town with her guns. In return she came under fire from the cannons of the castle. We never would have survived against such a force, except that the guns set some of those buildings afire, and a wind blew the flames down the street as if those rows of wooden buildings had been trails of gunpowder. Many bodies fell in the dust of Vera Cruz on that day. Most of the town burned. My ship sank before my eyes. I escaped from the town with two of my men, and we made our way down the coast as best we could. One of my men was killed by an alligator, and one died of a fever. At length I came to a little port where I bought passage to Jamaica, that den of English thieves, now the only place in the Caribbean where I could hope to find sanctuary. There, I learned that in the weeks following the catastrophe, what remained of Vera Cruz had been taken and sacked by the pirate Lorenuillo de Petiguavas, and utterly leveled with the ground, so that it would have to be built again from nothing.

“As for myself, I tried to make my way back to Spain so that I could return to the place of my birth in Estremaduras. But when Gibraltar was almost in sight, my ship was captured by the Barbary Corsairs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

“It is a ripping yarn,” Jack conceded, after a few moments’ silence, “but the best story in the world does not amount to a Plan.”

“That is my concern,” said Moseh de la Cruz, “and I have a Plan that is nearly complete. Though it has one or two leaks in it, which you might be able to plug.”

Book 5

The Juncto

The Commerce of the World, especially as it is now carried on, is an unbounded Ocean of Business; Trackless and unknown, like the Seas it is managed upon; the Merchant is no more to be follow’d in his Adventures, than a Maze or Labyrinth is to be trac’d out without a Clue.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

Dundalk, Ireland

6 SEPTEMBER 1689

To Eliza, Countess de la Zeur

From Sgt. Bob Shaftoe

Dundalk, Ireland

6 September 1689

My lady,

I am speaking these words to a Presbyterian scrivener who followed our regiments down from our points of disembarkation around Belfast, and has hung out his shingle on a hut near Dundalk camp. From this, you may draw what conclusions you will concerning which matters I will address straightforwardly, and which I will speak not of.

A queue of soldiers begins at my left shoulder and extends out the door and down the lane. I rank most of them, and so could keep the scribbler busy all day if I chose, but I will address important matters first and try to conclude our business directly so that the others may send greetings to their mums and mistresses in England.

Your letter of June 15th reached me just before we embarked for Belfast, and was read to me aboard ship by a chaplain. It is well that I made your acquaintance and took your measure in the Hague, or I would have dismissed its contents as idle and womanish chatter. Your stylings are finer than the discourse that one is accustomed to hearing aboard a troop-ship. All the blokes who overheard it were gobsmacked that such pretty phrases had been directed to one such as me. I am now reputed to be a man of parts, and a fellow with many high and mighty connexions.

Upon listening to certain phrases for the third and fourth time, I collected that you had run afoul of a French count by the name of d’Avaux, who had obtained some knowledge of you that put you in his power. The Revolution in London had caused this d’Avaux to be recalled suddenly to France. Later the unfortunate Count was despatched to Brest, the remotest port of France, and loaded aboard ship in company of none other than Mr. James Stuart, who was formerly known as James II by the Grace of God of England, etc., King.

Off they sailed to the sophisticated metropolis of Bantry, Ireland. Later you had news that they had assembled an army of Frenchmen, Irish Catholics, and Jacobites (as we now refer to James’s supporters in Merry England) and established themselves in Dublin.

You are too courtly, my lady, ever to come out and say what you mean directly, and so the exact meaning of your letter was unclear to me and is unclear still. As I was situated in London, and your letter was addressed thither, you cannot have known that I’d have it read to me during a passage to Ireland. Or perhaps you are so clever and well-informed that you anticipated this. Surely it could never have been a request for my help? For how could I give you any aid in such a matter?

Brother Jack begat two sons by a strapping Irish lass named Mary Dolores Partry—he must have told you. She died. The boys have been raised by the kin of their late mum. I have made efforts to know them and to tender such support as I might—for example, by recruiting a few of their uncles and cousins into our Regiment. My life as a soldier has made me a poor uncle indeed. But the boys, who have inherited their dad’s weakness to impulses of a perverse kind, and who have been raised by Irishmen to boot, seem to respect me all the more, the more I neglect them.

Last year, Jim Stuart, then King, conceived a malignant distrust of his very own English regiments, and brought in several Irish ones to put down our Revolution (which he styled an uprising). These were phant’sied, by ordinary Englishmen, to be Crusaders, ten feet tall, bearing French bayonets red with English blood, led by Jesuits, controlled directly from Rome, yet just as wild in their ways as Irishmen ever were.

My Presbyterian scrivener is giving me the evil eye now, for making light of them. His folk have oft felt besieged in various corners of Ulster by such—by your leave, sir, put it down just as I have spoke it.

’Twas an even worse time than usual to be Irish in England, so all the kinfolk of Mary Dolores, including Jack’s boys, took passage on the first ship they could find that was Ireland-bound. This happened to set them down in Dublin—the wrong part of the island by far, as the Partrys are Connaught folk and seafarers. But Dublin they found more to their liking than they had foreseen. They’d raised two generations in London and grown used to city ways. During the same interval Dublin had grown to thrice its former size. Now these people, and Dublin, suited each other.

No sooner had they established themselves than James arrived with his motley Court, and his French generals began offering gold coins to any man who would join the Jacobite army. They had recruited a horde of naked bog-trotters whilst sloshing across the island and were calling them an army. Imagine, then, how pleased they were to encounter these fellows who had served in a Guards regiment, learnt to fire muskets, and fought in battles! Those fellows—not my in-laws, since Jack and Mary Dolores never married, but, if you will, my out-laws—were not merely accepted but embraced into James’s regiments, and made sergeants on the spot. They were quartered in the houses of the Protestant gentry of Dublin, who by this time had already fled to England or America.

So now the Partrys and I are ranged on opposing sides of the battle-front, which is a sleepy one at present. If I survive, and if they do, I am invited to join them over pints of black beer and to have strange, rousing yarns related to me of Dublin under the Jacobites, and of how one Connaught family made themselves at home there.

Now during the past summer, the Ulster towns of Derry and Enniskillen were put under siege by elements of this queer French-Irish army. James’s eagerness to score victories for the Pope exceeds his intelligence by an amount too great to measure. So on two occasions he dashed out of Dublin on short notice with all his entourage in the hopes of making his way north to Ulster and planting the Crusader-flag on the ruins of a Presbyterian church or two. The poor roads and scarcity of bridges hindered the royal progress, and the disinclination of the besieged Scotsmen to surrender might have balked him in any event.

My scrivener, who is at this moment glowing with pride and sniffling with emotion, will perhaps append a few lines extolling the manliness of the defenders of those two towns.

When d’Avaux—who had no choice but to accompany James on these excursions—returned, he was given the unwelcome news that some enterprising Dubliners (described by witnesses as a pair of towheaded lads) had climbed up some vines and a drain-pipe, entered his house through a window, and stolen everything that was of value, as well as a few items that were of no use to anyone but himself.

I will leave it to you, my lady, to guess whether there may be any connexion between these events, and a letter I had sent to my Dublin out-laws a few weeks previously, in which I had described this d’Avaux, and mentioned that he was now residing across the square from the house where their company had been quartered.

Not long after, I received a nocturnal delivery of papers, written out in what I am assured, by learned men, is the French language. Though I cannot read, I can recognize some of the words, and I half phant’sy I see your name in some of them. I have enclosed them in this packet.

During our memorable meeting in the Hague, you voiced sympathy for my problem, namely, that my true love, Miss Abigail Frome, was made a slave, and given to the Earl of Upnor. You seemed to doubt that I could ever be of use to you. Perhaps it is time for a new reckoning.

I attempted to settle the issue personally on the day of the Revolution but was baffled—you may hear the story from my lord Upnor if you care to know it.

This concludes my letter. You may direct any response to me at Dundalk. I am here with a stew of English, Dutch, Huguenot, Ulster, Danish, and Brandenburg regiments, enlivened by a sprinkling of unreconstructed Phanatiques whose fathers came over with Cromwell, conquered this island, and were paid for their work in Irish land. Now the Irish have got it back, and these hectical Nonconformists are disgruntled, and undecided whether they should join our army and conquer it anew, or sail to America and conquer that instead. They shall have a good eight or nine months to make up their minds, as Marshal Schomberg—the general whom King William has put in charge of this army—is desultory, and intends to tarry here in Dundalk for the entire winter.

So here is where I may be reached, if I am not killed by pestilence, starvation, or boredom.

Your humble and obedient servant,

Bob Shaftoe

The Dunkerque Residence of
the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir

21 OCTOBER 1689

BONAVENTURE ROSSIGNOL HAD MANY eccentric traits, even by the standards of cryptologists; but none more striking than his tendency to gallop into town alone when most needed and least looked-for. He had done it thirteen months ago, knowing (for he knew everything) that Eliza was in peril on the banks of the Meuse. The four-month-old infant she now carried was evidence of how it had wrought on her passions. Now, here he was again, wind-blown, mud-spattered, and horse-scented to a degree that was incorrect and absurd for a gentleman of the King’s court; yet suddenly Eliza felt as if she had just sat down in a puddle of warm honey. She closed her eyes, drew a breath, let it out slowly, and dumped her burden into his arms.

“Mademoiselle, I had held, until this moment, that your recent letter to me was the most exquisite flirtation that could be devised by the human mind,” said Rossignol, “but I perceive now that it was merely a prelude to the delicious torment of the Three Bundles.”

This snapped her head around—as he’d known it would—because it was a sort of riddle.

Rossignol had coal-black eyes. He was gaunt, and held to be unattractive by most of the ladies at Court. He was as lean as a riding-crop, which made him look awkward in court-dress; but bulked up in a cassock and flushed from the breeze off the sea, he looked well enough to Eliza. Those black eyes glanced briefly at the blanket-wrapped object she had dropped into his arms, then flicked up to a side-table where rested a packet of moldy tent-cloth, tied up in twine. Two tight little bundles. Then, finally, his eyes locked on Eliza’s for a moment—she was looking back over her shoulder at him—and traveled slowly down her back until they came to rest on her arse.

“The last time you galloped to my rescue thus,” she said, “there was only one bundle to contend with; a simple matter, therefore, which you were man enough to handle.” Her eyes now jumped down to the bundle in Rossignol’s arms, which urped up some curdled milk onto his sleeve, coughed, and began to cry. “As we grow older the number of bundles waxes,” she added, “and we must all become jugglers.”

Rossignol stared, with a kind of Natural-Philosophick detachment, at the viscous streak of baby-vomit probing a fold of his sleeve. His son let out a howl; the father winced and turned his head away. A door at the other end of the room was ripped open, and a woman pounded in, already cooing for the baby; then, seeing a strange man, she drew herself up and looked to Eliza. “Please, mademoiselle, be my guest,” said Rossignol, and extended his arms. He had never seen the woman before, and had no idea who she was, but it did not require a Royal cryptanalyst to read the situation: Eliza, despite being trapped and detained in Dunkerque with no money, had not only figured out a way to move into this vacant château, but had also managed to retain at least one competent, loyal, and trusted servant.

Nicole—for that was this woman’s name—did not move until she had seen Eliza nod. Then she stepped forward and snatched the infant away, glaring at Rossignol—who responded with a grave bow. By the time she had reached the room’s exit, the baby had stopped crying, and as she hustled him off down the corridor he began to make a contented “aaah.”

Rossignol had forgotten the baby already. The bundle count was down to two. But he had the good manners not to pay undue attention to the packet on the side-table, even though he knew it to be filled with stolen diplomatic correspondence. All his attention, for now, was fixed on Eliza.

Eliza was accustomed to being looked at, and did not mind it. But she was preoccupied now for a little while. Rossignol had no feelings whatsoever for the baby. He had not the slightest intention of being its father. This did not surprise her especially. If anything, it was simpler and easier that way. He wanted her for what lay at either end of her spinal column—it was not clear which end he favored—and not for her spiritual qualities. Certainly not for her offspring.

King Louis XIV of France had found it convenient to make Eliza a Countess. Among other privileges, this had granted her admittance to the Salon of Diana in the royal château at Versailles. There she had noticed this bored and lonesome man studying her. She had been every bit as bored. As it had turned out, they had been bored for the same reason: They both knew the odds of these games, and saw little point in staking money on them. But to talk about the odds, and to speculate as to ways of systematically beating such games, was absorbing. It had seemed unwise, or at least impolite, to hold such conversations around the gaming-tables, and so Eliza and Rossignol had strolled in the gardens, and had moved quickly from the odds of card-games to more elevated talk of Leibniz, Newton, Huygens, and other Natural Philosophers. Of course they had been noticed by gossips looking out the windows; but those foolish Court girls, who mistook fashion for taste, had not considered Rossignol desirable, had not understood that he was a genius, unrecognized as such by the savants of Europe.

At the same time—though she had not realized this until later—he had been observing her even more shrewdly. Many of her letters to Leibniz, and Leibniz’s letters back to her, had crossed his desk, for he was a member of the Cabinet Noir, whose purpose was to open and read foreign correspondence. He had found her letters to be curiously long, and filled with vapid chatter about hairstyles and the cut of the latest fashions. His true purpose in strolling with her in the gardens of Versailles had been to determine whether she was as empty-headed as she seemed in her letters. The answer, clearly, was no; and moreover she had turned out to know a lot about mathematics, metaphysics, and Natural Philosophy. This had sufficed to send him back to his family château at Juvisy, where he had broken the steganographic code that Eliza had been using to correspond with Leibniz. He could have destroyed, or at least damaged, her then, but he had lacked the desire to. For a kind of seduction had taken place between the two of them, which had not been acted upon until thirteen months ago.

It would have made matters a good deal simpler if he had fallen in love with the baby and proposed to elope with her, and him, to some other country. But this, as she now saw clearly, was unthinkable in so many different ways that to dream of it any more was a waste of time. Oh, well (she thought), if the world were populated solely by persons who loved and desired each other symmetrically, it might be happier, but not so interesting. And there would be no place in such a world for a person such as Eliza. During her weeks in Dunkerque, she had gotten better than ever at making do with what Fortune sent her way. If there was to be no doting father, so be it. Nicole was an ex-whore, recruited from one of Dunkerque’s waterfront brothels. But she had already given the baby more love than he would get in a lifetime with Bonaventure Rossignol.

“Now you show up!” she said finally.

“The cryptanalyst to His Majesty the King of France,” said Rossignol, “has responsibilities.” He was not being arch—merely stating facts. “Things are expected of him. Now. The last time you got into trouble, a year ago—”

“Correction, monsieur: the last time you know about.”

“C’est juste. On that occasion, war was brewing on the Rhine, and I had a plausible reason to go that way. Finding you, mademoiselle, in a most complex predicament, I endeavoured to assist you.”

“By impregnating me?”

“I did that out of passion—as did you, mademoiselle, for our flirtation had been lengthy. And yet it did militate in your favor—perhaps even saved your life. You seduced Étienne d’Arcachon the very next day.”

“I let him believe he was seducing me,” Eliza demurred.

“Just as I said. Tout le monde knew about it. When you turned up pregnant in the Hague, everyone, including le Roi, and Étienne, assumed that the baby was the spawn of Arcachon; and, when it was born healthy, this made it seem that you were that rarest of specimens: one who could mate with a scion of the de Lavardac line without passing on its well-known hereditary imperfections to the child. I did as much as I could to propagate this myth through other channels.”

“Are you referring to how you stole, and decyphered, my journal, and gave it to the King?”

“Wrong on all counts. Monsieur le comte d’Avaux stole it—or would have, if I had not galloped post-haste to the Hague and co-opted him. I did not decypher it so much as produce a fictionalized version of it. And since the King owns me, and all my work, I did not so much give it to his majesty as direct his majesty’s attention to it.”

“Couldn’t you have directed his majesty’s attention elsewhere?”

“Mademoiselle. You had been witnessed by many Persons of Quality carrying out what was obviously a spy-mission. D’Avaux and his minions were doing all in their power—and they have much power—to drag your name through the muck. To direct the attention of le Roi elsewhere would have booted you nothing. Rather, I produced for his majesty an account of your actions that was tame compared to the fabrications of d’Avaux; it deflated that man’s pretensions while cementing the belief that the baby had been fathered by Étienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon. I was not trying to rehabilitate you—that would have required a miracle—only to mitigate the damage. For I feared that they might send someone to assassinate you, or abduct you, and bring you back to France.”

And now he stopped because he had talked himself into a faux pas, and was mortified. “Er…”

“Yes, monsieur?”

“I did not anticipate this.”

“Is that why it took you so long to get here?”

“I have already told you that the King’s cryptanalyst has responsibilities—none of which, as it turns out, place him in Dunkerque. I came as soon as I could.”

“You came as soon as I incited your jealousy by praising Lieutenant Bart in a letter.”

“Ah, so you admit it!”

“I admit nothing, monsieur, for he is every bit as remarkable as I made him out to be, and any man in his right mind would be jealous of him.”

“It is just so difficult for me to follow,” said Rossignol.

“Poor Bon-bon!”

“Please do not be sarcastic. And please do not address me by that ridiculous name.”

“What is it, pray tell, that the greatest cryptanalyst in the world cannot follow?”

“At first you described him as a corsair, a boca-neer, who took you by force…”

“Took the ship I was on by force—pray watch your language!”

“Later, when it was to your advantage to make me jealous, he was the most perfect gentle knight of the seas.”

“Then I shall explain it, for there is no contradiction. But first take off that cassock and let us make ourselves more comfortable.”

“The double entendre is noted,” said Rossignol crisply, “but before I become dangerously comfortable, pray tell, what are you doing in the residence of the Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir? For that is where we are, to judge from the scutcheon on the gates.”

“You have decyphered the coat of arms correctly,” said Eliza. “Fear not, the d’Ozoirs are not here now. It is just me, and my servants.”

“But I thought you were under arrest on a ship, and had no servants…or did you write those things solely to make me come here the faster?”

Eliza clamped a hand on Rossignol’s wrist and dragged him through a door. They had been conversing in a foyer that communicated with the stables. She took him now down a corridor into a little salon, and thence into a larger drawing-room that was illuminated by several great windows facing toward the harbor.

At some point in its history, Dunkerque must have been an apt name for this place. For it literally meant Dune-church, and one could easily see it, some centuries back, as a dune with a church on, below, or near it, and nothing else, save an indifferent creek that reached the sea there, not so much impelled by gravity as blundering into it by accident. This stark dune-church-creek-scape had over ages been complicated, though never obscured, by the huts, houses, docks, and wharves of a modest fishing-and smuggling-port. More recently it had come to be thought of as a strategic asset, and been juggled back and forth between England and France for a while; inevitably Louis XIV had made it his, and begun to aggrandize it into a base navale, which was a little bit like mounting cannons and armor-plates on a fishing-boat. To anyone approaching the place from England, it looked fearsome enough, with a massive stout rubble-wall along the shore for cannonballs to bounce off of, and divers fortifications and batteries set up wherever the sand would bear their weight. But seen from within—which was how Eliza and Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol were seeing it—the place looked like a perfectly innocent little port-town that had been hurled into a prison, or had had a prison erected around it.

All of which was to say that it was not and never would be a place for a great lord to pile up a brilliant château, or a great lady to spread a fragrant garden; and while those dunes might be speckled with watch-towers and mortar-batteries, no grand maréchal would ever make them terrible with a high citadel. The Marquis and the Marquise d’Ozoir had had the discretion to know as much, and so had contented themselves with acquiring a compound in the middle of things, near the harbor, and improving it, building up rather than out. The exterior of the main house was still old Norman half-timbered style, but one would never know it if all one saw was the interior, which had been remade in Barock style—or as close to it as one could come without using stone. Much wood, paint, and time had been devoted to fashioning pilasters and columns, wall-panels and balusters that would pass for Roman marble unless you went up and rapped on them with a knuckle. Rossignol had the good grace not to, and attended, instead, to what Eliza wished to show him: the view out the window.

From here they could see most of the ship-basin: a pool, deepened by dredging, and a-mazed by moles, causeways, wharves, sea-walls, &c. Beyond it the view was chopped off by the rectilinear bluff of the fortress-wall. Eliza did not have to explain to her guest that part of the basin was still used by the ordinary sea-faring folk who had always dwelled here, while another part was for the Navy; as much was obvious from looking at the ships.

She gave him a moment to take this in, then said: “How did I end up here? Well, once I had recovered from childbirth—” then she caught herself short, and smiled. “What a ridiculous expression; I see now that I shall be recovering until the day I die.”

Rossignol ignored the remark, and so, blushing slightly, she went back to the main thread: “I began to liquidate all of my short-term positions in the Amsterdam markets. It would be impossible to manage them from across the sea during a war. This was done easily enough—the result was a pretty hoard of gold coins, loose gemstones, and vulgar jewelry, as well as Bills of Exchange payable in London, and a few payable in Leipzig.”

“Ah,” said Rossignol, drawing some connexion in his mind, “those would be the ones that you gave to Princess Eleanor.”*

“As usual, you know everything.”

“When she turned up in Berlin with money, people there gossiped. It sounds as though you were most generous.”

“I booked passage on a Dutch ship that was to take me, along with several other passengers, from the Hook of Holland to London. This was early in September. We were baffled by strong winds out of the northeast, which prevented us from making any headway towards England, while driving us inexorably south towards the Straits of Dover. To make a long, tediously nautical story short, we were captured off Dunkerque by—voilà!”

Eliza gestured toward much the finest ship in the basin, a Ship of Force with a sterncastle magnificently sculpted, and spread thick with gold leaf.

“Lieutenant Jean Bart,” Rossignol muttered.

“Our captain surrendered immediately, and so we were boarded without violence by Bart’s men, who went through and confiscated everything of value. I lost all. The ship itself became Bart’s, of course—you can see it there if you care to look, but it is not much to look at.”

“That is putting it kindly,” said Rossignol after he had picked it out among the warships. “Why on earth does Lieutenant Bart suffer it to be moored so close to his flagship? It is like an ass sharing a stall with a cheval de bataille.”

“The answer is: the innate chivalry of Lieutenant Bart,” said Eliza.

“How does that follow?”

“After we had surrendered, and during the time that we were en route hither, one of Bart’s petty officers remained on board to keep an eye on things. I noticed him talking to one of the other passengers at length. I became concerned. This passenger was a Belgian gentleman who had boarded this ship at the last minute as we made our way towards the breakwater at the Hook. He had been paying me a lot of attention ever since. Not the sort of attention most men pay to me—”

“He was a spy,” said Rossignol, “in the pay of d’Avaux.” It was not clear whether he had guessed this, or already knew it from reading the man’s mail.

“I had guessed as much. It had not troubled me at all when I had thought I was going to end up in London, where this man would be impotent. But now we were on our way to Dunkerque, where the passengers would be left to shift for themselves. I could not guess what sort of mischief might befall me here at this fellow’s hands. And indeed, when we reached Dunkerque, all of the passengers except for me were let off. I was detained for some hours, during which time several messages passed between the ship I was on, and the flagship of Jean Bart.

“Now as you may know, Bon-bon, every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say ’tis the other way round. This arises from the fact that their livelihood derives from sacking ships, which is a hurried, disorderly, murky sort of undertaking; one pirate may come up with some gentleman’s lucky rabbit’s foot while the fellow on his left pulls an emerald the size of a quail’s egg from a lady’s cleavage. The whole enterprise would dissolve into a melee unless all the takings were pooled, and meticulously sorted, appraised, tallied, and then divided according to a rigid scheme. That is why the English euphemism for going a-pirating is going on the account.

“The practical result in my case was that every one of Bart’s men had at least a general notion of how much had been pilfered and from whom, and they knew that the gold taken from my strong-box and the jewels plucked from my body were worth more than all the other passengers’ effects summed and multiplied by ten. Bon-bon, I do not wish to boast, but the rest of my story will not make any sense to you unless I mention that the fortune I had lost was really quite enormous.”

Rossignol winced. From this, Eliza knew that he must have seen the figure mentioned somewhere.

“I have not dwelled on it,” she went on, “because a noblewoman—which I purport to be—is not supposed to care about anything as vulgar as money. And when Bart’s men took the jewels away from me I did not feel any different from the minute before. But as days went by I thought more and more about the fortune I had lost—enough to purchase an earldom. The only thing that saved me from going mad was the blue-eyed treasure I cradled in my arms.”

She purposely refrained from saying our baby, as this sort of remark only seemed to make him restive.

“In time I was put aboard a longboat and taken to the flagship. Lieutenant Bart emerged from his cabin to welcome me aboard. I think he was expecting some dowager. When he saw me, he was shocked.”

“It is not shock,” Rossignol demurred. “It is an altogether different thing. You have witnessed it a thousand times, but you’ll go to your grave without understanding it.”

“Well, once Captain Bart had recovered a little from this mysterious condition that you speak of, he ushered me into his private cabin—it is the one high in the sterncastle, there—and caused coffee to be served. He was—”

“Here I beg you to skip over any further adoring description of Lieutenant Bart,” said Rossignol, “as I got quite enough of it in the letter that caused me to wear out five horses getting here.”

“As you wish,” Eliza said. “It was more than simple lust, though.”

“I’m sure that’s what he wanted you to think.”

“Well. Let me jump ahead, then, to review my situation briefly. I am rated a Countess in France only because le Roi decided to make me one; he simply announced one day at his levée that I was the Countess de la Zeur—which is a funny French way of denoting my home island.”

“I wonder if you know,” said Rossignol, “that, by doing so, his majesty was implicitly reasserting an ancient Bourbon claim to Qwghlm that his lawyers had dredged out of some pond. Just as his majesty has made a base navale here, to one side of England, he would make another like it in Qwghlm, to the opposite side. So your ennoblement—startling as it might have been to you—was done as part of a larger plan.”

“I’d expect nothing less of his majesty,” said Eliza. “Whatever his motives might have been, the fact is that I had repaid the favor by spying on his army and reporting what I saw to William of Orange. So le Roi had reason to be a bit cross with me.”

Rossignol snorted.

“But I had done so,” Eliza went on, “under the ægis of Louis’s sister-in-law, whose homeland Louis was invading, and continues to ravage at this very moment.”

“He does not ravage, mademoiselle, but pacifies it.”

“I stand corrected. Now, William of Orange has secretly made me a Duchess. But this is like a bill of exchange drawn on a Dutch house and payable only in London.”

This commercial metaphor made Rossignol confused, and perhaps a little queasy.

“In France it is not honored,” Eliza explained, “for France deems James Stuart the rightful King of England and does not grant William any right to create Duchesses. Even if they did, they would dispute his sovereignty over Qwghlm. At any rate, these facts were all new to Lieutenant Bart. It required some time for me to convey them to him, for, of course, I had to do so diplomatically. When he had absorbed all, and pondered, and finally made to speak, the care with which he considered each utterance was extraordinary; he was like a pilot maneuvering his vessel through a harbor crowded with drifting fire-ships, pausing every few words to, as it were, take soundings or gauge the latest shift in the wind.”

“Or maybe he is just not, in the end, very intelligent,” Rossignol suggested.

“I shall let you be the judge of that, for you shall meet him presently,” Eliza said. “Either way, my situation is the same. Let me put it to you baldly. The money that Bart’s men had stripped off my person was gold or, as some name it, hard money, spendable anywhere in the world for any good or service, and extremely desirable on both sides of the English Channel. Such is terribly scarce now because of the war. Living so near Amsterdam and dealing so rarely in hard money, I had quite lost sight of this. As you know, Bon-bon, Louis XIV recently had all of the solid silver furniture in his Grands Appartements melted down, literally liquidating 1.5 million livres tournoises in assets to pay for the new army he is building. At the time I heard this story, I had dismissed it as a whim of interior decoration, but now I am thinking harder about its meaning. The nobles of France have hoarded a stupendous amount of metal in the past few decades, probably banking it against the day Louis XIV dies, when they phant’sy they may rise up and reassert their ancient powers.”

Rossignol nodded. “By melting his own furniture, his majesty was trying to set an example. So far, few have emulated it.”

“Now, my assets—all in the most liquid possible form—had been seized by Jean Bart, a privateer, holding a license to plunder Dutch and English shipping and turn the proceeds over to the French crown. If I had been a Dutch or an English woman, my money would already have been swallowed up by the French treasury, and available for the contrôleur-général, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, to dispense as he saw fit. But since I was arguably a French countess, the money had been put in escrow.”

“They were afraid that you would lodge an objection to the confiscation of your money—for how can a French privateer steal from a French countess?” said Rossignol. “Your ambiguous status would make it into a complicated affair legally. The letters that passed back and forth were most amusing.”

“I am glad you were amused, Bon-bon. But I was faced with the question: Why not claim my rights and demand the money back?”

“It is good that you have posed this question, mademoiselle, for I, and half of Versailles, have been wondering.”

“The answer is, because they wanted it. They wanted it badly enough that if I were to put up a fight, they might turn against me, denounce me as a foreign spy and a traitor, void my rights, throw me into the Bastille, and take the money. Put to work in the war, it might save thousands of French lives—and balanced against that, what is one counterfeit Countess worth?”

“Hmmm. I understand now that Lieutenant Bart was presenting you with an opportunity to do something clever.”

“He dared not come out and say it directly. But he wanted me to know that I had a choice. And this little Hercules, who would not hesitate to send a ship full of living men to David Jones’s Locker, if they were enemies of France, did not wish to see me taken off in chains to the Bastille.”

“So you did it.”

“ ‘The money is for France, of course!’ ” I told him. “ ‘That is why I went to such trouble to smuggle it out of Amsterdam. How could I do otherwise when le Roi is melting down his own furniture to save French lives, and to defend French rights?’ ”

“That must have cheered him up.”

“More than words can express. Indeed he was so flummoxed that I gave him leave to kiss my cheeks, which he did with great élan, and a lingering scent of eau de cologne.”

Rossignol twisted his head away from Eliza so that she would not see the look on his face.

“Some part of me still phant’sied that I’d be aboard a Dover-bound boat within hours, penniless but free,” Eliza said. “But of course it was more complicated than that. I still was not free to go; for as Jean Bart now informed me with obvious regret, I was being held on suspicion of being a spy for William of Orange.”

“D’Avaux had made his move,” said Rossignol.

“That is what I came to understand, from hints given me by Lieutenant Bart. My accuser, he said, was a very important man, who was in Dublin, and who had given orders that I was to be detained, on suspicion of spying, until he could reach Dunkerque.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Two weeks.”

“Then d’Avaux might get here at any moment!” Rossignol said.

“Behold his ship,” said Eliza, and directed Rossignol’s attention to a French Navy vessel moored elsewhere in the basin. “I was watching it come round the end of the jetty when I saw you riding up the street.”

“So d’Avaux has only just arrived,” said Rossignol. “We have little time to lose, then. Please explain to me, briefly, how you have ended up in this house; for only a moment ago you told me that you were detained on the ship there.”

“I was already ensconced in one of her cabins. It was practical to remain there. Bart caused the ship to be anchored where you see it, so that he could keep an eye on it—both to protect me from lusty French sailors and to be sure that I would not escape. He rounded up a few female servants from gin-houses and bordellos and put them aboard to stoke the galley fires and boil water and so on. As weeks went by, I learned which were good and which weren’t, and fired the latter. Nicole, whom you saw a minute ago, has turned out to be the best of these. And I sent to the Hague for a woman who had become a loyal lady-in-waiting to me there, named Brigitte. Letters began to reach me from Versailles.”

“I know.”

“As you have already read them, to list their contents would be redundant. Perhaps you remember one from Madame la marquise d’Ozoir, inviting me to—nay, demanding that I make myself at home in this, her Dunkerque residence.”

“Remind me please of your connexion to the d’Ozoirs?”

“Before I was ennobled, I required some excuse to be hanging around Versailles. D’Avaux, who had put me there in the first place, concocted a situation for me whereby I worked as a governess for the daughter of the d’Ozoirs, and followed them on their migrations back and forth between Versailles and Dunkerque. This made it easy for me to travel up the coast to Holland when business called me thither.”

“It sounds, by your leave, somewhat farcical.”

“Indeed, and the d’Ozoirs knew as much; but I had treated their daughter well, and a kind of loyalty had arisen between us nonetheless. So I have moved into this house.”

“Other servants?”

“Brigitte has arrived, and brought another good one with her.”

“I saw men?”

“To ‘guard’ me, Lieutenant Bart chose two of his favorite marines: ones who have grown a bit too old to be swinging from grappling-hooks.”

“Yes, they had that look about them. And if I may ask an indelicate question, mademoiselle, how do you pay all of these servants when by your own tale you have not a sou in hard money?”

“A reasonable question. The answer lies in my status as a Countess and benefactress of the French treasury. Because of this Lieutenant Bart has been willing to open his purse and lend me money.”

“All right. It is improper, but clearly you had no choice. We shall try to improve on these arrangements. Now, there is one other thing I must understand if I am to assist you, and that is the bundle of letters from Ireland.”

“After I had been living on that boat for two weeks, my mail began to catch up with me, and one day I received that packet, sewn up in tent-cloth, which had been posted to me from Belfast. It turned out to be correspondence stolen from the desk of Monsieur le comte d’Avaux in Dublin. It contained many letters and documents that were state secrets of France.”

“And so knowing that d’Avaux was en route to accuse you of spying, you have held on to them as bargaining counters.”

“Indeed.”

“Excellent. Is there a place where I could spread them out and go through them?”

Here, though she would never show it, Eliza felt a sudden upwelling of affection for Rossignol. In a world full of men who only wanted to take her to bed, it was somehow comforting to know that there was one who, given the opportunity, would prefer to read through a big pile of stolen correspondence.

“You may ask Brigitte—she is the big Dutch woman—to show you to the Library,” Eliza said. “I will keep an eye on the harbor. I believe that the longboat over yonder, just rounding the end of that pier, might be carrying d’Avaux.”

“Carrying him hither?” Rossignol asked sharply.

“No, to the flagship of Lieutenant Bart.”

“Good. I need at least a little bit of time.”

ELIZA REPAIRED TO AN UPPER storey of the house, where a prospective-glass was mounted on a tripod before a window, and watched Lieutenant Bart receive d’Avaux in the cabin of his flagship. This cabin extended across the full width of the ship’s sterncastle, and was illuminated by a row of windows looking abaft; at either end these curled around like a great golden scroll wrapped around the transom of the ship, creating small turrets from which Jean Bart might gaze forward to port or starboard. The sky was clear, and the afternoon sun was shining in through these windows.

The interview proceeded as follows: first, courteous greetings and chit-chat. Second, a momentary pause and adjustment of postures (because of a recent exploit, Jean Bart still could not sit down without suffering the torments of the damned, and d’Avaux, ever the gentleman, spurned all offers of chairs). Third, a long and, Eliza did not doubt, most entertaining Narration from Lieutenant Bart, enlivened by diverse zooming and veering movements of his hands. Slowly mounting impatience shown in d’Avaux’s posture. Fourth, interrogation of Bart by d’Avaux, during which Bart held up a ledger and ticked off several items (presumably rendering an accompt of all the jewels, purses, etc., that had been taken from Eliza). Fifth, d’Avaux jumped to his feet, face red, and worked his jaw violently for some minutes; Bart was startled at first, and went a bit slack, but gradually stiffened into a dignified and aggrieved posture. Sixth, both men came over to the window and looked at Eliza (or so it seemed through her spyglass; they could not see her, of course). Seventh, aides were summoned and coats and hats were donned. Which was Eliza’s cue to summon Brigitte and Nicole and the other female servants of her little household, and to begin putting on clothes. She borrowed a dress from the closet of Madame la marquise d’Ozoir. It was from last year; but d’Avaux had been in Dublin since then, and so to him it would look fashionable. And it was too big for Eliza, but with some artful pinning and basting in the back, it would serve, as long as she did not stand up. And she had no intention of standing up for d’Avaux. She arranged herself, a bit stiffly, in an armchair in the Grand Salon, and discoursed sotto voce with Bonaventure Rossignol. For Bart and d’Avaux had only required a few minutes of time to reach this house from Bart’s flagship, and were being made to wait in another room, so nearby that Bart’s pacing boots and d’Avaux’s sniffling nose (he had caught a catarrh en route) were clearly audible.

Rossignol had had time by now to sort through the stolen letters. Certain of these he gave into Eliza’s hands, and she arranged them on her lap, as if she had been reading them. The rest he took away, at least for the time being. He withdrew into another part of the house, not wishing to be seen by d’Avaux. A few minutes later Eliza sent word that the caller was to be admitted. The furniture had been arranged so that the sun was shining hard into the side of d’Avaux’s face. Eliza sat with her back to a window.

“His majesty has summoned me to his château at Versailles, so that I may report on the progress of the campaign that his majesty the King of England wages to wrest that island from the grip of the Usurper,” d’Avaux began, once they had got the opening formalities out of the way. “The Prince of Orange has sent out a Marshal Schomberg to campaign against us near Belfast, but he is timid or lethargic or both and it appears he’ll do nothing this year.”

“Your voice is hoarse,” Eliza observed. “Is it a catarrh, or have you been screaming a lot?”

“I am not afraid to raise my voice to inferiors. In your presence, mademoiselle, I shall comport myself properly.”

“Does that mean you no longer intend to have me dangled over hot coals in a sack full of cats?” Eliza turned over a letter, written by d’Avaux, in which he had proposed to someone that such was the most fitting treatment for spies.

“Mademoiselle, I am shocked beyond words that you would connive with Irishmen to enter my house and ransack it. There is much that I would forgive you. But to violate the sanctity of an ambassadorial residence—of a nobleman’s home—and to commit theft, makes me fear I over-estimated you. For I believed you could pass for noble. But what you have done is common.”

“These distinctions that you draw ’tween noble and common, what is proper and what is not, seem as arbitrary and senseless to me, as the castes and customs of Hindoos would to you,” Eliza returned.

“It is in their very irrationality, their arbitrariness, that they are refined,” d’Avaux corrected her. “If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.”

“’Tis like gold, then?”

“Very much so, mademoiselle. Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value—seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does—it is a shared phant’sy. You, mademoiselle, came to me as a blank disk of gold—”

“And you, sir, tried to stamp nobility ’pon me, to enhance my value—”

“But then—” he said, gesturing to the letter, “to steal from my house, shows you up as a counterfeit.”

“Which do you suppose is a worse thing to be? A spy for the Prince of Orange, or a counterfeit Countess?”

“Unquestionably the latter, mademoiselle, for spying is rampant everywhere. Loyalty to one’s class—which means, to one’s family—is far more important than loyalty to a particular country.”

“I believe that on the other side of yonder straits are many who would take the opposite view.”

“But you are on this side of those straits, mademoiselle, and will be for a long time.”

“In what estate?”

“That is for you to decide. If you wish to continue in your common ways, then you will have a common fate. I cannot send you to the galleys, as much as that would please me, but I can arrange for you to have a life as miserable in some work-house. I believe that ten or twenty years spent gutting fish would re-awaken in you a respect for noble things. Or, if your recent behavior is a mere aberration perhaps brought about by the stresses of childbirth, I can put you back at Versailles, in much the same capacity as before. When you vanished from St. Cloud everyone assumed you had gotten pregnant and had gone off somewhere to bear your child in secrecy and give it away to someone; now a year has gone by, and it has all come to pass, and you are expected back.”

“I must correct you, monsieur. It has not all come to pass. I have not given the child away to anyone.”

“You have adopted a heretick orphan from the Palatinate,” d’Avaux explained with grim patience, “that you may see him raised in the True Faith.”

“See him raised? Is it envisioned, then, that I am to be a mere spectator?”

“As you are not his mother,” d’Avaux reminded her, “it is difficult to envision any other possibility. The world is full of orphans, mademoiselle, and the Church in her mercy has erected many orphanages for them—some in remote parts of the Alps, others only a few minutes’ stroll from Versailles.”

Thus d’Avaux let her know the stakes of the game. She might end up in a work-house, or as a countess at Versailles. And her baby might be raised a thousand miles away from her, or a thousand yards.

Or so d’Avaux wished her to believe. But though she did not gamble, Eliza understood games. She knew what it was to bluff, and that sometimes it was nothing more than a sign of a weak hand.

WELL-READ AND-TRAVELED GENTLEMAN that he was, Bonaventure Rossignol had learned that in the world there were countries—and even in this country, there were religious communities and social classes—where men did not always go about carrying long sharp stabbing-and slashing-weapons ready to be whipped out and driven into other men’s flesh at a moment’s notice. This was a thing that he knew and understood in theory but could not entirely comprehend. Take for example the present circumstance: two men, strange to each other, in the same house as Eliza, neither of them knowing where the other was, or what his intentions might be. It was a wildly unstable state of affairs. Some would argue that to add edged weapons to this mix was to render it more volatile yet, and hence a bad idea; but to Rossignol it seemed altogether fitting, and an apt way to bring into the light a conflict that, in other countries or classes, would be suffered to fester in the dark. Rossignol had been—this could not be denied—sneaking around the house, trying not to be detected by d’Avaux. A winding and backtracking course had led him to a gloomy hallway, bypassed by the redecoration project, paneled in slabs of wood that had not yet been painted to make them look like marble, and cluttered with the d’Ozoirs’ portraits and keepsakes—some mounted on the walls, most leaning against whatever would hold them up. For if it was a sign of high class and elevated tastes to adorn the walls of one’s dwelling with paintings, then how infinitely more sophisticated to lean great stacks of homeless art against walls, and stash them behind chairs! Reaching this gallery, anyway, he smelled eau de cologne, and placed his left hand on the scabbard of his rapier (a style of weapon that had gone out of fashion, but it was the one his father, Antoine Rossignol, the King’s cryptanalyst before him, had taught him how to use, and he would be damned if he would make a fool of himself trying to learn how to fence with a small-sword) and thumbed it out an inch or two, just to be sure it would not turn out to be stuck when the time came. At the same time he lengthened his pace to a confident stride. For to skulk about would be to admit some kind of bad intentions and invite preemptive retribution. As he pounded along the gallery he took note of chairs, busts on pedestals, stacks of paintings, carpet-humps, and other impedimenta, so that he would not trip over them when and if some sort of melee were to break out. Ahead of him, on the left, another, similar gallery intersected this one; the man with the cologne was back in there. Rossignol slowed, turning to the left, and edged around the corner just until the other became visible. Because of this slow crab-wise movement, Rossignol’s right arm and shoulder led the remainder of his body around the corner, which wrought to his advantage in that he could whip out the rapier and lunge around the corner at any foe, while his body would be shielded from any right-handed counter-attack. But alas, the other fellow had foreseen all of this, and re-deployed himself by crossing to the opposite side of the side-corridor and turning his back upon Rossignol so that he could pretend to study a landscape mounted to the wall there; thus, the corner was entirely out of his way, and his right shoulder was situated closest to Rossignol. A slight turn of the head sufficed to bring Rossignol into his peripheral vision. He had crossed his right arm diagonally over the front of his body and then clasped his left hand over the elbow to hold it in that position; this would place his right hand very near, if not on, the grip of the cutlass that was dangling from his hip. The pose was forced and artificial, but well-thought-out; in a moment he could draw, turn, and deliver a backhanded slash through the middle of the gallery-intersection. It was, therefore, a standoff.

It was also, admittedly, ridiculous. Rossignol, for his part, had not killed anyone in years. Jean Bart (for this had to be Jean Bart) probably did it more frequently, but never in rich people’s houses. If it had somehow come to swordplay, they’d have been civil enough to take it outside. And yet they did not know each other. There was no harm in taking precautions, particularly if they were as inoffensive as standing in a certain position, and maintaining a certain distance. These measures did not even require conscious thought; Rossignol had been thinking about something he had read in one of d’Avaux’s letters, and Bart (he could safely assume) was thinking about fucking Eliza, and both men had relied upon habit to plan and execute all of these maneuvers.

Bart was dressed in the habit of a naval officer, which was not terribly different from what any other civilian gentleman would wear, viz. breeches, waistcoat, Persian coat over that, periwig, and three-cornered hat. The costume’s color (tending to blue), its decoration (facings, piping, epaulets, cuffs), and the selection of plumes that erupted from the folds of the hat marked him as a Lieutenant in the Navy. He was not a tall man, and Rossignol belatedly saw that he was not a slender one either (the tailoring of his jacket had concealed this at first). Bart was, by the standards of this part of France, swarthy. According to rumor he was of very common extraction—his people had been fishermen, and probably pirates, around Dunkerque for æons. If so, there was no guessing what mongrel ichor pulsed in his veins. Like many who were short; many who were stout; and many who were of questionable ancestry; he paid close attention to his appearance. He affected the great Sun King mane-wig (a bit out-moded, but no more so than Rossignol’s rapier) and the ridiculous tiny moustache, like a pair of commas cemented to the upper lip, that must cost him an hour at his toilette every morning. In his costume there was rather too much of lace and of hardware (buckles and buttons) for Rossignol’s taste; but by the standards of Versailles, this Jean Bart would not even be rated as a fop. Rossignol made a conscious effort to ignore the clothes and the cologne, and instead concentrated his mind on the fact that the man standing before him had recently escaped from a prison in England, stolen a small boat, and, alone, rowed it all the way back to France.

Bart made a half-turn on the balls of his feet so that he could look Rossignol in the eye. Still his right arm was wrapped across the front of his body. His eyes popped down to Rossignol’s left hip and, spying a rapier, checked Rossignol’s left hand for a dagger, or the intention to draw one.

If Rossignol had been dressed en grand habit it might have gone otherwise, but as it was, he looked no better than a highwayman. So he spoke: “Lieutenant. Pray forgive my interruption.” He had prudently drawn up short of cutlass-backhand range, but now, as a sort of peace-offering, he drew back an additional pace, so that Bart was no longer in range of a long rapier-lunge. Bart noted this and responded by turning more fully towards him, causing his right hand to become visible, and then raising that hand a bit, so that his arms were crossed over the barrel of his torso.

“I have not had the pleasure of meeting you, and you will rightly wonder who I am, and what is my business in this house. As I am a visitor in your town, Lieutenant, I beg leave to introduce myself to you. I am Bonaventure Rossignol. I have come here from my home in Juvisy in the hope that I might be of service to Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur, and she has done me the honor of suffering me to cross the threshold of this house and bide here for some hours. It is, in other words, my privilege to be an invited guest here, as she would tell you, if you were to go and ask her. But I beg you not to do so while Monsieur le comte d’Avaux is present, for the matter is—”

“Complicated,” said Jean Bart, “complicated, delicate, and dangerous, like Mademoiselle la comtesse herself.” Both of his arms sprang free, which made Rossignol jerk; but those hands were moving towards Rossignol, away from the weapon. Rossignol let his own hands drift farther from hilts, pommels, &c., and even allowed Bart a glimpse of his palms.

“I am Lieutenant Jean Bart.” Bart advanced a step towards Rossignol, venturing within rapier-thrust range. Rossignol rewarded Bart’s gesture of trust by extending his hands farther and showing more palm, then glided to within cutlass-backhand range. Like two men groping through smoke they found each other’s hands and shook—a double-handed shake, just to be extra safe. “Though I am admittedly disappointed,” said Bart, “I am in no way surprised, that a gallant gentleman has ridden out from Paris to place himself at the lady’s service. Indeed, I had been wondering when someone of your description would show up.”

This was triple-edged, in that Bart was admitting to an interest in Eliza, conceding Rossignol’s priority in the matter, and needling him for having been too long getting here, all at once. Rossignol tried to think of a way to defuse this little granadoe while they were still safely gripping each other’s hands. “I have heard some in the same vein from the lady in question,” he admitted drily.

“Ha ha, I’ll bet you have!”

“I do all in my power to satisfy her,” said Rossignol, “and when that fails I can do no more than throw myself upon her mercy.”

“It is good to meet you!” Bart exclaimed, seeming genuine enough, then let go Rossignol’s hands. The two men burst asunder. But there was no more of furtive glancing at hands. “Now we wait, eh?” Bart said. “You wait for her, and I wait for d’Avaux. You have the better of me there.”

“I am certain that Monsieur le comte will not tarry in Dunkerque, if that will cheer you up.”

“It must be wonderful to know so many things,” said Bart—a way of stating that he knew what Bonaventure Rossignol did for a living.

“Many of those things are very tedious, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, but the power, the understanding it gives you! Take this painting.” Bart extended a blunt, thick hand toward the landscape he had been pretending to inspect a moment earlier. It depicted rolling countryside, a village, and a church, all seen from the garden of a manor house. In the foreground, children sported with a little dog. “What does it mean? Who are these people? How did they end up there?” He indicated another landscape, this one in a dark mountainous country. “And what significance do all of these sieges and battles have to the d’Ozoirs?” For, despite the occasional pastoral landscape, the art in the gallery was heavily skewed towards massacres, martyrdoms sacred and sæcular, and set-piece battles.

“Forgive me for saying so, Lieutenant, but given the importance of the Marquis d’Ozoir to the Navy, it strikes me as remarkable that you do not know everything about his family.”

“Ah, monsieur, but that is because you are a gentleman of Court. I am a dog of the sea, oblivious. But Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur has instructed me that I must attend to such matters if I am ever to rise beyond the rank of Lieutenant.”

“Then as we are both doomed to cool our heels as we await our betters,” said Rossignol, “let me do what would most please her, and spin you a little yarn that will tie together all of these paintings and plaques and busts.”

“I should be in your debt, monsieur!”

“Not at all. Now, even if you are as deaf to politics as you claim, you must know that Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir is a bastard of Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon.”

“That has never been a secret,” Bart agreed.

“Since the Marquis cannot inherit the name or the property of his father, it follows, by process of elimination, that all of these paintings and whatnot are from the family of—”

“Madame la marquise d’Ozoir!” said Bart. “And that is where I want instruction, for I know nothing of her people.”

“Two families, very different, forged into one.”

“Ah. One dwelling in the countryside of the north, I’m guessing,” said Bart, nodding at the first landscape.

“De Crépy. Petty nobles. Not especially distinguished, but middling affluent, and fecund.”

“The other family must have been Alp-dwellers, then,” said Bart, turning to regard the gloomier and more horrid of the two landscapes.

“De Gex. A poor dwindling clan. Die-hard Catholics living in a place, not far from Geneva, that had become dominated by Huguenots.”

“So the two families were quite different! How did they come to be joined?”

“The family de Crépy were tied, first by proximity, then by fealty, and at last by marriage, to the Counts of Guise,” said Rossignol.

“Err…I am vaguely aware that those Guises were important, and got into some sort of trouble with the Bourbons, but if you could refresh my memory, monsieur…”

“It would be my pleasure, Lieutenant. A century and a half ago, a comte de Guise distinguished himself so well in battle that the King created him duc de Guise. Of his aides, squires, lackeys, mistresses, captains, and hangers-on, several were of the de Crépy line. Some of these developed a taste for adventure, and began to conceive ambitions beyond the parochial. They lashed themselves to the mast, as it were, of the House of Guise, which seemed like a good idea, and served them well. Until, that is, a hundred and one years ago, when the two leading men of that House—Henry, duc de Guise, and Louis, cardinal de Guise—were assassinated by the King or his supporters. For they had waxed more powerful than the King himself.”

There was a pause now to look at some rather sanguinary art-work.

“How could such a thing happen, monsieur? How could this rival House become so powerful?”

“Nowadays, when le Roi is so strong, it is difficult for us to conceive of, is it not? It may help you to know that much of the power that so appalled the King was rooted in a thing called the Holy Catholic League. It had its beginnings in towns and cities all over France, where local priests and gentlemen had, in the wake of the Reformation, found themselves engulfed in Huguenots, and so banded together to defend their faith from that heresy and to oppose its spread.”

“Ah, here is where the de Gex family enters the picture, no?”

“I am almost to that part of the story. You are correct that the de Gexes were typical of the sorts of men who in those days founded local chapters of the Holy Catholic League. The House of Guise had forged these scattered groups into a national movement. After the assassinations of Henry and Louis de Guise, the decapitated League rose up in revolt against the King—who was himself assassinated not long after—and there was chaos throughout the country for a number of years. The new Huguenot King, Henry IV, converted to Catholicism and re-established control, generally at the expense of the ultra-Catholics and to the benefit of the Huguenots. Or so it seemed to many fervent Catholics, including the one who assassinated him in 1610. Now, during this time the fortunes of the de Crépy family went into eclipse. Some were killed, some went back to their ancestral lands in northern France and melted back into bourgeois obscurity, some scattered abroad. But a few of them ended up far from home, in that part of France that borders on Lake Geneva. It was the best, or the worst, place for Catholic warriors to be at the time. They were directly across the lake from Geneva, which to them was like an ant’s nest from which Huguenots continually streamed out to preach and convert in every parish in France. Accordingly, the Catholics in that area were more ardent than anywhere else—the first to create local branches of the Holy Catholic League, the first to swear fealty to the House of Guise, and, after the assassinations, the most warlike. They had not assassinated Henry IV, but only because they could not find him. The leading nobleman of that district—one Louis, sieur de Gex—had gathered around him a small, ragged, but ferocious coterie of like-minded sorts who had been driven out of other pays, and gravitated to this remote outpost from all over France as the fortunes of their party had declined.”

“Among them, I’m quite sure, must have been several of the de Crépy clan.”

“Indeed. So your question of how they got from here, to there,” said Rossignol, indicating the two landscapes, “is answered. The newcomers were fertile and affluent where the family de Gex were dwindling and poor.”

“I suppose most of the people in their district who knew how to make money had become Huguenots,” mused Bart.

This drew from Rossignol a sharp look, and a reprimand. “Lieutenant Bart. I believe I understand, now, why Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur sees a need to instruct you in how to be politic.”

Bart shrugged. “It is true, monsieur. All the best merchants of Dunkerque were Huguenots, and after 1685—”

“It is precisely because it is true, that you must not come out and state it,” said Rossignol.

“Very well then, monsieur, I vow not to say anything true for the remainder of this conversation. Pray continue!”

After a moment to collect himself, Rossignol stepped over to a stack of portraits leaning against a wall, and began to paw through them: men, women, children, and families, dressed in the fashions of three generations ago. “When the Wars of Religion finally came to an end, both families, having nothing else to do, began to produce children. A generation later, these began to marry each other. Here I may get some of the details wrong, but if memory serves, this is how it went: the scion of the de Gex line, Francis, married one Marguerite Diane de Crépy around 1640 and they had several children one after the other, then none for twelve years, then a surprise pregnancy. This ended in the death of Marguerite only a few hours following the birth of a boy, Édouard. The father construed the former as a sacrifice to, the latter as a gift from, the Almighty; and considering himself too old to raise a boy by himself, gave him to a Jesuit school in Lyon where he was found to be a sort of child prodigy. He joined the Society of Jesus at an exceptionally young age. He is now Confessor to de Maintenon herself.”

Rossignol had found a portrait of a lean young man, dressed in a Jesuit’s robes, glaring out of the canvas in a way that suggested he could actually see Rossignol and Bart standing in this back-hallway, and did not approve much of either one of them.

“I have heard of him,” said Bart, and edged out of the portrait’s sight-line.

Rossignol found an older portrait of a plump woman in a blue dress. “The sister of Francis de Gex was named Louise Anne. She married one Alexandre Louis de Crépy. They had two boys, who died at the same time from smallpox, and two girls, who survived it.” He pulled out of the stack a gouache of two post-pubescent girls: one older, bigger, more beautiful than the other, who peered over her shoulder, as if hiding behind her. “The older of the girls, Anne-Marie, who was unscarred by the disease, married the comte d’Oyonnax, who was much older. Anne-Marie was his second or third wife. This fellow Oyonnax had originally been a petty noble, but even that modest rank had stretched his wits and his wealth thin. His ancestral lands lay just at the doorstep of the Franche-Comté.”

“Even I have heard of that!”

“Really, Lieutenant? I am surprised, for it is landlocked.”

Rossignol’s jest almost went by Bart, for Rossignol was not, by and large, a fount of clever bon mots. But Bart caught it after a few awkward moments, and acknowledged it with a smile and a nod. “It is a part of the world over which the Kings of France have been fighting with the Hapsburgs for a long time, is it not—like two enemies trapped in a longboat together and struggling for the possession of the one dagger.”

“The analogy, though nautical, is apt,” said Rossignol. “During the reign of Louis XIII—whom it was my father’s great honor to serve as Royal cryptanalyst—Oyonnax had allowed the King’s armies to use his land as a base for invading the Franche-Comté, which they did frequently. In exchange for which he had been elevated to a Count. Such was his rank when he married the young Anne-Marie de Crépy. A few years after, he performed a like service for the legions of Louis XIV, which, since it led to the annexation of the whole of the Franche-Comté to France, caused the King to elevate him to a Duke. He and the new Duchess moved to Versailles, where he got to enjoy his new status for only a few months before she poisoned him.”

“Monsieur! And you accuse me of not being politic!”

Rossignol shrugged. “It is a harsh thing to say, I know, but it is true; everyone was doing it in those days—or at least all of the Satan-worshippers.”

“Now I think you are only pulling my leg.”

“You may believe me, or not,” said Rossignol. “Sometimes I cannot believe it myself. Such behavior has all been suppressed by de Maintenon, with the help of Father Édouard de Gex—who probably has no idea that his cousine was one of the ringleaders.”

“That is quite enough of such topics! What about the younger daughter?”

“Charlotte Adélaide de Crépy was scarred by the smallpox, though she goes to great lengths to hide it with wigs, patches, and so forth. Marrying her off was more of a challenge; but that of course makes it a more interesting story.”

“Good! Let’s have it, then! For it seems that Monsieur le comte and Mademoiselle la comtesse will never finish.”

“You have obviously heard of the de Lavardacs. You may know that they are a sort of cadet branch of the Bourbons. If you have had the misfortune of seeing any of their portraits you will have guessed that they have undergone quite a bit of Hapsburg adulteration over the centuries. You see, many of their lands are in the south, and they make tactical marriages across the Pyrenees. Through all of the troubles with the Guises, they were stolidly loyal to the Bourbons.”

“They switched religion whenever the King did, then!” exclaimed Lieutenant Bart, trying to muster a small witticism of his own. But it only drew a glare from Rossignol.

“To the de Lavardacs it is not such an amusing topic, for they suffered diverse assassinations and other reversals. As you know far better than I, they have developed a family association with the French Navy, which is passed on from father to son by survivance. The current Duke, Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, like his father before him, is Grand Admiral of France. He held that position during the time that Colbert expanded the French Navy from a tiny flotilla of worm-eaten relics to the immense force it is today.”

“Seven score Ships of the Line,” Bart proclaimed, “and God knows how many frigates and galleys.”

“The Duke profited commensurately, both in material wealth and in influence. His son and heir is, of course, Étienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon.”

It was not necessary for Rossignol to add what Bart, along with everyone else, already believed: He is the one who got Eliza pregnant.

“I have only seen Étienne from a distance,” said Bart, “but I gather he is a good bit younger than his half-brother.” He gestured to a recent painting that depicted the owners of this house, the marquis and the marquise d’Ozoir.

“The Duke was but a stripling when he begat this fellow off a woman in the household. Her surname was Eauze. The bastard was raised under the name of Claude Eauze. He went off to India for a while to seek his fortune, and later made enough money in the slave trade that he was able—with a loan from his father—to buy a noble title in 1674 when they went on sale to finance the Dutch war. Thus he became the Marquis d’Ozoir, which I take to be a play on words, as his name, to that point, had been Eauze. Only a year before buying this title, he married none other than Charlotte Adélaide de Crépy: the younger sister of the duchesse d’Oyonnax.”

“You’d think he could have found someone of higher rank,” said Bart.

“By all means!” said Rossignol. “But there is something at work you have forgotten to take into account.”

“And what is that, monsieur?”

“He actually loves her.”

“Mon Dieu, I had no idea!”

“Or, barring that, he knows that they form an effective and stable partnership, and is too cunning to do anything that might queer it. They have a daughter. Our friend tutored her for a while, last year.”

“That must have been before the King woke up one morning and remembered that she was a countess.”

“Let us hope,” Rossignol, “that she will still be one, when d’Avaux is finished.”

“IT IS A PITY,” Eliza began, “that Irishmen broke into your house, and stole your papers and sold them on the open market. What an embarrassment it must be for you that everyone knows that your personal correspondence, and drafts of treaties written in your hand, are being bartered for drinks by scullery-maids in Dunkerque gin-houses.”

“What! I was not informed of this!” D’Avaux turned red so fast it was if a cup of blood had been hurled in his face.

“You have been on a boat for a fortnight, how could you be informed? I am informing you now, monsieur.”

“I was led to believe that those papers had come into your possession, mademoiselle, and it is you I shall hold responsible for them!”

“What you have been led to believe does not matter,” said Eliza, “only what is. And so let me tell you what is. The thieves who stole your papers sent them to Dunkerque, it is true. Perhaps they even entertained a phant’sy that I would buy them. I refused to lower myself to such a dishonorable transaction.”

“Then perhaps you will explain to me, mademoiselle, why you have some of those very papers on your lap at this moment!”

“As the saying goes, there is no honor among thieves. When these ruffians saw that I was adamant in my refusal to do business with them, they began to seek other buyers. The packet was broken up into small lots, which were offered for sale, on various channels. To add to the complexity of the matter, it seems that the thieves had a falling-out amongst themselves. I cannot follow the business, to tell you the truth. When it became evident that these papers were being scattered to the four winds, I began making efforts to purchase them, as available. The ones on my lap are all that I have been able to round up, so far.”

D’Avaux was at a loss for civil words, and could only shake his head and mutter to himself.

“You may be chagrined, monsieur, and ungrateful; but I am pleased that I have been able to repay some small part of my personal debt to you by recovering some of your papers—”

“And returning them to me?”

“As I am able,” Eliza answered with a shrug. “To recover them all does not happen in a single day, week, or month.”

“…”

“Now,” Eliza went on, “a minute ago, you were indulging in some speculations as to where I shall end up. Some of your ideas on this topic are quite fanciful—Barock, even. Some of them are distasteful to persons of breeding, and I shall pretend I did not hear them. I can see well enough that you have lost confidence in me, monsieur. I know that you must do as honor dictates. Go then to Versailles—for I cannot travel as fast as you, encumbered as I am with an infant and a household, and busy as I am with this project of recovering your papers. State your case to the King. Let him know that I am no noble, but a common wench who deserves no better treatment. He will be startled to learn these things, for he considers me to be a hereditary Countess. I am a dear friend of his sister-in-law and moreover have recently loaned him above a million livres tournois of my own money. But your persuasive powers are renowned—as you demonstrated during your posting in the Hague, where you so effectively reined in the ambitions of that poseur, William of Orange.”

This was truly a knee to the groin, and rendered d’Avaux speechless, not so much from pain as from a curious admixture of shock and awe.

Eliza continued, “You may induce the King to believe anything—particularly given that you have such strong evidence. What was it again? A journal?”

“Yes, mademoiselle—your journal.”

“Who is in possession of this book?”

“It is not a book, as you know perfectly well, but an embroidered pillowcase.” Here d’Avaux began to pinken again.

“A…pillowcase?”

“Yes.”

“In English they call it a sham, by the way. Tell me, are there any other bedlinens implicated in the scandal?”

“Not that I am aware of.”

“Curtains? Rugs? Tea-towels?”

“No, mademoiselle.”

“Who has possession of this…pillowcase?”

“You do, mademoiselle.”

“Such items are bulky and soon go out of fashion. Before I left the Hague, I sold most of my household goods and burned the rest—including all pillowcases.”

“But a copy was made, mademoiselle, by a clerk in the French Embassy in the Hague, and given to Monsieur Rossignol.”

“That clerk died of the smallpox,” Eliza told him—which was a lie that she had made up on the spot, but it would take him a month to find this out.

“Ah, but Monsieur Rossignol is alive and well, and trusted implicitly by the King.”

“Does the King trust you, monsieur?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Monsieur Rossignol sent a copy of his report to the King but not to you. It made me curious. And what of the monk?”

“Which monk?”

“The Qwghlmian monk in Dublin to whom Monsieur Rossignol sent the plaintext to be translated.”

“You are most well-informed, mademoiselle.”

“I do not think that I am particularly well-or ill-informed, monsieur. I am simply trying to be of service to you.”

“In what way?”

“You have a difficult interview awaiting you at Versailles. You shall come before the King. In his treasury—which he watches with utmost care—he has a fortune in hard money, lately deposited by me. You will make him believe that I am a commoner and a traitor by describing a report you have never seen about a pillowcase that no longer exists, supposedly carrying an encrypted message in Qwghlmian, which no one reads except for some three-fingered monk in Ireland.”

“We shall see,” said d’Avaux. “My interview with Father Édouard de Gex will be a simple matter by comparison.”

“And how does Édouard de Gex enter into it?”

“Oh, of all the Jesuits at Versailles, mademoiselle, he is the most influential, for he is the confessor of de Maintenon. Indeed, when anyone” (raising an eyebrow at Eliza) “misbehaves at Versailles, Madame de Maintenon complains of it to Father de Gex, who then goes to the confessor of the guilty party so that the next time she goes to confession she is made aware of the Queen’s displeasure. Yes, you may smirk at the idea, mademoiselle—many do—but it gives him great power. For when a courtier steps into the confessional and has his ears blistered by the priest, he has no way to know whether the criticism is really coming from the Queen, the King, or de Gex.”

“What will you confess to de Gex, then?” Eliza asked. “That you have had impure thoughts about the Countess de la Zeur?”

“It is not in a confessional where I shall meet him,” d’Avaux said, “but in a salon somewhere, and the topic of conversation will be: Where is this orphan boy to be raised? What is his Christian name, by the way?”

“I have been calling him Jean.”

“But his Christian name? He has been baptized, of course?”

“I have been very busy,” Eliza said. “He is to be baptized in a few days, here at the Church of St.-Eloi.”

“How many days exactly? Surely it is not such a demanding calculation for one of your talents.”

“Three days.”

“Father de Gex will be, I’m sure, suitably impressed by this display of piety. The christening is to be performed by a Jesuit, I presume?”

“Monsieur, I would not think of having it done by a Jansenist!”

“Excellent. I look forward to making the acquaintance of this little Christian when you bring him to Versailles.”

“Are you certain I’ll be welcome there, monsieur?”

“Pourquoi non? I only pray that I shall be.”

“Pourquoi non, monsieur?”

“Certain important papers of mine have gone missing from my office in Dublin.”

“Do you need them immediately?”

“No. But sooner or later—”

“It will certainly be later. Dublin is far away. The inquiry proceeds at a snail’s pace.” Which was Eliza’s way of saying he’d not get his precious papers back unless he gave a good report of her at Versailles.

“I am sorry to trouble you about such matters. To common people, such things are important! To us they are nothing.”

“Then let us let nothing come between us,” Eliza said.

AS BONAVENTURE ROSSIGNOL HAD FORESEEN, d’Avaux did not tarry by the sea-side, but was en route for Paris before cock-crow the next day.

Rossignol stayed for two more nights after that, then rose one morning and rode out of town with as little fuss as when he’d ridden into it. He must have met the carriage of the Marquis d’Ozoir around mid-morning, for it was just before the stroke of noon when Eliza—who was upstairs getting dressed for church—heard the stable-gates being thrown open, and went to the window to see four horses drawing a carriage into the yard.

The coat of arms painted on the door of that carriage matched the one on the gates. Or so she guessed. To verify as much would have required a magnifying-glass, a herald, and more time and patience than Eliza had just now. The arms of Charlotte-Adélaide were a quartering of those of de Gex and de Crépy, and to make the arms of d’Ozoir, these had been recursively quartered with those of the House of de Lavardac d’Arcachon—themselves a quartering of something that included a lot of fleurs-de-lis, with an arrangement of black heads in iron collars, slashed with a bend sinister to indicate bastardy. At any rate, what it all meant was that the lord of the manor was back. Just as he stepped down from his carriage, the bells in the old, alienated belfry down the street began to toll noon. Eliza was late for church, and that was an even worse thing than usual, because on this day the proceedings could not go forward until she and her baby arrived. She sent an aide down to explain matters, and to tender apologies, to the Marquis, and hustled out one door with her baby and her entourage just as Claude Eauze entered through another. Presently he did the chivalrous thing, viz. got his carriage turned round and sent it rattling down the street after her. But so close was one thing to another in Dunkerque that, by the time the carriage caught up with her, Eliza was already standing at the church’s door. She might have given it the slip altogether if she had gone in directly. But she had paused to look at the Église St.-Eloi, and to think.

She favored the looks of this church. It was late-Gothic, and could have passed for old, but was in fact a new fabrique. The Spaniards had levelled the old one some decades past in a dispute as to the ownership of Flanders. All that remained of it was the belfry, and if its looks were any indication, the Spaniards had wrought a great improvement on the appearance of this town. The new one had a great rose window filled with a delicate tracery of stone, like the rosette on the belly of a lute, and Eliza always liked to stop and admire it when she passed by. Now, holding her baby to her bosom, she stopped to admire it one more time. At that moment a counter-factual vision entered her phant’sy, wherein Rossignol was by her side, and the two of them went in to be joined in marriage, and then walked down to the water and boarded ship and sailed off to Amsterdam or London to raise their baby in exile.

The dream was interrupted by the raucous vehement on-rush of the carriage of the Marquis d’Ozoir, which was about as fitting and about as welcome in this scene as musketry at a seduction. Lest she get trapped outside exchanging pleasantries with the Marquis, she hurried through the door.

The church’s vault was supported by several columns that were arranged around the altar in a semicircle, reminding Eliza of the bars of a giant birdcage: a birdcage into which she had been chased, not only by the banging and rattling carriage, but by divers other sudden and frightening onslaughts as well. She could fly no farther. She was caught. Best to flutter up onto her new perch, preen, and peer about. The Marquis slipped in alone, and took a seat in his family pew. She peered at him; he peered, discreetly, at her. Jean Bart watched them watching each other. They, and several servants and acquaintances who’d showed up, joined in the standings, sittings, kneelings, mumblings, and gestures of the Mass. Jean-Jacques turned out to be one of those infants who accepts the dunking, not with hysterical protests but with aghast curiosity; this made his godfather immensely proud, while giving his mother a vision of long rambunctious years ahead. The Jesuit crossed his forehead with oil and said that he was a priest and a prophet and that his name was Jean-Jacques: Jean after Jean Bart, who became his godfather, and Jacques after another man of Eliza’s acquaintance who was unable to attend the rite, being either dead, or crazy and chained to an oar. No mention was made of the child’s natural father. Indeed very little notice was given to the mother; for the story being given out was that Jean-Jacques was an orphan rescued from some massacre in the Palatinate and only being looked after by Eliza.

Over joyous bonging from the belfry, the Marquis—who, she now remembered, was a tall man, physically impressive, and handsome in a disreputable way—insisted on a celebration at his place. The produce of local vines, orchards, and distilleries was made available to a small and select list of guests. Some hours later, Jean Bart could be seen making his way home, tacking down the street in the manner of a ship working to windward.

The comtesse de la Zeur and the Marquis d’Ozoir kept an eye on Bart from the same room where Eliza had had her audience with d’Avaux three days earlier. She and the Marquis got along very well, which, given his past association with the slave trade, rather made her flesh crawl. He took a sort of avuncular interest in Jean-Jacques, which perhaps stood to reason given that the two had been born in such similar circumstances.*

The conversation that took place after Jean Bart had gone home, and the servants had been sent away, would have been altogether different if these two had inherited their titles. As matters stood, however, there were no illusions between them, and they could converse freely and without pretense. Though to do so for a few minutes (Eliza decided) was to be reminded that inhibited and pretentious chatter was not always such a bad thing.

“You and I are alike,” the Marquis said. Which he meant as a compliment!

He continued, “We have our titles because we are useful to the King. If I were a legitimate son of the Lavardacs, I’d not be permitted to do anything with my life other than sit around Versailles waiting to die. Because I am a bastard, I have traveled to India, Africa, and the Baltic as far as Russia, and in all of these places I have engaged in trade. Trade! Yet no one thinks less of me for it.”

He went on to explain why, in his view, Eliza was useful to the King. It all had to do with finance, and her links to Amsterdam and London, which he described aptly. This was unusual in a French noble. The very few of them who actually comprehended what went on in a Bourse, and why it mattered, affected ignorance for fear of seeming common. To them Eliza made as much sense as the Oracle of Delphi. By contrast, the Marquis affected to understand more than he really did. To him Eliza was a petty commerçant. Or so ’twould seem from his next remark: “Fetch me some timber, if you please.”

“I beg your pardon, monsieur?”

“Timber.”

“Why do you require timber?”

“You do know that we are at war with practically everyone now?” he asked, amused.

“Ask the contrôleur-général whether the Countess de la Zeur knows it!”

“Touché. Tell me, my lady, what do you see when you gaze out the window?”

“Brand-new fortifications, very expensive-looking.”

“Closer.”

“Water.”

“Closer yet.”

“Ships.”

“Closer yet.”

“Timber on the shore, piled up like ramparts.”

“You know, of course, of my family’s connections to the Navy.”

“Tout le monde knows that your father is Grand Admiral of France and that the Navy has grown prodigiously during his tenure.”

“During his tenure as a man in a glorious uniform, attending ship-christenings and twenty-one-gun salutes, and throwing magnificent fêtes. Yes. But tout le monde also knows that it was Colbert who was responsible for it. In addition to Grand Admiral, my father was Secretary of State for the Navy until 1669, did you know that? Then he sold the post to Colbert, for a lot of money. Did he want to sell it? Did he need the money? No. But he knew that the funds had been advanced to Colbert—a commoner—by the King himself, and so he could not refuse.”

“He was fired,” Eliza said.

“In the most polite and remunerative way imaginable, he was fired. Colbert became his superior—for of course the Grand Admiral of France is accountable to the Secretary of State for the Navy!”

“When you put it that way, it must have been an interesting time for the Duke.”

“It is just as well I was living as a Vagabond in India at the time. I could almost hear his screaming from Shahjahanabad,” said the Marquis. “In any case, he was well paid for the demotion, and he went on to make a great fortune out of the ship-building program that Colbert then instituted. For whenever so much money flows from the Treasury to the military, there are countless ways for those within the system to profit. I should know, mademoiselle.” And he glanced around the interior of the salon. Like much in Dunkerque, it was small. But everything in it was magnificent.

“You had your title in ’74,” Eliza said, “and made yourself useful as a part of this Navy-building project.”

“I am always eager to be useful to my King,” he said.

“God save the King,” Eliza said. “I of course share the same eagerness to be of service to his majesty. Did you say you required some timber?”

“Oh, but of course. There’s a war on. To this point, naval engagements have been few—a small battle in Bantry Bay when our ships were taking the soldiers to Ireland, and of course the heroics of your friend Jean Bart. But great battles will come. We need more ships. We require timber.”

“France is blessed with enormous size, and deep forests,” Eliza pointed out.

“Indeed, my lady.” His eyes strayed inland, to the crests of the dunes, which were held together with scrub, which here and there gave way to the firm straight lines of new earth-works concealing mortar-batteries. “I do not see any forests hereabouts.”

“No, this is like Holland, or Ireland. But farther inland, as you must know, are forests that cannot be traversed in less than a fortnight.”

“Fetch me some timber, then, if you wish to be of service to the King.”

“Would it be as useful to le Roi, if the timber came instead to Le Havre, or Nantes? For Dunkerque is not at the mouth of any great river, but those places are, and this would make the shipping infinitely easier.”

“We have shipyards in those places, too; why not?”

Here, Eliza ought to have paused to wonder why there was a shipyard in Dunkerque at all, given its location; but after weeks of boredom here, she was so pleased to have been given something to do that she did not give any thought to this paradox.

“Timber costs money,” she reminded him, “and I have given all of mine away.”

He laughed. “To the French Treasury, mademoiselle! And you shall be buying the timber on behalf of the King! I shall send letters to the Place au Change in Lyon. Everyone there shall know your credit is backed by the contrôleur-général. Speak to Monsieur Castan there—it is he who makes payments to those who have had the honor of lending money, or selling goods, to the King of France.”

“You are suggesting I am to journey to Lyon?”

“It is a terribly important matter, my lady. My coach is at your disposal. You seem in need of an airing-out. Whether the timber is delivered to Nantes or Le Havre, or even here, is all the same to me; but you, mademoiselle, I will meet back here in six weeks.”

Book 4

Bonanza

Throne Room of the Pasha,
the Kasba, Algiers

OCTOBER 1689

Dwelling on the Sea-coast, and being a rapacious, cruel, violent, and tyrannical People, void of all Industry or Application, neglecting all Culture and Improvement, it made them Thieves and Robbers, as naturally as Idleness makes Beggars: They disdain’d all Industry and Labour; but being bred up to Rapine and Spoil, when they were no longer able to ravage and plunder the fruitful Plains of Valentia, Granada and Andalusia, they fell to roving upon the Sea; they built Ships, or rather, took Ships from others, and ravag’d the Coasts, landing in the Night, surprising and carrying away the poor Country People out of their Beds into Slavery.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

“O MOST NOBLE FLOOR, exalted above all other pavements, nay even above the ceilings and rooves of common buildings, you honor me by suffering my lips to touch you,” said Moseh de la Cruz—in a queerly muffled voice, as he was not kidding about the lips.

The Pasha of Algiers, and his diverse aghas and hojas, had to lean forward and cock their turbans to make out his Sabir. Or so Jack inferred from the rustling of silk and wafting of perfume all around. Jack, of course, could see nothing but a few square inches of inlaid marble flooring.

Moseh continued: “Though you have already been generous far beyond my deserts in allowing me to grovel on you, I have yet another favor to request: The next time you have the high honor to come into contact with the sole of the Pasha’s slipper, will you please most humbly beseech said item of footwear to inform the Pasha that the following conditions exist…” at which point Moseh went on to relate some particulars of Jeronimo’s story. El Desamparado, needless to say, had been excluded from the meeting. Dappa and Vrej Esphahnian were somewhere near Jack with their faces likewise pressed to the floor.

When Moseh was finished, a voice above them spoke in Turkish, which was translated into Sabir: “Sole of our slipper, inform the floor that we are well aware of the existence of Spanish treasure-fleets, and would make them all ours, if we had the wherewithal to assault scores of heavily armed men-o’-war in the broad Atlantic.”

This led to a palpable cringing from the Turk who owned Moseh, Jack, and the others, and who was kneeling behind them; a position not only correct for a man of his station, but comfortable for one who still had very little skin on the soles of his feet. He began to bleat something in Turkish before the translation was even finished; but Vrej Esphahnian boldly cut him off.

“O glorious and sublime Floor, please make it known to the sole of the Pasha’s slipper that, according to Armenians in Havana, with whom I have recently corresponded, the Viceroy who figures in this story has finished his time in Mexico and next spring, weather permitting, should be on his way across the Atlantic in his brig.”

“Whose shot-lockers, it is safe to assume, will be filled, not with cannonballs, but with pigs of silver and other swag,” added Moseh.

“Slipper,” said the Pasha, “remind the Floor that this ship of the Viceroy’s, when surrounded by the Spanish fleet, is akin to a tempting morsel lodged between the open jaws of a crocodile.”

Moseh took a deep breath and said, “O patient and noble Floor, concerned as you are with preventing the Pasha’s carpets from falling through into the cellar, no doubt you have scarce concerned yourself with anything so tedious and ignoble as long-term bathy-metric trends in the Guadalquivir Estuary. But, half-breed crypto-Jewish oar-slaves have much leisure to contemplate such matters—so, pray allow me to try your patience even further by informing you that there is a submerged sand-bar at the place where the Guadalquivir empties into the Gulf of Cadiz. For many years it has been the case that the treasure-galleons could pass this bar at high tide and enter the Guadalquivir and drop anchor before Sanlúcar de Barrameda, or Bonanza; or even sail fifty miles up the river to Seville. Those cities, then, were long the destinations of the treasure-fleet, and accordingly it is at Bonanza that the Viceroy, at the beginning of his reign, laid the cornerstone of a palace to receive the proceeds of his relentless, corrupt, and gluttonous pillagings. It has been a-building ever since, and is now complete. But the galleons have grown ever larger, and meanwhile Allah in His wisdom has decreed that the sand-bar I spoke of should wax, and build itself nearer to the surface. For these reasons, as of three years ago, the treasure-fleet no longer ends its journey in the mouth of the Guadalquivir, but at the magnificent deep-water bay of Cadiz, a few miles down the coast.”

“Slipper, inform our Floor that we understand, now, that when the treasure-fleet reaches Cadiz next summer, the swag-barge of the orgulous and thrice-damned ex-Viceroy will have no choice but to break away from it, and make the passage up-coast to Bonanza by itself. But fail not to remind the Floor that it is no more a wise idea for us to send our war-galleys across the Gulf of Cadiz to assault the sand-choked estuary of the Guadalquivir, than it would be to stage a frontal assault on the high seas.”

“Floor most polished and enduring, so nigh unto what is holy, and so far from the profanities of the infidels, it would be difficult, and wholly unnecessary, for you to muddle your thoughts with the shabby fragments of knowledge that so clutter my mind: for example, that while war-galleys of the Dar al-Islam are distinctly unwelcome in the said Gulf, it is common for trading-galleys to be seen there. For whereas the former type of ship is crowded stem to stern with scimitar-, dagger-, blunderbuss-, and pistol-brandishing Janissaries, the latter is occupied primarily by wretches chained to oars, and, hence, is less likely to incite all manner of alarm in the superstitious minds of the bacon-eaters.”

“Slipper, for that same reason they are useless as offensive weapons.”

“Seamless Floor, for that reason they can substitute stealth for might, moving among other ships without creating alarm; and if the oar-slaves are unchained at the right moment, and if they happen to be a redoubtable crew of disgraced Janissaries seeking to recover their honor, Jesuit Samurais, harpoon-hurling wrestling champions, Caballero Desperadoes, and such-like, and if one of them happens to be personally familiar with the brig under attack; then, Floor, I put it to you that the Viceroy’s hoard could be taken in the name of the Faith rather easily.”

“And what then, Slipper? For if we understand the nature of the Viceroy’s smuggling operation, the proceeds will be in the form of silver pigs, which, like the four-legged sort, are unclean, and unwelcome in polite company. The coin of this realm, and of the wide world, is Pieces of Eight.”

“Floor, the slippers of many travelers have walked upon you and the lips of many learned scholars kissed you, and from some of these you may have learned that, while the supply for all the world’s silver is New Spain, the demand is in the East. According to legend, the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad, and the Forbidden City in Peking, are where it all ends up. And just as all the ships on a sea derive their motive power from a common wind, so do all the diverse enterprises and trading-companies of Europe and the Ottoman Empire draw their force from this perpetual eastward flux of silver. Accordingly, the best place to exchange crude silver for goods is as far east as possible, lest middle-men take all the profits. The vessel we will be using is a half-galley, or galleot, obviously unfit to sail round Africa and attempt the passage to the Mogul’s port at Surat, and so the farthest east it can possibly travel is Cairo.”

Now, a lengthy conversation in Turkish between the Pasha and their owner. Finally the translation into Sabir resumed: “Slipper, rumors have reached us that a rabble of galley-slaves propose to do battle against the Spaniards in the estuary before Bonanza, seemingly a desperate undertaking, and this would seem to raise the possibility of what the Jesuits would call a quid pro quo.”

“Floor, it would demean you to be subjected to the numerical calculations, which have been worked out in paralyzing detail by me and my Armenian comrade, here; but when the smoke clears, and the galleot returns from Cairo laden with coffee-beans and other treasures of the East, the proceeds—after various taxes, fees, commissions, baksheesh, rake-offs, and profit-takings—should suffice to pay the embarrassingly modest ransoms of all ten of the oar-slaves concerned.”

“Slipper, it is written in the Holy Koran that the holding of hostages is a sin, and so it grieves us indescribably that, owing to circumstances not of our making, we have, at any given time, several tens of thousands of them languishing in our banyolars. Therefore the plan, as described, is not lacking in virtue. And yet all men are subjected to temptation, and Christians are evidently more susceptible than most; and so what is to prevent these slaves, once unchained, from assaulting their overseers, and rowing this galleot—and the silver—to freedom?”

“Floor so hard and cool, it would indeed be foolish to trust a brace of slaves in this manner. Of course, if they went south, and ran the Straits of Gibraltar, they would be caught by the war-galleys of this Citadel of Islam and suffer the Penalty of the Hook. If they went directly to shore, the Spaniards would seize them. But what, an intelligent floor might ask, if they set their course to the north, circumventing the whole Iberian Peninsula, and made for France or England? This is a most trying question, and potentially a grievous fault in the Plan; but, thanks to Allah, there is another slave whose lips are pressed against you at this very moment and whose misfortunes have taught him much concerning such things.”

Jack was wondering to himself what the Penalty of the Hook was, and so almost missed his cue; but Dappa nudged him and he began to rattle off the speech he had rehearsed, albeit with certain improvements that had only just entered his mind. “My words are addressed, not even to the floor, but rather to the dirt wedged between the tiles, as, until such time as I have regained my dignity and rank as a Janissary, I do not feel worthy to address even the Floor directly; and yet here’s hoping that some of my reflections will make their way up to the ears of some piece of furniture or whatnot that is in a position of responsibility.” Several more nudges from Dappa and throat-clearings from Moseh had punctuated this first part of his oration, and made it difficult for him to establish a rhythm. “Unforgivably, I allowed myself to be taken prisoner at the Siege of Vienna, and knocked around Christendom for a while—it is a long story with no clear beginning, middle, or end. Suffice it to say, O magnificent Dirt of the Floor-Cracks, that before I completely lost my mind and became the wretch that I am today, I learned that there is, in France, a Duke who has polluted the seas with hundreds of infidel war-ships, brand-new and heavily armed; and that said Duke, who dines on the most unclean foods imaginable, is not wholly unknown to the Corsairs of this city, perhaps even to the extent of investing in some of their galleys; and that he owns several of the white, pink-eyed horses considered so desirable by the exalted. This Duke, if he were made aware of our Plan in advance, could easily give orders to his fleet that infests the Bay of Biscay, and tell them to monitor the coast (for our galleot, lacking navigational aids, can on no account stray out of sight of land) and stop any vessels matching the description of ours.”

Much discussion in Turkish. Then: “Slipper, if you should encounter any dirt on my floor, which strikes me as unlikely given the immaculate condition of my dwelling, tell it that I know of this French Duke. He is not the sort of man to take part in such a plan out of charitable motives.”

“Floor-dirt—or perhaps that is a dust-mote that I carried in on an eyelash—said Duke would almost have to be in on the plan anyway. For the galleot will require some sort of escort to Cairo, lest she fall into the hands of the pirates of Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Calabria, or Rhodes. The terrifying armada of this City has other errands; but the French fleet plies those waters anyway, shepherding the merchant-galleys of Marseille to and from Smyrna and Alexandria—”

But here the Pasha had apparently heard enough, for he clapped his hands and uttered something in Turkish that caused all of the slaves, and their owner, to be ejected from his audience-chamber and into the octagonal yard of the Kasba. Which Jack looked upon as bad, until he saw the smile on the face of their owner, who was being lifted onto his sedan-chair by Nubian slaves.

Jack, Dappa, Vrej, and Moseh ambled out of the gate into the City of Algiers, and happened to end up standing beneath a row of large iron hooks that projected from the outer wall of the Kasba, a couple of yards below the parapet, some with enormous, gnarled chunks of what appeared to be jerky dangling from them. But others were unoccupied. Above one of those, a group of Janissaries had gathered around a man who was sitting on the brink of the wall.

“What did the Pasha say, there at the end?” Jack asked Dappa.

“In more words, Jack, he said: ‘Make it so.’ ” Dappa had spent a lot of time rowing with Turks, and knew their language thoroughly, which is why he had been invited along.

A solemn look then came over the face of Moseh de la Cruz, as if he were uttering a prayer. “Then we are on our way to Bonanza, as soon as the season wheels round.”

Above them, the Janissaries suddenly shoved the seated man off the edge of the wall. He fell for a short distance, gathering speed, and then the iron hook caught him between the buttocks and brought him up short. The man screamed and wriggled, but the point of the hook had gone too far up into his vitals to allow him to squirm off of it, and so there he stayed; the Janissaries turned and departed.

But that was not the only reason Jack felt somewhat uneasy as he and the others made their way down into the lower city. The Pasha had, several times, gone on at great length in Turkish. And furthermore Dappa was regarding Jack with a certain type of Look that Jack had seen many times before, from persons such as Sir Winston Churchill and Eliza, and that usually boded ill. “All right,” Jack finally said, “let’s have it.”

Dappa shrugged. “Most of what passed between the Pasha and his advisors was of a practical nature—he was far more concerned with how to do it than whether.”

“That much is good for us,” Jack said. “Now, tell me why you are favoring me with the evil eye.”

“When you mentioned that execrable French Duke, the Pasha knew who you meant immediately, and mentioned, in passing, that the same Duke had lately been pestering him for information as to the whereabouts of one Ali Zaybak—an English fugitive.”

“’Tis not an English name.”

“It is a sort of cryptical reference to a character in the Thousand and One Nights: a notorious thief of Cairo. Time and again the police tried to entrap him but he always squirted free, like a drop of quicksilver when you try to put your finger on it. Zaybak is the Arabic word for quicksilver—accordingly, this character was given the sobriquet of Ali Zaybak.”

“A pleasant enough sounding færy-tale. Yet Cairo is a long way from England…”

“Now you are playing stupid, Jack—which in some jurisdictions is as good as a signed confession.” Dappa glanced up at the wall of the Kasba where the man squirmed on the hook.

“Perhaps you are right about Jack, Dappa, but my confusion is wholly genuine,” said Moseh.

“In Paris, Jack has a reputation,” put in Vrej Esphahnian. “There is a Duke there who does not love our Jack ever since he crashed a party, strangled one of the guests, chopped off the hand of the Duke’s first-born son and heir, and made a spectacle of himself in front of the Sun King.”

“Then perhaps this Duke got wind of Jack’s misadventures on the high seas,” Dappa said, “and began to make inquiries.”

“Well, as a lost Janissary, recovering from a grievous head injury, I know nothing of such matters,” Jack said. “But if it will help our chances, by all means let it be known that information as to the whereabouts of Ali Zaybak is to be had—if the duc d’Arcachon will only invest in the Plan.”

Book 5

The Juncto

Château Juvisy

10 DECEMBER 1689

AFTER CARDINAL RICHELIEU HAD RECOGNIZED, and Louis XIII had rewarded, the genius of Monsieur Antoine Rossignol, he had built himself a little château. In later years he had hired no less a gardener than Le Nôtre to fix up the grounds. The château was at Juvisy. This had made sense at the time, as the King’s court had been in Paris, and Juvisy lay just outside of it.

When the son of Louis XIII had moved his court to Versailles, the son of Antoine Rossignol—who had inherited Antoine’s château, his knowledge of cryptanalysis, and his responsibilities—had found himself exiled. He had not moved, but the center of power had, and Juvisy had all of a sudden begun to seem like a remote outpost. Another man might have sold the place at a loss, and built a new château somewhere around Versailles. But Bonaventure Rossignol had been content to remain in the old place. His work did not require continual attendance at Court. If anything, the distance, and the peace and quiet that came with it, made him more productive. Le Roi had ratified the younger Rossignol’s decision by coming to visit him at Juvisy from time to time. In its smallness, its seclusion, and the prim perfection of its walled garden, the château at Juvisy seemed to Eliza like a perfect little kingdom of secrets, with Bon-bon its king, and Eliza its queen, or at least concubine.

The garden was of an altogether different style from what Le Nôtre had done at Versailles, being, of course, much smaller, with fewer sculptures. But it had in common with the King’s garden that it was made to look splendid when seen from the high windows of the château, which was how Eliza was seeing it. Bon-bon’s bedchamber was on the upper storey, in the center of the building, so that when Eliza climbed out of his bed she could walk three paces over a cold floor and stand in a dormer and gaze straight down the path that formed the garden’s axis. Of course the plantings were dead and brown now, but the curlicues of its sculpted hedges still drew her eye, and gave her something to stare at while she began to answer a question that Bon-bon had just asked her.

He wanted to know, in effect, what the hell she was doing here. For some reason the question irked her a little bit.

She had showed up exhausted and dirty last night, with no thought of doing anything save putting Jean-Jacques to bed somewhere, and then collapsing into some bed of her own and sleeping for a few decades. Instead she’d been up half the night making love to Bon-bon. Yet she felt more awake, more refreshed now than if she’d spent the same amount of time slumbering. And so perhaps what she had taken for tiredness, yester evening, had been some other condition.

He’d had the good grace not to inquire what was going on. Instead he had accepted, with grace and even humor, the sudden arrival of Eliza and her entourage at his gates. She’d liked it that way, and she’d liked what had happened after. But now that the sun was up and they had gotten the sex out of their systems, there was this tedious need to explain matters. Certain parts of her mind had to be woken up, and were not happy about it. She stared at the dead garden, tracing the patterns of the hedges with her eyes, and mastered her annoyance.

“You had mentioned in a note to me that you contemplated a journey to Lyon,” Rossignol said, trying to prime the pump. “That was six weeks ago.”

“Yes,” Eliza said. “The journey to Lyon took ten days.”

“Ten days! Did you walk?”

“I could have done it faster by myself, but I was traveling with a five-month-old. The train consisted of two carriages, a baggage-cart, and some outriders and footmen borrowed from Lieutenant Bart and from the Ozoirs,” Eliza said.

Rossignol grimaced. “Unwieldy.”

“The first twenty miles were the most difficult, as you know.”

“Dunkerque is scarcely connected to France at all,” Rossignol agreed.

“Have you been to Lyon?”

“Only a little, passing through en route to Marseille.”

“And did you find it strangely bleak and austere compared to Paris?”

“Mademoiselle, I found it bleak and austere even compared to the Hague!”

Eliza did not laugh at the witticism, but only turned her back on the window, for a moment, to regard Rossignol. He was propped up in bed on a mountain of pillows, exposed to the chilly air from the waist up. The man burned food like a forge burned coal, and never grew fat, and never seemed to feel cold.

“That is because you have no regard for commerce. I found it most interesting.”

“Oh. Yes, I know about that,” Rossignol conceded. “The great crossroads where the Mediterranean trades with the North. It sounds as if it ought to be interesting. But if you go there, you see only warehouses and silk-factories, and tracts of plain open ground.”

“Of course it seems boring if all you do is look at it,” Eliza said. “What renders it interesting is to take part in what goes on in those boring warehouses.”

Rossignol’s black eyes strayed to some papers resting on a bedside table. He was already regretting having asked her to explain this, and was hoping she’d make it quick.

Eliza stepped over to the side of the bed and swept the papers off onto the floor. Then she got a knee up on the bed and crab-walked across it until she was straddling Rossignol, sitting down firmly on his pelvis. “You asked,” she reminded him. “and I have got an answer for you, which you are going to listen to, and what is more, by the time I am finished, you will confess that it is interesting.”

“You have my attention, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol.

“Lyon. I suppose they used to hold sprawling country-style fairs there, two hundred years ago. It was colonized, you know, by Florentines hoping to make fortunes selling goods to this wild northern place called France. There are still fairs, four times a year, but it is not so rustic. It is more like Leipzig now.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“It means people standing in courtyards of trading-houses, screaming at each other, and trading goods not physically present.”

“But the warehouses—?”

“Silly, the goods are not present in the trading-houses. But neither can they be terribly remote, for they must be inspected before and delivered after the sale. Much of the traffic on the streets is commerçants going to this or that warehouse to look at a shipment of silks, herring, figs, hides, or what-have-you.”

“That helps me to understand some of what was, to a gentleman, so incomprehensible about the place.”

“You’d never guess that the place does more business than all of Paris. From the street it is desolate. You can die of loneliness or starvation there. It is not until you get inside the houses that you discover the inner life of the place. Bon-bon, all of the people who have been lured here by trade have created, behind their iron-bound doors and shuttered windows, little microcosms of the worlds they left behind in Genoa, Antwerp, Bruges, Geneva, Isfahan, Augsburg, Stockholm, Naples, or wherever they came from. When you are in one of those houses, you might as well be in one of those faraway cities. So think of Lyon as a capital of trade, and the streets around the Place au Change as its diplomatic quarter, where the Jews, Armenians, Dutch, English, Genoans, and all the other great trading-nations of the world have established their embassies: shards of foreign territory embedded in a faraway land.”

“What were you doing there, mademoiselle?”

“Buying timber for Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir. I required some expert help. After I had been a week in Lyon, I was joined by my Dutch associates: Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and their cousin. I had sent a letter to them before I left Dunkerque, for I knew they were in London. It had caught up to them at Gravesend. They had changed their plans and made direct for Dunkerque, which they passed through five days after I had departed. As they passed through Paris they enlisted their cousin, one Jacob Gold, and the three of them followed me down and encamped at the house of a man they knew there—a wholesaler of beeswax that he imports from Poland-Lithuania.”

“Now I see why this thing took six weeks! Ten days to creep down to Lyon, a week to wait for all of these Jews to show up—”

“The delay was not a problem for me. It took me and my staff that long anyway to recover from the journey, and to set up housekeeping in Lyon. Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir, bless him, had sent word ahead, and arranged for us to stay at the pied-à-terre of someone who owed him a favor. Once we had established ourselves, I had begun to make contacts among the crowd who frequent the Place au Change. For I knew that the brothers de la Vega would spare no effort in ransacking the wholesale timber market and finding the best wood on the best terms. But their efforts would be of no use unless I had made arrangements for a bill of exchange to be drawn up, transferring the agreed-on sum from the King’s treasury to whomever sold us the timber. Likewise we would need to strike a deal with the shipper, and to purchase insurance, et cetera. So even if the de la Vegas had arrived at the same time as I, they should have little to do for a few days. And the need to feed little Jean-Jacques posed the most absurd complications.”

It was a mistake to mention this, for now Rossignol’s eyes drifted from Eliza’s face down to her left breast. Earlier she had wrapped herself in a sheet, but this had slipped down as she wrestled with him.

“The de la Vegas invited me to visit them at the beeswax-warehouse where they were lodging.”

Rossignol scoffed, and rolled his eyes.

“It would have seemed a very odd invitation to my ears before I had gotten to know Lyon,” Eliza admitted, “but when I reached the place, I found it to be perfectly congenial. It is on a meadow that rises up above the Rhône to the east of the trading district. They have more land than they need, and let it out to an adjacent vineyard. The growing season was over and so the vines were not much to look at, but the weather was fine, and we sat under a bower on the terrace of this stone building full of wax and drank Russian tea sweetened with Lithuanian honey. The daughters of the wax-magnate played with Jean-Jacques and sang him nursery-rhymes in Yiddish.

“To Samuel and Abraham de la Vega and Jacob Gold, I said that Lyon struck me as a very strange town.”

“I could have told you that, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol.

“But you and I think it is strange for different reasons, Bon-bon,” said Eliza. “Listen, and let me explain.”

“What of these Jews? What did they think?”

“They felt likewise, but had been reluctant to say anything. And so what I was trying to do, Bon-bon, was to get them talking.”

“And so were these Jews responsive to your gambit, mademoiselle?” Rossignol asked.

“You are impossible,” Eliza said.

SAMUEL DE LA VEGA, at twenty-four, was the senior man present—for the elders of the clan had more important things to do. He shrugged and said: “We are here to learn. Please say more.”

“I phant’sied you were here to make money,” Eliza said.

“That is always the object in the long run. Whether we make a profit on this matter of the timber remains to be seen; but we have heard of this place and want to know more of its peculiarities.”

Eliza laughed. “Why should I say more, when you have said so much? You come here not knowing whether it is possible to make money. It is a place you have heard of, which is no great testimony to its importance, and you approach it as a sort of curiosity. Would you speak thus of Antwerp?”

“Let me explain,” Samuel said. “In our family we do not recognize a profit—we do not put it on the books—until we have a bill of exchange payable in Amsterdam or (now) London, drawn on a house that maintains a well-reputed agency in one or both of those cities.”

“To put it succinctly: hard money,” Eliza said.

“If you will. Now, as we rode down here with Jacob Gold, he told us of the system in Lyon, and how it works.”

Jacob Gold looked so nervous, now, that Eliza felt she must make some little joke to put him at ease. “If only I could have eavesdropped on you!” she exclaimed. “For yesterday at dinner at the home of Monsieur Castan, I was treated to a description of that same system—a description so flattering that I asked him why it was not used everywhere else.”

They found this amusing. “What was Monsieur Castan’s reaction to that?” asked Jacob Gold.

“Oh, that other places were cold, distrustful, that the people there did not know one another so well as they did in Lyon, had not built up the same web of trust and old relationships. That they were afflicted by a petty, literal-minded obsession with specie, and could not believe that real business was being transacted unless they saw coins being physically moved from place to place.”

The others looked relieved; for they knew, now, that they would not have to break this news to Eliza. “So you are aware that when accounts are settled in Lyon, it is all done on the books. A man seated at a banca will write in his book, ‘Signore Capponi owes me 10,000 ecus au soleil’—a currency that is used only in Lyon, by the way—and this, to him, is as good as having bullion in his lock-box. Then when the next fair comes around, perhaps he finds himself needing to transfer 15,000 ecus to Signore Capponi, and so he will strike that entry from his ledger, and Signore Capponi will write that he is owed 5,000 ecus by this chap, and so on.”

“Some money must change hands though!” insisted Abraham, who had heard all of this before but still could not quite bring himself to believe it. He was fourteen years old.

“Yes—a tiny amount,” said Jacob Gold. “But only after they have exhausted every conceivable way of settling it on paper, by arranging multilateral transfers among the different houses.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler just to use money?” Abraham asked doggedly.

“Perhaps—if they had any!” Eliza said. Which was meant as a jest, but it stilled them for a few moments.

“Why don’t they?” Abraham demanded.

“It depends on whom you ask,” Eliza said. “The most common answer is that they do not need it because the system works so smoothly. Others will tell you that when any bullion does become available here, it is immediately smuggled out to Geneva.”

“Why?”

“In Geneva are banks that, in exchange for bullion, will write you a bill of exchange payable in Amsterdam.”

Abraham’s eyes blossomed. “So we are not the only ones who are worried about how to extract hard money profits from Lyon!”

“Of course not! For that, we are competing against every other foreign merchant in Lyon who does not share the belief, common here, that entries in a ledger are the same as money,” said Samuel.

“What kind of person would believe such a thing, though?” Abraham asked.

Jacob Gold answered, “The kinds of people who have been here for so long and who make a comfortable living off of those ledgers.”

Eliza said, “But the only reason this system works is that these people know and trust each other so well. Which is fine for them. But if you are on the outside, as we are, you can’t take part in the Dépôt, as this system is called, and it is difficult to realize profits.”

Jacob Gold added, “It is fine for those who have the houses here, the land, the servants. They transact an enormous amount of business and they find ways to live well. The lack of hard money is only felt when one wants to cash out and move somewhere else. But if that is the kind of person you are—”

“Then you don’t live in Lyon and you are not a member of the Dépôt,” Eliza said.

“We can talk about this all day, going in circles like the Uroburos,” said Samuel, clapping his hands, “but the fact is that we’re here and we want to buy some timber for the King. And we don’t have any money. But we have credit from Monsieur Castan who in turn has credit because he lives here and is very much a member of the Dépôt.”

“Thank you, Samuel,” Eliza said. “You are correct: people trust Monsieur Castan; when one of the other members of this Dépôt writes in his ledger ‘M. Castan owes me such-and-such number of ecus,’ to them that’s as good as gold. And what we need to do is turn that ‘gold’ into some timber arriving at Nantes.”

“Thanks to Monsieur Wachsmann,” said Jacob Gold, referring to our host, “we have some ideas as to where we might go and make inquiries about who has timber, and might be willing to sell it to us; but how do we actually transfer the money to them from the King’s Treasury?”

“We need to find someone who is a member of this Dépôt and who is willing to write in his ledger that the King owes him the money,” Eliza said.

“But that still doesn’t get the money into the hands of him who sells us the timber, unless he is a member of the Dépôt, and I do not phant’sy that lumberjacks are invited,” said Samuel.

“And it provides no way for us to realize a profit,” Abraham, the ever-vigilant, reminded them.

Eliza reached out and pinched him on the nose to shut him up while she pointed out, “True, and yet wax, silk and other commodities are sold here in immense quantities, so there must be some way of doing it! And some do realize hard money profits, as is proved by the covert transfers of bullion to Geneva!”

Monsieur Wachsmann was therefore brought in. He was a stolid gray-headed Pomeranian of about threescore years. They explained their puzzlement to him and asked how he sold his goods, given that he was not a member of the Dépôt. He replied that he had a sort of relationship with an important businessman in town, with whom he kept a running account; and whenever the account stood in Monsieur Wachsmann’s favor, he could leverage that to get what he needed. The same would be true, he assured his visitors, of any timber wholesaler big enough for them to consider doing business with.

“So a plan begins to take shape,” said Samuel. “We will negotiate terms with a timber-wholesaler, denominated in ecus au soleil, never mind that they are a wholly fictitious currency, and then take the matter to the Dépôt and allow them to clear it on their ledgers. We end up with the timber; but is is possible for us to extract any profit?”

Monsieur Wachsmann shrugged as if this was not something he paid much attention to; and yet his estate showed that he had profited abundantly. “If you would like, you can route the profits to my account, and I will owe them to you, and we may plow these into later trades within the Dépôt, which may eventually turn into some material form, such as casks of honey, that you could sell for gold in Amsterdam.”

“This is how people move to Lyon, and never leave,” muttered Jacob Gold, combining in this one remark the Amsterdammer’s amazement at Lyon’s business practices with the Parisian’s disdain for its culture.

Monsieur Wachsmannn shrugged, and looked at his château. “Worse fates can be imagined. Do you have any idea what Stettin is like at this time of year?”

“What about getting some bullion and running it to Geneva for a bill of exchange?” Abraham demanded. “Much quicker, and easier to carry to Amsterdam than casks of honey.”

“There is a lot of competition for the small amount of bullion that exists here, and so you will have to accept a large discount,” Monsieur Wachsmann warned him, “but if that is really what you want, the house that specializes in such transactions is that of Hacklheber. They are at the Sign of the Golden Mercury, cater-corner from the Place au Change.”

“Now, there is a familiar name,” Eliza said. “I have been to their factory in Leipzig, and been ogled by Lothar himself.”

“I have never heard of them,” said Samuel, “but if this Lothar was ogling you it means he is not altogether stupid.”

“They are metals specialists,” said Jacob Gold, “I know that much.”

“When the Genoese here went bankrupt,” said Monsieur Wachsmann, “it happened because the Spanish mines had hiccuped in their delivery of silver to Seville. Bankers of Geneva and other places came to Lyon to fill the void left by the Genoese. They had connections to silver mines in the Harz and the Ore Range, which flourished for a brief time, until Spanish silver once again flooded the market. Anyway, one of those banking-families had an agency in Leipzig, and the people they sent thither to look after it became linked by marriage to this family of von Hacklheber. Because of the Hacklhebers’ connections to the mines, they had older ties to the Fuggers. Indeed, it is said that this family goes all the way back to the time of the Romans…”

Abraham snorted. “Ours goes back all the way to Adam.”

“Yes; but to them this is all very impressive,” said Monsieur Wachsmann patiently, “and by the way, now that you have had your bar mitzvah you might spend less time poring over Torah and more learning social graces. At any rate, fortune favored the Leipzig branch, and before long the Hacklheber tail was wagging the Geneva dog. It is a small house, but reputed extraordinarily clever. They are in Lyon, Cadiz, Piacenza: anywhere there is a large flux of money.”

“What do they do?” Abraham wanted to know.

“Lend money, clear transactions, like other banks. But their real specialty is maneuvers such as the one we are talking about now: shipment of bullion to Geneva. Do you remember when I warned you that there would be a discount if you converted your earnings to bullion here? It should have occurred to you to wonder just where the missing money disappears to in such a case. The answer is that it goes into the coffers of Lothar von Hacklheber.”

Monsieur Wachsmann rolled to his feet, and paced across the terrace once or twice before going on.

“I trade in wax. I know where wax comes from and where it goes, and how much wax of different types is worth to different people in different times and places. I say to you that what I am to wax, Lothar von Hacklheber is to money.”

“You mean gold? Silver?”

“All kinds. Metals in pig, bullion, or minted form, paper, moneys of account such as our ecus au soleil. To me, money is frankly somewhat mysterious; but to him it is all as simple as wax. Or so it would seem; like honeycombs in a boiler, it melts together and is con-fused into one thing.”

“Then we shall go and talk to his agent here,” Eliza said.

“Agreed,” said Samuel de la Vega, “but I say to you that if they simply had a few coins lying about the place, we could get this whole thing done in an hour. That this system works, I cannot deny; but this Dépôt reminds me of certain towns up in the Alps where people have been marrying each other for too long.”

“THE NEXT DAY,” Eliza continued, “I met Gerhard Mann, who is the Hacklheber agent in Lyon.”

She now relaxed her grip on Bonaventure Rossignol’s testicles. For in the end, this was the only way she had found to maintain Bon-bon’s attentiveness as she had discoursed of ecus au soleil and the Dépôt and so forth. But the mention of the name Hacklheber brought Rossignol to attention.

“Lothar von Hacklheber,” she continued, “is not the sort who gladly suffers an employee to while away the afternoons sipping coffee in the café.”

“I should think not!”

“He has so arranged it that Mann has more work than he can handle. This forces him to make choices. He is always dashing about town on horseback like a Cavalier. Carriages are too slow for him. Arranging the meeting was absurdly difficult. It required half a dozen exchanges of notes. Finally I did what was simplest, namely remained still at the pied-à-terre and waited for him to come to me. He galloped up, naturally, just as I was beginning to suckle Jean-Jacques. And so rather than send him away, I invited him in, and bade him sit down across the table from me even as Jean-Jacques was hanging off my tit.”

“Appalling!”

“But I did this as a sort of test, Bon-bon, to see if he’d be appalled by it.”

“Was he?”

“He pretended not to notice, which was not an easy thing for him.”

Rossignol shuddered. “What did you talk about?”

“We talked about Lothar von Hacklheber.”

“YOU MET HIM IN LEIPZIG?” Mann asked.

“It had to do with a silver-mining project in the Harz,” Eliza said, “in which he elected not to invest: a typically shrewd decision.”

Eliza explained to Mann what she had in mind. He pondered it for a few moments. At first she saw concern, or even fear, on his face, which made her suspect that he did not really wish to do it, yet was loath to refuse, for fear of what he might say, were Eliza to go to him and pout. Mann was a young man—indeed, would have to be, to last for very long, working as he did—and Eliza saw clearly enough that he had been posted to this place to prove himself, or to fail, so that he could decide where to send Mann next. Mann had blue eyes a little too close together, and a broad brow, so expressive that in its creases and corrugations she could read his feelings like sonnets on parchment. He was intelligent, but lacking in resolution. She guessed that someone of strong personality would one day get the better of him, and that he would end up sitting at a banca on an upper floor of the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig, peering down into the courtyard with a mirror on a stick.

After a few moments’ thought, Mann relaxed, and began to sift through the vocabularies of diverse languages to express his thoughts. “It would be—” he began, and then switched to German in which Eliza could make out the word-part “sonder,” which to them meant “special” or “exceptional” or “peculiar.” This was his polite way of telling her that the sum involved was too small to be worth his time. “But we are encouraged to make such transactions. Sometimes they are like the first trickle of water coming through a tiny crevice in a dike; the amount that comes through is not as important as the channel that it cuts along its way, which presently carries a much greater volume.” Which was his way of saying that he had heard she was backed by the French government, and wanted to participate in what she was doing, now that expenditures were rising because of the war.

“It is not a similitude that shall be of any comfort to Dutchmen,” Eliza said, having in mind her colleagues, the de la Vegas.

“Ah, but if you cared about the comfort of Dutchmen you would not be on such an errand,” Gerhard Mann reminded her.

“SO THROUGH HIS OWN CLEVERNESS Gerhard Mann had devised a way to escape from the interview without giving me or him any cause to be angry,” Eliza said. Tired of sitting on Bon-bon, she now rolled back and sat cross-legged on the bed between his spread knees.

“I let the de la Vegas know that we had now a way to get hard money out of Lyon,” she continued. “Within a few hours, they were making the rounds of the timber wholesalers, and within a day, had struck two separate deals: one for a shipment of Massif Central oak logs, which were stacked near the bank of the Saône a mile upstream, another for some Alpine softwood at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône. If you’d like, Bon-bon, I can devote an hour or two, now, to explaining in detail the negotiations amongst ourselves, the two merchants who sold us the timber, Monsieur Castan, various other members of the Dépôt, Gerhard Mann, and certain insurers and shippers.”

Rossignol said something under his breath about la belle dame sans merci.

“Very well then,” said Eliza, “suffice it to say that some entries were made in some ledgers. A fast coach went to Geneva, which is some seventy-five miles away as the crow flies, though considerably farther as the horse gallops. Abraham got his Bill of Exchange, though the margin of profit was scarcely enough to cover their time and expense. The timber was ours.

“At this point—mid-November—we supposed the matter concluded. For we had the timber, and had arranged shipping. An Amsterdammer would consider the deal closed. For to such people it is a perfectly routine matter to ship any amount of goods to Nagasaki, New York, or Batavia with the stroke of a quill.

“We, as well as the logs, had to go north: Jacob Gold to Paris and the rest of us to Dunkerque, whence the de la Vegas could find sea-passage north to Amsterdam.

“The fastest way would have been for me to climb back into the carriage I had borrowed from Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir and go north by road. But there was no room in it for the de la Vegas. The weather had turned cold. We were in no particular hurry. And so we decided to send the horses and carriages north by road to Orléans, where the drivers could rent mounts, or hire another carriage, for the de la Vegas.

“In the meantime, we would take the river route to the same place, arriving a few days later.* Our plan was to go to Roanne, and buy passage on riverboats as far as Orléans, which would be infinitely more spacious and comfortable than making the same passage by road. At Orléans we would make rendezvous with our horses and vehicles, which would convey us north to Paris and then Dunkerque.

“The Loire, as you know, flows on past Orléans to Nantes. So the route I have just described to you was the same as that of the timber. And so there was another advantage to the plan I have described, which was that as we went along, we would be able to keep an eye on the King’s logs. In the unlikely event that some problem arose en route, we would be on hand to fix it.”

“But, mademoiselle,” said Rossignol, “by your account, this was almost a month ago. What on earth has been happening in the meantime?”

“A full recitation would take another month yet. You know that each of the component pays of la France controls its own stretch of road or river and has the right to extract tolls and tariffs, et cetera. Likewise you know that the population is a quilt of guilds and corporations and parishes, each with its own peculiar privileges.”

“Which are granted by the King,” said Rossignol. For he seemed a little bit nervous that Eliza was about to say something impolitic.

Which she was; but she felt safe in doing so here, in the kingdom of secrets. “The King grants those privileges in order to make people want to join those guilds and corporations! And thus the King gets power by offering to broaden, or threatening to restrict, the same privileges.”

“What of it?” Rossignol sniffed.

“After a few days, Abraham joked that this voyage was impossible unless one went accompanied by a whole squadron of lawyers. But this makes it sound too easy. Since every pays has its own peculiar laws and traditions, there is no one lawyer who comprehends them all; and so what one really has to do is stop every few miles and hire a different lawyer. But I have only mentioned, so far, the entities with formal legal rights to impede the movement of logs on a river. This leaves out half of the difficulties we faced. There are on these rivers people who used to be pirates but have degenerated into extortionists. We paid them in hard money until we ran out, at which point we had to begin paying them in logs. Every night, others who were less formally organized would come around and help themselves. We suspected this was happening, but the night-watchmen we hired were barely distinguishable from the thieves. The only reliable sentry we had was Jean-Jacques. He would wake me every couple of hours through the night, and I would sit in my boat-cabin feeding him and watching through a window as the locals made off with our logs.”

“It cannot all be as disorderly as you make it out to be!” Rossignol protested.

“There does exist an apparatus of maintaining order on the roads and waterways: diverse ancient courts of law, and prévôts and baillis who report to the local seigneurs and who are reputed to have bands of armed men at their disposal. But they were never there when we needed them. If I shipped logs down the river every week, I should have no choice but to come to understandings with all of those seigneurs. Whether this would prove more or less expensive than being robbed outright, I cannot guess. Our run down the Loire surprised many who would have stolen more from us if we had operated on a predictable schedule.

“The Loire, particularly on its upper reaches, is obstructed by sand-bars in many places, and different arrangements must be made to get past each: here one must find and hire a local pilot, there one must pay the owner of the mill to release a gush of water from his mill-pond that will heave the logs over the shallows.

“I could go on in this vein all day. Suffice it to say that when we at last reached Orléans, ten days behind schedule, Jacob Gold and I dashed north to Paris and cashed in our Bill of Exchange at a swingeing discount. Jacob returned to Orléans with the money, which he used to cover all of the unexpected expenses that had cropped up en route. I came here. Soon I’ll go on to Dunkerque and meet that bastard who sent me on this fool’s errand, Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir, and explain to him that half of the logs have evaporated, along with all of our profits, and six weeks of our lives.”

Dunkerque Residence of the d’Ozoirs

13 DECEMBER 1689

WHERE BONAVENTURE ROSSIGNOL HAD FIBRILLATED between boredom and disbelief, the Marquis d’Ozoir was richly amused when Eliza told him the same story. At the beginning of the interview, she had been merely furious. When he began to smirk and chuckle, she tended toward homicidal, and had to leave the room and tend to Jean-Jacques for a little while. The baby was in a gleeful mood for some reason, grabbing his feet and fountaining spit, and this cheered her up. For he had no thought of anything outside of the room, nor in the past, nor the future. When Eliza returned to the salon with its view over the harbor, she had quite regained her composure and had even begun to see a bit of humor in this folly of the logs.

“And why did you send me on such a fool’s errand, monsieur?” she demanded. “You must have known how it would all come out.”

“Everyone in this business knows—or claims to—that to get French timber to French shipyards is an impossibility. And because they know this, they never even try. And if no one ever tries, how can we be certain it is still impossible? And so every few years, just to find out whether it’s still impossible, I ask some enterprising person who does not know it’s impossible to attempt it. I do not blame you for being annoyed with me. But if you had somehow succeeded, it would have been a great deed. And in failing, you learned much that will be useful in the next phase of our project—which I assure you is not impossible.”

He had risen to his feet and approached the window, and by a look and a twitch of the shoulder he invited her to join him there. Gone were the days when one could look out over the Channel and see blue sky above England; today they could barely make out the harbor wall. Raindrops were whacking the windowpanes like birdshot.

“I confess the place looks different to me now, and not just because of the weather,” Eliza said. “My eye is drawn to certain things that I ignored before. The timber down at the shipyard: how did it get here? Those new fortifications: how did the King pay for them? They were put there by laborers; and laborers must be paid with hard money, they’ll not accept Bills of Exchange.”

The Marquis was distracted, and perhaps a bit impatient, that she had strayed into the topic of fortifications. He flicked his fingers at the nearest rampart. “That is nothing,” he said. “If you must know, the nobility have a lot of metal, because they hoard it. Le Roi gets to them at Versailles and gives them a little talk: ‘Why is your coastline not better defended? It is your obligation to take care of this.’ ” Of course they cannot resist. They spend some of their metal to put up the fort. In return they get the personal gratitude of the King, and get to go to dinner with him or hand him his shirt or something.”

“That’s all?”

He smiled. “That, and a note from the contrôleur-général saying that the French Treasury owes him whatever amount of money he spent.”

“Aha! So that’s how it works: These nobles are exchanging hard money for soft: metal for French government debt.”

“Technically I suppose that is true. Such an exchange is a loss of power and independence. For gold can be spent anywhere, for anything. Paper may have the same nominal value but its usefulness is contingent on a hundred factors, most of which are impossible to comprehend, unless you live at Versailles. But it is all nonsense.”

“What do you mean, it is all nonsense?”

“Those debts are worthless. They will never be repaid.”

“Worthless!? Never!?”

“Perhaps I exaggerate. Let me put it thus: The nobleman who built these new fortifications around the harbor knows he may never see his money again. But he does not care, for it was just some gold plate in his cellar. Now the plates are gone, but he has currency of a different sort at Versailles; and that is what he desires.”

“I am tempted to share in your cynicism, for I don’t wish to seem a fool,” Eliza said slowly, “but if the debt is secured by a sealed document from the contrôleur-général, it seems to me that it must possess some value.”

“I don’t wish to speak of fortifications,” he said. “These were built by Monsieur le comte d’——” and he mentioned someone Eliza had never heard of. “You may make inquiries with him if you are curious. But you and I must not let our attention stray from the matter at hand: timber for his majesty’s shipyards.”

“Very well,” Eliza said, “I see some down there. Where did it come from?”

“The Baltic,” he returned, “and it was brought in a Dutch ship, in the spring of this year, before war was declared.”

“No shipyard could exist in Dunkerque, unless it got its supplies from the sea,” Eliza pointed out, “and so may I assume that this was a habitual arrangement, before the war?”

“It has not been habitual for rather a long while. When I came back from my travels in the East, around 1670, my father put me to work in the Company of the North down at La Rochelle. This was a brainchild of Colbert. He had tried to build his navy out of French timber and ran afoul of the same troubles as you. And so the purpose of this Compagnie du Nord was to trade in the Baltic for timber. Of necessity, this would be shipped mostly in Dutch bottoms.”

“Why did he put it all the way down in La Rochelle? Why not closer to the North—Dunkerque or Le Havre?”

“Because La Rochelle was where the Huguenots were,” the Marquis answered, “and it was they who made the whole enterprise run.”

“What did you do, then, if I may inquire?”

“Traveled to the north. Watched. Learned. Gave information to my father. His position in the Navy is largely ornamental. But the information that he gets about what the Navy is doing has enabled him to make investments that otherwise would have been beyond his intellectual capacity.”

Eliza must have looked taken aback.

“I am a bastard,” said the Marquis.

“I knew he was wealthy, but assumed ’twas all inherited,” Eliza said.

“What he inherited has been converted inexorably to soft money, in just the manner we spoke of a few minutes ago,” d’Ozoir said. “Which amounts to saying that he has slowly over time lost his independent means and become a pensioner of the French Government—which is how le Roi likes it. In order for him to preserve any independent means, he has had to make investments. The reason you are not aware of this is that his investments are in the Mediterranean—the Levant, and Northern Africa—whereas your attentions are fixed North and West.” And here he reached out and took Eliza firmly by the hand and looked her in the eye. “Which is where I would like them to stay—and so let us attend to the matter of Baltic timber, I beg you.”

“Very well,” Eliza said, “You say that in the early seventies, you had Huguenots doing it in Dutch ships. Then there was a long war against the Dutch, no?”

“Correct. So we substituted English or Swedish ships.”

“I am guessing that this worked satisfactorily until four years ago when le Roi expelled most of the Huguenots and enslaved the rest?”

“Indeed. Since then, I have been desperately busy, trying to do all of the things that an office full of Huguenots used to do. I have managed to keep a thin stream of timber coming in from the Baltic—enough to mend the old ships and build the occasional new one.”

“But now we are at war with the two greatest naval powers in the world,” Eliza said. “The demand for ship timber will go up immensely. And as the de la Vegas and I have just finished proving, we cannot get it from France. So you want my help in reëstablishing the Compagnie du Nord here, at Dunkerque.”

“I should be honored.”

“I will do it,” she announced, “but first you must answer me one question.”

“Only ask it, mademoiselle.”

“How long have you been thinking about this? And did you discuss it with your half-brother?”

Jean-Jacques, with an uncanny sense of timing for a six-monthold, began to cry from the next room. D’Ozoir considered it. “My half-brother Étienne wants you for a different reason.”

“I know—because I breed true.”

“No, mademoiselle. You are a fool if you believe that. There are many pretty young noblewomen who can make healthy babies, and most of them are less trouble than you.”

“What other possible reason could he want me?”

“Other than your beauty? The answer is Colbert.”

“Colbert is dead.”

“But his son lives on: Monsieur le marquis de Seignelay. Secretary of State for the Navy, like his father before him, and my father’s boss. Do you have the faintest idea what it is like, for one such as my father—a hereditary Duke of an ancient line, and cousin of the King—to see a commoner’s son treated as if he were a peer of the realm? To be subordinated to a man whose father was a merchant?”

“It must be difficult,” Eliza said, without much sympathy.

“Not as difficult for the Duc d’Arcachon as some of the others—for my father is not as arrogant as some. My father is subservient, flexible, adaptable—”

“And in this case,” Eliza said, completing the thought—for the Marquis was in danger of losing his nerve—“the way he means to adapt is by marrying Étienne off to the female who most reminds him of Colbert.”

“Common origins, good with money, respected by the King,” said the Marquis. “And if she is beautiful and breeds true, why, so much the better. You may imagine that you are some sort of outsider to the Court of Versailles, mademoiselle, that you do not belong there at all. But the truth of the matter is thus: Versailles has only existed for seven years. It does not have any ancient traditions. It was made by Colbert, the commoner. It is full of nobles, true; but you fool yourself if you believe that they feel comfortable there—feel as if they belong. No, it is you, mademoiselle, who are the perfect courtier of Versailles, you whom the others shall envy, once you go there and establish yourself. My father feels himself slipping down, sees his family losing its wealth, its influence. He throws a rope up, hoping that someone on higher and firmer ground will snatch it out of the air and pull him to safety—and that someone is you, mademoiselle.”

“It is a heavy charge to lay on a woman who has no money, and who is busy trying to raise an infant,” Eliza said. “I hope that your father is not really as desperate as you make him sound.”

“He is not desperate yet. But when he lies awake at night, he schemes against the possibility that he, or his descendants, may become desperate in the future.”

“If what you say is creditable, I have much to do,” said Eliza, turning from the window, and smoothing her skirt down with her hands.

“What shall you do first, mademoiselle?”

“I believe I shall write a letter to England, monsieur.”

“England! But we are at war with England,” the Marquis pointed out, mock-offended.

“What I have in mind is a Natural-Philosophic sort of discourse,” Eliza said, “and Philosophy recognizes no boundaries.”

“Ah, you will write to one of your friends in the Royal Society?”

“I had in mind a Dr. Waterhouse,” Eliza said. “He was cut for the stone recently.”

The Marquis got the same aghast, cringing, yet fascinated look that all men did whenever the topic of lithotomy arose in conversation.

“Last I heard, he had lived through it, and was recovering,” Eliza continued. “Perhaps he has time on his hands to answer idle inquiries from a French countess.”

“Perhaps he does,” said the Marquis, “but I cannot understand why the first thing that enters your mind is to write a letter to a sick old Natural Philosopher in London.”

“It’s only the first thing, not the only thing, that I’ll do,” said Eliza. “It’s a thing easily done from Dunkerque. I would begin a conversation with him, or with someone, concerning money: soft and hard.”

“Why not discuss it with a Spaniard? They know how to make money that people respect all around the world.”

“It is precisely because the English coinage is so pathetic that I wish to take up the matter with an Englishman,” Eliza returned. “No one here can believe that Englishmen accept those blackened lumps as specie. And yet the trade of England is great, and the country is as prosperous as any. So to me England seems like an enormous Lyon: poor in specie, but rich in credit, and thriving through a system of paper transfers.”

“Which will boot them nothing in a war,” said the Marquis. “For in war, a king must send his armies abroad, to places where soft money is not accepted. Therefore he must send hard money with them that they may buy fodder and other necessaries. How then can England war against France?”

“The same question might be asked of France! By your leave, monsieur, her money is not as sound as you might like to think,”

“Do you suppose that this Dr. Waterhouse will have answers to such questions?”

“No, but I hope that he will engage in a discourse with me whence answers might emerge.”

“I believe that the answer lies in Trade,” said the Marquis. “Colbert himself said, ‘Trade is the source of finance, and finance is the vital sinews of war.’ What our countries cannot pay for with bullion, they will have to get in trade.”

“C’est juste, monsieur, but do not forget that there is trade not only in tangible stuff like Monsieur Wachsmann’s wax, but also in money itself: the stock in trade of Lothar von Hacklheber. Which is a murky and abstruse business, and a fit topic of study for Fellows of the Royal Society.”

“I thought they only studied butterflies.”

“Some of them, monsieur, study banks and money as well; and I fear they have got a head start on our French lepidopterists.”

Cap Gris-Nez, France

15 DECEMBER 1689

A DUTCHMAN PAINTING THIS SCAPE would have had little recourse to pigments; a spate of gull-shit on a bench could have served as his palette. The sky was white, and so was the ground. The branches of the trees were black, except where snow had begun sticking to them. The château was half-timbered, therefore plaster-white in most places, webbed with ancient timbers that had turned the color of charcoal as they absorbed snow-damp. The roof was red tile; but this was mostly covered in snow. From place to place the presence of a stove underneath was betrayed by a seeping lake of red. It was not especially grand as châteaux went nowadays: a rectangular court open on the side facing the Channel, with stables to one side, servants’ quarters to the other, and the big house holding them together, squarely facing the sea. Before it the ground dropped away sharply, and so the shoreline was not visible: just a distant strip of gray saltwater, which faded into the white atmosphere far short of the Dover shore.

A four-horse carriage and a two-horse baggage-wain were drawn up in the court. Booted footmen and drivers, wrapped in damp wool, were stomping from horse to horse, removing empty feed-bags and cinching harnesses. A large woman, her face lodged at the end of a tunnel of bonnet, emerged from the servants’ quarters, tugging a heavy blanket over her shoulders. She got a foot on the step below the carriage door and launched herself into it, making the vehicle list and oscillate on its suspension. A pair of men emerged from the stable, whacking smoky wads from the bowls of their clay pipes. They pulled on heavy gloves and mounted horses; as they swung legs over saddles, their heavy riding-coats parted for a moment, showing that each of these men was rigged like a battleship with an assortment of small cannons, daggers, and cutlasses.

The front door of the main house swung open and color burst forth: a dress in green silk, complicated by ribbons and flounces in many other colors, a pink face, blue eyes, yellow hair held up with diverse jewelled pins and more ribbons. She turned about to bid a last farewell to someone inside, which made the skirt flare out, then turned again and walked into the courtyard. Her attention was fixed on the one person here who had not yet mounted a horse or climbed aboard a vehicle: a man as brief and stout as a mortar, in a long coat and boots that had turned black from damp. His hat—a vast tricornered production rimmed in gold braid and fledged with ostrich-plumes—had toppled from his head and listed on the snow like a beached flagship. The prints made in the snow by his boots, and the furrows carved by the skirts of his coat and the scabbard of his small-sword, proved that he had been eddying about the court for quite a while. His gaze was fixed on a small bundle that was in midair just in front of him.

The woman in the green dress bent down to pick up the forgotten hat, and gave it a shake, releasing a flurry of snow from the ostrich-plume.

The bundle reached an apogee, hung there for a moment a few feet above the man’s bare head, and began to accelerate toward the ground. He let it drop freely for a moment, then got his gloved hands underneath it and began gently to slow its descent. The bundle came to a stop only a hand’s breadth above the ground, the man bent over like a grave-digger. A scream emerged from the bundle, which made the woman’s spine snap straight; but the scream turned out to be nothing more than the prelude to a long, drawn-out cackle of laughter. The woman relaxed and exhaled, then jerked to attention again as the man emitted a long whoop and heaved the bundle high into the air again.

In time she managed to get the man’s attention without leading him to drop the baby. Hat was exchanged for infant. She climbed into the coach, handing the baby in before her to a smaller woman who was sitting across from the big one. He—despite being dressed as a gentleman—clambered onto a perch at the back of the coach, normally used by a pair of footmen, but of a comfortable width for one man of his physique. The train of horses and vehicles pulled out onto the frozen road that meandered along the cliff-tops, and turned so that England and the Channel were to the right, France to the left.

A few hundred yards along, they slowed for a few moments so that the woman in the green dress could gaze out the window at some new earthworks that had been thrown up there: a revetment for a pair of mortars. Then they moved on, a thicket of legs and a storm of reins, black against the fresh snow, which muffled the sounds of their passage and swallowed them up, leaving nothing for a painter to depict except a blank canvas, and nothing for a writer to describe except an empty page.

“ONE OF THE OTHER THINGS they have at Versailles is physicians.” The voice emerged from a grate in the back of the coach.

“Oh, but we have those in abundance aboard our ships, my lady.”

“You have barbers. You have consulted them for months, and still cannot sit down! I am speaking of physicians.”

“It is true that barbers make a specialty of the other end of the anatomy from that which concerns me,” said the man on the perch. “Nature, though, offers her own remedies. I have packed my breeches with snow. At first it was shocking, intolerable.” He had to wait now, for some moments.

“You laugh,” he went on, “but, my lady, you do not appreciate the relief that this affords me, in more ways than one. For not only does it relieve the pain and swelling aft, but also, a similar but not so unpleasant symptom fore, which any man would complain of who went on a journey of any length in your company…”

Two of the women laughed again, but the third was having none of it, and answered him firmly: “The journey is not so long, for those of us who can sit down. The destination is a place where wit is prized, so long as it is discreet and refined, and does not offend the likes of Madame de Maintenon. But these sailorly jests of yours shall be immense faux pas, and shall defeat the whole purpose of your coming there.”

“What is the purpose, my lady? You summoned me, and I reported for duty. I supposed my rôle was to keep my godson amused. But I can see that you disapprove of my methods. In a few years, when Jean-Jacques learns to talk, he will, I’m certain, take my side in the matter, and demand to be flung about; in the meantime, I am dragged along in your wake, purposeless.” He gazed curiously out to sea; but the train had turned inland, and the object of his desire was rapidly receding into the white distance. He was hopelessly a-ground.

“You are forever fussing over your ships, Lieutenant Bart, wishing that you had more, or that the ones you have were bigger, or in better repair…”

“All the more reason, my lady, for me to jump off of this unnatural conveyance and return to Dunkerque post-haste!”

“And do what? Build a ship with your own hands, out of snow? What is needed is not Jean Bart in Dunkerque. What is needed is Jean Bart at Versailles.”

“What purpose can I serve there, my lady? Pilot a row-boat on the King’s reflecting-pool?”

“You want resources. You compete for them against many others. Your most formidable competitor is the Army. Do you know why the Army gets all the resources, Lieutenant Bart?”

“Do they? I am shocked to hear this.”

“That is because you never see them; but if you did, you would be outraged at how much money they get, compared to the Navy, and how many of the best people. Let us take Étienne de Lavardac as an example.”

“The son of the duc d’Arcachon?”

“Do not affect ignorance, Lieutanant Bart. You know who he is, and that he knocked me up. Can you think of any young nobleman with stronger ties to the Navy? And yet when war broke out, what did he do?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“He organized a cavalry regiment and rode off to war on the Rhine.”

“Ungrateful pup! I’ll work him over with the flat of my cutlass.”

“Yes, and when you are finished you can go to Rome and poke the Pope in the eye with a stick!” suggested the smaller of the Countess’s two assistants.

“It is a splendid idea, Nicole—I shall do it for you!” Bart returned.

“Do you know why Étienne made such a choice?” asked the lady, unamused.

“All I know is, someone needs to teach him some more manners.”

“That is exactly wrong—someone needs to teach him less. For he is generally agreed to be the politest man in France.”

“He must have forgot his manners at least once,” said Jean Bart, pressing his face to the grate and peering at little Jean-Jacques, who had his face buried in his mother’s left breast.

“Nay, for even when he impregnated me he did so politely,” said the mother. “It is because of this sense of honor, of decorum, that he, and all the other young Court men, prefer the Army to the Navy.”

“Hmm!”

“At last I have rendered you speechless, Jean Bart, and so I’ll take this rare opportunity to explain further. Every man at Court professes his loyalty to the King, indeed does little else but prate about it from sunup to sundown, which pleases the King well enough in times of peace. But in time of war, each and every man must go out and demonstrate his loyalty with deeds. On a battlefield, a Cavalier may attire himself in magnificent armor and ride forth on a brilliant steed to engage the foe in single combat; and what is better, he does so in full view of many others like him, so that those who survive the day can get together in their tent when it is all over and agree on what happened. But on the sea all is different, for our dashing fop is lumped together with all of the other men on the ship, who are mostly common sailors; he lives with them, and cannot move from place to place, or engage a foe, without their assistance. To order a gang of swabbies, ‘charge your cannon and fire it in the general direction of yonder dot on the horizon,’ is altogether different from galloping up to a Dutchman on a rampart and swinging your sword-blade at his neck.”

“We do not fire at dots on the horizon,” huffed Jean Bart, “however, I take your meaning only too well.”

“You, because of your recent exploit, are a shining counterexample to this general rule; and if we can get a physician to patch up your arse so that you can sit down at dinner and regale some Court ladies with the story—preferably without resorting to profanity or any other ribald elements—it shall translate directly into more money for the Navy.”

“And more Court fops to adorn my decks?”

“That comes unavoidably with money, Jean Bart, it is how the game is played.” And then she was banging on the carriage ceiling. “Gaetan! Over there, I see what looks like a new powder-magazine, let’s go have a look.”

“If my lady wishes to review all of his majesty’s new coastal fortifications,” said Jean Bart, “it is a thing more easily done from the deck of a ship.”

“But then I don’t get to interview the local intendants, and learn the gossip behind the fortifications.”

“Is that what you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“What did you learn?”

“That the chain of interlocking mortar emplacements we viewed this morning was financed by a low-interest loan to His Majesty’s Treasury from Monsieur le comte d’Etaples, who melted down a twelfth-century gold punchbowl for it; and at the same time he improved the road from Fruges to Fauquembergues so that it can carry ammunition-carts even during the spring thaw; and in return the King saw to it that an old lawsuit against him was delayed indefinitely, and he got to hold a candle one morning at the King’s levée.”

“It makes one wonder what fascinations may be connected with yon powder-house! Perhaps some local Sieur cashed in his great-grandpère’s ruby-set toenail-clippers to pay for the roof!” exclaimed Jean Bart, to stifled gurgles from Nicole and the large woman inside.

“Next summer, when Baltic timber is stacked to three times your height around the shipyard of Dunkerque, we shall see then if you are still mocking me,” said she who was not amused.

“I BEG YOUR PARDON, mademoiselle; but this sound that you are making, ‘yoo-hoo! yoo-hoo,’ has never been heard before in his majesty’s stables, or anywhere else in France that I know of. To the humans who live here, such as myself and my lord, it is devoid of meaning, and to the horses, it is a cause of acute distress. I beg you to stop, and to speak French, lest you cause a general panic.”

“It is a common greeting in Qwghlmian, monsieur.”

“Ah!” This brought the man to a hard stop for several moments. The stables of Versailles, in December, were not renowned for illumination; but Eliza could hear the gentleman’s satins hissing, and his linens creaking, as he bowed. She made curtseying noises in return. This was answered by a short burst of scratching and rasping as the gentleman adjusted his wig. She cleared her throat. He called for a candle, and got a whole silver candelabra: a chevron of flames, bobbing and banking, like a formation of fireflies, through the ambient miasma of horse-breath, manure-gas, and wig-powder.

“I had the honor of being introduced to you a year ago, along the banks of the Meuse,” said the gentleman, “when my lord—”

“I remember with fondness and gratitude your hospitality, Monsieur de Mayet,” said Eliza, which jerked another quick bow from him, “and the alacrity with which you conducted me into the presence of Monsieur de Lavardac on that occasion—”

“He will see you immediately, mademoiselle!” announced de Mayet, though not until after they had watched a second candelabra zoom back and forth a few times between the stall where they were standing, and one that lay even deeper in the penetralia of the stables. “This way, please, around the manure-pile.”

“TRULY, MONSIEUR, YOU ARE SECOND to none in piety. Even Father Édouard de Gex is a wastrel compared to you. For in this season of Christmas, when all go to Mass and hear homilies about Him who lived His first days in a stable, Étienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon is the only one who is actually living in the same estate, and sleeping on a pile of hay.”

“To piety I can make no claims whatever, mademoiselle, though I do aspire, at times, to the lesser virtue of politeness.”

They had fetched out a chair for her to sit on, and she had accepted it, only because she knew that if she didn’t, Étienne would be too stricken with horror to speak. He was squatting on a low stool used by farriers. The floor of the stall had been strewn with fresh straw, or as fresh as could be had in December.

“So Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon explained to me, when I arrived at La Dunette yester evening, and found that you and your household had moved out of it; not merely out of the house, but the entire estate.”

“Thank God, we had received notice of your approach.”

“But the purpose of my sending that notice was not to drive you out to his majesty’s stables.”

“No one has been driven, mademoiselle. Rather, I am lured hither by the prospect of assuring your comfort at La Dunette, and preserving your reputation.”

“That much is understood, monsieur, and deep is my gratitude. But as I am to be lodging in an outlying cottage, which cannot even be seen from the main house, and which is reached by a separate road, your mother is of the view that you may stay at home, even as I lodge at the cottage, without even the most censorious observer perceiving any taint. And I happen to agree with her.”

“Ah, but, mademoiselle—”

“So firm is your mother in holding this view that she shall be gravely offended if you do not return home at once! And I have come to deliver the message in person so that you can be under no misapprehensions as to my view of the matter.”

“Ah, very well,” Étienne sighed. “As long as it is understood that I am not being driven from here by what some perceive as its discomforts and inconveniences—” and here he paused for a moment to glare at several Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and other members of his household, who were fortunate enough to be hidden in darkness “—but, as it were, fleeing in terror of the prospect that my conduct is, in the eyes of my mother, other than perfect.”

Which was somehow construed as a direct order by his staff; for suddenly, hay-piles were detonating as liveried servants, who had burrowed into them for warmth, leapt to action. Great doors were dragged open, letting in awful fanfares of blue snow-light, and illuminating a gilded carriage, and diverse baggage-wains, that had been backed into nearby stalls.

Étienne d’Arcachon shielded his eyes with one hand, “Not from the light, which is nothing, but from your beauty, which is almost too great for a mortal man to gaze upon.”

“Thank you, monsieur,” said Eliza, shielding her own eyes, which were rolling.

“Pray, where is this orphan that some say you rescued from the clutches of the Heretics?”

“He is at La Dunette,” said Eliza, “interviewing a prospective wet-nurse.”

THE QUILL SWIRLED and lunged over the page in a slow but relentless three-steps-forward, two-steps-back sort of process, and finally came to a full stop in a tiny pool of its own ink. Then Louis Phélypéaux, first comte de Pontchartrain, raised the nib; let it hover for an instant, as if gathering his forces; and hurled it backwards along the sentence, tiptoeing over i’s, slashing through t’s and x’s, nearly tripping over an umlaut, building speed and confidence while veering through a slalom-course of acute and grave accents, pirouetting though cedillas and carving vicious snap-turns through circumflexes. It was like watching the world’s greatest fencing-master dispatch twenty opponents with a single continuous series of maneuvers. He drew his hand up with great care, lest his lace cuff drag in the ink; it inflated for a moment as it snatched a handful of air, then flopped down over his hand, covering all but the fingertips that pinched the pen, and giving them an opportunity to warm up. Twin jets of steam unfurled from Pontchartrain’s cavernous elliptical nostrils as he re-read the document. Eliza realized she’d stopped breathing, and released her own cloud of steam. As she emptied her lungs, her dress hugged her suddenly around the waist while relaxing its grip on her thorax. Some milk leaked out of her breasts, but she had anticipated this, and swathed herself in cotton. It was most unusual for a virgin, who had merely adopted an orphan, to lactate. She smelled like a dairy. But the room was so cold that no one could smell anything but dust and ice.

“If you would, my lady, verify that I have not erred in setting down the principal.” He withdrew his left hand from its warm haven between his thighs and gave the page a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation. Eliza stepped forward, trying not to push a vast front of milk-scent before her, and rested her hands on the marble tabletop, then drew them back, for the stone jerked the warmth from her flesh. Her arms were tired. Walking here through the corridors of the palace, she had had to lift up her skirts—heavy winter stuff—lest they drag in the human turds that littered the marble floors. Most of these were frozen solid, but a few were not, and in the dim galleries she could not see the steam rising from these until it was too late.

Those corridors, and the divided, subdivided, and sub-sub-divided apartments that crowded in on them, were Versailles as it was. The wing where Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, contrôleur-général, had his offices, were Versailles as it was meant to be, meaning that the rooms were spacious, the windows many and large, the floors turd-free. Pontchartrain sat at a table with his back to an arched window that looked out over the gardens. His bony ankles, protected only by silk stockings, were crossed, like a pair of sticks being rubbed together. The sun was on his back. His periwig cast an Alp-like shadow across the table, and the document. The amount of money that Jean Bart’s corsairs had taken from Eliza, and that she was loaning to the Treasury, was written out on the page, not in numerals but in words; and so large was the amount that, fully expressed to all of its significant digits, it spread across three lines of the document, and had forced the Count to dip his quill twice. It was like a chapter of the Bible; and as she read it, her mind was invaded by any number of memories of the deals she had arranged, the people she had met, the nights she had gone without sleep as she had accumulated this fortune. These recollections, which were of no utility to her now, and which she did not desire, simply leaked out. Milk was leaking out of her breasts, she could feel a leaky period coming on, she’d been suffering loose stools, she needed to urinate, and if she kept thinking about these things any more, tears would leak from her eyes. She had a passing phant’sy that she ought to go round and fetch Jean Bart from whatever salon he was regaling with corsair-tales, and put his nautical mind together with that of some corset-maker, and get them to invent some garment, some system of stays, laces, rigging, lashings, and caulk that would wholly encase body and head, and keep all unwelcome fluids and memories where they belonged.

But it was not available just now. She felt the warmth of the sun on her face; or maybe that was the gaze of the contrôleur-général. “The amount is correct,” she announced, and hitched up her skirts in the rear with her cold hands and tired arms, and stepped back until her face was protected in shadow.

“Very well,” said the Count in a gentle voice, like a kindly physician, and rotated his large brown eyes toward an aide, who for the last several minutes had been edging closer and closer to a fireplace at the other end of the room. Pontchartrain dipped his quill, set it to the page, and executed a lengthy series of evolutions, moving his arm from the shoulder. A vast mazy PONTCHARTRAIN took shape at the base of the page. The aide bent forward and countersigned.

Pontchartrain rose. “I hoped that my lady would consent to join me for some refreshment, while…” and he glanced at the aide, who had moved into the Count’s place at the table and was busying himself with a panoply of wax-pots, ribbons, seals, and other gear.

“I would gladly do so, or eat rocks, for that matter, if it is to happen near the fireplace.”

The Count offered the Countess his arm and together they glided to the pagan spectacle that answered to the name of fireplace here. Two chairs had been set out; both were armchairs, for the guest and the host were of equal rank. He got her settled in one of them, then picked up a log with his own two hands and threw it onto the fire; not a wholly normal thing for a Count to do, and presumably a coded gesture, meant to convey to Eliza that the Count did not mean to stand on ceremony. He dusted his hands together and then polished them with a lace handkerchief as he sat down. A maid shuffled forward on cold and unresponsive feet, worried her hands out of her sleeves, and poured coffee, sending up gales of steam.

“You’ve been doing a lot of these, my lord?” Eliza asked, looking over at the table, where the sealing process was just entering its opening rounds.

“Rarely for such amounts. Never for such a charming creditor, my lady. But yes, many Persons of Quality have followed the King’s example, and lent idle assets to the Treasury, where they may be put to work.”

“You will be gratified to know that those assets have been working very hard indeed along the Channel,” Eliza said. “Any English Ship of Force that dares sail that way stares up into many new guns, protected by new revetments, fed by powder-houses linked by excellent roads that were only cow-paths when his majesty added those lands to France.”

“It pleases me very much to hear this!” exclaimed the Count, crinkling up his eyes and rocking forward in his chair. Eliza was startled to see that he was entirely sincere; then wondered why it was so startling.

The Count’s face began to sag as he looked at Eliza’s and saw nothing there. “Please forgive me if I am…inappropriately subdued,” she said, “it is just that I have been traveling for some time. And now that I am finally here, there is so much to do!”

“Soon all that will be behind you, my lady, and you can enjoy the season! You should get some rest. This soirée that Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon is hosting tomorrow…”

“Yes. I do need to conserve my energies, if I am to remain awake for even one-third of that.”

“I do hope that when you have recovered from the journey, my lady, we shall have more opportunities to converse. As you know, I am rather new to the post of contrôleur-général. I accepted the position gladly, of course…but now that I have had a few months to settle in, I find that it is far more interesting than I had ever imagined.”

“Everyone imagines it to be interesting in a financial sense,” said Eliza.

“Of course,” said Pontchartrain, sharing her amusement. “But I did not mean it that way.”

“Of course not, monsieur, for you are an intelligent man, not motivated by money—which is one of the reasons his majesty chose you! But now that you are here, you find it fascinating intellectually.”

“Indeed, my lady. But you are one of the very few at Versailles who can understand this.”

“Hence your desire to carry the conversation forward. Yes, I understand.”

Pontchartrain dropped his eyelids and inclined his head minutely, then opened his eyes again—they were large and handsome—and smiled at her.

“Do you know Bonaventure Rossignol, my lord?”

The smile faltered. “I know of him, my lady, but—”

“He is another fish out of water.”

“He does not even live here, does he?”

“He lives at Juvisy. But he will be at La Dunette tomorrow. As will you, I trust?”

“Madame la duchesse has honored us with an invitation. Neither of us would miss it for anything.”

“Seek me out there, monsieur. I shall introduce you to Monsieur Rossignol, and we shall found a new salon, restricted to people who love numbers more than money.”

“AH, HERE COMES OUR CHAPERONE at last!”

“Our chaperone!?”

“But of course, Monsieur Rossignol. Madame la duchesse will join us. Otherwise people would talk! And look, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain is coming as well! I have wanted to introduce you to him.”

This name was sufficient to make Rossignol turn his head, or want to. But the head was encased in a wig that cascaded over his shoulders, over which he had draped a heavy wool blanket, rendering independent movement of head and torso inadvisable. He rose to his feet, triggering small avalanches—for he and Eliza had been waiting in this open sleigh long enough for drifts to form in their laps. As he tottered around to get a view of the garden entrance of La Dunette, he reminded Eliza of a club balanced on a juggler’s palm. He had much in common physically with Pontchartrain; but where the Count’s eyes were warm and brown, Rossignol’s were hot and black. And not hot in a passionate way, unless you counted his passion for his work.

A recorder arpeggio—some fragment of a minuet—leaked out of the doors for a moment as servants pulled them open. Pontchartrain stepped out, looked up, and blinked at the falling snow, then pirouetted towards his hostess, who had fallen behind, and was shooing him forward in violation of all rules of precedence. An aurora of red silk bloomed around her as she drew out a scarf and allowed it to settle atop her wig. With fingers slowed by cold, fat, and arthritis, she knotted it under a chin, then accepted Pontchartrain’s proffered arm and stepped out into the frozen garden with more gingerness than was really warranted. The gravel paths near the château had been swept clear of snow; the sleigh was stopped a stone’s throw away, on a track that wandered off into the Duke’s hunting-park. Party-goers surged to the door and the fogged windows to bid the Duchess farewell, as if she were sailing to Surinam, and not just going on a quarter of an hour’s sleigh-ride on her own property.

Rossignol rotated back around to gaze at Eliza. There was no point in sitting, as he’d just have to stand up again when the Duchess and the Count arrived.

“Monsieur Rossignol,” said Eliza, “every child knows that the juice of a lime, or a bit of diluted milk, may be used to write secret messages in invisible ink, which may later be made to appear by scorching it before hot coals. When you stare at me in this way, it is as if you phant’sy that some message has been writ upon my face in milk, which you may make visible by the heat of your scrutiny. I beg you remember that more often than not the procedure goes awry, and the paper itself catches fire.”

“I cannot help that God made me the way I am.”

“Granted; but I beg you. Monsieur le comte d’Avaux, and Father Édouard de Gex, have given me enough of such glares, in the last few days, to raise blisters on my brow. From you, monsieur, I should be grateful for a warm, rather than hot, regard.”

“It is obvious enough that you are flirting with me.”

“Flirtation is customarily more or less obvious, monsieur, but you do not have to mention it!”

“You invited me on a sleigh-ride, and led me to think it would be you and me alone together—‘it shall be never so cold, Bon-bon, and I shall freeze to death if I do not have anyone to share my blanket with’—and then we waited, and waited, and now it is obvious that I shall be sharing my blanket with a Count, or a Dowager. It is a little étude in cruelty. I observe such all the time in people’s love-letters. I understand this. But it would be very foolish of you, my lady, to believe that you shall achieve some power over me by playing such girlish games.”

Eliza laughed. “Never crossed my mind.” She lunged forward, spun around, and took the seat next to Rossignol. He looked down at her, startled. “Why not?” Eliza said, “as long as we are chaperoned.”

“Flirting with you without result is more interesting than doing nothing,” Rossignol insisted, “but since our adventure, you really have paid me very little attention. I think it is because you got into some trouble you could not get out of by your own wits, and so became indebted to me in a way; which you chafe at.”

“We will speak of chafing later,” said Eliza, and then actually batted her snow-laden eyelashes at him. She patted the seat next to her.

“I must greet the Count and the—” but he was cut short as Eliza grabbed the back of his breeches and jerked down hard. She had only meant to force him to sit down; but to her shock she all but depantsed him, and would have stripped him naked to the knees had he not sat down violently. Like a bullfighter wielding the cape, she heaved the blanket over his lap just in time to hide all from the Count and the Duchess, who looked their way at the sudden movement.

“You must put some meat on your hips, otherwise what is the point of wearing a belt?” she whispered.

“Mademoiselle! I must stand up for the Count and the—”

“Dowager, is that what you called her? She is no dowager, her husband is alive and well, and tending to the King’s affairs in the South. Don’t worry, I shall fix it.” She leaned against Rossignol’s shoulder and raised her voice: “Madame la duchesse, Monsieur le comte, Monsieur Rossignol is mortified, for he would stand up to greet you; but I won’t let him move. For his slender frame makes as much heat as a coal-stove, which is the only thing keeping me alive.”

“Sit, sit!” insisted the Duchess of Arcachon. “Monsieur, you are like my son, too polite for your own good!” She had reached sleigh-side. Three stable-hands converged, and helped Pontchartrain help her into the sleigh. She was a big woman, and when she threw her weight on the bench, facing Eliza and Rossignol, the runners broke loose on the snow and the sleigh moved backwards a few inches. All three of the occupants whooped: the Duchess because she was alarmed, Eliza because it was amusing, and Bonaventure Rossignol because Eliza, under the blanket, had shoved her cold hand into his drawers and seized hold of his penis as if it were a lifeline. Presently the Count took a seat next to the Duchess. The horses—a team of two matched albinos—nearly bolted, so cold and impatient were they, and there was harsh language from the driver. But then they settled into a trot. The four passengers waved at the crowd inside, who’d been mopping steam off the windowpanes with their handkerchiefs. Eliza waved with one hand only. After an initial shrinkage, Rossignol had come erect so fast that she was worried about his health. He had squirmed and glared, but only until he recognized that the situation was perfectly hopeless; now he sat very still, listening to the Duchess, or pretending to.

She was matronly, decent, and genuinely popular: the living embodiment of the traditional Lavardac virtues of simple sincere loyalty to King and Church, in that order, without all of the scheming. In other words, she was just what a hereditary noble was supposed to be; which made her both an asset and a liability to the King. By supporting him blindly, and always doing the right thing, she made of her family a bulwark to his reign. But by exhibiting genuine nobility, she was implicitly making a strong case for the entire idea of a hereditary peerage with much power and responsibility, and making the new arrivals—Eliza included—seem like conniving arrivistes by comparison. Sitting in the Duchess’s sleigh and firmly massaging the erect penis of the King’s cryptanalyst, Eliza had to admit the validity of this point; but she admitted it to herself. She had no choice but to make do with what she had—which at the moment was nothing at all, except for a handful of Rossignol. She still did not have more than a few coins to her name.

The sleigh moved briskly on the trail, which had been groomed in advance of the party. In a few moments they passed out of the formal garden and into a huddle of buildings that was concealed from view of La Dunette’s windows by adroit landscaping. The scent of manure from the hunting-stable of Louis-François de Lavardac d’Arcachon was driven away suddenly by a cloud of lavender-scented steam, surging from the open side of a shed where a servant was stirring a vat over a great smoky fire.

“You make your own soap here?” Eliza said. “The fragrance is wonderful.”

“Of course we do, mademoiselle!” said the Duchess, astonished by the fact that Eliza found this worthy of mention. Then something occurred to her: “You should use it.”

“I already impose on your hospitality too much, my lady. Paris is so well-supplied with parfumiers and soap-makers, I am happy to go there and—”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed the Duchess. “You must never buy soap in Paris—from strangers! Especially with the orphan to think of!”

“As you know, my lady, little Jean-Jacques is now in the care of the Jesuit fathers. They make their own soap, probably—”

“As they had better!” said the Duchess. “But you bring clothes to him sometimes. You will have them laundered here, in my soap.”

Eliza did not really care, and was happy to give her assent, since the Duchess of Arcachon was so firm on this point; if she hesitated for a moment, it was only because she was a bit nonplussed.

“You should use the Duchess’s soap, mademoiselle,” said Pontchartrain firmly.

“Indeed!” said Rossignol—who, given the circumstances, would probably be speaking in one-word sentences for a while.

“I accept your soap with all due gratitude, madame,” said Eliza.

“My laundresses do not wear gloves!” huffed the Duchess, as if she had been challenged on some point. This rather dampened conversation for some moments. They had passed clear of the out-buildings, and circumvented a paddock where the Duke’s hunting-mounts were exercised in better weather, and entered now into a wooded game-park, bony and bare under twilight. Pontchartrain opened the shades on a pair of carriage-lanterns that dangled above the corners of the benches, and presently they were gliding along through the dim woods in a little halo of lamplight. In a few moments they came to a stone wall that cut the forest in twain. It was pierced by a gate, which stood open, and which was guarded, in name anyway, by half a dozen musketeers, who were standing around a fire. The wall was twenty-six miles long. The gate was one of twenty-two. Passing through it, they entered the Grand Parc, the hunting-grounds of the King.

The Duchess seemed to regret the matter of the soap, and now suddenly worked herself up into a lather of good cheer.

“Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur has said she will start a salon at La Dunette! I have told her, I do not know how such a thing is done! For I am just a foolish old hen, and not one for clever discourse! But she has assured me, one need only invite a few men who are as clever as Monsieur Rossignol and Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, and then it just—happens!”

Pontchartrain smiled. “Madame la duchesse, you would have me and Monsieur Rossignol believe that when two such ladies as you and the Countess are together in private, you have nothing better to do than talk about us?”

The Duchess was taken aback for a moment, then whooped. “Monsieur, you tease me!”

Eliza gave Rossignol an especially hard squeeze, and he shifted uneasily.

“So far, it does not seem to be happening, for Monsieur Rossignol is so quiet!” observed the Duchess in a rare faux pas; for she should have known that the way to make a quiet person join the conversation is not to point out that he is being quiet.

“Before you joined us, madame, he was telling me that he has been wrestling with a most difficult decypherment—a new code, the most difficult yet, that is being used by the Duke of Savoy to communicate with his confederates in the north. He is distracted—in another world.”

“On the contrary,” said Rossignol, “I am quite capable of talking, as long as you do not ask me to compute square roots in my head, or something.”

“I don’t know what that is but it sounds frightfully difficult!” exclaimed the Duchess.

“I’ll not ask you to do any such thing, monsieur,” said Pontchartrain, “but some day when you are not so engaged—perhaps at the Countess’s salon—I should like to speak to you of what I do. You might know that Colbert, some years ago, paid the German savant Leibniz to build a machine that would do arithmetic. He was going to use this machine in the management of the King’s finances. Leibniz delivered the machine eventually, but he had in the meantime become distracted by other problems, and now, of course, he serves at the court of Hanover, and so has become an enemy of France. But the precedent is noteworthy: putting mathematical genius to work in the realm of finance.”

“Indeed, it is interesting,” allowed Rossignol, “though the King keeps me very busy at cyphers.”

“What sorts of problems did you have in mind, monsieur?” Eliza asked.

“What I am going to tell you is a secret, and should not leave this sleigh,” Pontchartrain began.

“Fear not, monseigneur; is any thought more absurd than that one of us might be a foreign spy?” Rossignol asked, and was rewarded by the sensation of four sharp fingernails closing in around his scrotum.

“Oh, it is not foreign spies I am concerned about in this case, but domestic speculators,” said the Count.

“Then it is even more safe; for I’ve nothing to speculate with,” said Eliza.

“I am going to call in all of the gold and silver coins,” said Pontchartrain.

“All of them? All of them in the entire country!?” exclaimed the Duchess.

“Indeed, my lady. We will mint new gold and silver louis, and exchange them for the old.”

“Heavens! What is the point of doing it, then?”

“The new ones will be worth more, madame.”

“You mean that they will contain more gold, or silver?” Eliza asked.

Pontchartrain gave her a patient smile. “No, mademoiselle. They will have precisely the same amount of gold or silver as the ones we use now—but they will be worth more, and so to obtain, say, nine louis d’or of the new coin, one will have to pay the Treasury ten of the old.”

“How can you say that the same coin is now worth more?”

“How can we say that it is worth what it is now?” Pontchartrain threw up his hands as if to catch snowflakes. “The coins have a face value, fixed by royal decree. A new decree, a new value.”

“I understand. But it sounds like a scheme to make something out of nothing—a perpetual motion machine. Somewhere, somehow, in some unfathomable way, it must have repercussions.”

“Quite possibly,” said Pontchartrain, “but I cannot make out where and how exactly. You must understand, the King has asked me to double his revenues to pay for the war. Double! The usual taxes and tariffs have already been squeezed dry. I must resort to novel measures.”

“Now I understand why you would like the advice of France’s greatest savants,” said the Duchess. Whereupon all eyes turned to Rossignol. But he had suddenly braced his feet and jerked his head back. For a few moments he stared up at the indigo sky through half-closed eyes, and did not breathe; then he exhaled, and took in a deep draught of the cold air.

“I do believe Monsieur Rossignol has been seized by some sudden mathematical insight,” said Pontchartrain in a hushed voice. “It is said that Descartes’s great idea came to him in a sort of religious vision. I had been skeptical of it until this moment, for the very thought seemed blasphemous. But the look on Monsieur Rossignol’s face, as he cracked that cypher, was unmistakably like that of a saint in a fresco as he is drawn, by the Holy Spirit, into an epiphanic rapture.”

“Will we see a lot of this sort of thing, then, at the salon?” asked the Duchess, giving Rossignol a very dubious look.

“Only occasionally,” Eliza assured her. “But perhaps we ought to change the subject, and give Monsieur Rossignol an opportunity to gather his wits. Let’s talk about…horses!”

“Horses?”

“Those horses,” said Eliza, nodding at the two that were drawing the sleigh.

She and Rossignol were facing forward. The Duchess and the Count had to turn around to see what she was looking at. Eliza took advantage of this to wipe her hand on Rossignol’s drawers and withdraw it. Rossignol hitched up his breeches weakly.

“Do you fancy them?” asked the Duchess. “Louis-François is inordinately proud of his horses.”

“Until now I had only seen them from a distance, and supposed that they were simply white horses. But they are more than that; they are albinos, are they not?”

“Ths distinction is lost on me,” the Duchess admitted, “But that is what Louis-François calls them. When he comes back from the south he will be glad to tell you more than you wish to hear!”

“Are they commonly seen? Do many people have them here?” Eliza asked. But they were interrupted by, of all things, a man riding an albino horse: Étienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon, who had ridden out from the château to meet them. “I am mortified to break in on you this way,” he said, after greeting each of them individually, in strict order of precedence (Duchess first, then Pontchartrain, Eliza, horses, mathematician, and driver), “but in your absence, Mother, I am the acting host of the party, and must do all in my power to please our guests—one of whom, by the way, happens to be his majesty the King of France—”

“Oooh! When did le Roi arrive?”

“Just after you left, Mother.”

“Just my luck. What do his majesty and the other guests desire?”

“To see the masque. Which is ready to begin.”

ONE END OF THE GRAND ballroom of La Dunette had been converted into the English Channel. Papier-mâché waves with plaster foam, mounted on eccentric bearings so that they cycled about in a more or less convincing churn, had been arranged in many parallel, independently moving ranks, marching toward the back of the room, and raked upwards so that any spectator on the ballroom floor could get a view of the entire width of the “Channel” from “Dunkerque” (a fortified silhouette downstage) to “Dover” (white cliffs and green fields upstage). To stage left was a little pen where a consort sawed away on viols. To stage right was a royal box where King Louis XIV of France sat on a golden chair, with the Marquise de Maintenon at his right hand, dressed more for a funeral than a Christmas party. A retinue was massed behind them. So close to the front of it that he could have put a hand on Maintenon’s shoulder was Father Édouard de Gex—this a way of saying that there had better be no salacious bits. Not that Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon would ever even conceive of such a thing; but she had hired artists and comedians to produce it, and one never knew what such people would come up with.

The name of the production was La Métamorphose. Leading man and guest of honor was one Lieutenant Jean Bart, who knew as little of what to do on stage, during a masque, as would a comedian in a naval engagement; but never mind, it had all been written around him and his dramaturgickal shortcomings. The opening number took place on the beach at Dunkerque. A mermaid, perched on a rock, looked on as Jean Bart and his men (dancers dressed as Corsairs) attended an impromptu Mass celebrated on the beach. Exit Priest. Jean Bart led his men onto their frigate (which was no larger than a rowboat, but wittily decked out with masts and yards sprouting every which way, and fleur-de-lis banners). The frigate took to the Channel’s bobbing waves and headed for England. The mermaid, stranded solus downstage right, sang an aria about her lovesick condition; for she had quite fallen in love with the handsome Lieutenant (in an earlier version, there had been no Mass on the beach; it had opened with Jean Bart spawled on the rock in a state of deshabille and the mermaid feeding grapes to him; but the Duchess had had words with the players, and mended it).

Neptune now arose from the waves and sang a duet with the mermaid, his daughter. He wanted to know why she was so morose. Learning the answer, he became cross with Jean Bart and vowed to take revenge on him in the traditional godly style of subjecting him to an inconvenient metamorphosis.

In the next scene, Jean Bart’s frigate did battle with a larger English one, and there was a lot of swinging from ropes and fake swordplay, which Bart did very well. Just as he was about to grasp the laurels of victory, angry Neptune appeared and, with a thrust of his trident and a roar of kettledrums, transformed Bart into a cat (effected by Bart’s putting on a mask while everyone was distracted by the histrionics of the sea-god). Because cats cannot give orders and are averse to water, this threw his men into disarray and they were all captured by the English.

The next scene took place far upstage, on the English shore, where the French sailors were pent up in a prison in Plymouth, gazing out barred windows across the Channel and pining, at considerable length, for France. This was by far the dullest part of the production and gave many a Countess an opportunity to powder her nose; but the upshot was that the mermaid, hearing their dirge, and spying the valiant French corsairs imprisoned through no fault of their own, begged her father to undo the spell he had laid on Jean Bart. Which was grudgingly done, though not until Bart, in his smaller, feline form, had slipped out between the bars of his cell and scampered onto the beach. Changed back into a man, he climbed into a rowboat, shoved it off the beach of Plymouth, and rowed to France.

When Jean Bart had achieved this feat for real, a few months ago, it had taken him fifty-two hours. That was compressed into about a quarter of an hour here. The passage of two days, two nights, and four hours was suggested as follows: Apollo, in a golden chariot suspended from an overhead track by wires, appeared low in the east (stage left); traversed the entire stage in a great arc, singing an aria all the while; and set low in the west (stage right) just as his sister Diana was being launched from stage left in a silver chariot. When she set in the west, Apollo reappeared (for his chariot had been unhooked and rushed around the back of the château) at stage left again, and sang through the second day of Jean Bart’s epic row. Then Diana sang through the second night. During the first day and night, Apollo and Diana respectively mocked the poor figure below them, refusing to believe at first that anyone would have the stupid-ity or hubris to row a boat from Plymouth to France. During the second day and night, they literally changed their tunes: Astounded to see that Jean Bart was still alive, and still hauling on those oars, they began to sing his praises and to cheer him on.

It concluded at the end of the second night with Diana setting at stage right, Apollo rising at the left, and Jean Bart center stage, desperately trying to row the last mile or so to freedom. Apollo and Diana sang a duet, urging him on; and finally Neptune (who had perhaps had enough of their caterwauling) popped out of the waves, sang an additional stanza about what a magnificent chap Jean Bart was, and, raising his trident, ordered that the waves of the sea escort this hero safely back to shore. Which they did, in the form of four dancers painted blue and wearing foamy white caps.

Even this audience, which included some of the most jaded and cynical persons on the face of the earth, could hardly keep a dry eye as Jean Bart finally staggered up onto the beach where it had all started, accompanied by a flood tide of patriotic music; but just as the party-goers were erupting in an ovation, yet another god descended from the rafters, dressed in gold, brandishing a lightning-bolt, and crowned with a laurel-wreath: yes, Jupiter himself, but all bedizened with French touches to make of him a hybrid of France with the King of the Gods; or rather, to imply that there was no substantive difference. Apollo, Diana, and Neptune were amazed, and did obeisance; the insouciant Jean Bart favored Jupiter with a courtly Versailles bow. Jupiter had come to make his ruling, which was that Jean Bart did indeed deserve to be subjected to a metamorphosis: but of a rather different sort than being turned into a cat. He handed down a package in golden paper, crowned with a laurel wreath, and Mercury took it from his hand, pranced about for a while in a gratuitous solo, and delivered it to Jean Bart, setting the laurel wreath on Bart’s head. Lieutenant Bart opened the package. Out tumbled a bolt of red. He held it up, and it unfurled: the long red coat and red breeches of a Captain in the French Navy.

The rigging that held the various Gods and Goddesses in the firmament now went into creaking and groaning movement, pulling those Olympian figures up or away so that Jean Bart was left alone on the stage to receive an ovation from the crowd. He hugged the uniform to his chest, turned stage right, and bowed very low to the King. This caused the laurel wreath to fall from his head. He snatched it just before it struck the floor and everyone in the room said, “Oh!” at once. Then, seized by an idea, he straightened up and tossed the wreath directly at Louis XIV, who did not fail to catch it. Everyone in the room said, “Ah!” The King, not the least bit discomposed, raised the laurel to his lips and kissed it, eliciting a great cheer from the assembled nobles of Versailles. For that moment, everything in France was perfect.

MUCH MORE HAPPENED at the soirée, but it all felt like an afterthought to the masque. Captain Jean Bart lost no time changing into his red uniform; then he danced all night, with every lady in the house. Eliza for once in her life was flummoxed by the intensity of the competition; for in order to dance with Captain Bart, one had to be asked by him, which meant that one had to be able to see, or at least hear him; and at the end of each number the man in red was immediately walled up in a rampart of pretty silk and satin gowns, as all of the hopeful girls—most of whom were taller than Bart—crowded around him, hoping to catch his eye. Eliza was petite and hopelessly shut out. Moreover, she had some obligations as hostess. The Duchess had granted her leave to add some names to the guest list. Eliza had invited four minor courtiers and their wives: all petty nobles of northern France who had loaned money to the Treasury and built fortifications along the Channel coast. They had done so precisely in the hope that it would lead to their being invited to parties such as this one. Now their schemes had come to fruition; but they looked to Eliza to manage some of the details, such as introductions. Each of them had recently had an audience with Pontchartrain and received a loan document similar to Eliza’s, albeit with a smaller amount inscribed upon it; each now phant’sied that this would entitle him to spend the entire evening following Pontchartrain around as full and equal participant in any conversation the contrôleur-général might become engaged in. In order to remain in the Count’s good graces, Eliza had to track them around the château and snatch them away on some pretext or other whenever they started to annoy their betters. This was work enough for a single evening; but, too, it was expected that she would dance at least twice with Étienne, as his titular girlfriend. And since she had jerked him off in the sleigh, it would have been poor form not to dance at least one time with Rossignol.

Rossignol danced like a cryptanalyst: perfectly, but with little self-expression. “You did not understand the soap conversation,” he said to her.

“Monsieur, was it that obvious? Please explain it to me!”

“During the time of the poisonings, ten years ago, where do you suppose all of those ambitious courtiers got their arsenic? Not by their own labors certainly, for they are helpless in practical matters. Not from Alchemists, for those style themselves holy men. Who, other than Alchemists, has mortars and pestles, vats, retorts, and ways of getting exotic ingredients?

“Soap-makers!” Eliza exclaimed, and felt herself blushing.

“Some laundresses wore gloves in those days,” said Rossignol, “because their mistresses would have them go into Paris and buy soap that was loaded with arsenic. They would wash the husband’s clothing in that soap, and he would absorb the poison through his skin. And so for a Duchess to make her own soap, on her own estate, is more than just a quaint tradition. It is a way for her to protect herself and those she loves. When she offers you, mademoiselle, the use of her soap, and of her laundry, it means two things: first, that she has true affection for you, and second, that she fears someone might wish you ill.”

Eliza could not speak. She scanned the crowd over Rossignol’s shoulder for a glimpse of d’Avaux, and, not finding him, forced Rossignol to spin around so that she could see the other half of the room.

“I beg your pardon, but which one of us is leading, my lady?” asked Rossignol. “Who is it you look for? You think of someone who wishes you ill? Do not be too sure of your first assumptions—that is a common error in cryptanalysis.”

“Do you know who—?”

“If I did I should tell you at once, if for no other reason than that I should enjoy another sleigh-ride some day. But no, mademoiselle, I cannot guess who it is that the Duchess is so worried about.”

“Excuse me, but may I break in?” said a man’s voice behind Eliza.

“We are in the middle of something!” Eliza snapped; for men had been pestering her all night. But Rossignol had stopped dancing. He released his grip on Eliza, backed away one step, and bowed deep.

Eliza spun around to see King Louis XIV acknowledging the bow with a warm look. He loved his codebreaker.

“But of course you are, mademoiselle,” said the King of France, “when my two most intelligent subjects put their heads together and converse, why, pourquoi non, how could they not be in the middle of something? But your expressions are so grave! It does not befit a Christmas celebration!” He had caught Eliza’s hand somehow, and drawn her into the pattern of the dance. Eliza was no more capable of intelligent speech than she had been a minute ago.

“I have much to thank you for,” said Louis XIV.

“Oh, no, your majesty, for—”

“Has no one ever told you that to contradict the King is not done?”

“I beg your pardon, your majesty—”

“Monsieur Rossignol has told me that you did a favor for my sister-in-law last autumn,” said the King. “Or perhaps it was for the Prince of Orange; this is not clear.”

Something now occurred that had only happened to Eliza a few times in her life: She lost consciousness, or close to it. A like thing had happened when she and her mother had been dragged off of the beach in Qwghlm and loaded into the longboat of the Barbary Corsairs. It had happened again, some years later, when she had been taken down to the waterfront of Algiers and traded to the Sultan in Constantinople for a white stallion—taken from her mother without even being given the opportunity to say good-bye. And a third time beneath the Emperor’s palace in Vienna, when she’d been queued up with a string of other odalisques to be put to the sword. On none of these occasions had she actually crumpled to the ground. Neither did she now. But she might have, if Louis XIV, who was a big man, graceful and strong, had not kept an arm firmly about her waist.

“Come back to me,” he was saying—and not, she guessed, for the first time. “There. You are back. I see it in your face. What is it you fear so much? Have you been threatened by someone? Tell me who has done it, then.”

“No one in particular, your majesty. The Prince of Orange—”

“Yes? What did he do?”

“I should not tell you what he did; but he said I must spy for him or he would put me on a ship to Nagasaki, for the amusement of the sailors.”

“Ah. You should have told me this immediately.”

“That—my failure to be perfectly frank with you—is truly the source of my fear, your majesty, for I am not without guilt.”

“I know this. Tell me, mademoiselle. What drives you to make such decisions? What is it you want?”

“To find the man who wronged me, and kill him.” In truth, Eliza had not thought about this for so long that the idea sounded strange to her ears, even as it came from her lips; but she said it with conviction, and liked the sound of it.

“Certain things you have done have pleased me immensely. The ‘Fall of Batavia.’ The loan of your fortune. Bringing Jean Bart to Versailles. Your recent efforts for the Compagnie du Nord. Others, such as the matter of the spying, displease me—though now I understand better. It is good that we have had this conversation.”

Eliza blinked, looked around, and understood that the music had stopped, and everyone was looking at them.

“Thank you, mademoiselle,” said the King, and bowed.

Eliza curtseyed.

“Your majesty—” she said, but he was gone, engulfed by the mobile Court, a school of expensively cinched waists and teased wigs.

Eliza went into a corner to get coffee and to think. People were following her—her own little Court of petty nobles and suitors. She did not precisely ignore, because she did not really notice, them.

What had happened? She needed a personal stenographer, so that she could have the transcript read back to her.

She had inadvertently given the King the wrong idea.

“Do you enjoy the soirée, my lady?”

It was Father Édouard de Gex.

“Indeed, Father, though I confess I do miss that little orphan—he stole my heart in the weeks we were together.”

“Then you may have a little piece of your heart back any time you wish to visit. Monsieur le comte d’Avaux was at pains to make certain that the infant was comfortably housed. He predicted that you would be a frequent caller.”

“I am indebted to the Count.”

“We all are,” said de Gex. “Little Jean-Jacques is a splendid boy. I look in on him whenever I have a moment. I hope to complete what you have begun, and d’Avaux has carried forward.”

“And that is—what precisely?”

“You snatched the lad from death physical—the war—and spiritual—the doctrines of the heretics. D’Avaux saw to it he was placed in the best orphanage in France, under the care of the Society of Jesus. To me, it seems that the natural culmination is that I should raise him up into a Jesuit.”

“I see, yes…” said Eliza dreamily, “so that the little Lavardac bastard does not create further complications by breeding.”

“I beg your pardon, my lady?”

“Please forgive me, I am not myself!”

“I should hope not!” De Gex was actually blushing. Which wreaked a great change for the better on his face. He was dark, with prominent bones in the cheeks and nose, and had it in him to be handsome; but usually he was very pale from too many hours spent in dark confessionals listening to the secret sins of the court. With some pink in his cheeks he was suddenly almost fetching.

“Please,” Eliza said, “I am still flustered by the memory of dancing with the King.”

“Of course, my lady. But when you have gathered your wits, and remembered your manners, my cousine would like to renew her acquaintance with you.” He leveled his burning gaze at a corner where the duchesse d’Oyonnax was smiling into the eyes of some poor young Viscount who had no idea what he was getting into.

De Gex took his leave.

She had spoken the truth to the King. For on the day she’d been swapped for the albino stallion, and loaded on a galley for Constantinople, she’d made a vow that one day she would find the man who was responsible for her and Mummy being slaves in the first place, and kill him. She had never divulged this to anyone, except Jack Shaftoe; but now, unaccountably, she had blurted it out to the King. She had done so with utmost conviction, for it really was true; and he had seen the look on her face, and believed every word.

“I have much work to do tomorrow, thanks to you, mademoiselle.”

It was Pontchartrain, again favoring her with a benign smile.

“How so, monsieur?”

“The King was so moved by the story of Jean Bart’s heroism that he has directed me to release funds for the Navy, and for the Compagnie du Nord. I am to attend his levée tomorrow, so that we may sort out the details.”

“Then I shall not detain you any later, monsieur.”

“Good night, mademoiselle.”

The King thought she was referring to William of Orange. She had made some reference to William—again, if only she had a transcript!—and a moment later she had changed the subject and said she wanted to find the man who had wronged her, and kill him—and the King had put those two truths together to make a falsehood: his majesty now believed that Eliza’s goal in life was to assassinate William! That she had spied on William’s behalf only as a ruse so that she could get close to him.

She spun around, hoping to find the King, to get his attention, to explain all—but found herself looking into the face of a man dressed all in red. Jean Bart, putting his corsair skills to use, had hacked his way through a throng of female admirers to reach Eliza. “Mademoiselle,” he said, “Madame la duchesse has announced that this is to be the last dance. If I might have the honor?”

She let her hand float up and he took it. “Normally, of course, I should make way for Étienne d’Arcachon in such a case,” he explained, in case Eliza had been wondering about this—which she hadn’t. “But he is outside, bidding farewell to the King.”

“The King’s leaving?”

“Is already in his carriage, mademoiselle.”

“Oh. I had been hoping to say something to him.”

“You and everyone else in France!” They were dancing now. Bart was amused. “You have already danced with his majesty! Mademoiselle, there are women in this room who have sacrificed babies in the Black Mass hoping to conjure up a single word, or a glance, from the King! You should be satisfied—”

“I don’t want to hear about such things,” Eliza said. “It makes me cross that you would even mention such horrors. You have been drinking, Captain Bart.”

“You are right and I am wrong. I shall make it up to you: As it happens, I shall see the King in a few hours—I have been summoned to his levée! We will discuss naval finance. Is there anything you would like me to pass on to his majesty?”

What could she say? I don’t really mean to kill William of Orange was not the sort of message she could ask Captain Bart to blurt out at the levée; nor was I don’t really know precisely who it is I mean to kill.

“It is sweet of you to offer and I do forgive you. Does the King talk much at his levées, I wonder?”

“How should I know? Ask me tomorrow. Why?”

“Does he gossip, tell stories? I am curious. For I told him something, just now, that, if it were to get around, would make me very unpopular in England.”

“Pfft!” said Jean Bart, and rolled his eyes, dispensing with the entire subject of England.

“Do ask the King one thing for me, please.”

“Only name it, mademoiselle.”

“The name of a physician who is good down here.” She let her hand slide down a few inches and patted him. She did it with exquisite caution. But nonetheless Jean Bart yelped and jumped, his face split open in agony. Eliza gasped and jumped back in horror; but his grimace relaxed into a smile, and he lunged after her and snared her back, for he was only joking.

“I have already been to see such a physician.”

“That is good,” said Eliza, still laughing, “for I would see you sit down before you go home.”

“Fifty-two hours of rowing did its damage, this is true; but this physician has been at my arse with all manner of poultices, and unmentionable procedures, and I am healing well. And this is the best bandage of all!” brushing some lint from the epaulet of his new red coat.

“If only all wounds could be healed by putting on new clothes, monsieur!”

“Don’t all women believe this to be true?”

“Sometimes they behave as if they did, Captain Bart. Perhaps I simply have not picked out the right dress yet.”

“Then you should go shopping tomorrow!”

“It is a fine thought, Captain. But first I need some money. And as there is none in France, you must go out to sea and capture some gold for me.”

“Consider it done! I owe it to you!”

“Try to keep that in mind tomorrow, Jean Bart.”

Letter from Daniel Waterhouse to Eliza

JANUARY–FEBUARY 1690

Mademoiselle de la Zeur,

Thank you for yours of December ’89. It took some time crossing the Channel, and I daresay this shall fare no better. I was touched by your expression of concern, and amused by the narrative of the timber. I had not appreciated how fortunate England is in this respect, for if we want timber in London, we need only denude some part of Scotland or Ireland where a few trees still stand.

I would be of help to you in your quest to understand money, if for no other reason than that I would understand it myself. But I am perfectly useless. Our money has been wretched for as long as I have been alive. When it is so bad, it is no easy matter to discern when it is getting worse; but hard as it might be to believe, this seems to be occurring. I was bedridden for some months following the removal of my Stone, and did not have to go out and buy things. But when I had recovered sufficiently that I could venture out once again, I found it clearly worse. Or perhaps the long time spent not having to haggle over daily purchases, lifted the scales from my eyes, so that the absurdity of the situation was made clear to me.

I keep running accounts at several coffee-houses, pubs, and a bottle-ale house in my street, so that every small purchase need not be attended by a tedious and irksome transfer of coin. Many who go out more often than I do have formed together into societies, called Clubbs, which facilitate purchase of food, drink, snuff, pipe-tobacco, &c., on credit. When, through some miracle, one comes into possession of coins recognizable as such, one runs out and tries to settle one’s more important accounts. The system staggers along. People do not know any better.

Here we have Whigs and Tories now. In essence these are, respectively, Roundheads and Cavaliers, under new guises, and less heavily armed. Tories get their money from the land that they own. To simplify matters greatly, one might say that France is a country consisting entirely of Tories; for all of the money there derives ultimately from the land. You might have had Whigs too, if you’d not expelled the Huguenots. And some of your Atlantic seaports are said to be a bit Whiggish. But as I said, I am over-simplifying to make a point: If you understand how money works in France, then you know everything about our Tories. And if you understand how it works in Amsterdam, then you know our Whigs.

The Royal Society dwindles, and may not last to the end of the century. It no longer enjoys the favor of the King as it did under Charles II. In those days it was a force for revolution, in the new meaning of that word; but it succeeded so well that it has become conventional. The sorts of men who, having no other outlet for their ideas, would have devoted their lives to it, had they come of age when I did, may now make careers in the City, the Colonies, or in foreign adventures. We of the Royal Society are generally identified as Whigs. Our President is the Marquis of Ravenscar, a very powerful Whig, and he has been assiduous in finding ways to harness the ingenuity of the Fellows of the Royal Society for practical ends. Some of these, I gad, have to do with money, revenue, banks, stocks, and other subjects that fascinate you. But I must confess I have fallen quite out of touch with such matters.

Isaac Newton was elected to Parliament a year ago, in the wake of our Revolution. He had made a name for himself in Cambridge opposing the former King’s efforts to salt the University with Jesuits. He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica. He and your friend Fatio have become the closest of companions, and share lodgings here.

POST-SCRIPT—FEB. 1690

After I wrote the above, but before I could post this, King William and Queen Mary prorogued and dissolved Parliament. There have been new elections and the Tories have won. Isaac Newton is no longer M.P. He divides his time between Cambridge, where he toils on Alchemy, and London, where he and Fatio are reading Treatise on Light by our friend and erstwhile dinner-companion Huygens. All of which is to say that I am now even more useless to you than I was a month ago; for I am in a failing Society linked to a Party that has lost power and that has no money, there being none in the kingdom to be had. Our most brilliant Fellow devotes himself to other matters. It were presumptuous of me to expect a reply to a letter as devoid of useful content as this one; but it would have been insolent of me to have failed to respond to yours; for I am, as always, your humble and obedient servant—

Daniel Waterhouse

Letter from Eliza to Daniel

APRIL 1690

NEWTON would have us believe that Time is stepped out by the ticking of God’s pocket-watch, steady, immutable, an absolute measure of all sensible movements. LEIBNIZ inclines toward the view that Time is nothing more nor less than the change of objects’ relationships to one another—that movements, observed, enable us to detect Time, and not the other way round. NEWTON has laid out his system to the satisfaction, nay, amazement of the world, and I can find no fault in it; yet the system of LEIBNIZ, though not yet written out, more aptly describes my own subjective experience of Time. Which is to say that during the autumn of last year, when I and all around me were in continual motion, I had the impression that much Time was passing. But once I reached Versailles, and settled into lodgings at my cottage on the domain of La Dunette, on the hill of Satory above Versailles, and got my household affairs in order, and established a routine, suddenly four months flew by.

The purpose for which I was sent to Versailles, early in December, was accomplished before Christmas, and all since then has been tending to details. I should probably return to Dunkerque, where I could be more useful. But I am held here by various ties which only grow stronger with time. Every morning I ride down the hill through a little belt of woods, just to the south of the Pièce d’eau des Suisses, that separates the land of the Lavardacs from the royal domain of Versailles. This takes me down into the old hamlet of Versailles, outside the walls of the palace, which is growing up into a village. Diverse monasteries, nunneries, and a parish church have taken root there since the King moved his court to this place some eight years ago, and in one of them, the Convent of Sainte-Genevieve, my little “orphan” boy makes his home. If weather is good, I take him for a perambulation around the King’s vegetable-garden: a limb of the gardens of Versailles that is thrust forth into the middle of the town. Being a working garden, whose purpose is to produce food, this is not as formal or as fashionable as the parterres west of the Château. But there is more here for little eyes to see and little hands to grasp, especially now that spring is coming. The gardeners are forever mending their trellises in expectation that peas and beans will climb up them in a few months; and to judge by the thoughtful way that little Jean-Jacques gazes upon these structures, he will be clambering up them like a little squirrel even before he has learned how to walk. Sometimes too we will go a little farther, into the Orangerie, which is an immense vaulted gallery wrapped around three sides of a rectangular garden, and open to the south so that its glazed walls can capture the warmth of the winter sun, and store it in stone. Tiny orange trees grow here in wooden boxes, waiting for summer to come so that the gardeners can move them out of doors, and Jean-Jacques is fascinated by the green globes that are to be found among their dark leaves.

In due time I bring him back to Ste.-Genevieve’s for an appointment with a wet-nurse. You might think that I would then go directly to the Château to immerse myself in Court doings. But more often than not I turn around and ride back up through the Bois de Satory to La Dunette, where I tend to various affairs. In my early months here, these were of a financial, but now they are more of a social, nature. Note, however, that La Dunette is no farther away from the King’s great Château than is the Trianon Palace or many other parts of the royal domain, and so it does not feel like a separate place from Versailles, but more of an out-building of the King’s estate. This illusion is strengthened by the architecture, which was done by the same fellow who designed the King’s Château.

The grounds of La Dunette spread across the Plateau of Satory, a hilltop that extends southwards from the wooded brow of a rise that overlooks the Pièce d’eau des Suisses and the south wing of the King’s Château. This land is hidden by the woods from direct view of the Dauphin, the Dauphine, and other royals who dwell in the palace’s south wing. But once that screen of trees has been penetrated, the domain of the de Lavardacs resembles in every way the much larger Royal gardens down the hill. This means that it is divided up, here and there, by great pompous stone walls, with massive iron grilles set into them from place to place; and those walls terminate in brick cottages, which I suppose are meant to recall guardhouses. In fact they have no practical purpose whatever that I can discern. They are there because they look good, like the knobs on the ends of a banister. The domaine of La Dunette contains four such cottages. Two are unfinished on the inside, and one is having its roof replaced. I live in the fourth. There is just enough room in it for my little household. It is tucked in under the eave of the woods of Satory so that I can duck out the back door and ride down into Versailles whenever I please without having to traverse any of the gravel paths that radiate from the main château of La Dunette. I do so frequently, going down to the palace for a dinner-party or to attend the couchée of some Duchess or Princess. And so my existence here is independent of the de Lavardacs for the most part. However, at least once a week I go to the main residence to have dinner with Étienne under the supervision of Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon.

M. le duc d’Arcachon I have never met. During my earlier life at Versailles, as a governess, I saw him from a distance a few times, surrounded by other big-wigs, but my social standing was so mean that there was no circumstance under which I could have met him. Later my status was elevated; but he was in “the South” tending to business of some nature. He was at Versailles through much of 1689, while I was absent; then he went back into “the South” a few weeks before I came there in December. He was supposed to be back for Christmas; but one thing and then another has kept him away. A few times a week Madame la duchesse receives a letter from Marseille, where M. le duc is looking after the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet; or Lyon, where he is meeting with the King’s money-men, and acquiring victuals, powder, &c; or Arcachon, where he is looking after Lavardac family affairs; or Brest, where he is responsible for shipment of men and matériel to the forces in Ireland. Madame la duchesse always replies on the same day, hoping her letter shall catch him before he has moved on to some other port. This has happened often enough that M. le duc has learned a little bit about me and my activities, or lack thereof, here; and lately he has begun writing to me personally at the cottage. It seems that I am to be useful to this family in some way other than as an eligible belle for Étienne. The Duc has recently become involved in some sort of momentous transaction that is in the offing down south, and that he expects to yield a large quantity of hard money when it comes off, which is expected to occur late in the summer. To report any more than this would be indiscreet, but if I am reading his most recent letter correctly, he wishes me to look after certain of the details: a large transfer of metal through Lyon.

So at last I shall have something to do, and can expect the passage of time to slow down again, as I go into violent movement, and change my relations with all around me.

Eliza, Countess de la Zeur

La Dunette

MID-JULY 1690

LA DUNETTE MEANT “POOP DECK,” the high place on a ship’s stern-castle from which the captain could see everything. The name had come to Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, some twelve years earlier, as he had stood upon the brow of the hill, peering, between two denuded trees, across the frozen bog that would later become the Pièce d’eau des Suisses, at the southern flanks of the stupendous construction site that would shortly become the royal palace of Louis XIV.

The King got things built more quickly than anyone else, partly because he had the Army to help him and partly because he hired all of the qualified builders. And so La Dunette was still nothing more than an empty stretch of high ground with a clever name when le Roi had given his cousin, the duc d’Arcachon, a personal tour of the palace. They had lingered particularly in the Queen’s Apartments: a row of bedchambers, antechambers, and salons that stretched between the Peace drawing-room and the King’s guardroom on the upper storey of the palace’s southern wing. The King and the Duke had strolled up and down the length of those apartments once, twice, thrice, pausing before each of the high windows to enjoy the view across the Parterre Sud, and the Orangerie below it to the rise of the Bois de Satory a mile away. The duc d’Arcachon had, in the fullness of time, perceived what the King had wished him to perceive, which was that any buildings erected on or near the crest of the hill would spoil the Queen’s view, and give her the feeling that the de Lavardacs were peering down into her bedroom windows. And so a great pile of expensive architectural drawings had been used to start fires in the Hôtel d’Arcachon in Paris, and the duc had hired the great Hardouin-Mansart and implored him to design a château altogether magnificent—but invisible from the Queen’s windows. Mansart had situated it well back from the crest of the hill. Consequently, from the windows of the château of La Dunette proper, the view was limited. But Mansart had laid out a promenade that swung out along a lobe of the garden and led to a gazebo, perched demurely on the brink of the hill, and camouflaged with climbing vines. From there the prospect was superb.

Before dinner was served, the Duke and Duchess of Arcachon invited their guests—twenty-six in all—to stroll out to the gazebo, enjoy the breeze (for the day was warm), and take in the view of the Royal Château of Versailles, its gardens, and its waterways. From this distance it was difficult to make out individuals and impossible to hear voices, but large groups were obvious. Out in the town, beyond the Place d’Armes, the Franciscans had lit a bonfire before their monastery and were dancing around it in a circle; from time to time, a few notes of their song would blow past on a slip of breeze. Another revel was underway along the Grand Canal, a mile-long slot of water stretching away from the Château along the central axis of the King’s garden. From here, it was a milling mob of wigs. Even the stable-hands out in the Place d’Armes had got a bonfire going, which had attracted hundreds of commoners: townspeople, servants of Versailles and nearby villas, and country folk who had seen the pillars of smoke and heard the pealing of bells, and come in to find out what all the excitement was about. Many of these probably had only the haziest of ideas as to who William of Orange was and why it was good that he was dead; but this did not hold them back from lusty celebration.

Étienne d’Arcachon raised his glass, and silenced the little crowd around the gazebo. “To toast the death of the Prince of Orange* would be uncouth, even though he was a perfidious and heretickal usurper and an enemy of France,” he said. This oration, being ambiguous, only threw the guests—who were all standing on tiptoe with glasses poised—into utter confusion. They froze long enough for Étienne to dig himself out of his own rhetorical hole: “But to toast the victory of the French, the free English, and the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne is honorable.”

They did so.

“The only event,” Étienne continued, “that could make the day more glorious would be a victory at sea, to match the one on land; and voilà, God has answered our prayers accordingly. The French Navy, of which my father has the high honor of being Grand Admiral, has routed the English and the Dutch off Beachy Head, and even now menaces the mouth of the River Thames. France is victorious on all fronts: on the sea, in Ireland, in Flanders, and in Savoy. To France!”

Now that was a toast. Everyone drank. Then it was “to the King!” and then “to the King of England!” meaning James Stuart, then “to Monsieur le duc!” which le duc had to sit out, since it was bad form to toast oneself. Servants scurried about cradling swaddled magnums and refilled glasses for the next round. Then M. le duc raised his glass: “To the Countess de la Zeur, who has done so much to give the Navy its sinews.” Which obliged Eliza to say, “To Captain Jean Bart who, they say, distinguished himself yet again off Beachy Head on his ship Alcyon!”

Madame la duchesse, peering down at Versailles through a spectacular Instrument, now initiated a controversy, as follows: “Louis-François, those revelers along the Canal do not celebrate the death of the Prince of Orange, they celebrate you!” and she handed her husband a gold and silver caduceus (emblem of Mercury, bringer of information) with lenses cleverly mounted in the eyes of the two snakes that were wound about its central pole. The duc brought it to his face as if expecting the serpents to drive their fangs into his cheeks, and blinked fiercely into the optics. But anyone who had good eyes could see that a few gilded barques had taken to the wavelets of the Grand Canal, and were jerking about in an extemporaneous reënactment of the Battle of Beachy Head. As combatants swung boat-paddles to dash up barrages of spray, blooms of white water appeared here and there, looking from this range much like cannon-smoke. From time to time the musket-like report of an ivory-inlaid paddle smacking the water, or a gilded oar-shaft snapping, would echo up from the vale of Galie. A drunken boarding-party, perhaps still fired by the memory of Jean Bart’s visit of a few months past, sprang from one boat to another, swinging like pirates on silken ropes, crashing into the brocade awnings, bucking the ebony and boxwood poles of the pavilions, smashing the velvet furniture. They must have been royal bastards, or Princes of the Blood, to behave so. A smaller boat was capsized; conversation lulled around the gazebo as rescuers paddled to the scene, then welled up into laughter and witticisms as combatants were dragged out of the canal and their bobbing periwigs fished out on the tips of swords.

“Ah, it is a great day,” announced the Duke, who looked, in his formal Grand Admiral uniform, like a galleon on legs. He was saying it to his wife; but something occurred to him, and he added, “and it will only get better, for France, and for us. God willing.” His eyes turned in their sockets towards Eliza. As his head was covered in a wig, and the wig had an admiral’s hat planted athwart it, he did not like to turn his head from side to side if he could avoid it; such complicated maneuvers demanded as much prudent premeditation as tacking a three-masted ship.

Eliza, recognizing as much, sidestepped into the Duke’s field of view. “I cannot imagine why you look to me when you say this, Monsieur le duc,” she said.

“Soon, if I have my way, you shall hear from Étienne a certain proposition that shall make it all perfectly clear.”

“Is it anything like the proposition you have spoken of in your letters to me?”

The very mention of this made the Duke nervous, and his eyes flicked left and right to see if anyone had heard; but soon enough they returned to Eliza, who was smiling in a way that let him know she had been discreet. The Duke stepped forward in the cautious bent-kneed stride of an African matron with a basket of bananas on her head. “Don’t be coy, Étienne’s proposal will be of an entirely different nature! Though it’s true I should like to see both of them come together at the same time, in the autumn—say, October. My birthday. What do you say to it?”

Eliza shrugged. “I cannot answer, monseigneur, until I know more of both propositions.”

“We’ll get that sorted out! The boy is still young in many ways, you know—not too old to benefit from some fatherly advice, especially where affairs of the heart are concerned. I have been away too much, you know? Now that I am back—for a little while, at least—I shall talk to him, guide him, give him some backbone.”

“Well, it is good to have you back, even briefly,” said Eliza. “It is odd, I feel as if I have met you before. I suppose it comes from seeing your busts and portraits everywhere, and your handsome features echoed in the face of Étienne.”

By now the Duke had drawn close to Eliza. He had put on cologne recently, something Levantine, with a lot of citrus. It did not quite mask another odor which put Eliza in mind of rotting flesh. A bird, or some little scurrying creature, must have given up the ghost some days ago under the gazebo, and gone foul in the heat.

“Time for dinner soon,” said the Duke. “My time here is short. Meetings with the King, and the Council. Then to the Channel coast to greet the victorious Fleet. But after that I go south. I have already despatched orders to my jacht. You and I must talk. After dinner, I think. In the library, while the guests are strolling in the garden.”

“The library is where I shall be,” said Eliza, “at your service, and waiting for you to explain all of these cryptic statements.”

“Ah, I shall not explain all!” said the Duke, amused. “Only enough—just enough. That will suffice.”

Eliza’s head snapped around to a new azimuth, and her attention settled on a group of guests, mostly men, who had migrated off the marble floor of the gazebo and gathered on the gravel path to smoke. It was rude to break off her conversation with the Duke in such a way. But her movement had not been voluntary. It had been occasioned by a word, spoken loudly, by one of these men. The word was une esclave, which signified, a slave—a female slave. The speaker was Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor. He was nominally an Englishman. But he had spent so much of his life in France that he was indistinguishable, in his speech, dress, and mannerisms, from a French noble. He had come over with James Stuart following the Revolution in England, and become an important man in the exiled King’s court at St.-Germain-en-Laye. This was not the first time Eliza had seen him socially.

It was not unusual to hear the word esclave in such company. Many at Versailles made money from the slave trade. But normally the word was used in masculine, plural form, to denote a ship-full of cargo bound for some plantation in the Caribbean. The singular, feminine form was rare enough to have turned Eliza’s head.

In the corner of her eye, she saw the pale oval of some woman’s face turn around to stare at her. Eliza had reacted so sharply that someone else had taken notice of it. She needed to control her reactions better. She wondered who it was; but to look over and find out would be obvious. She forced herself not to, and tried instead to memorize a few things about this lady who was giving her the eye: tall, and dressed in pink silk.

She looked back at the Duke, ready to apologize to him for having been distracted. But it seemed that he considered his chat with Eliza to be finished. He had caught someone’s eye and wanted to go talk to him. He most civilly took his leave from Eliza, and glided away. Eliza tracked him with her eyes for a few moments. As he passed in front of the tall woman in pink silk, Eliza glanced up, just for an instant, to see who it was. The answer was, the Duchess of Oyonnax.

Having settled that, Eliza turned her attention back to Upnor and his circle of admirers.

James Stuart and his French advisors phant’sied that, once they had retaken Ireland, they might move thence to Qwghlm, which could be used as a sort of outlying demilune-work from which to mount an invasion of northern England. This had at least something to do with Eliza’s popularity at the two Courts: the French one at Versailles, and the exile-English one at St.-Germain. Consequently she had seen and heard enough of Upnor, in the last half-year, to know the first parts of this story by heart. It was the tale of the day he had made his escape from England.

He had sent his household ahead of him to Castle Upnor, where they had made ready to board ship and sail to France as soon as he arrived. For he had stayed behind in London, supposedly at great risk, to attend to certain matters of stupendous importance. These matters were, however, far too deep and mystical for Upnor to say anything about them in mixed company. This suggested that they had something to do with Alchemy, or at least that he wished as many people as possible to believe so. “I could not allow certain information to fall into the hands of the usurper and those of his lackeys who pretend to know of matters that are, in truth, beyond their ken.”

At any rate, after completing his affairs in London, Upnor had mounted a stallion (he was a horse-fancier, and so this part of the anecdote was never related without many details concerning this horse’s ancestry, which was more distinguished than that of most human beings) and set off a-gallop for Castle Upnor, accompanied by a pair of squires and a string of spare mounts. They had departed from London around dawn and ridden hard all morning along the south bank of the Thames. From place to place, the river road would cross some tributary of the great river, and there would be a bridge or ford that all traffic must use.

In the middle of one such bridge, out in the countryside, they had spied a lone man on horseback, wearing common clothes, but armed; and it had appeared from his posture that he was waiting.

For the sorts of people the Earl was apt to tell this story to, this last detail sufficed to classify the anecdote as if it had been a new botanical sample presented to the Royal Society. It belonged to the genus “Persons of Quality beset by varlets on the road.” No type was more popular round French dinner tables, because France was so large and so infested with Vagabonds and highwaymen. The nobles who came together at Versailles must occasionally travel to and fro their fiefdoms, and the perils and tribulations of such journeys were one of the few experiences they shared in common, and so that was what they talked about. Such tales were, in fact, told so frequently that everyone was tired of them; but any new variations were, in consequence, appreciated that much more. Upnor’s had two distinctions: It took place in England, and it was embroidered, as it were, on the back-cloth of the Revolution.

“I knew this stretch of road well,” Upnor was saying, “and so I dispatched one of my squires—a young chap name of Fenleigh—to ride down a side-track that angled away from the main road and led to a ford half a mile upstream of the bridge.” He was scratching out a crude map on the gravel path with the tip of his walking-stick.

“With my other companion, I proceeded deliberately up the main road, keeping a sharp eye for any confederates who might be lurking in hedges near the approaches to the bridge. But there were none—the horseman was alone!” This puzzled or fascinated the listeners. It was another odd twist on the usual rustic-ruffian tale; normally, the shrubs would be infested with club-wielding knaves.

“The horseman must have noted the way in which we were peering about, for he called out: ‘Do not waste time, my lord, ’tis not an ambuscado. I am alone. You are not. Accordingly, I challenge you to a duel, my blade ’gainst yours, no seconds.’ And he drew out a spadroon, which is an abominable sort of implement, just the sort of thing you would expect commoners to invent if you make the mistake of suffering them to bear arms. More brush-cutter than weapon really. Sharpened on one side like a cutlass.”

Upnor, of course, was telling the story in French. He gave the ruffian the most vulgar rural accent he could manage. He devoted a minute or two to dilating on the pathetic condition of the knave’s horse, which was one step away from the knacker and exhausted to boot.

Upnor was rated one of the finest swordsmen of the Anglo-French nobility. He had slain many men in duels when he had been younger. He did not fight so much any more, as his style was one that relied upon speed and acute vision. Nevertheless, the very notion that such a rustic fellow would challenge Upnor to a duel practically had the French nobles falling down onto the path with tears running down their cheeks.

Upnor was clever enough to tell the story in a deadpan style. “I was…more…befuddled than anything else. I answered: ‘You have me at a disadvantage, sirrah—perhaps if you tell me who you are, I’ll at least know why you want to kill me.’

“ ‘I am Bob Shaftoe,’ he answered.”

This, as it always did, caused a hush to descend over Upnor’s listeners.

“ ‘Any relation to Jacques?’ I asked him.” (For the same question was on the minds of those who were gathered around Upnor listening.)

“He answered, ‘His brother.’ To which I said, ‘Come away with me to France, Bob Shaftoe, and I shall put you on a galley in the sunny Mediterranean—perhaps you may cross paths with your brother there!’ ”

Upnor’s audience loved to hear this. For they all knew of Jacques Shaftoe, or L’Emmerdeur as he was called in these parts. The name did not come up in conversation as frequently as it had a couple of years ago, for nothing had been heard from L’Emmerdeur since he had crashed a party at the Hôtel Arcachon and made a disgraceful scene there, in the presence of the King, in the spring of 1685. Precisely what had taken place there on that night was rarely spoken of, at least when members of the de Lavardac family were within earshot. From this, Eliza gathered that it was dreadfully embarrassing to them all. Because Eliza was now linked, in most people’s minds, to the family de Lavardac, they extended her the same courtesy of never talking about the events of that evening. Eliza had given up on ever finding out what had really happened there. Jack Shaftoe, who for a time had been a sort of hobgoblin of the French Court, a name to make people jump out of their skins, had dwindled to quasi-legendary status and was rapidly being forgotten altogether. From time to time he would appear as a figure in a picaresque roman.

Nevertheless, for Upnor even to mention the name of Shaftoe around La Dunette was more than daring. It was probably a faux pas. This might have explained why the Duke had suddenly terminated his conversation with Eliza, and gone off in the opposite direction. It was the sort of thing that led to duels. Some of Upnor’s listeners were conspicuously nervous. It was, therefore, quite deft of Upnor to have turned the story around in this manner, by implying that Jack Shaftoe, if he was indeed still alive, was a slave on one of the duc d’Arcachon’s galleys. Eliza now risked a glance over at the duc, and saw him red-faced, but grinning at Upnor; he favored Upnor with the tiniest suggestion of a nod (anything more would have undermined the Admiral-hat) and Upnor responded with a deeper bow. The listeners who, a few seconds earlier, had worried about a duel, laughed all the louder.

Upnor continued with the narration. “This Robert Shaftoe said, ‘Jack and I have long been estranged, and my errand has naught to do with him.’

“I asked him, ‘Why do you bar my progress, then?’

“He said, ‘I say that you are about to take out of this country something that does not rightfully belong to you.’

“I said, ‘Are you accusing me of being a thief, sirrah?’

“He said, ‘Worse. I say you pretend to own a slave: an English girl named Abigail Frome.’

“I said, ‘There’s no pretense in that, Bob Shaftoe. I own her as absolutely as you own that wretched pair of boots on your feet, and I’ve the papers to prove it, signed and sealed by my lord Jeffreys.’

“He said, ‘Jeffreys is in Tower. Your King is in flight. And if you do not give me Abigail, you shall be in the grave.’

Now Upnor had his audience rapt; not only because it was a good story, but because he had managed to connect the half-forgotten, but still powerful name of Jack Shaftoe to the late upheavals in England. Of course the French nobility were fascinated by the recent tendency of the English to chop off their kings’ heads and chase them out of the country. They were helpless in their fascination at the thought that William of Orange and his English allies must somehow be in conspiracy with all the world’s Vagabonds.

Dinner had already been announced, and the Earl of Upnor knew that his time was short, and so he put the anecdote to a quick and merciful end as he and the other dinner-guests trooped down the garden path to the big house. In the story, Upnor delivered a sort of homily to Bob Shaftoe, putting him in his place and expounding on the glories of the class system, and then Fenleigh, who had by that time forded the river and come round behind, galloped toward Bob and tried to take him with a sword-thrust from behind. Bob heard him coming at the last instant and whipped his spadroon around to parry the blow. Fenleigh’s rapier was deflected into the croup of Bob’s miserable horse, which reared up. Bob could not manage his horse because he was busy fending off a second blow from Fenleigh (though also, it was clearly implied, because men of his status did not really belong on horseback in the first place). Bob won the exchange nevertheless by almost severing Fenleigh’s right arm above the elbow, but he payed for it by being obliged to fall off his horse (extremely funny to the polished equestrians here). He landed balanced “like a sack of oats” on the stone parapet of the bridge. Upnor and his other companion were galloping toward him with pistols drawn. Shaftoe was so terrified he lost his balance and fell into the river, where (and here the story became suspiciously vague, for they had reached the house, and were deploying to their places at the long dinner-table) he either drowned or was slain by a volley of pistol-balls from Upnor, who stood on the bridge using him for target practice as he floundered along in the current of the river. “And what is a river but a lake that has failed to stay within its ordained limits, and now tumbles helplessly toward the Abyss?”

DINNER WAS DINNER. Dead things cooked, and sauced so that one could not guess how long they had been dead. A few early vegetables; but the winter had run long and the growing season had started late, so not much was ripe yet. Some very heavy and sweet delicacies that the Duke had imported from Egypt.

Eliza was seated across from the duchesse d’Oyonnax and tried to avoid meeting her eye. She was a big woman, but not fat, though middle-aged. She wore a lot of jewels, which was risqué in these times (she really ought to pawn them for the War, or, barring that, hide them), but she carried it off well; in this her size helped. Eliza was irked by this woman: by her physical presence, her wealth, what she had done, but most of all by her confidence. Other women, she knew, disliked Eliza because they envied her confidence, and so Eliza was startled to observe a similar reaction in herself to Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax.

“How is your little orphan?” the Duchess asked Eliza, at one point. To bring this up was either naïve, or rude, and it caused a few heads to twitch their way—like housecats alert to faint fidgeting.

“Oh, I do not think of him as mine any more, but God’s,” Eliza returned, “and anyway he is not so little now: a year old—or so we think, as there is no way to be sure precisely when he was born—and walking around already. Creating no end of trouble for the nurses.”

This elicited a few chuckles from those who had small children. It was a well-crafted reply on Eliza’s part, calculated to place defenses athwart all possible axes of attack from Oyonnax; but the Duchess responded only with an unreadable gaze, seeming almost nonplussed, and dropped the topic.

A young officer—Eliza recognized him as one Pierre de Jonzac, an aide to the Duke—sidestepped into the room carrying a dispatch. The Duke accepted it gratefully, for he was bored. People around him had poked fun at him for not eating any of his food; but the Duke had silenced them with the information that he was on a special diet, “for my digestion,” and had eaten previously by himself. He opened the dispatch, glanced at it, slapped the table, and shook for a few moments with suppressed laughter; but all the while he was shaking his head back and forth, as if to deny that there was anything funny.

“What is it?” asked Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon.

“The report was false,” he said. “The Franciscans will have to douse their bonfire. William of Orange is not dead.”

“But we had reliable news that he was struck from the saddle by a cannonball,” said the Earl of Upnor—who, being a man of some importance in James Stuart’s army, got all the latest intelligence.

“And so he was. But he is not dead.”

“How is that possible?” And the table went into an uproar over it, which did not die down for twenty minutes. Eliza found herself thinking of Bob Shaftoe, who must be there at this battle on the Boyne, if he had not died of disease over the winter. Then she happened to glance up, and once again saw the green eyes of the Duchess of Oyonnax gazing at her interestedly.

“NOW, AS TO THE TRANSACTION,” said the Duke, once he had got his pipe lit. The fragrance of the smoke was welcome, for the dead-animal smell Eliza had noticed out at the gazebo seemed to have followed them into the drawing-room. She was of a mind to go and throw the doors open, to admit some rose-scented air from the gardens; but that would have defeated the purpose of a private meeting in this place.

“It’s going to involve moving a lot of silver. I want you to go to Lyon and make the arrangements.”

“Will the silver actually be passing through Lyon, then, or—”

“Oh yes. You shall see it. This is not just a Dépôt sort of manipulation.”

“Then why Lyon? It is not the best place.”

“I know. But you see, it will come off of my jacht at Marseille. From there, Lyon is easy to reach—right up the Rhône, of course.”

“It makes sense, then. It is safer than any alternative. Tell me, is it coined?”

“No, mademoiselle.”

“Oh. I had assumed it would be pieces of eight.”

“No. It is pigs. Good metal, mind you, but not coined.”

“It makes more sense to me as we go along. You do not wish to be moving uncoined silver around, any more than you must. You want instead a Bill of Exchange, payable in Paris.”

“Yes, that is it precisely.”

“Very well. There are several houses in Lyon that can do this.”

“Indeed. And normally I would not care which one of them handled it. But in this case, I specifically want you not to use the House of Hacklheber. I have reason to believe that the old ogre, Lothar, will be most unhappy with me after the transaction goes through.” And the Duke laughed.

“I see. May I guess, from this hint, that it has something to do with piracy?”

Plainly the Duke thought this a stupid question. But he was polished, and handled it in good form. “That is the word that Lothar will attach to it, no doubt, in order to justify any…retaliations he may contemplate. But the method is normal, in a war. I am sure you will see nothing unusual in it, mademoiselle, given that you are such a friend of Jean Bart, and that along with the Marquis d’Ozoir you are a direct supporter of his exploits?” He laughed again, with gusto; and she felt his breath on her face, and with some trepidation drew it into her nostrils, and smelled death. It reminded her of something in addition to death, however.

“You look peaked, mademoiselle. Are you all right?”

“The air is stuffy.”

“We shall go outside, then! I have nothing further to say, other than that you should plan to be in Lyon no later than the end of August.”

“Shall I see you there?”

“It is not known. There is another aspect of this transaction, which has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the honor of my family. It is a matter of personal revenge, which need not concern you. I must tend to it myself, of course—that’s the whole point! No telling where or when exactly. Nevertheless, you may count on my being back in Paris, at the Hôtel Arcachon, for my birthday party on the fourteenth of October. It shall be splendid. I am already making the plans. The King will be there, mademoiselle. You and I shall see each other then and there, and if Étienne has done the honorable thing, why, then I shall expect a blessed announcement!”

He turned and offered his arm to Eliza, who took it, trying not to recoil from the smell of him. “I am certain it shall all come to pass just as you say, monsieur,” she said. “But as I go outside with you, I should like to change the subject, if I may, to horses.”

“Horses! It is a welcome change of subject! I am a great fancier of them.”

“I know, for the evidence has been all around me ever since I came here seven months ago. I noticed quite early that you have some albinos in your stable.”

“Indeed!”

“Seeing this, I phant’sied that such horses must be very popular among the Quality here, and that, in consequence, I could expect to see many more of them, in the stables of the King and of the many other nobles who live in these parts. But this has not been the case.”

“I should hope not! For the entire point of having them is that they are rare. They are distinctive. They are of Turkish stock.”

“May I ask who you bought them from? Is there some breeder hereabouts who has connections in the Levant?”

“Yes, mademoiselle,” said the Duke, “and he has the honor of being on your arm at this moment. For it is I who imported the Pasha to France some years ago, from Constantinople, via Algiers, in an unfathomably complex exchange of assets—”

“The Pasha?”

“A stud, mademoiselle, an albino stallion, the father of all the others!”

“He must have been magnificent.”

“Is magnificent, for he still lives!”

“Really?”

“He is old, and does not venture out of the stables so often, but on a warm evening such as this, you may go down to the paddock and see him stretching his stiff old legs.”

“When did you import the Pasha?”

“When? Let me see, it would have been ten years ago.”

“Are you certain?”

“No, no, what am I saying!? Time passes so quickly, I quite lose track. It would have been eleven years ago this summer.”

“Thank you for satisfying my curiosity, and escorting me out to your beautiful garden, monsieur,” said Eliza, bending to one side to bury her nose in a rose—and to hide her reaction from the Duke. “I shall go for a stroll now, by myself, to clear my head. Perhaps I shall go down and pay my respects to the Pasha.”

LIKE MOST OTHER PEOPLE, Eliza had never in her life been more than a stone’s throw away from an open flame. Wherever she was, there was always something burning: a cooking-fire, a candle, a pipe-bowl of tobacco or bhang, incense, a torch, a lanthorn. These were tame fires. Everyone knew that fire could go wild. Eliza had seen the aftermath of such fires in Constantinople, in the countryside of Hungary, where much had been burned as it was attacked by Ottomans or defended by Christians, and in Bohemia, which was studded with old forts and castles that had been put to the torch during the Thirty Years’ War. But she had never actually seen a fire grow from a tame spark to a feral conflagration until a couple of years ago, in Amsterdam, when a Mobb of Orangist patriots had gathered before the house of a Mr. Sluys, who had lately been exposed as a traitor to the Dutch Republic, and burned the place to the ground. They had done this by hurling torches in through windows. The house had been abandoned a few minutes earlier by Mr. Sluys and his household, who had not had time to board the place up. For several minutes, very little had seemed to happen, and the crowd had only become more agitated—the feeble and steady flickering of the torches, slowly dying on the floors of dark rooms, drove them into a kind of frenzy. But then a sudden sunrise of yellow light shone from an upstairs window, where a curtain or something had caught fire. This had probably saved the lives of several in the Mobb who had been so desperate to see the house come down that they would have jumped in through the shattered windows to attack it with their bare hands. After that, the fire built steadily for a few minutes, spreading from room to room. This was absorbing to watch, but not especially remarkable. It was even tedious, after a while. But at some point the fire had vaulted over some invisible threshold and simply exploded, over the course of a few heartbeats, into a monstrous thing that wore the envelope of the house as a suit of ill-fitting clothes. It sucked in so much air that it howled, and snatched wigs and caps from the heads of bystanders. Burning timbers shot up in the air like meteors. Vortices of white flame formed, fought, joined, and were swallowed. The ground hummed. Rivers of molten lead—for the house was full of it—spilled out onto the street and traced glowing nets in the crevices between the ashlars, fading from yellow to orange to red as they cooled. For a few moments it seemed that the fire might spread to engulf all Amsterdam in another minute, and all of the Dutch Republic the minute after that. But it had been contained between the thick masonry firewalls to either side. Pent up, it was almost more terrible than it would have been free, for all of its intensity was concentrated between those walls, instead of being allowed to spread and dissipate.

Now tears were a watery thing, and so a pedantic schoolman might insist that they were opposite in nature to fire, and could have naught in common with that element. Yet, just as Eliza had never been far from little fires, so she had never been far from the shedding of tears. Children were everywhere, and they cried all the time. Full-grown people did it less often, but they still cried. Especially women. In the banyolar of Algiers, the harim of the Topkapi Palace, and various European households, Eliza had spent most of her time in the company of women of all ages and stations, and rarely did a single day pass without her seeing at least one person get a little sniffly and moist about the eyes, whether out of pain, anger, sadness, or joy. Eliza often allowed even herself to shed a tear or two in private, and had done so more freely since the birth of Jean-Jacques. But these sheddings of tears were like so many candle-flames or kitchen-fires: elements of domestic life, controlled, unremarkable.

Eliza had seen, on occasion, crying of an altogether different nature: wild, hair-pulling, clothes-rending, spine-warping tear-rage. It had never happened to her, though, and she did not really ken it, until that evening when she walked down to the paddock out behind the stables of the Duc d’Arcachon, on the Plateau of Satory, and found herself standing face to face with Pasha: an albino Arabian stallion whom she had last encountered at dockside in the harbor of Algiers, eleven years ago. She and her mother had been snatched from the beach of Outer Qwghlm by a coastal raiding-galley of the Barbary Corsairs, and taken off into slavery; but presently they had learned that these Corsairs were operating in concert with a Christian ship. For they had spent the entire journey to Algiers being molested in a dark cabin by an uncircumcised man with white skin, who liked to dine on rotten fish. Delivered to Algiers, they had been assigned to a banyolar and become assets of some enterprise there, of which it was not possible to know very much, save that it imported certain goods—including slaves—from Christendom, exporting in exchange silks, perfumes, blades, delicacies, spices, and other luxuries of the East. When Eliza had reached puberty, she had been traded to Constantinople in exchange for this stallion—though according to what the Duke had just claimed, the exchange had been much more complicated than that, which only added insult to injury, since it implied that Eliza, by herself, was not worth as much as this horse. She had vowed then and there to find the smelly man in the dark cabin and kill him one day. Christendom being a large place—France alone had twenty millions of souls—she had supposed that finding the villain might take a while.

She had been wrong-footed by the easiness of it. She had only been in Christendom for seven years! And it had only taken her two years to meet her first de Lavardac, and three or four to lay eyes, from a distance, on the duc d’Arcachon himself. Had she been a little more perceptive she might have recognized the duc for what he was, and done him in, a long time ago.

What had she been doing instead? Socializing with Natural Philosophers. Putting on airs. Making money; all of which was now gone.

The tears that came over her, then, when she let herself into the paddock, and came face to face with Pasha, and saw and knew all, were to normal everyday tears as the burning of Mr. Sluys’s house had been to the flame of a candle. It raged up in her so fast that it seemed, for a few moments, as if it might have the power to burst free from the confines of her body and make blades of grass bend double and flood the pasture with salty dew, make Pasha crumple to his arthritic knees, blow the fences down, make the trees sag and groan as in an ice-storm. Which might have been better for Eliza; but as it was, this self-feeding vortex of sorrow, humiliation, and rage could not escape her ribcage, and so it was her ribs that took all the punishment. For once it was a good thing to be wearing a corset, for without that reinforcement she might have broken her own back with these sobs. Like the burning house of Sluys, she howled, she creaked, and the tears coming out of her felt no less hot than streams of molten lead. Fortunate it was for Eliza that all of the guests were gathered some distance away, deafened by their own happy uproar. The only witness was Pasha. A younger horse might have been spooked by the transmogrification of the Countess de la Zeur into a Fury, a Medea. Pasha merely turned sideways, the better to keep Eliza within view, and nuzzled the green grass.

“I have not the remotest idea what has come over you, mademoiselle,” said a woman’s voice. “It is quite the strangest reaction I have ever seen, to a horse.”

The Duchess of Oyonnax had timed the intrusion well. A minute before, Eliza wouldn’t have been able to stop herself even if the entire guest list had suddenly appeared around her. But the outburst had insensibly faded to a long slow run of sobs, which skidded to a halt when Eliza realized she was being watched.

She straightened up, took a deep breath, shuddered it out, and hiccuped. She must look red-faced and perfectly ridiculous; this she knew. She must look as if she hadn’t aged a day, in body or mind, since her first encounter with Pasha. This made her wince a little bit; for on that day, she had lost her mother forever; and now, all of a sudden, here she was with a bigger, older, richer and stronger woman, who had materialized just as suddenly and inexplicably as Mum had vanished eleven years ago. This was perilous.

“Say nothing,” said Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, “you’re in no condition to, and I don’t desire to know why this horse has such an effect on you. Given who it belongs to, I can only assume it is something unspeakable. The details are probably gross and tedious and in any event they are not important. All that I need to know of you, mademoiselle, I have seen on your face before, during and after dinner: that in general you are strangely fascinated by tales of women in a condition of slavery. That in particular you have found yourself in a like predicament; for you do not love Étienne de Lavardac, but will soon be cornered into marrying him. That you loathe his father the Duke. Please do not attempt to deny these things, or I am very much afraid that I shall laugh out loud at you.”

And she paused, to give Eliza the opportunity; but Eliza said nothing.

The Duchess continued: “I understand situations of this type as perfectly as Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol understands cyphers. I phant’sied my predicament unique in all the world, until I came to Versailles! It did not take me long to understand that no one need put up with such unfair situations. There are ways to arrange it. No one lives forever, mademoiselle, and many do not deserve to live as long as they do.”

“I know what you are talking about,” said Eliza. Her voice sounded quite strange at first, as though it belonged to a different Eliza altogether, one who had just been born screaming out of the old. She cleared her burnt throat and swallowed painfully. She could not keep her eyes from straying over to the shack where the Duchess had her soap made.

“I see that you do,” said the Duchess.

“There is nothing you could say to me that would change my intentions.”

“Of course not, proud girl!”

“My ends are fixed, and have been for many years. But as to means, it is possible that I might benefit from advice. For I do not care what happens to me; but if I pursue my ends through means that are obvious, it could lead to the little one in the orphanage being injured.”

“Then know that you are in the most tasteful and cultivated society the world has ever seen,” said the Duchess, “where there is a refined and subtle way of doing anything that a person could conceive a wish for. And it would be disgraceful for one of your quality to go about it in a rude and obvious style.”

“I would that you know one thing, which is that this is not about succession. It is not a matter of inheritance. It is a question of honor.”

“This is to be expected. You loathe me. I have seen it in the way you look at me. You loathe me because you believe that my late husband’s money was the only thing that I cared about. Now, you want my advice; but first you are careful to stipulate that you are better than I, your motives purer. Now, listen to me, Mademoiselle la comtesse. In this world there are very few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly. There used to be, at court, many practitioners of the Black Mass. Do you really think that all of these people woke up one morning and said, ‘Today I shall worship and offer sacrifices to the Prince of Evil?’ Of course not. Rather, it was that some girl, desperate to find a husband, so that she would not be sent off to live out the rest of her life in some convent, would hear a rumor that such-and-such person could prepare a love potion. She would save her money and go into Paris and buy a magic powder from some mountebank. Of course it had no effect at all; but she would cozen herself into believing that it had worked a little bit, and so conceive a desperate hope, and a desire for something a little bit stronger: a magic spell, perhaps. One thing would lead to another, and in time she might find herself stealing the consecrated Host from some church, and taking it to a cellar where a Black Mass would be sung over her naked body. Errant foolishness all of it. Foolishness leading to evil. But did she set out to do evil? Did she ever conceive of herself as evil? Of course not.”

“So much for lonely hearts, desperate for love,” said Eliza. “What of those who were married, and whose husbands dropped dead? Did they act out of love?”

“Do you propose to act out of love, mademoiselle? I have not heard the word love escape your pretty mouth. I heard something about honor instead; which tells me that you and I have more in common than you would like to admit. You are not the only woman in the world who is capable of taking offense at a violation of her honor, and who has the steel to respond. Tout le monde knows that Étienne de Lavardac seduced you—”

Eliza snorted. “Do you think it’s that? I don’t care about that.”

“Frankly, mademoiselle, I could not care less why it is that you want your marriage to be brief and your widowhood long.”

“Oh, no. It is not Étienne who deserves this.”

“The duc d’Arcachon, then? Very well. There is no accounting for taste. But you must understand that refinement is not compatible with haste. If you want the Duke dead now, go and stab him. If you want to enjoy his being dead for a little while, and to see your orphan grow up, you will have to be patient.”

“I can be patient,” Eliza said, “until the fourteenth of October.”

Book 4

Bonanza

The Gulf of Cadiz

5 AUGUST 1690

The Spaniards tho’ an indolent Nation, whose Colonies were really so rich, so great, and so far extended, as were enough even to glut their utmost Avarice; yet gave not over, till, as it were, they sat still, because they had no more Worlds to look for; or till at least, there were no more Gold or Silver Mines to discover.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

WITH ONE EYE JACK peered through his oar-lock across the gulf. He was looking edge-on through a slab of dry heat that lay dead on the water, as liquefacted glass rides above molten tin in a glass-maker’s pan. On a low flat shore, far away, white cabals of ghosts huddled and leaped, colossal and formless. None of the slaves quite knew what to make of it until they crawled in closer to shore, a cockroach on a skillet, and perceived that this Gulf was lined with vast salt-pans, and the salt had been raked up into cones and hillocks and step-pyramids by workers who were invisible from here. When they understood this, their thirst nearly slew them. They had been rowing hard for days.

Cadiz was a shiv of rock thrust into the gulf. White buildings had grown up from it like the reaching fingers of rock crystals. They put into a quay that extended from the base of its sea-wall, and took on more fresh water; for one of the ways that the Corsairs kept them on a leash was by making sure that the boat was always short of it. But the Spanish harbor-master did not suffer them to stay for very long, because (as they saw when they came around the point) the lagoon sheltered in the crook of the city’s bony arm was crowded with a fleet of Ships that Jack would have thought most remarkable, if he had never seen Amsterdam. They were mostly big slab-sided castle-arsed ships, checkered with gun-ports. Jack had never seen a Spanish treasure-galleon in good repair before—off Jamaica he had spied the wrack of one slumped over a reef. In any event, he had no trouble recognizing these. “We have not arrived too early,” he said, “and so the only question that remains is, have we arrived too late?”

He and Moseh de la Cruz, Vrej Esphahnian, and Gabriel Goto were all looking to one another for answers, and somehow they all ended up looking to Otto van Hoek. “I smell raw cotton,” he said. Then he stood up and looked out over the gunwale and up into the city. “And I see cargadores toting bales of it into the warehouses of the Genoese. Cotton, being bulky, would be the first cargo to come off the ships. So they cannot have dropped anchor very long ago.”

“Still, it is likely we are too late—surely the Viceroy’s brig would waste no time in going to Bonanza and unloading?” This from the raïs or captain, Nasr al-Ghuráb.

“It depends,” van Hoek said. “Of these anchored fleet-ships, only some are beginning to unload—most have not broken bulk yet. This suggests that the customs inspections are not finished. What do you see to larboard, Caballero?”

Jeronimo was peering towards the anchored fleet through an oar-lock on his side. “Tied up alongside one of the great ships is a barque flying the glorious colors of His Majesty the Deformed, Monstrous Imbecile.” Then he paused to mutter a little prayer and cross himself. When Jeronimo attemped to say the words “King Carlos II of Spain,” this, or even less flattering expressions, would frequently come out of his mouth. “More than likely, this is the boat used by the tapeworms.”

“You mean the customs inspectors?” Moseh inquired.

“Yes, you bloodsucking, scalp-pilfering, half-breed Christ-killer, that is what I meant to say—please forgive my imprecision,” answered Jeronimo politely.

“But the Viceroy’s brig would not have to clear customs here at Cadiz—it could do so at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and avoid the wait,” Moseh pointed out.

“But as part of his ransackings, the Viceroy would be certain to have cargo of his own loaded on some of these galleons. He would have every reason to linger until the formalities were complete,” Jeronimo said.

“Hah! Now I can see up into the Calle Nueva,” said van Hoek. “It is gaudy with silks and ostrich-plumes today.”

“What is that,” Jack asked, “the street of clothes-merchants?”

“No, it is the exchange. Half the commerçants of Christendom are gathered there in their French fashions. Last year these men shipped goods to America—now, they have gathered to collect their profits.”

“I see her,” said Jeronimo, with a frosty calm in his voice that Jack found moderately alarming. “She is hidden behind a galleon, but I see the Viceroy’s colors flying from her mast.”

“The brig!?” said several of the Ten.

“The brig,” said Jeronimo. “Providence—which buggered us all for so many years—has brought us here in time.”

“So the thunder that rolled across the Gulf last night was not a storm, but the guns of Cadiz saluting the galleons,” Moseh said. “Let us drink fresh water, and take a siesta, and then make for Bonanza.”

“It would be useful if we could send someone into the city now, and let him loiter around the House of the Golden Mercury for a while,” van Hoek said. Which to Jack would have meant no more than the singing of birds, except that the name jogged a memory.

“There is a house in Leipzig of the same name—it is owned by the Hacklhebers.”

Van Hoek said, “As salmon converge from all the wide ocean toward the mouths of swift rivers, Hacklhebers go wherever large amounts of gold and silver are in flux.”

“Why should we care about their doings in Cadiz?”

“Because they are sure to care about ours,” van Hoek said.

“Be that as it may, there’s not a single man, free or slave, aboard this galleot who could get through the city-gate. So this discussion is idle,” said Moseh.

“You think it will be any different at Sanlúcar de Barrameda?” van Hoek scoffed.

“Oh, I can get us into that town, Cap’n,” Jack said.

AFTER THE HEAT of midday had broken, they rowed north, keeping the salt-pans to starboard. Their ship was a galleot or half-galley, driven by two lateen sails (which were of little use today, as the wind was feeble and inconstant) and sixteen pairs of oars. Each of the thirty-two oars was pulled by two men, so the full complement of rowers was sixty-four. Like everything else about the Plan, this was a choice carefully made. A giant war-galley of Barbary, with two dozen oar-banks, and five or six slaves on each oar, and a hundred armed Corsairs crowding the rails, would of course bring down the wrath of the Spanish fleet as soon as she was sighted. Smaller galleys, called bergantines, carried only a third as many oarsmen as the galleot that they were now rowing across the Gulf of Cadiz. But on such a tiny vessel it was infeasible, or at least unprofitable, to maintain oar-slaves, and so the rowers would be freemen; rowing alongside a larger ship they’d snatch up cutlasses and pistols and go into action as Corsairs. A bergantine, for that reason, would arouse more suspicion than this (much larger) galleot; it would be seen as a nimble platform for up to three dozen boarders, whereas the galleot’s crew (not counting chained slaves) was much smaller—in this case, only eight Corsairs, pretending to be peaceful traders.

The galleot was shaped like a gunpowder scoop. Beneath the bare feet of the oarsmen there was loose planking, covering a shallow bilge, but other than that there was no decking—the vessel was open on the top along its entire length, save for a quarterdeck at the stern, which in the typical style of these vessels was curved very high out of the water. So any lookout gazing down into the galleot would clearly see a few dozen naked wretches in chains, and cargo packed around and under their benches: rolled carpets, bundles of hides and of linen, barrels of dates and olive oil. A spindly swivel-gun at the bow, and another at the stern, both fouled by lines and cargo, completed the illusion that the galleot was all but helpless. It would take a closer inspection to reveal that the oarsmen were uncommonly strong and fresh: the best that the slave-markets of Algiers had to offer. The ten participants in the Plan were distributed in outboard positions, the better to peer through oarlocks.

“In this calm we’ll have at least a night and a day to await the Viceroy’s ship,” Jack noted.

“Much hangs on the tides,” van Hoek said. “We want a low tide in the night-time. And the weather must remain calm, so that we can row away from any pursuers during the hours of darkness. At sunrise the wind will come up, and then anyone who can see us will be able to catch us…” His voice trailed off to a mumble as he pondered these and other complications, which had seemed hardly worth mentioning when they had been developing the Plan, and now, like shadows at sunset, stretched out vast, vague, and terrifying.

The brassy light of late afternoon was gleaming in through their larboard oar-locks when the galleot sank slightly lower into the water, and began to quiver and squirm in a current. At first they did not even recognize it—this was the first river of any significance they’d encountered since passing Gibraltar, or for that matter since leaving Algiers. Jack knew in his arms and his back why the Moors who’d roved up this way ages ago had named it al-Wadi al-Kabir, the Great River. When Jeronimo felt it tugging at his oar, he stood up and thrust an arm through his oar-lock to clip the top of a wave with one cupped hand. Slurping up a mouthful of water, he coughed, and then affected a blissful expression. “It is fresh water, the water of the Guadalquivir, rushing down from the mountains of my ancestors,” he announced, and more in that vein. During this ceremony his oar did not move, which meant that no oars on that side could.

“Speaking personally,” Jack said loudly, “I have more experience of sewers than of mountain streams, and cannot believe we have come all this distance to row in circles in the run-off of Seville and Cordoba!”

Jeronimo thrust out his chest and prepared to challenge Jack to a duel—but then the nerf du boeuf came down across the Spaniard’s shoulder blades as their overseer reminded them that they were yet slaves. Jack wondered how long it would take Jeronimo to get into a sword-fight after he was allowed to have a sword.

The next few hours provided more reminders of their lowly station in the world as they stroked upstream with the sun clawing at their faces. Van Hoek cursed almost without letup, and Jack reflected that, for an officer, nothing could be more humiliating than to face backwards, and never see where you were headed. But at some point they began to see tops of masts around them, and heard the blessed sound of the anchor-chains rumbling through their hawse-holes, and bent forward over their warm oars to stretch out the muscles of their backs.

Nasr al-Ghuráb, the raïs, was kul oglari, meaning the son of a Janissary by a woman native to the territory round Algiers—in any event, he spoke passable Spanish as well as Sabir. In the latter tongue, he now said, “Bring out the spare wretches.” Planking was pulled up and four damp oar-slaves climbed out of the bilge and quickly replaced Jack, Moseh, Jeronimo, and van Hoek. This took place under cover of a sail that had been spread out above them as if to be mended, so that any curious sailors who might be looking down from a yard or maintop of a nearby ship would not witness the ennoblement going on in the aisle of this newly arrived galleot. Meanwhile—in case anyone was counting heads—four of the Corsair crew retreated beneath the shade of the quarterdeck to take refreshment and doze. A canvas sack full of old clothes—looted from persons who were now captives in Algiers—was also brought up, and the four began to paw through it like children playing dress-up.

“Turbans are advisable for going abovedecks,” Jack pointed out, “as my hair’s sandy, and van Hoek’s is red, and that of Moseh—”

They all stood and looked dubiously at Moseh until finally he said, “Get me a dagger and I’ll cut off the forelocks—crypto-Jews can expect no better.”

“May you become free and rich and grow them until you must tuck them into your boot-tops,” Jack said.

They spent the last hour before sunset up on the towering quarterdeck turbaned, and covered in the long loose garments of Algerines. The town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda rose above them on the south bank where the river flowed into the gulf. It resembled a feeble miniature rendition of Algiers—it was encompassed by a wall, and below it spread a beach of river-sand where some fishermen had spread out their nets to inspect them. Van Hoek gave the town but a glance, then seized a glass from the raïs, climbed up the mast, and devoted much time to scanning the water: apparently reading the currents, and fixing in his mind the location of the submerged bar. Moseh’s attention was captured by a suburb that spread along the bank upstream of the town, outside the walls: Bonanza. It seemed to consist entirely of large villas, each with its own wall. After a while the avid Jeronimo spied the Viceroy’s coat of arms flying from one of these, or so they all assumed from the invective that geysered forth.

Jack, for his part, was looking for a place to land their little rowboat after it got dark. In the interstices between walled places he could easily make out a fungal huddle of Vagabond-shacks, and with some concerted looking it was not difficult to make out a scrap of mucky, useless river-bank where those persons came down to draw water. Jack got a compass bearing to it, though it remained to be seen how this would serve them when it was dark and the current was pushing them downstream.

“’Twere foolish to go ashore in daylight,” Jeronimo said, “and, when night falls, ’twere foolish not to. For smuggling and illicit trade are the only reasons for anyone to visit Sanlúcar de Barrameda nowadays. If we don’t try to do something illegal the night we arrive—why, the authorities will become suspicious!”

“If someone asks…what kind of illegal thing should we say we are undertaking?” Jack asked.

“We should say we have a meeting with a certain Spanish gentleman—but that we do not know his real name.”

“Spanish gentlemen, as a rule, are insufferably proud of their names—what sort refuses to identify himself?”

“The sort who meets with heretic scum in the middle of the night,” Jeronimo returned, “and fortunately for you, there are many of that sort in yonder town.”

“That schooner is strangely over-crowded with Englishmen and Dutchmen of high rank,” van Hoek offered, pointing with his blue eyes at a rakish vessel anchored a few hundred yards downriver.

“Spies,” Jeronimo said.

“What is to spy on here?” Jack asked.

“If Spain took all of the silver on those treasure-galleons in the harbor of Cadiz, and locked it up, the foreign trade of Christendom would wither,” Moseh explained. “Half the trading companies in London and Amsterdam would go bankrupt within the year. William of Orange would declare war on Spain before he allowed such a thing to happen. Those spies are here, and probably in Cadiz as well, to inform William of whether a war will be necessary this year.”

“Why would the Spaniards want to hoard it?”

“Because Portugal has opened vast new gold mines in Brazil, and—as Dappa can tell you—supplied them with numberless slaves. In the next ten years, the amount of gold in the world will rise extravagantly and its price, compared to that of silver, will naturally decline.”

“So the price of silver is certain to rise…” Jack said.

“Giving Spaniards every incentive to hoard it now.”

Night came over Spain as they stood there and talked, and lights were lit in the windows of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and in the great villas of Bonanza, where dinners were being cooked—Jeronimo had told them of the queer Spanish practice of dining late at night, and they had already made it part of the Plan. The rhythm of the waves, heaving themselves sluggishly against the beach at the foot of the town, underwent some sort of subtle change, or so van Hoek claimed. He spoke words in Dutch that meant “the tide is running out” and climbed down a pilot’s ladder into the galleot’s tiny skiff, which had been let down into the water. Here he took a kilderkin—a small keg, having a capacity of some eighteen gallons—removed one end, ballasted it with rocks, and planted a few candles in it. After lighting the candles he released it into the Guadalquivir, and then spent the better part of an hour watching it glide slowly out to sea. Jack meanwhile kept his eyes fixed on the landing-place that he had picked out on the river-bank, as slowly it faded and became a black void in a constellation of distant lanthorns.

They doffed their turbans and cloaks and changed into European clothes, of which there was no shortage in the dress-up sack. Then they moved down into the skiff and began rowing across the river’s current. Jack directed them towards the spot he’d picked out. Twice van Hoek insisted that they pause in midstream, backing water with the oars, while he threw a sounding-lead overboard to check the depth. Jeronimo spent the voyage winding a long strip of cotton around his head, lashing his jaw shut—a task not made any quicker by his tendency to think out loud. Thinking, for him, amounted to making florid allusions to Classical poetry until everyone around him had fallen into a stupor. In this case he was Odysseus and the mountains of Estremaduras were the Rock of the Sirens and this gag he was putting on himself was akin to the ropes by which Odysseus had bound himself to the mast.

“If the Plan is as leaky as that similitude, we are all as good as dead,” Jack muttered, once the gag was finally in place.

The arrival of all four of them would cause a commotion in the Vagabond-camp, or so Jack had managed to convince the other nine. So he waded into shore from a few yards out, then (reckoning no one could see him, and he was safe from mockery) fell to his knees on the strand, like a Conquistador, and kissed the dirt.

Here was the moment when he would simply disappear. He had never traveled down this way, but he had heard of this camp: it was supposed to be small but rich, an entrepôt for the better sort of Vagabond. A few days’ travel up the coast, then, a vast Vagabond city clung to the walls of Lisbon—from there, the way north was well-known. He reckoned that he could be in Amsterdam before winter, if he used himself hard. From there, the passage to London had always been easy, even when England and Holland had been at war—and now they were practically a single country.

This had been his secret Plan all along, and he’d spent more time working it out in his mind than he had following the numberless permutations and revisions of the Plan of Moseh. All he need do was walk up into the brush, and keep walking. This might be the doom of Moseh’s plan, or not—but (to the extent he’d paid attention at all) he suspected it was doomed anyway. Nothing that relied upon so many people could ever work.

But Jack’s feet did not move him thus. After a few moments he stood, and began to move carefully away from the river-bank, pausing every two steps to listen for movement or breathing around him. But he did not simply bolt. Somehow the commands that his mind sent toward his feet were blocked by his heart, or other organs. It might have been because others in the Cabal had shown him mercy and loyalty where Eliza had not. It might have been the smell of this Vagabond-camp and the wretched and loathsome appearance of the first people he spied, which reminded him of how poor and dirty Christendom was in general. Too, he was strangely curious to see how the Plan came out—somewhat like a spectator at a bear-baiting who was willing to pay money just to see whether the bear tore the dogs to bloody shreds, or the other way round.

But what really addled his mind—or clarified it, depending on one’s point of view—was his certainty that the Duc d’Arcachon had become involved, somehow. This much had been obvious from the evolutions of the Plan during the nine months since they’d presented it to the Pasha. By hiding the fact that he could understand Turkish, Dappa had learned much.

Now, Jack really had no particular reason to care so much about said Duke—he was an evil rich man, but there were many of those. However, at one point when he’d been stupefied by Eliza, he had volunteered to kill that Duke one day. This was the closest he’d ever come to having a purpose in life (supporting his offspring was tedious and unattainable), and he had rather enjoyed it. D’Arcachon had now been so helpful as to reciprocate by attempting to hunt him down to the ends of the earth. Jack took a certain pride in that, seeing in it what his Parisian friend St.-George would call good form. To slink away now and live like a rat in East London, forever worrying about the Duke’s homicidal intentions, would be bad form indeed.

When Jack and his brother Bob, as boys, had done mock-battle in the Regimental mess-hall in Dorset, they had been rewarded for showing flourish and élan; and if soldiers threw meat at boys for showing good form, might not the world shower Jack with silver for the same virtue?

Even so, Jack’s mind was not entirely made up until he had been ashore for perhaps a quarter of an hour. He had been edging quietly round the nimbus of light cast by a Vagabond campfire, counting the people and judging their mood, straining to overhear snatches of zargon. Suddenly a silhouette rose up between him and the fire, no more than five yards away: a big man with a strangely mummified head, carrying a crossbow, drawn back and ready to shoot. It was Jeronimo—who must have been sent ashore, as part of the Plan, to hunt Jack through the woods and launch a bolt through his heart if he showed any sign of treachery.

This confirmed in Jack’s mind that he really must remain faithful to the Plan. Not out of fear—he could easily slip away from Jeronimo—but out of sentimentality of the cheapest and basest sort. For Jeronimo wanted to go back to Estremaduras as badly as any man had ever wanted anything, and yet he was about to turn his back on that place, which was almost within sight, and go off to face (in all likelihood) death. It was the most abysmally poignant thing Jack had ever witnessed outside of a theatre, it made his eyes water, and it settled his mind.

So, slipping away from Jeronimo, he made his way into the fire-light and (after calming the Vagabonds down just a bit) told them he was an Irishman who, along with several other Papists, had been press-ganged in Liverpool (this was likely and reasonable-sounding to the point of being banal) and that before setting out for America he and some of the other sailors wanted to pay their respects at Our Lady of Buenos Aires, a mariners’ shrine inside the town (this was also very plausible, according to Jeronimo), and there would be a few reales in it for anyone who could sneak them into the town. This offer was taken up enthusiastically, and within the hour, Jack, Moseh, van Hoek, and Jeronimo (sans crossbow) were inside Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

Now Jeronimo and van Hoek went off towards a smoky and riotous quarter near the waterfront while Jack and Moseh went to reconnoiter in a finer neighborhood up the hill. Moseh had no particular idea where they were going and so they walked up and down several streets, looking in the windows of the white buildings, before slowing down in front of one that was adorned with a golden figure of Mercury. Remembering Leipzig, Jack instinctively looked up. Though there were no mirrors on sticks here, he did see the red coal of a cigar flaring and then blurring into a cloud of exhaled smoke—a watcher on the rooftop. Moseh saw it, too, and took Jack’s arm and hustled him forward. But as they hurried past a window Jack turned his face toward the light and glimpsed a molten vision from his pox-scarred memories: a bald head surmounting wreaths of fat, looming above a table where several men—mostly fair-haired—sat eating and talking.

When they had gotten some distance down the street, Jack said: “I saw Lothar von Hacklheber in there. Or perhaps it was a painting of him, hung on the wall to preside over the table—but no, I’m sure I saw his jaw moving. No painter could’ve captured that cannonball brow, the furious eyes.”

“I don’t doubt you,” Moseh said. “So van Hoek must have been right. Let us go and find the others.” Moseh turned his steps downhill.

“What was the purpose of that reconaissance?”

“Before you make mortal enemies, it is wise to know who they are,” Moseh said. “Now we know.”

“Lothar von Hacklheber?”

Moseh nodded.

“I should’ve thought our enemy was the Viceroy.”

“Outside of Spain, the Viceroy has no power. The same is hardly true of Lothar.”

“Why does the House of Hacklheber have aught to do with it?”

Moseh said, “Suppose you live in a house in Paris. You have a water-carrier who is supposed to come once a day. Usually he does, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes his buckets are full, sometimes they are half-empty. But your house is a large one and requires water in small amounts all the time.”

“That is why such houses have cisterns,” Jack said.

“Spain is a large house. It requires money all the time, to purchase goods from other countries, such as quicksilver from the mines of Istria and grain from the north. But its money arrives once a year, when the treasure-fleet drops anchor at Cadiz—or, formerly, here. The treasure-fleet is like the water-carrier. The banks of Genoa and of Austria have, for hundreds of years, served—”

“As money-cisterns, I see,” Jack said.

“Yes.”

“But Lothar von Hacklheber is not a Genoese name, unless I am mistaken,” Jack said.

“About sixty years ago Spain went bankrupt for a time, which amounts to saying that the Genoese bankers did not get paid what was due them, and fell on hard times. Various mergings and marriages of convenience occurred as a result. The center of banking moved northward. That, in a nutshell, is how the Hacklhebers came to have a fine house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. And, I would guess, a finer one in Cadiz.”

“But Lothar is here,” Jack said, “meaning—?”

“He probably intends to take delivery of the silver pigs that we are going to steal tomorrow, and pay the Viceroy with something else—gold, perhaps, which would be better for one who wanted to spend much soon.”

In a few minutes’ nosing around the lower precincts, dodging brawlers and politely declining offers from whores, they located van Hoek and Jeronimo, who were posing, respectively, as a Dutch commerçant wanting to smuggle cloth to America on the next outgoing ship (which would have been illegal, because the Dutch were heretics), and his Spanish conspirator, who’d recently had his tongue cut out for some reason. They were in a tavern, conversing with a seamy-looking Spanish gentleman who, oddly enough, spoke good Dutch—a cargador metedoro who acted as a Catholic front man for Protestant exporters. Jack and Moseh walked past the table to let it be known that they were here, and then staked out the tavern’s exits in case of trouble—which was not really much use, since they were still unarmed, but seemed like good form. There they waited for a while, as van Hoek conversed with the cargador. The conversation proceeded fitfully in that this Spaniard appeared to be participating in two card-games at once, and losing money at both. Jack could see he was one of those men who are not right in the head when it comes to gambling, and was tempted to join in and fleece him, but it did not seem meet just now.

Not that propriety had ever shaped Jack’s actions in the past. But only now was it coming clear to him that he had forgone his one opportunity to escape, and thereby gambled his life upon the success of the Plan: a Plan that, only an hour ago, he was silently mocking as inconceivably complex, and dependent upon too many persons’ exhibiting sundry rare virtues, such as cleverness and bravery, at just the right times. It was, in other words, a Plan that only desperate men would have come up with, a Plan in which it made no sense to participate unless one had no alternatives whatsoever. Jack had only gone along with it, to this point, because he’d always known he could jump ship before the worst parts of it were put into action.

Yet these others were not like John Cole.* Moseh and van Hoek and the others were more in the mold of John Churchill.†

Accordingly, Jack did not gamble, but contented himself with a tankard of cerveza—the first liquor that had passed his lips in something like five years—and simply gazing at the whores and barmaids, who were the first human females he had seen (other than the bat-like phantasms of Algiers) since Eliza. And his view of her had been obstructed by an incoming harpoon.

Suddenly van Hoek was on his feet, but he was smiling. A few moments later the four were outside on a tavern-street running along the foundations of the wall that faced the water—this looked as if sailors had been trying to undermine it, for hundreds of years, by burrowing tunnels through the stone with their urine.

“It is arranged,” van Hoek said. “He believes that my cargo will arrive tomorrow, or possibly the next day, on a jacht, and that she will be in a desperate hurry to cross the bar and unload. He says that ships from the north do this all the time, and that he can bribe the soldiers to fire signals during the night-time.”

They walked beneath Our Lady of Buenos Aires, which was disappointing: a fleck of stone in a bushel-sized niche. They departed the city the way they had entered into it, through a series of sneakings and petty briberies. An hour later they were in Bonanza, marking a path from the Vagabond-camp to the landward gates of the Viceroy’s villa by slashing blazes on tree-trunks. The sky above Spain was just beginning to dissolve the faintest stars when they returned to the galleot. The Corsairs, and the other members of the Cabal, were giddy that they’d actually come back; then excited, knowing that the Plan would actually go forward; then moody and apprehensive. They all tried to get some sleep, and most of them failed.

IN MID-MORNING, van Hoek began sending up spouts of pipe-smoke that swirled up through beams of hot sun and began migrating upriver—evidence of a breeze too faint for Jack to feel on his skin. This pleased everyone (because it suggested the brig could sail up from Cadiz today) except for van Hoek (who took it as a sign that the weather might be changing). The Dutchman spent the day pacing up and down the galleot’s central catwalk, just like a slave-driver, save that instead of cracking a whip he was fussing endlessly with his pipe and gazing balefully at the sky. It was senseless, Jack thought, to exert so much grim attention on weather that was not really changing. Then—brushing past van Hoek in the aisle—he came close enough to make out some of his words, and understood that the Dutchman was not cursing the elements, but rather praying. And he was not praying for the success of the Plan, but for his own immortal soul. Van Hoek had rowed as a slave for years because he refused to turn Turk. The Cabal had managed to convince him, through long debates on the roof of the banyolar, that the Plan did not really amount to piracy, because the Viceroy’s silver pigs were contraband to begin with, and the Viceroy himself a sort of landlubber Corsair. Finally van Hoek had accepted their arguments, or claimed to. But today he seemed to be in fear of hellfire.

Meanwhile, preparations were under way beneath the quarterdeck, and on those parts of the oar-deck that could be concealed under sails. The common slaves were encouraged to eat, drink, and rest. Members of the Cabal mostly unpacked certain strange goods, and organized them. In the rigging above, Corsairs adorned the masts and yards with a whorish gaudy array of banners and streamers.

The only pause in this work occurred in mid-afternoon, when the Viceroy’s brig—flying its own gorgeous panoply of banners—came up the coast. At first, Moseh and several other Cabal-men were nearly frantic with anxiety that she would reach the Viceroy’s palace with plenty of daylight remaining, and that the treasure would be unloaded this afternoon, before their eyes. But after firing a salute, which was answered by several guns on the city’s walls, she paused outside the infamous barra, and sent out a longboat to take soundings, and then bided her time for an hour or two, allowing the tide to rise a bit. Then she raised more canvas and rode that tide up into the river. Van Hoek lay flat on the oar-deck, poked his spyglass out through an oar-lock, and gazed upon the brig with the dumbfounded intensity of a stalking cat.

Her progress up the river was no quicker. When she entered the estuary her sails went slack. After maundering about for a while she struck her canvas altogether. Then long sweeps felt their way out through ports in a lower deck. The brig’s crew began to pull on them and she crawled towards Bonanza yawing and faltering in the confusion of the river’s current and the tide.

This gave the raïs, Nasr al-Ghuráb, more than enough time to have the galleot’s anchors weighed—a tedious job that involved eight slaves circling a windlass as free crewmen worked the messenger cable. The galleot got under way not long after the brig had passed by, and soon drew abeam of the larger, slower ship, then began to draw in closer as both vessels worked upriver. As soon as they had come within hailing distance, Mr. Foot ascended to the quarterdeck, garbed in a flame-colored silk caftan; raised a polished brass speaking-trumpet to his lips; and launched into a peroration. No one would ever guess he had been rehearsing it for months. His Spanish was so miserable that it actually caused Jeronimo (naked, and pulling on an oar) to flinch and writhe in agony. To the extent that Mr. Foot’s words conveyed meaning at all, he was trying to convince the Spaniards on the Viceroy’s brig that they really ought to be interested in certain splendiferous goods that he, Mr. Foot, the owner and captain of this galleot, had of late brought out of the Orient—particularly, carpets. He ordered a carpet to be hoisted up from a lug, as if it were a sail.

On the decks of the brig, now, a kind of split developed between labor and management: the ordinary seamen (at least, the ones not pulling on sweeps) seemed to find the ludicrous appearance of the galleot, and the spectacle of the incoherent Mr. Foot, a welcome entertainment. They began shouting rude things to him from various tops and ratlines, trying to provoke him. But the officers, true to form, were not amused, and kept shouting at Mr. Foot to keep his distance. Mr. Foot only cupped one hand to his ear and pretended not to understand, and ordered more and gaudier carpets to be hoisted from all available spars. They had loaded the galleot by making the rounds of the least reputable rug merchants of Algiers and hauling away their most immobile stock.

When only a few fathoms separated the galleot’s oar-tips from those of the brig, the Spanish captain finally drew his cutlass and brought it down—which was the signal for some gunners in the forecastle to discharge their swivel-gun across the galleot’s bow, showering the forward-most oar-slaves with a welcome spray of river water. Mr. Foot looked flabbergasted (which for him was not difficult) for a count of five, and then turned to his steersman and began waving his arms frantically—which, with the sunset radiant in the fabric of his caftan, made him look like a parrot with clipped wings being chased around a basket by a snake. The galleot fell away, to cheers and applause from the crew of the brig.

Gazing aft from his bench, Jack saw van Hoek at work, hidden beneath the quarterdeck, making sketches of the brig’s rigging. These would be useful to Jack later, because he had heard more of these events than he’d seen. As they had drawn close to the brig, though, he had been able to look up into the spyglasses of two Spanish officers who had ascended to the maintop. If the Cabal hadn’t already known that the brig was full of treasure, they might have guessed as much from this show of alertness. For their pains, the Spanish officers saw nothing more than a few dozen chained wretches, a very modest number of freemen, and nothing in the way of weaponry. More to the point, they got a good long look at the galleot: enough to fix it in their memories, so that they’d recognize it in an instant when they saw it again.

There was a bit of flailing about—enough to convince the captain of the Viceroy’s brig that these rug-pedlars had been scared out of their wits—then the big drum began to thump a brisk tempo and the slaves applied themselves to their work. The galleot sprang upriver, leaving the brig behind. After about half an hour, the drum was silenced and the galleot dropped anchor once more, this time in a place some distance above Bonanza where the river oozed through brackish marshes. Jack was released from his irons immediately and climbed halfway up the mainmast, whence he could gaze back downriver and observe the final quarter-hour of the brig’s several-month-long journey from Vera Cruz to Bonanza. At sunset she finally dropped anchor below the Viceroy’s villa, and the sound of cheering and celebratory gunfire drifted up the river. A lighter came out from a quay to collect the Viceroy and his wife and take them home.

Later, Dappa, watching through a spyglass, announced that a guard had been posted on the quay: perhaps a dozen musketeers, as well as a swivel-gun for taking pot-shots at anything that came within range looking shootable. But other than a boat-load of what appeared to be luggage, nothing came out of the brig before sundown, which meant nothing would come out of it until sunup.

“Is there anything downriver?” van Hoek asked significantly.

“Sails, glowing like coals, out to sea, headed towards Sanlúcar—a small ship* flying Dutch colors,” Dappa announced.

“Tomorrow, she’ll be flying French ones,” van Hoek said, “for that must be Météore—the Investor’s jacht.”

After dark, the Ten were free to move about, making no pretenses. The remaining slaves were distributed fairly among oars. Al-Ghuráb presented Jack with a long bundle wrapped in black cloth, and Jack was astonished to find it was his Janissary-sword. It was in a new scabbard, and it had been shined and sharpened, but Jack recognized it by the notch that had been made in its edge when it had collided with Brown Bess under Vienna. Apparently the weapon had lodged in some Corsair’s treasure-hoard during Jack’s captivity. Jack wanted in the worst way to belt it on, but it would only drown him if he tried to swim with it. So instead he put it to use by severing the galleot’s anchor cables. This would put them in a most awkward position if ever they wanted to stop the vessel again, for any reason. But after the events of the coming hours, to stop anywhere in Christendom would be suicide. And they could not afford to devote the better part of an hour to toiling with hawsers and cables just now. Having finished this errand, Jack handed the sword to Yevgeny, who was packing a certain bag.

During the winter storm season, this lot of slaves had (weather permitting) spent two hours a day rowing the galleot around the inner harbor of Algiers, learning to pull in unison without the need for a pounding drum. Now they emerged from the marshes without a sound—or so Jack managed to convince himself as he squatted in the bows with Dappa, slathering his naked body with a mixture of ox-grease and lamp-black. The galleot was making excellent time, helped along by the first stirrings of the out-going tide. Up on the splintery foothold that served as the galleot’s maintop, Vrej Esphahnian had taken over lookout duty. He claimed that he could now see currents of light flickering through the brush between Sanlúcar de Barrameda and Bonanza: hundreds (they hoped) of torch-carrying Vagabonds feeling their away through the darkness along the trails that the Cabal had marked out the night before, converging on the estate of the Viceroy, drawn by the rumor that, on the night of his return to the Old World, the Viceroy might hand out alms to the poor.

“Can you see anything of Météore?” van Hoek demanded.

“Maybe a lanthorn or two, out to sea beyond the bar—it is difficult to say.”

“Really it does not matter, as long as she is out there, and was noted by the harbor-master before dark,” Moseh said. “Assuming that ‘Señor Cargador’ is not too drunk to stand, he’ll be pacing along the battlements now, wringing his hands over the fate of the cargo in that jacht and pestering the night watch.”

“Is it time for us to go yet?” Jack asked. “I smell like one of my dear mother’s charred rib-roasts, and would fain take a bath.”

“This would be a good time, I think,” van Hoek said.

“Please do not take it the wrong way,” said Mr. Foot, “but once again I wish you Godspeed, and Dappa as well.”

“This time I will accept it, or any other blessings sent my way,” Jack said.

“We’ll see you on the deck of that brig, or not at all,” Dappa said. Then he and Jack jumped off into the river.

If Jack had been in his right mind, and if he had known he would one day become involved in a Plan such as this one, he never would have divulged, to his fellow oarsmen, the information that he had grown up a mudlark in East London, and that accordingly he had much experience swimming in estuaries, among anchored ships, in the dark, with a knife in his teeth. But that was all water under London Bridge. The last several months, as other members of the Cabal had refined the Plan or practiced other parts of it, Jack had been renewing his old skills, and imparting them to Dappa. The African had never been a swimmer for the simple reason that rivers in his part of the world were filled with crocodiles and hippopotami. But life had taught him to be adaptable—or as Dappa himself had put it, “I know that there are worse things than being wet, so let us get on with it.”

He and Jack now swam down the Guadalquivir, pushing before them a very large barrel, denominated a tun, which had been tarred black and laden with a long piece of heavy chain so that only a hand’s breadth extended above the surface. A circle of ox-hide was stretched over the top like a drum-head to prevent water from spilling in and sinking it altogether. Meanwhile the galleot backed water, fighting the river’s current, and began to spin round in mid-channel so that it was pointed upstream. But it was consumed in the darkness, from Jack’s and Dappa’s point of view, before it had half-completed that maneuver.

They swam on, paddling like dogs to keep their heads out of the water, frequently reaching out with one hand to touch the tun, which like them was being swept by the river toward the sea. If the tun happened to ship water and begin sinking, they would want to know sooner rather than later, because it was tethered to each of their wrists by a short length of rope. The only way to judge their position was by gazing up at the lights of Bonanza, where Spaniards who had grown rich from America were just sitting down to dinner. Jack had learned, by now, to recognize the windows of the Viceroy’s villa. Tonight every candlestick in the place was blazing, to celebrate the master’s return. But Jack was satisfied to see that on the landward side, it was now besieged by a small army of Vagabonds.

They almost missed the brig. At the last minute they had to swim hard across the current to prevent being swept right past her. The combined flow of the great river and of the tide moved them much more quickly than they had appreciated. Jack and Dappa collided with the brig’s larboard anchor cable hard enough to leave long rope-burns on their bodies. The tun toddled downstream for a few yards and reached the end of its tethers just short of thudding into the brig’s stempost. Its momentum nearly yanked Jack and Dappa off the anchor cable, to which they were clinging like a pair of snails.

Jack hugged the taut anchor cable for a few minutes and simply breathed with his eyes closed, until Dappa lost patience and gave him a nudge. Then Jack let go and swam as hard as he could against the current, edging sideways a few inches at a stroke, until eventually he reached the opposite anchor cable. This slanted into the water about three fathoms away from the one that Dappa had, by now, made himself fast to with a rope around his waist. Jack did the same here, leaving his hands free. He could not see a thing but he guessed that Dappa had already removed his necessaries from the tun. Indeed, when Jack pulled on his wrist-tether the great barrel moved in his direction—though Dappa was maintaining tension on his tether, so that the tun remained stretched out in the current between them, staying well clear of the brig’s stempost.

Soon the rim of the tun was in his grasp. Groping around atop a jumble of cold rough chain-links, Jack found a rope-end, and drew it out and hitched it around the anchor-cable using a sailor-knot he’d learnt to do with his eyes closed—just as Dappa had presumably done with the other end of the same rope. The brig’s twin anchor-cables were now joined by a length of sturdy manila with plenty of slack in it. In the middle of that length was a spliced-in loop, called a cringle, and fixed to that cringle was one end of a chain, somewhat longer than the river was deep here (as they knew from van Hoek’s soundings) and several hundred pounds in weight.

Stowed atop the chain were several implements—notably a matched pair of short axe-like tools, packed in oakum to keep them from clanking about “and waking the ducks,” as van Hoek liked to phrase it. Jack removed these one by one and hung them about his shoulders on their braided cotton straps. When the only thing remaining in the tun was the chain, Jack tipped it so that the water of the Guadalquivir spilled in over its top. Within a few moments the weight of the chain had driven it down below the surface. Immediately the line he’d lashed round the anchor cable began to take that weight. It tightened, but his knotwork held fast and it did not slip down.

What he feared most, now, was a long wait. But he and Dappa had used up more time than the Plan called for, or else the galleot had moved too hastily, for almost immediately they began to hear shouting from upstream: several voices, mostly in Turkish but a few in Sabir (so that the Spaniards on the brig would overhear, and understand), shouting: “We are adrift!” “Wake up!” “We’re dragging the anchor!” “Get the oarsmen to their stations!”

The watch on the brig heard it, too, and responded smartly by clanging a bell and hollering in nautical Spanish. Jack drew a deep breath and dove. Pulling himself hand-under-hand down the anchor cable, he descended until his ears hurt intolerably, which he knew would be a couple of fathoms deep—deeper than the draft of the onrushing galleot, anyway—and then began assaulting the cable with the edge of a dagger. He was working blind now, feeling one greased hand slide over another—a trick he’d worked out to prevent accidentally severing a finger. The blade made an avid seething noise as it severed the cable’s innumerable fibers one by one and thousands by thousands.

One of the cable’s three fat strands burst under his blade and unscrewed itself—he felt it slacken under his cheek, for he was gripping the cable between his head and shoulder, and felt the other two strands stretch and bleat as they took the load. He had no idea what might be going on twelve feet above. The galleot must be approaching, but it made no appreciable noise. Then there was a stifled thump, felt more than heard. He flinched, thinking it was the sound of the collision, and bubbles erupted from his nostrils. His eyes were still closed in the black water, and he was seeing phantasms: poor Dick Shaftoe being pulled up out of the Thames ankle-first. Was this how Dick’s last moments had been? But such thoughts had to be banished. Instead he conjured up van Hoek on the roof of the banyolar weeks ago, saying: “When we are some ten fathoms away from the brig I’ll strike the big drum once—just before we collide, twice. You’ll hear this, and with any luck so will the Vagabonds ashore, so they can make more noise for a few moments—”

Jack sawed viciously at the cable and felt the yarns of the second strand spraying outwards like rays from the sun. He sensed the hull of the galleot over his head all of a sudden and felt real panic knowing it stretched, an impenetrable bulwark, between him and air. At once came two thuds of the drum. He hacked at the cable’s one remaining strand and finally felt it explode in his hand like a bursting musket, the crack swallowed up in an incomparably vaster sound: a grinding drawn-out crunch like giants biting down on trees. The cut end of the cable snapped upwards and lashed him across the shoulder. But it did not whip round his neck, as had happened in many nightmares of recent months.

Something hard and smooth was pushing against the skin of Jack’s back—the hull-planks of the galleot! He could not tell up from down. But those clinkers were lapped one over the next like shingles, and by reading their edges with one hand he knew instantly which way was down towards the keel, and which was up towards the waterline. Swimming, fighting his own buoyancy that wanted to stick him against the hull, he finally broke the surface and whooped in air, baying like a hound.

Above he heard shouting and panic, but no gunfire. That was good, it meant that the brig’s officers had recognized them as the feckless rug-merchants seen earlier today, and not jumped to the conclusion that they were under attack. The Corsairs had lit lanterns up and down the length of the galleot shortly before the collision, so that Spaniards running up from belowdecks, rubbing sleep out of their eyes, would be presented with the reassuring sight of oarsmen who were still safely in chains, and free crew members who were unarmed and disorganized.

The galleot drifted away from Jack, or rather he drifted away from it. He squirmed round in the water to face the hull of the brig, which was onrushing—or rather the current was sweeping Jack toward it. And this was the single most terrifying moment of the Plan. The hull was angled up out of the water at the stem, to ride over waves, but it would ride over swimmers as easily. It was already blotting out the stars. The current would drive him underneath it if he did not gain some sort of purchase on it first. He would in effect be keel-hauled, and might or might not emerge a few minutes later, alive or dead, flayed by the carapace of barnacles that the brig had grown on her hull during her long Atlantic passage.

He had the means to save himself: a pair of boarding axes, taken out of the chain-barrel earlier. These looked like hatchets with long handles and small heads. Projecting out of the back of the head was a sharp curved pick, like a parrot’s beak. Jack got a grip on one of these, twisted it round in his hand so it would strike pick-first, and wound up to assault the brig’s hull. But the weight of his arm and of the axe drove the rest of him, including his head, under the surface. Drifting blind, he caught the hull on his chest and face. The barnacles dug into his skin like fish-hooks and the current knocked his legs out from under him, plastering his entire body up against the hull below the waterline. As a final, feeble gesture, the pick of his boarding axe might have pecked at the hull, a foot or so above water. But it found no purchase there. After a few moments he slipped down farther, the barnacles scoring his thighs, stomach, chest, and face as the current forced him under.

This was it, then: the exact keel-hauling he had worried about. He slipped again and the boarding axe tried to jerk itself out of his grasp. It must have caught on something—perhaps the edge of a single barnacle, or a caulked gap between planks. He pulled on it and it held for a moment, then started to break loose; its grip on the hull was not firm enough to pull his head up out of the water. But he had a second boarding axe that was trailing on a neck-rope and bumping uselessly against the hull. As Jack had nothing else to occupy the time while he was being flayed and drowned, he pawed water until he got a grip on that boarding axe, then brought it back, fighting that damned current, and drove it into the hull as hard, and as high, as he could. A sharp crunch of barnacle-shells was followed by the sweet thunk of iron driving into wood. Jack pulled with both hands, now, then brought the first axe away and struck with it, and finally managed to get his face up through the roiling crest of the bow-wave. He drew half a breath of air and half of water, but it was enough. Two more vicious strikes with the boarding axes brought his head and chest up out of the water. He wrapped the axes’ braided tethers round his wrists and hung there for a minute or two, just breathing.

BREATHING SEEMED INFINITELY MORE FINE and more momentous than anything that could possibly be going on around him, but after a while the novelty wore off and he began to wake up and to take stock of his situation.

The lights along the shore were gone, which meant that they were adrift in the channel as planned. Probably they were still gliding past the no man’s land between Bonanza and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. And yet the brig was still pointed upstream and her anchor cables were still stretched taut, because of that heavy chain she was dragging along the river-bottom. A person on the brig, preoccupied with having just been collided with by a rug-galleot, might not notice the drift.

Abovedecks, which might have been a different continent for all it mattered to Jack, some kind of acrid discussion was going on between Mr. Foot and a Spaniard (Jack assumed it was the ranking officer on the brig). The latter seemed to think that he was greatly humiliating Mr. Foot before his crew by lecturing to him on certain elementary facts about how properly to anchor a ship in an estuary. Mr. Foot, far from being embarrassed, was doing his best to elongate the argument by almost but not quite understanding everything that the other said. His ability to misapprehend even the simplest declarations had been driving his acquaintances into frenzies of annoyance for years. Finally he had discovered a practical use for it.

Meanwhile the oarsmen on the galleot were putting on a great show of indolence, very gradually getting themselves settled into position to row away from the brig. But certain decorative encrustations on the galleot’s high stern had become entangled in supremely functional matters on the brig’s bowsprit, such as the martingale (a spar projecting vertically downwards from about the middle of the bowsprit) and the stays that held it in place. The disentanglement of the two vessels took some time, and was noisy, which was good because a few yards away the Cabal was hard at work doing things that, in other circumstances, would have waked the dead.

The brig had a sort of blind spot (or so they hoped) around her stempost. The stempost was nothing more than the foremost part of the keel, where it broke out of the water and slanted up to support the figurehead, the bowsprit, and the railing around the ship’s head. This part of the ship was made for dashing against the sea as she fought through weather, and so was devoid of complications such as hatches and ports, which tended to be weak and leaky. Furthermore it was sharply undershot, and difficult to see from the deck above. One could get a clear look at it only by going to the head, kneeling down, and thrusting one’s head down and out through the shite-hole (which had been deemed unlikely by the architects of the Plan) or by clambering out onto the bowsprit to work the rigging associated with the spritsails. Those sails would not come into use tonight, but this posed a danger nonetheless, as several seamen had gone out there to work on the disentanglement.

But there was nothing Jack could do about that, so he tried to concentrate on matters nearer to hand. There was a veritable crowd down here! Yevgeny, Gabriel, and Nyazi had jumped from the galleot moments before the collision, and had evidently had better luck with their boarding axes than Jack—perhaps because they had not been half-drowned to start out with. They had converged on the stempost, which was one enormously thick piece of solid wood, and after pulling in bags of tools and weapons tethered to their ankles they had driven spikes into that wood with muffled hammers and hung little rope slings from the spikes, just big enough to serve as footholds. Jack let go of one of his axes, flailed out, and grabbed an empty one. With some thrashing around he was able to get a foot into it. Yevgeny, also coated in black grease, was barely visible above, standing in another one of these foot-loops. He offered Jack a hand, and pulled him all the way up out of the water. Jack and Yevgeny were now plastered up against the hull together, just to one side of the stempost. Yevgeny thumped Jack’s shoulder five times, meaning “we are five.” So on the opposite side of the stempost, Gabriel and Nyazi must have established footholds of their own. Apparently Dappa had avoided the fate of keel-hauling, too.

There followed an hour of something approaching boredom. The general circumstances were anything but boring, of course, yet there was nothing for Jack to do except hang there and await death or deliverance. Yevgeny thrust a sack into Jack’s hand. Jack found a pair of breeches inside, and a belt, and the Janissary-sword. The galleot worked itself free and rowed off, driven on a fresh gale of invective from the supremely irritated Spaniards—who almost immediately realized that they were being pushed downriver by the tidal current, and were already more than a mile from the Viceroy’s villa. They tried the anchor cables and found them taut, but not taut enough. Then they tried bringing them in, and found them fouled by the mysterious lashings of Jack and Dappa. Shouts and thuds reverberated dimly through the hull-planking as the crew were ordered belowdecks to man the sweeps.

But they had barely begun to row, there in the broad estuary below Sanlúcar de Barrameda, when the galleot—which had been stalking them through the night—shot out of the darkness, moving with a speed that the pudgy, barnacle-fouled brig could only dream of, and came on almost as if making for a head-on collision. It diverted to starboard at the last possible moment (to the relief of Jack and the others, who would have been crushed), folded her oars on that side, and skimmed down the side of the brig, shearing away half of her sweeps, and leaving her there like a bird with one wing shot off.

Now this, of course, was an overt attack, the brig’s first inarguable proof that she was under assault by pirates. So her captain moved just as van Hoek had predicted: He ordered that a cannon be run out and fired, as a signal to whomever was keeping watch over the harbor from the battlements of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.

But a single cannon-shot in the night-time is an ambiguous statement, and difficult to interpret—especially when what it is trying to say is something extremely implausible, such as that a Viceroy’s treasure-brig is being assaulted by a Corsair-galley in the midst of one of Spain’s most important harbors. And no sooner had the brig fired its distress-shot than another ship, a bit farther out to sea, fired several: this was Météore, the jacht that had appeared out of the Gulf towards sunset, flying Dutch colors. In response, a ragged patter of signals were fired from the town’s batteries. This had been done at the request of the cargador metedoro, who had been talked into believing that he had incoming goods on that jacht and did not want to wake up tomorrow morning to discover that she had run aground on the bar.

The Viceroy’s brig, spinning helplessly in the swirling currents, was swept out over the bar and into the Gulf of Cadiz without anyone in the town’s having a clear idea of what was going on.

There was a half-moon that night, and as they drifted into the Gulf Jack watched it chasing the lost sun towards the western ocean, all aglow on its underside, like a ball of silver heated on one side by the burning radiance of a forge. It was shrouded in ripped and frayed tissues of cloud that stole some of its light: new weather coming in from the ocean, which was bad for them, because it meant that tomorrow their pursuers would have wind.

And tonight their prey were beginning to have it: a chilly breeze coming in straight from the Atlantic. Seamen had already gone to stations on the upperdeck to raise sails and get under way as best they might. Jack sensed that the Spaniards were breathing easier now: The ride down the dark river among anchored ships and over the shallow bar had been dangerous, but now they had a lot of water under their keel, and they had a bit of wind. After a few minutes’ preparations they could raise some sails and move out a bit farther from the town, to eliminate the risk of running aground, and wait for daylight.

They were unaware that the galleot, after shearing away their oars, had rowed out into the Gulf and transformed herself into another kind of ship entirely. Stowed in the aisle that ran up her center, between the benches, had been an uncommonly large carpet, rolled up into a bundle some ten yards long. But that carpet (if all had gone according to the Plan) was now jetsam, unrolled and adrift in the Gulf of Cadiz somewhere. Its former contents—a tree-trunk of straight-grained fir from the slopes of the Atlas Mountains, spoke-shaved to a smooth needle shape, bolstered with iron hoops, and tipped with a barbed iron spearhead—had been brought forward and mounted on the nose of the galleot, somewhat like a bowsprit, but nearer to the waterline, and not so encumbered with stays and martingales. That iron spearhead should even now be skimming over the waves at a velocity of about ten knots, with fifty tons of galleot behind it, and one Spanish treasure-brig dead ahead.

The general plan was to strike the brig on her quarter, which meant towards the stern, where large cannons were somewhat less plentiful. The only drawback was that this made it impossible for the five boarders who were clinging to the stempost to see the galleot approaching (to the extent they could see anything by the flat chalky light of the setting half-moon). But the sudden screaming from the other end of the ship gave them a good clue that the time was now. They waited for a moment, as many footsteps receded, and then finally swung their grapples up and over the rail. Each man pulled on his rope until he felt the flukes catch in something (no way of guessing what, or how sturdy it might be) and after testing it with a few sharp tugs, abandoned his foot-loop and gave himself up to his rope. Because the hull flared out overhead they all swung far away from it, and swept to and fro above the water like pendulums.

Jack’s arms nearly gave way, for they had grown stiff in the fresh breeze coming off the ocean, and he slid down a short distance before finally whipping a leg round the rope and trapping it between shins and ankles. After that it was just rope-climbing, which was something he had done far too much of in his life. Consequently he surprised himself by being the first boarder to tumble over the rail and feel the blessing of wood against the soles of his feet.

He was standing in that part of the ship known as the head, gazing down her length. The moonlight was horizontal and so the masts, the rigging, and a few standing figures were columns of silver, but the deck was a black pool, completely invisible. A vast commotion was underway astern. Several pistols were suddenly discharged, making Jack startle. At the same moment he heard a gaseous eruption from very nearby, and turned to discover a Spaniard seated on a bench with his breeches round his ankles, gazing up, moonfaced with astonishment, at Jack. He made as if to stand, but Jack simply fell into him, driving one shoulder into the man’s abdomen to prevent him from calling out, shoving his buttocks into the hole he’d been sitting on, and wedging him into place with gleaming knees projecting into the sky. The Spaniard threw out one hand like a grapple on a rope, reaching for his coat, neatly folded on the bench, where a loaded pistol lay. But out came the Janissary-sword. Jack put its point against the Spaniard’s belly. “I’ll have that, señor,” he said, and took the pistol up in his free hand.

The other four boarders were just struggling over the rail. The timing was apt, because now there was a mighty splintering pop from astern. One of the benefits of having been a galley-slave of the Barbary Corsairs for several years was that Jack knew and recognized that sound: It was a large iron spear-head piercing the hull of a European ship. And it was followed a moment later by a crash that made them all hop to keep their balance.

Nyazi had clambered aboard farther astern than anyone else, and was all of a sudden blind-sided by a Spaniard who came at him silently with a dagger. The weapon lunged forward and met only air. Nyazi had somehow sensed the attack and gone elsewhere. Then he was back, swinging his cutlass, and felled his attacker with a frantic back-handed slash.

Then Dappa, Gabriel, Yevgeny, and Jack all moved at once, without discussion. Some parts of the Plan were complicated, but not this one. A brig had but two masts, and each mast had a platform halfway up called a top, reachable by clambering up a ladderlike web of shrouds. At this moment the fore-top was unoccupied. Jack handed the pistol to Dappa, who tucked it into his belt and began climbing. Yevgeny was loading some pistols he had brought with him (it being impractical to keep them loaded, and their powder dry, when they were bumping about in a partly submerged bag). Jack and Gabriel worked their separate ways astern along the larboard and starboard rails respectively, Jack swinging his Janissary-sword and Gabriel a sort of queer two-handed scimitar of Nipponese manufacture, on loan from some Corsair-captain’s trophy case. They were severing not heads, but haul-yards: the lines, running in parallel courses through large blocks, that were used to hoist up the yards from which the ship’s sails were all suspended.

Finally, then, Jack and Gabriel began to ascend the main shrouds, converging on the maintop where three Spanish sailors had belatedly realized that they were under siege. One of these drew out a pistol and pointed it down at Jack, but was struck in the arm by a pistol-ball from Dappa, shooting from a few yards away on the fore-top. A moment later Yevgeny fired from down on the deck, and apparently missed—assuming he was even trying to hit anything. For the two unhurt sailors on the maintop were dumbfounded to find themselves under fire from the bows of their own ship, only moments after being rammed astern, and it was probably better to have them stunned and indecisive than wounded and angry. Jack and Gabriel gained the maintop at about the same time, disarmed the two unhurt sailors at sword-point, and encouraged them, in the strongest possible terms, to descend to the deck. Yevgeny tossed up a couple of muskets, which were not even loaded yet.

Not that it mattered. For Jeronimo, standing back on the quarterdeck of the galleot, had seen Jack’s and Gabriel’s exploits. Raising to his lips the same speaking trumpet that Mr. Foot had used, only hours before, to try to sell carpets to the Viceroy, he now delivered a flowery oration in noble Spanish. Jack did not know the language that well, but caught the obligatory reference to Neptune (in whose jurisdiction they now were) and Ulysses (representing the Cabal) who had gone into a certain cave (the estuary of the Guadalquivir) that turned out to contain a Cyclops (the Viceroy and/or his brig) and escaped by poking said Cyclops in the eye with a pointed stick (no metaphor here; they had done it literally). It would have sounded magnificent, booming out of that trumpet and across the water, except that it was commingled with bewildering spates of profanity that made the sailors edge backwards and cross themselves.

Jeronimo identified himself, then, as El Desamparado Returned from Hell—as if he could have been any other. He reminded the brig’s captain that he was now adrift in the Gulf with a completely disabled ship and a skeleton crew, that his tops were now commanded by boarders armed with muskets, and, in case anyone was insufficiently scared, he told the lie that ten pounds of gunpowder were encased in the hollow head of the battering-ram now buried deep in the brig’s vitals, not far away from the powder magazine, and that it could easily be detonated at the whim of who else but El Desamparado.

Jack had the benefit of watching this performance from an exclusive private loge, as it were, at the back of the theatre. He noticed a sigh run through the brig’s crew when the fell sobriquet of El Desamparado first rang from the trumpet. The battle turned at that instant. When the gunpowder was mentioned, pistols and cutlasses began clattering to the deck. Jack judged that the captain, and one or two officers, were willing to fight—but it scarcely mattered, because the crew, exhausted from the passage of the Atlantic, were not keen on giving their lives to make the Viceroy slightly richer, when the taverns and whorehouses of Sanlúcar de Barrameda glowed so warmly from the shore a couple of miles away.

Six Barbary Corsairs—now resplendent in turbans and scimitars—came aboard the brig, along with the other members of the Cabal. Two of the Corsairs remained on the galleot, prowling up and down the aisle with whips and muskets to remind the oar-slaves that they were yet in the power of Algiers. The brig’s crew were disarmed and herded up to the poop deck, and several swivel-guns were charged with double loads of buckshot and aimed in their direction, manned by Corsairs or Cabal-members with burning torches. The officers were put in leg-irons and locked into a cabin guarded by a Corsair. They were joined by Mr. Foot, who made them chocolate; as it was felt by many in the Cabal that the best way to keep several Spanish officers in a helpless stupor was to have Mr. Foot engage them in light conversation.

Jeronimo led Nasr al-Ghuráb, Moseh, Jack, and Dappa belowdecks to the shot-locker, and hacked off a giant padlock, and flung its hatch open. Jack was expecting to see lead cannonballs, or nothing but rat-turds, because life had trained him to expect grievous disappointments and double-crossings at every turn. But the contents of that locker gleamed as only precious metals could—and gleamed yellow.

Jack thought of finding Eliza in the hole beneath Vienna.

“Gold!” Dappa said.

“No, it is a trick of the light,” Jeronimo insisted, moving his torch to and fro, experimenting with different positions. “These are silver pigs.”

“They are too regular in their shape to be pigs,” Jack pointed out. “Those are bars of refined metal.”

“Nonetheless—silver it must be, for gold is not produced by the mines of New Spain,” said El Desamparado doggedly. Now Jack had a small insight concerning Excellentissimo Domino Jeronimo Alejandro Peñasco de Halcones Quinto: He had a tale worked out in his head, like the tales written in the moldy books of his ancestors. The tale was the only way for him to make sense of his life. It ended with him finding a hoard of silver pigs, tonight, here. To find anything other than silver pigs was to suffer some sort of cruel mockery at the hands of Fate; finding gold was as bad as finding nothing.

But Jack’s reflections, and the Caballero’s denials, were interrupted by a sharp noise. The raïs had taken a coin from his belt-pouch and tossed it onto one of the bars. It spun and buzzed, a disk of silvery white on a slab of yellow. “That is a piece of eight—if you have forgotten the color of silver,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb. “What it lies on is gold.”

Then, for a long time, none of them uttered a sound. Even Jeronimo’s tongue had been silenced.

Moseh cleared his throat. “I think Jews have no word for this,” he said, “because we do not expect to get so lucky. But Christians, I believe, call it Grace.”

“I would call it blood money,” said Dappa.

“It was always blood money,” Jeronimo said.

“You told us, once, that the silver mines of Guanajuato were worked by free men,” Dappa reminded him. “This, being gold, must come from the mines of Brazil—which are worked by slaves taken from Africa.”

“I have watched you shoot a Spanish sailor not half an hour ago—where were all your scruples then?” Jack asked.

Dappa glared back at him. “Overcome by a desire not to see my comrade get shot in the face.”

Jeronimo said, “The Plan does not allow for finding gold where we expected silver. It means we have thirteen times as much money as we reckoned. Most likely we will all end up killing each other—perhaps this very night!”

“Now your demon is talking,” said al-Ghuráb.

“But my demon always speaks the truth.”

“We will continue with the Plan as if this were silver,” Moseh said nervously.

Jeronimo said, “You are all filthy liars, or imbeciles. Obviously there is no reason to go to Cairo!”

“On the contrary: There is an excellent reason, which is that the Investor expects to meet us there, to claim his rake-off.”

“The investor himself!? Or did you mean to say, the Investor’s agents?” Jack said sharply.

Moseh said, “It makes no difference,” but exchanged a nervous look with Dappa.

“I heard one of the Pasha’s officials joking that the Investor was going to Cairo to hunt for Ali Zaybak!” said the raïs, trying to inject a bit of levity. The attempt failed, leaving him bewildered, and Moseh on the verge of blacking out.

“Why do we waste breath speaking of the Frog?” Jeronimo demanded. “Let the whoreson chase phant’sies to the end of the earth for all we care.”

“The answer is simple: He has a knife to our throats,” said al-Ghuráb.

“What are you talking about?” Jack asked.

“That jacht did not sail down here only to provide a diversion,” said the Corsair. “He could have dispatched any moldy old tub for that purpose.”

“The Turk makes sense,” Dappa said to Jack in English. “Jacht means ‘hunter,’ and that is the swiftest-looking vessel I’ve ever seen. She could sail rings around us—firing broadsides all the while.”

“So Météore is poised to kill us, if we play any tricks,” Jack said, “but how will she know whether or not we need to be killed?”

“Before we row away tonight, we are to sound a certain bugle-call. If we fail—or if we sound the wrong one—she’ll fall on the galleot at first light, like a lioness on a crate full of chickens,” the Turk answered. “Likewise, we are to give certain signals to the Algerian ships that will escort us along the coast of Barbary, and to the French ones that will accompany us through the eastern Mediterranean.”

“And you are the only man who knows these signals, I suppose,” Dappa said, finding amusement here, as he did in many odd places.

“Hmph…what’s the world coming to when a French Duke cannot bring himself to trust a merry crew such as ours?” Jack grumbled.

“I wonder if the Investor knew, all along, that the brig would contain gold?” Dappa said.

“I wonder if he will know tomorrow,” said Jack, staring into the eyes of the raïs.

Al-Ghuráb grinned. “There is no signal for that information.”

Moseh, clapping his hands together, now said, “I believe the larger point our captain is making is that even if some of us…” glancing towards Jeronimo, “are inclined to turn this unexpected good fortune into a pretext for intrigues and skullduggery, we’ll not even have the opportunity to scheme against; betray; and/or murder one another unless we get the goods off this brig fast and commence rowing.”

“This is merely a postponement,” Jeronimo sighed. Obviously, it would take many days to cheer him up. “The inevitable result will be double-crossings and a general bloodbath.” He reached down with both hands and heaved a gold bar off the top of the hoard with a grunt of effort.

“One,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb.

Jeronimo began trudging up the stairs.

Moseh stepped forward and wrapped his fingers around a bar; bent his knees; and pulled it up off the stack. “It is not so different from pulling on a wooden oar,” he said.

“Two,” said the raïs.

Dappa hesitated, then forced himself to reach out and put his hands on a bar, as if it were red hot. “White men tell the lie that we are cannibals,” he said, “and now I am become one.”

“Three.”

“Don’t be gloomy, Dappa,” Jack said. “Recall that I could’ve run away last night. Instead I listened to the Imp of the Perverse.”

“What is your point?” Dappa muttered over his shoulder.

“Four,” said al-Ghuráb, watching Jack grab a bar.

Jack began to mount the stairs behind Dappa. “I’m the only one of us who had a choice. And—never mind what the Calvinists say—no man is truly damned until he has damned himself. The rest of you are just like trapped animals gnawing your legs off.”

What when we fled amain, pursu’d and strook

With Heav’ns afflicting Thunder, and besought

The Deep to shelter us? This Hell then seem’d

A refuge from those wounds: or when we lay

Chain’d on the burning Lake? that sure was worse.

—MILTON,
Paradise Lost

They left the ram embedded in the brig’s buttock and rowed off about an hour before dawn as one of the Corsairs played a heathen melody on a bugle. Most of their previous cargo and ballast had been thrown overboard as the gold bars had been passed from hand to hand up out of the brig’s shot-locker and across the deck and slid down a plank into the galleot. As sunrise approached, the breeze off the ocean consolidated itself into a steady west wind. First light revealed a colossal wall of red clouds that began somewhere below the western horizon and reached halfway to the stars. It was a sight to make sailors scurry for safe harbor, even if they were not aboard an undecked, anchorless row-boat fleeing from the iniquity of Man and the wrath of God.

The distance to the Strait of Gibraltar was seventy or eighty miles. With no wind to fill their sails that would take longer than a day; in these circumstances, it could be done before nightfall.

Van Hoek payed no attention to those clouds, which were many hours in their future; he was gazing at the waves around them, which began to develop little white hats as the sun and the wind came up. “They will be able to make six knots,” he said, referring to the Spanish ships that would be chasing them, “and that beauty will be able to make eight,” nodding at Météore, which was becoming visible a few miles in the distance. Jack and everyone else knew perfectly well that in these circumstances—the hull recently scraped and waxed, and combining the use of sails and oars—the galleot could likewise sustain eight knots.

They might, in other words, have been able to flee from the jacht and make a run for freedom on this very day—but first they would have had to fight the Corsairs on board. And at the end of the day they’d have to rely on other Corsairs to protect them from Spanish vengeance. So they adhered to the Plan.

The first several miles, from Sanlúcar de Barrameda to Cadiz, might have been an ordinary morning cruise, no different from their training-voyages around Algiers. But Météore—now flying French colors—raised as much sail as she could, and began to shadow them, a mile or two off to the west. Perhaps she only wanted to observe, but perhaps she was waiting for an opportunity to board them, and seize all the proceeds, and send them back into slavery or to David Jones’s Locker. So they made as much speed as they could, and were already running scared, and rowing hard, when they came in sight of Cadiz. Two frigates sailed out from there and challenged them with cannon-shots across the bows—evidently messengers had galloped down from Bonanza during the night.

The day then dissolved into a long sickening panic, a slow and stretched-out dying. Jack rowed, and was whipped, and other times he whipped other men who were rowing. He stood above men he loved and saw only livestock, and whipped skin off their backs to make them row infinitesimally harder, and later they did the same to him. The raïs himself rowed, and was whipped by his own slaves. Whips wore out and broke. The galleot became an open tray of blood, skin, and hair, a single living body cut open by some pitiless anatomist: the benches ribs, the oars digits, the men gristle, the drum a beating heart, the whips raw dissected nerves that spun and whorled and crackled through the viscera of the hull. This was the first hour of their day, and the last; it quickly became too terrible to imagine, and remained thus without letting up, forever, even though it was only a day—just as a short nightmare can seemingly encompass a century. It passed out of time, in other words, and so there was nothing to tell of it, as it was not a story.

They did not begin to be human again until the sun went down, and then they had no idea where they were. There were not as many men in the galleot as there had been when the sun had come up and they had dipped dry oars into the whitecaps as the bugle played. No one was really sure why. Jack had a vague recollection of seeing bloody bodies going over the gunwales, pushed by many hands, and of an attempt that had been made to throw him overboard, which had come to naught when he had begun thrashing around. Jack assumed that Mr. Foot could not have survived the day, until later he heard ragged breathing from a dark corner of the quarterdeck, and found him huddled under some canvas. The rest of the Cabal had all survived. Or at least they were all present. The meaning of survival was not entirely clear on a day like this. Certainly they would never be the same. Jack’s similitude about trapped beasts gnawing their legs off had been intended as a sort of jest, to make Dappa feel less guilty, but today it had come true; even if Moseh, Jeronimo, and the others were still breathing, and still aboard, important pieces of them had been chewed off and left behind. That night, it did not occur to Jack that, for some of them at least, this might amount to an improvement.

Raindrops were coming out of the dark, and they lay on their bellies on the benches letting the water cleanse their wounds. The galleot was bucking in huge pyramidal seas that rushed at her from various directions. Some were afraid they would run aground on the shore of Spain. But van Hoek—once he was able to speak again, and had finished praying to God for forgiveness and redemption—said he was certain he had spied Tarifa off to port, gleaming in the sunlight of late afternoon. This meant that the weather was driving them into the open Mediterranean; that the Corsair-countries were on their starboard; and that they were now a part of Spain’s glorious past.

Off Malta

LATE AUGUST 1690

“SINCE BEFORE THE TIME of the Prophet my clan has bred and raised camels on the green foothills of the Mountains of Nuba, in Kordofan, up above the White Nile,” said Nyazi, as the galleot drifted langorously through the channel between Malta and Sicily. “When they are come of age, we drive them in great caravans down into Omdurman, where the White and the Blue Nile become one, and thence we follow tracks known only to us, sometimes close to the Nile and sometimes ranging far out into the Sahara, until we reach the Khan el-Khalili in Cairo. That is the greatest market of camels, and of many other things besides, in the world. Sometimes too we have been known to follow the Blue Nile upstream and cross over the mountains of Gonder into Addis Ababa and points beyond, even ranging as far as sea-ports where ivory-boats set their sails for Mocha.

“Unlike my comrade Jeronimo I am not one to tell flowery stories, and so I will merely relate that on one such journey, many of the men in my caravan fell ill and died. Now we are great fighters all. But we were so weakened that, in a mountain pass, we fell prey to a tribe of savages who have never heard the word of the Prophet; or if they have, they have disregarded it, which is worse. At any rate, it was their custom that a young man could not come of age and take a wife until he had castrated an enemy and brought his orchids of maleness to the chief shaman. And so every man of my clan who had not died of the disease was emasculated, except for me. For I had been riding behind the caravan to warn of ambushes from the rear. I was on an excellent stallion. When I heard the fighting, I galloped forward, praying that Allah would let me perish in battle. But by the time I drew near, all I heard was screaming. Some of it was the cries of the men being castrated, but, too, I heard my own brother—who had already suffered—shouting my name. ‘Nyazi!’ he cried, ‘Fly away, and meet us at the Caravanserai of Abu Hashim! For henceforth you must be the husband of our wives, and the father of our children; the Ibrahim of our race.’ ”

This engendered a respectful silence from each of the Ten, save one. Jack held his cupped hands in front of him like scale-pans, bobbled them, and let one drop. “Beats having your nuts cut off by wild men,” he said.

At this Nyazi flew into a rage (which was something Nyazi did very well) and launched himself on Jack more or less like a leopard. Jack fell on his arse, then rolled onto his back—which hurt, because his back was still one large scab. He managed to get his knees up in Nyazi’s ribs, then used the strength of his legs to shove him off. Nyazi sprawled flat on his back, screamed just as Jack had done, and there was pinned to the deck by Gabriel Goto and Yevgeny. It was several minutes before he could be calmed down.

“I offer you my apologies,” he said, with extreme gravity. “I forgot that you have suffered an even worse mutilation.”

“Worse? How do you reckon?” asked Jack, still lying flat trying to think of a way to stand up without doing any more damage to his back.

Nyazi copied Jack’s gesture of the bobbling scale-pans. “My clansmen could still perform the act—but they did not wish to. You wish to, but cannot.”

“Touché,” Jack muttered.

“Because of this, I see, now, that you were not accusing me of cowardice, and so I no longer feel obligated to kill you.”

“Truly you are a prince among camel-traders, Nyazi, and no man is better suited to be the Ibrahim of his race.”

“Alas,” Nyazi sighed, “I have not yet been able to impregnate even a single one of my forty wives.”

“Forty!” cried several of the Cabal at once.

“Counting the several I already had; ones we had acquired in trade during this trip and sent home via a different route; and those of the men who had been made eunuchs by the savages, the number should come to forty, give or take a few. All waiting for me in the foothills of the mountains of Nuba.” Nyazi got a faraway look in his eye, and an impressive swelling down below. “I have been saving myself,” he announced, “refusing to practice the sin of Onan, even when ifrits and succubi come to tempt me in the night-time. For to spill my seed is to diminish my ferocity, and weaken my resolve.”

“You never made it to the Caravanserai of Abu Hashim?”

“On the contrary, I rode there directly, and there waited for my poor clansmen to catch up with me. I understood it might be a long wait, as men who have suffered in this way naturally tend to avoid long camel rides. After I had been there for two nights, a caravan came down out of the upper White Nile laden with ivory. The Arabs of the caravan saw my skill with camels, and asked if I would help them as far as Omdurman, which was three days to the north. I agreed, and left word with Abu Hashim that I would be back to meet my brothers in less than a week.

“But on the first night out, the Arabs fell on me and put a collar around my neck and made me a slave. I believe they intended to keep me forever, as a camel-driver and a butt-boy. But when we got near Omdurman, the Arabs went to a certain oasis and drew up not far from a caravan headed by a Turk. And here the usual sort of negotiation took place: The Arabs took the goods they wished to trade (mostly elephant tusks) and piled them up halfway between the two camps, then withdrew. The Turks then came out and inspected the goods, then made a pile of the stuff they wished to trade (tobacco, cloth, ingots of iron) and withdrew. It went back and forth like this for a long time. Finally I was added to the Arabs’ pile. Then the Turks came out and took me away along with the Arabs’ other goods, and the cursed Arabs did likewise with the goods of the Turks, and we went our separate ways. Eventually the Turks took me as far as Cairo, and there I tried to escape—for I knew that my clansmen would be at the Khan el-Khalili during a certain time of year, which is late August. Alas, I was caught because of the treachery of a fellow-slave. Later I tore a leg from a stool and beat him to death with it. The Turks could see that I would be trouble as long as I remained in Cairo, and so I was traded to an Algerian corsair-captain who had just rowed into port with a cargo of blonde Carmelite nuns.”

Jack sighed. “I am never one to turn down a yarn. But I detect a certain repetitive quality in these galley-slave narrations, which forces me to agree with (speaking of blonde slave-girls) dear Eliza, who took such a dim view of the whole practice.”

“But as I recall from your narrations—which were not devoid of a certain repetitive quality, by the way—” Dappa said, “she objected on moral grounds—not because it led to monotonous storytelling.”

“I, too, could probably dream up some highfalutin grounds if all I had to pass the time was embroidery and bathing.”

“I did not realize that pulling on an oar posed such a challenge to your intellect,” Dappa returned.

“Until la suette anglaise delivered me from the French Pox, I had no intellect at all. When I’m rich and free, I’ll come up with a hundred and one reasons why slavery is bad.”

“A single good one would suffice,” Dappa said.

Feeling the need for a change of subject, Jack turned towards Vrej Esphahnian, who had been squatting on his haunches smoking a twist of Spanish tobacco and watching the exchange.

“Oh, mine is banal compared with everyone else’s,” he said. “As you may recall, my brother Artan sent out letters to diverse places, inquiring about the market for ostrich plumes. What came back convinced him that our family’s humble estate might be bettered if we established a trading-circuit to Northern Africa. I was dispatched to Marseille to make it so. From there, by buying passage on small coastal vessels, I tried to work my way down the Balearic coast of Spain towards Gibraltar, which I supposed would be a good jumping-off place. But I did not appreciate that the Spanish coast from Valencia downwards is infested with Moorish pirates, whose forefathers once were the lords of al-Andalus. These Corsairs knew the hidden coves and shallows of that coastline as well as—”

“All right, all right, you have said enough to convince me that it is, as you said, the usual galley-slave tale,” Jack said, strolling over to the rail and stretching—very carefully. He picked up a bulging skin and squirted a stream of stale water into his mouth, then stood up on the bench to contemplate the rock of Malta, which was drifting by them a few miles to starboard. He had just realized that it was a very small island and that he’d better look at it while he had the chance. “What I meant was: How did you end up on my oar?”

“The ineffable currents of the slave-market drove me to Algiers. My owner learned that I had some skills beyond oar-pulling, and put me to work as a bookkeeper in a market where Corsairs sell and trade their swag. The winter before last, I made the acquaintance of Moseh, who was asking many questions about the market in tutsaklar ransom futures. We had several conversations and I began to perceive the general shape of his Plan.”

“He told you about Jeronimo, and the Viceroy?”

“No, I learned of that on the same night as you.”

“Then what do you mean when you say you understood his plan?”

“I understood his basic principle: that a group of slaves who, taken one by one, were assigned a very low value by the market, might yet be worth much when grouped together cleverly…” Vrej rolled up to his feet and grimaced into the sun. “The wording does not come naturally in this bastard language of Sabir, but Moseh’s plan was to synergistically leverage the value-added of diverse core competencies into a virtual entity whose whole was more than the sum of its parts…”

Jack stared at him blankly.

“It sounds brilliant in Armenian.” Vrej sighed.

“How came you to be at the bottom of the slave-market?” Jack asked. “I know your family was not the wealthiest, but I should’ve thought they’d pay anything to ransom you from Algiers.”

Vrej’s face stopped moving, as if he had spied a Gorgon atop one of Malta’s cliffs. Jack gathered that the question was an impolite one, by Armenian standards.

“Never mind,” Jack said, “you are right, it makes no difference why your family would not, or could not, pay your ransom.” Then, after there’d been no word from Vrej in quite a while: “I’ll not ask again.”

“Thank you,” said Vrej, as if forcing the words past a clenched garrotte.

“Nonetheless, it is remarkable that we ended up on the same oar,” Jack continued.

“Algiers in wintertime is lousy with wretched slaves, trying to dream their way to freedom,” Vrej admitted, in a voice still tight and uneven. But as he continued talking, the anger, or sadness, that had possessed him for a few minutes slowly drained away. “I reckoned Moseh for another one of these at first. As one conversation led to the next, I perceived he was a man of intelligence, and began to think that I should throw in my lot with him. But when I learned that he had acquired a new bench-mate named Jack Shaftoe, I looked on it as a sign from God. For I owe you, Jack.”

“You owe me!?”

“And have, ever since the night you fled Paris. On that night my family and I incurred a debt to you, and if necessary we will travel to the end of the world, and sell our souls, to make good on it.”

“You can’t be thinking of those damned ostrich plumes?”

“You left them in our trust, Jack, and made us your commission-agents in the matter.”

“They were trash—the amount of money is trivial. Please do not consider yourself under any obligation…”

“It is a matter of principle,” Vrej said. “So I hatched a Plan of my own, every bit as complex as the Plan of Moseh, but not nearly so interesting. I’ll spare you the details, and tell you only the result: I was traded to your oar, Jack, and chained to you in fact—though chains of iron are nothing compared to the chains of debt and obligation that have fettered us since that night in Paris in 1685.”

“That is extremely civil of you,” Jack said. “But the only thing in all the world that makes me feel more ill at ease than being obliged, is some other man’s feeling obliged to me—so when we reach Cairo I’ll accept a few extra pounds of coffee, or something, to cover the proceeds from the sale of those ostrich-plumes, and then you and I can go our separate ways.”

AFTER RIDING THE front of a storm through the Strait of Gibraltar, they had spent a couple of days riding out the gale in the Alboran Sea, the anteroom of the Mediterranean. When the weather had settled down they had sailed southeast, steering toward the peaks of the Atlas Mountains, until they’d picked up the Barbary Coast not far from the Corsair-port of Mostaganem. They had not put in there—partly because they had no anchors, and partly because Nasr al-Ghuráb seemed to be under strict instructions not to make contact with the world until they had reached their destination. But a few miles up the coast from Mostaganem, where a river came down off the north slopes of the Atlas and spilled into the sea, al-Ghuráb had caused a certain flag to be run up the mast. Not much later a bergantine had come rowing out of a hidden cove and had drawn alongside them, carefully remaining a bow-shot away. There had been some shouting back and forth in Turkish, and the galleot’s skiff had been sent over, carrying two corsairs and Dappa, and collected kegs of fresh water and some other victuals. This bergantine had then shadowed them on the slow progress along the coast to the harbor of Algiers. Slow because they had almost never laid hands on the oars; no one wanted to, most were not fit to, and the raïs had not asked them to.

At Algiers most of the regular oar-slaves had been transferred into the Peñon, the squat Spanish fortress in the middle of the harbor, and locked up, for the time being, in places where they could not tell the tale of what they had seen. Empty wooden crates had come back, and the Cabal had busied itself packing the gold bars into them and stuffing straw in between so that they would not clank. Only after the crates had been nailed securely shut had fresh—and ignorant—oar-slaves been brought aboard.

They had also acquired a new drum. For on the day following their deliverance from Spaniard and storm, Jack Shaftoe had made a great ceremony of tossing the old one overboard. It had been a large wooden barrel-half with a cowhide stretched over the top, the hair still on it except where it had been worn away from being pounded. It was mottled white and brown like an unlabelled map, and it had bobbed stubbornly alongside them for a while, a little world loose in the sea, until Jack had stove it in with an oar. Meanwhile, Jeronimo had solemnized it in his own way: looking about at the gore that lined the hull, and the exhausted and half-flayed rowers, he had said, “We are all blood brothers now.” Which he had probably intended as some sort of sacrament-like benediction. For his part, Jack could see any number of grave drawbacks to being part of the same family as Jeronimo. But he had kept these misgivings to himself so as not to mar the occasion. Jeronimo had included, among his new brothers, all of the galley-slaves who were not members of the Cabal, and promised that he would use his share of the proceeds to ransom them. This had produced only eye-rolling from those slaves who could understand what he was saying. As days had gone by, his promises had flourished like mushrooms after an autumn rain, until he had laid out a scheme for constructing or buying an actual three-masted ship, manning it with freed slaves, and setting out to found a new country somewhere. But as they had inched across the map towards Algiers, a depression had settled over him, and he’d gone back to predictions of a bloodbath in Egypt—or possibly even Malta.

Accompanied by another, more heavily armed galleot, they had left Algiers behind—they hoped forever. They had rowed briskly eastwards, passing by one small Corsair-port after another until they had traversed the mouth of the Gulf of Tunis and reached the Ras el Tib, a rocky scimitar-tip pointed directly at Sicily, a hundred miles to the northeast. Here they had offloaded all but a dozen of their oar-slaves and then used their sails to take them out into deep water—the first time they’d lost sight of land since the night of their escape from Bonanza. The raïs had immediately ordered the galleot’s Turkish colors struck, and had raised French ones in their stead.

THUS DISGUISED—if a new flag could be considered a disguise—they now sailed under the guns of various medieval-looking fortresses that had been built, by various occult sects of Papist knights, on crags and ridges looking north across the strait. No cannonballs were fired in their direction, and after a few hours, when they rounded a point and gazed into the Grand Harbor of Malta, they understood why: for a whole French fleet was riding at anchor there beneath the white terraces and flowered walls of Valletta. Not just merchant ships—though there were at least a dozen of those—but men-of-war, too. Three frigates to serve as gun-platforms, and a swarm of tactical galleys.

And—as van Hoek was first to notice—there was also Météore. Evidently she had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar behind them and then made directly for Malta, to join up with the fleet, and await the galleot. Jack borrowed a spyglass to have a look at the jacht, and was rewarded by a view of a new flag that had been run up her mizzen-mast. It was a banner emblazoned with a coat of arms that he’d last seen carved in bas-relief on the onrushing lintel of a door in the Hôtel Arcachon in Paris. “I would know that arrangement of fleurs-de-lis and Neeger-heads anywhere,” he announced. “The Investor is here in person.”

“He must have come down via Marseille,” van Hoek remarked.

“I thought I smelled a fish gone bad,” Jack said.

Likewise, their galleot was noticed and identified immediately. Within a few minutes a longboat had been sent out from Météore, rowed by half a dozen seamen and carrying a French officer. This fellow clambered aboard the galleot and made a quick inspection—just enough to verify that the crew was orderly and the vessel seaworthy. He handed the raïs a sealed letter and then departed.

“I wonder why he just doesn’t take us,” Yevgeny muttered, leaning on the rigging and gazing at all those warships.

“For the same reason that the Pasha did not do so when we were in the harbor of Algiers,” Moseh said.

“The Duke’s interests in that Corsair-city are deep,” Jack added. “He dares not queer his relations with the Pasha by violating the terms of the Plan.”

“I would have anticipated a more thorough inspection,” said Mr. Foot, arms crossed over his caftan as if he were feeling a chill, and glancing uneasily at a gold-crate.

“He knows we got something out of the Viceroy’s brig—and that it was valuable enough to make us risk our lives by tarrying in front of Sanlúcar de Barrameda for several hours, transshipping it to the galleot. If we’d found nothing we’d have fled without delay,” Jack said. “And that is as good as an inspection.”

“But does he know what it is?” Mr. Foot asked. They were within earshot of their skeleton crew of oar-slaves and so he had to speak obliquely.

“There is no way he could,” said Jack. “The only communication he’s had from this boat is a bugle call, which was a pre-arranged signal, and I doubt that they had a signal meaning thirteen.” Thirteen was a sort of code meaning twelve or thirteen times as much money as we expected.

“Still, we know that the Pasha of Algiers sent out messages on faster boats than ours, to all the ports of the Levant, telling the masters of all harbors to deny us entry.”

“All except for one,” Yevgeny corrected him.

“Might he not have sent a message here to Malta, telling about the thirteen?”

Dappa now came strolling along. “You are forgetting to ask a very interesting question, namely: Does the Pasha know?”

Mr. Foot appeared to be scandalized; Yevgeny, profoundly impressed. “I should imagine so!” said Mr. Foot.

Dappa said, “But have you noticed that, on every occasion when the raïs has parleyed with someone who does not know about the thirteen, he has been at pains to make sure I am present?”

“You, who are the only one of us who understands Turkish,” Yevgeny observed.

Jack: “You think al-Ghuráb has kept the matter of the thirteen a secret?”

Yevgeny: “Or wishes us to think that he has.”

Dappa: “I would say—to know that he has.”

Mr. Foot: “What possible reason could he have for doing such a thing?”

Dappa: “When Jeronimo gave his ‘blood brothers’ speech, and all the rest of you were rolling your eyes, I chanced to look at Nasr al-Ghuráb, and saw him blink back a tear.”

Mr. Foot: “I say! I say! Most fascinating.”

Jack: “For the Caballero, who is every inch the gentleman, it was no easy thing to admit what the rest of us have all known in our bones for so long: namely that we have found our natural and rightful place in the world here, among the broken and ruined scum of the earth. Perhaps the raïs was merely touched by the brutally pathetic quality of the scene.”

Dappa: “The raïs is a Corsair of Barbary. His sort enslave Spanish gentlefolk for sport. I believe he intends to make common cause with us.”

Mr. Foot: “Then why hasn’t he come out and said as much?”

Dappa: “Perhaps he has, and we have not been listening.”

Yevgeny: “If that is his plan, it depends entirely on what happens here in Malta. Perhaps he waits to announce himself.”

Jack: “Then it all pivots on that letter the Frenchman brought—and speaking of that, I believe we are delaying the ceremony.”

Nasr al-Ghuráb had retreated to the shade of the quarterdeck with the other members of the Cabal, who were looking toward them impatiently. When Jack and the others had arrived, the raïs passed the letter around so that all could inspect the splash of red wax that sealed it. Jack found it to be intact. He had half expected to find the arms of the Duc d’Arcachon mashed into it, but this was some sort of naval insignia. “I cannot read,” said Jack.

When the letter had made its way back to the raïs he broke the seal and unfolded it. “It is in Roman characters,” he complained, and handed it to Moseh, who said, “This is in French.” It passed into the hands of Vrej Esphahnian, who said, “This is not French, but Latin,” and gave it to Gabriel Goto, who translated it—though Jeronimo hovered over his shoulder cocking his head this way and that, grimacing or nodding according to the quality of Gabriel’s work.

“It begins with a description of very great anguish in the houses of the Viceroy and the Hacklhebers on the day following our adventure,” said the Jesuit in his curiously accented Sabir; though he was nearly drowned out by Jeronimo, who was laughing raucously at whatever Gabriel had glossed over. Gabriel waited for Jeronimo to calm down, then continued: “He says that his friendship with us is strong, and not to worry that every port in Christendom is now alive with spies and assassins seeking to collect the huge price that has been put on our heads by Lothar von Hacklheber.”

Which caused several of them to glance nervously towards the Valletta waterfront, judging whether they might be within musket-, or even cannon-range.

“He is trying to scare us,” Yevgeny snorted.

“It is just a formality,” Jack put in, “a—what’s it called—?”

“Salutation,” said Moseh.

Gabriel continued, “He says he has received a message from the Pasha, carried on a faster boat, to the effect that everything has gone exactly as planned.”

“Exactly!?” said Moseh, a bit unsettled, and he searched al-Ghuráb’s face. The raïs gave a little shrug and stared back at him coolly.

“Accordingly, he sees no reason to depart from the Plan now. As agreed, he will lend us four dozen oar-slaves, so that we can keep pace with the fleet on its passage to Alexandria. Victuals will be brought out on a small craft in a few hours. Meanwhile the jacht will send out a longboat to collect the raïs and the ranking Janissary—these will go to pick out the oar-slaves.”

Now all began talking at once. It was some time before their various conversations could be forged into one. Moseh did it by striking the new drum, which silenced them all; they’d been trained to heed it, and it reminded them once more that they were still enrolled as slaves on the books of the hoca el-pencik in the Treasury in Algiers.

Moseh: “If the Investor does not learn of the thirteen until Cairo, he’ll demand to know why we did not tell him immediately!” (shooting a reproachful look at the raïs). “It will be obvious to him that we sought to play out a deception, and later lost our nerve.”

Van Hoek: “Why should we care what the bastard thinks of us? It’s not as if we intend to do business with him in the future.”

Vrej: “This is short-sighted. The power of France in Egypt—especially Alexandria—is very great. He can make it go badly for us there.”

Jack: “Who says he’s ever going to find out about the thirteen?”

Jeronimo laughed with sick delight. “It begins!”

Moseh: “Jack, he expects his payment in silver pigs. We don’t have any!”

Jack: “Why give the son of a bitch anything?”

Van Hoek, grimly amused: “By continuing to conceal what the raïs has thus far concealed, we are already talking about screwing the investor out of twelve-thirteenths of what would otherwise come to him. So why make such scruples about the remaining one-thirteenth?”

Moseh: “I agree that we should either screw the Investor thoroughly, or not at all. But I would argue for completely open dealings. If we simply follow the Plan and give the Investor his due, we will all be free, with money in our purses.”

Jeronimo: “Unless he decides to screw us.”

Moseh: “But that is no more likely now than it was before!”

Jack: “I think it was always very likely.”

Yevgeny: “We cannot tell the Investor of the thirteen here, now. For then he will say that we tried to hide it earlier, as part of a plan to screw him, and use it as a pretext to seize the galleot.”

Van Hoek: “Yevgeny is an intelligent man.”

Jack: “Yevgeny has indeed read the Investor’s character shrewdly.”

Moseh clamped his head between the palms of his hands, massaging the bare places where forelocks had once grown. For his part, Vrej Esphahnian looked ill at ease to the point of nausea. Jeronimo had gone back to dire predictions, which none of them even heard any more. Finally Dappa said, “Nowhere in the world are we weaker than we are here and now. It is not the time to reveal great secrets.”

In this, it seemed, he spoke for the entire Cabal.

“Very well,” Moseh said, “we’ll tell him in Egypt, and we’ll hope he’ll be so pleased by unexpected fortune that he’ll overlook past deceptions.” He paused and heaved a sigh. “Now as for the other matter: Why does he want both the raïs and the ranking Janissary to come out in the longboat to collect the slaves?”

“It is a routine formality,” said the raïs. “For him to do otherwise would be very odd.”*

“Remember, we are speaking of a French Duke. He will hew to protocol no matter what,” Vrej agreed.

“Only one of us can pass for a Janissary. I will go,” Jack said. “Get me a turban and all the rest.”

“EVEN IF THAT DUKE STARED me full in the face, I doubt he would recognize me,” Jack said. “My face was covered most of the time that I was in his house—otherwise, he never would have mistaken me for Leroy. I only let the scarf fall at the very end—”

“But if there was any truth whatsoever in your narration,” said Dappa carefully, “it was a moment of high drama, exceeding anything ever staged in a theatre.”

“What is your point?”

“In those short moments you may have made a vivid impression in the Duke’s memory.”

“I should hope so!”

“No, Jack,” Moseh said gently, “you should hope not.”

Only Moseh, Dappa, and Vrej knew that the Investor had for some years been combing every last fen, wadi, and reef of the Mediterranean for the man identified, by Muslims, as Ali Zaybak. Moseh and Dappa had followed Jack to the dress-up sack to fret and wring their hands. Vrej was completely unconcerned, though: “In those days Jack had long hair, and a stubbled face, and was heavier. Now with his head and face shaved, and a turban, and with him so gaunt and weather-tanned, I think there is little chance of his being recognized—provided he keeps his trousers on.”

“What possible reason could there be to take them off?” Jack demanded hotly.

THE LONGBOAT CAME OUT. Jack and the raïs climbed in. Dappa came, too, as interpreter—for they had agreed that it would be unwise for Jack to let it be known that he spoke Vagabond-French. The longboat took them not to Météore after all, but to a part of the harbor where no fewer than half a dozen war galleys of the French Navy were tied up on either side of a long stone pier. The longboat was tied up at the pier’s end by a couple of barefoot French swabbies. The tide was quite low, so Jack, Nasr al-Ghuráb, and Dappa took turns ascending a ladder to the pier’s sun-hammered top and there met the same young officer who had earlier brought them the letter. He was a slender fellow with a high nose and an overbite, who bowed slightly, and greeted them without really showing respect. Introductions were made by an aide. The officer was identified as one Pierre de Jonzac.

“Tell Monsieur de Jonzac that he has the smallest nostrils of any human who ever lived,” Jack said in the most vulgar Sabir he could muster, “which must serve him well in his dealings with his master.”

“The Agha of the Janissaries greets you as one warrior to another,” Dappa said vaguely.

“Tell him that I am grateful that he has personally taken responsibility for getting us and our cargo to Egypt,” the raïs said.

French was exchanged. Pierre de Jonzac stiffened. His pupils widened and his nostrils shrank at the same time, as if they shared a common drawstring. “He understandeth little, and resenteth much,” Dappa said out of the side of his mouth.

“If we do not take our time, here, and pick out a good complement of slaves, why, we will fall behind the convoy, and Dutch or Calabrian pirates will end up with our cargo—” began the raïs.

“—of whose nature we are ignorant,” added Jack.

“—but which the Duke appears to value highly,” finished Dappa, who could see for himself how this was going. When he said all of this in French, Pierre de Jonzac flinched, and looked as if he were about to order them flogged. Then he seemed to think better of it.

De Jonzac spun on his heel and led them down the pier. The hulls of the French galleys were low as slippers and narrow as knives and could not even be seen from here, but each one had—as well as a pair of masts—both a fore-and a stern-castle, meant to carry her pay-load of cannons and Marines as high above the foes’ as possible. These castles—which were all decorated, gilded, and painted in the finest Barock style—seemed to hover in the air on either side of the pier, bobbing gently in the swell. It was a strangely peaceful scene—until they followed de Jonzac to the edge of the pier and looked down into one of the galleys: a stinking wood-lined gouge in the water, packed with hundreds of naked men, chained by their waists and ankles in groups of five. Many were dozing. But as soon as faces appeared above them, a few began to shout abuse, and woke up all the rest. Then they were all screaming.

“Rag-head! Come down here and take my seat!”

“You have a pretty ass, nigger! Bend over so we can inspect!”

“Where do you want to row today?”

“Take me! My oar-mates snore!”

“Take him! He prays too much!”

And so forth; but they were all shouting as loud as they could, and shaking their chains, and stomping the deck-planks so that the hull boomed like a drum.

“Je vous en prie!” said Pierre de Jonzac, extending a hand.

It came clear that they were expected to take a few slaves from each galley. A rite soon took shape: They’d cross a gangplank from the pier to the sterncastle and parley with the captain, who would be expecting them, and who would have helpfully culled out a few slaves—always the most miserable tubercular specimens on his boat. Nasr al-Ghuráb would prod them, inspect their teeth, feel their knees, and scoff. This was the signal to begin haggling. Using Dappa as his intermediary, al-Ghuráb had to reject galériens one by one, beginning always with the most pitiable, and these would be sent down into the ever-boiling riot of Vagabonds, smugglers, pickpockets, deserters, stranglers, prisoners of war, and Huguenots chained to the benches below. Then it would be necessary to pick out a replacement, which involved more haggling, as well as endless resentful glares, verbal abuse, bluffing, and stalling from the petty officers—called comités—who controlled the oar-deck, and tedious un-chaining and re-chaining. The longboat could only ferry ten or so slaves out to the galleot at a time, so five loads, and as many round trips, were needed.

Al-Ghuráb’s strategy had been that he would wear the French down by taking his time and choosing carefully; but as the day went on it became obvious that time was on the side of the captains of the galleys, who relaxed in their cabins, and of Pierre de Jonzac, who sipped Champagne under a giant parasol on the pier, while Jack, Dappa, and al-Ghuráb toiled up and down the gangplanks smelling the bodies and enduring the curses of the galériens. They picked out perhaps two boat-loads of reasonably good slaves before they began to lose their concentration, and after that they were more concerned with getting to the end of the day with some vestiges of dignity. Jack led many a galérien down the aisle that day. Some of them had to be prodded down the entire length of a one-hundred-fifty-foot ship to be offloaded. Each of those who was staying behind felt bound to say something to the one who was being taken off:

“I hope the Mohametans bugger you as often as you’ve whined about your wife and kids in Toulouse!”

“Send us a letter from Algiers, we hear the weather is very nice there!”

“Farewell, Jean-Baptiste, may God go with you!”

“Please don’t let the Corsairs ram us, I have nothing against them!”

It was on the very last trip of the day that Jack—standing in the aisle of a galley while the raïs argued with a comité—was dazzled, for a moment, by a bright light shone into his eye. He blinked and it was gone. Then it was back: bright as the sun, but coming from within this galley. The third time, he held up an arm to shield his eyes, and squinted at it sidelong, and perceived that it was coming from the middle of a bench near the bow, on the starboard side. He began walking towards it—creating a sensation among the galériens, who had all noticed the light on his face and were screaming and pounding their benches with amusement.

By the time he’d reached the forward part of the oar-deck, Jack had lost track of the light’s source—but then one more flash nicked him again, then faded and shrank to a little polygon of grey glass, held in a man’s fingers. Jack had already guessed it would be a hand-mirror, because these were commonly found among the few miserable effects that galley-slaves were allowed to have with them. By thrusting it out of an oar-lock, or raising it high overhead, the owner could see much that would otherwise be out of his view. But it was cheeky for a galérien to flash sunlight into the eyes of a free man standing in the aisle, because this was most annoying, and might be punished by breakage or confiscation of the mirror.

Jack looked up into the eyes of the insolent wretch who had been playing tricks on him, and recognized him immediately as Monsieur Arlanc, the Huguenot, whom he had last seen buried in shit in a stable in France.

Jack parted his lips; Monsieur Arlanc raised a finger to his, and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Then he swiveled his eyes in their sockets, leading Jack’s gaze over the gunwale and across the choppy black water of the harbor, off in the general direction of Sicily. Jack’s attention rolled aimlessly about the harbor, like a loose cannonball on a pitching deck, until it fell into a hole, and stopped. For he could clearly see a sort of heathen half-galley riding the swells at the harbor’s entrance, but obliterated, every so often, by a flash of light just like the one that had come from the hand-mirror of Monsieur Arlanc.

The half-galley was none other than the Cabal’s galleot.

Jack’s first thought was that the new slaves must be staging a mutiny and that his comrades were signalling for help. But the flashes emanated not from the quarterdeck, where the Cabal would make their last stand in a mutiny, but from a point down low and amidships: one of the oar-locks. It must be one of the new galériens, probably chained safely to his bench by now, but reaching out with a hand-mirror to flash signals to—whom, exactly?

Jack turned around to face the pier-side, which had fallen into deep shade as the sun had swung around over the high crags and castles of Malta. By blocking the sun’s glare with his hand he was able to see a vague spot of bluish light prowling around the pier’s shadows. The mirror was held in an unsteady hand on a rocking boat far away, and so the spot of light frequently careered off into the sky or plunged into the waves. But it would always come back, and work its way carefully down the pier, and then dart upwards at the same place. After this had occurred several times, Jack raised his sights to the top of the pier and saw Pierre de Jonzac sitting there at a folding table with a quill in one hand, staring out to sea. Each mirror-flash lit him up with a ghastly light, and after each one he glanced down (his wig moved) and made a mark (his quill wiggled).

“I suppose you think this was all predestined to happen, monsieur,” said Jack, “but I like to believe you had some say in the matter, and therefore deserve my thanks.”

“There is no time to talk,” Arlanc said. “But know that the men they have sent you are very dangerous: murderers, conspiracists, phanatiques, looters of bakeries, outragers of women, and locksmiths gone bad.”

“I would rather have a Huguenot or two,” Jack mused, scanning the other four members of Monsieur Arlanc’s team. The headman, who sat on the aisle, was a Turk.

“It is a noble conception, Jack, but not destined to happen. They will never agree to it—it is not part of their plan.”

“What about God? Doesn’t He have a plan?”

“I believe only that God preserved me until now so that I could show you what I have showed you,” said Monsieur Arlanc, glancing up towards de Jonzac frozen in another pallid flash, “and thereby repay you for your generosity in the stables. What on earth are you doing, by the way?”

“It is a long story,” Jack said, taking a step away—for al-Ghuráb had finally picked out the last slave, and was calling to him. “I’ll explain it when we reach Egypt.”

Monsieur Arlanc smiled like a saint on the gridiron, and shook his head. “This galley will never reach Egypt,” he said, “and my mortal body is, as you can see, one with it.” He patted the chain locked round his waist.

“What, are you joking? Look at the size of this armada! We’ll be fine.”

Arlanc closed his eyes, still smiling. “If you see Dutch colors, or English, or—may God forbid it—both combined, make for Africa, and stop not until you have run aground.”

“And then what? Go on foot across the Sahara?”

“It would be easier than the journey we begin tomorrow. God bless you and your sons.”

“Likewise you and yours. See you at the Sphinx.” Jack stormed off down the aisle. For once, the galériens did not hound him the whole way. They seemed sober and deflated instead, as if they had all guessed at the subject of Jack’s and Monsieur Arlanc’s conversation.

THE VOYAGE FROM MALTA to Alexandria was a rhumb-line a thousand miles long. The Dutch hit them halfway, five days into the passage, somewhere to the south of Crete. Jack supposed that if he were God watching the battle from Heaven it might make some kind of sense: the onslaughts of the Dutch capital ships, the stately maneuvers of the French ones, and the slashing zigzags of the galleys would form a coherent picture, and seem less like an interminable string of dreadful accidents. But Jack was just a mote on a galleot that was evidently considered too small to be worth attacking, or defending. Now they understood why the shrewd Investor had never insisted on having the loot taken off the galleot and loaded into a man-of-war: He must have suspected that half or more of his capital ships would end up on the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Every time a French frigate was struck by a Dutch broadside, a vast cloud of spinning planks, tumbling spars, and other important materials would come flying out the opposite side and tear up the water for a hundred yards or more. After this had happened several times the ship would stop moving and a galley would be brought in to tow it from the line of battle, somewhat like a servant scurrying into the middle of a lively dance-floor to drag away a fat count who had passed out from drink.

The galleot, for its part, wandered about aimlessly, like a lost lamb searching for its mother in a flock that was being torn apart by wolves. Van Hoek spent the day up on the maintop, cheering for the Dutch, and occasionally shouting explanations—so cryptic and technical as to be useless—of what was going on to the others. Very early the Cabal had met to discuss surrendering to the Dutch forthwith. But there was much that could go awry with that plan. At the very best it would mean surrendering all of the gold, and many in the Cabal did not share van Hoek’s natural affinity for the Dutch side of things anyway.

The galley to which Monsieur Arlanc was chained survived most of the battle without serious damage. Then (according to van Hoek) she was called in to ram a certain Dutch ship. Along the way she came under fire from others, and a bomb apparently went off in her sterncastle, starting a fire that, a few minutes later, detonated her powder magazine and essentially blew open her stern. Very quickly her bow began to point up in the air, her ram sweeping relentlessly upwards like the hand of a clock. The galériens in the forward half of the ship—presumably including Monsieur Arlanc—let go their oars and hooked their arms over their benches, though some of them broke loose, so that skeins of slaves dangled and swung like strings of trout hanging before a fishmonger’s stall.

“Let us row in that direction,” Jack said, “because it is no more dangerous than what we are doing anyway, and because it is good form.”

There was profound apprehension on the faces of other members of the Cabal. Vrej Esphahnian opened his mouth as if to lodge an objection but then a large cannonball hummed past, a couple of yards over their heads, confirming Jack’s point and sparing them many tedious deliberations. So Nasr al-Ghuráb brought the tiller around and they made for the sinking galley.

Meanwhile Jack went down among the oar-slaves—but not before asking Yevgeny to fetch a certain large hammer, and an anvil.

On the night before their departure from Malta, when most of the fleet’s ordinary seamen had been ashore carousing and/or receiving Holy Communion, and most of its officers attending formal dinners, the Cabal had armed themselves with blunderbusses and then worked their way down the aisle, unchaining one pair of slaves at a time and searching them. Turbans, head-rags, and loincloths had been shaken out and groped, jaws and butt-cheeks pried apart, hair combed through or cut off. Jeronimo had scoffed at this—more so after being told it was all because of a warning from a “heretic Frog slave.” But he went silent as soon as he saw a complete set of fine lock-picks being drawn out through the anal sphincter of a stocky middle-aged galérien named Gerard. And he remained silent as an increasingly astounding variety of hardware was produced, like conjurors’ tricks, from diverse orifices and bits of clothing. “If I see a granado coming from some man’s nostril I will be no more surprised than I am now,” he said. Finally a mirror was found, and then another—confirming Jack’s story. Nyazi was uncharacteristically pensive, and said: “Honor dictates that we send the Investor to Hell forthwith, along with as many of his clan as we can get our daggers into.” But El Desamparado flew into a rage that did not abate until he had ranted for the better part of an hour and made many trips up and down the length of the galleot flailing away with a nerf du boeuf.

Now these galériens were no more impressed by Jeronimo’s prowess with the whip than they were by his Classical allusions.* At the height of his rage Jeronimo was no more or less prepossessing than any comité of the French Navy. It was, rather, the odd comments he made when he calmed down that convinced them all that El Desamparado was a madman, and scared them all into silence and submission.

In any event, the French padlocks that had secured the slaves when they’d been brought over had been tossed into the bilge, and their chains heated up in the galleot’s portable brazier and hammered shut, just in case any lock-picks had escaped the search.

Now, as the galleot rowed through the wreckage of the French flotilla with clouds of grapeshot and lengths of smoking chain flying overhead, Jack fished one of those padlocks out of the bilge. As Yevgeny parted the chain of Gerard with a few terrible hammer-blows, Jack worked his way through the giant key-ring that the French had handed over to them, and got that padlock open. Then Jack, Yevgeny, Gerard, and Gabriel Goto got into the skiff and rowed the last few yards to the slowly sinking galley.

Hundreds of chained men had already been pulled below the water, and perhaps two score remained above it. The bench to which Monsieur Arlanc and his four companions were joined by a common chain, and from which they’d all been dangling for the last quarter of an hour, was only a couple of yards above the water now, and their legs were washed by every wave. Jack clambered onto that bench holding one end of the chain that went around Gerard’s waist, then wrapped Gerard’s chain around Arlanc’s and padlocked them together. He threw away the key and, for good measure, smashed the body of the lock with a hammer to make it unpickable.

Gerard’s eyes went immediately to the chain that went round the waists of Monsieur Arlanc and his four comrades, and terminated at the end of the bench along the aisle, where it was padlocked to a stout loop of iron.

Jack jumped back into the skiff; handed Gerard his set of lock-picks; and threw him overboard, saying, “Go and redeem thyself.”

Of course there was much more to it than that, and when Jack told the tale afterwards he would give the full report, with all due embellishments: the hysterical blubbering of some galériens, the pious praying of others, the many strong hands that shot up out of the water to grip the gunwales of their skiff and were cut away by Gabriel’s sword. The officers and French Marines still clinging to the galley’s forecastle, trying to buy passage on the galleot, or failing that, to fight their way aboard, only to be beaten back by Jeronimo and Nyazi and van Hoek and the others. The banks of powder-smoke drifting by overhead, and the bodies of the drowned galériens below: pale blurred forms in strings of five, like pearls.

But at the time Jack took little notice of this ambience and concentrated on the matter of the lock and the chain almost as intently as Gerard. At the moment that the galley pulled Gerard under water he still had not got the lock open, and Jack began to think his plan had failed. The Turk who sat in the aisle was pulled under crying “Allahu Akbar!” and then the man who sat next to Monsieur Arlanc went down intoning “Father into your hands I commend my spirit.” Then it came to the point where Monsieur Arlanc’s face was only visible in the troughs of the waves. But then the head of Gerard re-appeared, followed by that of the Turk; they were clambering uphill, using the galley as a ladder even as it slid deeper. Gerard reached a temporarily secure place, turned around, hefted the opened padlock in one hand, and flung it at Jack’s head. Jack ducked it and laughed. “There is your redemption, English!” screamed Gerard, weeping with rage.

NOW THEY MADE direct for the Mouths of the Nile, sailing by day and rowing by night. Every few hours they sighted remnant ships of the French fleet, now scattered across fifty miles. Several times they saw Météore, which had survived the battle with the amputation of her mizzenmast, and she signalled to them with mirror-flashes.

“A group of two, then a group of three,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb.

“According to the Plan, this is a signal that we are to curtail the voyage, and put in at Alexandria instead of going on to Abu Qir,” Moseh said.

Al-Ghuráb rolled his eyes. “That would be as good as going direct to Marseille. In El Iskandariya, the French are almost more powerful than the Turks.”

“There is no point in making it easy for the Investor to bugger us,” Jeronimo scoffed.

“Then we shall go to Cairo and make it slightly more difficult,” said the raïs.

“Cairo I like better than Alexandria,” Jack said, “but I do not like Cairo much. It is a cul-de-sac—the end of the line.”

“Not so—we could row up the Nile to Ethiopia!” Dappa said.

Nyazi, viewing Dappa’s jest as a challenge to his hospitality, declared that he would gladly sleep naked in the dirt to the end of his days in order to provide the Cabal with comfortable beds—providing they could get as far as the foothills of the Mountains of Nuba.

“The entire point of choosing Cairo was that it is as far East as Mediterranean vessels can go,” Moseh reminded them, “and so our cargo should have the highest value there, at the reputedly stupendous bazaar of the Khan el-Khalili, in the very heart of that ancient city, called by some the Mother of the World. And this is as true now as it was before.”

“But once we go in we cannot come out—the Investor needs only to post ships before the two Mouths of the Nile, at Rosetta and Damietta, and we are bottled up,” van Hoek pointed out.

“Nonetheless, this half of the Mediterranean is yet Turkish. Turks control every harbor,” said the raïs, “and word has gone out, on faster boats than ours, that if a galleot should appear, with a crew of mostly infidels, and such-and-such markings, it is to be impounded at once, and the crew put in irons. Going to Cairo and trading our cargo for a vast array of goods in the Khan el-Khalili is not such a miserable fate compared to the alternatives—”

“One, being buggered by the Investor in Alexandria,” said Jeronimo.

“Two, being thrown into a dungeon-pit in some flyblown port in the Levant,” said Dappa.

“Three, running the ship aground in some uninhabited place and trudging off into the Sahara bent under the weight of our cargo,” said Vrej.

“Ethiopia sounds better every minute,” said Dappa.

“I shall distribute my wives equally among the nine of us who still have penises,” proclaimed Nyazi, “and Jack can have my finest camel!”

“Jack, fear not,” said Monsieur Arlanc, taking him aside. “I know one or two negociants in Grand Caire. Through them, I can help you sell your share of the goods, and get a bill of exchange, payable in Amsterdam.”

Jack sighed. “I do not predict any of us will sleep easy in Cairo.”

So they made no response to messages from the Investor’s jacht, and used their (now) superior speed to stay well clear of her. And yet they did not attempt to pull away and vanish during the night-times, as there was no advantage in throwing the Investor into a rage.

High sere country, veiled in dust, began to appear off to starboard. The water took on a brown tinge and then became polluted with mud, sticks, and straw, which Nasr al-Ghuráb called sudd. He said it had been washed down out of Egypt by the Nile. The river, he said, would be at its fullest now, as it was the month of August.

Then one midday they spied a hill with a single Roman column rising out of its top, and a city jumbled about its base. “It looks as if a movement of the earth has shaken the whole city down into rubble,” Jack said, but the raïs said that Alexandria always looked that way, and pointed to the fortifications as proof. Indeed a square-sided stone castle rose from the middle of the harbor, at the end of a broad causeway; it seemed orderly and showed no signs of damage. One or two of the faster French ships had already dropped anchor under the shelter of its guns. Gazing for a few moments through a borrowed spyglass, Jack could see men in periwigs going to and fro in longboats, parleying with the customs officials, who here as in Algiers were all black-clad Jews.

“The French pay three percent—merchants of other nations pay twenty,” Monsieur Arlanc commented, “probably thanks to the machinations of your Investor, and of other great Frenchmen.” Since his being rescued from the galley, he had been accepted as a sort of advisor to the Cabal.

“Once the Turks see how the French fleet was mangled by the Dutch, perhaps they’ll change their policy,” van Hoek said.

“Not if the Duc d’Arcachon bribes them with a galleot-load of gold bars,” Jack put in.

Most of the French fleet, including Météore, set their courses direct for the harbor of Alexandria proper. Nasr al-Ghuráb, however, pointed them straight up the coast; raised all the sail he could; and put the galériens to work, driving them at a blazing speed of nine knots for two hours. This brought them to a cusp of land called Abu Qir. From here Alexandria was still plainly visible through dust and heat-waves, and presumably the reverse was true; no doubt some French officer had watched every oar-stroke through a spyglass.

There was no city at Abu Qir, other than a few huts of Arab fishermen surrounded by spindly racks where they put fish out to dry in the sun. But there was a solid Turkish fort with many guns, and a customs house below it, having its own pier. Moseh and Dappa went in using the skiff while the raïs and the others managed the ticklish job of bringing the galleot alongside the pier. Out of the customs house came the Jew who was in charge of the place, followed by Moseh, Dappa, and a couple of younger Jews—his sons—who carried sticks of red wax, bottles of ink, and other necessaries. The Jew was speaking a queer kind of Spanish to Moseh. He spent a couple of hours going through the hold, putting a customs-seal on each of the wooden crates without actually inspecting them, and without exacting any duties—this, of course, had all been pre-arranged on the Turkish side, by the Pasha working through his contacts in Egypt. This customs house at Abu Qir was the only one in the Ottoman Empire, or the world for that matter, where they could have done it.

The inspector made it clear to everyone within earshot that he was not happy with any part of the arrangement, but he did his part and departed without creating any obstructions or demanding any baksheesh above and beyond what he was getting anyway: a purse of pieces of eight, handed to him by Nasr al-Ghuráb after the “inspection” was complete.

This inspector turned out to be a hospitable soul, who importuned Moseh to come in and share an evening meal—making the reasonable assumption that the galleot would remain tied up to his pier all night. And indeed this would have been easiest. But a French sloop-of-war had been dispatched from Alexandria and was halfway to them now, her triangular sail apricot-colored in the late afternoon sun, and no one liked the looks of that. Furthermore, according to this Jew, a fine high-road called the Canopic Way joined Alexandria to Abu Qir, and riders on good horses could easily make the trip in a couple of hours. Having no particular desire to be trapped between the French sloop and a hypothetical squadron of French night-riders, Nasr al-Ghuráb ordered the galleot to put to sea about an hour before sunset. Under other conditions this would have been most unwise. But the current of the Nile would tend to push them away from the land, and according to the weather-glass that van Hoek had improvised from a glass tube and a flask of quicksilver, the skies would be clear for at least another day. So they abandoned themselves to the waves, and spent an uneasy night throwing the sounding-lead over the side and hauling it in again, over and over and over, lest they run aground in the Nile’s shifting sands.

When the sun rose upon one tired and irritable Cabal, they found themselves in the center of a vast half-moon-shaped bay, contained between the headland of Abu Qir to the southwest, and a huge sand-spit to the northeast, some twenty miles farther along the coast from Abu Qir. This bay had no distinct shore, but rather smeared away into mud-flats that extended for many miles inland before they became worthy of supporting trees, crops, and buildings. It soon became plain that the galleot had been drifting in a lazy orbit, a vast whorl of current driven by the Nile. For according to the raïs, the sand-spit to the northeast had been constructed, one grain of silt at a time, by the Rosetta Mouth, which was bedded in it somewhere. And when the sun bubbled up from the horizon and shone as a red disk through the haze of floury dust sighing down from the Sahara, it silhouetted a skyline of mosque-domes and minarets, deep among those mud-flats, which was the city of Rosetta itself.

The morning’s peace was then broken by wailing and sobbing from the head of the galleot. Jack went forward to find Vrej Esphahnian kneeling on the heavy timber that had once supported the ram. The Armenian was now doing some ramming of his own, repeatedly butting his forehead against the timber and clawing at his scalp until blood showed. He did not appear to hear anything Jack said to him. So Jack lingered until he was certain that Vrej did not intend to hurl himself into the bay, and then returned to the quarterdeck, where tactics were being discussed.

As soon as it had grown light enough to see, they had turned the galley northwards and begun rowing out of this bay. Rosetta (or Rashid, as al-Ghuráb called it) had been close enough that they’d heard the city’s muezzins wailing at the break of dawn. But the raïs explained that to reach the city they would have to go several miles north to the tip of the bar, and find their way in at the river-mouth, then work upriver for an hour or two.

It was not long before the French sloop came into view; she had sailed out into deeper waters for the night and was now patrolling off the Rosetta Mouth. Fortunately a wind came up from the southwest, and by raising some canvas the galleot was able to run before it, overshooting the river-mouth and making excellent speed towards the east—as if she intended to go in at the Damietta Mouth, a hundred miles away, or to break loose altogether and make a run for some other port. The sloop’s skipper had no choice but to bite down hard on that bait, and to chase them downwind. When she had drawn abeam of the galleot, and begun to converge toward them, al-Ghuráb struck the canvas, wheeled about, and set the oar-slaves to work rowing upwind. The sloop came about in response. But lacking oars, she could only work upwind by tacking, and so she had no hope of keeping pace with the galleot. The gap between the two vessels was about half a mile to begin with, and grew steadily as they rowed towards the snarl of interlocking and ingrown sand-bars that guarded the Nile’s Rosetta Mouth.

These maneuvers took up half the day, which gave Vrej Esphahnian time to calm down. When he seemed capable of speech again, Jack brought him a cup and a wineskin, and sat with him in the bow—now the least foul-smelling part of the ship, as they were working into the wind.

“Forgive my weakness,” said Vrej in a hoarse voice. “When I saw Rosetta, I could think only of the tales my father told me, of how he passed through that place with his boat-load of coffee. He had nursed that boat through countless narrow seas and straits, canals and river-courses, and when he passed through customs at Rosetta and sailed down to the river’s mouth, suddenly the vast Mediterranean opened up before him: to some, an emblem of terror and harbinger of wild storms, but to him a vista of freedom of opportunity. From there he sailed direct to Marseille and—”

“Yes, I know, introduced coffee to France,” said Jack, who knew the rest of the tale at least as well as Vrej himself. “Now excuse me for tacking upwind, as it were, against the general direction of your narration. But according to your brother’s version of this story, your father acquired that boat-load of coffee in Mocha.”

Vrej, taken aback: “Yes—Mocha is where coffee from Ethiopia, silver from Spain, and spices from India all come together.”

“I have seen maps,” said Jack impressively, “maps of the whole world, in a library in Hanover. And I seem to recollect that Mocha lies on the Red Sea.”

“Yes—as Nyazi can tell you, it lies in Arabia Felix, across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.”

“And furthermore I am under the impression that the Red Sea empties into the ocean that extends to Hindoostan.”

Vrej said nothing.

“If it is true that Cairo is the end of the line—that no vessel can go farther east than that—then how did your father manage to get his ship from Mocha, on the Red Sea, to here?”

Vrej was now sitting with his eyes tightly shut, cursing under his breath.

“There must be a way through!” Jack said, then stood up to shout the news to the others. As he did, he noticed, in the corner of his eye, a movement of Vrej’s hand. It was subtle. Yet any man in the world would notice it, and many would step away in response, or even reach across toward his sword-hilt, because Vrej was unmistakably reaching towards the handle of the dagger that was bound in his waist-sash. His hand moved no more than a finger’s breadth before he mastered the impulse and moved it back. But Jack noticed it, and faltered, and looked into the eyes of Vrej Esphahnian, red and swollen from weeping. He saw sadness there (of course), but he did not see murderous passions; only a kind of surrender. “That’s the spirit, Vrej!” he said, giving him a hearty shoulder-slap, and then Jack stepped away and called the Cabal to council.

THAT NIGHT THE PEACE of the Street of the Wigmakers in the souk of Rosetta was wrecked by the sound of a pistol-butt being hammered against an old wooden door. The head of an angry man was thrust out between shutters above, and became much less angry when he saw that two of the three visitors were Turks (or at least dressed that way), and one of those a Janissary. Pieces of eight jangled in a purse improved his mood even more. Door-bolts were removed, the visitors admitted.

The dwelling was clean and well-tended, but it smelt as if the floor-sweepings of every barbershop in the Ottoman Empire had been stuffed into its back room and left to ripen. Tea was brewed and tobacco proffered. After some half an hour of preliminaries, the visitors made a business proposal. Once the owner got over his astonishment, he accepted it. A boy was sent off to the Street of the Barbers at a dead run. While they waited, the wigmaker lit some lamps and displayed his wares. The finished products were big wigs mounted on wooden block-heads, destined for export to Europe; but they looked almost as strange to the European visitors as they did to any Arab, for during the years that they had spent pulling oars, fashions had been changing: wigs were now tall and narrow, no longer flat and broad.

Deeper in the shop were the raw materials, and here choices had to be made. Even the finest Barbary horse-hair was too coarse for tonight’s project. At the other end, hanks of fine, lustrous human hair from China were available—but these were the wrong color and it would take too long to dye them.

A bleary-eyed Turkish barber came in and began heating water and stropping razors. The customers settled on some sandy brown goat hair, intermediate in price.

The Janissary’s head and face were now shaved clean by the barber, and the fine fuzz on the upper cheeks burned away, dramatically but painlessly, using spirits of wine soaked into wads of Turcoman cotton. The barber was paid off and sent home. The wigmaker then went to work, painting the naked skin with pine gum one tiny patch at a time and stabbing tufts of goat hair into the goo. After two hours, the Janissary smelled overpoweringly of goats and pine-trees, and looked like he hadn’t had a shave or haircut in years. And when he was stripped to the waist, revealing a back ridged with whip-scars, anyone would have identified him not as a Janissary but as a wretched oar-slave.

PIERRE DE JONZAC RETURNED to the bank of the Nile an hour after dawn, just as he had promised or threatened to, and he brought with him his entire squadron of dragoons. Yesterday they’d galloped headlong to the very edge of the quay and pulled up just short of charging across the gangplanks, all panting and sweaty and dust-caked from having galloped up and down the Canopic Way for a night and a day trying to follow the maneuvers of the galleot.

Using Monsieur Arlanc as interpreter, Nasr al-Ghuráb complimented de Jonzac on the splendid appearance of his self and his troops this morning—for it was obvious that the menials at the French Consulate had been up all night grooming, scrubbing, starching, and polishing. The raïs went on to apologize for the contrastingly dismal state of his ship and crew. Some of them were “enjoying the shade of the vines,” which was a poetic way of saying they were in the bazaar (which had a leafy roof of grapevines) buying provisions. Others were “sipping mocha in the Pasha’s house.” De Jonzac looked on this (as he was meant to) as a crashingly unsubtle way of claiming that members of the Cabal were inside the stone fort built by the Turks to control the river, showering baksheesh upon officialdom. The fort was nearby enough to literally overshadow them, and scores of resplendent Janissaries were peering down from its battlements, casting a cold professional eye on the French dragoons. The point being that Rosetta was very different from Alexandria; here the French might have a consulate, and some troops, but (as the saying went) that and a few reales would buy them a cup of Mocha.

This point was entirely sound, but al-Ghuráb had spoken only lies so far. The real reason that only a few Cabal members were visible on the galleot’s quarterdeck was that four of them (Dappa, Jeronimo, Nyazi, and Vrej) had been riding south, post-haste, all through the night, hoping to cover the hundred and fifty miles to Cairo in two days. And another of them was chained to an oar.

“It was uncommonly humane of you to set free a third of your oar-slaves last night,” de Jonzac commented, “but since my master owns part interest in them, we have made arrangements, among our numerous and highly placed Turkish friends in yonder Fort, to have them all rounded up and sent back to Alexandria.”

“I hope that your Navy will be able to find benches for them to sit on,” shouted van Hoek.

De Jonzac’s face grew red and stormy-looking, but he ignored the cruel words of the Dutchman and continued: “Some of them were eager to talk to us, even before we put thumbscrews on them. So we know that you have been hiding certain metallurgical information from us.”

The night before—needing some ready cash to pay wigmakers and horse-traders—they’d broken open a crate, and pulled out a gold bar, in full view of certain oar-slaves who’d later been set free. This had been done in the hope and expectation that they’d later divulge it to de Jonzac.

The raïs shrugged. “What of it?”

De Jonzac said, “I’ve sent a message to Alexandria informing my master that certain numbers mentioned in the Plan must now be multiplied by thirteen.”

“Alas! If only the calculation were that simple, your master could relax in the splendor of his Alexandrian villa while you went to Cairo to balance the books. In fact it is much more complicated than that. Our friend in Bonanza turns out to have diversified his portfolio far beyond the usual metal goods. The hoard will require a tedious appraisal before we can reckon its value.”

“That is a routine matter—you forget my master is well acquainted with the workings of the Corsair trade,” de Jonzac sniffed. “He has trusted appraisers who can be dispatched hither—”

“Dispatch them instead to Cairo,” said the raïs, “for that is where our trusted appraisers dwell. And send for your master, too. For there is one treasure here whose value only he can weigh.”

De Jonzac smiled thinly. “My master is a man of acumen—I assure you he leaves appraisals to experts, save, sometimes, when it comes to Barbary stallions.”

“How about English geldings?” the raïs asked, and nodded to Yevgeny and Gabriel Goto.

Down on the oar-deck, Jack began to rattle his chains and to scream in English: “You bloody bastards! Sell me out to the Frog, will you? Motherless wog scum! May God’s curse be on your heads!”

Calmly ignoring this and further curses, Yevgeny came up behind Jack, pinioned his elbows together behind his back, and lifted him up off the bench so that de Jonzac could get a good look at him. Gabriel Goto then grabbed Jack’s drawers and yanked them down so they hung around the knees.

De Jonzac observed a long moment of silence as a frisson ran through his dragoons.

“Perhaps it is Ali Zaybak—perhaps some other English wretch who stood too close to a fire,” the raïs said drily. “Can you recognize Jack Shaftoe?”

“No,” de Jonzac admitted.

“Having recognized him, could you place a value on his head?”

“Only my master could do that.”

“Then we will see you, and your master, in Cairo, in three days,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb.

“That is not enough time!”

“We have been slaves for years,” said Moseh, who had been standing quietly, arms folded, the whole time, “and we say that three more days is too long.”

LATER THAT DAY they set off upriver, mostly under sail-power. The main channel was a few fathoms deep and perhaps a quarter-mile wide—which meant that they were never more than an eighth of a mile from French dragoons. For de Jonzac had sent out two pairs of riders to shadow them, one pair on each riverbank.

As soon as the galleot got clear of Rosetta—which was a sprawl of mostly humble dwellings with no wall to mark its boundary—Jack was dragged away from his bench and draped about in diverse neck-collars, manacles, and leg-irons, then taken back to the concealment of the quarterdeck where Yevgeny devoted a quarter of an hour to smiting an anvil, rattling chains, and producing other noises meant to convince anyone listening that Jack was being securely fettered. Meanwhile Jack—never one to stint on dramaturgy—screamed and cursed as if Yevgeny were bending red-hot irons directly around his wrists. In fact, the reason for his cries of agony was that he was ripping handfuls of goat-hair from his scalp and head. The skin was left covered with a scaly crust of hardened pine-gum. Various scrubbings with turpentine and lamp-oil got that off, taking several layers of skin and leaving him raw from the collarbones upwards. He wrapped his burning head in a turban, got dressed, belted on his sword, and strolled out into view looking every inch a Janissary; then paused, turned around, and shouted some abuse in Sabir at an imaginary chained wretch behind him.

He dared not look directly at his audience during this performance, but van Hoek was spying on the dragoons through an oar-lock, and reported that they’d witnessed most of it. They did not have much leisure for spying, though. The river was at its highest now, filling its channel and frequently spilling out into surrounding countryside, and so the galleot did not have to work her way around shallows as she would have in other seasons. Yet the current was gentle and she could easily make seven miles an hour upstream. Jack had been expecting a desert, and he could tell one was out there somewhere from the way everything collected a film of yellow dust. But Egypt, seen from here, was as moist and fertile as Holland. And as crowded. Even in the most remote stretches they were never out of sight of several dwellings. They passed villages a few times an hour, and large towns several times a day. For as far as they could see to both sides of the river, the flat countryside was covered with golden fields of corn and rice, and veined with wandering lines of darker green: the countless water-courses of the Delta, lined, and frequently choked, with reeds and rushes as high as a man’s head. Palm trees grew in picket-lines along waterways, and towns were belted with orchards of figs, citrus, and cassia.

All of it was scenery to the Cabal, and an obstacle course to the French riders. They fell behind the galleot when they had to swing wide around river-bends and flooded fields, then caught up when they found a way to cut across one of the river’s vast meanders. Fortunately for them they had left Rosetta trailing strings of fresh horses; and Egypt, like most of the Turks’ empire, was a settled and orderly country. Traveling along her high-roads was not as easy as in England, but it was easier than in France, and so they were able to keep pace during the day. This gave Moseh, Jack, and the others confidence that the four who’d gone ahead—Nyazi’s group—had reached Cairo without difficulty.

At night the wind fell. Rather than attempting to row through the dark, and perhaps run aground or stray into some backwater, the raïs simply tied the galleot to a palm tree along the riverbank and then organized the Cabal into watches. The dragoons actually served as an outlying guard-post, as they were not keen to see the galleot’s cargo fall into the hands of some local Ali Baba and his forty thieves.

In the middle of the second day, the wind failed and the raïs sent a dozen slaves ashore to pull the galleot by ropes—which was why they had not released all of the slaves in Rosetta. In this way they came, late in the afternoon, to the place where the Nile diverged into its two great branches: the one that they had just navigated, and another that ran to Damietta. Here, as night fell on the second day, they tied the galleot up again, and bided during the hours of darkness. Jack stood an early morning watch, then climbed into a hammock on the quarterdeck and fell asleep in the open air.

When he awoke, the sun was rising, the ship was under way, and he could see a strange terrain of angular mountains off to the west. Sitting up for a better look, he recognized them as Pyramids. When he had got his fill of gawking at those—which took a good long while—he turned around to face the rising sun and gazed across the Nile into the Mother of the World.

Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill, and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack’s mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed. Fortunately there were many such matters to occupy him: the Nile here was at least as big as the Danube at Vienna, and its course was crowded with boats laden with grain that had been brought down out of Upper Egypt. The captains of those boats had been shooting cataracts and beating back crocodiles for weeks, and were in no particular mood to make way for the unwieldy galleot. Many enemies were made as they worked their way in to the east bank of the river and made the galleot fast to a quay.

Almost immediately they were engulfed in camels, which is never pleasant, and rarely desirable—especially when they are being ridden and led by fierce-looking armed men. Jack thought they were under assault by wild nomads until he began noticing that all of them looked like Nyazi, and many were smiling. Then he heard Jeronimo bellowing in Spanish, “If I had a copper for every fly that swarms on you, beast, I’d buy the Spanish Empire! You smell worse than Vera Cruz in the springtime, and there is more filth clinging to your body than most animals shit in a year. Truly you must have sprung fully formed from a heap of manure, as flies and Popes do—may God have mercy on my soul for saying that! Jack Shaftoe is there smiling at me, thinking that you, camel, and I are well matched for each other—later I’ll make him your wife perhaps and you can take him out into the desert and do with him what you will.”

Dappa and Vrej were off seeing to other matters, but shortly Jack caught sight of Nyazi. He had had a joyous reunion with his clan-members. Jack was glad he had not been there to endure it.

Nasr al-Ghuráb now unchained all of the galley-slaves at once—some two score of them—and told them that they could go now into Cairo, and never come back; or they could join in with the Cabal, and never leave it; but these were their only two choices. Within moments, all but four of them had vanished. Those who remained were a Nubian eunuch, a Hindoo, the Turk who had been at the head of Monsieur Arlanc’s oar, and an Irishman named Padraig Tallow. The first three had somehow made the calculation that their chances were better with the Cabal, while Padraig (Jack suspected) just wanted to see how it would all come out. Monsieur Arlanc was offered the same choice as the others, and to Jack’s delight he elected to throw his lot in with the Cabal.

They all got busy pulling the gold-crates out of the galleot and loading them onto the camels, which took no more than half an hour. The raïs, accompanied by van Hoek, Jeronimo (who’d had enough of camels), the Turk, the Nubian, and several of Nyazi’s clansmen (who wanted to see what it was like to ride on a boat), cast off the galleot’s lines and took her downriver, heading for an isle in midstream a few miles distant where boats were bought and sold. The camel-caravan meanwhile formed up and prepared to move out.

SOME OF THOSE GALLEY-SLAVES, as they had considered the choice that they’d been given, had asked searching questions about the Plan. The most frequently heard was: “Why do you not simply ride out of town with your treasure? Why bother waiting for this Investor—who has made obvious his intention to cheat you?” Jack was not unsympathetic to this line of questioning. But in the end he had to agree with Moseh and Nasr al-Ghuráb, who answered by pointing with their chins across the Nile, toward the city that the Turks had built up there, called El Giza. It had mosque-domes, leafy gardens, baths, and houses of pleasure. But, too, it had dungeons, and high walls with iron hooks on them, and a Champs de Mars where thousands of Janissaries drilled with muskets and lances. There would be judges in there, too, and some of them would probably be sympathetic to a French Duke who complained that he was being robbed by a rabble of slaves.

The Turkish authorities had already been alerted by a couple of exhausted French dragoons who had galloped up on half-dead horses as the camels were being loaded. So as the caravan left the Nile behind and began winding through the 2,400 wards and quarters of Cairo, it was carefully followed by Janissaries, not to mention hundreds of beggars, Vagabonds, pedlars, courtesans, and curious boys.

Now Cairo was a sort of accomplice in everything that happened there. It was large enough to engulf any army, and wise enough to comprehend any Plan, and old enough to’ve outlived whole races, nations, and religions. So nothing could really happen there without the city’s consent. Nyazi’s caravan, three dozen horses and camels strong, armed to the teeth, laden with tons of gold, was nothing here. The train of men and animals was frequently chopped into halves, thirds, and smaller bits by yet stranger processions that burst out from narrow ways and cut across it: gangs of masked women running and ululating, columns of Dervishes in high conical hats pounding on drums, wrapped corpses being paraded around atop stilts, squadrons of Janissaries in green and red. Every so often they would stumble upon a shavush in his emerald-green, ankle-length robe, red boots, white leather cap, and stupendous moustache. Then every camel in the procession had to be made to kneel, every man had to dismount, until he had wandered past; and as long as they had stopped, Vagabonds would run up and spray rose-water at them and demand money for it.

Even if Jack had not known, when he’d disembarked from the galleot, that Egypt was the world’s oldest country, he’d have figured it out after an hour’s slow progress through Cairo’s streets. He could see it in the faces of the people, who were a mixture of every race Jack had ever heard about, and some he hadn’t. Every face told as many tales as a whole galley full of oar-slaves. Likewise their houses, which were made partly of stone, partly of timbers so old and gnarled they looked petrified, and mostly of bricks, hand-made and rudely baked, some looking as if they might bear the hand-prints of Moses himself. As many buildings were being torn down, as built up; which only stood to reason, as all the space had been claimed, and there was nothing to do but shift the available materials from one site to another, much as the Nile continually built and dissolved the sand-bars of the Delta by pushing grains of sand from place to place according to its whim. Even the Pyramids had had a gnawed look about their corners, as if people had been using them for quarries.

After hours of working deeper into the city they reached the Khan el-Khalili: a shambolic market, bigger in itself than all but a few European cities. Nyazi bade Jack take his shoes off and led him into an ancient mosque and up a steep spiral staircase that was dark and cool as a natural cave. Finally they stepped out on the roof and Jack looked out upon the city. The river was too far away to be seen from here and so what he saw was a million dusty flat rooves piled with bales, barrels, bundles, mounds, and household detritus. Each roof had its own peculiar height, and the lower ones seemed in danger of becoming buried.

Cairo was like the bottom of a vast pit whence the inhabitants had been madly trying to escape for thousands of years, and the only way out was to dig up clay, quarry limestone, and tear down empty houses and defenseless monuments, and pile the proceeds ever higher. Who had lately been winning the race could be judged by whose roof was highest. The losers could not keep pace with their neighbors, or even with the drifting dust that assiduously covered anything that failed to move, and so gradually sank from sight. Jack had the phant’sy that he could go into any house in Cairo, descend into the cellar, and find an entire house buried beneath, and yet another house beneath that one, and so on, miles down. Never had the preachers’ line “He will come to judge the quick and the dead” been so clear to Jack; for here in this Bible-land, Quick and Dead were the only two categories, and the distinction between them the only Judgment that mattered.

So he drew comfort from being in the Khan el-Khalili, which appeared to be the quickest part of the city. The caravan wound through market-streets devoted to every good imaginable, from slaves to butter to live cobras, and eventually reached a place that, Jack thought, must be the dead center of the entire metropolis. It was a yard, or perhaps an alley: a rectangle of dirt, a bow-shot in length, but not above five yards in width, hemmed in by four-and five-storey buildings. Above, a narrow aperture provided light, but something translucent had been thrown across between the parapets of the buildings: caravan-tents and tarpaulins, Jack suspected. These formed a continuous roof overhead, letting in dusty light but sealing the place off from eavesdroppers. The surrounding buildings were astonishingly quiet—the quietest place in Cairo—and they smelled of hay. Ships coming down the Nile had replenished the place with food for the horses and camels that were stabled here.

“This is where it began,” remarked Nyazi. “This was the seed.”

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“A hundred generations ago, some men like me camped here—” stomping the dirt with one sandal “—for the night with their camels, and in time the camp put down roots, and became a caravanserai. The market of Khan el-Khalili grew up around it, and Cairo around it. But you see the caravanserai remains, and still we come here to sell our camels.”

“It is a good place to meet the Duke,” Moseh said. “The Plan was sound all along. For, according to what Nyazi has said, not a single day has gone by in this place, since the very beginning of the world, when silver and gold have not passed from hand to hand here. Its presence was not dictated by any king, nor was it prophesied by any creed; it emerged of its own accord, and endures regardless of what the Sultan in Constantinople or the Sun King in Paris might prefer.”

Friendship is a Vertue oftener found among Thieves than other People, for when their Companions are in Danger, they venture hardest to relieve them.

—Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall

The ground floors of the caravanserai’s buildings had high ceilings so that without having to duck, or doff their turbans, men could ride camels into them, and that was just what the clan of Nyazi did. That night, Nasr al-Ghuráb came back with his contingent, and with Dappa and Vrej, whom they hadn’t seen since Rosetta.

“Truly the forkings and wanderings of the Nile are as unknowable as the streets of Cairo,” said Dappa, blinking his eyes in amazement, “but Vrej found an Armenian coffee-trader, no more than five minutes’ walk from this place, who knew all about the way to Mocha. You go downstream to the great fork, and take the Damietta branch, and after a few miles there is a village on the right bank where a water-course strays off eastwards. In time that stream goes all the way to the Red Sea.”

“Then much traffic must pass through it!” Moseh exclaimed.

“It is jealously guarded by the head men of the villages that bestride it, and by the Turkish officials,” Dappa agreed.

“And for that very reason,” said Vrej, picking up the narrative, “other Egyptians, in neighboring precincts, have been at work with picks and shovels, scooping out short-cuts that bypass the larger villages and toll-stations. These look like nothing more than stagnant dead-ends, or reed-choked sewer-ditches, when they are visible at all; and you may be sure that they are guarded by the farmers who dug them, every bit as jealously as the main channel. So we shall not make it through to the Red Sea without crossing the palms of innumerable peasants with baksheesh—the total expense will be dumb-founding, I fear.”

“But we will have a boat-load of gold,” said Yevgeny.

“And we will be running for our lives,” added Jack, “which always makes spending money not quite so painful.”

“And those farmers will want to keep it all a secret from their Turkish overlords just as badly as we will,” predicted Jeronimo.

“Not quite as badly,” Moseh demurred, “but badly enough.”

“Very good then,” said Surendranath, the Hindoo galley slave who had chosen to throw in his lot with them. “You have shown extreme wisdom in establishing your batna.”

“Avast! We are all People of the Book here, and have no use for your idolatrous claptrap,” said Jeronimo.

“Steady there, Caballero,” said Jack, “I know from personal experience that Books of India contain much of interest. What else can you tell us about this batna, Surendranath?”

“I learnt it from English traders in Surat,” said the befuddled Surendranath, “It stands for Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement.”

A recess, now, as the phrase was translated into diverse languages.

Moseh said, “Be it English or Hindoo, there’s still wisdom in it. Our friend, born and raised a banyan, understands that escaping over the flooded fields and through the wadis to the Red Sea is an alternate plan—a contingency and nothing more.” As Moseh was saying these words, he gazed deliberately into the eyes of those members of the Cabal he deemed most impetuous. But he began and ended with his eyes locked on Jack’s. Moseh concluded, “To have a batna is good and wise, as Surendranath has pointed out. But the Negotiated Agreement is much better than this Best Alternative.”

“Moseh, you have sat next to me for years and heard all of my stories, and so you know that I only love one thing in the world, even in spite of this,” said Jack, pulling up the loose sleeve of his garment to display the track of the harpoon in his arm. “There should be no doubt in your mind that I would rather be on a ship bound for Christendom tomorrow, than fleeing for my life towards the Red Sea, like some miserable Hebrew of yore. But like those Hebrews I’ll not be a slave any longer.”

“We are all in accord there,” said Dappa.

“Then, as I have been chosen to represent the Cabal in our final negotiation with the Investor, I must ask you all to do one thing. I am a Vagabond, and was never one for swearing pompous oaths and prating about honor. But this undertaking is no longer a Vagabondish sort of enterprise—so every man among you must now swear, by whatever he considers holiest, that you are with me tomorrow. That, whatsoever happens in my dealings with the Duke—whether I show foolishness or wisdom—whether I remain collected, or lose my temper, or piss my breeches—whether or not the Imp of the Perverse comes to pay me a visit—you are with me, and will accept my decision, and live or die with me.”

Here Jack had been expecting a long, awkward pause, or even laughter. But the sword of Gabriel Goto was out of its sheath before Jack’s words had stopped echoing round the narrow yard. The newcomers flinched. In a simple swift movement Gabriel reversed his sword and presented its hilt to Jack, and in the light of the fire the blade shimmered like a swift stream of clear water beneath the rising sun. “I am samurai,” he said simply.

Padraig, the big Irishman, stepped forward and spat into the fire. “We’ve a saying,” he said to Jack in English. “Is this a private fight, or can anyone join in? Well, I’m in, which ought to suffice. But if you want me to swear by something, then I do swear on my mother’s grave above the sea in Kilmacthomas, and damn you if you think that’s not as good as being a samurai.”

Moseh took the scrap of Indian bead-work from around his neck, kissed it, and tossed it to Jack. “Throw that into the fire if I fail you,” he said, “and let it become part of the dust of the Khan el-Khalili.”

Vrej said, “I have followed you thus far, Jack, seeking to make good on the debt that my family owes you. I swear on my family that I will pay you back.”

Monsieur Arlanc said, “I do not believe in swearing oaths. But I do believe that I am destined to see the matter through to its proper end.”

Van Hoek said, “I swear by my right arm that I’ll never be taken by pirates again. And this Investor is a pirate in the eyes of God.”

“But cap’n, you are left-handed!” Jack said, trying to lighten the mood, which he was beginning to find oppressive.

“To make good on the oath, I must use my strong left hand to cut off the right,” said van Hoek, missing the humor altogether. Indeed, the jest had put him into a more emotional state than any of his fellow-slaves had ever seen. Suddenly he drew his cutlass out; lay his right fist on a bench with only the little finger extended; and brought the cutlass down on it. The last joint of the pinky flew off into the dust. Van Hoek thrust his weapon back into its scabbard, then went out and retrieved the severed digit and held it up in the fire-light. “There is your oath!” he growled, and flung it into the fire. Then he sagged to his knees, and passed out in the dirt.

Some uneasiness, now, as the others wondered whether they would be expected to cut off pieces of themselves. But Nyazi withdrew from the folds of his cloak a red Koran, and he and Nasr al-Ghuráb and the Turk from Arlanc’s galley gathered around it and said holy words in Arabic, and for good measure, announced that they would make the haj if they survived. Likewise Yevgeny, Surendranath, and the Nubian swore fearsome oaths to their respective gods. Mr. Foot, who had been lurking round the edges of the fire-light looking vaguely indignant, announced that it would be super-fluous for him to swear loyalty since “the whole enterprise” had been his idea (apparently referring to the ill-starred cowrie shell voyage of many years back) and that in any case it “would never do” to show anything other than loyalty to his comrades and that it was “bizarre” and “shocking” and “unseemly” and “inconceivable” for Jack to even suggest that he, Mr. Foot, would do otherwise.

“I swear by my country—the country of free men,” said Dappa, “which at the moment has only sixteen or so citizens, and no territory. But it is the only country I have and so by it do I swear.”

Jeronimo stepped forward, piously wringing his hands, and began to mumble some words in Latin; but then his demon took over and he shouted, “Fuck! I do not even believe in God! I swear by all of you Vagabonds, Niggers, Heretics, Kikes, and Camel-Jockeys, for you are the only friends I have ever had.”

THE DUC D’ARCACHON had disembarked from his gilded river-barge, and was riding towards the Khan el-Khalili on a white horse, accompanied by several aides, a Turkish official or two, and a mixed company of rented Janissaries and crack French dragoons. Behind them rumbled several empty wagons of very heavy construction, such as were used to carry blocks of dressed stone through the streets. This much was known to the Cabal half an hour in advance—word had been brought by the messenger-boys who moved through the streets of Cairo like scirocco winds.

Every master jeweler in the city had been hired by the Duc d’Arcachon—or, failing that, had been bribed not to do any work for the Cabal—and were now converging on a certain gate of the Khan el-Khalili to await the Duke. This was common knowledge to every Jew in the city, including Moseh.

A flat-bottomed, shallow-draft river-boat waited at the terminus of a canal that wandered through the city and eventually communicated with the Nile. It was only half a mile from the caravanserai, down a certain street, and the people who dwelled along that street had carried their chairs and hookahs indoors and rounded up their chickens and were keeping their doors bolted and windows shuttered today, because of certain rumors that had begun to circulate the night before.

It was mid-afternoon before the clatter and rumble of the Investor’s entourage penetrated the still courtyard where Jack stood in the lambent glow of the stretched canvas above. He took a deep whiff of air into his nostrils. It smelt of hay, dust, and camel-dung. He ought to be scared, or at least excited. Instead he felt peace. For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The Messe of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of a hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.

The challenges and salutations were barely audible through the stable’s haystacks; Jack could not even make out the language. Then he heard horseshoes pocking over the stone floor, coming closer.

Jack rested his hand on the pommel of his sword and recited a poem he’d been taught long ago, standing in the bend of a creek in Bohemia:

Watered steel-blade, the world perfection calls,

Drunk with the viper poison foes appals.

Cuts lively, burns the blood whene’er it falls;

And picks up gems from pave of marble halls.

“That is he!?” said a voice in French. Jack realized his eyes were closed, and opened them to see a man on a white, pink-eyed cheval de parade. His wig was perfect, an Admiral’s hat was perched atop it, and four little black patches were glued to his white face. He was staring in some alarm at Jack, and Jack almost reached for one of the pistols in his waist-sash, fearing he had already been recognized. But another chevalier, riding knee to knee with the Duke to his left side, leaned askew in his saddle and answered, “Yes, your grace, that is the Agha of the Janissaries.” Jack recognized this rider as Pierre de Jonzac.

“He must be a Balkan,” remarked the Duke, apparently because of Jack’s European coloration.

A third French chevalier rode on the Duke’s right. He cleared his throat significantly as Monsieur Arlanc emerged from the stables and fell in beside Jack, on his left hand. Evidently this was to warn the Duke that they were now in the presence of a man who could understand French. Moseh now emerged and stood on Jack’s right to even the count, three facing three.

The Frenchmen—wishing to command the field—rode forward all the way to the center of the alley. Likewise Jack strolled forward until he was drawing uncomfortably close to the Duke. Finally the Duke reined in his white horse and held up one hand in a signal for everyone to halt. De Jonzac and the other chevalier stopped immediately, their horses’ noses even with the Duke’s saddle. But Jack took another step forward, and then another, until de Jonzac reached down and drew a pistol halfway from a saddle-holster, and the other aide spurred his horse forward to cut Jack off.

Behind the Duke and his men, it was possible to hear a considerable number of French soldiers and Janissaries infiltrating the caravanserai, and before long Jack began to see musket-barrels gleaming in windows of the uppermost storeys. Likewise, men of Nyazi’s clan had taken up positions on both sides of the alley to Jack’s rear, and the burning punks of their matchlocks glowed in dark archways like demons’ eyes. Jack stopped where he was: perhaps eight feet from the glabrous muzzle of the Duke’s horse. But he chose a place where his sight-line to the Duke’s face was blocked by the aide who had ridden forward. The Duke said something sotto voce and this man backed his mount out of the way, returning to his former position guarding the Duke’s right flank.

“I comprehend your plan,” said the Duke, dispensing with formalities altogether—which was probably meant to be some kind of insult. “It is essentially suicidal.”

Jack pretended not to understand until Monsieur Arlanc had translated this into Sabir.

“We had to make it seem that way,” answered Jack, “or you would have been afraid to show up.”

The Duke smiled as if at some very dry dinner-table witticism. “Very well—it is like a dance, or a duel, beginning with formal steps: I try to frighten you, you try to impress me. We proceed now. Show me L’Emmerdeur!”

“He is very near by,” said Jack. “First we must settle larger matters—the gold.”

“I am a man of honor, not a slave, and so to me, the gold is nothing. But if you are so concerned about it, tell me what you propose.”

“First, send your jewelers away—there are no jewels, and no silver. Only gold.”

“It is done.”

“This caravanserai is vast, as you have seen, and full of hay at the moment. The gold bars have been buried in the haystacks. We know where they are. You do not. As soon as you have given us the documents declaring us free men, and set us on the road, or the river, with our share of the money in our pockets—in the form of pieces of eight—we will tell you where to find the gold.”

“That cannot be your entire plan,” said the Duke. “There is not so much hay here that we cannot simply arrest you, and then search it all at our leisure.”

“While we were going through the stables, hiding the gold, we spilled quite a bit of lamp-oil on the floor, and buried a few powder-kegs in haystacks for good measure,” Jack said.

Pierre de Jonzac shouted a command to a junior officer back in the stables.

“You threaten to burn the caravanserai, then,” said the Duke, as if everything Jack said had to be translated into childish language.

“The gold will melt and run into the drains. You will recover some of it, but you will lose more than you would by simply paying us our share and setting us free.”

An officer came out on foot and whispered something to de Jonzac, who relayed it to the Duke.

“Very well,” said the Duke.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My men have found the puddles of lamp-oil, your story seems to be correct, your proposal is accepted,” said the Duke. He turned and nodded to his other aide, who opened up his saddle-bags and began to take out a series of identical-looking documents, formally sealed and beribboned in the style of the Ottoman bureaucracy.

Jack turned and beckoned toward the doorway where Nasr al-Ghuráb had been lurking. The raïs came out, laid down his arms, and approached the Duke’s aide, who allowed him to inspect one of the documents. “It is a cancellation of a slave-deed,” he said. “It is inscribed with the name of Jeronimo, and it declares him to be a free man.”

“Read the others,” Jack said.

“Now for the important matter, mentioned earlier,” said the Duke, “which is the only reason I made the journey from Alexandria.”

“Dappa,” read al-Ghuráb from another scroll. “Nyazi.”

A cart rattled out from behind the French lines, causing Jack to flinch; but it carried only a lock-box. “Your pieces of eight,” the Duke explained, amused by Jack’s nervousness.

“Yevgeny—and here is Gabriel Goto’s,” the raïs continued.

“Assuming that the wretch you displayed in Alexandria really was L’Emmerdeur, how much do you want for him?” the Duke inquired.

“As we are all free men now, or so it appears, we will likewise do the honorable thing, and let you have him for free—or not at all,” said Jack.

“Here is that of van Hoek,” said the raïs, “and here, a discharge for me.”

Another tolerant smile from the Duke. “I cannot recommend strongly enough that you give him to me. Without L’Emmerdeur there is no transaction.”

“Vrej Esphahnian—Padraig Tallow—Mr. Foot—”

“And despite your brave words,” the Duke continued, “the fact remains that you are surrounded by my dragoons, musketeers, and Janissaries. The gold is mine, as surely as if it were locked up in my vault in Paris.”

“This one has a blank space where the name should go,” said Nasr al-Ghuráb, holding up the last document.

“That is only because we were not given this one’s name,” explained Pierre de Jonzac, pointing at Jack.

“Your vault in Paris,” Jack said, echoing the Duke’s words. He now spoke directly to the Duke, in the best French he could muster. “I amguessing that would be somewhere underneath the suite of bedchambers in the west wing, there, where you have that god-awful green marble statue of King Looie all tarted up as Neptune.”

A Silence, now, almost as long as the one Jack had experienced, once, in the grand ballroom of the Hôtel Arcachon. But all things considered, the Duke recovered quickly—which meant either that he’d known all along, or that he was more adaptable than he looked. De Jonzac and the other aide were dumbfounded. The Duke moved his horse a couple of steps nearer, the better to peer down at Jack’s face. Jack stepped forward, close enough to feel the breath from the horse’s nostrils, and pulled the turban from his head.

“This need not alter the terms of the transaction, Jack,” said the Duke. “Your comrades can all be free and rich, with a single word from you.”

Jack stood there and considered it—genuinely—for a minute or two, as horses snorted and punks smoldered in the dark vaults of the caravanserai all around him. One small gesture of Christlike self-abnegation and he could give his comrades the wealth and freedom they deserved. At any earlier part of his life he would have scoffed at the idea. Now, it strangely tempted him.

For a few moments, anyway.

“Alas, you are a day too late,” he said at last, “for last night my comrades swore any number of mickle oaths to me, and I intend to hold them to account. ’Twere bad form, otherwise.”

And then in a single motion he drew out his Janissary-sword and plunged it all the way to the hilt into the neck of the Duke’s horse, aiming for the heart. When he hit it, the immense muscle clenched like a fist around the wide head of the blade, then went limp as the watered steel cleaved it in twain.

The blade came out driven on a jet of blood as thick as his wrist. The horse reared up, the Duke’s jeweled spurs flailing in the air. Jack stepped to one side, drawing a pistol from his waistband with his free hand, and fired a ball through the head of the aide who had brought the documents. The Duke just avoided falling off his horse, but managed to hold on as it bolted forward a couple of paces and then fell over sideways, pinning one of the Duke’s legs and (as Jack could hear) breaking it.

Jack looked up to see Pierre de Jonzac aiming a pistol at him from no more than two yards away. Moseh had meanwhile stuck his tongue out, and gone into motion. A flying hatchet lodged in de Jonzac’s shoulder, causing him to drop the weapon. A moment later his horse collapsed, shot through the head, and de Jonzac was thrown to the ground practically at Jack’s feet. Jack snatched the fallen pistol; aimed it at the head of de Jonzac; then moved the barrel slightly to one side and fired into the ground.

“My men think you are dead now, and won’t waste balls on you,” Jack said. “In fact I have let you live, but for one purpose only: so that you can make your way back to Paris and tell them the following: that the deed you are about to witness was done for a woman, whose name I will not say, for she knows who she is; and that it was done by ‘Half-Cocked’ Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!”

As he said these words he was stepping over to the Duc d’Arcachon, who had dragged himself out from under his horse and was lying there, hatless and wigless, propped up on one elbow, with the jagged ends of his leg-bones poking out through the bloody tissues of his silk stockings.

“Here I am supposed to give you a full account and explanation of your sins, and why you deserve this,” Jack announced, “but there is no time. Suffice it to say that I am thinking of a mother and daughter you once abducted, and disgraced, and sold into slavery.”

The Duke pondered this for a moment, looking bewildered, and then said: “Which ones?”

Then Jack brought the bright blade of the Janissary-sword down like a thunderbolt, and the head of Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, bounced and spun in the dirt of Khan el-Khalili in the center of the Mother of the World, and the dust of the Sahara began to cloud the lenses of his eyes.

NOW JACK GOT THE IDEA that it was raining, because of the spurts of dust erupting from the ground all around him. Frenchmen, Janissaries, or both were firing at him from above—feeling free to do so now that Jack had apparently slain all three of the Frenchmen in the alley. Monsieur Arlanc and Nasr al-Ghuráb had made themselves scarce. Jack ran into the stables, which had become the scene of a strange sort of indoor battle. Nyazi’s men, and the Cabal, were outnumbered. But they’d had plenty of time to ready positions among the haystacks and watering-troughs of the stable, and to string trip-wires between pillars. They could have held the French and Turks off all day, if not for the fact that the stables had been set on fire—possibly on purpose, but more likely by the muzzle-flash of a weapon. Jack vaulted into a trough, drenching himself and his clothes, and then scurried back through an apparently random hail of musket-balls to where Yevgeny, Padraig, Jeronimo, Gabriel Goto, the Nubian eunuch, and several of Nyazi’s clan were frantically rifling haystacks for gold bars and piling them into heavy wagons. These were drawn by nervous horses with grain-sacks over their heads to keep them from seeing the flames—a cheap subterfuge that was already wearing thin. At a glance Jack estimated that somewhat more than half of the gold had been recovered.

Moseh, Vrej, and Surendranath, with their merchants’ aptitude for figures, knew where every last bar was hid, and were making sure that none went missing. That was a job best done by calm men. As men were more intelligent than horses, one could not keep them calm by putting sacks over their heads; some kind of real security had to be provided, from fire, smoke, Janissaries, dragoons, and—what else had the Duke mentioned?

“Have you seen any French musketeers?” Jack inquired, when he had located Nyazi. As long as they remained in the stables, Nyazi was their general.

It was easier to talk now than it had been a few minutes ago. Smoke had rendered muskets useless, and flames the possession of gunpowder extremely dangerous. The thuds of musket-fire had died away and were being supplanted by the ring of blade against blade, and the shouting of men trying to shift their burdens of fear to their foes.

“What is a musketeer?”

“The Duke claimed he had some,” Jack said, which did not answer Nyazi’s question. But there was no time to explain the distinction between dragoons and musketeers now.

A horn had begun to blow from the back of the stables, giving the signal that the gold wagons were ready to depart. Nyazi began to holler orders to his clansmen, who were distributed around the smoke in some way that was clear only to him, and they began falling back toward the wagons. This was their attempt at an orderly retreat under fire, which as Jack knew was no easy thing to manage even with regular troops under good conditions. In fact it was almost as chaotic as the advance of the Janissaries, who had overrun at least part of Nyazi’s defensive line and were now stumbling forward, gasping and gagging, tripping over rakes and slamming into pillars, charging toward the sound of the trumpet call—not so much because the enemy and the gold were there, as because one could not blow a bugle without drawing breath, and so it proved that air was to be had ahead.

Jack got as far as a place where the smoke was diluted by a current of fresh air, then was nearly spitted by a bayonet-thrust coming in from his left rear, aimed at his kidney. Jack spun almost entirely around to the right, so the tip of the blade snagged in the muscle of his back but was deflected, cutting and tearing the flesh but not piercing his organs. At the same time he was delivering a backhanded cut to the head of the bayonet’s owner. So the fight was over before Jack knew it had started. But it led immediately to a real sword-fight with a Frenchman—an officer who had a small-sword, and knew how to use it. Jack, fighting with a heavier and slower weapon, knew he would have to end this on the first or second exchange of blows, or else his opponent could simply stand off at a distance and poke holes through him until he bled to death.

Jack’s first attack was abortive, though, and his second was nicely parried by the Frenchman—who backed into a pitchfork that was lying on the floor, and tripped over its handle, sprawling back onto his arse. Jack snatched up the pitchfork and flung it like a trident at his opponent just as he was scrambling to his feet. It did no damage, but in knocking it aside, the Frenchman left himself open for a moment and Jack leapt forward swinging. His opponent tried to block the blow with the middle of his small-sword, but this weapon—designed for twitchy finger-fighting and balletic lunges—was feeble shelter against Jack’s blade of watered steel. The Janissary-blade knocked the rapier clean out of the French officer’s hand and went on to cut his body nearly in half.

There was a clamor of voices and blades and whinnying horses off to his right. Jack desperately wanted to get over there, because he suspected he was alone and surrounded.

Then one of the powder-kegs exploded. At least that was the easiest way to explain the crushing sound, the horizontal storm of barrel-staves, pebbles, nails, horseshoes, and body parts that came and went through the smoke, and the sudden moaning and popping of timbers as sections of floor collapsed. Jack’s ears stopped working. But his skull ended up pressed against the stone floor, which conducted, directly into his brain, the sound of horseshoes flailing, iron-rimmed cartwheels grinding and screeching, and—sad to say—at least one cart-load of gold bars overturning as panicked horses took it round a corner too fast. Each bar radiated a blinding noise as it struck the pavement.

Lying flat on his back gave him the useful insight that there was a layer of clear air riding just above the floor. He pulled his soaked tunic off, tied it over his mouth and nose, and began crawling on his naked belly. The place was a maze of haystacks and corpses, but light was shining in through a huge stone arch-way. He dragged himself through it, and out into the open—and into battle.

Monsieur Arlanc got his attention by pelting him in the head with a small rock, and beckoned him to safety behind an overturned cart. Jack lay amid scattered gold bars for a while, just breathing. Meanwhile Monsieur Arlanc was crawling to and fro on his belly, gathering the bullion together and stacking it up to make a rampart. The occasional musket-ball whacked into it, but most of the fire was passing over their heads.

Rolling over onto his belly and peering out through a gun-slit that the Huguenot had prudently left between gold bars, Jack could see the large floppy hats characteristic of French musketeers. They had formed up in several parallel ranks, completely blocking the street that ran down to the canal where the Cabal’s means of escape was waiting. These ranks took turns kneeling, loading, standing, aiming, and firing, keeping up a steady barrage of musket-balls that made it impossible for the men of the Cabal to advance, or even to stand up. This human road-block was only about forty yards away, and was completely exposed. But it worked because the Cabal’s forces did not have enough muskets, powder, and balls left to return fire. And it would continue working for as long as those musketeers were supplied with ammunition.

Meanwhile the stable continued to burn, and occasionally explode, behind them. The situation could not possibly be as dire as it seemed or they would all be dead. Between volleys of musketeer-fire Jack heard the whinny of horses and the rattling bray of camels. He looked to the left and saw a stable-yard, surrounded by a low stone wall, where several of Nyazi’s men had gotten their camels to kneel and their horses to lie down on their sides. So they had a sort of reserve, anyway, that could be used to pull the carts down to the boat—but not as long as those carts were forty yards in front of a company of musketeers.

“We have to outflank those bastards,” Jack said. Which was obvious—so others must have thought of it already—which would explain the fact that only a few members of the Cabal were in evidence here. The left flank, once he looked beyond that embattled stable-yard, looked like a cul-de-sac; movement that way was blocked by a high stone wall that looked as if it might have been part of Cairo’s fortifications in some past æon, and was now a jumbled stone-quarry.

So Jack crawled to the right, working his way along the line of gold-ramparts and immobilized carts, and spied a side-street leading off into the maze of the Khan el-Khalili. At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently. A hookah jetted arcs of brown water from several musket wounds. Once he had entered the street, and gotten out of view of the musketeers, Jack got to his feet and threw his weight against a green wooden door. But it was solider than it looked, and well-barred from the inside. The same presumably went for every door and window that fronted on this street; there was no way to go but forward.

He rounded a tight curve and came to a wee square, the sort of thing that in Paris might have, planted in its center, a life-size statue of Leroy leading his regiments across the Rhine, or something. In place of which stood Yevgeny, feet planted wide, arms up in the air, manipulating a half-pike that he had evidently ripped from the hands of a foe. Yevgeny was holding it near its balance-point and whirling it round and round so fast that he, and the pike, taken together, seemed and sounded like a monstrous hummingbird. Three Janissaries stood round about him at a respectful distance; two, who’d ventured within the fatal radius, lay spreadeagled in the dust bleeding freely from giant lacerations of the head.

One dropped to his knees and tried to come in under Yevgeny’s pike, but the Russian, who was turning slowly round and round even as he spun the weapon, canted the plane of its movement in such a way that its sharpened end swept the fellow’s cap off, and might have scalped him had he been an inch closer. He collapsed to his belly and crept back away—which was not possible to do quickly.

All this presented itself to Jack’s eyes in the first moment that he came into this tiny plaza. His first thought was that Yevgeny would be defenseless against anyone who came upon the scene with a projectile weapon. Scarcely had this entered his mind when one of the two standing Janissaries backed into a door-nook, withdrew a discharged pistol from his waist-sash, and set about loading it. Jack picked up a fist-sized stone and flung it at this man. Yevgeny stopped his pike in mid-whirl, swung the butt high into the air, and drove the point into the body of the man who’d dropped to his stomach. The third, construing this as an opening, gathered his feet under him so as to spring at Yevgeny. Noting this, Jack let out a scream that astonished the man and made him have second thoughts and go all tangle-footed. He turned towards Jack and, distracted as he was by Yevgeny on his flank, parried an imagined attack from Jack, and mounted a weak one of his own. Yevgeny meanwhile chucked the pike at the pistol-loader, who had dropped his weapon into the dirt when Jack’s rock had caught him amidships (which was understandable) and gone down on both knees to retrieve it (a fatal mistake, as it had turned him into a stationary target).

The one who was fighting with Jack swooped his blade wildly from side to side. This was not a good technique, but its sheer recklessness set Jack back on his heels long enough for him to turn and run away. Yevgeny noted this, and pursued him hotly.

Three ways joined together in this little space. Jack had entered along one of them. That poor unnerved Janissary, and Yevgeny, had exited along the way that led off to Jack’s left. This was the way Jack needed to probe if there was to be any hope of outflanking the musketeers. It led imperceptibly downhill, away from the caravanserai and towards the canal. To Jack’s right, then, was a needle’s eye, which is to say a very narrow arch built to admit humans while preventing camels from passing out of the stables. Peering through that, he saw that beyond it the alley broadened and ran straight for about ten yards to a side entrance of the caravanserai, which was sucking in a palpable draft of air to feed the howling and cackling flames. A squad of some eight or ten French soldiers were just emerging from the smoke. They had prudently cast off their muskets and powder-horns, but otherwise looked none the worse for wear—they must have found some way to circumvent the fire.

But Jack’s view of these was suddenly blocked by a figure in a black ankle-length robe: Gabriel Goto, who stepped out from the shelter of a doorway and took up a position blocking the eye of the needle. At the moment he appeared to be unarmed; but he stopped the Frenchmen in their tracks anyway, by raising up his right hand and uttering some solemn words in Latin. Jack was no Papist, but he’d been in enough battles and poorhouses to recognize the rite of extreme unction, the last sacrament given to men who were about to die.

Hearing musket-fire from the opposite way out—the way Yevgeny had gone—Jack turned to look, and saw a somewhat wider street that wound off in the direction of where those musketeers had established their road-block. Ten or twelve yards away, just where it curved out of view, a corpse lay sprawled on its back.

Jack turned round again to look at Gabriel Goto, who had planted himself just on this side of the needle’s eye and was standing in a prayerful attitude as the Frenchmen came towards him. The samurai waited until they were no more than two yards away. Then he reached under his cloak and drew out his two-handed saber, gliding forward in the same movement, like a snake over grass, and tracing a compound diagram in the air with his sword-tip. Then he drew back, and Jack noticed that the head, neck, and right arm of one Frenchman were missing—removed by a single diagonal cut.

As Gabriel Goto seemed to have matters well in hand at the needle’s eye, Jack went the other way, slowing as he approached the corpse that lay in the street. It was the Turk from Monsieur Arlanc’s oar. He had been shot in the head with a musket, which was a polite way of saying that a lead ball three-quarters of an inch in diameter had hit him between the eyes traveling at several hundred miles an hour and turned much of his skull into a steaming crater. This gave Jack the idea of looking up, which was fortunate, as he saw a French musketeer kneeling on a rooftop above, aiming a musket directly at him. Smoke squirted from the pan. Jack darted sideways. A musket-ball slammed into a stone corner just above him, driving a shower of flakes into his face but not doing any real harm. Jack jumped back out and looked up to see Nasr al-Ghuráb up on that rooftop, lunging at the musketeer with a dagger. The raïs won that struggle in a few moments. But then he was struck in the leg by a musket-ball fired, from only a few yards’ distance, by a Janissary posted directly across the way. He fell, clutching his leg, and looking in astonishment and horror at the fellow who’d shot him, and shouted a few words in Turkish.

Jack meanwhile ran ahead, rounded a curve, and was confronted by a Y. The left fork led to a point in the main street, directly in front of the musketeers’ position; anyone who did so much as poke his head out of there would get it blown off in an instant. The right fork led to a point behind the musketeers, and so that was the one they wanted; but the French had had the good sense to throw up a barricade consisting of a wagon rolled over onto its side. Two muskets were immediately fired at Jack, who without thinking dove headlong into the deep gutter that ran down the center of the street. This had no more than a trickle of sewage in the bottom; it was lined with stone and (because of the slight curve in the street) protected him from musket-fire.

He rolled onto his back and looked straight up to see the sniper who had shot al-Ghuráb having his throat cut by Nyazi, who had somehow gotten to the roof. But rather than advancing, Nyazi was obliged to throw himself down to avoid fire from a few other Janissaries who were on the adjoining rooftop. Though he could not understand much Turkish or Arabic, Jack could tell the two languages apart by their sounds, and he was certain that several other Arabic-speaking men—Nyazi’s clansmen—were up there, too. So it was going to be camel-traders versus Janissaries on the rooftops.

Levering himself up on his elbows and surveying the street, Jack could now see Yevgeny, Padraig, and the Nubian backed into doorways, safe for now, but unable to advance toward the musketeers’ barricade.

Jack retreated up the gutter, squirming like an eel, until he was out of the line of fire, then got to his feet and ran back to the front of the stables, where the wagon-train was pinned down. There he could see into the stable-yard, where Jeronimo was saddling an Arab horse, apparently getting ready to do something.

From one of their supply-wagons Jack secured a powder-keg and an earthenware jar of lamp-oil. Then he turned round and went back, at first crawling on his belly and pushing these items before him, later hugging the keg to his belly and running. A rightward glance at the T intersection told him that Gabriel Goto was still embroiled at the needle’s eye, French body parts continuing to thud down every few seconds. The sword whirling through the air tracing Barock figures, like the pen of a royal calligrapher.

Jack paused near the Turk’s body to pry the wax-sealed bung from the jar of lamp-oil. He poured about half the contents over the powder-keg, dribbling it on slowly so that it soaked into the dry wood rather than running off. Then he came round the curve into the Y intersection and dove once more into the gutter: a trough with vertical sides and a rounded bottom, like a U, wide enough that the keg, laid sideways, could fit into it, remaining mostly below street level. But the round ends of the keg, bound by iron hoops, rolled like cartwheels along the sloping sides of the U.

Pushing the reeking keg in front of him, he inched forward until he began to draw direct fire from the musketeers manning the barricade, no more than ten yards away. Then he gave the keg a panicky shove and backed away. His intention had been to pour the remainder of the lamp-oil into the gutter and use it as a sort of liquid fuse. But here events overtook him. For Yevgeny had come up with the idea of trying to set fire to the barricade, and had fashioned a sort of burning lance from a spear and an oily rag. As Jack watched from the gutter, Yevgeny fired a pistol alongside this contrivance, igniting it; then he stepped out into the street and immediately took a musket-ball in the ribs. He paused, stepped farther into the street, and took another in the thigh. But these wounds apparently did not even qualify as painful by Russian standards, and so with perfect aplomb he hefted the flaming harpoon, judged the distance, then hopped forward three times on his good leg and hurled it towards the powder-keg. Another musket-ball hit him in the left wrist and spun him around. He fell like a toppled oak towards the street. At the same moment Jack rolled up out of the gutter and found himself standing in the middle of the Y with his back to the barricade.

There was a sudden bright light. It cast a long shadow behind Gabriel Goto, who was walking down the street painting the ashlars with a long streak of blood that drizzled from the hem of his black robe. He appeared to be perfectly unharmed.

Jack turned around to see planks fluttering down all over the neighborhood, and stray wagon-wheels bounding along the street. The right fork of the Y, where the barricade had once stood, was just a smoky mess. Above it, on the rooftop, Nasr al-Ghuráb had dragged himself into position despite a flayed and butchered thigh. He whipped out a cutlass, threw his good leg over the parapet, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and fell into the inferno, landing on two musketeers, crushing one and cutting the other in half.

At the same moment, Jack saw movement down the left fork of the Y, which had not figured much into the battle as it led to a place directly in front of the musketeers. But all of a sudden a lone man on horseback was galloping across that space: It was Excellentissimo Domino Jeronimo Alejandro Peñasco de Halcones Quinto, mounting a one-man cavalry charge on his Arab steed. He almost reached the enemy without suffering any injuries, for he had timed his charge carefully, and none of the musketeers were in position to fire. But as he galloped the last few yards, screaming “Estremaduras!” a shower of blood erupted from his back; some officer, perhaps, had shot him with a pistol. The horse was hit, too, and went down on its knees. This would have pitched any other man out of the saddle, but Jeronimo seemed to be ready for it. As he flew out of the saddle he shoved off with both feet, pitching his hindquarters upwards; tucked his head under; landed hard on one shoulder, and rolled completely over in a somersault. In the same continuous movement he sprang up to his feet, drew his rapier, and drove it all the way through the body of the officer who had shot him. “How do you like that, eh? El Torbellino made me practice that one until I pissed blood; and then he made me practice it some more until I got it right!” He pulled out the rapier and slashed its edge through the throat of another Frenchman who was coming up from one side. “Now you will learn that a man of Estremaduras can fight better when he is bleeding to death than a Frenchman in the pink of health! I judge that I have sixty seconds to live, which—” plunging his rapier into a a musketeer’s neck “—should give me more than enough time to—” cutting another musketeer’s throat “—kill a dozen of you—four so far—” he now revealed a dagger in the other hand, and stabbed a fleeing musketeer in the back “—make it five!”

But then several musketeers finally converged on El Desamparado, realizing that there was no escape from the man unless they killed him, and plunged their bayonets into his body.

“Yevgeny!” Jack shouted, for the Russian was only a few yards away from him, lying on his back in the street as if asleep. “We will be back with the heavy carts in a minute to get you.”

Then Jack, Padraig, the Nubian, and Gabriel Goto charged the barricade four abreast, and got through what was left of it with no difficulty. Padraig stayed behind to batter the surviving musketeers into submission with a quarter-staff, and to pick over their bodies for better weapons. Above them, several of Nyazi’s clansmen were charging across the rooftops, having overcome the Janissaries up there.

They came into the rear of the formation of musketeers that had been blocking the main street. At a glance Jack could not tell whether El Desamparado had slain his full quota of a dozen; but it was obvious that he would not slay any more. The rest were milling around, out of formation, and so Jack and his comrades simply discharged all of their remaining loaded firearms into their midst and then fell upon them with swords. The ones who survived all of this stumbled back over the bodies of El Desamparado and his victims and retreated into the side-street that had formed the left fork of the Y, where the men of Nyazi’s clan were able to rain stones and a few musket-balls on their heads.

Finally, now, the clansmen of Nyazi were able to bring the horses out of the stable-yard and hitch them to the gold-wagons, though various dragoons, musketeers, and Janissaries continued to harass them from all around; and now the thieves of Cairo were beginning to make their presence known, too. Flocks of them began to coalesce in doorways and corners, hidden by the greedy shadows of late afternoon, and made occasional sorties into the light in the hope of fetching some gold. In spite of this, within a quarter of an hour they were able to drive away from the stables—a cyclone of flame now—with four of the original six gold-carts.

Jack and Gabriel Goto were riding on the last of these, supposedly to act as a rear-guard. But both of them had another errand in mind as well. When they came abreast of the side-street where the barricade had been exploded, they reined in the cart-horse, jumped off, and ran up to recover Yevgeny.

Because of the smoldering debris that half-choked the street, they could not see the place where he had fallen until they were almost upon it. But then they found nothing except a wide smear of gore. Yevgeny’s blood had outlined the paving-stones in narrow red lines as it trickled between them, seeking the gutter. But Yevgeny himself was nowhere to be seen. The only other traces of him that remained were his left hand, which had been shot off, and a few rude characters drawn in blood on the pavement. An uneven line of bloody footsteps meandered up the street toward the stables, and disappeared into dust and smoke.

“Can you read it?” Jack asked Gabriel.

“It says, ‘Go the long way round,’ ” Gabriel answered.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Specifically? I do not know. Generally? It suggests that he will go some other way.”

“Spoken like a Jesuit.”

“He has gone that way,” said Gabriel, pointing toward the caravanserai, “and we must go this.” Pointing back towards the gold-carts.

“We are needed there anyway,” Jack said, breaking into a run. For their cart had already come under attack from a mixed mob of thieves, Vagabonds, Janissaries, and French soldiers. The appearance of Jack and Gabriel on their flank, bloody sabers held high, got rid of most of them. But looters better armed and more determined were close behind them, and so Jack and Gabriel and a few of Nyazi’s men rattled the half-mile down to the canal hotly pursued, though at a prudent distance, by a sort of wolf-pack.

At the foot of the street where it gave way to the canal, Mr. Foot, Vrej, Surendranath, and van Hoek were waiting—looking as if they had been through some adventures of their own this afternoon. They had thrown a heavy platform across the gap between the quay and the river-boat, and the other three gold-carts had already rumbled across it, spilling many of their contents on the deck.

Parked to one side of the street was a humble-looking hay-wain, harnessed to a camel. As the last cart, carrying Jack and Gabriel, jounced past it, a whip cracked and this vehicle bolted out into the middle of the street. By this point nothing could have prevented the gold-cart from reaching the platform, so Jack vaulted off of it, and turned round to face the hay-wain, anticipating some sort of attack. But by the time he had recovered his balance, the hay-wain had stopped in the middle of the street, directly in the path of the pursuing horde. The driver (Nyazi!) and another man (Moseh!) jumped off and chocked its wheels there, and at the same time the pile of hay on the cart’s back seemed to come alive; most of the load showered into the street. Revealed were a long tubular black object (a cannon!) and, clambering to his feet next to it, a black man (Dappa!).

Now in a way this was not surprising, for it was all a part of the plan—they’d spent all of yesterday buying the damned piece. In another way it was, for it was supposed to have been set up at dockside, loaded, aimed, and ready to be fired. Instead of which it had just gotten here—in the nick of time, Jack thought, if it had been loaded. But Dappa, rather than jamming a torch against its touch-hole, now began to rummage through a clanking assortment of implements strewn about his feet, while from time to time casting a glance up the length of the street to (at first) count, and (presently) estimate the number of heavily armed, screaming men sprinting their way.

“I have not done this before,” he announced, fishing out, and inspecting, a long, rusty pick, “but have had it all explained to me, by men who have.”

“Men who have lost sea-battles and been taken as galley-slaves,” Jack added.

Dappa brushed hay from the butt of the cannon and shoved the pick into the touch-hole.

“Help load the boat!” Jack screamed at Moseh and Nyazi. To Dappa he suggested, “For Christ’s sake, don’t worry about clearing the bloody touch-hole!”

Dappa returned, “If you’d be so good as to get the tampion out of my way?”

Jack scurried around to the muzzle-side of the wagon, turned his back to the on-rushing horde—which was not a thing that came naturally to him—reached up, and yanked out a round wooden bung that had been stuffed into the gun’s muzzle. It was shot out of his hand by a pistol-ball.

Dappa had an arrow through his sleeve, though not, apparently, through his arm. He was regarding a long-handled scoop. “As you are in such a hurry today,” he announced, “we shall dispense with the customary procedure of swabbing out the barrel.” As he spoke he shoved the scoop into some crunchy-sounding receptacle, which was hidden from Jack’s view by the side of the wagon, and raised it up heaped with coarse black powder. Balancing this in one hand he produced a copper-bladed spatula in the other, and leveled the powder-charge; then, moving with utmost deliberation so as not to spill any, he turned the scoop end-for-end and introduced it to the cannon’s muzzle, then, slowly at first, but quicker as he went along, hand-over-handed it until the entirety of its long handle had been swallowed by the barrel. He then gave it a half rotation to disgorge its load, and began gingerly to extract it.

Jack had until now been caught between a desire to make sure that Dappa didn’t do it wrong, and a natural concern for what was approaching. To describe the foremost of the attackers as irregulars would have been to give far too high an estimate of their discipline, motives, armaments, and appearance; they were thieves, avaricious bystanders, micro-ethnic-groups, and a few Janissaries who had broken ranks when they had caught sight of gold bars. Most of these had faltered when they had caught sight of the cannon. But awareness had now propagated up the street that it was still in the process of being loaded. Meanwhile the French platoons had re-formed and begun marching in good order down the hill, reaming the street clear in a manner very like what the gun-swab would have done to the barrel of the cannon, had Dappa not elected to omit that step. The emboldened rabble swarming out from their places of concealment mingled together with the not-so-emboldened ones being rammed down the street by this piston of French troops and all joined together into—

“An avalanche, or so ’tis claimed by certain Alpine galériens I have rowed with, may be triggered by the sound of cannon-fire.” Dappa had torn off his shirt, wadded it up, and stuffed it down the barrel, and was now feeding in double handfuls of shot. He followed that with his turban, and finally took up his long rammer. “I wonder if we may halt an avalanche thus.” His long dreadlocks, freed from the imprisonment of the head-wrap, fell about his face as he bent forward to get the pad of the rammer into the muzzle.

“Don’t bother taking the rammer out—at this range ’twill serve as a javelin,” was Jack’s last advice to Dappa, as he turned his back and began to stalk up the hill towards the Mobb. For there were one or two fleet-footed scimitar-swingers, far ahead of the pack, who might arrive soon enough to interfere with the final steps of the rite.

“Where did that horn of priming-powder get to?” Dappa wondered.

Jack feinted left long enough to convince the hashishin on the right that he had a clear path to Dappa; then Jack lashed out with a foot and tripped him as he ran by. Moseh emerged from nearer to the quay. He had located another boarding axe, his tongue was coming out, he had an eye on the man who’d just planted his face in the street, and he was followed by Nyazi and Gabriel Goto, who had been watching all of these developments with interest and decided to leave off ship-loading work.

A scimitar slashed downward from the left; Jack angled it off the back of his blade. A tapping sound from behind suggested that Dappa had found his priming-powder and was getting it into the touch-hole.

“Has anyone got a light?” Dappa said.

Jack butt-stroked his opponent across the jaw with the guard of his sword and yanked a discharged pistol out of the fellow’s waist-band, then turned round and underhanded it across five or six yards of empty space to Dappa. Which might have got him killed, as it entailed turning his back on his opponent; but the latter knew what was good for him, and prudently flung himself down.

As did Jack; and (as he saw now, turning his head to look up the hill) as did nearly everyone else. A small number of utterly unhinged maniacs kept running toward them. Jack got to his feet, making sure he was well out of the way of the cannon’s muzzle, and backed up to the wagon. Nyazi, Moseh, and Gabriel Goto closed ranks around him.

There followed a bit of a standoff. Crazed hashishin aside, no one in the street could move as long as Dappa had them under his gun. But as soon as Dappa fired it, he’d be defenseless, and they’d be swarmed under. Pot-shots whistled their way from a few doorways up the street; Dappa squatted down, but held his ground at the cannon’s breech.

It bought them the time they needed, anyway. “All aboard!” called van Hoek—a bit late, as the boat had already cast off lines, and the gap between it and the quay was beginning to widen. “Now!” called Dappa. Jack, Nyazi, Gabriel Goto, and Moseh all turned and ran for it. Dappa stayed behind. The French regulars leapt to their feet and made for him double-time. Dappa cocked the pistol, held its pan above the small powder-filled depression that surrounded the orifice of the cannon’s touch-hole, and pulled the trigger. Sparks showered and, like stars going behind clouds, were swallowed in a plume of smoke. A spurt of flame two fathoms long shot from the cannon’s muzzle, driving the ram-rod, some pounds of buckshot, and half of Dappa’s clothing up the length of the street. The riot that came his way a moment later suggested that none of it had been very effective. But by the time the Mobb engulfed the cannon, Dappa was sprinting down the quay. He jumped for it, caromed off the gunwale, and fell into the Nile; but scarcely had time to get wet before oars had been thrust into the water for him to grab onto. They pulled him aboard. Everyone went flat on the decks as the French soldiers discharged their muskets, once, in their general direction. Then they passed out of sight and out of range.

“What went awry?” van Hoek asked.

“Our escape-route was blocked by a company of French musketeers,” Jack said.

“Fancy that,” van Hoek muttered.

“Jeronimo and both of our Turks are dead.”

“The raïs?”

“You heard me—he is dead, and now you are our Captain,” Jack said.

“Yevgeny?”

“He dragged himself away to die. I suspect he did not want to be a burden on the rest of us,” Jack said.

“That is hard news,” van Hoek said, gripping his bandaged hand and squeezing it.

“It is noteworthy that both of the Turks were killed,” said Vrej Esphahnian, who had overheard most of this. “More than likely one of them betrayed us; the Pasha in Algiers probably planned the whole thing, from the beginning, as a way to screw the Investor out of his share.”

“The raïs seemed very surprised when he was shot by a Janissary,” Jack allowed.

“It must have been part of the Turks’ plan,” said Vrej. “They would want to slay the traitor first of all, so that he would not tell the tale.”

Upstream, a Turkish war-galley had been dispatched from Giza to pursue them. But it had feeble hope of catching them, for the Nile was not a wide river even at this time of the year, and such width as it had was choked by a jam of slow-moving grain barges.

Night fell as they were approaching the great fork of the Nile. They took the Rosetta branch to throw off their landward pursuers, then cut east across the Delta, following small canals, and got across to the Damietta Fork by poling the boat over an expanse of flooded fields several miles wide. By the time the sun rose the following morning, they had struck their masts, and anything else that projected more than six feet above the waterline, and were surrounded by tall reeds in the marshy expanses to the east.

At the end of that day they made rendezvous with a small caravan of Nyazi’s people, and there a share of the gold was loaded onto their camels. Nyazi and the Nubian both said their farewells to the Cabal at this point and struck out for the south, Nyazi visibly excited at the thought of a reunion with his forty wives, and the Nubian trusting to fortune to get him back to the country from which he had been abducted.

Eastwards on the boat continued Jack, Mr. Foot, Dappa, Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig Tallow, Vrej Esphahnian, Surendranath, and Gabriel Goto, with van Hoek as their captain and Moseh as their designated Prophet. It was a role in which he seemed uncomfortable until one day, after many wanderings and lesser adventures, they came to a place where the reeds parted into something that could only be the Red Sea.

There Moseh stood in the bow of the boat, lit up by the rising sun, and spoke a few momentous words in half-remembered Hebrew—prompting Jack to say, “Before you part the waters, there, please keep in mind that we’re on a boat, and have nothing to gain from being left high and dry.”

Van Hoek ordered the masts stepped and the sails raised, and they set a course for Mocha and the Orient, free men all.

Book 5

The Juncto

Eliza to Leibniz

LATE SEPTEMBER 1690

Doctor,

I have been a few days in Juvisy, a town on the left bank of the Seine, south of Paris, where Monsieur Rossignol has a château. This is a natural stopping-place for one who has come up from the south. I have been in Lyon for almost a month tending to some business, and am just now returning to Île-de-France. Juvisy is a sort of fork in the road; thence one may follow the river into Paris, or else strike cross-country westwards toward Versailles. Monsieur Rossignol placed his stables and staff at my disposal so that my little household, and our brief train of horses and carriages, could refresh themselves while they waited for me to make up my mind. Jean-Jacques is at Versailles, and I have not seen him since I departed for Lyon, and so my heart told me to go that way; but there is much to be done in Paris, and so my head bid me go thither. I am going to Paris.

When I woke up this morning, the estate was strangely quiet. I drew a blanket over my shoulders and went to the windows, where I beheld a grotesque scene: during the night the garden had become matted with unsightly lumps of damp straw. The gardeners, sensing an unseasonable drop in temperature yester evening, had been out late into the night packing straw around the smaller and more delicate plants, like nurses tucking their babies in under duvets. All was now dusted with silver. Taller plants, such as the roses, had frozen through. The little pools around the fountains were glazed, and the statues had picked up a frosty patina that gave keen definition to their rippling muscles and flowing garments. The place was quiet as a graveyard, for the workmen, having toiled half the night to erect ramparts of straw against the invading cold, were all sleeping late.

It was quite beautiful, especially when the sun came up over the hills beyond the Seine and suffused all of that frost with a cool peach-colored light. But of course for such cold to strike France in September is monstrous—it is like a comet or a two-headed baby. Spring was late in coming this year. France’s hopes for an adequate harvest depended on a long, warm autumn. As much as I admired the beauty of those frosted roses, I knew that grain, apples, vines, and vegetables all over France must have suffered the same fate. I sent word to my staff to prepare for an early departure, then tarried in M. Rossignol’s bedchamber only long enough to bid him a memorable farewell. Now—as you will have discerned from my wretched penmanship—we are in the carriage, rattling up the Left Bank into Paris.

During my earlier life here, I’d have been beside myself, for this early frost would have sent the commodities markets into violent motion, and it would have been of the highest importance for me to get instructions to Amsterdam. As matters stand, my responsibilities are more profound, but less immediate. Money surges and courses through this realm in the most inscrutable ways. I suppose one could construct some sort of strained analogy—Paris is the heart, and Lyons the lungs, or something—but in any event, the system does not work, and money does not flow, unless people make it work, and I have become one of those people. At first I worked mostly for the Compagnie du Nord, which imports Baltic timber to Dunkerque. Through this I came to know more than I should care to about how le Roi finances the war. Lately I have also become embroiled in some scheme of M. le duc d’Arcachon whose details remain vague. It was the latter that took me down to Lyon; for I traveled down there in August in the company of the Duke himself. He installed me in a pied-à-terre that he maintains in that city, then journeyed onwards to Marseille where he planned to embark on his jacht for points south.

We are coming up on the University already, we move too fast, the streets are empty as if the whole city mourns for the lost harvest. All is frozen except for we who move quickly so as not to freeze. Soon we shall cross the river and reach the hôtel particulier of Arcachon, and I have not got to the main points of my letter yet. Quickly then:

§ What do you hear from Sophie concerning Liselotte, or, as she is addressed here, Madame? For a few weeks, two years ago, she and I were close. Indeed I was prepared to jump in bed with her if she gave me the sign; but contrary to many steamy rumors, it never happened—she wanted my services as a spy, not as a lover. Since I returned to Versailles, she and I have had no contact at all.

She is a lonely woman. Her husband the King’s brother is a homosexual, and she is a lesbian. So far, so good; but where Monsieur gets to indulge in as many lovers as he pleases, Madame must find love furtively. Monsieur, even though he does not desire Madame, is jealous of her, and persecutes and sends away her lovers.

If Court gossip has any truth in it, Madame had become close, in recent years, to the Dauphine. This is not to say that they were lovers, for the Dauphine had been having an affair with her maid, a Piedmontese woman, and was said to be quite faithful to her. But as birds of a feather flock together, Madame and the Dauphine, the maid, and a few other like-minded women had formed a little clique centered upon the Private Cabinet of the Dauphine’s Apartment, just next to the Dauphin’s quaint little library on the ground floor of the south wing.

I was aware of this two years ago, though I never saw the place with my own eyes. For I was engaged in those days as a tutor of the niece of M. la duchesse d’Oyonnax, who was lady-in-waiting to the Dauphine. By no means was the Duchess ever part of this little circle of clitoristes, for she is clearly an admirer of young men. But she knew of it, and was in and out of the Private Cabinet all the time, waiting on these people, attending their levées and couchées and so on.

Now as you must have heard, a few months ago the Dauphine died suddenly. Of course, whenever anyone dies suddenly here, foul play is suspected, especially if the decedent was close to M. la duchesse d’Oyonnax. Over the summer, everyone was expecting the Dauphin to marry Oyonnax, which would have made her the next Queen of France; but instead he has secretly married his former mistress—the maid-of-honor of his half-brother. Not a very prestigious match!

So nothing is clear. Those who cannot rid their minds of the conviction that the Dauphine must have been poisoned by Oyonnax, have had to develop ever more fanciful hypotheses: that there is some secret understanding between her and the Dauphin, for example, that will bring her a Prince of the Blood as her husband, &c., &c.

Personally, while harboring no illusions as to the moral character of Oyonnax, I doubt that she murdered the Dauphine, because she is too clever to do anything so obvious, and because it has deprived her of one of the most prestigious stations at Court: lady-in-waiting to the next Queen. But I cannot help but wonder as to the state of mind of poor Liselotte, who has seen her most intimate social circle exploded, and no longer has a comfortable haven within the Palace. I believe that Oyonnax may have positioned herself so as to be drawn into that vacuum. I wonder if Madame writes to Sophie about this. I could simply ask M. Rossignol, who reads all her letters, but I don’t wish to abuse my position as his mistress—not yet, anyway!

§ Speaking of M. Rossignol:

Though my stay at Château Juvisy was cut short by the frost, I was able to notice several books on his library table, written in a queer alphabet that I recognized dimly from my time in Constantinople but could not quite place. I asked him about it, and he said it was Armenian. This struck me as funny since I had supposed that he would have his hands quite full with all of the cyphers in French, Spanish, Latin, German, &c., without having to look so far afield.

He explained that M. le duc d’Arcachon, prior to his departure for Marseille in August, had made an unusual request of the Cabinet Noir: namely, that they examine with particular care any letters originating from a Spanish town called Sanlúcar de Barrameda during the first week of August. The Cabinet had assented readily, knowing that letters came into France from that part of the world only rarely, and that most were grubby notes from homesick sailors.

But oddly enough, a letter had come across M. Rossignol’s desk, apparently postmarked from Sanlúcar de Barrameda around the fifth day of August. A strange heathenish-looking thing it had been, apparently penned and sealed in some Mahometan place and transported none too gently across the sea to Sanlúcar. It was written in Armenian, and it was addressed to an Armenian family in Paris. The address given was the Bastille.

As bizarre, as striking as this was, even I might have let it pass without further notice had it not been for the fact that on the sixth of August a remarkable act of piracy is said to have taken place off Sanlúcar: as you may have heard, a band of Barbary Corsairs, disguised as galley-slaves, boarded a ship recently returned from New Spain and made off with some silver. I am certain that M. le duc d’Arcachon is somehow implicated.

[Written later in a more legible hand]

We have reached the Paris dwelling of the de Lavardacs, the Hôtel d’Arcachon, and I am now at a proper writing-desk, as you can see.

To finish that matter of the Armenian letter: I know that you, Doctor, have an interest in strange systems of writing, and that you are in charge of a great library. If you have anything on the Armenian language, I invite you to correspond with M. Rossignol. For though he is fascinated by this letter, he can do very little with it. He had one of his clerks make an accurate copy of the thing, then re-sealed it, and has been trying to track down any surviving addressees, in hopes that he may deliver it to them. If they are alive, and they choose to write back, M. Rossignol will inspect their letter and try to glean more clews as to the nature of the cypher (if any) they are using.

§ Speaking of letters, I must get this one posted today, and so let me raise one more matter. This concerns Sophie’s banker, Lothar von Hacklheber.

I saw Lothar recently in Lyon. I did not wish to see him, but he was difficult to evade. Both of us had been invited to dinner at the home of a prominent member of the Dépôt. For various reasons I could not refuse the invitation; I suspect that Lothar orchestrated the whole affair.

To shorten this account somewhat, I shall tell you now what I only divined later. For as my driver and footmen would be tarrying in the stables for some hours with Lothar’s, I had given instructions to mine that they should find out all that they could from his. It had become obvious that Lothar was trying to dig up information concerning me, and I reckoned that turnabout was fair play. Of course his grooms and drivers could know nothing of what Lothar had been thinking or doing, but they would at least know where he had gone and when.

Through this channel, I learned that Lothar had set out from Leipzig in July with a large train, including a prætorian guard of mercenaries, and made his way down to Cadiz, where he had transacted certain business; but then he had withdrawn up the coast to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where he had apparently expected some momentous transaction to come off during the first week of August. But something had gone wrong. He had flown into a rage and made a tremendous commotion, despatching runners and spies in all directions. After a few days he had given orders for the whole train to ride up to Arcachon, which is a long hard journey over land; but they had done it. Lothar meanwhile accomplished the same journey in a hired barque, so that he was waiting for them when they arrived at Arcachon late in August. Immediately he announced that they would turn around and make for Marseille. Which they did, at the cost of several horses and one man; but they reached the place a few days too late—late for what, these informants knew not—and so they withdrew up the Rhône to Lyon, which is a place where Lothar is much more comfortable. Of course I was already in Lyon, having been dropped off there by M. le duc d’Arcachon a week earlier; from which it was easy enough to guess that the person Lothar had hoped, but failed, to intercept in Marseille had been M. le duc. Now perhaps it was his intention to tarry in Lyon, and wait for the return of d’Arcachon. I was going to add “like a spider in his web” or some such expression, but it struck me as absurd, given that Lothar is a mere baron, and a foreigner from a country with which we are at war, while the duc d’Arcachon is a Peer, and one of the most important men in France. I stayed my quill, as it would seem ludicrous to liken this obscure and outlandish Baron to a spider, and the duc d’Arcachon to a fly. And yet in person Lothar is much more formidable than the duc. At the House of Huygens I have seen a spider through a magnifying-glass, and Lothar, with his round abdomen and his ghastly pox-marked face, looked more like it than any other human I have beheld. Spider-like was he in the way that he dominated the dinner-table, for it seemed that every other person in the room was noosed to a silken cord whose end was gripped in his dirty ink-stained mitt, so that when he wanted some answer from someone he need only give them a jerk. He was absurd in his determination to find out from me precisely when M. le duc would be returning from his Mediterranean cruise. Every time I beat back one of his forays he would retreat, scamper around, and attack from a new quarter. Truly it was like wrestling with an eight-legged monster. It demanded all of my wits not to divulge anything, or to tumble into one of his verbal traps. I was tired, having spent the day meeting with one of Lothar’s competitors discussing certain very complicated arrangements. I had gone to this dinner naïvely expecting persiflage. Instead I was being grilled by this ruthless and relentless man, who was like some Jesuit of the Inquisition in his acute perception of any evasions or contradictions in my answers. It is a good thing I had come alone, or else whatever gentleman had escorted me should have been honor-bound to challenge Lothar to a duel. As it was, our host almost did, so shocked was he by the way that Lothar was ruining his dinner-party. But I believe that even this was a sort of message that Lothar intended to send to me, and through me to the duc: that so angry was he over what had occurred off Sanlúcar de Barrameda that he considered himself in a state akin to war, in which normal standards of behavior were cast aside.

You are probably terrified, Doctor, that I am about to demand a formal apology of Lothar, and that I have designated you as the luckless messenger. Not so, for as I have told you, it is obvious that Lothar has no intention of apologizing for anything. Whatever M. le duc d’Arcachon took from him is more important than his reputation or even his honor. He was announcing as much by his behavior at dinner, and I doubt not that word of it has already gone out among all of the members of the Dépôt. The bankers I was dealing with there suddenly lost their nerve, and broke off negotiations with me—all except one, a Genoan with a very tough reputation, who is demanding a large rake-off “to cover the extraordinary precautions,” and who insisted that a peculiar clause be inserted into the agreement: namely, that he would accept silver, but never gold.

I fear that in the end I failed utterly to keep Lothar at bay. How long will Mademoiselle be staying in Lyon? I have no fixed plans, mein Herr. But is it not true, mademoiselle, that a soirée is planned at the Hôtel d’Arcachon on the fourteenth of October? How did you know of this, mein Herr? How I know of it is none of your concern, mademoiselle—but that is a fixed plan, is it not? And so it is not truthful, is it, to assert, as you have just done, that you have no fixed plans? And so on. Lothar knew more than he should have known, for he must have spies at Versailles or in Paris; and whenever he divulged some morsel of information he had thus acquired, it was as if he had punched me in the stomach. I could not hold my own against him. He must have known, by the end of the dinner, that le duc would be passing through Lyon at some time during the first or second week of October. He is down there now, I am certain, waiting; and I have sent word, every way I know how, to the naval authorities in Marseille, that when le duc returns he must take great care.

Thus forewarned, le duc ought to be perfectly safe; for how much power can one Saxon baron wield, in Lyon? Yet Lothar’s bizarre confidence jangled my nerves.

It was not until later, during my third round of negotiations with the said Genoan banker, that I began to get some inkling of what motivated Lothar, and how he knew so much. This banker—after a lengthy discussion of silver vs. gold—rolled his eyes and made some disparaging reference to Alchemists.

Now, during that dreadful dinner, Lothar had, more than once, made some dismissive comment about M. le duc, along the lines of “He does not know what he has blundered into.”

On the admittedly fragile basis of these two remarks, I have developed a hypothesis—a vague one—that the ship that was looted off Sanlúcar de Barrameda contained something of great importance to those—and I now number Lothar among them—who put stock in Alchemy. It appears that M. le duc d’Arcachon, in concert with his Turkish friends, has stolen that cargo—but perhaps they do not comprehend what it is. Now, all of the Alchemists are up in arms about it. This would explain how Lothar has come to be so well-informed as to what is happening in Versailles and in Paris, for many members of the Esoteric Brotherhood are to be found in both places, and perhaps Lothar has been getting despatches from them.

I have seen you, Doctor, standing next to Lothar on the balcony of the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig. And it is well known that Lothar is banker to Sophie and Ernst August, your patrons. What can you tell me of this man and what motivates him? For most Alchemists are ninehammers and dilettantes; but if my hypothesis is correct, he takes it seriously.

That is all for now. Members of this household are queued up six deep outside the door of this chamber, waiting for me to finish so that they can importune me to make this or that decision concerning the party planned for the fourteenth. Between now and then, I shall be absurdly busy. You shall not hear from me until it is all over, and then everything is going to be different; for on that evening, many dramatic changes may be expected. I can say no more now. When you read this, wish me luck.

Eliza

Leibniz to Eliza

EARLY OCTOBER 1690

Mademoiselle,

Please accept my apologies on behalf of all German barons.

I have already told you the tale of how, when I was five years old, following my father’s death, I went into his library and began to educate myself. This alarmed my teachers at the Nikolaischule, who prevailed upon my mother to lock me out. A local nobleman became aware of this, and paid a call on my mother, and in the most gentlemanly way possible, yet with utmost gravity and firmness, made her see that the teachers in this case were fools. She unlocked the library.

That nobleman was Egon von Hacklheber. The year must have been 1651 or 1652—memory fades. I recall him as a silver-haired gentleman, a sort of long-lost, peregrine uncle of that family, who had spent most of his life in Bohemia, but who had turned up in Leipzig around 1630—driven there, one presumes, by the fortunes of what we now call the Thirty Years’ War, but what in those days just seemed like an endless and mindless succession of atrocities.

Shortly after he caused the library to be unlocked for me, Egon departed on a journey to the west, which was expected to last for several months, and to take him as far as England; but on a road in the Harz Mountains he was waylaid by robbers, and died. By the time his remains were found, they were nothing more than a skeleton, picked clean by ravens and ants, still clad in his cloak.

Lothar had been born in 1630, the third son of that family. None of those boys had attended school. They had been raised within the household, and educated by tutors—some hired, others simply members of the family who possessed knowledge, and a willingness to impart it. Egon von Hacklheber, a man of exceptional erudition, who had traveled widely, had devoted an hour or two each day to educating the three von Hacklheber boys. Lothar had been his brightest pupil; for, being the youngest, he had to work hardest to keep up with his brothers.

If you have done the arithmetic, you’ll know that Lothar was in his early twenties when Egon departed on his fatal journey. By that time, dark days had fallen on that family, for smallpox had burned through Leipzig, taken the lives of the two older boys, and left Lothar—now the scion—mutilated as you have seen him. The death of his uncle Egon perfected Lothar’s misery.

Much later—rather recently, in fact—I became aware that Lothar maintains some peculiar notions as to what “really” happened. Lothar believes that Egon knew Alchemy—that he was, in fact, an adept of such power that he could heal the gravest illnesses, and even raise the dead. Yet he would not, or could not, save the lives of Lothar’s two brothers, whom he loved almost as if they were his own sons. Egon had departed from Leipzig with a broken heart, with no intention of ever coming back. His death in the Harz might have been suicide. Or—again this is all according to the eccentric notions of Lothar—it might have been faked, to hide his own unnatural longevity.

I believe that Lothar is simply out of his mind concerning this. The death of his brothers made him crazy in certain respects. Be that as it may, he believes in Alchemy, and phant’sies that if Egon had stayed in Leipzig a few years longer he might have imparted to Lothar the secrets of Creation. Lothar has not ceased to pursue those secrets himself, by his own methods, in the thirty-some years since.

Now, as to the infamous Duchess of Oyonnax—

“I LEFT INSTRUCTIONS NOT to be disturbed.”

“Please forgive me, mademoiselle,” said the big Dutchwoman, in passable French, “but it is Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, and she will not be put off.”

“Then I do forgive you, Brigitte, for she is a difficult case; I shall meet her presently and finish reading this letter later.”

“By your leave, you shall have to finish it tomorrow, mademoiselle; for the guests arrive in a few hours, and we have not even begun with your hair yet.”

“Very well—tomorrow then.”

“Where shall I invite Madame la duchesse to wait for you?”

“The Petit Salon. Unless—”

“Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon is entertaining her cousine, the big one, in there.”

“The library then.”

“Monsieur Rossignol is toiling over some eldritch Documents in the library, my lady.”

Eliza took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Tell me, then, Brigitte, where there might be a room in the Hôtel Arcachon that is not crowded with early-arriving party-guests.”

“Could you meet her in…the chapel?”

“Done! Give me a minute. And, Brigitte?”

“Yes, my lady?”

“Is there any word of Monsieur le duc yet?”

“Not since the last time you asked, mademoiselle.”

“THE JACHT OF THE DUC d’Arcachon was sighted approaching Marseille on the sixth of October. It was flying signal-flags ordering that fast horses and a coach must be made ready at dockside for immediate departure. That much we know from a messenger who was sent north immediately when everything I have just described to you was perceived, through a prospective-glass, from a steeple in Marseille,” Eliza said. “This news came to us early this morning. We can only assume that le duc himself is a few hours behind, and will show up at any moment; but it is not to be expected that anyone in this household could know any more than that.”

“Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain will be disappointed,” said the Duchess of Oyonnax in a bemused way. She nodded at a page, who bowed, backed out of the chapel, then pivoted on the ball of one foot and bolted. Eliza, comtesse de la Zeur, and Marie-Adelaide de Crépy, duchesse d’Oyonnax, were now alone in the private chapel of the de Lavardacs. Though Oyonnax, never one to leave anything to chance, took the precaution of opening the doors of the little confessional in the back, to verify that it was empty.

The chapel occupied a corner of the property. Public streets ran along the front, or altar end, and along one of the sides. That side had several stained-glass windows, tall and narrow to fetch a bit of light from the sky. These had small casements down below, which were normally closed to block the noise and smell of the street beyond; but Oyonnax opened two of them. Cold air came in, which scarcely mattered considering the tonnage of clothing that each of these women was wearing. A lot of noise came in, too. Eliza supposed that this was a further precaution against their being overheard by any eavesdroppers who might be pressing ears against doors. But if Oyonnax was the sort to worry about such things, then this chapel was a comfortable place for her. It contained no furniture—no pews—just a rough stone floor, and she had already verified that there was no one crouching behind the little altar. The chapel was hundreds of years older than any other part of the compound. It was unfashionably Gothick, dim, and gloomy, and probably would have been knocked down long ago and replaced with something Barock were it not for the windows and the altar-piece (which were said to be priceless treasures) and the fourth left metatarsal bone of Saint Louis (which was embedded in a golden reliquary cemented into the wall).

“Pontchartrain sent no fewer than three messages here this morning, requesting the latest news,” said Eliza, “but I did not know the contrôleur-général had also contacted you, my lady.”

“His curiosity on the matter presumably reflects that of the King.”

“It does not surprise me that the King should be so keen to know the whereabouts of his Grand Admiral. But would it not be more proper for such inquiries to be routed through the Secretary of State for the Navy?”

The Duchess of Oyonnax had paused by one of the open casements and levered it mostly closed, making of it a sort of horizontal gun-slit through which she could peer at the street. But she turned away from it now and peered at Eliza for a few moments, then announced: “I am sorry. I supposed you might have known. Monsieur le marquis de Seignelay has cancer. He is very ill of it, and no longer able to fulfill his obligations to his majesty’s Navy.”

“No wonder the King is so intent on this, then—for they say that the Duke of Marlborough has landed in force in the South of Ireland.”

“Your news is stale. Marlborough has already taken Cork, and Kinsale is expected to fall at any moment. All of this while de Seignelay is too ill to work, and d’Arcachon is off in the south on some confusing adventure of his own.”

From out in the courtyard, beyond the rear doors of the chapel, Eliza heard a muffled burst of feminine laughter: the Duchess of Arcachon and her friends. It was curious. A few paces in one direction, the most exalted persons in France were donning ribbons and perfume and swapping gossip, getting ready for a Duke’s birthday party. Beyond the confines of the Arcachon compound, France was getting ready for nine months’ starvation, as the harvest had been destroyed by frost. French and Irish garrisons were falling to the onslaught of Marlborough in chilly Ireland, and the Secretary of State for the Navy was being gnawed to death by cancer. Eliza decided that this dim, chilly, empty room, cluttered with gruesome effigies of our scourged and crucified and impaled Lord, was not such a bad place after all to have a meeting with Oyonnax. Certainly Oyonnax seemed more in her element here than in a gilded and ruffled drawing-room. She said: “I wonder if it is even necessary for you to kill Monsieur le duc. The King might do it for you.”

“Do not talk about it this way, if you please!” Eliza snapped.

“It was merely an observation.”

“When le duc planned tonight, it was summer, and everything seemed to be going perfectly. I know what he was thinking: the King needs money for the war, and I shall bring him money!”

“You sound as though you are defending him.”

“I believe it is useful to know the mind of the enemy.”

“Does le duc know your mind, mademoiselle?”

“Obviously not. He does not rate me an enemy.”

“Who does?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Someone wishes to know your mind, for you are being watched.”

“I am well aware of it. Monsieur Rossignol—”

“Ah, yes—the King’s Argus—he knows all.”

“He has noticed that my name crops up frequently, of late, in letters written by those at Court who style themselves Alchemists.”

“Why are the chymists watching you?”

“I believe it has to do with what Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon has been up to in the south,” said Eliza. “Assuming that you have been discreet, that is.”

Oyonnax laughed. “You and I associate with two entirely different sorts of chymists! Even if I were indiscreet—which I most certainly am not—it is inconceivable that a brewer of poison, working in a cellar in Paris, should have any contact with a noble practitioner of the Art, such as Upnor or de Gex.”

“I did not know that Father Édouard was an Alchemist as well!”

“Of course. Indeed, my divine cousin perfectly illustrates the point I am making. Can you phant’sy such a man associating with Satanists?”

“I cannot even phant’sy myself doing so.”

“You aren’t.”

“What are you then, if I may inquire?”

Oyonnax, in a strangely girlish gesture, put a gloved hand to her lips, suppressing a laugh. “You still do not understand. Versailles is like this window.” She swept her arm out, directing Eliza’s eye to a scene in stained glass. “Beautiful, but thin, and brittle.” She opened the casement below to reveal the street beyond: a wood-carrier, looking like a wild man, had dropped his load to have a fist-fight with a young Vagabond who had taken offense because the wood-carrier had bumped into a whore that the Vagabond was escorting into an alley. A man blinded by smallpox was squatting against a wall releasing a bloody phlux from his bowels. “Beneath the lovely glaze, a sea of desperation. When people are desperate, and praying to God has failed, they begin to look elsewhere. The famous Satanists that Maintenon is so worried about wouldn’t recognize the Prince of Darkness if they went down to Hell and held a candle at his levée! Those necromancers are just like the mountebanks on the Pont-Neuf. You can’t make a living as a mountebank by offering to trim people’s fingernails, because the clientele is not desperate enough. But you can make a living as a tooth-puller. Have you ever had a tooth go bad, mademoiselle?”

“I am aware that it hurts.”

“There are people at Court who suffer from aches of heart and spirit that are every bit as intolerable as a toothache. Those who prey on them, are no different from tooth-pullers. The emblems of the devil are no different from the pliers brandished by tooth-pullers: visual proof that these people are equipped to ply their trade, and satisfy their customers.”

“You are so dark! Is there anything you believe in?”

Oyonnax closed the casement. The gruesome images outside were gone. “I believe in beauty,” she said. “I believe in the beauty of Versailles, and in the King who created it. I believe in your beauty, mademoiselle, and in mine. The darkness beyond has power to break through, just as those people out there could throw rocks through this window. But behold, the window has stood for centuries. No one has thrown a rock through it.”

“Why not?”

“Because there is a balance of powers in the world, which can only be perceived by continual attention, and can only be preserved by—”

“By the unceasing and subtile machinations of persons such as you,” Eliza said; and the look in the green eyes of Oyonnax told her that her guess was true. “Is that why you have involved yourself in my vendetta against the Duke?”

“I am certainly not doing so out of any affection for you! Nor out of sympathy. I don’t know, and don’t wish to, why you hate him so, but the stories told about him make it easy to guess. If le duc were a great hero of France—a Jean Bart, for example—I should poison you before suffering you to harm him. But as matters stand, Monsieur le duc is a poltroon, absent for months when he is most needed. Wise was le Roi in subordinating him to Monsieur le marquis de Seignelay. But now that de Seignelay is dying, the duc d’Arcachon will try to reassert his former eminence, which shall prove a disaster to the Navy and to France.”

“So you see yourself as doing the King’s work.”

“I see myself as serving the King’s ends.” Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax removed from her waistband a pale-green cylinder, scarcely bigger than a child’s finger, and displayed it on the palm of her gloved hand. She was standing several paces away, which forced Eliza to approach her. Eliza did so in spite of a sudden horripilation that had spread over her scalp like a slick of burning oil. Her hands were clasped together in front of her stomach, in part to keep them warm—but in part to keep them close to a slim dagger that she was in the habit of hiding at the waist of her dress. Which was a queer thing to be thinking about, here and now; but she would not put anything past the Duchess, and wanted to be ready in the event that Oyonnax tried to throw something in her face or jab her with a poisoned needle.

“You’ll never appreciate how easy this is going to be compared to a typical poisoning,” said Oyonnax in a light conversational tone, as if this would set Eliza at ease. Eliza had now drawn close enough to see the green thing: a tiny phial such as might be used for perfume, carved out of jade, bound in bands of silver, with a silver stopper on a fragile chain. “Don’t dab this behind your ears,” said the Duchess.

“Is it one of those that is absorbed through the skin?”

“No, but it smells bad.”

“Then le duc will certainly notice it in a drink.”

“Yes—but not in his food. You know of his peculiar tastes?”

“I know more than I should care to of that.”

“This is what I mean when I say it is going to be easy for you. Normally an ingested poison must be tasteless, and such are frequently ineffective. This stuff is as deadly as it is foul—yet le duc will never notice it when it is mixed with a meal of rotten fish. All that you need to do is to find some way of getting into the private kitchen where his dreadful repast is prepared. This will not be a trivial matter—yet it will be much easier than the machinations most people must go through.”

“Most poisoners, you mean…”

Oyonnax did not respond to—perhaps did not even understand—the correction. “Take it, or don’t,” she said, “I’ll not stand here like this any longer.”

Eliza reached out to pluck the phial from Oyonnax’s palm. As she did so, the other’s larger hand closed around hers, and then Oyonnax brought her other hand over and clamped it on top, so that Eliza’s fist, clenched around the green phial, was swallowed up between the Duchess’s hands. Eliza was staring fixedly at this, having no desire whatever to see the Duchess’s face, now so close to hers. But Oyonnax would not let go; and so finally Eliza turned her head that way, and, with some effort, raised her eyes to gaze directly into those of Oyonnax. She could not bear to do so for more than a moment; but it seemed that this was enough for the Duchess to be satisfied. Satisfied of what, Eliza did not know. But Oyonnax gave Eliza’s fist one last squeeze and pushed it towards Eliza’s breast, then released her. “It is done,” said the Duchess. “You shall accomplish it tonight, then?”

“It is already too late—I must get ready.”

“Soon, then.”

“It can never be soon enough for me.”

“People will talk, after it happens,” said the Duchess. “Pay them no mind, and have patience. It is not whether this or that person believes you to be a murderer, or even can prove it, but whether they have the dignity necessary to level such an accusation.”

BRITTLE DISJOINTED HOURS FOLLOWED. Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, and later the King himself, did not leave off sending messengers around to inquire as to the whereabouts of the duc d’Arcachon. For some reason these all wanted to speak to Eliza—as if she were expected to know things that the Duchess of Arcachon did not. This in no way simplified preparations for the soirée. Eliza had to get coiffed and dressed while holding at bay these inquisitive messengers, who, as the afternoon wore on, were of progressively higher rank. Finally, near dusk, a coach and four rattled into the court, and Eliza called out “Hallelujah!” She could not run to the window because a pair of engineers were braiding extensions into her hair; but someone else did, and disappointed them all by reporting that it was merely Étienne d’Arcachon.

“He’ll do,” said, Eliza, “now they’ll pester him instead of me.”

But presently, word filtered up that Étienne had literally called out the cavalry—despatched riders of his own personal regiment, on the swiftest mounts, to probe southwards along the roads that his father was most likely to take north, with instructions to wheel round and gallop back to the Hôtel Arcachon the moment they saw the Duke’s distinctive white carriage. This would give at least a few minutes’ warning of the Duke’s arrival—which was of the highest importance to Étienne, the Politest Man in France, as it would have been a grave embarrassment for the King to attend a Duke’s birthday-party only to be snubbed, in the end, by the guest of honor. This way, the King could continue to bide his time in the Royal Palais du Louvre—which was only a few minutes’ ride away—and come to the Hôtel Arcachon (which was in the Marais, not far off the Pont d’Arcole) only when positive word had been received that the Duke was on his way.

So Eliza was pestered no further by messengers; but now Étienne d’Arcachon wished to have a private audience with her. And so did Monsieur le comte d’Avaux. And so did Father Édouard de Gex. She told her hairdressers to work faster, and to forget about the last tier in the ziggurat of counter-rotating braids that was rising into the heavens above her pate.

“MADEMOISELLE, ALLOW ME THE HONOR of being the first to compliment your beauty—”

“I would prefer it if you were as keen to get out of my way as to hurl flattery at me, Monsieur le comte,” said Eliza, brushing past d’Avaux. “I am on my way to speak with Étienne de Lavardac in the chapel.”

“I shall escort you,” d’Avaux announced.

Such had been the vehemence of Eliza’s passage that her skirts had bullwhipped around d’Avaux’s ankles and his sword, and nearly upended him, but he had more aplomb than any ten other French diplomats, and so presently appeared on her arm, looking as perfectly composed as an embalmed corpse.

They were hurrying down a gallery that had been obstructed by servants balancing food-trays and carrying party-decorations; but when these saw the onrushing Count and Countess, they took shelter in the lees of pilasters or ducked into niches.

“I would be remiss if I failed to express to you, mademoiselle, my concern over the choices you have lately been making as to social contacts.”

“What!? Who!? The de Lavardac family? Pontchartrain? Monsieur Rossignol?”

“It is precisely because you are so frequently seen in the company of these fine persons, that you must reconsider your decision to associate with the likes of Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax.”

Now Eliza’s free hand strayed to her waistband, for she had a sudden terror that the green phial would fall out and shatter on the floor and fill the gallery with a smell as foul as her intentions. It was such an obvious gesture that d’Avaux would have seen it, had he been facing her; but he was looking in another direction.

“Like it or not, monsieur, she is a fixture of Court, and I cannot pretend she doesn’t exist.”

“Yes, but to have private meetings with such a woman, as you have done three times in the last two months—”

“Who has been counting, monsieur?”

“Everyone, mademoiselle. That is my point. Even though you may be pure as snow—”

“Your sarcasm is rude.”

“This is a rude conversation, being a hurried one. As I was saying, you might be as upright as de Maintenon herself. But if and when Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon dies—”

“How can you speak of this, on his birthday!?”

“One year closer to death, mademoiselle. And even if the manner of his death is as innocent as falling from a horse, or going down on a sinking ship, people will say you had something to do with it, if you continue to tryst in dark places with Oyonnax.”

“Anyone can bandy accusations. Few have the dignity to make them count.”

“Is that what Oyonnax told you?”

This left Eliza speechless for a turn; so d’Avaux continued: “I was born a count, you were made a countess; I am one of those few who can accuse you.”

“You really are hideous.”

“I accused you before, after you spied for the Prince of Orange; but you escaped trouble, because you were doing it for Madame, and because you paid. Now you are alone, and you have no money. I do not know who it is precisely that you mean to poison: perhaps the Duke, perhaps Étienne, perhaps one and then the other. I am strongly tempted to wait and to watch as you do these crimes, and then destroy you—for to see you chained to a stone wall in the Bastille would be most satisfying to me. But I cannot allow a Duke and Peer of the Realm to suffer murder, merely to slake my own base cravings. And so I warn you, mademoiselle, not to—”

“Kill me,” said a voice from ahead of them.

D’Avaux and Eliza, still clamped together side by side, arm in arm, had reached the ancient double doors at the back of the chapel, and gone through. It looked entirely different now. Eliza half supposed they had come into the wrong room. The sun had gone down, so no light came through the windows; but hundreds of candles were now burning on scores of silver candelabras. Their light gleamed on the polished backs of many gilded chairs, which in lieu of pews had been arranged on the stone floor—no, on a Persian carpet laid over the floor. The altar was covered in a white silk cloth encrusted with gold brocade, though this was difficult to see, as the front half of the chapel had been turned into a fragrant jungle of white flowers. Eliza’s first thought, oddly, was, Where the hell did those come from at this time of the year? but the answer must have been some nobleman’s stifling Orangerie.

Étienne de Lavardac d’Arcachon, attired in full-dress cavalry colonel’s uniform, was sprawled on the carpet at the base of the altar, posed like an artist’s model. Resting on the carpet before him, at the head of the aisle, were two shiny objects: a serpentine dagger, and a golden ring.

D’Avaux had stiffened up so violently that Eliza half hoped he was undergoing a stroke. But his grip on her arm slackened, and he began to retreat.

Étienne was having none of that; he jumped to his feet. “Stay! If you please, Monsieur le comte. Your presence here is fortuitous and most welcome. For it were improper for me to meet with Mademoiselle la comtesse without some chaperon; which, as I have lain here awaiting her, has been troubling me more than words have power to express.”

“I am at your service, monseigneur,” said d’Avaux, watching beneath a creviced brow as the nimble young Arcachon collapsed to the floor, and resumed his former pose.

“Kill me, mademoiselle!”

“I beg your pardon, monsieur?”

“My suffering is unendurable. Please end it by taking up yon flamboyant dagger, and plunging it into my breast.”

“But I have no wish to kill you, Monsieur de Lavardac,” said Eliza, and threw d’Avaux a vicious glare; but d’Avaux was far too profoundly taken aback to notice.

“Then there is only one other way in which my suffering can be ended; but it is too much to hope for,” said Étienne. And his eyes fell on the band of gold.

“Your discourse is fascinating—but strangely clouded,” said Eliza. She was moving cautiously up the aisle toward Étienne. D’Avaux, trapped, stood at attention in the back.

“I would be more direct, but such a magnificent being are you, and such a base Vagabond am I, that even to give voice to my desire is unforgivably rude.”

“I have comments. First, you may be over-praising me, but I forgive you. Second, I know something of Vagabonds, and you are not one. Third, if you must be rude in order to say what is on your mind, then please be rude. For considering what it is that you appear to be asking—”

The chapel door whacked open and in stormed an officer, dressed in the same regimental colors as Étienne, but of less plumage. He stopped in the aisle and turned white as a freshly picked orchid, and was unable to speak.

But everyone knew what he was going to say. Eliza came out with it first. “Monsieur, you have news of Monsieur le duc?”

“Forgive me, mademoiselle—yes—if you please—his carriage has been sighted, coming on at great velocity—he shall be here in an hour.”

“Has word of this been sent to the Palais du Louvre?” asked Étienne.

“Just as you directed, monsieur.”

“Very well. You are dismissed.”

The officer was more than glad to be dismissed. He took a last beady look around, then bowed, and backed down the aisle. As he was going arse-first out the door, he rammed someone who was attempting to come in. There was an exchange of abject apologies back in the shadows; then in stalked a robed and hooded figure, looking like Death without the scythe. He pulled back the hood to reveal the pale face, the dark eyes, and the carefully managed facial hair of Father Édouard de Gex; and the look on his face proved that he was as surprised, not to say alarmed, by all of this as anyone else.

“I say, was this all planned?” demanded Eliza.

“I received an anonymous note suggesting that I should be ready to perform the sacrament of marriage on short notice,” said de Gex, “but—”

“You had better be ready to perform the sacrament of extreme unction, if the young Arcachon does not untie his tongue, or hide that dagger,” said Eliza, “and as to short notice—well—a lady requires a little more time!” And she stomped out of the chapel.

“My lady!” called de Gex several times as he pursued her down a gallery; but she had not the slightest intention of being called back in there, and so she ignored him until she was a safe distance removed from the chapel, and had reached a more frequented part of the house. By that point, de Gex had caught up with her. “My lady!”

“I’m not going back.”

“It is not my design to coax you back. You are the person I wished to see. For when Monsieur Rossignol and I made inquiries as to your whereabouts, they said you had gone to the chapel. It was never my intention to interrupt a—”

“You interrupted nothing. Why were you with Monsieur Rossignol?”

“He has got some new messages from the Esphahnians.”

“The who?”

“The Armenians. Come. Please. I pray you. It’s important.”

FATHER ÉDOUARD DE GEX ESCORTED Eliza to the library as fast as he could walk, which meant that he kept edging ahead. The most direct route took them through the grand ballroom of the Hôtel Arcachon. Here, though, he faltered, and fell behind. Eliza wheeled about. De Gex was gazing up at the ceiling. This was understandable, for the de Lavardacs had hired Le Brun himself to paint it, and he had only recently finished. It was a colossal tableau featuring Apollo (always a stand-in for Louis XIV) gathering the Virtues about him in the bright center while exiling the Vices to the gloomy corners. The Virtues were not sufficiently numerous to fill the space, and so the Muses were there, too, singing songs, composing poetry, &c. about how great the Virtues were. Along the edges of the piece, diverse earthly humans (courtiers on one side, peasants on the next, then soldiers, then churchmen) listened adoringly to, or gazed rapturously at, the Virtue-promoting works of the Muses whilst generally turning their backs to, or aiming scornful glares at, all of those Vices crowded into the corners. Just to make it sporting, though, you might see, if you looked carefully enough, a Soldier succumbing to Cowardice, a Priest to Gluttony, a Courtier to Lust, or a Peasant to Sloth.

So everyone who came in here looked at the ceiling; but the expression on the face of de Gex was most peculiar. Rather than being dazzled by the splendour of the work, he looked as if he were expecting the ceiling to fall in on them.

He finally directed his dark eyes at Eliza. “Do you know what happened here, mademoiselle?”

“A fabulously expensive remodeling campaign that took forever and is only just finished.”

“But do you know why?”

“Le Brun is always engaged at Versailles, except when le Roi leaves off building it so that he can go fight a war. And so only since war broke out has any progress been made here.”

“No. I meant, do you know why they remodelled?”

“From the looks of it I should say it was de Maintenon.”

“De Maintenon?!” De Gex’s reaction told Eliza that her answer had been emphatically wrong.

“Yes,” she said, “she came along in 1685, did she not? Which is when this remodel got under way…and the subject matter of the painting is so markedly Maintenon-esque.”

“Correlation is not causation,” de Gex said. “They had to remodel, because of a disastrous Incident that took place in that year.”

And then De Gex seemed to remember that they were in a hurry, and once again began striding toward the library. Eliza stomped along beside, and a little behind him.

“You do know what happened here—?” he continued, and glanced back at her.

“Something grievously embarrassing—so embarrassing that no one will tell me what it was.”

“Ah. To the library, then.” They departed the ballroom and entered a gallery.

“What was that you said earlier, about being asked to perform a marriage on short notice?”

“I received a note to that effect. I suspect it was from your beau. Never mind; obviously he was deluding himself.”

“It is a bit sad,” said Eliza, remembering the chairs carefully arranged in the little chapel, never to be sat on, and the precious flowers, never to be seen or smelled before they were hauled out to a midden. “Perhaps he had in mind a sort of elopement—but being so polite, wished to arrange it so that it would enjoy the sanctions of Family and Church.”

“That is between you and him,” said de Gex a bit coldly, and hauled upon the library door for Eliza. “If you please, mademoiselle.”

“I PHANT’SIED YOU MIGHT FIND this interesting in more than one way,” said Bonaventure Rossignol. He sat with his back to the arched window of the library, which, though dark, afforded a view over the torch-lit courtyard of the Hôtel Arcachon. Eliza was shocked to observe occasional snowflakes spiraling down—so intemperate and remorseless was this winter, they might as well be living in Stockholm.

Before Rossignol was a broad table on which he had spread out a panoply of letters, books, and notes. Many bore the Armenian script.

“I mentioned to you before that the Cabinet Noir had intercepted a remarkable letter, posted during the first week of August from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and addressed to the family Esphahnian, who were said to be dwelling in the Bastille.”

“You had not mentioned the family name to me,” said Eliza, “but it scarcely matters, and it is almost certainly an assumed name anyway—”

“Why do you say that?” said de Gex.

“Esphahnian simply means ‘of Esphahan,’ which is a city where a vast number of Armenians dwell,” Eliza explained. “It is as if you went to live among the Turks and they called you ‘Édouard the Frank.’ ”

Rossignol nodded. “I agree it is probably not the true name of this family, but it is the name we shall use, lacking any other. At any rate, I inquired after them, and learned that some Armenians had indeed been put in the Bastille in 1685 and kept there for a year or so: a mother and a large brood of sons. One of them died there. The matriarch was released soonest, then the brothers. Some went to debtors’ prisons.

“It took me some time to track them all down, for more have died in the meantime, and it was difficult to establish who is the eldest of the brothers. I found him—Artan Esphahnian—in a wretched entresol not far from here, and caused the letter from Sanlúcar to be delivered to him.

“A few days later, Artan mailed a letter addressed to one Vrej Esphahnian in Cairo. I had an exact copy of it made, then sent it on its way. At the time, I held no particular opinion as to who this Vrej fellow might be—like you, mademoiselle, I suspected that the name Esphahnian was a meaningless ruse, or perhaps even a vector of hidden information, which, if true, might mean that Vrej was not even related to Artan.

“Nothing further happened until yesterday, when a letter came in addressed to Artan, posted from Rosetta, at the mouth of the Nile—and written in the same hand as the one from Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Now this was remarkable, for I had translated the Sanlúcar letter into French, and it had said nothing about Egypt. It was full of family chitchat. The fellow who wrote it—who I now believe to be Vrej Esphahnian—had been out of contact with Artan for a long time. He had said nothing whatever about what he was doing in Sanlúcar or whither he might be going next. And yet Artan, upon receiving this document, had known, somehow, that he must post his reply to Vrej in Cairo. Not long afterwards, this Vrej had appeared at Rosetta—which is en route to Cairo—long enough to despatch yet another letter filled with banal chitchat.”

“And so it is obvious to you that encrypted messages are contained in these letters,” Eliza continued; for she had spent enough time listening to the discourse of Natural Philosophers to recognize when one of them was developing a hypothesis. “This I understand well enough, and I compliment you on your prowess. But why do you deem it so important to tell me about it?”

Rossignol was not willing to attempt an answer, and looked at de Gex. From which Eliza collected that it must be a delicate matter; for de Gex, as de Maintenon’s favorite churchman, was allowed to speak bluntly in a way that was unusual in a place where insults were commonly answered with rapier-thrusts. “We who love and admire the family de Lavardac,” he said, “are terribly concerned that Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon, acting out of the most noble motives, and exhibiting marvelous ingenuity and strength of will, has made a mistake. We would assist him in mending his error before it leads to embarrassment. It were best to mend it this evening, before the ramifications spread any further. To bring it before Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon, or Étienne, might not be as productive as to bring it before you, mademoiselle.”

“Very well. Does the mistake have something to do with Alchemy?”

The briefest of pauses. Then: “Indeed, mademoiselle. Monsieur le duc participated in an act of piracy, which, as you know, is a usual thing in war, and wholly honourable. However, I am sorry to report that he was misinformed by persons who were ignorant, or perhaps malicious. Monsieur le duc supposed that the prize was silver pigs. In fact it was gold. And not just any gold, but gold imbued with miraculous—even divine—qualities.”

“I see,” said Eliza. “And needless to say, the Esoteric Brotherhood takes a proprietary interest in it?”

“I should prefer to say custodial, not proprietary. This material is not for just anyone to possess. In the wrong hands it could do the Devil’s work.”

“Hmm. Would Lothar von Hacklheber’s be the wrong hands?”

“No, mademoiselle. Lothar is a difficult man, but one knows where he lives, and one can reason with him. A boat-load of Vagabonds at large in the Mediterranean, bound for Egypt—that is the wrong hands.”

“Well, you may set your mind at ease, Father Édouard. The gold you seek was to have come ashore along with Monsieur le duc. He planned to drop it off in Lyon. It should now locked in the strong-box of a certain banker there, who values it only as gold. I shall be pleased to supply you with his name. He has no awareness of, or interest in, its supernatural characteristics. Presumably he will be pleased to exchange it for an equal or larger weight of mundane gold.”

“We should be in your debt, mademoiselle.”

“You may consider the debt discharged, if you tell me one thing.”

“Name it, mademoiselle.”

“The Bastille is a prison for enemies of the Realm. Why were the Esphahnians thrown into it?”

“Because they were thought to be connected to what happened here in 1685.”

“And—since I will be the last person in France to know—what happened here in 1685!?”

“You may have heard, on the lips of servants or other vulgar persons, tales concerning a man called L’Emmerdeur. By your leave, mademoiselle! For even his epithet is almost too vulgar to speak aloud.”

“I have heard of him,” said Eliza, though in her ears, the sound of her own voice was nearly drowned out by the stomp, stomp, stomp of her heart. “I did hear a story once that he showed up uninvited at some grand soirée in Paris and made a bloody mess of it—”

“That was here.”

“In this house!?”

“In this house. He cut Étienne’s hand off, and completely destroyed the ballroom.”

“How can one Vagabond, vastly outnumbered by armed noblemen, single-handedly destroy a Duke’s ballroom?”

“Never mind. But to make matters worse, all of these things happened in the presence of the King. Most embarrassing.”

“I can imagine!”

“The King of the Vagabonds, as he was styled, made his escape. But the Lieutenant of Police was able to determine that he had been dwelling in a certain apartment not far from here—and the Esphahnians were living directly below him. He had befriended them, and drawn them somehow into his schemes. But since he was long gone, retribution fell instead on the Esphahnians. Off they were taken to the Bastille. Their business was destroyed, their health suffered grievously. Now those who survived dwell as paupers in Paris.”

Through the windows came the clatter and rasp of many horseshoes and iron wheel-rims on cobblestones. All turned to see the white carriage of the duc d’Arcachon—wrought to look like a giant sea-shell borne on the foam of an incoming tide—being drawn, by a team of six mismatched and exhausted horses, into the courtyard. It passed below them, out of their view, and pulled up before the entrance of the ballroom.

But the noise did not let up, but doubled and redoubled, as into the open gates of the Court rode a vanguard of Swiss mercenaries, and a squadron of noble officers, and finally the gilded carriage of Louis XIV, lighting up the court as the Chariot of Apollo.

ÉTIENNE, WHEREVER HE WAS (presumably, at the door of the ballroom), could finally relax, for much that must have been troubling him had been resolved in these few moments. His father had come home. No more would embarrassing questions be asked about where the Grand Admiral of France was during this time of need. Almost as important, this party now had a guest of honor; and so the many guests who had come would not go home disappointed. Most important of all, the King had arrived, and had arrived last.

Eliza, by contrast, had so many things to fret about that she almost could not keep track of them. She left de Gex and Rossignol far behind as she threaded her way among servants and courtiers toward the ballroom.

She hated herself for having a phial of poison in her waistband. Stupid! Stupid! She could not even use it now, without drawing fire from d’Avaux! So it was worse than worthless. It had never occurred to her that she would have to carry the damned thing on her person all the time. It could not be left in a drawer for fear that someone would happen upon it, by chance or because snooping. The phial had only been in her waistband for a few hours, but she’d gladly have traded it for a back-load of firewood. It seemed to burn her stomach, and she had developed a nervous habit of patting it every few seconds. And for this useless burthen, she had put herself, in some unspecified way, into the power of the Duchess of Oyonnax.

But in its power to cause trouble for Eliza, this matter of the poison might be as nothing compared to what she had heard concerning the exploits of Jack Shaftoe in this house—nay, this very room (for she had entered the ballroom now) five years ago.

When the carriages of le duc and le Roi had entered the courtyard moments ago, Eliza had darted out of the library before de Gex or Rossignol could offer her his arm. She had done this because she required a few moments by herself to think—to recall all that had happened since she had met Jack below Vienna in 1683, and to ask herself who might know that she had once been associated with L’Emmerdeur?

Leibniz knew, but he was discreet. The same could be said of Enoch Root. Around Leipzig, Jack and Eliza had been seen together by several people, none of whom was likely to be rated as credible by the French nobility. The most high and mighty person who had seen them together—and, as she recalled this, Eliza felt the heat rising into her face like steam from a cauldron when the lid is lifted off—was Lothar von Hacklheber, who had gazed down on her from the balcony of the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig. Jack had been right next to her, posing as a manservant, a porter. Unlikely that even Lothar would connect such a figure with L’Emmerdeur.

After that, they had traveled to Amsterdam. A few Dutch people had seen them together. But again, there was no reason for these people to suppose that the ruffian sometimes seen in Eliza’s company was the legendary Vagabond King. Before long, Jack had gone down to Paris. Only then had he truly become famous to these people. He had ridden a horse into this room and wrecked the duc d’Arcachon’s party, fled Paris, and eventually found his way back to Amsterdam—where he had tracked Eliza down in her favorite coffeehouse. The had spent all of an hour together—an hour that had culminated in an unpleasant scene, whose details Eliza did not care to recall to mind, beneath the Herring-Packers’ Tower, just as Jack had set sail on the slave-trading voyage from which he could never return. By now, of course, he’d been dead any number of years. But that was not the question. The question was: Had anyone seen Jack and Eliza together during that hour in Amsterdam?

The answer was of course they had, for as she’d later found out, she’d been tailed, the whole time, by two spies in the employ of d’Avaux. D’Avaux! Who even at this moment was glaring at her from across the ballroom, as if reading minds were as easy for him as reading codes was to Rossignol. D’Avaux’s two spies had later been killed by the hand of William of Orange himself. But d’Avaux was alive, and he knew.

All this time the Duke’s carriage had been sitting in the courtyard, like an egg in a stone sarcophagus. Its door was open, and one of the footmen had thrust his head and upper body into the dark interior, and lit a few candles. His arm shook from time to time, as if he were trying again and again to get a tired passenger to wake up. The delay was perfectly convenient for those inside—close to a hundred of the titled nobility of France—as it afforded them the opportunity to arrange themselves in a long receiving-line that coiled and undulated around the ballroom. Outside the double doors, servants had rolled out a carpet so that the Duke, and later King, could tread on red wool instead of gray snow. An honor guard had formed up to either side of that road of scarlet: members of Étienne’s cavalry regiment to one side, and, facing them, a detachment of marines. Étienne stood just inside the doors, waiting, with his mother on his arm.

Finally something was happening. The cavalry and the marines drew sabers and cutlasses respectively, and raised them up to form an arch of steel above the red carpet. Étienne nodded to a pair of servants, who drew open the ballroom’s immense doors, letting in a blast of snowy air; Étienne screwed up his face and stepped back half a pace; his mother the duchess bowed her head and reached up with her free hand to prevent her lace headdress from being sheared off. Outside, the mud-spattered buttocks of the footman could be seen emerging from the door of the white carriage, straining and jolting, as he seemed to be helping someone out who required much help.

Eliza’s view of these proceedings got better and better, for she was being impelled toward the head of the receiving-line by a kind of social peristalsis. Even Dukes and Duchesses, in this circumstance, gave precedence to Eliza, who had come to be seen as an honorary de Lavardac. No one would admit her to the line, but all insisted that she move ahead. And so she kept advancing towards the open doors, and got a very clear view of what came out of that carriage.

It was not a Duke. The word “wretch” came to mind, for this man could barely stand up, and if he owned a periwig, he’d lost it, or forgotten it in the coach. His thinning hair was short and dark, and shellacked with sweat and grease, and his face beneath it was so pale it looked almost green. He could not stand or walk without assistance, and yet he would on no account let go of some great burdensome item of luggage: a sort of strong-box. It had a handle on either end. One of the footmen supported the wretch on his right side. The wretch, then, kept his left hand clenched around one of the strong-box’s handles. The other footman had grabbed the box’s opposite handle just in time to keep it from falling out of the carriage door. And so they formed up three abreast: footman, wretch, footman, and began an ungainly progress along the red carpet.

Eliza had now come close enough to the doors that she could hear Étienne saying to his mother, “Is that Pierre de Jonzac?” Instantly she saw that the wretch was none other. For the filthy, torn, and stained clothes that he was wearing had once been a naval officer’s uniform. And if in her mind’s eye she cleaned the wretch up, mended his clothes, and endowed him with thirty pounds more weight, a few pints of blood, and a decent periwig, the result was very like Monsieur de Jonzac.

Seeing this, Eliza developed in her mind a theory of what was going on here, which was wrong; but it was not too unlike everyone else’s theories, which would govern their actions until they knew more. The theory was that the duc d’Arcachon was still inside the white carriage, getting freshened up for the party, and that he had sent his aide de Jonzac out ahead of him bearing a treasure-chest full of booty, justly and valiantly won during some dire and exhausting combat in the Mediterranean, which was about to be presented to the King of France. It even occurred to Eliza that the Duke, finding himself unexpectedly in possession of a small mass of enchanted gold, rather than a large amount of silver pigs, had galloped straight through Lyon without stopping, and brought it here directly. Risky—but fantastically dashing, and almost enough to make her admire the man. She turned round to catch the eye of Father Édouard de Gex, who was not far away; and he had come to a similar phant’sy, and his gaze was already fixed on that strong-box. Someone next to him was, however, looking back at Eliza; she glanced up to find herself spiked on the unreadable glare of Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor.

De Jonzac, the footmen, and the chest had covered two-thirds of the distance to the door. As they drew closer to the light, they looked more and more pitiable. The footmen had been standing on the back of the carriage for a week and their faces and livery were coated with road-grime. Beneath the gray dirt, their flesh was ruddy from cold; but de Jonzac was gray through and through. His lips had disappeared, being of the same hue as the surrounding flesh, and they moved unceasingly, as if he were trying to say something. But if any sound came forth, Eliza could not hear it from this distance. Étienne greeted de Jonzac, but got no recognition or answer. He and the duchess moved out of the way so that this unwieldy parade could fit through the door. No doubt remained in Eliza’s mind now that something was terribly awry; but most of the others in the room were still working on the wrong theory. This included even poor Étienne, who sensed that something was desperately the matter, but was nailed to his post by etiquette. He turned towards the white carriage to greet his father, who should emerge next; but the door, hanging open, revealed that the vehicle was empty. A stable-hand slammed it shut and pounded on it twice, and the driver cracked his little whip, compelling the half-dead horses to make one last, brief journey to the stable-yard.

“Father Édouard!” Eliza said, raising her voice to be heard above the murmur of astonishment running through the guests. “Please tend to Monsieur de Jonzac; he is grievously wounded.” Eliza’s nose had confirmed this, for de Jonzac and the footmen had shuffled past her by now, leaving in their wake a scent of rotting flesh. De Jonzac had gangrene. The footmen, half deranged from exhaustion, only wanted some place to lay de Jonzac out on the floor; instead they had staggered into the midst of a formal Court ball. They were dumbfounded, lost.

De Gex had got a whiff of it, too. He stepped out briskly and got in front of the footmen. “Let him down. It is all right. Gently down—” (To the majordomo:) “Monsieur! Bring blankets, and a couch, or something that can be used as a litter. Have someone else summon a surgeon.” (To de Jonzac, now lying on the polished floor, his head on the palm of de Gex’s hand:) “What is that you say? I cannot hear you, Monsieur—pray save your strength, it can wait.”

De Gex seemed to have matters so well in hand that Eliza decided to go and inform Étienne (whose view of de Gex and de Jonzac had been blocked by a moving wall of inquisitive courtiers) as to what was going on. She found him still paralyzed by an unsolvable conundrum of etiquette; for the moment the Duke’s white carriage had moved out of the way, the King’s golden one had rattled forward to take its place, and even now the door was being opened. For none of the members of the King’s entourage had the slightest idea, yet, that things had gone all wrong. And it was too late to tell them now, for Louis XIV was standing at the head of the carpet, and the Marquise de Maintenon was on his arm.

Eliza spun around and said “The King!,” which was the one word that could have dispersed the crowd around de Jonzac and de Gex. The receiving line re-formed, though it made a wide detour around the stricken man on the floor, and the two who were occupied near him: de Gex, who was kneeling on the floor and bending close to hear de Jonzac, and the Earl of Upnor, who kept undoing latches on the strong-box, only to find that there was always another.

All of this became obvious to the King in an instant as the crowd melted away from his line of sight like frost in a sun-beam. He was the only person in the Hôtel Arcachon who had the freedom to behave normally. For in the presence of the King, no one other than the King could be acknowledged. Hence, for example, the unnatural posture of Étienne d’Arcachon, who stood fixedly with his back to the scene within, as if nothing at all was happening. The King, though, had eyes only for de Jonzac. He got half a pace ahead of de Maintenon, then turned to her and said a few private words, taking his leave of her with utmost courtesy. Then he strode forward, turning to Étienne and the Duchess as he went by, and exchanging a word with each: monsieur; madame. Into the ballroom he came, sweeping his cape from his shoulders, and in the same motion he whirled it down to cover the shivering body of Pierre de Jonzac. The King then took a step back and posed there, body erect, one foot slightly ahead of the other, toe pointed and slightly turned out, head inclined toward his injured subject, and inquired of de Gex: “What does he say?”

“If you please, your majesty,” said de Gex. For some time he had been holding up a hand for quiet. But the arrival of the King had silenced the room as nothing else could have. De Gex now bent very close, so that de Jonzac’s lips were practically nuzzling his ear, and repeated what he heard:

“The deed…you are about to witness…was done for the love of a woman…whose name…I will not say…for she knows who she is…and it was done by…‘Half-Cocked’ Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak: Quicksilver!”

“What on earth is he talking about?” asked the King. “What deed?” And it was well that he said something, as everyone else was struck dumb, so mortified were they by the mention of the forbidden name in this, of all places!

Upnor had continued to worry at the hasps of the strong-box the whole time—somewhat improperly, but then, he was merely an Englishman. Finally he got it open. He flipped the lid back with a thud and a clatter, practically thrusting his face into the cavity in his eagerness to get at the treasure within. But in the next moment he recoiled as if a cobra had leapt out of the box. He actually let out a long, incoherent yell. A few people nearby screamed, and looked away.

“Ladies, and persons of a sensitive disposition, will avert their eyes,” said the King, who retreated a few steps.

Étienne de Lavardac, Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon, Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, Monsieur le comte d’Avaux, and a few others drew closer to see what it was. De Gex, who was closest, leaned over the top of the chest and reached into it with his right hand, making the sign of the cross, and muttering a sentence in Latin. Then he rose to his feet and hauled out a severed human head.

“Louis-François de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, has come home,” he announced. “May he rest in peace.”

NOW, AT THIS MOMENT Eliza was far from clear-headed; yet she was the most clear-headed person in the room, with the possible exception of the late duke. Though she was still in a lot of trouble—much more trouble than three minutes ago, in fact—she knew two things absolutely. One was that the duc d’Arcachon was dead. Her mission in life had, therefore, been accomplished. The other was that Jack Shaftoe was alive, had redeemed himself, and loved her. Best of all, he loved her from a tremendous distance, which made being loved by him ever so much less inconvenient. And so even as people were still gasping and screaming and fainting all around her, Eliza was moving toward the duchesse d’Oyonnax, who, aside from Eliza, was the coolest person in the room. She looked almost amused. Eliza fished the little green phial out of her waistband. She approached Oyonnax from the side, reached out with her left hand, grasped that of Oyonnax, and drew it towards her, twisting it palm up. With her right hand Eliza pressed the phial down on Oyonnax’s palm. The Duchess’s fingers curled about it involuntarily, before she knew what it was, and Eliza got clear.

Her attention—and that of almost everyone else in the room—turned to d’Avaux, who had approached the King, and received permission to speak. It was a wonder he had sought permission, for he was in such a rage that he was almost slavering. He kept looking back at Eliza, which gave Eliza the idea that it might be best for her to draw closer and listen in.

“Your majesty!” cried d’Avaux. “By your majesty’s leave, I say that while the perpetrator of this atrocious crime may be far away, the first cause and inspiration of it is close by, yea, within the reach of your majesty’s sword almost, so that your majesty may have satisfaction presently—for she, the woman in whose name L’Emmerdeur committed this murder, is none other than—” and he raised his hand before his face, index finger extended, like a pistol-duellist in the moment before he levels the weapon at his foe. His gaze was rapt on Eliza. The fatal finger began to descend toward her heart. She reached up and caught that digit, however, while it was still directed toward the magnificent Le Brun ceiling, and bent it back sharply enough to make d’Avaux inhale sharply—which meant he could not finish his sentence. “Merci beaucoup, monsieur,” she whispered, and executed a full three-hundred-sixty-degree pirouette that brought her face to face with the King while relegating d’Avaux to the background. Her hand was behind the small of her back now, still gripping d’Avaux’s finger. She had carried it off—or so she hoped—in such a manner that an observer, still in shock over the appearance of the severed head of the birthday boy, might think that d’Avaux had courteously offered her his hand, and she had gratefully accepted it.

“By your leave, your majesty, I have heard it said that the rules of etiquette dictate ladies before gentlemen; was I deceived?”

“In no way, mademoiselle,” said the King.

“I tell you, it was—” began d’Avaux; but the King silenced him with a flick of the eyes, and Eliza reinforced the message with some torque on the finger.

“Moreover, it is said that the laws of Heaven place love before hate, and peace before war; is it true?”

“Pourquoi non, mademoiselle?”

“Then as a lady who stands before your majesty on an errand of love, I beg precedence over this gentleman, my dear friend and mentor, Monsieur le comte d’Avaux, whose red and angry visage tells me he is on some errand of hateful retribution.”

“So terrible is the news to-night that it would bring me, if not pleasure, then perhaps a few moments’ diversion from what is so unpleasant, to grant you precedence over Monsieur d’Avaux; provided that his errand is not of an urgent nature.”

“Oh, not at all, your majesty, what I have to say will be every bit as useful to you in a few minutes’ time as it is now. I insist that Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur go ahead.” D’Avaux finally worried his finger free and backed off a step.

“Your majesty,” said Eliza, “I grieve for le duc. I trust he has gone to his reward. I pray that L’Emmerdeur will get what he deserves for what he has done. But I cannot, I will not, allow the so-called King of the Vagabonds the additional satisfaction of disrupting the peaceful conduct of your majesty’s household, that is to say La France; and so, notwithstanding my feelings of shock and grief at this moment, I beg your leave to accept the proposal of marriage that was tendered to me earlier this evening by Étienne de Lavardac—now, duc d’Arcachon.”

“Then marry him with all the blessings a King can bestow,” the King answered.

And in this moment Eliza was startled by a most unexpected rush of sound from all about her. In any other circumstance she’d have recognized it instantly. But here, given all that had happened, she had to look about and verify it with her eyes: the guests were applauding. It was not, of course, a raucous ovation. Half of them were openly weeping. Many of the ladies had fled the room. Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon was being carried out unconscious, and Eliza’s unwitting fiancé only remained in the room because someone was obliged to greet Madame la marquise de Maintenon. But for all that, the remaining guests produced a spontaneous patter of applause. It was not that they had forgotten the Duke’s head—that was unlikely—but that they found something stirring in how this scene of shock and horror had been adroitly reversed. The applause was an expression of defiance. Eliza, understanding this belatedly, acknowledged it with a diffident curtsey. Presently Étienne drifted to her side—someone had explained matters to him—and took her hand, and then the applause welled up again, for just a moment. Then it died abruptly and was replaced by altogether more fitting sounds of sobbing, wailing, and praying. Eliza was distracted for a moment by a glimpse of a rider out in the courtyard wheeling his mount around with great panache, and galloping out into Paris. It was the Earl of Upnor.

Then she attended to the King, who was speaking: “Father Édouard. We came together here for a small celebration. But the only celebration that is fitting, on an evening such as this one, is that of the Mass.”

“Of course, sire.”

“We will observe a funeral Mass for Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon. Following that, a wedding for the new duc and Mademoiselle la comtesse de la Zeur.”

“Yes, sire,” said de Gex. “By your majesty’s leave, the family chapel has already been made ready for a wedding; shall we perform the funeral here, where there is more room, and move to the chapel thereafter?”

King Louis XIV made a tiny nod of assent, and then turned his gaze on d’Avaux, who had not yet been dismissed. “Monsieur le comte,” said the King, “you were about to voice an opinion as to the identity of the woman who inspired the heinous murder of my cousin?”

“By your majesty’s leave,” d’Avaux said, “If we interpret L’Emmerdeur’s statement literally, it will only amount to something banal. I have no doubt that he was merely trying to impress some whore he met once in Paris.” And he could not prevent his eyes from flicking at Eliza for just a moment as he said this; but then he returned his attention to the King. “I was, rather, attempting to make a more general statement about all the enemies of France, and what moves them.” He backed away one step, turned, and swept his arm up and out towards a corner of the painted ceiling, where Pandora was opening up her Box (in—come to think of it—an odd reminder of the box-opening scene that had just played out on the ballroom floor) to release a flood of demonic Vices. Pandora had been painted, as everyone knew, to resemble Mary, the usurper Queen of England. The foremost of the Vices rushing out of her box was green-eyed Envy, who had been made to resemble Sophie of Hanover. It was to Envy that d’Avaux now drew the King’s attention. “That, your majesty, is the lady love, not only of L’Emmerdeur—who is after all a nobody—but also of all the Dutch and English. Envy is what inspires their chivalrous acts.”

“You powers of observation are as keen as ever, monsieur,” said the King, “and I have never been more pleased to number you among my subjects.”

At this d’Avaux bowed very deeply. Eliza could not help but think that, for all the frustration and defeat d’Avaux had suffered here, this immense compliment from le Roi was more than compensation enough. It made her wonder: Did the King know everything?

The King continued: “Monsieur le comte d’Avaux has, as usual, spoken wisely. It follows that if we are to baffle Envy’s devotees, we should celebrate all that is magnificent in this Realm: with funerals, the magnificence that has passed, and with weddings, the magnificence that is yet to come. Let it be so.”

And it was so.

Most of the guests went home following the funeral in the ballroom, but enough remained to fill the chapel for the wedding. After that, they went directly into a second funerary mass; for Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon had not recovered from the sight of her husband’s head pulled from the box. What everyone had taken for a swoon, had in fact been a stroke. One side of her body had already gone lifeless by the time they had carried her to her bedchamber, and during the subsequent hours, the paralysis had spread to engulf the other side as well, and finally the heart had stopped. And so, by the time the newlyweds emerged from the doors of the Hôtel Arcachon, around midnight, and climbed into a borrowed carriage (for the white seashell-coach was both fouled and broken), both of Étienne’s parents were dead, and being made ready for shipment to consecrated ground at La Dunette. Étienne was duc, and Eliza was duchesse, d’Arcachon.

The new Duke and Duchess consummated their union under many blankets in a carriage en route to Versailles, and arrived at La Dunette in the darkest and coldest hours before dawn. Fresh hoof-prints in the snow on La Dunette’s gravel paths told them that they were not the first to come this way since the snow had ceased to fall. When they reached the château, they found the servants already awake and dressed, and red around the eyes. The doyenne of the maidservants took Eliza to one side, and let her know that she must go down to the Convent of Ste.-Genevieve immediately, for there was dreadful news. Eliza, unwilling to wait for preparations to be made, straddled the first horse she could get to—it was an albino mare—and rode it bareback down to the little convent full of weeping and praying nuns. She went directly to the room where Jean-Jacques slept. She knew already what she would see there, for she had seen it before in nightmares, as every parent does: the shattered window, curtains riven, muddy bootprints on the sill, and the empty cradle. The blankets had been taken; that was a comfort to her, as it suggested that wherever Jean-Jacques might be, he was at least not freezing to death. Left in the little bed was a note, addressed to the Countess de la Zeur; for whoever had penned it had not got the news of her new rank and title. It read:

Fräulein!

You and your Vagabond have something of mine. I have something of yours.

—L

Schloß Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony

DECEMBER 1690

It seems to us indeed that this block of marble brought from Genoa would have been exactly the same if it had been left there, because our senses make us judge only superficially, but at bottom because of the connection of things the whole universe with all of its parts would be entirely different, and would have been another from the beginning, if the least thing in it went otherwise than it does.

—LEIBNIZ

THE FORMAL INTRODUCTIONS HAD PLAYED against the backdrop of a fireplace large enough to burn a small village. For half an hour or so, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had inched towards each other as if conjoined by an invisible spring stretched through the middle of the muttering swarm of Freiherren and Freifrauen. When finally they drew within hailing distance of each other they switched over to French and launched into an easy chat about involutes, evolutes, and radial curves. Leibniz moved on into a tutorial about a new notion he had been toying with in his spare time, called parallel curves, which he illustrated by drawing invisible lines on the hearth with the toe of his boot. Petty nobles of Lower Saxony who trespassed on these were politely asked to move, so that Fatio could draw several invisible lines and curves of his own. Then he managed, in a single grammatically correct sentence, to make reference to Apollonius of Perga, the Folium of Descartes, and the Limaçon of Pascal.

The walls of the room were decorated with impossibly optimistic paintings, two to three fathoms on a side, of sowers, reapers, and gleaners plying their respective trades in sun-gilded fields. Fickle light was shed on these by flames burning in bronze baskets carried on the heads of naked, muscle-bound, bronze blackamoors planted on ten-ton pedestals in the corners.

Fatio looked significantly at his watch. “The sun rose—what—two hours ago? At this latitude, we have—say—two hours of daylight remaining?”

“A bit more, sir, by your leave,” answered Leibniz with a wink, or perhaps a cinder had flown into his eye. But that was all that needed to be said. Both men turned their backs to the fire for a last helping of warmth, then marched towards the room’s exit, groping through darkness and smoke for the door.

They were blinded by powerful bluish light. The Schloß’s galleries—which served not only as connecting passages, but also as a sort of perimeter defense against the climate—ran around its exterior wall, and had plenty of windows. The low light of the heavy winter sun ricocheted off the ice-crusted snow that covered the dead gardens, filling these corridors with chilly brilliance. An indignant servant slammed the doors behind them to keep the heat in. Leibniz and Fatio began to match each other’s pace down the length of the gallery, moving just short of a sprint. The cold seemed to have dissolved their stockings. It was imperative to keep the knees and calves working.

“Some family,” Fatio ventured. “One hears of them but does not meet them.”

“They grow into the interstices left between other families,” Leibniz admitted. “You would find the Hanover crowd more interesting.”

“They do seem impossibly fecund,” Fatio said. “The Winter Queen left children strewn all over the place, and Sophie, at one time or another, has given birth to nearly everyone.”

“Sophie married in to this lot,” Leibniz said, glancing back.

“And that is how you became her librarian?”

“Privy Councillor,” Leibniz corrected him.

“Sir! I beg you to accept my apologies and my congratulations!” announced Fatio, faltering and reaching for his hat so that he could bow; but Leibniz caught his elbow and pulled him along.

“Never mind, it happened quite recently. In brief, the family of Dukes whose ancestral home is this Schloß put on a tremendous spate of baby-making round the time of the Thirty Years’ War, probably because they were besieged here for æons by Danes, Swedes, and God knows who else, and had nothing to do but fuck. Four brothers were born in an interval of eight years! All survived!”

“Calamity!”

“Indeed. Through the 1650s the lads ran riot through the courts of Christendom, trying to mitigate the unnatural surplus of virgins that had built up during the War. All of them wanted Sophie. One of them was too fat and, in any event, Catholic. One was too drunk and impotent. One was famously syphilitic. But the youngest—Ernst August—was, as the Færy Tale has it, just right! Sophie married him.”

“But my dear Doctor, how did the youngest brother end up in the best position?”

They came to a corner of the Schloß and turned into another endless gallery.

“In 1665 the drunk one died. Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm—the syphilitic—were off sowing their wild oats. So John Frederick—”

“By process of elimination, he would be the obese Catholic?”

“Yes. He appropriated the Duchy and raised an army to defend it. By the time news of this coup de main had made its way to the Venetian brothel where Ernst August and Georg Wilhelm had set up their headquarters, ’twas a fait accompli. Later, like good brothers, they worked out a settlement. John Frederick got the great prize, and was made Duke of Hanover. Georg Wilhelm became Duke of Celle. Ernst August—despite being a Protestant—remained the Bishop of Osnabrück. The odds and ends of the clan ended up here in Wolfenbüttel—you have just met them. Now, Ernst August and Sophie had already resolved to make their little fiefdom into a Parnassus, a kingdom of Reason—”

“So they hired you, naturally.”

“No, actually, there was a lot of that going round at the time. John Frederick wanted to do the same at Hanover.”

“It must have been a good time to be a savant.”

“Indeed, one could name one’s price. John Frederick had more money and a vast library.”

“Right, now I am starting to remember it. Huygens told me that after he taught you everything he knew concerning mathematics—which would have been round about the early 1670s—you had to leave Paris and take a job in some cold bleak place.” Fatio looked significantly out the window.

“’Twas Hanover actually—a distinction without a difference, as to you it would seem very like Wolfenbüttel.”

Leibniz ushered Fatio into an entrance hall dominated by frighteningly massive staircases.

Sounding a bit perplexed, Fatio said, “Rather a lot of people must have died then, for Ernst August to become Duke of Hanover—”

“John Frederick died in ’79. Georg Wilhelm still lives. But it was Ernst August who became Duke of Hanover, by dint of this or that sub-clause in the agreement made between him and his brothers—I’ll spare you details.”

“So Sophie got to merge her Parnassus with John Frederick’s—of which you were the crowning glory—”

“Really you do flatter, sir.”

“But why did I have to come down here to meet you? I’d expected to find you at Hanover.”

“The Library!” Leibniz answered, surging past the younger man and hurling himself against an immense door. There was a bit of preliminary cracking and tinkling as ice shattered and fell from its hinges. Then it yawned open to afford Fatio a view across several hundred yards of flat snow-covered ground to a dark uneven mountainous structure that was a-building there.

“No fair making comparisons with the one Wren’s building at Trinity College,” Leibniz said cheerfully. “His will be an ornament—not that there is anything wrong with that—mine will be a tool, an engine of knowledge.”

“Engine?” Fatio, who was well-shod, pranced out into the snow in pursuit of Leibniz, who had given up any hope of preserving his boots and shifted to a sort of plodding, stomping gait.

“Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God,” Leibniz said, as if making an off-handed comment about the weather. “Adam named the beasts; meaning, that from casual observations of particular specimens, he moved to the recognition of species, and then devised abstract names for them—a sort of code, if you will. Indeed, if he had not done so, Noah’s task would have been inconceivable. Later, a system of writing was developed: spoken words were abstracted into chains of characters. This became the basis for the Law—it is how God communicated His intentions to Man. The Book was written. Then other books. At Alexandria the many books were brought together into the first Library. More recently came the invention of Gutenberg: a cornucopia that spills books out into specialized markets in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The merchants there have been completely unreceptive to my proposals! There are too many books in the world now for any one mind to comprehend. What does Man do, Fatio, when he is faced with a task that exceeds the physical limits of his body?”

“Harnesses beasts, or makes a tool. And beasts are of no use in a Library. So—”

“So we want tools. Behold!” Leibniz proclaimed, taking his hands from his coat-pockets just long enough to direct a sort of shoveling gesture at the looming Pile. “It must be obvious to you that this was a stable* until quite recently. I will stipulate that this is a mean beginning for a library and that you will be able to elicit howls of laughter from the Royal Society and from any salon at Versailles by describing it to them…”

“On the contrary, Doctor! When I bid you adieu I shall go straight back to the Hague to resume my studies with Mr. Huygens. ’Twill be a year or more before I address the Royal Society on any matter. Wren’s library remains half-built for want of funds.”

“Very well, then,” Leibniz muttered, and led Fatio through a temporary door of rough planks and into the stable. It was unheated, but it got their faces out of the wind, and their feet out of the snow. The foundation and ground-floor walls were made of large blocks of undressed stone. Everything above those was built of timbers. So far, the temporary scaffolding was more substantial than the structure itself, which was only sketched in with a few posts and beams. Fatio was baffled, and soon turned his huge eyes downwards to the several tables arrayed in the center of the main floor.

“One day we shall haul out these rude workbenches and replace them with polished desks where scholars will go to their work, illuminated by sky-light from a high fair cupola above,” Leibniz said, craning his head back so that his wig shifted, and thrusting his index finger up through the cloud of vapor that had veiled his words.

“The cupola is a fine innovation, Doctor. Getting adequate light is ever a problem in libraries. Sometimes I am tempted to burn one page to shed light on the next.”

“It is but one instance of the principle.”

“Which principle?”

“I told you I am trying to build a tool, an engine.” Leibniz sighed out a vast cloud of steam.

The tabletops supported divers forms of industry. Each was a gelid still-life unto itself. About half were given over to the library-building project (drawings weighed down with stones and wood-scraps, ragged quills projecting from frozen ink-wells, half-completed ledgers, clamped timbers surrounded by knee-high piles of wood-shavings) and half to whatever the Doctor was interested in at the moment. Fatio drew up short in front of a table strewn with what appeared to be stones; but as he did not fail to note, each stone was impressed with the skeleton of a leaf, insect, fish, or beast—some of them utterly unfamiliar.

“What—”

“I have laid off of Dynamics for the time being and am trying to finish another book Proto-gaea, whose subject matter you may know from the title. But let us refrain from digressions,” said Leibniz, shuffling carefully across the cluttered room. He paused to regard a colossal piece of furniture. “You see I am not the first to contemplate the making of a knowledge engine.”

Fatio closed his eyes, which was the only way to pry his attention from the outlandish skeletons, and stepped back, then maneuvered over to join Leibniz.

“Behold, the Bücherrad!”* Leibniz said.

Viewed end-on, the Bücherrad was hexagonal, and nearly as tall as Fatio. When he worked his way round to the front, he saw that it consisted mostly of six massive shelves, each one a couple of fathoms long, bridging the interval between hexagonal end-caps that were mounted on axles so that the whole apparatus could be revolved. But each of the six shelves was free to revolve on an axis of its own. As the Bücherrad spun, each of those shelves counter-rotated in such a way that it maintained a fixed angle with respect to the floor, and did not spill its load of books.

Going round to the other end, Fatio was able to see how it worked: a system of planetary gears, carven from hard wood, spun about the central axle-tree like Ptolemaic epicycles.

Then Fatio turned his attention to the books themselves: curious folio volumes, hand-written, all in the same hand, all in Latin.

“These were written out personally by one Duke August, a forerunner of that lot you just met. He lived to a great age and died some twenty-five years ago. It was he who assembled most of this collection,” Leibniz explained.

Fatio bent slightly at the waist to read one of the pages. It consisted of a series of paragraphs each preceded by a title and a long Roman numeral. “It is a description of a book,” he concluded.

“The process of abstraction continues,” Leibniz said. “Duke August could not keep the contents of his library in his memory, so he wrote out catalogs. And when there were too many catalogs for him to use them conveniently, he had woodwrights make Bücherrads—engines to facilitate the use and maintenance of the catalogs.”

“It is very ingenious.”

“Yes—and it is threescore years old,” Leibniz returned. “If you do the arithmetick, as I have, you may easily demonstrate that to hold all the catalogs needed to list all the world’s books would require so many Bücherrads that we would need some Bücherradrads to spin them around, and a Bücherrad-rad-rad to hold all of them—”

“German is a convenient language that way,” Fatio said diplomatically.

“And so on with no end in sight! There are not enough woodwrights to carve all of the gears. New sorts of knowledge-engines will be demanded.”

“I confess you have lost me, Doctor.”

“Observe—each book is identified by a number. The numbers are arbitrary, meaningless—a kind of code, like the names Adam gave to the beasts. Duke August was of the old school, and used Roman numerals, which makes it that much more cryptickal.”

Leibniz led Fatio away from the center of the floor toward the rugged stone walls, which were mostly barricaded by high thick ramparts covered in canvas tarpaulins. He peeled up the edge of one and flung it back to reveal that the rampart was a stack of books, thousands of them. All of them had been bound in the same style, in pigskin (for like many noble bibliophiles Duke August had bought all his books as masses of loose signatures and had them bound in his own bindery, by his own servants). The newest ones (say, less than half a century old) were still white. More ancient ones had turned cream, beige, tan, brown, and tar-colored. Many bore scars of long-forgotten encounters between pigs and swineherds’ cudgels. The titles, and those long Roman numerals, had been inscribed on them in what Fatio now recognized as Duke August’s hand.

“Now they are in a heap, later they shall be on shelves—either way, how do you find what you want?” Leibniz asked.

“I believe you are now questioning me in a Socratic mode.”

“And you may answer in any mode you like, Monsieur Fatio, provided that you do answer.”

“I suppose one would go by the numbers. Supposing that they were shelved in numerical order.”

“Suppose they were. The numbers merely denote the order in which the Duke acquired, or at least cataloged, the volumes. They say nothing of the contents.”

“Re-number them, then.”

“According to what scheme? By name of author?”

“I believe it would be better to use something like Wilkins’s philosophical language. For any conceivable subject, there would be a unique number. Write that number on the spine of the book and shelve them in order. Then you can go directly to the right part of the library and find all books on a given subject together.”

“But suppose I am making a study of Aristotle. Aristotle is my subject. May I expect to find all Aristotle-books shelved together? Or would his works on geometry be shelved in one section, and his works on physics elsewhere?”

“If you look at it that way, the problem is most difficult.”

Leibniz stepped over to an empty bookcase and drew his finger down the length of one shelf from left to right. “A shelf is akin to a Cartesian number-line. The position of a book on that shelf is associated with a number. But only one number! Like a number-line, it is one-dimensional. In analytic geometry we may cross two or three number-lines at right angles to create a multi-dimensional space. Not so with bookshelves. The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves.”

“I perceive that clearly now, Doctor,” Fatio said. “Indeed, I am beginning to feel like the character of Simplicio in one of Galileo’s dialogs. So let me play that rôle to the hilt, and ask you how you intend to solve the problem.”

“Well played, sir. Consider the following: Suppose we assign the number three to Aristotle, and four to turtles. Now we must decide where to shelve a book by Aristotle on the subject of turtles. We multiply three by four to obtain twelve, and then shelve the book in position twelve.”

“Excellent! By a simple multiplication you have combined several subject-numbers into one—collapsed the multi-dimensional space into a uni-dimensional number-line.”

“I am pleased that you favor my proposal thus far, Fatio, but now consider the following: suppose we assign the number two to Plato, and six to trees. And suppose we acquire a book by Plato on the subject of trees. Where does it belong?”

“The product of two and six is twelve—so it goes next to Aristotle’s book on turtles.”

“Indeed. And a scholar seeking the latter book may instead find himself with the former—clearly a failure of the cataloging system.”

“Then let me step once again into the rôle of Simplicio and ask you whether you have solved this problem.”

“Suppose we use this coding instead,” quoth the Doctor, reaching behind the bookcase and pulling out a slate on which the following table had been chalked—thereby as much as admitting that the conversation, to this point, had been a scripted demo’.

2 | Plato
3 | Aristotle
5 | Trees
7 | Turtles
2×5=10 | Plato on Trees
3×7=21 | Aristotle on Turtles
2×7=14 | Plato on Turtles
3×5=15 | Aristotle on Trees
[etc.] |

“Two, three, five, and seven—all prime numbers,” remarked Fatio after giving it a brief study. “The shelf-numbers are composites, the products of prime factors. Excellent, Doctor! By making this small improvement—assigning prime numbers, instead of counting numbers, to the various subjects—you have eliminated the problem. The shelf position of any book may be found by multiplying the subject-numbers—and you may be assured it will be unique.”

“It is a pleasure to explain it to one who grasps the principle so readily,” Leibniz said. “Huygens and the Bernoullis have both spoken highly of you, Fatio, and I can see that they were by no means insincere.”

“I am humbled to hear my name mentioned in the same sentence with theirs,” Fatio returned, “but since you have been kind enough to so favor me, perhaps you will indulge me in a question?”

“It would be my privilege.”

“Your scheme is a fine way to build a library. For the correct position of any book may be found by taking the product of the several primes that correspond to its subjects. Even when those numbers grow to several digits, that presents no great difficulty; and in any event it is well known that you have invented a machine capable of multiplying numbers with great facility, which I now perceive is just one element of the immense knowledge engine you have proposed to build.”

“Indeed, all of these are of a piece, and may be considered aspects of my Ars Combinatorica. Did you have a question?”

“I fear that your library, once built, will be difficult to understand. You are seeking the help of the Emperor in Vienna, are you not?”

“It cannot be accomplished without the resources of a great kingdom,” Leibniz said vaguely.

“Very well, perhaps you are in communication with some other great prince. At any rate, it would seem, then, that you wish to make your Knowledge Engine on a colossal scale.”

“Marshalling resources is a continuing problem,” the Doctor said, still treading gingerly.

“I predict that you will find success, Doctor Leibniz, and that one day there will rise up, in Berlin, Vienna, or even Moscow, a Knowledge Engine on a titanic scale. The shelves will extend for countless leagues and will be crowded with books all arranged according to the rules of your system. But I fear that I could very easily become lost in the bowels of that place. Looking at a shelf I might see some number, eight or nine digits long. I would know this to be a composite number, the product of two or more primes. But to decompose such a number into its prime factors is a notoriously difficult and tedious problem. There is a curious asymmetry about this approach, in other words, lying in the fact that to its creator the structure and organization of the great library will be clear as glass—but to a solitary visitor it will seem a murky maze of impenetrable numbers.”

“I do not deny it,” Leibniz answered without hesitation, “but I find in this a sort of beauty, a reflection of the structure of the universe. The situation of the solitary visitor, as you have described it, is one with which I am familiar.”

“That is odd, for I conceive of you as the creator who stands with his hand on the Bücherrad and comprehends all.”

“You should know this about me. My father was a learned man who owned one of the finest libraries in Leipzig. He died when I was very small. Consequently I knew him only as a jumble of childish perceptions—between us there were feelings but never any rational connection, perhaps somewhat like the relationship that you or I have with God.”

And he related a story about how he had, for a time, been locked out of his father’s library, but later re-admitted.

“So I ventured into that library which had been closed up since the death of my father and still smelled like him. It might seem funny for me to speak of the smell, but that was the only connection I could draw at the time. For the books were all written in Latin or Greek, languages I did not know, and they treated of subjects with which I was completely unfamiliar, and they were arranged upon the shelves according to some scheme that must have been clear to my father, but to me was unknown, and would have been beyond my ken even if someone had been there to explain it to me.

“Now in the end, Monsieur Fatio, I mastered that library, but in order to do it I first had to learn Greek and Latin, and then read the books. Only when I had done these things was I finally able to do the most difficult thing of all, namely to understand the organizing principle by which my father had arranged the books on the shelves.”

Fatio said: “So you are not troubled by the plight of my hypothetical scholar, a-mazed in the penetralia of your Knowledge Engine. But Doctor Leibniz, how many persons, dropped into a library of books written in unknown languages, could do what you did?”

“The question is more than just rhetorical. The situation is not merely hypothetical,” Leibniz answered. “For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme—pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again.”

“But what if it can only be understood by a mind as great as God’s? What if we can only find what we want by factoring twenty-digit numbers?”

“Let us understand what we may, and extend our reach, insofar as we can, by the making of engines, and content ourselves with that much,” Leibniz answered. “It will suffice to keep us busy for a while. We cannot perform all of the calculations needed without turning every atom in the Universe into a cog in an Arithmetickal Engine; and then it would be God—”

“I think you are coming close to words that could get you burnt at the stake, Doctor—meanwhile, I turn to ice. Is there a place where we could strike a balance between those two extremes?”

THE DOCTOR HAD CAUSED a large shed to be scabbed onto the outer wall of the stable and filled with the books and papers most important to him. In one corner stood a black stove having the general size and shape of the biblical Tower of Babel. When they arrived it was merely warm, but Leibniz wrenched open several doors, rammed home half a cord or so of wood, and clanged them to. Within seconds, ears began to pop as the mickle Appliance sucked the air from the room. The iron tower began to emit an ominous rumbling and whooshing noise, and Leibniz and Fatio spent the rest of the conversation nervously edging away from it, trying to find the radius where (to paraphrase Fatio) being burnt alive was no more likely than freezing to death. This zone proved surprisingly narrow. As Leibniz fussed with the stove, which had taken up a kind of eerie keening, Fatio stepped back a pace, and let his eye fall on a sheet of paper—the topmost of several that were sticking out of a book. A few lines of printing were visible at the top of the page, written in Leibniz’s hand:

DOCTOR

THE RECENT EVENTS IN THE BALLROOM OF THE HÔTEL ARCACHON WERE OF SUCH A DRAMATICK NATURE THAT I CANNOT BUT THINK YOU HAVE ALREADY HAD ACCOUNTS OF THEM FROM DIVERSE SOURCES HOWEVER MY VERSION FOLLOWS…

Beyond that point all was swallowed up between the pages of the enclosing book, which was expensively bound in red leather, ornately gilded with both Roman and Chinese characters.

“Any possibility of tea?” Fatio inquired, spying a kettle that had been left on one of the steps of the flaming ziggurat. Shielding his face in the crook of one arm, Leibniz ventured closer, seized a poker, and lunged like a fencing-master at the kettle to see whether it contained any water. Meanwhile Fatio peeled back the topmost sheet to reveal a letter written on different paper, in a different hand: Eliza’s!

To G. W. Leibniz from Eliza, the Marrying Maiden

Doctor,

You will want to know everything about the dress I was married in. The stomacher is made of Turkish watered silk decorated with several thousand of the tiny pearls that come from Bandar-Kongo on the Persian Gulf…

Leibniz had been rummaging in a drawer. He pulled up a black slab about the size of a folio book, impressed with a single huge Chinese character, and snapped off a corner. “Caravan tea,” he explained. “Unlike your English and Dutch tea, which comes loose off of ships, this stuff was brought overland, via Russia—it is a million dried leaves pressed together into a brick.”

Fatio did not seem to be as fascinated by this as Leibniz had hoped. Leibniz tried another gambit: “Huygens wrote to me recently, and mentioned you had come over from London.”

“Monsieur Newton and I devoted the month of March to reading Mr. Huygens’s Treatise on Light and were so taken with it that we agreed to divide forces for the year—I have been studying with Huygens—”

“And Newton toils at his Alchemy.”

“Alchemy, theology, philosophy—call it what you will,” Fatio said coolly, “he is close to an achievement that will dwarf the Principia.”

“I don’t suppose it has anything to do with gold?” asked Leibniz.

Fatio—generally so birdlike-quick in his answers—allowed some moments to pass. “Your question is a bit vague. Gold is important to Alchemists,” he allowed, “as comets are to astronomers. But there are some, of a vulgar turn of mind, who suppose that Alchemists are interested in gold only in the same sense as bankers are.”

“C’est juste. Though there is a troublesome banker, not far from here, who seems to value it in both the monetary and the Alchemical sense.” Leibniz, who until this point in the conversation had been the embodiment of good cheer, deflated as he was saying these words, as if he had been reminded of something very grave, and his eye strayed over to the outlandish red-leather book. This topic had had the same effect on his spirits as a handful of earth tossed into a fire. Again, Fatio allowed some moments to pass before he responded; for he was studying Leibniz carefully.

“I think I know who you mean,” Fatio said finally.

“It is most curious,” Leibniz said. “Perhaps you have heard some of the same stories concerning this as I have. The entire controversy, as I understand it, revolves around a belief that there is a particular sample of gold, whose precise whereabouts are unknown, but that possesses some properties that make it more valuable, to Alchemists, than ordinary gold. I would expect a banker to know better!”

“Do not make the error of believing that all gold is the same, Doctor.”

“I thought Natural Philosophy had proved at least that much.”

“Why, some would say it has proved the opposite!”

“Perhaps you have read something new in London or Paris that I have not seen yet?”

“Actually, Doctor, I was thinking of Isaac’s Principia.”

“I have read it,” Leibniz said drily, “and do not recollect seeing anything about gold.”

“And yet it is clear enough that two planets of equal size and composition will describe different trajectories through the heavens, depending on their distances from the sun.”

“Of course—that is necessarily true, by the inverse-square law.”

“Since the two planets themselves are equal in every way, how can this difference in their trajectories be accounted for, unless you enlarge your scope of observations to include the difference in their situations vis-à-vis the sun?”

“Monsieur Fatio, a cornerstone of my philosophy is the identity of indiscernibles. Simply put, if A cannot be discerned from B, then A and B are the same object. In the situation you have described, the two planets are indiscernible from each other, which means that they ought to be identical. This includes having identical trajectories. Since they are obviously not identical, in that their trajectories differ, it follows that they must in some way be discernible from each other. Newton discerns them by assigning them differing positions in space, and then presuming that space is somehow pervaded by a mysterious presence that accounts for the inverse-square force. That is, he discerns one from the other by appealing to a sort of mysterious external quality of space…”

“You sound like Huygens!” Fatio snapped, suddenly annoyed. “I might as well have stayed in the Hague.”

“I am sorry if the tendency of me and Huygens to agree causes you grief.”

“You may agree with each other all you like. But why will you not agree with Isaac? Can you not perceive the magnificence of what he has achieved?”

“Any sentient man can perceive that,” Leibniz returned. “Almost all will be so blinded by its brilliance that they will be unable to perceive its flaws. There are only a few of us who can do that.”

“It is very easy to carp.”

“Actually it is rather difficult, in that it leads to discussions such as this one.”

“Unless you can propose an alternative theory that mends these supposed flaws, I believe you should temper your criticisms of the Principia.”

“I am still developing my theory, Monsieur Fatio, and it may be a long time before it is capable of making testable predictions.”

“What conceivable theory could explain the discernibility of those two planets, without making reference to their positions in absolute space?”

THIS LED TO AN INTERLUDE in the snow outside. Doctor Leibniz packed two handfuls of snow together between his hands, watched warily by Fatio. “Don’t worry, Monsieur Fatio, I’m not going to throw it at you. If you would be so helpful as to make two more, about the size of melons, as like to each other as possible.”

Fatio was not quick to warm to such a task, but eventually he squatted down and began to roll a pair of balls, stopping every couple of paces to pound away the rough edges.

“They are as close to indiscernible as I can make them under these conditions—which is to say, in twilight with frozen hands,” shouted Fatio towards Leibniz, who was a stone’s throw off, wrestling with a snowball that weighed more than he did. When no response came back, he muttered, “I shall go in and warm my hands if that is acceptable.”

But by the time Nicolas Fatio de Duillier had got back to Leibniz’s office, his hands were warm enough to do a few things. He took another look at the papers stuck into the Chinese book. The letter from Eliza was inordinately long, and appeared to consist entirely of gaseous chatter about what everyone was wearing. Yet on top of it was the other document, addressed to the Doctor but written in the Doctor’s hand. A mystery. Perhaps the book was a clue? It was called I Ching. Fatio had seen it once before, in the library of Gresham’s College, where Daniel Waterhouse had fallen asleep over it. The sheaf of papers had been used to mark a particular chapter entitled: 54. Kuei Mei: The Marrying Maiden. The chapter itself was a bucket of claptrap and mystickal gibberish.

He put it back where he’d found it, and went over to the shed’s single tiny window. Leibniz now had his back pressed against an immense snowball and was trying to topple it over by thrusting with both legs. Fatio strolled once around the room, pausing to riffle through any prominent stacks of papers that presented themselves to his big pale eyes. Of which there were several: letters from Huygens, from Arnauld, from the Bernoullis, the late Spinoza, Daniel Waterhouse, and everyone else in Christendom who had a flicker of sense. But one of the larger stacks consisted of letters from Eliza. Fatio reached into the middle, grabbed half a dozen leaves between his thumb and index finger, and snapped them out. He folded them and stuffed them into his breast pocket. Then he ventured back outside.

“Are your hands warm, Monsieur Fatio?”

“Exceeding warm, Doctor Leibniz.”

The Doctor had arranged the three snowballs—one giant one and the two small indiscernibles—on the field between the stable, the Schloß, and the nearby Arsenal. The triangle defined by these balls was nothing special, being neither equilateral nor isosceles.

“Isn’t this how Sir Francis Bacon died?”

“Descartes, too—froze to death in Sweden,” the Doctor returned cheerfully, “and if Leibniz and Fatio can go down in the annals next to Bacon and Descartes our lives will have been well concluded. Now, if you would be so good as to go to that one and tell me of your perceptions.” The Doctor pointed to a small snowball a few paces in front of Fatio.

“I see the field, the Schloß, Arsenal, and Library-to-be. I see you, Doctor, standing by a great snowball, and over there to the right, not so far away, a lesser one.”

“Now pray do the same from the other snowball that you made.”

A few moments later Fatio was able to report: “The same.”

“Exactly the same?”

“Well, of course there are slight differences. Now, Doctor, you and the large snowball are to my right, and closer than before, and the small snowball is to my left.”

Leibniz now deserted his post and began stomping towards Fatio. “Newton would have it that this field possesses a reality of its own, which governs the balls, and makes them discernible. But I say the field is not necessary! Forget about it, and consider only the balls’ perceptions.”

“Perceptions?”

“You said yourself that when you stood there you perceived a large snowball on the left, far away, and a small one on the right. Here you perceive a large one on the right, near at hand, and a small one on the left. So even though the balls might be indiscernible, and hence identical, in terms of their external properties such as size, shape, and weight, when we consider their internal properties—such as their perceptions of one another—we see that they are different. So they are discernible! And what is more, they may be discerned without reference to some sort of fixed, absolute space.”

By now they had, without discussion, begun trudging back towards the Schloß, which looked deceptively warm and inviting as twilight deepened.

“You seem to be granting every object in the Universe the power to perceive, and to record its perceptions,” Fatio ventured.

“If you are going to venture down this road of subdividing objects into smaller and smaller bits, you must somewhere stop, and stick your neck out by saying, ‘This is the fundamental unit of reality, and thus are its properties, on which all other phænomena are built,’ ” said the Doctor. “Some think it makes sense that these are like billiard balls, which interact by colliding.”

“I was just about to say,” said Fatio, “what could be simpler than that? A hard wee bit of indivisible matter. That is the most reasonable hypothesis of what an atom is.”

“I disagree! Matter is complicated stuff. Collisions between pieces of matter are more complicated yet. Consider: If these atoms are infinitely small, why, then, is it not true that the likelihood of one atom colliding with another is essentially zero?”

“You have a point,” said Fatio, “but I hardly think it is somehow simpler to endow these atoms, instead, with the ability to perceive and to think.”

“Perception and thought are properties of souls. It is no worse to posit that the fundamental building-block of the Universe is souls than to say it is wee bits of hard stuff, moving about in an empty space that is pervaded by mystickal Fields.”

“Somehow a planet’s perception of the sun and all the other planets, then, causes it to behave exactly as if it were in such a ‘mystickal Field,’ to an uncanny degree of precision.”

“I know it sounds difficult, Monsieur Fatio, but ’twill work out better in the long run.”

“Physics, then, becomes a sort of vast record-keeping exercise. Every object in the Universe is distinguished from every other object by the uniqueness of its perceptions of all the other objects.”

“If you think on it long enough you will see it is the only way to distinguish them.”

“Why, it is as if every atom or particle—”

“I call them monads.”

“Monad, then, is a sort of Knowledge Engine unto itself, a Bücherrad-rad-rad-rad…”

Leibniz summoned a weak smile.

“Its gears grind away like the ones in your Arithmetickal Engine, and it decides what to do of its own accord. You knew Spinoza, did you not?”

Leibniz held up a warning hand. “Yes. But pray do not put me in with him.”

“If I may just return to the topic that got us started, Doctor, it seems to me that your theory allows for a possibility you scoffed at—namely, that two lumps of gold might be different from each other.”

“Any two such lumps are different, but it is because, being differently situated, they have different perceptions. I am afraid that you want to assign mystickal properties to some gold and not other.”

“Afraid why?”

“Because the next thing you’ll do is melt it down to extract that mystery and put it in a phial.”

Fatio sighed. “In truth, all these theories have their problems.”

“Agreed.”

“Why not admit it, then? Why this stubborn refusal to consider Newton’s system, when yours is just as fraught with difficulties?”

Leibniz drew to a halt before the front stoop of the Schloß, as if he’d rather freeze than continue the discussion where it might be overheard. “Your question is dressed up in the guise of Reason, to make it appear innocent. Perhaps it is. Perhaps not.”

“Even if you do not think me innocent, pray believe that my confusion is genuine.”

“Isaac and I had this conversation long ago, when we were young, and matters stood quite differently.”

“How odd. You are the only person, other than Daniel Waterhouse, who has ever called him by his Christian name.”

The look of uncertainty on Leibniz’s face now hardened into open disbelief. “What do you call him, when the two of you are alone together in your London house?”

“I stand corrected, Doctor. There are three of us who have known him thusly.”

“That is a very clever sentence you just uttered,” Leibniz exclaimed, sounding genuinely impressed. “Like a silken cord turned in on itself and knotted into a snare. I commend you for it, but I will not put my foot in it. And I will thank you to keep Daniel out of it as well.”

Fatio had turned red. “The only thing I wish to snare is a clearer understanding of what has passed between you and Isaac.”

“You want to know if you have a rival.”

Fatio said nothing.

“The answer is: you do not.”

“That is well.”

“You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.”

Ireland

1690–1691

THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John Churchill), and as a sort of punishment for that, the regiment had now been exiled in Ireland for almost two years. Bob Shaftoe had learned many things about this island during that time: For example, that it was commonly divided into four pieces, which were variously styled Kingdoms or Duchies or Presidencies or Counties depending on whom you were talking to and what peculiar notions they held concerning the true nature and meaning of Irish history. Connaught was one, and the others were Ulster, Leinster, and Munster.

Bob heard about Connaught first, but saw it last. Nevertheless, he felt he knew something of it. He had heard endless discourse of it during the last thirteen years from his Irish “out-laws,” the kin-folk of the late Mary Dolores, most of whom bore the surname of Partry.

Until of late, the Partry clan and their swine, kine, assorted free-ranging poultry, and one bewildered sheep had teemed in a bit of shed in Rotherhithe, which lay across the Thames from Wapping, about a mile downstream of the Tower of London. Teague Partry—one of three Partrys who had, at one time or another, enlisted in the Black Torrent Guards—had often volunteered to stand watch on Develin Tower, the extreme southeastern vertex of the citadel, in spite of the fact that it was sorely exposed to raw weather coming up the River, and detested by all of the other soldiers. The cold wet winds, he claimed, reminded him of Connaught, and from his Develin vantage point he could see all the way downriver to Rotherhithe and keep an eye on his four-legged assets. Teague rhapsodized about Connaught all the time, and did it so convincingly that half the regiment was ready to move there. Bob had taken it with a grain of salt because he knew that Teague had never in his life ventured more than five miles’ distance from London Bridge, and was merely repeating tales told to him by his folk. From which Bob had collected, very early, something that it would have benefited the Partrys to know, namely that Ireland was a mentality, and not a physical place.

After the Revolution the Partrys had slaughtered all their livestock, deserted their Regiment, gathered up what money they could, and escaped to Dublin. Several months later, Bob had been shipped to Belfast with the rest of his regiment, and with the Dutch colonel who’d been put in command of it. Now, King William found John Churchill hard enough to trust when he was inside London Wall. He could not possibly bring himself to trust Marlborough (or any other English commander) with an elite regiment on Irish soil, especially when Churchill’s former master, James, was only a few marches south, in Dublin. So it was under a Colonel de Zwolle that the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards voyaged to Belfast, and under him that they tarried on that island over two winters. When Bob next saw Churchill, he would assure his old chief that he had not missed a thing.

From their point of disembarkation the regiment had marched south for a few days, and then wintered over in a camp at Dundalk, which lay near the border between the part of Ireland called Ulster and the one called Leinster. Out of a full strength of 806 men they suffered casualties of thirty-one dead, thirty-two so disabled that they had to be retired, and many hundreds who were laid low for a time but later got better. Most of these casualties were put down to disease or hunger, a few to accidents and brawls—zero to combat, of which there was none. This was an exceptionally good record.

They were encamped near a Dutch regiment commanded by one of Colonel de Zwolle’s old drinking-and hunting-buddies. The Dutch soldiers suffered very little from disease, though they were every bit as cold and hungry. They kept their camp so clean that it was mocked as “the Nunnery” by certain men in Bob’s regiment, who espoused a more temperate approach to hygiene. But when English soldiers began dying at a rate of several per day, the Black Torrent Guards finally began to pay some attention to de Zwolle’s nagging and to emulate some of the practices of their Dutch neighbors. Coincidentally or not, the number of men sick in bed began to drop not long afterwards. When spring came and the rolls were called, it was found that they had suffered much lighter casualties than other English regiments.

In June 1690, then, William of Orange finally arrived in Ulster as only a King could, viz. with three hundred ships, fifteen thousand troops, hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling, more Princes, Dukes, and Bishops than a boat-load of playing-cards and chess-sets, and a lot of Dutch artillery. He marched south, pausing at Dundalk long enough to collect the regiments that had wintered over there, and then invaded Leinster at the head of thirty-six thousand men. He made straight for Dublin, where James Stuart had established his rebel Parliament. King William had a wooden house, designed by one Christopher Wren—that same bloke who was building the new St. Paul’s in London. It was ingeniously made so that it could be taken down in sections at a few minutes’ notice, transported on wagons, and put back up again wherever William decided to establish his headquarters. Normally he erected it in the midst of his army, which was not at all usual for a campaigning King, and made a good impression on his soldiers.

James Stuart had been spoiling for a fight for a year and a half. He marched north from Dublin at the head of twenty-five thousand men and, after some preliminary maneuvering, set up a position on the south bank of the river called Boyne.

The next day, William was reconnoitering the north bank in person, looking for crossing-places, when a Jacobite cannonball hit him on the shoulder and knocked him off his horse. Jacobites on the opposite bank saw it happen, and saw a vaguely king-shaped object being carried away in haste by agitated Protestants.

What they could not see, from that side of the Boyne, was that the cannonball was a spent ricochet that had glanced off William’s shoulder and dealt him no serious harm. They made the wholly reasonable assumption that William the Usurper was dead and reported as much up the chain of command.

The next day William launched a diversionary attack across the Boyne not far from where he had been hit. He waited for James to move his main force that way, then crossed the river in force elsewhere. The first to mount this main attack were William’s best and favorite soldiers, the Dutch Blue Guards. But they were followed closely by several companies of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, a plum job that never would have been afforded them if they’d been under the command of Marlborough. De Zwolle had spent the winter plying his superiors with brandy and sending letters to London; that probably explained how Bob and his men were given such a splendid opportunity to have their heads hacked off in a bog. They crossed the Boyne, at any rate, and formed up on the south bank, and withstood several Jacobite cavalry charges. This was not an easy thing to do. They did it in direct view of King William, who had found a vantage point on the north bank from which to observe his beloved Blues.

The captain of Bob’s company was killed very early and so Bob had to assume effective command of threescore men for the rest of the day. This had very little effect on anything. Whether or not their captain was alive, Bob’s job was to get his men to believe that they really were safer standing together as a unit, as opposed to throwing their muskets down and diving into the river. Far be it from Bob to think about his company’s or his regiment’s reputation at Court.

If he had thought about it, he might have counseled his men to break and run instead.

That night the King came to their camp to tell them what fine fellows he thought they were. Now the Irish Army had simply vanished; the only evidence they’d been present at the Boyne was the thousands of pikes and muskets they had thrown down on the ground, the better to outrun their pursuers. King William’s host had climbed up out of the river-valley and spread out across churned and trampled pastures between the hamlet of Donore and the village of Duleek—places that, like færies, were spoken of, by Irishmen, as if they really existed, but that could not actually be seen. As they went they harvested the dropped weapons, hugging bristly faggots of them to their chests and finally letting them drop in clanking heaps when they decided to set up camp.

As their baggage had not caught up with them, they spent the night in the open, and as there were no trees hereabouts they used the captured weapons for firewood. They were not worth keeping as weapons—a fact that was obvious to Bob, but tended to be ignored by those who espoused the view that the Irish had thrown them down out of cowardice. Bob found flintlocks without flint, muskets with cracked barrels, pikes that could be snapped over the knee.

A few hours after nightfall, anyway, they received their King. He had suffered an asthma attack while fording the river and was still wheezing piteously—which evidently hurt, because of the cannonball injury—so he tended to speak in very short sentences. He was sitting askew on a tired horse. He spoke in Dutch to de Zwolle and then in English to the company captains and to Bob. He did not look at them, however; he was very close to falling asleep in the saddle, and could not tear his eyes away from the musket-bonfires.

What he said was that, with regiments such as his own Black Torrent Guards, he could not only take Ireland but Flanders, too, and fight all the way to Paris.

Bob stayed up late gazing into the fire, which was slowly devolving into a red tangle of melted gun-barrels, and pondered some of the longer-term implications of the King’s statement. Overall, the notion was somewhat troubling. On the other hand, an invasion of France might afford him an opportunity to seek out Miss Abigail Frome.

The next day they left the field pimpled with smoking twists of blackened iron and marched south to Dublin. James Stuart had already run off to France. Protestants were running wild, looting Catholic homes. Bob ventured into a certain quarter where Protestants were more apt to behave themselves, if indeed they went there at all. He found Teague Partry sitting on a stoop smoking a clay pipe and gravely observing the bums of passing milk-maids, as if nothing much had happened recently. But the right side of his face was flushed red, as if sunburnt, and pocked with recent wounds that all appeared to have radiated from a common center.

Teague bought him a mug of beer (it being Teague’s turn to do this) and explained to him that James’s foreign cavalry regiments had panicked first and, finding their escape route blocked by the Irish infantry, had opened fire on them to clear the way. He put it to Bob that Irishmen had it in them to fight effectively when they were not being massacred by Continental cavaliers who were supposed to be on their side, and (pointing significantly to his face) when they were provided with guns that projected musket-balls instead of blowing up in their faces. Bob agreed that it was so.

Later the bulk of William’s army marched west across the island, out of Leinster and into the southern realm of Munster. They laid siege to Limerick, which was one of the few places in Ireland that had proper fortifications, and could serve as the venue for a proper military engagement. Unfortunately, the Irish had little use for proper military engagements. William’s Dutch cannons blasted a hole in the city wall; Bob rushed in at the head of his company and got conked in the head by a bottle hurled at him from the top of a ruin by a massive hag in a wimple, screaming something at him in Gaelic. Bob, who knew nothing about his father, or his mother’s father, had long been preoccupied by the suspicion that he might be partly, or even largely, Irish, and while he lay unconscious on the rubble of the shattered wall of Limerick, he had a strange dream concerning the nun who had thrown the bottle—the import of it was that she was his great-aunt or something, scolding him for everything bad he had ever done.

His skull was merely dented, but his scalp was nearly taken off, and had to be sewed back on by a barber-surgeon who advised him to grow his hair back again as soon as he could; “And for god’s sake get a wife before you go bald, or women and children will run away from you screaming!” He was only trying to be cheerful, but Bob growled at him that he had already found his true love, and that scars on his pate were the least of his concerns.

The Earl of Marlborough finally got leave from the distracted King to sail across to Munster. He took the cities of Cork and Kinsale, but he did it without the help of his Black Torrent Guards. Then he went home to spent a comfortable winter in London while Bob and the regiment remained encamped outside of Limerick, fending off occasional sorties by the Irish cavalry, and keeping up a running, sporadic battle with bands of armed peasants who styled themselves “rapparees.”

The rapparees actually did have firearms that worked, and had learned to strip them down into their parts in seconds. The locks they kept in their pockets, the barrels they corked shut and hid in sloughs or streams, the stocks they thrust into wood-piles, or anywhere else a bare stick might go unnoticed. So what appeared to be a crew of half-naked peat-cutters or a congregation strolling to Mass could scatter into the waste at a word or a gesture, and reconstitute itself an hour later as a band of heavily armed marauders.

Because of the rapparees there were few places on the island, outside of Ulster, where Englishmen could feel safe in groups of less than an infantry company. But one of those places was the south bank of the river Shannon just downstream of Limerick. As the winter eased, and the hair grew back over his wound, Bob began to go there by himself and sit under a solitary tree overlooking the river and smoke his pipe and brood. The reading of books was not available to him. He’d lost his interest in whoring. He had heard his men’s stories, jokes, and songs so many times he could not suffer them any more. Drink made him feel poorly, and card-playing was pointless. He suffered, in other words, from a want of things that he could do to pass the time.

So he sat under his brooding-tree and gazed across the wide river Shannon. Like all the other rivers of the British Isles, it had a long estuary leading in from the sea to a port (Limerick in this case) that had been built where the river first became narrow enough to be bridged. The Shannon was the boundary between Munster and Connaught, and so by looking across it Bob could gaze into that land of legend so highly spoken of by the Partrys. From here Connaught looked like the rest of Ireland. But what did he know?

When King William had come over before the Battle of the Boyne he had brought fresh recruits to replace the ones who had sickened and died over the winter, but not enough of the sort Bob favored. Bob had however managed to recruit half a dozen English Protestants who had never actually been to England. They had grown up on various farms in Ireland that their fathers or grandfathers, who had been Cromwell-soldiers, had taken away from Gaelic Catholics. But the various revolutions of the last decades had turned their families into Vagabonds of an extraordinarily hard and dour cast, roaming around Eire in search of organized violence. Bob knew how to talk to men like that, and so they had spread the word among themselves and gravitated toward the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and continued to gravitate still.

After the Battle of the Boyne, a Protestant wool-merchant of Dublin (who had grown wealthy from the fact that the Irish were not allowed to sell their wool overseas except through England) had donated some portion of his lootings to buy these new recruits weapons and uniforms, and they had formed a company. So the Black Torrent Guards were now a slightly oversized regiment, with 14 companies instead of 13, and a nominal strength of 868 men.

One day Bob reached his brooding-tree and turned around to discover that he had been followed out by Tom Allgreave and Oliver Good, two of the original Phanatiques he’d recruited last year in Dundalk. They were a quarter of a mile behind him, exchanging the lead position every few steps, as if egging each other on. Each of them had a sword dangling from his belt, part of the motley collection of brought and stolen weaponry that had been showered upon the Fourteenth Company by that wool-merchant.

To give great long blades to such boys was dangerous. Fortunately the boys knew it, or anyway had found out as much, over the course of the winter, by slashing each other in what were meant to be playful exchanges. By the time Tom and Oliver drew within hailing-distance of Bob, he had guessed why they had come: They required instruction in sword-fighting. Normally this was considered a pastime of effete courtiers, a pointless, useless, out-moded affectation; in a word, idle. But among common folk, especially older ones who remembered Cromwell, the lore of the spadroon continued to circulate. Word had apparently got round to Tom and Oliver that Bob knew something of the practice. Those boys were unreconstructed Puritans who had nothing to do all winter long, as drinking, gambling, and whoring were ruled out on religious grounds. One could pray for only so many hours a day. It was not possible to practice marksmanship because powder and balls were strictly rationed. So it was not clear to Bob whether they had decided to take up the practice of sword-fighting because they genuinely cared about it, or because there was literally nothing else for them to do.

It did not matter either way, as Bob was idle, too. And so as Tom and Oliver got to within a horseshoe-throw of his brooding-tree, Bob knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stood up, reached around himself, and drew out his spadroon. The Puritans were thrilled. “You’ll want to stand sideways, as you make a narrower target that way, and it gets your sword-arm that much closer to the other bloke,” Bob said. He raised the sword up until its guard was touching his nose, the blade pointing vertically into the air. “This is a sort of salute, and do not on any account mistake it for some foppish affectation, as it says to any man who stands before you, ‘I mean to engage in swordplay with you, do not just stand there and be hit, but either defend yourself, or else retire.’ ”

Tom and Oliver now nearly killed themselves getting their weapons unsheathed, and then nearly killed each other getting them into the salute position. “Oliver, what you have in your hand is a rapier, and I do not know the method of its use as well as I do that of the spadroon,” Bob said, “but anyway we shall try to make shift with the tools at hand.”

Thus did Bob open up a new defencing academy on the south bank of the river Shannon. It became popular very quickly and then just as quickly collapsed to some half a dozen men who were genuinely interested in the subject. After a month they were joined by Monsieur LaMotte, a Huguenot cavalry captain who happened to spy them as he was riding by one day. He was expert with a cavalry saber, which was a somewhat similar weapon to the spadroon, but he had also studied the rapier, and so he was at last able to give Oliver some instruction in what to do with his weapon. In general, cavalry officers (who tended to be Persons of Quality) would never fraternize thusly with common foot-soldiers, but the Huguenots were an exceeding queer lot. Many were common Frenchmen whose families had grown wealthy in trade and then been kicked out of France. Now they were in Ireland, gaining some small revenge by teaching the defencing tricks of the Continental nobility to savage Anglo-Irish Puritans.

OLIVER GOOD’S GRANDFATHER had dwelt for a dozen years on a farm between Athlone and Tullamore, which placed it in Leinster. But it lay not far from the Connaught frontier, which was regarded by Protestants as the utmost boundary of civilization. He had obtained title to the land by driving off its Catholic inhabitants, the Ferbanes, who had driven their cattle west across a ford of the Shannon and thereby vanished from ken. Good’s justification, if he needed any, was that those Ferbanes had taken part in the Rebellion of 1641 and expanded their farm at the expense of some neighboring Protestants who had come over from England in Elizabethan times. But he had to stop using that justification after he was confronted by several ragged men who appeared on the property one day claiming to be the descendants and rightful heirs of those same Elizabethan Protestants! After that, if anyone dared question his claim to the land, he said it was his by right of conquest, and because he had a piece of paper that said so.

He and his children toiled on the land as only Puritans could toil on the land, and made many improvements, few of which were obvious, none of which produced results quickly. They bore arms all their days and often rode the countryside hunting down “disorderly elements.” They did not see those ragged Protestants any more, and forgot about them altogether, except for their surname, which could be read from the odd gravestone: Crackington.

After Charles II restored the monarchy, however, it was learned that the Crackingtons had somehow found their way back to England and made themselves pests and parasites on their relations, who went to the new Parliament (along with thousands of other Anglo-Irish landholders who had been displaced by other Cromwellian soldiers) and demanded that the Phanatiques be cast out of Ireland. As one of the new King’s first acts had been to put Cromwell’s head up on a stick, their chances of success seemed reasonable enough. In the end, they got only part of what they wanted. Some of the Cromwellian settlers were kicked off their land and some were not. The Goods managed to hang on to theirs, but only because of some obscure and contingent political happenstance at Westminster.

They were not, however, free to practice their religion any more, and that was what drove them off the land in the end, and sent half of them to Massachusetts. The Crackingtons came back and took over the farm, with all of its improvements, and began to prosper, and even paid for the reconstruction of the local Anglican church (which the Goods had made useful as a barn). This had occurred not long after the birth of Oliver Good, with the result that he had only ill-formed childish memories of the farmstead that he intended to re-occupy one day.

Then when James II became King, he re-Catholicized Ireland. The Crackingtons awoke one morning to find breaches in their fences, and wild Connaught kine grazing in their enclosures, guarded closely by red-haired men who spoke no English and carried French muskets. It was not possible to persuade them to leave because the new Catholic government in Dublin had confiscated the weapons of the English gentry. After not very long the Crackingtons judged it prudent to leave until a judge could rule on the title to the land—or the titles to the lands, rather, as by this point the farm comprised half a dozen contiguous patches of dirt, each of which had an equally complex story. The Ferbanes, it turned out, had been carrying on boundary-feuds with their neighbors for five hundred years—some were mere interlopers who’d been driven inland by the Vikings.

At any rate the Crackingtons packed up what household effects they could, rounded up a few horses (the Ferbanes had driven most of them off), and set out for Dublin, where they kept a town-house. Along the way they were set upon by rapparees. But just when it looked as if all were lost, they were saved by a Protestant militia band that came on in a grand, noisy rush and drove the rapparees away. The Crackington patriarch thanked these mangy-looking Protestants again and again, and promised to reward them in golden guineas if they would sent a representative to call on him at his town-house in Dublin—“my name,” he said, “is Mr. Crackington and anyone in Dublin—” (by which he meant any Anglican English gentleman) “—will be able to direct you to my house.”

“Did you say Crackington?” said one of the militia. “My name is Good. Do you know me?”

After this certain unpleasantries, which Oliver Good declined to speak much of, had been visited upon the Crackingtons, and it was unclear whether any of them had made it as far as Dublin—but if they had, they’d have found their town-house looted, and occupied by Catholics, anyway. But the point was that all of Ulster, Leinster, and Munster were like that farm between Athlone and Tullamore.

England was divided into parcels of land whose ownership was clearly established. It was like a wall made of bricks, each brick an integral thing surrounded by a clear boundary of white mortar. Ireland was like a daub-wall. Every generation came around with a fresh hod and troweled a new layer of mud atop all of the previous ones, which instantly hardened and became brittle. The land was not merely encumbered; it was the sum of its encumbrances.

Connaught was supposedly different because it had not succumbed to the incursions of the English. But it had troubles of its own because those Irish who declined to be conquered fled there in times of trouble and squatted on the land of the Irish who had always lived there.

DEFENCING-PRACTICE WENT ON MUCH LONGER than anyone really wanted. The war was not quick to resume in the spring of 1691. King William’s supreme commander in Ireland was now Baron Godard de Ginkel, another Dutchman. His objective was obviously Connaught, which was guarded by the Shannon and by the fortified cities of Limerick, Athlone, and Sligo. Irish diggers bossed around by French engineers had devoted the whole winter to building up those cities’ earth-works. Therefore Ginkel wanted boats and pontoons for crossing the river, and guns for knocking down the fortifications. Those cost money. Parliament had very little of it, and had become surly about handing it over to their Dutch king, whom they were already sick of. Nothing was forthcoming until the end of May, which convinced Bob and all the rest that they were truly lost and forgotten in Ireland, and destined to be stranded here, and to become the next players in stories of the Ferbane-Crackington-Good type.

For his part, King Louis XIV of France did little to disabuse the combatants of the feeling that they had dropped off the map of Christendom. The Battle of the Boyne had been the battle for Ireland, or so everyone in Christendom believed, according to a letter Bob had got from Eliza. They believed it not because it had any particular military weight but because there had been a King on each side of a river and one had crossed over it and the other had turned his backside to it and run away, and not stopped running until he’d reached France.

During the battle that had given the Black Torrent Guards their name, their commander, Feversham, had been asleep. Even when he was awake he was daft, because of his brain injury. John Churchill had been the real commander and Bob and the other foot-soldiers had done the fighting. Yet Feversham had got the credit for all. Why? Because it made a good story, Bob supposed, and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise the war for Ireland, which had ceased to be a good story when the Kings had left the stage.

Thus Bob in a very bleak mood all through April. On the 9th of May, a flock of sails appeared in the Shannon estuary, and sword-practice came to a halt, and the pupils of Bob’s fencing-academy gathered silent under the shade of the brooding-tree to watch a French convoy coming up the river towards Limerick. The ships were cheered by small crowds gathered in tiny raucous clumps on the Connaught side, and saluted by guns on the walls of Limerick. It was noted by all of the men around Bob that the cannon-salutes were returned in full measure (they had no lack of powder), but the cheers were not (these were supply-, not troop-ships).

Monsieur LaMotte took a spyglass from his saddle-bag, climbed halfway up the tree, and made observations. “I see the colors of a field-marshal; the big ship, there, third from the lead, she is carrying the new French commander…” then all the air went out of him in a long sigh, like bagpipes collapsing, and he said nothing for a minute or so, not because he had nothing to say but because he was the sort of fellow who did not like to utter as much as a word until he had made himself master of his emotions. “It is the butcher of Savoy,” he said in French to another Huguenot who was standing under the tree.

“De Catinat?”

“No, the other.”

“De Gex?”

“This is a field-marshal, not a priest.”

“Ah.” The other Huguenot ran to his horse and galloped away.

In English, La Motte explained: “I have recognized the coat of arms of the new French commander. His name is St. Ruth. A nobody. Our victory is assured.”

The muttering of the men resumed, and there were sporadic outbreaks of laughter. LaMotte climbed down out of the tree wearing an expression as if he’d just seen his mother being keel-hauled under St. Ruth’s flagship. He handed his spyglass to Bob, then went to his horse without a word and cantered away, stiff-backed.

Bob was glad to have the loan of the spyglass, for one of the smaller ships, farther back in the line, had familiar lines. His eyes unaided could not make out the colors flying from her mizzen-mast. With a bit of fiddling and focusing, and steadying the spyglass against the bole of the tree, he was able to see the coat of arms he had been looking for: for St. Ruth had brought a pair of lieutenant-generals with him, and one of them bore the title Earl of Upnor.

BOB HAD SAT AND WATCHED marvels during his idle spring: a butterfly forcing its way out of a cocoon, and an apple-blossom burgeoning from a sticky green pod. Those two unfoldings had much in common with each other, and with something that happened in Bob’s soul during the next hours. The behavior of the Huguenot cavalrymen served as a model and source of inspiration. Not that Bob generally wanted such things, but his time in Ireland had left him pressed together and folded up inside a stiff dry husk that protected him but imprisoned him, too. The same was true of all the others. But the knowledge that St. Ruth was here had sent a dread-thrill running through the camp of the Huguenots and shocked them all alive. Bob had no idea who St. Ruth was or what he had done in Savoy, but it did not matter; the effect of it was that the Huguenots now suddenly perceived themselves as being in the thick of a story. It was not a King-story and might never be written down, but it was a good story to them.

Years ago Bob had gone deaf in one ear, and had put it down to standing close to guns. But then one day a barber had reached into that ear with a wee hook and wrenched out a bung of brown wax, hard as pine-wood, and just like that Bob could hear again—he could hear so well it almost hurt, and could sense things going on all round him with such definition that for the next day he had difficulty keeping his balance. On the 9th of May 1691, all of Bob’s senses came alive thusly, and his lungs filled with air for the first time since he had waded across the Boyne with Jacobite musket-balls taking bites out of his hat.

They struck camp and withdrew from Limerick altogether during the next fortnight, and marched with the sun on their backs to Mullingar, in the center of the island, where all of King William’s host was assembling. A few days after they arrived the trains of wagons began to come from Dublin in their clouds of dust and noise, bringing the great cannons and mortars that had been sent from the Tower of London.

On June 8th they marched west to Ballymore and easily took a little out-post there, and made prisoners of one of the best Irish regiments, which had been left exposed in the middle of nowhere for no reason.

On June 19th they reached Athlone, which bestrode the Shannon. It consisted of an English town on the Leinster side—which the Jacobites abandoned almost immediately—and an Irish city on the Connaught side—which they retreated into, and defended with unnerving ferocity for two weeks. Scouts were sent across the Shannon; most did not come back. The ones that did brought news that cascaded down the chain of command to Bob: General St. Ruth had brought his whole army to a camp west of the Irish town, just out of range of Ginkel’s Dutch cannon.

The battle of Athlone was straightforward and bloody: Ginkel’s artillerymen fired a cannonball a minute for ten days, and an avalanche of bombs and mortar-stones, across the river into the Irish town and completely destroyed it. Meanwhile his foot-soldiers tried again and again to force a crossing on the stone bridge joining the English to the Irish town. This was the only way of reaching the Connaught side of the Shannon, and everyone knew it. The Irish had destroyed one segment of the bridge. The gap would have to be closed with timbers. Under hellish covering fire of artillery, Ginkel’s troops would go there at night and try to throw beams across the gap while Irish snipers hidden in the ruins of Athlone pierced them with musket-balls. Then Irish troops would show equal bravery in going down and setting the timbers afire, or casting them into the Shannon.

The Irish won the battle of the bridge, but lost that of Athlone when two thousand of Ginkel’s troops forded the Shannon downstream on June 30th and forced their way into the Irish town.

St. Ruth thereby lost Athlone, and all of his troops who were trapped inside of its walls. The rules of Continental siege warfare were in effect, meaning that towns could hope for easy treatment if they surrendered but that resistance was to be punished by massacre. Bob’s chief worry, then, was that he would be given a direct order to go into Athlone and massacre someone. The only thing that would be worse would be if the victims turned out to be Mr. McCarthy’s company of foot-soldiers from Baron Youghal’s regiment. Mr. McCarthy was a Dublin candle-maker who had spent all of his money to raise and outfit a company, and made himself its captain. Along the way he had recruited Teague Partry, who had in turn recruited several other of Bob’s out-laws. Jack Shaftoe’s sons—Bob’s nephews—had gotten swept up in Regimental life, much as Jack and Bob had done at the same age. For all Bob knew, the boys might be carrying muskets now. So it was not out of all possibility that Bob might be obliged to swing a spadroon into the necks of his nephews during the mopping-up of Athlone. It was the sort of dilemma that might make a fellow anxious. Fortunately Bob had (as was his habit) imagined and anticipated the worst, and made up his mind in advance what he should do if it came to pass: He would excuse himself, declare himself Irish (easily enough done, as ’twas only a state of mind anyway), make the sign of the cross over his red-coated breast, and go running off into Connaught with the Partrys. He even had a sort of excuse worked out: He’d declare that the hag who’d brained him with the bottle in Limerick was his long-lost great-aunt. This scheme had the added advantage of getting him closer to Upnor. After the Jacobites had lost the war, he’d sign up with an Irish mercenary regiment and go campaigning on the Continent. If he picked the right time and place to desert, he could then simply walk to wherever Abigail was.

This plan actually seemed more attractive to him the more he considered it, and the more phantastickal refinements he added onto it. By the time he crossed that half-wrecked bridge into what had been the Irish side of Athlone, he was almost looking forward to finding whatever was left of Mr. McCarthy’s company, and surrendering to it.

What he did not want was to find them dead, or to see them being hunted down in the streets by the Danish horsemen, who had reverted to the ways of the Vikings. So his fondest hope and worst nightmare were separated by an infinitesimally slender distance.

But he found nothing in Athlone save dead or dying Irishmen buried in settling piles of rubble. Fortunately a good part of the civilian population of Athlone had already fled into Connaught. A small Irish garrison was trapped near the bridge and enthusiastically butchered by the Danish cavalry. However, the great bulk of St. Ruth’s force never even saw fighting, and remained safe in its camp. Ginkel spent several days getting his army across the river, which meant that St. Ruth could stage a leisurely and orderly retreat of his whole army toward the interior of Connaught, or indeed all the way to the port of Galway if he chose.

So Bob found himself in the fabled land of Connaught. No, it couldn’t be; this part was connected to Leinster and the rest of the damned island by that bridge, it was an excrescence of the bad, ruined Ireland into the good. And fortunately it was surrounded by a wall to prevent the contagions of the world from spreading. Irish Athlone was just a buboe, holding the plague pent up inside.

When they got the order to march out of its western gate, then they would enter the true Connaught that Teague Partry had sung of during his long raw watches on the Develin Tower.

“IT IS SUNDAY, the twelfth of July, Anno Domini sixteen hundred and ninety-one,” said Captain Barnes helpfully, shaking Bob’s shoulder. “The train has arrived; we expect a long march.”

Very faint pink light gleamed in jackets of dew that had formed on the cold pale stones all around. Bob exerted all his will not to close his eyes and go back to sleep.

They were still in Athlone, sleeping in a half-wrecked wool warehouse that stood on the road uphill from the bridge. Wheels were grinding on the ashlars of that road, drawn by hundreds of patient hooves that beat a lulling tattoo on the stones.

Ginkel’s army had marched out a day ago and left them behind to await a train of wagons from Dublin, and to make sure it got across the bridge safely. Today they would have to catch up with the army and, if that army was on the move, accomplish a second march as well.

When someone was trying to kill him and his men (which was not really all that often), Bob’s chief professional obligation was to think about that. At all other times he thought about food. Treading carefully among sleeping men, he came to a place where he could look out through a bomb-hole and see orange flames fondling the bum of Black Betty, the company’s prize kettle, out in the court. There would be a sort of gruel boiling in it, with shreds of mutton flashing to the top occasionally, and an inch of grease floating on it. In other weathers a cloud of steam would be roiling from Black Betty’s mouth, but today she was surrounded and hemmed in by æons of fog proceeding out of the west, seemingly drawn by the feeble promise of the pink gloaming over Leinster. If any steam was coming out of Black Betty, it was like a fart in a whirlwind.

By the time Bob had groped his way to the coffee-pot and burnt his hands and lips on a tin cup of Mocha’s finest, the pink light that had greeted him earlier had been snuffed out by the progress of this fog. When he went about nudging men awake, they were all certain it must be midnight, and not dawn as Bob earnestly claimed.

Connaught would not let go of her mysteries easily, then. By the time they fell in with the regiment, chasing the customary, hideous screams of sergeants through the gloom, a kind of profound blue-gray light had begun to emanate from the fog: light without warmth or even the colors that made men remember warmth. There was a lot of bumping into other companies in rubble-congested streets, and standing still for no discernible reason, and then at last a gate materialized around them and they understood that the regiment was forcing its way through a bottleneck. They marched out of Athlone and left its unburied dead to the flies—for only flies could reach the ones who lay in the cellars of the fallen-in buildings.

Immediately the road began to fork and fork again, offering passages to Roscommon, Tuam, Athleag, or Killimor. Bob gazed down every one of those tracks with frank longing. But young officers on horseback were posted at every turning to ensure that the regiment, and the wagon-train, did not stray in the fog.

They marched on the high road, the road west toward Galway. Everything about the conduct of the operation said to Bob that it would be a long trudge with no objective other than to put distance behind them, and no prospect of actual fighting. But late in the morning—or so he guessed from the color of the fog, which had taken on a brassy shimmer, like a counterfeit guinea—he heard musket-fire far off.

It could not be his regiment. It must be some other battalion of Ginkel’s main army. So Ginkel had not marched on ahead of them at all. He had done a day’s march and then stopped. And from the sound of those muskets it was clear why: St. Ruth had only retreated a few miles down the road from Athlone.

They joined in with another column, marched for a mile, and crossed a river at a place called Ballinasloe. Immediately the rope of men and beasts raveled and frayed into a wide mess, each strand pursuing a different course. This would only occur if they had butted up against the army of St. Ruth, and were spreading out to form a battle-front.

Lone cavaliers dashed from left to right and right to left, wearing the colors of Brandenburgish, Danish, Huguenot, or Dutch cavalry regiments; these were engaged in the supremely important tasks of finding the ends of the line. The great bodies of soldiers were still proceeding towards the front, occasionally crossing over each other’s paths, but more and more often moving along parallel courses. The fog shone more brightly to their left, which suggested that they were going generally westwards. Bob’s left knee was hurting rather more than his right one—not only were they moving down-slope, but the ground on the right, toward the Ballinasloe road, was higher.

They’d seen no sign of the Jacobite army other than a few Irishmen hanged by the necks from tree-limbs along the road, presumably for desertion. But as they worked their way down from the road they did come upon a dead horse from Patrick Sarsfield’s Irish cavalry regiment, which was still warm and steaming. It was in a field, or rather, an expanse of disturbed soil. Every patch of dirt in Ireland bore the marks of desperate soldiers who had pawed through it in search of potatoes that might’ve been overlooked by other, slightly less desperate fellows. This horse had broken its leg stepping into a hole where some lucky man had struck a jackpot. Its rider had put it down with a pistol-ball to the brain and limped away on a pair of French-style boots in good repair. Bob followed the boot-prints, and his men followed him, until a mounted Dutch officer—one of de Zwolle’s aides—coalesced out of the fog, ordered them to abandon this pursuit, and signalled that they should form up into a line. And a good thing, too, as the ground had been getting soupier, and they were very nearly down in a bog by this point.

Now that all burdens had been thrown down and the commotion of the march had ceased, Bob found that he could hear for a great distance. In fact, he was convinced that they had mistakenly set up only a stone’s throw from the enemy. But the sound came and went with the sluggish convolutions of the fog, telling him that it was only a trick played on his ears by the queerness of the air, and further evidence that Connaught was a realm of mischievous færies.

Setting aside eldritch deceptions, and listening patiently whilst smoking his way through three pipe-bowls of tobacco, and (above all) thanking that barber for having drawn the wax out of his ear, Bob collected the following:

That there was a bog before them, much broader than he had supposed at first, perhaps half a mile from this side to the other. That water stood, rather than ran, at its bottom. That it was occupied by the enemy, but not heavily; it was not a position to be held, but an obstacle to slow down the onslaught of the Protestant legions. Beyond it, however, the ground rose up again, in some places to heights that would command the whole battlefield. The great bulk of the Jacobites were there, working with picks and shovels in reasonably dry ground (the implements bit rather than splashed). When a breeze finally came up, it became possible to hear canvas flapping. They had not taken their tents down yet; they had no thought of retreating. To the north and the south—that is to say, on the wings—were the cavalry. By process of elimination, infantry was in the center.

The Irish foot did not have the equipment or the training to form itself up into pike-squares and so were defenseless against horse. Therefore St. Ruth would only put them where cavalry could not go. It followed that the bog must be a formidable barrier, for St. Ruth was trusting it to preserve his infantry from a frontal charge. The Butcher of Savoy, as the Huguenots called him, had, however, felt obliged to put his cavalry at the ends, to prevent the infantry from being flanked and destroyed; so there must be easier ways of getting across the bog in those places.

In this section of the line—which seemed to be towards Ginkel’s right, or north flank—all was orderly and quiet. But at the left or southern flank, which might be as much as two miles away, they were having great difficulty forming up into line because of some skirmishes—most likely Sarsfield’s enterprising and high-spirited cavalry. Sporadic cackles of fire came from that direction and occasionally swelled into abrupt throat-clearings, but never developed into a proper engagement.

As this was Sunday, the French and Irish regiments were taking turns at Mass; Bob could track the gradual progress of two or perhaps three different priests along the Jacobite line of battle, stopping every so often to deliver a warlike homily and celebrate a truncated version of the sacrament. He only knew un peu de français and a wee bit o’ Gaelic, but after hearing several repetitions of these homilies, and the synchronized cheering of the congregants, he thought he had a clear enough notion of what was being said.

The breeze became dependable and the fog finally began to dissolve.

He strolled to the left and exchanged gossip with Greer, the sergeant of the fourteenth company. Then he strolled to the right and discovered an English cavalry regiment and chatted with one of its sergeants for a time. By now it was possible to understand where the Black Torrent Guards were situated. Ginkel’s army, like St. Ruth’s, had been arranged with infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings. Bob’s regiment was farther to the right than any of the other foot, and his company farther right than any other company; from their location northwards to the road, it was nothing but horse all the way.

The fog had lifted to the point where he could see his own regimental colors, about a musket-shot away, slightly uphill of the line established by the soldiers. He walked toward them and arrived just in time to see a conference breaking up: Colonel de Zwolle had served brandy and given orders to all of his company commanders. Bob about-faced and fell into step beside Captain Barnes, who was returning to the company.

“Ne pas faire de quartier,” ’ Bob said. “That’s what the priests are saying across the bog.”

Captain Barnes had a degree from Oxford. “After what happened in Athlone, it is to be expected.”

“Is it the same for us, then? No quarter?”

“Sergeant, your aversion to killing Irishmen is the talk of the regiment. Do not embarrass me today by turning suddenly into a paragon of mercy.”

Captain Barnes was the fifth son of a modestly important Bristol family, and had a quick mind. It had been expected of him that he would become a vicar. Instead he had discomposed his family by deciding to become an infantry officer. He was not yet twenty-five and still seemed more the student of divinity. He liked commanding troops in battle, and did a surprisingly good job of it, as long as they hewed to the tactics and maneuvers of conventional warfare, against similar opponents. Which might sound like damning with faint praise, but very few men could actually do this. He grew uncertain, and began to make bad decisions, when asked to do anything that was not explicitly covered by the rules of war. At such moments other rules must of necessity come into play, and the rules he was wont to fall back on were the sort that were taught in church. And he was bright enough to see that this was, in a war, ridiculous.

“You want a brute for a sergeant, so that he can go do the mopping-up while you wring your hands and disavow his unchivalrous deeds,” Bob said. “For that type of sergeant you must look in a common regiment. But we were organized by Churchill—”

“The Earl of Marlborough, to you!”

“In truth, to me he is John. But whatever he is called, he has odd tastes in sergeants, and though he has been replaced by de Zwolle, you are stuck with me—unless you would care to promote another from the ranks.”

“You’ll do, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

Finally the fog had lifted so that they could see as far as they pleased, though things more distant were wrapped in shimmering auras, bristling with iridescent needles. All was more or less as Bob had seen it with his ears. Across a bog they faced a hill whose near slope was exceeding well trenched, the trenches filled with Irish musketeers in gray coats. They would be armed with good new French muskets, not the trash that had served as firewood after the Battle of the Boyne. Far to the south the Jacobite line curved around the flank of the hill into some trees, and thus out of Bob’s view. Directly in front lay what appeared to be the worst part of the bog, where three water-filled ruts twined together in the heart of a morass. The main Athlone-Galway road was no more than a few hundred paces off to the right. It sported first a bridge and then a long, strait causeway over the boggy ground.

A mass of English and Huguenot cavalry were deployed in a clump around the road. Bob could see several regimental standards at a glance, meaning that this was probably styled a division, thus probably commanded by a major-general. Most likely the Huguenot Henri de Massue, who, though he’d never see France again, still went by his French title, the marquis de Ruvigny. Ruvigny was one of three generals King William had sent out to Ireland in the spring to replace ones who had exasperated him with their slowness. Another was a Scotsman, Hugh MacKay, who was commanding the division of infantry—Bob’s division, for the nonce—that was now looking out over the bog.

The bridge and the causeway could be reached by a short advance, which raised the question of why this cavalry division had not already taken it. The answer lay half a mile farther down the road, where an old castle rose up above the western end of the causeway. It was little more than a wreck: just four mossy stone walls, with mounds at the corners suggesting towers. But the tops of the walls were furry with musket-barrels, and the surrounding hamlet had been fortified with earth-works. Several roads then radiated westwards from the village. Various Jacobite regiments had positioned themselves short distances up those roads so that they could converge on any force that made it over the causeway and into the killing-zone around the castle.

Bob spent more time than was good for him searching out the standards of the Irish foot regiments and trying to identify Baron Youghal’s colors. That would tell him approximately where Mr. McCarthy the candlemaker was situated with the Partrys’ company. But he was unable to see matters clearly, as most of these regiments were dug in on the hill farther south and across the bog, two miles or more away, and their colors had not been particularly large or glorious to begin with.

“This is an excellent position,” Bob said admiringly. “It could not be better—for the Irish.”

Captain Barnes gave him a sharp look, but softened when he understood that Bob was merely stating facts, and according a sort of gentlemanly respect to the foe. “Today we will be dragoons, until we are told otherwise.”

“Where are our horses, then?”

“We must imagine them.”

“Imaginary horses are much slower than the other kind.”

“We need never mount up. Dragoons are supposed to ride into battle, then dismount and fight as infantrymen,” Barnes reminded him. “We walked here, that much is true. But that’s in the past. Now it’s as if we have all just climbed out of our saddles.”

“That is why they have placed us here, hard up against the cavalry—we are to support them,” Bob supposed, looking into Barnes’s eyes. Barnes showed no sign of disagreement. Bob turned away from General MacKay’s part of the field—the bog in the center—and toward General Ruvigny’s—the road, the causeway, and the village. At first glance this latter seemed the harder assignment, but he felt unaccountably relieved that they would not have to harry thousands of Irishmen out of the maze of ditches that they had cut into the peat.

Bob continued, “We are meant to advance along the road, I take it.” He then turned his attention to the castle, and tried to count the colors on its walls and in the surrounding village.

“It is a better assignment than to advance across that bog,” Barnes observed.

“Anything would be better than that, Captain,” Bob said. “When I am hit I want to fall with sun in my eyes. Not mud in my lungs.”

BOB, NORMALLY AN IN-THE-THICK-OF-THINGS kind of soldier, now had the unfamiliar opportunity of sitting still and watching the battle unfold, just like a General. This came about because the cavalry to which they were attached was not ordered to do anything for the first few hours; no General in his right mind would send his regiments across that causeway in the face of those defenses. In fact, very early on most of Ruvigny’s cavalry were detached and sent miles down the line toward the left wing, leaving only a regiment or so to guard the road. If the Black Torrent Guards had been real dragoons (with horses) they probably would have gone, too. As it was, they were stuck in the least active part of the battlefield.

But every other part of the line attacked. The only part Bob could see was the foot in the center, but from distant rumblings of thousands of hooves, and movements of reinforcing horse across the Irish rear, he could tell that a large cavalry engagement was under way at the opposite end.

MacKay’s infantry spent the first few hours of the battle failing against their Irish counterparts. Though ’twere more just to say that Ginkel had failed by ordering them even to try. The Irish had cut successive lines with protected passages from one to the next. The walls of the ditches were graded to afford protection against an attack from the east while leaving their occupants naked to fire from the west. So as soon as MacKay’s men fought their way across the sucking mud into one ditch, they would find that their foes had all vanished like wills-o’-the-wisp and reappeared in the next ditch uphill, whence they could fire musket-balls into the attackers at their pleasure. A small number of English actually managed to get through all of the ditches and hedgerows, but by the time they had done so, they were more a smattering of refugees than an army; and when they finally staggered out into open country along the base of the hill, they were confronted by an Irish battle-line that looked as if it had drawn itself up on a parade ground. The Irish charged with a roar that reached Bob’s ears a few seconds after he saw them leap forward, and the surviving English fell back all the way to where they had started an hour before. By the time any semblance of order had been reëstablished among MacKay’s battalions, the Irish had re-occupied the very same positions, in the forward-most ditch, as they’d been in when the fog had first lifted. The field looked the same as it had before, save that dead Englishmen were strewn all over it. Farther south it was the same except that the dead were Danish, Dutch, Hessians, and Huguenots.

While respecting Irishmen as individuals, Bob had always viewed their regiments primarily as a source of comic relief. He was fascinated to see them chasing Hessian storm-troopers across a bog. It was the first time in his knowledge that their ferocity and love of country had come into alignment with military competence. At the same time he was apprehensive, for the Partrys’ sake, of what might happen next, because the cavalry fight at the far end sounded more ferocious than any he had ever heard. He could not believe that the French and Irish could withstand such an assault for long. But nothing happened; the Protestant cavalry never broke through. The battle was a stalemate.

Bob watched two more attacks across the bog. Both failed in the same way as the first; the Irish not only stopped them cold, but threw them back, and not only threw them back but overran some of their positions and spiked some of their field-pieces. Captain Barnes: “’Tis worse even than a Pyrrhic victory; ’tis a Pyrrhic defeat.”

General MacKay was as wet, cold, and furious as a cat in a rain-barrel. He had led the failed attacks personally. As the afternoon turned into evening he had worked his way north up the line. It was plain that the center could not be forced, and he had no real choice but to probe that part of the bog around the piles of the causeway. For the fourth attack, therefore, he got permission from Ginkel to lead the Black Torrent Guards—who had done nothing so far—on a thrust parallel to and just a bit south of the road.

This attack failed like the others. Bob and his men had learned from the mistakes of the fellows they had been watching, and so they took fewer casualties. But it failed nonetheless, partly because of the ditches, and partly because of the plunging musket-fire that came down from the parapets of the ruined castle when they advanced within range. It was demoralizing to see a large building such as Aughrim Castle vanish behind a cloud of gray smoke as hundreds of muskets were discharged at once.

But they all suspected that they might have succeeded with more men. Bob mentioned to Captain Barnes, who reported to de Zwolle, who told General MacKay, that before the battle he’d spied a pair of regimental standards in the bog just by the causeway, where it entered Aughrim village. During one of the earlier attacks he had watched those colors move far south to the center of the line, where the fighting had been fiercest. They had not returned since. So the village’s defenses were not what they had once been.

MacKay rode the line, having a look at the Black Torrent Guards, and pronounced them not half so wet, muddy, and exhausted as the men who’d attacked in the center; which he looked on as proving that this was not such a very boggy part of the bog, and that cavalry might get across it. He was being trailed by a motley string of European and English cavaliers who, because they had not done any fighting yet, were spotless and jittery. At one point MacKay got into a dispute with them, which he ended by wheeling his horse and charging directly toward Aughrim Castle just to show that it could be done. His horse took a header over a wall and stopped hard in muck on the other side, and MacKay flew off and ended up wetter, dirtier, and angrier than he had been before. Most of the cavaliers were convinced it could be done, and the others were now too ashamed to speak their minds.

The Black Torrent Guards were ordered to advance as far and as fast toward the castle as they could, and then throw themselves down in the bog and shoot at any Irish heads that showed above the parapet. It was hoped that this would lessen the damage inflicted on Ruvigny’s skeletal division of cavalry as they galloped across and alongside the causeway. For every other route along which Ginkel’s army might advance had been blocked; Ruvigny’s squadrons were the only fresh troops he had; and the only way to avoid total defeat was to mount a charge along that causeway.

The Black Torrent Guards were sent across the bog first, in full view of the castle, to draw off some fire, but the Irish seemed to recognize that tactic for what it was and saved their loads for the cavalry, which came thundering down the road a few moments later.

Only ragged firing sounded from Aughrim Castle as the first squadrons rode directly past it. They galloped into the village with almost no casualties and found that it had been left nearly undefended, as Bob had predicted.

Bob got up on one knee to fire his musket at a head silhouetted against the evening sky, and was hit in the chest by something that made a strange zooming noise. He dropped his weapon and fell flat on his back.

When he woke up a couple of his men had ripped his coat open to examine the wound, which was in a bad spot, near where his left collarbone joined his breastbone. And yet Bob was still alive, and not coughing up blood. Not feeling bad at all, really.

He was being looked after by one Hamilton, a big bloke, infamous for uncouth qualities. Hamilton had planted a knee on Bob’s shoulder to pin him in a more convenient attitude, and was picking curiously at a hard object embedded in Bob’s flesh. Bob found this extremely annoying and said so more than once. “Oh, fuck it!” Hamilton decreed, and dived into Bob’s chest, planting his lips over the wound. After a quick suck and a bite he popped up again with something yellow in his teeth, and spat it out for examination.

“’Tis a pretty brass button,” he announced, “a bit dented by the ram-rod, but ’twill suffice to replace the ones we tore off your coat just now.”

“Or we may fire it back to its owner,” said one Roberts, who always did what Hamilton did, but not as well. He had a knee on Bob’s other shoulder. “If we should run out of ammunition, I mean.”

Not more than ten minutes had passed while Bob lay on his back on the ground, but when he got up again it was a new battle. All of Ruvigny’s horse had now crossed over, and more was on the way, galloping up from the opposite wing where they’d been balked all afternoon. The gates of Aughrim Castle were open, and a lot of screaming and hasty praying could be heard within its walls as the unlucky garrison was put to the sword (vide Rules of Continental Siege Warfare). The squadrons not participating in this massacre had positioned themselves around the edge of the village and made ready to be attacked by the Irish and French battalions not far away, but such an attack never came; something had gone wrong in St. Ruth’s chain of command, orders to counter-attack had not been issued or else were not getting through, and his generals were unwilling to do it on their own initiative.

Bob wrapped his coat around himself to cover the wound, which was bleeding, but not hissing or spurting. He strolled uphill a short distance and climbed up onto one of the earthen ramparts that the Irish had thrown up to defend Aughrim village.

He could see some Irish dragoons retreating off to his right. In the overall scheme this was amazingly stupid, and probably fatal, but they had no way of knowing.

“Sergeant!”

Bob looked down into the face of Captain Barnes, which was in the middle of a transition from intense anxiety to giddy relief; for the nonce it looked more quizzical than anything. “I was given to understand you had suffered a dire injury!”

“I was shot in the chest,” Bob said guardedly. “One of those musketeers drilled me about here, from perhaps fifty yards.” Bob glanced towards the corner of the castle from which the button had been fired. A French standard was being cut down by trophy-hunting cavaliers.

“Then you should be taking your rest! We have been ordered to garrison the castle,” said Barnes.

“Has my bedchamber been made ready?”

“Alas, there are no chambers of any kind, only roofless cells,” Barnes answered deadpan. “We could make you a bed from ammunition cases.”

“I thought they had none.”

“They have thousands of musket-balls in there,” Barnes said.

“Then why did they not use them?”

“Because they are made for English muskets—ever so slightly larger than the barrels of their French muskets.”

Hamilton had ambled to within earshot of this conversation, and responded, “Haw! I always knew we Englishmen had bigger balls than the French!” Indeed, all of the private soldiers found it hilarious. But sergeants and captains—who were actually responsible for getting musket-balls to the troops—could only wince at such a story, even when it had befallen the enemy.

Bob looked off to the south and saw a series of English and Huguenot cavalry squadrons slipping like a knife-blade into a gap between the Irish infantry, and the stunned cavalry to its rear. They were swinging round behind the Irish foot, getting into position to charge them, panic them, and mow them down like hay.

“Captain Barnes,” Bob said, “you have said it yourself. I have been shot in the chest and am plainly a casualty of war, hors de combat, and for now my duties must be assumed by another sergeant…. Fortunately your company’s assignment is trivial. There will be no counter-attack made against yonder castle this afternoon.” Bob turned his back on Barnes and strode down the slope of the rampart, muttering, “Or this month, this year, this century.”

ONCE THE DANES and the Huguenots over-ran the field like flocks of starlings scouring the earth for worms, Bob’s red Guards uniform would not help him; this side of the bog, any man on foot was under a death sentence. Because the French/Irish phant’sied themselves the army of the true King (James II), many of their regiments wore the same red uniforms, and the only way to tell them apart was by looking for small badges or devices thrust into their hats: sprigs of green for King William’s forces, scraps of white paper for James Stuart’s. These were difficult to see even in good light. Bob’s hat had been lost in the bog anyway.

Fortunately the battle had long ago got to that stage where riderless horses were wandering about, instinctively forming up into little herds, looking for quiet places to graze. They were being pursued by men under orders to round them up. Bob ventured into a sort of no-man’s-land that had opened up between the village and some Irish battalions retreating from it, and pretended that he had been given such orders. For the available horses, he was striving against two men who were younger and quicker than he was; but being older and wiser and (today) luckier, he had the satisfaction of being able to rest, crouching alongside a fragment of stone wall, while they chased a saddled horse directly towards him. He vaulted up onto the wall, grabbed the mount’s dragging reins, and swung a leg over its saddle before it even knew he was about. He inferred that it had been ridden by a member of Ruvigny’s cavalry who’d fallen or been shot out of the saddle, but that it had followed its squadron across the causeway just to be sociable. At any case it was a good horse and fresh. Bob pulled its nose round southward and whacked it lightly with the flat of his spadroon.

He galloped into the heart of the battle while it still deserved that name, before it turned into a rout and massacre. Ruvigny’s cavalry had by now broken through the Irish flank altogether and were charging south, traversing the hill. To their left and downhill lay the entrenchments crowded with Irish foot-soldiers in their gray coats. To their right and uphill were the white tents of the Jacobite encampment. In front of them was nothing but a flimsy barrier of cavalry: not above three squadrons of what looked like an English Catholic regiment.

Bob had begun by galloping in the wake of this charge, but soon caught up and found himself in the middle of it—close enough that he could see the faces of those English Papists, Persons of Quality all, and watch them think as the attack bore down on them. Some seemed ready to die for their faith and rode forward with a certain look of calm ferocity that Bob admired very much. Some stood their ground—not, Bob thought, out of courage but out of terror, as rabbits freeze when the hawk flies overhead. Some wheeled and ran. But a contingent of three riders, who had been situated toward the rear, turned away and rode south in a way that looked purposeful to Bob.

Bob knew what they were doing: first, preserving their regimental standard (one of the three riders was the standard-bearer). This would enable them to erect the colors on a high place later, so that the scattered squadrons and stragglers could converge on it and reform into an effective battalion. Without that scrap of cloth they could never amount to anything but lost Vagabonds. Second, they were going to the other wing where Sarsfield was commanding the bulk of the Jacobite cavalry, and apparently doing a very good job of it; in a few minutes they would come back at the head of several regiments.

Bob out-stripped Ruvigny’s cavalry in an instant when they galloped into the Catholic squadrons and stopped to duel it out with pistols and sabers. French Protestants fighting for the King of England crossed blades with English Catholics fighting for the King of France. Bob, having no personal interest in their quarrel, rode through them all like a cannonball through a bank of smoke and discovered himself in open country pursuing the three riders.

The standard-bearer was moving slowest, and gradually falling behind. Bob almost had him when the fellow chanced to look back; then he let out a yell and spurred his horse forward. The two officers in front, perhaps eight lengths ahead of him, looked back to see their standard-bearer in trouble; he could not defend himself without dropping the colors. As this happened Bob got a direct view of their faces and realized for the first time that one of the two was Upnor.

After a brief exchange of words, Upnor drew back hard on one rein to wheel his mount around, while the other officer shot ahead to get the message out to Sarsfield. Bob—who had a lot to keep track of—heard a loud crack and assumed a pistol had gone off. The standard-bearer, four lengths ahead of Bob, faltered. Bob looked again for Upnor, but he had vanished! Then in the corner of his eye he saw the standard-bearer coming up fast—having brought his mount nearly to a stand-still while Bob was still at a gallop. Bob had no time to do anything but stick his spadroon out. The blade struck something hard and the weapon was wrenched out of his grasp, and he was nearly thrown back onto the horse’s croup. What saved him was that this had all occurred just short of a declivity in the hillside, a little water-course running straight down into the bog, therefore straight across their path. Both Bob’s horse and that of the standard-bearer had seen it coming, and in the absence of orders to the contrary, slowed down.

Bob recovered his equilibrium just shy of this gulley and shook his hand frantically in the air a few times. It felt as if it had been stung by a bee. Lacking another blade, he drew out his pistol, which he had put out of his thoughts until this moment because it was useless while galloping. But now he was standing still, as was the standard-bearer, no more than four yards away from him.

The standard was hung from one end of a full-length pike so that it would rise to thrice the height of a man and be visible above a teeming battlefield. While galloping, the bearer had held it nearly horizontal, like a jousting-lance, in his left hand, while using his right to hold the reins. Bob had overtaken him on the left and he had reflexively raised up the pike-staff to parry Bob’s blow; Bob’s spadroon had cut into it at an angle about a third of the way from the top and come to a stop, wedged into the wood.

The standard-bearer now raised the pole to vertical and planted it, leaving Bob’s spadroon high in the air and out of reach. Hugging the pike against himself and his horse’s ribs to steady himself, he drew out a pistol of his own. He was a beautiful blond English boy of about eighteen and Bob shot him in the head. He was wearing a steel cuirass to protect his torso and so it was the head or nothing.

A light misty rain had commenced and the late afternoon sun had gone out like a snuffed candle, leaving gray twilight. Bob looked down the gulley, drawn by an anguished noise, and saw Upnor’s horse thrashing around with a broken leg. Then he saw Upnor clambering up out of the gulley intact. The crack he had heard before must have been Upnor’s horse breaking its leg when it tried to stop and wheel around in the wrong place.

Bob had discharged his only pistol and there was no time to reload. The standard-bearer had squeezed his trigger involuntarily and fired his pistol into the air. Bob dismounted, staggered on cramped legs over to the standard, and threw it down. He glanced over at Upnor, who had got himself up above his horse on the brink of the watercourse and pulled out a pair of pistols, one in each hand. He aimed one at his horse and pulled the trigger; Bob saw the white sparks from the flint, but it did not fire—the pan had gotten wet.

Upnor now gave Bob a sort of appraising look. Bob planted his foot on the pike at the place where his spadroon was lodged in it, and pulled up on the end until it snapped; then he came up with the weapon in his hand. The Earl of Upnor took one look at it and then, with no hesitation, aimed his other pistol down into the ditch and put his charger out of its misery. He dropped both of his pistols, turned to face Bob, and drew out his rapier. For being something of a traditionalist in these matters, he had not yet adopted the more fashionable small-sword.

“Sergeant Shaftoe,” he said, “since we last met, your brother has achieved even greater infamy than he had then. Now the Battle of Aughrim has been lost. I am not likely to see the sun rise again. But I can at least thank Providence that she has placed you in my power, that I may salvage something of the day by sending the brother of L’Emmerdeur to Hell.”

“I phant’sied ’twas you who were in my power,” Bob muttered.

Upnor cast off his cloak to reveal a shining steel cuirass underneath, with a vest of light mail under that.

“Not at all chivalrous,” Bob observed.

“On the contrary, nothing is more characteristic of the chivalric classes than to put on armor and go round ridding the country of rebellious Vagabonds—as your own cavalry is demonstrating!”

With a wry tilt of the head, Upnor pointed toward the lower slopes of the hill where King William’s cavalry was hunting Irishmen, frantic to kill as many as they could before they lost the daylight altogether. The Earl was a sophisticated man who enjoyed this irony, and wanted Bob to share it with him.

“Enough talking,” Bob said, raising his guard to his face. “I did not come here to make friends with you.” And he snapped the blade down and away, completing the salute. Upnor took half a step forward, raising the rapier to a guard position, then made a little show of remembering his manners and acted out the faintest memory of a salute. He was so dexterous with a sword that he could convey certain qualities, such as sarcasm, simply through nuances in his movements. Bob now stepped towards Upnor, hoping to back him up against the brink of the gulley; this also situated Bob on slightly higher ground.

“It’s about the girl, isn’t it? Abigail, my pretty slave,” Upnor exclaimed. “I had forgotten.”

“No, you hadn’t.”

“Tell me, do you believe that killing me will help you repossess her?”

“Not really. She’ll pass to your heirs and assigns, and I will kill them.”

Upnor did not like this very well. “It is revenge, then,” he concluded. He spun on the ball of one foot, ran down the bank for several yards to build up speed, then leapt across to the opposite brink. “In that case you are obligated to pursue me—so I am entitled to choose the ground. Come over here, Sergeant!”

Bob backed up for a few paces to get a running start, but by the time he was ready to make his leap, Upnor had moved back up to stand directly across from him, rapier aimed out into the space above the stream, positioned to impale Bob in mid-jump. “You hesitate a second time! You could have cut me down before I jumped across,” Upnor said reproachfully.

Bob did not see fit to dignify this with a reply. He sidestepped up the bank; Upnor tracked him until he stopped. Then the Earl turned his head sideways and cupped his hand to his ear like a bad actor. “Hark! Patrick Sarsfield’s cavalry is approaching, I do believe!”

“Those sound like Danish hooves to me.”

Upnor made a sound like heh-heh, a completely unconvincing simulation of a laugh.

“Why are you playing message-boy, my lord? Why is not St. Ruth doing his job?”

“Because his head was carried off by a cannonball,” Upnor responded. He brought the back of his hand to his mouth, pretending to cover a yawn. “It is a dull sword-fight so far,” he complained.

“Let me across and it will become exciting soon enough.”

“No, it is that you lack passion! A Frenchman would have leaped over by now. Perhaps it would help if I told you that I have fucked your sweet Abigail.”

“I assumed as much,” Bob said levelly.

“And you…haven’t?”

“It is none of your business.”

“It is all of my business, as she is my property, and I broke her maidenhead with this rapier, just as I am about to break yours with this one! So do not be coy, Sergeant, I know you have not enjoyed Abigail. Perhaps you shall, one day. But be sure to bring some sheep-gut. I am afraid that I, or one of my friends, have given her a nasty social disease.”

Bob jumped over the ditch at this time. Upnor backed away and let him land safely, but then closed in on him quickly, twitching the rapier with his right hand and now drawing a dagger with his left.

“Don’t look at the poniard, silly man,” Upnor chided him. “You must fix your gaze upon your opponent’s eyes—just as Abigail Frome stares into mine when I am pleasuring her.”

Bob, reckoning that this was enough, wrapped his right arm across his body, drawing the blade back in position to let go a hay-maker. Part of the plan was to convince Upnor that his predictable taunts had actually made Bob angry. So Bob let out a bellow as he launched himself toward Upnor while letting go a mighty backhanded swing.

This was something he had practiced for a whole month with Monsieur LaMotte. Upnor’s light blade could never stand up to a scything attack by the heavier spadroon, and so he had little choice but to drop his blade and step back to let it whoosh by. But Bob’s forward rush would bring him into dagger range. So Upnor drew his right foot (which had been foremost) back, while pivoting on his left, turning sideways to let Bob charge past him. At the same time he raised his left hand so that he could plunge the dagger into Bob’s ribs as he went by.

All of which went according to plan except for the last bit. For instead of rushing by standing up, Bob had planted his feet and dived forwards, so that his trunk was too low to receive Upnor’s dagger. The back-handed cut had flung his body into a twisting movement from his left to his right, and so as he hurtled past he was spinning to face his opponent’s legs. Bob’s left arm and shoulder went through first, extended to take his impact on the ground. Then his head, and the right arm and spadroon trailing along his body. As soon as his left elbow struck the peat he curled that arm around and caught Upnor’s right leg, trapping it against his body.

Upnor needed that leg to take his weight as he moved backwards, and thus had no choice but to fall down, even as Bob was getting his own knees under him. Upnor knew that to fall on his stomach was death, so he spun and landed on his arse and rolled up onto his back, his legs going straight up in the air. If this were a Parisian Salle d’Armes he might have turned it into a backwards somersault and come up fighting, but this was nearly impossible in a stiff cuirass. So Upnor’s legs and arse reached apogee and then came down again. He was going to come up forwards. He planted his right elbow to push off against the ground but kept his guard up with the left, keeping that dagger pointed in the air. Bob had now got up on one knee and managed to take a swing at it. He fully intended to take Upnor’s hand off at the wrist, but either his aim was bad or Upnor reacted with exceptional speed, because instead the blow struck the dagger’s handle just behind the guard, right where Upnor’s thumb and index finger gripped it, and ripped it loose from Upnor’s hand. It whirred off and vanished in gloom and mist.

Upnor did a sideways roll away from Bob and came up angry. “You are a cold, cold, cold-blooded knave!” he exclaimed. “I think you do not care about Abigail at all!”

“I care enough to win this.”

“You have been practicing against someone who knows the rapier,” Upnor said. “Tell me, did he show you this?”

Bob liked to sit in a meadow and throw bits of bread to the birds. He had done this once with a flock of some hundred pigeons who had, once they’d gotten the general idea, surrounded him and waited patiently for him to throw out each scrap. But presently a sparrow had come along and begun to collect evey last crumb that Bob tossed, even though it had been one against a hundred. Even if Bob lured the sparrow to one side, then threw the morsel to the other, the little bird would come across like a flash of light from a signal-mirror and wend its way among the stumbling pigeons and pluck the bread right out from under their open beaks, which would snap together on thin air.

Bob now learned that he was a pigeon and Upnor a sparrow. One moment he was certain that his spadroon was about to take Upnor’s leg off at the knee, and the next, the Earl was somewhere else, and the point of the rapier was headed for Bob’s heart. In desperation he pawed at it with his left hand and diverted it so that it got him just under the ribs on the right side and passed out his back. As Bob fell back, his flailing left hand struck the guard of the rapier, a swirl of silvery bars, and his fingers closed around it. This would prevent Upnor from drawing it out and stabbing Bob again and again as he lay on the ground. Bob landed flat on his back, preceded by that part of the rapier that had gone all the way through him, and found himself pinned, nailed like Jesus. Upnor was pulled forward and ended up staring down into Bob’s face from not far away.

“Lung?” Upnor guessed.

“Liver,” Bob said, “or else I could never do this.” He inhaled and then spat at Upnor’s face, but it came out as a feckless spray.

“’Twill be a slow-festering wound then,” Upnor said. “I will gladly supply you with a quicker death if you will be so good as to let go my weapon.” He glanced up for a moment, distracted by the sound of hurtling cavalry. “Sarsfield,” he pronounced. “Let us finish, I must go to them.”

Bob turned his head sideways, just to get Upnor’s visage out of his sight. He saw a queer thing silhouetted against the deepening gray sky above the hill: a fellow in a gray coat perched on a pole above a ditch, not far away. No, he was not perched, but swinging across it, a matted ponytail trailing behind him like a profusion of battle-streamers from a regimental flag. It was an Irish infantryman, pole-vaulting across the ditch. Coming to the aid of Upnor, his English overlord. He would probably have a dirk or something to finish Bob off with.

“When you go to the next world,” Upnor said, “tell the angels and demons that we know everything about your infamous cabal, and that we will have the gold of Solomon!”

“What the bloody hell are you talking about!?” Bob exclaimed. But before answering, Upnor peeled Bob’s hand off the guard, pinky first. He planted his foot in Bob’s stomach and stood up, yanking the blade out.

“You know perfectly well,” he said indignantly, “Now go and do as I have instructed you!” He aimed a death-blow at Bob’s heart. Bob put his hands up to slap it aside. Then a large object hurtled across the sky and smashed into the rapier’s guard, crumpling the bars and sending it spinning away.

Upnor staggered back, gripping a damaged hand. Bob looked up to see a bulky figure in a ragged muddy gray coat, gripping eight feet or so of pike-staff: the same bit that Bob had broken off the cavalry standard.

Bob levered himself up on his elbow and rose to a seated position to find the cool, level gaze of Teague Partry directed his way. Teague had a head like a cube of limestone, and brown hair pulled back tight against his skull, though many strands had come loose during the day’s fighting and been plastered back with mud. His blue-gray eyes were set close together, redoubling the intensity of his glare.

“What d’you think y’are, a character in a friggin’ novel, Bob? Can you not perceive that the gentleman is wearin’ armor, and knows more concernin’ swordsmanship than you ever will?”

“I perceive it well enough now, Teague.”

Upnor had, during Teague’s scolding of Bob, gone over and retrieved his rapier. He held it now in his left hand, advancing crab-wise toward Teague.

“Look out, Teague, he’s as dangerous with his left as he is with his right—”

“Bob! You make too much and too little of him at the same time. As a ’fencer he’s a caution, ’tis plain enough to see, but in the larger scheme, Bob, what is he but a friggin’ tosser wavin’ a poker around in the dark.” By this time Upnor had advanced to within about eight feet and so Teague gave his stave a toss upward, gripped it with both hands at the end, and with a grunt, swung it round in a long arc parallel to the ground, catching Upnor in the side and flattening him. Upnor made a grab at the end of the staff, which had ended up hovering over his face, but his movements were cramped by his steel cuirass, which now sported a huge dent jabbing deep into his side. Teague withdrew the stave, shifted his grip so that he was holding it in the middle, raised it up above his head, and began to execute a series of brisk stabbing motions, with the occasional mighty swing. These were accompanied by metallic bashing sounds and screams from Upnor’s end of the stick.

Between these efforts he sent the following, loosely connected string of comments and observations Bob’s way:

“You have responsibilities now, Bob. You must lose this naïve understanding of violence! You are embarrassin’ me in front of the lads! You can’t play by their rules or they’ll win unfailingly! You don’t engage in courtly play-fightin’ with one such as this. You get a great friggin’ tree-branch and keep hittin’ him with it until he dies. Like that. D’you see, boys?”

“Aye, Uncle Teague,” came back two voices in unison.

Bob looked to the other side of the ditch and saw a pair of blond lads there, each holding the reins of a horse. One of them—it looked like Jimmy—had the horse Bob had rode in on, and the other—by process of elimination, Danny—had the standard-bearer’s.

“There,” Teague said. “Now get you over the ditch and be gone with the lads.”

“I’ve been run through the liver.”

“All the more reason to stop your lollygaggin’. You’ll bleed to death shortly or heal up in a few weeks—the liver has a miraculous power of regeneration, while the body lives. Take it from an Irishman.”

Bob slumped forward on his hands, then got his knees under him. He could hear blood dripping onto the ground. But it was only dripping, not coming in a continuous stream, or (worse) a series of spurts. If he had seen a private soldier with such a wound, he’d have guessed that the fellow would live, once the wound was packed with something to stop the bleeding. Upnor had been right; if Bob died of this, it would be because it festered in the days to come.

“I’m not askin’ you to walk. You may ride one horse and the boys may share the other.”

“And you, Teague?”

“Oh, it’s into the ditch with me, Bob, into the bog. I’ll collect a musket from one of the Englishmen I killed today, and go a-rappareein’.” Teague’s eyes now turned into running pools, and he tilted his head back and sniffled. “Get you gone, none of us has a moment to waste.”

“I’ll raise a monument in London,” Bob promised, and got up slowly. He did not pass out.

“To me? They wouldn’t have it!”

“To Upnor,” Bob said, staggering past the Earl’s smashed corpse, and kicking the rapier aside into the watercourse. “A fine statue of him, looking just as he does now, and an inscription: ‘In Memoriam, Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, finest swordsman in England, beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.’ ”

Teague considered it for a moment, then nodded. “In Connaught,” he added.

“In Connaught,” Bob agreed, then eyed the ditch. It looked as wide as the Shannon. But the boys were waiting on the other side: Jack’s boys, and now Bob’s. For under the circumstances they were likely the only children Bob would ever have. Teague gave him a mighty shove in the arse as he flew back over the water. By the time Bob got up from a rough, agonizing tumble on the far side and turned to thank him, Teague Partry was gone.

A Hay-rick, St.-Malo, France

9 APRIL 1692

The mind is its own place, and in it self

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

—MILTON,
Paradise Lost

“THIS MUST BE how syphilis spreads: blokes like me, hopping from place to place.”

“Why, Bob! I don’t believe anyone’s ever said anything quite so romantick to me.”

“I can’t guess what you were expecting when you roger an old sergeant in hay.”

“Come, lace me back up.”

“Would you hold your hair up out of the way? There, that’s better…”

“…”

“…tedious work, ain’t it?”

“Oh, stop complaining.”

“I’ve no complaints. But we could have left this bit on, you know.”

“Yes, and the stockings as well, and we could have done it standing up, and you with your boots and breeches on. But for me to enjoy it, Bob, I require a sense of abandon, of freedom, that only comes with removal of clothes.”

“This tight enough?”

“It is fine…for the same reason, Bob, I could do without your idle ruminations on syphilis, and how it spreads.”

“I don’t have it, mind you. Haven’t rogered anyone in years.”

“Nor do I. And neither have I.”

“What d’you mean, you told me you’ve a baby boy, six months old—”

“Last time we met. Now, seven months.”

“Be that as it may, how can you say you haven’t rogered anyone in years?”

“Sex with my husband I leave out of the reckoning altogether.”

“Strikes me as a large omission.”

“It would not, if you had ever had sex with Étienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.”

“Can’t say as I have, Madame.”

“Unless you did, and forgot about it. At any rate—he has been doing it to me again lately.”

“Lately…ah. You are saying that there was a cessation, round about the time of the birth of number two, and now he is trying for three.”

“In his mind they are One and Two respectively. For the first, being a bastard, is a zero; which means a nullity, something that does not exist.”

“That—the bastard I mean—is the one you had round about the time I shipped out to Dundalk, and you got marooned in Dunkerque?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Just refreshing my memory, my lady, no need to be getting all stiff in the spine—cor! It’s gone loose, I shall have to re-lace from the beginning.”

“It is not necessary. Just get to work buttoning up the bodice.”

“Got ripped a bit, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll have it mended. Come, I am apprehensive that someone will happen along and discover us.”

“Ah, but not to worry—I’m naked!”

“How is it better to be naked?”

“As long as I keep my mouth shut, I’ll be indistinguishable from one of your French nobility. They’ll run away in terror.”

“Especially when they see your scars. Very impressive.”

“You would never think so, if you had any notion of the pain that comes with these scars, the weakness, the helplessness—draining pus for months—not knowing from one moment to the next whether you shall live or die—”

“You forget that I have given birth twice.”

“Touché. Ah, but now you’ve brought me back round to my topic.”

“What is your topic?”

“You never talk about the bastard.”

“Perhaps, from that, you should collect that I do not wish to speak of him.”

“I was merely asking as a routine courtesy, as is common among parents.”

“How are Jack’s boys?”

“Jimmy and Danny are Regimental boys like their father and nuncle. If they’re doing as they ought to—which is unlikely—they are, at this moment, peeling potatoes at our camp outside of Cherbourg.”

“Do they have any inkling that you are acting as a spy for Marlborough?”

“Why, what an impolite question, Madame la duchesse! I am in no way certain that I am a spy. Haven’t made up my mind yet. Haven’t sent any information his way.”

“Well, when you decide to do so, you may send it through me.”

“If I decide to do so.”

“You will. An invasion of England is planned, is it not?”

“When French and Irish regiments march up to the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula and form great camps in the spring-time, it does make one tend to think ’long those lines, don’t it?”

“In the end you’ll not suffer England to be invaded. You’ll inform Marlborough.”

“Marlborough’s in disgrace. He and his meddlesome wife got on the wrong side of William and Mary. He had to sell his offices, his commissions. He is nothing now.”

“Yes, it is the talk of every salon in Versailles. But if England is invaded, he will be un-disgraced very rapidly, and put at the head of some regiments. And you will rally to him.”

“As you seem so certain of these things, I deem all your questions answered, madame—so I turn them round. Does the Duke of Arcachon have any inkling that you are a spy?”

“Your supposition is mistaken. I spied for England once. Now I do it for myself.”

“Ah. So, if we are to cross the Channel, you should like to know of it for your own purposes.”

“You say this—‘for your own purposes’—as if I am the only one in the world who had purposes.”

“Very well, very well…damned lot of buttons, ain’t it?”

“You did not seem to mind so much when you were undoing them ten minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes, by your leave, madame, do allow me some pride. Ten minutes! Am I really so perfunctory?”

“Perhaps I am.”

“Hmm, now, that is an unusual turning of the tables…it is supposed to be he who is perfunctory and selfish, and she who wants to stretch it out.”

“Ah, but I did stretch it out, Sergeant, when I was inspecting it for signs of the French Pox. And a long stretch it was.”

“You try to change the subject, and to distract me with flattery—but this methodical inspection of my yard is further proof of the businesslike nature of the transaction just concluded, is it not?”

“Very well…I hope that Number Three, as you count them, or Two, as Étienne does, will be half-Shaftoe rather than half-Lavardac, and, in consequence, altogether fitter, handsomer, and cleverer than Number Two/One, bless his poor little heart.”

“I…I…I am shocked!”

“Why so shocked, you who’ve been in battles and seen, and done, the worst that men can do?”

“P’raps that is not so terrible, set against the worst that women can do.”

“You protest too much. You are not serious. Though ’tis true there are terrible women in the world, I am not one of them.”

“Why, to use a man in such a way…am I to have no knowledge of my own offspring!?”

“Why did you not ask such penetrating questions prior to fucking me in a haystack, Sergeant Shaftoe? Were you not aware, until now, that fucking leads to babies?”

“Very well, very well…that is not why I am shocked.”

“Why then, Bob?”

“Of course, I know you don’t really fancy me. So, ’tis not that I have been let down on that score.”

“Just as I know you do not really fancy me.”

“Of course not. Though you are fetching, a bit.”

“Just as are you in your own mottled way, Bob.”

“But I always assumed that you had me simply because you couldn’t have Jack.”

“Just as you have me because you can’t have Abigail?”

“Just so, madame. But it did never enter my head that it was, at root, a baby-making proposition…what is wrong with Number Two/One?”

“Lucien is, to use an English expression, a funny-looking kid. ’Tis common among Lavardacs. Moreover, he is listless and slow to thrive.”

“What of Number One/Null?”

“The most beautiful child who ever lived. Bright, happy, vigorous, altogether radiant.”

“What’s his name?”

“He was baptized Jean-Jacques.”

“I can guess where the Jacques is from.”

“Yes, and the Jean is from Jean Bart.”

“You named your firstborn after a pirate and a Vagabond?”

“Don’t be so haughty. One of them is your brother, after all.”

“But why this careful phrasing: ‘He was baptized Jean-Jacques’?”

“He answers to Johann.”

“How’s that again?”

“Johann. Johann von Hacklheber.”

“Peculiar name that, for the bastard of a French duchess.”

“He has been…visiting in Leipzig for a few days short of eighteen months. When he went there, he was not quite a year and a half old. I have got reports of him from friends who dwell in that part of the world, and they inform me that he is called by the name Johann von Hacklheber there.”

“Now, anything with a ‘von’ in it is a noble name—like ‘de’ here, am I right?”

“Oh yes. He dwells in the household of a German baron.”

“I know nothing of the ways of Continental nobility, but it strikes me as an unusual sort of arrangement.”

“You have no idea.”

“You may not know it, Madame, but you have got a sort of burning glow about the face and eyes now, a bit like during sex, but different.”

“It is another form of desire, that’s all.”

“You want the boy back. You are not happy with the arrangement…oh, Jesus!”

“Go ahead and say it.”

“He was taken from you!?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus. Why!?”

“Never mind. My purpose is to get to him who took my boy, and…”

“Get your boy back, I assume?”

“…”

“Or, to judge from the look on your face, perhaps I should not make assumptions.”

“Let me tell you what is truly evil about what was done to me eighteen months ago.”

“I am listening.”

“You are probably phant’sying parallels, similitudes, between what was done to your Abigail and what was done to my Jean-Jacques. But put such thoughts out of your mind. Abigail is a slave, held against her will, misused. A prisoner. This is no longer true of my Jean-Jacques. He is better off as Johann in Leipzig than he was as Jean-Jacques in Versailles. The captors of Abigail are imbeciles—guilty of a failure of imagination. By keeping her in a miserable estate, they make you miserable, ’tis true—but your path is clear: It is the path so familiar from myths and legends, the path of righteous fury, revenge, retribution, rescue. Lothar von Hacklheber has done something infinitely more cruel. He has made my boy happy. If I were able, somehow, to go to Leipzig and steal him back, the child would be terrified and miserable. And perhaps justly so, for when I got back I should have no choice but to deposit him in some Church orphanage outside of Versailles to be raised by nuns and made over into a Jesuit priest.”

“Hoosh. I am glad for my own sake, madame, that I was not anywhere near you at the moment when you first came to understand this…”

“…”

“Why are you staring at me thus? It makes me think I had better put my clothes back on—perhaps arm myself as well.”

“…”

“Are you only just understanding it now!?”

“If an idea is terrible enough, the mind is unwilling to swallow it in one go, but regurgitates and chews it like cud many times before it goes down for good. This is one that I have been chewing on for more than a year. It took me several weeks, after Jean-Jacques was abducted, for me to establish his whereabouts. By the time I could formulate even a hasty and ill-conceived plan to go fetch him back, I was pregnant with Lucien. It is only now that Lucien has been born, and I have recovered from it, that I can consider taking any steps in the matter of Jean-Jacques. And now it is too late. There. Done. I have swallowed it.”

“All right. I could see this coming. Put your head there on my breastbone, madame, I’ll hold you in my arms, so you don’t collapse, or come undone. Sob all you want, I have you, no one’s looking, we have time.”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“Now that you mention it, my lady, to have the love of my life enslaved and raped by a syphilitic lord does seem quite mild by comparison.”

“I cannot tell if you are being sarcastic.”

“Neither can I, madame, I honestly cannot. But tell me this: If you cannot get your boy back without destroying his welfare, then what do you intend?”

“In pondering this very question I have hesitated, and in hesitating I have only made matters worse. Soon I shall act.”

“And what is the end you have fixed on?”

“I mean to end up, in some sense, with my boot on the neck of Lothar von Hacklheber, and him looking up helpless into my eyes.”

“Well. Well! Let me just say that the last bloke who had me in such a fix was the Earl of Upnor, and—”

“My powers of organization exceed those of the late Upnor by a significant margin, and so I intend to arrange matters so that I will not end up being beaten to death with a stick by an Irishman.”

“Ah. That is good news.”

“Tell me everything about what is being prepared around Cherbourg, Sergeant Shaftoe, whether you intend for it to be relayed to Marlborough, or not.”

“Very well. But how will this intelligence be of any help to you in your machinations against—oh, never mind. You’re glowering at me.”

“You speak so knowingly of my machinations, as if I were some ridiculous figure in an Italian opera, who does naught but machinate; yet if you could follow me about, you would observe a tired mother who follows her husband from Versailles to St.-Malo, and suckles her infant, and occasionally throws a dinner party, and perhaps once or twice a year fucks a cryptologist in a carriage, or a sergeant in a haystack.”

“How will this lead to your boot on Lothar’s throat again? Never mind, never mind. I’m certain I’d never understand it anyway.”

“You are in good company. If I do it right, not even Lothar will understand it.”

Château d’Arcachon, St.-Malo, France

11 APRIL 1692

“THE ENGLISH HAVE DEVISED an extraordinary scheme for the military defense of their homeland, which is that they have no money,” said Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, contrôleur-général of France and (now) Secretary of State for the Navy.

This curious gambit was meant for Eliza, for Pontchartrain was gazing directly into her eyes when he came out with it. But others were privy to the conversation. Five were seated around the basset-table in the Petit Salon: besides Eliza and Pontchartrain, there were Étienne d’Arcachon, who was serving as dealer; a Madame de Bearsul, who was the very young wife of a captain of a frigate; and a Monsieur le chevalier d’Erquy, who was from just down the coast. These latter two were, of course, unique souls, precious in the eyes of God, endowed with any number of more or less interesting personal quirks, virtues, vices, &c., but Eliza could scarcely tell them apart from all of the other people who were at this moment seated around card-tables in her Petit Salon, playing at billiards or backgammon in her Grand Salon, bowling outside on her damp lawn, or noodling around on her harpsichord.

This was St.-Malo in the spring of ’92. An invasion force was massing. It would quite obviously be departing from Cherbourg, which was only half as far from the shore of England as was St.-Malo; but facilities there, at the tip of the peninsula, were not adequate to sustain so many ships and regiments during the weeks it would take for them to gather and draw up into a coherent force. The regiments—ten thousand French and as many Irish, the latter evacuated from Limerick—were obviously not as mobile as the ships, and so they had first claim to the territory, food, fuel, whores, and other military musts in the immediate vicinity of Cherbourg. By process of elimination, then, the ships of the Channel fleet, and the galleys of the Mediterranean fleet that had lately passed the Gates of Hercules and voyaged north to take part in the invasion, were stationed in Channel ports within striking distance: most important, Le Havre and St.-Malo. Of those, Le Havre was twice as close to Paris, and a hundred times easier to reach from there, since the Seine joined them. So, much larger and more fashionable parties must, at this moment, be going on in noble châteaux around Le Havre. St.-Malo, by contrast, was hardly connected to France at all. A doughty pedestrian like Sergeant Bob Shaftoe could get to it, but such a journey was not recommended for normal people; everyone came to St.-Malo by sea. The family de Lavardac had for a long time maintained a château, which looked out over the harbor to one side, and had farms and an excellent potagerie out back. As the fortunes of that family had waxed, this had become the grandest house in St.-Malo, and the former duc d’Arcachon had loved to come here and pace to and fro on the terrace with a golden prospective-glass gazing down upon his privateer-fleet. Eliza had heard much of the place. Having spent most of her married life pregnant at La Dunette, she’d never laid eyes on it until a month ago. But she’d loved it immediately and now wished she could live here year-round.

The astonishing appearance of Bob Shaftoe—who, along with his regiment of Irish mercenaries, had marched right past, en route to Cherbourg from their winter quarters above Brest—had enlivened her first week’s stay at the place. His return visit last week had forced her to put her rusty scheming-and-intriguing skills to use again, there being no proper, sanctioned way for a French Duchess and nursing mother to meet with an English sergeant and probable spy who just happened to be the brother of the most infamous villain in Christendom.

Eliza and Étienne, the infant Lucien, and their household had reached St.-Malo a fortnight in advance of the Mediterranean Fleet. More recently, other Ships of Force had come in from Brest, Lorient, and St.-Nazaire. All of these galleys and ships had officers, who quite often were of noble rank. The social obligations placed upon le duc and la duchesse d’Arcachon were correspondingly immense. Another duchesse would have welcomed those obligations in the same way as generals welcomed wars, or architects cathedral-commissions. Eliza delegated all of the work to women who actually enjoyed such things (she had inherited a large household staff from the previous duchesse d’Arcachon). Her old trusted aides, such as Brigitte and Nicole, and a few retired privateers deeded to her by Jean Bart, she kept close. The retinue of social climbers that had arrived in the wake of her marriage to Étienne, she put to work arranging parties, which kept them busy and, though it did not make them happy, infused them with feelings that they were wont to confuse with happiness.

Eliza, then, merely had to get dressed, show up, try not to forget people’s names, and make conversation. When she became insufferably bored, she would claim she could hear Lucien bawling, and flit off to the private apartments in the other wing of the château.

And so the only thing the least bit novel about her situation at this moment—viz. seated at a basset-table watching her husband deal out cards to idle nobles—was that the fellow seated directly across the table from her was of titanic importance. At any other of the parties that the Arcachons had hosted in the few weeks just past, it would have been the captain of some Ship of the Line, cringing and servile in the presence of his master, the Grand Admiral of France (for Étienne had inherited the title). Today, though, it was Pontchartrain who, technically, ranked Étienne d’Arcachon! Étienne was under no obligation to toady, however, as he and Pontchartrain were both of such lofty stature as to be essentially equals. Pontchartrain had turned up unexpectedly this morning on a jacht that had sailed in from Cherbourg. He had spent all of dinner trying to catch Eliza’s eye, and not because he wanted to flirt with her. She had invited the count to join her and Étienne at basset. Then, to prevent the gentlemen from crossing swords, or the ladies from poisoning each other, for the other seats at the table, Eliza had picked out this Madame de Bearsul and this Monsieur d’Erquy, precisely because they were nobodies who would not interfere too much in the conversation. Or such had been her phant’sy. Of course each of them had turned out (as mentioned) to be fully autonomous souls possessed of free will, intelligence, and an agenda. D’Erquy had heard, through the grapevine, that Eliza had been buying up bad loans from petty nobles like him who had been foolish enough to lend money to the government. De Bearsul was angling for a position in the household of some higher and mightier Court personage. To Pontchartrain, who was accustomed to meeting with the King of France almost every day, they might as well have been ants or lice. And so, about five hands into this basset-game, he had locked his brown eyes on Eliza’s and made this curious remark about the English and their lack of specie.

Basset was simple, which was why Eliza had chosen it. Each player was dealt thirteen cards face up on the table, and placed money on any or all of them. The dealer then dealt cards from the bottom and the top of the deck alternately, gaining or losing wagers on all cards of matching ranks. As turns went on, the wagers escalated by a factor of as much as sixty. The dealer was kept very busy. Étienne had had to strap on his basset-dealing prosthesis: a cupped hand with spring-loaded fingers, made to grip a deck of cards. The players could be busy or not, depending on how many of their cards they elected to put money on. Eliza and Pontchartrain had laid only token wagers, which was a way of saying that they were more interested in conversation than in gambling. D’Erquy and de Bearsul were more heavily engaged in the game, and their squeals, moans, stifled curses, sudden outbursts of laughter, &c., provided a ragged, bursty continuo-line for this duet between the other two.

“My English friends have been complaining of this lack of coin for years—especially since the onset of war,” said Eliza, “but only you, monsieur, would have the penetration to see it as a defensive strategy.”

“That is just the difficulty—I did not penetrate it until rather late,” said Pontchartrain. “When one is planning an invasion, one naturally makes plans to pay the soldiers. It is as important as arming, feeding, and housing them—perhaps more so, as soldiers, paid, can shift for themselves when arms, food, and shelter are wanting. But they must be paid in local money—which is to say the coin of the realm in whatever place is being invaded. It’s easy in the Spanish Netherlands—”

“Because they are Spanish,” said Eliza, “and so you can pay them in Pieces of Eight—”

“Which we can get anywhere in the world,” said Pontchartrain. “But English pennies can only be gotten in England. Supposedly they are minted—”

“At the Tower of London. I know,” said Eliza, “but why do you say supposedly?”

Pontchartrain threw up his hands. “No one ever sees these coins. They come out of the Mint and they vanish.”

“But is it not the case that anyone may bring silver bullion to the Tower of London and have it minted into pennies?”

Pontchartrain was nonplussed for a moment. Then a smile spread over his face and he burst out in laughter and slapped the table hard enough to make money jump and buzz atop the playing-cards. It was a rare outburst for one of Pontchartrain’s dignity, and it stopped the game for a few moments.

“Monsieur, what an honour and a privilege it is for us to bring you a few moments’ diversion from your cares!” exclaimed Étienne. But this only brought an echo of the first laugh from Pontchartrain.

“It is precisely of my cares that your magnificent wife is speaking, monsieur,” said Pontchartrain, “and I believe she is getting ready to suggest something cheeky.”

Étienne’s face pinkened. “I pray it shall not be so cheeky as to create an embarrassment for our guests—”

“On the contrary, monsieur, ’tis meant to embarrass the English!”

“Oh, well, that is all right then.”

“Pray continue, madame!”

“I shall, monsieur,” said Eliza, “but first you must indulge me as I speculate.”

“Consider yourself indulged.”

“The jacht on which you arrived is under conspicuously heavy guard. I speculate that it is laden with specie that is meant to cross the Channel with the invasion force and be used to pay the French and Irish soldiers during their campaign in England.”

Pontchartrain smiled weakly and shook his head. “So much for my efforts at secrecy. It is said of some that he or she has a nose for money; but I truly believe, madame, that you can smell silver a mile away.”

“Do not be silly, monsieur, it is, as you said, an obvious necessity of a foreign invasion.”

For some reason she glanced, for a moment, at D’Erquy, and then regretted it. The poor chevalier was so transfixed that it took all her discipline not to laugh aloud. This poor fellow had melted down the family plate and loaned it to the King in hopes that it would get him invited to a few parties at Versailles. The interest payments had at first been delayed, then insufficient, later nonexistent. The man with the power to make those payments, or not, was seated less than arm’s length away—and now it had been revealed that he had sailed into St.-Malo on top of a king’s ransom in silver, which was locked up on a jacht a few hundred yards down the hill. A word, a flick of the pen, from Pontchartrain would pay back the loan, or at least pay the interest on it—and not just in the form of a written promise to pay, but in actual metal. This was the only thing D’Erquy could think about. And yet there was not a single word he could say, because to do so would have been impolite. Etiquette had rendered him helpless as effectively as the iron collar around a slave’s neck. All he could do was watch and listen.

“Want of silver is not your difficulty, then,” Eliza continued. “Very well. You must needs translate it across the Channel—very risky. For in the annals of military history, no tale is more tediously familiar than that of the train of pay-wagons, bringing specie to the troops at the front, that is ambushed and lost en route, with disastrous consequences to the campaign.”

“We have been reading the same books,” Pontchartrain concluded. “Even so, as we laid plans for this operation during the winter, I am afraid I paid more attention to my rôle as Secretary of State for the Navy, than that of contrôleur-général. Which is to say that I placed more emphasis on preparations of a purely military nature than on the attendant financial arrangements. Not until I reached Cherbourg the other day, and was confronted with the invasion in all of its complexity and scale, did I really grasp the difficulty of getting this specie to England. To send it across in an obvious and straightforward manner seems madness. I have considered breaking it up into small shipments and sending them over in the boats of those who smuggle wine and salt to remote ports of Cornwall.”

“That would distribute the risk, but multiply the difficulties,” said Eliza. “And even if it succeeded, it would not address the great difficulty, which is that if the silver is not accepted on the local—which is to say, English—market, then the troops will not deem themselves to have been paid.”

“Naturally we should like to pay them in English silver pennies,” said Pontchartrain, “but matters being what they are, we may have to use French coins.”

“This brings us back to the conversation we had in the sleigh at La Dunette two years and some months ago,” Eliza said; and the answering look on Pontchartrain’s face told her that she had struck home.

But here Madame Bearsul threw a quizzical look in the direction of the Politest Man in France, who intervened. “On behalf of those of our guests who were not in that sleigh,” Étienne said, “I beg permission to interrupt, so we may hear—”

“I speak of the recoinage, when all of the old coins were called in and replaced with new,” said Eliza. “By royal decree, the new had the same value, and so to those of us who live in France, it made no difference. But they contained less silver or gold.”

“Madame la duchesse, who in those days was Mademoiselle la comtesse, said to me, then, that it must have consequences difficult to foretell,” said Pontchartrain.

“Before Monsieur le comte says a word against himself,” said Eliza, “I would have the honor of being the first to rush to his defense. The favorable consequences of the recoinage were immense: for it raised a fortune for the war.”

“But Madame la duchesse was a true Cassandra that evening in the sleigh,” said Pontchartrain, “for there have been consequences that I did not foretell, and one of them is that French coins are not likely to be accepted at full value in English market-places.”

“Monsieur, have you given any thought to minting invasion coin?” asked d’Erquy.

“Yes, monsieur, and to using Pieces of Eight. But before we take such measures, I am eager to hear more from our hostess concerning the English Mint.”

“I am simply pointing out to you, monsieur,” said Eliza, “that there already exists a mechanism for importing silver bullion to England, at no risk to France; having it made into good English coin in London; and transferring the coin into the hands of trusted French agents there.”

“What is this mechanism, madame?” inquired d’Erquy, suspicious that Eliza was having them on.

“France’s chief connection to the international money market is not here in St.-Malo, or even in Paris, but rather down in Lyon. The King’s moneylender is of course Monsieur Samuel Bernard, and he works hand-in-glove with a Monsieur Castan. I know Castan; he is a pillar of the Dépôt. He can deliver money to any of several merchant banking houses who maintain agencies in Lyon, and get negotiable Bills of Exchange which can be endorsed to French agents who can transport them to London in advance of the invasion. These may be presented well in advance of the expiry of their usance to bankers in London who, upon accepting them, will make whatever arrangements may be necessary to have the coin ready on the date the bills come due—which may mean that they shall have to ship bullion over from Amsterdam or Antwerp and have it minted at the Tower. But that is their concern, not ours, and their risk. The coin shall be delivered to our agents, who need merely transport it to the front to pay the troops.”

Early in this discourse, the mouth of Madame de Bearsul fell open, as if she might more easily take in these difficult words and notions through her mouth than her ears; and as Eliza went on, similar transformations came over the faces of all her other auditors, including some at adjacent tables; and by the time she reached the terminal phrase pay the troops, they had all begun glancing at each other, trying to build solidarity in their confusion. And so before anyone could give voice to his amazement, Eliza, with unfeigned, uncharacteristic ardor for her role as entertainer to the bored nobility of France, had got to her feet (obliging Étienne, Pontchartrain, and d’Erquy to stand) and begun to arrange a new parlor-game. “We are going to put on a little masque,” she announced, “and all of you must sit, sit, sit!” And she called to a servant to bring quills, ink, and paper.

“But, Eliza, how can gentlemen sit in the presence of a lady who stands?” asked Étienne.

“The answer is simple: In the masque, I am no lady, but a God: Mercury, messenger of Olympus, and patron deity of Commerce. You must phant’sy wings on my ankles.”

The mere mention of ankles caused a little intake of breath from Étienne, and a few eyes flicked nervously his way. But Eliza forged on: “You, Monsieur de Pontchartrain, must sit. You are the Deliverer: the contrôleur-général of France.”

“That should be an easy rôle for me to play, Mercury,” said the contrôleur-général, and, with a little bow to Eliza, sat down.

Now—since the ranking man in the room had done it—all others were eager to join in.

“First we enact the simple Bill of Exchange,” said Eliza, “which requires only four, plus Mercury. Later we will find rôles for the rest of you.” For several had gravitated over from different tables to see what the commotion was about. “This table is Lyon.”

“But, Mercury, already I cannot suspend my disbelief, for the contrôleur-général does not go to Lyon,” said Pontchartrain.

“We will remedy that in a few minutes, but for now you are in Lyon. Sitting across from you will be Étienne, playing the rôle of Lothar the Banker.”

“Why must I have such a ridiculous name?” demanded Étienne.

“It is an excellent name among bankers—Lothar is Ditta di Borsa in Lyon, Bruges, and many other places.”

“That means he has impeccable credit among other bankers,” said Pontchartrain.

“Very well. As long as the fellow is as well-reputed as you say, I shall accept the rôle,” said Étienne, and sat down across the table from Pontchartrain.

“You have money,” said Eliza, and used one hand as a rake to sweep a pile of coins across the table so that it ended up piled before Pontchartrain. “And you wish to get it—here!” She strode through the double doors to the Grand Salon where a backgammon game had been abandoned. “Madame de Bearsul, you are a merchant banker in London—this table is London.”

Madame de Bearsul approached London with a show of cringing, blushing, and hand-wringing that made Eliza want to slap her. “But, madame, I know nothing of such occupations!”

“Of course not, for you are so well-bred; but just as Kings may play Vagabonds in masques, you are now a merchant banker named Signore Punchinello. Here, Signore Punchinello, is your strong-box.” Mercury clapped the backgammon-set closed, imprisoning the game pieces, and handed it to de Bearsul, who with much hair-patting and skirt-smoothing took a seat at London. Monsieur le chevalier d’Erquy pulled her chair out for her, for, anticipating Eliza’s next command, he had followed them into the Grand Salon.

“Monsieur, you are Pierre Dubois, a Frenchman in London.”

“Miserable fate! Must I be?” complained d’Erquy, to general amusement.

“You must. But you need not sit down yet, for you have not yet made the acquaintance of Signore Punchinello. Instead, you wander about the city like a lost soul, trying to find a decent loaf of bread. Now! Places, everyone!” and she walked back into the Petit Salon, where the Lyon table had been supplied with quills, ink, and paper.

“Monsieur le contrôleur-général, give your silver—which is to say, France’s silver—to Lothar the Banker.”

“Monsieur, s’il vous plaît,” said Pontchartrain, shoving the pile across the table.

“Merci beaucoup, monsieur,” said Étienne, a bit uncertainly.

“You must give him more than polite words! Write out the amount, and the word ‘Londres,’ and a time, say five minutes in the future.”

Étienne dutifully took up his quill and did as he was told, putting down “half past three,” as the clock in the corner was currently reading twenty-five minutes past. “To the contrôleur-général give it,” said Eliza. “And now you, contrôleur-général, write an address on the back, thus: ‘To Monsieur Pierre Dubois, London.’ Meanwhile you, Lothar, must write an avisa addressed to Signore Punchinello in London, containing the same information as is in the Bill.”

“The Bill?”

“The document you have given to the contrôleur-général is a Bill of Exchange.”

Pontchartrain had finished addressing the Bill, and so Mercury snatched it out of his hand and pranced out of the room and gave it to “Pierre Dubois,” who had been watching, bemused, from the doorway. Then she returned to “Lothar,” who was writing out the avisa with a good deal more formality than was called for. Mercury jerked it out from under the quill.

“Good heavens, I haven’t even finished the Apology yet.”

“You must learn better to inhabit the rôle of Lothar. He would not be so discursive,” said Mercury, and wafted the avisa out of the room to “Signore Punchinello.” “In truth, there would be two or even three copies of the Bill and the avisa both, sent by separate couriers,” said Mercury, “but to prevent the masque from becoming tedious we shall only use one. Signore Punchinello! You said earlier you did not know how to play your rôle; but I tell you now that you need only know how to read, and be capable of recognizing Lothar’s handwriting. Do you? (The correct answer is ‘Yes, Mercury.’)”

“Yes, Mercury.”

“Monsieur Dubois, I think you can guess what to do.”

Indeed, “Pierre Dubois” now helped himself to a seat at the London table across from “Signore Punchinello,” and presented the bill.

“Now, signore,” said Eliza to Madame de Bearsul, “you must compare what is written on Monsieur Dubois’s Bill to what is in the avisa.”

“They are the same,” answered “Punchinello.”

“Do they appear to have been written in the same hand?”

“Indeed, Mercury, the hands are indistinguishable.”

“What time is it?”

“By yonder clock, twenty-eight minutes past the hour of three.”

“Then take up yonder quill and write ‘accepted’ across the face of the Bill, and sign your name to it.”

Madame de Bearsul did so, and then, getting into the spirit of the thing, opened up her backgammon-set and began to count out pieces.

“Not yet!” said Mercury. “That is, it’s fine for you to count them out, and make sure you have enough. But good banker that you are, you’ll not give them to Monsieur Dubois until the Bill has come due.”

But they only had to wait for a few more seconds before the clock bonged twice, signifying half past three; then the backgammon pieces were pushed across the table into the waiting hands of “Pierre Dubois.”

“Voilà!” announced Mercury to the audience, which by this point numbered above twenty party-guests. “The first act of our masque draws to a happy ending. Monsieur le contrôleur-général has transferred silver from Lyon to London at no risk, and even converted it to English silver pennies along the way, with practically no effort! All by invoking the supernatural powers of Mercury.” And Eliza took a little curtsey, and basked for a few moments in the applause of her guests.

ENTR’ACTE

“I am the contrôleur-général of France, madame; I know what a Bill of Exchange is.” This from Pontchartrain, who had maneuvered her into a niche and was muttering out the side of his mouth with uncharacteristic harshness.

“And I know your title and your powers, monsieur,” said Eliza.

“Then if you have more to say concerning the Mint, I would fain hear it—”

“In good time, monsieur!”

Madame de Bearsul was pitching a minor scene at “London.” Petulance was something she did well. “I have given up my coins to Monsieur Dubois—in exchange for what!?”

“Bills written in the hand of a banker who is Ditta di Borsa—as good as money.”

“But they are not money!”

“But Signore Punchinello, you may turn them into money, or other things of value, by taking them to an office of Lothar’s concern.”

“But he is in Lyon, and I am stuck in London!”

“Actually he is in Leipzig—but never mind, for he maintains an office in London. After the Usurper took the throne, any number of bankers from Amsterdam crossed the sea and established themselves there—”

“Wait! First Lothar was in Lyon—then Leipzig—then Amsterdam—now London?”

“It is all one thing, for Mercury touches all of these places on his rounds.” And Eliza thrust an arm into a boozy-smelling phalanx of young men and dragged forth a young Lavardac cousin and bade him sit down near the backgammon table. “This is Lothar’s factor in London.” She grabbed a second young man who had been snickering at the fate of the first, and stationed him in the short gallery that joined the two salons, calling this Amsterdam.

“I must register an objection! (Pardon me for speaking directly, but I am trying to inhabit the rôle of an uncouth Saxon banker),” said Eliza’s husband.

“And you are doing splendidly, my love,” said Eliza. “What is your objection?”

“Unless these chaps of mine in Amsterdam and London are titled nobility, which I’m led to believe is generally not the case—”

“Indeed not, Étienne.”

“Well, if they are not of independent means, it would seem to suggest that—” and here Étienne colored slightly again, “forgive me, but must I—” and he balked until both Eliza and Pontchartrain had made encouraging faces at him, “well, pay them—” he half-swallowed the dreadful word—“I don’t know, so that they could—buy—food and whatnot, presuming that’s how they get it? For I don’t phant’sy they would have their own farms, living as they do in cities.”

“You must pay them!” Eliza said loud and clear.

Étienne winced. “Well, it hardly seems worth all the bother for me to be taking in silver here, and sending Bills to one place, and avisas to another, all so that I can end up handing the silver over to Signore Punchinello in the end.” He scanned nearby faces uncertainly, taking a sort of poll—but everyone was nodding profoundly, as if the duc d’Arcachon had made a telling point. All of those faces now turned towards Eliza.

“You get to keep some of the money,” Eliza said.

Everyone gasped as if she had jerked the veil from a statue of solid gold.

“Oh, well, that puts it in a whole new light!” exclaimed Étienne.

“The amount collected by Pierre Dubois in London was not quite as large as what I gave to you,” said Pontchartrain. He then turned to look at Eliza. “But, madame, I live in Paris.”

Eliza went into the opposite corner of the Petit Salon and patted a gilded harpsichord. Pontchartrain excused himself from Lyon and sat before it. Then, to amuse himself and to provide incidental music for the second act of the masque, he began to pick out an air by Rameau.

Eliza beckoned to a middle-aged Count dressed in the uniform of a galley-captain. Until recently, he and a friend had been playing at billiards. “You are Monsieur Samuel Bernard, moneylender to le Roi.”

“I am to portray a Jew!?” said the dismayed Count.

The music faltered. “He is an excellent fellow, the King speaks highly of him, monsieur,” said Pontchartrain, and resumed playing.

“But now there is no one in Lyon!” said Étienne.

“On the contrary, there is Monsieur Castan, an old confrère of Monsieur Bernard,” said Eliza, and dragged the Count’s erstwhile billiards-opponent over to occupy the chair warmed by Pontchartrain.

Lately the room had become a good bit louder, for the galley-captain playing Samuel Bernard had adopted a hunchbacked posture and begun rolling his eyes, leering at the ladies, and stroking his chin. Meanwhile the “Amsterdam” and “London” crowd, which consisted mostly of younger people, had become restive, and begun to engage in all sorts of unauthorized Transactions.

“Fetch me a bowl of dough,” Eliza said to a maid.

“Dough, madame?”

“Dough from the kitchen! And an empty fruit-bowl or something. Hurry!” The servant hustled out. “Places, everyone! Act the Second begins. Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, pray continue playing your beautiful music, it is entirely fitting.” Indeed, some of the guests who had not been assigned specific rôles had begun dancing to it, so that “Paris” had already become a center of beauty, culture, and romance.

“I am your servant, madame,” said Pontchartrain.

“No, I am Mercury. And I say you have dough!”

“Dough, Mercury?” Pontchartrain looked about curiously but continued to play.

“You rarely see it, of course, and you never handle it. Pourquoi non, for you are a member of the Conseil d’en-Haut and a trusted confidant of le Roi Soleil. But you know that you have dough!”

“How do I know it, Mercury?”

“Because I have whispered it into your ear. You have a thousand kitchens in which it is being prepared, all the time. Now, call Monsieur Bernard to your side, and let him know.”

Monsieur Bernard did not need to be summoned. Using his billiard-cue as cane, he staggered over—for he had perfected his Jew act—and bent close to Pontchartrain, rubbing his hands together.

“Monsieur Bernard! I have dough.”

“I believe it, monseigneur.”

“I should like to see, oh, a hundred pieces of dough transferred safely and swiftly to the hands of Monsieur Dubois in London.”

“Hold!” commanded Mercury, “you do not yet know the identity of your payee in London.”

“Very well—make the Bill endorsable to one of my agents, to be determined later.”

“It shall be done, my lord!” announced “Bernard,” who then leered up at Eliza for his cue.

“Go and tell your friend,” Eliza said.

“Don’t I get anything?”

“Monsieur! You have got the word of the contrôleur-général of France! What more could you possibly ask for?”

“I was just asking,” said “Bernard” a little bit resentfully, and then crab-walked across the Petit Salon to “Lyon,” where his billiards-partner awaited. “Mon vieux, bonjour. Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain has dough and wants a hundred pieces of it in London.”

“Very well,” said “Castan” after some sotto voce prompting from Mercury. “Lothar, if you would get a hundred pieces of dough to our man in London, I shall give you a hundred and ten pieces of dough here.”

“Heavens! Where is this dough?” Étienne demanded—a bit confused, for in the first run-through, he had been given actual silver.

“I don’t have any just now,” said “Castan,” who had been a bit quicker than Étienne to see where this was going, “but my friend Monsieur Bernard has heard from Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain who has heard from Mercury himself that there is dough aplenty, and so, in the sight of all these good Lyonnaise—”

“We call them le Dépôt,” put in Eliza, indicating several persons who had gathered round the basset-table to watch.

“—I say that I shall pay you a hundred and ten pieces of dough any day now.”

“Very well,” said “Lothar,” after looking up at Eliza for permission.

Now some time was spent in draughting the necessary papers. Meanwhile Eliza had thrust her hands into a great warm ellipsoid of bread-dough that had been fetched out of the kitchens by a cook, and torn it apart into two pieces, a small and a large. The small she placed in an empty fruit-bowl, which she took into the Grand Salon and slammed down on a gilded sideboard near the backgammontable, astonishing Madame de Bearsul. “Tear this in half, and continue tearing the halves in half, until you have thirty-two pieces of dough,” decreed “Mercury,” then stormed away before de Bearsul could pout or fret. Eliza fetched the great bowl containing the larger amount of dough, and set it into the arms of the young banker she had posted in “Amsterdam.” Three younger guests, eight to twelve years of age, had already converged on the sideboard, overturned the fruit-bowl, and begun tearing the dough into bits. “Very good, you are the English Mint, and that is the Tower of London,” Eliza informed them. Then, because they were being a bit too enthusiastic, she cautioned them: “Remember, I desire only thirty or so.”

“We thought a hundred!” said the oldest of the children.

“Yes; but there is not enough dough in London to make so many.”

By now the paperwork had been settled in “Lyon.” A new wrinkle had been added: this time, “Lothar” made the Bill out, not to “Dubois” but to “Castan,” who was sitting across the table from him. “Castan” then had to flip it over and write on the back that he was transferring the Bill to Monsieur Dubois. It was due in fifteen minutes. “Castan,” handed it to “Dubois” on the outskirts of “Lyon” at 4:12 and “Dubois,” after a detour for a thimble of cognac, arrived in “London” at 4:14 and handed it to “Punchinello,” who compared it as before to the avisa, and checked the time. She was just about to write “accepted” across it when ever-diligent “Mercury” stayed her hand.

“Stop! Think. Your solvency, your credit hang in the balance. How many pieces of dough do you have?”

The eyes of “Punchinello” strayed towards the “Tower of London,” where thirty-two dough-balls were arrayed eight by four.

“Those don’t belong to you,” said Mercury. She scooped them into the fruit-bowl and handed it to the Lavardac cousin who was pretending to be Lothar’s factor in London.

Madame de Bearsul was starting to get it. “I’m going to be needing those—I’ve a note from your uncle, right here, says you owe me a hundred.”

“I don’t have a hundred!” complained the young banker.

“Mercury comes to the rescue, as usual!” announced Eliza. “Does anyone else here in London have dough?”

“I’ve got a great bowl of it,” said an adolescent voice from the next room.

“You’re not in London!” answered “Mercury.” And she turned to the “London” nephew and gave him an expectant look.

“Cousin! Come in here and bring me some of the family dough!” he called.

The young man with the dough-bowl staggered into the room. Whereupon Eliza gave the nod to a pair of six-year-old boys who had been crouching in a corner with wooden swords. They rushed out and began to batter the dough-bearer about the shins and ankles. “Augh!” he cried.

“Pirate attack in the North Sea!” Eliza announced.

The dough-carrier was hindered badly by his inability to see the little boca-neers, for the bowl blocked his view. Nevertheless, after having been chased several times around the entirety of Britain, he arrived in port some minutes later (4:20) listing badly to starboard, and upended the bowl, dumping out the dough-load at the Tower of London. “Hurry!” said Eliza, “only five minutes remaining until the Bill expires!”

And it was a near thing; but working feverishly, and with some help from Eliza, the Coiners were able to get the balance of Lothar’s London correspondent up above one hundred dough-pieces by 4:23. This was slammed down triumphantly before “Signore Punchinello,” who disgustedly shoved it across the table into the embrace of “Pierre Dubois.” It was 4:27 exactly. The entire crowd, players, audience, and servants alike, now burst into applause, thinking that the play was over. The only exceptions were Monsieur le chevalier d’Erquy, who had been left holding the dough, and the twin six-year-old pirates who—not satisfied with the amount of swordplay, swash-buckling, and derring-do in the play thus far—had begun trying to sever his hamstrings and Achilles tendons with blunt force trauma.

“In all seriousness, Mercury,” complained d’Erquy, “how are the coins to be transported from London to the front? For if half of what is said of England is true, the place is full of runagates, Vagabonds, highwaymen, and varlets of all stripes.”

“Never fear,” said Eliza, “if you only wait a few days, the front will come to you, and French and Irish troops will march in good order to your doorstep in the Strand to receive their pay!” Which prompted a patriotic cheer and a standing ovation, and even a couple of tossed bouquets, from the crowd.

“But if I may once again play the rôle of the uncouth banker,” said Étienne—who had abandoned his post in “Lyon” to watch the denouement—“why on earth should the English Mint strike coins whose purpose is to finance a foreign invasion of England?”

This quieted the crowd so profoundly that Étienne felt rather bad about it, and began to formulate what showed every sign of being a lengthy and comprehensive apology. But Eliza was having none of it. “You don’t know England!” she said, “But I do, for I am Mercury. England has factions. The one that rules now is called the Tories, and they make no secret that they loathe the Usurper, and want him out. Indeed, our invasion plans are predicated, are they not, on the assumption that the English Navy will look the other way as our fleets cross the Channel, and that the common folk of England, and much of the Army, will joyfully throw off the yoke of the Dutchman and welcome our French and Irish soldiers with open arms. If we grant all of these assumptions, why, there is no difficulty in supposing that the Tory masters of the Mint will strike a few coins for the House of Hacklheber—”

“Or whichever bank we elect to deal with,” put in Pontchartrain.

“—without asking too many awkward questions as to where those coins are intended to end up.”

“Yes—I see the whole thing now as if you have painted a picture,” said Étienne. At which most of the party-guests attempted to get faraway looks in their eyes, as though gazing raptly at the same picture that Étienne was viewing in his mind’s eye.

Though there were exceptions: “Samuel Bernard,” unable or unwilling to let go of the scheming-Jew impersonation that had garnered him so many laughs and so much attention, was still back in the Petit Salon, storming to and fro between “Paris” and “Lyon,” waving his stick around and demanding to know when he was going to see some of this dough that Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain had spoken of so convincingly; and “Castan,” his partner in billiards, finance, and (now) drinking (for they had got control of a decanter of something brown), was also beginning to make himself heard on the matter. “What are they on about?” inquired Étienne.

“Don’t worry, ‘Lothar the Banker,’ ” said Eliza. “You will be paid back.”

Étienne’s brow furrowed. “That’s right—I quite forgot! I haven’t seen any dough! Is that what those two are so upset about?”

Pontchartrain intervened, sharing a warm private look with Eliza. “Those two, monsieur, have just discovered something called liquidity risk.”

“It sounds dreadful!”

“Never mind, Monsieur le duc. It is a phantom. We do not have such things in France.”

“That’s fortunate,” said the duc d’Arcachon. “They were starting to make me a bit anxious—and I’m not even a banker!”

Eliza to Lothar von Hacklheber

12 APRIL 1692

Mein Herr,

PRIDE is a vice to which a woman is no less susceptible than a man, and I, perhaps, more than other women. PRIDE, like other vices, is arrogant of what room it can claim in the human breast, and jealous of that occupied by the Virtues, which it ever seeks to trample on or drive out.

When I rushed to little Johann’s nursery eighteen months ago to discover his cradle empty, a war began within my soul. On one side was the Virtue of Love: a mother’s natural love for her child. On the other was the Vice of Pride: pride wounded, aggrieved, and humiliated. It was not merely that I had been bested, but that it had happened while I was far away attending a fashionable soirée, rather than staying at home and tending to my duties as a mother. Pride, therefore, was urged on by Shame; and together their legions charged across the field and swept Love’s feebler forces before them. All that I have done since then, where Johann is concerned, has been dictated by Pride. Love’s counsel has rarely been heard, and when I have heard it, I have wilfully ignored it.

But the soul harbors its own tides. Much has changed in eighteen months. I have a new little boy now. Impetuous Pride, I have learned, is better at seizing ground than holding it. Love’s inroads have insensibly made up all the ground that she lost, and more. This letter may be considered the instrument of Pride’s surrender, and Love’s victory. It only remains for terms to be negotiated.

Of course you have already dictated the terms; you laid them out with admirable clarity in the note that was left in Johann’s crib. You seek the return of the gold that was seized off Bonanza in August of 1690 and that is believed to be in the hands of the band of thieves and pirates led by the villain Jack Shaftoe. You phant’sy that I had something to do with the theft and that I know where Jack is to be found.

In truth I had nothing to do with it and I have no idea where he is. But this is a prideful response, which brings me no closer to seeing my little boy again. The loving response is to give you, sir, what you want, to appease your anger and balm your wounds, though it be never so humiliating to me, your humble and obedient servant.

So: though I cannot return the gold, and do not know where Jack is, I shall protest no more, but do all in my power to give you what I can in compensation.

As to the whereabouts of Jack Shaftoe: no one knows this, though Father Édouard de Gex and Monsieur Bonaventure Rossignol have devised a scheme to ferret him out. One of the members of his pirate-band writes letters, from time to time, to his family in France. These letters are intercepted and read by Monsieur Rossignol, who, however, is unable to extract all of their meaning, as they are written in an impenetrable code. He makes copies of them and passes them on to the family.

The family are coffee merchants who until recently lived as paupers in Paris. Then they were discovered by Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, who as you may know is the cousine of de Gex. She began to serve their coffee exclusively at her salon, and soon enough de Maintenon herself, at her levée, was heard to ask for coffee of this marque, and in no time at all, this family had established a coffeehouse in the village of Versailles, where they serve a steady walk-in trade as well as purveying beans to the royal château and the other estates that abound in this area.

Obviously de Gex is behind this. For where previously the family in question were dispersed among various prisons and poorhouses around Paris, now they are all dwelling together in one house in Versailles where the Cabinet Noir can easily keep an eye on them. As I have mentioned, all of the letters that are sent to France by their brother who is a member of Jack Shaftoe’s pirate-band are passed on to them, in the hopes that they will write back to him, and in so doing, divulge something to M. Rossignol. So far this has not been productive of useful information. The family do not write back. This appears to be because they have nowhere to write back to. For the ship of L’Emmerdeur and his band is wandering all over the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, so that trying to intercept it with a letter posted from Paris is akin to trying to strike a horsefly with a round fired from a siege-mortar. Nevertheless, the scheme that M. Rossignol and Fr. de Gex have devised to trace Jack’s movements is well-conceived and likely to bear fruit sooner or later. When it does, I shall be in a position to know about it, and will pass the information on to you.

As to the gold you lost: since I cannot satisfy you where this is concerned, I have resolved to compensate you, inasmuch as that is possible, by other means. I am well aware that the gold taken off Bonanza possesses special properties, the loss of which no amount of mundane silver and gold can make good. But until such time as the thieves are tracked down, there is nothing I can do but try to make up your losses in the only way I know how. I lost all of my personal assets shortly after Johann was born, and so have no money of my own that I could send you. The property of my new family, the Lavardacs, is not at my disposal. I can dwell in the family residences, but not sell them. I can eat off the family plate, but not melt it down. However, my position does afford me a matchless vantage-point on the workings of French government finance. I frequently become aware of opportunities in this field from which a man in your position could reap considerable gains with little effort or risk. As a sort of down-payment or, if you will, interest on the lost gold of Bonanza—which I have every intention of repaying in full when it becomes possible—I present you, now, with such an opportunity—the first in what I hope will grow into a long series of profitable liaisons.

Your agent in Lyon, Gerhard Mann, will presently be able to tell you more concerning this, but here it is in a nutshell: The French government needs to transfer silver to England to pay the French and Irish troops who will invade that country from around Cherbourg in late May. They were going to ship the silver over directly, but recently I have convinced them that it will be more efficient to make use of the existing commercial channels, viz. a Bill issued in Lyon against the credit of M. Castan (backed, it goes without saying, by France) and payable in silver coin in London. The Bill would need to be issued early in May and payable in late May or early June, and it would have to be transferable, since the identity of the French payee in London might not be known until later, and in any case, for obvious reasons, would need to be kept secret.

Because this is being arranged at the last minute, during wartime, you could probably demand a very high fee, as these things go.

Moreover, the transaction would involve relatively little risk for you. You may laugh at this, for it must sound absurd to claim that shipping silver to England in wartime is not risky; but it is true, for the reason that the invasion probably will never happen. And if it does, it will fail. The entire plan is predicated on the assumption that the common people of England will welcome an invasion by French and Irish troops come to place a Catholic on the throne. Nothing more absurd can be imagined. You may easily verify this through your own excellent sources. So by far the most likely outcome is that the Bills you issue in Lyon will never reach England, and never be presented for payment; the transaction will be cancelled, and you shall get to keep the fee and the float on the funds transferred in Lyon. The worst possible outcome, then, is that the Bills are presented and accepted; but this would be nothing more than a routine, albeit large, transaction for the House of Hacklheber.

I have done all in my power to predispose M. le comte de Pontchartrain, M. Bernard, and M. Castan to select the House of Hacklheber as its bank for this transaction. They show signs of favoring the idea; yet as you know, there is much competition in Lyon, and I do not have the power to compel them to deal with you. I shall continue to work discreetly on your behalf unless you write back requesting that I desist.

In return I ask nothing, save that you might show me more favor than in the past, and consider allowing me to pay a brief visit (chaperoned if you wish) to little Johann, if I can find some way of getting to Leipzig.

I am, mein Herr, your humble and obedient servant

Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon, comtesse de la Zeur

Eliza to King William III of England

12 APRIL 1692

Majesty,

By now you must have heard from a hundred different sources that an invasion of your Realm is being readied on the Cotentin Peninsula. You may even know that it is to set sail from Cherbourg during the third or fourth week in May. I shall not waste your time, then, belaboring these facts. I write to you, not as a spy for England, but as a champion of France. This invasion must never be allowed to go forward. It is a ruinously stupid plan. Its defeat will neither improve the security of England (since it is doomed in any case) nor bring England glory (since it is so feeble and ill-conceived). The French have convinced themselves otherwise. Somehow they have made themselves believe that all England is against your majesty, and that your majesty’s Army and Navy are so riddled with secret Jacobites that they will declare their allegiance to James Stuart as soon as the signal is given; that the Royal Navy will suffer the French to cross the Channel in force, English regiments will make themselves scarce while a French beach-head is established in Wessex, and English people will welcome French and Irish invaders on their territory. Perhaps all of this is true; but to my ear it sounds absurd. I suspect that your spies and emissaries in France have been making a pretense of hostility to your majesty and whispering, into the ears of their French counterparts, all sorts of flattering and seductive nonsense about how England is poised for a Jacobite rebellion. If so, your majesty, the deception has worked all too well, and made the French so cocksure that they have laid plans, devised stratagems, and formulated resolves that seem to your humble and obedient servant like utter lunacy.

I pray that you will write a letter, or send an emissary, to King Louis XIV; announce that you know of the invasion plans; and make le Roi understand that the project is doomed. If French troops and sailors must be sacrificed on the fields of Mars, then let it happen in fair and honourable clashes of arms. It is more than I can bear to see them go down to David Jones’s Locker in pursuit of a folly.

Eliza, Duchess of Qwghlm, Duchess of Arcachon

P.S. I have sent three copies of this letter in the holds of three different smugglers’ boats. If you have received redundant copies, please accept my apologies for so making a pest of myself; but the matter is important to me.

Eliza to Monsieur le Chevalier d’Erquy

13 APRIL 1692

Monsieur,

Thank you for your assistance in despatching those letters to England. I could never have made the necessary contacts without the assistance of one such as you, a Breton born and bred, who knows his way around the little coves and harbors of the Golfe de St.-Malo. I pray that you will forgive me for having laughed at the look on your face. It was entirely proper and prudent for you to open and examine those letters before you became complicit in sending them across the Channel, for who knows what they might have contained. Many times it has happened that a woman, well-meaning but foolish, allowed herself to be duped, by some conniving wretch of more wit and less virtue, into carrying letters that contain damaging information. Far from being angry with you, I am indebted to you for having had the prudence to examine the letters before turning them over to those smugglers. In return, I pray you will forgive me for the way I laughed out loud when you were confronted with page after page of gibberish. As you must have collected by now, I dabble in the stocks that are traded at the bourses of London and Amsterdam. Because of the state of war that now exists between France and Holland/England, it is difficult for me to communicate with my brokers there through the channels that are customary in peacetime. That is why I put you to so much bother in sending those letters. But such communications, by their nature, consist predominantly of numbers and financial jargon. You should not be surprised that you were unable to make any sense of them.

This brings my subject around to business. You should know that my resources are limited and, for the most part, illiquid. However, many of the assets of the Lavardac family naturally produce revenue. Farms, for example, generate rents, which are delivered to our coffers. Those coffers are also drained by countless expenses, but if the affairs of the family are well managed, some surplus may from time to time result. It then becomes my responsibility to see to it that the surplus is put to productive use. Many opportunities for investment present themselves to me every day; I try to distribute the available capital among these in a rational way.

So the rumors that you have evidently been hearing are correct. I have, on several occasions, purchased distressed loans from persons who have lent money to the King’s treasury and who have found that the interest payments on those loans are insufficient for their needs.

Like all proper transactions in a market, these must be of benefit to both parties. To the original lender (which would be you, in this case) the benefit is that you receive hard money, where before you had only a piece of paper signed by the contrôleur-général promising to make interest payments. For me, the benefit is somewhat more difficult to explain. It is a service I perform for the King. Suffice it to say that by consolidating a large number of such loans into a single instrument, representing a very large amount of government debt, I may help to bring some simplicity and clarity to what would otherwise be a most complex and tedious welter of affairs. In this way the œconomy of France may be better regulated and altogether more efficient.

At this point it is necessary to bring up the awkward and distasteful subject of terms. Specifically, we must decide what is to be the discount at which your loan is to be sold—i.e., for each hundred livres tournoises of principal that you originally loaned to his majesty’s treasury, how many livres tournoises are you to receive from the buyer now? Such discussions are naturally repellent to Persons of Quality. Fortunately, we may refer the matter to an impartial judge: the market. For if you were the only man in France who had ever tried to sell such a loan, why, we should have to work out terms without any reference to established customs or precedents. Endless discussion would be entailed, every word of it beneath our dignity as nobility of France. But as it happens there are many hundreds of recent precedents. I myself have purchased no fewer than eighty-six loans. At the moment, you are one of seven men who is offering me such an opportunity. When the number of participants is so large, a price emerges, as if by magic. And so I can tell you that the price of one hundred livres tournoises of French government debt, three years ago, was eighty-one livres tournoises. Two years ago it was sixty-five, a year ago it was holding steady around forty, and today it is twenty-one. Which is to say that for every hundred you loaned the Treasury, I will pay you twenty-one today. Tomorrow the price may rise again, in which case it would benefit you to hold on to the loan, and sell it later; on the other hand, it might decline further, in which case you may wish you had sold it today. It is regrettably not possible for me to offer you advice in the matter.

My attorney at Versailles is M. Ladon and I have let him know that he may hear from you on this. He is quite proficient in such transactions, having, as I mentioned, carried out more than four score of them. If you elect to proceed, he shall see to it that all of the requisite papers, &c., are drawn up correctly.

In closing, I thank you again for your assistance in sending the letters to England. I shall probably need to send more in the near future; but now that you have shown me where to go, and introduced me to the right men, my staff, some of whom are old Marines from around Dunkerque, should know what to do.

Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon

Café Esphahan, Rue de l’Orangerie, Versailles

26 APRIL 1692

“YOU WERE EXPECTING SOMEONE DIFFERENT? It is all right, madame. So was I.”

This was how Samuel Bernard introduced himself to Eliza, lobbing the words across the coffee-house as he cut toward her table.

By arranging the meeting in a coffee-house in the town, as opposed to a salon in a château, Eliza had already obviated several days’ invitation-passing and preliminary maneuvers. Not satisfied even with this level of efficiency, Bernard had now lopped off half an hour’s introductory persiflage by jumping into the middle of the conversation before he had even reached her table. He came on as if he meant to place her under arrest. Heads turned towards him, froze, and then turned away; those who wished to gawk, looked out the windows and gawked at his carriage and his squadron of musket-brandishing bodyguards.

Bernard scooped up Eliza’s hand as if it were a thrown gauntlet. He thrust out a leg to steady himself, bowed low, planted a firm dry smack on her knuckles, and gleamed. Gleamed because threads of gold were worked into the dark fabric of his vest. “You thought I was a Jew,” he said, and sat down.

“And what did you think I was, monsieur?”

“Oh, come now! You already know the answer. You just aren’t thinking! I shall assist you. Why did you phant’sy I was a Jew?”

“Because everyone says so.”

“But why?”

“They are mistaken.”

“But when otherwise well-informed persons are mistaken it is because they wish to be mistaken, no?”

“I suppose that’s logical.”

“Why would they wish to be mistaken about me—or you?”

“Monsieur Bernard, it has been so long since I began a conversation so briskly! Allow me a moment to catch my breath. Would you care to order something? Not that you are in need of further stimulation.”

“I shall have coffee!” Bernard called out to an Armenian boy with a peach-fuzz moustache, dressed like a Turk, who had been edging toward them, impelled by significant glares and subtile finger-flicks from the proprietor, Christopher Esphahnian, but intimidated by Bernard. The garçon sped into the back, relieved to have been given orders. Bernard glanced about the coffee-house. “I could almost believe I was in Amsterdam,” he remarked.

“From the lips of a financier, that is flattery,” Eliza said. “But I believe that the intent of the decorator was to make you believe you were in Turkey.”

Bernard snorted. “Does it work for you, madame?”

“No, for I have been in the coffee-houses of Amsterdam, and I share your opinion.”

“You do not say that you have been in Turkey.”

“Do I need to? Or have others been saying it for me?”

Bernard smiled. “We return to our subject! People say of me that I am a Jew, and of you that you are an odalisque, sent here by the Grand Turk as a spy—”

“They do!?”

“Yes. Why?”

The good thing about Bernard was that when he said something jarring he would quickly move on to something else. Eliza decided ’twere better to keep pace with him than to dwell on this matter of her and the Grand Turk. “The only thing I can think of that you and I have in common, monsieur, is a predilection for finance.”

Bernard let it be seen that he was not fully satisfied with this attempt. He had a long, complicated French nose, close-set eyes, and a mouth turned up tight, like a recurved bow, at the corners. The look on his face might have been one of frustration, or intense concentration; perhaps both. He was trying to get her to see something. “Why do I wear cloth of gold? Because I am some kind of a fop? No! I dress well, but I am not a fop. I wear this to remind me of something.”

“I supposed it was to remind others that—”

“That I am the richest man in France? Is that what you were going to say?”

“No, but it is what I was thinking.”

“Another rumor—like that I am a Jew. No, madame, I wear this because it used to be my trade.”

“Did you say trade!?”

“My family were Huguenots. I was baptized in the Protestant church of Charenton. You can’t see it any more, it was pulled down by a Catholic mob a few years ago. My grandfather was a painter of portraits for the Court. My father, a miniaturist and an engraver. But God did not bestow on me any artistic talent, and so I was apprenticed to a seller of cloth-of-gold.”

“Did you serve out your whole apprenticeship, monsieur?”

“Pourquoi non, madame, for then as now, I always fulfill my contracts. My formal métier is maître mercier grossiste pour draps d’or, d’argent, et de soie de Paris.”

“I think I finally begin to understand your point, Monsieur Bernard. You are saying that you and I have in common that we do not belong.”

“We make no sense!” Bernard exclaimed, throwing up both hands and raising his eyebrows in dismay, mocking a certain type of courtier. “To these people—” and he shoveled his hands across the Rue de l’Orangerie at Versailles—“we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God.”

“I have heard some in this vein, too, from Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir—”

Bernard would not allow such a foolish sentence to be finished; he spewed air and rolled his eyes. “Him! What would he know of us? He is the epitome of who I mean—son of a Duke! A bastard, I’ll grant you, and enterprising, in his way; yet still wholly typical of the established order.”

Eliza now judged it best to stop talking, for Bernard had led her off into some wild territory—as if enlisting her, a Duchess, in some sort of insurgency. Bernard saw her discomfort, and physically drew back. The Armenian boy whispered up on slippered feet, bearing on a gaudy salver a tiny beaker of coffee clenched in a writhen silver zarf. Eliza gazed out the windows for a few moments, letting Bernard enjoy the first few sips. His guards had long since set up a perimeter defense around the Café Esphahan. But if she looked beyond that, cater-corner across the Rue de l’Orangerie, she could see deep into a vast rectangular plot embraced on three sides by a vaulted gallery-cum-retaining wall that supported the southern wing of the King’s palace. This garden was open to the south so that during the winter it could gather in the feeble offerings of the sun. The King’s orange trees, which lived in portable boxes of dirt, were still cowering back inside the warm gallery, for the last few nights had been clear and cold. But the garden was crowded with palm trees; and it was the sight of their blowing fronds, and not the faux-Turkish decor inside the café, that made it possible for her to phant’sy that she was sitting along some walled garden of the Topkapi Palace.

Bernard had settled down a bit. “Never fear, madame, for my father and I both converted to Catholicism after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Just as you have married a hereditary Duke.”

“I don’t really see what those two have to do with each other.”

“They were, if you will, sacraments that we undertook to show that we were submitting to the established order of this country—the same order that we undermine by pursuing what you so aptly described as our predilection for finance.”

“I don’t know that I agree with that, monsieur.”

Bernard ignored Eliza’s weak protest. “Sooner or later the King will probably make me a Count or some such, and people will pretend to forget that I once served an apprenticeship. But do not be fooled. To them, you and I are as noble; as French; and as Catholic; as him!” and Bernard shot out one hand as if hurling a dagger. The target was a painting on the ceiling that depicted an immense, shirtless, muscle-bound, ochre-skinned hashishin with a red turban and a handlebar moustache raising a scimitar above his head. “And that is why they say Iama Jew; for this amounts to saying, an inexplicable monster.”

“As long as it’s just us inexplicable monsters here,” said Eliza (as indeed it was; for most of the other patrons had bolted) “shall we—”

“Indeed, yes. Let us review the figures,” said Bernard, and blinked twice. “The number of invasion troops is some twenty thousand. Each receives five sols per day; so that is five thousand livres a day. The number of sergeants is, in round numbers, a tenth of the number of troops, but they receive twice the pay; add another thousand livres a day. Lieutenants receive a livre a day, captains get two and a half; at any rate, when you add it all up, reckoning dragoons, cavalry, et cetera, it comes to some eight thousand a day—”

“I have made it ten thousand, to allow for other expenses,” said Eliza.

“C’est juste. So why do you ask for half a million livres in London?”

“Monsieur, England is not so large as France, ’tis true; and yet it is much larger than some scraps of land in the Netherlands that have been fought over for months. Years.”

“Those places you speak of in the Low Countries are fortified. England is not.”

“The point is well taken, but the distance between the landing-sites in Devon and London is considerable. It took William of Orange a month and a half to cover the same interval, when he invaded.”

“Very well, I grant you that fifty days’ pay—almost two months—for this army comes to half a million livres. But why must every last penny of it be minted in advance, in London? Surely if the campaign progresses beyond a beach-head there will be opportunities to ship specie to the island later.”

“Perhaps and perhaps not, monsieur. I only know of this one opportunity, and seek to make the most of it. You make this more complicated than it is. I have been asked to tender advice on how the troops might be paid. You and I seem to agree that half a million livres is a reasonable, though perhaps generous, estimate of the amount that will be required. This is not too large an amount for the normal channels of commerce. I ask for as much as I think shall be needed. If half that amount is actually coined at the Tower of London, then I shall consider the transaction to have come off passing well.”

“The matter becomes complicated when the entire transaction is made to pass through Lyon,” said Bernard. “It is a large bolus for the Dépôt to swallow. If we could instead transfer it through a public market where there were proper banks…”

“Monsieur Bernard. You tempt me. For nothing would afford me such fascination as to sit here with you all morning and afternoon drinking coffee and discoursing of the peculiarities of Lyon and the Dépôt. Quite possibly we might have similar views on it. But as matters stand, Lyon is, by long tradition, France’s connexion to the financial system of the world, and it is through Lyon that we must send all of this money. It may be a bit quaint, a bit odd; but fortunately there are sophisticated houses there, such as the Hacklhebers, who have ready access to public markets in other cities.”

“I understand, madame,” said Bernard. “But the carrying capacity of the Dépôt is limited. France fights on more than one front. There are other demands on the credit of her treasury.”

“I have seen the silver with my own eyes, Monsieur Bernard. It was stacked in the hold of Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain’s jacht in St.-Malo. This is merely an alternate, more prudent means of getting it to London.”

“And I do not question that, madame. But during wartime, the temptation will be strong to use that silver elsewhere—to spend it twice.”

“Now I perceive why it is that you are shunned by Court fops, monsieur. For you to suggest that Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain would do anything of the sort is most rude.”

“Ah, madame, but I said nothing of that noble man. It is not he who matters in this case—for, last I heard, Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain was not the King of France.”

“Then you are being even more impertinent!”

“Not at all. For the King is the King, and it is his prerogative to spend his money twice, or even three times, if that is his pleasure, and neither I nor any other Frenchman will say a word against him! It might, however, make a difference to the Dépôt.”

“Suppose the Dépôt was asked to adapt to these trying new circumstances, and it was found wanting, and in consequence, France had to get a modern banking system? Would that not be better for France, and for you, monsieur?”

“For me, perhaps—as well as for you. For France, there might be grave disruptions.”

“That is beyond my scope. I am like a housewife shopping for turnips in the market. If I go to my old traditional turnip-sellers and they ask too high a price for turnips of poor quality, and not enough of them, why, I shall go and buy my turnips elsewhere.”

“Very well,” said Bernard, “I depart for Lyon this afternoon to meet with Monsieur Castan. I might relay your challenge to the Dépôt and we might see if they have got enough turnips for you.”

“Monsieur, what is this word might doing in the sentence? You do not strike me as a flirtatious man, in general.”

“You have a house in St.-Malo, madame.”

“Indeed, monsieur.”

“It is said you are quite fond of the place—more so than La Dunette.” Bernard glanced in that general direction, for La Dunette was only a couple of musket-shots up the hill from the Rue de l’Orangerie. But all he could see in that quarter was another gaudy painting of wild Turks in action.

“You would like it, too, for St.-Malo is a place where Commerce rules.”

“I understand. For that is where the ships of the Compagnie des Indes call, or have I been misinformed?”

“Many ships call there; but if India is a particular interest of yours, monsieur, then that is what we shall speak of.”

“How can it not be of interest to us, madame? Have you any notion of the profits made in that part of the world by the V.O.C. and the British East India Company?”

“Of course, monsieur. They are proverbial. As is the perpetual failure and reincarnation of the Compagnie des Indes. You need only ask Monsieur le marquis d’Ozoir—”

“The history is all too well known. I am more concerned with the future.”

“Then truly you are a shameless flirt, Monsieur Bernard, for I can scarcely contain my curiosity any longer—what are you thinking?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nonsense!”

“It is quite true. All I know is that I look at the Compagnie des Indes and see—nothing! Nothing is happening. Something should be happening. It is curious.”

“You have scented an opportunity.”

“As have you, madame.”

“Oh—you refer to the silver in London?”

“Now you flirt with me. Madame, it is within my power to make this happen. I may have been re-baptized as a Catholic, but this has not prevented my maintaining any number of contacts with Huguenots who elected to leave. They have gone to places like London and prospered. You know this perfectly well, for you have filled the void that was created in the Compagnie du Nord by their departure. You buy timber from them in Sweden and Rostock all the time. So yes. I can see to it that your silver is transferred, and I shall. But it shall not be profitable. It shall not be especially convenient. Monsieur Castan’s credit with the Dépôt shall be over-extended for a time. I shall have to twist his arm. And I hate dealing with Lothar.”

“Very well. What could I do, monsieur, to show my gratitude for your undertaking so many travails?”

“You could direct your intelligence upon the strange case of the Compagnie des Indes in faraway St.-Malo. You, I take it, have no interest in this?”

“None whatsover, monsieur; the Compagnie du Nord is my sole concern.”

“That is well. You will supply me with your thoughts and observations, then, concerning the other?”

“It will be a joy to converse with you on the topic, monsieur.”

“Very well.” Bernard got to his feet. “I am off to Lyon, then. Au revoir.”

“Bon voyage.”

And Samuel Bernard exited the Café Esphahan as abruptly as he had come in.

His gilded chair was still warm when Bonaventure Rossignol sat down in it.

“I have seen Kings travel with a smaller guard,” Eliza remarked; for both she and Rossignol devoted some time now to enjoying the spectacle of the departure of Bernard’s carriage, his train of lesser vehicles, his out-riders, spare horses, grooms, et cetera from the Rue de l’Orangerie.

“Many Kings have less to fear,” Rossignol remarked.

“Oh? I did not know Monsieur Bernard had so many enemies.”

“It is not that he has enemies as a King does,” Rossignol corrected her, “which is to say, identifiable souls who wish him ill, and are willing and able to act on those wishes. Rather, it is that from time to time a sort of frenzy will come over certain Frenchmen, which only abates when a financier or two has been hanged from a tree-limb or set on fire.”

“He was trying to warn me about such things,” Eliza said, “but his squadron of mercenaries conveys it much more effectively than words.”

“It is curious,” said Rossignol, turning his attention to Eliza. “I know that you are married to a Duke, and share his bed, and bear his children. Yet this causes me not the least bit of jealousy! But when I see you talking to this Samuel Bernard—”

“Put it out of your head,” Eliza said. “You have no idea.”

“What does this mean, I have no idea? I may be a mathematician, but yet I know what passes between a man and a woman.”

“Indeed; but you are not a commerçant, and you haven’t the faintest idea what passes between the likes of me and Bernard. Don’t worry. If you were a commerçant, I shouldn’t be attracted to you—just as I’m not attracted to Bernard.”

“But it looked for all the world as if you were flirting.”

“As indeed we were—but the intercourse to which this flirting will lead is not sexual.”

“I am perfectly confused now—you are playing with me.”

“Come now, Bon-bon! Let us review matters. Out of all the men in Germany, which did I choose for a friend?”

“Leibniz.”

“And what is he?”

“A mathematician.”

“Holland?”

“Huygens…a mathematician.”

“England?”

“Daniel Waterhouse. A Natural Philosopher.”

“France?”

“…”

“Come now! When I came to Versailles for the first time, and got invited to Court soirées, and was pursued by any number of randy Dukes, to whom did I give my affections?”

“You gave them to…a mathematician.”

“What was that mathematician’s name?” asked Eliza, cupping a hand to her ear.

“It was Bonaventure Rossignol,” said Bonaventure Rossignol, and flicked his black eyes to and fro to see if anyone was listening.

“Now, when I got myself into a big mess of trouble outside of St. Diziers, who was the first to learn of it?”

“That fellow who was reading everyone’s mail. Bonaventure Rossignol.”

“And who came galloping to my rescue across half of France, and journeyed north with me to Nijmegen, and put me on a boat?”

“Bon—”

“Stop. The name is beautiful and distinguished. But I prefer to call him Bon-bon.”

“Very well, then, it was Bon-bon.”

“Who made love to me along the banks of the Meuse?”

“Étienne de Lavardac.”

“Who else?”

“Bon-bon.”

“And who helped me concoct a plan to get out of my terrible mess of trouble?”

“Bon-bon.”

“Who helped me cover my traces, and forged documents, and lied to the King and to d’Avaux?”

“Bon-bon.”

“And who is the father of my first-born?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Only because you avoided looking at him, when you had the opportunity. But I tell you Jean-Jacques looks very much like Bon-bon—there is no trace in him of the tainted blood of the Lavardacs. You are the father, Bon-bon.”

“What is your point?”

“Only that it is absurd for you to be jealous of this Samuel Bernard. Whatever may pass between him and me in the way of business is nothing compared to the adventure that you and I had, and the son that we share.”

The attention of “Bon-bon” had strayed to a painting of a fabulous, many-domed mosque that adorned a wall behind Eliza. “You remind me of things I would forget. I could have done a better job.”

“Nonsense!”

“I could have exonerated you entirely from charges of spying.”

“In retrospect, perhaps. But I do believe it worked out for the best.”

“What…you married to a man you do not love, and Jean-Jacques held captive by a demented Saxon banker?”

“But that is not the end of the story, Bon-bon. We have met here today to further the story along.”

“Yes. And it is an interesting choice of venue,” Rossignol said, leaning far over the table and lowering his voice so much that Eliza nearly had to touch her forehead against his in order to hear him. “I have read every scrap of these people’s mail for two years, you know, but never seen their faces, and certainly never sipped their coffee.”

“Do you fancy it?”

“It is a cut above the usual swill, to be sure,” said Rossignol, “but on its merits as a beverage, it would never be so chic if you and Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax were not forever singing its praises.”

“You see? There is nothing I would not do in the service of cryptology,” said Eliza with a smile, and spread out her hands, inviting Rossignol to take in the magnificence of the Café Esphahan. “Have you learned anything recently?”

“This is not the place or the time to speak of it! But no,” said Rossignol. “I have been much more preoccupied with reading your mail.”

“Does it make for interesting reading?”

“A bit too interesting. To Lothar you say, ‘The invasion of England will surely be called off,’ while to some financier in Lyon you are saying, ‘The invasion will happen soon and we must pay the troops!’ ”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“It makes me worry that you are about to get in trouble again and I shall have to go back to galloping hither and yon, forging documents, and lying to important people…all of which I would gladly do!” he added hastily, as the beginnings of a pout had appeared on Eliza’s face. “But I think it a miracle that you were forgiven, by the powers that be, for the previous go-round of spying and lying. If you do it again—”

“Your misinterpretation is total,” Eliza said. “There was no forgiving, but an œconomic transaction. And I did not get off scot-free, as you seem to phant’sy, but paid a price so terrible I do not think you’ll ever fathom it. To you, perhaps, it seems that I am plunging once more into a sea of intrigue from which I was absent for a couple of years—restful years for you, Bon-bon!—but to me it seems I have been submerged in it the whole time, and am only now getting my head above water where I can see and breathe again. I mean to keep clawing away until I have dragged myself out.”

“You’ll never be out,” said Rossignol, “but if it is in your nature to claw, then claw away. Speaking of which, my back has healed since the last time—”

“I have three more engagements to-day, but perhaps I could append a fourth,” said Eliza. She reached across the table and set a packet of letters in front of Rossignol. “My out-going mail,” she explained. “I was going to post it, but then I thought, why not give it directly to Bon-bon?”

“I shall decrypt them while I await your fourth social engagement,” said Rossignol. “Here is your incoming.” And he handed Eliza a packet.

“Thank you, Bon-bon. Anything interesting?”

“Compared to most of what I have to read? Madame, you have no idea.”

Daniel Waterhouse to Eliza

19 APRIL 1692

I am in receipt of your recent note urgently requesting information concerning the Mint and the men who run it. I cannot fathom why you desire to know such things, so hastily. I can assure you that I am the wrong chap. The right chap is the Marquis of Ravenscar. I have taken the liberty of forwarding your questions to him. You may be assured of his discretion. I hope that everything is well with you; for I am, as always, &c., Daniel Waterhouse.

Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar, to Eliza

20 APRIL 1692

A LETTER

To Her Grace, ELIZA, Duchess of Arcachon and (though ’tis not recognized in France) Qwghlm

Madame,

Most humbly do I set before you this Offering, and do pray that Your Grace may deem it a satisfactory Answer to those Inquiries lately despatch’d to my wise Friend and Colleague, Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, F.R.S.

APOLOGY

Olympus’ Court no fairer Visage housed

Than that of Helen. Goddesses were roused

To ENVY: which though petty Vice on Earth

When spent on High where all’s of greater Worth

Loosed Havock down below. Fleets sailed, Gods vied,

For Helen cities fell and heroes died.

ELIZA’s Fame on Rumour’s wing hath come

To Albion’s shores. French flatterers, struck dumb,

Have kept her beauty hid ’til now, it seems;

But as a light beneath a Bushel gleams

Thro’ any Chink, ELIZA’s Charms are out,

And putting Goddesses to rout.

A-tremble, Men gaze up, and shall be glad

Not to be Players in her Iliad.

MY LADY,

You who are accustom’d to that incomparable Palace of Versailles would find little in London worthy of casting your eye over, and least of all my habitation near Red Lyon Square, which is yet but a pile of loose stones and timbers. Its sole Glory, at this time, is its Architect, Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, Secretary of the Royal Society, who being a diligent man is oft to be seen in its Precincts surveying, measuring, drawing, &c. Today I chanc’d to meet Dr. Waterhouse about the Property and, upon supplying him with certain Libations, learnt from him that his letter-box had been graced by a missive from the incomparable Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, who is the subject of some debate among Persons of Quality in this Country; for while some would have it that her Wit is exceeded only by her Beauty, others would have it the other way round. I confess myself incompetent to have an opinion on the matter, for while your letter to Dr. Waterhouse leaves me confounded and dazzled by your Wit, I cannot but suppose that were I to have the honour of encountering you in Person I should be as a-maz’d by your Beauty. Setting aside, then, this Question, which I cannot answer for lack of sufficient Data (though not, I assure you, for want of Curiosity), I shall apply myself to the Question that you put to Dr. Waterhouse in your recent Missive, viz.: who is in charge of the Mint at the Tower of London, and is it reasonable to assume that he is a good Tory?

The answers, respectively, are Sir Thomas Neale, and yes, it were reasonable to make such an assumption—but WRONG. Reasonable, because, as you have obviously heard, our Government has fallen under the Sway of the Tories since the election of ’90. Wrong because this is England, and Offices and Privileges of the Realm are not managed according to REASON but BECAUSE WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT THUS. Accordingly, Sir Thomas Neale, Master of the Mint, has his post, not because he is a Tory (for to the extent he holds fixed views on anything, they are Whiggish views, and to the extent he has friends, they are Whigs), but rather because James II gave him the position immediately upon his succession to the throne in February of 1685. Prior to that date, Sir Thomas had served as Groom-Porter of the Court of Charles II. The duties of the Groom-Porter are ill-defined and not susceptible of accurate translation into the language and the customs of La France. Nominally the Groom-Porter is in charge of the Sovereign’s furniture. Since this, however, rarely changes, it does not occupy very much of his time; consequently he devotes a larger moiety of his energies to furnishings smaller, more mutable and perishable: viz. dice and cards. Whatever other personal shortcomings Sir Thomas might possess, even his most obstreperous detractors would readily agree that never were man and job so perfectly match’d as Sir Thomas Neale, and Dice-Keeper Royal.

Master of the Mint would seem to be a different sort of job entirely and so those of a Skeptickal turn of mind might argue, that it would seem to call for a different sort of chap. But no one seems to have offered up any such argument before James II; or if they did, perhaps his majesty did not understand it. Indeed, his appointment of Sir Thomas to run the Mint was construed by some as more evidence (as if more were wanted) tending to shew, that a certain Malady had got the better of the King’s Brain. Those of us of a more charitable habit of mind, might perceive a certain kind of Sense in the appointment. For Sir Thomas had become link’d, in the riddled mind of James, with dice and cards, which were associated with Money; hence Sir Thomas was the best chap in the land to coin Money, Q.E.D.

I know Sir Thomas well, for he has been extraordinarily keen to maintain friendly relations with me, ever since he got it in his head that I am a possible Supplier of Capital. You too, my lady, may so arrange it that you shall hear from him frequently, and even discover him loitering in front of your House several times a Week, merely by giving him some cause to phant’sy that you are in control of some bored Capital that wants an Adventure. For where some hommes d’affaires come into the world of Commerce from Shipping, and others from the ’Varsity, Sir Thomas came at it by way of Gambling, and not just of the penny-ante sort, but on the Royal plane. And so where another commerçant might employ a Ship-Voyage as his over-arching Metaphor for what a business-venture is, Sir Thomas sees all such Projects as Rolls of Dice. And where a Venturer of Ship frame of mind would have a care to raise profits, and reduce risk, by caulking his Ship well, hiring good seamen, keeping an eye on the weather-glass, &c., Sir Thomas’s notion of a well-structured Enterprise is one in which the dice are loaded, the cards marked, and the deck stacked, to the utmost extent possible. Indeed, this is why I have not ejected him from my Circle of Friends; for while I’d never risk any of my Capital on one of his Ventures, I very much enjoy having them explained to me, much as I might derive pleasurable diversion from reading a vivid roman about some Picaroons.

I might add in passing that James II’s equation of Gambling with the Making of Money is not the syphilitic madness that it first seemed. For during the period of forced Idleness that has succeeded the disastrous Election of ’90, I have had leisure to consider diverse Schemes to raise money for the Government, which feels a want of Specie chargeable to the War. We contemplate a great national Lottery. To explain the scheme at any more length than that would be tedious, to point out Sir Thomas’s aptness for such a Project were to insult your intelligence. We meet from time to time with Mathematickal Savants of the Royal Society to explore its statistical penetralia.

In conclusion, I say to you that if you desire to have silver minted here as part of some Adventure (whose details I do not need or wish to know); and if the Adventure enures to the advantage of the Tories (which I hope it does not; but this is none of my business); and if you have phant’sied that our Tory government has some power over the Mint, so that the Mint’s interests, and yours, are naturally aligned; then you are mistaken. For the Mint is, I am happy to report, firmly in the grip of a Whig. This need not, however, militate against your Project. For if I read correctly between the lines of your letter, all you really need is a cooperative, not to say compliant, friend in the Mint; and you may make Thomas Neale just that, by meditating upon the Character I have given him in this Missive, and devising your approach to the man accordingly.

I pray that the question you sent to Dr. Waterhouse has been addressed, to your satisfaction, by the foregoing. If I have failed to satisfy, or (may God forbid it) given offense, I beg you to write back telling me as much, so that I may bend every effort to make it good. For it is my very great honour and pleasure to be your humble and obedient servant,

RAVENSCAR

P.S. If your intention is to mint French silver into English coin to pay the French and Irish troops that have been preparing to invade England from around Cherbourg in the third week of May, then I congratulate you on your ingenuity. Delivery of the coins from Mint to Front shall pose a not inconsiderable logistical challenge, and so I make you the following offer: If Admiral Tourville’s invasion-fleet makes it across the Channel without being sunk by the Royal Navy, and if the Papist legion establishes a beachhead on English soil without being destroyed by the Army or torn to bits by an enraged Mobb of English rurals, then I shall personally carry every single one of your coins from the Tower of London to the front in my arse-hole, and Deposit them in some Place where they may be easily Picked Up.

Leibniz to Eliza

21 APRIL 1692

Eliza,

You asked—some might say, commanded—me to be on the alert for any news out of Leipzig touching on Lothar von Hacklheber in general, and Jean-Jacques—or, as they call him, Johann—in particular. This is not made any easier by the fact that Lothar knows, in a vague way, that I am linked to you. Moreover, I must confess that I am torn between a desire to give you what you have asked me for, and a reluctance to pass on information that is sure to tear open this wound that Lothar inflicted on you a year and a half ago.

So I have avoided going to Leipzig. But yesterday Leipzig came to me, here in Hanover. As you must have heard, my patrons, Ernst August and Sophie, who until recently have been titled the Duke and Duchess of Hanover, have for some time been campaigning in Vienna to have their dignity raised to that of Elector and Electress. France has been opposed to it, and held them in check by diverse political counter-maneuvers whose particulars would fill book after tedious book. To make a long story short, the war, and in particular the recent developments along the Savoy front, has put the Emperor into a state of mind where he will do anything to spite Louis XIV; accordingly, Ernst August and Sophie are, as of a couple of weeks ago, the Elector and the Electress of Hanover, an eyelash below a King and Queen as these things are measured. This has set into motion a whole train of ramifications and realignments, &c., &c., that will give the courtiers along the Leine Strasse things to natter about for years to come. Some of the ramifications are, of course, financial, and so bankers from all over the Empire have come to call on Sophie and Ernst August, to offer their felicitations and to see if they might be of service in the new Electorate. It is all about as interesting to me, as physics is to them; except that one of these visitors has been Lothar. Sophie and Ernst August invited him to dine with them at the Palace of Herrenhausen outside of Hanover. In filling out the guest list, the chamberlain added my name, which must have seemed logical, as I am a Leipziger and my family has certain ties to that of von Hacklheber. They had no way of knowing about my link to you or the awkwardness that would arise from the matter of Jean-Jacques. Indeed, Sophie is so civilized, and exerts such a civilizing influence on Ernst August, that it would never enter their minds that one of their dinner-guests could be guilty of such an atrocity as baby-snatching. So, quite innocently, they invited me and Lothar to the same dinner, and seated us across the table from each other!

I cannot describe what it is like to sit across from such a man through a long dinner, without spoiling your appetite for a whole fortnight. I’ll limit my report to the conversation. Much of this concerned the war, and was more or less interesting; but you must hear of nothing else there, and so I shall move on to what concerns you personally.

Lothar, you must remember, was there for one purpose, which was to impress Sophie and Ernst August with his intelligence, his foresight, and his many connexions in the world; and so, at a certain point in the evening, after a certain amount of drink had been taken, he hazarded a prediction about the spring campaign. For how better for a banker to impress a potential client than to predict the future, and get it right?

France, he predicted, would soon suffer a humiliation in the northwest—he used the word Fehlschlag, which is difficult to translate but means a failed attempt, a miscarriage. He implied clearly that it would take place on or near English soil.

Of course Sophie is not easily impressed by such theatrics. She said, “If you are so sure of this prediction, Baron von Hacklheber, why are you not putting your money where your mouth is? For your mouth may be large, but we all know that your purse is larger yet.” This fetched a laugh, even from Lothar. When the commotion had died down, he announced that he would place just such a bet very soon—i.e., that he intended to so dispose his bank’s resources that he would gain money if the Fehlschlag took place as he had foretold. And to bolster his claim further, he vowed that he would donate a certain sum to any charity Sophie named, and that the money would come out of his profits on the bet, if it paid off, but out of his own purse if he were proved wrong.

Asked by Sophie how he could be so certain about this, he turned an eye in my direction and said that he knew persons in France, of considerable wealth and power, who had in the past been insolent to him, but more recently had been brought to heel—he actually employed the term bei Fuß! which is a dog-training command. You see now, Eliza, why I am so reluctant to act as a conduit for this sort of information. Even those at the table who did not know who Lothar was talking about found it a little disgusting.

That is my news, just as you requested it. Frankly, I pine for the days when my letters to you were filled with Natural Philosophy. Perhaps we can resume such discussions in happier times to come. Until then, I have the honor to be, &c.,

Leibniz

P.S. You also requested news of your friend Princess Eleanor and her daughter Princess Caroline. I have met them in Berlin; little Caroline is just as charming as you claimed, and just as intelligent. Eleanor has been betrothed to the Elector of Saxony, who is an ogre straight out of a færy-tale, and who has a mistress reputed to be even worse. The best place to send letters to them will probably be the Electoral court at Dresden.

Eliza to Samuel de la Vega

5 MAY 1692

Here is how peculiar France is: They are calling people Jews who have no trace of Jewishness. It is a long story, of which I’ll tell you more if we ever see each other again. It put me in mind of Amsterdam, where there are to be found Jews who really are Jews—a much more logical arrangement!

That is not my only reason for writing to you. For some years I have made little effort to follow the commodities markets in Amsterdam, as, from the remove of Versailles, it it impossible to do this competently. Lately, however, I have taken a position in silver. The details are unimportant. Suffice it to say that I must needs be alert to any moves in the silver market that may occur in the first half of June. My sources of information are not what they once were, and so I am reduced to the estate of a little girl with her nose pressed against the glass; I must judge the trends in the market by observing the behavior of larger and better-informed players.

Though the House of Hacklheber is not the largest, it is probably the best-informed concern in metals. Accordingly, I have resolved to take my cues from them. It would be of great significance to me if the Hacklhebers were suddenly to remove a large quantity (a few tons) of silver from their Amsterdam warehouse. You know where it is. If my guess is correct, the bullion would be transferred directly to a ship on the Ijsselmeer.

Can you spare someone to keep an eye on the Hacklhebers’ warehouse? As time draws nearer, I shall supply more precise information as to the exact time at which the transfer might occur. The information that I shall require is as follows: the name of the ship carrying the bullion and a complete description of her sail plan, &c., so that she may be identified from a distance, as well as the date and time of her departure from Amsterdam.

In coming weeks, I’ll be moving around quite a bit, and so there is little point in your trying to guess my whereabouts. Rather, you should send the particulars to me in care of my good friend and confidant, Captain Jean Bart, of Dunkerque. Captain Bart is a trustworthy fellow; there is no need (and there shall be no time!) to encrypt the message. You know more than I about getting messages out fast, so I’ll hold my tongue where that is concerned; but I am guessing you’ll want to send riders out from Amsterdam to Scheveningen and there transfer the message to a fast boat, Dunkerque-bound. There should be plenty of time to arrange this; but if you want help setting up the boat, just inform Captain Bart.

I think I have given you enough information now that you shall be able to place bets of your own in the silver market, which are likely to profit you; but if, when all is said and done, you have spent more than you have gained, forward your complaints to me in St.-Malo and they’ll not fall on deaf ears.

Eliza

Eliza to the Marquis of Ravenscar

15 MAY 1692

Your Grace’s recent letter to me was so courteous as to put the lucubrations of these French flatterers to shame. I must warn you, however, that en route it must have fallen into the hands of some mischievous boy, who added a very rude postscript.

It was most considerate of you to answer all of my silly questions about the Mint. As you must have surmised, I do have in mind taking part in a transaction that will only profit me if the price of silver should happen to rise late in the month of May. I only hope and pray that all of the silver in London is not bought up in the meantime! I tell you this in confidence, my lord, not wishing that you, who have been so forward in assisting me, should suffer any reverses in consequence of what I am about to do. Know, then, that to be in possession of a large quantity of silver, in London, late in the month of May, would be no bad thing. But do you make your purchases discreetly, lest you touch off a buying panic that would drive up the price to absurd heights. For if people see that the Marquis of Ravenscar is selling gold to buy silver, they will assume he is privy to something, and flock to Threadneedle Street to follow his example. While you might admittedly profit from such a speculative bubble by selling into it at the peak (by no means later than the middle of June), it would cause any amount of disturbance and trouble to the current Government; which I am certain you, a good English patriot, should prefer to avoid, even if you are a Whig and that government be run by the Tories.

Eliza

Eliza to Samuel Bernard

18 MAY 1692

Monsieur Bernard,

I am en route from St.-Malo to Cherbourg aboard the jacht of my husband. In Cherbourg I’ll post this on to Le Havre; I pray it reaches you soon in Paris. I shall tarry in Cherbourg until the invasion is launched.

In St.-Malo this morning I received your despatch of the 12th instant stating that you have the Bills of Exchange in your pocket and want only instructions as to whom they should be endorsed.

This amounts to asking me for the names of the agents who shall be sent across the Channel to present the Bills for payment in London. I regret to inform you that the names of these agents are not known to me yet (though I have some ideas as to who they shall be). Even if they were, I should be chary of sending them to you in a letter during wartime; for the enemy has spies everywhere, and consider what disaster would ensue if our agents’ names became known. For most of them are Englishmen secretly loyal to James Stuart—and if they were caught in England with these Bills in their pockets, they should suffer the penalty for High Treason, which is to be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Cross.

A safer expedient would be for you to endorse the bills to a trusted intermediary who is resident here at Cherbourg, and who shall not be setting foot outside of France until after the invasion. That intermediary can then hold the Bills until the last moment and then endorse them to the several agents just before they cross the Channel. In this way the identity of the agents shall never be exposed to any risk of discovery.

To serve in this role of intermediary, several candidates come to mind, for Cherbourg is crowded just now with notable personages. But all of them are busy and distracted. I, meanwhile, have nothing to do save gaze out the window of my cabin in the sterncastle of this jacht, and watch the preparations. As odd as it might sound, I may be the safest person to choose for this rôle, since there is obviously no likelihood whatever of my crossing the Channel and falling into the hands of enemy interrogators; this alone should be a great comfort to the agents whose names I shall write across the backs of those bills before they set forth on their perilous missions. So, unless you object very strongly, simply endorse the Bills to me and send them to me at Cherbourg.

I don’t know how Lothar is sending the avisas to London, but presumably his channels are swifter than ours, and his payers in England will be ready and waiting for our payees whensoever they arrive.

Eliza

P.S. I look forward to continuing our conversation about St.-Malo. The merchants of the Compagnie des Indes, who on a normal day swagger about that town as if they owned it, have been displaced, and quite out-classed, by the captains and admirals of our invasion fleet. As a result they are almost pathetically eager to talk to anyone about anything—including the state of our commerce with India. My head is full of more information than it can hold, and all of it useless to me. After the invasion, we must meet again at the Café Esphahan, and I’ll tell you all that I know.

Samuel Bernard to Eliza

23 MAY 1692

Madame la comtesse,

Five Bills should be enclosed, each in the amount of one hundred thousand livres tournoises and each endorsed, for the time being, to you. These are drawn ultimately on the credit of the French treasury as personified by M. le comte de Pontchartrain. If you see him, perhaps you could think of a polite way of reminding him that the chain of credit passes through yours truly; my friend Monsieur Castan; and diverse members of the Dépôt of Lyon.

It is a good thing that I went to Lyon, for in the end it was necessary for me to involve myself in the negotiations with Lothar (he was obviously present in Lyon, but we were never in the same room together; his factor Gerhard Mann mediated all of our discussions).

Monsieur Castan is cunning and assiduous, but when presented with something outside his scope he does not respond well, and is apt to become flustered and then irritable. This happened very early in our talks with the House of Hacklheber. It took some time for me to understand why: Lothar believes that the invasion will never actually happen; or that if it does, it will be snuffed out within a few hours. In consequence, our negotiations over the terms of these Bills were strangely duplicitous. The nominal purpose was to pay troops in England, and so we had to settle terms in such a way that we—meaning France—could get silver coin in England, while allowing Lothar to realize some profit. In that sense I got what we wanted, viz. wholly legitimate, negotiable Bills which you now have in your hand. But Lothar’s true purpose, as I eventually came to understand, was to reap a large windfall at very little risk by expressing a willingness to forward silver for an invasion that would never materialize. In effect he was selling us insurance against the contingency that our invasion fails to fail. It was this subtext that M. Castan had not understood, with the result that he was bewildered by what he saw as erratic demands made by the House of Hacklheber.

At the beginning we proposed that the five Bills’ dates of expiry should be at one-week intervals. We envisioned, in other words, that, beginning shortly after the invasion, our agents would present Bills in London approximately once a week for a period of five weeks, as our army fought its way across southern England toward London. We presumed that Lothar would prefer it thus, as it would spread out the transaction over a long period of time and simplify the logistics of buying or shipping the silver and having it minted. This was when we were still naïve enough to believe that Lothar construed payment of the bills as an opportunity. Later, as I have mentioned, I perceived that Lothar actually sees the possible consummation of this transaction as a risk to be hemmed in and mitigated as strictly as possible. Accordingly, he hated the idea of staggering the Bills’ dates, because it would mean committing himself to be at risk (risk of having to pay silver to some unknown person in London) over a period of almost two months. For the first Bill would become payable, in theory, about two weeks following the date that Lothar wrote it in Lyon, i.e., in mid-May. The last one would remain payable in theory as late as the middle of July. It was in his interest to limit our freedom in the matter by having the Bills all payable only during a narrow interval of time shortly after the scheduled date of the invasion. That way, if the invasion came off as scheduled and a stable beach-head were established on English soil, we should have only a few days in which to present the Bill in London and demand that all of the silver be supplied at once. The deal became, in other words, an all-or-nothing proposition to be resolved, one way or the other, quite early. Indeed, Lothar wanted to issue one single Bill for half a million livres rather than breaking it up into several smaller ones—this struck me as too risky and I persuaded him to relent. So there are five separate Bills. Four of them bear the same dates—they are 45-day Bills—and the other is a 30-day Bill. All of them were written by Lothar himself; for only he has authority to write Bills of this size. He wrote them in Lyon on the 6th day of May, the Year of our Lord 1692. Postal time from Lyon to London is generally reckoned at about two weeks, so they could be presented there as early as 20 May (by the French calendar). The 30-day Bill is payable on 5 June, the other four on 20 June.

It is generally to the advantage of the payer (Lothar’s factor in London) if the payee (whomever you endorse these Bills to) presents the Bills well in advance of the expiration of their usance, as this will give the payer more time to make arrangements to deliver the specie. That is particularly true in this case, when the acceptance of these Bills in London may trigger purchase or shipment of silver by Lothar.

We have have no reason to present these Bills for payment in London until a successful invasion has occurred, which ought to be no later than the last day of May. The 30-day Bill would then come due almost immediately, which suggests that Lothar will have to have 100,000 livres’ worth of silver on hand in London. Thus we may be assured of paying our troops the first installment of their salary shortly after their arrival on English soil. The other four bills, as I have mentioned, are not payable until 20 June; and obviously it will be in our best interests to present these at the same time as the 30-day Bill so that Lothar will have two or three weeks’ time in which to get an additional 400,000 livres’ worth of silver to the Tower of London to be minted.

That amount, in British coin, is some 20,000 pounds sterling, which represents two days’ produce for the Mint at the Tower; so Lothar’s factor will have to deliver some three tons of bullion to the Tower mint no later than the 17th of June. This will present something of a challenge even to a man of Lothar’s resources, and so he has been careful to insert a proviso on the four 45-day bills stating that they must be presented to the House of the Golden Mercury, Change Alley, London, no later than fifteen days before the date of expiry, i.e., the stroke of midnight, 5 June.

I remind you that the English use a calendar that long ago was abandoned by the rest of the civilized world. It is ten days behind ours, and falling further behind with each tick of the clock. All of the dates I have mentioned in this letter are in the modern (French) system of reckoning; you must subtract ten days to get their English equivalents.

In all other respects this transaction is wholly normal and self-explanatory and should present no particular difficulties for you or your agents.

It has been my honor and privilege to be of service to France in this matter. I look forward to renewing our acquaintance at the Café Esphahan after the tumult of invasion has subsided.

Your humble &c.

Samuel Bernard

Cabin of Météore, off Cherbourg, France

2 JUNE 1692

FOR THREE DAYS Météore had been swinging about her anchor in a languid circle like the shadow on a sundial, driven by the comings and goings of the tides. Eliza lived in a great cabin at the stern. Had this been a warship or a merchantman, this would have been the private domain of the captain. One of its walls consisted of an arc of windows, as broad as the whole ship, staring abaft. When Eliza’s view through those windows consisted of the town of Cherbourg, it meant that the tide was flooding in from the Channel, pushing Météore east-southeast at the end of her cable. When the tide ebbed, then, and Météore swung round the other way, she ought to have enjoyed a view out to sea. Instead, for three days she had seen nothing but fog: a murk into which all her carefully laid plans had been slowly dissolving. Very occasionally, loud booming noises would come out of it as gunners on the lost ships would take aim and fire at dark patches that were making suspicious noises. But for the most part it was a source of cacophonous music: sailors blowing trumpets and whistles, beating drums, and calling out in English, Dutch, or French and rattling chains as they raised or lowered anchors, depending on whether they judged it less hazardous to drift with the tide or stay in one place.

The two fleets—to the west, forty-five French ships under Admiral de Tourville, and to the east, ninety-nine Dutch and English ships under Admiral Russell—had collided in plain view of Cherbourg on the 29th, and joined battle. Tourville had driven hard into the center of Russell’s line, so careless of the risk of being flanked that he had flanked himself. Standing on Météore’s maintop watching the battle through a perspective-glass, Eliza had almost phant’sied she could read Tourville’s mind: He believed that the great ships in Russell’s center were under command of Jacobites who would strike their colors and run up Stuart flags when he bore in close. Instead of which they had opened fire, and it had developed into a full engagement.

On behalf of Jean Bart, Eliza had of late campaigned in the salons of Versailles to persuade young courtiers that the navy was as gallant as the army. Few had taken the bait. For one glorious hour in the Channel off Cherbourg, a battle had played out that, if only Versailles could have seen it, would have left the army denuded of talent for years to come. Never again would Eliza have had to use words to convey the glamour of naval combat, for it was all there plainly to be seen. The flagship of Admiral Tourville was Soleil Royal, new, with a hundred guns; as fine a ship as any afloat, for French shipwrights had caught up with and even surpassed the Dutch in recent years. Admiral Russell’s flagship was Britannia, also with a hundred guns. These two vessels went after each other like fighting cocks. There was no standing off to watch the battle from a remove, no tedious maneuver and counter-maneuver of the line of battle. The worst of the fighting was not delegated to lesser ships and lower ranks. Like two medieval kings jousting in the lists, Soleil Royal and Britannia went at each other full-bore, each giving as good as it got. Before long they had crippled each other. Only then did Admiral Tourville seem to comprehend that none of the English ships would be coming over to his side—which meant he was outnumbered by more than two to one. New signals went up on the half-ruined Soleil Royal. The French fleet suspended the attack and drew off in good order. They had engaged a force double their size, rendered the opposing flagship useless, and stood down, all without losing a single vessel. More importantly to Eliza, the twenty thousand French and Irish soldiers camped outside of Cherbourg—mostly around La Hougue, ten or fifteen miles away—were still safe on terra firma. James Stuart, who had been King of England, and phant’sied he still was, had come out from his pretend Court at St.-Germain to head up the invasion; presumably he had watched this battle from some high place nearby. He had just suffered one more rude shock in a life that had been full of them: Not a single one of the British ships—his ships—had shown the slightest inclination to take his part in the dispute. It had to be obvious, even to him, that there would be no invasion.

Eliza would never have been so fatuous as to have said that the day had gone perfectly. For aboard those ships scuttling about on the water were men, and every bloom of powder-smoke meant balls of metal flying through the air and sometimes carrying away legs, or lives. But not a single ship had gone down; it was no longer possible to take seriously the possibility of an invasion; and Eliza’s plan was ticking along like a watch.

Then the wind had died, and the brassy haze that had lain on the water for most of that day had congealed into fog. It had come down like a grey velvet curtain terminating the first act of an opera, which was well enough; except that then it had got stuck, and there had been no second, third, fourth, or fifth Acts; only endless, sporadic noises off as the fleets had drifted to and fro, firing at phantoms. The rest of the 29th, fog; the 30th, fog; the 31st, fog; the 1st of June, fog! From time to time some intrepid sailors would reach shore in a longboat and grope their way along the coast until they found Cherbourg, and they would bring news. In this way they learned, for example, that some French ships (anchored) and some English ones (drifting) had become tangled together in the murk on the second day, and had at each other with cutlasses until the tide had drawn them apart. But really very little happened. On the first day Eliza had wished that all of Versailles could have witnessed the duel of the flagships; every hour since then, she had thanked Providence that no courtiers were anywhere nearby to see this travesty; or (what would was worse) to not see it. She did not envy Pontchartrain and Étienne, who would have to approach the King soon and request more money for the navy. She could not guess what the King might say, for he was unfailingly civil; but she knew what he would be thinking: Why should I scrape my Treasury floor to build wooden tubs so that men may bump into one another in fog?

She had all but given up hope for her plan when the sun had gone down behind the fog last night. “If I see the sun rise tomorrow morning,” she had said, “then perhaps there is a way; if not, the work of the last two months is wasted, and I shall begin all over again.”

At first light today she had gazed into the eastern sky half hoping to see nothing but a cliff of fog, for then her plan would have been unequivocally dead, which would have been altogether simpler and easier. Instead she had seen the disk of the sun, as crisp, and about as bright, as a copper coin resting on a bed of ashes.

She closed her eyes; invoked the Devil and the Heavenly Father in the same sentence, in case either of them was listening; and closed the shutters on three of the cabin windows, while leaving the others open. As Météore swung round on the morning tide, and exposed her gilded backside to the town, this signal would become visible to those who had been watching for it.

She began to pack some goods into a bag: first, five Bills of Exchange, which she wrapped up in a wallet of skins, oiled to baffle moisture. Then a rolled blanket. Scarves. A comb and some pins, clips, and ribbons for suppressing her hair. Some silver coins, mostly Pieces of Eight chopped into wedge-shaped bits, certain to astonish the English.

The rooves of Cherbourg were glowing, seemingly not with the reflected light of the sun, but rather from within, like hot irons pulled from the forge. A boom sounded from far off, then another, then a ripple of them.

Then someone knocked on her door and her skeleton practically jumped free of her skin; for she phant’sied somehow it was a handful of wayward grapeshot striking Météore. She dropped her bag on the floor and kicked it under her bed, then went to the door and unlatched it. It was Brigitte, her lady-in-waiting.

“It is Monsieur d’Ascot to call on you, my lady.”

“Bit early.”

“Nevertheless, he is here.”

“A few minutes while I make myself presentable.”

“Shall I help you?”

“No, for I am not really going to make myself presentable. I make him wait because I can, and because it is expected, and because he deserves to be punished for coming so early.”

“PARDON ME, MADAME, for having disturbed your morning,” said William, Viscount Ascot, in French that sounded as if he’d practiced it while he’d been waiting. Eliza thought of asking him to speak English; but he’d probably take it as an insult. “I was asked to keep you apprised of any news concerning the invasion.”

This meant several things. First of all, in spite of the fact that James Stuart had showed up, there must be someone competent still in charge and making information wash up and down the chain of command. Second, this man, Ascot, must be one of the agents who were supposed to carry the Bills of Exchange to London. Third, nothing was going to happen; for if Ascot and the other four agents were going to do it today, all five would have showed up at dawn, and they’d already be fanning out across the Channel in separate boats, each with a Bill of Exchange in his breast pocket.

“Time is drawing very short,” Eliza remarked. “The Bills must be presented in London three days from now. They must be sent on their way this morning, or else I might as well tear them up.”

“Yes, madame,” said Ascot. “The King and Council are aware of it.” He meant James Stuart and his claque. As if to emphasize this, he gazed out the window into Cherbourg. Somewhere in the town, on some church-steeple, there must be signalmen poised to raise flags as messages came in from the headquarters at La Hougue. “The fog is lifting!” he exclaimed. “When I was strolling on the upperdeck just now, madame, I was able to see one or two miles out into the Channel.”

“And what did you observe, monsieur?”

“Boats coming in, madame.”

“Under sail or—”

“No, for the wind is only just coming up. They are longboats, with sailors pulling lustily at the oars. Some of them are towing a damaged ship—a big one.”

“Do you think it might be the Soleil Royal?”

“Quite possibly, madame. Or”—Ascot smiled—“perhaps what is left of Britannia.”

This made Eliza dislike Ascot somehow; for he was after all an Englishman. He was straining visibly to say things he guessed she would like to hear; and his guesses were not very interesting. She was silent for a moment, out of sheer hopelessness. Into that silence Ascot put the words “On those longboats will be information, madame; the information that the King of England shall require to make his decision.”

Eliza nodded as if she accepted this; but what she was thinking was, first, How could even a syphilitic be so insane as to phant’sy that the invasion might still happen and, second, If he doesn’t cancel it soon I shall have a grave problem on my hands. She glanced involuntarily at the cabin windows, and the three closed shutters. They’d been visible from Cherbourg for at least half an hour now. Things were in motion that she could no longer control.

For a minute or two it had been possible to hear shouting abovedecks, which aboard ship was a wholly usual thing; more so when longboats were coming in from the Channel bearing news. Eliza had paid no attention to it. Now, though, they heard a thunking splash. A man, or something as big as a man, going overboard.

“Madame, I beg your leave to investigate—” began Ascot.

“Go, go!” said Eliza in English; which startled Ascot so much that he reverted to it as he opened the cabin door.

“I can’t imagine what this is all about—what on earth—”

Eliza followed him out the hatch into a dark and somewhat cluttered space sheltered beneath the poop deck. But in a few strides they had emerged onto the open upperdeck of Météore. From here they enjoyed a clear view forward, which meant, out of the harbor and into the waters of the Channel. As Ascot had mentioned, many longboats were coming in. Too many, to Eliza’s suspicious eye; for how many were really needed, to carry a few bits of news? Bright patches shone out here and there in the fog on the Channel: sunlight illuminating squares of canvas that had been strung up to catch the freshening breeze.

As Ascot had mentioned, one ship—a big one—was a good deal closer. It was not so much being towed by longboats as being washed into the harbor by the tide. It had somehow caught a sunbeam that had pierced a loop-hole in the fog. Or so Eliza thought when she first caught sight of it out the corner of her eye. When she looked at it full on, though, she realized it was making its own light. It was burning. It was, or had been, Soleil Royal.

Her attention was diverted by another thunk-splash, then another. It could no longer be denied that men were jumping off the ship.

Several of the sailors on the upperdeck were men she had never laid eyes on before. And to judge from the curious way they were gazing about, they were new to Météore.

Just ahead of them a man vaulted over the upperdeck railing on to the ship. This was not supposed to happen. There was nothing out there—it was like a stranger jumping into a second-storey window.

“I say!” exclaimed Ascot, still stuck in English. “I do say!”

The newcomer turned to face Ascot. His answer was as follows: “Fucking whoreson Jacobite traitor!” He was raising one arm as he delivered this remark, and punctuated the sentence by turning Ascot’s head into a pink spout. The thing in his hand was a blunderbuss.

Eliza went back into the dark space beneath the poop deck and began pulling doors open. The doors led to cabins where Brigitte, Nicole, and a maidservant were lodged. “Into my cabin now, no questions!”

She got them all into the big cabin: four women in all. Brigitte was of a mind to heave furniture against the door. But that did not work as well here as it would have ashore, since the significant furniture was bolted down. Some trunks, a chair, and a mattress were all that they could shift for in the way of a barricade. Eliza urged them all to bend their efforts to this task, even though she knew it was absurd. A glance out the windows told her that Météore was moving. The English had cut her anchor cable, made her fast to a longboat or two, and were towing her out into the Channel. Better for them to attend to barricade-making than to think too hard about what this portended.

A most unsettling noise radiated through the air all round, and made their breakfasts quiver in their stomachs. Eliza went to a window and saw one of Cherbourg’s shore-batteries obnubilated by powder-smoke. The artillerymen had opened fire; she guessed they were hoping to sink Soleil Royal before she drifted into the anchorage and set fire to other ships, or exploded. She explained as much to her companions. Fortunately none of them was swift enough to ask how long it might be before the same batteries opened up on Météore.

They had been ignored, for a time, by those who had taken the ship—which made perfect sense once Eliza understood that their intention was to take the entire vessel. But now that Météore was under way, albeit slowly, English marines had begun to pound desultorily on the door of the cabin. Hammers and prybars were mined from tool-lockers. Splinters began to fly out of the wall—rather than waste effort on the barricaded door, they were simply smashing their way through a bulkhead.

Such was the noise that Eliza might almost have overlooked the sudden arrival of the immense one-armed man in her cabin. Almost; for he entered through a window, swinging in on the end of a rope, and a chunk of glass hit her in the ear. And the maidservant must have seen him hurtling toward the glass, for she began screaming an instant before the implosion, and kept it up for a few moments after; long enough for the intruder to catch her about the waist by his one proper arm, pick her up, and throw her out of the ship. In the end, the scream was terminated only by her impact with the water. A few seconds later it resumed, sounding a bit gurgly. The large man had big pale blue eyes and seemed distracted; so much to take in, so many things to do. He looked around the cabin, making a quick count of the number of women who had not yet been thrown out (three). He turned and looked back at the ruined window. It was partly blocked by a skein of crazed glass, shredded wood, and caulking, which had complicated the defenestration of the maidservant. The man shrugged and one of his arms tripled in length. For it had been severed below the elbow and replaced with a three-part flail, segments made of some sort of dark, heavy-looking wood, bound and capped with iron, and joined one to the next by short segments of chain. He turned toward the window, judged the distance, and went into a curious shrugging and shivering movement that propagated down the length of the flail and sent its distal segment ripping through what was left of the window-frame like chainshot launched from a cannon. That and a few kicks sufficed to make a clean rectangular aperture through which he presently hurled a screaming Nicole.

Before he could pursue this wench-flinging project any further, he was distracted by the rude irruption into the cabin of a man’s arm. The English boarders had made a hole, and one of them was reaching in to see what he might grab. At the top of his list was the brass bolt holding the cabin door closed.

The ramshackle and skeletal arm of the flail rattled across the cabin, a strangely unfolding train of dire consequences, and struck the new intruder round about the elbow with a splintery sort of noise. The arm was withdrawn, leaving a dark cavity through which the one-armed man flung a dagger that had appeared in his hand from nowhere. “Shoot him!” someone screamed, from the other side of the bulkhead; but Brigitte had the presence of mind to topple Eliza’s mattress—which had been propped against the cabin door—so that it obscured the rift in the bulkhead. The men on the other side could reach through the hole and thrust it away, but it only flopped back again; which, if Eliza had had more time for reflection, she might have taken as some sort of lesson in how soft defenses could be more effective than hard ones.

Eliza had gone to the missing window. Below was a two-oared skiff. A line ran from it straight up to a grapple snared in the rigging of Météore’s mizzen-mast, above; this was how the one-armed man had gotten aboard, though, being one-armed, it seemed he had had to make use of some ingenious block-and-tackle arrangement, much too complicated for Eliza to work out under these circumstances.

The two women who had been flung out earlier were bobbing like lilies on the water, for their skirts had inflated as they had dropped. Eventually they would become waterlogged and sink, but they had both got hold of the little boat’s gunwale and seemed fine for now. Which was the very least that Eliza looked for, from her personal staff. Indeed she made a mental note to ask this question of all prospective employees she interviewed in future: You are on your mistress’s jacht preparing for her petit levée when the vessel is taken by English marines and towed out to sea under fire from shore batteries. Barricaded in a cabin, waiting for a fate worse than death, you are picked up and hurled into the sea by a mysterious one-armed giant who has swung into a window on a rope. Do you (a) struggle bootlessly until you sink and drown, (b) scream until someone rescues you, or (c) dog-paddle to the nearest floating object and wait calmly for your mistress to resolve the difficulty?

Eliza had suspected very early that the one-armed man might be some sort of a godsend, and was now convinced of it. She hitched up her skirt, snaked a leg under her bed, caught her bag-handle on the point of her slipper, and jerked it out. Turning to the open window, she paused for a few moments to time her breathing, and the rolling of the seas; then she tossed out the bag, and it landed square in the middle of the rowboat. Then she turned around. Flail-arm, it seemed, had fastened his gaze upon Brigitte with a look that seemed to say, “I mean to throw you out next, mademoiselle,” and she had declined the honor. Now he was trying to get one arm about her waist (a factitious narrowing of Brigitte’s midsection, owed to laces and whalebones). Few men were big, strong, and reckless enough to pick up Brigitte and toss her, when she was not of a mind to be. This fellow had been, prior to the loss of his arm. As matters stood, they were evenly matched, unless he elected to beat her senseless with the terrible flail first. And this he was not of a mind to do; though he was plainly enough tempted, Eliza thought she could see a tenderness about his eyes. And so a dire, ungainly, loud struggle, destructive of property and of the dignity of the participants, ranged all across the cabin.

“Brigitte!” Eliza called, at a moment when the one-armed man had tripped over his flail and was slow getting up. Brigitte raised her hot gaze from the intruder and looked up to see Eliza framed in the window. “You may stay and flirt with him all you want, or take him to bed for all I care! But I am departing and shall await you below.” And then she vanished from Brigitte’s sight.

In spite of herself she let out a yell just before she hit the water. Then she was speechless for a moment, it was so cold; but before more than a few moments had passed, she began paddling toward the wee boat, as best she could. She did this partly out of a thought to the Interview Question, and partly out of fear that Brigitte and Monsieur Flail-arm might hurtle down atop her at any moment. Heavy splashes behind her confirmed that she’d made the correct choice.

To get four sopping femmes aboard so small a boat was no simple thing. Flail-arm, as soon as he’d gone into the water, had prestidigitated another sharp object and severed the line linking the rowboat to Météore, and the gap between them had begun to widen. Eliza glanced up at her stolen jacht only once. She saw English marines at the poop-deck rail, and English marines in the windows of her cabin (for they had finally got past Brigitte’s improvisations). One of them had the bad manners to aim a pistol down at Flail-arm. But just then a boom sounded from not far away, and something whined over their heads and ripped two pounds of oak out of the railing. The marines jumped back, and some flung themselves to the deck. Eliza followed Flail-arm’s startled gaze across the water and spied a boat coming on rapidly, under full sail.

Eliza was no great aficionado of ship-types, and made a practice of quitting any conversation in which the men drifted off into, and got stuck on, ship-prattle. But at a glance she guessed this one was eighty feet long. It had no transom and no superstructure, had two masts, was lug-rigged. In Holland it might have gone under the name of galjoot. In any case, it was a coastal trading-ship, adequate to cross the Channel, and it was obviously armed with at least one swivel-gun. The shot they had fired at the English marines had been mostly for effect. Never could this little smuggler’s craft have challenged Météore, had Météore been under sail, and properly manned; but as matters stood, the galjoot had enough sting in her swivel-guns to give the English second thoughts about standing in plain view and taking pot-shots at Men Overboard. Eliza had spied the boat a few minutes ago, and hoped it might be the one she had hired; this confirmed as much. It made no effort to pursue Météore, but wore around so as to make itself a barrier between Météore and the rowboat, and then released the air from its sails. Arbalète (for that was the name painted on her bows) approached with a curious mixture of charity and hostility, on the one hand flinging out lines for the ladies to snatch from the air, or rake up out of the water, on the other hand keeping loaded muskets at the ready. The only part of this morning’s proceedings that they had been led to expect was that they might be collecting an anonymous passenger from the vicinity of Météore. All else—the assault of the English longboats, the apparition of the flaming Soleil Royal, and Flail-arm with his rowboat—had been unexpected. Eliza was already dreading the re-negotiation of the deal that probably lay ahead with the captain of Arbalète. That it had even ventured this far into the melee could probably be attributed solely to a bloke standing amidships holding a musket: Bob Shaftoe.

“All is well, Sergeant Bob. No, I don’t know who he is. He is a mute, or something. But he seems well-intentioned. The worst I can say of him is that he is more forthright in his methods than would be considered proper at Versailles.”

“I have noted him about the waterfront, spying on Météore,” was Bob’s answer.

“Come to mention it, so have I,” said Eliza, “but lacking your penetration, sir, I could not make out whether he was spying, or merely satisfying his curiosity.”

“Perhaps lovely Duchesses are more accustomed to being stared at for hours at a time than mangled Sergeants,” Bob said. “To me it looked like spying.”

“As perhaps it was, Sergeant Bob; but this morning he has been of service to a boat-load of women.”

“Is it to be you alone, or the entire boat-load?” demanded the incredulous Monsieur Rigaud, Captain of Arbalète. Until this point, he had been preoccupied by the spectre—even more terrifying to a ship-captain than to any other sort of person—of the Soleil Royal drifting past them with gouts of flame spurting from her hundred gun-ports. Rigaud seemed at last to have convinced himself that the English, before setting fire to her, had extracted her stores of gunpowder—i.e., that they wanted her to burn for a long time, make a memorable spectacle for the citizenry of Cherbourg, and perhaps set fire to a few other ships—not simply blow up. If he was right, then the danger to Arbalète was past, for the flagship had unequivocally drifted beyond them. He had, accordingly, turned his mind to a threat almost as dire: an onslaught of female passengers.

“Only I,” said Eliza, and slung her bag at Rigaud’s head.

This was news to the other women, and caused a little flurry of gasps and outcries. Eliza considered trying to explain matters. Mommy must run off to England and steal three tons of silver. Instead she reached up—for the rowboat was grinding against Arbalète’s side—and let Bob seize one of her hands, and a French sailor the other. The weight came off of her feet. She was hoisted aboard Arbalète like a bale of silk. “Lovely Brigitte,” she called, “I hope that one day you will forgive me for now pressing you in to service as galérienne. But you must get in to shore before matters get any worse; and this man, I am afraid—”

“Rows in circles. The same had occurred to me, my lady.” Brigitte seized the oars.

“We shall keep our swivel-guns charged, and watch you in to the shore,” volunteered Monsieur Rigaud, who had become considerably more pliant now that the rowboat full of women was working away from Arbalète.

“Send a despatch to Captain Bart in Dunkerque,” Eliza called.

“Saying what, Madame?”

“That it is going to happen after all.”

“AMPUTATIONS ARE DICEY THINGS,” remarked Bob Shaftoe some hours later. For a while, he had had that look on his face that warned Eliza he was pondering something, and likely to blurt out just such a ghoulish observation as soon as he took a whim to speak. “One strives to preserve the elbow, or the knee, at all costs, for that additional degree of articulation in the stump makes all the difference. In a below-the-elbow amputation, the hand is gone, and with it the ability to sense, to grasp, to caress. But yet there is the elbow, and the sinews to make it act. To turn the arm into a flail—a whole train of articulations, unfeeling, ungrasping, yet capable of action—yes, to put a flail on a stump is wholly fitting in a way.”

“Remind me to ask you later for your thoughts on disembowelment,” said Eliza, then regretted it, for she was already queasy. They were out on the Channel now, the wind had come up, and she was robed, hooded, and swaddled in blankets like a woman out of a desert land—a very cold desert land.

Bob squinted at her. “I’ve had any number of such thoughts this morning, and have held them back from you.” He was alluding to the scenes that they had all beheld from the deck of Arbalète as they had sailed east-northeast along the tip of the Cotentin—that stump of an arm that France thrust out toward England. For the first hour or so, their view had been of Cherbourg, and of the waters north of it, which had gradually been unveiled as the last traces of the four-day fog had dissolved into plain air. A goodly part of the Anglo-Dutch fleet was there. The burning of Soleil Royal and the invasion of Cherbourg Harbor by longboats were only aspects of a larger action, which they came better to understand as they drew back from it. The English and Dutch had cut a few ships from the French fleet and were going about the tedious and ungallant work of mopping them up: trying to get enough cannonballs into their hulls to sink or ruin them before they could scurry in under the protection of the shore batteries. By the time that Cherbourg had receded from Arbalète’s view, that issue was no longer in much doubt: This remnant of the French fleet, if it reached Cherbourg at all, would never sail again. Not long after, Arbalète had rounded the Point of Barfleur, which had brought them in view of a vast bay, fifteen miles broad and five deep, pressed like a thumbprint into the eastern side of the Cotentin. It was there, in the shelter of the peninsula, that the bulk of the invasion-transports had gathered to receive soldiers and matériel from the great camps around La Hougue. And it was there, they now discovered, that Admiral Tourville had sought refuge with perhaps two dozen of his ships. Now that the fog had lifted, the bulk of the Anglo-Dutch fleet had formed up off La Hougue and were boring in to finish Tourville off; and since the anchorage proper was protected by shore batteries, this meant longboat-work again. What had happened to Météore this morning was, in other words, to be the pattern for what would be done to Tourville’s fleet today. Eliza, though she knew little of Naval tactics, could see the logic of it as plainly as if it had been writ out on a page by Leibniz: The English could bring their ships no nearer shore than a certain point because of the shore-batteries. Tourville could not sail what was left of the French fleet—now outnumbered three or four to one—out of the anchorage. And so there was a no-man’s-land between the English and French, which soon developed a dark infestation of longboats issuing from all the Anglo-Dutch ships. Unable to maneuver or even to weigh anchor in the jammed anchorage, the crews of the French ships could only stand on the decks and wait to repel boarders.

Arbalète, which under these circumstances could be overlooked as an insignificant smuggler’s boat, now made her course due north, threaded her way between a pair of laggardly English men-of-war, and began a sprint for Portsmouth. Before the anchorage of La Hougue was lost to view astern, they noted a spark of light drifting out of it, trying to catch up with its own column of smoke. The burning of the French fleet had begun. Those aboard Arbalète could at least turn their backs on the scene, and run away from it. Not so fortunate, as Eliza knew, was James Stuart, who was camped in a royal tent on a hill above La Hougue. He’d have to watch the whole thing. For all that she despised the man and his reign, Eliza couldn’t but feel sorry for him: chased out of England once in girl’s clothes, during the Commonwealth, and a second time with a bloody nose during the Glorious Revolution; loser of the Battle of the Boyne; chased out of Ireland; and now this. It was while she was mulling over these cheerful matters that Bob Shaftoe unexpectedly piped up with his ruminations on the topic of stumps; which gives a fair portrait of the mood aboard Arbalète during her passage to England.

“I HAVE SEEN altogether too many men in my day, living as I have in Vagabond-camps and Regimental quarters. And so it could be that my memory has been overfilled and is now playing tricks on me. But I think that I have seen that man before,” Bob said.

“Flail-arm? You mentioned you’d noticed him in Cherbourg, spying or gawking.”

“Aye, but even the first time I saw him there, I phant’sied I’d seen his face elsewhere.”

“If he was spying on me there, perhaps he had been doing the same in St.-Malo, and you’d noticed him on one of your visits,” said Eliza, and was immediately sorry that she had raised this topic; for her bowels were in an uproar, she’d spent more time at the head than all others on the boat summed, and Bob had conspicuously refrained from saying anything about it, but only squinted at her knowingly. It was late afternoon. The sun was slicing down across the northwestern sky, making England into a rubble of black lumps in the foreground, and casting golden light on Bob’s face.

“I phant’sied I’d make the return voyage, you know.”

“You mean, back to Normandy tomorrow? But are you not absent without leave from your Irish regiment? Would you not be flogged for it, or something?”

“I got leave, on a pretext. It is still not too late.”

“But it sounds as though you are having second thoughts.”

“The closer we draw to England, the better she suits me. I went to France for diverse reasons, none of which have turned out to be any good.”

“You hoped it would bring you within reach of Abigail.”

“Aye. But instead I was marooned in Brest nigh on half a year, then Cherbourg for three months. And so serving France has brought me no nearer to Paris than if I’d been posted in London. Who knows where they’ll have us go next?”

“If what I have heard means anything,” Eliza said, “the fighting will be very hot in the Spanish Netherlands this summer. They are probably laying siege to Namur as we speak. That is most likely where Count Sheerness is—”

“And so probably Abigail as well,” said Bob, “for if he means to spend the whole summer in those parts, he has brought his household with him. Very well. My most expedient way of reaching that part of the world shall be to re-join the Black Torrent Guards and be shipped thither at King William’s expense.”

“Don’t you suppose your nine months’ absence will have been noted? What kind of flogging will they award you for that!?”

“I was conducting military espionage in the enemy camp for the Earl of Marlborough,” Bob retorted; though the look on his face, and the lilt in his voice, suggested that this had only just come into his head.

“The Earl of Marlborough has been dismissed from all offices, stripped of command. His colonelcy of the Black Torrent Guards will have been sold off to some Tory hack.”

“But nine months ago when my mission of espionage began, none of that was true.”

“Your idea still seems risky to me,” said Eliza, eager to draw the exchange to a curt finish because the rioting had started up in her belly once more.

“Then I shall test the waters first, with Marlborough, before presenting myself to the Regiment,” Bob said. “You’re going to London! I don’t suppose you’d be willing to bring him a private note from me—?”

“Since you cannot read or write, I suppose you’d like me to pen the note as well?” said Eliza, and turned her back on Bob, the better to search for a convenient scupper. She did not feel as though she would have time to trudge all the way to the head; besides which, a French sailor was already sitting up there, taking a lengthy shit into the English Channel and singing.

“Your offer is well received,” Bob returned. “And as I am unfit to frame a proper letter to an Earl, perhaps I could interest you in composing it as well—?”

“I’ll just talk to him,” said Eliza, dropping to her hands and knees. The next thing that emerged from her mouth, however, was altogether unfit for presentation to an Earl; a fact Bob was discreet enough not to point out.

London

4 JUNE (N.S.)/25 MAY (O.S.), 1692

Where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruin.

—HOBBES,
Leviathan

ELIZA FRETTED, AND BELABORED HERSELF for being too late and too little organized, until the moment that she gazed out the carriage window and saw the waters of the Thames below her, all crammed with shipping. This was too strange to believe for a moment. Then it came to her that this street must be London Bridge, and the carriage must be traversing one of the firebreaks, where it was possible to get a view. The sight of the River triggered a curious reversal in her mood. It was midafternoon of the day nominated, by the French and most of the rest of Christendom, June 4th, and by the English May 25th. Whichever calendar was used, the fact of the matter was that the Bills of Exchange would not expire until the end of the day tomorrow; she had, in other words, reached London with more than twenty-four hours to spare. This in spite of the fact that for the last week—since the day that Tourville had assaulted Russell in the Channel, and the fog had closed in—she had been certain she was too late and that the entire enterprise was doomed. From that moment until this, London had seemed infinitely far away, and impossible to reach. Now, having reached it, she wondered what all the fuss had been about. For London was after all a great city and people went there all the time—the number of masts thrust into the air above the Pool spoke to this. Perhaps Eliza had nursed an exaggerated view of its remoteness because of the difficulty she’d had in escaping to it almost three years ago, when her ship had been waylaid by Jean Bart.

At any rate she was across the Bridge and in the City before she had reached the end of these ruminations. The horses irritably dragged the carriage up Fish Street Hill as the coachman irritably popped his whip about their ears. It occurred to Eliza that she had not given the driver a destination, other than London. She had no destination in mind. But the driver had. Presently he turned off to the left, into a slit between new (brick, flat-fronted, post-Fire) buildings. The slit broadened and developed into a rambling composition of chambers and orifices, like the stomachs of a cow. It all seemed to be wrapped around the backside of a big structure that looked somehow like church, but somehow not. Tired Eliza remembered, then, that she had found her way to a country where there was more than just one church. She reckoned that this must be a meeting house of Quakers or some other such sect. At any rate they came, after certain turns, reversals, and squeezings, to a doorway adorned with a sign shaped like the head of an indifferent-looking brown horse. A porter exploded out of the doorway and vied with a footman for the honor of ripping the carriage door open. For painted on the outside of the carriage were the arms of the Marquis of Ravenscar, who Eliza gathered must be a valued regular of this inn or tavern, the Brown Horse or the Old Gelding or whatever they called it—

“Welcome to Nag’s Head Court, my lady,” said Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, emerging from the door, and bowing as deeply as a man of his maturity and dignity could without peeling a hamstring or lobbing his wig into the gutter. Eliza by now had thrust her head and shoulders out the door (about all she wanted to reveal, given that she had lost contact with her wardrobe some days ago). She ought to have given her undivided attention to Ravenscar; but she could not restrain the urge to look this way and that up the length of Nag’s Head Court.

“No, madame, your senses have not misled you, it is just as mean, narrow, and squalid as you feared, and no apology from me shall balance the offense I have done you, by bringing you to it; but it was a suitable place for me to wait, and behold, it is nigh to the mysteries and delights of the ’Change.”

Eliza followed his gaze down the alley. It rambled on in the same vein for a stone’s throw and discharged into a proper street, which seemed to be crowded with an inordinate number of well-to-do-chaps who were all in a frightful hurry. She knew what it was just that quickly. If she had been wearing Versailles court-makeup, it would have cracked and fallen to the ground like ice from a warming roof. For her face had done something she never allowed it to do at Versailles, namely, opened up into a broad grin. She directed this at Ravenscar, who all but swooned. “On the contrary, my lord, in all London there’s no place I’d rather be than the ’Change, and there is no place I am so well suited for, in my present state, than a dark doorway in Nag’s Head Court—so—”

Ravenscar was aghast, and quick-stepped to the base of the wee Barock staircase that the footmen had arranged beneath the carriage-door. This was to help her down, if she insisted; but really he was throwing his body across her path as a barrier. “I would not dream of escorting a Duchess into that place! I had hoped that the lady might suffer me to join her in the carriage while we proceeded to some destination worthy to be graced by one of her dignity.”

“It is, after all, your carriage, monsieur—”

“Nay, madame, yours, for as long as you choose to remain on our Isle, and I, your servant.”

“Get in the damned carriage, then. And pray lower the shades, for I am not fit to stop light.”

Ravenscar did as he was told. The carriage began to move. “Obviously, my driver was able to find you in Portsmouth—?”

“We found him. The skipper of our boat would not go to Portsmouth, or any other proper port-town, but only to certain coves he knew of. Thence we hired a waggon.”

Ravenscar was looking curiously about the interior of the carriage, as if someone were missing. “We?”

“I was with an Englishman.”

“A Person of Quality, or—”

“A Person of Usefulness. But somewhat bull-headed. He had set his mind to looking up his whilom Captain. When we reached Portsmouth he began to make inquiries about the fellow—name of Churchill.”

Ravenscar winced. “Eeeyuh, the Earl of Marlborough has been clapped in the Tower of London!”

“So you tell me now, but, isolated as I’d been, I’d not heard that news. Otherwise I’d have warned my companion not to mention the name.”

“They put your man in irons, did they?”

“They did. For I gather that the charge on which Marlborough is being held is that of being a Jacobite spy—?”

“It is so ludicrous that I am too embarrassed even to repeat it to you. But a moiety of the English race are the more inclined to credit an accusation, the more fanciful it becomes; and whoever it was that arrested your man in Portsmouth—”

“Was of that sort, and, seeing a man just off a boat from Cherbourg, asking the whereabouts of Marlborough, assumed the worst.”

“Have they hanged him yet?”

“No, nor will they soon, for haply your carriage came along. I, to them, was just a wench in a wet dress; but when this fine vehicle made the scene, with your arms on the door, and your driver started in with ‘la duchesse’ this and ‘the Duchess’ that—”

“Matters changed.”

“Matters changed, and I was able to let those in charge know that hanging my companion would not be in their best interests. But now that I’m here, I would visit Marlborough.”

“Many would, my lady. The queue of carriages at the Tower is long. You rank most of them, and should be able to go directly to its head. But if I might, first—?”

“Yes?”

They had been driving around a triangular circuit of Cornhill, Threadneedle, and Bishopsgate, enclosing some twenty acres of ground that contained more money than the rest of the British Isles. It was remarkable that they had been able to converse for even this long without the topic having arisen.

“It is frightfully indecent of me to mention this, I know,” said Ravenscar, “but I am, at present, the owner of rather a lot of silver. Rather a lot. They tell me ’tis worth ever so much more now than ’twas three weeks ago, when I bought it; but if news were to arrive, say from Portsmouth, that the French invasion had miscarried—”

“It would suddenly be worth ever so much less. Yes, I know. Well, the invasion has failed.”

Ravenscar’s pelvis actually rose off the bench as if someone had shoved a dagger into his kidney. His voice vaulted to a higher register: “If we could, then, pay a brief call upon a certain gentleman, now, before you go spreading the news about—”

“I’ve no intention of doing that, as the news shall get here soon enough on its own,” said Eliza, which little comforted Ravenscar. “But before you spread the news, by selling all of your silver, I have a small transaction that I must conduct at the House of Hacklheber—do you know it?”

“That? It is a hole in the wall, a niche, a dovecote—if you require pocket money in London, madame, I can convey you to the banca of Sir Richard Apthorp himself, who will be pleased to extend you credit—”

“That is most courteous of you,” said Eliza, rummaging in her pathetic bag, and drawing out a slimy bundle of skins, “but I prefer to get my pocket-money from my own banker, and that is the House of Hacklheber.”

“Very well,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, and boomed on the ceiling with the head of his walking-stick. “To the Golden Mercury in ’Change Alley!”

“I CONFESS THAT I was observing through the window—and only out of a gentlemanly concern for your safety,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, “and only after some half an hour had elapsed—for it struck me as rather a lengthy transaction.”

Eliza had only just returned to the carriage and was still smoothing her skirts down. She’d been in there for an hour and twelve minutes. Ten minutes’ waiting would have made Ravenscar impatient; twenty, apoplectic. Seventy-two had put him through the full gamut of emotional states known to mortal man, as well as a few normally reserved for angels and devils. Now, he was spent, drained. Though perhaps just a bit apprehensive that she would want to go on some other errand next.

“Yes, my lord?”

“The fellow had—well, I don’t know, a bit of a startled look about him. Perhaps ’twas just my imagination.”

“Mind your toes!” This warning came simultaneously from Eliza, and from one of Ravenscar’s footmen, who had carried a box up the wee stairs behind Eliza and thrust it inside; its weight overbore his strength, and it crashed onto the floor, making the carriage rock and bounce up and down for a while on its springs. One of the horses whinnied in protest. “Where shall I place the others, madame?” he inquired.

“There are more!?” exclaimed Ravenscar.

“Ten more, yes.”

“What are we—pardon me, you—going to do with so much, er…did you say ten? Please tell me it is copper.”

Eliza flipped the lid open with her toe to reveal more freshly minted silver pennies than the Marquis of Ravenscar had seen in one place in years. He responded in the only way fitting: with absolute silence. Meanwhile his driver answered the question for him.

“Not load it on this coach, guv’nor, the suspension won’t hold.” The driver was struggling to settle the exhausted horses, who had sensed that the carriage was rapidly getting heavier. Another crash sounded from the shelf in the back, causing the vehicle to pitch nose up, and then another on the roof, which began to bulge downward and emit ominous ticks.

“Summon a hackney!” commanded the Marquis, and then swiveled his eyes back to Eliza, imploring her to answer his question.

“What am I going to do with it?”

“Yes.”

“Sell it, I suppose, at the same time as you are selling yours. It is rather more pocket-money than I shall be requiring during my stay in your city. Though I should very much like to go to the West End later, and go—what is the word they use for it now?”

“I believe the word you are looking for is ‘shopping,’ madame.”

“Yes, shopping. The money, of course, belongs to the King of France. But, gentleman that he is, he would never begrudge me the loan of a few pounds sterling so that I might change into a new dress.”

“Nor would I, madame,” said Ravenscar, “if it came to that—but le Roi, it goes without saying, has precedence.” Ravenscar swallowed. “It is a remarkable coincidence.”

“What coincidence, my lord?”

More jingling crashes came to their ears from just behind, where a hackney had pulled up, and was being laden with more strong-boxes. The sound was enormously distracting to Ravenscar, who struggled to keep stringing words together. “Our route to the lovely shops of the West End shall take us past Apthorp’s, where—”

“Oh, that’s right. You wish to put your silver on the market. Not yet.”

“Not yet!?”

“Think of a ship’s captain, sailing into battle, guns charged and ready to let go a broadside. If he loses his nerve, and fires too soon, the balls fall short of their target, and splash into the water, and he looks a fool. Worse, he is not afforded the opportunity to re-load. It is like that now.”

Ravenscar did not seem convinced.

“After our epistolary flirtation, which I did enjoy so much,” Eliza tried, “I should be crestfallen if I journeyed all the way to London only to find that you were a premature ejaculator.”

“Really! Madame! I do not know how the ladies discourse in France, but here in England—”

“Oh, stop it. ’Twas a figure of speech, nothing more.”

“And not a very accurate one, by your leave; for more is at stake here than you seem to know!”

“I know precisely what’s at stake, my lord.” Here Eliza was distracted by some activity without. A man had emerged from the door of the House of Hacklheber, dressed as if about to embark on a voyage, and was signalling for a hackney. There was no lack of these, as word seemed to have spread that coins were falling from the sky hereabouts. Within moments the fellow was on his way.

“Was that one of the shouting Germans?” Ravenscar inquired.

Eliza met his eye. “You could hear them all the way out here?” Then she tilted her head out the window to watch.

“Madame, I could have heard them from Wales. What were they on about?”

Eliza was crooking her finger at someone outside, then nodding as if to say, yes, I mean you, sirrah! Presently a face appeared in the window: a hackney-driver, hat in hands. “Follow yonder German until he gets on a boat. Watch the boat until you can’t see it any more. Go to—what did you call your Den of Iniquity, my lord?”

“The Nag’s Head.”

“Go to the Nag’s Head and leave word for the Marquis that his ship has come in. Someone there will then give you more of these.” Eliza blindly scooped some coins out of her strong-box and slapped them into the driver’s hat.

“Right you are, milady!”

“It shall probably be the Gravesend Ferry, but you might have to trail him all the way to Ipswich or something,” Eliza added, partly to explain the amount; for she got the idea, from the way Ravenscar had just swallowed his own tongue, that she had overpaid.

The hackney driver was so gone, ’twas as if he’d been launched from a siege-mortar. Eliza looked back to Ravenscar. “You asked, what were the Germans shouting about?”

“Yes. I was afraid I should have to venture within and run them through.” Ravenscar slapped the scabbard of his small-sword.

“They were full of impertinent questions about what I meant to do with all that silver.”

“And you told them—?”

“I affected a noble diffidence, and pretended not to understand any language other than the high French of Versailles.”

“Right. So they believe that the invasion has begun!”

“I cannot read their minds, my lord; and if I could, I should not wish to.”

“And they have in consequence despatched a runner to the Continent. You mentioned Ipswich—implying that his destination is Holland—and his mission is, what?”

Eliza shrugged. “To fetch the rest, I’d suppose.”

“The rest of the Germans!?”

“No, no, the rest of the silver—the remaining four-fifths of it.”

An observer standing without the carriage would have seen it buck and rock. Some sort of nervous catastrophe had caused all of the Marquis of Ravenscar’s muscles to contract at once. He was a few moments getting his faculties back. When he spoke again, it was from a sprawling, semi-prone position. “What the hell are you going to do with so much silver?”

“Most likely, convert it into Bills of Exchange that can be taken back to France.”

“Where the money came from in the first place. Why bother at all?”

“Now it is you who asks impertinent questions,” Eliza said. “All that need concern you for now is that the Hacklhebers believe the invasion has been launched. They are probably trying to buy silver on the London market now. Which shall lead all to believe in the invasion, until positive news arrives to the contrary. Your silver has only gone up in value.”

“In truth there is one other matter that doth concern me,” said Ravenscar, “which is that we are sitting out in the street with a king’s ransom in silver; pray, could we get it now behind walls, locks, and guns?”

“Wherever you consider it shall be safest, monsieur.”

“The Tower of London!” commanded Ravenscar, and the carriage moved, setting off small tinkly avalanches in all the strong-boxes.

“Ah,” said Eliza with evident satisfaction, “no want of walls and guns there, I suppose; and I shall have an opportunity to pay a call on my lord Marlborough.”

“I exist to please you, madame.”

Gresham’s College

10/20 JUNE 1692

Even Solomon had wanted Gold to adorn the Temple, unless he had been supply’d by Miracles.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

“MY DELIGHT AT seeing Monsieur Fatio again is joined by wonder at the company he keeps!” Feeble as it was, this was the best that Eliza could muster when Fatio walked into the library accompanied by a man with long silver hair—a man who could not be anyone but Isaac Newton.

Even by the standards of savants, this had been a socially awkward morning. Eliza had been in London for a fortnight. The first few days had gone to buying clothes, finding lodgings, sleeping, and vomiting; for obviously she was pregnant. Then she had sent notes out to a few London acquaintances. Most had responded within a day. Fatio’s message had not arrived until this morning—it had been shot under her door as she knelt over a chamber-pot. Given the lengthy delay, she might have expected it to be a flawlessly composed letter, the utmost of many drafts; but it had been scratched out in haste on a page torn from a waste-book, and it had asked that Eliza come to Gresham’s right away. This Eliza had done, not without much discomfort and inconvenience; then she had waited in the library for an hour. Now Fatio was at last here, looking flushed and wild, as if he had just galloped in from some battlefield. And he had this silver-haired gentleman in tow.

For a few moments he had stood between them, calculating the etiquette; then he remembered his manners, and bowed to Eliza, and spoke in French: “My lady. Our exploit at Scheveningen is never far from my mind. I think of it every day. Which may give some measure of my joy in seeing you again.” This had been rehearsed, and he delivered it in too much haste for it to seem perfectly sincere; but the situation was, after all, complicated. Before Eliza could respond, Fatio stepped aside and thrust a hand at his companion. “I present to you Isaac Newton,” he announced. Then, switching to English: “Isaac, it is my honor to give you Eliza de Lavardac, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm.”

Fatio scarcely took his eyes from Eliza’s face as he spoke these words, and as Eliza and Isaac curtseyed or bowed and said polite things to each other.

Eliza liked Fatio but remembered, now, why the man had always made her a bit uneasy. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier was forever an Actor in an Italian Opera that existed in his own mind. Today’s scene at the Library of Gresham’s was meant to be some kind of a set-piece. The Duchess, summoned in haste by a mysterious note, fumes impatiently for an hour—dramatick tension mounts—finally, just when she is about to storm out, Fatio saves the day by rushing in, aglow from superhuman efforts, and turns disaster to triumph by bringing in the Master himself. And it was dramatick, after a fashion; but whatever genuine emotions Eliza might have had she kept to herself, for no reason other than that Fatio was studying her as a starving man studies a closed oyster.

Newton had been dragged here; this was plain enough. But once he saw Eliza in the flesh, and she became something concrete to him, his reluctance was forgotten. Then it was a simple matter of remembering why he had been brought here.

They sat around a table, like students, all in the same sorts of chairs, with no thought given to rank. Newton fixed his gaze on a small burn-mark on the tabletop, and collected his thoughts for a minute or two. Eliza and Fatio filled the silence with chit-chat. But each kept an eye on Newton. Finally Newton’s eyes flicked up to a nearby window, and he got a look on his face as if he were ready to unburden his mind of something. Fatio broke off in mid-sentence and half turned toward him.

“I shall speak as if everything Nicolas has said of your wit and erudition is true,” Newton began, “which means that I shall not limp along with half-truths, nor circle back to proffer tedious explanations, as I might do when speaking to certain other Duchesses.”

“Then I shall strive to be worthy of Fatio’s compliments and of your respect, sir,” Eliza answered.

Which seemed to be just the sort of thing Newton had been hoping to hear, for he gave a little nod, and almost smiled, before going on. “I would address in a straightforward way the question of Alchemy, and why I esteem it. For you will think me addled in the mind, that I devote so much time to it. You will think this because all of the Alchemists you have talked to are mountebanks or their fools. This will have given you a low opinion of the Art and its practitioners.

“You are a friend of Daniel Waterhouse, who does not love Alchemy, and who looks on my time spent in the laboratory as time lost to Natural Philosophy. You know, he went so far as to set fire to my laboratory in 1677. I have forgiven him. He has not, however, forgiven me for continuing to study Alchemy. Perhaps he has, by words or gestures, communicated his views to you, my lady.

“You are also a friend of Leibniz. Now, there are those who would have me believe that Leibniz is, to me, some sort of adversary. I do not think so.” Newton’s eyes strayed towards Fatio as he said this. Fatio turned red, and would not meet his gaze. “I say that the product of mass and velocity is conserved; Leibniz says that the product of mass and the square of velocity is conserved; it seems that both of us are correct, and that by applying both of these principles we may build a science of Dynamics—to borrow Leibniz’s term—that is more than the sum of these two parts. So in this Leibniz has not detracted from my work, but added to it.

“Likewise, he would not detract from Principia Mathematica but rather add to it what is plainly wanting: namely, an account of the seats and causes of Force. In this, Leibniz and I are comrades-in-arms. I, too, would unlock the riddle of Force: Force at a distance, such as joins gravitating bodies, and Forces in and among bodies, as when they collide. Or as here.”

Newton extended one hand, palm up, and Eliza supposed for a moment that he was directing her attention to the window set into the wall above this table. But Newton waved his hand around in the air as if trying to catch a moth, and finally steadied it. His palm, which was as pale as parchment, was striped with a little rainbow, projected by some bevel or irregularity in the windowpane. Eliza turned her attention to it. The swath of colors was steady as a gyroscope on a stand, even though Newton’s hand never stopped moving. This was a trompe l’oeil to best anything daubed on a wall by a mischievous painter at Versailles. Eliza acted without thinking: she reached out with both hands, cupping them together beneath Newton’s, and cradled his wayward hand in hers, steadying it. “I see that you are unwell,” she said, “for this is not the tremor of a coffee-enthusiast, but the shivering of a man with a fever.” Yet Newton’s hand felt cold.

“We are all unwell, if it comes to that,” Newton returned, “for if some Plague were to take us all, why, these little spectra would still crawl about the room until the End of Days, neither knowing nor caring whether living hands were held up to catch them. Our flesh stops the light. The flesh is weak, yes, but the spirit is strong, and by applying our minds to the contemplation of what has been interrupted by our fleshly organs of sense, we may make our minds wiser and our spirits better, even though flesh decays. Now! I do not have a fever, my lady.” He took his hand back, and gripped the arm of his chair to stop its shivering. The little rainbow now fell on Eliza’s cupped hands. “But I am mortal and would fain do all that I could, in the time allotted to me, to penetrate this mystery of Force. Now consider this light that you are catching in your hands. It has traveled a hundred million miles from the Sun without being affected in any wise by the Cœlestial Æther. In its passage through the atmosphere it has been subjected to only slight distortions. And yet in traversing a quarter of an inch of window-glass, its course is bent, and it is riven into several colors. It is such an everyday thing that we do not mark it; yet pray consider for a moment just how remarkable it is! During its hundred-million-mile passage, is it not acted upon by the gravity of the Sun, which is powerful enough to hold even mighty Jupiter in its grasp, though at a much greater remove? And is it not acted upon as well by the gravity of the Earth and Moon, and all the other planets? And yet it seems perfectly insensitive to thse mighty forces. Yet there is embedded within this shard of glass some hidden Force that bends it and splits it with no effort. It’s as if a cannonball, hurled at infinite speed from some gun of inconceivable might, and passing through ramparts and bulwarks as if they were shadows, were deflected and shivered into bits by a child holding up a feather. What could be concealed within an ordinary piece of window-glass that harbors such potency, and yet affects you and me not at all? Or consider the action of acids, which can in a few moments dissolve stones that have stood unmarked by Time and the elements since the world was formed. What has the power to annihilate a stone God made, a stone that could support a Pyramid, stop fire, or turn aside musket-balls? Some force of immense power must be latent in acids, to destroy what is so strong. And is it so inconceivable that this force might be akin to, or the same as, what bends the light as it passes through the window? Are these not perfectly suitable questions to be asked by those who style themselves Natural Philosophers?”

“If only others who study Alchemy would form their questions so well, and state them so lucidly!” Eliza said.

“The traditions of the Art are ancient and strange. Alchemists, when they say aught, say it in murky similitudes. This is not for me to remedy, save by pursuing the Work to its proper conclusion and thereby making plain what has been occulted for so many centuries. And it is concerning that Work that I should like to say something to you concerning the gold that Jack Shaftoe stole in Bonanza.”

This was such an unexpected turn in the conversation that Eliza flopped back hard in her chair, like a doll tossed into a box. Fatio turned his face toward her and stared avidly. Newton seemed ever so drily amused by her astonishment. “I do not know the nature of your involvement with this, my lady, and it is neither my place, nor my desire, to quarry the truth out of you. It suffices that you are believed, by diverse members of the Esoteric Brotherhood, to know something about the matter; and as long as that is true, why, it is in your interest to know why Alchemists care so much about this gold. Do you know, my lady?”

“I know, or suspect, only what I have inferred from the words and deeds of certain men who desire it. Those men believe that this particular gold has some supernatural properties exceeding normal gold.”

“I do not know what the word supernatural means, really,” said Isaac, bemused. “But you are not far wrong.”

“I do not wish to be at all wrong. So pray correct me, sir.”

“King Solomon the Wise, builder of the Temple, was the forefather of all Alchemists,” Isaac said. “Set upon the throne, a young man, fearing himself unequal to the task, he made a thousand burnt offerings to the LORD; who then came to him in a dream and said, ‘Ask what I shall give thee.’ And Solomon asked not for wealth or power but for an understanding heart. And it pleased the LORD ‘so well that Solomon had desired this thing, that he gave him an understanding heart ‘so that there hath been none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall arise the like unto thee.’ First Kings, Chapter Three, Verse 12. Thus Solomon’s name became a byword for wisdom: Sophia. What is the name we give to those who love wisdom? Philosophers. I am a philosopher; and though I can never equal the wisdom of Solomon—for it says quite plainly in the chapter and verse I have quoted, that no man who came after Solomon would achieve like wisdom—I can strive to discover some of what is today hidden but was once in plain view in the Temple of Wisdom that Solomon built.

“Now it says, too, that the LORD gave Solomon riches, even though Solomon had not asked for them. Solomon had gold, and moreover he had an understanding heart, so that the secrets hidden within matter—such as I have discoursed of in window-glass and acids—could scarcely have been hidden from his gaze for long. The lucubrations of latter-day Alchemists such as I must be little more than crude mockery of the Great Work that Solomon the Wise undertook in his Temple. For thousands of years, Alchemists have sought to re-discover what fell into obscurity when Solomon came to the end of his years in Jerusalem. Most of their efforts have been unavailing; yet a few of the great ones—Hermes Trismegistus, Sendigovius, the Black Monk, Didier, Artephius—came to similar, if not identical, conclusions as to the process that must be followed to achieve the Great Work. I am very close now—” And here Newton faltered for the first time in several minutes, and took his gaze away from Eliza, and with a little nod and the faintest trace of a smile gathered Fatio once more into the discourse. “We are very close now to achieving this thing. I am told, my lady, that there are those who hold my Principia Mathematica in some high regard; but I say to you that it shall be nothing but a preface to what I shall bring forth next, provided I can only move the Work a short step further.

“It would be of immense help to us in this if we had even a small sample of the original gold given to Solomon by the LORD.”

“Now I understand it at last,” Eliza said. “That gold that was taken by Jack Shaftoe and his pirates from Bonanza is believed, by you and other Alchemists, to have been a sample of King Solomon’s gold, somehow preserved down through the ages. It is somehow different from the gold that the slaves of the Portuguese dig from the earth in Brazil—”

“The theory of how it differs has been developed in more detail than you might care to listen to, particularly if you hold Alchemy to be nonsensical,” said Fatio. “It has to do with how the particles—the atoms—of gold are composed, one to the next, to form networks, and networks of networks, et cetera, et cetera, and what occupies, or may pass into, the holes in the said nets. Suffice it to say that the Solomonic Gold, though it looks the same, is slightly heavier than mundane gold. And so even those who know nothing of the Art may recognize a sample of this Gold as extraordinary merely by weighing it, and computing its density. A large trove of such gold was found in Mexico some years ago and brought back to Spain by the ex-Viceroy, who intended to sell it to Lothar von Hacklheber, but—”

“I know the rest. But what do you phant’sy was King Solomon’s Gold doing in New Spain?”

“There is a tradition that Solomon did not perish, but rather went into the East,” said Newton. “You may credit it, or not; but what is beyond dispute is that the Viceroy was in possession of gold that was heavier than the ordinary.”

“And you are so certain of this because—?”

“Lothar von Hacklheber sent three assayers across the ocean to New Spain to verify it beyond any shadow of doubt.”

“Hmm. No wonder he was so vexed when Jack snatched it from under his nose!”

“May I inquire, my lady, whether you have heard from this Jack Shaftoe recently?”

“He sent me a present in a box, a year and a half ago, but it had quite spoiled in transit, and was buried. Mr. Newton, you may be assured that I, and certain acquaintances of mine in France, are bending all efforts to establish Jack’s whereabouts, but this is well-nigh impossible, as he seems to be flitting all about Araby trading. When I learn anything definite, I shall—”

But here Eliza broke off, for she’d been interrupted. Not by any utterance, for both Fatio and Newton were silent, but rather by the expressions that had come over the faces of Newton and Fatio, and the wild looks that were passing between them. Newton in particular seemed too preoccupied to speak.

Fatio, coming alive to the fact that the room had been silent for rather a long while, explained: “It would be a grievous misfortune if these pirates, ignorant of what they had, coined the Solomonic Gold and spent it. For then it would be dispersed all over the world, and melted down—con-fused—and commingled with ordinary gold, and dispersed to the four winds.” Fatio turned his eager gaze back on Newton. His face collapsed, and he launched himself out of his chair, alighting on a knee next to the savant. Newton had raised one trembling hand and clapped it over his eyes. He was shifting about in his chair without letup, almost writhing. Sweat had beaded up on his brow, and a vein in his temple was throbbing at a tempo twice or thrice Eliza’s pulse. In all, it seemed Newton was devoting every ounce of will to restraining his body’s wild urge to break out into a frenzy. For the moment, his will prevailed, but only just, and he could attend to nothing else.

Eliza might have supposed that Newton was suffering a stroke; but the way Fatio perched next to him, stroking his hand, suggested that this was not the first time it had happened.

Eliza stood. “Shall I summon a physician?”

“I am his physician,” was Fatio’s answer. Odd that, from a mathematician. But perhaps he’d been reading medicine-books.

To oblige the patient and his physician to rise and bid her a courtly farewell did not seem the wisest course. Eliza curtseyed and walked out of the room.

HALF AN HOUR LATER, she was in the House of the Golden Mercury. The office was full of English lawyers—not stacked lock-boxes containing three tons of silver, as she had every right to expect. Indeed, the lawyers out-numbered their clients: four (presumably German) bankers. Of these she had met three before, when she had stopped by with the Marquis of Ravenscar to present the Bills. The fourth was unfamiliar, and older. Eliza supposed that he had come in from Amsterdam.

“Is this a trading-house, or an art gallery?” Eliza inquired, if only to break the silence that had been her only greeting. “For I expected to see silver pennies stacked to the ceiling. Instead of which I am confronted by a Still Life such as has not been seen since the heyday of the Dutch Masters.”

No one was particularly amused. But it did look like a group portrait. This office was scarcely large enough to serve as a muffin-shop. It contained two heavy desks, or bancas, and diverse shelves where ledgers and rolled documents were stored. A strong-box on the floor served as a small reserve of cash; but this was not the sort of place that customarily dealt in large volumes of specie. Such would normally be handled through one of the larger goldsmith’s shops, or Apthorp’s Bank. A narrow door in the back gave way to a staircase that executed an immediate fierce turn and then shot diagonally upwards through the middle of the office, reducing its volume by one quarter; it was on these stairs that two weeks ago the strong-boxes containing the first installment of the silver had been stacked. But no strong-boxes were there now. Rather, the first stair was claimed by the old banker, who was using it as a sort of dais from which to glower at the entire contents of the London branch of the House of Hacklheber. The old banker was stout, and his bulk entirely filled the width of the stairway, so that as he stood there, just on the far side of the narrow doorway, it looked as if he had been chivvied and tamped into a coffin standing vertically on end with its lid swung open. His jowls bulged like flour-sacks, forming profound vertical crevices to either end of his upper lip, which was as high, white, and sheer as the Cliffs of Dover.

Even if Eliza had not already met the London factor and his two assistants, she would have been able to pick them out amid the crowd by their postures. For they all stood with backs exposed to the old banker, hunched forward, frozen in mid-shrug, as if with his blue eyes he were boring slow holes into their spines.

The lawyers were five strong. To judge from their ages, the quality of their periwigs, and their posture, she guessed two full-fledged barristers and three clerks. The barristers were shoulder-to-shoulder with their clients, the clerks packed like oakum into spaces beneath the stair and among bancas that were not, for the most part, shaped at all like human beings. It was well that Eliza’s morning sickness had abated, for the smell of coffee, snuff, decaying teeth, unwashed men, and colognes used to overpower same would else have sent her right back out into ’Change Alley, where she’d have gone into a fit as bad as Isaac Newton’s. As it was, she had no lack of incentive to make the conversation brief and momentous.

“With so many gentlemen here, there is no room for silver,” she remarked. “May I assume that it has all been delivered to the Mint to be coined?”

“My lady,” began the London factor. He was literally reading from a prepared script. “The two weeks since you presented the Bills of Exchange at these premises have been eventful ones. Allow me to give you a brief account. You arrived on a day when news of a French invasion was looked for at any moment. The price of silver was high; its availability, nonexistent. You presented five Bills. One was payable immediately, and we paid it. The other four were payable on the tenth of June, by English calendar; that is, today. As no silver was to be had in London we despatched a message, post-haste, to our factory in Amsterdam. Less than twelve hours after its arrival in that city, a ship was underway on the Ijsselmeer laden with silver sufficient to pay the four outstanding Bills. Under normal circumstances she would have reached London and called at Tower Dock in more than enough time for the said bullion to have been minted into English coins before the date of expiry of the said Bills. During her passage across the Narrow Seas, however, she was waylaid, and overhauled by Ships of Force flying the flag of the French Navy. The silver and the ship were taken to Dunkerque, where they remain. Because this piracy was carried out by ships flying the fleur-de-lis, it is nominated, by our Dutch insurers, as an Act of War, expressly not covered by our policy; in consequence, the cargo is a total loss.”

“Have you tried to buy silver on the local market?” Eliza asked. “There must be a glut of it now that everyone knows that the French invasion has failed. Why, I have heard that the Marquis of Ravenscar sold his holdings two weeks ago.”

“News of the piracy did not reach my clients until yesterday,” returned a barrister—a feline man not much bigger than Eliza. “Needless to say, my client has bent all efforts, in the short time since, to acquire local silver; but my client’s ability to make such purchases is founded upon the credit of his House, not, mind you, as it really is, or ought to be, but as that is perceived by other bankers of the City—” and here he could not prevent his eyes from straying toward the window; for a few of those bankers, or their messengers, had begun to gather without.

“And that has suffered a blow, hasn’t it,” Eliza returned, in a voice suffused with childlike wonder, as if this had only just occurred to her, “because of the pirates and the insurers and whatnot.”

“As to your speculations, my client has no comment,” announced the barrister, “however I must correct you on a matter of lexicography. You said pirates. A pirate owes allegiance to no sovereign. The correct word, in his instance, would be privateer. Do you ken the distinction, my lady?”

“Why, yes—a privateer flies the flag of some country or other, and is in effect a part of its Navy.”

“Your clarity, where this distinction is concerned, may perhaps reflect your status as the wife of the Grand Admiral of France—the superior of Captain Jean Bart, who confiscated my client’s silver.”

“That man is incorrigible! Why, only three years ago the rascal confiscated every last penny that I owned! I am relieved to be informed that the House of Hacklheber escaped with comparatively small losses.”

“That remains to be seen,” said the barrister. “A lady’s wealth consists of the contents of her jewellery-box, but that of a banking-house consists largely in its credit. Direct losses such as the shipment of silver may be written off, and perhaps recovered. By contrast, when a Person of Quality erects an elaborate complot to destroy the good name of a banking-house—”

“It would be terrible, I could not agree more!” exclaimed Eliza; which shut them all up for a bit, as it was not quite the sort of response they had readied themselves for. “Though, by your leave, you are wrong about a lady’s wealth being confined to her jewellery-box. Of far greater value is her honour, which is to a noblewoman what credit is to a banking-house. What I lost to Jean Bart three years ago meant nothing to me. Much more to be feared would be the damage that my good name should incur if persons, whether malicious or simply ill-informed, were to go about spreading a rumor that I had connived to swindle an honest German bank! Does your client not agree, sir?”

“Er…my client is not as fluent in the English language as you orI. Before I can speak on his behalf as to whether he agrees or disagrees with your assertion, I shall have to meet with him privily and see to it that our words are translated into German. Pray carry on, my lady; but first, know that nothing in my or my clients’ previous statements can or should be construed to imply that I or my client is directly or indirectly accusing you of participating in a swindle.”

“That is ever so reassuring. In any case, it is precisely to forestall any such damage to my name that I have rushed here this morning.”

“It is?”

“Why, yes! For I had received word that the House of Hacklheber had suffered a reversal of its fortunes. Lothar von Hacklheber is reputed to be a vindictive and unprincipled man. My first thought was that he might try to soften the blow to his reputation, by deflecting it onto me; which would be most unfair, given that he entered into this transaction of his own free will, and on his own terms, well knowing the risks. Be that as it may, the fact of the matter is that I am here in London, alone, defenseless, with no assets other than my title as Duchess of Qwghlm, which was bestowed on me by King William.”

“We are aware of your titles, my lady—English as well as French—as well as how you came by them.”

“And so I am here to offer a solution.”

“And what is your proposal, my lady?”

“The purpose for which the silver was intended no longer exists. But the Bills have been presented, and accepted, and must be paid in London before day’s end, if the reputation of the House of Hacklheber is to survive. I propose that we convert the transaction into another form of payment. France no longer has need of the silver, but she does have a perpetual need of timber—more so than ever, now that so much of her fleet has been burned in the harbors of Cherbourg and La Hougue. She purchases Baltic timber through the Compagnie du Nord, which deals with a net-work of Huguenot merchants in the north. Those same houses maintain bureaus within a stone’s throw of where we stand; indeed, as I was on my way here just now, I chanced to meet Monsieur Durand, who is the local factor of such a concern. I fetched him along with me.” Eliza waved her hand in the window. Instantly the door opened, and the last remaining volume in the House of the Golden Mercury was claimed by a big-nosed, wigless, white-haired gentleman. “I present Monsieur Durand of Durand et fils of London, Stockholm, Rostock, and Riga,” Eliza announced. “I have told him all about what has happened—though like most of ’Change Alley he had already heard much of the story. Monsieur Durand has let me know, in the most eloquent French, that, as a result of his many connexions and his long expertise in the north, he has developed a respect for the House of Hacklheber that cannot be shaken by one unfortunate incident of piracy. As such, he is willing to arrange shipment of timber to the Compagnie du Nord provided that the four outstanding Bills of Exchange are transferred to him today. He will, in other words, accept the credit of your House in lieu of actual delivery of silver bullion. The House of Hacklheber’s obligations shall be discharged in full by day’s end, and no damage to anyone’s repute shall ensue; Lothar von Hacklheber shall be Ditta di Borsa tomorrow just as yesterday, and this momentary lapse in his reputation, which has led to the abrupt hiring of so many members of the legal profession, shall be remembered—if it is remembered at all—as one of those brief irrational panics to which markets are everywhere prone.”

All of this now had to be explained to the big German at the back of the room. Eliza suspected, from this man’s age, his bearing, and the way the others deferred to him, that he must report to Lothar von Hacklheber personally. Clearly he spoke little English; which might have been more help than hindrance to him until now, as he had been gauging the mood of the room, and observing the struggle of wills and the balance of power among the participants. He had seen Eliza walk into a room in which the prevailing mood had been like that in a ravelin under siege. Yet she had astonished the beleaguered defenders by not pressing her advantage when she might have, and instead proffering a way out. Astonishment had developed into relief as Monsieur Durand made his entrance. All of these things the old banker perceived, without knowing any of the particulars; and the more hopeful his underlings allowed themselves to become, the more suspicious he waxed. Now they had to sell him the proposal, in German; but he was not of a mind to buy.

“Are we to understand,” said the London factor, translating for him, “that La France is to receive—in addition to the hundred thousand livres in silver we have already delivered to you—four hundred thousand livres worth of silver as booty in Dunkerque as well as four hundred thousand livres worth of Baltic timber, in exchange for nothing more than five hundred thousand livres in French government obligations in Lyon?”

“I recommend you moderate your tone,” said Eliza. “Voices carry out into the street; and lurking there in ’Change Alley are any number of City men who have heard all the rumors about the insolvency of the Hacklhebers. When I step out that door, I shall be interrogated like a prisoner on the Inquisition’s rack. They will know whether the Hacklhebers have been able to honour their obligations, or not. Through the generous intercession of Monsieur Durand, it will be possible for me to answer in the affirmative.” Eliza half-turned toward the door and rested a gloved hand on the latch. The room grew perceptibly darker as a Mobb of ’Change-men on the street outside noted her gesture, and drew closer to the windows, blocking out the light. Eliza continued: “This talk of yours about four hundred thousand livres here or there is quite lost on me; I am a mere housewife with no head for numbers.” She flexed her wrist and the door-latch made a clicking noise, a bit like the cocking of a flintlock. A volcanic up-welling of German sounded from the rear of the shop; Eliza could not quite follow what was being said, but suddenly the barrister spun to face her and announced: “My client is pleased to accept the proposal, pending resolution of the terms in detail.”

“Then pray resolve them with Monsieur Durand,” said Eliza, “I am going out for a bit of air.”

“And—?”

“And to let the City of London know that the House of Hacklheber is Ditta di Borsa, as ever,” Eliza added.

“WHAT WAS THAT BIT you hollered into the back, just as you were coming out the door?” asked Bob Shaftoe. “I could not make out your French.”

“’Twas nothing,” said Eliza, “only polite leave-taking. I complimented the old fellow on how adroitly he and his colleagues had managed the transaction, and expressed my hope that in future we might work together again thusly.”

“And what said he to that?”

“Naught, but only stared into my eyes—overcome with fond emotions, I should say.”

“You said before, in St.-Malo, when we—” Bob began, and got lost in his thoughts as his gaze slipped down toward her belly.

“When we were together.”

“Yes, you said you wanted your boot on Lothar’s neck. And it seems to me you had that, just as you phant’sied. But you let him go?”

“Never,” said Eliza, “never. For do not forget that every transaction has two ends, and this is only one of them.”

“Very well. I shall not forget it. But I do not understand it.”

“Neither does Lothar.”

“Will you return to France?”

“To Dunkerque,” Eliza said, “to pay my compliments to Captain Bart, and to inform the Marquis d’Ozoir that he has got his timber. What of you, Sergeant Bob?”

“I shall remain here for the present time. I’ve been to visit Mr. Churchill a time or two in the Tower, you know. He shan’t be there very much longer, mark my words.”

“The judicial proceedings against him have become a farce, such as appeals to the English sense of humor, but all grow weary of it.”

“And meanwhile King Louis himself is laying siege to Namur, isn’t he? And folks are asking, why does King William keep our best commander locked up on a ridiculous pretext, when a great campaign is under way on the other side of the Narrow Seas? No, my lady, if I were to go back to Normandy, I’d have some explaining to do, and might even be hanged for desertion. That Irish regiment’ll be sent God only knows where—for all I know, they’ll wind up in the South, on the Savoy front, a million miles from where I have been trying to go. But soon enough Churchill shall be at the head of an army, and I shall go with that army to Flanders. We shall face the French across some narrow strip of ground. I’ll scan the colors on the opposing side, until I spy those of Count Sheerness—”

“And then?”

“Why, then, I shall devise some means of ending up with my boot on his throat. And we shall enter into a discussion concerning Abigail.”

“You attempted that with his brother—Abigail’s previous owner. He almost killed you, and you did not get Abigail.”

“I do not claim ’tis a likely plan, but ’tis my plan, and it gives me something to do.”

“Can I not simply buy the girl from Sheerness?”

“It would raise questions. Why should you care about one English slave?”

“That is my business.”

“And Abigail is mine—”

“Would Abigail agree? Or would she prefer that plan that is most likely to lead to her freedom?”

This made Bob a bit stormy-looking. He strove with his temper for a bit. Then he chuckled. “What’s the point of flapping my jaw when you’ll go and do just what you please, no matter what I say? Be off to Dunkerque, then. But if my wishes have any gravity, you’ll tend to yourself and not to me. For I ween you are in a delicate way just now. That is all.”

“I am ever in a delicate way,” said Eliza, “but men pick and choose the time to take notice of it, as it suits their purposes.” At this Bob chuckled again, which provoked her. “Let us speak plainly,” she said, “for this is where our ways part—you must to the Tower to attend your master in his prison-cell, I must to dockside to arrange passage to Dunkerque.” They had arrived at the cross where Grace Church Street changed its name to Fish Street, and plunged down to the Bridge. From their right entered Great Eastcheap; under the name of Little Eastcheap it then wended its way off in the direction of the Tower. A stone’s throw down the hill, a lone, stupendous column jutted up from the city, casting a finger of shadow down the length of the street. They’d come nigh to the place where the Fire of London had been kindled a quarter-century before. The column was the Monument that Wren and Hooke had put up to it.

“When you promise to speak plainly, I know to brace myself,” said Bob, and then he did literally, leaning back against a brick wall.

“You have seen me sick, and suppose that I am pregnant. This has wrought powerfully on your mind, for you know that Abigail was given syphilis by Upnor and may not be able to give you children, even if you do pry her free from the clutches of Count Sheerness. You have stopped thinking of me as ‘Eliza the woman I roger from time to time’ and begun to think of me as ‘Eliza the expectant mother of my only child.’ This has queered your judgment and led you to consider schemes that are not likely to produce Abigail’s freedom. Know then that the fœtus—which might have been yours, or my husband’s, or any of several other men’s—miscarried the night before last. It is with the angels. I would still produce a competent heir for my husband, but must begin a new pregnancy once I have reached France. Perhaps I shall seduce Jean Bart, perhaps the Marquis d’Ozoir, perhaps a Marine who catches my fancy on the street. In any case you must give up hope that any progeny of yours shall come from here—” and Eliza rested her hand on the front of her bodice “—for I am done with being the other woman in the life of Bob Shaftoe and Abigail Frome. Done with being the poppy-elixir that makes you forget your pain, and leads you to dream stratagems that shall never avail you or her a thing. Abigail may be waiting for you, Bob. I am not. Get thee to thy projects, then.”

She was gone from Bob’s sight before the words penetrated all the way to his heart, for she was a small woman, quick, and dissolved into the traffic down Fish Street Hill like a mote of sugar in a stream of boiling water. Bob did not move, but let the brick wall hold him up for some while, until the proprietor—an insurance-man—thrust his head out the window and gave him that look that Gentlemen give to Vagabonds when it is time for them to be moving on. Bob had a soldier’s knack for moving when he did not wish to. He levered himself away from the wall, rounded the corner, and marched down Little Eastcheap toward the Tower, where his Captain would be waiting for him with orders.

Book 4

Bonanza

Ahmadabad, the Mogul Empire

SEPTEMBER 1693

When Men fly from danger, it is natural for them to run farther than they need.

—The Mischiefs that ought justly to be apprehended from a Whig-government,
ANONYMOUS (ATTRIBUTED TO
BERNARD MANDEVILLE), 1714

EVERY MORNING A MOB OF angry Hindoos convened outside the hospital hoping to have a conversation with Jack on his way in, and so every day Jack came a little earlier, stealing in through a back door where manure was carried out and food brought in. Because of that latter function it was the correct entrance for him to use anyway. He walked across an enclosed stable-yard, holding one hand before his face as a sort of visor, to break a trail through the horseflies. At least, he hoped that they were horseflies.

His passage was noticed and commented upon by insomniacal horses and camels, standing on splinted and bandaged limbs, or dangling from formidable slings, in stalls all round the yard. A tiger was here, too, being treated for an abscessed tooth, but she was kept in a cage in an out-building. Otherwise her fragrance, and the nearly inaudible sound she made when she yawned, would drive the horses and camels into frenzies. A horse supporting itself on two legs, and kicking with the remaining two, was dangerous enough; a horse in a sling, kicking with all four legs at once, was as dangerous as a cart-load of Afghans.

The insect situation did not improve when he went inside. In part, this was because the distinction between inside and outside was not closely observed in this part of the world; space was divided up by walls and screens, yes. But they all had great bloody holes in them (ornately shaped holes painstakingly carved by master craftsmen, yes, but none the less holes) to let in air and light and (or so Jack supposed in his more peevish moments) to keep buildings from bursting and falling down when the inmates got to farting—for these people ate beans, or, at any rate, a plethora of mysterious bean-like foodstuffs, as if they were all starving—which, come to think of it, they were.

At any rate, the result was that the gallery into which Jack had now entered was thick with flies, zinging through the darkness like spent grapeshot on the fringes of a battle, and crunching into his shaved head and raising welts. They had been drawn here, from all over the Indies, by the smell of diverse sick or injured creatures and their feed and their manure; for this hospital with all its stone screens and lattice-works was like a giant censer dispensing such fragrances into the air of Ahmadabad.

Past the mongoose with the suppurating eye, the jackal with mange, the half-paralyzed king cobra, the stunningly odoriferous civet-cat-with-bone-cancer, the mouse deer with the javelin wound did Jack proceed, and then entered a room filled with bird-cages of bent bamboo, where diverse broken-winged avians were on the mend. A peacock with an arrow stuck sideways all the way through his neck shuffled around, bumping into things and getting hung up on the cages and squawking in outrage. Jack gave him a wide berth, not wanting to get lockjaw off that arrowhead if the peacock should happen to execute a sharp turn in the vicinity of his knees.

Through a rickety door was a room piled floor to ceiling with even smaller cages housing sick or injured mice and rats, some of which sounded distinctly rabid. The less time spent here the better, and so Jack forged on to another room, and down some stone steps.

The smell here transcended mere badness. It was not a smell of mammals or even reptiles, but of an entirely different order of Creation. It was thrilling. For quite some time Jack had been breathing through his nose, but now he threw one arm over his face and sucked in air through the crook of his elbow. For the air in this, the deepest and innermost part of the hospital, was (he estimated) fifty percent insects by volume, a sort of writhing meat-cloud that continually hummed, as if he had climbed into an organ pipe. And if even one of those bugs got into a nostril and injured itself trying to struggle free of Jack’s nose-hairs, the caretakers would be sure to notice, and then Jack would be out of a job. For the same reason, he had altered his gait, and now shuffled along on bare feet, plowing carefully through the drifts and flurries of bugs on the floor, hoping there weren’t any scorpions there just now.

“Jack Shaftoe reporting for duty!” he hollered. The chief bug-doctor, and his diverse hierarchies and sub-hierarchies of assistants, had all been sleeping under gauzy bug-nets suspended from the ceiling. These huddled in the corners of the bug-ward like claques of pointy-headed ghosts. They now began to bobble and twitch as sleepy Hindoos emerged from them. Jack stripped down to the thong that he used to protect what remained of his privities, and handed his clothes to someone (he wasn’t sure whom, and didn’t care; this was Hindoostan, there were a lot of people here, and if you held something out and looked expectant, someone would soon enough take it).

A boy brought him the usual concoction, holding the coconut shell to Jack’s lips while others bound Jack’s hands together behind his back with a strip of cloth. Out of habit, Jack put his ankles together so that those could likewise be bound. When he had finished gulping down that draught (which was supposed to nourish and replenish the blood), he allowed himself to fall forward, and was caught by many small warm hands and gently lowered onto the floor—though not before it had been gently swept clear of any insects. His bound ankles were brought up to meet his hands, and all were tied together above his bare buttocks. Meanwhile a swathe of gauze was being tied about his head, screening his mouth, nose, and eyes.

Above, he could hear a boom of timber—what sailors would call a yard—being swung around until one end of it was above him. From a pulley on its tip, a stout rope was now brought down and tied to the web of bonds that joined his wrists and ankles, with a couple of turns around his waist to carry most of his weight.

Deeper voices spoke now—the pulley squeaked, the rope tensed, the yard began to tick and groan, and then Jack was airborne. They swung the yard around, Jack skimming along just a hand’s breadth above the floor, escorted by giggling and shuffling Hindoo boys. But these suddenly peeled away as the stone floor dropped out from under him and he swung out over a pit: a stone-lined silo perhaps four yards across and somewhat less in depth. They let him hang above the middle of it for a few seconds, prodding him artfully with bamboo poles until he stopped swinging; then the rope was let out and Jack descended. Many torches had been lit for this the most critical part of the operation. The gauze over his eyes strained their light from the air and clouded his vision, which was just as well. They took utmost care not to let his full weight down onto the sandy floor of the pit until they were absolutely certain that no living creature was underneath him. But they or their ancestors had done this many times a day since the beginning of Time and were good at their work. Jack came to rest on the pit-floor without crushing a thing.

Then from small holes and arches and burrows, tanks, puddles, sumps, rotten logs, decomposing fruit, hives, and sand-heaps all around, out they came: foot-long centipedes, clouds of fleas, worms of various descriptions, all manner of flying insects—in short, all sorts of creatures whatever that subsisted on blood. He felt a bat land on the back of his neck, and tried to relax.

“That iridescent beetle feasting on your left buttock does not appear to be injured or sick in the slightest degree!” said a curiously familiar voice, speaking English with a musical accent. “I think it should be discharged forthwith, Jack.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me—the whole country is infested with idlers and freebooters—like that rabble out front.”

“That rabble, as you call them, are the men of the Swapak mahajan,” said Surendranath—for by this point Jack had recognized him as none other.

“So they keep telling me—what of it?”

“You must understand that the Swapaks are a very ancient subcaste of the Shudra Ahir—the herdsmen of the Vinkhala tribe—which is one of the sixteen branches of the Seventh Division of the Fire Races.”

“And?”

“They are divided into two great classes, the noble and the ignoble, the former being divided into thirty-seven subtribes and the latter into ninety-three. The Shudra Ahir were formerly one of the thirty-seven, until after the Third Incarnation of Lord Kalpa, when they came up from Anhalwara by way of Lower Oond, and intermarried with a tribe of degenerated Mulgrassias.”

“So?”

“Jack, just to put that in context, you must understand that those people are regarded as Dhangs of the lower subcaste (yet considerably above the Dhoms!) by the Virda, whom they nonetheless abhor. To give you an idea of just how degenerate they were, these Dhangs, in an earlier age, had intermarried with the Kalpa Salkh of Kalapur, of whom almost nothing is known save that not even the ape-men of Hari would allow themselves to be overshadowed by them.”

“I am waiting for your point to arrive.”

“The point is that the Shudra Ahir have been herdsmen and feeders of livestock since before the breaking of the Three Jade Eggs, and the Swapak, for almost as long, have been—”

“Feeders of bloodsucking insects in animal hospitals that are operated by some other mahajan of some other caste—yes, I know, it’s all been tediously explained to me,” said Jack, flinching as a centipede bit through the flesh of his inner thigh and tapped into an artery. “But those Swapak have been assured of jobs for so many thousands of years that they have become indolent. They make unreasonable demands of the Brahmins who run this place, and lounge around out front all day and night, pestering passers-by.”

“You sound like a rich Frank complaining about Vagabonds.”

“If I were not having my blood sucked out by thousands of vermin, I might take offense—as it is, your japes and witticisms strike me as more of the same.”

Surendranath laughed. “You must forgive me. When I learned that you were earning your keep in this way, I rashly assumed that you had become a desperate wretch. Now I appreciate that you take pride in your work.”

“Compared to those layabouts who are encamped in front, Padraig and I—ouch!—are willing to do this work for a more competitive rate, and comport ourselves as professionals.”

“I very much fear that you will be comporting yourselves as dead men if you do not get out of Ahmadabad,” said Surendranath.

Above, Jack heard commands uttered in Gujarati, then the welcome creak of the pulley. The rope came tight and raised him a few inches off the ground. He writhed and shook himself, trying to shed as many of the creatures as he could. “What are you talking about? They don’t even step on bugs. What’re they going to do to a couple of men?”

“Oh, it is not difficult for such people to come to an understanding, Jack, with members of castes that specialize in mayhem.”

Jack was now raised up out of the pit and swung round over the floor again. The bug-doctors converged on him with brooms, gently sweeping away the engorged ticks and leeches. Then they let him down and began untying the bonds. As soon as he could, Jack reached up and pulled off the gauze face-mask. Now he was able to get a good look at Surendranath for the first time.

When they’d parted company, outside the customs-house of Surat, more than a year ago, Surendranath, like Jack, had been a shivering wretch, dressed in rags, and still walking slightly bowlegged on account of the thoroughgoing search that was meted out to all who entered the Mogul’s realms there, to make sure that they were not secreting Persian Gulf pearls in their rectal orifices.

Today, of course, Jack looked much the same, save that he was covered with bug bites and lying on his belly. But in front of his nose was a pair of fine leather slippers covered with red velvet brocade, and above them, a pair of orange-and-yellow-striped silk breeches, and hanging over those, a long shirt of excellent linen. This was surmounted by the head of Surendranath. He had grown his moustache out but otherwise had a professional shave—which must have cost him dearly, so early in the morning—and he had a sizeable gold ring in his nose, and wore a snow-white turban with an overwrap of wine-colored silk edged in gold.

“It’s not my fault I’m stuck in this fucking country with no money,” Jack said. “Blame it on those pirates.”

Surendranath snorted. “Jack, when I lose a single rupee I lie awake all night, cursing myself and the man who took it from me. You do not need to urge me to hate the pirates who took our gold!”

“Very well, then.”

“But does this mean that other Hindoostanis, belonging to a different caste, speaking a different language, residing at the other end of the subcontinent, must suffer?”

“I have to eat.”

“There are other ways for a Frank to make a living in Hind.”

“I see those rich Dutchmen in the streets every day. Bully for them. But I can’t make a living from trade when I’ve nothing to my name. Besides—for Christ’s sake, you Banyans make even Jews and Armenians seem like nuns in the bazaar.”

“Thank you,” Surendranath said modestly.

“Besides, in Surat and all the other treaty ports, there is an astronomical price on my head.”

“It is true that, as the result of your dealings with the Viceroy, the House of Hacklheber, and the Duc d’Arcachon, all of Spain, Germany, and France now wish to kill you,” Surendranath admitted, helping Jack to his feet.

“You left out the Ottoman Empire.”

“But Hind is another world! You have seen only a narrow strip along the coast. There are many opportunities in the interior—”

“Oh, one bug-pit is the same as the next, I’m sure.”

“—for a Frank who knows how to use the saber and the musket.”

“I’m listening,” Jack said. “Fucking bugs!” and then—distracted, as he was, by the peculiar nature of Surendranath’s discourse, he slapped a mosquito that had landed on the side of his neck. It was only noticed by Surendranath—who made a sound as if he were regurgitating his own gallbladder—and the boy who was standing next to Jack, holding out his neatly folded clothes. Jack met the boy’s eye for a moment; then both looked down at the palm of Jack’s hand, where the mosquito lay crumpled in a spot of Jack’s, or someone’s, blood.

“This lad thinks I’ve murdered his grandmother now,” Jack said. “Could you ask him to shut up?”

But the boy was already saying something, in a bewildered—yet piping and clearly audible—voice. The senior bug-doctor hustled over shouting. Then they all converged, and to Jack they suddenly all looked every bit as determined and bloodthirsty as their patients. He snatched his clothes.

Surendranath did not even try to argue the matter, but grabbed Jack’s arm and led him out of the room in a brisk walk that soon turned into a run. For news of Jack’s crime had spread, faster than thought, through the echoing galleries of the hospital and out its innumerable holes to the front, and (to guess from the sounds that came back) a hundred or more unemployed Swapaks had taken it as a signal to force their way in and launch a furious manhunt.

The monkeys, birds, lizards, and beasts sensed that something was happening, and began to make noise, which worked in Jack and Surendranath’s favor. The Banyan got lost in the darkness of the intestinal-parasite ward almost immediately, but Jack—who’d been skulking in and out of the place for weeks—surged into the fore, and soon enough got them pointed towards an exit; they staged an orderly retreat through the monkey room, opening all of the cage-doors on their way through, which (to put it mildly) created a diversion. It was a diversion that fed on itself, for the monkeys were clever enough to do some cage-opening of their own. Once all of the primates had been set free, they spread out into surrounding wards and began to give less intelligent creatures their freedom.

Meanwhile Jack and Surendranath fell back, taking a little-used route past the tiger’s cage. Jack tarried for a moment to scoop up a couple of the big cat’s turds.

Then they were out into Ahmadabad’s main avenue. This was wider than most European streets were long. Its vastness, combined with blood loss, always gave Jack a momentary fit of disorientation; had he found his way back into the city, or gotten lost in some remote wasteland? The monsoon rains were finished, and this part of Hindoostan had turned into a sort of gutter for draining chalk-dry air out of the middle of Asia. On its way down from Tibet, today’s shipment of wind had made a tour of the scenic Thar Desert, and availed itself of a heavy load of souvenir dirt, and elevated its temperature to somewhere between that of a camel’s breath and that of a tandoori oven. Now it was coming down Ahmadabad’s main street like a yak stampede, leaving no doubt as to why Shah Jahan had named the place Guerdabad: The Habitation of Dust.

This place had been conquered by Shah Jahan’s crowd—the Moguls—a while ago, and the Moguls were Mohametans who did not especially care whether Jack killed a mosquito. Disturbing the peace was another matter, and if rioting Swapaks did not qualify as disturbing the peace, then dozens of monkeys pouring out into the streets, some with their arms in slings, others hobbling on crutches, certainly did—especially when they caught wind of a market up the street and began to make for it. They were mostly Hanuman monkeys—flailing, whiptailed ectomorphs who acted as if they owned the place—which, according to Hindoos, they did. But there was an admixture of other primates (notably, an orang-utan recovering from pneumonia) who refused to accord the Hanumans the respect they deserved, and so as they all fought their way upwind toward the market, variously scampering on all fours, waddling on all twos, knuckle-dragging, hopping on lamed feet, swinging from limbs of stately mango-trees, and stampeding over rooftops, they were acting out a sort of running Punch-and-Judy show, flinging coconuts and brandishing sticks at one another. Bringing up the rear: a four-horned antelope that had been born with six horns, a baby one-horned rhinoceros, and a Bhalu, or honey bear, blind and deaf, but drawn by the scent of sweet things in the market.

A pair of rowzinders—Mogul cavalrymen—came riding up, all turbaned and scimitared, black studded shields dangling from their brawny arms, to see what was the matter. Immediately they were engulfed in angry Swapaks telling their side of the story and demanding that the kotwal and his retinue of whip-, cudgel-, and mace-brandishing goons be summoned to favor Jack with a bastinado, or worse. The Swapaks’ protests got them nowhere, as they spoke only Gujarati and the rowzinders spoke only Persian. But these Moguls, like conquerors everywhere, had a keen sense of how to profit from local controversies, and their dark eyes were wide open, following the stabbing fingers of the Swapaks, examining the guilty parties. Surendranath was obviously a Banyan, which was to say that he and his lineage had been more or less condemned by God to engage in foreign trade and make vast amounts of money all their lives. Jack, on the other hand, was a Frank wearing a snatch of leather held on by a crusty thong wedged up his butt-crack. The numerous scars on his back testified to his having been in trouble before—a nearly inconceivable amount of trouble. The rowzinders sized the Banyan up as a likely source of baksheesh, and made gestures at him indicating that he had better stay put for now. Jack they beckoned over.

Jack unfastened his gaze, with reluctance, from the thickening drama in the street. Industrious monkeys had evidently been opening up bird-cages. The entire Flamingo Ward emerged at once. It looked as if a hogshead of fuchsia paint had been spilled down the steps of the hospital. Most of them were in for broken wings, so all they could do was mill around until one of them appointed himself leader and led them away on a random migration into the Habitation of Dust, pursued or accompanied by a couple of Japalura lizards making eerie booming noises. This hospital had recently admitted a small colony of bearded vultures who were all suffering from avian cholera, and these now gained the rooftop; wiggled their imposing chin-bristles in the gritty breeze; and deployed their wings, which rumbled and snapped like rugs being shaken. They had been well-fed on a sort of carrion slurry made from patients that had died of natural causes, and so as they took to the air they jetted long spates of meaty diarrhea that fell like shafts of light across the backs of fleeing beasts: a praying mantis the size of a crossbow bolt, a spotted deer with a boa constrictor entwined in its antlers, and a nilgai antelope being pursued by the hospital’s world-famous two-legged dog, which, miraculously, could not only run, but had been known to outpace many three-legged dogs.

Jack approached the rowzinders from downwind. The crowd of Swapaks parted to make room for him, though a few spat on him as he went by. Others had already forgotten about Jack and were running towards the animals. Jack got into position between the heads of the two rowzinders’ horses and then began to protest his innocence in English whilst surreptitiously crumbling a tiger-turd in each hand. A distinctive fragrance made the horses extremely nervous all of a sudden. “There now, settle down, you two,” Jack said to them, and stroked each on the nose, one with each hand—smearing streaks of tiger shit from their brows all the way down to their flaring nostrils.

Then he had to step back to save his own life. Both horses reared up and began slashing at the air with their front hooves, and it was all the rowzinders could do to stay in their saddles. They galloped off screaming in opposite directions. One charged straight through the middle of a crowd of Hanuman monkeys who were carrying hairy arm-loads of coconut-meat, figs, mangoes, jamboleiras, papayas, yellow pears, green bilimbins, red cashews, and prickly jack-fruit from the dissolving market, pursued by enraged bazaaris who were in turn pursued by a toothless cheetah. A huge Indian bison, as high at the shoulder as Jack was tall, burst out through a rickety wall, shoving a heap of wrecked tables before him, and shambled into the street with a durian fruit dangling from one of his scimitar-like horns.

A formation of running men veered around the bison and headed straight for Jack and Surendranath. Jack mastered the impulse to turn and flee from them. There were four men in all, a pair supporting each end of a giant spar of bamboo, thick as a mast and four fathoms long. Suspended from the middle of the bamboo was a sort of mobile balcony, a lacquered platform surrounded by a low gilded balustrade and artfully strewn with embroidered cushions. The device had four legs of carven ebony, which dangled an arm’s length above the pavement. When these palanquin-bearers drew near, they broke stride and began to negotiate with each other.

“What tongue is that?” Jack asked.

“Marathi.”

“Your palanquin is carried by rebels?”

“Think of it as a merchant-ship. In the parts of Hindoostan where we will be going, they will be her insurance policy.”

The bearers were maneuvering the ends of the bamboo so as to bring the palanquin up alongside Surendranath. When they were finished, they set it down on its ebon legs, so close that their master had only to swivel his arse a compass-point to starboard, and sit down. He busied himself for a few moments arranging some glorious floral cushions against a polished backrest in the stern, then scooted back against them.

“If they are the insurance policy, what am I?”

“You, and any of your Frank comrades you may be able to round up, are the Marines on the quarterdeck.”

“Marines are paid at a flat rate—when they are paid at all,” Jack observed. “The last time our merry crew were together, we each had a share.”

“How much is your share worth now?”

Jack was not, in general, a sigher of sighs, but now he sighed.

“Take inventory of your BATNA,” Surendranath suggested, eyeing Jack’s naked and lumpy form, “and meet me in an hour’s time at the Caravanserai.” And then he uttered words in the Marathi tongue, and the four Marathas (as Marathi-speakers were called) got their shoulders under the bamboo and hoisted the palanquin into the air. They spun the conveyance end-for-end in the middle of the vast street and trotted away.

Jack scratched a bug-bite, then another half an inch to the left, then forced himself to stop, before it got out of hand.

The clouded leopard emerged from the hospital, quiet as fog, and curled up in the middle of the street to blink at goings-on; her enormous protruding fangs shone like twin stars in the firmament of swirling dust.

Bearded vultures were raiding a butcher’s shop in the market. One of them pounded up into the air with all the grace of a porter lugging a side of beef up a staircase.

Jack trudged upwind, headed for the Triple Gate: a set of three arches at the end of the street. Behind him he heard a rustling commotion, approaching fast. By the time he could turn round to look, it had already overtaken him: a trio of bustards—long-legged black and white birds—disputing possession of some dripping morsel. They reminded Jack of the ostrich in Vienna. Tears came to his eyes, which astonished and annoyed him. He slapped himself in the face, swung wide around a huge waddling porcupine, and headed briskly for the Tin Darwaza, as the Triple Gate was called hereabouts.

THE TIN DARWAZA formed one end of the central square of “The House of Hell” (as Jahangir, the father of Shah Jahan, affectionately referred to Ahmadabad). This square—the Maidan Shah—ran for perhaps a quarter of a mile to the opposite end, which was walled off by a clutter of towers, balconies, pillars, arches, and toy fortifications: the Palace of the local King, whose name was Terror of the Idolaters. The middle of the square was mostly open so that rowzinders could practice their horsemanship and archery there, and parade for the amusement of Terror of the Idolaters and his wives. There were a few low undistinguished buildings where the kotwals held their tribunals and inflicted the bastinado on anyone who did not measure up to their standards of conduct. Jack avoided these.

Several Hindoo pagodas had once stood around the Maidan Shah, and they still did; but they were mosques now. Jack’s knowledge of local history was limited to what he’d picked up by talking to Dutch, French, and English traders. But he gathered that this Shah Jahan fellow had spawned a boy named Aurangzeb and despised him so thoroughly that he had made him King of Gujarat, which meant that he had had to come and reside in “the abode of sickness” (another one of Jahangir’s pet names for Ahmadabad) and continually do battle against the Marathas. Later Aurangzeb had returned the favor by forcibly overthrowing his father and tossing him into a prison cell in Agra. But in the meantime he’d had many years to kill in The Abode of Sickness and to hone his already keen dislike of all things Hindoo. So he had slaughtered a cow in the middle of the main Hindoo pagoda, defiling it forever, and then gone round with a sledgehammer and knocked the noses off all the idols for good measure. Now it was a mosque. Jack gazed into it as he walked by and saw the usual crowd of fakirs—perhaps two hundred of them—sitting on the marble pavement with their arms crossed behind their heads. Of these, some were mere novices. Other had been doing it for long enough that their joints had frozen that way. These had begging-bowls in front of them, never without a few rupees, and from time to time junior fakirs would bring them water or food.

Some fakirs were Hindoos. As their temples had been desecrated, these had no central place to congregate. Instead they were scattered around the Maidan Shah, under trees or in the lee of walls, performing various penances, some of which were more bizarre and some less bizarre than those of the Mohametan fakirs. The common objective of all fakirs was to get money out of people, and by that definition, Jack and Padraig were fakirs themselves.

After a few minutes’ search Jack found his partner seated between the two rows of trees that lined the Maidan Shah. Coincidentally, Padraig had chosen a spot along the south side of the square, beneath one of the jutting balconies of the Caravanserai. Or perhaps it was no coincidence. This was one of the more beautiful buildings in the city. It attracted the wealthy men who made Ahmadabad work, just as the Damplatz did in Amsterdam. Neither its beauty nor its wealth meant much to Jack and Padraig in their current estate. But when they loitered here they could watch caravans coming in from Lahore, Kabul, Kandahar, Agra, and places even farther distant: Chinamen who had brought their silks down from Kashgar over the wastes of Leh, and Armenians who had sallied far to the east from their ghetto in Isfahan, and Turkomans from Bokhara, looking like poorer and shorter versions of the mighty Turks who held sway over Algiers. The Caravanserai reminded them, in other words, that it was possible, at least in theory, to escape “The Thorn Bed” (as Jahangir had referred to Ahmadabad in his Memoirs).

Padraig was sitting crosslegged on a snatch of rug (or, to be precise, the coarse weavings that rugs came wrapped in). He had a captured mouse, a rock, and a bowl. When he saw an approaching pedestrian who looked like a Brahmin, he would pin the mouse down on the ground and then raise the rock as if he intended to smash it. Of course he never actually did smash the mouse, and neither did Jack, when Jack took his turn. If they smashed the mouse they would not get money from the Brahmin, and they would have to spend valuable time searching for a replacement mouse. But by assiduously threatening to smash the mouse all day long, they could collect a few paisas in ransom money.

“We’ve been presented—assuming I am reading the signs correctly—with an opportunity to get ourselves killed for money,” Jack announced.

Padraig looked up alertly.

A bloody ox femur fell out of the sky and smashed into the pavement, where it shattered. Two bearded vultures plunged down after it and began to squabble over the marrow.

“Here, or somewhere else?” Padraig inquired, watching the vultures coolly.

“Somewhere else.”

Padraig let the mouse run away.

THE CARAVANSERAI SPRAWLED along the southern side of the Maidan Shah, and had many balconies and lodges, all surrounded by delicately carved stone screens, but you got into it through an octagonal porch that was topped with an onion-dome. Four sides of the porch were open to the street and four were archways giving entry to the building itself, or to the yard in the middle, where queues of horses and camels were assembled or dispersed, and loaded or unloaded. It was in that yard that they found the palanquin of Surendranath. The Banyan himself was negotiating with a one-eyed Pathan for a couple of horses, and when he saw Jack’s and Padraig’s condition he decided to acquire some clothing for them, too. This turned out to be long tunics over loose breeches, and turbans to protect their heads.

“Now that we are out of the bug-feeding business we shall have to let our hair grow back,” Jack mused as they rode out of town along the Kathiawar Road, which is to say that they were going a little south of west.

“I could have gotten you European clothes with a little effort, but I did not want to spend any longer than was absolutely necessary in the Place of the Simoom,” hollered Surendranath, clutching the balusters of his palanquin as it was slugged by another wind-blast. Leaves of exotic trees, curled and spiked like the shells of sea-creatures, whipped past their heads and cartwheeled madly down the road. Jack and Padraig, on horses, were flanking Surendranath’s palanquin, and three of the Banyan’s aides were following behind on foot, leading a couple of asses laden with baggage.

“With our backs to the wind it is not so bad,” said Padraig; but only because he prided himself on making the best of bad situations. Indeed, the street to the Kathiawar Gate was lined with much that would have been scenic, if not for the dust in their eyes: vast gardens of wealthy Banyans and Moguls, mosques, pagodas, reservoirs, and wells.

“With our backs to Ahmadabad it will be better,” said Surendranath. “Kathiawar is reasonably settled, and we can make do with the usual Charan escort. But when we begin the journey to the northeast, you will have to dress as Europeans, to cow the Marathas.”

“Northeast…so our destination is Shahjahanabad?” Jack inquired.

“He would prefer to say Delhi,” Padraig put in, after Surendranath failed to answer.

“Of course, because he is a Hindoo, and Shahjahanabad is the Mogul name,” Jack said. “Leave it to an Irishman.”

“The English have given our cities any number of inventive names,” Padraig allowed.

“The monsoon season has brought much valuable cargo from the West this year, but all of it lies piled up in warehouses in Surat,” said Surendranath. “Shambhaji and his rebels have made the passage to Delhi a dangerous one. Now I have heard, from mariners who have sailed far to the south, that there are strange birds in those regions who live on ice floes, and that when these birds become hungry they will congregate on the edge of the floe, desiring the small fish that swim in the water below, but fearing the ravenous predators that lurk in that same water. The hunters are subtle, so there is no way for these birds to know whether one is lying in wait for them. Instead they wait for one bird, who might be exceptionally bold, or exceptionally stupid, to jump in alone. If that bird returns with a belly full of fish, they all jump in. If that bird never comes back, they wait.”

“The similitude is clear,” Jack said. “The merchants of Surat are like the birds on the ice floe, waiting to see who will be bold, or stupid, enough to attempt the passage to Delhi first.”

“That merchant will reap incomparably higher profits than the others,” Surendranath said encouragingly.

“Assuming his caravan actually makes it to Delhi, that is,” said Padraig.

SHORTLY THEY PASSED out through the gate and proceeded south-westwards into Kathiawar, which was a peninsula, a couple of hundred miles square, that projected into the Arabian Sea between the Mouths of the Indus on the west, and the Indian subcontinent on the east. The city of Ahmadabad bestrode a river called Sabarmati that flowed south from there for a few miles and spilled into the Gulf of Cambaye—a long, slender inlet that lay along the east coast of this Kathiawar.

The weather rapidly calmed down as they climbed up out of the valley of the Sabarmati and entered into the hilly, sporadically forested country that would eventually become the Kathiawar Peninsula. They stopped for a night in one of the open roadside camps that tended to form spontaneously all over Hindoostan, whenever shadows began to stretch and travelers’ stomachs began to growl. These reminded Jack of gypsy camps in Christendom, and indeed the people looked a good deal like gypsies and spoke a similar language. The difference was that in Christendom they were wretched Vagabonds, but here they were running the place. Wandering from one part of the camp to the next, Jack could see not only penniless wanderers and fakirs but also rich Banyans like Surendranath, as well as various Mogul officials.

But both of these types—the Banyans and the Moguls—eyed Jack in a way that made him uneasy, and tried to beckon him over. It was just like being in Amsterdam or Liverpool, where solitary males who did not keep their wits about them were liable to be press-ganged. When Jack understood this he disappeared, which was something he had become good at, and made his way back to Surendranath’s little camp.

“There are quite a few people hereabouts who look as if they’d like to administer the Intelligence Test to us,” he said to Padraig.

Padraig accepted this news with a tiny nod of the head. But Surendranath had overheard them. He had retreated into his palanquin and drawn red curtains around it for privacy, and it was easy to forget he was there.

“What is the Intelligence Test?” he demanded to know, and swept the curtain aside.

“A private joke,” said the annoyed Padraig.

But Jack saw good reasons to explain it, and so he said, “Cast your memory back to when Fortune had set us ashore in Surat—”

“I remember it every day,” said Surendranath.

“You stayed there to pursue your career. We fled inland to get away from the diverse European assassins who infested that town, and who were all looking for us. Soon enough, we came upon a Mogul road-block. Hindoos and Mohametans were allowed to pass through with only minor harassment and taking of baksheesh, but when it became known that we were Franks, they took us aside and made us sit in a tent together. One by one, each of us was taken out alone, and conducted to a field nearby, and handed a musket—which was unloaded—and a powder-horn, and pouch of balls.”

“What did you do?” Surendranath demanded.

“Gaped at it like a farmer.”

“I likewise,” said Padraig.

“So you failed the Intelligence Test?”

“I would rather say that we passed it. Van Hoek did the same as we. Mr. Foot tried to load the musket, but got the procedure backwards—put the ball in first, then the powder. But Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc loaded the weapon and discharged it in the general direction of a Hindoo idol that the Moguls had been using for target practice.”

“They were inducted,” said Surendranath.

“As far as we know, they have been serving in the armed forces of the local king ever since that day.” Jack said.

“This happened north of Surat?”

“Yes. Not far from the Habitation of Dust.”

“So, were you in the realm of Terror of the Idolaters?”

“No,” said Padraig, “this road-block was at a border crossing. The Moguls who gave us the Intelligence Test, and who press-ganged our friends, were in the pay of—”

“Dispenser of Mayhem!” cried Surendranath.

“The very same,” said Jack.

“That is an unexpected boon for us,” said the Banyan. “For as you know, the realm of Dispenser of Mayhem lies squarely astride the road to Delhi.”

“That amounts to saying that Dispenser of Mayhem has been doing a miserable job of controlling the Marathas,” Jack said.

“Which means that if we can find Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc, they will have much useful intelligence for us!”

Jack reckoned that this was as good a moment as any to spring the trap. “Indeed, it seems as if the Cabal—wretched and scattered though we are—may be very useful to you, Surendranath. Or to whichever merchant ends up hiring us, and making the run to Delhi first.”

A sort of brisk whooshing noise now, as Surendranath yanked the curtain closed around his palanquin. Then silence—though Jack thought he could hear a curious throbbing, as if Surendranath were trying to stifle agonized laughter.

The next morning they got under way early and traveled for a few miles to a border, where they crossed into the realm of Shatterer of Worlds.

“Shatterer of Worlds has extirpated the local Marathas, but there are ragged bandit gangs all over the place,” Surendranath said.

“Reminds me of France,” Jack mused.

“The comparison is apt,” Surendranath said. “As a matter of fact, it is not even a comparison. Shatterer of Worlds is a Frenchman.”

“Those damned Frogs are everywhere!” Jack exclaimed. “Does the Great Mogul have any other kings from Christendom?”

“I believe that Bringer of Thunder is a Neapolitan artilleryman. He owns a piece of Rajasthan.”

“Would you like us to round up some Frankish clothes, then? To scare away the highwaymen?” Padraig inquired.

“No need—in Kathiawar, they still observe the ancient customs,” said Surendranath, and alighted from his palanquin to parley with some Hindoos who were squatting by the side of the road. In a few minutes, one of them arose and took up a position in the front of the tiny caravan.

A STICK WAS JABBED into the salty concrete that passed for soil hereabouts. A yard away was another stick. A third stick had been lashed across the tops of the first two, and a fourth across the bottom. Miles of vermilion thread had been run back and forth between the top and bottom stick. A woman in an orange sari squatted before this contrivance maneuvering a smaller stick through the vertical threads, drawing another thread behind it. A couple of yards away was the same thing again, except that the sticks, the colors, and the woman were different; and this woman was chatting with a third woman who had also managed to round up four sticks and some thread.

The same was repeated all the way to the horizon on both sides of the road. Some of the weavers were working with coarse undyed thread, but most of their work was in vivid colors that burned in the light of the sun. In some places there would be an irregular patch of green, or blue, or yellow, where some group of weavers were filling a large order. In other zones, each weaver worked with a different thread and so there might be an acre or two in which no two frames were of the same color. The only people who were standing were a few boys carrying water; a smattering of bony wretches bent under racks of thread that were strapped to their backs; and a two-wheeled ox-cart meandering about and collecting finished bits of cloth. A rutted road cut through the middle of it all, headed off in the general direction of Diu: a Portuguese enclave at the tip of Kathiawar. This was the third day of their journey from Ahmadabad. The Charan continued to plod along ahead of them, humming to himself, occasionally eating a handful of something from a bag slung over his shoulder.

Out of all the thousands of Pieces of India stretched out for viewing, one caught Jack’s eye, like a familiar face in a crowd: a square of blue Calicoe just like one of Eliza’s dresses. He decided that he had better get some conversation going.

“Your narration puts me in mind of a question I have been meaning to ask of the first Hindoo I met who had the faintest idea what the hell I was saying,” he said.

Down in the palanquin, Surendranath startled awake.

Padraig sat up straighter in his saddle and blinked. “But no one has said a word these last two hours, Jack.”

Surendranath was game. “There is much in Hindoostan that cries out, to the Western mind, for explanation,” he said agreeably.

“Until we washed ashore near Surat, I fancied I had my thumb on the ‘stan’ phenomenon,” Jack said. “Turks live in Turkestan. Balochs live in Balochistan. Tajiks live in Tajikistan. Of course none of ’em ever stay put in their respective ’stans, which causes the world no end of trouble, but in principle it is all admirably clear. But now here we are in Hindoostan. And I gather that it soon comes to an end, if we go that way.” Jack waved his right arm, which, since they were going south, meant that he was gesturing towards the west. “But—” (now sweeping his left arm through a full eight points of the compass, from due south to due east) “—in those directions it goes on practically forever. And every person speaks a different language, has skin a different color, and worships a different graven image; it is as varie-gated as this” (indicating a pied hillside of weavers). “Leading to the question, what is the basis for ’stanhood or ’stanitude? To lump so many into one ’stan implies you have something in common.”

Surendranath leaned forward in his palanquin and looked as if he were just about to answer, then settled back into his cushions with a faint smile under the twin spirals of his waxed moustachio. “It is a mystery of the Orient,” he said gravely.

“For Christ’s sake, you people need to get organized,” Jack said. “You don’t even have a common government—it’s Moguls up here, and from what you are telling me, if we went south we would soon enough run afoul of those Marathas, and farther south yet, it’s those fiends in human form, who’ve got Moseh and Dappa and the others—”

“Your memories of that day have run together like cheaply dyed textiles in the monsoon rain,” Surendranath said.

“Excuse me, I was trying not to drown at the time.”

“So was I.”

“If they weren’t fiends in human form, why did you jump overboard?” Padraig asked.

“Because I wanted to get to Surat, and those pirates, whoever or whatever they were, they would have taken us the opposite direction,” said Surendranath.

“Why do you suppose we jumped out, then?”

“You feared that they were Balochi pirates,” Surendranath said.

Padraig: “Those are the ones who cut their captives’ Achilles tendons to prevent them escaping?”

Surendranath: “Yes.”

Jack: “But wait! If they are Balochis, it follows that they are from Balochistan! If only they would stay put, that is.”

Surendranath: “Of course.”

Jack: “But Balochistan is that hellish bit that went by to port—the country that vomited hot dust on us for three weeks.”

Surendranath: “The description is cruel but fair.”

Jack: “That would be a Mahometan country if ever there was one.”

Surendranath: “Balochis are Muslims.”

Padraig: “It’s all coming back to me. We thought they were Balochi pirates at first because they came after us in a Balochi-looking ship. Which, if true, would have been good for all of us save Dappa and you, Surendranath, because we were all Christians or Jews, hence People of the Book. Our Achilles tendons were safe.”

Surendranath: “I must correct you: it wasn’t all right for van Hoek.”

Jack: “True, but only because he’d made that asinine vow, when we were in Cairo, that he’d cut his hand off if he were ever taken by pirates again. Consequently he, you, and Dappa were making ready to jump ship.”

Padraig: “My recollection is that van Hoek meant to stay and fight.”

Jack: “The Irishman speaks the truth. The cap’n took us between two islands, in the Gulf of Cambaye over yonder—whereupon we were beset by the second pirate ship, which was obviously acting in concert with the first.”

Padraig: “But this one was much closer and was manned by—how do you say—”

Surendranath: “Sangano pirates. Hindoos who steal, but do not kidnap, enslave, maim, or torture, except insofar as they have to in order to steal.”

Jack: “And who had apparently taken that first ship from some luckless Balochi pirates, which is why we mistook them for Balochis at first.”

Surendranath: “To this point, you are speaking the truth, as I recollect it.”

Padraig: “No wonder—this is the point when you jumped out!”

Surendranath: “It made sense for me to jump out, because it was obvious that we were going to lose all of the gold to the Sangano pirates. But van Hoek was preparing to fight to the death.”

Jack: “I must not have heard the splash, Surendranath, as my mind was occupied with other concerns. Van Hoek, as you say, was steering a course for open water in the middle of the Gulf, probably with the intention of fighting it out to the end. But we hadn’t gone more than a mile when we stumbled directly into the path of a raiding-flotilla, whereupon all of the boats—ours, and our pursuers’—were fair game for this new group.”

Padraig: “Darkies, but not Africans.”

Jack: “Hindoos, but not Hindoostanis, precisely.”

Padraig: “Only pirate-ships I’ve ever heard of commanded by women.”

Jack: “There are rumored to be some in the Caribbean—but—none the less—it was a queer group indeed.”

Surendranath: “You are describing Malabar pirates, then.”

Jack: “As I said—fiends in human form!”

Surendranath: “They do things differently in Malabar.”

Padraig: “At any rate, even van Hoek could now see it was hopeless, and so he jumped, which was preferable to cutting his hand off.”

Surendranath: “Why did you jump, Padraig?”

Padraig: “I fled from Ireland, in the first place, specifically to get away from matriarchal oppression. Why did you jump, Jack?”

Jack: “Rumors had begun to circulate that the Malabar pirates were even more cruel to Christians than the Balochi pirates were to Hindoos.”

Surendranath: “Nonsense! You were misinformed. The Mohametan Malabar pirates are that way, to be sure. But if the ships you saw were commanded by women, then they must have been Hindoo Malabar pirates.”

Padraig: “They are rich female Hindoo Malabar pirates now.”

Jack: “Mr. Foot had run to the head, either to take a shite (which is what he normally does at such times) or to wave a white flag. But he tripped on a loose gold bar and pitched overboard. I went after him, knowing he couldn’t swim. The water turned out to be less than two fathoms deep—I nearly broke my leg hitting the bottom. Accordingly, our ship ran aground at nearly the same moment. The rest is a blur.”

Padraig: “It’s not such a blur. You and I, Monsieur Arlanc, Mr. Foot, van Hoek, and Vrej waded, bobbed, and dog-paddled across those endless shallows for a day or two. At some point we re-encountered Surendranath. Finally we washed up near Surat. The Armenian and the Frenchman later failed the Intelligence Test and wound up in the army of Dispenser of Mayhem.”

Surendranath: “Concerning those two, by the way, I have sent out some messages to my cousin in Udaipur—he will make inquiries.”

They came over the top of a gentle rise and saw new country ahead. A mile or two distant, the road crossed a small river that ran from right to left towards the Gulf of Cambaye, which was barely visible as a grayish fuzz on the eastern horizon. The river crossing was commanded by a mud-brick fort, and around the fort was a meager walled town. Jack already knew what they would find there: a landing for boats coming up the river from the Gulf, and a marketplace where Pieces of India were peddled to Banyans or European buyers.

Jack said, “It will be good to see Vrej and Arlanc again, assuming they are still alive, and I will enjoy listening to their war-stories. But I already know what they would tell us, if they were here.”

This announcement seemed to startle Padraig and Surendranath, and so Jack explained, “There must be some advantage to growing old, or else why would we put up with it?”

“You’re not old,” Padraig said, “you can’t be forty yet.”

“Stay. I have lived through more than most old men. Letters I have not learned, nor numbers, and so I cannot read a book, nor navigate a ship, nor calculate the proper angle for an artillery-piece. But people I know well—better than I should like to—and so the situation of Hindoostan is all too clear to me. It is clear when I watch you, Surendranath, speaking of the Moguls, and you, Padraig, speaking of the English.”

“Will you share your wisdom with us then, O Jack?” Padraig asked.

“If Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc were here, they would tell us that the Marathas are angry, well-organized, and not afraid to die, and that the Moguls are orgulous and corrupt—that the rulers of this Empire live better while besieging some Maratha fortress than the Hindoos do when they are at peace. They would tell us, in other words, that this rebellion is a serious matter, and that we cannot get the caravan of Surendranath from Surat to Delhi by dint of charm or bribery.”

“You seem to be telling me that it is impossible,” Surendranath said. “Perhaps we should turn around and go back to the Habitation of Dust.”

“Surendranath, which would you rather be: the first bird to jump off the ice floe, or the first bird to climb back onto it with a belly full of fish?”

“The question answers itself,” Surendranath said.

“If you listen to my advice, you will not be the former, but you will be the latter.”

“You think other caravans will leave Surat first, and fall prey to the rebels,” Surendranath translated.

“I believe that any caravan headed to Delhi will have to face the Maratha army at some point,” Jack said. “The first such caravan to drive the Marathas from the field shall be the first to reach its destination.”

“I cannot hire an army,” Surendranath said.

“I did not say you need to hire an army. I said you need to drive the Marathas from the field.”

“You speak like a fakir,” Surendranath said darkly.

THE MAIDAN OF THIS KATHIAWAR river-town sported a more or less typical assortment of fakirs both Hindoo and Mahometan. Several were content with the old arms-crossed-behind-the-head trick. A Hindoo one was swallowing fire, a red-skirted Dervish was whirling around, another Hindoo was standing on his head covered with red dust. And yet most of them had empty begging-bowls and were going ignored by the townspeople. A score of idlers, barefoot boys, passersby, strolling pedlars and river-traders had gathered around one spectacle at the end of the maidan.

They were crowded so closely together that if Jack had not been mounted he wouldn’t have been able to see the object of their attention: a gray-haired European man dressed up in clothes that had been out-moded, in England, before Jack had been born. He wore a black frock coat and a broad-brimmed black Pilgrim-hat and a frayed shirt that made him look like a wandering Puritan bible-pounder. And indeed there was an old worm-eaten Bible in view, resting on a low table—actually a plank, just barely spanning the gap between a couple of improvised sawbucks, with a stained and torn cloth thrown over it. Next to the Bible was another tome that Jack recognized as a hymn-book, and next to the hymnal, a little place setting: a china plate flanked by a rusty knife and fork.

Jack seemed to have arrived during a lull, which soon came to an end as an excited young Hindoo came running in from the market nearby, a dripping object held in his cupped hands. The crowd parted for him. He scampered up and deposited it in the center of the fakir’s plate: a metal-gray giblet leaking blood and clear juice. Then he jumped back as if his hands had been burned, and ran over to wipe his hands on a nearby patch of grass.

The fakir sat for a few moments regarding the kidney with extreme solemnity, waiting for the buzz of the crowd to die away. Only when complete silence had fallen over the maidan did he reach for the knife and fork. He gripped one in each hand and held them poised over the organ for a few agonizing moments. The crowd underwent a sort of convulsion as every onlooker shifted to a better viewing angle.

The fakir appeared to lose his nerve, and set the utensils down. A sigh of mixed relief and disappointment ran through the onlookers. Someone darted up and tossed a paisa onto the table. The fakir put his hands together in a prayerful attitude and muttered indistinctly for a while, then reached for his Bible, opened it up, and read a paragraph or two, faltering as he came to bits that had been elided by book-worms. But this was something from the Old Testament with many “begats” and so it scarcely mattered.

Again he took up the knife and fork and struggled with himself for a while, and again lost his nerve and set them down. Mounting excitement in the crowd, now. More and larger coins rang on the plank. The fakir took up the hymnal, rose to his feet, and bellowed out a few verses of that old Puritan favorite:

If God thou send’st me straight to Hell

When I have breath’d my Last,

Just like a Stone flung in a Well

I’ll go down meek and Fast…

For even though I’ve done my Best

T’obey thy Law Divine,

Who am I, thee to contest?

The Fault must all be Mine!

…and so on in that vein until the fire-eater and the Dervish were screaming at him to shut up.

Pretending to ignore their protests, the Christian fakir closed up the hymnal, took up knife and fork for the third time, and—having finally mustered the spiritual power to proceed—pierced the kidney. A jet of urine lunged out and nearly spattered an audacious boy, who jumped back screaming. The fakir took a good long time sawing off a piece of the organ. The crowd crept inwards again, not because anyone really wanted to get any closer, but because people kept blocking one another’s view. The fakir impaled the morsel on the tines of the fork and raised it on high so that even the groundlings in the back row could get a clear view. Then in one quick movement he popped it into his mouth and began to chew it up.

Several fled wailing. Coins began to zero in on the fakir from diverse points of the compass. But after his Adam’s apple moved up and down, and he opened his mouth wide to show it empty, and curled his tongue back to show he wasn’t hiding anything, a barrage of paisas and even rupees came down on him.

“A stirring performance, Mr. Foot,” said Jack, half an hour later, as they were all riding out of town together. “Lo these many months I have been worried sick about you, wondering how you were getting along—unfoundedly, as it turns out.”

“Very considerate of you, then, to show up unasked-for to share your poverty with me,” said Mr. Foot waspishly. Jack had extracted him from the maidan suddenly and none too gently, even to the point of leaving half the kidney sitting on the plate uneaten.

“I regret I missed the show,” said Padraig.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before in a thousand pubs,” Jack answered mildly.

“E’en so,” said Padraig,” it had to’ve been better than what I’ve been doing the last hour: sneaking round peering at idolaters’ piss-pots.”

“What learned you?”

“Same as in the last village—they do it in pots. Untouchables come round once a day to empty them,” Padraig answered.

“Are the piss and shit always mixed together or—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“First kidney-eating and now chamber-pots!” exclaimed Surendranath from his palanquin. “Why this keen curiosity concerning all matters related to urine?”

“Maybe we will have better luck in Diu,” Jack said enigmatically.

THAT RIVER-CROSSING MARKED THE BEGINNING of a long, slow climb up into some dark hills to the south. Surendranath assured them that it was possible to circumvent the Gir Hills simply by following the coastal roads, but Jack insisted that they go right through the middle. At one point he led them off into a dense stand of trees, and spent a while tromping around in the undergrowth hefting various branches and snapping them over his knee to judge their dryness. This was the only part of the trip when they were in anything like danger, for (a) Jack surprised a cobra and (b) half a dozen bandits came out brandishing crude, but adequate, weapons. The Hindoo whom Surendranath had hired finally did something useful: viz. pulled a small dagger, hardly more than a paring-knife really, from his cummerbund and held it up to his own neck and then stood there adamantly threatening to cut his own throat.

The effect on the bandits was as if this fellow had summoned forth a whole artillery-regiment and surrounded them with loaded cannons. They dropped their armaments and held forth their hands beseechingly and pleaded with him in Gujarati for a while. After lengthy negotiations, fraught with unexpected twists and alarming setbacks, the Charan finally consented not to hurt himself, the bandits fled, and the party moved on.

Within the hour they had passed over the final crest of the Hills of Gir and come to a height-of-land whence they could look straight down a south-flowing river valley to the coast: the end of the Kathiawar Peninsula. At the point where the river emptied into the sea was a white speck; beyond it, the Arabian Sea stretched away forever.

As they traveled down that valley over the next day, the white speck gradually took on definition and resolved itself into a town with a European fort in the middle. Several East Indiamen, and smaller ships, sheltered beneath the fort’s guns in a little harbor. The road became broader as they neared Diu. They were jostled together with caravans bringing bolts of cloth and bundles of spices towards the waiting ships, and began to meet Portuguese traders journeying up-country to trade.

They stopped short of the city wall, and made no effort to go in through those gates, guarded as they were by Portuguese soldiers. The Charan said his farewell and hunkered down by the side of the road to await some northbound caravan that might be in need of his protection. Jack, Padraig, Mr. Foot, Surendranath, and their small retinue began to wander through the jumbled suburbs, scattering peacocks and diverting around sacred cows, stopping frequently to ask for directions. After a while Jack caught a whiff of malt and yeast on the breeze, and from that point onwards they were able to follow their noses.

Finally they arrived at a little compound piled high with faggots of spindly wood and round baskets of grain. A giant kettle was dangling over a fire, and a short red-headed man was standing over it gazing at his own reflection: not because he was a narcissist, but because this was how brewers judged the temperature of their wort. Behind him, a couple of Hindoo workers were straining to heave a barrel of beer up into a two-wheeled cart: bound, no doubt, for a Portuguese garrison inside the walls.

“It is all as tidy and prosperous as anything in Hindoostan could be,” Jack announced, riding slowly into the middle of it. “A little corner of Amsterdam here at the butt-end of Kathiawar.”

The redhead’s blue eyes swivelled up one notch, and gazed at Jack levelly through a rising cataract of steam.

“But it was never meant to last,” Jack continued, “and you know that as well as I do, Otto van Hoek.”

“It has lasted as well as anything that is of this earth.”

“But when you make your delivery-rounds, to the garrisons and the wharves, you must look at those beautiful ships.”

“Then of ships speak to me,” said van Hoek, “or else go away.”

“Tap us a keg and dump out that kettle,” Jack said, “so we can put it to alchemical uses. I have just ridden down out of the Hills of Gir, and firewood is plentiful there. And as long as you keep peddling your merchandise to the good people of Diu, the other thing we need will be plentiful here.”

The Surat-Broach Road, Hindoostan

A MONTH LATER (OCTOBER 1693)

For the works of the Egyptian sorcerers, though not so great as those of Moses, yet were great miracles.

—HOBBES,
Leviathan

“LORD HELP ME,” said Jack, “I have begun thinking like an Alchemist.” He snapped an aloe-branch in half and dabbed its weeping stump against a crusted black patch on his forearm. He and certain others of the Cabal were reclining in the shade of some outlandish tree on the coastal plain north of Surat. Strung out along the road nearby was a caravan of bullocks and camels.

“Half of Diu believes you are one, now,” said Otto van Hoek, squinting west across the fiery silver horizon of the Gulf of Cambaye. Diu lay safely on the opposite side of it. Van Hoek had been busy unwinding a long, stinking strip of linen from his left hand, but the pain of forcing out these words through his roasted voice-box forced him to stop for a few moments and prosecute a fit of coughing and nose-wiping.

“If we had stayed any longer the Inquisition would have come for us,” said Monsieur Arlanc in a similarly hoarse and burnt voice.

“Yes—if for no other reason than the stench,” put in Vrej Esphahnian. Of all of them, he had taken the most precautions—viz. wearing leather gloves that could be shaken off when his hands burst into flame spontaneously. So he was in a better state than the others.

“It is well that we had Mr. Foot with us,” said Surendranath, “to bamboozle the Inquisitors into thinking that we pursued some sacred errand!” Surendranath had not spent all that much time among Christians, and his incredulous glee struck them all as just a bit unseemly.

“I’ll take a share of the credit for that,” said Padraig Tallow, who had lost his dominant eye, and all the hair on one side of his head. “For ’twas I who supplied Mr. Foot with all of his churchly clap-trap; he only spoke lines that I wrote.”

“No one denies it,” said Surendranath, “but even you must admit that the inexhaustible fount and ever-bubbling wellspring of nonsense, gibberish, and fraud was Ali Zaybak!”

“I cede the point gladly,” said Padraig, and both men turned to see if Jack would respond to their baiting. But Jack had been distracted by an odor foul enough to register even on his raspy and inflamed olfactory. Van Hoek had got the bandage off his right hand. The tips of his three remaining fingers were swollen and weeping.

“I told you,” said Jack, “you should have used this stuff.” He gestured to the aloe-plant, or rather the stump of it, as Jack had just snapped off the last remaining branch. It was growing in a pot of damp dirt, which was carried on its own wee palanquin: a plank supported at each end by a boy. “The Portuguese brought it out of Africa,” Jack explained.

“Truly you are thinking like an Alchemist, then,” muttered van Hoek, staring morosely at his rotting digits. “Everyone knows that the only treatment for burns is butter. It is proof of how far gone you are in outlandish ways, that you would rather use some occult potion out of Africa!”

“When do you think you’ll amputate?” Jack inquired.

“This evening,” said van Hoek. “That way I shall have twenty-four hours to recuperate before the battle.” He looked to Surendranath for confirmation.

“If our objective were to make time, and to cross the Narmada by day, we could do it tomorrow,” said Surendranath. “But as our true purpose is to ‘fall behind schedule,’ and reach the crossing too late, and be trapped against the river by the fall of night, we may proceed at a leisurely pace. This evening’s camp would be a fine time and place to carry out a minor amputation. I shall make inquiries about getting you some syrup of poppies.”

“More chymistry!” van Hoek scoffed, and dipped his hand into a pot of ghee. But he did not object to Surendranath’s proposal. “I could have been a brewer,” he mused. “In fact, I was!”

VAN HOEK HAD SURRENDERED his brewing-coppers to Jack and gone down to the harbor of Diu to see about hiring a dhow or something like it. Jack, spending Surendranath’s capital, had set some local smiths to work beating the copper tuns into new shapes—shapes that Jack chalked out for them from his memories of Enoch Root’s strange works in the Harz Mountains. Surendranath had sent messengers north to the kingdom of Dispenser of Mayhem, along with money to buy the freedom of Vrej Esphahnian and Monsieur Arlanc. Then the Banyan, somewhat against his better instincts, had set about turning himself into a urine mogul.

Some simple deals struck with the caste of night-soil-collectors and chamber-pot-emptiers caused jugs, barrels, and hogsheads of piss to come trundling into van Hoek’s brewery-compound every morning. By and large these had been covered, to keep the stink down, but Jack insisted that the lids be taken off and the piss be allowed to stand open under the sun. Complaints from the neighbors—consisting largely of religious orders—had not been long in coming. And it was then that Mr. Foot had come into his own; for he’d been at work with needle and thread, converting his black Puritan get-up into a sort of Wizard’s robe. His line of patter consisted half of Alchemy—which Jack had dictated—and half of Popery, which Padraig Tallow could and did rattle off in his sleep.

What Jack knew of Alchemy-talk came partly from the mountebanks who would stand along the Pont-Neuf peddling bits of the Philosopher’s Stone; partly from Enoch Root; and partly from tales that he had been told, more recently, by Nyazi, who knew nothing of chymistry but was the last word on all matters to do with camels.

“Amon, or Amon-Ra, was the great god of the ancient peoples of al-Khem.* And just as al-Khem gave its name to Alchemy, so did the god Amon serve as namesake of a magickal substance well known to practitioners of that Art. For behold, when the Romans made al-Khem a part of their empire, they perceived in this Amon a manifestation of Jupiter, and dubbed him Jupiter-Ammon, and made idols depicting him as a mighty King with ram’s horns sprouting from his temples. To him they raised up a great temple at the Oasis of Siwa, which lies in the desert far to the west of Alexandria. As well as being a great caravanserai, long has that place been a center of mystickal powers and emanations; lo, an oracle of Amon was there from the time of the Pharaohs, and the Roman temple of Jupiter-Ammon was erected upon the same site. It was, and is, a very hotbed of Alchemy, and has become renowned for the production of a pungent salt, which is prepared from the dung of the thousands of camels that pass through the place. The secret of its preparation is known to but a few; but the Salt of Ammon, or sal ammoniac, is taken by the caravans to Alexandria and the other trading-centers of North Africa, whence it is distributed the world over by the infinitely various channels of Commerce. Thus have its extraordinary, and some would say magical, powers become known throughout the world. Now, if ignorant pagans could make so much out of what was literally a heap of shit, consider how much more Christians, who know the Bible, and who have access to the writings of Paracelsus, &c., might accomplish! What is present in camel shit, may also be found in the urine of humans, for Aristotle would say that both of these substances are of the same essential nature. Though Plato would observe that the latter is as much more refined and closer to the Ideal as human beings are compared to camels…”

All of this was, of course, a long-winded way of letting the neighbors know that Jack and company were about to stink the place up to a degree that no one who had not been near a mountain of fermenting camel shit could even imagine; but Mr. Foot delivered the terrible news at such numbing length and so laden down with homiletical baggage as to beat his auditors into submission before the essential point of what he was saying had even penetrated their minds.

As was ever true of any work that entailed the bending and beating of metal, the conversion of the tuns took longer than anticipated. What Jack was after was a single great round-bottomed wide-mouthed boiler, and a means to suspend it over a “bloody enormous” fire. This was simple enough. But at a later, critical stage of the operation he needed to clamp a sort of hat down over the maw of the kettle, and channel the vapors along a tube to another, smaller vessel where they could be bubbled through water. For the most practical of reasons, it was preferable that this latter vessel be made of glass. But it had proved difficult to get a glass container so large, and so they made do with copper. This explained what happened to Padraig; for against Jack’s express instructions, he had, while they were making a trial batch, lifted the lid to peer inside, and been greeted by a jet of white flame.

Around the time of this mishap, managerial acumen arrived in the person of Monsieur Arlanc, and, in Vrej Esphahnian, entrepreneurial legerdemain. Arlanc pointed out that it would be difficult to hire good people, or to maintain their reputation as proficient Alchemists, if the principals were forever torching off body parts, and making the Kathiawar Peninsula ring with screams of agony. Vrej, for his part, had proffered the observation that they would soon need to procure a large number of glass vessels anyway, and so it was high time to begin investigating the local market in such wares.

The results were none too encouraging. In Diu there was no Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, as in London. Indeed, it seemed that glass-making was one of the few arts and crafts that Christians did better than anyone else. There had, according to Vrej, been many brilliant glassworkers in Damascus three hundred years ago, but then Tamerlane had sacked the place and carried them all off to Samarkand, and they had not been heard from since. There was no time just now to send a delegation to Samarkand and make inquiries. So they had to make do with what glass could be collected from the diverse Portuguese chapter-houses, factories, and fortifications around Diu. For the bubbling-vessel, Vrej procured a single windowpane about a hand-span on a side. Jack put his coppersmiths to work letting a hole into the side of the vessel, and van Hoek used his caulking acumen to seal the pane into place so that not too much water would leak out around the edges. All of which took a while. But it required upwards of a fortnight for a given bucket of piss to reach the point where it was ready to be used, and so the hurry was not great. And Arlanc had been kept busy for some while procuring charcoal from the wooded hills in the north. This had to be prepared by locals making countless small batches in countless tan-doors, then collected and gathered and shipped. Capital ran low. Vessels came across from Surat bearing news, or at least rumors, that this or that Banyan was readying a caravan and a puissant force of mercenaries to punch through the Maratha blockade along the Narmada; and each such message sent Surendranath into an ecstasy of rage, and caused him to run about the compound (weaving carefully between urine-receptacles) flinging his turban on the ground and then picking it up so that he could fling it down again, while wondering aloud to the gods why he had ever chosen to take up with all of these crazy ferangs. For a week, it seemed that all they had to show for their efforts was a sea of putrescent urine; a lot of copper, beaten to outlandish shapes and stuck together with solder and with tar; and a few patches of dirt where dusk seemed to linger even after black night had covered the rest of Hindoostan.

But then finally a cart-train came down out of the north laden with charcoal and with firewood, and Vrej Esphahnian unveiled a wooden crate containing a gross of glass bottles (smoky brown, striated, and bubbly, but more or less transparent), and they were ready to go. Jack had mentioned to them, and Padraig had demonstrated beyond all question, that the apparatus would destroy itself in a spitting storm of white fire shortly after they were finished using it; they had, in other words, one and only one chance.

At last one morning Jack and van Hoek and some local representatives of the chamber-pot-handling caste wrapped cloths around their mouths and noses and set about lugging the vast motley collection of kegs, urns, and pots of fœtid urine up to the great kettle and dumping them in. At the same time, the largest and hottest possible bonfire was kindled beneath. It took some time for the fire to take hold, for the piss had grown chilly sitting out overnight. But when it did, all fled the compound, and many fled the neighborhood. They would have fled screaming, if they’d had the power to draw breath. Not that they were any strangers to the stench of old piss, by this point; but what the kettle exhaled was of an altogether different order. The broad rim of that kettle might as well have been the maw of Jupiter-Ammon himself, striking mortals dead, not with thunderbolts from on high, but with burning exhalations drawn up from Hell. It made the air shiver as it came on, and made birds fold their wings and smack their little heads into the ground. Men could do nothing but hide their eyes in the crooks of their arms, plug their noses, and bump into one another until they found a way out. When they had escaped to a radius where it was possible to draw breath, they turned inwards and watched the kettle through sheets of burning tears. From time to time someone would draw in a deep breath and hold it while he sprinted back to the hell-mouth to shove a few more pieces of cord-wood into the fire.

After a while the stench dissipated, and not long after that, steam began to rise. Presently the kettle came to a galloping boil, and they found that they could approach. The Breath of Ammon had all been expelled. But this was not the last time they smelled it, for the kettle had not been capacious enough to hold all the urine they had collected, and much remained strewn about the compound in diverse small containers. As the level of the boiling brew fell, they dumped in more urine to top it off again, and each time they did, it let off another scream of Ammon-breath. This went on for much of the day; but finally the last chamber-pot had been emptied and tossed into the street. A few minutes later the stench of sal ammoniac abated for good. There followed an interlude of some hours during which the kettle merely boiled, and threw off a column of steam that rose high over Diu and drifted away into the blue sky over the sea. Jack, peering in over the kettle’s rim, saw it boiled down to a small fraction of its former volume, and glimpsed just beneath the foaming surface a churning mass of solid yellow-brown stuff. From time to time he reached into it with a paddle, checking its consistency as he had seen Enoch Root do. When it became difficult to stir, he called for charcoal. The mass was stained with black as sacks of the stuff, ground up to the consistency of meal, were dumped in. Jack stirred until the mix was gray, and so dry and thick that the paddle nearly became lodged in it. Moisture was still condensing on his brow, but he knew all the water was nearly gone now, and they must work quickly. The others knew as much as Jack did, having been in on the trial batch that had taken Padraig’s eye. So when Jack jumped back from the kettle’s rim they did not need to be told what to do: pulling on lines and pushing with sticks, they maneuvered over the kettle’s rim an upside-down funnel of the same diameter, and set it down so that the two were joined in an open-mouth kiss, and packed oakum and dribbled tar around the junction so that no fume could escape. All of the vapors emanating from the hot gray mass in the bottom of the kettle were now channeled up into the copper dunce-cap, which had but one outlet: a copper chimney that bent round to the side and developed into a snergly tube, terminated by a U-bend that led into the bottom of the smaller vessel—the bubbler—with the glass port-hole in its side. This was filled with water, as anyone who looked at the window could see. It was two fathoms above the ground, and they had erected a scaffold and a platform of bamboo so that they could work there.

When Jack was satisfied with the progress of the caulking and sealing of the great dunce-cap, he ascended the platform—a tinker’s shop and an apothecary-store of ladles, funnels, bottles, and terra-cotta vessels of clove-oil—and was pleased to observe a slight rise in the water-level, followed by a blurp and a collapse as some residual steam forced its way through the water-trap in the U-bend. This happened several more times in the next few minutes as the very last of the moisture was exhaled from the humid cake in the kettle, but then it stopped. There was then an interlude, which grew awkward the longer it went on; but Jack bid them keep stoking the fire and have faith. He was viewing the water level with respect to a wee bubble trapped in the glass pane, and for a while it did not move at all. But then it rose up distinctly, and a moment later a little belch of vapor shimmered up through the water and broke out the top. “It begins!” he announced.

Contrary to claims lately issued by Mr. Foot to the good people of Diu, Jack did not have the power to command the wheeling of the heavens. It was wholly fortuitous that the sun went down a few minutes later. The window in the side of the bubbler gleamed in the light of the sunset, as shiny objects were wont to do. But after the sun had gone down it continued to glow for a length of time that was odd, then remarkable, and, finally, unnatural. For it only got brighter as the night grew darker. Had it not been square, it might have been mistaken for a full moon. It grew so bright that if Jack stared at it full-on he became dazzled, and then could see nothing else. He assigned to Monsieur Arlanc the duty of monitoring the level of the water and adding more as needed to keep it from boiling dry; which had been the error that had led to Padraig’s injury. Jack then turned his back on the window and let his eyes adjust. From the platform, he saw, as if he were an actor on a stage, a lake of faces, all turned his way, many with mouths open in wonder, all lit up by the blue-green radiance of the kaltes Feuer, the cold fire, of Phosphorus: light-bearer. They were all out of doors, of course, and the cold fire confined to a small vessel of beaten copper; but that was not how it seemed. It seemed that these people were all walled up inside some black dungeon, which had only a single square window, high up in the wall, through which light shone in from another world.

“This will all be smoking ruins by break of day,” he announced, “let us gather what we may of the kaltes Feuer and preserve it from the air, and ourselves from fiery death!”

They went about that in two ways. First, someone would from time to time dip a ladle into the top of the bubbler and scoop out portions of the water, and along with it, flecks and flakes of cold fire that swirled through it like sparks above a campfire. This they decanted through funnels into the bottles that Vrej had procured. The glowing bottles were handed down to others on the ground, who stopped them with rags to prevent air from getting in. These were then placed into a tray of simmering water that was going over a bed of coals. Gradually, over a period of hours, the level of water within these bottles declined as it escaped through the rag stoppers. But the amount of light escaping from them did not diminish, for the waxy phosphorus was trapped inside, and tended to cling to the walls, so that each bottle over time acquired a blotchy lining of weird light. When these bottles were nearly dry, they were plucked out and plunged neck-first into a tar-pot, to seal them against infiltration of air.

Second, they dumped ladles of the stuff into clay pots each of which contained a small amount of clove oil. The water fell through the oil and found the bottom of the pot, shedding some of its burden of phosphorus along the way. These pots were then subjected to a similar process of gentle heating, so that the water trapped beneath the oil was driven out as steam. When these pots stopped blurping and steaming, it meant that all the water was gone, and nothing was left but phosphorus suspended in oil. The oil coated the tiny particules of phosphorus and prevented air from touching them, which rendered the stuff safe.

This anyway was the general plan of action. For the most part it actually went this way; but what made it interesting were the mishaps. Every splash and spill remained visible as a pool, burst, or dribbling trail of cold fire. Jack got some splashed on a forearm and did not notice it until he went and stood by the bottle-simmering place for a few minutes; the warmth shining from the bed of coals dried the damp place on his arm, leaving a fine layer of phosphorus that burst into unquenchable flame. Many had similar stories. Presently most of them were naked, having frantically stripped off clothing when it was pointed out to them by excited spectators that they were glowing. Ladles were spilled on the scaffolding by burnt and nervous hands, obliging Monsieur Arlanc to stand his ground with more than human courage as he implored someone to come up and wash away the spill with buckets of fresh water before it dried out. The caulking around the windowpane weeped, then seeped, then began to dribble a steady stream of cold fire. They made shift to catch what they could of this, and confine it to bottles or oil-pots; but matters deteriorated as more and more of the scaffold, the ground beneath it, and the men working on it became tinged with the fire, which could have only one consequence when it dried. Finally Jack ordered Monsieur Arlanc to abandon ship. The Huguenot vaulted down with spryness odd in a man of his age, rending his garments even as he hit the ground; men converged on him with buckets of sea-water and sluiced him off until he was dark. Then all ran away, for the leak around the windowpane had opened wide, and the fire was raining down in a blinding cataract. The water all came out. Air found its way in through the empty bubbler to the chimney, which had become thickly lined with condensed phosphorus. White fire shrieked out of it. The sun rose. What a moment ago had been glowing pools of spilled fire on the black velvet ground, were revealed as damp patches on khaki dirt. The bubbler ripped loose, hurtled away, and impacted on the roof of a monastery half a mile downrange. The chimney and dunce-cap shot into the air, spiraling and pin-wheeling through the night sky as if the Big Dipper had scooped up a load of the sun’s own fire. It landed somewhere out to sea. Left in the vicinity of the scaffold was a metropolis of small sputtering conflagrations that erupted here and there without warning over the next several hours. Fortunately they had had the wisdom to establish the double-boilers for the bottles and the clove-oil pots at a respectful distance. So they abandoned the center and toiled at the periphery until daybreak. This was not without some dangers of its own; sometimes a bottle would crack from the heat, and then some intrepid person would have to pluck it out with tongs and fling it away, lest in burning and exploding it would detonate the others. This led to the burning-down of the house where they had all been dwelling. In other circumstances, the loss of their domicile would have been rated a grave setback; as it was, they knew they were going to be kicked out of town anyway. A formation of Portuguese pikemen came for them at daybreak. Working amid the smoldering ruins of what had, a month earlier, been a perfectly respectable brewery, Jack and the others had already loaded the bottles (packed very carefully in straw) and the pots of oil into crates, and the crates onto those wagons that remained unburnt, and harnessed these to the few domesticated beasts that had not run away or simply dropped dead of terror during the night-time. They were escorted, not to say pursued, by the pikemen down to the quay where they boarded their hired boat with the phosphorus and what few possessions they still had. Winds favored them; pirates, who had witnessed strange apparitions in the night sky above Diu, avoided them; and a day and half a later they were in Surat, taking up their position near the head of a great armed trade-caravan, and beginning the long march north and east to Shahjahanabad.

“YOU WILL BE AMUSED to know that where I come from, swords are straight,” Jack said. “Some are broader, and indeed, being a plain-spoken people, we call those broadswords. Some are of intermediate size, as rapiers, others whisker-thin, as the small-swords that are lately in vogue. Oh, admittedly one sees a few blades with a bit of a curve to them, as in your cutlass or saber. But compared to these, they’re all straight as a line, as are the style and tactics of their usage. Compared to which…” Jack extended a hand towards a Mobb of warriors that they had picked up in Surat. There were Yavanas—which was to say, Muslims—who had come across the water from the lands to the west, or down out of Afghanistan, Balochistan, or this or that Khanate. And there were Hindoos of diverse martial castes who for whatever reason had elected to throw in their lot with the Moguls. But even within the smallest discernible sub-sub-subtribe each warrior had a weapon—or at least, a dangerous-looking object—completely different from the next bloke’s.

Among the personal effects of the Doctor, Jack had once seen books, filled not with letters but with depictions of curves. These he had leafed through in times of boredom; for though he could not read, he could stare at a strange curve as well as any other man. Eliza had sat next to him and pronounced their names: the Limaçon of Pascal, the Kampyle of Eudoxus, the Conchoid of de Sluze, the Quadratrix of Hippias, the Epitrochoid, Tractrix, and the Cassinian Ovals. At the onset of the recitation Jack had wondered how geometers could be so inventive as to produce so many types and families of curves. Later he had come to perceive that of curves there was no end, and the true miracle was that poets, or writers, or whoever it was that was in charge of devising new words, could keep pace with those hectic geometers, and slap names on all the whorls and snarls in the pages of the Doctor’s geometry-books. Now, though, he understood that geometers and word-wrights alike were nothing more than degraded and by-passed off-shoots of the South Asian weapons industry. There was not a straight blade in all of Hindoostan. Some weapons had grips at one end and were sharpened elsewhere; these might be classed as swords. Others consisted mostly of handle, with a dangerous bit at one end; these Jack conceived of as axes or spears, depending on whether they looked like they were meant to be swung, or shoved. Still others had strings, and seemed capable of projecting arrows. Jack put these down as bows. But of the sword-like ones, some were bent all the way round to form hooks; some curved first one way, then thought better of it and veered back the other; some had a different curve on either edge, so that they became broad as shovels in parts; some quivered back and forth like wriggling snakes; some forked, or spun off hooks, beaks, barbs, lobes, prongs, or even spirals. There were swords shaped like feathers, horseshoes, goat-horns, estuaries, penises, fish-hooks, eyebrows, hair-combs, Signs of the Zodiac, half-moons, elm-leaves, dinner-forks, Persian slippers, baker’s paddles, pelican’s beaks, dog’s legs, and Corinthian columns. This did not take into account the truly outlandish contraptions that seemed to have been made by piling two or more such weapons atop each other, heating, and beating. Of long-handled swinging-weapons (axes, maces, hammers, halberds, and weaponized farm-implements, viz. war-sickles, combat-flails, assault-shovels, and tactical adzes) there was a similar variety. Most troublesome to Jack’s mind, for some reason, were the bows which instead of the good old crescent of English yew, here seemed to’ve been made from the legs of giant spiders; they were black, sinewy, glossy, spindly things that curved this way and that, and were sometimes longer on one end than the other, so that Jack could not even make out which end was up; which part was the handle; or which side was supposed to face the enemy. For each of these weapon-styles, he knew, there must be a six-thousand-year-old martial art with its own set of unfathomable rites, lingo, exercises, and secrets that could only be mastered through a lifetime of miserable study.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me it is all quite mundane compared to the weaponry of our adversaries,” Jack muttered.

“In truth you have waxed so peevish that I have avoided that, and all other topics of conversation, these last few hours,” said Surendranath.

The Banyan was in his palanquin. Jack rode a horse. This helped explain the peevishness, for the former reclined in the shade of a roof while the latter was protected only by a turban.

“Verily this must be the kingdom of Gordy himself,” said Jack.

“Who or what is Gordy?”

“Some bloke who had a Knot once, so tangled that the only way to get it undone was to chop it in twain. The story is proverbial among ferangs. It is what we are about to do at the crossing of the Narmada. Rather than see all of these blokes cross scimitars, kitars, khandas, jamdhars, tranchangs, et cetera with the Marathas, we are going to cut the Gordian Knot.”

“To you it may be a proverb of great significance but to me it is meaningless,” said Surendranath, “and I would fain have something like an actual plan of battle before we meet the foe, which will probably occur this very night.”

Here Surendranath was only pointing out something that had been weighing on Jack’s mind anyway, which was that they had been so preoccupied with making the phosphorus, and recovering from having made it, that they’d not thought much about what to do with it. So Padraig, Vrej, Monsieur Arlanc, and Mr. Foot were sent for, and presently rode up to join Jack and Surendranath. Van Hoek had chopped off the tips of his fingers the night before and, still woozy from shock and opium, was being carried behind on another palanquin.

“This country that we have been traveling through,” said the Banyan, “is hardly the type of scene to make any of you write awe-struck letters home, but it is the most dangerous and unsettled part of Hindoostan.”

They had made landfall at the port of Surat, which was at the mouth of the river Tapti, and since then had been heading north, following a caravan-road that ran parallel to the sea-coast, a few miles inland. From time to time they would cross some smaller stream that, like the Tapti, meandered down out of the country to their right on its way to the Gulf of Cambaye, to their left. All knew that the biggest such river was called the Narmada and that they would come to it today, but so flat was the landscape that it afforded no hints as to how near or far the great river might be. This coastal plain reminded Jack a little bit of the Nile Delta, which was to say that it was well-watered, populated with many villages, and presented to the traveler a mixed prospect of marshes, farms, and groves of diverse kinds of trees that were cultivated (or at least allowed to stay alive) because they provided fruit or oil or fiber. “We shall see wilder and stranger landscapes farther north,” Surendranath promised them, “but by then we shall be out of danger.

“If you think of Hindoostan as a great diamond, then the valley of the Narmada, which we are about to cross, is like a flaw that runs through the heart of it. Hindoostan has ever been divided among several kingdoms. Their names change, and so do their borders—with one exception, and that is the Narmada, which is a natural boundary between the north and the south. North of it, invaders come and go, and control of the cities and strongholds passes from one dynasty to another. To the south, it is a different story. You cannot see them from here, but there is a line of mountains cutting across Hindoostan from east to west called the Satpura Range. The Narmada drains their northern slopes, flowing along the mountains’ northern flank through a straight deep gorge for many days’ journey. The westernmost extremity of this range is called the Rajpipla Hills, and if the air were not so hazy we would be able to see them off to our right. A day’s journey thataway, the Rajpipla Hills draw back away from the Narmada, which, thus freed from the constraints of the gorge, adopts a meandering habit, and snakes across this plain, and broadens to an estuary much like that of the Tapti which we have just put behind us.

“The Moguls have proved little different from other martial races that controlled the north in millennia past, which is to say that the weapons and tactics that served them well in the plains and deserts proved ineffective in breaching the mountain-wall of Satpura. But unlike some who have been content simply to make the Narmada their southern border, they have nursed the ambition of making all Hindoostan a part of the dar al-Islam and so probed southwards via the only route that is passable: which happens to be the very road that we are treading on now. Coastal cities such as Broach on the Narmada and Surat on the Tapti they have conquered with ease, and, with a great deal of difficulty, retained. But south of Surat, the interior of Hindoostan is guarded from the western sea by a formidable range of mountains, the Ghats, which are ever a refuge into which the Hindoo resistance—the Marathas—may withdraw when they desire not to meet the Moguls in pitched battle in the plain. Likewise the Satpura Range is mottled with strongholds of the Marathas, even as far west as the Rajpipla Hills. From time to time the Moguls will venture up there and expel them, for those Hills, because of their situation, are like a blade against the throat of the Moguls’ commerce; all Western trade, as you know, comes in to the ports of Daman, Surat, and Broach, and the Maratha chieftains well know that they may sever those ports’ links to the north by issuing from their forts in the Rajpipla Hills and descending the Ravines of Dh¯aroli to the Broach Plain—which is where we are now—and catching the caravans when they are backed against the River Narmada. Surat is infested with their sympathizers, and you may be assured that their spies saw us mustering there, and preceded us along this road and have already sent them word of our movements.”

“Can we rely on them to attack us at night?” Jack asked.

“Only if we are so foolish as to reach the south bank of the Narmada at dusk and attempt a night crossing.”

“So be it then,” Jack said. “Clever stratagems are quite beyond my powers, but if it is rank foolishness you require, I have no end of it.”

JACK RODE AHEAD to view the battle-field in daylight, and to put the mercenaries where he wanted them. With help from a hired guide, he found a suitable place to feign a crossing. A few miles inland of where the Narmada broadened to an estuary, it described a Z, swept around in an oxbow, described an S, and resumed its westward course. In the center of the SZ was a mushroom-shaped head of gravel and sand bulging northwards into the oxbow, and connected at its southern end by the neck of land pinched between the opposing river-bends. In each of these bends, the river’s flow had undercut the banks, which rose above the water to no more than the height of a man, but were steep, and covered with scrub. Anyone coming to the river from the south would be funneled through a quarter-mile-wide gap between these bends. Beyond that narrow pass, the neck broadened and flattened, sloping imperceptibly down to the inner bank of the oxbow. The river was broad and shallow there, and seemed an inviting place for a ford; but this was of course the inner or concave surface of the oxbow-bend, and anyone who knew rivers would expect the opposite bank—the oxbow’s outer or convex face—to be steeper. Looking across, Jack saw that this was likely the case, though it was obscured by reeds. His local guide assured him that camels, horses, and bullocks could ascend the far bank, and thereby cross over into the North of India, but only if they attempted it in certain places known to him, which he would divulge for a fee. Beasts of burden attempting to ford the river in the wrong places would, however, face slow going through the reeds, only to find their way barred by a bank too steep to scale.

“I’ll pay you the amount you have named,” Jack promised him, “and I’ll double it if you allow me to strike you a few times with this riding-crop.”

This required lengthy and difficult translation; but the result in the end was that a ferang on a horse could be seen chasing the poor guide all the way out of the oxbow, flailing at him wildly, and cursing the wretch for his greed. Having done which, he wheeled his mount, rode back to the ford, and began pointing out, to his mercenaries, those places that to him seemed best for a crossing.

An unexpected but desirable effect of this reconnaissance was that the mercenaries sorted themselves out. For they were scouting Jack, and what they understood to be Jack’s plan. They began clumping together, the better to conduct arguments, and presently whole bands of them turned their backs on the enterprise and bolted down-river, headed for Anklesvar or Broach. Though Jack put on a great show of outrage at this, he was in truth pleased with it. The loss of so many mercenaries would make them seem all the more vulnerable in the eyes of the Maratha scouts who, as he knew perfectly well, were observing his every move; and the ones who had remained probably could be depended on. As soon as the deserters were out of earshot, Jack called the remaining ones together.

The Cabal had gone out of their way to recruit men who were proficient in the use of that ancient and simple weapon, the sling. They had rounded up approximately two score of them. Almost none of these had deserted—for they were the lowest-paid and most desperate of all mercenaries. Jack divided them into two platoons and bade them make themselves comfortable on the mushroom-shaped peninsula: one platoon on the western or downstream lobe, the other on the eastern or upstream lobe.

Of the remaining mercenaries, some were edged-weapons men; he set these to work digging a line of fox-holes across the narrowest part of the neck. But he made certain that they could fall back somewhere; and he put those idle slingers to work scooping out some trenches for just that purpose. Others of the mercenaries were archers, and he arranged these in the center of the peninsula so that they could fire volleys over the heads of the men defending the neck.

A vanguard of the caravan arrived bringing a great rolled-up Turkish sort of tent and its single tree-sized pole, its ropes, stakes, &c., as well as some strange cargo packed in straw. The tent they pitched in the center of the peninsula, and the cargo they dragged inside of it to be unpacked. Some of this was distributed to the platoons of slingers. As dusk fell, these could be seen creeping away from the positions where they had spent the afternoon and descending to the river’s bank. In ones and twos they worked their way south, converging on the neck: but rather than occupying its open center, they were wading in the stream, sheltering behind the undercut banks, concealed from view by the scrubby vegetation and by darkness. It was just as well that they were on the move, for the caravan had now arrived in force, and horses, camels, bullocks, and even two elephants were crowding through the gap, dividing round the tent, and gathering along the inner bank of the oxbow. Jack had identified those parts of the opposite bank most difficult to climb, and now ordered that it be attempted by those creatures most likely to fail: bullocks drawing wagons.

Even from his less than ideal vantage-point, viz. standing in a tent slathering himself with strange-smelling oil, Jack could picture everything that went wrong just from the bellowing, the immense splashes, futile whip-cracks, curses in diverse tongues, and snapping of spokes and axles.

Even this tumult, however, did not suffice to drown out the sound of the Maratha onslaught. Crafty and subtle these rebels might be when filtering down out of the hills, but on the attack they were as loud as any other army, and perhaps louder than some, as they were fond of drums, cymbals, and other means of terrifying the enemy’s critters at a distance. Jack put his eye to a hole in the tent to behold their approach. He had been told over and over again about the Marathas’ generous use of elephants in combat, but had scoffed. For all of the strange places Jack had been, there was in him enough of the East London mudlark that he could not believe such a thing was actually done in this world. And yet, on they came: moving battle-towers, lit with torches and agleam with metal, shingled all over with armor, swinging tusks a-bristle with scythe-blades of watered steel. Five abreast these creatures came on to the neck of land, and about their knees swarmed a moving carpet of infantry, their wicked blades gleaming by moonlight, a geometry-lesson from Hell. The air puckered with the peculiar sound made by many arrows: some out-bound from the archers who stood around the tent, but many incoming. A few snicked in through the roof of the tent.

“Bang!” suggested Jack, and a moment later a musket was fired outside by Vrej, as a signal.

Their plan was extremely simple, and so many events were triggered by the firing of this one shot. On the northern bank of the oxbow, local guides kindled bonfires; these shone out across the river as beacons marking the places where the bank was easiest to scale. The caravan-drivers, trapped between the river and the Maratha onslaught, needed no further incentive to make for those lights. Soon the river was striped in four places by columns of sloshing beasts.

The line of sword-wielding mercenaries barring the neck had already begun to desert their earthworks and to fall back, for the elephants were only a few yards away. When the musket sounded, those who had held their ground jumped out, to a man, and split into two groups, occupying the trenches that the slingers had prepared along the flanks of the expected Maratha advance. The archers fired a last volley of arrows. This, and the trenches, and some trip-ropes that had been pounded into place before them, and the congestion caused by the Marathas’ entire battle-front being compressed into the narrow pass, caused the onslaught to slow, just on the threshold. A few impetuous Marathas ventured across the line of fox-holes, or even jumped obstacles on horseback; but these were easy marks for the archers and for the few musketeers they had managed to round up.

All of which, wild and memorable though it was, remained well within the normal limits of what one saw in warfare. Night battles were unusual, and (to Jack anyway) ones involving elephants were outlandish; but for all that, it was just a battle. Until a hundred glowing bottles of phosphorus were lobbed out of the scrub to either side of the neck, and dropped out of the sky like falling stars, and burst upon the ground among the attackers. They came in a few ragged volleys, and by the time the last one had fallen, most of the ground that stretched before the Maratha vanguard was glowing. And as if that were not enough, some of it was bursting into flame.

One of the elephants made known his intention to turn around and go back. Jack could not discern, from this range, whether his driver was of the same mind, or not; but it did not matter, for the elephant was leaving. And perhaps he was some sort of a leader among pachyderms, for the idea spread to the others fast and unquenchable as phosphorus-fire. When several elephants with razor-sharp blades all over their tusks decide to pirouette in the midst of a tightly packed mob, there is apt to be disorder, and such was the case now; Jack could not really see through the arch of radiance, but could infer as much from the vocalizations of the Marathas, which sounded like every Italian opera ever written being sung at once.

As the phosphorus on the ground dried out, it burnt. This went on fitfully for longer than was really convenient. Jack and all of the others in the oxbow could not do anything, because they could not see. To their backs, the convoy dribbled across the fords like streams of molasses running down a chilly plate. It would be hours before they were all across. And Jack had been warned not to underestimate the Marathas. It was one thing to spook their beasts, another thing altogether to break the will of their men. For these were not just peasants with sticks, but veterans belonging to castes such as the Mahar and the Mang whose whole purpose was military service. Such warnings he had been slow to heed, for there was nothing in England that corresponded to it; but Surendranath had drawn a loose analogy between these castes and the Janissaries of the Turks, which began to give Jack the idea. He had accordingly ordered the slingers to hold a few of their bottles in reserve, and when the last of the phosphorus-fires burnt out, he insisted that the mercenaries move up again, and take up their former positions. The archers he moved to the flanks to join the slingers, so that they could fire from behind the protection of the riverbank. All of these measures were soon put to the test by attacks of Mahar and Mang infantry; and so it was that, as much as he had wanted to avoid it, Jack was finally obliged to ride out from the concealment of the tent, flanked by Mr. Foot on one side and Monsieur Arlanc on the other, and to sally across the neck and drive the die-hard Marathas back screaming all the way to the Ravines of Dh¯aroli. For Jack, Foot, Arlanc, and their horses were all glowing in the dark. No one even had the temerity to shoot an arrow at them.

“Mr. Foot!” Jack called out to a fiery blob hurtling to and fro in pursuit of demoralized foe-men, “turn thee around and let’s to the river. Nothing but dust now lies between us and the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad; and he had damn well better be grateful, lest we boil up some urine in his town.”

Book 5

The Juncto

Mrs. Bligh’s Coffee-house, London

SEPTEMBER 1693

“ROGER, YOU ARE a great man now, and worth more than the Great Mogul.”

“So I have heard, Daniel—but it is perfectly all right—I do not mind hearing it again.”

“You are also educated, after a fashion.”

“’Tis better to be educable—but pray continue in your flattery, which is so very unlike you.”

“So then. What metaphysical significance do you attach to the fact that you are unable to pay for a cup of coffee?”

“Why, Daniel, I say that I just did pay, not for one, but two—unless that object on the table before you is a mirage.”

“But you didn’t, really, my lord. Coffee was brought forth and you incurred a debt, pricked down on Mrs. Bligh’s ledger.”

“Are you questioning my solvency, Daniel?”

“I am questioning the whole country’s solvency! Empty out your coin-purse. Right there on the table. Let’s have a look.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Daniel.”

“Oh, now ’tis I who am vulgar.”

“Ever since you had the stone cut out, you have seemingly regressed in age.”

“I will bet you the whole contents of my purse that yours contains not a single piece of metal that could be exchanged for a bucket of cods’ heads at Billingsgate.”

“If your purse’s contents were worth so much, you’d be Massachusetts-bound. Everyone knows that.”

“You see? You are afraid to accept the wager.”

“Why do you belabor me about the fact that England has no money?”

“Because you are a momentous fellow now, rumors career about you like gulls round a herring-boat, and I want you to do something about it, so that I can go to America…right. Very well, my lord, I shall give you a few minutes to bring your mirth under control. If you can hear what I am saying, wave at me—oh, very good. Roger Comstock, I say ’tis well enough for you that you have credit, and can buy cups of coffee, or houses, by simply asking for them. Many other men of power enjoy the same privilege—including our King, who appears to be financing his war through some kind of alchemy. But some of us are required actually to pay for what we buy, and we have nothing to pay with at the moment. They say that America is awash in Pieces of Eight, and that is a sight I would fain see—alas, ships’ captains do not dispense credit, at least, not to Natural Philosophers…. Oh yes, my lord, do be entertained. I am here in Mrs. Bligh’s coffee-house, in pied rags, solely as a Court Jester to Creditable Men, and request only that you throw a silver coin at me for every giggle and a gold one for each guffaw. Fresh out? What, no coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding’s scrotum? ’Tis a common condition, Roger, and this brings me round to another subject ’pon which I will briefly discourse while you blow your nose, and wipe the tears from your eyes, and that is: What if all debts, public and private, were to be called in? What if Mrs. Bligh were to march over to this cozy corner with her accompt-book resting open on her bosom like a Bible on a Lectern and say, Roger Comstock, you owe me your own weight in rubies, pay up straightaway!”

“But, Daniel, that never happens. Mrs. Bligh, if she wants coffee-beans, can go down to the docks and shew her book—or her Lectern, in a pinch—to a merchant and say, ‘Behold, every powerful man in London is in debt to me, I have collateral, lend me a ton of Mocha and you’ll never be sorry!’ ”

“Roger, what is Mrs. Bligh’s bloody book—by your leave, Mrs. Bligh!—but squiggles of ink? I have ink, Roger, a firkin of it, and can molest a goose to obtain quills, and make ink-squiggles all night and all day. But they are just forms on a page. What does it say of us that our commerce is built ’pon forms and figments while that of Spain is built ’pon silver?”

“Some would say it speaks to our advancement.”

“I am not one of those hard cases who believes credit is Satan’s work, do not put me in that poke, Roger. I say only that ink, once dried on the page, is a brittle commodity, and an œconomy made of ink is likewise brittle, and may for all we know be craz’d and in a state to crumble at a touch. Whereas silver and gold are ductile, malleable, capable of fluid movement—”

“Some say it is because their atoms, their particules are bathed in a lubricating medium of quicksilver—”

“Stop it.”

“You asked me to wax metaphysical, just a minute ago.”

“You are baiting me, Roger. Oh, it is all right. By all means, amuse yourself.”

“Daniel. Do you really want to go to Massachusetts, and leave all this behind?”

“All this is more amusing, not to mention profitable, to you than ’tis to me. I want to put distractions behind, go to the wilderness, and work.”

“What, in a wigwam? Or do you have a cave picked out?”

“There are plenty of trees remaining.”

“You’re going to live in a tree?”

“No! Cut them down, make a house.”

“I fear you are unused to such labor, Daniel.”

“Oh but I am educable.”

“One really would do better to have an institution on which to rely. You could be a vicar of some Puritan church.”

“Puritan churches tend not to have vicars.”

“Oh, that’s right…then perhaps Harvard College would have you.”

“Then again, perhaps not.”

“Here, Daniel, is my metaphysical reading of your circumstance:”

“I am braced.”

“England is not finished with you yet!”

“Merciful God! What more can England possibly ask of me?”

“I shall come to that momentarily, Daniel. First, I propose a transaction.”

“Is this transaction to conclude with silver changing hands? Or ink-squiggles?”

“It is to conclude with a sinecure for Daniel Waterhouse. In Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

“Damn me, and here am I, on the wrong side of the ocean!”

“The sinecure is attended with certain perquisites including a one-way trans-oceanic voyage.”

“Are you saying, England wants from me something so dreadful that when I have done it, she won’t want me around any more?”

“You read too much into it. You are the one who has been bawling about Massachusetts for all these years.”

“But then why do you specify it has to be one-way?”

“You can come back if you think it would be in your best interests,” Roger said innocently. “As long as the Juncto remains in power, you shall have protectors.”

“Your voice has the most annoying way of fading just when you are on the verge of saying something interesting. Do you do that for effect?”

“Juncto…juncto…JUNCTO!”

“What on earth is a junk-toe? Some new type of gout?”

“More like a new type of gov’t.”

“I am quite serious.”

“A scholar might say it Latin-style: yuncto. Or, a Spaniard thus: hoonta!”

“Why don’t you just say ‘joint,’ which is what it means?”

“I know what it means. But then people would suppose we were discoursing of knees or elbows.”

“But isn’t the idea to be mysterious?”

“Then we would call it a cabal.”

“Oh, that’s right. So, you are in a juncto?”

“I am in the juncto.”

“And your role in the juncto is to be—?”

“Chancellor of the Exchequer…Daniel, it is childish to make coffee shoot out of your nostrils. You know of someone better qualified?”

“What about Apthorp?”

“Sir Richard, as he is called by polite men, will run the bank.”

“But do you not think he would gladly set aside his duties at Apthorp’s Bank to become Chancellor of the Exchequer?”

“No, no, no, no, no. I am not speaking of Apthorp’s bank. I refer to the Bank of England.”

“No such institution exists.”

“And no institution exists in Massachusetts Bay Colony that will put a roof over your head and give you a sinecure. But institutions can be made, Daniel. That is what an institution is: something that has been instituted.”

“Oh.”

“Ah, finally light dawns! You are educable, Daniel, very much so!”

“The Bank of England…the Bank of England. It sounds, I don’t know, big.”

“That is the point.”

“You shall amass some sort of capital, and lend out money.”

“This is the timeless function of a banca.”

“I can only perceive two drawbacks to what is otherwise an excellent plan, my lord…”

“Don’t say it. We have no capital…and no money.”

“Just so, my lord.”

“Is it not admirable, how simple things are in the beginning? Oh, how I love to begin things.”

“Let’s take them in order…what is the capital to be?”

“England.”

“Ah, very well, I should have guessed from the name, ‘Bank of England.’ Now, how about the money?”

“The Bank will issue some paper. But you are right. We need coinage. To be specific, we need recoinage.”

A silence now fell over this snuggery in the corner of Mrs. Bligh’s coffee-house. Roger had spent enough man-years orating in Parliament that he knew when a Pause for Effect was called for. And Daniel for his part was strangely affected, and lost all interest in speaking for a short time. The notion of recoinage made him strangely sad, and he was desirous of figuring out why. It would mean calling in all old coins—as well as the plate, candlesticks, bullion, et cetera—and melting them in the great crucibles of the Tower. Crucibles that purified and separated the genuine metal from the dross of the counterfeiters but thereby melted all those discrete objects together, destroying their individual characters.

Daniel had in his purse a pound coin stamped with a picture of Queen Elizabeth. He knew this because such coins were rarer than flawless diamonds now, and he was holding it back in case he had to ransom his life somehow. The Golden Comstocks—Roger’s ancestors—had imported the metal from Spain and Thomas Gresham had caused the coin to be minted at such-and-such a weight, and had used some of his rake-off to build Gresham’s College. The coin had been passing from hand to hand and purse to purse for more than a hundred years, and probably had more tales to tell than a ship full of Irish sailors—yet it was just a single mote in the dust-pile that was the English money supply. In a certain way to take that dust and shovel it into the maw of the crucibles was monstrous, like burning a library.

But imagine the glowing rivers that would spring from the lips of those crucibles when all of that tarnished silver was made clean, and made quick, and con-fused, and all of its old stories driven off as clouds of smoke that the river wind would carry away. Imagine the shining coins in purses everywhere—Mrs. Bligh striking out the debts from her ledger-book, her strong-box becoming a catch-basin for the new money, overflowing and spilling out gleaming rivulets down the street to the bankside coffee-merchants, and thence down the Thames into the wide.

“We’ve no choice,” Daniel understood.

“We’ve no choice. The Pope has all the gold, all the silver, all the men, and the rich lands where the sun shines. We cannot long stand against Spain, France, the Empire, the Church. Not as long as power is like a scale, with our riches on one pan, and our adversaries’ on the other. What are we to do, then? Daniel, you know that I think Alchemy is nonsense! Yet there is something in the idea of Alchemy; the conceit that we may cause gold to appear where ’twas not, by dint of artfulness and machinations up here.” He pressed the tip of one index finger delicately to his forehead. “We have no mines, no El Dorado. If we want gold and silver we must look not to treasure-fleets from America. Yet if we conduct commerce here, and build the Bank of England, why, gold and silver will appear in our coffers as if by magic—or Alchemy if you prefer.”

A pause to sip cold coffee. Then Daniel remarked, “You’ll want to take a page from Gresham’s book. ‘Bad money drives out good.’ If the new coin is good, ’twill drive away the bad, not only from this island but everywhere. Everyone will desire English guineas, as they desire Pieces of Eight now. The demand will cause ever more gold and silver to wash up on our shores to be coined in the Tower, just as you prophesy.”

Roger was nodding patiently, as if he and the Juncto had figured it all out long ago—which might or might not have been the case—but Daniel found it strangely reassuring all the same, and continued: “At the risk of sounding like a Royal Society partisan—”

“It is not much of a risk. Half of the Juncto are Fellows. And all are partisans of something.”

“Very well, then, I submit that you want a Natural Philosopher running the Mint—not the usual corrupt, drunken, time-serving political hack.”

This drew a brisk turn of the head from a gentleman who had been standing a short distance behind Roger, talking to another gent, or pretending to. Daniel realized he had spoken too loudly.

The gentleman was glaring at Daniel from beneath a copper-colored wig, one of the new model, narrow, with long ringlets trailing far down the back. The wig said that he had money and rank, yet was no admirer of the French. He would be High Church, Old Money, a reflexive backer of Monarchy—a Tory, as they were called nowadays. Odd that he should be passing the time of day in here—Mrs. Bligh’s was a Whig haunt. For that reason Daniel rated it as unlikely that this fellow would challenge him to a duel.

Roger had noticed Daniel noticing all of these things, and had the good instincts not to look back. But his eyes flicked slightly upwards to a windowpane just above Daniel’s head, and he scanned the reflections interestedly for a moment. Which in no way prevented his talking at the same time. “Indeed, Daniel, any man plucked from this coffee-house—with one or two exceptions—would be preferable to the fellows running our mint now, who are tapeworms.”

Daniel was staring fixedly into Roger’s eyes, but in the background he could see the Tory turning away. The Tory planted himself with his back toward Roger, set his coffee-cup down on a sideboard, rested a hand idly on the hilt of his small-sword, and seemed to survey the crowd of merry Whigs filling the house.

“It follows that any Fellow of the Royal Society would be excellent—but merely excellent is not quite good enough, Daniel. Normally it takes me hours to explain why this is true. You, thank God, have perceived it instantly. The fate of Britain and of Christendom hinge upon the power of the new good Pound Sterling to drive out the bad—to sweep all opposition from the field and bring gold and silver to our shores from every corner of the earth. The quality of money is only partly due to the purity of its metal—which any Natural Philosopher could see to. It is also a matter of trust, of prestige.”

Daniel had now realized what was coming, and slid down in his chair, and put his hands over his face. “You don’t want me to enlist him, Roger! I no longer have his ear. You want Fatio, Fatio, Fatio!”

“Everyone knows he is in-Fatio-ated—but passions are fleeting. You have known him longer than anyone, Daniel. You are the man for it. England needs you! Your Massachusetts sinecure awaits!”

Daniel had parted his fingers now and was peering out through slits in between. Unable to look Roger in the face, he was surveying the distant background. Andrew Ellis—a compact young man with a blond ponytail, an enjoyable, harmless young Parliamentarian—was coming over with a glass of claret in each hand, intent on breaking into the conversation and sharing his enjoyableness with Roger. If Daniel had hopes of weaseling out, he had to do it now. To Roger Comstock, silence implied not merely consent, but a blood oath.

“You cannot know what you are proposing, ensconcing such a man at the Tower, giving him control of our money. He has strange ideas, dark secrets—”

“I know all about the beastliness.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

“Alchemy is an even more common vice.”

“That’s not it, either. He is a heretic, Roger.”

“Look who’s talking!”

“I mean, he does not even believe in the Trinity!”

Roger got a glazed-over look, as he always did when abstract theological matters were dragged into the conversation. Unlike ordinary men, who required several minutes to become fully glazed over, Roger could do it in an instant, as if a window-sash had dropped in front of him from a great height. Daniel parted his fingers more to observe this phenomenon. But instead his attention was drawn to something even odder: an expensive copper-colored wig hanging in midair behind Roger’s chair. Its owner had ducked and darted out from under it as fast as a striking cobra and simply left it behind. It fell to the floor, of course. By that time the owner—who had red hair in a close Caesar crop—was whispering something into Andrew Ellis’s ear. It must have been something extremely shocking, to judge from the look of astonishment—nay, horror—that had come over the normally beaming face of Mr. Ellis.

Daniel pushed himself up in his chair to get a better look and perceived that the red-headed gent was now drawing away from Ellis—but Ellis was moving with him, as if they were joined together. Ellis gave out a little whimper.

Daniel could not credit what he was seeing. “Roger, I could almost swear that Mr. Ellis is having his ear bitten.”

Roger now took notice for the first time. He stood up, turned around, and quickly verified it. This prolonged ear-biting had drawn very little notice thus far because Ellis had been too astonished to speak and the biter, of course, could not really talk, either—though he did seem to be mumbling something in a low, grinding voice: “So you want to have the ear of Roger Comstock? Then I shall have yours.”

Oddly, it was Roger’s standing up that drew everyone’s attention. Then awareness splashed across the room.

“In the name of God, sir!” Ellis cried, and slumped against the paneled wall. The red-head stayed with him, of course, maintaining his bite like a bulldog, working his jaw slowly to gnaw through the cartilage. He planted a hand on the wall to either side of Ellis’s head, bracketing him in position. Several of the Whigs in the main room finally moved forward to intervene—but the gentleman who had been talking to the biter earlier whirled to face them, and drew his sword half out of his scabbard. That drove them back like a firecracker.

Roger stepped toward the biter and the bitee, and raised his arm that was nearer the wall, causing his cape to spread open and block Daniel’s view of the whole proceedings. He seemed to slap the back of the biter’s hand where it was planted on the wall. “Mr. White,” he said, in an indulgent tone, “do wipe your chin when you are quite finished.” Then Roger skirted around the pair and walked out of the coffee-house. Andrew Ellis collapsed to the floor with a scream and pressed both of his hands to the side of his head. Mr. White came up with a triumphant toss of his head, like a country boy who has just won at apple-bobbing. Something like a dried apricot was lodged in his smile. He plucked it out with one hand to admire it. Andrew Ellis was lying against Mr. White’s shins and knees, forcing them back, and so White had to keep his other hand braced against the paneling lest he topple forward. Anyway, he pocketed Ellis’s ear and flashed a bloody grin at Daniel.

“Welcome to politics, Mr. Waterhouse,” he announced. “This is the world you have made. Rejoice and be glad in it—for you shall not be allowed to leave.”

“I am freer to leave than you are, Mr. White,” Daniel said on his way out, nodding in the direction of the hand that Mr. White was bracing against the wall.

Mr. White now seemed to notice for the first time that a dagger had been shoved all the way through that hand, between the metacarpals and out through the palm, and lodged deep in the wooden wall. Worked into the dagger’s pommel, in silver letters, as a sort of calling-card, were the initials R.C.

WHEN DANIEL MADE IT out to the street he discovered that his hand had gone into his pocket and got ahold of the Pearl of Great Price and squeezed it so hard, for so long, that his fingers had got tired. The Stone had a sort of devil’s-head shape, with two stubby hornlets that had once been lodged in his ureters. He had a habit of gripping it so that those wee knobs stuck out between his knuckles—it fitted his hand almost as well as his bladder.

Riding north across Hertfordshire in a borrowed carriage the next day, he found his hand had gone to it once again, as he reviewed the ear-biting scene in the theatre of his memory. Daniel was meditating on Cowardice. He knew a lot of cowards and saw cowardice everywhere, but just as Mr. Flamsteed’s observations of the stars were frequently obnubilated by weather, so Daniel’s of Cowardice by Extenuating Circumstances. Viz. a man might explain cowardliness by saying that he had a family to support, or, failing that, with the simple argument that it just was not fair for a young man to give up life or limb. But Daniel had no wife or children of his own, and brother Sterling was doing a fine job of supporting the extended family. And not only was Daniel old (forty-seven), but he ought to’ve been dead by now, and owed his remaining years solely to Mr. Hooke’s pitiless blade-work. So in Daniel Waterhouse, an observer could see cowardliness in its pure form, and perhaps learn something of its nature.

A note from Roger Comstock was on the bench next to Daniel; it had been waiting for him in the carriage this morning. Dear Daniel, it read,

Forgive me my precipitous leave-taking from Mrs. Bligh’s yester-eve. As I am sure you have perceived by now, the whole event was a masque, a trifle. Do not allow Mr. White’s vulgarities to prey upon your good judgment.

Your coachman is Mr. John Hammond and I have charged him to convey you anywhere you desire, until your errand is accomplished; but I have led him to believe that most of your perambulations shall be confined to the triangle formed by London, Cambridge, and Mr. Apthorp’s country house. If you conceive a need to hie to John O’Groats or Land’s End, do break the news to him gently.

Yours very sternly,

(signed with a flourish, two inches high)

Ravenscar

P.S. I seem to have lost my poniard—have you seen it?

Roger was completely free of any taint of cowardice. Craven he might be, but a coward? Never. A trifle. Roger was sincere when he called it that.

It was impossible for Daniel to read in the dim, rocking vehicle, and he had no one to talk to, so sleeping and thinking were the only ways to pass the long drive through the rain up to Cambridge. As he contrasted his fear of Mr. White (which was very much akin to the fear he had previously had of Jeffreys) with how he had once felt about this rock that was now in his pocket, a new hypothesis of cowardice came into his head. The Stone had made him sad, reluctant to die, and anxious—but his fear of it had been as nothing compared to his fear of Jeffreys, and now of White. Yet those men had only spoken threatening words to him. Even when Hooke had reached up between his thighs with the scalpel, Daniel had been gripped by a sort of animal fear, but nothing like the dread of Mr. White, which had kept him awake all last night.

The only difference he could think of was that Hooke liked Daniel and White hated him. Could it be, then, that Daniel’s true cowardice lay in that he could not stand for people to think poorly of him?

That would be a strange shape for cowardice to take. But it tallied well with Daniel’s experiences to date. It was Daniel’s biography in a sentence. Further, perhaps it was the case that there were certain men, such as Jeffreys and White, who were adept at detecting this particular type of fear, and who had learned to cultivate it and use it against their enemies. Mr. John Hammond, the driver, had a long coachman’s whip and used it frequently, but never actually struck the horses with it. Rather, he made it crack in the air around the heads of his team, and used their own fear to drive them.

When Daniel had sent Jeffreys to the Tower and to his scaffold-top meeting with Jack Ketch, he’d phant’sied that he had slain a dragon, and put an end to that part of his life. Yet now Mr. White had appeared out of nowhere. An alarming chap! But much more alarming was what this all implied, namely that the world had more than one dragon—that it was infested with them—and that a fellow who was afraid of dragons must perforce spend all his days worrying about one or another.

This was all very much of the essence, because when Daniel tracked Isaac down, wherever he was, he would not be able to do what needed to be done without first mastering this fear.

AS IT TURNED OUT, he had no occasion to master it in Cambridge. He arrived at Trinity College in time to have a wash and a cat-nap in one of the guest chambers. Then, when the bell rang, he threw on a robe and went to the dining hall and took a place at the high table. Rather close to the head of that table, as it turned out. For between apoplexy and smallpox, Daniel was becoming more senior with every passing month. He was shown respect and even affection. He understood now why men afflicted with his particular brand of cowardice would gravitate to stations like this one, even though the College had fallen on very hard times, and was dishing up thin gruel little different from what was served in the poor-house.

When he inquired after Newton and Fatio, heads turned toward a young man seated near the foot of the table—too far away for Daniel to converse with him—who was called Dominic Masham. This suggested much to Daniel, for he knew that the family Masham were close friends and patrons of John Locke. Locke had been living on their estate at Oates since he’d come back from exile in Holland round the time of the Glorious Revolution. Daniel presumed that Locke had established some sort of alchemical laboratory there, for Newton and Fatio had frequently gone there for lengthy stays, as had Robert Boyle until his death a year or two ago. The Mashams had many children and Daniel guessed that this Dominic was one of them, and that he was here as a protégé of Newton.

It was explained to him that Newton, Fatio, and Locke had all been staying in Newton’s (and formerly Waterhouse’s) chambers here until yesterday morning, when they’d all gone away, leaving Masham behind to tie up some loose ends. Newton and Fatio had gone off together bound for Oates. Locke had gone off by himself down the Barton Road, which led generally southeastwards. But he had declined to state his destination.

“I went right by them,” Daniel remarked. For the Mashams’ estate lay just off the London-Cambridge road, some twenty miles north of the capital. “What were those fellows up to?” For they also collaborated on theological projects.

It made the men at High Table nervous that Daniel had even asked.

“That is to say, what sorts of stimulating conversations have I missed by being so long absent from this table? Surely, three such men did not sit here in silence.”

Everyone sat in silence for a few moments. But then, fortuitously, dinner was over. They all stood up and chanted in Latin, and filed out. Daniel tracked Dominic Masham across the Great Court, and caught up with him beyond the main gate as he was unlocking the portal to Newton’s private courtyard. Masham had a distracted and hurried look about him, which suited Daniel’s purposes well enough. Daniel had a lanthorn, which he used to illuminate Masham’s face.

“Going home soon, Mr. Masham?”

“Tomorrow, Dr. Waterhouse, or as soon as I can gather up certain…”

Daniel let Masham’s pause dangle embarrassingly for a while before saying, quietly, “You offend me with this affected coyness. I am not a lass to flirt with, Mr. Masham.”

This had the same effect on the younger man as a whip-crack by a horse’s ear. He froze and began trying to frame a suitably glorious apology, but Daniel cut him off. “You are charged with gathering together the necessaries for the continuation of the Great Work that Misters Newton, Locke, and Fatio are undertaking at Oates. These may be books or chemicals or glassware—it does not matter to me—what matters is that you are going to Oates in the morning, and you may convey this packet to Mr. Newton with my compliments. It came to me the other day in London. It was sent to Newton by Leibniz.”

The mention of the name Leibniz threw a look into Dominic Masham’s wide green eyes.

“It consists of a letter, and a book. The letter is unique, and more important. The book, as you can see, is the first printing of Leibniz’s Protogaea, and you may feel free to peruse it during your trip; it will teach you things you have never dreamed of.”

“And the letter—?”

“Think of it as an overture, an attempt to mend the breach that occurred in these chambers in 1677.”

“Sir! You know what happened in 1677!?” Masham exclaimed, in a tone of voice that was somewhat wistful, which seemed to say that he didn’t.

“I was here then.”

“Very well, Dr. Waterhouse, I shall not let it out of my sight until it is in Mr. Newton’s hands.”

“The future of Natural Philosophy revolves around it,” Daniel said. “Please tell those three gentlemen that I shall call on them in two days.”

“By your leave, sir, there are only the two of them there now. Mr. Locke has gone to…another place.”

“Again you do me a disservice. I know perfectly well that Mr. Locke has gone to Apthorp House.”

“Sir!”

SIR RICHARD APTHORP’S COUNTRY dwelling was situated about midway between Cambridge and Oxford, not far off the high road that ran from London northwest in the direction of Birmingham. The nearest town of any size was called Bletchley, and Daniel had to stop to ask for directions there, because Sir Richard had in no way made his house an obvious one. This bland countryside seemed oddly well suited for the hiding of secrets in plain sight. In any case, Daniel did not have to utter a word, only slide his window open and watch three Bletchley stable-boys jumping up and down in the street vying with one another to tell him the way to Apthorp House. Meanwhile an older fellow struck up a cheerful exchange with John Hammond. He let Daniel’s driver know that the stables at Apthorp House had long since gone full up, and that Sir Richard, as a courtesy to his guests, had retained this man to look after the overflow at his livery stable, which was just round the corner.

Indeed, the lane that meandered between low hills to Apthorp House was nearly paved with horse manure, and when Hammond drew his team up in front of the main building—yet another Barock neo-classical compound fraught with pagan-god-statues—Daniel’s eyes were treated to the sight of the finest fleet of carriages he had ever seen, outside of a royal palace. The coats of arms told him who was inside the house. The Earl of Marlborough, Sterling Waterhouse, Roger Comstock, Apthorp, Pepys, Locke, and Christopher Wren were all personal acquaintances of Daniel’s. Also well represented was a category Daniel thought of as “men like Sterling,” meaning sons or grandsons of the great Puritan trader/smuggler/firebrands of the Cromwell era, including particularly several Quaker magnates with large holdings in America. There were men with French surnames and others with Spanish: respectively, Huguenots and Amsterdam-Jews who had established themselves in England during the last ten or so years. There were a few nobles of high rank, notably the Prince of Denmark, who was married to Princess Anne. However, Persons of Quality were quite under-represented here, considering the amount of wealth. The nobles who had shown up were what Daniel thought of as “men like Boyle,” meaning sons of great lords who were not especially interested in being great according to the ancient feudal definition of that word, and who instead devoted their lives to hanging around the Royal Society or sailing across oceans to trade or to explore.

“This is the world you have made,” Mr. White had said to Daniel—blaming him somehow for the Glorious Revolution. But Daniel saw it rather differently. This was the world Drake had made, a world where power came of thrift and cleverness and industry, not of birthright, and certainly not of Divine Right. This was the Whig World, and though Drake would have abhorred everything about most of these people, he would have had to admit that he had in a way caused this Juncto.

None of these people really had time to talk to Daniel and so his conversations had a meted-out feeling to them. For all that, they were pleased to see him, and interested in what he had to say, which was soothing for a man equipped with Daniel’s particular form of cowardice.

“My Lord Marlborough, if I may just pursue you down this gallery—”

“I am pleased to see you are in a condition to do so.”

“Thank you, my lord. On the night that James II fled, you spoke to me on the Tower causeway and voiced grave concern as to the motives and machinations of Alchemists.”

“You do not need to remind me, Mr. Waterhouse, I am not the sort who ever forgets.”

“Pray, where stand you now on such matters?”

“I must admit they seem very quaint and queer to me today, where once they seemed occult and menacing. Yet the Marquis of Ravenscar is very forward in saying that one of the Esoteric Brotherhood ought to be put in charge of our Mint. And I do confess I am loath to throw my money in with this new Bank, and my lot in with this Juncto, when our money is to be recoined by a savant whose ideas are recondite, and whose motives are a source of endless puzzlement to me.”

“That will never change, my lord. But if some way could be devised for the motives of this alchemist to be aligned with yours, so that you agreed on the means whilst perhaps differing as to the ends, would that satisfy you?”

“Such alignments of interest are a staple of politics and of war. They may serve for a time. But in the end is always a divergence, and a catastrophe.”

“That is a Janus-like utterance, my lord, and for now I will prefer to look only upon its smiling face.”

“MY LORD RAVENSCAR, tomorrow morning I am off to Oates to tender a version of your proposal to Mr. Newton, unless you say to me beforehand that you have changed your mind.”

“Why on earth should I change my mind?”

“Perhaps you would prefer a Mint-master who, insofar as his motives were more intelligible, would prove more manageable.”

“I am sure I have no idea what you mean, Daniel.”

“I am sure you lie like a dog in the sun. A time-serving hack—a tapeworm—is easy to understand. He will run your mint for you because he receives a stipend, a place to live, influence and prestige. But you must get it very clear in your mind, Roger, that Newton wants none of this. He will benefit from a steady income, it is true. But if I am to interest him in this job, I must hold out enticements. And I say to you that he has the hard, bare soul of a Lincolnshire Puritan, a type of soul I understand well, and the usual incentives are less than nothing to him. If he does it, he shall do it in the name of ideals, and in the pursuit of goals, you may find incomprehensible. And inasmuch as you shall be unable to comprehend his ends, you shall be unable to control, or even influence him.”

“That’s perfectly all right, Daniel, I can always write you a letter in Boston and ask you to explain what he’s on about.”

“MAY I ASSIST YOU carrying one of those tomes, Mr. Halley?”

“Daniel! An unexpected pleasure! I can manage, thank you, but you may assist by telling me in which of these rooms I might find Mr. Pepys.”

“Follow me. He is meeting with one Cabal or other at the end of the opposite wing.”

“Ah, then wait with me while I rest my arms.”

“Are these for his book collection?”

“These are money.”

“On the pages I see numbers. Rumor has had it, Mr. Halley, that you have hired up every computer on this island, and set them to a great work. Now I see the rumors were true.”

“These are only the first fruits of their lucubrations—I have brought them up, at the request of Mr. Pepys, to show them as a sort of demo’.”

“Why do you say that they are money? To me they could be sines and cosines.”

“These are actuarial tables, a sort of extract or distillation from the records of births and deaths of every parish in England. Supplied with these data the Exchequer can raise capital by selling annuities to the general public; and if they sell enough of them, why, the law of averages dictates that they will make a profit without fail!”

“What, by gambling that their customers will die?”

“That is no gamble, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“SAFE JOURNEY TO OATES; I shall see you there on the morrow, Mr. Locke.”

“You may expect nothing but the warmest hospitality from the Mashams. From Newton you may expect—”

“You forget I have known him for thirty years.”

“Right.”

“…”

“I can only guess what machinations you are about, Mr. Waterhouse. But I admit that I shall look forward to your arrival and that I shall feel a weight lifted when you arrive.”

“Why, Mr. Locke, what weighs ’pon you?”

“Newton is unwell.”

“Love-sick?”

“That is the least of his ailments.”

“I shall be there soon, Mr. Locke, with what feeble medicine I may proffer.”

“MR. WATERHOUSE, MY SCHEDULE IS a monolith, seamless and unbroken. Except for piss-breaks. Shall we?”

“As I need hardly explain to you of all men, Mr. Pepys, nothing now gives me greater satisfaction than pissing—but to piss with you, sir, would be to compound honor with pleasure.”

“Let us then leave the company of these fellows who know not what it signifies, and go piss in each other’s company.”

“If it would please you to turn to your right out this door, Mr. Pepys, you shall come in view of a garden wall that, earlier, I was sizing up as—”

“Say no more, Mr. Waterhouse, ’tis a magnificent wall, well-proportioned, secluded, admirably made for our usage.”

“…”

“I say, Mr. Waterhouse, have you been buying your breeches from Turks?”

“I am a man of almost fifty, sir, and am permitted a small repertoire of eccentricities. As pissing gives me so much pleasure I will brook no interference from my clothing—I’ll have my yard out smartly and be finished with my work while you are still fumbling with buttons and clasps.”

“Not so, sir, I am only moments behind you.”

“…”

“Makes you want to sing hymns, eh?”

“I do, sometimes.”

“Word has reached me that you are off to visit Newton tomorrow. I wonder if he has an answer for me on my lottery question.”

“Another way of raising money?”

“Think of it rather as a way for ordinary men to enrich themselves at the (trifling) expense of vast numbers of other ordinary men. Of course the Exchequer will have to collect a small rake-off for overhead.”

“Of course. Mr. Pepys, when we got the Royal Society going, never did I dream you would find such uses for the knowledge it would generate.”

“That is the rub—the lottery is a game of chance, and will founder unless we get the mathematicks just so. I have brought in Newton as a consultant.”

“No harm in going straight to the top.”

“But he seems to be up to too many other things, Mr. Waterhouse, for he rarely answers my letters, and when he does, he does not discourse on probability but rather accuses me of being in league with Jesuits, or of setting fire to his laboratory…”

“Stay. Everyone who has spoken to me concerning Newton in the last few days has employed euphemisms and circumlocutions meant to suggest that he has gone clean out of his mind.”

“I always thought Hooke was our Lunatick in Residence, but lately Newton…”

“Enough. I shall try to get to the bottom of it.”

“Right. Now, on your knees, Mr. Waterhouse!”

“I beg your pardon!?”

“Never fear, I shall be joining you in moments…my knees being older work slower…er…ah!…owf. There. Now, let us pray.”

“You always say a prayer after you piss?”

“Only after a really first-rate one, or when communing with a fellow sufferer, as now. Lord of the Universe, Your humble servants Samuel Pepys and Daniel Waterhouse pray that You shall bless and keep the soul of the late Bishop of Chester, John Wilkins, who, wanting no further purification in the Kidney of the World, went to Your keeping twenty years since. And we give praise and thanks to You for having given us the rational faculties by which the procedure of lithotomy was invented, enabling us, who are further from perfection, to endure longer in this world, urinating freely as the occasion warrants. Let our urine-streams, gleaming and scintillating in the sun’s radiance as they pursue their parabolic trajectories earthward, be as an outward and visible sign of Your Grace, even as the knobby stones hidden in our coat-pockets remind us that we are all earth, and that we are sinners. Do you have anything to add, Mr. Waterhouse?”

“Only, Amen!”

“Amen. Damn me, I am late for my next conspiracy! Godspeed, Daniel.”

For the understanding is by the flame of the passions, never enlightened, but dazzled.

—HOBBES
Leviathan

Daniel’s first emotion, unexpectedly, was a pang of sympathy for young Dominic Masham. Daniel, too, would have been amazed by what John Locke, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and Isaac Newton were up to at Oates, if he had not been at Epsom during the Plague Year. As it was, the laboratory that those three lonely hereticks had set up on the Masham estate seemed a masque of what Wilkins and Hooke had done as guests of John Comstock.

He had to admit it was a good deal more civilized, though. No dogs were being disembowelled in Lady Masham’s out-buildings. Epsom (in retrospect) had grown up, as if by spontaneous generation, out of earth saturated with blood and manured with gunpowder; it had been dominated by elements of earth and water. Oates was like a potted lily brought over from France; it was made of fire and air. And it was all about the search for the fifth element, the quintessence, star-stuff, God’s presence on earth. When Dominic Masham took Daniel round the place, the sun was shining on the white-plastered Barock buildings, the roses of late summer were still a-bloom, windows flung open to let fresh air infiltrate the galleries and drawing-rooms, and Daniel could very easily comprehend why a young fellow who knew no better might convince himself that there was a quintessence, that it was everywhere, and especially here, and that men as brilliant as these might reach out and take some of it.

They encountered Fatio posed in the middle of a windowed library, surrounded by Bibles in diverse languages and alphabets. Protogaea had been quarantined on a table in the corner. Fatio was putting on a great show of thinking very hard on something and of not noticing that Daniel had entered the room—in effect daring Daniel to interrupt him, so that he could put on a further show of not minding at all. Daniel had no stomach for the game and so with a silent gesture to Masham he ducked out of the room. For about Fatio was a queer aura of fragility; he seemed stiff and scared as a glass figurine perched too close to an edge.

Masham led him on to a study that was obviously Locke’s. He had published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding four years before. To judge from the storm of letters on his desk, angry criticism was still rushing in, and Locke was at work on a sort of apologia for the next edition: “…searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure.”

Locke’s study had French doors that led out into a little rose-garden. The wind blew up now for a few moments and got under the edge of one of those doors, which was hanging ajar, and blew it open, letting cool air curl into the room and blow Locke’s papers around. It felt and smelt of autumn. Masham scurried around chasing the blown pages, which was amusing because they had been in utmost disorder to being with. Daniel stepped to the open door to get out of Masham’s way and to hide the smile on his face. The gust waned and Daniel heard Locke’s voice from the garden, saying things long-winded and soothing and reasonable, interrupted by sharp objections from Isaac Newton.

Daniel stepped out into the garden just in time to be wrapped up in another wind-gust. This weather was stripping browned and withered petals from thousands of shaggy rose-blossoms that dangled like bruised apples from bowers and trellises all around, and they were storming down to earth and scuttling round the place in whorls.

Isaac had not failed to notice him. He was seated in a garden-chaise with his feet up, and he was wrapped in blankets, which did not prevent him from shivering all the time, though the day was only beginning to turn cool. He looked near death: even gaunter than usual, and sunk in on himself, and so devoid of color that one might suppose the blood had been drawn out of his veins and replaced with quicksilver.

“Daniel, it is well that your friend and mine Mr. John Locke foretold your coming, or I should take it the wrong way.”

“How so, Isaac?”

“I have got into an odd turn of mind of late. The world seemeth benign enough, as I sit here in a bright garden among friends. But when night falls, as it does earlier and earlier, darkness stretches over my mind, and I phant’sy long menacing shadows cast by everyone and everything I saw during the day-time, which shades are interconnected in plots and conspiracies.”

“Everyone, save mad-men in Bedlam, has a Plot. Everyone belongs to a conspiracy or two. What is the Royal Society, besides a conspiracy? I shall not claim I am innocent. But the conspiracy I represent wants only good things for you.”

“I shall be the judge of that! How could you possibly know what is good for me?”

“If you could see yourself as I see you, Isaac, you would confess in an instant that I know much more of it than you do. How long has it been since you have slept?”

“Five nights I have sat up by the fire, tending a work.”

“The Great Work?”

“You have known me almost as long as I have known myself, Daniel, why do you waste breath asking? For you know that I will not answer you straight out. And you already know the answer. So your question is idle twice over.”

“Five nights…then I have come haply on this day, as I may be a match for you, Isaac, if you have gone a week without sleep beforehand.”

“In what wise do you seek to be my match, Daniel?”

Behind him Masham started to say something and was quickly shushed. Daniel turned halfway round and discovered that Fatio had followed him as far as Locke’s study; having now been discovered, he emerged into the garden, moving in an odd diagonal gait like a startled dog, acknowledging Daniel with a little bow. But he would not look Daniel in the eye.

“In what wise? Not as Fatio would be—this was settled between you and me on Whitsunday of the year 1662, unless I read the signs wrong.” A slow assenting blink of Newton’s bloodshot eyes told him he hadn’t. “And certainly not as Leibniz seeks to be.”

Fatio scoffed. “We have read Mr. Leibniz’s letter—which is nothing more than a butcherous attack on my theory of gravitation!”

“If Leibniz cuts down your theory of gravitation, Monsieur Fatio, it only means he has the courage and forthrightness to set down in ink what Huygens and Halley and Hooke and Wren have all said amongst themselves ever since you presented it to the Royal Society. And I mean to emulate Leibniz now. Stay, Fatio, no show of indignation, please, I cannot abide it. I see three faces in this garden: Fatio, who has just been attacked, and is ready to respond very hotly; Newton, who is strangely ambivalent, as if he agrees with me in secret; Locke, who perhaps wishes I had never come to disturb your colloquium. But disturb it I have, and now I shall disturb it some more. For as I reflect on my career I believe I could have accomplished more if I had not cared so much what people thought of me. Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors. I have been a mediocre Natural Philosopher not because I was stupid but because I was, after a fashion, cowardly. Today I shall try boldness for once, and be a better Natural Philosopher for it, and probably get you all hating me by the time I am done. Then it’s off to Boston on the next boat. Therefore, Fatio, do not defend your theory or attack that of Leibniz with some tedious outburst, but, prithee, shut up and hate me instead. Isaac, this is what I mean when I say that I shall try to be a match for you today. If you hate me when I leave, then let that be a measure of my success.”

“This is a harsh method,” Isaac reflected, shivering even more violently now. “But I cannot deny that in my career scientific disputes have always been coupled with the most intense personal enmity. And I am not of a mood to be tender and conciliatory just now. So, have at it. I may understand you better as an enemy than as a friend.”

“When I saw you here in this rain of dead petals I was put in mind of the spring of 1666 when I came up to Woolsthorpe and saw you in a flurry of apple-blossoms. Do you recollect that day?”

“Of course.”

“I had just ridden up from Epsom where Hooke and Wilkins and I had been holding a colloquium much like this one. The overriding subject of it could be called ‘Life: what it is, and is not.’ Now I come here and find you studying what I will summarize as ‘God: what god-head is and is not.’ Have I said it well?”

“This way of saying it is very easily misunderstood,” Locke demurred.

“Stay, John,” Newton commanded, “Daniel misunderstands nothing.”

“Thank you, Isaac,” Daniel said. “If what you say is true, ’tis so only in that I have strived for so many years to follow your tortuous windings through these matters. It has been no easy task. Bible-stuff has always been intermingled with your philosophical work, and I could never understand why, in our chambers, star-catalogs were so promiscuously thrown together with Hebraic scriptures, occult treatises on the philosophic mercury interleaved with diagrams of new telescopes, et cetera. But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and Principia Mathematica are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.”

“Why is it, Daniel, that you understand all of these matters with such clarity, and yet will not join with us? It seems to me as if some friend of Galileo had looked through his telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter making their circuits and yet refused to believe his own eyes, and taken the dead view of the Papists instead.”

“Isaac, I have done nothing but ask myself that for sixteen years.”

“You refer to what happened in 1677.”

“What did happen in 1677, anyway?” Fatio inquired. “Everyone wants to know.”

“Leibniz made his second visit to England. He went incognito to Cambridge, for no purpose other than to have a conversation with Isaac. Which did occur. But as they punted down the Cam, discoursing, I came upon papers in our chambers proving that Isaac had fallen into Arianism, which I saw as an unspeakable heresy. I burned those papers, and with them many of Isaac’s alchemical notes and books—for to me they were all of a piece. To which crime I now confess freely, and offer my repentance, and ask for forgiveness.”

“You speak as if you never expect to see me again!” Newton exclaimed, with tears in his eyes. “I perceived your shame, and knew your heart, and forgave you long ago, Daniel.”

“I know it.”

“Most of what you burned anyway was twaddle. You’ll see none of it here. Yet here I am infinitely closer to the Grand Magisterium.”

“I know you have torn Alchemy down to its foundations, and built it back up, and are recording it in a book called Praxis, which will be to Alchemy what Principia Mathematica was to physics. And perhaps ’tis hoped that in combination with some new reading of scriptures from Fatio, here, and new philosophy from Locke, there, and a reworking of Christianity on Arian principles from your disciples scattered round England, it shall all come together in some grand unifying discourse, a kind of scientific apocalypse in which the whole universe, and all history, shall be made clear as distilled water.”

“You mock us, by making it simple.”

“It is not simple, then? ’Twill not all happen at once, in a flash?”

“It is not for us to say in advance the manner of how it might happen.”

“Yet you have been awake five nights tending some work that you’ll not entrust to any assistant. You suffer obvious ill effects of quicksilver poisoning. You will not admit it is the Great Work, but what else could it be? And I cannot read your mind, Isaac, or ask you to divulge secrets, but I can see plainly enough that it failed. And if it was meant to combine with Fatio’s theory of gravity, then that has failed as well.”

“Before you mock our work, sir, prithee tell us in what way Leibniz’s has succeeded,” Fatio demanded.

“His differs from yours in that it does not need to succeed—only not to fail. And I take that to be a more sound way of doing science than your approach, which is all-or-nothing. For as I grow older and see new men coming into the Royal Society I perceive that though Natural Philosophy may have begun with our generation, it need not end with us. Nor am I alone in thinking so.” Daniel now lifted up a sheet he had taken from Locke’s study, and read: “It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him.”

“What sniveling fool penned that nonsense?” Fatio demanded.

“Mr. John Locke. And the ink is still damp on it,” Daniel replied.

“I am quite sure he did not mean it to apply to Isaac Newton!” Fatio returned, jarred, but recovering quickly.

“I believe what you really mean to say is, ‘Newton and Fatio,’ ” Daniel said.

Newton and Fatio looked at each other, and Daniel looked at them. Fatio had a kind of tender, insinuating look on his face, and Daniel got the idea it was very far from the first time he had shown that sort of face to Newton, and that Fatio was used to seeing a tender and loving face looking back his way. But not today. Newton was staring at Fatio not with love, but with avid curiosity, as if suddenly perceiving what had escaped his notice before. Daniel had no love for Fatio, but this made him so uneasy that he lost the courage he’d maintained up until now.

“I wish to tell you a story about Robert Hooke,” he announced.

This was one of the few things that could get Isaac’s attention away from his minute, penetrating study of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. He turned his eyes toward Daniel, who went on: “Before I came up to Woolsthorpe, Isaac, I did an experiment with him. We set up a scale above a well, and weighed the same object at the level of the ground, and again three hundred feet below it, to see if there was a difference. For you see, Hooke had an inkling of the inverse-square law.”

Isaac did a little calculation in his head and said, “There was no observable difference.”

“Just so. Hooke was let down, of course, but as we drove home he conceived a refinement of the experiment, which has never been carried out. But the point of the story is that our colloquium at Epsom succeeded at much, but failed in that, its most ambitious effort. Did it mean the end of Natural Philosophy? No. The end of Hooke’s career, or Wilkins’s, or mine? By no means. On the contrary, it led straight on to a flourishing of all those things. Which has led me to mistrust apocalyptic readings of Science or of Society. I have not been quick to learn that lesson, either. For example, I phant’sied that the Glorious Revolution would change all, but now I see that Cavaliers and Roundheads have only been replaced by Tories and Whigs, and the war goes on.”

“Am I to gather that you intend to draw some parallel between the failures of Hooke, and the prospects for our collaboration?” Fatio said, with forced hilarity. “I supposed you were here as a cat’s paw for Leibniz! He at least is a worthy opponent! He came out with calculus after Isaac and I did so, but at least he knows what it is! Hooke is nothing more than a sooty, bloody empiricist!”

“I am here as a cat’s paw for Isaac Newton, my friend of thirty years. I fear for him because I perceive that he has an idea of what Natural Philosophy is, and of what he is, that is false. He is so far above all of the rest of us that he has come to believe that he carries the burden of some millennial destiny, and that he must bring Natural Philosophy to some ultimate omega-point or be a failure. He has been encouraged to believe this by certain sycophantic admirers.”

“You want him back! You want Isaac to revoke the decision he made on Whitsunday of 1662!”

“No. I want him to repeat the same decision in respect of you, Fatio. He withdrew from me in ’62. From Leibniz in ’77. Now it is ’93, and your card has been dealt.”

“I know all about what happened in ’62 and ’77. Isaac told me. But with us it is a different case. With us there is a real, lasting, mutual affection.”

“Nicolas, that much is true,” Isaac said. “But you misunderstand. Daniel is working his way round towards another matter.”

“What could Mr. Waterhouse possibly say that would be of interest? He is an amanuensis, a secretary.”

“Do not make any more such offending statements about Daniel,” Isaac commanded. “He has done us the favor, Nicolas, of thinking about our future. Which is a matter we did not consider at all, so confident were we. But Daniel is right. We have failed. Our line was not long enough to fathom the depths on which we had ventured. It will be necessary to regroup, to start over again. We shall require time and money and leisure.”

“Isaac,” Daniel said, “two or three years ago, before you set out on the Great Work that has just come to an end, you made inquiries, with Pepys and Roger Comstock and others, concerning the possibility of a position in London. Since then Trinity College has only become more impoverished—your need of a reliable income cannot have been met from that quarter. Now I have come to offer you the Mint.”

Everyone now observed a prayerful silence for a minute or two as Isaac Newton considered it.

“In normal circumstances the position would be without interest,” he said, “but Comstock has sent adumbrations my way concerning a great Recoinage.”

“It is intended that Recoinage would be your Great Work. Which I do not say in jest. For perhaps that is indeed the only way that the Philosophic Mercury could ever be recovered.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Hooke could not find the inverse-square law in a well because there was too little of what he was looking for, for his equipment to find it. You could not extract the Philosophic Mercury from gold, perhaps for a like reason.”

“You hypothesize that my methods are sound but that there is too little of it in my sample. I disprove your hypothesis by reminding you that my methods are those of the ancients, who, as I believe, did not fail to get what they sought.”

“Would you number King Solomon among them?”

“You know as well as I do that he is regarded as the father of Alchemists.”

“If King Solomon had been in command of the Grand Magisterium, he would have used it. His wealth was fabled. He must have gathered together a moiety of the world’s supply of gold, and extracted the Philosophic Mercury from it.”

“Many adepts believe that he did just that.”

“It would follow that ordinary gold, such as you employ in your Great Work, was depleted, while King Solomon’s gold was enriched, in the quintessence.”

“Again, this supposition is commonplace.”

“Comes now word that King Solomon’s Gold was found by a Viceroy of Mexico who then lost it to the King of the Vagabonds—who absconded with it to India, and there dispersed it, commingling it with the ordinary gold that circulates all over the world as money.”

“That is what we are told.”

“Short of conquering the whole Orient and collecting all its riches by tyrannical confiscations, there is then no way to recover what the Vagabond King has pissed away—unless you could, by some magical incantation, cause the gold to come from every corner of the earth to London, and pass through the crucibles of the Tower.”

Fatio stepped forward, almost blocking the sight-line between Daniel and Isaac. “Now that you have got down to business, you offer up a most reasonable and attractive proposition,” he proclaimed. “Prithee explain what you meant earlier.”

“I shall explain it, Nicolas,” Isaac said. “Daniel has done all the explaining we may justly require of him. He means—but is unwilling to say—that your theory of gravity is nonsense and that it has weakened my position vis-à-vis Leibniz. He probably refers also to your claim to be a co-inventor of the calculus, which is, I am sorry to say, perfectly false. Perhaps he has also in mind your pretensions of becoming a medical doctor and curing thousands with a new patent-medicine, and your fanciful interpretations of the Bible, and strange prophecies drawn therefrom.”

“But he knows nothing of these!”

“But I do, Fatio.”

“What are you saying? I confess the Bible is easier to interpret than you, Isaac.”

“On the contrary, I feel that I am all too transparent, for Daniel, and God only knows how many others, have seen through me.”

“Not that many—yet,” Daniel said quietly.

“The nub of it is this: I have let my affection for you cloud my judgment,” Isaac said. “I have given much greater credit to your work, Nicolas, than I ever should have, and it has led me down a cul-de-sac and caused me to waste years, and ruin my health. Thank you, Daniel, for telling me this forthrightly. Mr. Locke, you have worked in a gentle way to bring about this epiphany, and I apologize for thinking poorly of you and accusing you of plotting against me. Nicolas, come to London and share lodgings with me and be my help-meet as I move forward in the Great Work.”

“I am not willing to be less than your equal partner.”

“But you cannot ever be my equal partner. Only Leibniz—”

“Then go and make love to Leibniz!” Fatio cried. He stood poised where he was for a few moments as if he could not believe he’d said it—waiting, Daniel thought, for Newton to retract everything he’d said. But Isaac Newton was long past being able to change his mind. Fatio was left with only one thing he could possibly do: He ran away.

Once Fatio had passed out of view, Daniel began to hear a distant moaning or wailing. He assumed that he was hearing Fatio crying out in grief. But it grew louder. He feared for a moment that Fatio might be coming back toward him with a weapon drawn.

“Daniel!” said Locke sharply.

Locke had gotten to his feet and was standing over Newton, blocking Daniel’s view. Locke had begun his career as a physician and seemed to have reverted to his old form now; with one hand he was throwing off the mass of blankets in which Newton had been wrapped up this whole while, with the other, he was reaching for Newton’s throat to check his pulse. Daniel rushed toward them, fearing that Isaac had suffered a stroke, or an apoplectic fit. But Newton knocked Locke’s hand away from his neck with a shout of “Murder! Murder!”

Locke took half a step back. Daniel drew up on Newton’s other side to find him flailing all of his limbs, like a man who was drowning in air. The violence of his movements seemed to levitate his whole body out of his chair for an instant. He fell hard onto the stone patio, yelped, and went stiff, his entire body trembling like a plucked twist of catgut. Daniel dropped to a knee and placed a hand on one of Newton’s bony shoulders. What meager flesh he had was hard and thrumming. Newton started away as if Daniel had touched him with a hot iron and rolled blindly against the chair leg, which caught him in the midsection. In a heartbeat he contracted into a fœtal position, wrapping his whole body round the leg of the chair like a toddler who grips his mother’s leg with his whole being because he does not want her to walk away. “Murder, murder!” he repeated, more quietly now, as if dreaming of it, though it might have been Mother, mother.

Locke spoke from between his hands, which he had clapped over his face like the covers of a book. “The greatest mentality of the world—demented. Oh, God have mercy.”

Daniel sat down crosslegged next to Isaac. “Mr. Locke, if you would be so good as to have one of the servants bring me a cup of coffee. I am going to do something I have not done in three decades: sit up all night worrying about Isaac Newton.”

“What you have done was necessary and in no way do I fault you for it,” Locke said, “but gravely I fear that he shall never be the same.”

“You are right. He will be merely the most successful Natural Philosopher in all of history. Which is a better thing to be than a false Messiah. It will take him years to get used to his new station in the world. By the time he is himself again, I’ll be out of his reach, in Boston, Massachusetts.”

Bonaventure Rossignol to Eliza

MARCH 1694

My lady,

I pray this intercepts you in Hamburg, but I worry that it shall never catch up with you. I am a mortal, earthbound, attempting to get a message to a Goddess who travels in a flying chariot.

Of late I wonder: Do you really ken the devastation of Trade? You might scoff at such a question, as you do naught but trade. But to us earthbound mortals, it seems that you float about in a golden nimbus of prosperity, like the halo about a saint. And the company you keep can only enhance this illusion. Besides you, the only people in France who are not prostrate from Famine and Want of Money are your friends Jean Bart and Samuel Bernard. Bernard because he has taken over St.-Malo, driven out what was left of the old Compagnie des Indes, and fitted out his own fleet. Bart because the Navy ran out of money and had to be sold off to private investors. What does it say about our commerce, when the most attractive investment in France is a fleet of buccaneers preying on the commerce of other Realms?

And so I have every confidence that Captain Bart has conveyed you in safety, and even in comfort, to Hamburg; for what Navy in Christendom could stand against a fleet so well financed, so richly supplied with Baltic timber, and so brilliantly led? (Though I do hope he hurries back, as the British Navy is bombarding Dieppe.) I worry, though, that the posts will fail somewhere between Paris and Hamburg. For all is bankrupt. The spring breezes are redolent, not of tilled earth and burgeoning wildflowers, but the rotting flesh of all the livestock that froze to death during the winter. Rice—rice!—is coming in to Marseille from Alexandria, but no one has the means to buy it, for the wellsprings of our coinage have quite dried up. Our Army’s commanders slouch despondently around Versailles, wishing they’d had the foresight to join the Navy—as, owing to a want of specie, and even of credit, they cannot fight this year, but only squat in their fortresses, succumbing to disease, and beating back whatever assaults the English may mount against them, supposing that England has two pennies to rub together.

At any rate, my lady, do let me know if this has reached you, and of your itinerary. I know you would be informed of the latest exchanges between Vrej Esphahnian and his family. It will take me a long time to encrypt the report. If my late father’s map collection is to be credited, three hundred miles of winding Elbe lie between you and your destination; this should give you time sufficient to accomplish the decipherment. Perhaps I can arrange for it to catch up with your river-boat at Hitzacker or Schnackenburg or Fischbeck or one of the other euphoniously named villages that, according to my father’s maps, are soon to be adorned with the grace and beauty of the duchesse d’Arcachon and her baby girl Adelaide.

Bon. Ross.

Eliza to Rossignol

MARCH 1694

Bon-bon,

Yours reached me in Hamburg, where we have been interviewing river-captains and buying provisions for the journey inland. What a grim petulant mood you were in when you let this dribble from your quill! A few remarks:

—Adelaide is no baby, but a toddler of fourteen months, careering around the deck pursued by a squadron of stooping and waddling nurses who are all terrified she’ll go over the side.

—Hitzacker is said to be a perfectly lovely village; I’m sorry you don’t favor the name of it.

—The parlous condition of Trade is well known to me; who do you suppose arranged for the rice to be shipped from Egypt? Do you think it is a bad thing that there shall be no great battles this year? And have you forgotten that my son Lucien sickened and died over the winter just past? Where was my golden halo of prosperity when the Angel of Death came for him in St.-Malo? Really, you quite forget yourself.

But I forgive you. The grimness of your discourse tells me much that is useful of the mood among the Quality of Paris and Versailles. If it eases your mind, know that the confusion of which you complain is the death-throes of an old system—as when a man’s heart stops beating but his limbs continue to twitch for some time afterwards. The English, being a small and disorderly country, understood this a few years earlier than the French. Or perhaps that is giving them too much credit. They did not understand, but sensed, it. The tide of quicksilver that rose up in that country around the time of Plague and Fire produced a generation of more than normally acute minds—some, such as Newton, almost too tight-strung to endure the world. These men had power before, but knew not what to do with it, and lost it. In exile they formed the Juncto, which with the recent elections has taken over the government. The things that the Juncto does during the coming year—the Bank of England, the Recoinage, &c.—are the beginnings of the new way of things that shall replace the old one that has died, or is dying. France lags, having more of lead and less of quicksilver in her constitution, and lacking a Juncto; but the same forces are at work there.

You need only look to Lyon for an example. When Lothar von Hacklheber journeyed to Lyon in April of 1692 and accepted, from M. Castan, half a million livres tournoises of French government obligations in exchange for silver deliverable at London, no one thought twice about it. It was a large transaction, to be sure, but altogether routine. If you had gone to him, or to any of the other German or Swiss bankers in Lyon, at that time, and said, “This is the last such loan that shall ever be made in Lyon, and it shall never be repaid,” they’d have thought you a madman.

Yet all through 1692 Castan temporized, and promised to pay interest, and sought alternatives to paying it back. The bad harvest that autumn rendered payment quite out of the question, and the lines of galériens marching through Lyon en route to Marseille—mostly ordinary Parisians who had been caught looting bakeries—served to place the “sufferings” of Lothar in perspective. The immense military operation of last year consumed what money the Treasury had. The French victories (costly though they were) at Heidelberg, at sea, at Landen, and in Piedmont might have given Lothar some hope of seeing his money again. If so, that hope died in the winter just past, along with so many other things. The bankers of Lyon now look upon Lothar’s April 1692 loan as the moment it all went wrong; the end of an epoch. My correspondents there tell me that real estate in that city is to be had for nothing now, because the Swiss and German bankers are all turning their backs on it, cutting their losses, packing their coffers, and moving out. One day France will have its equivalent of the Bank of England, and it will probably be in Paris; but not for a long time, and until then, her finances will be in perpetual confusion.

It is for all of these reasons that I have resolved to descend on Leipzig now. But in order for me to know how best to set my pieces on the board, as it were, vis-à-vis Lothar, I must have the very latest on the Esphahnians, and the machinations of Father Édouard de Gex. For I know that hardly a day passes without his pestering you for the latest news concerning Vrej and his movements about Hindoostan.

Here, we are still shopping for a conveyance. Boats in every country are as various as breeds of dogs. In Bohemia, in the forests that surround the headwaters of the Vltava, they fashion barges of oak, and float them down to be finished around Prague. These carry Silesian coal down to places like Magdeburg and Hamburg, where local boatmen buy them and fix them up for their own uses. So though they may have all looked the same as they were being wrought in Bohemia, where the waters of the Elbe began as raindrops dripping from pine-needles, by the time I inspect them in Hamburg, where the Elbe is a mile wide, each has become as unique as its owner. The notion of conveying a Duchess, her daughter, and her household three hundred miles up the Elbe is extraordinary to these boatmen, who as a rule do not venture more than one or two days’ journey upriver; but some of the more adventurous spirits among them are warming to the idea, and I don’t suppose it shall be long before we have come to terms with one of them, and set out. The spring thaws shall place an abundance of water under the flat bottom of our Zille (as these barge-boats are called), so that we shall not have to be so concerned with shoals; but by the same token, the vigorous flow of the river will make it impossible to sail upstream on any but the windiest of spring days, and so we shall progress only as fast as an ox-team on the river-bank can draw us. Figure ten miles a day, on average; from this and from your father’s maps, you may put your mathematical acumen to use in guessing whither to post your reply. I guess Magdeburg; if you are slow, Wittenberg.

Eliza

Eliza to Pontchartrain

MARCH 1694

Monsieur,

A man of your erudition, a scholar as well as a nobleman, must know that the office of contrôleur-général comes with certain perquisites. If you have been slow to avail yourself of the same, it is not out of ignorance, but because your only thought is to be of service to the Most Christian King. I have long noted, but never mentioned this, for it was obvious that you were satisfied. But the latest letters from my friends in France are of a very grim cast, which has caused me to wonder whether you have, as you lay in bed in the dark hours of the night, regretted that you had not been more forward in looking after your own interests during those early years when France’s prosperity was the envy of the world, and her credit as good as gold.

I would be remiss if I did not let you know of a certain opportunity. As you know, France has since ancient times owed money to any number of different creditors at any given time. Part of the job of the contrôleur-général is to see that these obligations are discharged by assigning them to sources of revenue; for example, if France owes such-and-such number of livres to Signore Fiorentino, the contrôleur-général might go to some French count and say, “This year, when you collect the taxes on your lands, send the proceeds to Signore Fiorentino, as we owe him a debt.” A consequence of this is that not all French government debts are of equal value; for if the count, in the example above, was honnête, his lands bountiful, and the weather good, why, Signore Fiorentino would be repaid promptly and in full, while some other creditor, whose loan had been assigned to a less reliable source of revenue, might come up short-handed. It is this variability that makes the work of the contrôleur-général so endlessly absorbing. Not to mention profitable; for nothing in law or custom prevents the contrôleur-général himself from purchasing some loans that have gone bad, and then re-assigning them to more reliable sources of revenue, so that they are suddenly worth more. It is a perquisite of the office, and no one would give it a second thought if you were to avail yourself of it.

As it happens, for several years I have been purchasing underperforming loans from diverse petty nobles who did their parts to be of service to the King when the present war broke out. The total number of such transactions now numbers in the hundreds. The principals of all of these loans, summed, come to rather more than half a million livres, though I acquired them for less than a quarter of that amount. I will now sell them to you, Monsieur, for just what I paid for them, plus a soupçon of five percent. If, as I suspect, you lack the liquid assets necessary to close such a transaction, I will accept your word as a nobleman, and not think of being repaid until after you have had the leisure to plumb all of these obligations into adequate sources of revenue. Once you have accomplished that, you should be able to see that each of these loans is repaid in full, which means that you could in theory get back quadruple what you shall owe me.

No gratitude is expected, or desired; my only wish, as ever, is to be of service.

Eliza, duchesse d’Arcachon My lady,

Rossignol to Eliza

APRIL 1694

My lady,

I hope this finds you on a tidy and well-skippered Zille halfway up the Elbe. Please forgive me for the intemperate remarks contained in my previous letter. The situation in all places has become so bizarre, so suddenly, that I know not what to make of it. Half of London—the better half—is said to have been abandoned. Because there is no silver, Persons of Quality have no means of conveying rents from their lands in the country, to town; so they have no choice but to board up their town-houses and move to the country, where they can live on barter. It seems the worst possible moment for the Whigs to have taken power, and to have put in the Marquis of Ravenscar at the Exchequer; but perhaps it is the case that he, like you, perceives some opportunity where others see only confusion, and has chosen this moment to strike.

To business. You asked for the latest on the Esphahnians. I will tell you what I know.

You’ll recall that after the severed head of your father-in-law turned up at his own birthday party on the evening of 14 October 1690, we heard little that was of any use on this channel for several years. Vrej Esphahnian had contrived to get a letter out from Egypt a few days before the duc d’Arcachon’s demise, and several months later he posted a brief note from Mocha in which he directed his family not to make any effort to reply, as he could not predict where the currents of trade would next take him.

In the meantime I had not been idle. It was clear to me that the Esphahnians used some form of steganography in their letters, but I could not make out how they did it. The family was scattered among several hovels, entresols, and prisons around Paris. I hired thieves to rifle through their possessions, and at length found some letters that Vrej had sent to them from Spain and Barbary beginning in 1685. In the margins and interlinear spaces of these, I saw an inscription writ in letters of vermilion. It was plain enough that this was some sort of invisible ink, which had been made visible by some secret art known to the Esphahnians. By reading these, I was able to learn more of Vrej’s story.

He had been sent to Spain early in 1685 to establish a family trading circuit there. But he had been taken by the Barbary Corsairs and enslaved. Yet his owner soon recognized that he had talents beyond pulling oars, and put him to work in a port city near Morocco, whence he was able to correspond with his family. From them, he learned of the disaster that had befallen the Paris Esphahnians after they had made the mistake of sub-letting their entresol to Jack Shaftoe. By this time they had been released from the Bastille, but one of them had died in prison, and their business was of course destroyed, so that in coming years many would drift in and out of debtors’ prisons.

In 1688 Vrej’s owner traded him to Algiers. There he became acquainted with another literate slave, a Jew of great intelligence, and over the course of several conversations with this Jew learned that Jack Shaftoe was still alive, as a galley-slave in the same city. During the winter of 1688–89, Vrej wrote to his family in Paris apprising them of this and proposing to find Jack and cut his throat, or arrange for it to be done, as revenge. Of course I do not have a copy of what was sent back in response; but it is easy enough to infer, from what Vrej wrote in his next letter, that older and wiser heads in Paris had prevailed. Jack Shaftoe was looked on as a sort of madman, a victim of possession, not responsible for his actions (though Vrej questions this, and suspects it is all an act), and no advantage to the family, temporal or spiritual, is seen in killing the poor man. Rather, it is suggested that Vrej seek some advantage in his dealings with the Jew.

As you will have anticipated, my lady, this Jew, this Armenian, and Jack, as well as several other galley-slaves, developed into the corps of pirates who have caused so much trouble since then.

All of these things were known to me, and to Father Édouard de Gex, by the end of the Year of Our Lord 1690. As you know, de Gex took the keenest imaginable interest in this. He began to ransack books of Alchemy for information about the vermilion ink: how it was concocted, and what vapor or infusion was required to make the hidden letters manifest on the page. With the connivance of his cousine the duchesse d’Oyonnax, he made the Esphahnians a great success among all the coffee-fanciers at Court, with the result that they have been able to move to Versailles and build that coffee-house on the Rue de l’Orangerie where you and I have spent so many stimulating hours. This had the effect that de Gex desired: All of the Esphahnians were gathered together in one house where they could be spied on with ease. When a letter came to them from some place such as Mocha, de Gex and I knew it first; and when a member of this family went out to buy something from a chymist, he was of necessity dealing with one of the Esoteric Brotherhood, well known to de Gex. And so by the middle of 1692 we had learned everything there was to know about the vermilion ink: how to compound it, and how to render it visible. Too, we knew of Vrej’s movements about the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The one person who was wholly in the dark was Vrej himself. Because of his erratic movements, his family had not been able to send a letter to him since 1689, when they had been clinging to a wretched existence in Paris.

Finally in September of 1692 the pirates sailed to Surat, in Hindoostan, to get away from the Hell-hounds sent after them by Lothar von Hacklheber and various others they had injured. They were assaulted from an unexpected quarter by pirates of Malabar and their treasure was taken from them. Several, including Vrej, waded up on to the shores of Hindoostan where they dispersed. Vrej was press-ganged into the army of a regional king, a vassal of the Great Mogul whose nom de guerre is Dispenser of Mayhem. One might imagine that a man in such a position would be little better than a slave; however, it seems that, in the armies of the Mogul, Christian mercenaries enjoy a kind of elevated status—even when they are serving against their will! Or so I infer from the fact that Vrej was at last able to assemble the materials needed to concoct the invisible ink. And for the first time since his wanderings had begun, he was able to specify a return address. His letter reached France in November of 1692. De Gex and I steeped it in the chymical vapour that caused the scarlet letters to appear, and extracted the information I have just given you. Then I put my forgers to work making an exact duplicate of the letter, including the part written in invisible ink. This was delivered to the Café Esphahan and duly read by Vrej’s kin. They immediately produced a letter in reply. Its outward contents were just the sort of mawkish drivel you would expect, but when de Gex and I exposed it to the vapour and read the hidden inscription, we found it to be rather more businesslike. In neat vermilion letters they told Vrej about the good fortune that the family had lately achieved.

I had been planning to have my forgers produce an exact copy of this, as we had done with the incoming letter; but de Gex had come under the spell of an idea, and formed a resolve to play a deeper game. He was extremely vexed that he had patiently bided his time for so many years only to learn that the Solomonic Gold had been lost to Malabar pirates, and had decided to grasp the nettle, as it were, and go to Hindoostan himself. To that end, he wished to cultivate Vrej as a source of intelligence, and, if possible, as an accomplice. But it was necessary to keep the matter a secret from other members of this pirate-band. The hidden channel of the vermilion ink was ideally suited to that purpose. And so the letter crafted by my forgers ended up being rather different from the original. It was written out on the cheapest paper we could gather up, with ink of miserable quality. The plaintext was much the same as in the original. But the invisible message was altogether different. In the letter that was actually posted back to Vrej, he is given the bad news that life has only gotten worse for the Esphahnians; two more of his brothers have perished in debtors’ prisons, &c. However (according to this account, which de Gex concocted himself), the star of Jack Shaftoe has only soared higher; he is accounted a sort of picaresque hero now, and the story goes that he has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, especially those of the pirates he travels with; for hidden in the treasure that was stolen is something of unimaginable value, known to Jack and to the Jew, but that they are concealing from their brethren.

The forged letter concludes by urging Vrej not to worry too much over the fate of his family in Paris, for, praise be to God, they have at last found an ally and a protector in one Father Édouard de Gex, a saintly man who knows of all the injustices perpetrated against the family, and who has taken a solemn vow to see to it that justice is done.

That forgery was sent off to Vrej in Hindoostan in December of 1692. The following April—about one year ago—Vrej’s reply came in, and the scarlet letters might have been written in some unholy concoction of blood and fire, so infused were they with fury and lust for revenge. “The Lord has delivered him into my hands!” was what de Gex said upon reading it. I think he meant Jack Shaftoe, rather than Vrej. At any rate we produced a forged version whose invisible text was, of course, wholly different. In this version Vrej congratulates his family on their good fortune and asks to learn more of the glorious Café Esphahan, &c.

In this manner the correspondence has gone back and forth a few more times between Vrej and his brothers. Every word of it, of course, has passed through the mind and hand of de Gex, and been twisted one way or the other, so that Vrej and his brothers have developed utterly divergent pictures of what is going on.

Had you taken the trouble to ask me, you might have learned of all of these things prior to your departure for Germany. Since then, however, one more letter has come in from Vrej.

This letter was written in the court of the Great Mogul at Shahjahanabad where (one imagines) Vrej was reclining on silken pillows and being fed peeled grapes by bejewelled virgins, as he and what remained of his pirate-band had won a great battle against the Maratha rebels and thereby re-opened the high road from Surat to Delhi. Vrej relates the story in some detail. Word of it has already reached the courts of Europe via more than one channel and so I shall not say much about it here, on the assumption that you have heard or read other accounts. The general drift of Vrej’s letter is that although he is being showered with rewards in Shahjahanabad, he cannot take any pleasure in them as long as he knows that his family are suffering in Paris; indeed, he would come home in the blink of an eye were it not for this saintly benefactor, Father Édouard de Gex, who was now looking after the family. Instead, Vrej proposes to tarry in Hindoostan so that he can get to the bottom of this story that I mentioned before—namely that there was something of extraordinary value secreted in the treasure of Bonanza. One would think that this had been irretrievably lost; but Vrej reports that some members of the pirate-band were taken as prisoners by the Malabar pirates. There exists the possibility that not all of them were slain instantly, tortured to death presently, or driven insane; i.e., that they are still alive in Malabar and know something about the lost treasure’s whereabouts.

For his services to the Great Mogul, Jack Shaftoe has been made King of a region in southern Hindoostan for a term of three years, which, as bizarre as it sounds, is a customary way for that potentate to reward his generals. Soon Jack and the remnants of his band shall journey to his new kingdom for him to be enthroned. Vrej shall go with them, and promises to send his family news as soon as he has any to write down, and the means to post it.

That is all. Father Édouard, who was hoping for news more definite, is beside himself, and divides his time between the following three activities: one, uttering oaths that should never be heard from a priest. Two, seething, and trying to prevent himself from uttering any further oaths. Three, doing penance in various churches and chapels, to seek forgiveness for having let slip oaths. And so it is not an especially productive time for him; but between famine and lack of money it is no productive time for France either and so he does not stand out from the crowd.

Bonaventure Rossignol

Pretzsch, Saxony

APRIL 1694

PRINCESS WILHELMINA CAROLINE of Brandenburg-Ansbach had been sending letters to Eliza almost every week since the summer of 1689, which was when they had last seen each other. Caroline had been six years old then. Now she was almost eleven. The handwriting, and the contents of her letters, had changed accordingly. Yet as Eliza stood on the deck of her Zille—the slim, hundred-foot-long river-barge she had chartered in Hamburg—and scanned the green banks of the Elbe, she was looking for the young mother and the little girl she had bid farewell to in the Hague five years earlier. There was no helping it. To a child, nothing seemed more stupid in adults than their inability to come to grips with the fact that people grew. Unfathomably moronic seemed the aunt or grandpapa who exclaimed “You have grown!” at each reunion. Eliza knew this as well as anyone who has ever been a child. And yet she was ambushed by the two women on the quay. They had been waving to her as the Zille drew near, and she had paid no more notice to them than to the cattle grazing in the undulating fields that rose up from the river’s edge.

In her defense—if she needed any—she was exhausted from the length of the journey, and feeling especially woolly-headed today. And even if she’d been at her very sharpest, she might not have marked this quay because it was so humble. She had been on this river for a month, and had seen an uncountable number of wharves, piers, bridges, fords, and landings. Some, in cities, were vibrating entrepôts—little Amsterdams. Some, at the foot of barons’ country estates, were Barock stone-piles and iron-snarls, meant to overawe the other Barons. Others were little more than flat places on the bank where farmers could bring their carts down to trade with barge-men. But the only reason this thing outside of Pretzsch rated a second look was that two women had risked their lives to come out and put their weight on it. A hundred years ago it might have supported a carriage and a team; two hundred, a house. Today, it was a slumping huddle of black piles slowly being transubstantiated into slime. Half the decking had been pilfered, and the other half was being used by shrubs and grass in lieu of soil. Those madly waving women showed bravery by putting themselves in its trust. The slenderer of the two showed a kind of reckless bravado by jumping up and down. They’d at least had the good sense to leave their wagon on terra firma—it was drawn up at the base of a mud track that meandered down the hill from a shaggy copse that might conceal a building. To either side of the wagon, a finger of stone was thrust into the air, as if to test the wind. Around these spread moraines of alienated blocks, bricks, and vous-soirs, remnants of an arch that had been pulled down in some forgotten disturbance. In summer the loose stones would have been concealed by the leaves of the bushes and the sickly weed-trees that had insinuated roots among them, but winter had been even longer and deeper here than in France, and so most of these had not yet arrived at a firm decision as to whether they should put forth the effort of growing leaves, or simply stiffen up and die.

All of which made it no more or less decrepit than any other Elbe-side attractions that had passed in front of Eliza’s uncaring eyes during the last month. It was not, however, the sort of place she would look for an Electress and a Princess.

Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa, born a Princess, the daughter of the Duke of Saxe-Eisenach, had married the Margrave of Ansbach, John Frederick. When he had died, Eleanor and three-year-old Caroline had been turned out of the household and took up a poor wandering life among diverse minor courts of northern Europe. The center of gravitation round which they looped, and to which they frequently returned, was the court of the Elector and Electress of Brandenburg-Prussia, in Berlin. And a fine choice it was, for the Electress, Sophie Charlotte, had made of it a fair and fascinating place, replete with savants (e.g., Leibniz), writers, artists, musicians, &c. Sophie Charlotte and her redoubtable Mum, the Electress Sophie of Hanover, had taken Eleanor and Caroline under their wings, and been good to them.

But royalty was a family, which was to say that anyone fortunate enough to stay alive to the age when she became a sentient being would know in her bones that by having emerged from her mother’s womb she had agreed to a pact, never to be broken or even questioned, whereby she’d receive all kinds of love and loyalty, but must repay every bit of it in kind. And whereas to a peasant family “loyalty” might mean slopping the hogs, to a royal it might mean marrying one, if that would help.

Brandenburg wished to form an alliance with Saxony, which lay immediately to its south, and thereby to worry it loose from the stern embrace of Austria. The alliance was to be sealed by the physical union of Johann Georg IV, the Elector of Saxony, with a suitable Princess from the House of Brandenburg. Eleanor was suitable, was available, and was there. And so she had married Johann Georg in Leipzig in 1692 and thereby become Electress of Saxony—so, equal in dignity to Sophie Charlotte, to Sophie, and to the six other Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The newlyweds had moved to the Saxon electoral court at Dresden (which lay another sixty or so miles up the river from where Eliza was at this moment). Eliza had received a spate of Caroline-letters, and one Eleanor-letter, from there. But after a few months the Caroline-letters had begun to originate from this Pretzsch and the Eleanor-letters had stopped coming altogether. Even the maps of the father of Bonaventure Rossignol did not list any Pretzsch and so Eliza had had to ask Leibniz where it was. “A few hours’ ride from Wittenberg,” he had answered, and then declined to say anything more of it, which ought to have signified something to Eliza.

Caroline-letters tended to be full of talk about trees she had climbed, squirrels who had admitted her into their circle of trust, boys who had disgusted her, chess-games she had played via post against Leibniz, dreadful books she’d studied, wonderful books she’d read, the weather, logarithms, and timeless disputes among domestic animals. They told Eliza nothing about Johann Georg IV, about Dresden, or why they had moved to Pretzsch, or how Eleanor was doing. And so Eliza had assumed what would have been the case in France, namely that Pretzsch was some outlying château of the Saxon court, as Marly was to Versailles, and that Eleanor, for whatever reason, favored it over life in the capital. And so ever since the spires of Wittenberg had receded from view aft, Eliza had been scanning the hilltops above the river for some new Barock palace, with terraced gardens leading down to a stone quay along the river, the Electoral household drawn up in formation to greet her, perhaps a consort playing music, the mother on the arm of her strapping husband the Elector, and the little girl. Her only concern had been that, tired as she was, she might not be equal to the magnificence of it all. Instead, this: above, a few leaning turrets and slumping eaves discernible through overgrown trees, a mud trough winding down to the ruined dock where the two women were madly waving. It was so at odds with Eliza’s expectations that it made almost no impression on her.

The day was saved by Adelaide, who could not talk yet, but who had developed a keen interest in waving, and being waved to. The apparition, in this empty countryside, of two women in bright dresses, waving and waving and waving, could not have been better calculated to draw her notice, and before long she was not only waving back but had to be chased down, snatched from the brink of a watery demise, and physically restrained as she flung out both chubby arms again and again toward the wavers. So it was that a preverbal fourteen-month-old was able to perceive a simple truth that had eluded Eliza: that they had reached the end of their journey and were welcome among friends. Eliza gave word to the skipper. He maneuvered the Zille alongside what remained of the quay. Eliza pulled herself up out of the chair where she had been watching Germany go by, wiped sweat off her brow, and tried the experiment of seeing whether the platform would support a third human.

Eleanor had broadened, sagged, lost teeth, shorn her hair, and given up trying to conceal her old pox-scars beneath black patches, as had been her practice in the Hague. She well knew how her looks had declined, for she would not meet Eliza’s eye, and kept turning her face aside. What she did not understand was that the joy in her face made up for all else; and moreover Eliza, who felt as run down as Eleanor looked, was not of a mind to judge her unkindly. Eleanor stood back half a pace, granting precedence to her daughter, who was a glory. She was not exceptionally beautiful by the standards of Versailles; however, she was more comely than nine out of ten princesses. She had some spark about her, anyway, that would have enabled her to outshine pretty people even if she’d been ugly, and she had a self-possession that made her more watchable than anything Eliza had laid eyes on since her weird audience with Isaac Newton. Eleanor hugged Eliza for a solid minute; in the same interval of time, Caroline greeted everyone on the Zille, asked the skipper three boat-questions, stuffed a bouquet of wildflowers into Adelaide’s hand, hitched the toddler up on her hip, told her to stop eating the flowers, pranced across the cratered and shifting deck of the quay to the shore, taught Adelaide how to say “river” in German, told her a second time not to eat the flowers, pulled the flowers out of her chubby fist, got into a violent row with her, patched it all up, and got the little one giggling. She was now ready to go back to the house and play chess with her Aunt Eliza; why the delay?

Pontchartrain to Eliza

APRIL 1694

My lady,

You have given me a strict command not to be grateful. I know better than to disobey it. But you cannot command me not to harbor charitable instincts. Of the benefit that I shall reap from the transaction that you so cleverly devised, and that your lawyers and mine have just consummated, I intend to donate one quarter (after I have paid you your five percent) to charity. Alas, so many years have passed since I had money to donate, that I have quite lost track of where the deserving charities are to be found. Would you care to offer any recommendations?

Ungratefully yours,

Ponchartrain

Eliza to Pontchartrain

MAY 1694

My ungrateful (but charitable) Count,

Your letter brought a smile to my lips. The prospect of discussing charities with you gives me one more reason to rush back to Versailles as soon as my business in Leipzig is finished. But do not forget that the government obligations I have sold to you are worthless until the contrôleur-général has assigned them to reliable sources of hard money revenue. As there is no money in France, or even in England, it must be got from other sources. Ships travel the sea bearing objects of tangible worth, and the laws of nations state that these may be taken as prizes during time of war. While the rest of France has been plunged into despair, Captain Jean Bart has presided over a golden age in Dunkerque, and often brings in prizes whose value is sufficient to cover the payments on those loans, supposing that the contrôleur-général wishes to manage it thus. As it may be some weeks before I can return to France, I recommend that you take up the matter directly with Captain Bart. If it bears fruit, why, then you and I may look forward to some delightful strolls in the King’s gardens, during which we may plot how your generous donations may be put to work to better the world.

Eliza

The Dower-house of Pretzsch

APRIL AND MAY 1694

To suffer, as to doe,

Our strength is equal, nor the Law unjust

That so ordains.

—MILTON,
Paradise Lost

LIKE A GUINEA WORM, Eleanor’s story had to be drawn out of her inch by inch. Its telling extended over a week, and was broken into a dozen installments, each of which was preceded by exhausting maneuvers and manipulations from Eliza and brought to a premature end by Eleanor’s changing the subject or breaking down in tears. But the tiredness that Eliza had felt on the last day of the river-journey had developed into an influenza that kept her in bed for some days with aches and chills. So there was nothing else to pass the hours, and time favored Eliza.

The telling began when Eliza, sick, sore, woozy from mildew-smell and irritable because damp plaster kept falling from the ceiling onto her bed, asked: “A dower-house is where a dowager goes to live out her days after her husband has passed on; but yours still lives. So why are you in a dower-house?”

The answer—when all of the bits were spliced together and the preliminaries and digressions trimmed—was: The Elector Johann Georg IV belonged to a sort of fraternity whose members were to be found in every country in the world, and among every class of society: Men Who Had Been Hit on the Head as Boys. As MWHBHHB went, Johann Georg was a beauty. For some, the insult to the brain led to defects of the body, viz. wasting, unsightly curling of the fingers, twitches, spasms, drooling, &c. Johann Georg was not one of those; now in his late twenties, he could easily have found employment in Versailles as a gigolo for male or female clients—or both at the same time, as he was a great strapping stallion of a man, and who knew the limits of his body?

But everyone knew the limits of his mind. Eleanor might have known better than to marry him; but she had wanted to do her bit for the Brandenburgs, and to find a home for Caroline. He was rich and handsome; and though everyone knew he was a MWHBHHB, she had been assured, by many who knew him (Ministers of the Saxon court who in retrospect might not have been the most reliable sources) that he had not been hit all that hard. They pointed to his physical perfection as evidence of this. And (again, so easy to see in retrospect) they’d presented him to her, during their first few encounters, in settings ingeniously devised so that those aspects of his character attributable to his having been hit on the head as a boy had not been obvious. The wedding had been set for a certain date in Leipzig, a city easily reached from either capital (Berlin or Dresden) and large enough to accommodate two Electoral courts and a wedding party of noble men and women from all parts of Protestant Europe. Eleanor had gone there in the train of the Brandenburgs, and they had paid a call on her betrothed. The Elector of Saxony had received his bride-to-be in the company of a ravishing, expensively dressed young woman, and introduced her as Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz.

Eleanor had heard the name before, always in a context of tawdry gossip. This woman had been Johann Georg’s mistress for some years. Indeed they were said to be admirably matched, for though there was no evidence, visible or anecdotal, of her having been hit on the head as a girl, she might as well have been; despite lengthy and expensive efforts of her noble family to educate her, she could not read or write. And yet she was as perfect, as desirable a specimen of female beauty as Johann Georg was of male. The union made sense, in its way. There was a notable lack of brain power, but (a) the Doctors of Saxony were as one in saying that the imbecility of the Elector and of Fraülein von Röohlitz were not of the sort that is passed down to children, i.e., their offspring might be of sound mind, provided he were not hit on the head as a boy, and (b) the Countess’s mother was said to be a clever one. Too clever; for she was in the pay of the Court of Austria, and doing all that she could to make Saxony into a fiefdom of that Realm. The Fräulein von Röohlitz had been Johann Georg’s wife in all but name for some years and he’d given her a fortune, a Schloß, and a Court to go with it. Yet she was not of a rank to wed an Elector, or so insisted the old wise heads of the Saxon court, who were anti-Austria and pro-Brandenburg to a man. What Eleanor had seen and heard of these Saxons, from her distant and imperfect vantage-point in Berlin, had been only the faint noises off of a titanic struggle that had been carried out, over several years, in Dresden, between the pro-Brandenburg ministers of Saxony and the pro-Austria von Röohlitz faction. That Johann Georg had come to Brandenburg to woo her was evidence only that those ministers had, for a few months, got the upper hand. That her fiancé had now chosen to receive her, on the eve of their wedding, with his mistress draped all over him, and her draped in jewels that ought to have been gifts to Eleanor, proved that the struggle had lately swung the other way. Another prince, in such a circumstance, would have kept the mistress hidden away in her Schloß. The reality would have been no different but the presentation would have been comelier. But Johann Georg was a MWHBHHB and did not do things as other men. As Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, looked on incredulously, and von Röohlitz watched in obvious delight, Johann Georg openly spurned Eleanor. And yet he had come to Leipzig with every apparent intention of going through with the wedding!

Frederick by now was acting in much the same rôle as Father of the Bride—though it was combined with that of one head of state negotiating an alliance with another, as well as that of a Doctor ministering to a village idiot. The meeting broke off. Most of those on the Brandenburg side of it were too nonplussed to be angry.

She married him. Eleanor Erdmuthe Louisa married Johann Georg IV, Elector of Saxony, albeit a few days later than planned, as everything had to be re-jiggered at the last minute. They moved to Dresden. The Elector promoted Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz to the rank of Countess and kept her around. Libels began to circulate in the streets of Dresden in which it was argued that bigamy was no bad thing, having been practiced by any number of Biblical kings, and ought to be revived in Saxony. At about the same time, the Elector openly promised to marry the Countess von Röohlitz—at the same time as he was still married to Eleanor. The good Lutherans of Saxony pushed back against the idea of making bigamy the new law of the land, and even Johann Georg’s impaired mind came to understand that he would never be able to marry two women at once.

Attempts to poison Eleanor’s food commenced not long after. She might have been an easy victim in some other courts—a court, let us say, in which she had more enemies, and in which the enemies were not all mental defectives. But poisoning was a difficult and exacting business even for persons who had never been hit on the head, and the attempts of Johann Georg and Magdalen Sybil von Röohlitz were obvious, and were failures. Eleanor took as many clothes as she could pack in a hurry, and as many servants (three) as Johann Georg would allow her, and departed without taking another meal. This was how she and Caroline had landed at the dower-house of Pretzsch. Her sojourn here had hardened into a sort of exile, or imprisonment. As she had no money of her own, there was little practical difference. She and Caroline slept in the same room and barricaded the door at night in case Johann Georg should conceive some hare-brained plan to send assassins. Caroline, despite being an abnormally acute young lady when it came to squirrels and logarithms, had no idea that any of this was happening.

AT THE END OF TELLING THIS TALE, Eleanor looked better, albeit puffy around the eyes. She looked more like the dogged young Princess that Eliza had known at the Hague five years ago.

But any ground that she had gained by unburdening herself thus to Eliza, she gave back again in a few moments when, on the eighth day of Eliza’s visit, she opened and read an ornate document that had been brought to the dower-house by a galloping courier. “Whatever is the matter?” Eliza asked. For she could not phant’sy what, to a woman in Eleanor’s estate, could possibly be accounted Bad News; any conceivable change, it seemed, would be a step up.

“It is from the Elector,” she announced.

“The Elector of—?”

“Saxony.”

“Your husband?”

“Yes.”

“What says it?”

“He has got word that I am entertaining a visitor, whose beauty and charm are renowned in all the courts of Christendom. He is pleased to learn that his Realm is graced by such a distinguished personage as the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, and announces that he and the Countess shall arrive tomorrow to pay their respects to the Duchess, and to stay for a few days.”

Eliza had summoned the strength to move to a chair by the sick-room’s sole window. Cramped and dingy the dower-house of Pretzsch might be, but open fields surrounded it, with good climbing-trees. For some days Eliza had been too drained and listless even to read books; but she’d spent many hours in this chair, doing what she was doing now: watching Caroline and Adelaide play. The sheer number of hours that they could put into playing were a prodigy to Eliza, especially given that she felt a hundred years old. This had been her only form of contact with either of the girls since the day she’d arrived, for all had agreed it were best if Eliza were quarantined until she got better.

Eliza, draped in blankets like a statue for shipment, was rubbing the palms of her hands together. “Has the Elector ever had smallpox?” she asked.

“He does not bear scars of it, as far as I know. But as the marriage was never consummated, I have seen little of him. Why do you ask?”

“We have journeyed a great distance,” Eliza said, “and called at more towns along the Elbe than I can remember. Given that, and given the sheer size of my entourage, there is always the possibility of someone’s having picked up a disease en route. That is why travelers from abroad are frequently quarantined. Now, having heard so many lovely stories about the Elector of Saxony and the Countess von Röohlitz, I should be crestfallen if I missed the opportunity to make their acquaintances. But it would be most unfortunate if one of them were to fall ill of some malady that we brought up the Elbe. You will apprise them of this—?”

“I shall throw words in their general direction, to that effect,” Eleanor said, “whether any shall stick I cannot say.”

“BY A LONG SHOT, however, the most sophisticated practice of the Turks is the institution of polygamy,” Eliza said.

The Elector of Saxony, who really was a great penis of a man, all purple-red, and laced about with throbbing veins, and crowned with a tremendous curling black wig, sat up just a bit straighter. One eye, then the other, strayed in the direction of the Countess von Röohlitz. She was everything that Eliza could have anticipated from Eleanor’s narration. Stuffed into a bag and smuggled a thousand miles to the southeast, she’d have sold, in a Constantinople slave-mart, for a whole stable of Arab race-horses. To ask her to make conversation, however, was a little bit like expecting a dog to cook his meat before eating it. Eliza had talked herself hoarse rather than shut up and listen to what these two would attempt to say to her. And like groundlings in a theatre, they were more than content simply to watch with open eyes, and, most of the time, open mouths.

“You don’t say,” said the Elector, after a while. “How do they… do it?”

Eliza let a beat or two pass in silence before letting go with a titter. She was not a great titterer by and large. This was a titter she had borrowed from a certain Duchess she had sat next to once at Versailles. She did not duplicate it very precisely, but here in the dower-house of Pretzsch it would serve. “Oh, monsieur,” she went on, “your double entendre almost got by me.”

“I beg your pardon—?”

“At first I supposed you meant, ‘How did they institute the practice of polygamy?’ but of course now I perceive you were really asking, ‘How does the Sultan make love to two women, or more, at the same time?’ I should be pleased to let you in on the secret, but I fear some of a more prudish disposition might object.” And she kicked Eleanor in the shin under the table, and jerked her head toward the room’s exit: which Eleanor had been pining for, as a prisoner regards a high window in the wall of his cell.

“I am exhausted,” Eleanor announced.

“You look it,” said the Countess, “or perhaps that is just age.”

“Exhaustion or age—who can guess? I shall let it remain my little secret,” Eleanor said equably. “I am sorry to leave the party so early, and when it appears that the conversation is about to take such a fascinating turn—”

“Or,” said Eliza, catching the eye of Johann Georg, “to turn into something else.”

“Pray, don’t get up!” Eleanor said to her husband, who had shown not the slightest intention of doing so. “I’ll to my bed, and shall see you all, I suppose, whenever you crawl out of yours. I do apologize once more for the miserable state of the accommodations.” This last was aimed at her husband, who did not penetrate its meaning.

“Right,” said Eliza, once the staircase, and the floorboards overhead, had let off creaking under the movements of Eleanor. She was in the salon now with the Elector of Saxony and his mistress, and she had their undivided attention. She brushed a bit of damp plaster out of her hair. “Where were we? Oh yes, the Chariot.”

“Chariot?”

“I’m sorry, it is the name given to the technique that—in those countries that are enlightened enough to sanction the ancient Biblical practice of polygamy—is used by a Sultan when he is at a numerical disadvantage to his wives. I could try to describe it. A picture would be ever so much more effective, but I can’t draw to save my life. Perhaps I should demonstrate it. Why, yes! That would be best. Would you be a dear, my good Elector, and flip yonder table upside down? I’ll fetch an ottoman from the other room—”

“A what!?” barked Johann Georg, and his hand shifted to the hilt of his sword.

“As in a piece of furniture. We’ll want something in lieu of reins—my dear Countess, if you’d care to unwind that silk sash from about your waist, ’twould serve.”

“But the sash is holding up my—”

“—?”

“—ah, j’ai compris, madame.”

“I knew you would, Fräulein.”

“I HAD TO FUCK SOMEONE,” Eliza mumbled through the hem of her blanket. “I suppose you’ll think me a whore. But my son—I refer to the legitimate one—Lucien—died. Adelaide is a gem, but she was foolhardy enough to have been born female. My husband requires a legitimate boy.”

“But—with him!?”

“You said yourself that his imbecility was not congenital.”

“But how will you explain the timing of it!?”

“There is nothing that can’t be explained away, if Étienne is willing to play along, and not ask difficult questions. And I think he is willing. None of it matters, probably.”

“What do you mean by that?”

By way of an answer, Eliza—who was lying flat on her back in bed with a blanket over most of her face—thrust out a hand.

Eleanor screamed.

“Be quiet! They’ll hear you,” said Eliza.

“They—they have already left,” said Eleanor from the uttermost corner of the room, whence she’d fled, quick as a sparrow.

“Oh. Then go ahead and scream all you like.”

“When did the bumps appear?”

“I thought I felt one coming on yesterday. Had no idea they’d spread so rapidly.” Eliza flipped the blanket down to expose her face. Earlier she’d counted twenty bumps, there, by feel, then lost interest. Eleanor gave her only the briefest glance before turning her face aside, and adopting a pose in the corner of the room like a schoolgirl who is being punished.

“So this is why you insisted Caroline and Adelaide be sent away to Leipzig!”

“You do a sick woman an injustice there. You yourself told me that the Elector could not take his eyes off Caroline. You mentioned it half a dozen times unbidden. She has only bloomed the more since he last raped her with his eyes. That alone was reason sufficient to get her out of the house.”

“Does the Elector know?”

“Know that I have smallpox? Not yet.”

“How could he have missed it?”

“First, most of these vesicles have broken out in the last few hours. Second, we did it in the dark. Third, many persons—including some who were not hit on the head as boys—are unclear as to the distinction between smallpox, and the great pox, or syphilis. Given the company he keeps, I cannot but think that Johann Georg has seen much of the latter!”

“What you have done is horrible!” Eleanor said, turning around, and, when she saw Eliza’s face, thinking better of it.

“Oh, I’ve had worse.”

“No! I mean, trying to get someone sick.”

“You could have guessed yesterday that I had smallpox. You could have warned them off. You chose not to. So your outrage at this moment is very tiresome.”

Eleanor could not frame any response to this.

“I don’t know a single man at Versailles who has not killed someone, at least once in his life, directly or indirectly, by omission or commission. It is done commonly, and on the slightest pretexts. I might not have done what I did last night, had you not told me that the Elector desires Caroline. But knowing what I did of his lust for the girl, and his power over you, and knowing how it was likely to come out—well, I did what I did. Now, Eleanor, that is enough of talking about it. I really am spent. Last night took too much out of me at a time when I ought to have been conserving my strength. Now I’ll pay the penalty. I wrote out instructions—in case of my death. It’s under my pillow. I’m sleepy. Good-bye.”

Jean Bart to Eliza

MAY 1694

My lady,

I take the liberty of sending you a first draft, only because the English Navy is massing in the Channel to lob more bombs on to French soil, a most tiresome practice of which they have lately become quite fond. They would prefer, of course, to destroy the many ships of our fleet (which all ought to be named Eliza, as we owe their existence to you). But these are moving targets, which their vessels are too slow to pursue, and their gunners too inept to hit, and so instead they have have taken to shooting at buildings. One is reminded of some old Baron who phant’sies himself a brave hunter, but is too shaky, senile, and blind to hit anything, and so stands in his garden blasting away at stuffed animals that his servants have propped up against the hedge.

But life, and this letter, are both too short to be wasted on the English and so I shall go straight to the point and pray you’ll forgive my bald way of speaking.

My services are much in demand of late, as trade has stopped, owing to some confusion in the world of money. I do not understand it at all. You, I am certain, understand it perfectly. In between my perfect ignorance and your perfect knowledge stand the rest of humanity—innumerable persons of greater or less dignity, who phant’sy they understand it. Whatever the case may be, these persons know that your humble and obedient servant, Captain Jean Bart, is, at the present time, the only person making money in France (some small-minded pedants would assert that this is only by virtue of the fact that I steal things by force from their rightful owners; but this is a fine distinction that I shall leave to the Jesuits, so that one of them may one day come to me on my death-bed and inform me whether I’m bound for Heaven or Hell). Call it what you will, I bring money to France and deposit almost all of it into the King’s coffers, in accordance with certain rules and procedures that have seen set down, or so I am told, to govern my métier, viz. Privateer. In consequence, I have been noticed by many persons, foreign and domestic, who are owed money by our government. They write me letters, sidle up to me at soirées, tug on my sleeve at the many levées and couchées to which I am invited; they loiter before my house, overhaul me on the high seas, pursue me down streets and garden-paths, send me wine, plant the most alluring whores in my very bed, mutter to me in the confessional, and threaten to kill me, all in the hopes that I shall, by some prestidigitation, channel the next treasure-ship to this or that port, so that it may fall into the hands of this or that local official who shall route the proceeds to this or that account.

You might recall that two years ago I took a large amount of silver from Lothar von Hacklheber, who waxed very wroth, and sent me the most impertinent letters, claiming that the money had been meant to cover some French government loan that had been made down in Lyon. I replied to his representative that Lyon was a long way from Dunkerque—I even offered to draw him a map—and I threw up my hands, knowing little and caring less of these Lyonnaise follies. In time, von Hacklheber stopped importuning me about this; but then after an all too brief respite he got after me again, claiming that the contrôleur-général had failed to make good on that Lyon loan. It seemed that he or his agents had inquired in every pays and arrived at the conclusion that the only way he would ever get his money back was through Dieppe; for in that port he had come to some sort of understanding with the local officials, such that, of the King’s revenue that happened to come in there, some moiety would be diverted to the House of Hacklheber in repayment of the loan that it had extended to France.

Of course, I ignored him; though this did stick in my memory, for I recall that you had some sort of unpleasantness with Lothar von Hacklheber, though you would not part with any of the details; and in his communications, which were often of a most bizarre character, he made liberal use of your name.

A little bit more recently, I have begun to receive communications of a markedly similar nature from none other than the contrôleur-général himself, M. le comte de Pontchartrain, who is keen that I should get in the habit of bringing my prizes to the port of Le Havre. For it would seem that he has so arranged matters that any of the King’s revenue passing through that port shall be channeled to some destination that is pleasing to him. He too has mentioned your name; for he knows of my passionate, wholly inappropriate and scandalous, and (so far) unrequited affection for you.

Now as a practical matter nothing of value has entered either Dieppe or Le Havre for some weeks, as both were attacked, bombed, and burnt by the British, in the manner I have already described. These disturbances have not hindered me from plying my trade, and so I have, during the same interval, garnered much treasure I would fain unload. Instead I have, perforce, kept it stored away in the holds of diverse ships—which, being moving targets, are perfectly safe from the British Navy. Why, in the hold of my own ship Alcyon, where I sit writing these words, are stored three-quarters of a million livres tournoises worth of silver and gold. I’ll not unload such treasure in Dunkerque, for, as much as I love my hometown, its land connexions to France are too tenuous, and infested by highwaymen and Vagabonds. Dieppe or Le Havre, being closer to Paris, would be better—but which?

Far be it from me to spite the contrôleur-général, and so Le Havre is the obvious choice—yet just a few weeks ago you bestowed on me the honor of escorting you to Hamburg, so that you could pursue some errand among the Tatars, the Cossacks, or the Germans (as a sea-going man, I am unclear as to whatever fine distinctions might be observed, by geographers, among these landlocked tribes). Rumor has it that you are near Leipzig, the seat of Lothar von Hacklheber. It would seem, therefore, that my actions in respect of the gold and silver that is stored in my hold must have consequences for your venture. But I can’t for the life of me make out what those consequences might be, and what is the best course for me to take.

To summarize, I am surrounded by persons who ask much of me but give me nothing that I desire. Far away are you, my lady, who have done more for me than anyone alive—and all simply because you are infatuated with me (don’t bother denying it!). Yet you have never asked me for anything. And so, perversely, it is you, and no one else, whose bidding I would do in the matter. I hope that this finds you in good health in Crimea, Turkestan, Outer Mongolia, or wherever it is you have got to. Please know that I am awaiting some clarification from you as to whether I should call next at Dieppe, Le Havre, or some other port.

Your tumescent love slave,

(Capt.) Jean Bart

Leipzig

MAY 1694

And why then are we to despise Commerce as a Mechanism, and the Trading World as mean, when the Wealth of the World is deem’d to arise from Trade?

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

PRINCESS WILHELMINA CAROLINE of Brandenburg-Ansbach wrinkled her nose, and flipped her braid back over her shoulder. “ ‘Tumescent love slave’—is this some sort of French idiom? I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“Noise! It is an idiocy that Captain Bart threw in at the end, for he knew that he had to wind up the letter, but could not make out how, and became desperate, and lost his wits. Thank God he is more even-tempered in battle! Pray don’t dwell on that, my lady—”

“Why do you call me that? It’s weird. Stop it!”

“You are a born Princess, and very likely to be a Queen some day. I am a made Duchess.”

“But to me you are Aunt Eliza!”

“And to me you are my little squirrel. But the fact remains that you’re doomed to be a Princess whether you like it or not, and you’re going to have to marry someone.”

“As happened to my mother,” said Caroline, suddenly serious.

“Please do not forget that it happened twice. The second time around, she had to marry someone who was not suited for her. But the first time she was in a good marriage—to your father—and a perfectly wonderful Princess came of it.”

Caroline blushed at this, and looked at the floor of the carriage. A whip-pop sounded from outside, and it lurched forward. They’d been stalled, for a time, outside the north gate of Leipzig. Caroline’s eyes came up off the floor and gleamed in the light of the window. Eliza continued: “Why did your mother later end up in a bad marriage? Because things had gone against her—things she was powerless to do anything about, for the most part—and in the end she had very little choice in the matter. Now, why do you suppose I’m letting you read my personal correspondence from Captain Bart? To pass the time on the road to Leipzig? No, for if we only wished to make time pass, we could play cards. I show you these things because I am trying to teach you something.”

“What, exactly?”

It was a good question, and brought Eliza up short. For a few moments there was no sound in the carriage except what came into it from without: the clopping of shod hooves, the crashing of rims on road, the oinking and grunting of the suspension. A shadow enveloped them, then fell away aft: They’d passed through the gate into Leipzig.

“Pay attention, that’s all,” Eliza said. “Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain—”

“Uncle Gottfried says, ‘Whatever acts cannot be destroyed.’ ”

“The Doctor means that in a fairly narrow and technical metaphysical sense,” Eliza said, “but it’s not the worst motto you could adopt.”

And now for the tenth time in as many minutes Eliza reached up to scratch and probe at her face. In half a dozen places, small disks of black felt had been glued to it, covering crater-like excavations that smallpox had made in her flesh, but not had the good grace to fill back in before it had departed her body.

Most of what she knew about the progress of the disease, she knew second-hand, from Eleanor and the physician who had come to tend to her. Eliza herself had descended into a sort of twilight sleep. Her eyes had been open, and impressions had reached her mind, but the span of time she had spent in this trance—about a week—seemed both very long and very brief. Very brief because she remembered little of it—it was “when I had smallpox” to her now. Very long because, during it, she had heard every tick of the clock, and felt the budding of every pox-pustule, its growth as it peeled layers of skin asunder a slow steady agony that sparked whenever two pustules found each other and fused. In some places—particularly her lower back—those sparks had built to a wide-spread fire. Though Eliza had been too delirious to know it, these had been the moments when her life had hung in the balance, for if that fire had spread any further or burnt any brighter, her skin would have come off, and she’d not have survived it.

It was at such times that a physician would emerge to tell a room of hand-wringing loved ones that the case was very grave, and that the patient’s life hung in the balance. Had it gone any further, the report would have changed to “not expected to survive,” and everyone would have known, from this, that the disease had moved on to its sausage-grinder phase. In Eliza’s case this had not happened. Fate had flipped a coin, and it had come up heads. The disease had nearly flayed her lower back and some parts of her arms and legs, and done damage internally, too. But it had spared her eyesight and left perhaps three dozen pocks on her face, of which most could be seen only in direct sun; of the ten or so that were obvious even by candlelight, some could be hid by a lock of hair or a high-collared dress, and the remainder got the black patch treatment. Eliza did not seriously intend to begin every day for the rest of her life by gluing these horrid objects to her skin, but today was special; she was venturing out of the dower-house of Pretzsch for the first time since she had arrived there six weeks earlier. She was going into Leipzig—which passed for a big city in these parts—and she was going to meet some people.

Of the six weeks at the dower-house, the first had been spent in (in retrospect) the prodrome of the illness, and culminated with the sending away of Caroline and Adelaide and the visit of the Elector and his mistress. After that it had been all pustules for two weeks. Eliza had not really come awake and begun to weave her impressions into coherent memories again until the twenty-fourth day; which happened to be the same day that the distant church-bells of Torgau and Wittenberg had begun to toll, announcing the deaths of the Elector of Saxony and his mistress. Eleanor was a widow for the second time. She was henceforth the Electress-Dowager of Saxony. Which meant she was living in the right house for once: The dower-house was where a dowager was supposed to live. The new Elector was Johann Georg’s brother, August. August the Strong. He already had a hundred illegitimate children and was said to be hard at work on the second hundred, and his passion for engaging wild beasts in single combat would do nothing to improve Saxony’s reputation at Versailles; but he had not been hit on the head, he bore no ill will toward Eleanor, and he didn’t want to screw Caroline, so it looked like a win.

Eleanor had been called away to Dresden to attend her husband’s funeral. And after Eliza’s mattress and bedclothes had been immolated in a great bonfire down by the Elbe, and the scabs had fallen away to reveal her new face and body, Caroline and Adelaide had at last returned from Leipzig along with most of Eliza’s retinue. So much for the fourth week; weeks five and six, then, had been time for Eliza to get her strength back. She had an idea that the pox had done to her entrails the same sort of things as it had done to her back, and so there had been problems for a while with eating, digestion, and elimination. Even if she’d bounced back like a rubber ball, there’d have been a delay while new garments were sewn for her, in smaller dimensions to fit her wasted frame, and with collars, sleeves, &c., to cover heavily cratered parts of her body. But the day before yesterday she’d noticed, all of a sudden, that she was bored. Yesterday had been devoted to the laying of plans. This morning she’d departed from the dower-house in a little train of borrowed and rented carriages. On the spur of the moment she’d decided to bring Caroline along with her (for Eleanor was busy organizing a Dowager-household), and little Adelaide, too (for she became obstreperous now if she did not have her Caroline to play with).

“WHAT IS THIS VENTURE of yours that Captain Bart speaks of in his letter?” Caroline asked her.

“Ay! That’s difficult to explain!” Eliza said. “But I do not have to explain it, for you to get the point—which is that Captain Bart, ordinarily the most decisive, the most ruthless man on earth, cannot make up his mind whether to take his cargo to Dieppe or Le Havre, and feels obliged to send me a letter in Leipzig before acting. If I sat at home knitting and playing cards, he would feel no such compulsion, believe you me; but because I’m on the move, I am an unknown variable in the equation—”

“Which makes it more difficult for him to solve!” Caroline said. “Uncle Gottfried has been teaching me how to solve such problems using a thing he invented called matrices.”

“Then you know more of it than I,” said Eliza, not for the first time feeling a bit envious of this girl. “And you may show off your skills to your teacher now.”

“Uncle Gottfried is here?”

The carriage had rolled to a stop. Eliza opened the door herself and allowed a footman to help her down. Caroline leapt out a moment later, landing bang on both feet, followed, after brief intervals, by her skirts and her braid.

They were in a square before a church from whose open doors organ-music was chanting. Not far away was the town square of Leipzig with its great dark Rathaus along one side, and narrow streets radiating from it, lined with trading-houses. Eliza was slowly turning round and round, taking the place in. But the look on her face was not of wonder but rather distracted, even a bit suspicious. “It is so small,” she said.

“If you’d been living in Pretzsch it would seem ever so large!”

“Oh, but when we came here last—ten years ago, almost to the day—we’d been living in a shack in the mountains and it did seem large!”

“Who is this ‘we?’ ”

“Never mind…but it is funny how one’s mind works. I have built up a phant’sy of this as a great metropolis, whose trading-houses are immensely rich and powerful, but look at it…there are merchants in London, in Amsterdam, who could buy this whole town and slip it into a vest-pocket.”

“Perhaps you should buy it then!” Caroline said, as a jest.

“Perhaps I already have.” Eliza paused, blinked, and let out a breath, as if purging herself of all old memories and overblown phant’sies, then peered around sharply. “I have affairs to transact, and must leave you, for a few hours. Come!” She led Caroline through the doors of the church. It was empty just now. The organ-music was just someone practicing—someone not very accomplished, for he kept making mistakes, and each time he did, he came to a stop, and struggled to find the rhythm.

This place—the Nikolaikirche—lacked the dark, spooky look of so many churches. The vault was a semicircular barrel supported by fluted columns—but not of the Doric, Ionian, Corinthian, or any other known order of architecture. For the capitals were made to resemble sheaves of slender vertical palm leaves. The high vaults above, sluiced with clear white light rushing in through high windows, gathered themselves together and plunged down into these rich bundles of light green leaves, from which clusters of fruit peeked out. The altar rail described a broad half-circle with a gap in the center, like a pair of arms sweeping out to embrace the congregants. The font was a gilded goblet. Behind it, steps led up to an altar, above which a quicksilver Jesus hung from a plank. This part of the church—the Altarraum—was a sanctum of polished wine-colored and fleece-gray marble with many windows, giving a view of budding linden trees startled by pockets of breeze speeding invisibly through a blue heaven. The patterns in the marble suggested powerful turbulent motion—rapids, say, or lightning streaking through boiling clouds—arrested and silenced. Recalling the notion that if you knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe at one moment of time, you’d know all—you’d be God. At the back of the church was a balcony claimed by a great organ of silver pipes in a white case in Roman style, lilies and palm leaves rampant. Hunched doggedly at the console was a man in a great periwig and a coat brocaded with hundreds of wee flowers. An elderly man in academician’s robes loitered nearby, gazing down curiously at Eliza, Caroline, and other members of the entourage who were now straggling up the aisle; for Adelaide had been woken out of a nap by the stoppage of her coach, and had pursued her mother, and been pursued in turn by nurses, and by Eliza’s guards, who were under orders not to let Adelaide out of their sight so long as they were on the hostile ground of Leipzig. The organist noticed all this, and raised his hands from the manuals, and the throaty singing of the organ-pipes seeped away, leaving in the still air of the church only the faint hiss of some leakage in the valves, and panting of a couple of pudgy schoolboys who’d been dragooned into pumping the bellows. Eliza applauded, and after a moment Caroline, recognizing the organist, followed suit.

“My lady. My lady,” said Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz to Caroline and Eliza respectively; and then, to Adelaide: “My lady.” Then, to Eliza: “I am sorry that your arrival in the Nikolaikirche, which ought to have been a moment of Grace and Beauty unalloyed, was dimmed by my maunderings.”

“On the contrary, Doctor, the town is so quiet, your music brings life to it. Was that some new Passacaglia from Herr Buxtehude?”

“Just so, my lady. ’Twas brought hither in the pocket of a merchant of Lübeck, who means to have it printed and sold at the fair, a fortnight hence; I fetched one of the page-proofs and prevailed upon my old schoolmaster, Herr Schmidt—” the old man in the robes bowed “—to let me pick it out as I awaited your arrival.”

Leibniz descended a stair to the floor of the church, and a lengthy round of bowing, curtseying, hand-smooching, and baby-adoration ensued. Leibniz’s eyes lingered on Eliza’s face, but not quite long enough to be offensive. It was to be expected that he’d be curious as to what the pox had done to her, and Eliza was content to have him look. He would return presently to such places as Hanover and Berlin, and propagate the news that the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm had come through it with only light disfigurement; that she could still see; and that her wits were intact.

“I was recalling my first visit to this town—and my first meeting with you—ten years ago, Doctor,” Eliza said.

“As was I, my lady. But so many things are different now, of course. You mentioned that the town is quiet. Indeed. You will have speculated it is because the spring fair has not begun yet. That is what I supposed, when I arrived, some weeks ago. But since then I have learned that it is quiet for more reasons than meet the eye. Trade has all but stopped—”

“Owing to a mysterious, dire want of specie,” Eliza said, “which is both cause and effect; for all who hear of it are transformed, as if by a magician’s spell, into misers, and hoard whatever coin, plate, or bullion they have.”

“You are familiar with the affliction, I perceive,” Leibniz said drily. “So is our friend Dr. Waterhouse; for he tells me that the same plague has spread to London.”

“Some would say it originated there,” Eliza said.

“Others say Lyon,” tried the Doctor, and watched Eliza’s face a bit too sharply.

“Now you are fishing,” said Eliza. Leibniz was pulled up short, but only for a moment; then he chuckled.

“Fishing for what? Is that another idiom?” Caroline demanded.

“He dangles bait before me, to see if I shall rise to it; for some trading-houses in this town have connexions of long standing to the Dépôt of Lyon, and if Lyon is bankrupt, why, it has consequences here. Do you have friends in Leipzig, Doctor, hungry for news?”

“I should not call them friends exactly; not any more.”

“Well, I have enemies here. Enemies, and a boy who has not seen his mother in three years and seven months. I must make preparations to meet them. If you would be so good as to entertain the Princess for me, for a few hours—”

“No.”

“What?”

“You are in error. Come with me.” And Leibniz turned his back on Eliza, which was an arrestingly rude thing to do, and walked down the aisle and out of the Nikolaikirche into Leipzig. This left her no choice but to pursue him. Caroline pursued Eliza, and the rest of the train was drawn out behind them. Eliza turned back and with a significant look or two commanded the nurses to bundle Adelaide back into one of the carriages; she screamed at this, loud enough to draw looks from hookah-puffing Turkish merchants half a mile away.

“You are very rude. What is the meaning of this?”

“Life is short,” said Leibniz, and looked Eliza up and down. It was a blunt allusion to smallpox. “I can stand in the aisle of the Nikolaikirche for two hours and try to get it across to you in words, and at the end of it you’ll only say, ‘I must see it with my own eyes.’ Or I can take you on a five-minute walk and see the thing settled.”

“Where are we going? Caroline—”

“Let her come along.”

They walked across Leipzig’s town square, which, the last time Eliza had seen it, had been a maze of leads and gaps among fragrant stacks of baled, barrelled, and trade-marked goods. Today it was all but empty, and sheets of dust skimmed across its paving-stones driven by spring gusts. Here and there, well-dressed men had clumped in twos and threes to smoke pipes and converse—not in the amused, aghast tones of merchants haggling over terms, but more as old men do on Sunday afternoons as they stroll out of church. As Eliza and Caroline followed the Doctor into the streets that issued from the square on the yonder side, they began to see business transacted, of a kind—but only at open-air coffee-houses, and nothing more weighty than a third cup of coffee, or a second slice of cake. The street was ventilated with broad vaulted arches, each of which, as Eliza knew, led into the courtyard of a trading-house. But half of them were closed, and in those that were open, Eliza spied, not throngs of hollering commerçants but unraveling knots of semi-idle men, smoking and sipping. For all that, though, the scene was never gloomy. It felt as though a holiday had been declared, not only for Christians, or Jews, or Mahometans, but for all at once. And this holiday was all the more enjoyable for being unwanted and unplanned. Leipzig was calm—as if the quicksilver that, as a rule, intoxicated these merchants were ebbing from their bloodstreams. When they all came together in a place like Leipzig, a madness came over them, and transformed them into a new kind of organism, as fish schooled. One such jumping, irritable, rapier-quick creature, if he were to appear in the town square of a medieval village, would be a useless, incomprehensible nuisance. But a thousand of them together amounted to something that worked, and that wrought prodigies that could never be imagined by villagers. That spell had been undone today, and the quiet of the village reigned.

A golden Mercury leapt from the keystone of an especially grand arch halfway up the street. The gates below it were closed. But they were not locked. The Doctor pushed one of them open, and extended an arm, inviting Eliza to precede him. She hesitated and looked both ways. This was a habit from Versailles, where merely to step over a threshold in the company of a person constituted a Move in the social chess-game, sure to be noted, talked of, and responded to; indeed people there might devote hours to engineering the details: seeing to it that certain persons were in positions to notice the event, and encoding messages in who preceded whom. Here it was faintly ridiculous, and she knew it; but the habit died hard. She looked, and acquired the knowledge that her entry into the House of the Golden Mercury was witnessed by half a dozen persons: an idler collapsed in a doorway, a Lutheran minister, a widow sweeping a stoop, a boy running a message, a Jew in a furry hat, and a very large bearded man with one sleeve empty and the opposite hand gripping a long staff.

This latter she recognized. From time to time, during the long barge-ride up the Elbe, she’d glimpsed such a figure striding along the riverbank, or betimes wading like a three-hundred-pound stork, darting at the water with a fish-spear. Here, he almost blended in. For Leipzig was the crossroads of the Venice-Lübeck and the Cologne-Kiev highways, and served as a catch-pot for all sorts of exotic ramblers, human oddities, and people who could not make up their minds which turn to take. She marked him only because she had seen him before. And in other circumstances she would have devoted the remainder of the week to puzzling over what he was doing here; but too much else was on her mind now, and this crowded Flail-arm out of her consciousness. She walked into the court of the House of the Golden Mercury as if she owned the place.

It was like a graveyard, save that instead of cenotaphs and head-stones, it was cluttered with stacks and piles of goods: bales of cloth, barrels of oil, crates of china. She could not see far in any direction; but craning her neck she could see up five stories to the big cargo-doors let into the gables of the House. These were a-gape, swinging untended in the breeze. Within, the attics of the House of Hacklheber were empty. Their contents had all been let down into the courtyard, as if Lothar had decided to liquidate all. But there were no buyers.

Something plopped to the ground behind Eliza, and she heard Caroline give out a little gasp of surprise. Eliza spun on her heel and confronted a tiny savage—a pygmy with a tomahawk. He’d been stalking her through the courtyard, creeping along behind the piles of goods. He had sprung from the lid of a crate taller than his head to menace her in a narrow pass. But now he was having second thoughts, for he had trapped himself between Eliza and Caroline. He turned around to look at the latter. Gazing now at the back of his head Eliza saw a whorl of blond hair that needed washing, a precipitous cowlick that needed trimming, a small body, just stretching out through its sheath of baby fat, that needed a bath. He was dressed in a breech-clout and moccasins, and carrying a weapon made from a terra-cotta pot-sherd that some grownup had patiently lashed to a stick.

Caroline had got over being startled and was trying to pick between amusement and annoyance. “Boo!” she shouted. The little blond Indian spun around as if to run away, but remembered too late that his escape was blocked by Eliza. His eye met hers for a moment, and she recognized it as an eye that belonged to her. He dropped the tomahawk, the better to scramble over a netted pallet of sugar-loaves, and before she could call his name, he had vanished into a pretend Massachusetts.

Caroline laughed, until she met Eliza’s eye, and took in her face; then she knew.

The court was surrounded by a covered gallery, where, when Eliza had last been here, men of the House of Hacklheber had sat at their bancas writing in their ledgers, and counting streams of outlandish coinage in and out of their massy strong-boxes. Eliza could see little of it now, save the tops of the arches; but a few moments later she heard a piping voice in German, making something known to “Papa,” and a moment later, a rumble of a laugh, followed by some patient explanation.

Hearing that voice, Eliza by some instinct turned and gazed up at a three-storey balcony that projected out into the space above the court, all decked out with golden Mercurys and other Barock commerce-emblems. She had once seen Lothar up there, talking to the Doctor, and staring down at her and Jack; but the thing was deserted now, a still-life of dusty windowpanes, faded curtains, and moss-slicked stone.

The man had begun to declaim in a loping singsong. Eliza knew little German. She looked to Caroline, who explained, “He reads from a book of tales.”

Eliza picked her way among the dusty goods, following the sound of that voice, until she stepped up onto the stone floor of the encircling gallery. This had been cleared of many of its bancas. Several paces away, a massive man squatted upon a black strong-box, all bound about with straps and hasps; but none of them was locked, which she looked on as suggesting it might be empty. The man had a great illustrated story-book open on one of his thighs. Perched on the other was the little blond Indian, who had leaned his head back on the man’s bosom, and drawn up a corner of his breechclout to chew on it. His spindly legs straddled the man’s leg. The moccasins pedaled slow air. He had got a falling look in his eyes, and the lids were unfolding. He glanced up at Eliza when she stepped into his field of view, but presently lost interest, and looked to his dreams. To him the appearance of the strange woman in the court of the house had been diverting, but only for a moment, and alarming, but only until “Papa” told him everything was going to be fine. “Papa,” who was Lothar von Hacklheber, kept reading the story—not, Eliza, thought, out of any studied effort to ignore her, but because no parent who knows the rules of the game interrupts a story just when a child has tucked his wings and settled into the long glide to sleep. A pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on Lothar’s cratered nose, and when he reached the end of a page he would lick a finger, turn a page, and glance up at her with mild curiosity. The boy’s lids drooped lower and lower, more and more of the breechclout made its way into his mouth to be sucked on—a sight that produced an ache in Eliza’s breasts as they remembered what it was to let down milk. Presently Lothar shut the book, and glanced around for a place to set it—a gesture that brought Caroline running up to take it from his hand. Tightening a burly arm around the boy’s chest, he leaned back, making of his body a sort of great pillowy couch, and somehow levitated to his feet. He turned his back on the visitors and padded on bare feet through a doorway, then laid the boy into a sort of makeshift Indian-hammock that had been strung diagonally across a disused office. After spreading some blankets over the child, he straightened up, emerged into the gallery, and pulled the door to behind him—leaving it cracked, as Eliza the mother well knew, so that he could hear if the boy cried.

“I had got the news that the Elector and his whore had died,” said Lothar mildly, in French, “and wondered if a visit from the Reaper might not be in store for me as well.”

Atop a bench on the edge of the court rested an array of weapons, dis-arranged, as if he and the boy had been at fencing-practice. Lothar scooped up a sheathed dagger, and in the same movement tossed it towards Eliza, who clapped it out of the air. “That hashishin stiletto that you have secreted in the sash of your dress is too small to dispatch one of my size with decent speed; pray use this instead.” He was wearing a linen shirt that had not been changed in a while; now he ripped it open to expose his left nipple. “Right about there ought to do it. You may send the Princess of Brandenburg-Ansbach out first, if you would ward her tender eyes from so grisly a sight; or, if it’s your purpose to raise her up to be another such as yourself, by all means let her watch and learn.”

“Until this moment I had believed that the art of the masque had been developed to its highest in the Court of the Sun King,” said Eliza in a quiet voice, so as not to wake the boy. “But now I see you know as much of it as anyone. What sort of mind invents a show like the one I have just witnessed?”

“What sort of mind,” answered Lothar, “invades the tranquillity of a man’s home and then denounces it as a show? This is the world, madame, it is not Versailles; we are not so devious, so recondite here.”

Eliza tossed the dagger on to the floor. “You who kidnapped a baby, should not presume to deliver catechism to its mother.”

“When an orphan, being raised by strangers, is brought to live with a family who loves it, does this even deserve the name of kidnapping? It seems rather like kidnapping’s opposite. If you now announce that you are its mother, then I am disposed to believe you, for there is a marked resemblance; but this is the first time you have admitted it.”

“You know perfectly well that to admit it then would have destroyed me.”

Lothar turned to face his courtyard, and raised both hands. “Behold!”

“Behold what?”

“You speak of being destroyed as an abstraction, a thing you have read about, a phantom you fear as you lie in bed at night. Do not be satisfied with abstractions and phantoms, madame. Instead look upon destruction, for it is here. You have wrought it. You have destroyed me. But I have a boy who calls me Papa. If you had admitted to being his mother, and suffered destruction, what would your estate be to-day? And would it be better or worse than what you have?”

Eliza flushed at this: and not just her face but her whole body. It felt as though warm blood was washing into parts of her body that had been starved and pallid since the pox. She would have faltered, and perhaps even surrendered, if she’d not spent years steeling herself for this. Because the words of Lothar carried in them much that was true. But she had always known he would be formidable and that she’d have to bull ahead anyway. “You need not be destroyed,” she said. “With a word, I can see to it that the loan is repaid, with interest.”

“Stop, I pray you. Do you suppose my mind is as empty as this?” He kicked the strong-box with the side of his foot and it boomed like a drum. “I know that you would never have come to Leipzig had you not so arranged matters that you could hold out to me the choice of destruction or salvation. It is all very ingenious, I am sure, the sort of thing I’d have found fascinating at your age; but I am not your age.”

“Of course I am well aware that you have moved beyond money, to Alchemy—”

“Oh, you are? And I suppose you have some morsel to dangle above my mouth, where the Solomonic Gold is concerned?”

Having been anticipated thus made Eliza disinclined to say it, but she did: “I know who has it, and where; if that is your desire—”

“My desire was to conquer Death, which took my brothers young and unfairly,” said Lothar von Hacklheber. “It is a common desire. Most come to terms with Death sooner or later. My failure to do so was an unintended consequence of a pact that my family had made with Enoch Root. In order for him to dwell among humankind he must don identities, and later, before his longevity draws notice, shed them. My father knew about Enoch—knew a little of what he was—and struck a deal with him: he would vouch for Enoch as a long-lost relative named Egon von Hacklheber, and suffer him to dwell among us under that name for a period of some decades, if, in exchange, ‘Egon’ would serve as a tutor to his three sons. Of the three, I was in some sense the quickest, for I came to know that Enoch was not like us. And I guessed that this was a matter of his having discovered some Alchemical receipt that conferred life eternal. A reasonable guess—but wrong. At any rate, it fired my interest in Alchemy until of late.”

“And what came of late to damp that fire?”

“I adopted an orphan.”

“Oh.”

“It is trite, I know. To defeat Death, or to phant’sy that one has defeated it, by having a child. But I could not manage it before. For the same pox that slew my brothers left me unable to get a woman pregnant. I’ll not speak of the motives that led to the taking of the boy from the orphanage where you kept him at Versailles. They were, as you have collected, quite beastly motives. I did not intend to love the boy. I did not even intend to keep him in my house. But as things came out, I did both—first kept him, then loved him—and as time went on, my mind turned to Alchemy, and to the lost Gold of Solomon, less and less frequently. I’d not thought of it for half a year until you reminded me of it just now.”

“Then whatever other differences you and I may have, we are united in seeing it as foolishness.”

“Oh, I don’t think it is the least bit foolish,” said Lothar, raising the pocked ridges where eyebrows had once sprouted, “all I said was that I no longer think of it. I’m ready to die. And whether I die rich or poor is of little account to me. But you are gravely mistaken if you believe that you can take Johann away from me. For that truly would be kidnapping; it would break his heart, and that would break yours.”

“As to that, I am not mistaken. I know this, and have known it, ever since I learned, from the Doctor, that he was being raised as your son.” Eliza looked up to solicit a confirmation from Leibniz. But it seemed that the Doctor had some minutes ago quietly taken Caroline aside, and led her off to some other corner of the courtyard so that Eliza and Lothar could talk privily.

“Son and sole heir,” Lothar corrected her, “though, thanks to your intrigues, I have nothing to will to him save debts.”

“That could be changed.”

“Then why do you not change it? What is it you want? Why are you here?”

“To see him. To hold him.”

“Granted! Truly and happily granted. You may move in with me here, for all I care; you’re welcome to do so. But you can’t take him.”

“You are in no position to dictate terms.”

“Foolish girl! They’re not my terms, and I am not dictating them! They are the terms of the world. You cannot admit to this world that you bore a child out of wedlock. You cannot even admit it to the boy—until he is older, perhaps, and able to fathom such things. You can take him back and give him to the Jesuits, who will raise him up to be a priest, who will fault his mother for having sinned. Or you can leave him in my care, and visit him whenever you will. In a year or two he’ll be old enough to travel—he can visit you incognito in France, if that shall please you. He shall be a Baron and a banker, a gentleman, a Protestant, the cleverest scholar in Leipzig; but he shall never be yours.”

“I know. I know all of these things—have known them for years.”

Lothar’s ravaged face was a difficult one to read, but he seemed exasperated now, or bewildered. “After all this,” he said, “I did not expect you to be such a confused person.”

“You did not? How unreasonable of you. You belabor me for being confused—yet you took the boy, not for love of him, but for hate of me, and out of lust for Alchemical gold—only to change your mind!”

Lothar shrugged. “Perhaps that is the real Alchemy.”

“Would that such Alchemy could work its spell on me, and make me as content as you seem.”

“I shall grant you this much,” said Lothar. “The taking of the gold at Bonanza put me into a vengeful rage that kept me awake at night, and filled all of my days, for a long time, and drove me to hurt you as badly as I supposed you had hurt me. I wanted you to fathom my anger. You then went on to destroy me, cleverly and systematically, over a span of years. You used my own greed as a weapon against me. And if I seem content to you, why, in part it is because I have a son. But in part it is because of you, Eliza, your Barock fury, sustained for so long and expressed so Barockly. You showed, you expressed, what I once felt; and from that, I knew that I had struck home, that a spark had passed between us.”

“Very well. Enough of this. Do you have, Lothar, a spare banca at which I could sit down for some minutes, and write a letter?”

Lothar spread his hands out, palms up, as if handing the place over to her. “Take your pick, madame.”

SHE WOULDN’T HAVE NOTICED FLAIL-ARM if not for this gesture of Lothar’s, so stealthily had the big amputee crept into the House. But as it happened, she turned on the balls of her feet to gaze into the court, and saw in the corner of her eye that a new thing had been added to the jumble-sale: a tall man with a beard, who had chosen this moment to step out from behind a crate. As before, he held a long walking-staff; but now something had been added to its end: the leaf-shaped warhead of a harpoon, its twin edges white where the whetstone had scoured them. This he hefted in his one hand, bringing it up above his shoulder, and he swung the shining adder’s head about so that it pointed at the heart of Lothar.

Now Eliza—who only a couple of hours ago had been preaching to Caroline about the importance of noticing, and connecting—at last took her own advice. There was no telling how long it might have taken for her to recognize Flail-arm as Yevgeny the Raskolnik if he had not suddenly appeared gripping a harpoon, and making ready to kill Lothar; but these two data did the trick. She remembered now seeing this Yevgeny in the company of Jack in Amsterdam. Eliza had even borrowed his harpoon, and in a fit of pique hurled it at Jack. Yevgeny must have become, and might still be, a member of Jack’s pirate-band. He must have peeled off from the group and come back to Christendom for some reason. He’d been keeping an eye on Eliza, and, in consequence, had found himself in Leipzig, before the gates of the house of the man who, as he supposed, was Jack’s worst enemy. And now he was about three heartbeats away from doing what any red-blooded pirate would, when presented with such an opportunity.

This hefting and pointing of the harpoon was only the first move in some procedure that involved running some steps toward the prey. Yevgeny also extended his stump, which he had fortified with what appeared to be a cannonball on the end of a stick: a counterweight to augment the force of the throw. Eliza began moving sideways toward Lothar. She would interpose herself between harpoon and target, and Yevgeny would break off the attack. Yevgeny’s blue eyes flicked towards her as she moved.

But a small person flitted out of the shades of the gallery. He had built up a running start and so was able to bound up and over the empty strong-box next to Lothar and thence to the top of the baluster that surrounded the courtyard. He already had an arrow nocked to his tiny bow, for as Yevgeny had stolen around the courtyard, getting into position to attack, Johann must have stalked him, and plotted intercepts, and looked for his opportunity. Eliza, seeing him flash across her vision, had already changed course, and flung out both arms toward the boy; but quick as a fingersnap he drew back his arrow and let it fly. Its blunted tip caught Yevgeny in the eye just as he was winding up to throw. The counterweight dropped like Thor’s hammer. His body convulsed forward. The arm cracked like a knout. The harpoon was launched. It hurtled past Lothar’s shoulder and crashed into the banca behind him. Lothar dropped onto his arse. Eliza, unable to stop herself, ran into Johann and hammered him off the railing; he tumbled into the dusty cobbles below and became one large abrasion. Yevgeny had ended up on his knees, staring forward. Eliza assaulted the baluster with her midsection and toppled over it, diving to the courtyard and catching her weight on her hands.

She, Johann, and Yevgeny now formed an equilateral triangle, maybe two yards on a side, in the court. Lothar, enthroned on his empty coffer, gazed down upon them in stupefaction. Yevgeny was no less dumbfounded. Johann was still winding up to bawl. Eliza, having just narrowly evaded death by smallpox, was the least taken aback, and the first to get up. She took a step toward Yevgeny. She didn’t know Russian, and assumed he knew little French. But if he’d been a galley-slave in Algiers, he must know Sabir; so she scraped up a few leavings of that tongue that were to be found in rarely-visited corners of her brain, and said to him—quietly, so that only he could hear—“If your loyalty is to Jack, then know that this man is no longer your enemy. Instead go to Versailles and throw some harpoons at Father Édouard de Gex.”

Yevgeny nodded once, clambered to his feet, and went up to the level of the gallery to extract the tool of his trade from the tool of Lothar’s. Because of the head’s barbed flukes, this was not to be accomplished without half-destroying the banca; a task for which Yevgeny was superbly equipped in that he had the strength of ten men, and in lieu of one hand, a cannonball. A city-sacking’s worth of splintering and shattering was packed into a brief span of time; then he popped up with the terrible head in his hand, and the shaft under one arm. He turned toward Lothar and favored him with a very civil nod and half-bow, then stalked out of the House of the Golden Mercury, glancing up once to get the sun’s bearing.

“Who was that!?” asked Leibniz. He and Caroline had been oblivious to the harpoon-attack but had been drawn to the banca-demolition.

Eliza had Johann on her hip; he had got through all of the bawling and gone into child-shock.

“My dear Doctor,” she answered, “if I explained every little thing to you, you’d grow bored with me, and stop writing me those charming letters.”

“I simply wish to know, for practical reasons, whether you are being stalked by any more giant murderous harpooneers.”

“He is the only one, as far as I know. His name is Yevgeny the Raskolnik.”

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“As I said before, if I explain everything…”

“All right, all right, never mind.”

Our heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by words, by proverbs, by signs, and similitudes, as well as if one was awake.

—JOHN BUNYAN,
The Pilgrim’s Progress

She chose an ancient desk that had been dragged out into the court and left to die. Rain had fallen on it, and its planks had warped and split, and its drawers were stuck. But the sun shone on it, which felt good on her skin. From another banca she fetched a sheet of foolscap, and in a recess of this one she quarried out a glass inkwell whose cork was cemented in place by a rime of hardened ink. In the end the only way to get it open was to take that stiletto out of her waist-sash and scrape off the crust, then pry the cork loose. The ink had become sludge. She thinned it with saliva and gathered some of it up into a quill.

Leibniz and Caroline were sitting on crates, doing lessons: “Tactics,” said the Doctor, “are what the Duchess of Arcachon has been pursuing; Baron von Hacklheber has quite neglected tactics for strategy.”

“Who won?” Caroline asked.

“Neither,” said the Doctor, “for neither pure tactics nor pure strategy constitutes a wise course for a Prince, or a Princess. Perhaps the winner shall be Johann Jean-Jacques von Hacklheber.”

“Let us hope so,” said Caroline, “for he has been saddled with the most ungainly name I have ever heard.”

Eliza to Jean Bart

MAY 1694

Captain Bart,

My dear friend Monsieur le comte de Pontchartrain, being the contrôleur-général of France, has, and shall have, numberless opportunities to channel the flow of the King’s revenues in those ways that are most satisfactory to him, and so I feel I do him no great disfavor by suggesting that you sail your treasure-ship to the port of Dieppe, so that the King’s loan to the House of Hacklheber may at last be repaid. France is helpless to defend her interests on foreign soil, so long as her credit, in foreign eyes, is bad; and repayment of even a single loan shall go far towards repairing the damage done in recent years. The German and Swiss bankers have already abandoned Lyon, but this need not prevent the payment from being sent through more modern channels, perhaps in Paris. It might help if you could suggest as much to the gentleman in Dieppe.

I thank you for having consulted me before taking action in this matter. Please know that one of the beneficiaries shall be your long-lost godson, who, as I write these words, is creeping up on me from behind with a bow and arrow, like a dirty little Cupid.

Eliza

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MADAME?”

“Finishing up a letter.” She scattered sand across the page to blot it.

“To whom?”

“The most famous and daring pirate-captain in the world,” Eliza said matter-of-factly. She let the sand slide off onto the ground, folded the letter up, and began ransacking the old desk’s drawers for a bit of sealing-wax.

“Do you know him?”

Using a scrap of paper as a spatula, Eliza scraped some beads of sealing-wax out of a drawer-bottom. “Yes—and he knows you. He held you when you were baptized!”

Johann von Hacklheber quite naturally wanted to know more—which was how Eliza wanted it. He pursued her like an Indian tracker through the dusty rooms of the House of Hacklheber, pelting her not with arrows but with questions, as she scared up a melting-spoon, a candle, and fire. Presently she had a flame going under the blackened belly of the spoon. Into it she poured the crumbs of wax that she had looted from the desk: mostly scarlet, but a few black, and some the natural color of beeswax. Those on the bottom quickly succumbed to the heat. Those above stubbornly maintained their shapes. The similarity of these to smallpox-vesicles was very obvious to her. “When a thing such as wax, or gold, or silver, turns liquid from heat, we say that it has fused,” Eliza said to her son, “and when such liquids run together and mix, we say they are con-fused.”

“Papa says I am confused sometimes.”

“As are we all,” said Eliza. “For confusion is a kind of bewitchment—a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature.” She gave the melting-spoon a little shake, and the beads of wax that had been floating on its top—which had become sacs of liquid wax, held together by surface tension—burst and collapsed into the pool of molten wax below, giving off a puff of sweet fragrance, vestiges of the flowers visited long ago by the bees that had made this stuff. It was sweeter by far than the telltale fragrance of smallpox, which she hoped never to smell again, though she caught a whiff of it from time to time as she moved about the town.

Before the black and red could mix together into mud, Eliza dumped the contents of the spoon onto her folded letter, and mashed her ring into it. The seal, when she pulled her ring away from it, was of scarlet marbled through with black and pale streaks—most attractive, she thought, and perhaps the beginning of a new trend at Court.

Lothar had summoned a rider who was willing to carry the message at least as far as Jena, where other messengers might be found to take it into the west. The rider waited just inside the gates with one horse that was saddled, and a second to spell it. Eliza handed him the letter and wished him Godspeed, and he mounted up without further ceremony and set to trotting down the street. When he reached the great square, he got his mount turned toward the west gate, and cantered out of sight. Along his wake were any number of curious onlookers, peering out the windows, and opening up the doors, of diverse factories and trading-houses. A man emerged from a door, pulling a big wig down over his stubbled scalp. He turned toward the House of the Golden Mercury and began to hustle toward it, eager to get some explanation from Lothar; and before he’d reached Lothar’s gate, two others, not to be outdone, had fallen in stride with him. Eliza returned their courteous greetings as they went in the gate, curtseying to each in turn. But she did not follow them in. She stayed out in the street to watch the news spread and to hear the slow-building murmur of Leipzig coming alive.

Book 4

Bonanza

Southern Fringes of the Mogul Empire

LATE 1696

We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

A LAKE OF YELLOW DUST lapped at the foundations of some cobra-infested hills in the far west. Eastwards it ran to the horizon; if you went that way long enough, and survived the coastal marshes, you would reach the Bay of Bengal. To the north lay a country that was similar, except that it encompassed the richest diamond mines in the world; this was the King of Aurangzeb’s favorite nephew, Lord of Righteous Carnage. To the south lay some hills and mountains that, except for the scattered citadels of the Marathas, were not really controlled by anyone just now. Beyond, at the very tip of Hindoostan, lay Malabar.

A pair of bamboo tripods supported the ends of a timber cross-piece that spanned a tiny puncture wound in the sheet of dust. The timber had been polished by a rope that slid over it all day long. On one end of that rope was a bucket, which dangled in the well-shaft. On the other end was a yoke thrown over the cartilaginous hump of a bullock. A gaunt man, armed with a bamboo cane, stood behind the animal. The bullock trudged away from the well. Here and there it would insolently pause and prod the dust with its snout for a minute or two, pretending that there was something edible there. The man would begin talking to it. At first his tone was conversational, then whining, then pleading, then irked, then enraged. Finally he would go to work with the cane and the bullock would stomp forward another few steps.

From time to time the bullock would reach the end of his rope, which signified that the bucket had emerged from the hole. The man with the bamboo cane would then shout at a couple of younger men who were dozing in the shade of the low dung rampart that surrounded the well’s opening, giving it the general appearance of a giant rugged nipple. These men would bestir themselves, scale the rampart, get a grip on the bucket, swing it off to one side, and dump a few gallons of water onto the ground. The water would embark on a senseless quest for the nearest ocean. The bullock would turn round and come back.

These people were all People (as they name themselves in their language). The bucket-emptiers belonged to a separate subcaste from the bullock-spanker, but both could trace their lineage back for a hundred generations to the same ur-Person. And even if Sword of Divine Fire had not already known as much, it could have been guessed from following a given bucket-load of water downhill, and observing the scenery on either hand. For thousands of years’ hourly bucket-emptyings had cut a meandering drainage channel into the dust. It careered and zigzagged for a mile, heading generally eastwards, until it petered out in a crazed salt-pan, which sported the locally renowned Large Hole in the Ground, and other improvements. In most places, a grown man could comfortably plant one foot on either side of the channel. In some parts one had to jump over it. In one stretch it spread out so wide that one needed a running start. Consequently the local children never wanted for sports and entertainment.

Each bank of the ditch was green from the water’s edge to the point, about an arm’s length away, where the desert took over again. Seen from the high ground at the well-mouth, it looked as if some Hindoo deity had dipped a quill in green ink and dragged it aimlessly across a blank parchment—which was not extremely far from what the People actually believed. Their king of the last two years and two hundred and forty-eight days scoffed at this creed, but since it had sustained them in adverse circumstances for a couple of thousand years, he had to admit it was no worse than any other religion.

The People furthermore believed that the same deity had divided the ditch’s length (some two thousand paces in all) into five zones, and portioned them out to the five daughters of the ur-Person, and laid down certain rules as to what should be cultivated where. These five zones had inevitably been divided and subdivided as the five subcastes spawned from the loins of the five daughters had ramified into diverse clans, which had distinguished themselves from other clans by intermarrying with groups that were viewed as higher or lower, or, in some cases, destroyed themselves by not intermarrying enough. So each of those two thousand paces, on each side of the ditch, was now spoken for by someone.

Most of the someones were present and accounted for, dressed in brilliant fabrics, and squatting behind their tiny farms—therefore, packed shoulder-to-shoulder along the banks all the way from the well to the Large Hole in the Ground. Sword of Divine Fire had come to make his monthly inspection.

Sword of Divine Fire was mounted on a donkey. His aides, bodyguards, and attendants were on foot, except for two rowzinders on horseback and one zamindar in a palanquin.

“Very well,” said Sword of Divine Fire, “which is to say, it looks the same as last time, and the time before that.”

His words were translated into Marathi by the man in the palanquin, who then said, “Shall we have a look at the Large Hole in the Ground, then, and call it a day?”

“The Large Hole in the Ground can wait. First, we will inspect our potato,” said Sword of Divine Fire.

This pronouncement, once it had been translated, touched off the most urgent conspirings and shushings among the aides, hangers-on, courtiers, camp-followers, and the khud-kashtas or head-men of the Ditch’s various segments. Sword of Divine Fire gave his donkey a few smart heel-jabs and began steering for the Fourth Meander of the Third Part of the Ditch. His zamindar shortly caught up with him—the feet of his palanquin-bearers creating bursts of dust that flourished, paled, and dissolved in the still air.

“Your majesty’s potato can hardly have changed much since the last visit. On the other hand, I am informed by the most highly placed sources that the Large Hole in the Ground is not only deeper—but wider, too!”

“We would view our potato,” the king said doggedly. They were definitely getting close—the kids tear-assing around had the high noses and elongated skulls that set Fourth Meander folk apart from the less prestigious subcastes who cultivated the left bank of the Third Part. Only last week, one of them had been made an out-caste for Jumping the Ditch, i.e., having sex with one of the hillbilly girls on the Right Bank.

“Is one potato really so different from the next?” asked his zamindar philosophically.

“In general, no—but in our jagir, there is no next!”

“And yet—assuming that some potato materializes on your plate on the day specified, does the fate of a specific potato really amount to so much?”

“You are a tax collector, not a philosopher—mind your place.”

“Excuse me, Your Royal Highness, but we were philosophizing when Aristotle’s grandparents were banging rocks together.”

“Where has it gotten you though?”

Ahead, Sword of Divine Fire could see the Flat Brown Rock, which—together with the Little Gray Rock, which stood about a hundred yards distant—accounted for most of the local topography. The Fourth Meander made a small excursion to go around it. The clan of the Flat Brown Rock Excursion were reputed to be the finest horticulturalists of the whole Ditch, and on cold nights were known to stay up sitting on their cabbages like hens warming their eggs. Normally, they would be turning round to smile proudly at their monarch. But today they squatted on the bank, hunched over with their backs turned to him, and refused to meet his gaze. Sword of Divine Fire could not fathom it until he noticed a gap forming in the line of persons. They were packed in nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, but still they were finding some way to shift sideways, creating an open space two yards across, which gradually expanded to three. In the center of that open space, a bony woman in a threadbare garment was hunched over a dead plant.

Sword of Divine Fire’s reaction was succinct: “Fuck!” The woman cringed as if he’d hit her with a bullwhip. Then: “What has happened to our potato?”

“Sire, I launched an investigation as soon as I was informed. The khud-kashta of the Fourth Meander has been sternly brought to account. Furthermore, I have made discreet inquiries with Lord of Righteous Carnage, as well as with Shambhaji, to ascertain whether it might be possible to buy a replacement potato…”

“Come off it! Where’s the money coming from? We can’t even feed the bullock.”

“If we put off purchasing a new rope…”

“The rope has been spliced so many times it’s naught but splices. Besides! Jesus Christ! Shambhaji!? You asked him? I was sent down here to make war on Shambhaji.”

“But you have not actually conducted an offensive operation against him in years.”

“What, I’m besieging his citadel.”

“You call it a Siege—others would describe it as a very long Picnic.”

“In any event—Shambhaji is the enemy.”

“In Hindoostan, all things are possible.”

“Then where is my fucking potato!?”

Silence. Then the woman flung herself on the ground and began to beseech Sword of Divine Fire for mercy.

“Oh, splendid! Now she’s probably going to go set fire to herself or something,” the king muttered. Then he sighed. “What has your investigation turned up?”

“It may have been sabotage.”

“Those Right Bankers, y’think?”

“Retribution for many Ditch-Jumpings.”

“Well, I don’t want to start a war,” mused Sword of Divine Fire, “or my rutabaga will be next.”

“I would not put anything beneath the Right Bank Vhadriyas, they are scarcely above apes.”

“Tell ’em it’s my fault.”

“I beg your pardon, sire?”

“Karma. I looked crossways at a cow, or something…make some shit up. You’re good at that, aren’t you?”

“Truly you are the wisest ruler this kingdom has ever had…”

“Yeah, too bad my term’s up in another four months.”

Half an hour later, Sword of Divine Fire alighted from his donkey, and his zamindar emerged from his palanquin, and they stood together at the brink of the Large Hole in the Ground. All of the water that struggled out to the end of the Ditch emptied into this Hole. Members of the local Koli caste brought wagon-loads of black dirt hither from their dirt-mines in other parts of the jagir and dumped it into the hole. Then they pounded it with timbers, mixing it with the ditch-water, and drew off the liquor that floated on top and put it into a motley collection of pots and pans. These they boiled over fires made with wood brought down out of the hills by the people of the wood-splitter caste. When the pots had nearly boiled dry, they dumped their contents out into flat shallow earthenware trays and left them out under the sun. After a while, those trays filled up with a whitish powder—

“Who the hell is that man in the robe, and why is he eating my saltpeter?” demanded Sword of Divine Fire, visoring his eyes with one hand and gazing over towards the tray-farm.

Everyone looked over to see that, indeed, a figure in a long off-white robe—a cross between a Frankish monk’s robe and an Arab djellaba—was nibbling at a handful of saltpeter-slush that he’d scooped up from one of the trays. His face was obscured by the hood of the robe, which he’d pulled over his head to shield himself from the sun.

A couple of rowzinders and three archers on foot—about half of Sword of Divine Fire’s body-guards—bestirred themselves, and began trotting over that way, unlimbering weapons as they went. But the robed visitor turned out to have a sort of body-guard of his own: two men on horseback who rode forth and took up positions on the flanks, and let it be known that they had muskets.

“Sire, this would appear to be a better-organized-than-usual assassination attempt,” said the zamindar, stepping over to his palanquin and retrieving a musket of his own. “May I suggest you climb down into the Large Hole in the Ground?”

The king for his part pulled a pistol from his garment and checked the pan. “This fitteth not the profile of an assassination,” he observed. “Perhaps they are wandering potato-merchants.” He spurred his donkey forward, and rode past his body-guards, who had been stopped in their tracks by the appearance of those muskets.

As he drew closer to the robed man, he was surprised—but then again, not really—to observe a red beard. The visitor pulled his hood back to divulge a fountain of silver hair. He spat saltpeter on the ground and smacked his lips for a few moments, like a connoisseur of wine.

“I’m afraid it is contaminated with much that is not actually saltpeter,” he said. “It would work for ballasting ships, but not for making gunpowder.”

“Strange you should mention that, Enoch, as I may be needing some ballast soon.”

“I know,” said Enoch Root. “Unfortunately, many others in Christendom know it, too, Jack.”

“That is most annoying, for I went to vast expense to bring in a scribe who knew how to employ cyphers.”

“The cypher was broken.”

“How is Eliza?”

“She is a Duchess in two countries.”

“Does she know that I am a King in one?”

“She knows what I knew, before I left. Namely that there are tales of a Christian sorcerer who, some years ago, was traveling in a caravan to Delhi that was attacked by a Maratha army that came down out of the hills on elephants. The Marathas had the upper hand until nightfall, when they and their elephants alike were thrown into a panic by a cold fire that limned the warriors and the horses of the caravan without consuming them. This caravan reached Delhi without further incident, and Aurangzeb, the Great Mogul, according to his long-standing practice, elevated the victor to the rank of omerah, and rewarded him with a three-year jagir.”

“And so you decided to come out and see who was putting your alchemical knowledge to such ill uses.”

“I came for many reasons, Jack, but that was not one of them…I knew who the sorcerer was.”

“Did you bring the thing I asked for?”

“We will speak of that later,” Enoch said judiciously. “But I did bring two things you should have asked for, and forgot to.”

“Hmm, let me think…I love riddles…a replacement penis, and a keg of decent beer?”

“I love riddles, too, Jack, but I hate guessing-games. Can we go somewhere that is not so, er…” And here Enoch Root turned his gaze one way, then the other, taking in most of the hundred-mile expanse between the hills and the coastal marshes. “…exposed?”

Jack laughed. “If it’s privacy you want, you’re in the wrong subcontinent.”

“So you say—and yet there is more here than meets the eye, no?” said Enoch Root, staring Jack in the eye.

Jack rode back to his zamindar and said, “That gentleman over there is a buyer of saltpeter from Amsterdam.”

“Is that the best you could come up with!?” answered Surendranath.

“’Twill serve, for now…I am going to take him on an inspection-tour of the dirt-mines. Dismiss the khud-kashtas with my compliments. Tell them not to give the potato-woman any grief. Meet me at the Royal Palace this evening, unless the roof has been blown off again, in which case, meet me by the tree.”

“Sire, the dirt-mines are situated in a rowdy and treacherous pargana, quite infested with stranglers. Are you quite certain you do not want me to send the rowzinders?”

Jack sized up the two horsemen who had arrived with Enoch Root. “What do you make of them?”

“Mercenaries. Judging from their coloration, most likely Pathans.”

“That was my guess, too, until I got closer. Methinks they are Christians with tans. They are barely even twenty years of age, but weathered like veterans, and they returned my gaze insolently.”

“They handle their weapons like drilled musketeers,” said the zamindar.

“They’ve made it all the way here, from Christendom…”

“But perhaps they are the last remnants of a whole Regiment.”

“I believe I will be safe in their hands,” Jack said.

“THAT’S FOR ME MUM!” said the one.

“She’s me mum, too, give ’im another!”

A large, bleeding fist filled most of Jack’s visual field, getting rapidly bigger. Then lights flashed and a loud popping noise went off in the base of his skull.

“You can do be’er’n that, Jimmy!” said one, shoving the other aside. “Let me show you—now, how’s about that! An’ that! For our sainted mum!”

Suddenly they got six feet taller—either that, or Jack’s head was resting on the ground. The one called Jimmy wound up for a kick.

“That is for mayakin’ it neces’ry for us to travel all the way out to the butt o’ the world to beat the bejesus out o’ ye!”

Enoch hovered nervously in the background encouraging them to stop, or at least slow down—but they were having none of it.

“That is for bein’ a friggin’ shite-head!”

“Can you be more specific?” Jack said (he had found that a bit of levity sometimes worked wonders in these situations). But the words came out all a-mumble, for his lips stuck together whenever they got near each other—and they’d ballooned to the point where they were always near each other. But somehow the one named Jimmy understood, and went wide-eyed.

“Oh, you want specificity!? Danny, he’s requested we wax specific at this time!”

Jack got up on all fours, then staggered to his feet. Being on the ground only tempted them to kick him, and that was worse, in the long run, than being punched.

“That is specifically for tayakin’ up with another lady when the urth on Mum’s grayave hadn’t even been tamped down yet!”

“That is specifically for tradin’ in yer French jools on a shite-load o’ malarkey!”

Jack tumbled backwards into a stand of bamboo, and Jimmy and Danny—perhaps fearing cobras—did not come in after him. They stood where they were for a moment, getting their wind back. For the first time since Jimmy had tackled him out of the saddle a few minutes ago, it occurred to Jack that he was armed with a serviceable Janissary-sword, and knew a thing or two about how to use it; but cutting up his own flesh and blood wouldn’t be right. Instead he eased it quietly from its scabbard and swung it into the base of a bamboo cane about as thick as his wrist, easily cutting it through. Then he staggered out of the thicket dragging it behind him.

“Powers o’ Darkness!” Jack exclaimed, focusing his one eye that hadn’t swollen shut on a point in the middle distance. “I do believe that elephant is fookin’ that camel up the arse—or is it t’other way round?”

Jimmy and Danny turned around to look. Jack yanked on the bamboo, bringing it forward into his hands like a pike, and jammed the butt of it into Jimmy’s left kidney, which caused Jimmy to topple backwards clawing at his lower spine with both hands. Danny turned round to see why Jimmy was screaming. Jack got the bamboo between his knees, sending him a-sprawl, and just as the young man’s legs made a broad V in the air, Jack brought the cane down smartly. It was impossible to miss.

Stillness descended on the scene, save for the twittering of exotic birds and the groaning of the two lads.

“Enoch, if you could just keep an eye out for snakes, stranglers, and hordes whilst I give my boys a brief talking to.”

“Glad to—but please do be brief.”

“Now, Jimmy and Danny. Thank you for coming all the way out to Hindoostan to catch up with your dear father. You’re probably afraid I’m going to be angry that you beat the shite out of me. But really it gives me no strong feelings one way or the other. I don’t hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn’t there to make Englishmen of you, and so it’s Irish you are, by default. That’s all right; that can be remedied. But I must take exception to your saying—what was it? ‘A shite-load o’ malarkey.’ You underestimate me, lads. Which you’ve plenty of reasons to do, I admit, since this is the first time you’ve ever laid eyes on me, and Mary Dolores’s folk have been filling your heads with venom. I want you to understand that when I set forth on my trading voyage, twelve or thirteen years ago, I did it for you. And I’m still doin’ it for you—I’m just not finished yet, is all. I’ve had diverse treasures to steal and Dukes to assassinate and pirates to escape from. But no voyage is finished until the ship drops anchor in London or Amsterdam—and you’ll admit we’re a hell of a long way from those places!”

Danny was the first to struggle to his feet. Still bent over at a right angle, he dug Jimmy’s hand out of the brush and tried to heave him to his feet. “C’mon, now, Seamus, we’ve had our say—let’s turn round an’ head for Whitechapel now.”

“Go if you must,” Jack said, “but if you can bring yourselves to stay for a little while, I believe I can offer you transportation.”

“SHAHJAHANABAD IS A BASKET of asps,” Jack remarked the next day, as they were all riding through some wooded hills in the southeastern quarter of his domain. “Most of the Mogul’s omerahs go there and become entangled with the intrigues and doings of other omerahs, not to mention diverse courtiers, concubines, eunuchs, Banyans of the sodagar and the katari class, Brahmins and Fakirs of diverse Hindoo sects, spies and intriguers from wild ’stans to the Northwest, the agents of the French, Dutch, and English East India Companies, and anyone else who just happens to be hanging around. Aurangzeb has a great palace there, which he stole from his pa and his brothers. So you see, lads, you’re not the first men to violate the Fourth Commandment in Hindoostan—”

“ ‘Remember the Sabbath?’ ” quoth Jimmy, incredulous.

“Beg your pardon, I must’ve meant the Seventh.”

“ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery?’ ” said Jimmy and Danny in unison.

“I can see the Papists have left their mark on you lads—again, my fault.”

“His Royal Highness meant to say the Fifth—honor thy father and mother,” hollered Enoch Root—who, along with Surendranath, had been dropping farther and farther behind them, but who was still within earshot.

Danny made a sort of throat-clearing noise. “We came here to do that specifically—honor our mum, that is. It’s just that in order to do it, we had to settle a score wi’ Dad.”

“Well, now that you’ve settled it,” said Jack, pointing to various large swellings on his face, “shut up, because I’m trying to educate you. Before we embarked on theologickal disputations, I was talking about the Palace of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad, outside Delhi. It rises above the flood plain of a river, and on that plain, the Great Mogul stages mock-battles between armies of hundreds of elephants, and as many horse and camel. The expense, for elephant-feed alone, is damnable.”

“Let’s go! I ha’ to see it!” exclaimed Jimmy, all starry-faced.

“Doahn’t be such a shite-for-brayans!” said Danny. “Cahn’t you perceive, he’s tryin’ to payant a picture of Oriental decadence?”

“I can perceive it as clearly as your ugly fayace! But I ha’n’t rode all this friggin’ way to beat up Dad an’ then go hoahm! I’d not be above seein’ a wee sahmple of Oriental decadence afore I leave—assoomin’ that’d be all right wi’ ye, Parson Brown.”

“You’ll see Oriental decadence and then some, if you’ll only shut up—but you won’t see it in my kingdom. Because the point I was leading up to is as follows. Among those omerahs is a fair sprinkling of Christian artillerymen—renegadoes and Vagabond soldiers from the armies of King Looie and the Holy Roman Emperor. Aurangzeb needs ’em, you see, because they’ve mastered the al-jebr, which is a sort of mathematickal sorcery that we had the good sense to steal from the Arabs. And by wielding this al-jebr they can predict where cannonballs will land, which is a useful thing to know in a battle. Consequently, Aurangzeb simply cannot make do without ’em.”

“What has this t’do wi’ you, Dad, who doahn’t know al-jebr from jabber?” said Danny.

“In the clouded and furious imaginings of the Great Mogul, I am just another Frankish sorcerer. Which is to say that I could be reclining on a silken pillow in Shahjahanabad right now while some Hindoo lass played knick-knack on my chakras. But instead I am here!” And at this point Jack was secretly glad that his sons had been interrupting him the whole way, because the timing had worked out just as in some reasonably well-produced theatrical production: He spurred his donkey forward to the bare top of a hill and swept out a vast arc with his arm. “Look well and carefully upon these domains, my sons—for one day, they will not be yours!”

“Fook it in that case—we’ve already seen ’em,” said Jimmy. “Which way to Shahjahanabad?”

“As you can see, my jagir resembles one of those large earthenware trays in which we make saltpeter. It has a flat hard bottom caked with salty mud, in which what little grows is immediately eaten. The sloped sides of the tray, then, are these ranges of hills that surround it on all sides—save in one place, down below us here, which—in this similitude—is the spout of the tray. It is a stretch of marshes, a sort of Reptile Paradise, that leads eventually to the Bay of Bengal.”

“Beggin’ your pardon, Dad, but your royal highness’s rayan lasts another—what—four months?”

“One hundred sixteen days and counting.”

“Then whoy should me ’n’ Danny give a fook?”

“If you would shut up for ten consecutive minutes, I’d get to that,” said Jack, and took advantage of his altitude to try to find Surendranath and Enoch Root—who seemed to think that the only purpose of going on journeys was to wander about and gawk at all and sundry. Not long after they’d all left the Royal Palace at Bhalupoor (Jack’s summer capital, up in the hills), the Banyan and the alchemist had fallen into conversation. Not long after that, they’d evidently lost all interest in the incessant banter of the Shaftoes, and in the last few minutes they had dropped out of the caravan altogether. A retinue of spare palanquin-bearers, bodyguards, aides, and other wallahs had come along with them, and these were spreading out as the gap between Jack’s and Enoch’s group widened, trying to maintain some sort of contact; Jack could barely see the closest one, and could only hope that that fellow could see the next. The danger lay not in getting lost (for Surendranath knew the way better than Jack), and not in wild animals (according to Jimmy and Danny, Enoch could take care of himself), but in Thugs, Dacoits, and Maratha raiding-parties. Today’s journey was taking them along the southern rim of the metaphorical Tray, and at no point were they more than a few miles away from some Maratha fort or outpost.

Jack realized with mild astonishment that Jimmy and Danny were actually listening to him.

“Oh, yes. Precisely because the Great Mogul hands out his king-ships on a strictly limited three-year term, every king must devote his energies, from the first day of his reign, to preparing for the day when he will be a king no more. Now here I could speak to you of details for twelve hours, and those of you who are fascinated by tales of Oriental decadence would hear much to marvel at. Instead I will summarize it as follows: There are two approaches to being a king. One, remain in Shahjahanabad and maneuver and strive against all the others in hopes that the Great Mogul will reward thee with another kingship at the end of the three years.”

“I can guess two,” said Danny. “Avoid Shahjahanabad as if ’twere a plague-town. Go dwell in your jagir and do all you can to suck it dry, so you can get out wi’a shite-loahd o’ money…”

“Just like an English lord in Ireland,” Jimmy added.

Jack heaved a great sigh; sniffled once; and wiped a tear from his eye. “My sons, you do me proud.”

“That is the course you be steerin’, then, Dad?”

“Not quite. Sucking this jagir dry is like getting blood from beef jerky. My illustrious predecessors have been sucking it dry for millennia. Really it is one great sucking apparatus—there is a zamindar or chief tax collector, who does the sucking on behalf of whomever is king at the moment.”

“That’d be the wog in the palankeen, then…”

“Surendranath is my zamindar. His agents hover over the markets in my two cities—Bhalupoor in the hills, where we stayed last night, and Dalicot on the coast, where we are going now. For those are the places where the produce of the earth or sea is exchanged for silver. And since I must pay my taxes to the Great Mogul in silver, that is the only place to collect it. The tax rate is fixed. Nothing ever changes. The jagir produces a certain meager income, and there is no way to increase it.”

“So what’ve you been doin’ all these years, Dad?” Jimmy demanded.

“My first move was to lose some battles—or, at the very least, fail to win them—against the Marathas.”

“Why? Y’know how t’make phosphorus. You could’ve scared those Marathas shitless and driven ’em into the sea.”

“This was tactical losing, Danny boy. The other omerahs—I mean the intriguing types in Shahjahanabad—had heard tales of that phosphorus. It was in their nature to look on me as a dangerous rival. If I’d gone out and started winning battles, they’d’ve begun sending assassins my way. And I already have my hands full with French, Spanish, German, and Ottoman assassins.”

“But by makin’ yerself out to be a feckless Vagabond shite-for-brayans, you assured yourself of some security,” said Jimmy.

“Moguls and Marathas alike want me to stay alive—for another one hundred and sixteen days, anyway. Otherwise I never would’ve lasted long enough for you boys to journey out and beat me up.”

“But what then, Dad? Have you done anything here besides losin’ battles and mulctin’ wretches for pin-money?”

“Ssh! Listen!” Jack said.

They listened, and mostly heard their own stomachs growling, and a breeze in the trees. But after a few moments they were able to make out a distant chop, chop, chop.

“Woodcutters?” Danny guessed.

“Not just any wood, and not just any cutters,” said Jack, spurring his donkey down off the hilltop and riding toward the sound. “Mark this tree over here—no, the big one on the right! That is teak.”

“Tea?”

“Teak. Teak. It grows all over Hind.”

“What’s it good for?”

“It grows all over Hind, I said. Think about what that means.”

“What’s it mean? Just give it to us straight, Dad. We’re no good at riddles,” Jimmy said; at which Danny took offense.

“Speak for yourself, ninny-hammer. He’s tryin’ to tell us that nothin’ succeeds in eatin’ this type o’ wood.”

“Danny’s got it,” Jack said. “None of the diverse worms, ants, moths, beetles, and grubs that, sooner or later, eat everything here, can make any headway against teak-wood.”

SEVERAL TALL TEAKS HAD BEEN felled in the clearing, but even so, Danny and Jimmy had to peer around for a quarter of an hour to realize what the place was. In Christendom there would have been a pit full of wood-shavings, and a couple of sawyers playing tug-of-war with a saw-frame the size of a bed-stead, slicing the logs into squarish beams, and looking forward to the end of the day when they could go home to a village some distance down the road. But here, a whole town had sprung up around these fallen trees. It had been a wild place before, and would be wild again in a year, but today, hundreds dwelt here. Most of them were gathering food, cooking, or tending children. Perhaps two score adult males were actually cutting wood, and the largest tool that any of them had was a sort of hand-adze. This trophy was being wielded by an impressive man of perhaps forty, who was being closely supervised—some would say nagged—by a pair of village elders who had an opinion to offer about every stroke of the blade.

The village’s approach to cutting up these great teak-logs had much in common, overall, with how freemasons chipped rough blocks of stone one tiny chisel-blow at a time. At the other end of the village, some of them were scraping away at almost-finished timbers with potshards or fragments of chipped rock. Some of these timbers were square and straight, but others had been carved into very specific curves.

“That there would be a knee brace,” Danny said, looking at a five-hundred-pound V of solid teak.

“Do not fail to marvel at how the grain of the wood follows the bend of the knee,” Jack said.

“It’s as if God formed the tree for this purpose!” said Jimmy, crossing himself.

“Aye, but then the Devil planted it in the middle of a million others.”

“That might’ve been part of God’s plan,” Danny demurred, “as a trial and a test for the faithful.”

“I think I have made it abundantly clear that I am no good at tests of that sort,” Jack said, “but these kolis are another matter. They will wander the hills for weeks and look at every single tree. They’ll send a child scampering up a promising teak to inspect the place where a bough branches off from the trunk, for that is where the grain-lines of the wood curve just so—and, too, it’s where the wood is strongest and heaviest. When they’ve found the right tree, down it comes! And they move the whole village there until the wood has been shaped and the timbers delivered.”

“I didn’t think the Hindoos were seafarin’ folk,” Jimmy said, “other than wee fishin’ boats and such.”

“Most of these kolis will go to their graves, or to be precise, their funeral-pyres, without ever having laid eyes on salt water. They have been roaming the hills forever, going where they find work, supplying timbers for buildings, palanquins, and whatnot. When I became king they started coming here from all over Hindoostan.”

“You must pay ’em summat. I thought you had no revenue.”

“But this comes from a different purse. I am not paying these folk with tax money.”

“Where is the friggin’ money comin’ from, then?” Jimmy demanded.

“More than one source. You’ll learn in good time.”

“He an’ that Banyan must’ve made a shite-load of money when they brought that caravan home to Shahjahanabad,” Danny observed.

“It wasn’t just me and the Banyan, but the whole Cabal—or rather the half of it that had not fallen into the snares of Kottakkal, the Malabar pirate-queen.”

“Hah! Now, there is your Oriental decadence!” Danny exclaimed to Jimmy, who was momentarily speechless.

“You have no idea,” Jack muttered.

IT TOOK THEM ALMOST TWO hours to track down Enoch and Surendranath, who had wandered quite beyond the frontier of Jack’s kingdom and into a sort of lawless zone between it and a Maratha stronghold. Through the center of that no-man’s-land ran a small river in a large gulley—a steep-sided channel that the water had cut down through black earth every bit as slowly and patiently as the kolis whittling their beams.

“I should’ve predicted that we would find Enoch in the Black Vale of Vhanatiya,” Jack said, when he finally caught sight of the alchemist down below.

“Who’s that bloke in the turban?” Jimmy demanded, peering down over the lip of the gulley. Ten fathoms below them, in the bottom of the gorge, Enoch was standing in knee-deep water, conversing with a Hindoo who squatted in the shallows nearby.

“I have seen men like him once or twice before,” Jack said. “He is a Carnaya, which I realize means nothing to you.”

“Obviously he is a gold-miner,” Danny said. The Carnaya was holding a round pan between his hands and swirling it around, causing a foamy surge of black river-sand to gyrate around its rim.

“If this were Christendom, where everything is obvious, he would be a gold-miner,” Jack said. “But there is no gold, and naught is simple, in these parts.”

“He must be panning for agates then,” Jimmy said.

“An excellent guess. But there are no agates here.” Jack cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered: “Enoch! It is a long ride to Dalicot, and we do not want to be caught in this country after dark!”

Enoch paid him only the slightest notice. Jimmy and Danny pounded down into the gulley, following their own avalanches into the river, which became cloudy—to the exasperation of the Carnaya. Enoch wound up his conversation. There was much significant pointing, and Jack got the impression that directions were being given out. Jimmy and Danny peered at the Carnaya’s pan, and at the heavy bags that he had filled with the results of his panning.

In time the whole caravan got re-assembled up above, and made ready for a forced march to Dalicot. “Be sure to check your pocket-compass,” Enoch suggested before they set out.

“I know where we are,” Jack said. But Enoch prevailed on him to check the compass anyway. Jack got it out and removed the cover: It was just a magnetized needle coated with wax and set afloat in a dish of water, and to get a reading, it was necessary to set it down on something solid and wait for a minute or two. Jack put it on a rock at the lip of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya, and waited for two minutes, then five. But the needle pointed in a direction that obviously was not north. And when Jack moved it to another rock, it pointed in a different direction that was not north.

“If you are trying to spook me, it has worked. Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jack said.

Their inspection of the Carnaya’s equipment had left Danny and Jimmy baffled and suspicious respectively. “’Twas nought more’n some dark matter, as dull and gross as anything I’ve ever seeyen,” Danny reported.

“Certain gemstones look thus, before they have been cut and polished,” Jack said.

“It was all sand and grit, nothing bigger’n a pin-head,” Jimmy said. “But Jayzus! Those sacks were heavy.”

Enoch was as close to being excited as Jack had ever seen him. “All right, Enoch—let’s have it!” Jack demanded. “I’m king in these parts—stand and deliver!”

“You are not king there,” Enoch said, nodding in the direction of the Black Vale, “nor in the place we will visit tomorrow.”

Jimmy and Danny rolled their eyes in unison, and made guttural scoffing noises. They had been traveling in the company of Enoch the Red for half a year.

JACK WAS STANDING ON A beach, letting warm surf surge and foam around his sore feet, and watching a couple of Hindoo men working with a fragile-looking bow-drill, using it as a sort of lathe to shape a round peg of wood from the purple heartwood of some outlandish tree. “Peg-makers are a wholly different caste from plank-whittlers, and will on no account intermarry with them, though on certain days of the year they will share food,” he remarked.

No one answered him; no one even heard.

Enoch, Jimmy, Danny, and Surendranath were standing on the beach a few yards away with their backs to him. On one side they were lit up by the reddish light of the sun, which (because they were so near the Equator) was making a meteoric descent behind the hills from which they had just descended. They were as motionless as figures in a stained-glass window, and in fact this was no mean similitude, since their heads were tilted back, their lips parted, their eyes clear and wide, much like Shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem or the Three Women in the empty tomb. Waves surged around their ankles and leapt up as high as their knees and they did not move.

They were beholding a vast Lady that lay on the beach. She was the color of teak. The light of the sun made her flesh glow like iron in a forge. She was far larger than the largest tree that had ever been, and so must have been pieced together from many individual bits of wood, such as this peg that the peg-maker was shaping next to Jack, or that plank that the plank-maker over there was assiduously sculpting out of a giant rough timber. Indeed, if they had come a year ago they might have seen her ribs jutting into the air, and courses of hull-planks still being cut to length, and it would have been evident that she had after all been pieced together. But in her current state it seemed as if she had just grown on the beach, and the way that the grain-lines of the teak followed her every curve did everything to enhance that illusion.

“Aye,” Jack said, after he had allowed a proper silence to go by, “sometimes I think her curves are too perfect to’ve been shaped by man.”

“They were not shaped, but only discovered, by man,” said Enoch Root, and risked a single step towards her. Then he fell into silence again.

Jack busied himself inspecting various works higher up the beach. For the most part these were makers of planks and pegs. But in one place a shed of woven canes had been erected, and thatched with palm-fronds. Inside it, a woodcarver of higher caste was at work with his chisels and mallets; wood-chips covered the sandy floor and spilled out onto the beach. Jack went in there, bringing Surendranath as his interpreter.

“For Christ’s sake! Look at her! Will you just look at her!? Look at her!” Then a pause while Jack drew breath and Surendranath translated this into Marathi, a couple of octaves lower, and the sculptor muttered something back.

“Yes, I see quite plainly that you were so good as to remove the elephant-trunk, and that the lady has a proper nose now, and for that you have my undying gratitude,” Jack hollered sarcastically, “and as long as I am helping you with your self-esteem, sirrah, allow me to thank you for scraping off the blue paint. But! For! Christ’s! Sake! Do you know, sirrah, how to count? You do!? Oh, excellent! Then will you be so good, sirrah, as to count the number of arms possessed by this Lady? I will patiently stand here while you take a full inventory—it may take a little while…oh, very good! That is the same reckoning that I have arrived at! Now, sirrah, if you will be so kind, how many arms do you observe on my body? Very good! Once again, we agree. How about Surendranath—how many arms has he? Ahh, the same figure has come up once again. And you, sirrah, when you carve your idols, you hold the hammer in one, and the chisel in another, hand—how many makes that? Remarkable! Yet again we have arrived at the same figure! Then will you please explain to me how come it is that This! Lady! is formed as you have formed her? Why the numerical discrepancy? Do I need to import a Doctor of al-jebr to explain this?”

Jack stormed out of the shed, followed closely by Surendranath, who was saying, “You told the poor fellow she was supposed to represent a goddess—what on earth were you expecting?”

“I was being poetickal.”

Jimmy and Danny had long since clambered aboard, and were running from stem to stern and back again, hooting like schoolboys. Enoch had been walking about her, tracing short segments of arcs on the wet sand, and was now standing in violet light with the water up around his knees.

“My first thought was that she couldn’t have been wrought by a Dutchman, on account of her marked dead-rise,* which will make her fast but will bar her from most Dutch harbors.”

“There are no Dutch harbors around here, you’ll notice,” Jack observed.

“Her stem is strongly raked, more like a jacht than a typical East Indiaman. It looks as if two and maybe three exceptionally noble teaks were sacrificed to fashion that curve. There are no such trees in Europe any more, and so stems are pieced together, and rarely have such a rake. How did you find trees that were curved just so?”

“In this country, as you have seen, there is a whole sub-civilization of woodcutters who carry in their heads an inventory of every tree that grows between the Roof of the World in the north, and the Isle of Serendib in the south,” Jack said. “We stole those trees from other jagirs. It took six months and was complicated.”

“And yet her keel is no shorter, for all her stem-rake. So yet again, the builder seems to have valued speed above other desirables. Being so long and so rakish, she had to be narrow—quite a bit of volume has been sacrificed to that. And even more has been given up to riders and other reinforcements—you’ve put two ships’ worth of teak into her. Expecting her to carry a lot of guns, are you?” Enoch asked.

“Assuming you’ve held up your end of the transaction.”

“She should last thirty or forty years,” Enoch said.

“Longer than most of us will,” Jack answered, “present company excepted, that is—if the rumors about you are true.”

“Anyone who looks at her will know she is hauling valuable cargo,” said Enoch. “If ship-building is the art of compromise, then your builder has everywhere chosen speed and armament at the expense of volume. Such a ship can only pay for her upkeep if she is hauling items of small bulk and great value. She is pirate-bait.”

“If there is anything we have learned in our wanderings, it is that every ship on the sea, even one as humble as God’s Wounds, is pirate-bait,” said Jack. “And so we have built a pirate-slayer. There is a reason why the Dutch make their merchantmen almost indistinguishable from their Ships of Force. Why should we go to the expense of fashioning a teak-built ship, only to lose her to some boca-neers six months after she is launched?”

Enoch nodded. Jack had become a bit furious.

“So let me hear your guess, Enoch. You said that she didn’t look like a ship built by a Dutchman. Who was the shipwright, then?”

“A Dutchman, of course! For only they are so free in adopting outlandish notions—only they have the confidence. Everyone else only parrots them.”

“You are both right and wrong,” Jack said after a moment’s pause, and then turned away and began slogging down the beach in the direction of a fire that had been kindled in the last few minutes, as the sun had finally disappeared and stars came out overhead. “Our shipwright is one Jan Vroom of Rotterdam. Van Hoek recruited him.”

“His name is well-known. What on earth is he doing here?”

“It seems that in the days of Vroom’s apprenticeship, shipwrights were held in high esteem by the V.O.C. and the Admiralty, and given a free hand. Each ship was built a little differently, according to the wisdom—or as some would say, the whim—of the shipwright. But recently the V.O.C. have become prideful, thinking that they know everything that will ever be known about how to build ships, and they have begun specifying sizes and measurements down to a quarter of an inch—they want every ship the same. And if a shipwright dares to show any artistry, why, then, some rival shipwright will be brought in to take measurements and write up a report, laying out how these rules and regulations have been violated, and causing no end of trouble. What it comes down to is that Jan Vroom did not feel appreciated. And when a worm-gnawed and weatherbeaten letter arrived in his hands, a couple of years ago, from an old acquaintance of his named Otto van Hoek, he dropped what he was doing and took passage on the next ship out of Rotterdam.”

“Looks as if more followed,” said Enoch, for they were now close enough that they could see a whole semicircle of muttering Dutchmen around the fire, lighting up their clay pipes with flaming twigs. In the middle were the red-headed captain, and a tall man with a blond-going-gray beard who was obviously Vroom. But four younger men were around them, listening and nodding.

“Before we interrupt these gentlemen, let us conspire in the darkness here,” said Enoch.

“I’m listening.”

“Along with these very Dutchmen, you imported some scribe, skilled—or so you were told—in the cryptographickal arts. You had this scribe write me an encyphered letter saying, ‘Dear Enoch Root, I require forty-four large naval cannons, preferably of finest and most modern sort, please provide.’ And several months later I decrypted and read this document in London—though not before some spy had intercepted it, and copied it out. At any rate, I read this document and I laughed. I hope you were laughing when you dictated it.”

“A smile might have played round my lips.”

“That is good, because it was an absurd request. And if you did not have the wit to recognize it as such, it would mean you had turned into some sort of addle-pated Oriental despot.”

“Enoch. Do you, or do you not, have certain large metal items for me?”

“The items you refer to are not free for the taking. One does not acquire such goods without accepting certain obligations.”

“You’re saying you’ve found us an investor? That is acceptable. What are his terms?”

“You should rather say, her terms.”

Jack levitated. Enoch clapped a hand on his shoulder and looked him in the eye. Enoch was facing toward the fire and the light glinted weirdly in the dilated pupils of his eyes: a pair of red moons in the night. “Jack, it is not her. She has done well for herself, it’s true—but not so well that she can dispatch an arsenal halfway around the world, simply because a Vagabond writes her a letter.”

“What woman can?”

“A woman you saw once, from a steeple in Hanover.”

“Stab me!”

“And now you appreciate, I trust, how deep the matter is.”

“But I should not have addressed the letter to Enoch Root, if I did not want it to become deep. What are her terms?”

The red moons were eclipsed for a little while. Enoch sighed. His breath on Jack’s face was hot and warm like a Malabar breeze, and laced—or so Jack imagined—with queer mineral fragrances.

“Investors who dictate terms are common as the air, Jack,” Enoch said. “This is a different matter altogether. You are not borrowing capital from an investor in exchange for specific terms. You are entering into a relationship with a woman. Certain things will simply be expected of you. I cannot even begin to guess what. If you and your partners fail to act as gentlemen should, you will incur the lady’s displeasure. Is that specific enough? Is it clear?”

“It is neither.”

“Good! Then this has been a successful conversation,” Enoch said. “Now I must convey the same maddening ambiguity to your partners. That being accomplished, I must show due diligence, and—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Certain items are conspicuously absent—such as masts and sails. Cordage. A crew. I cannot release the weapons until I have seen these. Also, her position on the beach is vulnerable.”

“We will float her soon, and complete her on the water—as is traditional. If she had a few cannons on board she would be a difficult prize to take from land.”

“Agreed. Have you made plans for her maiden voyage?”

“We were thinking perhaps of running saltpeter to Batavia, and then bringing spices back to one of the Great Mogul’s ports—for Hindoostan consumes more spices than all Europe combined, and they have no lack of silver with which to pay for it.”

“It is not a bad plan. But you may have a different plan tomorrow, Jack.”

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND THEM in dangerous territory south of the Black Vale of Vhanatiya. The Carnaya miner had given Enoch deliberately misleading directions that would have led him directly into a Maratha trap. But Enoch had anticipated this, and tracked the miner through the hills like a hunter stalking wild game.

They passed for some hours through a high terrain overgrown with vicious scrub. All of the large trees seemed to have been cut down long ago and never grown back. Just when Jack was convinced that they were utterly lost in the most God-forsaken part of the world, he smelled camels, and they stumbled upon a caravan of Persians headed the same direction. This was a bit like running into a clan of kilted Scotsmen in the middle of the Sahara Desert.

The way became broad and trampled; Enoch no longer had to use his tracking skills. Finally even the scrub and thorn plants vanished. Like a few pebbles rattling down into a stoneware bowl, they descended into a rocky crater, maculated with schlock-heaps and filled with a perpetual miasma of wood-smoke.

“Even if your taste is abominable, I must grant you credit for consistency,” Jack muttered. “How is it you always end up in the same sort of place?”

“By following the spoors of men such as the Carnaya,” said Enoch, speaking in a hush, like a Papist who’s just entered a basilica. “Now you see why I insisted that we come here alone—if we’d brought an escort of rowzinders, imagine how this place would have been upset.”

“Isn’t it already?” Jack asked. “What the hell are they up to? And why are those Persians here? And do my smoke-burnt eyes deceive me, or is that a contingent of Armenian long-range traders?”

Enoch said only: “Watch.” So Jack followed Enoch and watched Enoch watch.

Now in the beginning Jack was certain that they had come to the place where all of Europe’s teacups were manufactured, for there were clay-pits all over, and Hindoos squatted in them fashioning teacup-sized vessels. These were carried up to kilns to be fired. But if they were teacups, they were rough thick-walled ones without handles or decoration, and each came with a domed lid. And other peculiar operations were going on nearby: Canes of bamboo, and odds and ends of teak-wood, were being loaded into smoky furnaces to be turned into charcoal. Jack was certain that some of this teak was scrap left over from his ship-building project, and was peeved at first, then amused, to realize that his kolis had another operation going on the side.

Teak and bamboo were not the only vegetable matter being brought up to this stony vale. Wizened hill-people were staggering down under twig-bundles bigger than they were, and being paid in silver by important-looking characters. Jack did not recognize the twigs, but he gathered from the price paid for, and the reverence accorded, them that they were of some sort of plant sacred to the Hindoos.

All of these ingredients came together before a towering mud hearth, a sort of blazing termite-mound the size of a small church that rose from the center of the compound, looking twice as ancient as anything Jack had seen in Egypt. An old man with a priestly look about him squatted on his haunches next to a pyramid of rough teacups. He stirred his hand around in a sack of black sand just like what the Carnaya had panned out of the riverbank, and sifted it between his fingers into the crucible, seemingly feeling every single grain between his wrinkled fingertips, flicking away any that didn’t feel right. Then he chose a few shards of charcoal and distributed them around atop the black sand, crumbling them into smaller bits as necessary, and finally plucked some leaves and blossoms from a giant spraying faggot of magic twigs and arranged these on the charcoal like a French chef placing a garnish atop a cassoulet. Then his hand went back into the sack of black sand and he repeated the procedure, layer upon layer, until the tiny vessel was full. Now the lid went on, and it was passed with great care to an assistant who sealed the lid in place with wet clay.

The finished crucibles, looking like slightly flattened balls of mud, were stacked like cannonballs near the great furnace. But they did not go in just now, because a firing was in progress: Jack could look in and see a heap of similar crucibles glowing in the heat like a bunch of ripe fruit.

“I’ll be damned,” said Enoch Root, “they are only red-, not yellow-hot. That means that the iron ore is not actually being melted. Instead the charcoal is being absorbed by the iron, though the iron is yet solid.”

“Why doesn’t the charcoal just burn?”

“No air can get into the sealed crucibles,” Enoch snapped. “Instead it fuses with the iron to make steel.”

“We’ve come all this way to watch a bunch of wogs make steel!?”

“Not just any steel.” Enoch stroked his beard. “The diffusion must be very slow. Mark how carefully they tend the fire—they must keep it at a red heat for days. You have no idea how difficult that is—that boy with the poker must know as much of fire as Vroom knows of ships.”

The alchemist continued gazing at the furnace until Jack feared they would remain in that very spot for as many days as the firing might take. But finally Enoch Root turned away from it. “There are secrets about the construction of that forge that have never been published in the Theatrum Chemicum,” he said. “More than likely they are forgotten secrets, or else these people would have built more of them.”

They moved on to a pile of crucibles that had been removed from the furnace and allowed to cool. A boy picked these up one at a time, tossing them from hand to hand because they were still too hot to hold, and dashed them against a flat stone to shatter the clay crucible. What remained among those smoking pot-shards was a hemisphere of spongy gray metal. “The egg!” exclaimed Enoch.

A smith picked up each egg with a pair of tongs, set it on an anvil, and struck it once with a hammer, then examined it carefully. Eggs that dented were tossed away on a discard-heap. Some were so hard that the hammer left no mark on them—these were put into a hod that was eventually carried across the compound to another pit where an entirely different sort of clay was being mixed up, according to some arcane recipe, by the stomping feet of Hindoo boys, while a village elder walked around the edge peering into it and occasionally tossing handfuls of mysterious powders into the mix. The eggs of metal were coated in thick jackets of this clay and then set aside to dry. The first clay had been red when wet and yellow when fired, but this stuff was grey, as if the clay itself were metalliferous.

Once the gray clay had dried around the eggs, these were carried to a different furnace to be heated—but only to a dull red heat. The difference become obvious to Jack only when the sun went down, and he could stand between the two furnaces and compare the glow of one with that of the other. Again, the firing continued for a long time. Again, the eggs that emerged were cooled slowly, over a period of days. Again they were subjected to the test on the anvil—but with different results. For something about this second firing caused the steel egg to become more resilient. Still, most of them were not soft enough to be forged after a single firing in the gray clay, and had to be put through it again and again. But out of every batch, a few responded in just the right way to the hammer, and these were set aside. But not for long, because Persians and Armenians bought them up almost before they had hit the ground.

Enoch went over and picked one of them up. “This is called wootz,” he said. “It’s a Persian word. Persians have been coming here for thousands of years to buy it.”

“Why don’t the Persians make their own? They seem to have the run of the place—they must know how it’s done by now.”

“They have been trying, and failing, to make wootz since before the time of Darius. They can make a similar product—your sons and I made a detour to one of their forges—but they cannot seem to manage this.”

Enoch held the egg of wootz up so that fire-light grazed its surface and highlighted its terrain. Jack’s first thought was that it looked just like the moon, for the color and shape were the same, and the rugged surface was pocked with diverse craters where, he supposed, bubbles had formed. On a closer look, these craters were few and far between. Most of the egg’s surface was covered with a net-work of fine cross-hatched ridges, as if some coarsely woven screen—a mesh of wires—had been mixed into the stuff, and was trying to break free of the surface. And yet Jack had seen the crucibles prepared with his own eyes and knew that naught had gone into them save black sand, fragments of charcoal, and magic leaves. He pressed a fingertip against a prominent lattice of ridges; they were as hard as stone, sharp as a sword-edge.

“Those reticules grow inside the crucible, as plants do from seeds. And they are not only at the surface, but pervade the whole egg, and are all involved with one another—they hold the steel together and give it a strength nothing else can match.”

“If this wootz is so extraordinary, why’ve I never heard of it?”

“Because Franks name it something else.” Enoch glanced up, attracted by a distant ringing sound: a smith was smiting something. But it was not just some dull clod of iron. This was not a horseshoe or poker in the making. It rang with a noble piercing sound that put Jack in mind of Jeronimo wielding his rapier in the Khan el-Khalili.

The forge was about five minutes’ walk away, and when they arrived they joined a whole crowd of Ottoman Turks and other travelers who had convened to watch this Hindoo sword-smith at work. He was using tongs to grip a scimitar-blade by its tang, and was turning it this way and that on an anvil, occasionally striking it a blow with a hammer. The metal was glowing a very dull red.

“It isn’t hot enough to forge,” Jack muttered. “It needs to be a bright cherry red at least.”

“As soon as it is heated a bright cherry red, the lattice-work dissolves, like sugar in coffee, and the metal becomes brittle and worthless—as the Franks discovered during the Crusades, when we captured fragments of such weapons around Damascus and brought them back to Christendom and tried to find out their secrets in our own forges. Nothing whatsoever was learned, except the depth of our own ignorance—but ever since, we have called this stuff Damascus steel.”

“Damascus steel comes from here!?” Jack said, jostling closer to the anvil.

“Yes—the reticules you saw in the egg of wootz, when patiently hammered out, at low temperature, produce the swirling, liquid patterns that we know as—”

“Watered steel!” Jack exclaimed. He was close enough, now, to see gorgeous ripples and vortices in the red-hot blade. Without thinking, he reached for the hilt of his Janissary-sword and began drawing it out for comparison. But Enoch’s hand clapped down on his forearm to restrain him. In the same moment the forge was filled with a storm of whisking, scraping, ringing, and keening noises. Jack looked up into a dense glinting constellation of drawn blades: serpentine watered steel daggers, watered steel scimitars, watered steel talwars, Khyber swords, and the squat fist-knives known as kitars. Inlaid passages from the Koran gleamed gold on some blades, as did Hindoo goddesses on others.

Jack cleared his throat and let go of his sword.

“This gentleman with the hammer and the tongs is extremely well-thought-of among connoisseurs of edged weapons the world round,” Enoch said. “They would be ever so unhappy if something happened to him.”

“ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT, your point is well taken,” Jack said, after they had, by dint of Enoch’s diplomacy, extracted themselves from the forge with all of their body parts present and in good working order. “If we want valuable cargo for the ship’s maiden voyage, there is no need to go to Batavia and load up with spices.”

“Ingots of wootz will fetch an excellent price at any of the Persian Gulf or Red Sea ports,” Enoch said learnedly. “You could trade them for silk or pearls, then sail for any European port—”

“Where we would all be tortured to death ’pon arrival. It is an excellent plan, Enoch.”

“On the contrary, you might survive in London or Amsterdam.”

“I had in mind going the opposite direction.”

“It is true that in Manila or Macao you might find a market for wootz,” Enoch said, after a moment’s consideration. “But you would make out much better in the Mahometan countries.”

“Let us strike out south and west towards the Malabar coast tomorrow.”

“Will that not take us through Maratha territory?”

“No, they live in citadels up on mountain-tops. I know the way, Enoch. We will pass through a couple of independent kingdoms that pay tribute to the Great Mogul. I have an understanding with them. From there we can pass into Malabar.”

“Wasn’t it Malabaris who stole your gold, and enslaved half of your companions?”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“What is the other way?”

“Surendranath, Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz—our most cosmopolitan and sophisticated members—prefer to think of Malabar as a large, extremely queer, remote, hostile, and heavily armed goldsmith’s shop in which we have made an involuntary deposit.”

“We call such enterprises banks now.”

“Forgive me, I haven’t been in England for nigh on twenty years.”

“Pray continue, Jack.”

“They have our gold. We can never get it back. But it does them very little good, sitting there. Kottakkal, the Queen of the Malabar Pirates, can only spend so much of it fixing up her palace and refurbishing her ships. Beyond that, she must put that gold to work if she’s to derive any benefit of having stolen it from us.”

“Has she been putting it to work, then?”

“She owns twenty-five percent of our ship.”

Enoch laughed—an uncommon event. He did more than his share of winking, smirking, chuckling, and deadpan commentary, but laughing out loud was a rare thing with him. “I am trying to imagine how I will explain to the Electress of Hanover, and heiress to the Throne of England, that she is now in partnership with Kottakkal, the Queen of the Malabar Pirates.”

“Imagine how you’re going to explain it to Kottakkal, please,” Jack suggested, “because that will happen sooner.”

Malabar

LATE 1696 AND EARLY 1697

THEY WERE TRAVELING NOW AS Hindoostani gentlemen: Enoch and Jack each had a light two-wheeled carriage drawn by a pair of trotting bullocks. Each carriage could have accommodated two passengers, provided they were very close friends, but by the time Jack and Enoch had packed themselves in with their diverse weapons, bundles, wine bottles, et cetera, there was only room for one. And that was fine with Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe, who acted as if they’d never seen anything quite this bizarre in all their travels, and could not choose between being amused and disgusted. That was before they discovered that their own horses could barely keep up with these trotting bullocks over the course of a long night’s march. Their escort—eight musketeers and eight archers, siphoned off from the endless Siege that Sword of Divine Fire had supposedly been prosecuting against the Marathas—had to jog the whole way.

By day the pace, combined with the sun, would have slain them all in a few hours. So they woke up around sunset, lay about camp for a few hours as the heat of the day seeped away into the earth and sky, then got underway a couple of hours before midnight and hurried down roads and paths until dawn. Jack had made the trip several times, and had learned how to break it up into stages, each of which ended in a mango-or coconut-grove near the walls of a town. They would smooth out some ground and make camp as the sun rose, and a few runners—adolescent boys of his jagir, well compensated for their exertions—would be dispatched to loiter outside the town’s gates until they were opened. These would go in and bargain for victuals while the others slept in the shade of the trees. The goods would then be delivered after sundown as the party readied themselves for the next stage.

This was traveling of a wholly serious and businesslike nature, and demanded certain adjustments of Jimmy and Danny, who in their journey across Eurasia with Enoch Root had wantonly indulged in side-trips and digressions. There was no time to do anything except cover ground, or make preparations to cover ground. There was no time even to talk.

Once they had escaped from Jack’s blighted jagir the landscape was pleasant enough, but uniform and monotonous: ditched and irrigated fields alternating with groves of food-bearing trees, and occasional stretches of jungle covering hills, vales, and other areas that were not suited to agriculture. Sometimes they had to pass through such parts; the jungle seemed to rush out of the night to envelop them, and they moved forward with extreme care, expecting stranglers to abseil from overhead limbs, or large man-eating felines to explode from the brush. They had to ford several rivers, which in this part of the world meant wading through crocodiles. At one of these fords, Danny noticed a pair of largish reptilian nostrils closing in on a boy who was straggling behind the main group, and discharged his pistol in that general direction. It probably had no effect on the crocodile, but it scared the boy into catching up. At another ford, an immense crocodile carried away one of their donkeys.

The next day—or rather, the next evening—they woke up to find themselves in a black country of black men. It had been a long night’s march and their bodies wanted to sleep but their minds did not. When they lay their heads down they could hear the earth thumping beneath them, like a gentle heartbeat, for this black earth was far richer in saltpeter than any in Jack’s jagir, and the ground outside the walls of this town was pocked with holes where people labored with their thudding timbers all day long.

If the earth was full of thumps the air was just as full of strange cries, for every peasant working in the fields hollered “Popo!” every minute or so. Jack ended up sitting in the shade of a tree with Jimmy and Danny and Enoch, eating mangoes that literally fell into their laps, occasionally jumping up to sweep back plagues of ants, and watching these black Hindoos live their lives. A cool westerly breeze blew over them smelling of salt water, for they had almost crossed Hindoostan from east to west, and were nearing the Arabian Sea.

“Those field workers are Cherumans—a caste so low that they can pollute a Nayar from a distance of sixty-four feet,” Jack explained, “whereupon the Nayar is obligated to kill them, and then purify himself with endless and pompous rites. So to save themselves from being killed, and the Nayars from being inconvenienced, they cry out Popo! all the time, to warn all comers that they are present.”

“You’re full o’shite as ever, Dad,” said Jimmy with equal measures of contempt and affection.

A different cry sounded from around the road-bend: “Kukuya! Kukuya!” As soon as they heard it, the Cherumans picked up their hoes and moved away from the road, depopulating a sixty-four-foot-wide strip to either side of it. Presently a small party of travelers came into view: a black-skinned woman, naked from the waist up except for her gold jewelry, riding a white horse, and a few servants on foot.

“If that be a Nayar, then let’s go to where the Nayars live,” Danny said.

“What the hell d’you suppose we’ve been doing for the last week?”

“There’s more like her where we’re going?”

“Yes—they run the place. They are a warrior caste. It’s just like going to St. James’s and gawking at the Persons of Quality: lovely ladies, and men with swords—who don’t hesitate to use ’em.”

After the sun had gone down, Jack sent his escort back to re-join the luxurious Siege. They lay about in that camp for the rest of the night dozing. At daybreak they were startled awake by a shouting match between a Cheruman, standing before a slab of rock sixty-four feet from the city limits, and a Banyan standing on the parapet of the wall. The Cheruman upended a sack of money onto the slab: cowrie-shells, Persian bitter almonds, and a few black coppers. Then he withdrew. A minute later the Banyan came out, deposited a bundle of goods, plucked off a few shells, almonds, and coppers, and went back into the town. The Cheruman returned and collected the bundle and whatever change the Banyan had left behind.

“Seems a wee bit cumbersome,” Danny observed, watching incredulously.

“On the contrary, I deem it eminently practical,” said Enoch Root. “If I belonged to a small warrior elite, my greatest fear would be a peasant uprising—ambushes along the roads, and so on. If I had the right to kill any peasant who came within a bow-shot of me…”

“You could relax an’ enjoy the good life,” Jimmy said.

After provisioning themselves in the town they turned south and followed the coast deeper into Malabar. From time to time they would pass a criminal who had been impaled on a javelin and left to die by the road-side, which only confirmed the impression that they were in a well-ordered place now, and had not taken any undue risks in sending their escort home. The heat of the sun in this far southern place was murderous, but the farther they went the closer the came to the Laccadive Sea with its cool onshore breezes, and in many stretches the road was lined with Palmyra palms whose enormous leaves cast volumes of shade on the way below.

They knew they were close to the court of Queen Kottakkal when frail racks began to line the road, all a-drape with those same palm leaves, which had been put there to dry and whiten. The Queen’s scribes used them as paper. A lot of shouting could be heard up ahead.

“What’re they hollerin’ about?” Danny wondered.

“Maybe one of their ships just came back loaded to the gunwales with booty,” Jack said, “or maybe a crocodile is loose in the town square.”

The road opened up into the main street of a fair-sized port town consisting mostly of woven reed dwellings. There were occasional timber houses along the street, and these became more numerous and larger as they drew closer to the waterfront: the bank of a significant river that ran slowly and quietly through a deep-looking channel that broadened, a quarter of a mile downstream, to form an inlet of the Laccadive Sea. The town had doubtless stood here for æons but gave the impression of having just been set up in the midst of an ancient forest, as giant trees—teaks, mangoes, mahua, mahogany, coconut-palm, axle-wood, and one or two cathedral-sized banyan trees—stood between houses, and spread and merged overhead to create a second roof high above the palm frond thatchings that topped the buildings.

Young Nayar men were racing from house to house and tree-trunk to tree-trunk hollering at each other in extreme excitement. The travelers had only just come into view of the waterfront when a posse of Nayar boys burst out of a house and ran past them, completely ignoring them. Moments later those Nayars were pursued by a shower of arrows that came hissing down all around, some landing among the Shaftoes and lodging in the soft ground.

“Those black fookers are shoowatin’ at us!” exclaimed Jimmy, yanking out his pistol and cocking the hammer.

“Not just at us, Jimmy boy,” Jack said, in an ominously quiet voice.

All of the others turned to see Jack sprawled in his little two-wheeled carriage, both hands clutching his abdomen, where an arrow projected from his body at right angles. “It’s a damned shame,” he whispered. “Come all this way to die here and now…”

Jimmy was torn, like a man on the rack, between his desire to go and kill some black people, and the strictures of the Fifth Commandment. “Dad!” he cried, dismounting, and crossing over to the carriage in a couple of strides. He put his hand up to Jack’s face as if to give him a tender caress—then clamped his father’s jaw between thumb and fingers and wrenched his head this way and that, inspecting him. “You still bear the marks o’ the beatin’ we gayave ya—an’ to think you’ll carry ’em to yer grayave.”

“To me they’re like the sweet kisses I never had from the two of you—and never deserved—”

“Aw, Dad!” Jimmy cried, and planted one directly on Jack’s lips. Fortunately from Jack’s point of view it only lasted a few seconds—then Jimmy grunted, bit his father’s lip, and spun away from him, clutching his ribs.

Danny was looking down on them coolly from the back of his horse, holding a bow whose string was still quivering. “When you’re finished, tell me so I can go an’ throw up. Then we’ve a score to settle with those Nayars, or what e’er the fook you call ’em.”

Jimmy bent down stiffly and picked up the arrow that Danny had just loosed into his ribs. It had a blunt tip.

“Take two—you’ll be needing ’em,” Jack said, handing Jimmy the one that had bruised him in the stomach.

A couple of Nayars charged each other in the middle of the street nearby, and fell into a terrific duel with bamboo swords.

“I’m startin’ to like the looks o’ this town!” Jimmy said. “May we use firearms?”

“I do not think it would be considered sporting,” Jack said, as Danny shot a blunt arrow into the chest of a strapping Nayar who was just emerging from a doorway. A dozen arrows swarmed from the windows of the same dwelling and knocked Danny out of the saddle.

“Ye basetards!” Jimmy bellowed, and charged the doorway before the snipers could nock a second flight of arrows.

“Run along and play, boys,” Jack said—unnecessarily. He and Enoch slapped their bullocks’ reins and went into motion. Soon the street debouched into a sort of waterfront plaza hacked out of the mangroves. Diverse small river-boats and coastal craft were tied up along the quay, reminding Jack, in a very imprecise way, of Thames-side. Turning their heads they could look downstream to the inlet that served as Queen Kottakkal’s chief, and only, harbor. A dozen or so larger vessels rode at anchor there, and their appearance made Enoch chuckle. “Nowhere have I seen a more motley collection of pirate-vessels—not in Dunkirk, not even in Port Royal of Jamaica. Turkish galleots, Arab dhows, Flemish corvettes—is there anything they won’t use?”

“To carry guns and to sail fast are the only requirements,” Jack said. “The dhow, second from left, is the vessel she took from us.”

And then both men naturally turned their heads to gaze southwards across the river. The opposite bank was a stone bluff undercut by the current, so that it bulged out towards them slightly, then rose to a plateau some ten fathoms above their heads. This was not extraordinarily high, but it sufficed to command the river and the inlet with batteries of forty-eight pounders and mortars that could be seen, here and there, protruding from embrasures at the corners of Queen Kottakkal’s palace wall. It was difficult to make out where the natural cliff left off and the built wall began, for both were concealed deep behind a mat of interwoven vines, some as thick as tree-trunks, that had grown outwards to a depth of yards. This hanging jungle was home to a whole nation of adventurous monkeys with prehensile tails. The vines that grew on the Queen’s fortifications were of diverse species, but all of them seemed to be flowering. These were not roses or carnations but ripe dripping fleshy organs of sweet light, big as cabbages, grown in shapes that Euclid never dreamed off, organized in clusters, networks, and hierarchies. At the moment all were facing into the sun, so that the jungle-wall blazed with shocking color. It looked as if some fabulously wealthy pirate-nation had laid siege to the place and bombarded it with giant rubies, citrines, pearls, opals, lumps of coral, and agates, which had lodged in the cliff and been left there. It hummed and teemed with the energy of a million bees and a thousand hummingbirds that had been drawn to the place from all over the South Seas by the cataract of narcotic fragrance that came out of it. Compared to this, the mossy domes of the palace above and the blunt muzzles of its guns, were as dim as old paint.

Getting up there, if they had not been invited, would have been a short, fatal adventure. As it was, Jack and Enoch were conveyed across the river without losing any limbs to crocodiles, and ascended to the palace without running afoul of any trap-doors or poison-dart barrages. They followed a series of stairways—some external, winding up the stone cliff-face among the vines, and some internal, cut through the stone. Finally they emerged into a small courtyard surrounded by walls with many arrow-slits: a killing-ground for invaders. But a door was opened and so they entered into the palace.

Very little of Queen Kottakkal’s palace was really indoors: It was a complex of gardens, terraces, temple-courts, and plazas divided one from the next by a sparse net-work of roofed galleries, with apartments situated here and there.

“Normally it is teeming with Nayars,” Jack offered, “especially when so many pirate-ships are in the harbor. But they are all down in the town, enjoying the mock-battle.”

He led Enoch on a short excursion down a gallery and across agarden to the very door of a large stone dwelling with diverse balconies and windows. But he drew up short when he noticed a sheathed sword leaning against the door-post. Jack shushed Enoch with a finger to his lips, and did not speak until they had put a hundred paces behind them.

“It was a good enough sword,” Enoch said, “some sort of Persian shamsir, to judge from its extreme curvature and slender blade. But methinks you show it more respect than is warranted…”

“These Malabar women are as free with men, as Charles II himself was with women,” Jack explained. “In these parts, a man can never tell which children are his. Or to put it another way, every man knows his mother but hasn’t the faintest idea who his father might be. Consequently, all property passes down the female line.”

“Including the crown?”

“Including the crown. One peculiarity of this arrangement is that a man, going in to pay a call on a lady, never knows what other man he might discover in her bed. To prevent awkward situations, a gallant therefore leaves his weapon leaning against the door-post when he enters—as a sign to all who pass by that the lady’s attentions are spoken for.”

“So the Queen is passing some time with a Persian? Odd, that.”

“The weapon is Persian. Dappa—our linguist—bought it in Mocha when we passed through there years ago. Of all of us, he is the only one who has made much headway in learning the Malabar language.”

“He is putting it to good use!”

“He has already put it to good use by convincing the Queen that he and the others have a higher calling than to be slaves.”

And with that Jack opened the door to another, much smaller apartment, and led Enoch through to a terrace at the back that looked out over the harbor. European-style tables and chairs had been brought out here. Two men were working over messes of palm-leaves covered with writing, figures, maps, and diagrams: Monsieur Arlanc and Moseh de la Cruz.

They were only mildly surprised to see Jack. Enoch Root required a bit of explanation—but once Jack adumbrated that the stranger had something to do with cannons, the others welcomed him. Moseh, Jack, and Monsieur Arlanc fell quickly into a detailed conversation about the ship. They were speaking Sabir, which was the only tongue they all shared. Enoch could not perfectly follow it. He drifted away to gaze out over the Laccadive Sea, and then turned his attention to some ink drawings that had been pegged to the wall.

“Is this art Japanese?” he inquired, breaking in abruptly.

“Yes—or at least, the fellow who made it is,” Jack said. “We were just talking about him. Let’s go and introduce you to Father Gabriel Goto of the Society of Jesus.”

I was driven out of my native country by a dreadful sound that was in mine ears, to wit, that unavoidable destruction did attend me, if I abode in that place where I was.

—JOHN BUNYAN,
The Pilgrim’s Progress

Gabriel Goto had politely declined to work as a pirate and so Queen Kottakkal had put him to work as a gardener. Some suspected that he did not work very hard, for compared to most of the palace—which was continually in danger of being overrun and conquered by its vegetation—Gabriel Goto’s plot was a desert. He’d been put in charge of a courtyard in the landward corner of the palace grounds that was perpetually shaded by tall trees and by an adjacent stone watch-tower, yet sorely exposed to storm-winds, and poorly drained. It had defeated many a gardener. Gabriel Goto settled the matter by growing nothing there, except for moss, and the odd stand of bamboo. Most of the “garden” consisted of stones, raked gravel, and a pond sporting a brace of bloated, mottled carp. Every so often the Jesuit would drag a rake across the gravel or throw some food at the fish, but most of the work involved in the upkeep was mental in nature, and could not be accomplished unless his mind was clear. Clearing his mind was an extraordinarily demanding project requiring him to sit crosslegged on a wooden patio for hours at a time, dipping a brush into ink and drawing pictures on palm leaves. At any rate, this corner of the palace no longer bred mosquitoes and poisonous frogs as it had formerly been infamous for doing, and so the Queen left him alone.

The results of Gabriel Goto’s artistic labors were neatly stacked, and in some cases baled, almost to the ceiling of the apartment behind his patio. More recent work had been hung from lines to dry in the breeze.

“It is the same landscapes over and over,” Enoch Root observed, browsing his way down a clothes-line of rugged and none-too-cheerful-looking scenes: mostly hills and cliffs plunging into waters speckled with outlandish square-sailed vessels.

“The work, as a whole, is called One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata,” said Moseh de la Cruz helpfully.

“This is my favorite: Breakers on the Reef Before Katsumoto,” said Monsieur Arlanc—delighted to have someone to speak full-dress French to. “So much is suggested by so little—it is a humbling contrast with our Barock style.”

“Bor-ing! Give me Korean Pirate Attack in the Straits of Tsushima any day!” Jack put in.

“That is fine if you like vulgar sword-play, but I believe his finest work is in the Wrecks: Chinese Junk Aground in Shifting Sands, and Skeleton of a Fishing-Boat Caught in Tree Branches being two notable examples.”

“Are all of his pictures about Hazards to Navigation?” asked Enoch Root.

“Have you ever seen a nautical picture that wasn’t?” Jack demanded.

“Over here, you can see the Massacre of Hara triptych,” said Moseh.

“Let’s go find the samurai,” Jack said. And they did, passing in a few steps through the wee house he’d fabricated out of sticks and paper—or, to be precise, palm leaves. His swords—a long two-hander and a shorter cutlass—rested one above the other in a little wooden stand. Jack went over and peered at the longer of the two. It had come from the collection of an Algerian corsair-captain, but according to Gabriel Goto it had unquestionably been forged in Japan at least a hundred years ago. And indeed the shape of its blade, the style of the handle, and the carving of the guard were unlike anything else Jack had ever seen, which argued in favor of its being from what by all accounts was the queerest country on the face of the earth. But the actual steel of the blade was (as Jack had noted, and remarked on, in Cairo years before) marked with the same swirling pattern shared by every other watered-steel blade, be it a Janissary-sword forged in Damascus, a shamsir from the forge of Tamerlane in Samarkand, or a kitar from the wootz-vale.

Having confirmed this memory to his own satisfaction, Jack straightened up and turned around and nearly butted heads with Enoch Root, who was just in the act of noticing the same thing. To his great satisfaction Jack saw amazement on the alchemist’s face, followed by a few moments of what looked almost like fear, as he came aware of what it might mean.

“Let’s hear what the artist has to say for himself,” said Jack, and slid a translucent screen aside to reveal the flinty garden, and Gabriel Goto sitting with his back to them, holding a brush with an ink-drop poised on its sharp tip.

GABRIEL GOTO’S STORY
[AS NARRATED IN CLERICAL LATIN TO ENOCH ROOT]

“I have never seen Japan. I know it only from pictures my father drew, of which these are but miserable plagiarisms.

“From the others you have heard stories that are as complicated as a Barock church or Ottoman mosque. But the Japanese way is to be simple, like this garden, so I will tell my tale with as few brush-strokes as possible. Even so it will be too many.

“Those who have ruled Japan, be they monks, emperors, or shoguns, have always depended upon local knights, each of whom is responsible for looking after some particular piece of land—seeing to it that this land produces well and that the people who work it are orderly and content. Those knights are called Samurai, and as with the knights of Christendom, it is their responsibility to keep arms and to bear them in the service of their lord when called upon. My family have been Samurai for as long as we choose to remember. The lands for which we were responsible were of little account, being in a high cold stony place, and we were held in no special regard by others of our class.

“The story is related that an ancestor of ours had split his holdings between two sons, giving the paddies to his first-born and the rocks to the other. Each spawned his own branch of the family: one rich, dwelling in low-lands and distinguishing itself in wars, the other a clan of coarse mountain-dwellers, not known for their loyalty, but allowed to remain in existence because neither were they known for martial prowess.

“The tale of these two clans goes on for centuries, and is as fraught with complications as the history of Japan itself—someday when we are on a long sea-voyage perhaps I will relate more of it. What is important is that copper and then silver were discovered in the rocky up-lands. This was about two hundred years ago, at a time when the shogun turned his back on the affairs of the world and went into retirement, and Japan ceased being a unified country for a very long time—like Germany today. All power fled from Kyoto to the provinces, and each part of the country was controlled by a lord called a daimyo, something like a baron in Germany. These daimyos clashed and strove against each other ceaselessly, like stones on a pebble beach grinding each other. Ones who met with success built castles. Markets and cities formed round their walls. Markets require coins, and so each daimyo began to mint his own currency.

“What it amounts to is that this was a dangerous time to be a warrior but an excellent time to be a miner. As my ancestors—being Buddhists—would have expressed it, the two clans were bound to opposite points of the Wheel, and the Wheel was turning. Those lowland warriors allied themselves with a daimyo who was not deserving of their trust, and lost two consecutive generations of males in battle. My ancestors—the uplanders—moved down from the mountains and into apartments in another daimyo’s castle, not far from Osaka Bay, near Sakai, which in those days was a free city devoted to foreign trade, like Venice or Genoa. This happened about a hundred and fifty years ago, which was the same time that the Portuguese began to come up from Macao in tall ships.

“The Portuguese brought Christianity and guns. My ancestors embraced both. To people living in Sakai in those days it must have seemed an intelligent choice. The harbor was crowded with European ships bristling with cannons and flying Christian banners from every spar. Also, the Jesuits liked to establish missions in poor areas, and despite the silver mines, our ancestral land was still poor. So when a mission was established there at the invitation of my great-great-grandfather, the miners and peasants embraced Christianity without hesitation. Here was a creed that preached to the poor and the meek, and they were both.

“At the same time my great-great-grandfather was learning the secrets of gunsmithing, and teaching this skill to the local artisans. Men whose fathers had hammered out hoes and shovels were now making firelocks worth a hundred times as much.

“Now the peasants who lived down below, working the paddies, began to make trouble for their Samurai, our cousins. Some of these peasants began to turn Christian, which our cousins abhorred; others were growing disrespectful of their lords, who seemed to have lost the mandate of heaven. In those days there was a thing called katana-gari which means sword-hunt, in which the Samurai would search the peasants’ homes for armaments. They began to find not only swords but firearms.

“So naturally the cousins allied themselves with powerful men who sought to unify Japan. This tale extends across three generations and as many shoguns—the first two being Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi—and has more twists and turns than a game trail over the mountains. The long and the short of it is that they threw in their lot with Tokugawa Ieyasu, who, a hundred years ago, won the Battle of Sekigahara, in part by using foot-soldiers armed with guns. In that battle my cousins won glory, and they won even more in the storming and the destruction of Osaka Castle, which took place in the Year of Our Lord 1615. My father was eighteen years old at the time, and he was one of the defenders of that castle, and of the Toyotomi family which was extinguished on that day.

“The Wheel had turned again. The Tokugawa shogunate claimed a monopoly on the minting of coins—my family lost its chief source of revenue. Firearms were banned—another source of income vanished. Foreign trade was strictly controlled—Sakai became an island cut off from the rest of Japan. But worst of all, for my family, was that Christianity had been outlawed. My father had not been the only Christian to have allied himself with the Toyotomi family, and Tokugawa Ieyasu believed that the Jesuits and the Toyotomis, allied together, were the only force that could defeat him. Both were extirpated.

“At the time of my father’s birth there were a quarter of a million Christians in Japan and at the time of his death there were none. This did not occur all at once but gradually, beginning with the execution of a few Jesuit missionaries in the Year of Our Lord 1597 and culminating forty years later in a few great battles and massacres. My father perhaps did not really grasp what was happening until it was nearly finished. His brother had gone back to our ancestral land to look after the mines and practice Christianity in secret. My father remained in Sakai for a while trying to make a living in foreign trade. But first this fell under the strict control of the shogun, and from there it was gradually choked off. The Portuguese were banned altogether because they kept bringing over priests disguised as mariners. Sakai and Kyoto were closed to foreign trade altogether. Only Nagasaki was left open, and only to the Dutch, who—being heretics—did not care about saving Japanese souls from eternal fire, and only wanted our money.

“So my father had become a masterless Samurai, or ronin—one of a large host of Christian ronin brought into being by the policies I have described. He moved round to the opposite coast of Honshu—the coast that faces towards Korea and China—and worked as a smuggler. He smuggled silk, pepper, and other goods to Japan, and smuggled fugitive Christians out to Manila.

“Now, formerly my family had had no contacts with Manila whatsoever, because we were exporters of silver. If the commerce of Asia is like a fire, then silver is like the air blown into it to make it blaze up, and Manila is the bellows. For it is to Manila that the Spanish galleon sails every year, full of silver from the mines of New Spain. My family’s mines could not compete against this, and so in generations past we had been more apt to trade with Macao, and other ports on the coast of China—a vast country that is eternally ravenous for silver.

“But in that time Japan refused to accept ships from Macao, even at Nagasaki, because Portuguese priests, who longed for martyrdom, used Macao as their point of departure. My father’s contacts in Macao dried up, or moved to Manila. By that time he was no longer in the silver business anyway. So he began to trade between Manila and a certain smuggler’s harbor in northern Honshu, near Niigata. His fame spread as far as Rome, and soon Jesuits began to arrive in Manila from Goa in the west and Acapulco in the east, and to request him by name. He would take them up to Niigata, where they would be met by Japanese Christians who would take them up into the mountains to preach the Word of the Lord and serve holy communion in secret. But at the same time my father would bring aboard other Japanese Christians who had fled from this persecution. He would convey them down to Manila where there was, and is, a large community of such persons.

“So it went for a time. But in the Year of Our Lord 1635 the shogun decreed that thenceforward no Japanese could leave the Home Islands on pain of death, and that all Japanese currently abroad must return home within three years or face the same penalty. Two years after that, the Christian ronin staged a great rebellion on Kyushu and fought the forces of the shogun for half a year, but they were wiped out. Not much later the remaining Christians were obliterated at the Massacre of Hara. My father survived by virtue of several miraculous interventions by various Saints, which I will not enumerate since I know that you are a heretic who does not believe in such things, and made one last voyage to Manila where he took a young Japanese wife.

“I was born in Manila three years after Japan closed itself off from the world. When I was a boy I would beg my father to take me up on his boat so that I could see where we came from, but by then he was an old man and the boat was a worm-eaten wreck. He contented himself with painting pictures of the landmarks that he had used to navigate from Manila to his smuggler’s cove on Honshu. My efforts here—One Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata—are a miserable pastiche of the art that he made.

“My life has been uneventful by comparison. I grew up in Manila. The only people I ever saw were Japanese Catholics, and a few Spanish priests. Jesuit fathers taught me to read and write. Christian ronin taught me the martial arts. In time I took holy orders and was sent to Goa. I lived there for a few years, and developed some familiarity with the language of Malabar. Then I was dispatched to Rome, where I saw Saint Peter’s and kissed the Holy Father’s ring. I had hoped that the Pope would send me to Nippon to achieve martyrdom, but he said nothing to me. I was crushed, and in my self-indulgence I went through a time of doubting my faith. Finally I volunteered to travel to China to work as a missionary and perhaps be granted martyrdom there. I boarded a ship bound for Alexandria—but along the way we were captured by a galley of the Barbary corsairs. I killed a fairly large number of them, but then a member of my own ship’s crew, seeking to curry favor with the Turks who were soon to be his masters, hit me from behind with a belaying-pin, and ended my struggle. The Turks took us back to Algiers and gave the one who had betrayed me slow death on the hook. Me they offered work on a corsair-galley, as a Janissary. I refused, and was made to pull an oar instead.”

A paper door slid open, and from the darkness on the far side of it emerged a pair of ebony breasts and a tummy, followed in short order by their owner: Kottakkal, the Pirate Queen of Malabar. Behind her came Dappa, who was also naked from the waist up, but who had belted on his Persian scimitar. This accounted for the dim muttering sounds that had been audible through the paper wall for the last quarter of an hour: Dappa had been translating this story for the Queen.

She was a big woman, about as tall as an average European man, with broad hips that gave her exceptional stability when standing barefoot on the rolling deck of a pirate-ship, and were equally convenient to child-bearing—she had produced five daughters and two sons. She had a marvelous round belly covered in an expanse of smooth purplish-black skin. Jack always had the vague, dizzying sense that he was falling into it, and he suspected that other men felt the same. Her breasts showed the aftermath of many babies, but her face was quite beautiful: round and smooth except for a sword-scar under one cheekbone, with complicated lips that always had a knowing grin, or even a sneer, and eyelashes as black and thick as paint-brushes. Her head always seemed to be resting on a steel platter, or rather a whole stack of them, for whenever the Queen ventured out she wore—in addition to diverse gold bangles and rings—a stack of flat watered-steel collars that went over her head, and piled up into a sort of hard glittering neck-ruff.

Now the Queen spoke and Dappa translated her words into Sabir: “When we captured the gold-ship with Father Gabriel, Dappa, and Moseh—for Jackshaftoe and the others lacked the courage of those three, and had already lost their nerve, and jumped off into the water like panicked rats—”

Jack bowed low and muttered, “A pleasure to see you as always, Your Majesty.” but the Queen ignored him and continued:

“At any rate, my men were about to put them to death, for they assumed that this would please me. But then Father Gabriel recognized us as Malabari, and spoke to me in a way that pleased me even more, and so I suffered them all to live.”

“What did he say?” asked Enoch Root.

“He said, ‘It is your prerogative to cut my head off, but then I cannot tell you the story of how the Vagabond named Quicksilver achieved his long-planned revenge against a Frankish Duke in Cairo, and stole this hoard of Mexican gold.’ So I commanded him to tell me that tale before he was put to death. And this he did; but what he was really telling me was that he and his companions were worth more to me alive, as slaves, than as headless corpses bobbing in the Gulf of Cambaye.”

“Your Majesty chose wisely,” said Enoch Root.

“Often I have doubted it,” said the Pirate Queen. “Dappa is a linguist, which (he informs me) means a man with an excellent tongue, and he has found more than one way of putting his tongue to work pleasing me. Gabriel Goto makes a good, if peculiar, garden. Moseh seemed like a useless mouth. Many times my advisors urged me to break the group up and sell them at a loss. Indeed I was on the brink of doing so several times in the early going, for there is an excellent slave-market in Goa and another in Malacca. But when Jackshaftoe secured his jagir from the Great Mogul, everything changed, and the construction of the ship began. Lately even my most skeptical captains have been vying with each other for the honor of supplying the ship’s masts.”

“I was wondering where you were going to obtain masts.”

“Come with me, O Bringer of Armaments,” said Queen Kottakkal, and whirled around and stalked out through Gabriel Goto’s paper house. She moved so decisively that the wind of her passage peeled dry palm-leaves from stacks of finished artwork. The men hastened to catch up with her, creating a wind of their own, and gloomy drawings of Hazards to Navigation rose into the air and careered back and forth, spinning and sailing lazily on the heavy air. Among these Jack noticed some letters brushed in what he took to be the Japanese script—these were on rice-paper and had a weather-beaten and well-traveled look about them.

“What news from your brush-buddies in Nippon and Manila?”

Gabriel Goto’s face did not betray any particular reaction, but he turned his head suddenly toward Jack. “Normally I do not look to you to voice any interest in the internal broils of Nippon and the exiled Christian ronin of Manila,” he announced starkly.

“But now that I am a king of sorts I must broaden my interests—so indulge me.”

“The shogun continues to hoard silver for internal use—which amounts to saying that he has been making the Dutch at Nagasaki accept gold coins for the goods that they unload from their ships. But recently the shogun devalued gold to the point that the Dutch are forced to take their compensation in the form of vast quantities of copper coins instead.” He stopped and inspected Jack’s face for signs of incomprehension or boredom. They were following the others across a courtyard where Hindoo statuary lurked in cascades of ripe flowers, and fountains fed melodious brooks.

“Don’t be such a tease!”

“All such matters are now firmly controlled by a family called Mitsui—they have founded what you would call a banking house.”

“I ween you’ve been in touch with your uncle’s people—the miners.”

“How did you know this?”

“Why, it’s obvious that the devaluation of gold had great import for anyone running a copper mine in Nippon.”

Gabriel Goto, seemingly shocked at having been found out, said nothing. They had entered into the Queen’s apartments and were pursuing her down a gallery. She was deep in conversation with Enoch Root, but Jack got the impression that during the pauses, when Dappa was translating, Enoch was cocking an ear towards them.

Gabriel went on: “Since your inexplicable and new-found interest in Nipponese currency fluctuations is so marked, then, Jack, I shall warn you that it is all very complicated. The shogun has actually made several devaluations, trying to draw more metal from the ground and increase the supply of money, which in his view will bring about a corresponding increase in the amount of goods produced. Or so it seems from a miner’s perspective—which, after all, is the only perspective available to me.”

They were ascending a stone staircase, working against a current of cooler salt air. “Tell me of more complications,” Jack said.

“You probably imagine my people still working the same land that we were bequeathed many centuries ago. But we lost that land as part of the evolutions I spoke of, and my surviving relatives fled generally northwards, to be closer to the smuggling ports, and farther from Edo. Edo has a million people now.”

“It is impossible for a city to be that large.”

“It is the largest city in Creation, and no place for Christians.”

They had gained the top of the stairs now, and were crowding into a chamber that opened onto a balcony. From the rail of this balcony—the highest part of the palace—they could look down the vine-and flower-covered cliff below and out across the inlet where most of the Queen’s pirate-fleet rode at anchor. The ships seemed to float in mid-air, such was the transparency of the water, and underneath them schools of bright fish maneuvered through coral formations.

“Behold!” said the Queen, sweeping out one bangle-covered arm. Actually she said something in Malabari, but obviously it meant “Behold” and Dappa did not bother with a translation.

A peculiar sort of cargo-handling operation was under way down below: two pairs of small boats, each pair lashed together abeam of each other with logs spanning the gap between them. One of these makeshift catamarans was following several lengths behind the other, and the distance between them was bridged by a colossal tree-trunk, spoke-shaved smooth, and painted barn-red.

Jack heard Dappa speaking in English to Enoch Root: “Normally I would not be so presumptuous as to proffer advice to you on any subject, least of all manners and protocol—but I urge you, sir, not to ask the Queen where she obtained that mast.”

“I accept your counsel with gratitude,” said Enoch Root.

It was obvious that the mast had just been brought in by one of the Queen’s fleet: a frigate of European design. She was the largest ship in the harbor, but much smaller than the one being built on the beach in Dalicot, and so the mast dwarfed her—it was longer than the frigate’s deck, and must have projected forward and aft before it had been unlashed and let down onto those boats.

The boat-crews were paddling toward the shore as gamely as they could, though half the men were laboring with bails; gouts of water flew from the boats in all directions and slapped the surface of the harbor, only to rush back in over the gunwales during the next swell. Jack wondered whether he was about to witness a disaster, until he heard men in the boats, and on the shore, laughing.

Then he turned his attention back to Gabriel Goto. “But if your family are reduced to Vagabonds, how comes it they know so much of currency devaluations—and how do they write you letters on fair-looking rice-paper?”

“The short answer is that they remain bound to the same ancient Wheel, which has not ceased to turn.”

“The shogun wants metal to come from the ground—and in order to make it so, the House of Mitsui needs your cousins and nephews.”

“That is not the only thing on the shogun’s mind. In the far north, the Russians are on the move. Mostly it has been adventurers and fur-traders, ranging from outposts in Kamchatka, the Kurils, and the isles of the Aleuts. But there is a new Tsar in Russia named Peter, a man with a formidable reputation, who has even traveled to Holland to learn the art of shipbuilding—”

“I know all about this Peter,” said Jack. “Jan Vroom worked by his side, and Peter wanted him to come to Russia and build ships there. But Vroom saw the prospect of more profit, and warmer climes, in the offer of van Hoek.”

“In any event,” said Gabriel Goto, “Peter’s fame has reached the court of the shogun. Obviously Russia will one day threaten Nippon from the north. When that day arrives, Nippon will be defenseless against Peter’s Dutch-style ships and al-jebr-trained gunners, unless we are well established in northern Honshu and on the vast island to the north—a wilderness full of blue-eyed savages, called Ezo, or Hokkaido.”

“So your family may be doubly useful to the shogun. You can mine copper, and you have an interest in moving northwards.”

Gabriel Goto said nothing, which Jack took to mean yes.

“Tell me—has the shogun’s concern about this military threat led him to relax his ban on firearms?”

“He imports books of rangaku, which means ‘Dutch learning,’ so as to keep abreast of developments in fortifications and artillery. But the ban on guns will never be lifted,” said Gabriel Goto firmly. “The sword is the symbol of nobility—it is what marks a man as a Samurai.”

“How many Samurai are there in Japan?”

Gabriel Goto shrugged. “Their proportion to the entire population is somewhere between one in ten, and one in twenty.”

“And there are a million souls in Edo alone?”

“That is what I am told.”

“So, between fifty and a hundred thousand Samurai in that one city—each of whom must possess a sword?”

“Two—the long and the short. Many have more than one set, of course.”

“Of course. And is watered steel as desirable there as it is everywhere else?”

“We may be isolated, but we are not ignorant.”

“And where do the sword-smiths of Nippon get this kind of steel?”

Gabriel Goto inhaled sharply, as if Jack had strayed into the middle of his garden and left muddy foot-prints in the white gravel. “This is a great secret, the subject of legends,” he said. “You know that most Japanese are Buddhists.”

“Of course,” said Jack, who hadn’t known.

“Buddhism came from Hindoostan. And so did some of our other traditions that are very ancient—such as tea…”

“And steel,” Jack said, “which for centuries has been imported, by the finest swordsmiths of Nippon, from India, in the form of small egg-shaped ingots with a distinctive cross-hatch pattern.”

For once Gabriel Goto was openly dumbfounded. “How did you come to know this!?”

Down below, the narrow end of the giant mast had plowed into the beach. One pair of boats was being abandoned by drenched rowers. The other group was thrashing the water, trying to wheel the trunk around so it could be rolled up onto dry land. At a glance it seemed not to be moving at all. But move it did, as slowly as the minute-hand of a clock—as steadily as that mysterious Wheel that Gabriel Goto was always speaking of.

“You want to return to this homeland that you have never seen,” Jack said. “It could hardly be more obvious.”

Gabriel Goto closed his eyes and turned towards the Laccadive Sea. The onshore breeze blew his long hair back from his face and made his kimono billow like a colorful sail. “When I was a boy standing at my father’s knee and watching him paint his pictures of the Passage to Niigata, he told me, over and over again, that Nippon was now a forbidden land to us, and that the places he was drawing were places I would never see. And that is just what I believed for most of my life. But let me tell you that when I stood in Saint Peter’s, in Rome, waiting to kiss the Pope’s ring, I looked up at the ceiling of that place, which was magnificently adorned by a painter named Michelangelo. Not in Latin, English, or Nipponese are there words to express its magnificence. And that is the very reason for its being there, for sometimes pictures say more than words. There is a place in that painting where the Heavenly Father reaches out with one finger toward Adam, whose hand is outstretched as I am doing here, and between the fingertips of the Father and the Son there is a gap. And something has leapt across that gap, something invisible, something that not even Michelangelo could portray, but anyway it has crossed from the Father into the Son, and the Son has been awakened by it, and been infused with awareness and purpose. At the moment that I stood there in Saint Peter’s and saw all of these things, understanding suddenly came into my mind, bridging the gap of miles and years that separated me from my father, and I became aware for the first time. I understood that even though with his words he had forbidden me to return to Nippon, in his pictures he had told me that one day I must return—and in those same pictures he had given me the means.”

“You believe that the Hundred and Seven Views of the Passage to Niigata are a sort of nautical chart, telling you how to return?”

“They are better than a chart,” said Father Gabriel Goto of the Society of Jesus. “They are a living memory.”

HALF THE TOWN WAS PULLED away from their mock-battle to heave the mast up onto the beach, and eventually three elephants were brought into play. Through the Queen’s spyglass, which had evidently been pilfered from some Portuguese sea-captain’s personal effects, Jack could see his sons—now half-naked, and covered with bruises—striving alongside Nayar youths to land this prize. Eventually it was paraded through the town, garlanded with flowers, bristling with incense-sticks, and then it was made the centerpiece of more merry-making, which continued into the night. In earlier years Jack would have been at the center of this, but as it was, he delegated the revelry to Jimmy and Danny, and spent most of the evening huddled with Enoch and the other members of the Cabal.

Everyone in the town slept late the next morning, save a few sentries and low-caste laborers. Jack reckoned it would be a simple matter to find his sons passed out under a palm-tree somewhere. But he could not find them. The tide was about to go out, and men on ships were calling his name. Jack returned to the top of the cliff, intending to wake up Monsieur Arlanc and ask him to search for Jimmy and Danny later. But on his way to the apartment where the Huguenot slept, Jack detected volcanic emanations from the Queen’s chambers, and detoured thataway out of curiosity. As he approached her door he saw not just one but two sets of weapons leaned up against the door-posts: European muskets and cutlasses. Dim moanings, mutterings, and controversies emanating from the other side of that door told Jack that the boys had finally found what they had been looking for in the way of Oriental decadence, though Jack honestly could no longer tell it apart from the Occidental kind. In any event Jack left the boys there to pursue their own story while he sailed away to pursue his.

Two of Queen Kottakkal’s ships sailed on that tide, and turned opposite ways when they cleared the harbor. The one on which Jack was a passenger planned to coast southwards until it rounded Cape Comorin at the tip of Hindoostan. Then it would turn north and sally through one of the gaps in Adam’s Bridge—the chain of reefs and isles that stretched between the mainland and the Island of Serendib. From there it would be a short voyage to Dalicot, where the Cabal’s ship was being built. Their eventual purpose was to raid shipping around the Dutch settlements of Tegnapatam and Negapatam, and the English ones at Tranquebar and Fort St. David, but they said they would be happy to deposit Jack on the shores of his jagir, which was not too far north of those places. Enoch Root, meanwhile, took passage on a northbound ship, intending to make a rendezvous in Surat with a Danish merchantman that was ballasted with cannons, and that wanted to unload them to make space for saltpeter and cloth.

THREE MONTHS LATER JACK WAS a King no longer: merely a Vagabond sailor infringing on the hospitality of the Malabar pirate-queen. He and van Hoek, Jan Vroom, Surendranath, Padraig Tallow, and various Dutchmen sailed into Queen Kottakkal’s harbor aboard something that was close to being a ship. Her hull was painted and ballasted, her decks were in place, and a temporary foremast had been jury-rigged, giving her the ability to crawl through the water before a following wind. Her gunports were caulked shut. She was unarmed and helpless, but four of the Queen’s pirate-ships had escorted, and occasionally towed, her around Cape Comorin. She had not been christened yet—it had been decided to save that ceremony for when the masts were stepped, the guns installed, and all members of the Cabal on hand.

The cannons had preceded them, and were stacked on logs just above the tide-line. Jack, ever disposed to view things from a wretch’s standpoint, grasped right away that the movement of these objects from the hold of the Danish ship to their current position, concealed just within the first rank of palm trees, embodied a lavish expenditure of human toil—perhaps not so much as the Pyramids but still enough to give him pause.

For his part van Hoek, once he had sloshed ashore, stomped past the cannons without breaking stride, and did not even pause to light his pipe until he had encountered his three masts lying side-by-side in the middle of the town, out back of the Temple of Kali. He walked up and down the length of each one, stooping to inspect how they had been blocked up off the ground. He stood at their narrow ends and peered down them to check for undue curvature, and ambled up and down pounding on them with a pistol-butt and listening to the wood’s reverberations with a hand cupped to his ear. He frowned at cracks, as if he could weld these imperfections shut with his furious gaze, and rested his hand contemplatively on places that had been scarred by the sawing friction of hawsers, collisions with spars, and impacts of pistol-balls. At first van Hoek seemed in the grip of something that approached panic, such was his anxiety that the masts would be found wanting. Gradually this eased into the quotidian fretting and continual state of low-level annoyance that Jack knew to be the perpetual lot of all competent sea-captains.

Then the Dutchman stopped for a while to gaze at the butt of the mainmast. Nowhere was it more obvious than from this standpoint that what they were really looking at, here, was a stupendous tree-trunk, most likely from a virgin forest in America. In other places its nature was somewhat concealed by the carpenters’ work, and by bands of iron that had been hammered out in some enormous forge somewhere and, while still red-hot, slipped onto it like rings onto a finger so that as they cooled and shrank they would cut into the wood and become one with it. But here at the foot of the mainmast—which was almost as thick as van Hoek was tall—the tree’s growth rings, and the boundary between heartwood and sapwood, were obvious even through diverse layers of tar, caulk, and paint. Van Hoek had gazed upon it twice as he circled round the mast, and seen nothing untoward, But on this third circuit he came in closer and began to hammer at the wood with the pistol-butt. Jack heard a solid thunk, thunk and then a sharp whack; a moment’s silence; and then a cry from the Dutchman.

“What’s amiss? Smash your finger?” Jack inquired. Meanwhile Jan Vroom came loping out of the trees, looking a bit peaked, asking in Dutch if van Hoek had discovered rot in the mast’s heart.

Van Hoek was gazing incredulously at a flake of yellow metal embedded in the foot of the mainmast.

Now it was a longstanding tradition that whenever mariners stepped a mast they slipped a coin beneath it. Supposedly this was to placate sea-gods, or buy them passage to the afterlife when the ship went down to David Jones’s Locker and took them with it. Normally such a coin became embedded in the bottom of the mast and could be viewed the next time it was pulled out. Masts that had been stepped several times had as many coins stuck to their bottoms. This particular mast had three of them, but they had been painted over, and so were visible only as blurred scabs. Van Hoek had just knocked a disk of paint clean off one of them with a blow of his pistol-butt. It was a French louis d’or. And that was how it came about that Jack Shaftoe, Otto van Hoek, Jan Vroom, and an ever-growing crowd of curious Nayar children found themselves staring into the face of King Louis XIV of France, stamped in fine gold, out behind the Temple of Kali in Malabar.

“Really the coiner was a flattering knave,” Jack said. “In person he is not half so handsome as all that.”

Van Hoek let go his pistol, yanked a dagger from his belt, and assaulted the mast. Jack guessed he was trying to get the point of the weapon beneath the coin and worry it loose; but the way he was flailing and jabbering he was unlikely to succeed. Anyway Vroom, who was two heads taller, grabbed van Hoek’s arm on the backswing and stopped it. “It is bad luck! Leave the coin be!” Jack understood that much Dutch, anyway. He did not understand what van Hoek said in return—some sort of advanced calculus of luck, he gathered, in which the sacrilege of removing the coin was weighed against the ill omen of having a golden effigy of Leroy eternally planted in the heart of the ship.

Jack looked carefully left, right, and behind, in case cobras or crocodiles were creeping up on them, which in these parts was a routine precaution to take before fastening one’s attention on any particular thing for more than a few moments. Then he stepped round this dangerous pair of struggling Dutchmen, drew out his own pistol, and struck one of the other coins. Paint fell away to reveal William of Orange on an English guinea. A blow to the last remaining coin produced King Carlos II on a Spanish doubloon.

“For God’s sake, hasn’t he died yet!?” Jack exclaimed. “Twenty years ago people were expecting him to drown in his own spit at the next moment.”

Van Hoek calmed down and Vroom relaxed, but did not let go of his arms.

“As I read the signs, the Spanish made this mast in America for a treasure-galleon. English privateers then took it as a prize, or perhaps salvaged its wreck after some hurricanoe. Later those poor Englishmen ran afoul of the French Navy—courtesy of my old friend the duc d’Arcachon.” Jack pointed with his pistol-barrel to each of the coins in turn as he made this all up. “That French ship later came east, escorting some merchant-vessels of the Compagnie des Indes, where God only knows what befell it. At any rate, the Wheel has now turned again—you may consult our new Pilot, Father Gabriel Goto, for more concerning the Wheel—and the mast is now ours. So let’s put a fucking rupee underneath it and be on our way, shall we?”

“Still I do not like it,” said van Hoek, and fired a broadside of spit at the golden Louis. He aimed high, but the tobacco-brown loogie rolled down over the coin like a cloud of battle-smoke darkening the face of the sun.

FIRST THEY BROUGHT THE CANNONS aboard, which was unspeakably tedious and toilsome, but gave them something to pass the time while Monsieur Arlanc, Vrej Esphahnian, and Moseh de la Cruz journeyed back and forth to and from the wootz-forge. Refining the terms of the deal was no less exacting than making watered steel from river-sand. Transporting gold north and wootz-eggs south across frequently hostile territory was no easier, and would have been impossible without pervasive bribery, and an escort of mounted Nayars; Jimmy and Danny came home with wild yarns of sword-and gun-play in jungle and mountain.

But the day came when the ship had been sufficiently ballasted, with cannons, cannonballs, wootz-eggs, and other heavy objects, that the masts could be stepped without risk of capsizing her. It was agreed that this would be as good a day as any to christen her. So Jack made ready a bottle of fizzing wine from the province of Champagne that he had acquired at staggering expense from a French factor in Surat. The Cabal assembled upon the shore of the river, where the three masts had been lashed together along with some lighter, more buoyant logs and made into a sort of raft. The river’s current strove to push them out to sea, and this raft tugged at a line that had been tied around a tree-trunk a few yards upstream. A couple of juvenile crocodiles, no more than two yards long, had clambered up onto the mast-raft to warm themselves in the morning sun. Standing on the quay above said reptiles, Jack could gaze downstream to a flower-bedecked boat; a few hundred yards of mangrove-lined river; and finally out into the harbor where the mastless ship was riding at anchor with all of her cannons run out of her gunports in preparation to fire a salute.

The other members of the Cabal, dressed in the finest clothes they had, were already aboard the Queen’s boat. Jack wasn’t, because Queen Kottakkal had instructed him that “according to our traditions” he, Jack, was supposed to board last—after the Queen. And the Queen was still on the bank, talking to various Nayars who belonged to her court of pirate-captains and cavaliers. From time to time one of these Malabaris would glance interestedly at Jack. The Queen herself shot him an occasional glare. She had liked Jack’s looks as much as he’d liked hers when he had made his first state visit to Malabar almost three years ago, and after a day or two of steamy flirtation Jack had leaned his Janissary-sword against the door-post of her apartments. He had been making the (in retrospect rash) assumption that the Queen would know why he was called Half-Cocked Jack, but that she would be familiar with certain Books of India—that Her Majesty would, in other words, know certain lore that would make Jack’s shortcomings irrelevant.

As it had turned out—to make a long story (a story Jack wished every day he could forget) short—the tryst had gone more badly than Jack could ever have imagined. It turned out that Jack did not know the half of it where Books of India were concerned. That there existed certain advanced Books, unknown to, or at least unmentioned by, Eliza. That these Books enumerated diverse additional Sexes above and beyond the usual Male and Female, including a plethora of different categories of hermaphrodites. That each of these was not merely a Sex but a Caste unto itself, subject to diverse limits and regulations like any other caste. That, depending upon how certain ancient writings were translated into Malabari, Jack belonged to one or another of these hermaphroditic castes, and that consequently he ought to have gone about dressed in a certain type of clothing so that all and sundry would know what he was, and treat him well or poorly depending on whether they were of a lower or higher caste. That Queen Kottakkal was of a higher caste whose members were (to put it very mildly) not in the general habit of entertaining hermaphrodites in their bedchambers.

At any rate Anglo-Malabari relations had been set back centuries. Jack had barely escaped with his life. Moseh and other Cabal members who were the Queen’s slaves had spent the better part of a year apologizing. Since then, Jack had had difficulty meeting the Queen’s eye, and she had not spoken more than a few words to him—he had become a sort of out-caste, a sexual and social Cheruman.

Jack was reflecting upon these very topics, and watching a third, somewhat larger crocodile struggle up onto the mizzen-mast, when he realized with a bit of a shock that the Queen was speaking to him (albeit through Dappa), and in complete sentences, no less. She had boarded her boat now and was standing in the bow, facing upstream towards Jack. The rest of the Cabal, in their breeches, periwigs, robes, and kimonos, were seated behind her, listening with obvious curiosity.

“The gold is mine, Vagabond, not yours—dared you think otherwise?” said Dappa, translating for the Queen. Then, as an aside, he added, “She used a much more degrading term than ‘Vagabond,’ but…”

“You’re trying to spare my feelings—I understand. Tell the Queen that she stole it from us fair and square, just as we did from the Viceroy, and I’ve never imagined else-wise. Dappa, do you think she is on the rag or something?”

The Queen responded, “Then why do you try to deceive me by sailing away over the horizon on a great ship in which I have invested so much of what is mine?”

“Dappa, have you not acquainted Her Majesty with the basic principles of the ship-owning business? Do I have to explain shares? Do I have to remind her that most of the ship’s crew is to be hand-picked Malabaris? That both of her sons will be aboard? What is going on in her mind?”

“Very likely she is on the rag as you said,” Dappa responded, “and in a bit of a Mood because her boys are leaving the nest.”

The Queen said something. At the same moment she reached up with both hands and carefully removed one of the metal ornaments from her neck: a single watered-steel ring, like a dinner plate with a large hole in the center. She gripped it in one hand and curled it in towards her belly while turning sideways to Jack. Then suddenly her hand sprang outwards. The ring hissed through the air, narrowly missing Jack, and buried itself, shockingly deep, in the trunk of a tree.

“Stop talking to each other, and talk to me,” she said. Another ring came off her neck, and every man within a hundred yards cringed. She flung this one at a closer target: the line mooring her boat to the quay. It sang through the rope as easily as flying through a shaft of sunlight and vanished into the water with a sizzle. The boat began to drift downstream. Jack caught movement in the corner of his eye and turned back to look at the masts: they too had gone into ponderous movement, and were adrift in the river now—Queen Kottakkal’s first throw had cut their line.

A third ring spun out and embedded itself in the mainmast next to a coil of rope with a throwing-lead tied to its end. “Mark that rope,” said the Queen. “If you throw it to one of your friends on my boat, here, your masts are saved. If not, they drift out to sea, and all of you are my slaves to the end of your days.”

“Are you certain you translated that aright?” Jack inquired.

“I translated it perfectly,” said Dappa, gazing nervously at the departing masts.

“Have I gotten her general drift—that she wants me to swim through crocodile-infested waters to retrieve the masts?”

“The judicial machinery here is not well-developed,” Dappa announced. “There is only one sort of trial: and that is Trial by Ordeal.”

“I’m being put on trial here? For what offense?”

“For offenses you might commit in the future—which is to say that your honesty is being tried. Sometimes this might mean walking across fire. Other times, the defendant must swim through crocodiles. It is said to be an astonishing thing to watch—which may account for the custom’s perpetuation. I can supply all manner of lurid detail later, after you have survived—”

“If I survive, you mean!”

“But for now, would you please do something!?”

As the Queen had begun flinging her lethal jewelry about, half a dozen Nayars had vaulted aboard the boat and trained loaded blunderbusses upon the other members of the Cabal. They could do nothing but sit tidily on their benches, like churchgoers, and watch Jack. Looking at them Jack was struck—and not for the first time, either—by the fact that, ever since Cairo, all of them had tended to look to Jack to take action. In other lives or other circumstances they might’ve been doers of deeds and leaders of men. But put ’em all together, pose ’em a problem, and they’d all turn their eyes Jack’s way to see what he was going to do.

Which (come to think of it) had probably been noticed by Queen Kottakkal—so wise in the ways of men crowded together on armed Vessels, so backwards in her approach to judicial proceedings—and probably accounted for that it was Jack, and not van Hoek, or Moseh, who had been chosen to undergo the Trial by Ordeal.

The others followed his lead because of what he had done in Cairo. And Jack had done that deed because the Imp of the Perverse had somehow tracked him down in the Khan el-Khalili and convinced him that, rather than let the Duke live, and accept the perfectly reasonable deal that he was holding out, it would be better to slay him, and bring down consequences on himself and the others.

Everything that had happened since had been born in that moment. All of this Jack understood well enough. His only difficulty, just now, was that the said Imp had not followed him out as far as Malabar—or if it had, it had been waylaid by pirates and was now chained up in some dusty ’stan and being put to work (one could only suppose) getting rag-heads to do rash and imprudent things. At any rate the Imp was absent. And Jack—who at earlier times of his life would have dived without hesitation into the river—was strangely fixed to the spot, as if he were an old banyan-tree that had sunk a million roots into the earth. There were so many things to be said in favor of not attempting to swim through crocodiles that he simply could not move.

His comrades sat meekly in the Queen’s boat, staring at him. Jack loved certain of those men as well as he’d ever loved anyone, not counting Eliza. But various experiences of war, mutilation, slavery, and Vagabonding had made him into a hard man. He knew perfectly well that any galley chosen at random from the Mediterranean would contain a complement of slaves every bit as deserving of freedom as van Hoek, Moseh, and the others, and that none of them would ever be free. So why swim through crocodile-infested waters for these?

His sons were on the boat. Jimmy and Danny were not even looking at him. They were affecting boredom, convinced he would fail them, as always.

Enoch was on the boat, too. One day, Enoch would escape from Malabar. It might take a hundred years, but Enoch would escape and return to Christendom and spread the tale of how Jack Shaftoe had lost his nerve in the end and consequently spent his last years as a hermaphrodite butt-slave in a heathen pagoda.

Jack noticed, as if from a distance, that he was sprinting down the river-bank.

The masts had a bit of a head start. Jack’s path was eventually barred by mangroves, which formed a sort of living breakwater at the edge of the village. But there was a way through it, a path that people took over exposed roots and through brackish sumps, to get to the edge of the river where they would collect fish with nets or spears. Jack detoured through a cane house, snatching a couple of chickens as he ran across the yard. Too, a piece of bamboo caught his eye. It was rumored that you could wedge a crocodile’s jaws open with such a thing and so he grabbed this and tucked it under his arm.

Then—moving as fast as a man could over wet slick tree-roots with one chicken-neck clenched in each fist—he picked his way out to the river-bank just in time to see the masts gliding by. They had reached a place where the river widened and slowed, and dropped silt on its bottom to form a submerged bar. Jack was praying that the masts would get hung up on this. But of course Queen Kottakkal’s minions had put floats around the masts to make them ride high in the water and prevent it from happening.

The masts were ten yards away, moving at a fast walking pace. The intervening water was murky and still, broken only by nostrils and eyeballs, some of which were disconcertingly far apart. Jack estimated the number of animals at somewhere between eight and a dozen. They had observed him, and were beginning to cruise in his direction.

This was more or less how the Queen had planned it. In a few moments the masts would clear the bar and take to the harbor waters, which were much deeper and choppier. Jack could not swim in those waters; to stop those masts he had to make his move here in the shallows, and here was where all of the crocodiles lurked.

As an experiment Jack flung one of the chickens out. It did not fall nor fly, but wandered through the air for a while, then snagged a wing-tip in the water and plowed to a stop. Its head came up once to squawk. Then the surface was broken by an upper jaw about the size of a tavern bench. Jack only glimpsed it. The chicken vanished like a candle-flame thrust into water.

Like Frenchmen, crocodiles were what they were, and did what they did, and saw no point in making pretenses or apologies, and therefore possessed a sort of aplomb that Jack found admirable in a way. He wished only that God would send him some more mammalian enemies. Though, come to think of it, nothing was more evident than that Queen Kottakkal was a mammal—unless it was that she was his enemy, too. So perhaps it was a distinction without a difference.

The only plan Jack could conceive of was to throw the other chicken in another direction and divert the crocodiles’ attention long enough to make a dash for it. And this required shifting his burdens from hand to hand—the second chicken went to his right, the bamboo pole to his left. This was when he first became aware that the pole in question had a barbed metal head on one end. It was a fishing spear. A rope was trailing from the other end—Jack had been dragging it behind him, without knowing he was doing it, during his run through the swamp. Now he gave it a hard jerk. The knot at its far end (intended to keep the rope from slipping out of a fisherman’s hand) bounced off a mangrove-root and came flying towards him. Jack dropped the spear and snatched the knot out of the air. Ten seconds later it was noosed round the neck of the second chicken. He now tossed the chicken into a momentarily crocodile-free zone about halfway between him and the masts. The crocodiles naturally converged on that place, their warty backs lifting the surface of the water without breaking through. Jack took advantage of this to jump down into the water, wade forward several steps (it came up to mid-thigh), and fling the spear in a high arc over the masts. It landed flat in the water on the far side of them. Or Jack guessed as much from the sounds made—he could not linger to watch its trajectory, because two crocodiles were already climbing over each other to reach him. Jack scampered back up onto mangroves and drew his sword before turning around.

The second chicken had long since been swallowed, without any tedious chewing, by a big croc. The rope was still attached—it ran up the crocodile’s gullet, out of its mouth, and several yards across the water, over the mast-raft to the floating spear. As the masts moved downstream, the spear was dragged backwards across them, and inevitably the barbs in the spear-head snagged in some of the ropes binding the raft together. As to what happened inside of the crocodile’s gut when the rope went taut and tried to pull the chicken out, Jack could only speculate—and as to what was going on in the mind of the chicken (which might be in some sense still alive), that was a matter for metaphysicians. The outward result was that the masts stopped moving and the crocodile became highly annoyed. Jack supposed that a very big and old crocodile must take a certain pride in his work, viz. swallowing and digesting whatever came along, and that an attempt to revoke a meal by yanking it out must be viewed, by such a Reptile, as a very serious affront. In any event it led to an amount of thrashing. And that led to a bit of good fortune Jack had not really looked for: All of the other crocodiles seemed to hear or feel this commotion and made it their business to get there as fast as they could—which was disturbingly fast.

Jack, anyway, was not slow to take advantage of this, the only opportunity he was likely to get. He waded halfway to the masts and faltered when he felt the river-bottom falling out from under his feet, and the current trying to sweep his legs. His boots and weapons would make swimming impossible. He kicked off a boot, and was about to abandon it when something prompted him to turn around. Nostrils were headed his way. He flung the boot towards them and it vanished as quickly as the chickens had. A few moments later, the second boot joined it. Now Jack pulled off the belt that supported his sword and scabbard. The belt he flung at the crocodile; it paused for one heartbeat to consume it. The sword he flung at the mast-raft; it had the good grace to stick there. The scabbard he made as if to throw at the crocodile. Watching him through bulging slit-pupil eyes, it opened its mouth to catch it; but Jack held on to this morsel, turned it vertical, and shoved it between the crocodile’s jaws.

Now this turned out to be nothing more than a brief annoyance to the animal, and not the show-stopper Jack had been hoping for; but as Jack had demonstrated in diverse settings, sometimes it sufficed to be annoying. It took a few moments for this crocodile to shake the scabbard loose, and in that time Jack divested himself of his clothes. While another crocodile was swallowing those, naked Jack was swimming to the masts. While the two crocodiles were fighting over precedence, Jack was climbing onto the masts and retrieving his sword. A smaller crocodile came towards him with shocking speed, as if it were being towed on a rope behind a fleet ship, and made it halfway up onto the fore-mast on sheer momentum. Jack nearly took its head off and it fell into the water and became food for other crocodiles. Another stroke of the Janissary-blade severed the rope of the chicken and set the masts adrift again. The raft slowly began to move, and soon eased over the bar and into the harbor, spinning slowly in some vast unseen vortex.

The Queen’s boat was waiting there, and with a couple of throws Jack was able to get the line over to his comrades, who proceeded to reel him and the masts in like a fish.

Jack sensed that he was already badly sunburnt; yet the equatorial sun was a soothing balm compared to the glare of Queen Kottakkal.

“I perceive the wisdom of your tradition, O Queen,” Jack said as his mast-raft was brought alongside the royal barge, “for not one man in a thousand could survive the trial you set for me there. Andas near as I can make out, one in a thousand is the normal proportion of honest men in any group…”

But here Jack’s oration was rudely interrupted by screams from nearly every man on the boat. He turned around to see a giant crocodile, twenty feet long if it was an inch. It was not so much climbing onto the masts as thrusting them below the surface of the water with its weight, and then gliding up over the submerged wood. This meant that it was advancing toward him. But then suddenly it was raining Shaftoes as Jimmy and Danny vaulted down between Jack and the reptile, each gripping a boat-paddle, and began waving these in the animal’s face. It proceeded to chew its way up the wood as if the oars were breadsticks, and was well on its way to having Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe for lunch, and Jack for dessert, when the Nayars up on the boat opened fire with their blunderbusses.

A moment later the Malabar skies were split open by a long rippling train of explosions. Jack looked across the water to see the new ship obscured in a bank of gray smoke, and light jabbing out of it in all directions: The eager crew had misunderstood, and were firing a full salute to their approaching Queen and their ship’s officers. Jack felt the masts bob upwards under his feet, and glanced over to see quite a bit of blood where the crocodile had been.

The guns of Queen Kottakkal’s castle were firing a salute of their own now, and the Queen was ascending to the top of her barge to accept all of these honors. She had been overtaken by events, which happened to all monarchs; but like a good monarch she knew when to accept the strange verdicts handed down by Fortune and by crocodiles.

JACK, IN A BORROWED Nayar loincloth, raised the Champagne-bottle over his head and drew a bead on the ship’s bowsprit. “In the name of whatever passes for sacred in this hell-hole, I christen thee Eli—”

Halfway to its target, the bottle slapped into the suddenly out-thrust palm of Enoch Root.

“Don’t name it after her,” he said.

“Why not? That has always been my plan.”

“Do you really think it will go unnoticed? The lady is in a delicate position…even the figurehead bears a dangerously close resemblance to her.”

“D’you really suppose it’ll matter?”

“This ship is not destined to remain in Malabar forever. One day she will find her way back to some Christian port—and there are very few Christian ports left where Eliza is not, in some sense, embroiled.”

“Well, what the hell should we name it, then? Electress Sophie? Queen Kottakkal?”

“Sometimes it is better to be indirect…then each and every one of those Ladies can suppose that the ship is really named after her.”

“Not a bad idea, Enoch…but what does each of those three Ladies have in common?”

“Wisdom. Wisdom, and a kind of strength—a willingness to put her wisdom into effect.”

“Say no more,” Jack said, “I have seen the very Lady in plays.” Then, turning his attention back to the ship: “I christen thee Minerva.” A moment later French wine was fizzing on his sunburnt flesh, and the cannons were firing all round. Dappa was translating all to Queen Kottakkal, who looked Jack in the eye and smiled.

Book 5

The Juncto

The Thames

FEBRUARY 1696

“A GREAT HEAP OF CORD-WOOD and kindling, saturated with oil, was found on the brink of the cliff at Dover,” asserted Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar and Chancellor of the Exchequer, “ready to speed the news of his majesty’s assassination across the Channel.” Seated in the (more desirable) forward-facing bench of the boat, he held his head high, and gazed down the Thames as if combing the skies above the Nore for encrypted smoke-signals.

“It speaks well of the Jacobites that they have at last got their signals worked out,” was all Daniel had to say. “They have used up half of France’s wine and firewood celebrating false reports of William’s demise.”

Roger sighed. “You are as ever a fount of treasonous raillery. It is well that we meet on a water-taxi, where the only one who can overhear us, does not speak a word of English.” This a playful dig at the Cockney manning the oar. If Daniel had made the same jest, he’d have been pitched overboard, and the waterman would have been acquitted, at the Old Bailey, on grounds of All Too Understandable Righteous Fury. Somehow Roger said it with the wink that was as good as a one-pound tip.

“When we parley in a coffee-house,” Roger went on, “I flinch whenever you get that look on your face, and part your lips.”

“Soon I shall follow that other Seditious Libeller, Gomer Bolstrood, across the sea, and your flinching days shall be at an end.” Daniel, seated in the backward-facing seat, gazed wistfully toward Massachusetts.

“Yes, so you have been claiming, for the last ten years or so—”

“Closer seven. But to play fast and loose with quantities numerical is, of course, a perquisite—some would say, a necessity—of your office.” Daniel rotated his head a few degrees to the left and nodded in the direction of Westminster Palace, still and for the next few seconds visible around the elbow of Lambeth. This was a reference to the Exchequer, an avalanche of ill-considered additions to the river-ward side of the same Palace. It was there that Daniel had gone to meet Roger, and thence that they’d departed on this boat a few minutes ago.

Roger turned around, following Daniel’s gaze, but too late.

“I was looking at your Place of Business,” Daniel said. “It seems to have disappeared behind all of those immense stacks of rotting timbers that have accumulated there in recent years, along the Lambeth river-bend, in consequence of that no one can buy anything because there is no money.”

Roger blinked very slowly, once, which was a way of letting Daniel know that the jab had quite wounded him, but that the victim was in a forgiving mood.

“I should be ever so much obliged,” Roger said, “if you would attend to the very important news I am projecting in the general direction of your bloody ears. Forty men—gentlemen and titled nobility of England, for the most part—gathered yesterday on Turn-ham Green to fall upon the King of England, on his way back from hunting, and murder him.”

“Say, speaking of bloody ears—”

“Yes! He was among them.”

People hated listening to Daniel and Roger converse, for they’d known each other much longer than was decent, proper, or good for them, and so were able to communicate in a stunted zargon of private allusions. Bloody ears was here a reference to Charles White, the Jacobite Tory who had made a habit of biting Whigs’ ears off, and (or so ’twas rumored) later displaying them, in private, to like-minded friends, as trophies.

“In Calais, in Dunkirk,” Roger continued, “you’ll see ships crammed with French troops, waiting only for that signal-fire to blaze up before they set sail.”

“I see that you are furious. I understand why. If I am not, it is only because this is all so bloody repetitive that I can scarcely believe I am hearing it! Did we not go through this already?”

“What an odd reaction.”

“Is it? I could say the same about the bloody money. When are we to have money, Roger?”

“Some, Daniel, would say that the regrettable phænomena to which you allude were consistent, or persistent, or constant menaces to our liberties as Englishmen, and thus naturally to be confronted and subdued with manly vigor. For you to roll your eyes in this way, and deride them as merely repetitious—as if you were watching a play—is very strange.”

“That is why I am getting ready to excuse myself, and go out to the lobby for air.”

“The lobby is some labored metaphor, here, for Massachusetts Bay Colony?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you suppose Massachusetts will seem any less repetitious? The news that I get from there is just one bloody Indian-raid, and Mather-tirade, after another.”

“I shall be able to pursue work there, of an altogether novel character.”

“Yes—so you keep telling the Fellows of the Royal Society—all two dozen of us.”

“The correct figure is nearer eight dozen. But I take your meaning. We have dwindled. It is all because of Want of Novelty. I mean to fix that.”

“Here is novelty for you: When you come in sight of the French naval base at Dunkirk—”

“That is the second time you have spoken to me as if I were about to go on a voyage to France. What is troubling your mind, to inspire such phant’sies?”

“Troubled mind or no, I am, am I not, the sole benefactor and Chairman of the Court of Directors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”

“Sir, I am not aware that the said Institute has even been Instituted yet. But if it had, you’d be the Prime Suspect.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yes.”

“It follows that I am entitled to some say in how the sole employee goes about his work—do you not agree?”

“Employees get paid. They get paid money. Of which there is none.”

“You are really the most exasperating chap. How have you spent the past fortnight?”

“You know perfectly well I’ve been up at Cambridge helping Isaac clean out his lodgings.”

Roger affected astonishment. “I say, that wouldn’t by any chance be Isaac Newton the savant—?—! Why ever is he leaving Cambridge?”

“Coming down here—finally—to run the Mint,” Daniel allowed (this had been in the works for years; the Realm’s political complications, and Isaac’s mental disorders, had made it slow).

“They say he is the most brilliant fellow who ever lived.”

“He would give that distinction to Solomon; but I am with you, sir.”

“My goodness, do you suppose he’ll be up to the task of stamping out a few bits of metal?”

“If he is not fettered by Politicks.”

“Daniel, you offend me. What you have just said amounts to a suggestion that the Juncto is politically incompetent. May I remind you that Recoinage has been approved—by Commons as well as Lords? So we shall only have to put up with this rubbish for a little while longer.” The Chancellor of the Exchequer reached into his shoe and pulled out a wad of Bank of England paper money he’d stuffed into it to keep his feet warm, and waggled it in the chilly air for emphasis. Then—disgusted by the sight of it—he chucked it over his shoulder into the Thames. Neither he nor the waterman looked back.

“That was a foolish and profligate waste,” Daniel said. “We could’ve burned it to keep warm.”

“Tally-sticks make more heat, guv’nor,” volunteered the waterman, “and they are circulating at a discount of forty percent.”

“Isaac will be sworn in at the Mint at the beginning of May,” said Roger. “It is now February. How shall we occupy ourselves between now and then? Your intention is to carry forward that Comenius-Wilkins–Leibniz Pansophic Arithmetickal Engine–Logick Mill–Algebra of Ratiocination–Automatic Computation–Repository of all Knowledge project, is it not?”

“We need a better name for it,” Daniel conceded, “but you know perfectly well the answer is yes.”

“Then you really had ought to go have a chat with Leibniz first, or do you disagree?”

“Of course I don’t disagree,” said Daniel, “but even if money existed in this Realm, I should not possess any, and so I had not really considered it.”

“I found some old louis d’or, pre-debasement, in a sock,” Roger confided to him, “and should be pleased to advance them to you, while we wait for Isaac to stoke up the Mint.”

“What on earth would I do with French coins?”

“Buy things with them,” said Roger, “in France.”

“We are at war with France!”

“It has been a very slow war of late—one battle of consequence in the last two years.”

“Still—why should I go there?”

“It happens to be on the way to Germany, which is where Leibniz was, the last time anyone bothered to check.”

“It would be more prudent to avoid France.”

“But ever so much more convenient to go there direct—for that is where your jacht happens to be bound.”

“I have a jacht now, too?”

“Behold!” proclaimed the Marquis of Ravenscar. Daniel was obliged to swivel his head around and gaze downstream. They had, by this time, drifted past the Steelyard and were converging on the Old Swan Stairs, just above London Bridge. On the yonder side of the Bridge spread the Pool, which contained above a thousand ships.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what it is you want me to behold,” Daniel complained. “The Fishmongers?” For that was the closest thing along the azimuth that Roger was now forcibly indicating with bladelike thrusts of the hand.

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Roger, “she is at Tower Wharf, you cannot see her from here, let us go and pay her a visit.” And he alighted from the boat and stomped away up Old Swan Stairs without giving any money to, or even glancing back at, the waterman; who, however, seemed perfectly content. Roger must have an Understanding with him, as he seemed to with all London, a few Jacobites excepted.

FROM THE OLD SWAN, where they bated to warm themselves with pints, they could have walked half a mile along Thames Street and then applied themselves to the lengthy and complicated work of burrowing through the Tower’s gates, bastions, causeways, and the micro-neighborhoods that had grown up around, and occluded, the same, as vegetation on infected heart-valves. But Roger was of a mind to see a thing on the river side, and so they walked only far enough to get round the end of the Bridge, then descended the terraced rectilinear cove of Lion Stairs, below the barnlike mass of the Church of St. Magnus Martyr, which Wren had rebuilt, but not got round to putting a tower or a steeple on yet. Another waterman consented to take them downriver from there. Swinging wide round the riotous congestion of Billingsgate and the broad Key before the Customs House, they pounced upon Tower Wharf. For the most part this presented itself to them as a quarter-mile-long wall jumping straight out of the river. But it was adorned here and there with cranes, guns, a wee crenellated castle, and other curios. Two stairs and one arched tunnel were cut into it, and the waterman kept guessing Roger would go to one of those; but the Marquis of Ravenscar kept exhorting him on, on to the downstream end, where two brigs and a ship had been made fast to the wharf. Daniel instinctively looked at the smaller and meaner vessels, until he recollected that he was in the company of Roger; then he had eyes only for what was high and gaudy. They were looking up at the bows of the three-master. Its figurehead was extraordinary. Not only because it was covered in many square yards of gold leaf—that was common enough—but because of its sculpture. It was a face carved into the front of a bulbous golden sphere that seemed to be hurtling forth with utmost impetuosity, drawing behind it a vast swirling wake of golden, silver, and copper flames. It was, Daniel realized, an anthropomorphic phant’sy of a Comet or a great fiery—

“Meteor!” Roger announced. “Or Météore, as her former owner, Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon, would have it.” Then, to the waterman, “Take us up and down the length of her, and then, when Dr. Waterhouse has finished his inspection, we shall board her by yonder ladder. Daniel, I do hope you are in the mood for some ladder-climbing.”

“I’d climb a rope to see this,” Daniel returned.

“Mmm…any sane man, given a choice between scaling a rope, and going to France on a Duke’s jacht, would choose the latter…so I shall take your remark as a commitment to be in Dunkirk in three days’ time,” said Roger.

EARLIER IN HIS LIFE DANIEL would have counted the guns of Météore, but as it was he had eyes mostly for the woodcarving and the decoration. The shipwrights had made it appear that Météore was draped and festooned from stem to stern with garlands of golden laurel. Victory spread her wings across the breadth of the sterncastle, and drew all those wreaths and festoons together in one hand like so many reins, while brandishing a sword in the other. Above the spreading wings was a row of windows. “Your cabin,” Roger explained, “where refreshment awaits us.”

They dined there on a roast quail prepared in Météore’s galley, “which had to be gutted and re-built,” Roger said, “to remove the taint; for the late Duke had tastes abominable even to the French.” The azure tablecloth was embroidered with gold fleurs-de-lis; Daniel suspected it might have been a flag once.

“Is this ship yours now, then, Roger?”

“Please do not be vulgar by speaking of ownership, Daniel; as everyone knows, she was taken as a prize from Cherbourg the last time the Frogs got ready to invade us, and became a trifle for the King to dispose of as he wished; he had thoughts of bestowing her upon his Queen, and so had her repaired—”

“What, the Queen?”

“The ship. But when smallpox took her from this world—the Queen, that is, not the ship—Météore became a useless bauble, scarcely worth the upkeep—”

“You got this ship for free!?”

“Damn all Puritans and their base obsession with how much it costs!” Roger bellowed, shaking a tiny drumstick at Daniel’s brow as if it were the club of Hercules. “What matters is that the sentimental value of Météore to the de Lavardac family is very great. And who should be in Dunkirk just now but Eliza de Lavardac.” Roger lost focus for some moments. “I hope it is not all true, what people say about her and the pox.”

Daniel had seen the only woman he’d ever loved chewed up and vomited out by smallpox, and urgently desired a change of subject. “I begin to understand. The Whigs are seen as the party of the Bank, and of War. The Bank is said to be foundering and the War has ground to a halt.”

“Mind you,” put in Roger with one more admonitory shake of the drumstick, “the Bank shall succeed immensely, and we shall prevail over the French, all in good time; but it would help us if we could avoid losing the next election to Harley and Bolingbroke and his lot.” Meaning the Tories.

“And so you would make some peace-offering to the French. Eliza is seen as a sort of bridge between France and England. You would please her and her husband by returning Météore. And you would like me to go along—?”

“Somewhat as you went to the Hague in the days before the Revolution,” said Roger, “as the least likely imaginable diplomat.”

“The more often I am sent on such missions the more likely I must seem,” said Daniel, “but I shall go and deliver this boat to Eliza if that is what you want. From there it is on to Hanover.”

“It is extraordinary you should mention Hanover,” said Roger. “I have a message, too sensitive to commit to paper, that I should like you to deliver to our next Queen.”

“Are you referring to Sophie of Hanover? You confuse me, for our next Queen is named Anne, and lives in England.”

“Syphilitic like her sister and her dad,” Roger mumbled, as if Princess Anne were only the most fleeting of distractions, “unlikely to have viable children—whereas Sophie was an unstoppable baby-maker in her day. Mark my words, if we can only suffer through to the end of these poxy, Popish Stuarts, we’ll see Hanovers on the throne—and Hanovers are natural Whigs.”

“How does that follow?”

“Hanovers are natural Whigs,” Roger re-iterated. “Keep saying it to yourself, Daniel, an hundred times a day, until you believe it; and then say it to Sophie of Hanover as if you mean it.”

“Well, do not look up, Roger, but I phant’sy that some natural Tories are spying on us from the Tower.” Daniel cocked his head at a side-window of the cabin, which offered a prospect over the Wharf and the fortifications above and beyond it.

“Really!?”

“Oh yes indeed.”

“The curtain-wall or—”

“Farther in, I should say. Do keep in mind that the Tower’s a bit crowded with Tories today.”

“I suppose it would be,” said Roger. “Well done, Daniel! Perhaps you do have some future, after all, as a scheming political hack.”

“You forget I used to make my living as one. Excuse me, Roger, but the gastro-colic reflex is having its way with me, and I must to the head.”

“In truth or—”

“No, for I am stopped up in the bowels these three days; it is a diversionary ruse. Is there a prospective-glass to be found in this place?”

“Indeed, a lovely one, in that drawer—no, to the left—now down—and down again. There you have it.”

“To perfect the illusion, I’ll need something in lieu of a turd.”

“Spotted Dick!” said Roger instantly, eyeing a brown log on a platter.

“I was thinking bangers,” Daniel said, “but in English cuisine there are so many items of about the right size, shape, color and composition that it is easy to be overwhelmed by choices.”

“In France, you’ll find, there is greater variety in foods.”

“So they keep saying.” And Daniel, armed with a telescope in a hip-pocket and a length of Spotted Dick palmed in one hand, repaired to the head. In most ships this would have meant going all the way to the other end, and exposing his bum to London; but this being a ship of ducal luxury, there was, attached to this stateroom, a wee compartment, tacked on to the exterior of the hull proper, with a bench, with a hole, and three fathoms of open air between that and the water. Above the bench was a Barock window to admit light and vent fumes. Daniel made himself comfortable, cracked the window, and rested the prospective-glass on its sill, poking it out under the hem of the curtain.

Salt Tower, which anchored the southeastern corner of the fortifications that Henry III had, four hundred and some years ago, put up around what was now called the Inner Ward, looked to have been troweled together out of shivers and bits of other towers that had fallen down or been blown up. It was squarish in some places, roundish in others. Chimneys poked out here and there. In other parts were crenels or parapets. Diverse windows had been let into it whenever a whim to do so had taken the stonemasons. Or so it looked, at the end of half a millennium’s improvements. Probably there was some inerrant logic behind the placement of every brick. Several kings named Edward had later surrounded all the Inner Ward stuff with a lower curtain-wall sporting its own museum of towers and bastions. It was over the guns and through the crenellations of the latter that Daniel now aimed his prospective-glass, and drew a focus on the flat top of Salt Tower above and beyond them. Salt was one of several of the old Inner Ward towers that were used as cells for prisoners of noble rank. It seemed to Daniel sometimes that half the people he knew had, at some point in their lives, been locked up in one or the other of these Towers—including Daniel himself. And so what might have seemed an incomprehensible Masonick salvage-yard to a common Newgate sort of prisoner, was as familiar to Daniel as a kitchen to a cook. He rapidly picked out, and drew focus on, two periwigged figures. They were standing on the very spot where, almost thirty years ago, Daniel had stood with the imprisoned Olden-burg and watched shipments of French gold come up the river under cover of night to buy England’s foreign policy. Now all was reversed: These two men were peering down at Météore, which was on its way to France as part of an altogether different sort of Transaction. One of the men wore a wig of flaming red; this had to be Charles White, whose natural hair was the same color. His companion had a dark wig, a three-cornered hat, and a moustache, and was more difficult to make out. Both of them, presumably, had been rounded up following the betrayal, exposure, and failure of the assassination plot; but that only narrowed it down to a population of several thousand Tories who wanted King William dead badly enough to go and kill him. Conspicuous to Daniel was the dark-wigged man’s curiosity about all that met his eye. To stare and point was rated bad manners, and not done by nobility, however these two chaps did nothing but. Charles White wanted chiefly to stare at Météore, and Daniel gave him something to notice by dropping three lengths of Spotted Dick down the hole. But his companion had eyes for London, and would not leave off staring, pointing, and tugging at White’s sleeve to ask questions about this or that. He seemed particularly interested in the new developments of wharves and warehouses that had grown up along the banks of the river, spreading downstream towards Rotherhithe, in the last decades. Charles White was obliged to hold forth at some length, and to point out a few specifics. But once the dark-haired man had sated his curiosity, and gotten used to these novelties, he turned his attention towards older parts of London, and began to talk more and listen less. Charles White began to ask him questions. He began to relate anecdotes, with evocative hand-gestures and (Daniel supposed) expert wench-mimicry, planting limp wrists on his hip-bones, or cradling chin in curled fingers to deliver excellent punch-lines that evoked gusty laughter from both men—laughter with recoil, as both leaned back at the pelvis and exposed gleaming sweeps of teeth—like a pair of vipers rearing back to strike at each other. The dark man’s teeth were recognizable even at this distance as having been made of the finest African elephant-ivory. Daniel, a free man, was intimidated by these prisoners, and stared at them raptly, like a hunter in a blind.

Dunkirk

MARCH 1696

IT WAS FAR FROM A warm day, especially with the wind coming in off the Channel; but the sky was perfectly cloudless, the waves of the sea had nothing to reflect except the saturated azure radiance of the sky, and in consequence this was one of those rare days when the ocean really was blue. That, and the glints of gold from wave-facets catching the direct light of the sun, seemed like a favorable omen for France.

Météore nearly had not been able to get in to the harbor at Dunkirk. It wasn’t that she’d found a hostile reception. Midway across the Channel her crew had struck the Cross of St. George and run the fleur-de-lis up the mizzenmast, and the coastal batteries at Dunkirk had accepted this, or at least refrained from pulverizing them long enough for Daniel to explain himself, and send messages ashore. The difficulty had lain, rather, in finding room for one more ship in Dunkirk’s harbor. (1) A modest invasion force had gathered there in the expectation that King William would be assassinated. This was nothing like the army that had massed near Cherbourg in ’92, but it had been large enough that even now, a week after the plot had failed and the invasion had been cancelled, its remnants took up moorage-space. (2) Jean Bart, though he and his home town were as always well-fed, kept hearing reports from the interior of France that people were starving to death in large numbers; so he had sailed his fleet up north and fallen upon a hundred-ship convoy bringing Russian and Polish wheat out of the Baltic. He had defeated the Dutch naval squadron escorting it toward Amsterdam and diverted the entire convoy to Dunkirk. They were being unloaded as fast as cranes and stevedores could work, and the wheat was being taken in to famished France on endless wagon-trains that darkened the shore, and plugged the narrow ways of the town. (3) As bad as things were in France, they were worse to the north; reports had come in that during the winter just ending, one out of three Finns had died. And Scotland was not much better. Finland and Scotland were as far north as it was possible to go, and so those Finns and Scots who had been able to straggle out to the coasts and take ship had sailed south, and converged on harbors where food might be had. Many had ended up in Dunkirk.

No other ship would have been able to pass the Dunkirk breakwater, under such conditions; but when word made it up the chain of command that Météore had inexplicably returned, Captain Bart gave orders that room must be made for her; and so after some idling, Météore had been towed down a narrow lead among Baltic wheat-hulks, refugee-boats, invasion-transports, and ordinary Dunkirk fishing-and smuggling-craft to the anchorage of Bart’s privateer fleet, and given a place of honor alongside Bart’s flagship Alcyon. The first to come aboard had been a six-year-old boy armed with a wooden sword; the second, a noblewoman. She was gaunt, drawn, and black-patched compared to the last time Daniel had seen her, but he recognized her as the Duchess of Arcachon and (in England, and countries that recognized William) the Duchess of Qwghlm. And after he had talked to her for two hours, he was surprised by the awareness that she was still beautiful; just different.

And her internal fires had been banked. By the pox, he assumed at first. Then he guessed it was age—but she was not even thirty years old. On further consideration he decided it was because she had actually achieved things, and so needed not be as fierce as before. She was a Duchess twice over. She had made more fortunes than she’d lost. She had this six-year-old bastard, who seemed a fine lad, and gave every appearance of being one of those unusual children who survived to adulthood. She had a daughter of three, and a babe in arms, Louis de Lavardac, only a few weeks old—this implied she’d gone through at least as many miscarriages, stillbirths, and small-coffin funerals. Men sailed jachts across the sea and gave them to her, just to get her attention. And so perhaps her fires had been banked by choice; she’d had the sound judgment to know when to draw back, and let her investments and her children grow, and her plans come to fruition.

Daniel was invited to dine aboard Alcyon on the second day of his stay in Dunkirk—the day of the perfectly blue sky—and after he and Eliza and Jean Bart, the Marquis d’Ozoir, and a few other guests had sat round the table for some time, drinking coffee, talking, and letting the meal settle in their stomachs, Bart got up and took Jean-Jacques, or Johann as he was familiarly known, over to Météore to inspect her rigging. Daniel strolled round the decks with Eliza, drinking in the air and the sun, and watching Bart and his godson cavort about the decks, tops, and ratlines. For those two had forgotten about the ostensible purpose of the visit before they’d even come aboard the jacht, and it had turned into a sword-fighting tutorial. Bart was one of those who deemed it somehow dangerous to practice with anything other than a live, sharp, steel blade, and accordingly had armed Johann with a long knife. Bart drew a small-sword—a landlubber’s weapon, as he was dressed for dinner, not privateering. He had drawn Johann into an exercise that appeared to consist mostly of knocking Johann down (not too roughly) whenever he committed the sin of being off balance.

“In London have people heard of Father Édouard de Gex, and what befell him?” Eliza wanted to know.

“I am too retiring, too peculiar to make the social rounds and hear all the latest,” Daniel said, “and so maybe you are asking the wrong Englishman. He is a fierce Jesuit, close to the Marquise de Maintenon, and I have the vague notion that something bad happened to him—”

“You could say that,” said Eliza. “He was strolling in the gardens of Versailles late in the summer. There is a place there called the Bosquet de l’Encelade—a pool and a fountain of several jets, depressed in the center of a great encircling bower, the whole surrounded by woods, and rather remote from the château. I used to read there. As de Gex was strolling along the circuit of the bower, he became aware—or so he told the story later—that someone else was there, padding along in the same direction, but lagging far enough behind as to remain hidden from view by the curvature of the bower. And so de Gex stepped through one of the portals that gives access to the lawn within—terraced rings of turf descending toward the pool. Cutting across the lawn, he turned around abruptly to look behind him, and saw what was recognizable as a human form. But it was difficult to make out through the lattice-work of the bower. ‘Show yourself, whoever you are,’ de Gex called, and after a brief hesitation his stalker emerged from one of those portals and was revealed as an immense one-armed man carrying a long staff—which proved, on second glance, to be a harpoon. Now, the fountain lay between them, and de Gex wanted to keep it that way, whereas this other chap wanted to get closer to de Gex, so that he could launch the weapon from shorter range and without having to pitch it through jets and spray. De Gex called for help, but in this secluded part of the garden, with the roar and hiss of the fountain, he could not know whether his cry had been heard. The harpooneer took to pursuing him. De Gex was uncertain whether to keep circling the fountain—which had the advantage that it kept his adversary in view—or to exit through the bower, flee into the grove, and go for help. In any event he did not have to dither over it for long, for as it turned out someone had heard his cry and come running to see what was the matter. De Gex took his eye off the harpooneer for a moment as his would-be rescuer emerged from the bower. When he looked back he saw the harpoon inbound; for his hunter, seeing that he was losing his chance, had made a desperate fling. De Gex tried to dodge it. Meanwhile it was diverted by a surging jet from a fountain. The details are unclear; suffice it to say that the fluked head of the weapon had to be excavated, by the King’s surgeon, from deep in de Gex’s upper thigh. It passed through the muscle on the outside of the limb and spared the great vessels and nerves that run along the inside; but the bone was damaged, an infection developed, and de Gex has, ever since, lingered at Death’s door, in a sick-room at the chapter-house of the Jesuits in the town of Versailles.”

“The attacker?”

“Bolted into the forest of the King’s hunting-park and was tracked for some miles but never caught. Today I heard the news that de Gex has died. His cousin, Madame la duchesse d’Oyonnax, is looking after the arrangements—probably his body will be taken back to the family seat to be interred.”

“It is an extraordinary tale,” said Daniel. “As you have reasons for everything you do, I presume you had a reason for relating it to me?”

Eliza shrugged. “There was a feeling among some at Court that this was an assassin acting on orders from London, or some other Protestant capital. The plot to assassinate William on Turn-ham Green might have been tit-for-tat. I thought the Juncto might want to know as much.”

“I shall pass it along, then, madame. The Juncto shall consider itself in your debt.”

“I shall consider myself in yours, if you deliver the message.”

“On the contrary, it will be my honor to be of service, madame.”

“You might also be of service by escorting him home,” said Eliza, nodding over toward Johann, “assuming he survives his fencing-lesson.”

Johann had quickly tired of being knocked down by his godfather, and so the lesson had moved along to parts of the syllabus more fun and less practical: viz. hanging from ratlines with one hand whilst duelling the opponent with the other.

“I had supposed he was home,” said Daniel.

“Home is Leipzig,” said Eliza. “It is a long story—much longer than that of de Gex and the harpoon.”

“I wonder if I might engage in some tit-for-tat by telling you a bit of news from my side of the water.”

“Monsieur, I should be fascinated,” exclaimed Eliza, suddenly coming alive. “How unlike you to volunteer something!”

Daniel blushed at this, but went on: “When I was at university I was terrorized by the Earl of Upnor—Louis Anglesey. Of course he has been dead since the Battle of Aughrim. But a few days ago I phant’sied I spied his ghost standing atop a bastion of the Tower of London. Then it came into my head that he must be Upnor’s brother, Philip, Count Sheerness, who has not set foot in England for almost twenty years—he fled during the Popish Plot. England has forgotten him. But perhaps he has not forgotten England, and came back over at last to play some role in the complot to assassinate William.”

“Then England certainly will not forget him again,” Eliza said. “I wonder if he’ll be suffered to leave the Tower alive.”

“Were I a betting man, I’d bet yes. I’d bet he’ll be back on this side of the Channel before summer. Oh, he’ll be kept close for a while. Perhaps he’ll even be tried. But no proof will be found that he was involved in the plot.”

“What is your reason for telling me the story?”

“As it happens, I once was imprisoned in the same place. Some murderers were sent in to do away with me. But they were intercepted by a veteran sergeant of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, one Bob Shaftoe, who I believe is known to you.”

“Yes.”

“He and I made a sort of compact. He would be of aid to me in doing away with my bête noire—the late Jeffreys—if I would assist him in recovering a certain young woman—”

“I know the story.”

“Very well. Then you know she is a slave, once owned by the Earl of Upnor, but distributed to Count Sheerness as a part of Upnor’s estate when Upnor was killed at Aughrim. I presume she has been on this side of the water, serving in Sheerness’s household.”

“Indeed. What is it you would have me do, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“The Black Torrent Guards have been in the Spanish Netherlands for some years, fighting the war, whensoever the Juncto could scrape together money for balls and powder. I thought perhaps you might know of some way of getting word to Sergeant Shaftoe that the owner of Abigail is in a tight spot just now, and unable to defend his properties on the Continent. Between that, and the lull in the fighting, there might be opportunity—”

“Other such opportunities have come his way in the past, but he has not been quick to take advantage of them,” said Eliza, “because he has been looking after his nephews, and could not see a way to fulfill so many obligations at once. But his nephews must have reached the age of manhood by now. Perhaps he is ready.”

“That must have vexed their uncle to no end,” Daniel mused.

“Yes. But it must have made his life a good bit simpler, too,” said Eliza. “So, consider the message delivered and your obligation discharged, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“Thank you, your grace.”

“You are most welcome.”

“—”

“Is there anything else?”

“Nothing that I would dream of mentioning to any ordinary Duchess—or woman, for that matter. But as you have an interest in money, here is a curiosity for you.”

Daniel reached into both hip-pockets at once. From each he drew a sheaf of printed bills, and held them out, rather like the two pans of a balance, so that Eliza could inspect them. The offerings on left and right were similar, but different. Clearly there had been a lot of work for engravers in London lately, for these documents had been pressed out by copper-plates of awesome complication: miles of line folded up into inches of space, like the windings of testicles. One depicted a goddess gripping a trident and sitting upon a great mound of coins. “Even by Barock standards, the most vulgar thing I’ve seen,” Eliza pronounced it. BANK OF ENGLAND, it said; and below that was printed a florid and verbose assertion that it—which is to say, this piece of paper—was money. The bills on Daniel’s opposite hand said LAND BANK and supported like claims—if anything, even more pompous.

“Whig,” said Daniel, shaking the BANK OF ENGLAND bills, “and Tory,” shaking the LAND BANK bills.

“You even have different money!?”

“The Bank of England was, as you must know, set up two years ago by the Juncto after it won the election. It is backed—these bills are backed—by the ability of the government to raise money from taxes, lotteries, annuities, and whatever other schemes the big brains of the Juncto can think up. Not to be outdone, the Tories set up their own Bank, backed by—”

“The land of England itself? How Tory-like.”

“They are nothing if not consistent.”

“Curious. Are these worth anything?”

“As always, you go to the heart of the matter. In the absence of any other money, these do circulate in London. The Marquis of Ravenscar, who gave these to me, asked that I present them to you, and try to—to—”

“To exchange them for specie?” Eliza laughed. “Cheeky fellow! So it is an experiment! A little foray into Natural Philosophy. He wishes you to gather some data on your Continental tour—to see if anyone outside of England heeds the promises stamped on these bills.”

“Something like that. I am relieved that you take it in such good humor.”

“Let me ask you this, Doctor: what is the exchange rate between Whig and Tory money?”

“Ah. At the moment, one of these—” he held up the Land Bank notes “—buys rather a lot of these.” He indicated the Bank of England notes. “For many are of the view that the Bank of England has failed already, and the Land Bank is ascendant.”

“Which amounts to saying that the Juncto will be cast down in the next election, and Harley will lead the Tories to victory.”

“I dare not disagree—as much as I’d like it otherwise.”

“Then I shall buy a few of these, in exchange for a Bill of Exchange, denominated in thalers, and payable at the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig,” said Eliza, indicating the Land Bank notes, “but I shall exchange them immediately for a lot of these.” She licked a finger and began to count off Bank of England notes.

“You place your trust in the Whigs? Roger shall be overjoyed.”

“I place my trust in Newton,” Eliza said.

“You refer to his new position at the Mint.”

“I had more in mind the calculus.”

“How so?”

“This is really a matter of derivatives, is it not?”

“Financial derivatives?”

“No, mathematical ones! For any quantity—say, position—there is a derivative, representing its rate of change. As I see it, England’s stock of land represents a fixed quantity of wealth. But commerce I see as a derivative—it is the slope, the speed, the rate of change of the nation’s wealth. When commerce stagnates, this rate of change is small, and money founded upon it is worthless. Hence the lopsided exchange rate you told me of. But when commerce thrives, all goes into rapid movement, the derivative jumps up, and money founded on it becomes of much greater value. Once Newton goes to work at the Mint, the supply of coin in England can only improve. Commerce, which has been frozen for lack of money, will surge, at least briefly. The exchange rate between these two currencies will swing the opposite way, long enough at least for me to take a profit.”

“It is a way of looking at the thing I had not considered before,” said Daniel, “and it sounds right to me. But if you ever have an opportunity to expound your theory to Isaac, I hope you’ll use the word fluxion in place of derivative.”

“What’s a fluxion?”

“That,” said Daniel, “is the problem in a nutshell.”

An Abandoned Church in France

MARCH 1696

“I DO HOPE YOU’LL RECONSIDER, now, all of the unpleasant things you have had to say in the past about Satan.” This was how Anne-Marie de Crépy, duchesse d’Oyonnax, greeted her cousin when his eyelids—which had been closed, three days ago, by a Jesuit father in Versailles—twitched open.

Father Édouard de Gex looked up at a black sky, framed in the aperture of his coffin. It was an uncommonly plush model, for a Jesuit. The brothers of his order had loaded him at first into a Spartan pine-plank box. But Madame la duchesse and her entourage had appeared just in time, and put a stop to it. “Imitation of Christ is all well and good during life, but my cousin is in Heaven now, and nothing prevents me from treating his earthly remains with decent respect; besides, I must accompany him all the way home, and I’d have the casket well sealed.” And she had caused to be brought in to the sick-room a coffin so heavy it took four men to lift it: a coffin of oak, lined with lead, and cushioned better than most of the beds that courtiers slept on in Versailles. And so cunningly had it been wrought that even the pallbearers who carried it and its contents out to the street and set it on a flower-strewn gun-carriage would never have guessed that not only was it not sealed, but ventilation-slots ran all the way round the lip where the lid overhung the sides.

Oyonnax was now waving a phial of smelling-salts around under her cousin’s nose. He tried to fend it off, but his arms were sluggish, and pinned to his sides by the overwhelming cushions. Finally he sat up, or tried to and failed and regretted it all in the same instant. The contraction of his abdominal muscles had ramifications as far down as the wounded thigh. The pain must have been desperate, for it brought him out of his stupor better than any smelling-salts. He managed to get an elbow under him, and Oyonnax reached in and rearranged cushions to prop him up. Then he was able to relax and look about himself. He could not have seen this from the satiny depths of the coffin, but: the gun-carriage, with him and the coffin on it, had been dragged up the aisle of a burnt-out church. The servants of Oyonnax had lifted the coffin up and set it crosswise on the altar—a granite plinth with all of its decorations burnt, weathered, gnawed, and looted away. The stone walls of the church stood mostly intact, though smoke had rendered them charcoal-black. The great beams of the roof had crashed to the floor as they’d burnt, and still lay there, like so many charred pews strewn around a floor that was knee-deep in shards of roof-tiles. Though from place to place, especially nearer the altar, wicker mats had been laid upon the burnt timbers so that well-dressed persons could sit upon them without soiling their fashions. Around the altar itself, the floor had been shoveled and swept clean, creating an open space where a pentagram had been daubed out in something that had dried to a thick brown crust. The altar, and de Gex, stood at the center of the pentagram.

“Holy Jesus, what I have I done—” said de Gex, and tried again to move; but the pain in his leg nearly killed him. He fell back and crossed himself.

Oyonnax laughed indulgently, and reached out to cradle her cousin’s head in her hand. “I wondered how you would react.”

“I had to escape from Versailles,” said de Gex. “I was an imbecile before—it took me so long to understand the enormity of this conspiracy. Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon, of course, is at the center—but she is in league—always has been—with L’Emmerdeur. The Baron von Hacklheber was her enemy, but is now her friend. She operates with the Juncto hand-in-glove. Newton—the recoinage in England—all part of the same conspiracy! What could I do? D’Avaux displeased her, and was sent packing to Stockholm! Lucky he was not poisoned—or harpooned, as I was!”

“This sounds,” said the Duchess, “like a little speech that you memorized, before you swallowed my sleeping-draught, so that you could recite it to St. Peter if you never woke up. I am not St. Peter, and this is the gateway to Hell, not Heaven. But if it pleases you to recite the speech anyway, pray continue.”

“You must understand, cousine, that if there was nothing more to the conspiracy, I needn’t have troubled you. For my Order is not without resources of its own; and when conjoined to the Office of the Holy Inquisition there is little in heaven or earth that could not be accomplished. But that was before I came to understand that she had seduced none other than Bonaventure Rossignol himself!”

“As much as I loathe her, I must admit this was a master-stroke. For who, other than le Roi himself, could be a more powerful ally for a subtle and conniving bitch like Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon?”

“Just so! I realized, then, that I was trapped like a fly in her web. For there is nothing that I do in this life that is not observed by hundreds of courtiers, all of whom gossip, and many of whom write letters. In consequence Rossignol must know everything I do, and must pass it on to Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon while they are fornicating! I then saw myself to be helpless, as long as I remained in this life—in this world. The failed assassination had given me—praise God and His mysterious ways—a convincing pretext for dying young. Hence the request I whispered into your ear—which must have struck you as very strange.”

“Look about yourself, having been resurrected in this of all places, and tell me what is strange,” said Oyonnax.

“Our Savior, having died on the cross, descended to the very pit of Hell before ascending once more into the light,” de Gex remarked. “Still, I must know, cousine, if you invoked any of the Fallen ones—if my death and resurrection were effected by dæmonic necromancy or—”

“Dæmonic necromancy is so tedious, and fraught with unintended consequences,” said Oyonnax, “when syrup of poppies does the job perfectly well. It is all a question of dosage—tricky to calculate, especially for one like you who was weakened.”

“Why did you choose to bring me around here of all places, then?”

“It was ever my plan that if I were to miscalculate the dose, and if I opened the coffin to find you dead in fact as well as in appearance, then I should employ the arts of the necromancer to bring you back to life.”

It took de Gex some moments to absorb this.

“But, cousine, I had always believed that you had only affected an interest in the Black Arts, when it was fashionable, years ago, when you were young and foolish. That you considered it all perfect nonsense.”

“You have been furious at me, Édouard, for deeming it all nonsense! For to call Satan a figment of man’s phant’sy is but one step from saying the same of God, is it not?”

“Indeed, cousine, I should rather you were a sincere Satanist than a pretend one; for the former recognizes God’s majesty, and may be reformed, while the latter is an atheist, and doomed to the Lake of Fire.”

“Then look about yourself, and draw your own conclusions.”

“I see the relics and signs of the Black Mass, the candles still burning, the inverted cross. I conclude that there is hope for you. But I do not know yet whether there is hope for me.”

“What do you mean, Édouard?”

“You have been strangely reticent on the question of whether I was alive or dead when the lid came off the coffin; whether, that is, I am alive now because of smelling salts, or because you used necromancy on my corpse.”

“Perhaps I shall tell you one day,” said Oyonnax. She lifted a bundle of clothes off the floor and dropped it into his lap. “Change out of those Jesuit weeds and into these.”

It was too much, in too short a time, for the opiated mind of de Gex. “I do not understand.”

“Understand this: You ask too many favors of me. Perhaps I’m not as different as you phant’sy from Eliza. She is a businesswoman—she does nothing for free. You, cousin, have put me to an immense amount of trouble and expense. I have given you death, a splendid bespoke coffin, resurrection, safe transit out of Eliza’s web, and now a new identity.” She patted the bundle: it was a clerical robe, but light gray, not the black of the Jesuits. “You are now Edmund de Ath, a Belgian Jansenist.”

“A Jansenist!?”

“What better disguise for a Jesuit than to become a Jesuit’s nemesis? Put these on, shave your beard, and the transformation is complete. You can go on your quest to the East a new man. I’m sure the Jansenists in Goa, Macao, Manila, will be glad of your company!”

“The disguise should serve,” said de Gex. “I thank you for it. For it and for all the rest.”

“Have I not done much for you?”

“Obviously you have, cousine, but—”

“Then shave, put on your new garments, and let us be on our separate ways.”

“I want only to know whether it was a chymist’s receipt, or the Powers of Darkness, that brought me back to life!”

“Yes. You have already made that plain.”

“And—?”

“And I thought I made it clear to you, Edmund de Ath, that I do not wish to answer your question at this time.”

“But it is a simple thing for you to do! And it makes all the difference.”

Oyonnax smiled and shook her head. “You contradict yourself—how like a Jansenist! Because it makes such a difference, it can never be simple. Édouard, apply your Jesuitical logic for a moment. If I brought you to life with necromancy, it means you belong to the Legions of Hell now—and that I am a necromancer—which means I believe that both Satan and God are real—and therefore have hope of redemption, if only I agree to switch sides. Am I correct so far?”

“Indeed, cousine, you have reasoned as soundly as any man.”

“On the other hand, if I did it all with drugs from the apothecary, then your soul belongs to God as it ever did. These trappings—” she indicated the pentagram, the candles “—are stage-props, nothing more—fetishes and relics of a ludicrous pseudo-religion that I hold in contempt, which I trotted out only to throw a fright into you—much as priests frighten peasants at church by prating about hellfire. In which case I am a cynical atheist. Am I correct?”

“Yes, cousine.”

“And so one of us shall go to hell, the other to heaven. But we cannot both end up in the same place. I know which, you do not. I have the power to tell you, but I choose to withhold the knowledge. You may embark, whenever you feel ready, on your quest to recover the Solomonic Gold, but you’ll do so not knowing the answer to your question.”

De Gex shook his head, too a-mazed to feel the horror of his predicament. “They say necromancers hold in thrall those whom they have brought back to life,” he said, “but I never thought it would work this way.”

“To me a more apt similitude is the way a priest enslaves the minds of his parishioners,” said Oyonnax. “But that is neither here nor there. I have lost count of the number of times some courtier has minced up to me and claimed he was enthralled by my beauty, wit, or perfume; of course it always turns out in the end that they are not enthralled at all. Still and all, I have often wondered what it would be like to have a thrall; and as you have so much hectored me, ever since we were children, about the prospects of my immortal soul, I can’t think of anyone who more deserves it. Know that your empty coffin shall be interred with all due ceremony in the family mausoleum at Gex. Where Edmund de Ath shall lie one day, there’s no telling; and where his soul shall end up is my secret.”

Winter Quarters of the King’s Own
Black Torrent Guards Near Namur

MARCH 1696

“SERGEANT SHAFTOE REPORTING as ordered, sir,” came a voice from the dark.

“I have got a letter addressed to you, Shaftoe,” answered a different voice from the dark—a college-cultivated voice. “As a training exercise, I thought we might sally forth in search of some source of light, so that I could do something other than run my fingers over it.”

“Captain Jenkins’s company gathered some brush on their ‘training exercise’ this afternoon, and are burning it yonder.”

“Ah, I phant’sied I smelled smoke. Where the devil did they find something to burn?”

“A wee sand-bar in the Meuse, three miles upstream. We’ve had our eye on it for several weeks. The French had not got to it yet, lacking swimmers. But Captain Jenkins’s company has a man who can dog-paddle, when he has to. Today, he had to. He got over to this sand-bar with a line, and stripped it bare while the French watched shivering, and threw stones, from the opposite bank.”

“That is the sort of initiative I look for in the Black Torrent Guards!” exclaimed Colonel Barnes. “’Twill serve them well in the years to come!”

The conversation to this point had been transacted through a wall of mildewy canvas, for Colonel Barnes was on the inside, and Sergeant Shaftoe the outside, of a tent. The sentences of Barnes were punctuated by thumping and clanking as he got sword, boot, peg-leg, and topcoat on. The tent was a ghostly cloud under starlight. It bulged at one end as Barnes pushed his way out through the flaps; then he became perfectly invisible. “Where are you?”

“Here.”

“Can’t see a bloody thing,” Barnes exclaimed, “it is an excellent training exercise.”

“You could be living in a house, with candles,” said Bob Shaftoe, not for the first time.

Indeed, Barnes had passed most of the winter in a house up the road from this, the winter camp of his regiment; but some piece of news from England, recently received and digested, had prompted him to vacate, to take up lodgings in a tent among his men, and to begin referring to everything they did as a training exercise. The change had been much noted but little understood. They’d not taken part in anything like a military engagement since half a year ago, when they had participated in King William’s successful siege of Namur. Since, they’d done naught but live on the land, like field-mice. And since the trees and brush had all long since been cut down and burnt, and the farms trampled to unproductive mud-flats, and the animals hunted and eaten, living on this land required some ingenuity.

The brush-fire was, as both men knew, on the opposite side of a swell in the earth, where Captain Jenkins’s company had made its camp. To get there, they had to walk through the camp of Captain Fletcher’s company, which in daylight would have taken all of thirty seconds. With a lanthorn it might have taken a minute or two. But the Black Torrent Guards’ last candle had vanished several days previously, and in the most ignominious way possible, viz. nicked from Colonel Barnes’s coat-pocket by rats when he ventured out to use the latrine, and carried away to be eaten. And so the passage through Captain Fletcher’s company’s camp was, as both men knew, to be an infinitely gradual shuffling and sliding through a three-dimensional labyrinth of tent-ropes and clotheslines. It seemed an opportune time to speak of difficult matters—for there was no way, in darkness, to look someone in the eye.

“Err…it is my duty to inform you,” said Bob, “that private soldiers James and Daniel Shaftoe are absent without leave.”

“Since how long?” asked Barnes, sounding interested, but not surprised.

“That might be debated. Three days ago, they claimed they had come upon the spoor and tracks of a feral pig, and requested leave to hunt it down. They vanished over the horizon, in the direction of Germany, not long after permission was granted.”

“Very good—an excellent training exercise.”

“When they did not return after one, then two days, yet their sergeant was disinclined to think the worst of them—”

“The expectation of bacon for breakfast had impaired his judgment. As my own mouth is almost too full of saliva for me to speak, I must say that I understand.”

“Now still Jimmy and Danny are not back. I must assume that they have deserted.”

“They trained only too well, and learned the lesson too soon,” Barnes reflected. “Now their lives shall be forfeit, if they are caught.”

“Oh, they shan’t be caught,” Bob assured him. “You forget that before I taught them to be English soldiers, Teague Partry taught them to be rapparees.”

“Do you want leave to hunt them down? It would be an excellent—”

“No, sir,” said Bob, “and would you please explain your incessant jesting about everything we do being a training exercise?”

“I have a soft spot in my heart for the men of my regiment—most of them, anyway,” said Barnes, “and would see as many of them as possible survive what is to come.”

“What, then, is to come?” Bob asked, “and how does brush-gathering and pig-chasing make us more fit for it?”

“This war is over, Bob. Ssh! Don’t tell the men. But you may be assured there’ll be no fighting in the year to come. We shall occupy this ground, as a bargaining-chit for diplomats to shove to and fro on a polished tabletop somewhere. But there’ll be no more fighting.”

“That is what is always claimed,” said Bob, “until a new front is opened, and a campaign launched.”

“True enough—in your boyhood,” said Barnes. “But you must adjust your thinking now, and take into account that the money is all gone. England has ninety thousand men under arms. She can afford perhaps nine thousand; and she is willing to pay for many fewer than that—especially if the Tories throw down the Juncto, as seems likely.”

“The Black Torrent Guards are an elite regiment—”

“You really must fucking listen to me, Shaftoe…”

Barnes’s voice was getting fainter and falling away aft.

“I am listening sir,” said Bob, “but mind you don’t stand still and declaim for too long in one place, lest mud swallow up your peg.”

“Shut up, Shaftoe!” said Barnes; but renewed sucking and squelching noises told that he had heard Bob’s counsel too late. There was a long grunt of effort terminated by a succulent pop as he drew his prosthesis out of the mire.

“Yes, sir.”

“It is all going away, man! Every bit of it. An elite regiment, you say? Then some draughty chamber in the Tower of London may be set aside, and a sign nailed to the door reading ‘King’s Own Black Torrent Guards,’ and if I am very fortunate, and if my lord Marlborough intercedes, and fights hard for us, I may be allowed to go behind that door from time to time and push a quill about. On frightfully important occasions of state, I may be prevailed upon to rake together a skeleton Company and dress them up in uniforms so that they may parade before a visiting Embassy, or some such. But I say to you, Bob, that a year from now everyone in this regiment, with a very few lucky exceptions, shall be a Vagabond. If Jimmy and Danny have deserted, and taken to the road, it is only because they have had the wit to anticipate this.”

“Mmph. I have oft wondered over the amount of time you spent in yonder house, over the winter, reading letters from London.”

“I know you have from the queer looks you sent my way.”

“Since the Year of Our Lord 1689,” said Bob, “I have spent all of about three weeks in England. As I cannot read, all that I know of the place now consists of rumors. Your predictions seem unlikely to me—if you are correct, it means England has gone mad. But I do not have knowledge of my own to set against yours, in a debate; and in any case I do not have the standing to over-rule you, sir, if you have made up your mind to turn your Regiment’s winter quarters into a training-ground for Vagabonds.”

“It is more than that, Shaftoe. For their own sakes, I would that these men would survive the coming lean years. And for England’s sake I would conserve this Regiment. Even if we be disbanded for some years, yet the day shall come when we are mustered again, and on that day I’d fain re-constitute the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards from this lot, and not, as is customary, from some random collection of criminals, shake-rags, and Irishmen.”

“You want them to stay alive—if possible honestly,” Bob translated, “and you want me to know where they are to be found, so that we can call them up again, if there is a need, and if there be money to pay them.”

“That is correct,” said Barnes. “Of course, we can’t tell them any of this!”

“Of course not, sir,” said Bob. “They’ll have to work it out for themselves.”

“As did Jimmy and Danny. Now! It is time to read your letter. Fetch me a burning bush and I shall play Jehovah to your Moses.”

Bizarre witticisms such as this were the price Bob Shaftoe had to pay for having a colonel who’d trained as a churchman. He trudged over to the feeble campfire that Captain Jenkins’s company had made in the midst of their encampment, requisitioned one uprooted shrub from their brush-pile, and shoved it into the coals until it began to burn. Then he hastened back to Barnes and held it up like a candelabra, from time to time waving it about to make it blaze up. Smoldering leaves snowed down upon the page and on the epaulets and the three-cornered hat of Barnes, and he shrugged or blew them off as he read.

“It is from your lovely Duchess,” said Barnes.

“I had guessed as much.”

Barnes read for a bit and blinked and sighed.

“Am I allowed to know that it says, sir?”

“It concerns your woman.”

“Abigail?”

“She is in a house not thirty miles from here…a house that is for the time being unguarded, as the proprietor has been locked up in the Tower of London. How fortuitous, Sergeant!”

“What is fortuitous, sir?”

“Don’t play the fool. Just at the moment when you must lay plans for a new life as an unemployed civilian, your two chief sources of distraction and gratuitous complications—Jimmy and Danny—have absented themselves, and you are presented with an opportunity to take a wife!”

“Take is an apt word in this case, sir, as she is the legal property of Count Sheerness.”

“Why should that trouble us? If Jimmy and Danny can run off in quest of a feral pig, cannot we steal you a wife?”

“What d’you mean we, sir?”

“I am altogether decided on it!” Barnes proclaimed, and thrust the corner of the page into the bush, setting it ablaze. “To establish you in a stable and happy domestic arrangement is to be a linch-pin of my strategy for keeping the Black Torrent Guards together! Besides which, it shall be an excellent training exercise.”

The Track to Pretzsch

APRIL 1696

God has chosen the world that is the most perfect, that is to say, the one that is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena.

—LEIBNIZ

“IT IS THE VERY LAST fate I should ever have imagined, that two unmarried and childless wretches should end up running a service to deliver children from city to city,” said Daniel.

As the carriage had thumped and veered out of Leipzig up the high road toward Wittenberg, and (later) the very, very low road to Pretzsch, he had settled like a great heap of sand, grabbing pillows and stuffing them under the boniest parts of his frame, and bracing his feet against the base of the bench that supported his companion, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

If Daniel was a heap of sand, Leibniz—far more hardened than Daniel to long-range coach travel—was an obelisk. He sat perfectly upright, as if ready to dip quill in ink-pot and begin penning a treatise. He raised his eyebrows and looked curiously at Daniel, who was now only a few degrees shy of supine, with a knee practically wedged in Leibniz’s groin.

Daniel had assumed his ears had deceived him when the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm had asked him to deliver Johann to Leipzig. But he had done it—only to discover Leibniz was there, rather than in Hanover, where Daniel had expected him. News had reached Hanover and Berlin that Eleanor, the Electress-Dowager, had fallen gravely ill in the Dower-house of Pretzsch. It seemed likely she would not survive; and if she perished, someone would be required to transport a grieving Princess Caroline to her new foster-home at the Electoral court at Berlin. And who had been chosen for this duty? Leibniz.

Leibniz considered it for a few moments, then said: “Say! How is the youngest son of the Duke of Parma faring these days? Has he recovered from that nasty rash?”

“You have quite lost me, sir. I do not even know the name of the Duke of Parma, much less the medical condition of his youngest son.”

“That was already obvious,” said Leibniz, “for he has no sons—two daughters only.”

“I am beginning to feel like the Dim Interlocutor in a Socratic dialogue. What is your point?”

“If you asked the Duke of Parma about Leibniz, he might recognize the name vaguely, but he would know nothing of Natural Philosophy, and of course it is absurd to think he would entrust a daughter to me, or you, on a journey. Almost all the nobility are like the Duke of Parma. They don’t know, or care about, us, and we know little of them.”

“You are saying that I have fallen victim to observational bias?”

“Yes. The only nobility who suffer the likes of you, or of me, to come within a mile of them, are those exceedingly peculiar few who (God help them!) have taken an interest in Natural Philosophy. They used to be more numerous, but now I can count them on the fingers of a hand: Eliza, Sophie, and Sophie Charlotte. Those are the only ones we get to talk to. They are desirous of exposing their young ones to Natural Philosophy. Given a choice between the likes of you or me, Daniel, versus some available—which is to say idle—retainer, uncle, stooge, or priest who would be inclined to ignore, molest, corrupt, or convert the child en route, such a woman will unfailingly choose the Natural Philosopher; for the worst we will do is bore them.”

“I believe I did just that with little Johann,” said Daniel. “He would respond better, I do believe, to a curriculum centered wholly on Weaponry and its uses. In the absence of weapons, he prefers unarmed combat. I do believe I learned more wrestling-holds from him than he Philosophy from me.”

“That should serve you well when you get to Massachusetts,” said Leibniz gravely, “for the Indians are said to be brave wrestlers all.”

“After he has fenced with Jean Bart on the deck of a warship, to be shut up in a carriage with the likes of me for several days was a miserable fate.”

“Pfui! A slow and excruciating death by lockjaw is the miserable fate of those who play too much with edged weapons,” said Leibniz. “Eliza knows this. You served her well, even if Johann is too young to appreciate it! Tell me, did he really show no curiosity at all?”

“The foolish boy gave me an opening, by discoursing too much of mortars and cannons,” Daniel admitted. “We got into parabolas. I halted the carriage in a field between Münster and Osnabrück and we scattered some peasants by conducting a systematic trial, first with archery, later moving on to firearms.”

“You see? He’ll never forget that! Every time Johann sees a Projectile Weapon—which in this benighted world means every five minutes—he’ll know that they are useless without mathematicks.”

“How far are we from this Pretzsch?”

“You are deceived by the understated style of the place,” said Leibniz. “Behold, we are in Pretzsch, and have been for some minutes.” He slid his window open, laid a hand atop his wig to prevent its ending up under a wheel-rim, and thrust his head out. “The Dower-house is dead ahead.”

“What will you discourse of with the orphan,” Daniel asked, “assuming she does not share Johann’s curiosity about weapons?”

“Whatever she likes,” Leibniz said. “She is after all a Princess, and almost certain to be a Queen one day.” He regarded Daniel skeptically.

“All right,” said Daniel, moving. “I’ll sit up straight.”

THE TRAIN WAS THREE CARRIAGES, a baggage-wain, and several mounted dragoons. The latter had been sent down from Berlin, which was to say they were Brandenburgish/Prussian. Leibniz had met up with these Berliners in Leipzig. This had occurred only an hour after Daniel—who’d only just dropped off Johann, and cashed his Bill of Exchange, at the House of the Golden Mercury—had tracked down Leibniz. The union of these three separate parties was under the command of a Brandenburger noble who was also a captain of dragoons. He was adamant that they must press on across the Elbe and get into Brandenburg territory before nightfall, lest some Saxons give in to the temptation to make things complicated. Daniel found this a little ridiculous, but Leibniz saw wisdom in it. For Caroline might be an impoverished orphan living out in the middle of nowhere, but she was still a Princess, and to have a Princess in one’s custody, voluntary or in-, was to have power. And though Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony, was a much better man than his late brother, yet there was no end to his crafty scheming; who knew if he might snatch Caroline up on a pretext and marry her off to some Tsarevich. So the collection of Caroline and her one item of baggage from the Dower-house of Pretzsch was carried through with a brusqueness normally reserved for kidnappings and elopements. This didn’t make it easier for the orphan Princess, but nothing could have done so, and a lingering farewell might have made it harder. By her choice she shared Leibniz’s coffee-brown, flower-painted carriage with him and Daniel. Tears and smiles passed alternately across her face like squalls and sunbeams on a gusty March day. She was thirteen.

The train crossed the Elbe on a nearby ferry and pounded down the road for some hours until they reached Brandenburg, then stopped for the night at an inn on the Meißen-Berlin road. The next day they got a late start. Some fifty miles separated them from the Palace of Charlottenburg and the hospitality of its namesake, the Electress Sophie Charlotte. “Pray consider me at your disposal, your highness,” said Leibniz. “The road is long, and I shall deem it a high honor to be of whatever assistance I may in making it seem shorter. We may pursue your mathematicks-lessons, which have been neglected during the illness of your late mother. We may discourse of theology, which is something you should tend to; for in the Court of Brandenburg-Prussia you’ll encounter not only Lutherans but Calvinists, Jesuits, Jansenists, even Orthodox, and you’ll need to keep your wits about you lest some silver-tongued zealot lead you astray. I have a blockflöte, and could attempt to give you a music-lesson. Or—”

“I would hear more of the work that Dr. Waterhouse purposes to undertake in Mas-sa-chu-setts,” said the Princess carefully. She had got wind of this from remarks overheard yesterday.

“A fitting topic, but in the end a very broad one,” said Leibniz. “Dr. Waterhouse?”

“The Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts,” began Daniel, “has been founded, and will sooner or later be endowed, by the Marquis of Ravenscar, who looks after his majesty’s money, and who is a great Whig. That means he belongs to a faction whose bank and whose money are founded on Commerce. They are ever opposed to the Tories, whose bank and money are founded on Land.”

“Land seems much the better choice, being fixed and stable.”

“Stability is not always a good thing. Think of lead and quicksilver. Lead makes good ballast, rooves, and pipes, but is sluggish, while quicksilver has marvelous properties of speed, flexibility, fluidity…”

“Are you an Alchemist?” Caroline demanded.

Daniel colored. “No, your highness. But I will go so far as to say that Alchemists think in metaphors that are sometimes instructive.” He shared a private look with Leibniz, and smiled. “Or perhaps we are all born with such habits of thought ingrained in our minds, and the Alchemists have simply fallen into the trap of making too much of them.”

“Mr. Locke would disagree,” said Caroline. “He says we start out a tabula rasa…”

“It might surprise you to learn that I know Mr. Locke well,” Daniel said, “and that he and I have argued about it.”

“What has he been up to lately?” Leibniz asked, unable to hold himself back. “I’ve been working on a reply to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding…”

“Mr. Locke has spent much time in London of late, debating Recoinage; for while Newton would devalue the pound sterling, Locke is a staunch believer that the standard laid down by Sir Thomas Gresham must never be tampered with.”

“Why do England’s greatest savants spend so much time arguing about coins?” Caroline asked.

Daniel considered it. “In the old world, the Tory world, when coin was nothing more than an expedient for moving rents from the country to London, they would never have paid it so much notice. But Antwerp suggested, and Amsterdam confirmed, and London has now proved, that there is in Commerce at least as much wealth as in Land; and still no one knows what to make of it. But money makes it all work somehow, or, when it is managed wrong, makes it collapse. And so coins are as worthy of the attention of savants as cells, conic sections, and comets.”

Leibniz cleared his throat. “The way to Berlin is long,” he said, “but not that long.”

Daniel said, “The Doctor complains of our digression. I was speaking of the new Institute in Boston.”

“Yes. What is to be the nature of its work?”

Here Daniel was stumped; which was odd, and embarrassing. He did not quite know where to begin. But the Doctor, who knew Caroline much better, said, “If I may,” and gratefully Daniel gave the floor to him.

Leibniz said, “Persons such as your highness, who woolgather, and ponder things, are apt to be drawn into certain labyrinths of the mind—riddles about the nature of things, which one may puzzle over for a lifetime. Perhaps you have already visited them. One is the question of free will versus predestination. The other is the composition of the continuum.”

“The what of the what?”

“Simply that if you begin with observable things around you, such as yonder church-tower, and begin dividing them into their component parts, viz. bricks and mortar, and the parts into parts, where does it lead you in the end?”

“To atoms?”

“Some think so,” said Leibniz, agreeably enough. “At any rate, it happens that even the Principia Mathematica of Mr. Newton does not even attempt to settle such questions. He avoids these two labyrinths altogether—a wise choice! For in no way does he address the topic of free will versus predestination, other than to make it plain that he believes in the former. And he does not touch on atoms. Indeed, he is reluctant even to divulge his work on infinitesimal mathematics! But do not be misled into believing that he does not have an interest in such things. He does, and toils night and day on them. As do I, and as will Dr. Waterhouse in Massachusetts.”

“Do you toil on these two problems separately or—”

“A most important question, and one I should have anticipated,” said Leibniz, clapping his hands. “I should have mentioned that both Newton and I share a suspicion that these two problems are connected. That they are not two separate labyrinths, but a single large one with two entrances! You can enter either way; but by solving one, you solve the other.”

“So, let me see if I am understanding you, Doctor. You believe that if you understood the composition of the continuum—which is to say, atoms and whatnot—”

Leibniz shrugged. “Or monads. But pray continue.”

“If you understood that, it would somehow settle the question of free will versus predestination.”

“In a word: yes,” said the Doctor.

“Atoms I understand better,” began Caroline.

“No, you only phant’sy you do,” said Leibniz.

“What’s to understand? They are wee hard bits of stuff, jostling one another…”

“How big is an atom?”

“Infinitely small.”

“Then how can they touch each other?”

“I don’t know.”

“Supposing they do, by some miracle, come in contact, what happens then?”

“They bounce off each other.”

“Like billiard balls?”

“Precisely.”

“But, your highness, have you any idea just how complicated a billiard ball must be, to bounce? It is a fallacy to think that that most primitive of entities, the atom, can partake of any of the myriad qualities of a polished spherical lump of an elephant’s tusk.”

“Very well, then, but, too, sometimes they stick together, and form aggregates, more or less porous…”

“How does the sticking-together work? Even billiard balls can’t do that!”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Doctor.”

“Nor does anyone, so do not feel bad about it. Not even Newton has figured out how atoms work, for all his toil.”

“Does Mr. Newton work on atoms too, then?” asked Caroline. It was directed at Daniel.

“All the time,” said Daniel, “but this work is called by the name Alchemy. For a long time I could not fathom his interest in it; but finally I came to understand that when he did Alchemy he was trying to solve this riddle of the two labyrinths.”

“But when you go to Massachusetts you’ll do no Alchemy at your Institute, will you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“No, your highness, for I am more persuaded by monads than atoms.” He glanced at Leibniz.

“Eeyuh, that’s what I was afraid of!” said Caroline, “for I do not understand those one bit.”

“I believe we have established,” said Leibniz in a gentle voice, “that you do not understand atoms one bit—whatever illusions you may have nourished to the contrary. I hope to disburden your highness of the idea that, in looking for the fundamental particle of the universe, atoms are a simple and natural choice, monads not.”

“What’s the difference between a monad and an atom?”

“Let us first speak of how they are the same, for they have much in common. Monads and atoms both are infinitely small, yet everything is made out of them; and in considering how such a paradox is possible, we must look to the interactions among them: in the case of atoms, collisions and sticking-together, in the case of monads, interactions of an altogether different nature, which I shall come to presently. But either way, we’re obliged to explain the things we see—like the church-tower—solely in terms of those interactions.”

“Solely, Doctor?”

“Solely, your highness. For if God made the world according to understandable, consistent laws—and if nothing else, Newton has proved that—then it must be consistent through and through, top to bottom. If it is made of atoms, then it is made of atoms, and must be explained in terms of atoms; when we get into a difficulty, we cannot suddenly wave our hands and say, ‘At this point there is a miracle,’ or ‘Here I invoke a wholly new thing called Force which has nothing to do with atoms.’ And this is why neither Dr. Waterhouse nor I loves the Atomic theory, for we cannot make out how such phænomena as light and gravity and magnetism can possibly be explained by the whacking and sticking of hard bits of stuff.”

“Does this mean that you can explain them in terms of monads, Doctor?”

“Not yet. Not in the sense of being able to write out an equation that predicts the refraction of light, or the pointing of a compass-needle, in terms of interactions among monads. But I do believe that this type of theory is more fundamentally coherent than the Atomic sort.”

“Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon has told me that monads are akin to little souls.”

Leibniz paused. “Soul is a word frequently mentioned in connexion with monadology. It is a word of diverse meanings, most of them ancient, and much chewed over by theologians. In the mouths of preachers it has come in for more abuse than any other word I can think of. And so perhaps it is not the wisest choice of term in the new discipline of monadology. But we are stuck with it.”

“Are they like human souls?”

“Not at all. Allow me, your highness, to attempt to explain how this troublesome word soul became entangled in this discourse. When a philosopher braves the labyrinth, and sets about dividing and subdividing the universe into smaller and smaller units, he knows that at some point he must stop, and say, ‘Henceforth I’ll subdivide no further, for I have at last arrived at the smallest, elemental, indivisible unit: the fundamental building-block of all Creation.’ And then he can no longer dodge and evade, but must finally stick his neck out, as it were, and make an assertion as to what that building-block is like: what its qualities are, and how it interacts with all the others. Now, nothing is more obvious to me than that the interactions among these building-blocks are stupefyingly numerous, complicated, fluid, and subtle; just look about yourself for irrefutable proof, and try to think what can explain spiders, moons, and eyeballs. In such a vast web of dependencies, what laws are to govern the manner in which one particular monad responds to all of the other monads in the universe? And I do mean all; for the monads that make up you and me, your highness, feel the gravity of the Sun, of Jupiter, of Titan, and of the distant stars, which means that they are sensitive of, and responsive to, each and every one of the myriad monads that make up those immense bodies. How can they keep track of it all, and decide what to do? I submit that any theory based on the assumption that Titan spews out atoms that hurtle across space and whack into my atoms is very dubious. What is clear is that my monads, in some sense, perceive Titan, Jupiter, the Sun, Dr. Waterhouse, the horses drawing us to Berlin, yonder stable, and everything else.”

“What do you mean, ‘perceive’? Do monads have eyes?”

“It must be quite a bit simpler. It is a logical necessity. A monad in my fingernail feels the gravity of Titan, does it not?”

“I believe that is what the law of Universal Gravitation dictates.”

“I deem that to be perception. Monads perceive. But monads act as well. If we could transport ourselves much closer to Saturn, and get into the sphere of influence of its moon Titan, my fingernail, along with the rest of me, would fall into it—which is a sort of collective action that my monads take in response to their perception of Titan. So, your highness: What do we know of monads thus far?”

“Infinitely small.”

“One mark.”

“All the universe explainable in terms of their interactions.”

“Two marks.”

“They perceive all the other monads in the universe.”

“Three. And—?”

“And they act.”

“They act, based on what?”

“Based on what they perceive, Dr. Leibniz.”

“Four marks! A perfect score. Now, what must be true about monads, to make all of these things possible?”

“Somehow all of these perceptions are flooding into the monad, and then it sort of decides what action to take.”

“That follows unavoidably from all that has gone before, doesn’t it? And so, summing up, it would appear that monads perceive, think, and act. And this is where the idea comes from, that a monad is a little soul. For perception, cogitation, and action are soul-like, as opposed to billiard-ball-like, attributes. Does this mean that monads have souls in the same way that you and I do? I doubt it.”

“Then what sorts of souls do they have, Doctor?”

“Well, let us answer that by taking an inventory of what we know they do. They perceive all the other monads, then think, so that they may act. The thinking is an internal process of each monad—it is not supplied from an outside brain. So the monad must have its own brain. By this I do not mean a great spongy mass of tissue, like your highness’s brain, but rather some faculty that can alter its internal state depending on the state of the rest of the universe—which the monad has somehow perceived, and stored internally.”

“But would not the state of the universe fill an infinite number of books!? How can each monad store so much knowledge?”

“It does because it has to,” said the Doctor. “Don’t think of books. Think of a mirrored ball, which holds a complete image of the universe, yet is very simple. The ‘brain’ of the monad, then, is a mechanism whereby some rule of action is carried out, based upon the stored state of the rest of the universe. Very crudely, you might think of it as like one of those books that gamblers are forever poring over: let us say, ‘Monsieur Belfort’s Infallible System for Winning at Basset.’ The book, when all the verbiage is stripped away, consists essentially of a rule—a complicated one—that dictates how a player should act, given a particular arrangement of cards and wagers on the basset-table. A player who goes by such a book is not really thinking, in the higher sense; rather, she perceives the state of the game—the cards and the wagers—and stores that information in her mind, and then applies Monsieur Belfort’s rule to that information. The result of applying the rule is an action—the placing of a wager, say—that alters the state of the game. Meanwhile the other players around the table are doing likewise—though some may have read different books and may apply different rules. The game is, au fond, not really that complicated, and neither is Monsieur Belfort’s Infallible System; yet when these simple rules are set to working around a basset-table, the results are vastly more complex and unpredictable than one would ever expect. From which I venture to say that monads and their internal rules need not be all that complicated in order to produce the stupendous variety, and the diverse mysteries and wonders of Creation, that we see all about us.”

“Is Dr. Waterhouse going to study monads in Massachusetts, then?” Caroline asked.

“Allow me to frame an analogy, once more, to Alchemy,” Daniel said. “Newton wishes to know more of atoms, for it is through atoms that he’d explain Gravity, Free Will, and everything else. If you visited his laboratory, and watched him at his labours, would you see atoms?”

“I think not! They are too small,” Caroline laughed.

“Just so. You instead would see him melting things in crucibles or dissolving them in acids. What do such activities have to do with atoms? The answer is that Newton, unable to see atoms with even the finest microscope, has said, ‘If my notion of atoms is correct, then such-and-such ought to happen when I drop a pinch of this into a beaker of that.’ He gives it a go and sees neither success nor failure but some other thing he did not anticipate; then he goes off and broods over it, and re-jiggers his notions of atoms, and devises a new experimentum crucis, and re-iterates. Likewise, if your highness were to visit Massachusetts and see me at work in my Institute, you’d not see any monads lying about on counter-tops. Rather you would see me toiling over machines that are to thinking what beakers, retorts, et cetera, are to atoms: Machines that, like monads, apply simple rules to information that is supplied to them from without.”

“How will you know that these machines are working as they ought to? A clock may be compared to the wheeling of the heavens to judge whether it is working aright. But what is the action that your machine will take, after it has applied the rule, and made up its mind? And how will you know whether it is correct?”

“That is easier than you might suppose. For as Dr. Leibniz has pointed out, the rules need not be complicated. The Doctor has written out a system for conducting logical operations through manipulation of symbols, according to certain rules; think of it as being to propositions what algebra is to numbers.”

“He has already taught me some of that,” said Caroline, “but I never phant’sied it had anything to do with monads and so forth.”

“That system of logic may be imbued into a machine without too much difficulty,” said Daniel. “And a quarter of a century ago, Dr. Leibniz, building upon the work of Pascal, built a machine that could add, subtract, divide, and multiply. I mean simply to carry the work forward. That is all.”

“How long will it take?”

“Years and years,” said Daniel. “Longer, if I were to try to do it amid the distractions of London. So, as soon as I have delivered you to Berlin, I shall begin heading west, and not stop for long until I have reached Massachusetts. How long shall it take? Suffice it to say that by the time I have anything to show for my labors, you’ll be full-grown, and a Queen of some Realm or other. But perhaps in an idle moment you may recall the day you went to Berlin in a coach with two strange Doctors. It may even occur to you to ask yourself what became of the one who went off to America to build the Logic Mill.”

“Dr. Waterhouse, I am certain you shall come to mind more frequently than that!”

“Difficult to say—your highness shall have many distractions. But I hope I am not being too forward in saying that I should be honored to receive a letter from your highness at any time, if you should wish to inquire about the state of the Logic Mill. Or, for that matter, if I may be of service to your highness in any other way whatsoever!”

“I promise you, Dr. Waterhouse, that if any such occasion arises, I shall send you a letter.”

As best he could in a moving carriage, Daniel—who had sat up admirably straight all through the interview—bowed. “And I promise your highness that I shall respond—cheerfully and without a moment’s hesitation.”

A House Overlooking the Meuse Valley

APRIL 1696

BEFORE THE MANOR-HOUSE’S GATES, two equestrians parleyed: a stout, peg-legged Englishman in a coat that had been drab, before it had got so dirty, and a French cavalier. They were ignored by two hundred gaunt, shaggy men with shovels and picks, who were turning the house’s formal garden into a system of earthen fortifications with interlocking fields of fire.

The Englishman spoke French in theory, but perhaps not so well in practice. “Where are we?” he wanted to know, “I can’t make out if this is France, the Spanish Netherlands, or the Duchy of bloody Luxembourg.”

“Your men appear to believe it is part d’Angleterre!” said the cavalier reproachfully.

“Perhaps they are confused because an Englishman is said to reside here,” said the other. He gave the Frenchman an anxious look. “This is—is it not—the winter quarters of Count Sheerness?”

“Monsieur le comte de Sheerness has chosen to establish a household here. During intervals between campaigns, he withdraws to this place to recover his health, to read, hunt, play the harpsichord—”

“And dally with his mistress?”

“Men of France have been known to enjoy the company of women; we do not consider it a remarkable thing. Otherwise I should have appended it to the list.”

“But what I’m getting at is: There is a feminine presence here? Maids and whatnot?”

“There was, when I went out this morning to ride. Whether there is any more, I can only speculate, Monsieur Barnes, as the place has been invested, and I cannot get into it!”

“Pity, that. Say, monsieur, do tell me, is this French soil or not?”

“Like a banner in the wind, the border is ever-shifting. The soil we stand upon is not presently claimed by La France, unless le Roi has issued some new proclamation of which I have not been made aware yet.”

“Ah, that’s good—these chaps have not invaded France, then—now, that would be embarrassing.”

“Monsieur. There are some commanders in some armies who would find it embarrassing that two entire companies of their Regiment had deserted and wandered thirty miles from their assigned quarters and laid siege to the country house of a nobleman!”

“I believe it is now you and I who are laying siege to them,” observed Barnes, “as they are on the inside, and we on the out!”

The cavalier did not take the jest very well. “In wartime there are always deserters and foraging-parties. For this reason Monsieur le comte de Sheerness left orders, when he went to Londres, that musketeers were to be billeted in the stables, and the perimeters of the estate were to be patrolled night and day. In recent days these sentries have reported seeing more strange men than usual about the place, which I attributed to the spring thaw; I assumed, as anyone would, that they were French soldiers who had deserted from some regiment on the Namur front that had disintegrated from pestilence or want of food. Indeed, when I went out riding this morning, I had it in mind that when I returned to the house I ought to send word to a company of cavalry that is billeted some miles to the north, and ask that they ride down to round up a few of these deserters and hang them. Never did it enter my mind that they might be Englishmen until I was out for a gallop in a pasture down the road, and came upon a whole nest of them, and heard them talking in their jabber. I rode back to the house to find that, in my absence, upwards of a hundred men had emerged suddenly from the wooded ravines that lead down to the Meuse, and taken the estate in a coup de main! As I looked on in astonishment, the number doubled! I was going to ride north to summon help, but—”

“The roads had been blocked,” said Barnes. “And then haply I came along. Thank God! For there is still time to prevent this from developing into some sort of an incident.”

The cavalier’s eyebrows leapt up so high as to almost disappear beneath the verge of his periwig. “Monsieur! It is already an incident! Under no circumstances do the rules of war allow such a thing as this!”

“I agree fully, and you have my abject apologies as an English gentleman, monsieur. But only listen and consider what Count Sheerness himself would do, were he here. The Count is an Englishman, living in France, and commanding a regiment that, I need hardly tell you, fights nobly and loyally on the French side. Yet in the halls of Versailles, courtiers, who are not here to witness his gallantry on the field of battle, must be whispering, ‘Can we trust this Anglo-Saxon not to betray us?’ Ludicrous, I know, and unfair,” Barnes continued, holding up a hand to calm the cavalier, who looked as if he were about to lash the impertinent Barnes with his riding-crop, “but in these muddled times, an unfortunate fact of human nature. Now yonder band—”

“I should name them a battalion, not a band!”

“—of English deserters—”

“Strangely well-disciplined ones, monsieur—”

“Wandering lost, far behind enemy lines—”

“Is it wandering? Are they lost?”

“Have made camp, by a perverse accident, on the grounds of the quarters of Monsieur le comte de Sheerness. It means nothing, as you and I can plainly see; but there are those at Versailles who are bound to read something into it! Count Sheerness is detained in the Tower of London, is he not?”

“Obviously you know perfectly well that he is.”

“Some will allege, perhaps, that he is not so much detained as a willing guest, coöperating with King William, and with the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, which happen to be headquartered in the Tower.”

The cavalier was now so incensed that all he could do, short of murdering Barnes on the spot, was to wheel his mount, gallop some yards down the road, wheel it again, and gallop back. By the time he had returned from this excursion, he had parted his lips to deliver some choice remark to Barnes; but Barnes, who had nudged his saber a few inches out of its scabbard, now drew it out altogether, and pointed it through the iron-work of the gate. This drew the cavalier’s attention, first to the saber itself, and then to half a dozen men standing attentively just inside the gate with loaded muskets cradled in their arms.

“These,” Barnes announced, “are the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. I recommend we get them out of here as quickly as possible, before there is serious trouble.”

“As I suspected,” said the cavalier, “it is a kind of blackmail. What is it you want?”

“I want you to take this opportunity to be silent, monsieur, and to bide here for a time, so that I may go within and parley with their leaders, and convince them that it is in their best interests to depart immediately and without pillaging.”

The cavalier, after another look at the musketeers, and at another such formation that had appeared on the road nearby, accepted those terms with a nod. Barnes nudged his nag to the gate, which was opened for him. He dismounted and crunched down the gravel path into the château.

Five minutes later, he was back. “Monsieur, they will leave,” he announced. Which had been obvious anyway, for as soon as he had entered the house the men had ceased digging, and begun to gather their things, and to form up in the garden by platoons.

“There is a complication,” Barnes added.

The cavalier rolled his eyes, sighed, and spat. “What is the complication, monsieur?”

“One of my men came across something in the house that, I regret to inform you, is not the rightful property of Count Sheerness. We are taking the item in question with us.”

“So, monsieur, it is as I knew all along. You are thieves. What is this prize, I wonder? The plate? No—the Titian! I suspected you had an eye for art, monsieur. It’s the Titian, isn’t it?”

“On the contrary, monsieur. It is a woman. An Englishwoman.”

“Oh no, the Englishwoman stays here!”

“No, monsieur. She goes. She goes with her husband.”

“Her husband!?”

IT HAD BEEN UPWARDS OF thirty years since Bob Shaftoe had shinnied up a drainpipe to break into the home of a rich man. But the women of the household had, like birds, flown upwards by instinct, and availed themselves of every stair that presented itself to them, until they nested in an attic. An eyebrow window protruded from the roof, and worried faces flashed in it. Bob, rather than see doors smashed down and the house torn apart, ascended to that roof, belly-crawled up the roof-tiles, kicked out the window, somersaulted to the floor, and parried a rush and a thrust from some kitchen-wench who had thought to snatch up a butcher-knife before abandoning her post. He got this one by the wrist, spun her around into a hammerlock, pried the knife from her grip, and held her as a shield before him, in case any of the four other women in this attic had like intentions. She smelled of carrots and thyme. She shouted something in French that he was sure meant, “Run away!” but not a one of them moved. The booming on the attic-door proved they had no route of escape that way.

They looked at him. Their faces were turned to the light pouring in through the wrecked window. One was a crone, two were matrons, too old and stout to be Abigail. One was the right age, and shape, and coloration. His heart jumped and stumbled. It wasn’t her. “Damn it!” he said, “do not be afraid, you’ll not be touched. I seek Miss Abigail Frome.”

Four pairs of eyes shifted slightly from Bob’s face to that of the woman he was holding.

Then her entire weight was pressing him back, and he had to let go her wrist to catch her. In his life he had learned a few things about unarmed combat, including a trick or two for escaping from a hammerlock. This, though, was a new one: faint dead away into your captor’s arms.

SHE CAME AROUND THREE MINUTES later, diagonal on a bed one storey below. Bob bobbed in and out of her field of view. He’d draw near to count her freckles, then would remember that a life of military service had made him a frightful thing to look upon, and so, to spare Abigail’s tender eyes, he would withdraw, and make a circuit of the room’s windows, inspecting the trench-work of the soldiers below. Some of them were doing it a little bit wrong. He mastered the urge to fling up a sash and bawl at them. He flicked his eyes up to scour the horizon for vengeful French Horse-regiments. When Abigail reached up to rub her nose, he kept an eye on her, in case she had secreted on her person any more cutlery. But he need not have bothered. This was not a tempestuous assassin he was looking at. She was a schoolgirl from a small town in Somerset, of a sweet and level disposition, but inclined to be a bit daft about practical matters, which was how Bob had met her in the first place, and how he had lost his heart to her. To rush at him with a knife, as she had just done, was not typical of her character, but it was a fair sample of the less than practical side of her nature, which Bob, who had nothing but practical in his makeup, needed and wanted. He had seen this, eleven years ago, in the time it had taken his heart to skip three beats. And in a sort of miracle—the only miracle that Bob had ever been party to—this girl had seen in him what she wanted. Wanted, both in the sense that meant was lacking, and the sense that meant desired.

Beds of the time had a lot of pillows, as it was the practice to sleep half-sitting up. Abigail had been flung down flat by Bob, but now pushed herself up against the pillows so that she could eye him pacing about the room.

“Bloody hell!” were his first tender words to her. “There is no time! I know you remember me, or you would not have fainted.”

She was still pale, and not inclined to move more than she had to, but a smile came on her face, giving her the placid look of a Virgin Mary in a painting. “Even if I had it in me to forget you, my lords Upnor and Sheerness would have made it impossible. It was strange how oft they felt moved to relate the story of how you stood on the bridge and challenged Upnor on my behalf.”

“Oh, that was ignominious.”

“True, they told the tale to make fun of you; but to me ’twas a love-story I never tired of hearing.”

“Still, ignominious. As was my second meeting with Upnor, which you might not have heard about. Thank god Teague happened along with his stick! But we have no time for this. Oh, bloody hell, here he comes!”

“Who!?” cried Abigail.

“Didn’t mean to alarm you, Miss. It is not Monsieur le comte. It’s Colonel Barnes. He approaches. Do you mark his peg-leg beating time on the stairs? We must get out of this place.”

Bob moved toward the door of the bedchamber. Abigail watched with a wrinkled brow, not knowing whether it was Bob’s intention to flee; to barricade it; or to welcome the Colonel. But instead some detail of it caught Bob’s notice. He reached out and touched—caressed—the upper hinge: two straps of forged iron, one fixed to the door, the other to the post, joined by a short rod of iron about as thick as his little finger. “Quickly then: a few moments in Taunton market-square, eleven years ago, helping you with that silly banner, when the wind had gusted, and blown it down—you remember? Those moments are to my life what this hinge-pin is in the case of the door; which is to say that all pivoted, and pivots, about it; it is what I am about, as it were, and at the same time, it holds all together. Take it away—” And here Bob, not trusting his tongue, on an impulse drew a knife from his belt, shoved it under the mushroom-shaped head of the pin, and popped it loose. Lifting the door up with one hand, he jerked the pin up and out with the other; then he let go. The pin clanged to the floor. The door fell askew and cracked, and would not move properly any more, but hung sadly askew and wobbled.

“We’ve another moment now, unfortunately no longer than the first. What’s it to be, Abigail?”

“What do you mean exactly?”

Barnes stepped carefully into the room, eyeing the broken door. He gave Bob a Significant Look; then, remembering his manners, turned smartly toward Abigail and bowed. “Miss Frome! Sergeant Shaftoe has extolled your beauty so many times I have grown bored of him; seeing you in the flesh, I understand, and repent, and shall never again yawn and drum my fingers on the table, when the topic arises, but join in chorus with Sergant Bob.”

“Thank—” Abigail began, but Barnes had already moved on.

“Have you asked her yet?”

“No, he hasn’t,” Abigail said, for Bob was dumbstruck.

“Drop,” said Barnes, “ask.”

Bob smashed down on to his knees. “Will—”

“Yes.”

“Abigail Frome will you take—” began Barnes.

“I do.”

“Robert Shaf—”

“I do.”

“—nounce you man and wife. You may kiss the bride—later. Let’s get the bloody hell out of here!” said Colonel Barnes, and fled the room; for he phant’sied he’d spied something through the window.

“Fetch me that hinge-pin, husband,” Abigail said, “in lieu of a ring.”

SEVERAL PLATOONS OF MUSKETEERS were already formed up anyway in the forecourt of the house, and so it did not impose any significant further delay for them to line up on both sides of the path and form an arch of bayonets for Mr. and Mrs. Shaftoe to run through. It was too early for spring flowers, but some private had the presence of mind to hack a branch from a budding cherry-tree and slap it into Abigail’s arms. A white horse was pillaged from the stables and bestowed on the newlyweds as a wedding-present. Members of the household staff looked on through windows, and cooed and waved tea-towels. The French musketeers who were supposed to be guarding the place, and who had been disarmed, and herded into a dry fountain, wept for joy and blew their noses. Even the cavalier who had been giving Barnes such a hard time could only look the other way, shake his head, and blink. He was indignant to have been made the small-minded villain in this story, and wished he could have spoken more to Barnes, and let him know that, if he had only been made aware of the nature of the errand, he might have served Venus instead of Mars.

Barnes and the Shaftoes, distributed between two horses, inspected the troops a last time.

“You have done well by your Sergeant to-day,” Barnes announced, “and repaid a small portion of that debt you owe him for having kept you alive through so many battles. Now, back to training! Today’s exercise is called ‘melt away into the countryside.’ It has already commenced, and you are already doing a miserable job of it, being bunched together in plain view!”

Private soldiers began to break ranks and vault walls. A senior sergeant approached Barnes, and lodged a protest: “There’s no countryside to melt into, sir! We’ve got one foot in bloody France, all the trees are cut down, we are thirty miles behind enemy lines—”

“That is what makes it such a superlative training exercise! If we were in bloody Sherwood Forest, it’d be easy, wouldn’t it? Here is a suggestion: As long as you keep your gob shut, they’ll assume you are starveling deserters from the French Army! Now, get you all gone. I shall see you all back at quarters in a few days. I must convey Mr. and Mrs. Shaftoe to the sea-coast, that they may go to London and set up housekeeping. You shall all be welcome at their house!”

Abigail here for the first time looked a little less than radiant. But the joy came back into her face again as those Black Torrent Guards who had not yet melted away into the countryside broke into cheers. Bob got the white horse moving, and trotted round the circuit of the gardens, accepting in turn the cheers of various small mobs of soldiers, of the French maids in the windows, and the musketeers in the fountain; and then it was through the gate and out on to the road. Following Barnes—who was halfway to the western horizon already—they took off hell-for-leather. Abigail, straddling the horse’s croup, pressed her cheek into the hollow between Bob’s shoulder-blades, wrapped her arms about his waist, and clasped her hands together. Bob, feeling a hard thing jammed into his belly, looked down to see Abigail’s fingers interlocked about the hinge-pin.

Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover

AUGUST 1697

“FRANCE WILL SHED all of the lands she has conquered since 1678—except for Strasbourg, which Louis seems to have conceived a great liking for—on the condition they remain Catholic,” said the fifty-one-year-old savant. He ticked another item off a list that he had spread out on a Dresden china dinner-plate blazoned with the arms of the Guelphs.

Then he glanced up, expecting to see the hem of the sixty-seven-year-old queen’s ball gown hovering just above the tabletop. Instead, the garment—miles of gathered silk, made dangerous by an underlying framework of bone and steel—whacked him in the face, and stripped off his spectacles, as the Electress of Hanover made a smart about-face.

“It took me a week to grind these lenses.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz leaned sideways to rake his spectacles up off the floor. He had to keep his head upright to prevent his biggest and best wig from sliding off his bald, sweaty scalp. This gave him a crick in the neck, however enabled him to get a charming view of muscular white calves pumping in and out as his patroness stormed down the mid-line of the banquet-table.

“This is news,” she complained, “I could get it from any of my Privy Councillors. From you I expect better: gossip, or philosophy.”

Leibniz got to his feet, and took part of his chair with him; his vacant scabbard had got locked up in a bit of Barock wood-carving. The sound of a blade whipping through the air made him cringe and duck. “Almost got it!” Sophie exclaimed, fascinatedly.

“Gossip…I am trying to think of some gossip. Er, your daughter’s palace in Berlin continues to shape up splendidly. The courtiers there are all in an uproar.”

“The same uproar as last week, or a different one?”

“With every day that passes, with every new statue and fresco that is added to the Charlottenburg, it becomes more and more difficult to deny the awkward—the embarrassing—the monstrous fact that Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg and probable future King of Prussia, is in love with your daughter.”

“Why should that be the cause of an uproar?”

“Because they are married to each other. It is viewed as bestial—perverse.”

“Really it is because of what the courtiers all believe about me.”

“That you planted Sophie Charlotte there to control Frederick?”

“Mmmm.”

“Well, did you?”

“If I did, it obviously worked, and that is what the courtiers cannot abide,” Sophie answered vaguely. She now whirled again, her formidable Hem shredding a few centerpiece snapdragons, and ran down the table with silk ribbons trailing behind her like battle-streamers. She made another vicious cut with the sword. Candle-tops scattered and came to rest in splashes of their own wax, spinning out threads of smoke. “I could finish this in an instant if this verdammt burning bush were not in my way,” she said meditatively, pointing the sword at a candelabra that had been hammered together out of several hundred pounds of Harz silver by artisans with a lot of time on their hands.

A few servants, who had to this point kept as far as they could from the Electress, peeled their backs off the wall of the dining-hall and scuttled inwards toward the offending fixture, knees flexed and hands raised. Sophie ignored them and tilted the rapier this way and that, letting the light of the surviving candles trickle up and down the blade. “No wonder you could not wrest it out of its scabbard,” she said, “it was rusted in place, wasn’t it?”

“…”

“What if I had to call upon you to defend my realms, Doctor?”

“Swordsmen are gettable. I could fashion a hell of a siege-engine, or make myself useful in some other wise.”

“Make yourself useful now! I do not need to hear gossip from Berlin. My daughter sends me more than I need, and little Princess Caroline has been posting me the most excellent letters—your doing?”

“I have taken some interest in her education since the untimely death of her mother. Sophie Charlotte has become the next best thing, however, and I sense I am needed less and less.”

“Ach, now I can move, but I cannot see,” complained Sophie, squinting up towards a fresco shrouded by poor light and ancient congealed smoke. “I can’t tell the painted-on Furies from the living bat.”

“I believe those would be harpies, your majesty.”

“I will show you what a harpy is, if you do not begin doing your job!”

“Right…well, Louis XIV has a mickle abscess on his neck. That’s not very good, is it? Right, then…the French will now recognize William as King of England, and all of the titles he has bestowed. So, to mention a few examples, John Churchill is now Earl of Marlborough, the Duchess d’Arcachon is now also the Duchess of Qwghlm.”

“Arcachon-Qwghlm…yes…we have heard of her,” Sophie announced, making a momentous decision.

“She’ll be overjoyed, your Electoral Highness, that you recognize her existence. For she respects no monarch in this world more than your Electoral Highness.”

“What about her own liege-lords, Louis and William? Does she not respect them?” inquired her Electoral Highness.

“Er…protocol, I’m sure, forbids the Duchess from preferring one over the other…besides which, both of them are, sorry to say, men.”

“I see what you mean. Does this double Duchess have a Christian name?”

“Eliza.”

“Children? Other than—unless I’m mistaken—that energetic little bastard who is always following my banker around.”

“Two surviving children thus far: Adelaide, four, and Louis, going on two; the latter is the personal unification of the Houses of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, and, if he survives his father, will become lord of a hyphenated Duchy, like Orange-Nassau or Brandenburg-Prussia.”

“Arcachon-Qwghlm doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, I’m afraid. What are her pastimes?”

“Natural Philosophy, amazingly complex financial machinations, and the abolition of slavery.”

“White, or all of it?”

“I believe she means to begin with white, and then leverage legal precedents thus obtained to extend it to all.”

“Scarcely matters to us,” muttered Sophie, “we have no blackamoors hereabouts, and no fleet with which to go and get them. But it seems a bit, I don’t know, quixotic.”

Leibniz said nothing.

“Quixotic is fine!” Sophie allowed, “we enjoy a dash of quixotic, as long as it is not boring. She is never boring about it, is she?”

“If you take her aside and really press her on it, she can go on at some length about the evils of slavery,” Leibniz conceded, “but otherwise she is the very soul of discretion, and never heard to utter more than a few words on the topic in polite company.”

“Where is she?”

“She spends most of her time in London lately, looking after an unfathomably lengthy and tedious Judicial Proceeding involving one Abigail Frome, a white slave, but maintains residences in St. Malo, Versailles, Leipzig, Paris, and of course the Castle on Outer Qwghlm.”

“We would meet her. We are grateful that she took Princess Caroline under her wing when the poor child was forgotten and alone. We share her passion for Natural Philosophy. We may require someone of her talents to assist us in the management of our ship Minerva and to ensure that the profits are not illicitly diverted to the coffers of our partner, Kottakkal, the Pirate-Queen of Malabar.”

“I am afraid you quite lost me there, your Electoral Highness!”

“Do try harder to keep up, Doctor Leibniz, I hired you because people said you were clever.”

“It shan’t happen again, your Electoral Highness…er…you were on to something about a ship?”

“Never mind the ship! The most important thing is that this Eliza shall bring us the most excellent gossip from London; gossip that it is our duty to hear, as we or our heirs are likely one day to be crowned monarchs of England. And so if Eliza comes to this part of the world to pay a call on her bastard…”

“I’ll see to it that she puts in an appearance here, your Electoral Highness.”

“Done! What is next on the list?”

“Whitehall Palace burnt down.”

“The whole thing? I was led to believe it was quite…rambling.”

“According to the few people remaining in London who will still write to me, it is all smoking ruins.”

“Ve must speak Englisch ven ve speak of Englant!” the Electress decreed. “I never get to practice othervise.”

“Right. In English, then: As soon as the war ended, the Whigs were cast out—”

“The Yuncto?”

“Very good, your majesty, you have it right, the Yuncto is cast into the outer darkness, the Tories are ascendant.”

“How fortunate for William,” Sophie said drily. “Just when he needs a new palace built, the king-loving party gets its hands on the treasury.”

“Which happens to be completely empty at the moment, but that problem is being worked on by clever fellows, fear not.”

“Now the conversation really is about to become very boring indeed,” Sophie reflected, “as we are on to revenue and taxes. The bat will go to sleep up there, snuggled up next to a naiad or a dryad, and not come awake until the middle of dinner.”

“Everything said of the Tsar would suggest he’ll not be troubled by a bat. You could have wolves and bears in here and he would not look twice.”

“I am not trying to make Peter feel at home,” Sophie said frostily, “but to show him that, somewhere between Berlin and here, he at last crossed the frontier of civilization. And one lovely thing about civilization is philosophers capable of making interesting conversation.”

“Right. So we are finished with gossip, then, and—”

“—and on to the latest developments in philosophy—Natural, or Unnatural, as you prefer. Stand and deliver, Doctor Leibniz! Whatever’s the matter? Bat got your tongue?”

“The English savants are all busy toiling at practical matters—Mints, Banks, Cathedrals, Annuities. The French are all under the shadow, if not the actual boot, of the Inquisition. Nothing of interest has been heard out of Spain since they kicked out the Jews and the Moors two hundred years ago. So when you inquire after Philosophy, Majesty, you inquire—and I do not wish to seem self-important when I say this—after me.”

“Am I not allowed to inquire after my friend in my house?”

“Of course, I just…well…never mind. I have been corresponding with those Bernoulli brothers rather a lot. Nothing important. You know I have always been fascinated with symbols and characters. The calculus has brought us new ideas for which we want new symbols. For differentiation, I like a small letter d, and for integration, a sort of elongated S. That’s how the Bernoullis have been doing it, and it suits them well. But there is another Swiss mathematician, a fellow who was once viewed as quite a promising young savant-in-the-making, by the name of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier.”

“That one who saved William of Orange from a kidnap-plot?” asked Sophie, planting the tip of Leibniz’s rapier in the tabletop and flexing it absent-mindedly.

“The same. He and the Bernoullis have been corresponding.”

“But you said, very meaningfully, that this fellow was once viewed as promising.”

“His work the last few years has been laughable. He is not right in his head, or so it would seem.”

“I thought it was Newton who had gone out of his mind.”

“I am coming to Newton. He—Fatio, that is—and the Bernoullis have, ’twould seem, been carrying on one of these slow-smoldering disputes. They send him a letter using the little d and the stretched-out S, and, tit-for-tat, he sends them one back using a little dot for differentiation and some sort of abominable “Q”-notation for integration. This is how Newton writes calculus. It is a sort of shin-kicking contest that has been going on for years. Well, a few months ago it blew up. Fatio published an article saying some very uncomplimentary things about your humble and obedient servant right here, and attributing the calculus to Newton. Then the Bernoullis cooked up a mathematicks problem and began sending it round to the Continental mathematicians to see if any of them could solve it. None of them could—”

“Not even you!?”

“Of course I could solve it, it was just a calculus problem and it had only one purpose, which was to separate the men—which is to say, those who understood the calculus—from the boys. They then sent the damned thing to Newton, who worked it out in a few hours.”

“Oh! So he is not out of his mind!”

“For all I know, Majesty, he may be entirely out of his mind—the point is, he is still without rival, when it comes to mathematicks. And now, thanks to those mischievous Bernoullis, he believes that I and all the other Continental mathematicians do conspire against him.”

“I thought you were going to talk philosophy now, not gossip.”

Leibniz inhaled to say something, stopped, and sighed it all out. Then he did it again. Then a third time. Fortuitously, the bat chose this moment to come out of hiding. Sophie was not slow to jerk the rapier free from the tabletop and return to the hunt. After a bit of random flitting here and there—for the bat seemed to phant’sy that the keening tip of the rapier was some sort of blindingly fast insect—it settled into a hunting pattern, swinging around the long perimeter of the dining room, but judiciously avoiding the corners, plotting therefore a roughly elliptical orbit. The table was planted across one end of the room and so the bat flew across it twice on each revolution. Sophie’s strategy, then, was to plant herself on the table just where she predicted the bat would over-fly it as it came in from its long patrol of the room. Missing it there, she could then rush down to the other end to take another hack at it when it rebounded from the near wall and passed over again, outward-bound.

“Your majesty’s situation vis-à-vis the bat is very like that of a terrestrial astronomer when the earth’s orbit—a segment of which is here represented by the table—is intersected by that of a comet, crossing over twice, once inbound towards Sol, and once outbound.” Leibniz nodded significantly at the dazzling blaze of the candelabra, which had been set down on the floor between the table and the wall.

“Less sarcasm, more philosophy.”

“As you know, the library is being moved here—”

“I just thought, what’s the use of having a library if I must journey to Wolfenbüttel to use it? My husband never cared much for books, but now that he spends all his time in bed—”

“I do not criticize, Majesty. On the contrary, it has been good to withdraw from day-to-day management of the collection, and turn my attention to the library’s true purpose.”

“Now you really have got me confused.”

“The mind cannot work with things themselves. I see the bat over yonder, my mind is aware of it, but my mind does not manipulate the bat directly. Instead my mind is (I suppose) working with a symbolic representation of the bat that exists inside my head. I can do things to that symbol—such as imagining the bat dead—without affecting the real bat itself.”

“All right, so thinking is manipulation of symbols in the head, I have heard this from you before.”

“A library is a sort of catalog or warehouse of all that men think about—so by cataloging a library I can make a more or less orderly and comprehensive list of all the symbols that sapient beings carry around in their heads. But rather than trying to dissect brains and ransack the actual gray matter for those symbols—rather than use the same sorts of symbolic representations that the brain manipulates—I simply assign a prime number to each. Numbers have the advantage that they may be manipulated and processed with the aid of machines—”

“Oh, it’s that project again. Why don’t you stick to monads? Monads are a perfectly lovely subject and you don’t need machines to process them.”

“I am sticking to monads, Majesty, I work on the monadology every day. But I am also working on this other thing—”

“You used to call it something else, didn’t you? This is the ‘I need an infinite amount of money’ project,” said Sophie distractedly, and made a rush down the table.

Leibniz ambled out into the center of the room, where it was a geometric impossibility for the tip of the blade to reach him. “The only sense in which it requires an infinite amount of money,” he said with great dignity, “is that it requires some money every year, and I hope it shall go on forever. Now, I tried to fix up your silver mines—that didn’t work because of sabotage, and because we had to compete against Indian slave labor in Mexico. I am sorry it failed. So then I went to Italy and set everything up so that you might, Parliament willing, become the next Queen of England. According to the Tories who are running the Land Bank, the value of that country is 600 million livres tournoises. They are selling grain and importing gold at a terrific clip. There is money there, in other words—not an infinite amount, but enough to pay for a few arithmetickal engines.”

“Not only does Parliament have to vote on it, but also lots of people have to die in the right order, before I can be Queen of England. First William, and then Princess Anne (who would be Queen Anne by that point) and then that little Duke of Gloucester, and any other children she might have in the meantime. I am sixty-seven years old. You need to seek support elsewhere—eeeYAHH! There you are! Invade my dining room, will you! Doctor Leibniz, how do you like my cooking?”

The sword was no longer moving. Leibniz ventured closer, keeping his eyes fixed on Sophie’s powdered face, then traced a line from her soft, plump white shoulder, down the sleeve of her dress, across a rubble of jewelry encrusting her wrist and fingers, down the rusty rapier-blade, to a Dresden china plate where a deceased bat lay, wings arranged artfully as if it had been put there as a garnish by a French chef. “The comet has come to earth!” she proclaimed.

“Oh, how very poetickal you are, Mummy!” exclaimed a voice from behind Leibniz.

Leibniz turned around to face the door and discovered a large bloke, nearing forty, but with the face and manner of a somewhat younger man. George Louis, or Georg Ludwig as he was called in the vernacular, seemed to have only just realized that his mother was standing on a table. He blinked slowly a few times, froglike.

“The comet is approaching, er, the tree,” he said uncomfortably.

“The tree!? Comets don’t approach trees!”

“He has been ensnared, as it were, by the net cast by the falcon.”

“Falcons don’t cast nets,” Leibniz blurted, unable to stop himself. The look he got in return from George Louis made him wish that he hadn’t handed his only means of self-defense to Sophie.

“What does it matter, since it’s all nonsense to begin with!? Once you’ve made up your mind to speak in ridiculous figures, instead of saying things straight out, why bother with making it all consistent?”

“George, my firstborn, my pride, my love. What are you trying to say to us?” Sophie asked indulgently.

“That the Tsar is approaching the Herrenhausen!”

“So the Tsar is the comet?”

“Of course!”

“We were using ‘comet’ to mean this bat.”

The corners of George’s mouth now drew back and downwards so far that his lips ceased to exist and the slit between them took on the appearance of a garrotte. He threw a dark look at Leibniz, blaming him for something.

“Who is the falcon, your royal highness?” Leibniz asked him.

“Your fawning disciple—and my little sister—Sophie Charlotte, Electress of Brandenburg, Dr. Leibniz.”

“Splendid! So the metaphor of the net was to say that she had ensnared Peter by her charm and wiles.”

“He passed through Berlin like a cannonball—didn’t even slow down—she had to hunt him down like a fox at Koppenbrügge—”

“Do you mean, Sophie Charlotte was like a fox, in that she was so clever to hunt down the cannonball? Or that the Tsar was foxlike in his evasions?” Sophie asked patiently.

“I mean they are coming right now.”

“Go to your father’s bedchamber. Send the embalmers away,” Sophie commanded, meaning the physicians. “Get your father to understand that someone very tall, and frightfully important, may swim into his vision, and that he should try to mumble a pleasantry or two if he is feeling up to it.”

“Yes, Mummy,” said the obedient son. With a parting bow for his mother, and a momentary eye-narrowing at Leibniz, George Louis took his leave.

It felt now as if Sophie and the Doctor ought to say something concerning George Louis, but Sophie very deliberately didn’t and Leibniz easily decided to follow her lead. There was a brief upwelling of chaos and hilarity as Sophie was brought down to floor level again (she threatened to jump, and probably could have), but word had reached them that the Tsar of All the Russias had entered the building, preceded by Sophie Charlotte, who was essentially dragging him in by the ear. If this had been an official state visit they’d have had plenty of time to get ready. As matters stood, Peter was traveling incognito and so they were going to behave more or less as if he were a country cousin who had decided to drop by for dinner.

Clanking noises and guttural accents approached, and the avian trilling of Sophie Charlotte’s laughter! A couple of ladies-in-waiting darted in on Sophie to tuck in loose hair-strands and yank down on her bodice; she counted to ten and slapped them away. Behind her one servant, moving in a posture of awful dignity, bore the bat-plate out of the room while another replaced it with a clean one. Still others made frenetic repairs to the candelabra and the centerpiece. “Doctor! Your sword!” Sophie exclaimed. She snatched the moist weapon up off the table and, in an absent-minded way, made for Leibniz as if to impale him. Leibniz side-stepped politely, took the weapon by its hilt, and then embarked upon the project of trying to get it back into its scabbard. The tip had to be introduced into an opening that was too small for Leibniz to even see, inasmuch as he had pocketed his spectacles, and he was loath to touch the bat-smeared metal with the fingers of his other hand. So when the Tsar’s advance-guard rounded the corner into the room, he was still standing directly before the entrance holding it up in a posture that was ambiguous. The guards, who were not paid to be meditative, could not really discern, at a moment’s glance, whether he was yanking the blade out, or shoving it in.

Three swords screamed out of their scabbards as one, and Leibniz glanced up to discover the blades—quite a bit shinier than his—triangulated on the base of his neck. In the same instant—possibly because he had gone slack with terror—the tip of his blade happened to blunder into his scabbard, and down it slid, until rust-blockages froze it about halfway in. Leibniz’s arms had dropped to his sides like damp hawsers. The heavy guard of his rapier reciprocated back and forth on its springy blade going wuv, wuv, wuv. Twenty-five-year-old Peter Romanov entered the room on the arm of twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Charlotte. Or Leibniz (who was standing motionless, with his chin high in the air to keep it from being shaved) assumed this fellow must be the Tsar, from the fact that he was the tallest human being that Leibniz had set eyes on in his whole life. For all his immensity, he had a gracefully drawn-out frame, and his face—clean-shaven except for a dark moustache—still had a boyish softness about it. When he tore his dark, quasi-Mongol eyes away from Sophie Charlotte (not easy in that she was very likely the most lovely and interesting female he had ever seen) and got a load of the tableau in the dining room, he came to a stop. His left eye twitched shut as if he were winking, then struggled open, then did it again. Then the whole left side of his face contorted as if an invisible hand had gripped his cheek and twisted it. He pulled free of Sophie Charlotte’s arm and clapped both hands over his face for a few moments, possibly from embarrassment and possibly to hide this twitching. Then both hands lunged out as he strode forward. He was so shockingly colossal that it seemed as if he were diving forward, launching himself towards his three guards like an immense bat. But he remained on his feet. He grabbed the two guards on the flanks by the scruffs of their necks and drew them together so that they collided with the one in the middle; and holding them all together in a bear-hug he screamed at them for a while in what Leibniz took to be the tongue of Muscovy. Leibniz stepped backwards until he was behind and beside Sophie, then got both hands together on his sword-pommel and rammed it all the way home in a series of sharp yanking gestures. By that time, Peter had switched over to whorehouse German. “I would borrow three large wheels!”

“What for?” Sophie Charlotte inquired, as if she and everyone else in the room did not already know.

“Merely breaking all of the bones in their bodies does not cause sufficient pain to punish them for this crime. But if they are first tied to a wheel, which is continually rotated, the shifting of their weight causes the broken bone-ends to jar and grind against each other—”

“We have this form of punishment, too,” Sophie Charlotte said. “But,” she added diplomatically, “we have not actually employed it recently, and our punishment-wheels are in storage. Mother, may I introduce Mr. Romanov. Mr. Romanov is from Muscovy and is traveling to Holland to visit the ship-yards. He is very very very interested in ships.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Romanov,” said Sophie, allowing the giant Tsar to spring forward and kiss her hand. “Did my daughter show you my gardens and greenhouses as you drove in?”

“She told me of them. You walk in them.”

“I do walk in them, Mr. Romanov, for hours and hours every day—it is how I preserve my health—and I am terribly afraid that if these three wonderful gentlemen were to be mounted on wheels and broken and rotated for days and days screaming with the torments of the damned as they slowly died, that it would quite spoil my recreations.”

Peter looked somewhat baffled. “I am merely trying to—”

“I know what you are trying to do, Mr. Romanov, and it is so very dear of you.”

“He is worried about Raskolniki,” Sophie Charlotte said helpfully.

“As very well he should be!” Sophie returned without hesitation.

“They believe that I am the Antichrist,” Peter said sheepishly.

“I can assure you that Doctor Leibniz is in no way offended to have been mistaken for a Raskolniki, are you, Doctor?”

“In a strange way I am almost honored, your majesty.”

“There, you see?”

But Peter, upon hearing Leibniz’s name, had turned questioningly to Sophie Charlotte and said something no one could quite make out—except Sophie Charlotte. She got a look of joyous surprise on her face, causing every male heart in the room to stop beating for ten seconds. “Why, yes, Mr. Romanov, it is the same fellow! Your memory is quite excellent!” Then, for the benefit of everyone else, she continued, “This is indeed the same Dr. Leibniz who gave me the tooth.”

A ripple of mis-translation and conjecture spread outwards through the carnival of Prussians, Muscovites, Tatars, Cossacks, dwarves, Dutchmen, Orthodox priests, et cetera, who had piled up behind them. Sophie Charlotte clapped her hands. “Bring out the tooth of the Leviathan! Or whatever it was.”

“Some sort of giant elephant, I rather think, but with plenty of hair on it,” Leibniz put in.

“I have seen such beasts frozen in the ice,” said Peter Romanov. “They are bigger than elephants.”

George Louis had returned from his errand and had been skirting the back of the crowd trying to find a way in without getting into a shoving-match with any Cossacks. The crowd parted to admit one of Sophie Charlotte’s footmen, who glided in carrying a tray with a velvet pillow on it, and on the pillow, a rock still nestled in torn-up wrapping paper. George Louis followed the lead and took up an appropriate position next to his mother, and got an expression on his face that said, I am ready to be introduced and to have a jolly good time playing along with this incognito business, but everyone else—especially Peter—was gazing at the rock instead. It was pinkish-brown, and about the size of a melon, but sort of Gibraltar-shaped, with a flat, angled grinding-surface on the top and a system of rootlike legs below. There was a lot of rude behavior going on in the outer fringes of Peter’s retinue, as diverse furry muscular steppe-dwellers jostled for position. They seemed to have convinced themselves that “Tooth of the Leviathan” was a flowery monicker for some very large diamond. Men who were eager to lay eyes on the treasure collided with others who already had, and were recoiling in dismay. Meanwhile Leibniz had been nudged up to the front by Sophie, who did not believe in breaking her minions on the wheel, but was not above delivering swift jabs to the arse and kidney with her bejewelled knuckles. Leibniz bellied up to the tooth and caught the edge of the underlying tray, which was almost too heavy for the servant to hold up. Sophie Charlotte’s heavenly face was beaming at him. Next to it was the Tsar’s watch-chain. Leibniz began to tilt his head back, and did not stop until he was gazing at the undersurface of Peter’s chin. His wig slipped and Sophie cuffed him in the back of the head to set it aright, and said: “The Doctor is hard at work on a wonderful project in Natural Philosophy, which my son does not understand, but which should produce miraculous results, provided some wise monarch can only supply him with an infinite amount of money.”

At this Leibniz naturally winced, and George Louis chuckled. But Tsar Peter thought about it very gravely, as if an infinite amount of money was a routine sum for him to bandy about in his budget-meetings.*

“Could it make ships better?”

“Ships and many other things, Mr. Romanov.”

That did it; Peter hurled a frightfully significant glare at some advisor, who cringed back half a step and then fastened a raptor-like gaze upon Leibniz’s face. The Tsar, having settled that much, brushed past the Doctor on his way to greet George Louis.

Book 4

Bonanza

Japan

MAY 1700

DAPPA EXCHANGED MALABAR-WORDS with three black sailors who had just hauled in the sounding-lead, then turned toward the poop deck and gave van Hoek a certain look. The captain stretched out a mangled hand towards the bow, then let it fall. A pair of Filipino sailors swung mauls, dislodging a pair of chocks, and the head of the ship pitched upward slightly as it was relieved of the weight of the anchors. Their chains rumbled through hawse-holes for a moment, making a sound like Leviathan clearing its throat. Then chains gave way to soft cables of manila that slithered and hissed across the deck for quite a few moments, gathering force, until everyone abovedecks began to doubt if the Malabari sailors with the sounding-lead had really gotten it right. But then the life seemed to go out of those cables. They coasted to a stop, and the Filipinos went to work recovering the slack. The sails had all been struck, but the wind that they had ridden in from the Sea of Japan found purchase on Minerva’s hull and nudged her forward into the long shadow of a snow-topped mountain, creating the curious impression that the sun was setting in the east.

Jack, Vrej Esphahnian, and Padraig Tallow were up around the foremast, stowing the few paltry sails that van Hoek had used to bring Minerva into this cove. Jack and Vrej were up in the ratlines while Padraig, who had lost his left leg during a corsair-attack around Hainan Island, was stomping around on a hand-carved peg-leg of jacaranda wood, humming to himself and pulling on ropes as necessary. These men were all shareholders in the enterprise, and normally did not do sailors’ work. But today most of the ship’s complement was down on the gundeck. The ship had developed a ponderous side-to-side roll that was obvious to Jack, high up in the ratlines. This told him, without looking, that all of the cannons had been run out as far as they could go, and were protruding from their gunports, giving Minerva the appearance of a hedgehog. The Japanese lurking in the forests that lined this cove would not have to consult their books of rangaku, Dutch Learning, to understand the message.

Gabriel Goto was standing at the bow in a bright kimono. Gazing down on him from above, Jack saw his shoulders soften and his head bow. The ronin had shaved, cut, greased, and knotted his grizzled hair into a configuration so peculiar that it would have gotten him burnt at the stake, or at best beaten to a pulp, in most jurisdictions; but here it was apparently as de rigueur as wigs at Versailles. Gabriel Goto did not have to worry about looking strange in Western eyes ever again, once he set foot on yonder shore. Because either the whole Transaction was a trap, and he would be crucified on the spot (the customary greeting for Portuguese missionaries), or else it was on the up-and-up, and he would become a Japanese in good standing once again—a Samurai looking after some scrap of mining country in the north, and keeping his religious opinions—if he still had any—to himself.

“His journey is over,” Enoch Root observed, when Jack descended to the upperdeck. “Yours is about halfway along, I should say.”

“Would that it were,” Jack said. “Van Hoek tells me that we have another forty degrees to travel eastwards, before we reach the Antipode of London. After all these years I am not even close to halfway.”

“That is only one way to measure it,” Enoch said. He had been crouched on the deck, arranging some mysterious instruments and substances in a black chest. Now he stood up and nodded at some particular feature that his eyes had marked on the shore. “You might instead say that no place is less accessible from London, than this.”

“Or that no place is harder to reach from here than London,” Jack said. “I take your point.”

They stood and looked at Japan for a while. Jack had not been sure what to expect. Nothing would have surprised him: castles floating in air, two-headed swordsmen, demons enthroned on tops of volcanoes. They’d finally reached one of those places that were not shown on the Doctor’s maps in Hanover, save as vague sketchings of shorelines with nothing in back of them. If phantasms existed anywhere on the globe, they’d be here. But Jack saw none. Now that they had been here long enough to begin picking out details, Jack could perceive buildings here and there. They had an Oriental look about them, to be sure. But Minerva had been trading in East Asia for two years, as slow progress was being made towards today’s Transaction, and they had seen Chinese roofs in many places: Manila, Macao, Shanghai, even Batavia. These Japanese buildings seemed much the same. Smoke came from their chimneys as it did in every other place where weather was cold. Hilltops had watch-towers on them, coastlines had piers, fishing-boats and fishnets were drawn up on beaches just as they had been at the foot of Sanlúcar de Barrameda. A few Japanese crones were out on a rock with baskets, gathering seaweed, but Jack had seen Japanese Christians doing the same thing near Manila. There were no demons and no phantasms.

“In truth? I feel as if I’ve already been round the world,” Jack said. “The only thing separating me from London is Mexico, which I have seen on maps, and know to be but a narrow isthmus.”

“Don’t forget the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans,” Enoch said. He began closing up the several latches and locks of the little chest.

“’Tis naught but water, and we have a ship,” Jack scoffed. Every Filipino within earshot crossed himself, taking Jack’s words as a more or less direct request for God to strike Jack, and anyone near him, dead. “In truth, I was considering this very subject the night before we departed Queena-Kootah, when we were all convened, there, at the new Bomb and Grapnel, at the foot of Eliza Peak, enjoying the balmy breezes and drinking toasts to Jeronimo, Yevgeny, Nasr al-Ghuráb, Nyazi, and others who could not be with us.”

“Oh? You did not seem to be in any condition to consider anything.”

“You forget I am no stranger to mental impairments, and have learned to get by with them,” Jack said. “At any rate. My ruminations—”

“Rum-inations?”

“Roominations ran along these general lines: You gave me advice not to name this ship after Eliza, for one day the Vessel might arrive in the same city as the Lady and give rise to whisperings and inferences that he might find embarrassing or even dangerous. Fine. So when we first dropped anchor before Queena-Kootah, a couple of years ago, and Surendranath ventured ashore to trade with the Moorish natives, and learnt that they stood in need of a new Sultan—I say, when we became aware that the place was essentially being given to us—I looked at that beautiful snow-capped mountain and named it Eliza. Because it was warm, fertile, and beautiful below, while being a bit frosty and inaccessible at the top—yet possessing a volcanick profile foretelling explosions—”

“Yes, you have explained the similitude in great detail on several occasions.”

“Righto. But I reckoned it was safe to use Eliza’s name there, as it was so far away from the cities of Christendom. But later—after we had installed Mr. Foot as Sultan, and Surendranath as Grand Wazir, and they had built the Bomb and Grapnel anew—European ships began to drop anchor there, and old sea-captains began coming ashore, and some of them knew Mr. Foot from of old. They resumed conversations that had been interrupted by tavern-fights thirty years earlier at the first Bomb in Dunkirk. And I began to understand that even Queena-Kootah is not so terribly far from London. Standing on a ship in Japan, I am closer to London than ever I was standing on the banks of the Thames as a mud-lark boy.”

“We must needs see to certain matters before you go for a stroll down the Strand,” said Dappa, who was perched above them on the fo’c’sle-deck like a raven. “Such as whether we will be suffered to leave Japan alive. You have no idea how illegal this is.”

“In truth I have a fairly good idea,” Jack demurred.

But there was no stopping Dappa. “If this were Nagasaki, boats would have come out already to remove our rudder and take it ashore—armed Samurai would be searching every cranny of the ship for stowaway Jesuits.”

“If this were Nagasaki we would not even be able to enter or leave the harbor without a Japanese pilot to help us over the rocks, and even then we would have to drop anchor several times and wait for tides—so we’d be helpless,” Jack said. “As it is, we can be on our way at a moment’s notice, provided we don’t mind cutting our anchor-cables.”

“When night falls we shall be desperately vulnerable to boarders,” Dappa returned.

“We are in high latitudes for once—it is near the middle of the year (though you’d never guess it from the temperature)—and the day is long,” Jack said, stepping around to a new position where he could get a clear view of the sun rising over the mountains of Japan. The water of the harbor was glancing light into his eyes so that it looked like a sheet of hammered copper. A longboat was clearly silhouetted on it, headed their way. “Damme, these Japanese are punctual—it is not like Manila.”

“Chinese smugglers they accept grudgingly. It pleases them not to have a Christian ship drop anchor here. They want rid of us.”

Van Hoek came by and said, “I had Father Gabriel write, in his last communication, that the transfer of metal would continue until the sun was four fingers above the western horizon—not a moment longer.”

Every man on the ship who was not manning a cannon gravitated to the rail to watch the Japanese boat approach. As it drew closer, and the sun came clear of the rugged horizon, they were able to see a dozen or so commoners in drab clothing pulling on the oars, and, in the middle of the boat, three men wearing the same hair-do as Gabriel Goto, each armed with a pair of swords, and dressed in kimonos. Packed in around them were half a dozen archers in outlandish helmets and metal-strip armor. The boat was moving almost directly up-wind and so had not bothered raising her one sail, but from the mast she was flying a large banner of blue silk blazoned with a white insignia, a roundish shape that like the art of the Mahometans did not seem to be a literal depiction of anything in particular, but might have been thrown together by a man who had seen a flower once.

A fresh breeze was rising up out of the Sea of Japan as the day got under way, and no one needed to consult a globe to guess that this air had originated over Siberia. It was the first time Jack had felt cold since he had left Amsterdam—a memory that caused him to rub absent-mindedly at the old harpoon-scar on his arm, which at the moment was all covered with goose-pimples. The crew of Filipinos, Malabaris, and Malays had never felt anything like this, and muttered to one another in astonishment. “Make sure they understand that this is only a taste of what will come when we are crossing the Pacific, or rounding Cape Horn,” van Hoek said to Dappa. “If any of them desires to jump ship, Manila will be his last opportunity.”

“I am giving thought to it myself,” Dappa said, rubbing and spanking himself. His eyes crossed for a moment as he gazed in alarm at steam rising from his own mouth. “I could be a publican at the new Bomb and Grapnel…and never feel cold, except when I had snow brought down from Eliza Peak, and scooped a handful of it into a rum-drink. Brrr! How can those men stand it?” He nodded across fifty yards of chop to the Japanese boat. The Samurais were kneeling there stolidly, facing into the wind, which made their garments billow and snap.

“Later they will go boil themselves in vats,” Enoch said learnedly.

“When I saw Goto-san’s get-up,” Jack said, “I supposed that he’d had it pieced together of scraps collected from Popish Churches and whorehouses, such are the colors. Yet compared to what those sour-pusses in the boat are wearing, Father Gabriel’s togs look like funeral-weeds.”

“They put French Cavaliers to shame,” Enoch agreed.

In a few minutes the Japanese boat advanced into the lee of Minerva and drew up alongside her. Lines were thrown back and forth, and a pilot’s ladder unrolled from the upperdeck. The protocol of what followed had been worked out in such detail that van Hoek had to consult a written list: First, the Cabal gathered near the mainmast and said farewell to Gabriel Goto. Jack, for his part, had never felt especially friendly toward the man, but now he remembered the ronin doing battle against the foe at the needle’s eye in Khan el-Khalili, and his nose ran and tears came to his eyes. Gabriel Goto was recalling the same thing, for he bowed low to Jack and said in Sabir: “I have been a ronin all my life, Jack, which means a Samurai without a master—except for that one day in Cairo when I swore allegiance to you, and for a brief time knew what it was to have a Lord and to fight as part of an Army. Now I go to a place where I will have a new Lord and serve in a different Army. But in my heart I will always owe my first allegiance to you.” And then he removed the two swords, the katana and the wakizashi, from the belt of his garment, and presented them to Jack.

Dappa, van Hoek, Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig, and Vrej Esphahnian each stepped forward to exchange bows with the Samurai. Moseh, Surendranath, and the Shaftoe boys had remained behind in Manila and had already said their good-byes on the banks of the Pasig. Finally Gabriel Goto strode over to the top of the ladder and threw one leg over the gunwale and began to descend, rung by rung, vanishing below the teak horizon. For a moment only his head was visible, his face clenched like a fist, a few stray strands of hair whipping around in the wind. Then it was only his top-knot. Then he was gone.

Jack sighed. “We are a Cabal no longer,” he said. “What began on the roof of the banyolar in Algiers has dissolved in this Japanese smugglers’-cove.”

“We are all business partners now, and not brothers-in-arms,” said Dappa.

“There is no difference to me,” said Vrej Esphahnian, moderately annoyed. “Why should the bonds holding a business partnership together be inferior to those joining brothers-in-arms? For me the venture does not end here—it only begins.”

Jack laughed. “A great adventure to other men is a routine thing for an Armenian, it seems.”

A different top-knot appeared at the gunwale, and a different Samurai came aboard and exchanged bows with van Hoek. It was obvious from the way he looked around that he had never seen a ship of any size before, to say nothing of sailors with red hair, blue eyes, or black skin. But he kept his composure and carried on with the next phase of the protocol: van Hoek presented him with a single egg of wootz, which had been cleverly boxed and wrapped, with great ceremony, by an ancient Japanese lady in Manila. The Samurai made as great a ceremony of unwrapping it, then handed it off to one of his archers, who had to scamper up the ladder to get it.

Van Hoek gave the visitor a tour of Minerva’s hold, where many more eggs of wootz, and diverse other goods besides, were waiting for inspection. Meanwhile Enoch Root caused his black chest to be lowered into the boat. Then he descended the ladder. In a few minutes he was followed by the Samurai, who’d finished his inspection belowdecks. The Japanese boat cast off its lines, raised a sail, and quickly made its way into a pier, where it was tied up next to a much larger vessel, a sort of cargo-barge that looked as if it might be used for ferrying goods between shore and ship. Under the watchful spyglasses of various men on Minerva, everyone disembarked onto the pier. Enoch was escorted to a sort of warehouse on the shore.

Half an hour later the alchemist came out by himself and boarded the boat. Immediately it shoved off and began rowing towards Minerva. At the same time a few score boat-men swarmed over the barge and cast off its mooring-lines, and began laboring with oars and push-poles to move it away from shore.

Enoch Root ascended the pilot’s ladder like a young man, though when his face appeared above the rail he had a grave look about him. To van Hoek he said, “I performed every test I know of. More tests than the assayers in New Spain will likely do. I submit to you that the stuff is as pure as any from the mines of Europe.” To Jack the only thing he said was, “It is a very strange country.”

“How strange?” Jack asked.

Enoch shook his head and answered “Enough to make me understand how strange Christendom is.” Then he retired to his cabin.

Minerva’s sailors pulled his belongings up on ropes: first his chest of alchemical whatnot, and second a box, still partly covered in gaudy wrapping paper. Dappa caught this as it was hoisted over the rail and set it down on a table that they’d brought up from van Hoek’s wardroom. Nestled in crumpled paper inside the box was an egg of fired clay: a flask, stoppered at one end by a wooden bung. Wax had been dribbled over this to seal it, but Enoch Root had already violated the seal so that he could perform his tests. Dappa thrust his hands down into the nest of paper and cupped the egg in his hands and raised it up into cold blue sunlight. Van Hoek drew out his dagger and used its tip to worry the bung loose. When this had been removed, Dappa tipped the flask. Fluid sloshed inside with momentum so potent that it nearly pulled him off his feet. A bead of liquid silver leapt out into the sun and built speed until it struck the tabletop with the impact of a hammer. Then it exploded in a myriad gleaming balls that glided across the table and cascaded over its edge like a waterfall and spattered heavily on Minerva’s deck. The quicksilver probed downhill, seeking gaps between planks, spattering down into the gundeck and making an argent rain among the men who stood tense by their guns. A murmur and then a thrill ran through the ship. It was to every man aboard as if Minerva had received a second christening, with quicksilver instead of Champagne, and that she was now re-consecrated to a new mission and purpose.

It was high noon before the barge was alongside Minerva and the transfer of cargo could begin. This was an awkward way to do it, but the Japanese officials would on no account suffer Minerva to approach shore. With larger cargo it would have been well nigh impossible. But Minerva was laden with wootz, silk, and pepper, and the barge carried nothing but flasks of quicksilver, and bales of straw for packing it. Any of these items could be passed or thrown from hand to hand, and once they had got it organized the transfer went on at a terrific pace—a hundred men, sweating and breathing hard, could transfer tons of cargo in a minute. Steel, spice, and silk streamed out of Minerva’s holds and were replaced by quicksilver. The outgoing and incoming flows grazed each other at one place on the upperdeck, where Monsieur Arlanc and Vrej Esphahnian sat at the table facing each other, each armed with a stockpile of quills, one tallying the quicksilver and the other tallying other goods. Every so often they would call out figures to each other, just making sure that the flows were balanced, so that Minerva would not rise too high or sink too low in the water.

Enoch Root emerged, rubbing sleep from his eyes, when the transfer was perhaps two-thirds complete. He flicked his eyes at Jack, and then van Hoek, and then returned to his cabin.

Twenty seconds later Jack and van Hoek were in there with him.

“I was trying to sleep but that lanthorn kept me awake,” Enoch said, nodding at an oil lamp that was suspended from the ceiling of his cabin on a chain. It was swinging back and forth dramatically even though the ship was only rocking slightly from side to side.

“Why don’t you take it down?” Jack asked.

“Because I think it is trying to tell me something,” Enoch said. He then turned his gaze on van Hoek. “You told me, once, that every harbor, depending on its size, has a characteristic wave. You said that even if you were lying in your cabin with the curtains drawn you could tell the difference between Batavia and Cavite simply by the period of the waves.”

“It’s true,” van Hoek said. “Any captain can tell you stories of ships that were proven seaworthy, but that were cast away entering an unfamiliar harbor, because the period of that harbor’s waves happened to match the natural frequency of the ship’s hull.”

“Every ship, depending on how it is ballasted and laden, rocks in a particular rhythm—just as this lantern swings at a fixed rate,” said Enoch, explaining it for Jack. “If waves strike that ship in the same rhythm, then she soon begins moving so violently that she overturns and is cast away.”

“Just as a lute-string that is plucked makes its partner, which is tuned to the same note, vibrate in natural sympathy,” said van Hoek. “Go on, Enoch.”

“When we sailed into this harbor early this morning, my lanthorn suddenly began to swing so violently that it was bashing against the ceiling and spilling oil about the cabin,” Enoch said. “And so I took it down and adjusted the chain to a different length, as you see it now.” Enoch now lifted the lanthorn’s chain from its hook in the ceiling-beam, and began to feel his way along, link by link, until he came to one that was worn smooth. “This is how it was when we entered the harbor,” he said, and then re-hung the lanthorn so that it dangled a few inches lower than before. He pulled it away to the side and then let it go, and it began swinging back and forth in the center of the cabin. “So it follows that the frequency we observe now—swing, swing, swing—is tuned to the natural period of this harbor’s waves.”

“With all due respect to you and your friends of the Royal Society,” van Hoek said, “can this demonstration not wait until we are out in the middle of the Sea of Japan?”

“It cannot,” Enoch said calmly, “because we will never reach the Sea of Japan. This is a death-trap.”

Van Hoek was about to spring to his feet, but Enoch restrained him with a hand on the shoulder, and glanced out his cabin window lest they be observed by some Japanese. “Hold,” he said, “it is a subtle trap and subtle we must be to escape it. Jack, on my bed there is a flask.”

Jack, who was too tall to stand upright in the cabin, crab-walked sideways a step or two, and found one of the quicksilver-flasks nestled among Enoch’s bed-clothes.

“Hold it out at arm’s length,” Enoch said.

Jack did so, though it took the strength of both arms. The quicksilver inside the flask swirled about as he moved it, but then it settled. His hands became still. Then the liquid metal began sloshing back and forth, forcing his hands to move left, right, left, right, no matter how hard he tried to hold it still.

“Mark the lantern,” said Enoch. Attention shifted from the sloshing flask to the swinging light.

Van Hoek saw it first. “They move at the same period.”

“Which is the same as what?” Enoch asked, like a schoolmaster leading his pupils forward onto new ground.

“The natural rhythm of the waves at the entrance to this harbor,” Jack said.

“I have tried three flasks in this way, and all of them slosh at the same frequency,” Enoch said. “I submit to you that they have been tuned, as carefully as the pipes in a cathedral-organ. When this ship is fully loaded, and we try to sail out the harbor’s mouth—”

“We will hit those waves…ten tons of quicksilver will began to heave back and forth…we will be torn apart,” van Hoek said.

“It is a simple matter to remedy,” Enoch said. “All we need is to go down and open the flasks and fill each one up so that they cannot slosh. But we must not let the Japanese know that we have figured out their plan, or else they will swarm on us. The warehouse on shore has an oily smell. I believe that there are many archers concealed in the woods, waiting with fire-arrows.”

THEY FINISHED THE TRANSFER OF goods with plenty of daylight left. The Samurai in charge of the barge bid them farewell with a perfunctory bow and then turned his attention to getting his hoard of exotic goods in to shore. Van Hoek ordered preparations made for sailing, but they were of a highly elaborate nature, and took much longer than they might have. Belowdecks he had pulled one man off of each gun crew and put as many as he could muster to work unstoppering the quicksilver-flasks and decanting the mercury from one to the next, until each one was brim-full. Aboard ship there was never a shortage of pitch and black stuff used for caulking seams, and so each one of the flasks was sealed shut in that way. Half an hour before sunset van Hoek ordered the anchors weighed, a procedure that lasted until twilight had fallen over the harbor.

From that point onwards it was mad, black toil for many hours. There was a full moon (they’d planned it that way long in advance, so that they’d have better light during the tricky parts of the journey) and it shone very bright in the cold sky. As they traversed the harbor entrance, all of the ship’s officers gathered in Enoch’s cabin to watch the one quicksilver flask that had not been changed; it seemed to come alive at a certain point, when the rhythmic waves struck the hull, and thrashed around as if some djinn were trapped inside trying to fight its way out.

This was the point when the Japanese must have realized that their trap had been foiled, and out they came in longboats that were all ablaze with many points of fire from burning arrows. But van Hoek was ready. Abovedecks, the riggers had quietly readied all the courses of sail that Minerva had to offer, and they spread it all before the wind as soon as they heard the war-drums booming from the shore. Belowdecks, every cannon had been loaded with grape-shot. The Japanese boats could not hope to match Minerva’s speed once she got under way, and the few that came close were driven back by her cannons. All of about half a dozen burning arrows lodged in her teak-wood and were quickly snuffed out by officers with buckets of sand and water. They were able to get well clear of the shore, and of their pursuers, by the moon’s light.

When the sun rose over Japan the next morning, a soldier’s wind came up out of the west—which meant it blew perpendicular to their southerly heading, and was therefore so easy to manage that even soldiers could have trimmed the sails. Nevertheless van Hoek kept her speed low at first, because he was concerned that the flasks would shift about in their straw packing as they entered into heavier seas. As Minerva worked through various types of waves, van Hoek prowled around her decks sensing the movements of the cargo like a clairvoyant, and frequently communing with the spirit of Jan Vroom (who had died of malaria a year ago). His verdict, of course, was that they’d done a miserable job of packing the flasks, and that it would all have to be re-done when they got to Manila, but that, given the hazards of pirates and typhoons, they had no choice but to raise more sail anyway. So that is what they did.

They added one or two more knots to their speed thereby, and after three days, ran the Straits of Tsushima: a procedure that might have been devised by some fiendish engineer specifically to drive van Hoek mad with anxiety, as it involved running down a complex and current-ridden, yet poorly charted chute hemmed in on one side by pirate-islands of Korea and on the other by a country (Japan) where it was death for a foreigner to set foot. The paintings of Gabriel Goto’s father were of very little use because that ronin had been piloting a boat of much shallower draft than Minerva and invariably chose to hug shorelines and squirt through gaps between islands where Minerva could not go.

At any rate they made it through, and putting the mountains of Japan on their larboard quarter they ventured into the East China Sea. Immediately the lookout identified sails to larboard: a ship emerging through a spacious gap between certain outlying Japanese islands, and coming about into a course roughly parallel with their own. This was curious, because the charts showed nothing but Japanese land in the direction from which the ship had come—beyond that, it was the Pacific Ocean for one hundred degrees, and then vague sketches of a supposed American coastline. And yet this ship was unmistakably European. More to the point, as van Hoek announced after peering at it for a while through his spyglass, it was Dutch. And that settled the mystery. This was one of those Dutch vessels that was allowed to sail into the harbor of Nagasaki and anchor before Deshima—a walled and guarded island-compound near that city, where a handful of Europeans were suffered to dwell for brief periods as they traded with the representatives of the Shogun.

Now van Hoek ordered that the Dutch flag be run up on the mizzenmast, and had them fire a salute from the ship’s cannons. The Dutch ship responded in kind, and so after exchanging various signals with flags and mirrors, the two vessels fell in alongside each other, and gradually drew close enough that words could be hollered back and forth through speaking-trumpets. Every man on board who knew how to write was busy writing letters for himself, or on behalf of those who couldn’t, because it was obvious that this Dutch ship was headed for Batavia, and thence west-bound. Within a few months she would be dropping anchor in Rotterdam.

This was when they lost their Alchemist.

When it came clear that they were about to lose their Adult Supervision, Jack felt panic under his feet like a swell pressing up on the ship’s hull. But he did not suppose that it would instill confidence, among the crew, for him to break down and blubber. So he acted as if this had been expected all along. Indeed, in a way it had. Enoch Root had shown inhuman patience during the last couple of years, as the transaction of the quicksilver had been slowly teased together, and there had been plenty of interesting diversions for him in the Chinese and Japanese barangays of Manila, the countless strange islands of the Philippines, and in helping to establish Mr. Foot as the White Sultan of Queena-Kootah. But it was long since time for him to move on.

He had taken up an interest in the vast territories limned on Dutch charts to the South and East of the Philippines: New Guinea; the supposed Australasian Continent; Van Diemen’s Land; and a chain of islands sprawling off into the uncharted heart of the South Pacific, called the Islands of Solomon.

Enoch stood on the upperdeck, waiting for his chests and bags to be lowered into the longboat. As he often did in idle moments, he reached into the pocket of his traveling-cloak and took out a contraption that looked a bit like a spool. But a poorly made one, for the ends of the spool were bulky, and the slot in between them, where the cord was wound, was narrow. He unwound a couple of inches of cord and slipped his finger through a loop that had been tied in its end. Then he allowed the spool to fall from his hand. It dropped slowly at first, as the spool’s inertia resisted its tendency to unwind, but then it picked up speed and plunged smoothly toward the deck. Just shy of hitting the planks it stopped abruptly, having unwound its meager supply of cord. At the same moment Enoch gave a little twitch of the hand, and the spool reversed its direction and began to climb up the string.

Jack glanced across several fathoms of open water toward the Dutch ship. A dozen or so sailors were watching this miracle with their mouths open.

“They cannot see the string at this distance,” Jack commented, “and suppose you are doing some sort of magick.”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo,” Enoch said.

“That could not hurt a sparrow,” Jack said. “I prefer the original type with the rotating knives.”

“All well and good for striking prey off tree-limbs in the Philippine jungle,” Enoch said, “but it gets uncomfortable, carrying such weapons about in one’s pocket.”

“Where art thou and thy yo-yos bound?”

“It is rumored that the purple savages of Arnhem Land also make throwing-weapons that return to the thrower,” Enoch said, “but without a string, or any other such physickal connexion.”

“Impossible!”

“As I said—‘Any sufficiently advanced tech—’ ”

“I heard you the first time. So it’s off to Arnhem Land. And then?”

Enoch paused to check the progress of the boat-loading, and seeing that he still had a minute or two, related the following: “You know that our entire Enterprise hinges on our being able to corrupt certain Spanish officials and sea-captains, which is not inherently difficult. But we have had to spend countless hours wining and dining them, and listening to their interminable yarns and sea-fables. Most of these are tedious and unremarkable. But I heard one that interested me. It was told me by one Alfonso, who was first mate aboard a galleon that left Manila for Acapulco some years ago. As usual they attempted to sail north to a higher latitude where they could get in front of the trade wind to California. Instead they were met by a tempest that drove them to the south for many days. The next time they were able to make solar observations, they discovered that they had actually crossed the Line and were several degrees south. Now the storm had washed away all of the earth that they had packed around their hearth in the galley, making it impossible for them to light a cook-fire without setting the whole galleon ablaze. So they dropped anchor near an island (for they’d come in sight of a whole chain of ’em, populated by people who looked like Africans) and gathered sand and fresh water. The water they used to replenish their drinking-jars. The sand they packed around their hearth. Then they continued their journey. When they arrived at Acapulco, the better part of a year later, they discovered nuggets of gold under the hearth—evidently that sand was auriferous and the heat of the fire had melted the gold and separated it from the sand. Needless to say, the Viceroy in Mexico City—”

“The same?”

Enoch nodded. “The very same from whom you stole the gold before Bonanza. He was informed of this prodigy, and did not delay in sending out a squadron, under an admiral named de Obregon, to sail along that line of latitude until they found those islands.”

“Would those be the Solomon Islands?”

“As you know, Jack, it has long been supposed that Solomon—the builder of the Temple in Jerusalem, the first Alchemist, and the subject of Isaac Newton’s obsessions for lo these many years, departed from the Land of Israel before he died, and journeyed far to the east, and founded a kingdom among certain islands. It is a part of this legend that this kingdom was fabulously wealthy.”

“Funny how no one ever makes up legends concerning wretchedly poor kingdoms—”

“It matters not whether this legend is true, only that some people believe it,” Enoch said patiently. He had begun to do tricks with the yo-yo now, making it fly around his hand like a comet whipping around the sun.

“Such as this Newton fellow? The one who reckoned the orbits of the planets?”

“Newton is convinced that Solomon’s temple was a geometrickal model of the solar system—the fire on the central altar representing the sun, et cetera.”

“So he would fain know about it, if the Islands of Solomon were discovered…”

“Indeed.”

“…and no doubt he has already perused the chronicles of that expedition that was sent out by our friend in Bonanza.”

Enoch shook his head. “There are no such chronicles.”

“The expedition was shipwrecked?”

“Shipwrecked, killed by disease…the vectors of disaster were so plentiful that the accounts cannot be reconciled. Only one ship made it to Manila, half of her crew dead and the rest dying of some previously unheard-of pestilence. The only one who survived was one Elizabeth de Obregon, the wife of the Admiral who had commanded the squadron.”

“And what does she have to say for herself?”

“She has said nothing. In a society where women cannot own property, Jack, secrets are to them what gold and silver are to men.”

“Why did the Viceroy not then send out another squadron?”

“Perhaps he did.”

“You have grown coy, Enoch, and time grows short.”

“It is not that I am coy, but that you are lazy in your thinking. If such expeditions had been sent out, and found nothing, what would the results be?”

“Nothing.”

“If an expedition had succeeded, what result then?”

“Some chronicle, kept secret in a Spanish vault in Mexico or Seville, and a great deal of gold…” Here Jack faltered.

“What did you expect to find in the hold of the Viceroy’s brig?”

“Silver.”

“What found you instead?”

“Gold.”

“But the mines of Mexico produce only silver.”

“It is true…we never solved the mystery of the origin of that gold.”

“Do you have any idea, Jack, how many alchemists are numbered among the ruling classes of Christendom?”

“I’ve heard rumors.”

“If a rumor got out among those people—kings, dukes, and princes—that the Island of Solomon had been discovered, and gold taken from there—not just any gold, mind you, but gold that came from the furnaces of King Solomon himself, and was very close to being the pure stuff of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Philosophick Mercury—I should think that it would excite a certain amount of interest. Wouldn’t you say?”

“If rumor got out, why, yes—”

“It always gets out,” Enoch explained flatly. “Does this help to explain why so many great men are so very angry with you?”

“I never thought it wanted explanation. But now that you mention it…”

“Good. And I hope it also explains why I must go and see these Solomon Islands myself. If the legends are true, then Newton will want to know all about it. Even if they are nothing more than legends, those islands might be a good place for a man to go, if he wanted to get away from the world for a few years, or a few centuries…in any event, that is where I am bound.”

The yo-yo came up sharply into Enoch’s palm and stopped.

THE SEA-VOYAGE FROM JAPAN to Manila had in common with all other sea-voyages that it was all about latitudes. Van Hoek, Dappa, and several others aboard knew how to find their latitude by observing the sun’s position in the sky. The sun came out at least once a day and so they always had a good idea of which parallel they were at. But there was no way to reckon longitude. Accordingly, van Hoek’s charts and records of Hazards to Navigation tended to be organized by latitude. Along certain parallels they had nothing to worry about, because in this part of the world (according to the documents) no reefs or islands existed there. But along certain other parallels, hazards had been discovered, and so whenever Minerva was found to be in such latitudes the mood of the ship changed, sail was reduced, lookouts added, soundings taken. They might have been a hundred miles due east or due west of the Hazard in question; not having any idea of their longitude, there was simply no telling. Since the voyage from Japan to Manila was a north-to-south one, their degree of latitude, and their degree of anxiety, were changing every moment.

Other than reefs and islands, the chief hazards were typhoons, and the kingdom of Corsairs who had wrested Formosa from the Dutch some years previously, and through whose waters they had to sail in order to reach Luzon. On this voyage both of those hazards struck on the same day: Corsairs sighted them and fell into an intercept course, but before they could close with Minerva, the weather began to alter in ways that suggested an approaching typhoon. The Corsairs broke off the pursuit and turned their energies to survival. By this point Minerva had ridden out several such storms, and her officers and crew knew how it was done; van Hoek could make educated guesses as to how the direction of the wind would change over the course of the next two days, and how its strength would vary according to their distance from its center. By setting some storm-sails and managing the tiller personally, he was able to arrange it so that they were not driven against the isle of Formosa. Instead the typhoon flung them out to the south and east, into the Philippine Sea, which was deep water with no obstructions. Later, when the weather cleared and they could shoot the sun again, they sought out a particular latitude (19° 45’ N) and followed that parallel west for two hundred miles until they had passed through the Balintang Channel, which separated some groups of small islands north of Luzon. Turning to the south then, they made way with great care until the hills and headlands of Ilocos—the northwestern corner of Luzon—came into view.

At that moment the character of the voyage changed. Three hundred miles separated them from the point of Mariveles at the entrance to Manila Bay, and it would all be coastal sailing, which meant contending with weak and fickle winds, and taking frequent soundings, and dropping anchor at night lest they run aground on some unseeable hazard in the dark. Some days they made no progress whatever, owing to contrary winds—by day, they traded with locals for fresh fruit and meat brought out in long dual-outrigger boats, and by night they patrolled Minerva’s decks with loaded blunderbusses, waiting for those same locals to steal out in the same boats and creep over the gunwales with knives in their teeth.

At any rate, ten days of this sort of travel brought them, late one afternoon, to the point of Mariveles, where several rocks projected from the surf like daggers. The garrison on the nearby island of Corregidor caught sight of Minerva around sunset and lit some fires to prevent her from running aground. By triangulating against these they were able to bring the ship gingerly around the south side of the island and drop anchor in the bay there. The next morning the Spanish ensign in command of the garrison came out on a longboat for an hour’s visit; they knew him thoroughly, as Minerva had passed this way a dozen or so times on her triangular voyages among Manila, Macao, and Queena-Kootah. He gave them the latest jokes and gossip from Manila and they gave him some packets of spices and a few trinkets they’d picked up in Japan.

They weighed anchor and sailed across Manila Bay. The Spanish castle on the point of Cavite came into view first, and later they could make out, beyond it, the bell-towers and fortifications of Manila, and a thicket of masts and spars, shot through with furling silk banners, around the outlet of the Pasig River. It was the expectation of most aboard that they would make direct for there. But as they weathered the point of Cavite and entered into calmer water in the lee of the castle, van Hoek ordered most of the sails taken in. A banca—a sort of longboat hewn from the trunk of a single colossal tree—came toward them, and as it drew closer, Jack was able to recognize Moseh and Surendranath, who had stayed behind to settle some business affairs, and Jimmy and Danny, who had been acting as their bodyguards. One by one these men clambered up the pilot’s ladder and joined their brethren on the upperdeck. Moseh and Surendranath went back into van Hoek’s wardroom to confer with the captain and the other chief men of the enterprise. Jack could have participated in this meeting but declined to because he could tell from the look on Moseh’s face that it had all gone more or less well, and that their next voyage would be eastbound.

This was the innermost harbor of Manila Bay: a hammock-shaped anchorage slung between two points of land several miles apart, each of which had been built up into a fortress by the Spaniards, or rather by their Tagalian minions, during the century and a half that they had held sway over these islands. The closer of the two forts, just off their starboard, was Cavite: a conventional square, four-bastioned castle thrust out into the water on a slender neck of land, so that the bay served as its moat. A ditch had been dug across that neck so that the landward approach could be controlled by a drawbridge. This ditch was situated at some distance from the castle proper, and the intervening space had been covered with buildings: a crowd of cane houses with more substantial wood-frame dwellings rising out of it from place to place, and three stone churches that had been erected, or were being erected, by various Popish religious orders.

The opposite end of the harbor was the city of Manila proper. The Spaniards had taken a small peninsula framed on one side by the Bay and on two others by rivers: the Pasig, and a welter of pissant tributaries that joined the Pasig just short of where it emptied into the Bay. They had enclosed this peninsula in a modern sort of slope-sided wall, a couple of miles in circuit, and erected noble bulwarks and demilunes at its corners, rendering it impregnable to land assault by Dutch, Chinese, or native legions. The outlet of the Pasig was dominated by a considerable fortress whose guns commanded the river, the Bay, and certain troublesome ethnic barangays across the river.

From this point of view—or any point of view, for that matter—it did not look like a fabled citadel of inconceivable wealth. If the Spaniards had built Manila anywhere else, her church-spires and watch-towers would have reached into the clouds. As it was, even the noblest buildings hugged the ground and had a stoop-shouldered look about them, because they had learned the hard way that anything more than two storeys high, and built of stone, would be brought down by an earthquake while the mortar was scarcely dry. So as Jack stood there on Minerva’s deck he perceived Manila as something very dark, low, and heavy, and overlaid with smoke and humidity, softened only a little by the high coconut palms that lined her shore.

This was just the sort of weather that culminated in a bracing thunder-shower—a fact Minerva’s crew knew well, for Manila had been their home port for most of the three years since the ship had made her maiden voyage out of Malabar, and at any rate half the crew had grown up along the shores of this bay. They also knew that this bay offered no protection from north winds, and that a big ship like Minerva would be cast away if she were caught between Cavite and Manila when the wind shifted round that way; she would run a-ground in the shallows and fall prey to Tagalians who would come out in their tree-trunk boats and Chinese sangleys who would come out in their sampans to salvage her. So instead of being boisterous, as one might reasonably expect of sailors who’d just made a perilous and improbable voyage to Japan and back, they were solemn as monks on Sunday, and angrily shushed anyone who raised his voice. Malabaris had suspended themselves in the ratlines like spiders in webs and were hanging there motionless with eyes half closed and mouths half open, waiting for meaningful stirrings in the air.

The sky and air were all white, and of a uniform brightness, so that it was impossible to get even a general notion of where the sun might be. According to the hour-glasses they used to keep track of watches, it must be an hour or so before sunset. The whole bay was as still and hushed as Minerva’s upperdeck; the only noise, therefore, came from the vast shipyard that spread along the shore below the sullen arsenal of Cavite. There five hundred Filipino slaves were at work under the whips and guns of helmeted Spaniards, constructing the largest ship Jack had ever seen. Which, considering the places he had been, meant that it was very likely the largest ship the world had seen since Noah’s Ark had run a-ground on a mountain-top and been broken up for firewood.

Piled on the shore in pyramids were the stripped boles of giant trees that these Filipinos, or others in the same predicament, had cut down in the bat-infested jungles that crowded in along the shores of Laguna de Bay (a great lake just inland of Manila) and floated in rafts down the Pasig. Some of the workers were cutting these into beams and planks. But the great ship was close to being finished and so the demand for huge timbers was not what it had been months ago when the keel and frames had stood out like stiff fingers against the sky. Most of the laborers were concerned with finer matters now: making cables (indeed, Manila made the finest cordage in the world), caulking joints between hull-planks, and doing finish carpentry on the cabins where the most ambitious merchants of the South Seas would dwell for most of the next year, or drown within weeks, depending on how it went.

“Dad, either my eyes play tricks, or else you’ve finally traded in that Mahometan spadroon for proper armaments,” said Daniel Shaftoe, eyeing the katana and wakizashi of Gabriel Goto, thrust into Jack’s belt.

“I’ve been trying to grow accustomed to ’em,” Jack allowed, “but it’s all for naught. One-handed is how I learned to fight, and it’s all I’ll ever know. I wear these to honor Goto-san, but when next I venture into some place where I might need to do some defensing, it’s the Janissary-sword I’ll be wearing.”

“Aw, it ain’t that hard, Dad,” said Jimmy, coming up to shoulder past his brother. “By the time we reach Acapulco we’ll have you swingin’ that katana like a Samurai.” Jimmy patted the hilt of a Japanese sword, and now Jack noticed that Danny was armed in the same manner.

“Been broadening your horizons?”

“Manila is better than the ’varsity,” Danny proclaimed, “as long as you remain a step ahead o’ that pesky Spanish Inquisition…”

“From the fact that Moseh is still alive, and has all his fingernails, I’m guessing you succeeded there.”

“We fulfilled our obligations,” Jimmy said hotly. “We took lodgings on the edge of the barangay of the Japanese Christians—”

“—an orderly place—” Danny offered

“Perhaps a bit too orderly,” Jimmy said. “But we were hard up against the wicker walls of the sangley neighborhood, which is a perpetual riot, and so whenever the Inquisitors came after us we withdrew into that place for a while, and kept a sharp eye on one another’s backs until such time as Moseh could settle the matter.”

“I did not appreciate that Moseh had any such influence with the Sons of Torquemada,” Jack said.

“Moseh has let it be known, to a few of the Spaniards, what we are planning,” said Danny. “Suddenly those Spaniards are our friends.”

“They call off the Inquisitor’s dogs whenever Moseh lets out a squawk,” Jimmy said airily.

“I wonder what their friendship will cost us,” Jack said.

“They’d be more expensive as enemies, Dad,” Danny said, and in his voice was a confidence that Jack had not felt about anything in about twenty years.

The teak deck was changing color from a weathered iron-gray to a warmer hue, almost as if a fire had been kindled belowdecks and was trying to burn its way through. Jack looked away toward the exit of the bay, and saw the cause: The sun, now a hand’s breath above the horizon, had bored a hole through the miasma of vapor over the bay. Wisps and banks that still lurked in pockets of shade and stagnant coves round the foundations of the arsenal were fleeing from its sudden heat like smoke driven before a gust. For all that, the air was still. But a faint rumble prompted Jack to turn around and look east. Manila stood out in the clear now, her walls and bastions glowing in the sunlight as if they had been hewn out of amber and lit from behind by fire. The mountains behind the city were visible, which was a rare event. By comparison with them, the highest works of the Spaniards were low and flat as paving-stones. But those mountains in turn were humbled by phantasmic interlocking cloud-formations that were incarnating themselves in the limitless skies above, somewhat as if the personages and beasts of the Constellations had become fed up with being depicted in scatterings of faint stars, and had decided to come down out of the cosmos and clothe themselves in the stuff of typhoons. But they seemed to be having a dispute as to which would claim the most gorgeous and brilliant vapors, and the argument showed every sign of becoming a violent one. No lightning had struck the ground yet, and the cataracts of rain shed by some clouds were swallowed by others before they descended to the plane of the mountain-tops.

Jack altered his focus to the yards of Minerva, which compared to all of this were like broom-straws tangled together in a gutter. The men of the current watch were quietly making ready to be hit. Below, the head men of what had formerly been the Cabal had emerged from van Hoek’s cabin and were moving forward. Some of them, such as Dappa and Monsieur Arlanc, had gone to the trouble of changing into gentlemanly clothes: breeches, hose, and leather shoes had been broken out of foot-lockers. Vrej Esphahnian and van Hoek were wearing actual periwigs and tri-cornered hats.

Van Hoek stopped just in front of the mainmast, at the edge of the quarterdeck, which loomed above the broadest part of the upperdeck like a balcony over a plaza. Most of the ship’s complement had gathered there, and those who couldn’t find room, or who were too short to see over their fellows’ heads, had ascended to the forecastledeck whence they could look aft and meet van Hoek’s eye from the same level. The sailors had grouped themselves according to color so that they could hear translations: the largest two groups were the Malabaris and the Filipinos, but there were Malays, Chinese, several Africans from Mozambique by way of Goa, and a few Gujaratis. Several of the ship’s officers were Dutchmen who had come out with Jan Vroom. To look after the cannons they had rounded up a French, a Bavarian, and a Venetian artilleryman from the rabble of mercenaries that hung around Shahjahanabad. Finally there were the surviving members of the Cabal: van Hoek, Dappa, Monsieur Arlanc, Padraig Tallow, Jack Shaftoe, Moseh de la Cruz, Vrej Esphahnian, and Surendranath. When Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe were added, the number came to a hundred and five. Of these, some twenty were active in the rigging, readying the ship for weather.

Jack ascended the stairs to the quarterdeck and took up a position behind van Hoek, among the other share-holders. As he turned round to look out over the upperdeck—facing in the general direction of Manila—one of those constellation-gods in the sky above the city, furious because he had ended up in possession of nothing more than a few shredded rags of dim gray-indigo stuff, flung a thunderbolt horizontally into the mid-section of a rival, who was dressed in incandescent coral and green satin. The distance between them must have been twenty miles. It seemed as if a sudden crack had spanned a quarter of Heaven’s vault, allowing infinitely more brilliant light to shine through it, for an instant, from some extremely well-illuminated realm beyond the known universe. It was just as well that the crew were facing the other way—though some of them noticed startled expressions on the faces of the worthies on the quarterdeck, and swiveled their heads to see what was the matter. They saw nothing except a blade of rain sinking into the black jungle beyond Manila.

“It must have been Yevgeny, throwing a cœlestial Harpoon, to remind van Hoek that brevity is a virtue,” Jack said, and those who had known Yevgeny chuckled nervously.

“We have lived through another voyage,” van Hoek announced, “and if this were a Christian ship I would take my hat off and say a prayer of thanksgiving. But as it is a ship of no one particular faith, I shall keep my hat on until I can say my prayers alone later. Go you all to your temples, pagodas, shrines, and churches in Manila this night and do likewise.”

There was a general muttering of assent as this was translated. Minerva had no fewer than three cooks, and three completely different sets of pots. The only group who did not have their own were the Christians, who, when it came to food, would balk at nothing.

“Never again will this group of men be all together in one place,” said van Hoek. “Enoch Root has already bid us farewell. Within a fortnight Surendranath and some of you Malabaris will set sail for Queena-Kootah on the brig Kottakkal so that the rightful share of our profits may be conveyed to the Queen of the same name. In time Padraig will join them. He, Surendranath, and Mr. Foot will pursue happiness in the South Seas while the rest of us journey onwards. You sailors will disperse into Manila tonight. Some of you will return to this ship in one month’s time to prepare on our great voyage. Others will think better of it.”

Van Hoek now yanked out his cutlass and aimed it at the titanic ship that was being finished before the arsenal of Cavite. “Behold!” he proclaimed. All heads turned toward the mountainous galleon, but only for a moment; then attention turned to the weather. A wind had finally been summoned up, and it came from the east but showed signs of swinging round to the north. But the watch had a sail ready on the maintop, and they raised it now and let the wind bite into it, and trimmed it so as to bring Minerva about and convey her toward deeper waters in the center of the bay.

“A great ship for a great voyage,” van Hoek said, referring to the Spanish behemoth. “That is the Manila Galleon, and soon it will be laden with all the silks of China and spices of India and it will sail out of this bay and commence a voyage of seven months, crossing half of the terraqueous globe. When the Philippines fall away to aft her anchors will be brought up and stowed in the nethermost part of her hold, because for more than half a year they’ll not see a speck of dry land, and anchors will be as much use to her as bilge-pumps on an ox-cart. Northward she’ll sail, as far north as Japan, until she reaches a certain latitude—known only to the Spaniards—where trade winds blow due east, and where there are no isles or reefs to catch them unawares in mid-ocean. Then they’ll run before the wind and pray for rain, lest they die of thirst and wash up on the shores of California, a ghost-ship crowded with parched skeletons. Sometimes those trade-winds will falter, and they’ll drift aimlessly for a day, then two days, then a week, until a typhoon comes up from the south, or Arctic blasts come down out of the polar regions and freeze them with a chill compared to which what made us shiver and chafe so in Japan is as balmy as a maiden’s breath against your cheek. They will run out of food, and wealthy Epicureans, after they’ve eaten their own shoes and the leathern covers of their Bibles, will kneel in their cabins and send up delirious prayers for God to send them just one of the moldy crusts that earlier in the voyage they threw away. Gums will shrivel away from teeth, which will fall out until they must be swept off the deck like so many hailstones.”

This similitude was apparently improvised by van Hoek, for a barrage of pea-sized hail had just sprayed out of a low swirling cloud and speckled the deck. All hands looked at the hail and dutifully imagined teeth. A gust came across the water, decapitating a thousand whitecaps and flinging their spray sideways through the air; it caught them upside their heads, and in the same instant the sail popped like a musket-shot and the whole structure of the ship heaved and groaned from the impact. A rope burst and began thrashing about on the deck like a living thing as the tension bled out of it and its lays came undone. But then this momentary squall subsided and they found themselves working into a blustery north wind, across the darkling bay. The sun had plunged meteorically into the South China Sea, and its light was now overmatched by the lightning over Manila, which had merged into a continuous blue radiance that a person could almost read by.

“One day, long after they’ve given up hope, one of these wretches—one of the few who can still stand—will be up on deck, throwing corpses over the rail, when he’ll see something afloat in the water below: a scrap of seaweed, no bigger than my finger. Not a thing you or I would take any note of—but to them, as miraculous as a visitation by an angel! There’ll be a lot of praying and hymn-singing on that day. But it will all end in cruel disappointment, for no more seaweed will be observed that day, or the next, or the next. Another week they’ll sail—nothing! Nothing to do but run before the wind, and try with all their might to resist the temptation to cannibalize the bodies of the dead. By that point the most saintly Dominican brothers aboard will forget their prayers, and curse their own mothers for having borne them. And then another week of the same! But finally the seaweed will appear—not just a single bit of it, but two, then three. This will signify that they are off the coast of California, which is an island belted all around with such weeds.”

Jack noticed at about this time, that the blue-green light had grown much brighter, and had become steady and silent as if some eldritch Neptunian sun had risen out of the water, casting light but no warmth. Fighting a powerful instinctive reluctance, he forced himself to look up into the spars and rigging of the mainmast. Every bit of it—every splinter of wood and fiber of cordage—was aglow with crackling radiance, as if it had been dipped in phosphorus. It was a sight worthy of a good long look, but Jack made himself look down at the crowd on the quarterdeck instead. He saw a pool of upturned faces, teeth and eyes a-gleam, a well of souls gazing up in wonder.

“First ’twas Yevgeny—now Enoch Root is putting in his tuppence worth,” he joked, but if anyone did so much as chuckle, the sound was swallowed up in the susurration of waves against the hull. Van Hoek turned and glanced at Jack for a moment, then squared off again to continue his terrible Narration. The weird Fire of Saint Elmo had crawled down the mast to dance round the fringes of his tri-cornered hat, and even the curls of his goat-hair wig had become infected by sparks that buzzed and rustled as if alive. The individual hairs of that long-dead goat were now re-animated as if by some voudoun chaunt, and began trying to get away from each other, which entailed straightening and spreading out-wards. The quivering tip of each hair was defended by a nasty corona.

Van Hoek paid it no mind; if he was even aware of it, he evidently saw it as a way to add emphasis to his words. “Yet their ordeal is not finished, but only takes a different form; now they must endure the torment of Tantalus, for that land of milk and honey is the domain of savages, and no victuals are to be found on her shores—only sudden and violent death. Now they must sail for many long days down that coast, moving ever southeastward, making occasional desperate forays on to the land to scavenge fresh water or game. Finally one day they spy a Spanish watch-tower glowering down upon ’em from a stony mountain-top above the sea. Signals are exchanged, letting those on the ship know that riders have been sent out, galloping down the King’s Highway to the City of Mexico to spread the news that this year’s Manila Galleon has not been cast away or sunk in a storm but, mirabile dictu, has survived. Several days more and then a Spanish town comes into view. Boats come out bearing the first fruit and vegetables that these travelers will have eaten in half a year. But, too, they bring tidings that both French and English pirates have rounded Cape Horn and are prowling the coast—many dangerous miles still separate them from their destination of Acapulco…”

The Saint Elmo’s Fire was dying down now, and the miraculous pocket of calm in which they had drifted for the last several minutes was giving way to something a bit more like a thunderstorm. A big roller got under the hull, and the faces on the upperdeck undulated like a field of grain as every man sought his balance.

“As I said, we will be departing a few weeks after the Galleon, and we require sailors…” van Hoek began.

“Er, excuse me there, Cap’n,” Jack said, “your description of the voyage’s terrors was most affecting, and I’m sure every man jack has shited his breeches now…but you have forgotten to include any countervailing material. Having aroused the fear, you must now stimulate the avarice, of these sailors or else they will jump overboard and swim to shore right now, and will never enlist again.”

Van Hoek now got a contemptuous look which Jack was only able to see with the help of a convenient triple lightning bolt. “You sorely underestimate their intelligence, sir. It is not necessary to come out and state everything so directly. A well-formed Narration says as much by what is left out of it as by what is put in.”

“Then perhaps you should have left more out. I have some experience in matters theatrickal, sir,” Jack said, “which is applicable here insofar as this quarterdeck resembles nothing so much as a stage, and those, to my eye—notwithstanding your very generous estimate of their intelligence—look like nothing so much as groundlings, knee-deep in hazelnut shells and gin-bottles, waiting—begging—to be hit over their heads with some direct and unambiguous message.”

A lightning-bomb detonated over Manila.

“There is your message,” van Hoek said pointing toward the city, “and your groundlings will go into it tonight, and dwell in that Message for the next two months. You have dwelt there, too, Jack—did the Message not reach your ears?”

“I may have heard faint whisperings—could you amplify it?”

“Of all the enterprises to which a man can devote his energies,” van Hoek began grudgingly, raising his voice, “long-distance trade is the most profitable. It is what every Jew, Puritan, Dutchman, Huguenot, Armenian, and Banyan aspires to—it is what built the Navies and palaces of Europe, the Court of the Great Mogul in Shahjahanabad, and many other prodigies besides. And yet in the world of trade, it is common knowledge that no circuit—not the slave trade of the Caribbean, not the spice trade of the Indies—exceeds the Manila-to-Acapulco run in sheer profit. The wealthiest Banyans in Surat and bankers in Genoa lay their perfumed heads on silken pillows at night, and dream of sending a few bales of cargo across the Pacific on the Manila Galleon. Even with all the dangers, and the swingeing duty that must be shelled out to the Viceroy, the profits never fall below four hundred percent. That city is founded upon such dreams, Jack. We are all going to go there now.”

Van Hoek finally shut up at this point, and in the silence that followed he realized that, down below him on the upperdeck, his rant was being dutifully translated into diverse heathen tongues. The translators took more or less time to relate it, depending on the wordiness of their several languages and how much they edited out or how freely they embellished. But when the last of them finally wound up his oration, a light pattering started up. Jack flinched, thinking it was more hail. But then it grew into a heavy, stomping roar, and he recognized it as applause. Dappa thrust both index fingers into his mouth and emitted a piercing noise. Van Hoek seemed startled at first; then understanding dawned, and he turned to Jack, removed his hat, and bowed.

Book 5

The Juncto

Berlin

JANUARY 1700

At bottom, all our experience assures us of only two things, namely, that there is a connection among our appearances, which provides us the means to predict future appearances with success, and that this connection must have a constant cause.

—LEIBNIZ

G. W. Leibniz, President

Berlin Academy

Berlin, Prussia

To Mr. Daniel Waterhouse, Chancellor

Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts

Newtowne, Massachusetts Bay Colony

Dear Daniel,

The appearance of your letter on the doorstop of my Academy brought unlooked-for cheer to an otherwise frosty Berlin day, which developed into pleasure when I read that your Institute now has a roof over its head, and joy when you expressed your continued desire to collaborate with me. I confess that when two years passed without word from you, I thought you had been killed by Indians or hanged for a witch!

Much has happened since we last exchanged letters. You have probably noticed that I have a new address (Berlin) and what is more, it is in a new kingdom (Prussia). The monarch you knew by the name Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg is now called King Frederick I of Prussia. He is the same chap, still joyfully married to the same Sophie Charlotte, living in and ruling from the same palace that he built for her in Berlin, but he has (through machinations that would only disfigure this letter) persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna (still Leopold I, in case you have not been keeping up) to suffer him to use the title of King. His family (the Hohenzollerns) have been the Dukes of Prussia as well as Electors of Brandenburg for so many generations that it made sense to merge the two countries. The result is called Prussia but still ruled out of Brandenburg.

Sophie is as vigorous and crafty as always. She and her daughter have deemed it unwise to give the appearance of being too close, as this would give the idea, to friends and foes alike, that Sophie was now controlling an immense German state stretching from Königsberg in the east almost all the way west to the Rhine. For various reasons she prefers to seem instead like a contented elderly widow; so she lets her son George Louis think that he rules Hanover, and she travels to Berlin only occasionally, to pinch the cheeks of her grandchildren and put on a great show of harmlessness.

I shuttle back and forth between Hanover and Berlin all the time, to the point where the more bloody-minded Berlin courtiers were beginning to whisper that I must be acting as a secret conduit for Sophie’s influence. The problem being that I could not point to any official reason why I should be in Berlin so frequently. The real reasons (to have interesting conversations with Sophie Charlotte and her brilliant circle of friends, and to tutor Princess Caroline) are scoffed at by that sort of person.

Hence the Berlin Academy, of which I am the first president. It seems like the sort of institution that a King ought to found (the fashion having been established, of course, by your Charles II with his Royal Society) and so doing it makes Frederick’s new title seem that much more richly deserved. And being its president gives me an excuse to be in Berlin whenever I wish.

And it is well that I have something to belong to other than the Royal Society! By now you have probably received copies of the dreadful publications of last year: volume three of Wallis’s work, in which my twenty-five-year-old correspondence with Newton is exposed to the whole world, and made to seem like something other than what it really was, and Fatio’s Lineae Brevissimi Descensus, which is yet another bitter assault on me. A school of thought seems to be developing, according to which I had no inkling of the calculus until I stole the whole thing from Newton around 1677. Apparently my years of toil in Paris under the tutelage of Huygens count for nothing!

I had best not begin to rant and rave about this. Let me instead turn to some of your questions.

Yes, I still correspond with Eliza. How could I not? But, as many people do when they have children, she settled, at some point, into a more steady kind of life, and since has not written to me as frequently. When the peace treaty was signed between France and the allies three years ago, her title as Duchess of Qwghlm was recognized by the French court, and she began to travel frequently to England—though almost never with her husband. She keeps a town-house near St. James’s and has even journeyed to Qwghlm occasionally to renew her ties to the place of her birth. Once or twice a year she journeys to my part of the world to spend time with her bastard son and to pay a call on Sophie. Her husband, with his long-standing connexions to the Navy, is more fond of Qwghlm than she is, and seems to phant’sy that the massive Castle there has the makings of a country house—though it is difficult to think of a more outlandish and wretched setting for one! And so he is there several months this last year overseeing a project to rebuild one part of that ruin, and make it over into a villa and a proper seat for the nascent Duchy of Arcachon-Qwghlm. Some in London grumble that he is getting ready to turn Qwghlm into a French naval base, à la Dunkerque. But I cannot imagine Eliza allowing any such thing to happen.

As a way of making a name for herself in London society she supports a charity for Vagabond-soldiers, which has been a pet cause of hers for some years. After the peace treaty was signed and the Tories came into power, the size of England’s army was drastically reduced, many regiments disbanded, and out-of-work soldiers have been roaming around the country making trouble ever since. Eliza’s obvious concern for them is an implicit criticism of Tory policies, which should put her in a good position if the Juncto ever returns to power.

Concerning her opposition to Slavery, she is not as outspoken, even though her feelings run deeper. She knows that to make a pest of herself on this topic would cause her to be ejected from society altogether, and to lose any hope of effecting change. Those in the legal profession are well aware of the work she has done in the last few years to secure freedom for some of the Taunton maids who were enslaved by Jeffreys after Monmouth’s Rebellion.

It is well that she maintains good relations with the Whigs. As you must know if you get any letters from London at all, they are close to Princess Anne, who will probably reign over England sooner or later. And they are the party of active foreign policy—or, setting aside euphemisms, of war. That wretch, King Carlos II (the Sufferer) of Spain, who has been on his death-bed for something like thirty-five years now, cannot possibly live much longer—no, really!—and when he dies there will certainly be another great war. For make no mistake. Louis XIV covets Spain, with her Empire and her mines and her mints. It must be admitted that the duc d’Anjou has as good a claim to the throne as anyone else. Never mind that he happens to be the loyal and obedient grandson of Louis XIV!

If you do not get a lot of mail, you might be saying, wait! I thought the matter had been settled by treaty, and that the Electoral Prince of Bavaria was going to be King of Spain. But he has died, suddenly and strangely. The Empire has nominated its own candidate: Archduke Charles, the younger son of the Holy Roman Emperor. There is public talk of negotiations and partition-treaties, but private preparation for war. And as the stakes of that war will be Spain, the beating heart that circulates silver and gold through the world’s markets, we may expect that it will be harder-fought even than the last one.

But on to more interesting matters.

You say you would collaborate with me. I will try to dissuade you by mentioning two facts. First, it is now clear that you will be ostracized from the Royal Society if you associate your name with mine. Second, we will be working for a chap who has his minions broken on the wheel if they incur his displeasure. No, I am not talking about my new King of Prussia, but about a taller monarch who lives farther to the east and owns about half of the planet.

If I have not scared you away yet, then consider the nature of the work. The thing I want to make embodies very little that is beautiful or elegant mathematically. It will consist of two components: a mechanical system for performing arithmetickal and logical operations upon numbers, and a vast compendium of data that will inform the operations of that machine. Much work remains to be carried out on both of these fronts. The former promises more satisfaction, in that it is a practical pursuit, akin to Hooke’s watch-making, and one may see the machine take shape on the workbench, and point to this gear or that shaft with a measure of pride. But I fear it is not what really demands our attention now. Think of how the art of watch-making has advanced during our lifetimes alone, beginning with Huygens’s pendulums, &c., and extrapolate this into the future, and you will readily agree that arithmetickal engines will only get better with time. On the other hand—with due respect for the work that you and Wilkins did on the Philosophical Language—we have only just embarked upon the amassing of the data and the writing-out of the logical rules that will govern the machine’s workings.

You are the protégé of Wilkins and the only man still living who worked on that project; on his deathbed he passed his mantle on to you. It follows that you are the man best suited to assemble and organize the data that our machine shall require, and to place it in a form that may be read and understood by a machine. This is a matter of assigning prime numbers to the symbols and then encoding them in some medium, probably as binary digits. The medium needs to be something enduring, for it may be many generations before machines can be constructed that are capable of doing the work. Best would be thin sheets of gold.

For my part, I confess I have a thousand distractions, which conspire to make me a poor collaborator indeed. Any work that demands a vast amount of un-interrupted time is impossible for me—which is why I have suggested that you, alone in your quiet Massachusetts cabin, are better qualified to draw up the immense symbol-tables.

Setting aside political entanglements, calculus-controversies, and the three Ladies (Sophie, Sophie Charlotte, and Princess Caroline) who never stop asking me to explain things to them, my chief project, at the moment, is the monadology.

At any rate, what it comes down to is that my life for the next several years will consist of flying back and forth between Hanover and Berlin (with perhaps the occasional excursion to St. Petersburg!) trying to work out a beautiful set of logical rules. That matches well with the other part of the arithmetickal engine project, namely, writing down the set of rules that will govern how it processes symbols. As a matter of fact I should like to think that these two sets of rules—the one governing monads, the other governing the mechanical mind—will turn out to be one and the same. So I propose to take on this part of the undertaking myself, as it is so similar to what I am doing anyway.

That is my proposal for how we might collaborate, Daniel, and I hope it pleases you. The Tsar is fearsome it’s true, but he is far away from you, and extremely distracted putting down the Raskolniki and the Streltsy and making war on the Swedes. I do not think you need to fear him. Hard as it might be to believe, there is no monarch in the world more committed to advancing what you call the Technologickal Arts. I believe that if I were to ask him for a ton of gold, explaining that we wanted to use it to store data, he would hand it over in a moment. But first you and I need to come up with some data so that those plates will not remain as blank as Mr. Locke’s tabula rasa.

Yours affectionately,

Leibniz

Book 4

Bonanza

The Pacific Ocean

LATE 1700 AND EARLY 1701

Such are the Diseases and Terrors of the long Calms, where the Sea stagnates and corrupts for Want of Motion; and by the Strength of the Scorching Sun stinks and poisons the distrest Mariners, who are rendered unactive, and disabled by Scurvies, raging and mad with Calentures and Fevers, and drop into Death in such a Manner, that at last the Living are lost, for Want of the Dead, that is, for want of Hands to work the Ship.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

MINERVA DROPPED ANCHOR below the burning mountain of Griga in the Marian Islands on the fifth of September. The next day the Shaftoe boys and a squad of Filipino sailors went ashore and ascended to the rim of a secondary cinder-cone on the western slope of the mountain proper. They established a watch-post there, within sight of Minerva. For two days they flew a single flag, which meant We are here, and still alive. The next day it was two flags, which meant We have seen sails coming out of the west, and the day after that it was three, meaning It is the Manila Galleon.

Van Hoek had the crew make preparations for departure. The next morning the Shaftoe boys struck their camp and came down, still coughing and rubbing their eyes from the fumes that hissed out of that cinder-cone day and night, and after splashing around gleefully in the cove for a few minutes, washing off dust and sweat, they came out to Minerva in the longboat and announced that the Galleon had commenced her long northward run at dawn.

For two days they wove a course among the Marian Islands—a chain that ran from about thirteen degrees at its southern end, to about twenty degrees at the north. Some of the islands were steep-sided volcanoes with deep water all around, but most were so flat that they did not rise more than a yard or two above the level of the ocean, be they never so large. These were belted all round with dangerous shallows, and yet they were easy to overlook in darkness or weather. So for a few days their energies were devoted to simply not disembowelling themselves on coral-reefs, and they did not see the Manila Galleon at all.

Some of the islands were populated by stocky natives who came and went in outrigger canoes, and one or two even had Jesuit missions on them, built of mud, like wasps’ nests. The sheer desolation of the place explained why they’d chosen it as a rendezvous point. If Minerva had set out from Cavite on the same tide as the Galleon, it would have been obvious to everyone in the Philippines that some conspiracy had been forged. Almost as bad, it would have added several weeks to the length of Minerva’s voyage. The Manila Galleon was such a wallowing pig of a ship, and had been so gravely overloaded by Manila’s officialdom, that only a storm could move it. The exit from Manila Bay, which took most ships but a single day, had taken the Manila Galleon a week. Then, rather than taking to the open sea, she had turned south and then east, and picked her way down the tortuous passages between Luzon and the islands to the south, anchoring frequently, and occasionally pausing to say a mass over the wrack of some predecessor; for the passage was marked out, not with buoys, but with the remains of Manila Galleons from one, ten, fifty, or a hundred years past. Finally the Galleon had reached a sheltered anchorage off a small island called Ticao. She had dropped anchor there and spent three weeks gazing out over twenty miles of water at the gap between the southern extremity of Luzon, and the northern cape of Samar, which was called the San Bernardino Strait. Beyond it the Pacific stretched all the way to Acapulco. Yet Luzon might as well have been Scylla and Samar Charybdis, because (as the Spaniards had learnt the hard way) any ship that tried to sally through that gap when the tides and the winds were not just so would be cast away. Twice she had raised anchor and set sail for the Strait only to turn back when the wind shifted slightly.

Boats had come out to the Galleon at all hours to replenish her stocks of drinking water, fruit, bread, and livestock, which were being drawn down at an appalling rate by the merchants and men of the cloth who were packed into her cabins. Indeed this had been the whole point of taking the route through the San Bernardino Strait, for by going that way they had been able to get two hundred and fifty miles closer to the Marianas without passing out of sight of the Philippines.

When finally she had broken out on the tenth of August—a month and a half after departing Manila—she had done so fully provisioned. Almost as important, the officials, priests, and soldiers who had stood by at the foot of Bulusan Volcano to witness and salute the great ship’s departure had seen her venture forth into the Pacific alone.

Minerva had sailed out of Manila Bay two weeks after the Galleon and had gone for a leisurely cruise round the northern tip of Luzon, then had looped back to the south and taken shelter in Lagonoy Gulf, which emptied into the Pacific some sixty miles to the north of the San Bernardino Strait. There, by trading with natives and making occasional hunting and gathering forays, they had been able to keep their own stocks replenished while they had waited for the Galleon to escape from the Philippine Islands. Padraig Tallow had been among the crowd at the foot of Bulusan watching that event, and he’d thrown his peg-leg over the saddle of a horse and ridden northward until he had come to a high place above the Gulf of Lagonoy whence he could signal Minerva by building a smokey fire. Minerva had fired the Irishman a twenty-gun salute and hoisted her sails. Padraig Tallow’s doings after that were unknown to them. If he’d stayed in character, he’d have stood where he was until the tip of Minerva’s mainmast had sunk below the eastern horizon, weeping and singing incomprehensible chanties. If things had gone according to plan, he’d then ridden his horse through the bundok, following the tracks from one steamy mission-town to the next, until he’d reached Manila, and he and Surendranath, and the one son of Queen Kottakkal who’d survived the last years’ voyaging, and several other Malabaris were now making their way down the long coast of Palawan to join Mr. Foot in Queena-Kootah.

For her part Minerva had sailed almost due east for fifteen hundred miles to the Marianas, passing the Manila Galleon somewhere along the way.

Now they sailed north out of those islands without ever catching sight of her. This was just as well for all involved in the conspiracy—including all of the Galleon’s officers. The bored Jesuits and soldiers scattered among those islands would see the Galleon, and would see Minerva, but would never see them together.

Weather made it impossible to observe the sun or look for the Galleon’s sails for two days after they put the Marianas behind them. Then the sun came out, and they traversed the Tropic of Cancer and sighted the Galleon’s topsails, far to the east, at almost the same moment. It was the fifteenth of September. Even before the northernmost of the burning islands of the Marianas had sunk below the southern horizon, they had gone off soundings, which meant that their sounding-lead, even when it was fully paid out, dangled miles above the floor of an ocean whose depth was literally unfathomable. After several days had gone by without sighting land they had brought Minerva’s anchors up on deck and stowed them deep in the hold.

They traversed the thirtieth parallel, which meant that they had reached the latitude of southern Japan. Still they continued north. They could not keep the Galleon in sight all the time, of course. But it was not necessary to follow in her wake. They had only two requirements. One was to discover the magic latitude, known only to the Spanish, that would take them safely to California. The other was to arrive in Acapulco at about the same time as the Galleon, so that certain officers aboard that ship could smooth the way for them. With her narrow hull Minerva could not carry as many provisions as the Galleon, but she could sail faster, and so the general plan was to speed across the Pacific and then tarry off California for a few weeks, surviving on the fresh water and game of that country, while keeping a lookout for the Galleon.

But they could not bolt east until they were sure of the right latitude, and so every day they posted lookouts at the top of Minerva’s foremast and had them scan the horizon for the sails of the Manila Galleon. Having sighted her, they would plot a converging course, and creep closer until they could see how her sails had been trimmed. The winds almost always came from the southeastern quarter of the compass rose, and every time they caught sight of the Galleon she seemed to be going free, which was a way of saying that the wind was coming in from behind her and from one side—in this case, the starboard. In other words the Galleon’s captain was still bending all his efforts to gain latitude, and seemed not to know or care that he had five thousand miles to cover eastwards; or that every degree he went north was a degree he’d later have to go south (Manila and Acapulco lying at nearly the same latitude).

They spent a few days becalmed at thirty-two degrees, then advanced due north to thirty-six degrees, then encountered weather. At the beginning this came out of the east, which made van Hoek extremely nervous that they would be cast away on the shores of Japan (they were at the latitude of Edo, which Gabriel Goto had claimed was the largest city in the world, and so it wasn’t as if the wreck of their ship would go unnoticed). But then the wind shifted around to the northwest and they were forced to put up a storm-sail and scud before it. The weather was not nearly as threatening as the waves, which were mountainous.

It happened sometimes that when a wind shifted violently, or a ship was miserably handled, or both, the wind would blow in over the head and strike a ship’s sails directly in the face, plastering the canvas back over the rigging, and frequently slamming crew-members off of their perches. The ship would be flung into disarray. She’d go dead in the water, making her rudder quite useless, and would drift and spin like a stunned fish until she was brought in hand again. This was called being taken a-back, and it could happen to persons as well as ships. Jack had never seen van Hoek taken aback until the Dutchman emerged from belowdecks at one point to see one of those waves rolling toward them. Its crest of foam alone was large enough to swallow Minerva.

The only way to survive seas like these was to manage rudder and a few scraps of canvas in such a way that the waves never struck the ship broadside. That was the only thing the men on Minerva thought about for the next forty-eight hours. Sometimes they stood poised on watery mountain-tops and enjoyed the view; seconds later they’d be in a trough with seemingly vertical walls of water blocking their vision fore and aft.

After Jack had been awake for some thirty consecutive hours, he began to see things that weren’t there. For the most part this was preferable to seeing the things that were. But strangely enough—with so many natural dangers all around—the one fear that obsessed him was that they would collide with the Manila Galleon. Early in the storm he had seen a great wave coming in the corner of his eye, and phant’sied somehow that it was the Galleon riding a storm-crest; the dark bulk of the wave he took to be her hull of Philippine mahogany, the foamy crest he imagined was her sails. Of course in such a storm she wouldn’t have canvas up at all, but in this momentary dream she was a ghost-ship, already dead, and riding the storm with every inch of canvas stretched out before the wind. Of course it was really nothing more than just another damned great wave and so he forgot this apparition in the next instant.

Every wave that came their way was a fresh challenge to their existence, as formidable as anything the Duc d’Arcachon or Queen Kottakkal had flung at them, and had to be met and survived with fresh energy and ingenuity. But they kept coming. And late in the storm, when Jack and everyone else on the ship had entirely lost their minds, and were surviving only because they were in the habit of surviving, the phant’sy of the ghost-Galleon came back and haunted him for long hours. Every wave that came towards them he saw as the underside of the Galleon’s hull, the barnacled keel coming down on them like the blade of an axe.

He woke up lying on the deck, in the same position where he had collapsed hours before, at the end of the storm. Bright light was in his eyes but he was shivering, because it was damnably cold.

“Thirty-seven degrees…twelve minutes,” croaked van Hoek, working nearby with a back-staff, “assuming…that I have the day right.” He paused frequently to heave great laboring sighs, as if the effort of forcing words out was almost too much for him.

Jack—who’d been lying on his stomach—rolled onto his back. His arms had been pressed underneath him the whole time he’d been asleep, and were completely numb and dead now, like sopping rags a-dangle from his shoulders. “And what d’you suppose the day is?”

“If that storm lasted a mere two days, I am ashamed at selling myself so cheaply. For a two-day storm should not leave a sea-captain half dead.”

“You are half dead? I am at least three-quarters dead.”

“Further evidence that it was more than two days. On the other hand, we could not have survived four days of that.”

“I am not some Jesuit, bent on arguing. If you call it three days, I will agree.”

“Then we agree that this is October the first.”

“Any sign of the Galleon?”

Van Hoek squinted up. “No one has the strength to go above and look. I doubt she survived. So big, and so overloaded…now I understand why they build a new one every year. Even if she survived, she’d be worn out.”

“What do we do in that case?”

“North,” said van Hoek. “They say that if we turn east too soon, we will make it most of the way across the Pacific, only to be becalmed, almost within sight of America, where we’ll starve to death.”

This conversation happened at dawn. It was midday before Minerva’s topmasts could be raised again, and midafternoon before she was under way, sailing north by northeast. Every man was busy repairing the ship, and those who had no skills at carpentry or rope-work were sent down to the bilge to collect quicksilver that had trickled down there from broken flasks.

Two days later they grazed the fortieth parallel, which put them at the same latitude as the northern extremes of Japan. Van Hoek finally consented to sail towards America. His intention was to hew closely to forty degrees, which (according to a bit of lore he had pried out of a drunken Spanish sea-captain in Manila) would lead eventually to Cape Mendocino. But this went the way of all intentions a day later when he discovered that some combination of winds, currents, and wandering compass-needle had driven them down almost to thirty nine degrees. He laughed at this, and that evening when they gathered in the dining cabin to saw at planks of dried beef and flick maggots out of their beans, he explained why: “Legend would have it that the Spaniards have found out some secret way across the Pacific Ocean. It is a good legend because it prevents Dutchmen, Englishmen, and other prudent Protestants from attempting the voyage. But now I know the truth, which is that they wander across, driven north and south willy-nilly, placing their lives and estates in the hands of innumerable saints. So let us drink to any saints who may be listening!”

Thus they wandered for most of October. It turned out that the storm had done irreparable injury to the foremast, rendering it more trouble than it was worth, and so they lost a knot or two. Sometimes the wind would grow frigid and bear down out of the north, pushing them toward the latitude of thirty-five degrees, which was the lowest that van Hoek would tolerate. Then they would have to work painstakingly into the wind. The cold spray blew into the faces of the Filipino and Malay sailors like chips of flint. Van Hoek’s insistence on remaining far to the north led them to grumble. Jack did not think they were going to mutiny, but he could easily imagine circumstances in which they would. The difference in climate between thirty-five and forty degrees was considerable, and winter was making no secret of its intentions.

They had no idea where they were. Indeed, the very notion of being somewhere lost its hold on their minds after they had gone for a month without seeing any land; if some Fellow of the Royal Society had been a-board with a newfangled instrument for measuring longitude, the figures would have meant nothing to them. Van Hoek made estimates based on their speed, and at one point announced that they had probably crossed over the meridian dividing the East from the West Hemisphere. But under close interrogation from Moseh, he admitted that it might have happened last week or that it might happen a week in the future.

Jack saw no difference between East water and West water. They were in a part of the world that, on the Doctor’s maps, either had not appeared at all (it being considered sinful wastefulness to leave such a large expanse of fine vellum blank) or else had been covered up by some vast Barock cartouche with words printed on it in five-hundred-mile-high letters, surrounded by bare-breasted mermaids blasting away on conch-shells. Minerva had crawled underneath the legends, compass-roses, analemmas, and cartouches that were superimposed on all the world’s maps and globes, and vanished from all charts, ceased to exist. Jack had a phant’sy of some young Princess in a drawing-room staring at a map, and seeing a bit of movement under the eastern edge of some bit of engraver’s trompe l’oeil, a scrap of faux-weather-beaten scrollwork where the cartographer had writ his name. She would suppose it to be a wandering silverfish at first—then, peering at it through a magnifying lens, would resolve the outlines of a certain ship filled with mercury…

Anyway, he was not the only man aboard seeing strange visions, for one day early in November, the lookout let out a wail of mingled fear and confusion. It was not a cheering kind of sound, coming from a lookout, and so it got the attention of every man on board.

“He says that there is a ship in the distance—but not a ship of this world,” Dappa said.

“What the hell does that mean?” van Hoek demanded.

“She sails upside-down. She leaps from place to place and her form shifts, as if she were a droplet of quicksilver trapped between sea and sky.”

Jack found this marvelously poetickal, but van Hoek was all ready with a tedious explanation: “Tell him he is only seeing a mirage. It might be another ship that lies over the horizon, or it might be a reflection of our own vessel. But there is probably not another ship within two thousand miles of us, and so it is most likely the latter.”

But every man who was not busy with something else ascended the ratlines and got in position to view this entertainment. Jack got up sooner and higher than most. As a shareholder, he slept in a cabin instead of belowdecks, and as an Englishman he kept his windows open unless there was a positive hurricane blowing, and he had escaped the never-ending round of catarrhs, influenzas, rheumatic malfunctions, and fœbrile disorders that eddied through the crew. At any rate he had more energy and better lungs than they did and so he climbed all the way to the topmast trestletrees: high enough that he could take in Minerva’s whole length at a glance. At first the mirage was not visible, but van Hoek said that this was the common way of mirages and to be patient. So while he was being patient in the topmast trestletrees, Jack looked down at the crew, struggling up the ratlines and coughing, spitting, and scratching themselves just like the audience in a theatre, waiting for the show to begin. This was not such a bad similitude either. From the point of view of a drawing-room Princess, Minerva had vanished underneath a florid mermaid-cartouche. But from Minerva’s point of view, it was the world that had disappeared—somewhat as players do when the story pauses between acts. With their wigs, costumes, swords, and stage-props they exeunt; nothing happens for a while; the audience shifts, mutters, farts, cracks hazel-nuts, hawks up phlegm; and if it is a better class of theatre, there begins a little play-within-the-play, an entr’acte.

“Mira!” someone shouted, and Jack looked up to see it.

The phantom-ship appeared to be no more than a cannon-shot away from them. At times it appeared quite normal and solid. Then it would split into two symmetrical images, one right-side-up and one upside-down, or it would warp and flit about, like a drop trapped between panes of glass and being moved hither and thither by the pressure of a finger.

But when it was solid and stable for a moment, it was obviously not Minerva but some other ship. It had men on it, and they had trimmed her sails to run before the wind, just as Minerva was doing. Several of them had climbed into her rigging to gawk and point at something.

“Does she have any cannon run out?” van Hoek inquired.

“It would be a strange part of the world to go a-pirating,” said Dappa.

“Hmph!”

“She is running up a flag,” said Moseh de la Cruz. “She must see us, as we see her!”

Red silk bloomed in the mirage, a sudden billowing of flame. In the middle of it a gold cross and some other heraldic designs. Every man sighed at once.

“It is the Manila Galleon!” Jack announced.

At this news van Hoek finally bestirred himself. He climbed to the maintop and began trying to fix his spyglass on the mirage, which was like trying to spear a flea with a jack-knife. There was a certain amount of cursing in Dutch. Jack had spent enough time with van Hoek to know why: For all her bulk and shoddy construction, the Manila Galleon had not only survived; she had come through the storm in better condition than Minerva, or at least without losing any of her masts.

After that it hailed for two straight days. One of the older sailors remarked that hail never occurred far from land. The wind came about into their teeth, and as they’d been pushed by inscrutable currents dangerously close to thirty-five degrees, they had no choice but to sail northwest for a day. When the weather cleared and the trade-wind returned, and they were able to steer towards California again, someone sighted a school of tunny fish. All agreed that tunny never ventured far from land—all except for van Hoek, who only rolled his eyes.

The day after that they once again caught sight of the Manila Galleon in a mirage. This time—though the image was fleeting and warped—they saw a jab of flame, which probably meant that the Galleon had fired a cannon in an effort to signal them. All hands shushed each other, but if any sound reached Minerva it was drowned out by the shushing. Accordingly van Hoek refused to fire an answering signal; the Galleon, he said, might be a hundred miles away, and there was no point in wasting gunpowder.

That evening one far-sighted man insisted he saw a column of smoke to the southeast, which he took to be an infallible sign of land. Van Hoek said it was probably a waterspout. Still, several men loitered at that quarter of the ship, looking at it while the sun went down. Sunsets at this latitude, in November, were long and gradual, so they had plenty of time to look at this apparition, whatever it was, as the horizontal red light of dusk reflected from it.

Eventually the sun went down, of course, though some clouds high in the eastern sky continued to reflect back a faint glow for a while afterwards.

But there was one spot that refused to stop glowing, as if a spark of sun had flown off and gotten lodged there. It lay over the horizon, along the same bearing as the column of smoke or waterspout seen earlier. Van Hoek now revised his explanation: it was most likely an uncharted volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific. As such it might be naught more than a hot rock. On the other hand it might have streams of fresh water, and birds that could be shot and eaten. Every mouth on the ship was, in an instant, flooded with saliva. So he ordered a change in course, and had more canvas raised, since tomorrow weather might close in and make it difficult to see the volcano and easy to run aground on it.

At first he estimated the distance to the volcano at a hundred miles or more. But the light (which at first they’d seen only by its reflection on a cloud layer above) popped up over the horizon almost immediately, and van Hoek halved the estimate. Then, when flickerings in that light became clearly visible, he halved it again. Finally he declared that this was no volcano but something entirely different, and then everyone understood that, whatever it was, they were no more than a few miles away from it. Van Hoek ordered a prudent reduction in speed. Every man was abovedecks now, bumping into things because dazzled by the light.

They were close enough to see that it was an enormous fire that had by some miracle been kindled on the very surface of the ocean. Crackles and roars came out of it, and it billowed and stretched easily, sometimes drawing itself up and surging hundreds of yards straight up into the air, other times growing squat and spreading out over the hissing surface of the calm sea. At times black shapes became visible in its heart: suggestions of massive ribs, and a broken mast clothed in fire. Sparks of green, red, and blue flame appeared here and there as exotic Oriental pigments and minerals were reached by the flames.

At some point they could no longer deny that they were hearing screams. “Socorro! Socorro!” The Spanish word for help had a sorrowful rather than an urgent sound. There was sentiment for going in closer, but “We wait for the magazine” was all van Hoek would say. Jack saw a red-hot cannon finally break through the charcoal beams that were supporting it. It dropped clumsily into the bilge and ejaculated a vast cloud of steam that blurred and dimmed the fire-light. One man with a very loud voice was crying “Socorro! Socorro!” But then he changed over into some Latin prayer.

He was halfway through it when all of the gunpowder on the Manila Galleon exploded at once. Flaming planks streaked away in every direction, blazing with the white heat of a forge as air shrieked over them, rapidly burning away to black cinders that plopped and sizzled in the water all around. Some landed on the ship and burnt little holes through her sails or started small fires on her deck, but van Hoek had long since ordered men to stand by with buckets, and so all flames were smartly doused.

It was near dawn before they could mount any serious attempt to look for survivors. The longboat had been taken apart and stowed, and in the darkness it took hours to get its pieces out, put it together, and launch it. Though no one came out and said as much, it was understood (as how could it not be) that everyone aboard Minerva was starving to death to begin with and that matters would only get worse with each survivor that was plucked out of the water.

At dawn they set out in the longboat and began rowing toward what had been the Galleon. She had burnt to the waterline, and now was just a shoe, a sole afloat in the Pacific, likely to fill up and sink as soon as the seas rose. Curls of cinnamon-bark dotted the surface of the water, each one looking like a small burnt ship itself. Around the hulk spread a morass of Chinese silk, ruined by fire and sea-water but still more gaily colored than anything their eyes had seen since their final whorehouse-visits in Manila four months earlier. The silk caught on the longboat’s oars and came out of the water with each stroke, giving them gorgeous glimpses of tropical birds and flowers before sliding off and sinking into the gray Pacific. A map floated on the surface, a square of white parchment no longer parched. Its ink was dissolving, images of land, parallels, and meridians fading away until it became a featureless white square. Jack fished it up with a boat-hook and held it above his head. “What a stroke of luck!” he exclaimed, “I do believe this map shows our exact location!” But no one laughed.

“MY NAME,” SAID THE SURVIVOR, speaking in French, “is Edmund de Ath. I thank you for inviting me to share your mess.”

It was three days since Jack had pulled him out of the drink and slung him over one of the longboat’s benches; this was the first time de Ath had emerged from his berth since then. His voice was still hoarse from inhaling smoke and swallowing salt-water. He had joined Jack, Moseh, Vrej, Dappa, Monsieur Arlanc, and van Hoek in the dining cabin, which was the largest and aft-most cabin on the quarterdeck; its back wall was a subtly curved sweep of windows twenty feet wide, affording a splendid view of the sun setting into the Western Pacific. The visitor was drawn inevitably to those windows, and stood there for a few moments with the ruddy light emphasizing the pits and hollows of his face. If he put on two or three stone—which he was likely to do when they reached New Spain—he’d be handsome. As it was, his skull stood a bit too close to the surface. But then the same was true of every man aboard this ship.

“Everything is idiotically plain and stark here, and that goes for the view as well,” Jack said. “A line between water and sky, and an orange ball poised above it.”

“It is Japanese in its simplicity,” said Edmund de Ath gravely, “and yet if you only look deeper, Barock complexity and ornament are to be found—observe the tufts of cloud scudding in below the Orb, the delicate curtseying of the waves as they meet—” and then he was off in high-flown French that Jack could not really follow; which prompted Monsieur Arlanc to say “I gather from your accent that you are Belgian.” Edmund de Ath (1) took this as an insult of moderate severity but (2) was too serene and poised to be troubled by it unduly. With Christian forbearance he responded with something like, “And I gather from the company you keep, monsieur, that you are one of those whose conscience led him to forsake the complexity and contradictions of the Roman church for the simplicity of a rebel creed.” That this Belgian friar refrained from using the word heretic was noted silently by every man in the cabin. Again he and Arlanc went off into deep French. But van Hoek was clearing his throat a lot and so Jack finally broke in: “The maggots, weevils, mealworms, and mold in those serving-dishes aren’t going to keep fresh all night!”

The only food remaining on the ship was beef jerky, some dried fish, beans, and biscuit. These were steadily being converted into cockroaches, worms, maggots, and weevils. They had long since stopped observing any difference between food that had and that had not undergone the conversion, and ate both in the same mouthful.

“According to my faith, I am not allowed to eat any flesh on Friday,” said Edmund de Ath, “and so someone else may have my portion of beans.” He was gazing bemusedly at a raft of maggots that had floated to the surface of his bowl. Van Hoek’s face grew red when he understood that their new passenger was making jests about the food, but before the Dutchman would leap up and get his hands around the throat of the Belgian, Edmund de Ath raised his eyes to the red horizon, delved blindly with his spoon, and brought a stew of beans and bugs to his mouth. “It is better fare than I have had in a month,” he announced. “My compliments, Captain van Hoek, on your logistical acumen. Rather than trusting to some saint as the Spanish captains do, you have used the brain God gave you, and provisioned the ship responsibly.”

The diplomacy of de Ath only seemed to make van Hoek more suspicious. “What sort of Papist are you, to make light of your own faith?”

“Make light of it? Never, sir. I am a Jansenist. I seek reconciliation with certain Protestants, finding their faith nearer truth than the sophistry of the Jesuits. But I would not bore you with tedious theologickal discourse—”

“How about Jews?” asked Moseh gravely. “We could use an extra Jew on this ship, if you could stretch your principles that far.”

“I will not stretch my principles, but I will stretch my mind,” said Edmund de Ath, refusing to be baited. “Tell me, what do the rebbes say concerning the eating of larvae? Kosher, or trayf?”

“I have been thinking of writing a scholarly treatise on that very subject,” said Moseh, “but I need access to certain rabbinical writings that are not available in Captain van Hoek’s library of nautical lore and picaresque novels.”

Everyone laughed—even Monsieur Arlanc, who was hard at work grinding a fragment of boiled jerky against the tabletop with the butt of his dagger. His last remaining tooth had fallen out a week ago and so he had to chew his food manually.

They had spent so many years together that they had nothing to say to one another, and so this new fellow—whether they liked him or not—held their attention fast, no matter what he did or said. Even when he was answering Vrej Esphahnian’s questions about Jansenist views towards the Armenian Orthodox Church, they could not look at anything else.

After dinner, hot sugar-water was brought out. Dappa finally broached the subject they all wanted to hear about. “Monsieur de Ath, you seemed to take a dim view of the Manila Galleon’s management. Without intending disrespect for the recently departed, I would like to know how the disaster came about.”

Edmund de Ath brooded for a while. The sun had set and candles had been lit; his face stood out pale, floating in the darkness above the table. “That ship was as Spanish as this one is Dutch,” he said. “The overall situation was more desperate, as the ship was slowly disintegrating and the passengers were unruly. But the atmosphere was gay and cheerful, as everyone aboard had given themselves over to the verdict of Fortune. The chief distinction between that ship and this is that this is a single unitary Enterprise whereas the Manila Galleon belonged to the King of Spain and was a sort of floating bazaar—a commercial Ark supporting diverse business interests, many of which were naturally at odds. Just as Noah must have had his hands full keeping the tigers away from the goats, so the Captain of the Galleon was forever trying to adjudicate among the warring and intriguing commerçants packed into her cabins.

“You’ll recollect that a few days ago we had two days of hailstorms. Several of the merchants who’d bought passage on the Galleon had brought aboard servants from balmy climes where cold air and hailstones are unheard of. These wretches were so unnerved by the hail that they fled belowdecks and secreted themselves deep in the hold and would not be fetched out for anything. In time the weather cleared, and they emerged to be soundly beaten by their masters. But about the same time, smoke was observed seeping out from one of the hatches. It appears likely that one of those servants had brought a candle below with him when he had gone down fleeing the hailstorm. Perhaps they had even kindled a cook-fire. The truth will never be known. In any event, it was now obvious that a slow smoldering fire had been started somewhere down amid the countless bales of cargo that the merchants had stuffed into the hold.”

Van Hoek rose and excused himself, for from the point of view of ship’s captain the story was finished. There was no point in hearing the details. The others remained and listened.

“Now, many ponderous sermons could be written about the rich pageant of greed and folly that played out over the next days. The correct action would have been to man the pumps and drench everything in the hold with sea-water. But this would have ruined all of the silks, and caused incalculable losses, not only for the merchants but for the ship’s officers, and various of the King’s officials in Manila and Acapulco who had bales of their own in the hold. So the captain delayed, and the fire smoldered on. Men were sent below with buckets of water to find and douse the fire. Some returned saying that the smoke was too thick—others never came back at all. Some argued that the hatches should be opened and bales brought out onto the deck, but others who had more knowledge of fires said that this would allow an in-rush of air that would cause the fire to billow up and consume the Galleon in a moment.

“We sighted your ship in a mirage, and fired a signal-cannon hoping you would come to our aid. There was disagreement even concerning this, for some supposed you were Dutch pirates. But the captain told us that you were a merchant-ship loaded with quicksilver, and confessed he had made an agreement with you in secret, that he would guide you across the Pacific and grease the path for you in Acapulco in return for a share of your profits.”

“Was everyone shocked and dismayed?”

“No one batted an eye. The signal cannon was fired forthwith. No answer came back to our ears: only the silence of the Pacific. At this, madness descended on the Galleon like a Plague. There was an insurrection—not merely a mutiny but a three-sided civil war. Again, someday it will make for a great allegory-tale that preachers may recite from pulpits, but the way it came out was that those who wanted to unload the cargo-hold prevailed. Hatches were opened—smoke came out, which you must have seen on the horizon—a few bales were hoisted out—and then, just as some had predicted, flames erupted from below. I saw the very air burning. A boiling flame-front came towards me, trapping me against the rail, and I toppled overboard rather than be roasted alive. I climbed onto one of the bales that had been thrown overboard. The ship crept downwind, slowly getting farther away from me, and I watched the final catastrophe from a safe distance.”

Edmund de Ath bowed his head slightly, so that arcs of reflected candle-light gleamed in the tear-filled channels beneath his eyes. “May Almighty God have mercy on the hundred and seventy-four men and the one woman who perished.”

“You may scratch the one woman off that list, at least for the time being,” Jack said. “We plucked her out of the water fifteen minutes after you.”

There was a long pause, and then Edmund de Ath said: “Elizabeth de Obregon survived?”

“If you call this surviving,” Jack answered.

“HE SWALLOWED!” SAID MONSIEUR ARLANC the next day, having cornered Jack up at the head. “I saw his Adam’s apple move.”

“Of course he swallowed—he was eating dinner.”

“Dinner was finished!”

“All right, he was drinking sugar-water then.”

“It was not that sort of a swallow,” said Monsieur Arlanc. “I mean he was perturbed. Something is not right.”

“Now Monsieur Arlanc, consider it: What could de Ath possibly find troubling about the poor lady’s survival? She’s half out of her mind anyway.”

“People who are half out of their minds sometimes forget discretion, and say things they would normally keep secret.”

“All right, then, perhaps he and the lady were having a scandalous affair de coeur—that would explain why he’s been sitting at her bedside ever since.”

Jack was sitting in a hole, his buttocks dangling over the Pacific, and Monsieur Arlanc was standing next to him; together they gazed down the length of the ship for a few moments. The several divisions and subdivisions of the current watch were distributed among the masts and sail-courses, running through a drill that every man knew in his sleep, trimming the sails for new weather that was bearing down on them out of the northwest. Their limbs were swollen from beri-beri and many of them moved in spasmodickal twitches as their feet and hands responded balkily to commands from the mind. On the upperdeck, in the middle of the ship, a dozen Malabaris were standing around a corpse stitched up in a sheet, joining in some sort of heathenish mourning-chant prepatory to flinging it overboard. A scrap of cordage had been lashed around its ankles and made fast to an empty drinking water jar packed with pot-shards and ballast-sand, so that the body would be pulled smartly down to David Jones’s Locker before the sharks who swarmed in the ship’s wake could make sport with it.

“We gained two mouths from the Galleon, and fretted about going hungry on that account,” Jack mused. “Since then three have died.”

“There must be some reason for you to sit there and tell me things of which I am already aware,” said Monsieur Arlanc, mumbling pensively through swollen gums, “but I cannot fathom it.”

“If strong sailors are dropping dead, what chance has Elizabeth de Obregon?”

Monsieur Arlanc spat blood over the rail. “More chance than I have. She has endured a voyage that would slay any man on this ship.”

“Are you trying to tell me that there is a worse voyage in all the world than this one?”

“She is the sole survivor of the squadron that was sent out from Acapulco years ago, to find the Islands of Solomon.”

Now Jack was glad in a way that he was sitting on the head, for it was a pose well-suited to profound silent contemplation. “Stab me!” he said finally. “Enoch told me of that expedition, and that the only survivor was a woman, but I had not drawn the connexion.”

“She has seen wonders and terrors known only to the Spaniards.”

“In any event she is very sick just now,” Jack said, “and so it is no wonder that Edmund de Ath sits at the lady’s bedside—we’d expect no less of a priest.”

“And nothing more of a blackguard.”

Jack sighed. The corpse went over-board. Several Filipino idlers—which meant tradesmen not attached to any particular watch—were arguing about ducks. A flight of ducks had been sighted in the distance this morning and several were of the opinion that ducks were never seen more than a few miles from land.

“It is in the nature of men cooped up together aboard ship that they fall to infighting at some point,” Jack finally said.

Monsieur Arlanc grinned, which was an unspeakably nasty sight: his gums had peeled back from his mandibles to show blackening bone. “It is some sort of poetic justice. You turn my faith against me by arguing that I am predestined to distrust Edmund de Ath.”

MONSIEUR ARLANC DIED a week later. They held on to his corpse for as long as they could, because a fragment of kelp was sighted in the water almost at the moment of his death, and they hoped that they could make landfall and bury him in the earth of California. But his body had been well decayed even while he’d been still alive. Dying scarcely improved matters, and forced them to make another burial at sea. It was just as well that they did. For even though kelp-weeds continued to bob in the waves around Minerva’s hull, it was not for another ten days after they threw the Huguenot’s corpse overboard that they positively sighted land. They were just below thirty-nine degrees of latitude, which meant they’d missed Cape Mendocino; according to the vague charts that van Hoek had collected in Manila, and a few half-baked recollections of Edmund de Ath, the land they were looking at was probably Punto Arena.

Now the so-called idlers, who really had been idle for most of the last several weeks, worked night and day re-making Minerva for a coastal voyage. The anchors were brought up out of the hold and hung on the ship’s bow. Likewise cannons were hoisted up from storage and settled on their carriages. The longboat was re-assembled and put on the upperdeck, an obstruction to the men of the watch but a welcome one. While these things were being done Minerva could not come too near the coast, and so they put the distant mountains of California to larboard and coasted southwards for two days, sieving kelp up out of the water and trying to find some way to make it palatable. There were clear signs of an approaching storm, but as luck had it, they were just drawing abreast of the entrance to the great bay of California. As the wind began to blow hard off the Pacific they scudded between two mighty promontories that were lit up by golden sunlight gliding in beneath the storm-clouds. Changing course to the south, they were then able to navigate between a few steep rocky islands and get through a sort of bottle-neck. Beyond it the bay widened considerably. It was lined with salt-pans reminiscent of those at Cadiz, though of course no one was exploiting these. They dropped anchor in the deepest water they could find and readied the ship to wait out the storm.

WHEN THE WEATHER lifted three days later they found that they had dragged their anchor for a short distance. But not far enough to put them in danger, for the bay behind the Golden Gate was vast. Its southern lobe extended south as far as the eye could see, bounded on both sides by swelling hills, just turning from green to brown. The crew of Minerva now embarked on a strange program of eating California, beginning with the seaweed that floated off-shore, working their way through the mussel-beds and crab-flats of the intertidal zone, chewing tunnels into the scrub that clung to the beach-edge and perpetrating massacres of animals and birds. Foraging-parties would go out one after the next in the longboat, and half of them would stand guard with muskets and cutlasses while the others ransacked the place for food. Certain parts of the shoreline were defended by Indians who were not very happy to see them, and it took a bit of experimentation to learn where these were. The most dangerous part was the first five minutes after the longboat had been pulled up on the beach, when the men felt earth beneath their feet for the first time in four months, and stood there dumbfounded for several minutes, their ears amazed by the twittering of birds, the buzzing of insects, the rustle of leaves. Said Edmund de Ath: “It is like being a newborn babe, who has known nothing but the womb, suddenly brought forth into an unimagined world.”

Elizabeth de Obregon emerged from her cabin for the first time since Jack had carried her in there, all wet and cold from the Pacific, on the night the Galleon burned. Edmund de Ath took her for a feeble promenade around the poop deck. Jack, lying on his bed directly beneath them, overheard a snatch of their conversation: “Mira, the bay seems to go on forever, no wonder they believed California was an island.”

“It was your husband who proved them wrong, was it not, my lady?”

“You are too flattering, even for a Jesuit, Father Edmund.”

“Pardon me, my lady, but I am a Jansenist.”

“Yes, I meant to say Jansenist—my mind is still addled, and I cannot tell waking from dreaming sometimes.”

“That promontory to the south of the Gate would be a brave place to build a city,” said Edmund de Ath. “A battery there could control the narrows, and make this entire Bay into a Spanish lake, dotted with missions to convert all of these Indians.”

“America is vast, and there are many nice places to build cities,” said Elizabeth de Obregon dismissively.

“I know, but just look at this place! It’s as if God put it here to be built on!”

They tottered onwards and Jack heard no more. Which was just as well—he’d heard enough. It was a type of clever, courtly conversation the likes of which he had not been forced to listen to since he’d left Christendom behind, and it filled him with the same old desire to run abovedecks and throw those people overboard.

As Elizabeth de Obregon ate of the fruits and greens of California and recovered her strength, she began to emerge from her cabin more frequently and even to join them in the officers’ mess from time to time.

After Jack had related certain things to his partners, and after they’d allowed a day or two to pass, Moseh turned to Elizabeth one evening as they were dining, and remarked, “The situation of this Bay seems so fair that it will probably attract simpletons from all over the world…doubtless the Russians will throw up a fort on that promontory any year now.”

Elizabeth looked politely amused at the reaction of Edmund de Ath, who turned red and began to chew his food very slowly. She turned to Moseh and said, “Pray tell, why wouldn’t sophisticated men build here?”

“Ah, my lady, I would not bore you with the tedious speculations of the Cabbalists…”

“On the contrary, my family tree is full of conversos, and I love to steep myself in the wisdom of the rabbis.”

“My lady, we are near the latitude of forty degrees. The golden rays of the sun, and silver rays of the moon, strike the surface of the globe at a glancing angle here, rather than shining down vertically onto the ground. Now it has been understood by Cabbalistickal sorcerers, ever since the days of the First Temple, that the diverse metals that grow in the earth, are created by certain rays that emanate from the various heavenly bodies, penetrate the Earth, and there combine with the Elements of Earth and Water to create gold, silver, copper, mercury, et cetera, depending on which Planet emanated the Ray. Videlicet, the rays of the Sun create Gold, those of the Moon Silver, et cetera, et cetera. And it follows naturally that Gold and Silver will be found most abundantly in sunny places near the Equator.”

“The Alchemists of Christendom have either borrowed this insight from your Cabbalists, or discovered it on their own,” said Elizabeth.

“As you know, Lady, the great metropolises of al-Andalus, Cordoba and Toledo, were crucibles in which the most learned men of Christendom, of dar al-Islam, and of the Diaspora commingled their knowledge…”

“I thought the function of a crucible was to purify and not to intermix,” said Edmund de Ath, and then put on an angelic face.

“To fall into discussion of alchemichal arcana would be to do the lady a disservice,” said Moseh. “She informs me that the sages of the King of Spain are well-acquainted with the nature and properties of the astrologickal emanations. Yet any half-wit who glances at a map could have inferred that that the Rey knows all about the rays, for it has ever been the wise policy of the Spanish Empire to follow the Line, and establish colonies in the auriferous belt where Sun and Moon beat straight down on the earth. Leave California and Alyeska to the wretched Russians, for gold will never be discovered in those places!”

“I confess I am somewhat taken a-back,” said Edmund de Ath, “as I never dreamed until now that I was sharing a ship with a Cabbalistic sorcerer.”

“Don’t hang your head so, monsieur. The North Pacific is not generally considered a Jewish neighborhood…”

“What possessed you to venture out this way, sir?” asked Elizabeth de Obregon. The sight of land, and fresh food, had brought her back to life, and now this fencing-match between the Jansenist and the Jew was taking years off her age.

“My lady, you do me a favor to pretend interest in my obscure researches,” said Moseh. “I’ll return the kindness by being as brief as possible: there is an occult legend to the effect that King Solomon, after building the Temple on Mount Zion—”

“—journeyed far to the East and built a Kingdom on some island there,” said Elizabeth de Obregon.

“Indeed. A kingdom of vast wealth to be sure, but—more importantly—an Olympian center for alchemical scholarship and Cabbalistic research. There the secrets of the Philosopher’s Stone and the Philosophic Mercury were first brought to light—in fact, all the lucubrations of our modern-day Alchemists and Cabbalists are but a feeble attempt to pick over the scraps left behind by Solomon and his court magicians. After I had journeyed to the frontiers of learning during my youth, I reached the conclusion that I could only learn more by seeking out the Solomon Islands and going over them inch by inch.”

Now it was Elizabeth’s turn to become pink in the face. “Many have died trying to discover those islands, rabbi. If your tale is true, you are fortunate to be alive.”

“No more fortunate than you, my lady.”

Now Elizabeth de Obregon locked her gaze upon Moseh, and mystickal Rays passed back and forth between them for a while, until Edmund de Ath could not endure it any longer. He said, “Can you share your findings with us, sir, or must the results be locked up in some encyphered Torah somewhere?”

“The results are still resulting, sir, there is no definite report to be made.”

“But you’ve left the Solomon Islands!”

“I have. That much is obvious. But did you really think I could have journeyed there alone? Of all those who went, monsieur, I am the least. A mere errand-boy, sent this way to fetch a few necessaries. The rest are still there, hard at work.”

PLAYING WITH THE MINDS of Edmund de Ath and Elizabeth de Obregon made for excellent sport, and if done right, might even keep Jack, Moseh, and company alive when they reached Acapulco. But it was a sport Jack could only watch, since neither of those two would seriously entertain the idea of having a conversation with him. To Jack, the lady showed faint, perfunctory gratitude, and to all others she showed a sort of amused tolerance—all except Edmund de Ath, who was the only one she treated as an equal. This galled Jack far more than it should have. It was years since he’d been a king in Hindoostan and he should have been used to his reduced status. But being around this Spanish gentlewoman made him want to go back to Shahjahanabad and enlist in the service of the Great Mogul once more. And he was on his own ship!

“The only cure for it is to become a merchant prince,” said Vrej Esphahnian, as they were sailing out of the Golden Gate on a cold, clear morning. “And that is what we are working toward. Learn from the Armenians, Jack. We do not care for titles and we do not have armies nor castles. Noble folk can sneer at us all they like—when their kingdoms have fallen into dust, we will buy their silks and jewels with a handful of beans.”

“That is well, unless pirates or princes take what you have so tediously acquired,” Jack said.

“No, you don’t understand. Does a farmer measure his wealth in pails of milk? No, for pails spill, and milk spoils in a day. A farmer measures his wealth in cows. If he has cows, milk comes forth almost without effort.”

“What is the cow, in this similitude?” asked Moseh, who had come over to listen.

“The cow is the web, or net-work of connexions, that Armenians have spun all the world round.”

“It has never ceased to astonish me how you find Armenians everywhere we go,” Jack admitted.

“In every place where we have tarried for more than a few days: Algiers, Cairo, Mocha, Bandar-Abbas, Surat, Shahjahanabad, Batavia, Macao, Manila—I have been able to invest some small fraction of my profits in the diverse enterprises of other Armenians,” Vrej said. “In some cases the amounts were trivial. But it does not matter—those men know me now, they are knots in my net-work, and when I return to Paris, even if we lose Minerva and everything aboard her, I’ll be a wealthy man—not in milk but in cows.”

“Avast there, Vrej,” Jack said, “I am not a superstitious man, but I do not love to hear this talk of losing Minerva.”

Vrej shrugged. “Sometimes a man must accept a great loss.”

An awkward stillness for a few moments, made more excruciatingly obvious by the shouting of the riggers as they trimmed the sails for a new course. Minerva was leaving the Golden Gate behind, and coming about into a new southeasterly course along the coast. She’d follow this general heading for some two thousand miles to Acapulco.

Finally Moseh said, “Well, I am a superstitious man, or at least a religious one, and I have been pondering this: When is my trading-voyage finished?”

“When you drop anchor in London or Amsterdam and come ashore with Bills of Exchange, or imported goods,” Jack said.

“I cannot eat those.”

“Very well, change them into silver and buy bread with it.”

“So I have bread then. But did I need to sail around the world for bread?”

“Bread you can get anywhere,” Jack admitted, then glanced at the open Pacific to starboard. “Save there. Why sail round the world, then? For entertainment, I suppose. We do what we have to do, Moseh, and are not frequently given diverse choices. What are you getting at?”

“I believe my journey ended when we crossed the Sea of Reeds and escaped from bondage in Egypt,” Moseh said. “Nothing since then has brought me satisfaction.”

“Again, though, you’ve had no choices available.”

“Every day,” Moseh said, “every day I’ve had choices, but I’ve been blind to them.”

“You are being too Cabbalistickal for me,” Jack said. “I am an Englishman and will go to England. You see? Very simple and plain. Now I will ask you a question that should have a simple answer: When we get to Acapulco, will you be in the Wet or the Dry Group?”

“Dry,” said Moseh, “dry forever.”

“Very well,” said Vrej after another of those awkward silences, “as we’ve lost poor Arlanc, it follows that I shall have to be Wet. And that sits well with me, for I am eager to see Lima, the Rio de la Plata, and Brazil, and after all we’ve endured, Cape Horn holds no terror for me.”

Dappa happened along. “For a man without a country, the ship is the only choice. Brazil and the Caribbean are awash in African slaves and I cannot learn or tell their stories unless I voyage there and talk to them.”

“Then since van Hoek obviously goes with the ship, I’m obligated to be Dry,” Jack said, “and my boys will go with me.”

They all stood silently for a few moments, caught between a raw Pacific wind and the coast of California. Then every one of them seemed to understand how many preparations lay ahead of him, and each went his own way.

“THE BEST TIME TO NEGOTIATE is before negotiations have begun,” said Moseh, as he and Jack watched the longboat crawl towards the shore of the port of Navidad. The Alcalde of Chiamela, several priests, and a few men in the full Conquistador get-up stood there waiting for it. “Or anyway that is what I learned from Surendranath, and I hope it has worked in this case.”

Jack noticed that, as Moseh was saying this, he was fingering the scrap of Indian bead-work he had inherited from his Manhattoe ancestors. It was something that Moseh did, in an absent-minded way, whenever he was afraid of getting a raw deal. Jack decided not to mention it.

After two weeks of working their way down the coast of California they had crossed the Tropic of Cancer and weathered the bald promontory of Cabo San Lucas on New Year’s Day of 1701. Then they had set their course due southeast so as to traverse the mouth of the Gulf of California, a journey that had ended up taking several days because the Virazon, or northwest wind down the coast, had failed. Eventually they had come in sight of the trio of islands called the Three Marys, which lay off the bony elbow of New Spain, Cabo Corrientes—the Cape of Currents. Two rather tense days had followed. Those two Capes (San Lucas and Corrientes) formed the gate-posts of the long narrow body of water that ran between lower California and New Spain, which was called a Strait by those who still believed California was an island and a Gulf by those who didn’t. Whether it was a Strait or a Gulf, the Three Marys had a commanding position near its entrance. Yet they were far enough north to be out of reach of the Spanish authorities in Acapulco. Consequently they were a popular place for English and French pirates to spend winters. And to this human danger were added certain natural ones: the Three Marias were nearly joined to Cabo Corrientes by vast shallows. Even if they’d been able to salvage the latest Spanish charts from the Manila Galleon—which they hadn’t—these would have been nearly useless, because the powerful currents passing between the two Capes in and out of the Strait or Gulf shifted the sands from one tide to the next. The only persons in the world who would have the cunning to pilot a ship in that area would be the aforementioned pirates—if there were any. If there were, and they were English, they might or might not be the natural allies of Minerva. If French they would certainly be enemies.

But a nerve-wracking circuit of Maria Madre, Maria Magdalena, and Maria Cleofas had not turned up anything beyond a few decaying bivouacs, some abandoned and some manned by skeleton crews of dumbfounded wretches who fired guns in the air in weak bids to beckon them closer. “This year’s crop of pirates—if any made it around Cape Horn—must be wintering in the Galápagos,” van Hoek had said one night at mess, as they supped on the meat of some tortoises that had been captured from the longboat.

“The only pirates are we,” Dappa had remarked. This had not sat very well with van Hoek, but it had made something of an impression on Elizabeth de Obregon and Edmund de Ath. They had excused themselves early, withdrawn to the taffrail, and had yet another in their seemingly un-ending series of obscure conferences. “They’ll be re-writing their damned letters all night long,” Jack had predicted.

More conferences, and more re-writing, had followed the next day, as they’d dropped anchor off Maria Madre (the largest of the islands) and used the longboat to ferry Heavy Objects back and forth between Minerva and shore. Elizabeth and Edmund were confined to their cabins the whole time, and the longboat’s load was covered with sailcloth whenever it was within view of their windows. The cargo hold was off limits to them. There was no way for them to know what had been done. The obvious interpretation was that part of the quicksilver had been taken ashore and buried, and stones brought out from the island to ballast the ship. But it might just as well have been a mountebank’s shell-game: quicksilver-flasks going in to shore and then coming right back out again to be put back in their places in the hold.

The same performance had been repeated two days later on the Cape of Currents itself. Only then had van Hoek given the order they’d all been waiting for: to put that Cape behind them and run before the Virazon, coasting southeast into the country of New Galicia, the northernmost part of the coast that was really settled. The mountains and volcanoes of that country looked empty and barren, but after the sun went down they saw a signal-fire blazing on a high remote summit and knew from this that they had been sighted by the sentinel who was posted there. It meant that a rider was now galloping post-haste towards the City of Mexico, a journey of five hundred miles across terrible mountains, to deliver the news that a great ship had come out of the West. According to Elizabeth de Obregon, the people of Mexico (who were almost all monks and nuns, as the Church owned all of the land in the city) would begin to pray around the clock as soon as they heard that news, and would not stop until letters arrived from other watchers, farther down the coast, confirming that it was indeed the Manila Galleon.

Of course in this case it wasn’t, and so the letters would say something else. As the only two survivors of the disaster, Elizabeth and Edmund would perforce be the authors of those letters. Van Hoek would make a report, too, as a courtesy to the Viceroy. Much hinged upon how exactly those letters were worded, and on how Minerva’s involvement was explained. The two survivors had spent much of the journey from the Golden Gate to Cabo San Lucas writing and re-writing them, and had continued to make revisions until a few minutes before the documents had been placed on the longboat and despatched toward the shore. Minerva had cruised past the port of Chiamela, which was large and well-sheltered by islands but too shallow for large ships, and continued a few hours down the coast to the deep-water port of Navidad. By then it must have been obvious to the Alcalde of Chiamela, who was pursuing them on horseback the whole way, that this was no Manila Galleon, and that something had gone wrong. But not until Minerva’s longboat pulled to within shouting distance of Navidad did anyone who’d not been on the voyage learn of what had happened in the middle of the Pacific. There was a suitable eruption of wailing, cursing, praying, and (eventually) bell-clanging when this bit of intelligence finally sparked across the gap. Moseh winced empathetically and turned his attentions back to Jack.

“Though they were our captives in all but name, Ed and Elsie” (here he used Jack’s names for the two passengers) “might have said to us: ‘You men of Minerva are starving, your ship needs repairs, your cargo is valueless save at the mine-heads of New Spain and Peru. Only at the great ports of the King of Spain, such as Acapulco, Panama, and Lima, have you any hope of trading your quicksilver for what you so desperately need. If you are barred from those ports, you shall be exiled to a few wretched pirate-islands, for in your current plight you’ve scant hope of weathering Cape Horn. A few words on parchment, signed and sealed by us, determine whether you’ll be welcomed as heroes or hunted down as scurvy pirates.’ ”

“They might have said that,” Jack agreed. “But they didn’t.”

“They didn’t. If they had, it would have meant we were negotiating, which was best avoided. So before the subject was even broached I went into my Cabbalist act and gave Ed and Elsie to believe that I was naught more than an errand-boy for a legion of wizards and alchemists in the Islands of Solomon. That, and the caches of quicksilver that we might or might not have buried on Maria Madre and Cabo Corrientes, put us in a stronger position than we really deserve.”

“Dappa has read their letters,” Jack remarked. “He admits that their Latin is high-flown and abstruse, and that he may be overlooking much that is nuanced. But he seems to think that the survivors’ accounts depict us in a favorable light.”

“At the very least we should avoid summary execution,” Moseh allowed.

“There you go again—always the optimist.”

The port of Navidad despatched a boat of its own to bring out some provisions. The only cure for scurvy was to go ashore, but since they had arrived at the Golden Gate and begun to eat the fruits of the earth again, teeth had stopped falling out and gums had pinkened. Whatever was on this boat should tide them over to Acapulco. As it turned out, the boat carried not just food, but also tidings from Madrid: King Carlos II, “The Sufferer,” had finally died.

Of course hardly anyone on Minerva cared, and in any case it was not much of a surprise, as all of Christendom had been waiting for it to happen for three decades. But as they were in the Spanish Empire now, they tried to look solemn. Edmund de Ath crossed himself. Elizabeth de Obregon covered her face and went into her cabin without saying a word. Jack naïvely supposed she was praying the rosary for her dead monarch. But when he next went to his own cabin for a cat-nap he could hear the scribble, scribble of her quill, inscribing yet more letters.

They sailed for another week along a coast lined with cacao and vanilla plantations, and on the 28th of January came in sight of the first city they’d seen since leaving Manila in July. It was a shoal of mean little shacks that looked in danger of being shrugged into the water by the green mountains rising up behind. They could have sailed right past it, mistaking it for a wretched fishing-village, if not for the fact that a large castle stood in the middle.

The steepness of those mountains suggested a deep-water harbor. This was confirmed by a few large ships that had come in so close to shore that they were tied up to trees! But the passage in to that harbor was winding; the barque de négoce that came out to meet them had to put her three lateen sails through any number of difficult evolutions just to get out into blue water. This barque sported two six-pounders on either side of her high stern as well as a dozen or so swivel-guns distributed around her gunwales. In other words, compared to a Dutch East Indiaman like Minerva she was essentially unarmed. But the gaudy encrustations wrapped around her stern, and the fabulously complex heraldry on her ensign, told them that this barque had been sent out by someone important: according to Elizabeth de Obregon, the castellan, who was the highest authority in Acapulco. The two survivors of the Galleon were welcomed aboard this barque. Minerva was told not to enter the harbor, but to proceed several miles down the coast to a place called Port Marques.

Van Hoek had heard of it; Port Marques was the semi-official smugglers’ port, frequented by ships that came up from Peru with pigs of silver and other contraband that it would be unseemly to unload directly beneath the windows of the Castle of Acapulco. So they passed Acapulco by, with no sense of regret, as every building there was either a mud hovel or a monastery, and a few hours later dropped anchor before Port Marques. This was even more ragged and humble, being little more than a camp inhabited by Vagabonds, blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos.

Moseh went ashore on the first boat-load, fell on his face in the sand, and kissed it. “I will never set foot on a ship again as God is my witness!” he hollered.

“If you are talking to God, why are you speaking Sabir?” shouted Jack, who was watching from the poop deck of Minerva.

“God is far away,” Moseh explained, “and I must rely on men to keep me honest.”

LATER DAPPA WENT ASHORE and talked to some of the black men camped on the beach. There was a group of half a dozen who had come from the same African river as he, and spoke a similar language. Each of them had been captured by other Africans and sold down the river to Bonny, where he had been branded with the trademark of the Royal Africa Company and eventually loaded on an English ship that had taken him to Jamaica.

Each of them had come, in other words, from a part of Africa notorious for breeding lazy and rebellious slaves, and each had acquired some additional defect en route: infected eyes, gray hair, excessive gauntness, mysterous swellings, or contagious-looking skin diseases. Therefore none of the planters had wanted to buy them, or even take them for free. Obviously the captain of the slave-ship had no intention of taking such refuse slaves back to Africa and so they were simply abandoned on the dock of Kingston, where it was hoped and expected they’d die. And indeed there was no better place for it, as Kingston was perhaps the filthiest city on the planet. Most of the refuse slaves obligingly died. But each of the ones in this little band had separately made his way inland, and entered into a sort of Vagabond life, joining together in bands with escaped slaves and native Jamaicans and roving about the island stealing chickens and trying to stay one step ahead of the posses sent out after them by plantation-owners.

This particular group had drifted to an unsettled stretch of coast towards the western tip of Jamaica, where fishing was rumored to be good. About a year later they had encountered a brig full of English adventurers sailing out of the west, i.e., from the general direction of New Spain. These Englishmen—who, to judge from their description, were likely nothing more than incompetent or luckless boca-neers—had lately been reckless enough to find a route through a barrier reef that had hitherto barred access to a certain part of the Mosquito Coast, seven hundred miles due west of Jamaica. Now they were making a foray to Kingston to collect gun-powder, musket-balls, swine, and other necessaries, so that they could go back and establish a settlement.

Here the narrator—an African by the name of Amboe, with a bald head and grizzled beard—jumped over what must have been a somewhat involved negotiation, and said simply that he and a dozen of his band had decided to leave Jamaica and throw in their lot with these boca-neers, and had helped establish a rudimentary village at a place called Haulover Creek near the mouth of the river Belice. But it was a pestilential place, and the Englishmen got drunker and nastier every day, and so those who’d survived the initial rounds of diseases and hurricanes had pulled up stakes and moved inland, passing through a land of jungle-covered Pyramids (lengthy, implausible yarns deleted here), and straying across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (or so Jack—who’d been studying maps—inferred), to the Pacific Coast, and then wandering up this way.

Acapulco, Amboe explained, was far too hot, cramped, and famished to support many Spaniards and so for most of the year its hovels were occupied by the wretched soldiers of the garrison, a few missionaries who did not care whether they lived or died, and people like these: Indians, refuse-slaves, and the like. Only when the Manila Galleon or the Lima treasure-fleet was expected did white men swarm down out of the mountains and kick out the squatters and turn Acapulco into a semblance of a real city. This had just happened a week ago, which explained why so many rabble were camped on the beach at Port Marques; but word had already gotten around that the ship was not the Manila Galleon, and disappointed merchants were already streaming out of town in droves, leaving behind empty buildings that the beach-people would soon move back into.

Naturally all of Minerva’s crew wanted to come ashore, but van Hoek only let them do so one watch at a time, and he insisted that men stand by the longboat with muskets. He was worried, in other words, that the Spaniards would try to seize the ship on some pretext, and that she would have to fight her way out onto the main and make for Galápagos or some other pirate-haven. Jack for his part was inclined to believe that the Spaniards would see things their way. If Minerva came under attack she would either flee or be sunk, and in either event the quicksilver in her holds would never arrive at the mine-heads of New Spain. And if she were not received hospitably and dealt with fairly, she could sail down the coast to Lima and the quicksilver would end up at Potosí, the greatest mine in the world.

In any event there was a pause while the accounts of Edmund de Ath and Elizabeth de Obregon were sent by express to Mexico City, and (presumably) pondered by important people, and orders sent back by express. This ended up taking sixteen days. Van Hoek never once came ashore, but remained aboard his ship, doing sums in his cabin or pacing the poop deck with a spyglass, scanning the horizon for armadas. Vrej Esphahnian ventured into Acapulco to procure the wood and other items needed to repair Minerva’s foremast. He ended up being absent for two nights and a day, and van Hoek was getting ready to send out a rescue party when a barge emerged from Acapulco Harbor’s broad southeastern entrance and came their way, laden with what they wanted. Vrej was posed insouciantly on a new foremast, and explained the delay by informing them that Acapulco was that rarest of places, an important trade-port without a single Armenian, and so he had been forced to deal with slower minds.

Minerva’s idlers were now idle no more, as the new foremast had to be stepped and rigged. That procedure might have been interesting to Jack if it had been done in mid-ocean where there was nothing else to look at, but as it was, being on land had reminded him of how much he hated being aboard ship. He spent those days ashore, making friends with diverse Vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells, learning which of them were idiots and which merely independent-minded. Amboe and his band were obviously of the latter type, but most of these beach-people did not have such informative Narrations to tell, and Jack could sound them out only through carousing with them over a period of weeks. Jack had long since lost interest in carousing per se, but he recalled how it was done, and could still put on a performance of carousing that looked sincere but was in fact wholly affected, shrewd, and calculating. He was helped in this by his two sons, who really meant it.

Gentlefolk liked to claim that horsemanship was a noble art. If that were true, then half of the renegadoes on the beach at Port Marques were bastard sons of Dukes and Princes. New Spain bred horses the way London bred fleas, and many of these mulattoes and mestizoes could ride like cavaliers, even bareback. Jack of course was the last man on earth who’d ever believe that riding well was a sign of superior breeding. But he did know that riding badly was its own punishment, and that spirited horses could smell fools and poseurs from a mile away. Some of the Port Marques crowd would entertain themselves by roping wild beach-mustangs and riding them up and down the sand, forcing them against their will to gallop into breaking waves. From a musket-shot away Jack could see the white teeth of those riders as they laughed, and later on, as they gathered around driftwood-fires to eat the food of the country (maize flat-bread wrapped around meager helpings of beans and spicy stews), he would seek those men out and try to learn something of them, and he would ply them with rum to see if they had a weakness for liquor. Of all of these, the best man, in Jack’s opinion, was an African named Tomba, a member of Amboe’s band. Tomba was not a refuse slave; he had escaped from a sugar plantation in Jamaica. The scars on his back confirmed part of his story, which was that he’d fled to avoid being beaten to death by an overseer. The time he’d spent on the plantation, and at the English settlement on Haulover Creek, had given Tomba some knowledge of English, and he spent several long evenings sitting by the fire with Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe talking about what sons of bitches Englishmen were in general.

Almost three weeks after Minerva had dropped anchor at Port Marques, Edmund de Ath came out alone one morning from Acapulco, bearing sealed letters from the Viceroy. One was addressed to van Hoek and another to the Viceroy’s counterpart in Lima. Van Hoek opened his in Minerva’s dining cabin, in the presence of de Ath, Dappa, Jack, and Vrej.

Moseh’s vow compelled him to remain ashore. Later Jack rowed in on a skiff and found the Jew eating a taco.

“These Vagabond-boots are longing to Stray,” Jack said. “I reckon that tomorrow we will round up a posse of these vaqueros and desperadoes and begin to assemble a mule-train.”

Moseh finished chewing a bite of his taco and swallowed carefully. “The news is good, then.”

“We are all vile hereticks and profiteers, says the Viceroy, and ought to be whipped all the way to Boston…but Edmund de Ath has put in a good word for us.”

“Is that Ed’s version or…”

“It’s right there in black and white in the middle of the Viceroy’s letter, or so literate men assure me.”

“Very well,” said Moseh, dubiously. “I do not like being beholden to that Jansenist, but—”

“We are beholden to him anyway,” said Jack. “Do you recollect the fellow we had dealings with in Sanlúcar de Barrameda?”

“That cargador metedoro? It’s been a while.”

“You don’t have to remember him personally, but only the class he belonged to.”

“Spanish Catholics who front for Protestant merchants…”

“…because hereticks are barred from doing business in Spain. You’ve got it.”

“The Viceroy wants our quicksilver,” Moseh said, “but as long as the Inquisition is active in Mexico City, he cannot allow Protestants and a Jew to roam about transacting business in his country. And so he insists that we nominate a Papist to act as our cargador metedoro.”

“Just so,” Jack said.

“And—don’t tell me—Edmund de Ath is our man. I am uneasy.”

“You are always uneasy, and more often than not, for the best of reasons,” Jack said, “but for God’s sake look about you and consider our situation. We must have a Catholic and that is all there is to it. There are many to choose from, but as a Belgian Jansenist, Ed is the least Catholic Catholic we are likely to find, and at least we know something about him.”

“Do we? The only person who can testify as to his character is Elizabeth de Obregon, and she’s been under his spell ever since she came to.”

Jack sighed. “Do I need to tell you that you’ve been out-voted?”

Moseh flinched. “I never should have given any of you voting privileges…that was never part of the Plan.”

“We’re not putting him in control of the ship,” Jack said, “just allowing him to act as our front here and in Lima. He’ll sail down that-a-way aboard Minerva and sell whatever quicksilver we do not off-load here. At that point, his role in the enterprise is finished. Minerva leaves him on the dock in Lima, rounds Cape Horn, and makes rendezvous with us in Vera Cruz or Havana a year or two later. Edmund de Ath can stay in Peru and try to convert the Incas to Œcumenicism, or he can come back to Mexico…it matters not to us.”

“It matters not to me, for my voyaging days have ended,” said Moseh. “If Edmund de Ath tries to do any mischief I’ll put on my poncho and sombrero and ride north with saddlebags full of silver.”

“Very well,” Jack said, “but first you had better learn how to ride. It is more difficult than pulling on an oar.”

Book 5

The Juncto

Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin

JULY 1701

“YOUR HIGHNESS, WHEN I WAS a boy—rather younger than you are now, hard as that might be to imagine—I was locked out of a library for a time, and I did not care for it at all,” said the bald man leading the young woman down the gallery. “I pray you understand how it has pained me to have locked you out of yours for the last week—”

“It’s not really mine, is it? The library is the property of Uncle Freddy and Aunt Figgy!”

“But you have made it yours by spending so much time there.”

“While it was closed, you’ve brought me every book I asked for without delay, Doctor. So whyever should I mind?”

“It’s true, Highness, my desire to apologize to you is wholly irrational, Q.E.D.”

“Is it just one of those Barock apologies that courtiers put at the beginnings of letters?”

“I should hope not. An apology may be heartfelt without being rational.”

“Whereas a courtier’s apology is the opposite,” said the Princess, “in that it is insincere but calculated.”

“It is well said—but said too loudly,” answered the proud Doctor. “Your voice carries for a mile down these echoing galleries; and a courtier who has just snatched an indiscretion out of the air will prance about to all the salons like a puppy who has just stolen a drumstick.”

“Then let’s in here, where my voice will be muffled by books, and where courtiers never venture,” answered Caroline, and paused before the doors to the library, waiting for Leibniz to open them for her.

“Now you will see your birthday present, and I hope you like it,” said the Doctor, drawing a key on a blue silk ribbon from his pocket. The key was a rod of steel having a fabulously ornate handle at one end, and at the other, a sort of three-dimensional maze carved into a steel cube. He inserted this into a square hole in the door-lock, wiggled it to and fro to make it one with the mechanism concealed inside, then turned it. Before opening the doors, he removed the key from the lock and hung it on its blue ribbon around the Princess’s neck. “Since you cannot carry your present with you, I hope you’ll carry this key as a token. May you never be locked out again.”

“Thank you, Doctor. When I am Queen of some country or other, I shall build you a library greater than that of Alexandria, and give you a golden key to it.”

“I fear that I shall be too old and blind to make good use of the library—but I shall accept the key with gratitude, and carry it to my grave.”

“That would be irresponsible of you—then no one else would be able to get into the Library!” Caroline answered, with a roll of the eyes, and a sharp sigh of exasperation. “Open the doors, Doctor, I want to see it!”

Leibniz unlatched the double doors, turned around, and backed through them so that he could watch her face. He saw light reflected in her blue eyes: light from high windows all around the room, and from sparking fire-works set in buckets of sand to make it look like one great birthday-cake.

The library had been built two stories high, with a catwalk all around, halfway up, to afford access to the higher shelves, and its walls and the frescoed vault overhead had been generously arched with windows so that “Aunt Figgy” (short for Figuelotte, as Queen Sophie Charlotte was known to her family) and her bookish friends could read into the evening without need of candles. The high windows had been cracked open to let the room breathe in warm summer air and to exhale the smoke from the fizzing sparklers. The frescoes depicted the same assortment of Classical scenes that covered the ceiling of every rich person in Christendom nowadays, though the gods and goddesses had been provided with blond hair and blue eyes so that Jupiter might as well have been Wotan. Trompe l’oeil made it look as if the library had no ceiling but was open to the blue skies, and the gods were all springing out of frothy clouds. The writhing columns of smoke from the fireworks spread out against the plaster-work and swirled about to make the illusion that much better.

A cheer and a little song followed, from the dozen or so people who had come to wish Caroline Glück on her Geburtstag. It was a small party, for a Princess, and it was an older crowd. Sophie was the eldest of all at seventy-one—she had come out from Hanover, crammed into a carriage with Leibniz and her grandchildren: George August (who was a few months younger than Caroline) and Sophie Dorothea (four years younger yet). Sophie Charlotte (Figuelotte), Queen of Prussia and the mistress and namesake of the palace, was here with her son Frederick William, a legendary brat of thirteen. Filling out the guest list was the motliest collection of metaphysicians, mathematicians, radical theologians, writers, musicians, and poets ever brought together for a princess’s eighteenth birthday.

The Queen of Prussia liked to stage operas, when she wasn’t inciting riotous dinner-table debates among her friends, and the only sense in which she was ever a tyrant was in ordering some poor physicist to don a mad-cap and warble a role for which he was untrained and ill-suited. Princess Caroline had been dragooned, from time to time, to sing a Nymph or Angel part. Nothing, except perhaps for fighting side-by-side in a war, forged bonds among disparate persons so well as performing together on stage, and so Caroline had become a great friend of these grownups, her fellow-sufferers on the boards of the Charlottenburg.

With wine-glasses and sparklers in hand they had gathered round a pedestal that had been built of polished cherry-wood in the center of the library. Surmounting this, and spreading out above the heads of the revelers, was a large spherical object—

“A cage!” Caroline exclaimed.

Dismay flowed over Leibniz’s face. But very soon that emotion gave way to a sort of distracted, intrigued look, as his curiosity had been somehow provoked. He bobbed his head in a way that might have been a nod, or a bow. “C’est juste,” he said. “Geometers have, with their parallels and meridians, ruled the globe that, being unmarked, save by irregular coastlines and river-courses, seemed wild to eyes that only in order could see beauty. But one who loves Nature for her variety might see the geometers’ devices as a disfigurement—no bird is as beautiful when seen through the bars of a cage, as it is in the wild. But I pray, Highness, that you will construe this rather as an inventory of the known. It is a map of the world, not as flattened out by cartographers, but as it is.”

The globe had been set at an angle, as the earth was tilted with respect to the ecliptic. An unexplored portion of the South Pacific bore on the pedestal. Not far away from it, the south pole presented itself just at the level of Caroline’s head. This globe was indeed fashioned like a spherical bird-cage, with curving brass bars following the lines of longitude and latitude. Most of it (the oceans) was open-work. But the continents were curved plates of brass riveted to those bars. They were mounted to the inside of the cage, rather than the outside, so that the bars passed in front of them—at least, for the celebrants who were standing around it. An irregular, wholly factitious continent had been placed around the south pole, representing the hypothetical land of Antarctica, and this had a round hatchway cut into it, and steps leading up to it from the floor.

Dr. Krupa (a Bohemian mathematician who had become a sort of permanent houseguest here) said, “Highness, some have proposed that at the world’s poles are openings where one may descend into the earth’s interior. Here is your opportunity personally to put that hypothesis to the test.”

The Princess appeared to have forgotten that anyone else was in the room, and had not even said hello to Aunt Figgy or to Aunt Sophie. She stood for a moment at the base of the steps, the O of her mouth an echo of the big hole that was about to swallow her up. Even Frederick William shut up for a moment, sensing a frisson running through the assembled grownups, but not having the first idea why. That Princess Caroline of Ansbach had once been a little penniless orphan had been long forgot by most. But something about her pose there, below that hole in the Antarctic, unaware of all the people standing about, called to mind the orphan who had showed up on Sophie Charlotte’s doorstep five years ago, escorted by two Natural Philosophers and a brace of Prussian dragoons.

Then she got a smile on her face and climbed up through the hole. The grownups resumed breathing and applauded—giving Frederick William the diversion he needed to loop round behind the crowd and slam George August over the head with a book. Leibniz, who had not spent much time around children, watched this dumbfounded. Then he noticed Sophie regarding him with amusement. “It begins,” she said, “already the boys are vying for Caroline’s attention.”

“Is that what they’re doing?” Leibniz asked incredulously as George August,* who was five years older than, and twice the size of, his assailant, body-slammed Frederick William† against a smaller and more traditional sort of globe that had been shoved into a corner to make way for the new one. The papier-mâché sphere crumpled inward and Frederick William ended up wearing it on his head, making him look like some antipodean creature with a monstrously oversized brain.

These antics had gone unnoticed, or been deliberately ignored, by Monsieur Molyneux, a Huguenot writer who had been haunting Berlin since his family had been wiped out in Savoy. “Why indeed should we not view the world as a cage in which our spirit has been imprisoned?” he reflected.

“Because God is not a prison-warden,” Leibniz answered sharply, but stopped when an elbow even sharper (Sophie’s) caught him in the ribs.

Princess Caroline had taken her seat: a swivel-stool mounted in the middle of the globe. Planting one of her party-shoes at the junction of the Twentieth West Meridian and the Fortieth South Parallel, so that the toe seemed to breach out of the South Atlantic like an immense white whale, she gave a little kick that sent her spinning around. “I’m rotating!” she reported, “the world is revolving around me!”

“Solipsistic, that,” somone remarked drily.

“It is more than that,” Leibniz said, “it is a profound question of Natural Philosophy. How indeed can we tell whether we do stand still in a rotating universe, or spin in a fixed cosmos?”

“Eeehuhh, I’m dizzy!” Caroline said, explaining why she had planted her feet, and stopped.

“There’s your answer,” Dr. Krupa said.

“Not at all. You assume that dizziness is a symptom—internally produced—of our spinning. But why might it not just as well be an effect exerted upon us from a distance, by a revolving universe?”

“No one should be forced to listen to metaphysics at her eighteenth birthday-party,” Sophie decreed.

“It’s dark in here,” Caroline said, “I can’t see the maps.”

Wladyslaw—a Polish tenor who sang the lead in just about every one of Sophie Charlotte’s operas—lit a fresh sparkler and handed it through the central Pacific Ocean to Caroline. Leibniz’s view of the girl happened to be blocked by Brazil, but he saw the inside of the sphere light up as the sparkler was drawn into the middle; the freshly buffed brass seemed to ignite as it sieved the light from the air and spilled it out in every direction. For a moment it seemed as if the globe-cage was filled with flame, and Leibniz’s heart ached and pounded with fear that Caroline’s dress had caught fire; but then he heard her delighted voice, and decided that the fear he felt was of something else, of some larger and longer calamity than the fate of one orphan Princess.

“I can see now all the rivers set in turquoise, and all the lakes, too, and forests of green tortoise-shell! The cities are jewels, which the light shines through.”

“It is how the world would look if it were transparent and you could sit in the middle looking outward,” said Father von Mixnitz, a Jesuit from Vienna who had somehow arranged to get himself invited.

“I am aware of that,” said Caroline, annoyed. A long, irritable silence followed. Caroline was quickest to forgive and forget. “I see two ships in the Pacific, and one is full of quicksilver, and the other is full of fire.”

“I do not recall putting those in the drawings,” Leibniz joked, trying to obey Sophie’s command to lighten things up a bit. “I shall have to have a word with the workmen about that!”

“Consider this, your royal highness,” continued Father von Mixnitz, “you may spin yourself all the way round, three hundred and twenty degrees—”

“Three hundred and sixty!”

“Yes, highness, that is what I meant to say—three hundred and sixty degrees—and never shall you pass out of sight of the Spanish Empire. Is it not remarkable, how vast, how wealthy, are the dominions of Spain?”

“Aunt Sophie says it may be the dominions of France soon,” Caroline demurred.

“Indeed, the French pretender does sit on the throne in Madrid at the moment…”

“Aunt Sophie says it’s the woman behind that throne who matters.”

“Indeed,” the Jesuit said, twitching his eyes toward Sophie, “many argue that the duc d’Anjou, or King Philip V of Spain as he styles himself, is a mere pawn of the princesse des Ursins, who is herself a notorious soulmate of Madame de Maintenon—but this is beside the point, as Anjou cannot possibly endure long on the Spanish throne, when he is opposed by women far more cunning, more powerful, and more beautiful.”

“Aunt Sophie says she does not care for flatterers,” said the voice from the center of the brass world.

Sophie, who had been about to squash the priest like a bug, now did something rare for her: She hesitated, torn between annoyance with the Jesuit and delight in Caroline.

“It is no flattery, highness, to say that Sophie, in league with King William, or Queen Anne as the case may one day be, is a stronger hand than Maintenon and des Ursins. All the more so if the rightful heir to the Spanish throne—Archduke Charles—were wed to a Princess in the mold of Sophie and Sophie Charlotte.”

“But Archduke Charles is Catholic while Aunt Sophie and Aunt Figgy are Protestants—as am I,” said Caroline, absent-mindedly kicking at meridians to twist herself left, right, left, right, peering first to one side, then the other, of the Isthmus of Panama.

“It is hardly unheard-of for Persons of Quality to change their religion,” the Jesuit said. “Especially if they are intellectually active, and are presented with compelling arguments. As I am taking up residence here in Berlin, I shall look forward to exchanging views with your royal highness on such matters in coming years, as you grow in wisdom and maturity.”

“We needn’t wait,” Caroline said helpfully. “I can explain it to you now. Dr. Leibniz has taught me all about religion.”

“Oh, has he now?” Father von Mixnitz asked uneasily.

“Yes, he has. Now tell me, Father, are you one of those Catholics who still refuses to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun?”

Father von Mixnitz swallowed his tongue and then hacked it back up. “Highness, I believe in what Dr. Leibniz was saying just a minute ago, namely, that it is all relative.”

“That’s not exactly what I said,” Leibniz protested.

“Do you believe in the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine, Father?” Caroline asked.

“How could I be a Catholic if I did not, Highness?”

“This is not how we do birthday parties in Poland,” commented Wladyslaw, ladling himself another cup of wine.

“Hush! I am enjoying it greatly,” Sophie returned.

“What if you ate it and then you got sick and threw up? When it came out, would it be Jesus’s flesh and blood? Or would it de-transubstantiate on the way out, and become bread and wine again?”

“Such solemn questions do not comport with the frothy imaginings of an eighteen-year-old girl,” said Father von Mixnitz, who had gone all red in the face and was biting the words off one at a time, as if his tongue were a trip-hammer in a mill.

“Here’s to frothy imaginings!” said Queen Sophie Charlotte, raising her glass with a beautiful smile; but her eyes were like those of a falcon tracking a mink as she watched Father von Mixnitz take his leave and stalk out of the room.

“What else do you see in the empty places, besides the ships of quicksilver and of fire?” asked Dr. Krupa.

“I see the very first ship sailing into the Tsar’s new city of St. Petersburg. It is a Dutch ship, I phant’sy. And in the Atlantic and the Caribbean, ships of the Dutch and of the English sailing to war against the French and the Spanish…” but suddenly her sparkler fizzled out. A groan of sympathy ran through her audience. “Now I can see nothing!” she complained.

“The future is a mystery,” Sophie said.

Sophie Charlotte’s smile had been forced and fragile the last few minutes. “At least she got to use the thing as it was intended for a few minutes,” she said to Leibniz.

“What do you mean, Majesty?”

“I mean, innocently, as a wonder to marvel at—and not as a Visual Aid for choosing her husband.”

“She can learn all she needs to know of husband-choosing from you, Majesty,” Leibniz answered. Those words led to a brief sweet moment between the savant and Sophie Charlotte—which was cut short by Frederick William, who came running in to shield himself behind his mother’s skirts. George August had ascended to one of the library catwalks with a big fire-stick he had plucked from a sand-bucket. Copying his pose directly from the fresco above, he drew back and aimed it at his cousin just like Jupiter readying a thunderbolt.

Leibniz excused himself so that Sophie Charlotte could scold her son. As he passed beneath the globe he saw Princess Caroline’s shoes flashing out first to one side, then the other, as she reciprocated to and fro, first towards George August, then towards Frederick William. She was singing a little nursery rhyme she had picked up from her English tutor: “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe…catch a suitor by the toe…to England or Prussia shall I go…to be made high or be laid low…eeny, meeny, miney, moe.”

Book 4

Bonanza

Mexico City, New Spain

SUKKOTH 1701

That Golden Sceptre which thou didst reject

Is now an Iron Rod to bruise and breake

Thy disobedience.

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

“CARAMBA!” EXCLAIMED DIEGO DE FONSECA, “a cucaracha has fallen onto the tortillas of my wife!”

Moseh had seen it before de Fonseca had, and had jumped to his feet even before the initial Caramba! had echoed off the far wall of the prison’s courtyard. As he reached over the table, the beads of his colossal rosary—walnut-shells strung on a cowhide thong—whacked the rim of a honey-filled serving-crock. His arm shot free of its sleeve, revealing a ladder of welts and scars, some fresher than others. His shoulder-joint rumbled and popped like a barrel rolling over cobblestones. Most of the men at the table felt twinges of sympathetic pain in their own shoulders, and inhaled sharply. Moseh’s ingratiating smile hardened into a scary grimace, but he got a grip on Señora de Fonseca’s tortilla-plate and pulled it clear. “Allow me to fetch some fresh ones…”

Diego de Fonseca glanced sidelong at his wife, who had tilted her head back, reducing her chin count to a mere three, and was glaring at the net-work of vines above the table, which was vibrant with six-legged life. The Director, who was not a thin specimen either, leaned slightly towards Moseh and said, “That is most Christian of you…but we prefer our tortillas made with rich lard, and in fact have never seen them made with olive oil before—”

“I could send out an Indian, Señor Director—”

“Don’t bother, we are satiated. Besides—”

“I was just about to say it!” Jack put in. “Besides, you and the Señora get to go home tonight!”

Diego de Fonseca adjusted the set of his jaw slightly, and favored Jack with the same look his wife had aimed at the cockroach moments earlier. Fortunately, Señora de Fonseca’s attention had been drifting: “Over there, you pay such attention to cleanliness,” she observed, casting a look down an adjacent gallery, where several prisoners were sweeping the paving-stones with bundles of willow-branches. “Yet you lay out your feast with nothing to protect you from the sky, save this miserable thatching of infested vines.”

“I gather from your tone that you are bemused by our ineptitude where a señora less imbued with Christian charity would be angry at our rudeness,” Moseh said.

“Quite! Why, those fellows with the willow-branches are not so much sweeping the pavement as spanking it!”

“Those are from that batch of Jewish monks we arrested at the Dominican monastery three years ago,” said Diego.

From any other Inquisition prison warden, this might have sounded judgmental—even condemnatory. But Diego de Fonseca presided over what was widely held to be the mellowest and most easy-going Inquisition prison in the whole Spanish Empire, and he said it in mild conversational tones. Then he popped a honey-dipped pastry into his mouth.

“That explains it!” said Moseh. “Those Dominicans are so rich, each monk hires half a dozen Indians as housekeepers, and consequently they know nothing of the domestick arts.” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Say, Brother Christopher! Brother Peter! Brother Diaz! There are ladies present! Try to move some dirt as long as you are sweeping the courtyard, will you?”

The three monks straightened up and glared at Moseh, then bent their backs again and began scraping dust across the stones. Clouds of volcanic ash built up and rose around their knees.

“As for this wretched covering, I can only beg you pardon, señora,” continued Moseh. “We like to lie out in this place and recuperate after a question-and-answer session with the Inquisitor, and so we have been training the vines to grow thus, to shade us from the mid-afternoon sun.”

“Then you need to give them manure, for I can clearly see stars coming out through the gaps.”

To which the obvious response was Manure!? We get no shortage of that from the priests, and give all of it back to the Inquisitor, but before Jack could say it, Moseh silenced him with a look, and said: “Insofar as the vines cover us, we thank Lord Jesus, and insofar as they don’t, we are reminded that in the end we are all dependent on the protection of God in Heaven.”

The feast had been brought in by the prisoners’ families and laid out on a long deal table at the edge of the prison courtyard, under a makeshift awning of bougainvilleas. It was a lot of harvest-time food: particularly squashes, baked with Caribbean sugar, cinnamon from Manila, and an infinity of beans. Jack had taken a liking to mushy food since losing most of his teeth crossing the Pacific. Up in Guanajuato he’d hired an Indian to make him a new set out of gold and carven boar’s tusks, but this accessory had been mislaid, somewhere along the line, after he and Moseh had fallen into the hands of the Inquisition. He guessed that some familiar or alguacil was chewing his pork with Jack’s teeth at this very moment, probably just over the wall in the dormitories of the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición.

“Consider your apologies accepted, and your flattery disregarded,” said Señora de Fonseca. “But a lady who attends a social function in a prison, organized by men—hereticks and infidels at that!—does not expect that the niceties will be observed. That is why every man seeks a wife, no?”

There followed a long silence, which quickly became embarrassing to those hereticks and infidels, and then stretched out to a point where it seemed likely to become fatal. Finally Jack kicked Salamón Ruiz under the table. Salamón had been rocking back and forth on his bench and muttering something. When Jack’s boot impacted on his shin he opened his eyes and shouted, “Oy!”

Then, amid sharp inhalations from all around the table, stretched it out thus: “Oigo misa!”

“You are going to Mass!?” said Diego de Fonseca, perplexed.

“Misa de matrimonio,” said Salamón, and then finally remembered to unclasp his hands and grope for the hand of his supposed novia, this evening’s nominal guest of honor, Isabel Machado, who was seated on his right. He had never seen the girl before, and for a moment Jack was afraid he was going to grab the wrong woman’s hand. “In my head, you know, I was going to Mass on my wedding day.”

“Well, keep your hands out of your lap when you’re doing it please!” Jack returned. The comment was not well received by the warden’s wife, but Moseh plastered it over by rising to his feet and hoisting his chocolate-cup into the air: “To Isabel and Sanchez,* whose betrothal we celebrate tonight, may the Inquisitor be merciful to Sanchez, may the auto da fé be of the non-violent sort, and may their marriage be long and prosperous.”

That toast led to others, which continued in chocolatey volleys until the Cathedral bells rang vespers. Then the dinner broke up as the prisoners and their guests got to their feet and began to walk in a long uneven procession around the perimeter of the courtyard.

“To walk around thus after eating is a custom up north,” Jack heard Moseh explaining to Señora de Fonseca.

“In Nuevo Leon? But that place was settled by Jews!”

“No, thank God, I meant the new mining country: Guanajuato, Zacatecas…”

She shuddered. “Brr, it is a land of Vagabonds and Desperadoes…”

“But pure-blooded Christians all. And after a big meal they always march around the town square seven times.”

“Why seven?”

“Five times for the Five Wounds of Christ,” Jack blurted out, “and three for the three persons of the Trinity.”

“But five and three make eight!” observed Señor de Fonseca, now becoming interested.

Moseh now literally stepped in between Jack and the Fonsecas and continued, “All right, I did not wish to bore you with all of the details, but really the tradition is this: formerly they would go eight times around, turning always to the right. Then they would reverse direction and march around four times, one for each of the four gospels, turning to the left. Then reverse again and three additional times to the right, one for each of the crosses on Calvary. But then some Jesuit came along and pointed out that five and three, take away four, add three, make seven all together, and so why not simply go around seven times and leave it at that? Of course he was not taken seriously until they got a new priest up there, who had gout in one foot, and did not like so much walking. A letter was sent to the Vatican. Twenty years later the answer came back that the Jesuit’s arithmetick had been examined, and determined to be sound. By that time the gouty priest had died of a fever. But his replacement was in no position to argue sums with the Pope, and so the tradition was established anyway.”

Visibly exhausted, Moseh now lapsed into silence, as did the Fonsecas, who had been driven into a profound stupor. Not until several orbits of the courtyard had been tallied up did anyone speak again.

“Damn all this dust!” said Diego de Fonseca, waving a flabby hand before his face. The monks who had been sweeping earlier were now shaking their branches in the air, releasing clouds of Popocatepetl ash.

“I heard unfamiliar screaming today,” Jack remarked. “Sounded as if someone was being given the strappado, but I didn’t recognize his voice.”

“It is a Belgian priest, supposedly with heretickal leanings—they brought him up from Acapulco,” said the warden. “I believe he is a material witness in your case.”

FATHER EDMUND DE ATH was sitting in his cell staring with a kind of dull curiosity at his own arms, which were laid out on the table in front of him like lamb shanks in a butcher’s shop. They were still attached to his shoulders, but they were bloated and bluish, except around the wrists where ropes had sawn nearly to the bone. The only part of him that moved was his eyeballs, which swiveled toward the door as Jack and Moseh entered.

“You know, there was a monk in Spain who was thrown into the common jail for some petty crime, fifty or a hundred years ago,” said de Ath. He was speaking in a quiet voice. Jack and Moseh knew why: the strappado ripped all of the muscles around the ribs and spine, giving the victim every incentive to breathe shallowly for the next couple of weeks. Jack and Moseh came round to either side and bent close so that de Ath could get by with a mere whisper. “After a few days in the squalor of that jail, he called the jailer over and uttered certain heretickal oaths. Of course the jailer denounced him to the Inquisition without delay. Before the next sundown, this monk had been moved to the Prison of the Inquisition, where he had his own cell, clean and well-ventilated, with a chair and—ahh—a table.”

“A table’s a good thing to have,” Jack allowed, “when your arms have been pulled out of their sockets, and have nothing to support their weight save a few strands of gristle.”

“You are not really a heretick, are you, Father?” asked Moseh.

“Of course not.”

“So it follows that you believe in turning the other cheek, that the meek shall inherit the earth, et cetera?”

“¿Como no? As the Spaniards say.”

“Good—we shall hold you to it,” said Jack, raising one foot and planting it in the middle of de Ath’s chest. He grabbed one of the priest’s hands and Moseh the other. A violent shove sent the victim toppling backwards in his chair. Just as he was about to bash his head on the stone floor, Jack and Moseh jerked as hard as they could on de Ath’s arms, yanking him back up like Enoch Root’s yo-yo. A loud pop sounded from deep in each shoulder. The scream of Edmundde Ath, like the blowing of the legendary horn of Roland, could presumably be heard several mountain ranges away. Of course it emptied his lungs, which forced him to draw a deep breath, which was so painful that he had to scream some more. But after a while this Oscillatory Phenomenon damped out and de Ath was left in the same position as before, viz. sitting bolt upright with his arms on the table. But now he was cautiously clenching and unclenching his fists, and in the light of the candles that Jack and Moseh had brought in, it seemed his flesh was becoming a pinker shade of gray.

“Pardon me while I try to come up with theologickal analogies for what you just did to me,” he said.

“You could do that until the vacas came back to the hacienda, I’m sure,” said Moseh.

“Now that we are all devout Catholics we’ll have plenty of opportunities to listen to homilies,” Jack said. “For now, only tell us what you know of the proceedings against us.”

Edmund de Ath said nothing for a long time. In Mexico, time was as plentiful as silver.

“The warden says you are a witness,” Moseh said, “but they would not torture you unless you were also a suspect.”

“That much is obvious,” agreed de Ath, “but as you know perfectly well, the Inquisition never tells a prisoner what the charges are against him, or who denounced him. They throw him in prison and tell him to confess, and leave him guessing what he’s supposed to confess to.”

“’Tisn’t hard for me to guess,” Jack said. “I’m an Englishman missing the end of his dick, which means the only question is: Jew, or Protestant?”

“I hope you’ve been wise enough to tell them you’re a Jew who was never baptized.”

“That I have. Which—assuming they believe me—marks me as an infidel. And as this Church of yours thinks it is its mission to preach to infidels rather than burn ’em, I’m likely to escape with nothing worse than having to listen to a whole lot o’ preaching.”

“Your sons?”

“When the alguaciles came for me and Moseh, they were on a trip to Cabo Corrientes to dig up some of that buried quicksilver. No doubt they are drinking mezcal in some mining-town saloon about now.”

“And you, Moseh?”

“They can see perfectly well I’m half Indian, so they’ve pegged me as a mestizo spawned by one of those crypto-Jews who went up to Nuevo Leon a hundred years ago.”

“But that lot was exterminated in the autos da fé of 1673.”

“Ridding a country of Jews is easier than purging every last phant’sy and suspicion from an Inquisitor’s mind,” Moseh returned. “He supposes every Indian between San Miguel de Allende and New York has a Torah concealed in his breech-clout.”

“He wants to find that you are a heretick,” said Edmund de Ath.

“And hereticks burn,” Moseh added.

“Only if they are unrepentant,” said Edmund de Ath, and his eyes followed the lines of Moseh’s tunic until they found the rosary. “So you have made the decision to pass as a Christian, and avoid the stake. As soon as you are set free you’ll go far away and become a Jew again. That is exactly what the Inquisitor suspects.”

“Go on.”

“He has been asking me questions about you. He would like for me to testify that you are a sham Christian and an unrepentant Jew. That is all he needs to burn you over a crackling mesquite fire…your only choice then would be to accept Christ as they were tying you to the stake…”

“In which event they’d charitably strangle me as the flames were rising—or, I could live for a few minutes longer as a devout Jew.”

“Albeit an uncomfortable one,” Jack concluded.

“Jack, he would also like for me to testify that you and Moseh prayed together in Hebrew, and observed Yom Kippur aboard Minerva.”

“Go ahead, it just confirms I’m an infidel.”

“But now that you are pretending to be a Catholic you’ve burned that excuse—any lapses make you a heretick.”

Jack now became mildly irked. “What is your point? That you could, with a few words, send me and Moseh to the stake? We already knew that.”

“There must be something more,” Moseh said. “A witness they would not torture. Edmund has been accused of something by someone.”

“Under normal circumstances there would be no guessing who my accuser was,” said de Ath, “since the Inquisition keeps such matters a secret. But here in New Spain, no one knows me except for those who disembarked from Minerva in Acapulco. Obviously you two did not denounce me to the Inquisition.” De Ath said this deliberately, and looked Jack and then Moseh in the eye, examining each for signs of a guilty conscience. Jack had been subjected to this treatment countless times in his life, first by Puritans in English Vagabond-camps and subsequently by diverse Papists eager to hear him confess all his colorful sins. He met the gaze of de Ath directly, and Moseh looked back at the Belgian with a sorrowful look that showed no trace of guilt or nervousness. “Very well,” said de Ath, with a faint, apologetic smile. “That leaves only—”

“Elizabeth de Obregon!” Moseh exclaimed, if a whisper could be an exclamation.

“But she was your disciple,” Jack said.

“Judas was a disciple, too,” de Ath said quietly. “Disciples can be dangerous—especially when they are not right in the head to begin with. When Elizabeth returned to awareness in that cabin on Minerva, mine was the first face she saw. I believe now that my face must somehow haunt her nightmares, and that she seeks to exorcise it in flames.”

“But we thought—”

“You imagined I was exerting some sinister influence on a susceptible mind—I know you did,” said de Ath. “In fact, I was ministering to one who was not right in mind or body. Ever since that disastrous expedition to the Islands of Solomon she had been a little daft—confined to a nunnery in Manila. Finally her family in Spain arranged for her to come home, which is how she ended up on the Manila Galleon. To outward appearances she was entirely sane. But the fire on the Galleon burned away what was left of her good sense. By treating her with tincture of opium, and staying by her side at all times, I was able to keep her madness in hand as long as we remained aboard Minerva. But when I became the cargador for your enterprise, my responsibilities took me down to Lima. Elizabeth came here to Mexico City. I am afraid she has fallen under the influence of certain Phanatiqual Jesuits and Dominicans. Churchmen of that stripe loathe such as me, because I keep a civil tongue in my head when talking to Protestants. I fear that they have preyed upon Elizabeth’s mind and that in her madness she has said things about me that have made their way to the stupendous and omniscient annals of the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición. The Inquisitor wants to make me, and by extension every other Jansenist, out to be a heretick. Along the way he would like for me to utter words that would send both of you to the stake.”

Jack sighed. “Now I’m glad we did not invite you to the feast—you are so depressing to talk to.”

Edmund de Ath attempted to shrug, but this hurt a lot, and all the muscles on his skull stood out for a few moments, making him look like a woodcut in an anatomy book that Jack had once seen flying through the air in Leipzig. When he could speak again he said, “It is just as well—my faith would not allow me to participate in your Sukkoth even though you cleverly disguised it as a betrothal-feast.”

Moseh laced his fingers together and stretched his arms, which was a noisy procedure. “I am going to bed,” he said. “If they are looking for reasons to burn you, Edmund, and if you are not giving them any, it follows that Jack and I will soon be dangling from the ceiling of the torture-chamber while clerks stand below us with dipped quills. We’ll need our rest.”

“If any one of us breaks, all three of us burn,” said de Ath. “If all three of us can stand our ground, then I believe they will let us go.”

“Sooner or later one of us will break,” Jack said wearily. “This Inquisition is as patient as Death. Nothing can stop it.”

“Nothing,” said de Ath, “except for the Enlightenment.”

“And what is that?” Moseh asked.

“It sounds like one of those daft Catholicisms: The Annunciation, the Epiphany, and now the Enlightenment,” Jack said.

“It is nothing of the sort. If my arms worked, I’d read you some of those letters,” said de Ath, turning his head a fraction of a degree towards some scrawled pages on the end of this table, weighed down by a Bible. “They are from brothers of mine in Europe. They tell a story—albeit in a fragmentary and patchwork way—of a sea-change that is spreading across Christendom, in large part because of men like Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes. It is a change in the way men think, and it is the doom of the Inquisition.”

“Very good! Well, then, all we must needs do is hold out against the strappado, the bastinado, the water-torture, and the thongs for another two hundred years or so, which ought to be plenty of time for this new way of thinking to penetrate Mexico City,” said Jack.

“Mexico City is run out of Madrid, and the Enlightenment has already stormed Madrid and taken it,” de Ath said. “The new King of Spain is a Bourbon, the grand-son of King Louis XIV of France.”

“Feh!” said Moseh.

“Eeew, him again!” said Jack. “Don’t tell me I’m to peg my hopes of freedom on Leroy!”

“Many Englishmen share your feelings, which is why a war has been started to settle the issue, but for now Philip wears the crown,” said Edmund de Ath. “Not long after his coronation he was invited to the Inquisition’s auto da fé in Madrid, and sent his regrets.”

“The King of Spain failed to turn up for an auto da fé!?” Moseh exclaimed.

“It has shaken the Holy Office to its bones. The Inquisitor of Mexico will probe us once or twice more, but beyond that he’ll not press his luck. Scoff all you like at the Enlightenment. It is already here, in this very cell, and we shall owe our survival to it.”

THE PRISON OF THE INQUISITION lay not far from the Mint where, in theory, every ounce of silver that came up out of the mines of Mexico was turned into pieces of eight. In practice, of course, somewhere between half and a quarter of Mexico’s treasure was smuggled out of the country before the King could take his fifth, but still the amount that came down into Mexico City sufficed to mint sixteen thousand pieces of eight every day. This was a large enough number to mean almost nothing to Jack. A couple of thousand an hour began to make sense to him. The booming and grinding of heavy silver-carts on the cobblestones beyond the prison walls gave a feeling of the sheer mass of metal involved.

One afternoon he was taking the air in the prison courtyard, letting the sun shine on some fresh thong-wounds that twined around his body like purple vines. It was a still and sultry day. Mexico City spread for no more than a mile in each direction and so Jack was able to hear something from every quarter: rugs being flapped out of windows; iron wheel-rims on stone pavers; whip-cracks; disputes at the Market; protesting mules, chickens, and swine; aimless chantings of diverse religious orders—the same noises as any city in Christendom, in other words, though the thin bony air of this high valley seemed to make sounds carry farther, and to favor harsh sounds over soft ones. Too, there were certain sounds unique to this country. The chief food was maize and the chief drink was chocolate, and both had to be ground between stones as the first step in their preparation, so any group of human beings in New Spain that was not positively starving to death was attended by a dim gnawing sound.

Jack had tied a strip of cloth over his eyes so that he could lie in the sun comfortably, and had unrolled a straw mat on the stones of the courtyard to even out the bumps somewhat, but except for a few negligible layers of skin, hair, and straw, his skull was in direct contact with the stones. Even if he stopped up his ears with his fingers, blocking out the noises of living things, certain vibrations of a mineral nature were still conducted into his head through that route, and even when no carts happened to be passing by, Jack fancied he could sense the omnipresent grumble of those grinding-stones, thousands of granite molars chewing the maize and cacao of this country. Which might be mistaken as the deepest ground-note, the continuo-line of this neverending Mass that was Mexico City. Except that there was another note even more pervasive. Jack did not hear it for a while, or if he did he could not disentangle it from the city’s other noises. But after he had been lying there for some time he went half to sleep and had some strange vision that, if he’d been a Papist, probably would have been accounted a miracle and got him nominated a Saint. The vision was that his body was a body of light, rising up and growing as it rose, as bubbles do when they come up out of a black depth, but that it was bound with thongs of darkness, somewhat as the light of a lanthorn appears to be gibbeted by the straps of iron that clasp it all round. At any rate, something about this sun-intoxicated state of mind, and the general drugged stupor that followed a torture-session, caused the brocade of sounds to unravel itself and come apart into its several threads, yarns, warps, and woofs. And in this way Jack became aware of the sound of the Mint.

Years before, he had seen a coiner at work making thalers in the Ore Range, and so he knew that underneath all of the ceremonies and offices, this Mint must be nothing more than a few men with hammers pounding out the coins one at a time. To make sixteen thousand pieces of eight per diem, they had to have several coiners working at once, each with his own hammer and die. Each hammer-blow was another eight bits given the sacred imprint of the King of Spain and sent out into the world. Sometimes several coiners would bring their hammers down in quick succession and Jack would hear a cluttered barrage of rings, other times there would be anomalous pauses during which Jack phant’sied the whole Spanish Empire was holding its breath, fearing that the silver had run out. But for the most part the coiners worked in a shared rhythm, each taking his turn, and the rings of the hammers came steadily, about as frequently as the beats of Jack’s heart. He put his hand to his breast to prove it. Sometimes his heart would beat in perfect synchronization with the coiners’ hammers for several beats in a row, and Jack wondered whether this was more true among persons who had been born and raised in this city.

Like a heartbeat, the sound of pieces of eight being born was not normally audible, but if you sat very still you could sense it, pervading the streets of Mexico City as the blood did the body; and Jack already knew that in certain remote places like London, Amsterdam, and Shahjahanabad, you could detect its pulse, just as you could count a man’s at a certain place on the wrist, far away from the beating heart.

Jack had never had much use for Spaniards, having always tended to view them as Englishmen gone spectacularly wrong, grapes that had turned to vinegar, a reasonably promising folk who’d been made utterly deranged by being trapped between la France and dar al-Islam. But lying there in the fist of the Inquisition listening to the grinding of the tortilla-stones and the ringing of the coiners, Jack was forced to admit that they were as vast and queer in their own way as the Egyptians.

Jack would never have accused himself of being a wise man, but he prided himself on cunning. Wisdom or cunning or both told him that he’d best ignore de Ath’s ravings about the Enlightenment and keep his attention fixed on nearer and more practical matters. The crypto-Jews who occupied the cells of this prison were an odd lot, but they knew quite a lot about the workings of the Mexican Inquisition—as how could they not. It was the rule in most Inquisition prisons to keep every prisoner in solitary confinement, for years at a time if need be, in the hope that he or she would finally break down and confess to some heresy that the Inquisitor had not even suspected, or even dreamed of—supposedly whole new categories of Sin had been discovered, or invented, in this way. But the only rule that Diego de Fonseca enforced in his prison was that the inmates were not supposed to leave, and he’d even bend that rule for a few hours or a night, if you promised to come back.

Consequently Jack, while lying in the sun of the courtyard recovering from various torture-sessions, had already had plenty of opportunities to listen to his fellow-inmates holding forth on the dark glories of the Inquisition. At the drop of a hat they’d tell the tale of the auto da fé of 1673 or of 1695, how many were burnt and how many merely humiliated. Even allowing for routine exaggeration, there was no avoiding the conclusion that an auto da fé was a colossal event, something that happened only once or twice in an average person’s lifetime, and a spectacle that peons would travel for days just to witness.

None of which was exactly comforting—until it was learned, a week or two after the arrival of Edmund de Ath, that the Inquisitor had scheduled an auto da fé for two months hence, which put it shortly before Christmas. Obviously such an enormous pageant could not be re-scheduled once a date had been set, and so if the three Minerva prisoners could only hold out until mid-December they would probably be punished and set free. But in the meantime the Inquisitor had every incentive to break them.

A single gifted torturer acting free of bureaucratic restrictions probably could have gotten Jack, Moseh, and Edmund to say anything he wanted them to in a few minutes’ work. But Inquisition torture was ponderous and rule-bound. A large staff of doctors, clerks, bailiffs, advocates, and Inquisitors had to be present, and by the looks of things it was no easy task finding openings on so many important men’s schedules. Torture-sessions would be arranged a week in advance and then cancelled at the last minute because some important participant had come down with a fever or even died.

In spite of these difficulties, during the month of November, men rammed a length of gauze down Jack’s throat into his stomach and then poured water down it until his abdomen swelled up, and it felt as if gunpowder were burning inside of him, filling his guts with smoke and fire. Edmund de Ath was tied to a table and thongs tightened round various parts of his body until the skin burst under the pressure.

But Moseh went into the torture-chamber and came out half an hour later looking rather all right—fine, in fact—so unruffled, really, that it made Jack want to share some pain with him, when he sauntered over and joined Jack and Edmund de Ath under the patchy shade of the vines. “I confessed,” he announced.

“To being a heretick!?”

“To having money,” Moseh said.

“I didn’t know that you’d been accused of that.”

“But when you are in the hands of the Holy Office you never know. You just have to figure it out, through silent meditation, and give them the confession that they want. I’ve been ever so slow. But finally it came to me the other day—”

“Through silent meditation?”

“No, I’m afraid it was a bit more mundane. Diego de Fonseca came to my cell and asked me for a loan.”

“Hmmm—I knew he was meagerly compensated, but that he is begging from his own prisoners comes as news to me,” said Edmund de Ath.

“The alguaciles brought you straight to this prison from Acapulco—you never had to buy anything in Mexico City,” Jack said. “We came here once or twice selling quicksilver to the owners of mines. Food is cheap enough, which explains why there are so many Vagabonds in the suburbs. But the scarcity of all other goods, and the over-supply of silver, make this an expensive place to be respectable.”

Moseh nodded. “I talked to many old Jews in New Amsterdam and Curaçao who told me that in the old days the Inquisition supported itself by confiscating goods from Jews. But here in Mexico they did their job so well that they’ve run out of Jews—they’ve been reduced to stealing the occasional burro from some mestizo who took the Lord’s name in vain. So finally I had what you might call a little Enlightenment of my own, and I understood what the Inquisitor really wanted. I confessed to nothing except having a lot of silver, and offered to make due penance for this crime on the morning of the auto da fé. With that my ordeal—our ordeal—was over and done with.”

Mexico City

DECEMBER 1701

NOT SHOWING UP FOR ANauto da fé was regarded as a Bad Idea everywhere in the Spanish Empire, and especially in Mexico City. Every scrap of land in the town was owned by the Church, and the Holy Surveyors of Rome had (or so Jack phant’sied) come out here and planted Trinitarian transits on the land that had been miraculously reclaimed from Lake Texcoco and hung holy plumb-bobs made of saints’ skulls and stretched cords of spun angels’ hair, driven crucifixes into the ground at strategickal Vertices, and platted the land into quadrilaterals, each one butted snugly against the next; angels might slip through the interstices, but never Indians nor Vagabonds. These parcels had been entrusted to various religious Orders, viz. Carmelites, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, Benedictines, et cetera, each of which had lost no time in erecting a high stone wall around its property-line to shield it from the intrigues and supposed heresies of the neighboring Orders. This accomplished, they had got to work filling in the middle with churches, chapels, and dormitories. The buildings sank into the soft ground almost as quickly as they were built, which made the place seem much beyond its true age of about a hundred and eighty years. At any rate there was no place to live in Mexico City that was not controlled by one Order or another, and consequently no way not to show up for an auto da fé without its being noticed by someone who’d be apt to take it the wrong way.

In spite of—or on second thought, maybe because of—their tendency to live cloistered behind high walls, the men and women of these diverse Orders loved nothing better than to dress up in peculiar clothing and parade through the streets of the city, bearing religious effigies or fragments of saints’ anatomies. When Jack had been abroad in this city as a free man, these never-ending processions had been an absolute menace, and an impediment to commerce. Sometimes one procession would collide with another at a street-corner and monks would come to blows over which Order had precedence. An auto da fé was one of the few occasions significant enough to get every single nun from the city’s twenty-two convents and every friar from its twenty-nine monasteries all processing at one time, in more or less the same direction. So all of them were present.

Of course Vagabonds always found a way to exist. Around here they seemed to dwell outside the walls, which was where important people liked them to stay. Not ten years earlier, they had gathered in the zócalo in sufficient numbers to burn the Viceroy’s palace down. Since that event, Count Montezuma had tended to get a little jumpy whenever rabble gathered near his dwelling in large numbers; his rebuilt palace had high walls with plenty of loop-holes for broadcasting grapeshot into any inconvenient crowds. The Vagabonds, criollos, the mountain-dwelling Indian peons, the desperadoes from the mining-country up north, these were only permitted to gather in the City on certain occasions, and an auto da fé was one of them. Of course they had no formal place in the procession of processions that wound its way through the streets to the zócalo, but cheerfully insinuated themselves among and between the nuns and monks, the three-or four-hundred-strong staff of the Cathedral, the asesors, fiscals, alquaciles, and familiares of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and diverse priests, friars, nuns, oidors, and fiscals who happened to be passing through en route to or from Manila or Lima. Despite the now well-known fact that the new French King of Spain had snubbed the auto da fé of Madrid, all of the King’s representatives in Mexico City turned out: the Viceroy and all his household and courtiers, the various ranks and hierarchies of civil servants, the officers of foot and of horse in their ostrich plumes and polished helmets, and as many of the garrison’s soldiers as could be spared from guarding the five gates and innumerable walls of this City.

Jack and Moseh had made it their business to know about the men who ran the Mint, and so as they and the other prisoners were marched out into the zócalo and made to stand in ranks before the grandstands that had been erected there, Jack was able to pick them out easily. The Apartador, the head of the Mint, was a Spanish count who had bought the office from the previous King for a hundred thousand pieces of eight, which was a bargain. He was there with his wife and daughter, all wearing the finest clothing Jack had seen since his last trip to Shahjahanabad (Jack, as a king, had been obliged to show up for the annual ceremony at which the Great Mogul sat crosslegged on one pan of an enormous scale, and silver and gold were heaped up on the opposite pan by his diverse omerahs, king, courtiers, and foreign emissaries until the jewel-covered crossbar finally went into motion and became level, leaving the Mogul suspended on his pan, balanced by his annual revenue, and modestly accepting the applause and gun-salutes of his subjects; on that occasion, Jack had done his part by heaving a big sack of coins onto the pan—taxes collected by Surendranath in the few wretched bazaars of Jack’s domain—at least half of which had been pieces of eight minted decades earlier under the direction of some predecessor of this Count who was now peering down at Jack from the highest bench of the grandstand). Arrayed below him and his family were those Treasurers not currently on duty (Moseh had estimated these earned fifty to sixty thousand pieces of eight annually), the Assayers and Founders (some fifteen thousand annually), and farther down, in humble but still very good clothing, a plethora of Cutters, Clerks, Under-clerks, Alcaldes, and various ranks of Guards; close to the very bottom, numerous Foremen and Brazajereros who stoked the fires, and finally the brawny young criollo men who actually struck metal with metal and turned disks of silver into pieces of eight: the Coiners.

Seated near all of the Mint people were the three merchants who supplied them with most of their business. Technically any miner who came into the city with silver could have it minted, but in practice most miners sold their pigs to these few merchants who had made it their business to act as middle-men, and make sure that the Minters were duly wined, dined, coddled, and bribed at all times. They were not easy to pick out in the midst of their enormous and well-dressed families, but finally Jack caught sight of one of them looking right back at him through a spyglass. The fellow recognized Jack in the same instant, took the glass away from his eye, and made a remark to a younger man seated next to him. For to the churchmen of Mexico City, Jack and Moseh and Edmund de Ath might be foreign hereticks, but to anyone connected to the Mint they were the men who had the quicksilver, and who could modulate the flow of pieces of eight by putting more or less of it on the market.

They did not look the part of quicksilver magnates today. All three of them were wearing dunce-caps, and large sack-like yellow over-garments with giant red Xs on them, called sanbenitos. If these had been decorated with pictures of angels, devils, and flames, it would have signified that their wearers were to be burnt at the stake outside the city gates at the end of the day. The red X, on the other hand, meant only that the wearer was a Blasphemer in Recovery who would have to wear this garment whenever he ventured out of doors for the next several years. Jack had never been the sort to care about clothing, but he knew that the decorations he wore today were of high import not only to himself but to everyone connected with the Mint—which meant everyone in Mexico City, except for the hapless Inquisition, which was run out of Rome and had no way to dip its fingers into the running river of silver except by arresting and shaking down the likes of Jack and Moseh. At any rate, the fact that he and his comrades were wearing red Xs was probably influencing a market somewhere even at this very moment. And given that all news eventually reached Amsterdam, Jack now devoted half an hour or so to a little phant’sy about a blue-eyed woman sitting in a coffee-house along the Damplatz, hearing this bit of news, and connecting it to a certain Vagabond she had run around with when she was young.

He knew that his sons must be somewhere inside the city, or else his sanbenito would be decorated with pictures of flames. It took a full hour for his eyes to find them, which was not so terribly long since the auto da fé was an all-day event. The stands filled one end of the zócalo (they had been a-building for two months) and everyone in them was gleaming and glorious to some degree, whether it was the Archbishop who reigned over the ceremony from the highest and most central altar, or the coiners’ wives in their best dresses. But there was an undeniable tendency for the costumes to become more drab as they got farther from the Archbishop, so the transition to the common folk standing on the pavement in their undyed homespun stuff was almost seamless. Beyond that point they only got plainer and browner as they spread around the edges of the zócalo, to the point where they almost faded away into the rough-hewn stone walls. In such a place Jack finally saw three men, two brown and one black, holding the reins of some burros. Their faces were shaded under the vast brims of their sombreros. But Jack could have recognized them from the burros alone. Those animals were still crusted with the yellow dust of the high country and the sweat of traveling through it, and each of them had smallish saddlebags sewn of the heaviest ox-hide and scored in countless places from brushes with cactus-thorns. Those were the saddlebags used to bring silver down to the mints. This morning they were hanging limp on the burros’ flanks. Their contents had been transferred to the vaults of the Inquisition, where they rested safe among piles of documents listing every heresy that had ever been committed or imagined in the New World.

The ceremony was all in Latin. Sunstroke probably would have slain them all if it hadn’t been December. About four hours into it, Jack noticed that Moseh was humming to himself, which was the one thing Jack would never have expected. He was tempted to bend his head close to Moseh’s, but given that he was wearing a dunce-cap three feet high, the movement would have been about as subtle as dancing a tarantella on the Lord’s Table. So he stood straight, along with everyone else in Mexico. To his other side Edmund de Ath was muttering some Latin phrases of his own, but rather than closing his eyes and bowing his head, he seemed to be staring straight forward into a phalanx of wealthy nuns seated below and to the left hand of the Archbishop. Jack had nothing but time, and so he looked at each nun in turn until finally he recognized Elizabeth de Obregon staring right back at him.

The auto da fé continued there until shortly after sundown and then devolved: the nuns and monks marched away in color-coded processions and the poor people staged a bread-riot. Which seemed like an interesting story, but Jack wanted no part of it. He and Moseh and Edmund de Ath made rendezvous with Jimmy and Danny and Tomba, and out of the city they went.

When finally it was safe to talk out loud, Jack said to Moseh, “Never was a Jew so happy during an auto da fé—have you been chewing those Peruvian leaves that the Spaniards are so fond of?”

“No, I was watching the sun swing low over the mountains and pondering matters astrologickal. First: This is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the longest in the Southern, which is good for us at both ends. Here it made the ceremonies an hour or two shorter than they might have been, and much cooler. Down Tierra del Fuego way, the weather’s as balmy as it ever gets, and the days exceptionally long. If van Hoek knows what he’s doing—which I think he does—he’ll be venturing into the Straits of Magellan about now. Which brings me to my Second observation, namely: a new year is about to begin. It is the second year of the Eighteenth Century, and van Hoek will celebrate it (God Willing) by rounding Cape Horn, and I will celebrate it by trading this cursed sanbenito for a poncho and this dunce-cap for a sombrero and riding north, beyond the reach of the Inquisition. It is the Century of the Enlightenment—I can feel it!”

“You have been chewing leaves from Peru,” Jack concluded.

THAT NIGHT THEY LODGED at an inn where they had to suspend their boots and stirrups from the ceiling in order to prevent them from being carried away and eaten by rats. They paid an outrageous price and departed before dawn, and after getting clear of certain fœtid suburbs where Vagabonds dwelt, they began the first leg of their journey north: traveling through the high Valley of Mexico. This was quite a bit more interesting to Edmund de Ath than to the others, who had seen it before. The Belgian was silent as they trudged over marshy plains gouged with the remains of failed flood-control projects, and splotched here and there with weirdly colored mineral springs. From cocoa and vanilla plantations rose gaudy churches and monasteries thrown up by Spaniards who had made ludicrous amounts of money, and in some cases half torn down by the thieves and Vagabonds who infested this country far in excess of Europe.

Moseh’s ineffable Leadership Qualities had caused a whole retinue of sanbenito-and-dunce-cap-wearing crypto-Jews to fall in step behind them. They paraded through inexplicable concentrations of Negroes and Filipinos and over foamy puddles of congealed lava, past sugar-works smoking and steaming. At riverbanks they struck complicated bargains with Indians, naked except for loincloths and lines of tattooed dots on their faces, and were towed across on balsas made of planks lashed across bundles of air-filled calabashes, while other Indians back-carried the burros across fords. They steered clear of settlements or else rode through them as directly as possible, for now that they were out of the city, most of the townspeople were criollos (mixed-blood, born here) who bore a mad hostility towards Europeans. They’d have drawn much unwanted attention, and criollo boys would have been darting out and chucking stones at them, even if they hadn’t been wearing sanbenitos.

All in all it seemed advisable to get clear of settled areas as quickly as possible, so Jack, Moseh, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba payed very little attention to all of the Roadside Attractions that so fascinated Edmund de Ath, and bent all efforts to putting miles between them and the City. Only food was worth slowing down for, as when a miniature deer appeared at the edge of a copse or they happened upon a large tree whose branches were crowded with turkeys. Then sudden loud noises, clouds of smoke, and roadside butchery.

“Your ransom cost us a fortune,” Danny remarked, “but as luck would have it, we have several.”

“Have you been making new deals during our absence,” Moseh said nervously, “or only making deliveries on the old?”

“We sold all the mercury for sixpence a ton,” Jimmy answered sharply, “and spent that on whiskey and prostitutes.”

Silence, then, for a mile or two. Then Moseh tried again, patiently: “As I am still part owner of the quicksilver, I am entitled to know how much has been delivered, how much committed, and how much held back.”

“Before we came on the scene, the King of Spain’s men were gouging the mine-owners to the tune of three hundred pieces of eight per hundred-weight of quicksilver,” Danny reminded him, “and when we began selling it for two hundred, the Spaniards dropped the price to one hundred, which is nearer its natural market-price. At the time you and Dad were arrested by that Inquisition, we were takin’ a breather from sellin’ of it, waitin’ for the price to stiffen up a bit.”

Jimmy continued, “When Danny and Tomba and I came back from the Cape of Currents with a mule-train of quicksilver, and learned you’d been arrested, the price was still no higher than a hundred twenty-five, and so we contented ourselves making good on the deliveries you’d arranged, Moseh, and hidin’ the proceeds in various locations ’tween here and Vera Cruz. But lately we’ve had nothin’ to occupy ourselves, and the price has crept up to one-sixty—”

“Near two hundred in Zacatecas,” Tomba put in.

“And so we’ve been strikin’ some deals of our own, if that’s all right with you.”

“It is perfect,” Moseh said. Three sombreros swiveled in his direction, looking for sarcasm, but Moseh was sincere: “Without delay, I want to liquidate my assets.”

“Or since we are speaking of quicksilver, solidify ’em,” Jack said.

“Very well, I want to take my share of the Plan, in the form of silver, or better yet gold, and strike out for the north with them.” He looked back over his shoulder at the crowd of red Xs shuffling along in their wake. “Lately these Spaniards have conquered a new territory up beyond the pissant ditch known as the Rio Grande, which they style New Mexico. It can’t possibly be worse than Old. Word has it that six hundred cavalry are garrisoned in that territory, and each one is paid five hundred pieces of eight a year, but most of that ends up in the coffers of the governor, who sells those soldiers food and other necessaries at outrageous prices. That is upwards of three hundred thousand pieces of eight a year! I am going to go up and sell them victuals at a fair price, and while I’m at it, I’m going to convert every Indian I see to Judaism.”

“Er, if half of what they say of those Comanches is true,” said Danny, “’tweren’t wise to go up to ’em and prate about religion.”

“Or any subject,” said Tomba.

“Truth be told, ’tweren’t wise to go up to ’em at all,” said Jimmy.

“That is enough!” Jack said. “Moseh has cashed out of one Plan to invest in another, and naturally the new one needs a little refinement…he’ll have plenty of time to make improvements on the ride north.”

AFTER A FEW DAYS they rode up out of the Valley and into mountains that were much less inhabited. Other than pockets of wretched Indians who’d been chased up out of the lowlands by the Spaniards, the only folk who lived up here were miners. The mines were old, deep, and famous, and surrounded by adobe houses and churches. Most of the workers were forced labor, and most were Indians. In many ways the landscape was like that of the Harz Mountains, with schlock-heaps all over the place, and large outdoor furnaces where the ore was refined, and mounds of earth in long rows where quicksilver was being used to extract silver from lower-grade ore. To Jack it was a toss-up as to whether the Harz with its icy wind and leaden skies was a bleaker landscape than this sunburnt place where nothing grew except cactus. Moseh’s ruminations were bleaker yet: “They’ve been turning the land inside out for almost two hundred years, and here are the bones and guts strewn about…I’m reminded of the Expulsion in 1492. Spanish Jews fled to Portugal. They rode down roads strewn with the bodies of the ones who’d gone before them—friends and relatives who’d been waylaid by bandits and eviscerated, on a rumor that they swallowed gold and diamonds to smuggle them out of the country. These Spaniards are giving a like treatment to this country, and getting the Indians who used to own it to do the dirty work for them.”

“The coca has worn off, I see—this might be a good time to think harder about your new Plan,” said Jack.

As they worked north into Guanajuato, the mines became newer, shallower, more slapdash—typically these were owned by individual prospectors. More and more, the workers were free men. But this country had been settled long enough that some towns had been built, churches erected, and families moved in. It was in one of those towns—which a generation earlier had marked the absolute northern boundary of civilization—that they paused for a day to make a grand reckoning.

Starting from that night in the Gulf of Cadiz when they’d sacked the ex-Viceroy’s treasure-brig, Moseh had kept, in his mind, a ledger-book of all that the Cabal had gained and lost. At certain times, as when they’d fallen into the hands of Queen Kottakkal, whole pages had been torn out and thrown away. Some of the Cabal had died, others had joined in late, some had taken their shares out in intangibles, such as Gabriel Goto, who only wanted to see Japan. Some of the Cabal’s value was in Minerva, which, God willing, would continue generating revenues, other was in the quicksilver-hoard that they’d brought across the Pacific. This had been split into two batches, one for New Spain and one for Peru; the former had already been liquidated, the latter might have been sold for greater or lesser amounts of money that, now, might or might not be on the bottom of the Straits of Magellan. Whatever the current Bottom Line might be, part was owed to Queen Kottakkal and part to Electress Sophie of Hanover. But Moseh worked through all of these complications, committing it to paper so that Jack could show it to van Hoek later, and patiently explaining the difficult bits until Jack agreed.

This reckoning stretched over three days, and in the end Moseh was reduced to bringing in a sack of dried beans and making piles of them on the table, shoving them from place to place to demonstrate to Jack where the money had gone. A great many beans ended up on the floor, representing what they’d simply lost. But when Moseh was finished, an impressive pile of beans still remained on the table, and when Moseh told him that each bean amounted to a hundred pieces of eight, Jack had to admit that the Plan Moseh had proposed to him long ago in Algiers had been a pretty good one after all.

Jimmy and Danny and Tomba meanwhile ventured out into certain desolate places and recovered enough silver pigs to pay Moseh what was due him. Lacking banks, they had deposited their assets in holes in the ground, carefully hidden.

On the fifth of January 1702, then, Moseh and a score of others donned their sanbenitos and dunce-caps and formed a mule-train on the edge of this little adobe town, and set out for New Mexico. Jack rode with them until they were well out of sight of the bell-tower beside the town’s church. There, every man except Jack stripped off his sanbenito and his cap, and they made a bonfire of them by the roadside. Jack shook every man’s hand, but he embraced Moseh, and with tears washing the dust from his face, issued several ludicrous promises, e.g., that after he’d bought himself an earldom in England he’d come out to New Mexico for a social call. The parting lasted for a long time, which only made it worse when Moseh finally climbed astride his mule and hauled on one rein and got it pointed north. Jack stood there for an hour or so, making sure the sanbenitos were thoroughly burnt to ashes, and watching the dust-trail of the mule-train swirl up into a blue sky: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and…

“Quicksilver to silver,” he said, turning towards the town. “Then Jack to London.”

“AS FAR AS I CAN DISCERN, all that remains here is to collect the final remnants of what was cached around Cabo Corrientes, make certain deliveries, and get the pigs down to Vera Cruz, where we’ll await Minerva,” said Edmund de Ath that evening, as they sat in front of the cantina availing themselves of the liquor of the maguey.

“It is not so easy as you make it sound,” Jimmy growled.

“On the contrary, I think it is much too difficult for a man of my limited capacities,” said de Ath. “Here, I’ll be an impediment. In Vera Cruz, on the other hand, there is much I could be doing to smooth the way for us, when Minerva, God willing, arrives.”

“Get thee to Vera Cruz, then,” Jack suggested.

“I am interested to see the place,” said de Ath. “Properly it is called New Vera Cruz. The old city was burnt to the ground, almost twenty years ago, by the notorious and terrible outlaw called El Desamparado…”

“I have already heard the story,” Jack said.

WINDING UPMINERVA’S affairs in New Spain took several months. Jack, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba moved north to a frontier town in Zacatecas where no one cared if Jack failed to wear his sanbenito—or if they did, they were too scared to say anything, because this was a town of desperadoes, and every man went armed all the time. When Jack had lived in Europe, he had enjoyed and even profited from being a picaroon in a world of Lords, Ladies, and Chamber of Commerce members. But he found living in a whole society of picaroons to be tiresome if not downright dangerous. So he did not linger in that border-town long, but went west over the Sierra Madre Occidental with a mule-train to recover the last of the goods they’d cached around Cabo Corrientes: a ton of quicksilver, and all of van Hoek’s books—which he had left in the mountains so that they would not be seized and burnt by the Inquisition when Minerva called at Acapulco or Lima.

The trip back to Zacatecas was exceptionally dangerous because no fewer than three groups of desperadoes were waiting to waylay them in the passes. But Jimmy and Danny, as the result of their journey halfway around the world, and their exploits with the warrior-caste of Malabar, had become expert in travel through hostile mountains. And Tomba, a man who’d escaped from a sugar-plantation in Jamaica and covered a lot of ground since then, in places that were not friendly to black Vagabonds, had developed a kind of guile and subtility that Jack thought of as Oriental. There was nothing he could tell those three boys except to remind ’em, now and then, that this was not Hindoostan, and so they were only allotted one life apiece. This was cheerfully ignored, or else taken as proof that, at the age of forty-one, Jack had become a fretful old man, and toothless in more than one way.

Their trail back over the mountains was traced out by several set-piece battles in which the brigands found their ambushes ambushed, and many a desperado’s head was struck off by a ringing katana. They came back to discover that they were developing a legend, which Jack had come to believe was a good thing to leave behind but a bad thing to have.

A letter was waiting in the saloon that they used as their headquarters; the innkeeper said it had been brought up from the south by a courier, and that it was addressed to either Moseh or Jack. Since Moseh and Edmund had gone away, the only person in this town capable of reading it was the parish priest. But the priest would turn Jack in to the Inquisition if Jack revealed his identity, for Jack hadn’t been wearing his sanbenito or attending Mass. Jack tossed the letter for safe-keeping into the caulked trunk that contained van Hoek’s books, and re-sealed it.

Now their assets consisted of a ton of quicksilver (which needed to be delivered to various mine-heads and exchanged for pigs of silver) and several tons of pigs distributed among a dozen buried caches. All of it had to be moved to Vera Cruz. Yet it would be folly to concentrate it in one gigantic wagon-train, and so the caches had to be dug up and moved one at a time, leap-frogging one another as they converged on Vera Cruz. It was a complicated business that really demanded the skills of a Moseh or a Vrej Esphahnian, and it sorely taxed Jack, who preferred things simpler. More than once he woke up in the middle of the night wondering whether they’d left a cache behind in the mountains.

The one or two broad simple concerns of Jack’s early life, like the light and dark portions of a wootz-ingot, had been hammered out and folded over, hammered out and folded over, so many times that they had become involved and inter-tangled into a swirl of swirls, something too intricate to follow, or to be given the name of “pattern” or “design.” It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like “complicated.” But he would tell Jimmy and Danny and Tomba that it was complicated, and they would not have the faintest understanding of what he meant. Jack could only pray that its complexity gave it the strength and keenness of a watered-steel blade. Much later he might be able to discern whether there was beauty in it, too.

For a month it did not seem as if the goods were making progress at all, but then Jack could no longer deny that they were spending less time in high deserts and more on roads. In moving the silver they spent part of it but lost none. This seemed implausible to Jack until he considered how wretched was their opposition. They hadn’t gone most of the way around the world without acquiring a certain kind of wisdom, and if having silver made them a target, it also gave them the option to buy their way out of certain problems. Really the only persons Jack was afraid of were the Indians who controlled the river-crossings; these had a distant look in their eyes that somehow reminded Jack of Gabriel Goto when he reminisced about Japan. Their treatment by the Spaniards had left them with nothing to lose. Attempted bribery only made them angrier.

But by the end of April all of their silver was cached in eight different holes in the ground within half a day’s journey of Vera Cruz, and Jack, Danny, Jimmy, and Tomba were ensconced in a house that Edmund de Ath had rented out there, waiting.

“WHERE ARE MY DAMNED BOOKS?” demanded Otto van Hoek, bending over Minerva’s rail to peer down into the bark.

“They tumbled into a river only a few miles short of Vera Cruz,” Jack said nonchalantly, “so I’d estimate they are bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico somewhere—didn’t you spy ’em on your way in?”

These were all the words they could exchange before they were drowned out by cheering and jeering from Minerva’s sailors, who had all come abovedecks to watch the bark approach and to see how many of the “dry” group had survived the year and a half in New Spain. They seemed generally happy and surprised, which Jack looked on as indicating that no one in the “wet” contingent had ever expected to see a live Shaftoe again. For his part Jack felt almost like a mother hen counting her chicks as he recognized one familiar face after another, and only a few new ones. Minerva herself had never looked better. Jack guessed from this that they’d made a good profit in Peru and that any damages suffered rounding Cape Horn had already been made good in some Caribbean port. If so, it showed excellent foresight on van Hoek’s part, because Vera Cruz was both wretched and expensive, and, in sum, probably the most unfavorable place imaginable to fit out a ship for the Atlantic crossing.

“Let us load her up and be done with New Spain,” Jack said when he had climbed aboard and been duly pounded on the back or embraced by every member of the complement. “Also, I would like to carry on Jeronimo’s tradition, as long as we are here…”

“Which tradition is that?” asked Vrej Esphahnian, looking every inch the successful merchant.

“That of burning down Vera Cruz at every opportunity.”

“We’ll be several months sieving the Gulf for the Captain’s books,” said Dappa when laughter had died down. He was the only man aboard who had not aged several years, and he still had more teeth in his head than any four sailors.

“I was only jesting. We’ve the books, and a letter as well,” Jack said.

“A letter from whom?” asked Vrej.

“I’ve no idea,” Jack returned. “Edmund de Ath might have read it to me, I suppose, but…”

“You don’t trust him! That is very wise,” said van Hoek.

“On the contrary—in the Prison of the Inquisition I had no choice but to trust him with my life, and he extended me the same consideration. He is odd, but harmless.”

“Then why didn’t you have him read the letter?”

“Because I know you will never trust him.”

“Is he still in Vera Cruz?” Vrej inquired.

“As you have probably learned, the Spanish treasure-fleet is massing in Havana Bay, getting ready to bring thirty million pieces of eight to Cadiz,” Jack said. “Several galleons weighed anchor in this harbor four days ago, and went thither to join that Fleet. Edmund de Ath took passage on one of those ships—I’ve already paid him his commission as cargador.”

“Notwithstanding your affection for the man—” Dappa began.

“I didn’t say anything about affection,” Jack said.

“Very well—I’m happy he will be going home on some other ship.”

“We have no time to waste,” van Hoek said. “If we can embark at the same time as the Treasure-Fleet, we’ll have a much easier voyage. Every pirate in the Caribbean will be hunting for Spanish galleons.”

“Yes, they will, won’t they?” Jack mused.

“We will be looked on as a Dutch privateer,” van Hoek predicted.

“Or a heavily armed sugar-barge headed back to London or Amsterdam,” Dappa put in.

“In any event, no boca-neer in his right mind will trifle with us when thirty million pieces of eight are afloat in the same waters.”

AND SO THEY WENT and rounded up all their buried pigs and loaded them on board Minerva, and stowed them alongside silver from Peru and gold from Brazil. Of course van Hoek’s books were loaded aboard first of all. He complained of the miserable job Jack had done re-caulking the lid, and threatened to make him pay the devil, but when the box was set down on the deck of his cabin the Dutchman looked as close to happy as Jack had seen him in years.

There was no time even to pry the lid off, though. Getting the pigs and loading them aboard only took four days, but it seemed longer to Jack than all the time he’d spent in New Spain before. He avoided going ashore, and could not set foot on dry land without entertaining a moment’s phant’sy that Minerva would sail away and leave him stranded in that town, where anything that moved was pursued by a cloud of mosquitoes, and anything that didn’t was shortly buried in wind-blown sand.

THEY DID NOT OPEN the crate and read the letter until they had cleared Bermuda, a month after departing Vera Cruz. Dappa passed it around the table first so that Jack, Vrej, and van Hoek could inspect the seal. Pressed into a daub of red wax was a coat of arms too detailed to be made out: Jack imagined he saw a fragment of fleur-de-lis in one corner and a seagull in another. But the other men were all smirking.

“Who the hell is it from?” he demanded.

“It claims to be from the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm,” said Dappa.

This bit of news hit Jack like a yard-arm across the brow, and shut him up long enough for Dappa to break the seal and smooth the page out on the table. “It is in English,” he announced, and took a swallow of chocolate to whet his whistle. “ ‘To Jack Shaftoe, esq. The inexorable tides ebb and flow ’neath the battlements of the Castle as I pen these lines, reminding me that what is submerged and seemingly drown’d forever in fatal Seas may yet rise forth from Neptune’s wat’ry Dungeon if one hath only Patience to await the natural Wheeling of the Heavens. I am put in mind of a certain Man who when I last spied him seem’d to’ve been dragged down by the Moral Undertow which sweepeth away even strong souls who stand long in it, and to have fallen into a condition of Degradation worse than Death; and whose Body was scarcely more fit than his Spirit, as he was far gone with the French Pox and afflicted with divers Wounds and Amputations to boot—’ ”

“The most of notable of which was inflicted by her,” Jack said with a gigantic wink, “but she omits that—she’s too much the Lady now.”

“She writes like one,” van Hoek said, none too admiringly.

Dappa cleared his throat irritably and continued, “ ‘thus did this Man, whom many styl’d a Vagabond, vanish from Christendom’s ken, swamped by Mortality’s Tide; and if rumors echoed up from Barbary, years later, to the effect that a Man answering to his Description had been witness’d there, it signified Nothing more than when a Sparend or Mast-head breaketh the Surface of some stagnant Cove at low Tide and reminds us that, once, a Ship was wrack’d in that Place. But all that was rumor’d concerning this Man was in an Instant over-turn’d when tidings were delivered to France of a bataille rangée in the streets of Grand Caire, whose Reverberations seem’d to echo back and forth ’tween the rugged Pyramids and the Barock Monuments of Versailles, as when a Thunderbolt splits the Air ’tween two very Mountains. For the Tides of Fortune had turn’d, even as those of us, who should’ve known better, had turn’d our backs to advert on inward and inland Matters. Nor was this the only such occasion, for in later Years came news of a Battle won through Alchemical cozening in Hindoostan, and other Ebbings and Flowings I’ll not tediously enumerate, as you are their Author.’ ”

“Thank God, I was afraid she was going to relate the whole story again,” Jack said.

“ ‘In recent years, Tidings of your Adventures have, from time to time, stirr’d Admiration and Envy in the Courts of Europe. Tho’ my Situation in this Castle is exceeding remote from such grand Places, yet it has been my Privilege to conduct a frequent Correspondence with certain rare Persons who inhabit them, and they have not been slow to inform me of all that is claimed, or rumored, concerning your Asiatick wand’rings. Indeed, my icy Castle hath proved a better Vantage than Versailles itself, for some of the Letters that come to me here originate in Hanover, and were written by a certain Lady whom you, sir, and I once looked upon there, from a respectful Distance. And lest these words seem to demean that same Lady by implying too great familiarity with me, who am so mean by comparison, I say to you, sir, that as a Paragon of Wisdom and Beauty she is as distant and remote to me, as she was on that Day we spied ’pon her from a Germanick church.’ ”

This paragraph was enough to make Jack’s eyes cross, and van Hoek knead his temples, but after Dappa had read it a second time, Jack attempted the following translation: “All right, she’s cozy with Sophie, who provided us with our cannons and owns part of this ship, and Sophie knows where we are better than the gossips of Versailles.”

“We sent Sophie a letter from Rio de Janeiro,” van Hoek said.

Dappa continued, “ ‘That incomparable Lady hath given me to believe that you may be in New Spain. I pray that this Letter hath found you in good Health there, and that you have found a trustworthy person to read it to you. If it is your Intention to sail for Europe with metal goods, then I wish you Godspeed, and I beg you to consider making land-fall at Qwghlm; for all your Sins have long since been forgiven.’ ” Dappa slowed as he read this, and there was much awkward shifting about as heads turned toward the poleaxed Jack. Seeing that he was no longer really a part of the conversation, Dappa rushed through the last bit: “ ‘I pray you will take this as a fair Prospect, but I know it is of no especial Value to your Partners. To them I say that, if Britain is one day to be the realm of the Lady before mentioned, that the first speck of it to owe its love and loyalty to her will be Qwghlm; and if it is to be overwhelm’d by the Popish legions, the last bit of soil to surrender her colors will be that on which this Castle is pil’d. London may sway to and fro ’tween Whigs and Torys, Jacobites and Hanoverians, but Qwghlm is a rock, ever loyal, and nowhere in the World will Minerva find a safer harbor.’ What the hell is she on about there?”

Vrej said, “If the last news we had from London is true, Queen Anne will never produce an heir to the throne, which means that the next Queen of England will be our co-owner, the Electress Sophie of Hanover—who has apparently become some sort of patroness to Jack’s fair Eliza.”

Van Hoek said, “The harbor beneath her castle may be safe. The approach is anything but—we’ve no way of actually getting there.”

“Eliza—or I should say, the Duchess—addresses that matter in a final paragraph, here,” Dappa said. “She instructs us to make for Derry, or as she styles it, Londonderry, on the north of Ireland, and there to find a certain pilot, name of James Hh. He’ll bring us safely into the harbor beneath Qwghlm Castle.”

“As Captain of this vessel, I see no commanding reason to do this when perfectly safe and well-known harbors are available at London and Amsterdam,” van Hoek said, “but as a share-holder in our Enterprise I am obligated to entertain discussions.”

“Sophie is a greater share-holder than any of us, and Eliza would appear to speak for her,” Jack said.

“But she did not say so explicitly. Until we see a letter with the arms of Hanover on it, we can’t know Sophie’s mind,” said Vrej.

“So you vote for London?” Dappa asked.

Vrej shrugged. “That would bring us directly to the Mint at the Tower of London. We could hardly improve on that. What is your vote, Dappa?”

Dappa’s eyes strayed momentarily toward his cabin. “I vote for Qwghlm.”

“Are you voting as a share-holder in this venture, or a chronicler of the slave-trade?” van Hoek asked. For as Minerva had worked her way up the long coast of Brazil, Dappa had patiently collected and written down the personal accounts of numerous African slaves, and it was no secret that he would see them in print.

“True, it’s a foregone conclusion that Eliza—who according to Jack is an ex-slave like us, and a passionate hater of that Institution—would gladly be the patroness of my book, and support its publication,” Dappa admitted. “But I have reasons besides that for preferring Qwghlm. To reach London or Amsterdam we’d have to sail up the Channel, practically under the guns of St.-Malo and Dunkerque and diverse other French privateer-havens. This were unwise even if France and England were not involved in a great war.”

“We could go north round Britain, conceivably,” Vrej muttered, “and approach through the North Sea, which ought to be a Dutch-English lake.”

“But if we are going that route anyway, we may as well go to Qwghlm.”

“I am coming about to your view,” Vrej said, after a moment.

“I don’t like it,” van Hoek said.

Qwghlm

AUGUST 1702

The Seamen returned enriched with the Plunder, not of Ships, but of Fleets, Loaden with Silver; they went out Beggars, and came home Gentlemen; nay, the Wealth they brought Home, not only enrich’d themselves, but the whole Nation.

—DANIEL DEFOE,
A Plan of the English Commerce

TWO MONTHS LATER, while Minerva was lost in fog off of Outer Qwghlm, a loud noise came up from her hold, and she stopped moving.

Van Hoek drew his cutlass and went after the pilot, James Hh, and at length tracked him down at the head. He was perched on the bowsprit. “Welcome to Qwghlm,” he announced, “you are hard aground on the rock that we call the Dutch-hammer.” Then he jumped.

By this point van Hoek had been joined by several other men with pistols, and all of them rushed forward in the hope of getting a shot off at Hh. But they did not see him in that icy water (which soon would have killed him anyway); all they saw was a faint impression in the fog, like a woodcut pressed with diluted ink, of a longboat rowing away. That longboat fired a signal from its swivel-gun, and when the boom had finished echoing among the Three Sghrs, the men on Minerva could hear the distant shouting of men on other ships—a whole squadron, arrayed all around them, riding safely at anchor, well clear of the stony reef. All of these voices were speaking in French except for one or two, shouting through speaking-trumpets: “Welcome home, Jaaack!”

The men on Minerva remained perfectly still. It was not that they were trying to be stealthy—there was little point in hiding now. This was a ceremonial silence, as at a funeral. Too, there was a process of mental rearrangement taking place in the minds of the ship’s officers, as they sorted through the memories of everything that had occurred in the last few months, and began to understand it all as an elaborate deception, a trap laid by the French.

As the fog began to lift, and the outlines of French frigates started to resolve and solidify all around them. Van Hoek ambled back to the poop deck, laid his right arm out carefully on the rail, and brought his cutlass down on it, a few inches above the wrist. The blade caught in his bones and he had to worry it out and chop several more times. Finally the hand—already mangled and truncated from diverse mishaps—made a splash in the water below. Van Hoek lay down on the deck and turned white. He probably would have died if he had not been aboard a ship where treating amputations was a routine affair. This at least gave the sailors something to do while the French longboats converged on them.

At some point Dappa got a distracted look on his face, excused himself from van Hoek’s side, and began to walk briskly in the direction of Vrej Esphahnian.

Vrej drew one of several pistols from his waist-band and aimed it at Dappa. A whirring blade flew into his arm, like a steel hummingbird, and spoiled his aim. It was a hunting yo-yo and it had been flung by a Filipino crewman standing off to Vrej’s side.

Vrej dropped the weapon and flung himself overboard. He was wearing a scarlet cape that billowed up as he fell, like a sail, and formed a bubble on the water below, an island of satin that kept him afloat until a Frenchman on a longboat flung a rope to him.

“Say the word, Dad,” said Jimmy, who was manning a loaded swivel-gun, and holding a lighted torch above its touch-hole.

“It’s me they want,” Jack said, matter-of-factly, as if he were captured by the French Navy every day.

“It’s us they have,” Danny answered, pointedly, bringing another swivel-gun to bear on another longboat, “and we’ll soon make ’em wish they didn’t.”

Jack shook his head. “This is not to be another Cairo.”

QWGHLM CASTLE WAS a Dark Ages citadel that had all too obviously failed its essential purpose. Indeed, most of it was not even competent to keep out sleet and rats. Its lee corner, where it gripped the living rock of the Sghr, had, however, at least put up a struggle against gravity. It supported a row of stark crenels that finger-combed the tangled winds above the crunchy wilderness of smithereens and guano that accounted for the rest of the Castle.

To re-roof such a thing was to waste money; but to embed a whole brand-new Barock château in it, as the duc d’Arcachon had recently finished doing, was to make some sort of ringing proclamation. In the visual language of architects and decorators, the proclamation said something about whatever glorious principles were personified by all its swooping, robed, wreathed, winged demigods. Translated into English it said, “I am rich and powerful, and you are not.”

Jack got the message. They put him under house-arrest in a grand bedchamber with a high Barock window through which the Duke and Duchess, presumably, could watch the comings and goings of ships in the harbor. The room’s back wall, facing these windows, consisted mostly of mirrors—which as even Jack knew was an homage to the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.

Jack lay in bed for several days, unable to bring himself to look into any mirrors, or to go near that window and see Minerva stuck on the Dutch-hammer. Sometimes he would get out of bed and hug the cannonball that was attached to his neck-collar by a four-foot length of chain and carry it into the en suite garderobe: a closet with a wooden bench decorated with a hole. Being ever so careful not to let the cannonball fall into that hole—for he’d not quite decided to kill himself yet—he’d sit down and void himself into a chute that spilled out onto the stone cliff-side far below.

Years ago—the last time a collar of iron had been locked around his neck by an Arcachon—John Churchill had warned him that angry Frenchmen were bound to come after him with pliers sooner or later. Jack could only assume that this was still true, and that in the meantime he was being kept in luxurious surroundings as part of some highly refined campaign of sarcasm.

After a week they moved him to a stone chamber. The windows were crossbow-embrasures that had recently been chocked up with pigs of glass. But they did afford him a view of the Dutch-hammer and its latest victim. Minerva had languished there, an object of ridicule, as gold and silver were extracted from her hold, and replaced with rocks to keep her ballasted.

“Did Vrej survive the fall, and the water?” was Jack’s first question when Edmund de Ath—who had revealed himself to be, in fact, one Édouard de Gex, a Jesuit, and a hater of the Jansenists and of the Enlightenment both—came around to taunt him.

Édouard de Gex looked surprised. “Why do you ask? Surely you’re not naïve enough to think you’ll have an opportunity to kill him.”

“Oh no, I was just wondering how it came out in the end.”

“How what came out?”

“The story. You see, all along I’ve been supposing that this was my story, but now I see it has really been Vrej’s.”

Édouard de Gex shrugged. “He lives. He has a bit of a catarrh. When he’s feeling better he’ll probably come around and explain matters to you.”

“That should be a lively conversation…but pray tell, why the hell are you here?”

“I am here to look after your immortal soul.”

De Gex had traded his former garb for a Jesuit’s black robes, and even his language had changed. Formerly he had spoken Sabir, but now it was English. “It is my intention to convert all of Britain to the true faith,” he remarked, “and so I have made a study of your language.”

“And you’re going to begin with me? Weren’t you paying attention in Mexico City?”

“The Inquisition there has grown lax. You said you were a Catholic and they took you at your word…. I prefer a more rigorous approach.” De Gex produced a letter from his sleeve. “Does this look familiar?”

“It looks like the one Eliza sent me in New Spain…” Jack blinked and shook his head. “The one we opened and read on the ship…which was obviously a fake…but that one hasn’t even been opened.”

“Poor Jack. This is the true letter that was delivered to you in New Spain, and that you sealed up inside van Hoek’s book-chest. But it was not sent by Eliza. It was sent by Elizabeth de Obregon. That fickle bitch smuggled it out of the convent where she was being held in Mexico City. Then later, when we were in Vera Cruz—”

“You took it out of the crate where I’d stored it, and substituted a fake one you’d written. Van Hoek complained that the caulking was badly done…. I should’ve suspected tampering.”

“I am a better forger than a caulker, it would seem,” de Gex said.

“The forgery worked,” Jack allowed.

“Monsieur Esphahnian listened to your talk of Eliza for years, and knew every detail of the story by heart…without his information, I could never have composed that letter.”

De Gex broke the seal on the letter of Elizabeth de Obregon. “It would weigh on my conscience, Jack, if I did not read you your mail. This is written in florid Spanish…. I will translate it into English. She begins with the usual complicated salutation and apology…then complains of persistent nightmares that have plagued her ever since she arrived in New Spain, and prevented her from getting a single good night’s sleep. In these nightmares, she is on the Manila Galleon, in the middle of the Pacific, when it falls into the hands of the Inquisition. There is no mutiny and no violence…one day the Captain is simply gone, as if he had fallen overboard when no one was looking, and the officers are in irons, confined to their cabins, but none of them knows it yet because they are all in a drugged sleep. A man in a black robe has seized control of the ship…like any other Inquisitor, he has a staff of familiars, who until now have been disguised as merchants’ servants. They have been gathering information about their employers’ blasphemies and heresies. And, too, he has bailiffs, alguaciles, who’ve been disguised as ordinary seamen but who are now armed with pistols, whips, and blunderbusses, and are not slow to use them against anyone who challenges the authority of the man in the black robe…. She goes on, Jack, to narrate this nightmare (she calls it a nightmare) in considerable detail, but much of it is well-known to you, who have such an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Inquisition. Suffice it to say that the Holy Office carried out its duties exactingly on that ship, and many of the merchants aboard were discovered to be Jews. Really, the entire Galleon was a nest of vipers, a ship of infamous degradation…”

“Is that what she wrote, or are you ‘translating’ a bit freely?”

“But even as he was decorating the yard-arms with dangling merchants, giving them the strappado so that they would unburden themselves of their sins, this black-robe was keeping lookouts posted for any sign of Minerva.”

“Does she explain the firing of the signal-cannon?”

“The hereticks mutinied. They fired the cannon in an attempt to summon help. There was general warfare—the black-robe was driven belowdecks…”

“Where he kindled a fire, to make an auto da fé of the entire ship.”

“When Elizabeth de Obregon woke aboard Minerva, the first thing she saw was that same black-robe staring her in the face. With opium and with clever arguments he induced her to believe that the burning of the Galleon had been an accident, and that now, on Minerva, they were prisoners of the hereticks, who would kill the black-robe if they knew him to be a Jesuit. After that they would make her their whore. So she played the role that the black-robe devised for her…but after recuperating in Mexico City, and suffering diverse tortures from want of opium, and coming out from the influence of the black-robe, these nightmares had begun. She decided that they were not nightmares but true memories, and that all the black-robe’s doings must have been part of a plan having something to do with Minerva, and something to do with the gold of Solomon, which Minerva’s owners had stolen from the ex-Viceroy.”

“And she wrote to warn us of this? That was a noble act on the lady’s part,” Jack mused, “but I cannot imagine why she cared whether we lived or died.”

“She was of a converso family,” de Gex said. “She was a Jewess.”

“I cannot help but notice you are using the past tense.”

“She lies in a pauper’s grave outside Mexico City. The Inquisition there, so corrupt and pusillanimous, gave her nothing more than routine treatment. She died of some pestilence that was sweeping through the prison. But one day I will see her burned in effigy in a great auto da fé in St. James’s Park, Jack. You’ll be there, too—you’ll put the torch to her pyre and pray the rosary while her effigy burns.”

“If you can arrange an auto da fé in Westminster, I’ll do that,” Jack promised.

JACK HAD ASSUMED during the first days in Qwghlm that everyone aboard Minerva would be put to the sword, or at least sent to the galleys in Marseille. But as days had gone by it had become clear that only Jack and Vrej would be getting off at this stop—the ship and her crew, and van Hoek, Dappa, Jimmy, and Danny, were free to go, albeit without their gold. Jack liked to believe that this was because he had given himself up willingly. Later he came to suspect that it was because Electress Sophie was a part-owner of the ship. She was being shown a Professional Courtesy by whatever noble Frenchman was behind all of this—the duc d’Arcachon, or Leroy himself.

After Minerva’s holds and lockers had been stripped to the bare wood, they waited for a high tide and began throwing ballast-rocks overboard, trying to float her off the reef. Jack watched this operation from a battlement of the Castle, where he was allowed to carry his cannonball to and fro sometimes, under guard. After a while de Gex joined him, greeting him with: “I remind you, Jack, that suicide is a mortal sin.”

Jack was baffled by this non sequitur until he followed de Gex’s gaze over the mossy crenellations and down a hundred feet of sheer stone to icy surf flailing away at rocks. Then he laughed. “I’ve been expecting some Arcachon to come up here and put me to a slow death—d’you really think I’d do the deed for him, and spare him such a pleasant journey?”

“Perhaps you would wish to avoid being tortured.”

“Oh no, Édouard, I’m inspired by your example.”

“You are referring to the Inquisition in Mexico?”

“I was wondering: Did the Inquisitor know you were a fellow-Jesuit? Did he go easy on you?”

“If he had given me light treatment, you and Moseh would have detected it—and you would not have decided to trust me. No, I fooled the Inquisitor as thoroughly as I fooled you.”

“That is the most bizarre thing I have heard in my entire circuit of the world.”

“It is not so strange,” said de Gex, “if only you knew more. For, contrary to what you suppose, I do not consider myself some kind of saint. Nay, I have secrets so dark that I myself do not know them! I phant’sied the Inquisitor might somehow wrest out of me through torture what I could not discover by prayer and meditation.”

“That is more bizarre yet. I preferred the first version.”

“Really, it was not so bad as the Jews are always claiming. There are any number of ways it could be made far more painful. When the Holy Office is reëstablished in London, I’ll institute some improvements—we’ll have a lot of hereticks to prosecute in a short time, and this desultory Mexican style simply will not do.”

“I had not considered suicide when I came up here,” Jack muttered, “but you are bringing me around smartly.” He stuck his head out through a gap between crenels and leaned over the edge of the wall to see what the final few seconds of his life might look like. “Pity the tide is so unusually high—I’d hit water instead of rocks.”

“Pity we are abjured to deliver you in one piece,” de Gex said, gazing at Jack almost lovingly. “I would love to put what I learned in Mexico City to use, here and now, against your person, and get a full accounting of what you did with King Solomon’s gold.”

“Oh, is that all you wanted to know? We took it to Surat, excepting some trivial expenditures in Mocha and Bandar, and there Queen Kottakkal took it from us. If it’s that particular gold you want, get thee to Malabar!”

Édouard de Gex shook his finger at Jack. “I know from Monsieur Esphahnian that the true story is far more complicated. He spent years in the north of Hindoostan, fighting in some infidel army—”

“Only because he failed the Intelligence Test.”

“—and by the time he finally got to Malabar, the Jew had had plenty of time to insinuate himself into the confidence of that pagan Queen. A substantial part of the gold had already been diverted into the ship-building project. What became of it?”

“You said yourself it had gone to the ship-building project!”

Jack naturally turned to look towards the ship in question now. She had foundered perhaps two miles away, but seen from this tower through clear Arctic air, she seemed much closer. She was riding unusually high by this point, which was no wonder since for the last half-hour her hull had been veiled in splashes made by the ballast-stones that the crew were rolling out through the gun-ports. The waves began to nudge her back and forth as her keel lifted off the reef. Finally a cheer sounded, and several cannons were fired as signals and celebrations. Triangles and trapezoids of canvas began to cloud her spars. “Note how upright she carries herself, even when underloaded,” Jack had pointed out.

“I will not be taken in by this ruse of changing the subject,” de Gex said.

“Oh, but I’m not,” Jack answered, but de Gex plodded onwards with his interrogation.

“Vrej claims that timber and labor are practically free in Hindoostan. According to his review of the accounts, too much gold was missing and whatever I may think of his theology, I would not dream of calling into question his accounting.”

“Vrej has been tiresome on this particular subject for nigh on eight years now,” Jack answered. “When he vaulted over the rail the other day, right out there, the first thing that came to my mind—even before I really grasped that he’d betrayed us—was joy. Joy that I’d never again have to listen to him on this subject. Now, you have picked up the torch.”

“Vrej has related his suspicions to me. He says that whenever he raised this subject, the others would shrug it off with all sorts of vague similitudes, about ‘greasing the path’ or some such…”

“We are all old salts now, and prefer nautickal terms,” Jack answered. “Instead of talking about some path needing to be greased, we’d more likely think of hulls that become barnacle-covered, which slows them down, and we’d speak of the desirability of keeping ’em smooth, for easy movement through the water.”

“In any event—I assume this is a Delphic way of saying that bribes were paid to some Mogul or Maratha chieftain?”

“Assume what you like—that would still place the gold far away from you,” Jack pointed out. He was gazing out to sea, watching Minerva trim her sails as she came out of the lee of the Sghr and picked up a leading wind across her larboard beam. One by one the yards traversed round, and their sails stopped shivering as the crew braced the yards and made her close-hauled. Immediately Minerva began to heel over and pick up speed. But de Gex now blocked Jack’s view, squaring his shoulders and getting his face directly in front of his. “Your ship may be free now, Jack, but you seem to have forgotten that you are not on her. You are in my power now.”

“I thought I was in Leroy’s power,” Jack said, which was nothing more than an audacious guess; but the look on de Gex’s face told him he’d guessed right.

“My Order is not without influence in his majesty’s court,” de Gex said. “In his efforts to find the gold that the Jew stole, Vrej Esphahnian could do nothing more than bore you. I can do much more.”

Jack rolled his eyes. “Oh come now! If our aim had been to steal from Vrej, we’d have made a proper job of it. We were only chaffing him—we’re not thieves.”

“Where, then, is King Solomon’s gold?”

“Turn around,” Jack said.

De Gex finally turned around. The harbor below the Castle was crowded with French ships, most of them riding at anchor; the few that were in a position to get under way were now, however, frantically trying to raise more sail. Their decks were a-swarm with sailors coming up from below, like ants from a damaged hill. De Gex could not fathom why, until he noticed that every spyglass and pointing finger in the harbor was aimed at Minerva, now several miles ahead of the French ships that were trying to organize a pursuit. Van Hoek—commanding from a sick-bed lashed into place on the poop deck—had heeled her perilously far over for one so lightly ballasted, but she did not capsize, and seemed to be skimming over the water rather than plowing it up. A ship that hadn’t been careened since before Vera Cruz would normally have been too encrusted with barnacles to make much headway, but Minerva moved as if her hull had been freshly scraped and painted. Not until she altered course slightly, and the sun glanced off her exposed hull, did de Gex understand why: the underside of the ship, below the waterline, had been sheathed, from stem to stern, in plates of hammered gold.

Only a sliver of that plating was now visible, but it shone out across the harbor like a gleam of light through a cracked door. Everyone had seen it, and a few French ships were now setting out on a forlorn pursuit, but most of the mariners were content to stand at the railings of their anchored vessels and only gaze in adoration. Jack knew what those sailors were thinking. They did not care about the value of the gold, and they certainly believed no nonsense about King Solomon’s hoard. They were thinking, instead: If I were a sailor on that ship, I’d never have to scrape another barnacle.

JACK SAW IT AS ODD that de Gex had set Minerva free so hastily, considering that he had been pursuing this matter for above ten years, and traveled all the way around the world, survived the wrack of the Manila Galleon, given himself up to torture, &c. The next day Jack understood why de Gex had wanted to get Minerva, and most of the French fleet, clear of the harbor. Sails breached the southern horizon, a ship came into view, maneuvered adroitly round the Dutch-hammer, and dropped anchor directly below the Castle. Jack recognized her from miles out. He’d last seen her in Alexandria, holed and dismasted. Since then Météore had been refitted and cleaned up by ship-wrights who, to judge from the looks of what they’d done, charged a lot of money.

He was taken back to his cell long before the jacht came close enough that anyone on its decks might have picked him out through a spyglass. This gave him another hint as to who might be aboard. His suspicions were confirmed later by faint sounds of women’s and children’s laughter, audible when he lay with his ear to the crack under his door. This was not a Naval Expedition but a pleasure-cruise, timed to call at Qwghlm during the magic fortnight around late August and early September when blizzards were least oft observed. The chilly cannonball that Jack had been carrying around for the last fortnight now seemed to have been implanted in his chest, and his heart ripped out to make room for it. De Gex had been oddly disinclined to torture him thus far, which had caused Jack to wonder what new, excruciating horrors might be in store for him. But he’d never phant’sied it’d be this bad! He could see how this would end: He would be dragged out naked and chained, and displayed before Eliza, and de Gex would relate the hilarious tale of how Jack had twice had all the money in the world, and twice lost it.

A few hours after Météore’s arrival, when aromas of French cooking had suffused the entire castle, large Bretons came to Jack’s cell and dragged him to a part of the château that, as best as Jack could make out, was near the bedchambers. It was a windowless, hence torch-lit corridor joining an irregular series of chambers, closets, and wide spots. It had received little attention during the remodel, and still looked much as the last band of Vikings, Saracens, or Scots had left it. Here and there Jack glimpsed the backside of a wall: strips of lath, or wattle, with curls of plaster, or daub, squirting through. Casks and crates were piled in some places. They took him to a wide place in the passage where an iron grid had been leaned against the wall: a portcullis hammered out by some blacksmith a thousand years ago, torn down and thrown aside in some upheaval, and left to gather rust and cobwebs ever since. The Bretons pinned Jack against this, spreadeagled, and lashed him to it with cords. Here it became obvious that they were sea-faring men. When Jack opened his mouth to issue some remark to that effect, one of them opportunely shoved a rag-wad into his mouth, and lashed that in place, and lashed his head to the grate. They lashed his fingers down even, which struck Jack as gratuitous, unless they were afraid of his rapping out some message. When they were satisfied, they dragged the gridiron, Jack and all, down the passageway a short distance and through a curtain of mildewy sailcloth. Jack was then blinded for a few moments by sudden light. But as his eyes adjusted, he began to think he was back in the bedchamber where they had kept him for the first week. As he saw clearer, though, he came to understand he was gazing into that bedchamber from without. He was looking through the back sides of the mirrors that glazed the wall. His view of the room, from here, was total; he was positioned at the head of the canopied bed, arm’s length from where a sleeper would lay his, or her, head.

“It is a style of architecture that has served me well,” said a voice in French.

Jack would have jumped out of his skin, had he not been restrained, for the Bretons had taken their leave, and he hadn’t suspected anyone else was in here. All he could move was his eyeballs. By swiveling these as far as they’d go, he was able to perceive movement in a dim corner of this hidden chamber.

A man came into view. He wore a periwig—powdered white, as was the new vogue—and what Jack could only assume were the most excellent fashions from France, so ridiculous were they. Something was funny about one of his hands, but, beyond that, he was splendid to look upon, and (as Jack could now detect, even with dirty rags jammed into his gob) he smelled good.

“You shan’t recognize me, I’m afraid,” said the only man in the room who could talk. “I scarcely recognize you. We last met in the Grand Ballroom of my residence in Paris: the Hôtel Arcachon. You took your leave of most of me hastily, and impolitely; though you did carry my hand for several miles, tangled in the bridle of that magnificent horse. Later it was found in the middle of the post-road to Compiègne with my signet-ring still on it; which is how it was traced back to me. Still you were not done re-arranging the body-parts of Lavardacs, for some years later you kindly shipped me the head of my father.”

Étienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon, raised now the stump of his arm so that Jack could view it. A cup had been strapped thereto, and extending from this was a black leather riding-crop. If Jack hadn’t been gagged, he’d now have volunteered some observations as to how Étienne had a paltry and disappointing view of how to inflict pain, compared to the Spanish Inquisition; but Étienne anticipated him. “Oh, this is not for you. My revenge on you I have contemplated, and prepared for, these seventeen years, and it shall involve more than a riding-crop. It takes time to build a place like this, you know! I have had several of them made: there is another at St.-Malo and yet another at La Dunette. I have stood in them and watched my wife whore herself to sergeants and cryptologists. That, however, is not why I caused them to be made. Only today are these chambers being put to their true purpose. Vrej Esphahnian is in the one at La Dunette even at this moment. He is trussed up like you, staring through such a mirror, and listening as his brothers, dressed in the finest clothing, serve expensive coffee to dinner-guests.

“You see, we fooled Monsieur Esphahnian into believing that his brothers had been betrayed by you, Jack, and were perishing of typhus in debtors’ prisons all around Paris. His joy at learning that this is not true will be balanced by some embarrassment that he turned you in to us for no good reason, and lost his share of the silver and gold in Minerva’s hold. I do wonder which of these three causes him the greatest anguish: that he betrayed his friends, that he threw away a fortune, or that he was duped. Father Édouard should reach Versailles in a few more days—he’ll inform Monsieur Esphahnian that the missing gold was attached to the ship’s hull the entire time—this ought to perfect his agony. It is a better torture, I believe, than anything the Spanish Inquisition could devise. But better yet is in store for you, Jack!”

He walked out.

A door opened and a woman entered the bedchamber. Jack did not know her instantly, only because he did not wish to. She’d changed, but not that much. He simply could not bear to open his eyes to her.

Nasr al-Ghuráb had told them that in the sack of Constantinople the Ottomans had discovered, in a dungeon, a device that the Byzantines had once used to put out the eyes of noble prisoners. There was none of poking or gouging. Rather, it was a great hemispherical bowl, wrought of copper, with a sort of vise in its center. The bowl would be heated first until it was glowing, and then the prisoner’s head—masked, except for the eyes—would be clamped into the vise. The apparatus was so laid out that the pupils of the victims’ eyes were positioned at the center of the hemisphere. When the lids were pulled up, the eyes could see nothing but a featureless heaven of red wrath that ruined even as it dazzled. The sensitive parts of the eyes were incinerated in a few moments, and the victim rendered perfectly blind without the eyes themselves ever having been touched by anything save that awful last glimpse.

In idle moments since having heard this story, Jack had sometimes wondered what thoughts went through the mind of the one who was being clamped into it. Did he resist? Could he? Were unwilling eyelids peeled back with tongs, or was the victim compelled somehow to open them himself?

It was in much the same frame of mind that he followed Eliza’s entry into the bedchamber without looking at her directly. But in the end he couldn’t not open his eyes, of his own free will, and gaze upon what was there, burn him and blind him though it might.

She had been at dinner with rich people, and was some time taking her gown off, washing her face, peeling off the black patches, and letting her hair down. Ladies-in-waiting came and went. A girl of perhaps nine, with eyes and face marred by smallpox, came into the room and crawled into Eliza’s lap for a few minutes’ rocking and snuggling; Eliza read to her from a book, then sent her off to bed with kisses all over her wrecked face. A nurse led in a boy of about seven, who had escaped the pox so far—but in a way he was worse for Jack to look upon, for his jaw had the same deformity as both of the two last ducs d’Arcachon. But Eliza smiled when he came in, and cuddled him and read to him just as she had done to the pock-marked girl. The nurse took the boy away and Eliza sat alone for some time, tending to correspondence; she read a scattering of notes and wrote two letters.

Étienne came in to the bedchamber now and twirled off his coat, and tossed his small-sword onto a window-bench. Eliza gave him a perfunctory over-the-shoulder greeting. Étienne strolled up along the side of the bed, walking towards Jack, loosening his cravat, idly swishing the riding-crop. He stopped before the mirror, pretending to study his own reflection, but in fact staring Jack directly in the eye. “I believe I shall ride bare-back to-night,” he announced, loudly enough to penetrate the silvered glass.

Eliza was a bit surprised. But she mastered that quickly, and then had to hide a flush of annoyance. She finished a sentence, parked her quill in an inkwell, stood up, and peeled her gown back over her head. What greeted Jack, then, viewed through forty-odd-year-old eyes and a mottled, half-silvered mirror by candlelight, was not a bit less lovely than what he had last seen of her seventeen years ago. He could tell there had been a hard-fought dispute with the Pox and that Eliza had won it. Of course she had won it!

Her husband came up and struck her across the face with his hand, twisting her around so that she fell face-down on the bed. Then he whipped her across the arse and the backs of her thighs with the crop, occasionally looking up to smirk at Jack through the mirror. He commanded her to rise to all fours, and she obeyed. Fucking, interspersed with more whipping, ensued. Étienne did it from a position bolt upright on his knees on the bed behind Eliza, so that he could stare Jack down until the last moments when his eyes closed.

Now in the dungeons of the Inquisition, Jack had himself noted a phænomenon oft discoursed of by prisoners, namely that after a bit of torture the body went numb and it simply did not hurt that much any more. Perhaps the same thing was at work here. It had hurt just to see Eliza—to be so close to her. Seeing her little Lavardac boy had perhaps been the worst. This scene of “riding bare-back,” however grisly it was in a certain way, simply did not trouble him as much as Étienne clearly supposed it did. If Eliza had jumped up from her writing-desk to smother her husband with kisses and then dragged him to bed and made rapturous love to him, that would have hurt. But instead she had shrugged, and parked her quill. Before the ink was dry on the sentence she’d been writing when Étienne had entered the room, he had exhausted himself, she had her clothes back on, and was approaching the desk with a look on her face that said, Now where was I when what’s-his-name interrupted me?

LATER JACK WAS TAKEN AWAY and returned to his cell. The next night, the whole thing was repeated—almost as if Étienne knew in his heart that it had failed the first time. The chief difference was that when Étienne came into the bedchamber and announced his intentions, Eliza was, this time, truly astonished.

On the third night, she was out-and-out flabbergasted, and asked Étienne a number of probing questions clearly meant to establish whether he might be developing a brain tumor.

Jack, a theatre-goer of long standing, now saw how it was going to be. For Étienne had explained to him that his doom was to be locked up in a cell here for the rest of his life, and that once a year, when the weather cleared, Étienne was going to sail up here with Eliza and repeat this procedure a few times before turning round and sailing home. As Étienne told him this, Jack was, of course, gagged, and could not answer; but what he was thinking was that this was indeed an excruciating torture, but for wholly different reasons than Étienne imagined. The premise was excellent, granted; but the road to dramaturgickal perdition was thick strewn with excellent premises. The difficulty lay in that this show was wretchedly staged and, in a word, botched. This made it almost more painful to view than if it had been carried off brilliantly. Jack’s fate, it seemed, was to languish in a chilly dungeon three hundred and sixty-odd days out of each year and, on the other few days, to be a captive audience to a bad play. He had to grant that it would be a humiliating fate if he had been a member of the French nobility. But as a Vagabond who’d already lived thrice as long as he ought to’ve, it wasn’t bad at all; it was pleasing, in fact, to see how not under Étienne’s thumb was Eliza. Jack’s chief source of discomfort, then, was a feeling well known to soldiers of low rank, to doctors’ patients, and to people getting their hair cut; namely, that he was utterly in the power of an incompetent.

After the third night, the set was struck, as it were. Jack was locked in his cell to begin the first year of his ordeal, and Météore sailed away south.

Jack settled in, and began to make friends with his gaolers. They were under strict orders not to talk to him, but they couldn’t help hearing him when he talked, and he could tell that they fancied his stories.

He was there for all of a month. Then a French frigate came and took him away. They gave him clothes, soap, and a razor. Jack had a most enjoyable journey to Le Havre, for he knew that there was only one man in the world who could have countermanded the orders of Étienne de Lavardac, duc d’Arcachon.

Book 5

The Juncto

Hôtel Arcachon

OCTOBER 1702

“WE ARE VERY SORRY to hear of your little ship-wreck,” said King Louis XIV of France. “But consider yourself fortunate you did not book passage on the Spanish treasure-fleet. The English Navy fell upon it in Vigo Bay and sent several millions of pieces of eight to the locker of David Jones.”

The King of France did not seem especially troubled by this news; if anything, discreetly amused. His majesty was sitting in the biggest armchair that Western Civilization had to offer, in the center of the Grand Ballroom of the Hôtel Arcachon in Paris. Jack, somewhat to his surprise, had been allowed to sit down on a stool. The Kings of France and of the Vagabonds were alone together; the former had made a great show of dismissing his glorious courtiers, who had made a great show of being astonished. Now Jack could hear the murmur of their voices in the gallery outside as they smoked pipes and batted witticisms at each other.

But he could not make out any of their words. And this, he began to suspect, was all by design. This room was large enough to race horses in, but it had been emptied of furniture, except for the big armchair and the stool, which were in its center. The King could be certain that any words he spoke would be heard by Jack, and no one else.

“You know,” said Jack, “I was a King for a while in Hindoostan, and my subjects would get worked up into a lather about a potato, which to them was worth as much as a treasure-chest. At first I’d want to know everything about the potato in question, and I would take a large stake in the matter, but towards the end of my reign—”

Here Jack rolled his eyes, as Frenchmen frequently did during encounters with Englishmen. Leroy seemed to take his meaning very clearly. “It is the same with every King.”

“Potatoes grow back,” Jack pointed out.

Louis took this as a witty and yet profound apothegm. “Indeed, mon cousin; and in the same way, there will always be more pieces of eight, as long as the metallic heart in Mexico City continues to beat.”

Jack was a bit unsure as to why King Louis XIV was referring to him as my cousin, but he reckoned it must be a matter of protocol. Jack had been a king once. King of a ditch in Hindoostan, true; but no less a king.

“There is so much that is better ignored,” Jack tried, hoping Leroy would agree, and apply the principle to his particular case.

“The King must not descend into these broils,” said Leroy. “He is Apollo, riding above all in his bright chariot, seeing the entire world as if it were a courtyard.”

“I could not have put it better myself,” Jack said.

“But even bright Apollo had his adversaries: other Gods, and loathsome monsters, spawned before Time from the Earth and the Deep. The legions of Chaos.”

“I never had to contend with those legions of Chaos myself, cuz, but then everything you do is on a much, much larger scale.”

“There is another Heart that beats in London.”

Jack had to ponder this ænigma for a moment. The happiest possible interpretation was that the King was speaking of Eliza, and that she was waiting for Jack on London Bridge. But given the general turn of recent events, this did not seem likely; the Jack-Eliza matter would definitely be classed as a “broil,” not worth bringing up in conversation. Thinking of London Bridge reminded him of the water-pumps there at the northern end, which banged away like giants’ hearts; this, then, reminded him of the Tower, and finally he got it.

“The Mint.”

“Mexico beats out the divine ichor that circulates through, and animates, Catholic realms. Sometimes the treasure-fleet sinks and we feel faint; then another one reaches Cadiz and we are invigorated. London beats out the vile humour that circulates through the countless grasping extremities of the Beast.”

“And that would be a spawn-of-Chaos type of primordial beast you’re talking about there, I am guessing, the sort of foe worthy of Apollo’s attention.”

“The beating of that Heart can be heard across the Channel sometimes. I prefer silence.”

Twenty years ago Jack might have heard this as a baffling, eccentric sort of remark. Today he understood it as a more or less direct order for Jack to go up to London straightaway and personally sack the Royal Mint and level the Tower of London. Which raised more questions than it answered; but the largest of them all was: Why should Jack run errands, especially dangerous ones, for the King of France? It seemed obvious now that Leroy had saved him from the duc d’Arcachon, who had in turn preserved him from de Gex; but this King was far too intelligent to expect loyalty and service from one such as Jack on that score alone.

“If I have taken your meaning, there, Leroy, I can’t say how flattered I am that you think I am the bloke for the job.”

“It is a trifle, compared to your past exploits.”

“I had a lot of help in my past exploits. I had a plan.”

“A plan is good.”

“I didn’t come up with the plan. My plan man is somewhere north of the Rio Grande just now, and difficult to get in touch with…”

“Ah, but the plan of Father Édouard de Gex was the superior one in the end, was it not?”

“Are you saying I’m to work with him!?”

“You shall be afforded the resources you shall require to accomplish this thing,” said Leroy, “and moreover you shall be relieved of burdens, and cut free from entanglements, that might hinder you.” He took a bit of snuff from a golden box and then snapped it shut with a loud pop. This must have been a pre-arranged cue, for suddenly the doors at the far end of the room were drawn open, and three persons entered the room: Vrej Esphahnian, Étienne d’Arcachon, and Eliza.

They came on briskly, bowed or curtseyed to the King, and ignored Jack; for in the presence of the King, no other person could be acknowledged. Which was well enough for Jack. He wouldn’t have known what to say or do in the presence of any one of these persons, had they come to him solus. To be with all three at once made him giddy, off-balance, and, in sum, even more than normally susceptible to the Imp of the Perverse. Vrej and Étienne kept Jack in their peripheral vision, which was only prudent; Eliza turned her head so that her view of him was blocked by a cheek-bone. He phant’sied she was a little red about the ears.

“Monsieur Esphahnian,” said the King of France, “we have heard that you were misinformed, and that in consequence you swore a vendetta against Monsieur Shaftoe. As we have just been explaining, we do not, as a rule, involve ourselves in such broils; but in this case we make an exception, for Monsieur Shaftoe is about to do us a favor. It may take him many years. We should be most displeased if your vendetta should interfere with his work. We have heard that the misunderstanding on which the vendetta was founded has been cleared up, and from this, we presume all is forgiven between the two of you; but we would see Monsieurs Shaftoe and Esphahnian shake hands and swear in our presence that all is forgiven. You may feel free to speak to each other.”

Vrej, by all appearances, had been out of pokey for a while—long enough to get some clothes made, and put on a few pounds. He had, in sum, gotten himself altogether ready for this audience. “Monsieur Shaftoe, on that evening in 1685 when you rode your horse into this ballroom and lopped this chap’s hand off—” he cocked his head at Étienne “—the Lieutenant of Police came to the apartment in the Marais where my family had given you lodgings—”

“Sold, not given,” said Jack, “but pray go on.”

“They took my family away and threw them in prisons whence some did not emerge alive. I swore vengeance against you. Years later the flames of my passions, which had at last subsided, were whipped up again by lies sent my way by devious persons, and I looked for some way to inflict upon you the same pain I phant’sied you’d done to my family. In Manila I met in secret with Édouard de Gex, whom I believed to be my family’s benefactor, and I did conspire with him against you and the other members of the Cabal. Thank God, most were either dead, or had parted from the group and found lives in places as diverse as Japan, Nuba, Queena-Kootah, and New Mexico. Of those who were still on the ship when it was driven on to the reef at Qwghlm, all have found freedom, save you. You, though, I have wounded grievously.”

“No worse than I did you in 1685, or so it would seem.”

“For what you did here in 1685 I forgive you; and for what I believed you had done, I hope you shall forgive me. In token of which I offer you my hand.”

During this discourse Vrej had held his arms crossed somewhat awkwardly before him, as if the right was injured and wanted support from the left. Now he unfolded them and held out the right as if to shake; though he kept it curiously bent at the elbow. Postural oddities aside, Jack, who had lived with Vrej, on and off, for a dozen years, had no doubt of his sincerity. He reached out and shook Vrej’s hand.

Vrej looked him in the eye. “To Moseh, Dappa, van Hoek, Gabriel, Nyazi, Yevgeny, Jeronimo, and Mr. Foot!” Vrej said.

“To the Ten,” Jack agreed, and pumped Vrej’s hand, hard enough to straighten the elbow. At that, something hard slid forth from Vrej’s sleeve and barked Jack’s knuckle. Vrej reached across with his left and slapped his forearm to keep the object from falling out altogether. As Jack could see plainly enough, it was a two-barrelled pocket-pistol.

Not knowing what Vrej had in mind, Jack let go his hand and got between him and Eliza. He’d scarcely done so when he heard a loud noise and saw Étienne d’Arcachon collapsing to the floor.

“Pardon the interruption, your majesty,” said Vrej. The pistol was in his hand, a cloud of smoke drifting up from it.

Jack had got himself squarely between Vrej and Eliza by now, but she wanted to see what was happening, and kept moving about, which forced him to move as well. A door whammed open at the far end of the ballroom, and a cloud of feathers, lace, and blades—a dozen or so armed noblemen—came at them. It would be some moments before they arrived.

“I could run. Perhaps escape,” Vrej went on. “But this would bring suspicion down upon my family—who are wholly innocent, your majesty, and always were.”

“We understand,” said Leroy, “and always have.”

Vrej turned the pistol round and shot himself in the mouth.

“MONSIEUR SHAFTOE, THIS BALLROOM does not seem to agree with you. I do believe you should not be invited back,” the King was able to remark, a bit sourly, before they were engulfed in courtiers with drawn swords.

Now Jack had always taken a dim view of Louis, but even he had to admit he was impressed by the aplomb with which this surprising turn of events was managed. There was, of course, an interruption; but only a few minutes elapsed before the conversation resumed. Jack, Eliza, and the King were in the Petit Salon now; the ballroom would require some cleaning-up.

First order of protocol was that the King expressed condolences to the widow d’Arcachon (for Étienne had taken the pistol-ball between the eyes). Then the King of France turned his attention once again to Jack. “Monsieur Shaftoe, it pleases us that when you saw the weapon in the hand of Monsieur Esphahnian, your only thought was to shield Madame la duchesse d’Arcachon. However, this does put us in mind of a certain entanglement that shall impede your work in London if it is not cut immediately. If the tales told of your love for this woman are true, it were useless to ask you to sever the tie. Madame?”

Jack, who’d been so alert to Vrej, was blindsided by Eliza. She was on him, and hugged him side-on, and kissed him once on the cheek and leaned her head against his long enough to breathe into his ear: “Sorry about the harpoon, and sorry about this; but I must do it, lest you end up in the Bastille, and I find poison in my coffee.”

Jack reached out to return the embrace but caught only air, for she’d darted back as quick as any defensing-master. “I swear before God that you, Jack Shaftoe, shall never again look on my face, nor hear my voice, until the day you die.” Hastily then, before tears came, she turned to the King, who made a little gesture meaning that she was permitted to leave. She curtseyed, spun, and got out of the room as if it were on fire.

“There was to be a third part of the interview,” said the King, “in which Monsieur le duc d’Arcachon would have sworn never more to molest you. But this has been obviated. Monsieur Shaftoe, you are free to depart. We must now turn our attentions back to the War; but it shall please us to learn, in a year, or several, that the money of England has been rendered worthless, and the ability of that heretic country to make war beyond its shores thus mitigated. Do take your time and make a proper job of it. No half measures. And know that as the pound sterling suffers, the widow d’Arcachon and her children shall thrive, and shall continue to enjoy all the good things that France has to offer.”

Book 4

Bonanza

The upheavals of the last twenty years have been unbelievable: the kingdoms of England, Holland and Spain have been transformed as fast as scenery in a theatre. When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.

—LISELOTTE IN A LETTER TO SOPHIE,
10 JUNE 1706

En Route from Paris to London

OCTOBER 1702

THE KING WAS TOO POLITE to mention the opposite face of the bargain, which was that if Jack failed, consequences would fall on Eliza; but Jack had plenty of time to work that out on the voyage down the Seine and across the Channel. Before the end of the next day, he was on an ostensibly Danish brig pretending to smuggle French wine to England.

The last time he’d been in these waters, seventeen years ago, he’d been bound the other way, harpoon-gashed, and half out of his mind with fever. On this the return trip, his body was sound, but his mind wasn’t. The full monstrousness of everything that had happened to Jack in the last weeks finally struck home, and rendered him sub-human for a long time.

The ability of sailing-ships to survive storms and tides depended on starving, drenched, terrified wretches’ carrying out certain rote procedures even though their minds were absent. Jack had not sailed around the world without acquiring a few such instincts, and that probably explained how he passed the next day or so. The weather was fine; the storm was in his mind. When he came back to awareness, a day had gone by, but it seemed that he had been eating and drinking and eliminating in the meantime. He soon wished that he had remained in that semi-conscious state, because awareness brought pain.

Even so, tears did not finally come to his eyes and begin to roll down his face until the middle of the next day, when the downs of England thickened the horizon, all treeless and green, and as alien-looking as any landscape Jack had viewed during his travels. That went double for the Dover cliffs. The brig was turning now, bearing round to the north, and one morning she finally came round to a westerly heading and began to ride an incoming tide, skimming above the vast sands of the Thames, all tangled with the wracks of ships, looking like harpsichords that had yielded to the tension of their strings and imploded to black snarls. She picked her way up the estuary for the whole day, past Gravesend and Erith and various places on the Long Reach that the Shaftoe brothers, Jack and Bob and Dick, had once thought of as being extremely far away.

The river was crowded with ships far downstream of where it had been in the days of Jack’s boyhood, and so Jack kept thinking that he had passed over Dick’s watery death-site, only to learn they’d not be reaching it for quite some time yet. But as evening fell the captain issued blunderbusses to certain crewmen and told them to be on the lookout for mudlarks, and then Jack knew he had come full circle at last. It was strangely comforting to him. Home, as miserable as it was and had been, had some power to balm his wounds. It was all he could do not to jump overboard and wade ashore to lose himself in some Limehouse gin hole.

But that would’ve been irresponsible. Jack had a job that needed doing. He was a man of affairs now, a City man, and no mudlark. He told the captain to keep making way upstream until the lights of London Bridge were in view.

When they rounded the last river-bend at Wapping, light broke across the mile of water between them and the Bridge, outlining every spar and line of the countless ships riding at anchor in the Pool. Jack had remembered the Bridge as a gleaming dam of light across the Thames, but now he could scarcely make it out for the radiance of the rebuilt city piled up behind it. It was almost as if London had caught fire again, just in time for Jack’s homecoming.

But the most brilliant object in Jack’s vision was neither the Bridge nor the City. On the northern bank of the river, downstream of the Bridge, rose the Tower. Jack recalled this as a dull stone pile with the occasional candle gleaming through an embrasure. But on this night, anyway, the Tower was a massive stone plinth supporting a pillar of airborne light, and all the ships in the Pool below it seemed to have collected around its radiance like gnats besieging a lanthorn. Actually the eastern end of the place was as dark as ever, but at its western edge hot fires had been kindled. Piles of smoke and steam were rising up to black out the stars, and sparks careered through those clouds like meteors. The flames were concealed behind Tower walls, but they lit up their own smoke from beneath, and made of it a screen to project boiling and flaring light across the water. “Closer, closer,” Jack kept demanding—it had become obvious that the captain was under orders to do Jack’s bidding no matter what. So sailors were sent below to work the sweeps, and, like a many-legged insect crawling through a crowded burrow, the brig felt its way among anchored ships for hours, shrugging off curses and threats from men on other vessels who did not want to see their anchor cables fouled.

Jack could hear now the rumble of coal-carts inside the Tower, and the steady pounding beat of some giant machine inside the Mint: some massive trip-hammer coining golden guineas. When the brig had shouldered up to the front rank of ships, affording Jack an unobstructed view, he gave the signal to drop anchor, directly before the sprawling span of the Traitor’s Gate. The ship swung around to point upstream and, as it did, Jack performed a slow pirouette on the foredeck so that the heat of the Mint shone always on his face.

High above, on one of the ancient towers, he could see a gentleman who had gone up there for a stroll, perhaps to get some fresh air and clear his head after too long spent down in the broiling Mint. This fellow stopped on the parapet to look out over the river, silhouetted against the burning cloud behind him, and a sea-breeze caught his long hair and blew it back like a banner. Jack could see that the man’s hair was snow-white.

“That must be him, then,” he said to no one, “him that was put in charge of the Mint.” Raising his voice a bit he said, “Enjoy your perch up there, Mister Newton, because Jack the Coiner has come back to London-town, and he aims to knock you down; the game has begun, and may the best man win!”

Credits

Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

Cover illustration: 1746 plan of Versailles/Historic Urban Plans, Inc.

Copyright

The epigraph on page 292 is from The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, edited and translated by H. T. Mason. Published by Manchester University Press, Manchester, England, 1967.

The epigraph on page 646 is from Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist. Published by Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1994.

The epigraph on page 707 is from G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Hackett. Published by Hackett, Indianapolis, 1989.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE CONFUSION. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition APRIL © 2004 ISBN: 9780061793387

Version 08162013

FIRST EDITION

06 07 08 09 10

Map

Dedication

To Mildred

Contents

Map

Dedication

Epigraph

The story thus far…

BOOK SIX
Solomon’s Gold

Dartmoor

Crockern Tor

The Saracen’s Head

Southern England

Crane Court

London

Mr. White’s Baiting-Ring

Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell

Bloomsbury

Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, London

Leicester House

The Kit-Cat Clubb

Crane Court, London

River Thames

Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London

Sloop Atalanta, Gravesend

Cold Harbour

Sloop Atalanta, the Hope

The Monument, London

Sloop Atalanta, off the Isle of Grain

Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London

The City of London

Sloop Atalanta, off the Shive

The Monument

Worth’s Coffee-house, Birchin Lane, London

Shive Tor

The White Tower

Shive Tor

BOOK SEVEN
Currency

Hanover

Westminster Palace

Garden of Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover

Princess Caroline’s Bedchamber, Herrenhausen Palace

Between Black Mary’s Hole and Sir John Oldcastle’s, North of London

Clerkenwell Court

Westminster Palace

Westminster Palace

The Kit-Cat Clubb

The Carriage

The Launch Prudence

Royal Society, Crane Court

Clerkenwell Court

Golden Square

Leicester House

Newgate Prison

Golden Square

The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison

Monmouth Street

Leicester Fields

The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison

Bolingbroke’s House, Golden Square

The Italian Opera

Golden Square

Billingsgate Dock

Sophia, Mouth of the Thames

Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

Billingsgate Dock

A Tavern, Hockley-in-the-Hole

BOOK EIGHT
The System of the World

Marlborough House

The Temple of Vulcan

The Kit-Cat Clubb

Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

Surrey

Library of Leicester House

London Bridge

Greenwich

Roger Comstock’s House

The Castle, Newgate Prison

The Black Dogg of Newgate

Fleet Prison

The Tap-Room, Fleet Prison

Under a Pile of Lead Weights, the Press-Room, Newgate Prison

Westminster Abbey

The Court of the Old Bailey

The Tower of London

A Letter

Mint Street, the Tower of London

A Letter

The Condemned Hold, Newgate Prison

The Gallows, Tower Hill

The Press-Yard and Castle, Newgate Prison

Clerkenwell Court

The Chapel, Newgate Prison

Halfway Along Cheapside

Poop Deck of Minerva, the Pool of London

The Temple of Vulcan

Newgate Prison

Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s

Friday
29 October 1714

Westminster Abbey

Chapel of Newgate Prison

New Palace Yard, Westminster

The Stone Anvil, the High Hall, Newgate Prison

The Trial of the Pyx

The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison

Star Chamber

Church of St. Sepulchre

Star Chamber

Holbourn

Star Chamber

EPILOGS

Leibniz-Haus, Hanover

Gardens of Trianon, Royal Château of Versailles

Blenheim Palace

Carolina

Cornwall

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CREDITS

COPYRIGHT

Epigraph

But first whom shall we send

In search of this new world, whom shall we find

Sufficient? Who shall tempt with wandring feet

The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss

And through the palpable obscure find out

His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight

Upborn with indefatigable wings

Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive

The happy Ile…

MILTON, Paradise Lost

The story thus far…

In Boston in October 1713, Daniel Waterhouse, sixty-seven years of age, the Founder and sole Fellow of a failing college, the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts, has received a startling visit from the Alchemist Enoch Root, who has appeared on his doorstep brandishing a summons addressed to Daniel from Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, thirty.

Two decades earlier, Daniel, along with his friend and colleague Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, knew Princess Caroline when she was a destitute orphan. Since then she has grown up as a ward of the King and Queen of Prussia in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, surrounded by books, artists, and Natural Philosophers, including Leibniz. She has married the Electoral Prince of Hanover, George Augustus, known popularly as “Young Hanover Brave” for his exploits in the recently concluded War of the Spanish Succession. He is reputed to be as handsome and dashing as Caroline is beautiful and brilliant.

The grandmother of George Augustus is Sophie of Hanover, still shrewd and vigorous at eighty-three. According to the Whigs—one of the two great factions in English politics—Sophie should be next in line to the English throne after the death of Queen Anne, who is forty-eight and in poor health. This would place Princess Caroline in direct line to become Princess of Wales and later Queen of England. The Whigs’ bitter rivals, the Tories, while paying lip service to the Hanoverian succession, harbor many powerful dissidents, called Jacobites, who are determined that the next monarch should instead be James Stuart: a Catholic who has lived most of his life in France as a guest and puppet of the immensely powerful Sun King, Louis XIV.

England and an alliance of mostly Protestant countries have just finished fighting a quarter-century-long world war against France. The second half of it, known as the War of the Spanish Succession, has seen many battlefield victories for the Allies under the generalship of two brothers in arms: the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy. Nevertheless France has won the war, in large part by outmaneuvering her opponents politically. Consequently, a grandson of Louis XIV now sits on the throne of the Spanish Empire, which among other things is the source of most of the world’s gold and silver. If the English Jacobites succeed in placing James Stuart on the English throne, France’s victory will be total.

In anticipation of the death of Queen Anne, Whiggish courtiers and politicians have been establishing contacts and forging alliances between London and Hanover. This has had the side-effect of throwing into high relief a long-simmering dispute between Sir Isaac Newton—the preëminent English scientist, the President of the Royal Society, and Master of the Royal Mint at the Tower of London—and Leibniz, a privy councilor and old friend of Sophie, and tutor to Princess Caroline. Ostensibly this conflict is about which of the two men first invented the calculus, but in truth it has deeper roots. Newton and Leibniz are both Christians, troubled that many of their fellow Natural Philosophers perceive a conflict between the mechanistic world-view of science and the tenets of their faith. Both men have developed theories to harmonize science and religion. Newton’s is based on the ancient proto-science of Alchemy and Leibniz’s is based on a theory of time, space, and matter called Monadology. They are radically different and probably irreconcilable.

Princess Caroline wishes to head off any possible conflict between the world’s two greatest savants, and the political and religious complications that would ensue from it. She has asked Daniel, who is an old friend of both Newton and Leibniz, to journey back to England, leaving his young wife and their little boy in Boston, and mediate the dispute. Daniel, knowing Newton’s vindictiveness, sees this as foreordained to fail, but agrees to give it a try, largely because he is impoverished and the Princess has held out the incentive of a large life insurance policy.

Daniel departs from Boston on Minerva, a Dutch East Indiaman (a heavily armed merchant ship). Detained along the New England coast by contrary winds, she falls under attack in Cape Cod Bay from the formidable pirate-fleet of Captain Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard, who somehow knows that Dr. Waterhouse is on board Minerva, and demands that her Captain, Otto Van Hoek, hand him over. Captain Van Hoek, who loathes pirates even more than the typical merchant-captain, elects to fight it out, and bests Teach’s pirate fleet in a day-long engagement.

Minerva crosses the Atlantic safely but is caught in a storm off the southwest corner of England and nearly cast away on the Isles of Scilly. Late in December she puts in at Plymouth for repairs. Dr. Waterhouse goes ashore intending to travel to London by land. In Plymouth he encounters a family friend named Will Comstock.

Will is the grandson of John Comstock, a Tory nobleman who fought against Cromwell in the middle of the previous century and, after the Restoration, came back to England and helped found the Royal Society. Subsequently, John was disgraced and forced to retire from public life, partly through the machinations of his (much younger) distant cousin and bitter rival, Roger Comstock. Daniel served as a tutor in Natural Philosophy to one of the sons of John. This son later moved to Connecticut and established an estate there. Will was born and grew up on that estate but has lately moved back to England, where he has found a home in the West Country. He is a moderate Tory who has recently been created Earl of Lostwithiel. Queen Anne has recently been forced to create a large number of such titles in order to pack the House of Lords with Tories, the party that she currently favors.

Daniel has spent the twelve days of Christmas with Will’s family at his seat near Lostwithiel, and Will has talked him into making a small detour en route to London.

Book 6

Solomon’s Gold

Dartmoor

15 JANUARY 1714

In life there is nothing more foolish than inventing.

—JAMES WATT

“MEN HALF YOUR AGE and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold,” said the Earl of Lostwithiel, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and Rider of the Forest and Chase of Dartmoor, to one of his two fellow-travelers.

The wind had paused, as though Boreas had exhausted his lungs and was drawing in a new breath of air from somewhere above Iceland. So the young Earl was able to say this in matter-of-fact tones. “Mr. Newcomen and I are very glad of your company, but—”

The wind struck them all deaf, as though the three men were candle-flames to be blown out. They staggered, planted their downwind feet against the black, stony ground, and leaned into it. Lostwithiel shouted: “We’ll not think you discourteous if you return to my coach!” He nodded to a black carriage stopped along the track a short distance away, rocking on its French suspension. It had been artfully made to appear lighter than it was, and looked as if the only thing preventing it from tumbling end-over-end across the moor was the motley team of draught-horses harnessed to it, shaggy manes standing out horizontally in the gale.

“I am astonished that you should call this an extremity of cold,” answered the old man. “In Boston, as you know, this would pass without remark. I am garbed for Boston.” He was shrouded in a rustic leather cape, which he parted in the front to reveal a lining pieced together from the pelts of many raccoons. “After that passage through the intestinal windings of the Gorge of Lyd, we are all in want of fresh air—especially, if I read the signs rightly, Mr. Newcomen.”

That was all the leave Thomas Newcomen wanted. His face, which was as pale as the moon, bobbed once, which was as close as this Dartmouth blacksmith would ever come to a formal bow. Having thus taken his leave, he turned his broad back upon them and trudged quickly downwind. Soon he became hard to distinguish from the numerous upright boulders—which might be read as a comment on his physique, or on the gloominess of the day, or on the badness of Daniel’s eyesight.

“The Druids loved to set great stones on end,” commented the Earl. “For what purpose, I cannot imagine.”

“You have answered the question by asking it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dwelling as they did in this God-forsaken place, they did it so that men would come upon these standing stones two thousand years after they were dead, and know they had been here. The Duke of Marlborough, throwing up that famous Pile of Blenheim Palace, is no different.”

The Earl of Lostwithiel felt it wise to let this pass without comment. He turned and kicked a path through some stiff withered grass to a strange up-cropping of lichen-covered stone. Following him, Daniel understood it as one corner of a ruined building. The ground yielded under their feet. It was spread thin over a shambles of tumbledown rafters and disintegrating peat-turves. Anyway the angle gave them shelter from the wind.

“Speaking now in my capacity as Lord Warden of the Stannaries, I welcome you to Dartmoor, Daniel Waterhouse, on behalf of the Lord of the Manor.”

Daniel sighed. “If I’d been in London the last twenty years, keeping up with my Heraldic Arcana, and going to tea with the Bluemantle Pursuivant, I would know who the hell that was. But as matters stand—”

“Dartmoor was created part of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1338, and as such became part of the possessions of the Prince of Wales—a title created by King Edward I in—”

“So in a roundabout way, you are welcoming me on behalf of the Prince of Wales,” Daniel said abruptly, in a bid to yank the Earl back before he rambled any deeper into the labyrinth of feudal hierarchy.

“And the Princess. Who, if the Hanovers come, shall be—”

“Princess Caroline of Ansbach. Yes. Her name keeps coming up. Did she send you to track me down in the streets of Plymouth?”

The Earl looked a little wounded. “I am the son of your old friend. I encountered you by luck. My surprise was genuine. The welcome given you by my wife and children was unaffected. If you doubt it, come to our house next Christmas.”

“Then why do you go out of your way to bring up the Princess?”

“Only because I wish to be plain-spoken. Where you are going next it is all intrigue. There is a sickness of the mind that comes over those who bide too long in London, which causes otherwise rational men to put forced and absurd meanings on events that are accidental.”

“I have observed that sickness in full flower,” Daniel allowed, thinking of one man in particular.

“I do not wish you to think, six months from now, when you become aware of all this, ‘Aha, the Earl of Lostwithiel was nothing more than a cat’s paw for Caroline—who knows what other lies he may have told me!’ ”

“Very well. For you to disclose it now exhibits wisdom beyond your years.”

“Some would call it timidity originating in the disasters that befell my father, and his father.”

“I do not take that view of it,” Daniel said curtly.

He was startled by bulk and motion to one side, and feared it was a standing-stone toppled by the wind; but it was only Thomas Newcomen, looking a good deal pinker. “God willing, that carriage-ride is the closest I shall ever come to a sea-voyage!” he declared.

“May the Lord so bless you,” Daniel returned. “In the storms of the month past, we were pitched and tossed about so much that all hands were too sick to eat for days. I went from praying we would not run aground, to praying that we would.” Daniel paused to draw breath as the other two laughed. Newcomen had brought out a clay-pipe and tobacco-pouch, and Lostwithiel now did the same. The Earl clapped his hands to draw his coachman’s eye, and signalled that fire should be brought out.

Daniel declined the tobacco with a wave of his hand. “One day that Indian weed will kill more white men, than white men have killed Indians.”

“But not today,” Newcomen said.

If this fifty-year-old blacksmith seemed strangely blunt and direct in the presence of an Earl, it was because he and that Earl had been working together for a year, building something. “The balance of the voyage was easier, I trust, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“When the weather lifted, those horrid rocks were in sight. As we sailed past them, we said a prayer for Sir Cloudesley Shovell and the two thousand soldiers who died there coming home from the Spanish front. And seeing men at work on the shore, we took turns peering through a perspective-glass, and saw them combing the strand with rakes.”

The Earl nodded knowingly at this and so Daniel turned towards Newcomen, who looked curious—though, come to think of it, he always looked curious when he was not in the middle of throwing up. “You see,” Daniel continued, “many a ship has gone down near the Isles of Scilly laden with Pieces of Eight, and sometimes a great tempest will cause the sea to vomit up silver onto dry land.”

The unfortunate choice of verb caused the blacksmith to flinch. The Earl stepped in with a little jest: “That’s the only silver that will find its way onto English soil as long as the Mint over-pays for gold.”

“I wish I had understood as much when I reached Plymouth!” Daniel said. “All I had in my purse was Pieces of Eight. Porters, drivers, innkeepers leapt after them like starving dogs—I fear I paid double or treble for everything at first.”

“What embarrassed you in Plymouth inns, may enrich you here, a few miles north,” said the Earl.

“It does not seem a propitious location,” Daniel said. “The poor folk who lived here could not even keep their roof off the floor.”

“No one lived here—this was what the Old Men call a jews-house. It means that there was a lode nearby,” said the Earl.

Newcomen added, “Over yonder by that little brook I saw the ruins of a trip-hammer, for crushing the shode.” Having got his pipe lit, he thrust his free hand into a pocket and pulled out a black stone about the size of a bun. He let it roll into Daniel’s hand. It was heavy, and felt colder than the air. “Feel its weight, Dr. Waterhouse. That is black tin. Such was brought here, where we are standing, and melted in a peat-fire. White tin ran out the bottom into a box hewn from granite, and when it cooled, what came out was a block of the pure metal.”

The Earl had his pipe blazing now too, which gave him a jovial, donnish affect, in spite of the fact that (1) he was all of twenty-three years old, and (2) he was wearing clothes that had gone out of fashion three hundred years ago, and furthermore was bedizened with diverse strange ancient artifacts, viz. some heraldic badges, a tin peat-saw, and a tiny bavin of scrub-oak twigs. “This is where I enter into it, or rather my predecessors do,” he remarked. “The block tin would be packed down the same sort of appalling road we just came up, to one of the four Stannary towns.” The Earl paused to grope among the clanking array of fetishes dangling from chains round his neck, and finally came up with a crusty old chisel-pointed hammer which he waved menacingly in the air—and unlike most Earls, he looked as if he might have actually used a hammer for some genuine purpose during his life. “The assayer would remove a corner from each block, and test its purity. An archaic word for ‘corner’ is ‘coign,’ whence we get, for example, ‘quoin’—”

Daniel nodded. “The wedge that gunners use, aboard ship, to elevate a cannon, is so called.”

“This came to be known as quoinage. And thence, our queer English word ‘coin,’ which bears no relation to any French or Latin words, or German. Our Continental friends say, loosely translated, ‘a piece of money,’ but we English—”

“Stop.”

“Is my discourse annoying to you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Only insofar as I like you, Will, and have liked you since I met you as a lad. You have always seemed of a level head. But I fear you are going the way of Alchemists and Autodidacts now. You were about to declare that English money is different, and that its difference inheres in the purity of the metal, and is signified in the very word ‘coin.’ But I assure you that Frenchmen and Germans know what money is. And to think otherwise is to let Toryism overcome sound judgment.”

“When you put it that way, it does sound a bit silly,” the Earl said, cheerfully enough. Then he mused, “Perhaps that is why I have felt it necessary to make this journey with a blacksmith on one hand, and a sixty-seven-year-old Doctor on the other—to lend some gravity to the proposal.”

By gestures so subtle and tasteful that they were almost subliminal, the Earl led them to understand that it was time they were underway. They returned to the coach, though the Earl lingered for a few moments on the running board to exchange civil words with a small posse of gentleman riders who had just come up out of the Gorge and recognized the arms painted on the carriage door.

For a quarter of an hour they trundled along in silence, the Earl gazing out an open window. The horizon was far away, smooth and gently varying except where it was shattered by peculiar hard shapes: protruding rocks, called Tors, shaped variously like schooners or Alchemists’ furnaces or fortress-ramparts or mandibles of dead beasts.

“You put a stop to my discourse and quite rightly, Dr. Waterhouse. I was being glib,” said the young Earl. “But there is nothing glib about this Dartmoor landscape, or would you disagree?”

“Plainly not.”

“Then let the landscape say eloquently what I could not.”

“What is it saying?”

By way of an answer, Will reached into a breast-pocket and pulled out a leaf of paper covered with writing. Angling this toward the window, he read from it. “The ancient tumuli, pagan barrows, Pendragon-battlegrounds, Druid-altars, Roman watch-towers, and the gouges in the earth wrought by the Old Men progressing west-to-east across the land, retracing the path of the Great Flood in their search for tin; all of it silently mocks London. It says that before there were Whigs and Tories, before Roundheads and Cavaliers, Catholics and Protestants—nay, before Normans, Angles, and Saxons, long before Julius Cæsar came to this island, there existed this commerce, a deep subterranean flow, a chthonic pulse of metal through primeval veins that grew like roots in the earth before Adam. We are only fleas gorging our petty appetites on what courses through the narrowest and most superficial capillaries.” He looked up.

“Who wrote that?” Daniel asked.

“I did,” said Will Comstock.

Crockern Tor

LATER THAT DAY

SO MANY BOULDERS PROTRUDED through the moth-eaten tarp of dirt stretched over this land, that they had to stop and alight from the carriage, which had become more trouble than it was worth. They must either walk, or ride on arguably domesticated Dartmoor ponies. Newcomen walked. Daniel elected to ride. He was ready to change his mind if the pony turned out to be as ill-tempered as it looked. The ground underfoot was a wildly treacherous composite of boulders, and grass-tufts as soft as goose-down pillows. The pony’s attention was so consumed by deciding, from moment to moment, where it should place all four of its hooves, that it seemed to forget there was an old man on its back. The track ran north parallel to a small water-course below and to their left. It was only visible about a third of the time, but helpfully marked out by a breadcrumb-trail of steaming horse-patties left by those who had gone before them.

The stone walls that rambled over this land were so old that they were shot through with holes where stones had fallen out, and their tops, far from running straight and level, leaped and faltered. He would phant’sy he was in an abandoned country if it weren’t for the little pellets of sheep dung rolling away under Newcomen’s footsteps and crunching beneath the soles of his boots. On certain hilltops grew spruce forests, as fine and dense and soft-looking as the pelts of Arctic mammals. When the wind gusted through these, a sound issued from them that was like icy water hurrying over sharp stones. But most of the land was covered with heather, gone scab-colored for the winter. There the wind was silent, except for the raucous buller that it made as it banged around in the porches of Daniel’s ears like a drunk burglar.

Of a sparse line of Tors stretching north over the horizon, Crockern was the smallest, humblest, and most convenient to the main road—which was probably why it had been chosen. It looked not so much like a Tor as like the stump and the crumbs left behind after a proper Tor had been chopped down and hauled away. They broke out onto the top of the moor and saw it above them. The men and horses huddling in its lee enabled them to judge its size and distance: farther away and higher up-hill than they had hoped, as was the case with all hard-to-reach destinations. It felt as though they had toiled for hours, and got nowhere, but when Daniel turned around and looked back at the way they had come, its many long meanders, which he had hardly noticed at the time, were all compressed so that they looked like the fingers of two interlaced fists.

The Tors were out-croppings of layered rocks of the kind that Leibniz thought were built up in riverbeds. Wind had eaten out soft layers to make them flattened lozenges piled atop each other in teetering stacks that leaned together for support—like piles of time-rounded books made in a library by a scholar who was trying to find something. Remnants of fallen ones were scattered down-hill for some distance, half-sunk into the ground at crazy angles, like three-volume treatises hurled into the ground in disgust. The wind only became stronger as they went up; small brown birds flapped their wings as hard as they could and yet fell behind this invisible currency in the air, so that they moved slowly backwards past Daniel.

Daniel estimated that two hundred and fifty gentlemen had answered the Earl’s summons, and gathered in the lee of the Tor. But in this place, that many men seemed like ten thousand. Few of them had bothered to dismount. For whatever sort of folk their forebears might have been, these truly were modern gentlemen, and they were as out of their rightful place, here, as Daniel was. The only man who seemed at home was the blacksmith, Thomas Newcomen, who looked like a chip off the old Tor as he stood to the side, broad shoulders an umbrella against the wind, scabby hands in pockets. Daniel saw him now for what he was, a Dwarf out of some Saxon ring-saga.

Between Stones and Wind this Tor ought by right to be dominated by elements of Earth and Air, if he were disposed to think like an Alchemist; but to him it seemed more a watery place. The wind sucked heat from his body as swiftly as snow-melt. The air (compared to the miasmas of cities) had a clarity and cleanliness, and the landscape a washed, lapidary quality, that made him feel as if he were standing on the bottom of a clear New England river at the moment when the ice broke up in the spring. So Water it was; but the presence of Thomas Newcomen spoke of Fire as well, for a Dwarf was never far from his Forge.

“Do not mistake me, I would fain be of service to the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire,” Daniel had insisted, on the twelfth day of Christmas, after Newcomen had stoked the boiler, and the Engine he had wrought, sucking and hissing like a dragon, had begun to pump water up out of Lostwithiel’s mill-pond, and into a cistern on the roof of his house. “But I do not have money.”

“Consider that stop-cock by which Mr. Newcomen brings the machine to life,” the Earl had said, pointing to a hand-forged valve-wheel mounted on a pipe. “Does that stop-cock make steam?”

“Of course not. Steam is generated in the boiler.”

“The trade of this country is a boiler that raises all the steam—which is to say, all the capital—we require. What is wanted is a valve,” the Earl had said, “a means of conducting some of that capital into an engine where it may do something useful.”

THE JUMBLE OF SHRUGGED-OFF slabs afforded natural benches, podia, lecterns, and balconies that served the tin-men as well as the same furnishings in a proper meeting-house. The Court of Stannary was convened there, as it had been for half a millennium, by reading certain decrees of King Edward I. Immediately the most senior of the gentleman of this Tin Parliament stepped forward and proposed that they adjourn, without delay, to a certain nearby Inn, the Saracen’s Head, where (Daniel inferred) refreshments were to be had. This was proposed without the least suspicion that it would be refused. ’Twas like the moment at a wedding when the Priest polls the congregation for objections to the union. But the Earl of Lostwithiel astonished them all by refusing.

He had been seated on a mossy bench of stone. Now he clambered up onto it and delivered the following remarks.

“His Majesty King Edward I decreed that this Court meet in this place, and it has been phant’sied ever since that he did simply thrust the royal finger at a Map, indicating a place equidistant from the four Stannary Towns that surround the Moor, and never suspecting that by so doing he was choosing one of the most remote and horrible places in Britain. And so it is customary to adjourn to the comforts of Tavistock, on the supposition that the King of yore would never have intended for his gentlemen to hold their deliberations in a place like this. But I give King Edward I more credit. I daresay that he had a suspicion of Courts and Parliaments and that he wanted his Tin-men to spend their days in producing metal and not in carrying on tedious disputes, and perhaps forming Cabals. So he chose this place by design, to shorten our deliberations. I say that we ought to remain here, and profit from the King’s wisdom. For the tin and copper trades have fallen on hard times, the mines are flooded, and we have no real business to transact, other than what we gin up. I mean to gin some up now, and to go about it directly.

“My grandfather was John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom, and the scion of that branch of our ancient line, known vulgarly as the Silver Comstocks. As you know he came to ruin, and my father, Charles, fared little better, and even had to leave over the Earldom and immigrate to America when James I was overthrown. I make no bones about my ancestors.

“But even those of you who suppose that we are Jacobites (which we are not) and call us inveterate Tories (which we are) and who say that Queen Anne made me an Earl, only to pack the House of Lords with Tories when she needed to break Marlborough’s power (which may be true)—I say, even those among you who think nothing of me and my line, except what is deprecating and false, must know of the Royal Society. And if you think well of that Society and its works—as every sapient gentleman must—you may not take it amiss, if I remind you of the old connexions between that Society and my grandfather. John Comstock, though wedded to many of the old ways, was also a forward-thinking Natural Philosopher, who introduced the manufacture of gunpowder to England, and whose great distinction it was to serve as the first President of the Royal Society. During the Plague Year he succoured them as well, by offering them refuge on his estate at Epsom, where discoveries too many to list were made by John Wilkins, by the late Robert Hooke, and by him who stands at my right hand: Dr. Daniel Waterhouse, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Society, and Chancellor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts. Dr. Waterhouse has very recently re-crossed the Atlantic and is even now on his way to London to confer with Sir Isaac Newton…”

The mention of Daniel’s name caused a sparse ripple of curiosity to propagate through the company of cold, irritable Gentlemen. The mention of Isaac’s created a sensation. Daniel suspected this had less to do with Isaac’s invention of the calculus than with the fact that he was running the Mint. The suspicion was confirmed by the next words of William Comstock, Earl of Lostwithiel: “It has been years since silver coins were to be seen in the market-places of this land. As many as are minted are taken to the furnaces of the money-goldsmiths and made over into bullion and sent into the East. Golden guineas are the currency of England now; but that is too great a denomination for common folk to use in their dealings. Smaller coins are wanted. Will they be minted of copper? Or of tin?”

“Copper,” shouted a few voices, but they were immediately drowned out by hundreds shouting, “Tin!”

“Never mind, never mind, ’tis no concern of ours, for our mines will not produce!” proclaimed the Earl. “Else, we would have never so much to talk about. To the Saracen’s Head we should adjourn, so as not to starve or freeze during our deliberations. But as all of our mines are flooded with water, the copper, or the tin, for the next English coinage shall perforce be imported from abroad. ’Twill be of no concern and no profit to us. The doings of this ancient Parliament shall remain a mere antiquarian curiosity; and so why not convene for a few ticks of the clock on a freezing moor, and have done with it?

“Unless—gentlemen—we can pump the water out of our mines. I know how you will object, saying, ‘Nay, we have tried man-engines, horse-engines, mill-wheels and windmills, none of them profit us!’ Even though I am not a miner, gentlemen, I understand these facts. One who understands them better is this fellow standing at my left hand, Mr. Thomas Newcomen, of Dartmouth, who being an humble man styles himself blacksmith and ironmonger. Those of you who have bought mining-tools from him know him thus. But I have seen him work on mechanical prodigies that are, to a mining-pick, as the Concertos of Herr Handel are to the squeaking of a rusty wheel, and I recognize him by the title of Engineer.

“Now, those of you who have seen the apparatus of Mr. Savery may hold a low opinion of engines for raising water by fire; but that of Mr. Newcomen, though it comes under the same patent as Mr. Savery’s, works on altogether different principles—as is evidenced by the fact that it works. Dr. Waterhouse is plucking at my sleeve, I can keep him quiet no longer.”

This came as a surprise to Daniel, but he did in fact find something to say. “During the Plague Year I tutored this man’s father, the young Charles Comstock, in Natural Philosophy, and we spent many hours studying the compression and rarefaction of gases in the engines conceived by Mr. Boyle, and perfected by Mr. Hooke; the lesson was not lost on young Charles; two score years later he passed it on to young Will at their farm in Connecticut, and it was my very great pleasure to visit them there, from time to time, and to witness those lessons being taught so perfectly that no Fellow of the Royal Society could have added what was wanting, nor subtracted what was false. Will took up those lessons well. Fate returned him to England. Providence supplied him with a lovely Devonshire wife. The Queen gave him an Earldom. But it was Fortune, I believe, that brought him together with the Engineer, Mr. Newcomen. For in the Engine that Newcomen has fabricated at Lostwithiel, the seed that was planted at Epsom during the Plague, England’s darkest hour, has flourished into a tree, whose branches are now bending ’neath the burgeoning weight of green Fruit; and if you would care to eat of it, why, all you need do is water that Tree a little, and presently the apples shall fall into your hands.”

From this, most of the gentlemen understood that they were about to be dunned for Contributions, or, as they were styled in those days, Investments. Between that, and hypothermia, and saddle-sores, the response was more tepid than it might have been. But Will Comstock had their attention. “Now one may see why I did not adjourn this Court to the Saracen’s Head. Our purpose is to set prices, and transact other business relating to tin-quoinage. And as the Old Men were exempt in several ways from Common Law, and common taxation, this Court has long met to supersede and overrule the ones that held sway over the rest of England. Without capital, Mr. Newcomen’s engine will remain nothing more than a curiosity that fills my cistern. The mines shall remain inundated. Neither copper nor tin shall come out of them, and this Court shall lose standing, and have no business to transact. On the other hand, if there is some interest among you Gentlemen of Devon—to speak plainly, if a few of you would care to purchase shares in the joint stock company known as the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire—why, then, the bleak situation I have just described is overturned, you shall have purchased a Revolution, and this Court will be a busy one indeed, with little choice but to adjourn to that merry Inn down the road—where, by the way, the first two rounds of drinks will be paid for by your humble and obedient servant.”

The Saracen’s Head

THAT EVENING

“NOW YOU WILL BE a Tory, in the eyes of certain Whigs,” Will warned him, “and a butt for all the envenomed Darts of Party Malice.”

“It is merely a repetition of when I departed my father’s house on Holborn during the Plague, and went to seek refuge at Epsom,” Daniel said wearily. “Or when I became part of King James’s court—in part, at the urging of your father. It is ever thus, when I have dealings with a Comstock…”

“With a Silver Comstock,” Will corrected him. “Or a Tin one, as they have taken to calling me in Parliament.”

“Being a Tory has its perquisites, though,” Daniel allowed. “Mr. Threader has very courteously offered to convey me to London, departing tomorrow. He is going thither on business.”

The Earl looked a bit queasy. “And you have gratefully accepted?”

“I saw no reason not to.”

“Then know that Tories have their factions too, and parties within the party—”

“And Party Malice?”

“And party malice. Though within a party—as within a family—the malice is more strange, and frequently worse. Dr. Waterhouse, as you know, I am my father’s third son. I spent a good deal of time getting beaten up by my elders, and quite lost my savour for it. I was reluctant to be made a Tory lord, because I knew it would lead to more of the same—” Here his gaze broke free of Daniel’s, and wandered round the Inn until it had sought out Mr. Threader, who was holding court with several gentlemen in a corner, saying nothing, but listening, and writing in a book with a quill.

Will continued, “But I said yes to the Queen, because she was—is—my Queen. Many blows have landed on me since, from Whigs and from Jacobite Tories alike, but the two hundred miles of bad road between here and London act as a sort of padding to lessen their severity. You enjoy the same benefit here; but the moment you climb into Mr. Threader’s coach, and begin to put miles behind you—”

“I understand,” Daniel said. “But those blows do not hurt me, because I am followed around—some would say, haunted—by a long train of angels and miracles that account for my having survived to such a great age. I think that this explains why I was chosen for this work: either I am living a charmed life, or else I have overstayed my welcome on this Planet; either way, my destiny’s in London.”

Southern England

LATE JANUARY 1714

TRUE TO HIS WORD, Mr. Threader—or, to be precise, Mr. Threader’s train of carts, coaches, spare horses, and blokes on horseback—collected Daniel from the Saracen’s Head on the morning of 16 January 1714, hours before even the most optimistic rooster would be moved to crow. Daniel was proffered with a courtly bow, and accepted with sincere reluctance, the distinction of riding with Mr. Threader himself in his personal coach.

As Daniel’s person had been deemed so worthy, his baggage (three sea-trunks, two of which sported bullet-holes) merited placement on the cart that followed right behind the coach. Getting it there was not to be achieved without a few minutes’ unpacking and rearranging.

Daniel stayed outside to observe this, not because he was worried (the luggage had survived worse) but because it gave him a last opportunity to stretch his legs, which was something he had to do frequently, to prevent his knees from congealing. He doddered round the Inn’s stable-yard trying to dodge manure-piles by moon-light. The porters had unpacked from the wagon a matched set of three wooden boxes whose deeply polished wood harvested that light and raked it together into a pattern of gleams. They were expertly dovetailed together at the corners, and furnished with pretty hardware: hinges, locks, and handles made to look like natural swirlings of acanthus-leaves and other flora beloved of ancient Roman interior decorators. Behind them on the cart was a row of peculiarly tiny strong-boxes, some no larger than tobacco-chests.

The three wooden cases put Daniel in mind of the ones commissioned by the more well-heeled Fellows of the Royal Society for storage and transportation of scientific prodigies. When Hooke had made the Rarefying Engine for Boyle, Boyle caused such a box to be made to carry it round in, to emphasize its great significance.

In his laboratory in the cupola of Bedlam, Hooke had used Comstock gunpowder to drive the piston of such an engine, and had shown it could do work—or in Hooke-language, that it could give service as an artificial muscle. That was because Hooke the cripple had wanted to fly, and knew that neither his muscles nor anyone else’s were strong enough. Hooke knew that there were certain vapors, issuing e.g. from mines, that would burn with great violence, and hoped to learn the art of generating them and of conducting them into a cylinder to drive a piston—which would be an improvement on the gunpowder. But Hooke had other concerns to distract him, and Daniel had distractions of his own that led him apart from Hooke, and if Hooke’s artificial muscles had ever been perfected, Daniel had never seen them, nor heard about them. Now Newcomen was finally doing it; but his machines were great brutish contraptions, reflecting the fact that Newcomen was a blacksmith to miners where Hooke had been a watchmaker to Kings.

That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations. And to become involved, at this late date, with the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, hardly simplified matters! Perhaps he was being too hard on himself, though. He was of an age where it was never possible to pursue one errand at a time. He must do many at once. He guessed that people who had lived right and arranged things properly must have it all rigged so that all of their quests ran in parallel, and reinforced and supported one another just so. They gained reputations as conjurors. Others found their errands running at cross purposes and were never able to do anything; they ended up seeming mad, or else perceived the futility of what they were doing and gave up, or turned to drink. Daniel was not yet certain which category he was in, but he suspected he’d find out soon enough. So he tried to forget about Hooke—which was difficult, since Daniel was still carrying his bladder-stone around in one pocket, and Hooke’s watch in the other—and got into the coach with Mr. Threader.

Mr. Threader bid him good morning and then slid down the coach’s window and made some remarks to his entourage, the general import of which was that they ought all to begin moving in the direction of London. This command was received much too cheerfully, as if going to London were a sudden brilliant improvisation of Mr. Threader’s. Movement commenced; and so it came to pass that on the evening of the 16th they found themselves slightly less far away from London than they had been at the start, and on the evening of the 17th, slightly less distant still. They lost ground on the 18th. Progress on the 19th was debatable. Certain days (as when they wandered north to the suburbs of Bristol) they might have been vulnerable to the accusation that they were not making any progress whatsoever.

Daniel’s father, Drake Waterhouse, had once moved his person, two horses, a pistol, some bags of oats, a Geneva Bible, and a sack containing eleven hundred pounds sterling from York to London—a distance comparable to the one Daniel was attempting to cover with Mr. Threader—in a single day. And this at the height of the Civil War, when roads were so muddy, and canals so murky, as to erase the distinction. That ride, and others like it, had become proverbial among Puritan traders: examplars of Industry. Mr. Threader, by contrast, played the slothful tortoise to Drake’s enterprising hare. On the first day of the journey, they stopped no fewer than five times so that Mr. Threader could engage in lengthy conversations with gentlemen who surprised them along the way—in all cases, gentlemen who happened to have been in attendance at the Court of Stannary the day before.

Daniel had just begun to form the idea that Mr. Threader was not of sound mind, when, during the last of these conversations, his ears picked up the sounds of coins in collision.

Daniel had come well stocked with books, borrowed from Lostwithiel’s small but colorful library. He began reading his way through them, and gave little further thought to Mr. Threader’s activities for the next several days. But he saw and heard things, which was a grievous distraction for one who was suffering from the particular form of anti-senility troubling Daniel.

Just as the end of a Parishioner’s life was announced by the tolling of the church-bell, so the demise of a Threader-conversation was invariably signalled by the music of coins: never the shrill clashing of farthings and Spanish bits, but the thick, liquid clacking of English golden guineas hefted in Mr. Threader’s hand. This was a nervous habit of Mr. Threader’s. Or so Daniel guessed, since he obviously was not doing it to be tasteful. Once, Daniel actually caught him juggling a pair of guineas one-handed, with his eyes closed; when he opened his eyes, and realized Daniel was watching, he stuffed one coin into the left, and the other into the right, pocket of his coat.

By the time they had got past Salisbury Plain en route to the suburbs of Southampton, and thereby put all strange Druidic monuments behind them, Daniel had learned what to expect from a day on the road with Mr. Threader. They traveled generally on good roads through prosperous country—nothing remarkable in itself, save that Daniel had never in his life seen roads so excellent and country so thriving. England was now as different from the England of Drake, as Île-de-France was from Muscovy. They never went into the cities. Sometimes they would graze a suburb, but only to call upon some stately manor-house that had formerly stood all by itself in the country (or had been made, in recent times, to look like such a house). In general, though, Mr. Threader hewed to the open country, and sniffed out the seats of gentle and noble families, where he was never expected but invariably welcome. He carried no goods and performed no obvious services. He dealt, rather, in conversation. Several hours of each day were devoted to talking. After each conversation he would retire, clinking pleasantly, to his carriage, and open up a great Book—not a ledger (which would be tasteless) but a simple Waste-Book of blank pages—and joggle down a few cryptical notations with a quill pen. He peered at his diary through tiny lenses, looking somewhat like a preacher who made up the scripture as he went along—an Evangelist of some gospel that was none the less pagan for being extremely genteel. This illusion, however, diminished as they drew (at length) closer to London, and he began to dress more brilliantly, and to bother with periwigs. These, which would have been ornaments on most humans, were impenetrable disguises on Mr. Threader. Daniel put this down to the man’s utter lack of features. On careful inspection one could discover a nose in the center of the fleshy oval that topped Mr. Threader’s neck, and working outwards from there, find the other bits that made up a face. But without such diligent observations, Mr. Threader was a meat tabula rasa, like the exposed cliff of a roast beef left by the carver’s knife. Daniel at first took Mr. Threader for a man of about three score years, though as the days went on, he began to suspect that Mr. Threader was older than that, and that age, like a monkey trying to scale a mirror, simply had not been able to find any toe-hold on that face.

Southampton was a great sea-port, and since Mr. Threader obviously had something to do with money, Daniel assumed they would go to it—just as he had assumed, a few days before, that they would go into Bristol. But instead of Bristol, they had traced a hyperbola around Bath, and instead of Southampton, they grazed Winchester. Mr. Threader, it seemed, felt more comfortable with cities that had actually been laid down by the Romans, and viewed the newfangled port-towns as little better than hovels thrown up by Pictish hunter-gatherers. Recoiling from salt water, they now set a course, not precisely for Oxford, but for a lot of tiny places between Winchester and Oxford that Daniel had never heard of.

Now, Daniel was not being held captive; Mr. Threader even tendered apologies to him more than once, and offered to put him on a hired coach to London. But this only made Daniel want to see it through with present company. (1) Partly it was class. To leap out of Mr. Threader’s excellent carriage and dash off to London in a grubby hack-coach would be to admit that he was in a hurry—which, in Mr. Threader’s crowd, was not done. (2) He had been worried, anyway, about his knees locking up if he were forced to sit for a long time; which would be true, axiomatically, in an efficient coach. The leisurely itinerary of Mr. Threader was just the one Daniel would have chosen, had he been afforded the power to choose. (3) He was not in a hurry anyway. According to what Enoch Root had confided to him in Boston, his summons from the Princess had been a single mote in a storm of activity that had broken in the Court of Hanover in the late spring and early summer of the year just concluded, after the signing of the Peace of Utrecht had brought the War of the Spanish Succession to an end, and got all the Princes and Parliaments of Europe thinking about what they were going to do with the rest of the Eighteenth Century. Caroline could be made the Princess of Wales, and Daniel’s errand could suddenly be imbued with all sorts of import and urgency, by two deaths—Queen Anne’s and Sophie’s. Perhaps Caroline had, at that time, had reasons to expect the former, and to fear the latter. Accordingly, she had begun to set her pieces out on the board, and dispatched her summons to Daniel. But both Anne and Sophie were still alive, as far as Daniel knew. So he was not even a pawn yet. ’Twere pointless, as well as self-important, to rush to London, so long as he was on the island, and able to reach the city on short notice. Better to take his time and to see that island, so that he would better understand how things were, and be a more competent pawn when the time came. Through the windows of Mr. Threader’s carriage he was viewing a country almost as strange to him as Japan. It was not only England’s unwonted peace and prosperity that made it strange to him. Too, it was that he was viewing places that Puritans and Professors did not get invited to. Since Daniel had never seen those places, he tended to forget they existed, and to discount the importance of the people who lived in them. But this was a mistake, which would make him a very poor and useless pawn indeed if he did not mend it; and weak pawns were liable to be sacrificed early in the game.

They had a surprising bit of warm weather then, for a day or two. Daniel took advantage of it by getting out of that coach whenever it stopped moving. When he tired of walking, he had his great raccoon-lined cape brought out—it filled a trunk by itself—and spread upon the wet grass. There was always grass, for they always stopped in places with lawns, and it was always short, for there were always sheep. On his square of American raccoon fur he would sit and read a book or eat an apple, or lie on his back in the sun and doze. These little picnics enabled him to make further observations of Mr. Threader’s business practices, if that is what they were. From time to time, through a manor-house window, across a Great Lawn, or between sparkling fountain-streams, he would catch sight of Mr. Threader passing a scrap of paper to a gentleman, or vice versa. They looked like perfectly ordinary scraps—not engraved, like Bank of England notes, and not encumbered with pendulous wax seals like legal documents. But their passing from hand to hand was always attended with much courtesy and gravitas.

If children were present, they would follow Mr. Threader about, and, whenever he stopped moving, form up around him and look expectant. He would pretend not to notice them at first. Then, suddenly, he would reach out and snatch a penny out of some child’s ear. “Were you looking for this? Do take it—it is yours!” he’d say, holding it out, but before the little hand could grasp it, the penny would vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared, and be discovered a moment later in a dog’s mouth or under a stone, only to disappear again, &c., &c. He would drive the little ones into a frenzy of delight before finally bestowing a silver penny on each of them. Daniel hated himself for being so fascinated by what he knew to be the cheap jugglery of a carnival mountebank, but he could not help watching. How, he wondered, could the wealthy parents of these children entrust money—as they apparently did—to a prestidigitator?

On one Lawn, while he dozed, sheep came up all around him, and the sound of them grazing became a sort of continuo-line to his dreams. He opened his eyes to see a set of blunt yellow sheep-teeth tearing at the grass, inches from his face. Those teeth, and the mass of winter wool that had turned the animal into a waddling, greasy bale, struck him as most remarkable. That solely by gnawing at the turf and lapping up water, an animal could generate matter like teeth and wool!

How many sheep in England? And not just in January 1714 but in all the millennia before? Why had the island not sunk into the sea under the weight of sheep-bones and sheep-teeth? Possibly because their wool was exported—mostly to Holland—which was in fact sinking into the sea! Q.E.D.

On the 27th of January they entered a forest. Daniel was astonished by its size. He thought they were somewhere near Oxford—it went without saying that they were avoiding the city itself. He saw a fragment of Royal heraldry, but old and ivy-grown. They must be on the estate that, in his day, had been known as the Royal Manor and Park of Woodstock. But Queen Anne had given it to the Duke of Marlborough in gratitude for his winning the Battle of Blenheim, and Saving the World, ten years ago. The Queen’s intention was that a magnificent Palace was to be thrown up there for Marlborough and his descendants to dwell in. If this had been France, and the Queen had been Louis XIV, it would have been done by now—but it was England, Parliament had its knobby fingers around the Monarch’s throat, and Whigs and Tories were joined in an eternal shin-kicking contest to determine which faction should have the honor of throttling her Majesty, and how hard. In the course of which, Marlborough, a quintessential Tory, and son of a Cavalier, had somehow been painted as a Whig. Queen Anne, who had decided, very late in life, that she much preferred Tories, had stripped him of military command, and in general made life so unrewarding for him in England that he and Sarah had gone away to Northern Europe (where he was considered the greatest thing since beer) to bask in the gratitude of Protestants until such time as the Queen stopped fogging mirrors at Kensington Palace.

Knowing all of this, and knowing what he knew of construction sites and of the English climate, Daniel expected to see a lifeless morass surrounded by a slum of underemployed workers huddling under tarpaulins and drinking gin. For the most part he was not disappointed. But Mr. Threader with his genius for skirting, and his abhorrence of the center, teased Daniel by taking unmarked tracks through the woods and across meadows, opening gates and even taking down fence-rails as if he owned the place, and sniffing out the cottages and lodges where the Duke’s tame gentlemen kept records and counted coins. In glimpses between the trunks of trees (where trees still stood) or piles of timbers (where they didn’t) Daniel collected vague impressions of the Palace’s foundations, and some half-completed walls.

This divagation to Woodstock finally broke the ice—which had been very thick—between Dr. Waterhouse and Mr. Threader. It was clear that Daniel was as mysterious to Mr. Threader as the other way round. Since Threader had not been present at Crockern Tor—he had lain in wait for the Stannary Court at the Saracen’s Head—he’d not had the benefit of hearing Will Comstock’s account of the Plague Year. All Mr. Threader knew was that Daniel was a Royal Society chap. He could infer that Daniel had got in solely on account of his brains, as he was manifestly lacking in the other tickets: wealth and class.

In the early going, out in Devon where distances between fine houses were greater, Mr. Threader had not been able to restrain himself from circling round Daniel and jabbing at his outer defenses. He had somehow got it in his head that Daniel was connected to the family of Will Comstock’s bride. And to him this would make sense. Will had married the daughter of a Plymouth merchant who had grown wealthy importing wine from Portugal. But her great-grandfather had been a cooper. Will, by contrast, had noble blood, but no money. Such complementary marriages were all the rage now. Daniel was no gentleman; ergo, he must be some friend of the cooper’s folk. And so Mr. Threader had made certain dry, deadpan utterances about Will Comstock, hoping that Daniel would put his book down and unburden himself of some lacerating comments about the folly of using steam to do work. In the first few days’ travel he had bobbled such bait before Daniel, but his angling had been in vain. Since then, Daniel had kept busy reading in his books and Mr. Threader writing in his. Both men were of an age when they were in no great hurry to make friends and share confidences. Starting friendships, like opening up new overseas trade routes, was a mad venture best left to the young.

Still, from time to time, Mr. Threader would lob dry conversation-starters in Daniel’s direction. Just to be a good sport, Daniel would do the same. But neither man could accept the loss of face that attended curiosity. Daniel could not bring himself to come out and ask what Mr. Threader did for a living, as he could see that among the set who kept big houses in the country, it was perfectly obvious, and that only an idiot, or a grubby Whig, would not know. Mr. Threader, for his part, wanted to know how Daniel was connected to the Earl of Lostwithiel. To him, it was monstrously strange that an aged Natural Philosopher should materialize all of a sudden in the middle of Dartmoor, in a coonskin wrapper, and croak out a few words that would cause every gentleman in a twenty-mile radius to liquidate other holdings, and buy stock in that commercial Lunatick Asylum, the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire.

Daniel had developed two alternative hypotheses: Mr. Threader was a betting agent who roamed about taking and settling wagers. Or, Mr. Threader was a Jesuit in disguise, visiting the homes of crypto-Catholic Jacobite Tories to hear confessions and to collect tithes. The polished wooden chests, according to this hypothesis, contained communion wafers, chalices, and other Popish gear.

All of these speculations collapsed in a few minutes when Daniel saw Blenheim Palace a-building; realized whose estate they were on; and, in his astonishment, forgot himself, and blurted, “Is he here?”

“Is who here, precisely? Dr. Waterhouse?” Mr. Threader asked delicately.

“Churchill.”

“Which Churchill?” Mr. Threader asked shrewdly. For new ones were being produced all the time.

“The Duke of Marlborough.” Then Daniel came to his senses. “No. I’m sorry. Stupid question. He’s in Antwerp.”

“Frankfort.”

“He has just moved to Antwerp,” Daniel insisted.

This occurred moments before Mr. Threader went into one of Marlborough’s out-houses to do whatever it was that he did. Meanwhile Daniel meditated on the foolishness of his little outburst. Obviously the Lord of the Manor was not in residence now. Men who owned such estates did not live upon them, at least, not in January. At this time of the year they were all in London. The most important occupants of the country estates were not men, but sheep, and the most important activity was conversion of grass into wool; for wool, exported, brought revenue, and revenue, farmed, enabled gentlefolk to pay rent, buy wine, and gamble in London, all winter long.

All clear enough in its general outlines. But as Daniel had got older he had developed a greater respect for details. Mr. Threader, he suspected, was a detail.

To a merchant, England was a necklace of sea-ports surrounding a howling impoverished waste. As with a burning log on a hearth, all the warmth, color and heat lay in the outer encrustation of ruby-red coals. The interior was cold, damp, dark, and dead. The sea served the same purpose for the commerce of England as the atmosphere did for combustion of a log. Any place that the sea could not reach was of no account, save in the vastly inferior sense that it sort of held everything together structurally.

And yet England did have an interior. Daniel had quite forgotten this until he had been awakened by the sheep-teeth right in front of his face. Unlike, say, the interior of New Spain, which produced its wealth in a few highly concentrated mines, England’s countryside made its treasure in the most diffuse way imaginable. There were no wool-mines. A given swath of grass produced infinitesimal revenue. In order to arrange it so that a Lord could wager a hundred guineas on a horse-race, some kind of frightfully tedious and complicated money-gathering process would have to take place, and it would have to take place all over England, all the time, without letup. Daniel’s eyes watered, to think of the number of separate transactions that must go on, all over a given hundred-mile-square patch of English turf, in order to yield a single pound sterling of free-and-
clear income, deliverable to a Fop in London.

But at any rate it happened somehow. The recipients of those pounds sterling gathered in London, all winter long, and engaged in Intercourse. That is, money changed hands among them. In the end, a great deal of that money must make its way back out into the countryside to pay for the building and upkeep of stately houses, &c., &c.

The stupidest imaginable way of handling it would have been to gather together all of the pennies in the countryside, from millions of tributary farmsteads, and physically transport them into London; let the wagon-trains feed and water while the gentlefolk carried out their Intercourse; and then load the coins back onto the wagons and haul them back out to the country again. And perhaps that was how they did it in some countries. But England had obstinately refused to mint coins of large denominations—which was to say, gold coins—in large enough quantities to be actually useful. Anyway, such coins were too enormous for small transactions on farms. Those that were minted, tended to be snapped up by London merchants, and used for overseas trade. The true coin of England, the one ordinary folk used, had always been the silver penny. But its low value—which was precisely what made it useful in market-town and countryside—made it miserably inconvenient for gentry who wanted to live in the city. The annual systole and diastole of wealth in and out of London would require movement of vast wagon-trains laden with coins.

One never saw such traffic on English roads, though. The very idea had a Robin Hood–esque, days-of-yore ring to it. And because what was out of sight was out of mind, Daniel had never thought about what was implied by the disappearance of money-chests from the highways of modern England.

Suppose one had gained the trust of many gentlefolk in London. One could then act as an intermediary, settling their transactions in the city with a word and a handshake, without the need for bags of silver to be lugged around and heaved into the doorways of posh town-houses.

Suppose one also had many contacts in the countryside—a network, as it were, of trusted associates on all of the estates and in all of the market-towns. Then one could almost dispense with the need for hauling stamped disks of silver to and from London on the highways—but only by replacing it with a torrential, two-way flow of information.

Winged-footed Mercury, messenger of the Gods, must have very little to do nowadays, as everyone in Europe seemed to be worshipping Jesus. If he could somehow be tracked down and put on retainer and put to work flitting back and forth from city to country and back, carrying information about who owed what to whom, and if one, furthermore, had rooms full of toiling Computers, or (engaging in a bit of Speculative Fiction here) a giant Arithmetickal Engine for balancing the accounts, then most transactions could be settled by moving a quill across a page, and movement of silver across England could be cut back to the minimum needed to settle the balance between city and country.

And forget silver. Convert it to gold, and the number of wagons required would be divided by thirteen.

And if one possessed a reservoir, a money-cistern somewhere, even those movements could be reduced—one could then do calculus on the curves, and integrate them over time—

“You were right,” Mr. Threader exclaimed, climbing back into the carriage. “His Grace has indeed moved to Antwerp.”

“When Queen Anne suffered her latest Onset of Symptoms,” Daniel said absent-mindedly, “George Louis in Hanover finally got it clear in his mind that he and his mum would be responsible for the United Kingdom any day now, and that they would need an apparatus—a Council of State, and a Commander in Chief.”

“Of course he would want Marlborough for that,” said Mr. Threader, sounding just a bit scandalized. As if there was something clearly improper about the next King of England choosing the most glorious and brilliant general of English history to take the reins of the Army.

“Therefore the Duke has gone to Antwerp to renew ties with our regiments in the Low Countries, and to be ready—”

“To pounce,” Mr. Threader said.

“Some would say, to be of service, when the new reign begins, and his exile comes to an end.”

“Self-imposed exile, let us not forget.”

“He is not a fool, nor a coward—he must have felt some strong compulsion to leave his country.”

“Oh, yes, he was to be prosecuted for duelling!”

“For issuing a challenge, I was informed, to Swallow Poulett, after Mr. Poulett said, to the Duke’s face, in Parliament, that the Duke had sent his officers off to be slaughtered in hopeless Engagements, so that the Duke could then profit from re-selling their commissions.”

“Scandalous!” said Mr. Threader ambiguously. “But that is in the past. The Duke’s pretensions as to his exile, however sturdy they may have appeared to some in the past, are now wholly undermined; for I have a bit of news concerning Marlborough that I’ll wager not even you have heard, Dr. Waterhouse!”

“I am cataleptic with anticipation, Mr. Threader.”

“My lord Oxford,” said Mr. Threader (referring to Robert Harley, Lord Treasurer of the Realm, the Queen’s chief minister, and leader of the Tory Juntilla which had thrown down the Whig Juncto four years earlier), “has granted the Duke of Marlborough a warrant of ten thousand pounds to resume construction of this Palace!”

Daniel picked up a London newspaper and rattled it. “What a very odd thing for him to do, when Harley’s own Spleen, the Examiner, is jetting bile at Marlborough.” This was Daniel’s delicate way of suggesting that Harley was only throwing money at Marlborough to create a distraction while he and his henchman Bolingbroke were up to something really reprehensible. Mr. Threader, however, took it at face value. “Mr. Jonathan Swift of the Examiner is a bull-terrier,” he proclaimed, and favored the newspaper with what, by Mr. Threader’s standards, was a warm look. “Once he got his canines sunk in my lord Marlborough’s leg it was several years’ labor for my lord Oxford to pry those foaming jaws apart; never mind; Harley’s deeds speak louder than Swift’s words; those Whigs who would claim Marlborough’s virtues for their own, must now explain the matter of those ten thousand pounds.”

Daniel was about to air the observation that ten thousand pounds was a very reasonable price for the Tories to pay to get Marlborough in their camp—especially since it was not actually their money—but he curbed his tongue, sensing that there was no point. He and Mr. Threader would never agree on a thing. There was no profit to be gained by further discussion anyway, for Mr. Threader’s fascination with those ten thousand pounds was the datum that enabled Daniel to solve the equation at last.

“I wonder if we might have met before, you and I,” Daniel mused. “Long ago.”

“It must have been very long ago indeed, sir. I never forget—”

“I have perceived that about you, Mr. Threader—that you allow certain things to slip decently into the past—which is practical—but you never forget, which is prudent. In this instance you have not forgot a thing; we were not formally introduced. In the summer of 1665, I left London and went out to find refuge at Epsom. As very little traffic was moving on the roads, for fear of the plague, I had to walk from Epsom town out to John Comstock’s estate. It was rather along walk, but in no way unpleasant. I recall being overtaken by a carriage that was on its way to the manor-house. Painted upon its door was a coat of arms not familiar to me. I saw it several more times during my stay there. For even though the rest of England was immobilized—embalmed—the man who went about in that carriage would not stop moving on any account. His comings and goings were evidence, to me, that the world had not come to an end, the Apocalypse had not occurred—the hoofbeats of his team on Comstock’s carriageway were like the faint pulse in a patient’s neck, which tells the Physician that the Patient still lives…”

“Who is that madman, coming and going in the midst of the Plague,” Daniel asked, “and why does John Comstock let him into his house? The poxy bastard’ll infect us all.”

“John Comstock could not exclude that fellow any more than he could ban air from his lungs,” Wilkins said. “That is his money-scrivener.”

Mr. Threader was getting teary-eyed now, though it was a toss-up whether this was because of Daniel’s mawkish Narration, or because at long last he understood the nature of Daniel’s feeble connection to the Silver Comstocks. Daniel brought the anecdote to a swift merciful conclusion: “Unless my memory is having me off, the same arms are painted on the door of the vehicle in which we are now sitting.”

“Dr. Waterhouse, I’ll not sit still while you disparage your faculty of recollection any more, for truly, you have the memory of an elephant, sir, and it is no wonder to me that you were gathered in by the Royal Society at a tender age! Your account is without flaw; my late father, may God have mercy on his soul, had the honor of being of service to the Earl of Epsom, just as you said, and my brothers and I, during our apprenticeships, as it were, did accompany him on several of his excursions to Epsom.”

HE HAD PROMISED that they would go into London the next day, but the matter of the ten thousand changed everything. Mr. Threader was now in the same predicament as a spider who has unexpectedly caught something huge in his web, which is to say, the news was good, but much frantic scurrying around was now demanded of him. So they were detained round Oxford on the 28th and 29th of January. Again, Daniel could have got to London easily but again he resolved to see the journey through with Mr. Threader. So he nipped into Oxford and renewed friendships or, as warranted, hostilities with scholars at the University, while Mr. Threader mended the strands of his local Web, so unused to such exertions.

On the 30th, which was a Saturday, they got a late start. Daniel first had to find a hackney-carriage to take him from Oxford back out to Woodstock. There was a lot of blundering about in the woods there trying to rendezvous with Mr. Threader’s train. When he spied it, drawn up before a cottage on the edge of the wood, he saw that he was too early after all, as the horses were all in their feed-bags. He had the hackney-driver unload his trunks on the spot, so that Mr. Threader’s men could get them packed on the right cart. But Daniel himself remained in the hackney-coach, and asked the driver to continue a mile down the road and drop him off, so that he could enjoy a stroll back through the woods. If they were going to attempt to make it all the way to London today, this would be his last opportunity to stretch his legs.

The woods were pleasant enough. Spring was trying to come early. Even though branches were bare, holly and ivy provided some greenery. But the road was a slough, with puddles that would have challenged an albatross. It seemed to be cutting round the base of a rise situate between him and the cottage, and so Daniel angled away from it first chance he got, taking what looked like a game trail up onto higher and firmer ground. Reaching the top of the rise he was faintly disappointed to discover the cottage just where he had expected to find it. Decades had passed since he had enjoyed the thrill of getting lost. So down he went, and approached the little compound from its back side, and thereby saw something through a window.

The three wooden chests from Mr. Threader’s baggage cart had been brought in and unlocked. They contained scales—exquisite scales made out of gold, so that cycles of tarnishing and polishing would not, over the years, throw off their balance. In front of each scale sat one of Mr. Threader’s assistants, weighing golden coins, one at a time. Another assistant was counting the coins out of a chest and distributing them, as needed, to the weighers, who stacked the weighed coins one at a time on embroidered green felt cloths that they had unrolled on the tabletop. Each weigher was maintaining three stacks of coins; the stack in the middle tended to be higher than the other two. When a stack grew precarious it would be carried off, counted, and deposited in one of Mr. Threader’s strong-boxes. Or that was the general impression Daniel collected peering through bubbly ancient window-panes with sixty-seven-year-old eyes.

Then he remembered the warning that Will had spoken to him at the Saracen’s Head. He knew instantly that, even though he had come this way with intentions wholly innocent, and stumbled upon this scene by chance, it would never be viewed that way. He began to feel actual guilt-pangs even though he was blameless. This was a miraculous prodigy of self-shaming that was taught to young Puritans by their elders, as Gypsies taught their children to swallow fire. He skulked back into the forest like a poacher who has stumbled upon the gamekeeper’s camp, and worked his way round to the road, and approached the carts from that side, just as the scales and strong-boxes were being loaded onto the carts for transport.

They began to work their way down the gantlet of thriving river ports that crowded the brinks of the Thames. It was market-day in several of the towns they passed through, which impeded their progress, and at the end of the day they had got no farther than Windsor. This suited Mr. Threader, who perceived opportunities for conversation and profit in that district, so lousy with Viscounts, Earls, &c. Daniel was of a mind to stroll up the road to the nearby town of Slough, which was full of inns, including one or two newish-looking ones where he thought he could find decent lodgings. Mr. Threader deemed the plan insane, and watched Daniel set out on the journey with extreme trepidation, and not before Daniel had, in the presence of several witnesses, released Mr. Threader from liability. But Daniel had scarcely got himself into a good walking-rhythm before he was recognized and hailed by a local petty noble who was a Fellow of the Royal Society, and who insisted that Daniel accompany him to his house near Eton and stay the night in his guest bedchamber. Daniel accepted gladly—to the fascination of Mr. Threader, who saw it play out in the carriageway, and found it extremely singular, verging on suspicious, that a chap such as Daniel should be thus recognized and plucked out of the crowd simply because of what went on in his brain.

The next day, Sunday, January 31st, 1714, Daniel did not get breakfast, because none was served. His host had given his kitchen staff the day off. Instead he was hustled off to a splendid church between Windsor and London. It was exactly the sort of church that Drake would have set fire to with extreme prejudice during the Civil War. As a matter of fact, the longer Daniel looked at it, the more certain he became that Drake had torched it, and that Daniel had watched. No matter; as Mr. Threader would say, that was in the past. The church was vaulted with a fair new roof now. Daniel’s bum, and the bums of the noble and gentle congregants, were kept up off the stony floor by most excellent carven pews, which were rented out to the occupants at annual rates that Daniel did not dare to even think about.

This seemed like the sort of High-Flyer church where the minister would wear glorious raiments. And maybe it was. But not today. He trudged up the aisle in burlap, his head hung low, pallid knuckles locked together below his chin, dolorous musick wheezing out of the organ, played upon reed stops that mocked the rumblings of the parishioners’ empty stomachs.

’Twas a scene of pre-Norman gloom. Daniel half expected to see Vikings crash through the stained glass windows and begin raping the ladies. He was quite certain that Queen Anne must have suffered another Setback, or the French unloaded a hundred regiments of Irishmen in the Thames Estuary. But when they had got through the obligatory stuff in the beginning of the service, and the Minister finally had an opportunity to stand up and share what was on his mind, it turned out that all of this fasting, humiliation, and wearing of rough garments was to bewail an event that Daniel had personally witnessed, from a convenient perch on his father’s shoulders, sixty-five years earlier.

“THOSE PEOPLE MIGHT AS WELL have been Hindoos to me!” he shouted as he was diving into Mr. Threader’s carriage three hours later—scant moments after the Recessional dirge had expired.

Then he looked at Mr. Threader, expecting to see the man’s periwig turned into a nimbus of crackling flames, and his spectacle-frames dripping, molten, from his ears, for Daniel’s humours got sorely out of balance when he was not fed, and he was quite certain that fire must be vomiting from his mouth, and sparks flying from his eyes. But Mr. Threader merely blinked in wonderment. Then his white eyebrows, which were not on fire at all, went up, which was what Mr. Threader did when overtaken by the urge to smile.

Daniel knew that Mr. Threader was feeling that urge for the following reason: that now, in the final hours of their two-week trek, starvation and a High Church sermon had succeeded where Mr. Threader had failed: the real Daniel Waterhouse had been unmasked.

“I see no Hindoos, Dr. Waterhouse, only a flock of good English parishioners, emerging not from a heathen temple but from a church—the Established Church of this Realm, in case you were misinformed.”

“Do you know what they were doing?”

“That I do, sir, for I was in the church too, though I must admit, in a less expensive pew…”

“ ‘Expiating the horrid Sin committed in the execrable Murder of the Royal Martyr! Remembrancing his rank Butchery at the Hands of the Mobb!’ ”

“This confirms that we did attend the same service.”

“I was there,” Daniel said—referring to the rank Butchery—“and to me it looked like a perfectly regular and well-ordered proceeding.” He had, by this time, had a few moments to compose himself, and did not feel that he was spewing flames any more. He uttered this last in a very mild conversational tone. Yet it affected Mr. Threader far more strongly than anything Daniel could have screamed or shouted at him. The conversation stopped as dramatically as it had begun. Little was said for an hour, and then another, as the carriage, and the train of wagons bringing up the rear, found its way along town streets to the Oxford Road, and turned towards the City, and made its way eastwards across a green, pond-scattered landscape. Mr. Threader, who was facing forward, stared out a side window and looked alarmed, then pensive, then sad. Daniel recognized this train of emotions all too well; it was a treatment meted out by evangelicals to Damnable Sinners. The sadness would soon give way to determination. Then Daniel could expect a fiery last-ditch conversion attempt.

Daniel was facing backwards, watching the road pass under the wheels of the baggage-cart. On that cart, he knew, was Mr. Threader’s strangely over-organized collection of strong-boxes. This put him in mind of a much-needed change of subject.

“Mr. Threader. How shall I compensate you?”

“Mm—Dr. Waterhouse? What?”

“You have not only transported me but boarded me, entertained me, and edified me, for two weeks, and I owe you money.”

“No. Not at all, actually. I am a very particular man, Mr. Waterhouse, in my dealings. Had I desired compensation, I’d have said as much before we set out from Tavistock, and I’d have held you to it. As I did not do so then I cannot accept a penny from you now.”

“I had in mind more than a penny—”

“Dr. Waterhouse, you have made a lengthy journey—an unimaginable journey, to me—and are far from home, it would be a sin to accept so much as a farthing from your purse.”

“My purse need not enter into it, Mr. Threader. I have not undertaken this journey without backing. My banker in the City will not hesitate to advance you an equitable sum, on the credit of the Person who has underwritten my travels.”

Now Mr. Threader was, at least, interested; he stopped looking out the window, and turned his attention to Daniel. “I’ll not take anyone’s money—yours, your banker’s, or your backer’s, sir. And I’ll not ask who your backer is, for it has gradually become obvious to me that your errand is—like a bat—dark, furtive, and delicate. But if you would be so good as to indulge my professional curiosity on one small matter, I should consider your account paid in full.”

“Name it.”

“Who is your banker?”

“Living as I do in Boston, I have no need of a bank in London—but I am fortunate enough to have a family connexion in that business, whom I can call upon as the occasion demands: my nephew, Mr. William Ham.”

“Mr. William Ham! Of Ham Brothers! The money-goldsmiths who went bankrupt!”

“You are thinking of his father. William was only a boy then.” Daniel began to explain young William’s career at the Bank of England but he bated, seeing a glassy look on Mr. Threader’s face.

“The money-goldsmiths!” Mr. Threader reiterated, “The money-goldsmiths.” Something in his tone put Daniel in mind of Hooke identifying a parasite under a microscope. “Well, you see then, it’s of no account anyway, Dr. Waterhouse, as I do not think that Mr. Ham’s money would have any utility for me.”

Daniel understood now that Mr. Threader had set a trap by asking for the name of his banker. Saying to Mr. Threader, a money-scrivener, My banker is a money-goldsmith, was like mentioning to an Archbishop I attend church in a barn: proof that he belonged to the Enemy. The trap had sprung on him now; and, whether by design or no, it happened at the moment they trundled through Tyburn Cross, where limbs of freshly quartered criminals were spiked to the scaffold, festooned with unraveled bowels. Mr. Threader proclaimed, “Coiners!” with the finality of a Norn.

“They’re drawing and quartering people for that now?”

“Sir Isaac is determined to root them out. He has brought the judicial Powers round to his view, which is that counterfeiting is not just a petty crime—it is high treason! High treason, Dr. Waterhouse. And every coiner that Sir Isaac catches, ends up thusly, torn by flies and ravens at Tyburn Cross.”

Then, as if it were the most natural Transition imaginable, Mr. Threader—who had leaned far forward and screwed his head around to contemplate, at greater length, the festering shreds of Sir Isaac’s latest kills—fell back into his repose with a contented sigh, and fastened the same sort of look on the tip of Daniel’s nose. “You were there when Charles the First was decapitated?”

“That is what I told you, Mr. Threader. And I was startled, to say the least, to enter a church three score and five years later, and be confronted with evidence that these High Church folk have not yet recovered from the event. Do you have any idea, Mr. Threader, how many Englishmen perished in the Civil War? In accordance with our norms, I shall not even mention Irishmen.”

“No, I’ve no idea…”

“Precisely! And so to make such a bother about one chap seems as bizarre, idolatrous, fetishistic, and beside the point to me, as Hindoos venerating Cows.”

“He lived in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Threader, meaning Windsor.

“A local connexion that was not even mentioned in the homily—not, I say, in the first, the second, or the third hour of it. Rather, I heard much talk that sounded to me like politics.”

“To you. Yes. But to me, Dr. Waterhouse, it sounded like church. Whereas, if we were to go there—” and Mr. Threader pointed at a barn in a field to the north side of Tyburn Road, surrounded by carriages, and emanating four-part harmony; i.e., a Meeting-House of some Gathered Church “—we would hear much that would sound like church to you, and politics to me.”

“To me it would sound like common sense,” Daniel demurred, “and I hope that in time you would come round to the same opinion—which would be an impossibility for me, in there—” Fortuitously, they had just crossed over some important new street that had not existed, or had been just a cow-path, in Daniel’s day; but never mind, as looking north he saw Oxford Chapel just where it had always been, and so he was able to thrust his finger at an Anglican church-steeple, which was all he wanted to illustrate his point. “—in that there is no sense to it whatever, only mindless ritual!”

“It is naturally the case that Mysteries of Faith do not lend themselves to commonsensical explanation.”

“You, sir, might as well be a Catholic, if that is what you believe.”

“And you, sir, might as well be an Atheist—unless, like so many of the Royal Society, you have, on your way to Atheism, chosen to pause for refreshment at the Spring of Arianism.”

Daniel was fascinated. “Is it widely known—or supposed, I should say—that the Royal Society is a nest of Arianism?”

“Only among those capable of recognizing the obvious, sir.”

“Those capable of recognizing the obvious might conclude from the service you and I have just been subjected to, that this country is ruled by Jacobites—and ruled, I say, thusly from the very top.”

“Your powers of perception put mine to shame, Dr. Waterhouse, if you know the Queen’s mind on this question. The Pretender may be a staunch Catholic, and he may be in France, but he is her brother! And at the end of a poor old lonely woman’s life, to expect that she’ll not be swayed by such considerations is inhumane.”

“Not nearly as inhumane as the welcome her brother would receive if he came to these shores styling himself King. Consider the example just cited, so tediously, in church.”

“Your candor is bracing. Among my circle, one does not allude so freely to Decapitation of Kings by a Mobb.”

“I am glad that you are braced, Mr. Threader. I am merely hungry.”

“To me you seem thirsty—”

“For blood?”

“For royal blood.”

“The blood of the Pretender is not royal, for he is no King, and never will be. I saw his father’s blood, streaming out of his nostrils in a gin-house at Sheerness, and I saw his uncle’s blood being let from his jugulars at Whitehall, and his grandfather’s plashing all round the scaffold at the Banqueting House, sixty-five years ago today, and none of it looked different from the blood of convicts that we put up in jars at the Royal Society. If spilling the Pretender’s blood prevents another Civil War, why spill it.”

“You really should moderate your language, sir. If the Pretender did come to the throne, the words you just spoke would be high treason, and you would be dragged on a sledge to the place we have just put behind us, where you would be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered.”

“I simply find it inconceivable that that man would ever be suffered to reign over England.”

“We call it the United Kingdom now. If you were fresh from New England, Dr. Waterhouse, which is a hot-bed of Dissidents, or if you had been dwelling too long in London, where Whigs and Parliament lord it over ordinary sensible Englishmen, then I should understand why you feel as you do. But during our journey I have showed you England as it is, not as Whigs phant’sy it to be. How can a man of your intelligence not perceive the wealth of this country—the wealth temporal of our commerce and the wealth spiritual of our Church? For I say to you that if you did comprehend that wealth you would certainly be a Tory, possibly even a Jacobite.”

“The spiritual side of the account is balanced, and perhaps o’er-balanced, by the congregations who gather together in Meeting-Houses, where one does not need to sign a lease, to sit on a pew. So we may leave Church-disputes out of the reckoning. Where money is concerned, I shall confess, that the prosperity of the countryside quite overtopped my expectations. But it comes to little when set against the wealth of the City.”

Timing once again favored Daniel, for they were now on Oxford Street. To the carriage’s left side, the Green Lane stretched northwards across open country, threading its way between parks, gardens and farms, darting into little vales and bounding over rises. To the right side it was all built-up: a development that had been only a gleam in Sterling’s* eye twenty years ago: Soho Square. Gesturing first this way, then that, Daniel continued: “For the country draws its revenue from a fixed stock: sheep eating grass. Whereas, the City draws its wealth from foreign trade, which is ever-increasing and, I say, inexhaustible.”

“Oh, Dr. Waterhouse, I am so pleased that Providence has given me the opportunity to set you right on that score, before you got to London and embarrassed yourself by holding views that stopped being true while you were gone. For look, we are come to Tottenham Court Road, the city begins in earnest.” Mr. Threader pounded on the roof and called out the window to the driver, “High Street is impassable for re-paving, jog left and take Great Russell round to High Holborn!”

“On the contrary, Mr. Threader. I know that the Tories have established their own Bank, as a rival and a counterpoise to the Bank of England. But the Bank of England is capitalized with East India shares. The equity of the Tories’ Land Bank is, simply, land. And East India trade grows from year to year. But of land there is a fixed quantity, unless you mean to emulate the Dutch, and manufacture your own.”

“This is where you need to be set to rights, Dr. Waterhouse. The Land Bank is an antiquarian folly, for just the reasons you have set forth. But this in no way signifies that the Bank of England holds a monopoly. On the contrary. With all due respect to the busy, but misguided men of the Juncto, their Bank’s health is as precarious as the Queen’s. The war we have just brought to an end was a Whig war, pressed upon a reluctant Queen by the importunities of a warlike Parliament, led by a Juncto intoxicated by dreams of adventures on foreign soil. They got the money by taxing the people of the country—and I know whereof I speak, for they are my friends!—and they got that money into the coffers of the Duke of Marlborough’s army by means of loans, brokered in the City, at great personal profit, by Whig bankers and money-goldsmiths. Oh, it was very lucrative for a time, Mr. Waterhouse, and if you were to believe the representations made by my lord Ravenscar, why, you might be forgiven for thinking it was all profitable to the Bank of England. There is his house, by the way,” Mr. Threader remarked, as he peered at a spreading Barock pile on the north side of Great Russell Street. “Unspeakably vulgar, quintessentially nouveau…”

“I was the architect,” Daniel said mildly.

“Of the first bit,” said Mr. Threader after only a moment’s break, “which was admirable, a jewel-box. Pity what has been inflicted on it since you left. You know both the Golden, and the Silver, Comstocks. Fascinating! Ravenscar is no longer in a position to afford the best, and so, as you can plainly see, he makes up in ostentation and volume what he cannot have in taste and quality. His mistress seems to find it pleasing.”

“Oh.”

“You do know who my lord Ravenscar’s mistress is?”

“I’ve no idea, Mr. Threader; when I knew him, he had a different whore every week, and sometimes three at once. Who is his whore presently?”

“The niece of Sir Isaac Newton.”

Daniel could not bear this and so he said the first thing that came into his head: “That is where we used to live.”

He nodded southwards across Waterhouse Square, and slipped far down in his seat so that he could get a look at the house that brother Raleigh had built on the rubble of the one where Drake had been blown up. This change of position brought him knee-to-knee with Mr. Threader, who seemed to know the story of Drake’s demise, and observed a respectful silence as they circumvented the square. Gazing, from his low-down position, over the skyline of the city, Daniel was shocked by a glimpse of an enormous dome: the new St. Paul’s. Then the carriage rounded a turn onto Holborn and he lost it.

“You were making some comment about banks, earlier?” Daniel inquired, in a desperate bid to purge his mind of the image of Roger Comstock putting his poxy yard into Isaac’s niece.

“It went poorly for the Whigs, very poorly indeed, in the last years of the war!” Mr. Threader answered, grateful to’ve been given the opportunity to recount the misfortunes of the Juncto. “Bankruptcy forced England to do what France could not: sue for peace, without having accomplished the chief goals of the war. No wonder Marlborough fled the country in disgrace, no wonder at all!”

“I cannot believe East India trade will be depressed for very long, though.”

Mr. Threader leaned forward, ready with an answer, but was tripped up by an interruption, of a professional nature, from the driver.

“Dr. Waterhouse, if you would be so good as to specify any destination in greater London, it would be my honor and privilege to convey you to it; but we are approaching Holborn Bridge, the gates and wall of the ancient City are within view, and you must decide now, unless you really want to accompany me all the way to Change Alley.”

“That is very kind of you, Mr. Threader. I shall lodge at the Royal Society to-night.”

“Right, guv’nor!” said the driver, who could overhear conversations when he needed to. He turned his attention to his horses, then, and addressed them in altogether different language.

“Bad luck that that the Royal Society has moved out of Gresham’s College,” Mr. Threader asserted.

“The delicacy of your discourse is a continual wonder to me, sir.” Daniel sighed, for in truth, the Royal Society had been thrown out of that mouldering pile after Hooke—who, for many years, had defended their lease with his usual vicious tenacity—had died in 1703. Without Hooke, they had only been able to delay the eviction. And they had delayed it superbly, but as of four years ago they were in new quarters off Fleet Street. “Those of us who sank our money into the bonds that paid for the new building, might employ stronger language than ‘bad luck.’ ”

“It is apropos, sir, that you should bring up the topic of investments. I had been about to mention that, should we have taken you to Gresham’s College, we should have passed by the front of a new edifice, at Threadneedle and Bishopsgate, that might fairly be called a new Wonder of the World.”

“What—your offices, Mr. Threader?”

Mr. Threader chuckled politely. Then he got a distracted look, for the carriage had slowed down, and tilted slightly, depressing him and elevating Daniel. They were climbing a gentle grade. Mr. Threader’s gaze bounced from the left window to the right, and stuck there, fixed on the sight of St. Andrew’s church-yard, a huddled mob of gray head-stones fading into the twilight of the absurdly truncated mid-winter day. Daniel, who even in daylight would have been at some difficulty to keep track of where they were in this new London, realized that they were still rattling eastwards down High Holborn; they had missed several turns, viz. Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane, that would have taken them down toward Fleet Street. As St. Andrew’s fell away aft, they missed yet another: Shoe Lane. They were climbing the approaches to the bridge where Holborn, like a country gentleman stepping over a turd-pile, crossed the Fleet Ditch.

Mr. Threader rapped on the roof. “The Royal Society is no longer at Gresham’s College!” he explained to the driver. “They have moved to a court off of Fleet Street—”

“Crane Court,” Daniel said. “Near Fetter Lane, or so I am informed.”

The driver now murmured something, as if he were ashamed to speak it aloud.

“Would you be offended, affrighted, sickened, or in any wise put out, if we were to go down the Fleet?”

“As long as we do not attempt it in a boat, Mr. Threader.”

Mr. Threader put the tips of his fingers to his mouth, lest the mere suggestion should cause him to throw up. Meanwhile with his other hand he made a coded rap on the ceiling. The driver immediately guided his team toward the right edge of the street. “The brink of our Cloaca Maxima has been shored up since you last, er—”

“Made a Deposit into a Vault?”

“As it were, Dr. Waterhouse. And it is still early enough that the nocturnal traffic shall not have built to the pitch of activity one would so desperately wish to avoid, later.”

Daniel could not see where they were going, but he could smell it now, and he could feel the carriage swerving away from the foot of the Holborn Bridge, and slowing to negotiate the turn southwards. He leaned forward and looked out the window down the length of the Fleet Ditch, a black and apparently bottomless slot in a long slab of unspeakably stained pavement, running due south to the Thames. The sky above the river shed a flinty twilight on this gap, from which the buildings of the city seemed to draw back in dismay. In defiance of Mr. Threader’s optimistic prediction, an ox-cart, consisting of a giant barrel on wheels, had backed up to the edge of the ditch and opened a large orifice in its rear to spew a chunky brown cataract into this, the least favored tributary of the Thames. The sounds coming up from the depths below, indicated that it was striking something other than clear running water. Making a quick scan of the length of the Ditch between them and the Fleet Bridge, about a quarter of a mile downstream—if “downstream” had any meaning here—Daniel saw two other such carts doing the same thing, or getting ready to. Other than the usual crew of idlers, vagrants, thieves, shake-rags, and disgraced preachers selling instant weddings, there was no traffic, other than a single sedan-chair, which was just emerging from an alley on the opposite bank of the ditch, and in the act of turning north towards Holborn. As Daniel caught sight of it, it faltered and stopped. The faces of the two men carrying it waxed like a pair of moons as they turned to look at Mr. Threader’s train. Then the carriage in which Daniel was riding executed its turn. The Ditch swung out of Daniel’s view, and was replaced by the first in a various row of cookeries and market-stalls, not all that bad here, close to Holborn, but bound to degenerate rapidly as they moved on. Daniel turned his head the other way to look out at the Ditch. A slablike wall rose from the opposite bank, ventilated by a few windows barred with heavy grids: the front of the Fleet Prison. His view was then blocked by the nostrils of an ox towing a vault-wagon. A whiff came in the window that paralyzed him for a few moments.

“Deposits must be down to-day, and vaults empty, as so many are fasting in remembrance of the Royal Martyr,” Daniel observed sourly, for he could tell that Mr. Threader wanted to continue talking about Financial Institutions.

“If I were coming to London a-fresh, Dr. Waterhouse, and wished to align my personal interests with a bank, I should pass the Bank of England by—pass it right by, I say! For your own sake! And keep right on going.”

“To the Royal Exchange, you mean…one or two doors down, on the opposite side…”

“No, no, no.”

“Ah, you are speaking of Change Alley, where the stock-jobbers swarm.”

“That is off Cornhill. Therefore, in a strictly cartographic sense, you are getting colder. But in another, you are getting warmer.”

“You are trying to interest me in some security that is traded in Change Alley. But it issues from an Eighth Wonder of the World that is on Threadneedle, near Gresham’s College. It is a most imposing riddle, Mr. Threader, and I am ill-equipped to answer it, as I’ve not frequented that busy, busy neighborhood for twenty years.”

Daniel now leaned to one side, planting his elbow on an arm-rest and supporting his chin on his hand. He did so, not because he was tired and weak from hunger (though he was), but so that he could see round Mr. Threader’s head out the rear window of the carriage. For he had glimpsed a peculiar apparition overtaking them. A rustic person would have guessed it to be a coffin levitating through the air. And considering the number of corpses that had been disposed of in Fleet Ditch over the centuries, there was no better place in London for a haunting. But Daniel knew it was a sedan chair, probably the same one that had emerged, a few moments ago, from the alley across the way. Looking across the Ditch Daniel could see directly into that alley, or one like it, and it seemed to him like the vertical equivalent of the Fleet Ditch itself, a black slot filled with who knew what sort of vileness. What had a sedan chair been doing in such a place? Perhaps taking a gentleman to an unspeakably perverse tryst. At any rate it was now gaining ground on them, coming up along one side. It got close enough that Daniel could sit up straight and view it directly out the carriage’s side window. The windows of the sedan chair—assuming it had windows—were screened with black stuff, like a confession-booth in a Papist church, and so Daniel could not see into it. He could not even be certain that anyone was inside, though the ponderous jouncing of the box on its poles, and the obvious strain on the two massive blokes who were carrying it, suggested that something was in there.

But after several moments these porters seemed to hear some command from inside the box, and then they gratefully slackened their pace and allowed Mr. Threader’s carriage to pull away from them.

Mr. Threader, meanwhile, had resorted to complicated hand-gestures, and was staring at a distant point above Daniel’s head.

“Proceed to the fork in the road, there, where Pig Street leads away from Threadneedle. Whether you go right, toward Bishopsgate, or left up Pig toward Gresham’s College, you will in a few moments come to the offices of the South Sea Company, which, though it is only three years old, already spans the interval between those two ways.”

“And what do you propose I should do there?”

“Invest! Open an account! Align your interests!”

“Is it just another Tory land bank?”

“Oh, on the contrary! You are not the only one to perceive the wisdom of investing in the future increase of foreign trade!”

“The South Sea Company, then, has such interests…where? South America?”

“In its original conception, yes. But, as of a few months ago, its true wealth lies in Africa.”

“Africa! That is very strange. It puts me in mind of the Duke of York’s Africa Company, fifty years ago, before London burned.”

“Think of it as the Royal Africa Company, risen from the ashes. Just as the capital stock of the Bank of England is the East India Company, that of the South Sea Company is the Asiento.”

“Even I know that this word Asiento is linked somehow to the Peace, but I’ve been terribly distracted—”

“We could not win the war—could not dislodge the grandson of Louis XIV from the Throne of Spain—but we did extract certain concessions from him. One of which was the entire right of shipping slaves from Africa to the New World. Mr. Harley, our Lord Treasurer, made arrangements for this Asiento to become an asset, as it were, of the South Sea Company.”

“How splendid.”

“As the commerce of America grows, so the demand for slaves from Africa will grow apace with it, and so there can be no sounder investment than the Asiento, no surer foundation for a bank, for a fortune—”

“Or for a political party,” Daniel said.

Mr. Threader raised his eyebrows. Then they passed by another vault-wagon, forcing them to keep their mouths, and even their eyes, closed for a few moments.

Mr. Threader recovered quicker, and said: “Steam, on the other hand, sir, I would hold in very low esteem, if you’ll indulge me in a spot of word-play.”

“It is lamentably late in this journey, and this conversation, sir, for you to be divulging this to me.”

“Divulging what, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“That you think the Earl of Lostwithiel is launching a mad enterprise, and that you believe your clients should put their money, rather, into the Asiento.”

“I shall put their money where they have directed me to put it. But I cannot help observing, that the nearly limitless coast of Africa is crowded with slaves, driven out from the interior by their more ferocious cousins, and virtually free for the picking. If I wish to pump water from a Cornish tin-mine, Dr. Waterhouse, I need not pay Mr. Newcomen to erect a frightful Engine; now that we have the Asiento, I need only send a ship southwards, and in a few weeks’ time I shall have all the slaves I need, to pump the water out by stepping on tread-mills, or, if I prefer, to suck it out through hollow straws and spit it into the sea.”

“Englishmen are not used to seeing their mines and pastures crowded with Blackamoors toiling under the lash,” Daniel remarked.

“Whereas, steam-engines are a familiar sight!?” asked Mr. Threader triumphantly.

Daniel was overcome with tiredness and hunger, and leaned his head back with a sough, feeling that only a miracle could get him out of this conversation whole. At the same moment, they arrived at the Fleet Bridge. They turned right and began back-tracking westwards, since the driver had over-shot their destination. Daniel, who, as always, had a view out the rear window of the vehicle, was confronted suddenly by the astonishing sight of a colossal stone egg rising up out of the street less than half a mile away, reigning over the low buildings of London like a Khan over a million serfs. This was by a wide margin the largest building Daniel had ever seen, and something about it replenished his energies.

“Nothing about the English landscape is forever fixed. Just as you have probably grown used to the presence of that Dome,” Daniel said, nodding down Fleet to St. Paul’s, and obliging Mr. Threader to turn around and rediscover it, “we might grow accustomed to multitudes of black slaves, or steam-engines, or both. I speculate that the character of England is more constant. And I flatter us by asserting, furthermore, that ingenuity is a more essential element of that character than cruelty. Steam-engines, being a product of the former virtue, are easier to reconcile with the English scene than slavery, which is a product of the latter vice. Accordingly, if I had money to bet, I’d bet it on steam-engines.”

“But slaves work and steam-engines don’t!”

“But slaves can stop working. Steam-engines, once Mr. Newcomen has got them going, can never stop, because unlike slaves, they do not have free will.”

“But how is an ordinary investor to match your level of confidence, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“By looking at that,” Daniel answered, nodding at St. Paul’s, “and noting that it does not fall down. Go and examine its arches, Mr. Threader, and you will see that they are in the shape of parabolas. Sir Christopher Wren made them thus, on the advice of Hooke; for Hooke shewed that it should be so.”

“You have quite wandered away from me. It is an excellent church. I see no connection to steam-engines.”

“Both church-domes and engines are subject to physical laws, which are, in turn, amenable to mathematickal calculations; and we know the laws,” Daniel announced. “It is at least as well-founded as what you do for a living.”

They had come to a halt before the mouse-hole in the north side of Fleet Street that led to Crane Court. The driver maneuvered his team into it, giving directions to the other drivers that the baggage-cart alone should follow; the remainder of the train, consisting by this point of two large carriages and a second baggage-wain, were to remain in Fleet Street, and to get themselves turned around and aimed in the direction of Ludgate.

Getting the horses, their tack, and the carriage to pass through that archway was a bit like funneling a model ship, rigging a-luff, through the neck of a jug. At one point they drew to a full stop and Daniel, glancing out a side-window, found himself within kissing range of a pedestrian—gawky, post-smallpox, perhaps thirty years of age—whose advance down Fleet Street had been barred by all of Mr. Threader’s maneuvers. This fellow, who affected a ratty horse-hair wig, and who carried a smoky lanthorn in one hand and a staff in the other, peered in on them with frank curiosity that Mr. Threader found unseemly. “Go to, go to, sirrah, we are no concern of the Watch!”

The carriage moved forward into the narrow cul-de-sac of Crane Court.

“One of the Royal Society’s new neighbors?” Daniel asked.

“That watchman? No, I should think not!”

“Each inhabitant is supposed to take his turn on the Watch,” Daniel said pedantically, “and so I assumed…”

“That was twenty years ago when the Act was passed,” Mr. Threader returned, sorrowful over Daniel’s naïveté. “It has become the practice for householders to pool a bit of money and pay some fellow—usually some caitiff from Southwark—to do the chore in their stead. As you encountered him this evening, so shall you every evening, unless you have the good fortune to pass by while he is in Pub.”

Still they were making their way, tentatively, down Crane Court. Once they had squeezed through the entrance, it had broadened slightly, to the point where two oncoming carriages might scrape past each other.

“I rather thought we should be leaving you off at the home of some distinguished Fellow,” said the bemused Mr. Threader. “I say, you’re not on the outs with them, are you?” he jested, trying to terminate their journey on a jolly note.

I shall be soon enough. “I have several invitations in my pocket, and mean to spend them methodically—”

“Like a miser with his coins!” said Mr. Threader, still trying to haul Daniel up to the level of joviality that he considered suitable upon parting; perhaps this meant he wanted to see Daniel again.

“Or a soldier with his pouch of balls,” Daniel returned.

“You may add one more!”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Invitation! You must come and lodge with me for a few days, Dr. Waterhouse; I shall take it as an affront if you do not.”

Before Daniel could think of a polite way to beg off, the carriage came to a stop, and at the same moment the door was pulled open by a fellow Daniel assumed was a porter, albeit over-dressed for the job in his Sunday church-going togs. He was not a porter of the gorilla type, but rather tall, of reasonably normal proportions, perhaps forty-five years old, clean-shaven, almost gentlemanly.

“It is I,” Daniel volunteered, as this man could not seem to decide which of the two passengers was the honored guest.

“Welcome to Crane Court, Dr. Waterhouse,” said the porter, sincerely but coolly, speaking in a French accent. “I am Henry Arlanc, at your service.”

“A Huguenot,” muttered Mr. Threader as Henry Arlanc helped Daniel down onto the pavement.

Daniel glanced at the front of the house that formed the end of the court, but it looked just like the engravings, which was to say, very plain and simple. He turned to look back towards Fleet Street. His view was blocked by the baggage-cart, which had taken longer to negotiate the entrance, and was still fifty feet away, lumbering towards them. “Merci,” said Mr. Threader as Arlanc helped him out.

Daniel moved over to one side so that he could peer between the baggage-cart and the line of house-fronts running down to Fleet. His night vision was not what it had once been, but he thought he could see the glimmer of the inquisitive watchman’s lanthorn limning the arch, perhaps three hundred feet away. He was bothering someone else now, someone in a sedan chair.

The luggage wagon suddenly got much larger, as if a giant bladder had been inflated to fill the entire width of the court. Daniel had scarcely registered that impression, when it became a source of light. Then it seemed a radiant yellow fist was punching at Daniel through a curtain of iron-colored smoke. The punch was pulled long before it reached him, and collapsed and paled into an ashy cloud. But he had felt its heat on his face, and things had flown out of it and struck him. Crane Court was now enlivened by the music of færy-bells as golden coins sought out resting-places on the paving-stones, and fell in twirling parabolas onto the roof-tiles. Some of them must have been flung straight up in the air for great distances because they continued to land hard and to bounce high for several seconds after Daniel had found his own resting-place: on his arse in the street. The court had been blocked off by a wall of smoke which now advanced to surround him; he could not see his own feet. But he could smell the smoke; it was sulfurous, unmistakenly the product of the combustion of gunpowder. Mixed in with that was a sharper chymical scent that Daniel probably could have identified if he had sniffed it in a laboratory; as it was, he had distractions.

People were calling names, including his. “I am all right,” Daniel announced, but it sounded as if his fingers were in his ears. He got to his feet, spry as a twenty-year-old, and began working his way down the court in the direction of Fleet Street. The air was clearer nearer the ground, and he ended up walking bent nearly double, tracking his progress by the passage of sprayed coins and other detritus under his feet. There was a kind of snow fluttering through the smoke as well: raccoon fur.

“Watchman!” Daniel shouted, “can you hear me?”

“Yes, sir! The Marching Watch has been sent for!”

“I do not care about the Marching Watch, they are too late! I want that you should follow that sedan chair, and tell me where it goes!”

No answer came back.

Mr. Threader’s voice came out of the smoke, just a few yards away. “Watchman, follow that sedan chair and I shall give you a guinea!”

“Right you are, sir!” returned the watchman.

“…or a guinea’s equivalent value in other goods or services, at my discretion, provided that timely and useful information, which would not have been obtainable through other means, is brought to me, and me alone; and note that nothing in this offer shall be construed to create a condition of employment between you and me, particularly where assumption of liabilities, criminal or civil, is concerned. Did you hear all of that, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Yes, Mr. Threader.”

“It is so witnessed this thirty-first day of January, Year of our Lord 1714.” Mr. Threader muttered very rapidly.

In the next breath, he began finally to answer the hails of his assistants, who had come running up from Fleet Street and were now tramping blindly through the smoke all round, hardly less dangerous than the terrified horses. Having found Mr. Threader and Daniel by nearly running them down, they began asking, repeatedly and redundantly, whether they were all right; which soon became annoying to Daniel, who suspected that they were only doing it to be noticed. He told them to instead go and find the driver of the baggage-cart, who had been airborne when Daniel had lost sight of him.

The smoke was finally beginning to clear; it seemed to be draining, rather than rising, from the court. Mr. Threader approached. “Did anything strike you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Not very hard.” For the first time it occurred to him to brush himself off. Wood-shards and raccoon-tufts showered from the folds of his clothing. His finger caught the edge of a coin, which had been made rough as a saw-blade by the violence of its recent career, and this fluttered to the ground and hit with a tinny slap. Daniel bent to examine it. It was not a coin at all. It was a miniature gear. He picked it up. All round him, Mr. Threader’s assistants were in similar postures, snatching guineas off the ashlars like a crew of gleaners. The driver of the baggage-cart was face down, moaning like a drunk as he was tended to by Henry Arlanc and a woman, possibly Arlanc’s wife. Someone had had the presence of mind to draw the other baggage-cart across the entrance of Crane Court so that the Marching Watch—when and if they arrived—would not simply march in watching for stray coins.

“At the risk of being one of those bores who will only venture to state facts after they have become perfectly obvious to all,” said Mr. Threader, “I guess that my baggage-cart has just been Blown Up.”

Daniel flipped the gear over in his palm several times, then put it in his pocket. “Without a doubt, your hypothesis passes the test that we call, Ockham’s Razor.”

Mr. Threader was strangely merry. For that matter, even Daniel, who had been in a sour mood all day from fasting, was feeling a bit giddy. He saw Henry Arlanc approaching, wiping traces of blood from his hands, his face blackened. “Mr. Arlanc, if you are all right, would you be so good as to fetch a broom, and sweep my things in-doors?”

This actually produced a guffaw from Mr. Threader. “Dr. Waterhouse! If I may speak frankly, I had been concerned that your coonskins would leave you open to ridicule from London’s à la mode. But in the end, the Garment in Question was not even suffered to pass the city gates.”

“It must have been done by someone very young,” Daniel guessed.

“Why do you suppose so, sir?”

“I have never seen you happier, Mr. Threader! Only a fellow who had lived through very little would imagine that a gentleman of your age and experience would find this sort of thing impressive.”

This hammered a bung into Mr. Threader’s barrel of chuckles, and straightened him right up for several moments. In time he worked his way back to merry, but only after perilous detours through confused, astonished, and outraged. “I was about to make a similar remark directed at you!” He was less shocked by the explosion than by Daniel’s imputation that it had anything to do with him. Another cycle of bewilderment and stifled anger swirled round his face. Daniel observed with some fascination; Mr. Threader had facial features after all, plenty of them.

In the end, all Mr. Threader could do was laugh. “I was going to express my outrage, Dr. Waterhouse, that you imagined this had anything to do with me; but I bated. I cannot throw stones, since I have been guilty, mutatis mutandis, of the identical sin.”

“You thought it was for me!? But no one knew I was coming,” Daniel said. But he said it weakly, for he had just remembered the pirates in Cape Cod Bay, and how Edward Teach, literally smouldering on the poop deck of Queen Anne’s Revenge, had asked for him by name.

“No one, save the entire crew of the ship that put you ashore at Plymouth—for she must have reached London by now.”

“But no one knew how I was coming to London.”

“No one, save the Court of Directors, and most of the Investors, of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire! Not to mention your Backer.” Mr. Threader then got a bright look on his face and said, “Perhaps they were not trying to affright you, but simply to kill you!”

“Or you,” Daniel returned.

“Are you a wagering man, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“I was brought up to loathe it. But my return to London is proof that I am a fallen man.”

“Ten guineas.”

“On the identity of the intended victim?”

“Just so. What say you, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“As my life is already staked, ’twere false œconomy to quibble over ten guineas. Done.”

Crane Court

EARLY FEBRUARY 1714

But what should be the reason that such a good man should be all his days so much in the dark?

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

DANIEL’S FIRST FORTNIGHT at the Royal Society was not equal, in excitement or glamour, to that fiery Spectacle that had heralded his arrival. In the minutes after the blast, excitement born of fear had made him feel half a century younger. But the next morning, he woke in his little guest-garret to discover that the thrill had vanished as quickly as the smoke of the blast; while the fear persisted as stubbornly as the carbon-black scorches it had sprayed on the pavement. Aches and pains had appeared in every part of him, as if all the shocks and insults he had suffered since Enoch Root had walked into his Institute some four months ago, had not been registered at once by his body, but had been marked down in a credit-ledger which had now come due, all at once, and with usurous interest.

Much more debilitating was a melancholy that settled over his spirit, and took away his desire to eat, to get out of bed, or even to read. He only stirred at odd intervals when the melancholy condensed into a raw, beastly fear that set his heart thumping and caused all the blood to drop out of his head. One morning before dawn he found himself crouching before his tiny window, twitching a linen curtain, peering out at a wagon that had trundled into Crane Court to deliver some sea-coal to a neighboring house, wondering whether the collier and his boys might be disguised murderers.

His own clear awareness that he had gone half mad did nothing to lessen the physical power of his fear, which moved his body with irresistible power, as a sea heaves a swimmer. He got no rest during the two weeks he spent in that garret, despite staying in bed most of the while, and realized only one gain: namely, he arrived at a better understanding of the mentality of Sir Isaac Newton. But that hardly seemed like a reward. It was almost as if he had suffered a stroke, or a blow to the head, that had stolen away his faculty of thinking about the future. He was quite certain that his story had come to an end, that his sudden journey across the Atlantic was a flash in the pan, which had quite failed to ignite the powder in the barrel, and that Princess Caroline would purse her lips, shake her head, and write it all off as a failed investment and a Bad Idea. Really he was no better off during that time than he had been tied to Hooke’s chair at Bedlam being cut for the stone. The pain was not as intense, but the mental state was much the same: trapped in the here and now like a dog, and not part of any coherent Story.

He got better on Saint Valentine’s Day. The agent that brought about this miraculous cure was as obscure as the cause of the disease itself. It certainly did not originate from the College of Physicians, for Daniel had used what energies he had to keep the doctors and their lancets at bay. It seemed to issue, rather, from a part of town that had not existed when Daniel had been a young man: a place, just up the road from Bedlam, called Grub Street.

Daniel’s medicine, in other words, was Newspapers. Mrs. Arlanc (the wife of Henry, an English Dissenter, and the housekeeper of Crane Court) had been faithfully bringing up food, drink, and new-papers. She had told visitors that Dr. Waterhouse was deathly ill, and physicians that he was doing much better now, and thereby stopped all of them from crossing his threshold. At Daniel’s request, she refrained from bringing him his mail.

Now, most places did not have newspapers, and so, if Mrs. Arlanc had not brought him any, he would never have known that they were wanting. But London had eighteen of them. ’Twas as if the combination in one city of too many printing presses; a bloody and perpetual atmosphere of Party Malice; and an infinite supply of coffee; had combined, in some alchemical sense, to engender a monstrous prodigy, an unstanchable wound that bled Ink and would never heal. Daniel, who had grown to maturity in a London where printing presses had to be hidden in hay-wagons to preserve them from the sledgehammers of the Censor, could not quite believe this at first; but they kept coming, every day. Mrs. Arlanc brought these to him as if it were perfectly normal for a man to read about all London’s scandals, duels, catastrophes, and outrages every morning as he spooned up his porridge.

At first Daniel found them intolerable. It was as if the Fleet Ditch were being diverted into his lap for half an hour every day. But once he grew accustomed to them, he began to draw a kind of solace from their very vileness. How self-absorbed for him to cower in bed, for fear of mysterious enemies, here in the center of a metropolis that was to Hostility what Paris was to Taste? To be so unnerved, simply because someone had tried to blow him up in London, was like a sailor in a naval engagement pouting and sulking because one of his fellows had stepped on his toe.

So, inasmuch as it made him feel better, Daniel began to look forward to his daily ink-toilette. Immersion in Bile, a splash of Calumny on the face, and a dab of Slander behind each ear, and he was a new man.

The 14th of February was a Sunday, meaning that before the sun had risen, Mr. and Mrs. Arlanc had embarked on their weekly pilgrimage to a Huguenot meeting-house that lay somewhere out beyond Ratcliff. Daniel awoke to find, next to his door, a bowl of cold porridge resting on an otherwise empty tray. No newspapers! Down he ventured into the lower storeys of the house, scavenging for old ones. Most of the rooms had no reading material whatever, except for damned Natural Philosophy books. But on the ground floor, back in Mrs. Arlanc’s kitchen, he found a sheaf of old newspapers preserved as fire-starters. He re-ascended in triumph to his garret and read a few of the more recent numbers while excavating a pit in his congealed porridge.

Of the past week’s editions, several actually agreed on something factual. This happened about as often as a Total Eclipse of the Sun, and was just as likely to cause panic in the streets. They agreed that Queen Anne was going to open Parliament tomorrow.

Daniel had been conceiving of this Queen as a caricature of elderliness and frailty. News that this half-embalmed figment was going to clamber out of bed and do something of consequence made Daniel feel ashamed of himself. When the Arlancs returned from church in the late afternoon, and the Mrs. trudged up to the garret to collect the tray and porridge-bowl, Daniel announced that tomorrow he would read his mail, and perhaps even put on clothes and get out of bed.

Mrs. Arlanc, who hid competence beneath a jiggly, henlike façade, smiled at this news; though she had the good manners to keep her lips pressed together so that Daniel would not be exposed to the sight of her teeth. Like most Londoners’, these had been well blackened by sugar.

“You chose aptly, sir,” she allowed the next morning, backing through the narrow door with a basket of books and papers balanced on her tummy. “Sir Isaac inquired after you for a third time.”

“He was here this morning?”

“Is here now,” Mrs. Arlanc answered, then paused. The entire house had drawn a tiny, sharp breath as the front door was closed. “Unless that was him departing.”

Daniel, who had been sitting up on the edge of his bed, rose to his feet and ventured to a window. He could not see down to the front door from here. But in a few moments he spied a burly fellow plodding away, holding a pole in each hand, followed closely by a black sedan chair, and then a second pole-holding bloke. They patiently built up to a trot, weaving round a few stentorian vendors, knife-grinders, &c. who were making their way up and down Crane Court, pretending to be shocked that the residents were not flocking out of their houses to transact business with them.

Daniel tracked Isaac’s sedan chair until it reached Fleet, which was a howling flume of Monday morning traffic. The bearers paused long enough to draw deep breaths and then executed a mad sally into a gap between carriages. From a hundred yards away, through a window, Daniel could hear drivers reminding them about their mothers. But the whole advantage of the sedan chair was that it could out-pace other vehicles by insinuating itself into any narrow leads that might present themselves in traffic, and so very soon they had vanished in the tide of men and animals flowing to Westminster. “Sir Isaac is on his way to the opening of Parliament,” Daniel hazarded.

“Yes, sir. As is Sir Christopher Wren, who also nipped in and asked about you,” said Mrs. Arlanc, who had not failed to seize on this rare opportunity to strip off the bed-clothes. “But that is not all, oh, no sir. Why, this morning you’ve had mail from a Duchess. A messenger brought it round not half an hour ago. ’Tis on the top of the basket.”

Hanover 21 January 1714

Dr. Waterhouse,

As you are expected (God willing) to arrive in London soon, Baron von Leibniz is eager to correspond with you. I have made private arrangements for letters to be conveyed between Hanover and London by couriers who may be trusted. At the risk of being presumptuous, I have offered the Doctor (as I affectionately call him, even though he has been ennobled) the use of this service. My seal on this envelope is my affirmation that the enclosed letter came from the Doctor’s hand to yours, untouched and unseen by any other person.

If you would forgive a short personal memorial, I beg leave to inform you that I have taken possession of Leicester House, which, as you may know, was once the home of Elizabeth Stuart, before she came to be known as the Winter Queen; when I return to it, which may occur soon, I trust you will be so generous with your Time, as to call upon me there.

Your humble and obedient servant,

Eliza de la Zeur

Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm

This had been wrapped around a letter written in Leibniz’s hand:

Daniel,

That God hears the prayers of Lutherans, is a proposition hotly disputed by many, including many Lutherans. Indeed the late fortunes of the King of Sweden in his wars against the Tsar might lend support to those who say, that the surest way to bring something about, is for Lutherans to get down on their knees and pray that God forbid it. Notwithstanding which, I have prayed for your safe passage every day since I was allowed to know you had left Boston, and I write these lines in the hope and expectation that you have arrived safe in London.

It would be unseemly for me to beg for your succour so early in this letter, and so I shall divert you (or so I flatter myself) by relating my last conversation with my employer, Peter Romanov, or Peter the Great, as he is now styled—not without perfectly sound reasons—by many (I say “employer” because he owes—I do not say “pays”—me a stipend to act as his advisor on certain matters; my Mistress and liege-lady remains, as always, Sophie).

As you probably know, the Tsar’s chief occupation these last several years has been making war on the Swedes and on the Turks. What little time remains, he spends on the building of his city, St. Petersburg, which by all accounts is growing up into a fair place, though it is built on a slough. Which amounts to saying, that he has little time to listen to the prating of savants.

But he does have some time. Since he flushed the Swedes out of Poland, it has become his habit to travel down through that country and into Bohemia to take the waters at Carlsbad for a few weeks out of every year. This happens in the winter when the land is too barren and the seas too frozen for him to prosecute his wars. Carlsbad, which lies in a mountain valley thick with noble trees, is easily reached from Hanover, and so that is where I go to earn—I do not say “collect”—my pay as consultant to the Tsar of All the Russias.

But if you are imagining a peaceful winter idyll, it is because I have not rendered the scene faithfully. (1) The entire point of “taking the waters” is to induce violent diarrhœa for days or weeks on end. (2) Peter brings with him a vast entourage of lusty Steppenwolves who do not take well to the genteel boredom of Carlsbad. Such words as “languid,” “leisurely,” and “placid,” common as they may be among the Quality of Europe, who are exhausted by a quarter-century of wars, do not appear to be translatable into any of the languages spoken by Peter’s crowd. They stay on an estate that is loaned to them by the Polish duke who owns it. But I am certain that this fellow does so out of some baser emotion than hospitality, for every year the Russians find it in good repair, and leave it a ruin. I would not even have been able to reach the place if I had not come in my own personal carriage; the local coachmen will not venture near it for any amount of money, for fear that they or their horses will be struck by musket-balls, or—what is more dangerous—be invited to join in the revels.

I was not afforded a choice. When I stepped out of my coach in the carriageway of this estate, I was spied by a dwarf, who saw me thanking God for my safe arrival, and beseeching Him for an expeditious departure, in the Lutheran manner. “Swede! Swede!” he began to cry, and the chant was rapidly taken up by others. I told my driver to make himself scarce and he rattled away promptly. Meanwhile I had been picked up by a pair of Cossacks and thrown into a different sort of vehicle: an ordinary gardener’s wheelbarrow. But it took me several moments to understand this, for it had been decked out with silver candelabras, silk curtains, and embroidered tapestries. To make room for me, they had to expel a marble bust of the King of Prussia, which was already spalled by impacts of musket-balls, and now broke in half on the icy cobblestones. Then the living Leibniz took the place of the carved King. Unlike my predecessor I did not break in two, though I was put in my chariot roughly enough that I was lucky not to have fractured my tailbone. A fragment of a lady’s tiara was stabbed into my periwig to serve as a crown, and without further ceremony I was wheeled into the grand ballroom of this stately house, which was as smoky as any battle-field. By this time I had been engulfed in a motley phalanx of dwarves, Cossacks, Tatars, and diverse ill-looking Europeans who had been milling about in the stable-yard until my arrival. I did not see a single Russian until the smoke, driven by a frigid gust from the open doors, cleared from the far end of the ballroom to reveal a sort of makeshift fortress that had been erected by flipping several dining-tables up on edge, and then lashing those walls of polished wood together with bell-ropes and curtain-pulls. This fortification was supplemented by demilunes and ravelins, fashioned from chairs and cabinets; and it was manned entirely by Russians.

I collected now that Peter’s entourage had been divided into two groups, viz. Muscovites, and Miscellaneous, and that a battle was being enacted. Or re-enacted; for the general arrangement of the redoubt, and the deployment of the Miscellaneous forces, brought to mind the Battle of Poltava. Peter’s antagonist in that great clash was King Charles XII of Sweden, which role had been played by the marble bust until moments ago; but said statue had performed so miserably that his forces had been repulsed, and driven back into the bitter cold of the stable-yard. Little wonder that they had seized on me, a flesh-and-blood Lutheran, as a replacement. But if they were expecting me to display any more martial qualities than the bust, they were sorely let down, for even after I had been wheeled into the van of the Miscellaneous battalions, I comported myself in all ways as a sixty-seven-year-old philosopher. If I pissed myself it was of no account, since the Moravian prostitute who came running toward me with a two-foot-high tankard of beer, tripped on her dirndl and flung the contents into my lap.

After this pause for refreshment, the Miscellaneous forces mounted a charge towards the redoubt. We had got about halfway across the ballroom when some Russian galloped out from behind an overturned armoire and cut the chandelier-rope with a backhand swing of his saber. I looked up to see half a ton of crystal, and a gross of lit tapers, descending toward me like a glittering meteor. The men who were pushing my wheelbarrow flung themselves forward and with a mighty acceleration we shot beneath the chandelier so close that I felt the warmth of the candle-flames moments before being struck by a hail of shattered crystal. We had dodged it; but those behind us were brought up short by this spectacle, and then hindered by its sharp wreckage. So our advance faltered; but my heart stopped, when I saw barrels of muskets reach up over the wooden redoubt, and then shorten as they were leveled at us. Pan-powder flashed up and down the line, and then bolts of white fire sprang towards us. But nothing else came our way save a few chunks of wadding-material. I was struck on the arm by a smoking wine-cork and still bear the bruise on my bicep. The amount of smoke hardly bears description. Most of it came forth in an amorphous cloud, however I saw one or two smoke-rings, about the size of a man’s hat, propagating across the room, and retaining their shape and vis viva for extraordinary distances. These rings are unlike water-waves, which consist of different water at different times, for smoke rings propagate through clear air, proving that they indeed carry their own substance with them, neither diluting it with, nor dispersing it into, the surrounding atmosphere. And yet there is nothing special about the smoke as such—it is the same smoke that hangs over battlefields in shapeless clouds. The identity of a smoke ring would appear to consist, not in the stuff of which it is made, for that is commonplace and indifferent, but rather in a particular set of relationships that is brought into being among its parts. It is this pattern of relationships that coheres in space and persists in time and endows the smoke-ring with an identity. Perhaps some similar observation might be made about other entities that we observe, and credit with uniqueness and identity, including even human beings. For the stuff of which we are made is just the common stuff of the world, viz. ordinary gross matter, so that a materialist might say, we are no different from rocks; and yet our matter is imbued with some organizing principle that endows us with identities, so that I may send a letter to Daniel Waterhouse in London in the full confidence that, like a smoke-ring traversing a battle-field, he has traveled a great distance, and persisted for a long time, and yet is still the same man. The question, as always, is whether the organizing principle is added to the gross matter to animate it, as yeast is thrown into beer, or inheres in the relationships among the parts themselves. As a Natural Philosopher I feel compelled to support the latter view, for if Natural Philosophy is to explain the world, it must do so in terms of the things that make up the world, without recourse to occult intrusions from some external, unknowable Realm Beyond. That is the view I have set forth in my book Monadology, a copy of which is enclosed—you are most welcome—and, right or wrong, I interpreted the smoke-rings flying past me in the ballroom in Carlsbad as a Roman would interpret owls, ravens, &c. before a battle.

The Russians had not fired live musket-balls at us; or if they had, none had struck me. I flattered myself for a moment that we were safe. But then, on the other side of the smoke-bank into which I was being thrust headlong, I heard the scrape and ring of steel blades being whisked from scabbards, and the rumbling roar of deep-chested Russians bellowing war-cries as they vaulted over wrecked furniture. They were mounting a sally from the redoubt! They came out of the haze like apparitions, as if the smoke itself were condensing to solid form, and fell upon the attackers swinging their blades. By this point I had fully convinced myself that I really was caught up in a violent insurrection, and that I would go to my death in a wheelbarrow. Then my attention was commanded by a vast disturbance propagating through the smoke towards me: not so much a single whorl or eddy, as a whole meteorological event unto itself, like the towering whirlwinds of America, and seeming all the higher for my position: as low down in the wheelbarrow as I could slouch.

Glints and gleams, not only of steel, but of diamonds, and cloth-of-gold, shone through the dark turbulence of it; and finally the smoke cleared away, like a bow-wave parting round the gilded figurehead of a ship, to reveal Peter the Great.

When he recognized me, he laughed, and given my circumstance I could do nothing but accept this humiliation. “Let us go out,” he said in Dutch.

“I am afraid I will be killed!” I returned, quite honestly. He laughed again, then sheathed his saber and stepped forward until he was straddling the wheelbarrow, almost as if he meant to piss on me. Then he bent down, planted his shoulder in my gut, wrapped one arm around my waist, and lifted me up as if I were a sack of coffee-beans being taken from a ship’s hold. In a moment I was upside down over his shoulder, watching his spurs glide above the marble floor as he bore me across the room with immense strides. I expected to see pools of blood and severed limbs, too, but the worst was the occasional burst of beer-vomit. The battle still raged all around, but the shouting was mixed with a good deal of hilarity. Blade still rang against blade, but where sword-blows struck home, they did so with slapping noises; the Russians were beating their foes with the flats of their sabers.

In a few moments Peter had carried me out into a formal garden that had been hewn at great expense from the surrounding forest. He bent over and tossed me onto what I first supposed was a very high bench; but it pivoted beneath me. Looking around, and shaking away my dizziness, and blinking off the brightness of the sun on the snow, I perceived that I was perched on the wheel of a wagon, which had flipped over on its side at the end of a long set of skid-marks. It had plowed to a stop in a topiary hedge shaped like a man-of-war, which was now listing to port as a result of having been rammed by this cart. The hedge served to block the wind; and the cart-wheel, which was as high off the ground as an average man’s shoulder, elevated me to the point where by sitting up straight I could very nearly look the Tsar in the eye.

Now, it was not usual to see him so quickly. In previous years I have been summoned to Carlsbad most urgently, only to languish in the town for days or weeks as I beg his Court officials for the favor of an audience. My first impulse was to be pleased that I had found myself in the Presence so soon; then I had the wit to realize that he would only act in such haste if he were angry with me, or wanted me to do something. As it turned out, I was right about both.

The conversation was direct. Some would say brutal. It is not that Peter is a brute. Extremely violent and dangerous to be sure, but more in the style of a highly effective Roman Emperor than of a cave-bear. It is simply that he likes to accomplish things, preferably with his own hands, and tends to view conversations as impediments. He would rather do something of an essentially stupid and pointless nature, than talk of something beautiful or momentous. He wants his servants to be like his hands, which carry out his will immediately and without the tedium of verbal instructions—so much so that if a conversation extends beyond a few sentences, he will grow intolerably restless, his face will become disfigured by uncontrollable tics, and he will shoulder his interlocutor out of his way and take action himself. Since he and I do not share fluency in any language, he might have summoned an interpreter—but he was content to get along with a few crude sentences in a mixture of Dutch, German, and Russian.

“At St. Petersburg there is a place staked out to build the Academy of Sciences as you have suggested,” he began.

“Most Clement Lord,” I said, “as I have had the honor and privilege of founding such an Academy in Berlin; and as I have made some head-way in persuading the Emperor to found one in Vienna; my joy upon hearing this news, cannot but be commingled with apprehension that that of Russia will one day out-shine those of the Germans, and perhaps even put the Royal Society in the shade.”

You can well imagine his impatience as I croaked this out. Before I was half-way through it, he was stomping back and forth in the frozen garden like a frost-bitten sentry. I looked down to the opposite end of the clearing and noticed several portraits in ornate gilded frames, which had been taken down from the walls of the chateau, leaned against the hedge, and used for musketry practice. The faces of most of those paintings now consisted of fist-sized holes, and stray balls had punched out novel constellations in the dark backgrounds. I decided I had better get to the point. “How can I make this happen?”

This startled him and he spun round to glare at me. “What?”

“You want the Russian Academy to over-awe those of Berlin, Vienna, and London?”

“Yes.”

“How may I be of service to your Tsarish Majesty? Do you want me to recruit savants?”

“Russia is big. I can make savants. Just as I can make soldiers. But a soldier without a gun is only a fire that burns food. I think the same is true of a savant without his tools.”

I shrugged. “Mathematicians do not require tools. But all the other types of savant need something or other to help them do their work.”

“Get those things,” he commanded.

“Yes, Most Clement Lord.”

“We will make that thing you spoke of,” he announced. “The library-that-thinks.”

“The great machine that manipulates knowledge according to a set of logical rules?”

“Yes. That would be a good thing for my Academy of Science to have. No one else has one.”

“On both counts I am in full agreement, your Imperial Majesty.”

“What do you need, to build it?”

“Just as St. Petersburg cannot be built without architects’ drawings, or a ship without plans—”

“Yes, yes, yes, you need the tables of knowledge, written down as binary numbers, and you need the rules of symbolic logic. I have supported this work for many years!”

“With generosity worthy of a Cæsar, sire. And I have developed a logical calculus well adapted to regulate the workings of the machine.”

“What of the tables of knowledge!? You told me a man was working on this in Boston!”

By this point the Tsar had stormed up and put his face quite close to mine and gone into one of his twitching fits, which had spread to involve his arm. To steady himself he had gripped the rim of the wheel upon which I was seated, and was twisting it back and forth, rotating me first this way, then that.

For what I said next, it may help to exonerate me slightly in your eyes, Daniel, if I mention that this Tsar still breaks men on the wheel, and does even worse things to those who have incurred his displeasure; which was impossible for me to put out of my mind in my current circumstance, viz. mounted on a large wheel. Before I could think better of it, I blurted, “Oh, Dr. Waterhouse is on his way across the Atlantic at this very moment, and should, God willing, reach London soon!”

“He is turning over the work I paid for, to the Royal Society!? I knew I should have throttled that Newton when I had the opportunity!” (For when Peter visited London some years ago he met Sir Isaac at the Mint.)

“Not at all, Clement Lord, for indeed, your humble servant and all his works are reviled by the Royal Society, which would never accept anything linked to my name, even if Dr. Waterhouse were to behave so dishonestly, which is inconceivable!”

“I am building up my Navy,” Peter announced.

This, I confess, made little impression on me, for he is never not building up his Navy.

“I have ordered three men-of-war to be constructed in London,” he continued, “and to sail into the Baltic when weather permits in the spring, to join my fleet for a further assault upon the Swedes; for I have not yet fully purged Finland of those vermin. It is my wish that when those ships sail from London, they are to be laden with tools for my savants to use at the Academy of Science, and they are to carry the fruits of the labors of Dr. Waterhouse.”

“It shall be as you say, your Imperial Majesty,” I answered, as it seemed unwise to give any different response.

Then he could not shoo me away fast enough. I was dragged, breakneck, back into the center of Carlsbad on a troika and re-united with my driver. Thence we proceeded to Hanover with only a brief detour to Leipzig, where all of my affairs are in a state of upheaval. Publication of Monadology has gone forward with only the normal amount of bickering with printers. Now that the war is over, Prince Eugene, the Duke of Marlborough’s valiant brother-in-arms, has taken an interest in Philosophy—which may or may not be an affectation. At any rate, he asked me to write down some of my ideas in a form that would be readable by people like him, who are literate, and intelligent, but do not make a professional study of Philosophy (and he is not the first. It would be interesting to ask one of these people why they assume it is possible to do this in the case of philosophy when they would never dream of asking Sir Isaac to write a version of Principia Mathematica with all of the mathematicks taken out). I have done the best I can to satisfy Prince Eugene. The tract is called Principles of Nature and of Grace, and its printing moves forward too, attended by a completely different set of distractions and controversies. But most of my time in Leipzig was spent, not on the publication of new work, but on the most tedious re-hashing of what I was doing forty years ago. Since you are in the bosom of the Royal Society, Daniel, you know what I refer to: the dispute with Sir Isaac as to who first invented the calculus. Letters have been flying back and forth like kites over a knacker’s yard ever since this became warm about six years ago, but it has been hot during the last two years, or ever since Sir Isaac began to convene “committees” and, God help us, “tribunals” at the Royal Society to render an impartial verdict. In short, by the time you read this, anything I might say concerning the Priority Dispute will be out of date, and you can get better intelligence by stopping anyone in the hallway and asking him for the latest.

By this point, Daniel, you are no doubt frantic with anxiety that I’m about to ask for your help in my war with Sir Isaac. Indeed, I confess I might have stooped so low, if Peter had not laid more pressing burdens upon me. As it happened, during the ride from Leipzig to Hanover I scarcely thought of Newton at all, save in one, purely practical sense: I could not imagine how I was going to get a letter to you at Crane Court without someone—possibly even Newton himself—recognizing my handwriting, and tearing it open.

Upon my arrival, however, I learned that Providence had shed some favor on me. My old friend (and yours, I believe) Eliza, the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, had come to town incognito.

Several members of the English nobility have gravitated to Hanover in the last year or two, as the war ground to a halt like an unwound clock, and it became evident that England would not suffer the Pretender to succeed Queen Anne. These English courtiers—all Whigs, of course—have probably earned the scorn of London society for turning their backs on a reigning Queen and leaving their country to curry favor with Sophie and her son. And perhaps some of them deserve it. But they have performed invaluable services, not only to the Hanoverians but to England, by forging contacts, teaching their future rulers a few words of English, and coaxing them to think concretely about preparations. If the change of reign goes smoothly, you may thank them for it. They will be sure to compensate themselves handsomely!

This is not the place to tell the nature of Eliza’s work in Hanover. Suffice it to say that her incognito is not just a histrionic fashion statement. She is not seen in Court. Almost no one knows she is here. She corresponds frequently with a certain distinguished Englishman who lived in Frankfort until recently, when he moved to Antwerp. And if she receives letters from the Pretender’s court in St.-Germain, it is not because she is in league with the Jacobites, but because she makes it her business to know every detail of the plots that are being laid there, to bring a Catholic king back to the Court of St. James. At any rate, the Duchess’s network of couriers is peerless and more than equal to the task of getting a letter from my hands to yours without it falling into the grasping claws, and passing beneath the bulging eyeballs, of Sir Isaac.

So, to the matter at hand: Peter’s three new warships are supposedly being completed at Orney’s ship-yard in a place called Rotherhithe, across the river from Limehouse, adjacent to the Shepherd and Dog Stairs, off Lavender Street. I hope that these names mean something to you!

If you are feeling up to a minor adventure, and if it would in no way interfere with whatever it is you are supposed to be doing for Princess Caroline, I should be indebted if you were to (1) learn from Mr. Orney when those ships are expected to sail for St. Petersburg, and (2) before they do so, freight them, as much as you can, with goods that might be of use, or at least of interest, to aspiring Russian Natural Philosophers, viz. thermometers, scales, lenses, toad’s-eyes, unicorn’s-gallbladders, Philosopher’s Stone, and the like; and (3) for God’s sake give the Tsar something to show for our work of the last fifteen years. If you can arrange for your note-cards to be shipped over from Boston in time, that is ideal. Short of that, any tangible evidence that you have been doing something at the Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts, may help to keep your humble and obedient servant from being broken on a wheel before the Russian Academy of Sciences, as an example to Scientists who draw stipends without yielding Science.

Yours, & c.,

Leibniz

Daniel got dressed. Much of his clothing had been blown up. In the two weeks since, however, Mrs. Arlanc had brokered the procurement of new garments. Daniel had been too debilitated to meddle. Consequently he was now closer to being à la mode than at any time in his life.

The last fifty years had not witnessed anything like the thorough-going revolution in gentlemen’s attire that had come about after the Plague and the Fire, when doublets, and other medieval vestiges, had finally vanished from the world by decree of Charles II. The garments stacked on the table next to Daniel’s bed bore the same names, and covered more or less the same bits of the humane anatomy, as the ones that had become fashionable at that time: hose up to the knee, breeches, a linen shirt, a long, skirted, many-buttoned vest, and over that a long-sleeved coat with even more buttons. They had even managed to scare up a periwig for him. The old Louis XIV lion-mane wig was no longer in use; the new ones were narrower and more compact. A bizarre affectation seemed to have taken hold, of dusting them with white powder. The one Mrs. Arlanc had put on the block-head here was as plain as could be, and simply made it look as if Daniel had a luxuriant head of snow-white hair, tied back in a queue. Daniel put it on, if only to keep his bald head warm. He had avoided freezing to death in this room only by wearing a woolen night-cap twenty-four hours a day.

While he was putting on these clothes, which took a long time—his fingers were stiff with age and chill, and the buttons never ended—he glanced through the basket Mrs. Arlanc thought of as a repository, and Daniel thought of as a dustbin, for his mail. There were five separate communications from Mr. Threader, two from Roger Comstock, one from the Earl of Lostwithiel, and diverse cards and notes from Fellows who had stopped by to look in on him, and been turned away by the adamant Mrs. Arlanc. His London relations, some of whom he had never even heard of (these were children of the late Sterling and of Raleigh, and of William Ham) had written, somewhat perfunctorily. As promised, Monadology was in there from Leibniz, and there was a 2nd edition of Isaac’s Principia Mathematica, its leather cover still reeking of the tannery. This had been dropped off, not by Isaac—indeed, there was nothing in the basket from him—but by one of his young acolytes, who had thoughtfully piled on top of it a recent issue of Journal Literaire, a Royal Society document from last year called Commercium Epistolicum, and a litter of broadsheets and pamphlets in diverse languages, all tied together with narrow black ribbon. Daniel recognized these as several years’ worth of attacks and counter-attacks in the calculus dispute. Apparently he was expected to familiarize himself with them—which could only mean that they intended to call him before their tribunal to render testimony.

So much for mail from persons he actually knew. He worked his way deeper into the basket. Metallic clanking and scraping noises issued from its depths as he stirred through it. There were a few letters from Londoners who, starting as of a month ago, had become his fellows on the Court of Directors of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. There were two from chaps whose names he did not recognize at all, but who had orderly minds—or so he guessed from their handwriting. These two were the only letters he actually bothered to open and read, simply because they were the only ones whose contents were not wholly predictable. As it turned out, both were from men who had come up with inventions for determining longitude, and sought Daniel’s help in bringing their ideas before the Royal Society. Daniel threw them away.

There were no letters from his wife, or from little Godfrey, which was in no way surprising, given the season of the year and the rough weather. Groping to the very bottom of the basket, he scraped his hand on something jagged, and jerked back. He was not too old to die of tetanus. His fingers emerged sooty, rather than bloody. Pulling all the mail out of the basket and then tilting it towards the window he observed several twisted and blackened shreds of wood and of metal in the bottom. The largest bit was a miniature cask, no more than gallon-sized, such as might be used to transport distilled spirits. One end of it was intact—badly damaged to be sure, but still recognizable as having once been a keg. The staves were bound together by an iron band at the end, and spread out, like lines of longitude from the pole, until they reached the equator. But none of them continued very far into the opposite hemisphere. Some were snapped off clean, some bent outwards, some smashed into splintery brooms. That end of the keg, and its metal band, were gone entirely, though they might be accounted for by some of the loose fragments in the bottom of the basket. Other things were in there, too: gears, springs, levers of wrought brass.

Part of Daniel wanted to overturn this basket on a well-illuminated table and piece the device back together. But instead he buried it again under his unread mail. He had spent a fortnight immobilized by melancholy, and tormented by unreasonable fears. Today his humours had gone back into balance. The Daniel Waterhouse who had cowered in that bed for two weeks was a different chap from the one who was standing by the door, dressed and periwigged. But they could easily change places if he dwelled too long on the dark relics in that basket. They had grown cold, waiting for his attention; let them grow colder still.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY’S HEADQUARTERS comprised two separate houses and a tiny courtyard separating them. During the fund-raising effort, some had gone so far as to style it a “compound.” One of the houses was the northern terminus of Crane Court. Above its ground floor it had two addtional full storeys, plus a garret in the roof space. This garret, which was where Daniel had been lodged, had two small dormer windows facing the Crane Court side, which would have afforded a clear view all the way down to Fleet Street, and even to the Thames, had they not been partially blocked by a low parapet-wall that had been added to the front of the house to make it seem a few feet higher than it really was. So from his bed, Daniel’s view had been of a sort of lead-lined ditch formed where the steeply sloping roof plunged down to die in the base of the parapet: a bathing-place for birds when it rained, and a raceway for rodents in all weathers. For a few hours in the afternoon the sun would traverse the rectangle of sky that showed above the parapet, if the weather happened to be clear. If Daniel stood up and approached the window he could see over the lip of the parapet, where moss, soot, and birdshit vied for hegemony, down into Crane Court, and scan the jumble of rooftops all around. A view of the dome of St. Paul’s was denied him unless he opened the window, thrust his head out, and craned it to the left. Then it was startlingly close. Yet it seemed inapproachable because of the wide crevasse of Fleet Ditch, which broke the city in twain half-way between. If he turned one hundred eighty degrees and looked west, he was confronted by a church that was much closer, and infinitely older: the Rolls Chapel, which appeared to be sinking or collapsing into a spacious church-yard just across Fetter Lane. This medieval pile, which had been used by Chancery as a records dump for many centuries, had turned black with coal-smoke during Daniel’s lifetime. A bow-shot to the south of it, fronting on Fleet Street, was the Church of St. Dunstan-in-the-
West, a Wren production, duly turning black.

Much less strenuous for an old stiff-necked man was simply to gaze southward down the length of Crane Court and hope to glimpse a bit of open water between the buildings that filled most of the space between Fleet Street and the river. This view, every time he spied it, made Daniel feel as if he had, by some error in navigation, been taken to some city as strange as Manila or Isfahan. For the London in which he had grown up had been a congeries of estates, parks, and compounds, thrown up over centuries by builders who shared a common dream of what a bit of English landscape ought to look like: it should be a generous expanse of open ground with a house planted in it. Or, in a pinch, a house and wall built around the perimeter of a not-so-generous patch of ground. At any rate, there had been, in Daniel’s London, views of sky and of water, and little parks and farmlets scattered everywhere, not by royal decree but by some sort of mute, subliminal consensus. In particular, the stretch of riverbank Daniel could see from this garret had been a chain of estates, great houses, palaces, courts, temples, and churches put up by whatever powerful knights or monks had got there first and defended them longest. During Daniel’s lifetime, every one of these, with the exceptions of the Temple (directly across from the outlet of Crane Court) and Somerset House (far off to his right, towards where Whitehall Palace had stood, before it had burned down), had been demolished. Some had been fuel for the Fire and others had fallen victim to the hardly less destructive energies of Real Estate Developers. Which was to say that with the exception of the large open green of the Temple, every inch of that ground now seemed to be covered by Street or Building.

Turning his back on the window and opening his bedchamber door brought him back to London straightaway—not the London of average Londoners, but the circa-1660, Natural-Philosophic London of John Wilkins and Robert Hooke. For the remainder of the attic was packed to the rafters with material that Daniel recognized and identified under the broad heading of, Science Crapp. All had been brought over from the Royal Society’s crèche at Gresham’s College.

Gresham’s College had been precisely the sort of structure that had no place in modern-day London: a compound, rather than a house, built around a court that was spacious enough to house hundreds of Londoners if razed and jammed with town-houses. Gresham’s had been Tudor wattle-and-daub, a style that encouraged builders to make it up as they went along, and generally suffered them to get away with it. Whatever it might have looked like in Sir Thomas Gresham’s mind’s eye, when he had come back from Antwerp, famous from mending Gloriana’s coinage, and rich from speculating in it, by the time Daniel had got there it seemed to have been made not by human architects but by wasps.

At any rate it had been huge: ten times the size of the two Crane Court houses combined. They had not had the whole thing to themselves, but they’d had a lot of it.

Also they’d had Hooke and Wren, who’d built London up from cinders. If there was a cellar, closet, attic, or shed anywhere in London that was sitting vacant, Wren would know of it, and Hooke would have the temerity to use it for something.

What it all amounted to was this: up to about the turn of the century, the Royal Society had been able to store things by the acre. There had been no need to cull out, to throw away, or even to organize. But during the first decade of the century they’d lost Gresham’s and they’d lost Hooke. Their storage space had shrunk by a factor of ten, at the least. Which might have been a very favorable turn if the sorting out and throwing away had been done by someone who was qualified—who had been around from the beginning—and who had had the time to do a good job of it. To put it plainly, Newton, Wren, or Waterhouse. But Sir Isaac had been busy with the Mint, with prosecuting a war against Flamsteed, and with making the second edition of Principia Leibniz-proof. Sir Christopher Wren, during the same days, had been finishing St. Paul’s and building the Duke of Marlborough’s London house, just next door to St. James’s Palace: two significant jobs for an architect. Daniel had been in Massachusetts trying to build a Logic Mill.

Who then had performed the sorting-out? One of Newton’s acolytes. And he had probably done it in a hurry. If Daniel had been fully aware of this four years ago, when it had been happening, he’d have been in a panic. Now he could only look on the contents of this attic in the same spirit in which he had looked at the remains of Drake’s house on the morning after the Fire.

Most of the Science Crapp was still packed in the crates, barrels, bundles, and bales in which it had been carted hither. Each of these containers was an impediment to the casual investigator. Daniel spied a crate, not far below the rafters, with its lid slightly askew. The only thing atop it was a glass bell jar covering a dessicated owl. Daniel set the bird to one side, drew out the crate, and pulled off the lid. It was the old Archbishop of York’s beetle collection, lovingly packed in straw.

This, and the owl, told all. It was as he had feared. Birds and bugs, top to bottom, front to back. All salvaged, not because they had innate value, but because they’d been given to the Royal Society by important people. They’d been kept here just as a young couple keeps the ugly wedding present from the rich aunt.

He heard someone stifling a sneeze. Straightening up carefully, so as not to burst any of the juicy bits in his spinal column, he looked down the stairs and caught the eye of Henry Arlanc. Henry looked nervous, and studiously mournful, like a vicar at a wake, who did not know the deceased, but who is aware that the living have suffered a grievous loss and are likely to be in a foul mood. “I have endeavoured, Dr. Waterhouse, to preserve all that was brought here, in the condition it was brought.”

“No solicitor could have worded it more carefully,” Daniel muttered under his breath.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

Daniel stepped over to the top of the staircase, and steadied himself with a hand on the wall, for this was halfway between a ladder and a stair, and it made him dizzy.

“You have done well…you are absolved,” Daniel said. “The owl was free of dust.”

“Thank you, Dr. Waterhouse.”

Daniel sat down at the top of the stairs, resting his feet on the first step down. Between his knees he now enjoyed a clear and direct view of Henry’s face. Up here in the attic it was gloomy, but the walls and doors of the storey below were all painted white or close to it. The doors had been left open to release the light coming in the windows, and so Henry was bathed in pitiless and revealing illumination, like a specimen on a microscope stage. He was regarding Daniel uneasily.

“How long have you served here, Henry?”

“Since you moved in, sir.”

Daniel was a bit confused until he realized you meant The Royal Society.

“I like to say, that I came with the property,” Henry continued.

“When we moved here from Gresham’s College, there must have been a good deal of…rubbish. At Gresham’s, I mean.”

Henry looked inexpressibly relieved. “Oh yes, sir, more than you could ever imagine.”

“Cart-loads, then, was it?”

“Yes, sir, dozens of cart-loads hauled away,” Henry affirmed, in the pride of a job well done.

“Hauled away where, precisely?”

Henry faltered. “I—I would not know that, Dr. Waterhouse, there are salvage-men who pick through rubbish looking for objects of value, and sell them to tinkers…”

“I understand, Henry. What is more, I agree that neither you, nor any other man, can be asked to know whither rubbish has gone, after the rubbish-cart has disappeared from view. But I have a different question for you along the same lines, on which you must concentrate as intently as you can.”

“I shall strain to do so, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“At the time that Gresham’s was being cleared out, and the rubbish being carted away, and the treasures brought safely here—I say, at that time, was any rubbish taken away, or treasures produced, from other locations?”

“Other locations, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Hooke. Mr. Robert Hooke. He might have squirrelled things away at Bedlam, or in the additions to the Marquis of Ravenscar’s house, or the College of Physicians—”

“Why those places, sir?”

“He built them. Or St. Paul’s, or the Fire Monument—he had a hand in those as well. He might have left things in those buildings; and just as the nuts, hidden in out-of-the-way places by a squirrel, are oft forgotten, and discovered later by others—”

“I do not recollect anything coming from Bedlam, or any other place besides Gresham’s College,” Henry said flatly.

Henry looked curiously red in the face. He had been simple enough to fall into the trap that Daniel had set by speaking of rubbish. But he was sharp enough to see it in hindsight. His response was to become angry rather than fearful. Daniel sensed immediately that to have this man angry at him was undesirable. He explained, in softer tones, “It is only that the Royal Society is so pre-eminent among the scientific academies of the world, that what is rubbish to us, would be esteemed treasure to some who are accounted savants in backward places; and as a gesture of friendship towards such countries, we could send them odds and ends for which we have no further use.”

“I take your meaning now, sir,” said Henry, the flush fading from his cheeks.

“Better for one of Mr. Hooke’s old clocks to be studied by a student in Muscovy, than for some Shadwell tinker to make the gears into jewelry.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“I have been asked by a colleague on the Continent to keep an eye out for any such items. It is probably too late for the dozens of cart-loads. Perhaps not for what might have been stowed by Hooke in other buildings to which he had keys.”

“Sir Christopher Wren was an old friend of Mr. Hooke’s.”

“That he was,” said Daniel, “though I wonder how you know it, since Hooke died seven years before you had any connection to the Royal Society.”

Again Henry’s face flushed. “ ’Tis common knowledge. Sir Christopher is here all the time—why, he stopped in just this morning—and often speaks of Hooke with a kind of affection.”

Henry got a wry distracted look which proved he was speaking truth. God and the angels might speak of Hooke with outright and unalloyed affection; but a kind of affection was the best that could be achieved by Wren, or any other mortal.

“I should simply refer my inquiries to Sir Christopher, then.”

“He has stated more than once that he would enjoy renewing your acquaintance, sir, whenever…”

Henry trailed off and made a furtive glance at the doorway to the garret, near the top of the stairs.

“Whenever I came to my senses. Consider me healed, Henry. And if you are seized by an urge to throw anything away, do make me aware of it, so that I can pluck out any items that would pass for wonders in Muscovy.”

Daniel went out for a walk: a most imprudent act.

Henry Arlanc had let it be known that if Daniel ever summoned the will to leave, for an hour or a day, he, Henry Arlanc, could arrange a sedan chair or a carriage. This was nothing more than simple common sense. The streets of London were a good bit more dangerous now than when Daniel had last walked them, and Daniel much more vulnerable. But on a morning like this, with the streets so crowded with well-to-do persons on the move, murderers and footpads were less likely to be encountered than pickpockets. And these would reap only the meagrest of harvests from Daniel.

An odd notion had come in to Daniel’s mind: perhaps the intended victim of the Infernal Device had been, not Daniel or Mr. Threader, but Henry Arlanc.

Now in his years of toil for the Royal Society, Daniel had become a stern judge of odd notions. There were abundant reasons to discard this one straightaway. Its most obvious defect was simply that Daniel had not the faintest idea why anyone would want to blow up the Royal Society’s porter. Moreover, the fog that had descended over Daniel’s mind since the explosion had made him susceptible to hypotheses of an extremely dark and frightening cast, and this seemed like one of those.

But the Natural Philosopher in him had to admit that it was at least theoretically possible. And until it had been ruled out, Daniel liked to preserve, from Arlanc, some independence—he did not wish to get in the habit of relying on the Huguenot every time he stirred from Crane Court—and some privacy. ’Twas neither necessary nor desirable for Arlanc to know everything about his movements around London.

His knees were still recovering from too long spent in bed, but they had become unlimbered by the time he reached the end of Crane Court and flung himself on the mercy of Fleet Street. He turned to the right, therefore moving in the general direction of Charing Cross, and worked his way cautiously upstream, prudently facing on-coming traffic, and with his right hand dabbing at the fronts of houses and shops in case he should be forced to save himself by diving into a door-way. Soon he had left St. Dunstan-in-the-West behind. The Inner and Middle Temple would be to his left, on the opposite side of Fleet, lurking behind a screen of newer buildings. These were largely occupied by pubs and coffee-houses that were continual targets of arch but confusing references, and cruel but murky satire, in newspapers.

Soon he had passed through Temple Bar. The way—now called the Strand—forked into a main channel on the left and an inferior one to the right, creating a long central island with a couple of churches in it. Daniel took the narrower way—really a series of disjoint street-fragments crudely plumbed together—and grew convinced that he was lost. The buildings were held apart by splints of air, too narrow to deserve the name “alley,” that jogged crazily to the right and left, and did not run in straight lines even when they could have. The fire had stopped short of this part of the city, probably because the Rolls and the Temple, with their generous lawns, had acted as fire-breaks. Hooke, in his capacity as City Surveyor, had not been empowered to bring it out of the Dark Ages. These ancient rights-of-way were as sacred, or at least as unassailable, as the precepts of the Common Law. Somewhere among them was an old, therefore low-ceilinged room that had been acquired by a printer, Mr. Christopher Cat, and made into a thing called the Kit-Cat Clubb.

I have spoken to Mr. Cat about you, Roger had let Daniel know, in a note slipped under his door. When you venture out, stop by our Clubb for refreshment. There had been a sketchy map, which Daniel now withdrew from his pocket, and tried to interpret. It was useless. But presently he was able to find his way to the Kit-Cat Clubb simply by following the carriages of Whig M.P.s.

The building had clearly been thrown up in an epoch of English history short on food and building materials, because Daniel, who was of average height, could barely stand up without being bludgeoned by a joist. Accordingly, the paintings that Mr. Cat had commissioned to adorn the walls were all bizarrely wide and short. This ruled out portraits, unless they were portraits of very large groups as seen from tremendous distances. Of these, the largest and most prominently displayed was of the distinguished membership of the Kit-Cat Clubb. Roger was front and center in his best wig, which was captured as a horseshoe-shaped swipe of an overloaded paint-brush.

“LET’S DO SOMETHING about Longitude!”

He was the same Roger in a much older body. Only his teeth looked young, because they were; they could not have been carved more than a few months ago. He had deteriorated in every way save the Mental and the Dental. He made up for it with clothing.

Daniel blew on his chocolate for a few moments, trying to get it to cool without forming a wrinkled hide on the top. He could not hear himself think for all the Whigs in wigs shouting at each other. “The Queen opened Parliament only two hours ago,” he reminded Roger, “or so I’ve been told, and she forgot, entirely, to mention the trifling detail of who would succeed her, after her demise. And you wish to have a chat about Longitude.”

The Marquis of Ravenscar rolled his eyes. “ ’Twas settled æons ago. Sophie or Caroline will succeed her—”

“You mean, Sophie or George Louis.”

“Don’t be a fool. Ladies run Europe. The War of the Spanish Succession was all women. In Versailles, Madame de Maintenon. In Madrid, her best friend, the Princesse des Ursins, Camarera Mayor of the Bourbon Court of Spain. She runs the place. Those two on the one side, fought it out against Queen Anne and Sophie on the other.”

“I thought Queen Anne and Sophie hated each other.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Touché, Roger.”

“Now if you insist on being pedantic, yes, George Louis is next in the queue after Sophie. Do you know what he did with his wife?”

“Something horrible, I heard.”

“Locked her up in a Schloß for the rest of her life, for bed-swerving.”

“So clearly he has the upper hand, at least—”

“ ’Tis the exception that proves the rule, Daniel. By taking such a measure, he confesses his helplessness to the world. She made him a cuckold. Cuckolds cannot be unmade.”

“Still, she’s locked in a Schloß, and he isn’t.”

“He is locked up in the Schloß of his own mind, which, by all accounts, has walls so thick, as to leave very little room within. The leading lady of England will be the Princess of Wales—raised personally by Sophie and by the late lamented, by all accounts dazzling, Queen of Prussia; and tutored by your friend.” This Roger stressed ominously.

“Er, getting back to the actual topic of conversation, don’t you think your time were better spent making sure the Hanoverians actually do succeed to the throne? Longitude can wait.”

Roger waved his hand as if trying for the eleventh time to knock a particular horse-fly out of the air. “God damn it, Daniel do you really think we are so feckless, as not to have thought of that?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“We’re not letting the Pretender in! You were there at his so-called birth—you saw the sleight-of-
hand involving the warming-pan—surely a man of your discrimination was not so easily deceived!”

“To me it looked like a babe’s head coming out of the Queen’s vagina.”

“And you call yourself a man of science!”

“Roger, if you would set aside this quaint notion that countries must be ruled by kings who are the sons of other kings, then it would not matter whether the Pretender entered St. James’s Palace through a vagina, or a warming-pan; either way, to hell with him.”

“Are you suggesting I become a Republican?”

“I’m suggesting you already are one.”

“Hmmph…from there, ’tis only a short step to Puritanism.”

“Puritanism has its advantages…we are not so much under the thumb of ladies.”

“Only because you hang all of the interesting ones!”

“I am told you have a mistress of a distinguished family…”

“As do you—the chief difference being, I get to sleep with mine.”

“They say she is extraordinarily clever.”

“Yours, or mine?”

“Both of them, Roger, but I was referring to yours.”

Roger did an odd thing then, namely, raised up his glass and turned it this way and that, until it had caught the light from the window the right way. It had been scratched up with a diamond. Several lines of script ran across it, which he now read, in a ghastly chaunt that was either bad reading or bad singing.

At Barton’s feet the God of Love

His Arrows and his Quiver lays,

Forgets he has a Throne above,

And with this lovely Creature stays.

Not Venus’s Beauties are more bright,

But each appear so like the other,

The Cupid has mistook the Right,

And takes the Nymph to be his Mother.

By the time he had lurched and wheezed to the end, several nearby clubbers had picked up the melody—if it could be so called—and begun to sing along. At the end, they all rewarded themselves by Consumption of Alcohol.

“Roger! I never would have dreamed any woman could move you to write even bad poetry.”

“Its badness is proof of my sincerity,” Roger said modestly. “If I wrote her an excellent love-poem, it might be said of me, that I had done it only to flaunt my wit.”

“As matters stand, you are indeed safe from any such accusations.”

Roger now allowed a few silent moments to pass, and adjusted his posture and his wig, as if about to be recognized in Parliament. He proclaimed: “Now, when the attention of all Good and Forthright Men is fixed upon the controversies attending the Hanoverian Succession, now, I say, is the time to pass Expensive and Recondite Legislation!”

“Viz. Longitude?”

“We can offer a prize to the chap who devises a way of measuring it. A large prize. I have mentioned the idea to Sir Isaac, to Sir Christopher, and to Mr. Halley. They are all for it. The prize is to be quite large.”

“If you have their support, Roger, what can you possibly want of me?”

“It is high time the Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts—which I have supported so generously—did something useful!”

“Such as—?”

“Daniel, I want to win the Longitude Prize!”

London

LATE FEBRUARY 1714

DANIEL WAS LURKING LIKE A bat in the attic, supervising Henry Arlanc, who was packing Science Crapp into crates and casks. Sir Isaac Newton emerged from a room on the floor just below, talking to a pair of younger men as they strode down the corridor. Daniel craned his neck and peered down the stairway just in time to catch a glimpse of Isaac’s feet and ankles as they flicked out of view. One of the men was Scottish, and sanguine, and fully agreeable to whatever it was that Isaac thought he should do. “I shall remark on the Baron’s remarks, sir!”

Leibniz had published his latest salvo in Journal Literaire under the title “Remarks.”

“I’ll use him smartly, I will!”

“I shall supply you with my notes on his Tentamen. I found in it a clearly erroneous use of second-order differentials,” Isaac said, preceding the others down the stairs.

“I perceive your strategy sir!” boomed the Scotsman. “Before the Baron presumes to pick the lint from oot o’ yoor eye he ought to extricate the log from oot o’ his oon!” It was John Keill: Queen Anne’s cryptographer.

The three men stormed down the stairs and out into the streets, or so it sounded to Daniel, in whose failing ears their footsteps and their conversation melted together into a fusillade of hoots and booms.

Daniel waited until their carriages had cleared the end of Crane Court, then went to the Kit-Cat Clubb.

ONE OF THE REGULARS THERE was John Vanbrugh, an architect who made a specialty of country houses. For example, he was building Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough. He couldn’t help but be busy on that front just now, since Harley had just flung ten thousand pounds at the Duke. Most of his tasks, just now, had nothing to do with the drawing up of plans or the supervision of workers. He was rather shunting money from place to place and attempting to hire people. Daniel knew this because Vanbrugh was using the Kit-Cat Clubb as his office, and Daniel couldn’t go there and read the paper and drink chocolate without hearing half of Vanbrugh’s business. Occasionally Daniel would glance up to discover Vanbrugh staring at him. Perhaps the architect knew he had corresponded with Marlborough. Perhaps it was something else.

At any rate, Vanbrugh was there when Daniel walked down from Crane Court, and within a few moments he had a great deal more reason to stare. For Daniel had scarcely sat down before a really excellent carriage pulled up in front of the club, and the head of Sir Christopher Wren appeared in its window, asking for Dr. Daniel Waterhouse. Daniel obliged by coming out and climbing right in. The magnificence of this vehicle, and the beauty of the four matched horses that drew it, were sufficient to stop traffic on the Strand, which greatly simplified the task of getting it turned around and aimed back the way Daniel had come, eastwards into the city.

“I sent a carter round to Crane Court, as you requested, to collect whatever it was you wanted collected. He shall meet us at St. Stephen Walbrook and then he is yours for the day.”

“I am in your debt.”

“Not at all. May I ask what it is?”

“Rubbish from the attic. A gift to our scientific brethren in St. Petersburg.”

“Then I am in your debt. Given the nature of my work, what a scandal it would raise, if Crane Court collapsed under the weight of beetles.”

“Let us consider all accounts settled between us, then.”

“Did you really go through all of it!?”

“What I am really after is the residue of Hooke.”

“Oh—er! You shan’t find it there. Sir Isaac.”

“Hooke and Newton are the two most difficult persons I have ever known—”

“Flamsteed belongs too in that Pantheon.”

“Hooke thought Newton stole his ideas.”

“Yes. He made me aware of it.”

“Newton considered himself aggrieved by any such accusations. Hooke’s legacy could only support Hooke, and never exonerate Newton—so away with all such rubbish! But Hooke, being no less obstreperous than Newton, must have anticipated this—he would therefore have placed his most valuable stuff out of Newton’s reach.”

Wren bore his eighty-one years as an arch supports tons of stone. He had been a sort of mathematical and mechanical prodigy. The quicksilver that had seemingly welled up out of the ground, round the time of Cromwell, had been especially concentrated in him. Later that tide had seemed to ebb, as many of the early Royal Society men had succumbed to a heaviness of the limbs, or of the spirit. Not so with Wren, who seemed to be changing from an elfin youth into an angel, with only a brief sojourn in Manhood. He wore a tall fluffy silver wig, and clothing of light color, with airy lace at the throat and wrists, and his face was in excellent condition. His age showed mostly in the dimples of his cheeks, which had lengthened to crevices, and in the fragile skin of his eyelids, which had become quite loose, pink, and swollen. But even this only seemed to lend him a placid and mildly amused look. Daniel saw now that Wisdom had been among the gifts that God had bestowed on the young Wren, and that it had led him into architecture: a field where the results spoke for themselves, and in which it was necessary to remain on speaking terms with large numbers of one’s fellow humans for years at a time. The other early Royal Society men had not recognized Wren’s wisdom, and so there had been whispers, fifty years ago, that the wonder boy was squandering his gifts by going into the building trade. Daniel had been as guilty of saying so as anyone else. But Wren’s decision had long since been vindicated, and Daniel—who’d made his own decisions, some wiser than others—felt no trace of envy, and no regret. Only a sort of awed bemusement, as their carriage emerged from Ludgate and circumnavigated St. Paul’s church-yard, and Wren parted a curtain with one finger to cast an eye over St. Paul’s, like a shepherd scanning his flock.

What would it be like, to have built that? Daniel could only guess at it, by considering what he had built, and trying to appraise it in a similar spirit. But Daniel’s work was not finished yet. He was not that old—or so he felt, in present company. When Wren’s son had laid the last stone into its place in the lantern atop the dome of St. Paul’s, Sir Christopher had been ten years older than Daniel was today.

St. Paul’s had passed from view; they had turned onto Watling Street and come to a dead stop in the congestion; the tables had turned, and now Wren was looking at Daniel bemusedly. “I do not intend to make your business mine,” he said, “but it would help me to help you, if you would allow me to know what sort of Hooke-stuff you are looking for. Some of his artwork, to adorn your walls? Navigational instruments, for finding your way back to Boston? Architectural drawings? Astronomical observations? Schemes for flying machines? Samples of exotic plants and animals? Clock-work? Optical devices? Chymical Receipts? Cartographical innovations?”

“Forgive me, Sir Christopher, my affairs divide and multiply from one day to the next, I am compelled to pursue several errands at once, and so my answer is not as plain as it might be. Almost anything will serve the end I have already mentioned, viz. giving the Russian savants-in-training food for thought. As for my own purposes, I require anything to do with machines.”

“I have heard it mentioned that you are a member of the Court of Directors of the Proprietors—”

“No. It is not that. Mr. Newcomen’s Engine is a huge and beastly piece of ironmongery, and he needs no assistance from me to make it. I am thinking of small, precise, clever machines.”

“I suppose you mean, small, precise machines, made cleverly.”

“I meant what I said, Sir Christopher.”

“So it’s the Logic Mill again? I thought Leibniz gave up on it, what, forty years ago.”

“Leibniz only set it aside forty years ago, so that he could—” Here Daniel was struck dumb for a few moments out of sheer awe at the faux pas he had been about to commit; he was going to say, invent the calculus.

Sir Christopher’s face, as he regarded this narrowly averted conversational disaster, looked like the death-mask of a man who had died in his sleep while having a pleasant dream.

Finally Wren said, brightly, “I recall Oldenburg was furious. Never forgave him for not finishing it.”

A short pause. Daniel was thinking something unforgivable: perhaps Oldenburg had been right, Leibniz should have built the damned machine and never trespassed upon the holy ground that Isaac had discovered and walled round. He sighed.

Sir Christopher was regarding him with infinite patience. ’Twas like sharing a coach with a Corinthian column.

“I am serving two masters and one mistress,” Daniel began. “Just now, I don’t know what the mistress expects of me, and so let us leave her out of the discussion, and consider my masters. Both men of power. One, a prince of a faraway land, of an old style, but with new ideas. The other, a new sort of prince: a Parliamentary potentate. I can satisfy both, by achieving the same object: construction of a Logic Mill. I know how to build it, for I have been thinking about it, and making test-pieces, for twenty years. I shall soon have a place to build it in. There is even money. I want tools, and clever men who can work miracles with them.”

“Hooke devised machines for cutting tiny gears, and the like.”

“And he knew all of the watch-makers. Among his papers there might be names.”

Wren was amused. “Oh, you’ll have no difficulty getting watch-makers to talk to you, after my lord Ravenscar passes the Longitude Act.”

“That depends on whether they perceive me as a competitor.”

“Are you?”

“I believe that the way to find longitude is not to make better clocks, but to make certain astronomical observations—”

“The Method of Lunar Distances.”

“Indeed.”

“But there is so much arithmetick to be done, with that method.”

“And so let us equip every ship with an Arithmetickal Engine.”

Sir Christopher Wren pinkened—not because he was angry, or embarrassed, but because he was interested. His mind worked for a while. Daniel let it. Finally Wren said, “The most ingenious mechanics I have ever seen, have not been those who make clocks—though they are admittedly very clever—but the ones who make organs.”

“Pipe-organs, you mean?”

“Yes. For churches.”

Daniel felt something very strange happening to his face: he was smiling. “Sir Christopher, you must have employed more organ-makers than any man in history.”

Wren held up a steadying hand. “The furnishings are put in by the parish vestries—it is they who employ the organ-makers. But this much is true: I see them all the time.”

“London must be infested with them!”

“That was more true ten and twenty years ago than now. London’s churches are finished. Many of the organ-makers have gone back to the Continent, to rebuild instruments destroyed in the wars. But many are still here. I shall make inquiries, Daniel.”

They arrived at the church of St. Stephen on Walbrook. Walbrook had been a stream in Roman times, and was now assumed to be a sewer flowing somewhere beneath the street of the same name, though no one was volunteering to go down and verify this. It was a good omen for the day, because this was Daniel’s favorite church. (1) Wren had put it up early in his career—come to think of it, during the same years Leibniz had been toiling on the calculus. It was all domes and arches, as white and pure as an egg; and whatever uplifting thoughts its parishioners might think as they filed into it, Daniel knew it was Wren’s secret anthem to Mathematicks. (2) Thomas Ham, his goldsmith uncle, had lived and worked close enough to hear the hymns being sung in this church. His widow Mayflower—who late in life had converted to Anglicanism—had attended services there with her surviving son William. (3) When King Charles II had ennobled Thomas Ham by way of apology for absconding with all of his customers’ deposits, he had named him Viscount Walbrook, and so to Daniel the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook felt almost like a family chapel.

Wren had put up so many churches so quickly that he’d not had time to plant steeples on them. They all looked splendid on the inside. But steeples were essential to his vision of how London ought to look from the outside, and so now, in semi-retirement, he was going round to his old projects and banging out majestic yet tasteful steeples one after the other. From here Daniel could see another being finished at St. James Garlickhythe, a quarter-mile away, and yet another freshly completed one across the street from there at St. Michael Paternoster Royal. Apparently Sir Christopher’s steeple project was rolling through London a neighborhood at a time. Eminently practical, that. This one, at St. Stephen Walbrook, was just getting underway, using men and matériel being moved over from the other two.

They were taking over the near end of an anomalous open ground north of the church, which spanned a distance of a hundred yards or so between it and the riotous Poultry/Threadneedle/Cornhill/Lombard intersection. Formerly this had been the Stocks Market. It was impossible for so much uncovered dirt to exist in a city like London without becoming a breeding-ground for Crime or Commerce, and Daniel spied instances of both as soon as he got out of Wren’s carriage. At the nearer end, Wren’s workmen had set up, and were guarding, supply-dumps for the masons and carpenters who would spend the next year or two working here, and were erecting a tiny encampment of shacks and tents. Their dogs were parading around, solemn as doctors, urinating on anything that did not move fast enough. Amid this mess, Daniel spied one cart laden with parcels he’d packed with his own hands in the attic of the Royal Society.

A lot of fellows were doffing their hats—not to Daniel, of course, but to his traveling-companion. Wren was clearly getting ready to part ways with him. “I have in my possession drawings of many of Hooke’s buildings.”

“That is just the sort of thing I need.”

“I shall send them to you. As well as the names of some men, now retired, who built them, and who may have recollections of peculiarities in their construction.”

“That is really splendid of you.”

“It is the least I can do on behalf of the estate of the fellow who taught me how to design arches. Lastly, I shall nominate you as Overseer of Demonstrations to the Royal Society.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It will become clear to you with a little reflection. I bid you good day, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“You are a perfect gentle knight, Sir Christopher.”

HE HAD PHANT’SIED that London would be less congested in its eastern reaches, beyond Bishopsgate, but if anything that part of the city was worse yet. For on that front it lay open to the inroads of, on the left hand, Industry, and on the right, Shipping. Neither Daniel nor his carter cared to spend the balance of the day disputing the right-of-way against heavy wagons laden with bricks, coal, and lime, and being drawn down the street by cavalry-charges of draught
-horses. They might cross the Bridge, but Southwark would be the same scene with narrower, fewer, and worse roads. So Daniel decreed a change in plans, and had the carter drive him and his parcels down Fish Street Hill to the approaches of London Bridge, and then east along Thames Street as if going to the Tower. To their right, diverse narrow ancient lanes ran down to the wharves, about a bow-shot away, each street giving him a moment’s glimpse of a different controversy, mob action, or commercial transaction; but the river Thames was not present in any of these tableaux, because all he could see at the open street-ends was masts and rigging.

They passed the Billingsgate market, which was arrayed around the three sides of a large rectangular dock, or cut-out in the riverbank, where small vessels could come in from the Pool. The dock reached most of the way to Thames Street, which broadened into a plaza there, so as to shake hands with the market. Black rocks skittered out, or lodged and shattered, under the iron rims of the cart’s wheels. The horses faltered. They were pushing through a crowd of children in grimy clothes who were buzzing around gleaning those black rocks out of crevices between paving-stones.

“Crimps!” said the carter, “Crimps and Meters come to meet the Hags.” He was referring, not to the boys scavenging coal, but to classes of people doing business on the northern shore of Billingsgate Dock. Crimps were coal-merchants, and to judge from snatches of accent drifting on the breeze, they were Yorkshiremen. Meters were the City of London officials who weighed the chalders of sea-coal on immense blackened steel-yards, and Hags were the stout tubby boats that ferried it in from the big hulks out in the Pool. All of which was new to Daniel, who thought of Billingsgate as a fish-market; but he was reassured to see that the fishwives had not been driven out of the place, indeed still controlled most of the dock, and drove back encroaching Crimps with well-aimed barrages of fish-guts and vivid, faithful descriptions of their persons and their families.

Past Billingsgate the going was easier, but only slightly, as the Customs House was shortly ahead of them on the right. This was so crowded with men doing transactions that it was said by some to rival Change Alley. Their discourse commingled into a surfing roar, and even from here Daniel could hear the occasional crash and foam of some mighty wave of Intercourse.

“This will do,” he said, and the carter took the next right turn and drove down a lane, lined with small and dingy, but very active, business concerns, to the Thames wharf. Several wee docks had been chopped out of this stretch of the riverbank and it did not take them long to find one where watermen were gathered, smoking pipes and exchanging learned commentary. Simply by standing still and dispensing coins to the right people at the right times, Daniel was able to cause his parcels to be loaded on a boat; passage to be booked across and down the river; and the carter to be sent home.

Seen from Thames Street the river had seemed less Conduit than Barrier—a palisade of honed wood thrown up to prevent an invasion, or an escape. But with a few strokes of the waterman’s oar they penetrated the screen along the wharves and surged out into the main channel. This was as crowded as any water in the world, but miraculously open and accommodating compared to the streets of London. Daniel felt as though burdens had been lifted, though nothing could be further from the truth. London very quickly became a smouldering membrane, a reeking tarpaulin flung over the hill and not smoothed out. The only features of consequence were the Fire Monument, the Bridge, the Tower, and St. Paul’s. The Bridge, as always, seemed like a Bad Idea, a city on stilts, and a very old, slumping, inflammable Tudor city at that. Not far from its northern end was the Fire Monument, of which Daniel was now getting his first clear view. It was an immense solitary column put up by Hooke but universally attributed to Wren. During Daniel’s recent movements about London he had been startled, from time to time, to spy the lantern at its top peering down at him from over the top of a building—just as he had often felt, when he was a younger man, that the living Hooke was watching him through a microscope.

The tide was flowing, and it wafted them downstream at a fair clip. They were abreast of the Tower before he knew it. With some effort of will, Daniel swerved his gaze from Traitor’s Gate, and wrenched his thoughts from recollection of old events, and paid heed to present concerns. Though he could not see through the Tower’s walls and bastions, he could see smoke rising from the general vicinity of the Mint buildings; and beneath the general clamor radiating from the city he phant’sied he could detect the slow heavy pulse of the trip-hammers beating out guineas. On the battlements were soldiers, wearing black trim on their red coats: therefore, the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards, who had been garrisoned at the Tower, yanked away from it, re-garrisoned there, yanked back again so many times that Daniel had given up trying to keep track. The whereabouts of the Black Torrent Guard were an infallible weather-cock that told which way the wind was blowing, where Marlborough—who had founded the regiment—was concerned. If the United Kingdom was at war, the Black Torrent Guards were at the front. If at peace, and Marlborough in favor with the Sovereign, they would be at Whitehall. If Marlborough lay under suspicion of being another Cromwell-in-the-making, then his favored Regiment would be exiled to the Tower, and numbed with the toils of minding Mint and Arsenal.

As they drifted down the river, the buildings gradually became meaner, and the ships more magnificent. Not that the buildings were so very mean at first. Carriageways had always coursed along both banks, but now one could not see them because warehouses, mostly of burnt brick, had been cast up between them and the river, their walls plunging sheer into the water so that boats could bump against them to be loaded or unloaded with the help of cranes that projected out above the water like the feelers of microscopic animalcules. The only relief in these warehouse-walls was at small flat wharves specializing in this or that type of cargo, and connected to the world by rays of pounded dirt. On the left or Wapping bank, those streets led into a city that had, dumbfoundingly, been summoned into being during Daniel’s absence. On the right or Southwark bank, the buildings soon dwindled to a mere screen along the water-front, with open country beyond. But Daniel was only allowed to see into it when the boat swam into transitory alignment with a south-going road. Such roads were lined with new buildings for a quarter-mile or so inland, making them look like sword-cuts hacked into the city. And the country beyond was not your English farmsteads (though there were pastures and dairies) but your quasi-industrial landscape of tenter-grounds and tanner yards, the inherently land-hungry manufactures of large flat goods.

Coming round the elbow before Wapping put them in view of a mile of river, running straight up to the great horseshoe-bend between Limehouse and Rotherhithe, Daniel was surprised, and yet not, to see that the new city on the left bank extended almost that entire distance, so that the formerly free-standing towns of Shadwell and Limehouse were all but swallowed by London now. The very idea made his skin crawl just a bit, for the downriver slum-towns had always been the breeding-grounds of mudlarks, river-pirates, rabid dogs, wharf-rats, highwaymen, and Vagabonds, and the intervening belt of countryside—pocked though it might have been with clay-pits, brick-yards, and gin-houses—had been a sort of cordon sanitaire between them and London. He wondered if London might get more than it bargained for, by replacing that barrier with through streets.

The Southwark side was much more open, and parts of it were un-obstructed, so that Daniel, and grazing dairy-cows, could inspect each other across a few yards of water, mud, and turf. But just as the sloops and schooners were giving way to proper three-masted ships as they progressed down this stretch of the Pool, so the small wharves and warehouses of city merchants were being supplanted by vast flat yards that owned long swaths of the bank, big as battle-fields, and almost as noisy: the ship-yards. Some bloke at the Kit-Cat Clubb had tried to convince Daniel that there were now no fewer than two dozen ship-yards active along the edges of the Pool, and almost as many dry-docks. Daniel had only pretended to credit this, out of politeness. Now he believed. For what seemed like miles, the banks of the Thames were lined with enterprises that ate trees by the thousands and shit boats by the score. They spat out enough saw-dust and wood-shavings to safely pack St. Paul’s in a shipping-crate, supposing a crate that large could be built. Which it probably could, here. Certain things Daniel had been noticing suddenly became connected in his mind. The rafts of hardwood logs floating down the Charles, day after day, in Boston, and the fact that coal, its smoke, and its soot were everywhere in London now, both spoke of a desperate hunger for wood. The forests of Old and New England alike were being turned into fleets, and only a fool would burn the stuff.

At the last minute the waterman showed uncertainty as to which ship-yard was Mr. Orney’s—there being so many to choose from, here—but Daniel knew. It was the one with three men-of-war, all being built to the same plan, resting side-by-side on the ways. The workers sitting on the ribs of those ships, eating their midday meals, were English- and Irishmen, wearing wool caps if they bothered to protect their heads from the raw breeze at all. But as they rowed closer Daniel saw two men in giant fur hats, inspecting the work.

The waterman made them drift beneath the jutting sterncastles of the three hulls. The one in the middle was nearly complete, except for the all-important carving, painting, and gilding of gaudy decorations. The other two were still receiving their hull planks.

They came in view of a pier that thrust out into the river at the downstream end of the yard, well clear of the ships. A man in plain black clothing was sitting on a keg near the end, nibbling on a pasty and reading a Bible. When he saw them coming, he put both down carefully, stood up, and held out his hands to catch the painter thrown his way by the waterman. His hands blurred and conjured up a perfect knot, making them fast to a heavy iron bitt on the pier. The knot, and the style in which it had been performed, demonstrated to all who witnessed them that this fellow was one of God’s elect. His clothing was severe, and it was none of your fine Sunday stuff, but heavy woolen work-clothes, flecked all over with stray fibers and saw-dust. From the man’s callused hands, and his way with cordage, Daniel took him for a rigger.

On the shore above them, wheel-ruts and plank-roads formed a miniature London of avenues and squares, except that the place of buildings was taken by stacks and heaps of logs, timbers, rope-coils, oakum-bales, and pitch-kegs. Running along one side of this supply-dump, and defining the eastern boundary of Orney’s yard, was a public right-of-way that traversed the flats for a short distance and then bounded up a stairway to Lavender Lane, which was the bankside street in this part of Rotherhithe.

“God save you, brother,” Daniel said to the rigger.

“And thee—sir,” returned the rigger, giving him the once-over.

“I am Dr. Waterhouse of the Royal Society,” Daniel confessed, “a high and mighty title for a sinner, which brings me never so much respect and honor among those who have been seduced by the pleasures and illusions of Vanity Fair.” He threw a glance over his shoulder at London. “You may so address me, if you wish; but to be called ‘Brother Daniel’ would be a higher honor.”

“Then Brother Daniel it is, if thou wouldst return the favor, by knowing me as Brother Norman.”

“Brother Norman, I perceive that thou dost set a continual example of Industry to the men around you who are tempted by the false promises of Slothfulness. All of this I understand—”

“Oh, there are hard workers among us, Brother Daniel, otherwise how could we perform such works as these?”

“Thy point is well taken, Brother Norman, and yet my confusion only worsens; for I have never seen a ship-yard so prodigious, with workers so few; where is everyone?”

“Why, Brother Daniel, I am grieved to inform thee that they are in Hell. Or as close a thing to Hell as there is on this earth.”

Daniel’s first guesses at this riddle were prison or a battlefield but these did not seem likely. He had almost settled on whorehouse when he heard the sound of men erupting into cheers on the far side of Lavender Lane.

“A theatre? No! Bear-baiting,” he guessed.

Brother Norman closed his eyes prayerfully, and nodded.

This outburst of cheering was the signal for several of the men who had been eating to rise up and quit the ship-yard. They ascended the stairs in a bunch, followed at a cautious distance by the two Russians Daniel had noticed earlier. Other than Brother Norman, perhaps half a dozen workers now remained in the entire yard.

“I say,” Daniel exclaimed, “is it Mr. Orney’s custom to suspend all work, in the middle of the day, so that his workers can run off to attend a bloody and disgraceful spectacle? It is a miracle anything gets done in this place.”

“I am Mr. Orney,” Brother Norman said pleasantly.

Forty years ago, Daniel might now have flung himself into the river from sheer mortification. In light of recent months’ events, he knew he would survive this, like it or not. The best he could do was to soldier on. He was more concerned about the waterman who’d brought him here. That man had been listening shrewdly to the exchange, and now looked as if he might topple backward off the pier.

“I do beg your pardon, Brother Norman,” said Daniel.

“Oh, not at all, Brother Daniel, for how are we to come closer to God, if our ears be not open to the criticism of godly brethren?”

“Very true, Brother Norman.”

“Thou mightst never wot, O Son of Drake, what a ridiculous figure thou makest, in thy foppish periwig and whorish clothing, unless I were to lovingly put thee in mind of it.”

Another cheer from beyond Lavender Lane reminded Daniel that, as usual, the unrepentant sinners were having more fun.

“I have acquainted the workers with my views on such entertainments,” Brother Norman continued. “Several of our Brethren are there now, handing out tracts. Only God can save them.”

“I thought you were a rigger,” Daniel said idiotically.

“To be an examplar, in a ship-yard, is to show excellence in all of its tributary trades.”

“I see.”

“The baiting-ring is yonder. Tuppence a head. Enjoy!”

“Oh, no, Brother Norman, I have not come for that.”

“Why hast thou come then, Brother Daniel? Solely to offer me thy opinions as to how I might better look after my affairs? Wouldst thou care to audit my books? The day is young.”

“Splendid of you to offer, but—”

“I am afraid my fingernails are dirty, and might not meet with thine approval, but if thou wouldst come back tomorrow—”

“That is really quite all right, Brother Norman. My father, the smuggler, who employed diverse pirates and Vagabonds, was frequently observed to have a bit of dirt under his nails after we had been up all night loading contraband.”

“Very well, then, how may I be of help to thee, Brother Daniel?”

“By loading these parcels aboard the first of yonder ships that, if God wills it, does set sail for St. Petersburg.”

“This is not a warehouse. I cannot accept responsibility for aught that happens to them while they are stored in my yard.”

“Agreed. The thief who makes off with them is in for bitter disappointment.”

“You must secure the permission of Mr. Kikin.”

“And he is—”

“The short one. Approach Mr. Kikin from directly in front, with thine hands in plain view, or the tall one shall kill thee.”

“Thank you for that advice, Brother Norman.”

“Not at all. Mr. Kikin is quite certain that London is alive with Raskolniks.”

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“From the nature of Mr. Kikin’s precautions, I infer that it is a sort of Russian Huguenot, bearded, ten feet tall, and good at throwing things.”

“Well, I don’t think I quite match that description—”

“One can never be too careful. Thou couldst be a Raskolnik disguised as a superannuated dandy.”

“Brother Norman, ’tis such a pleasure to be free of the stuffy courtesies of London.”

“The pleasure is entirely mine, Brother Daniel.”

“Tell me, please, have you heard any news of an East Indiaman called Minerva?”

“The ship Minerva of Rumor and Legend? Or the real one?”

“I have heard no rumors, know no legends…I assure you my interest is practical.”

“I saw a Minerva in dry-dock, round the bend, a fortnight ago, and so I can promise thee she was not the one of legend.”

“How does that follow, Brother Norman? I am wanting some knowledge, concerning Minerva, that would transform your riddle into a story.”

“Forgive me, Brother Daniel, I assumed you were as knowledgeable about maritime legends, as you are in ship-yard management. Some of the French sailors impose on the credulous, by insisting that there was once a ship, of that name, whose hull, below the waterline, was clad in gold.”

“Gold!?”

“Which could only be seen when she was heeled over, as when a stiff breeze was coming in abeam.”

“What a preposterous notion!”

“Not entirely, Brother Daniel. For the enemy of speed is the barnacle, which makes the hull rub the water. The notion of covering a hull with smooth metal is excellent. That is why I, and half the other shipwrights along the Pool, went to the trouble of having a look at this Minerva when she was in dry-dock.”

“But you did not see gold.”

“Copper is what I saw, Brother Daniel. Which might have been shiny and red when it was new. And if the light were to glance off it in just the right way, why, a Frenchman—a Papist, susceptible to gaudy and false visions—might phant’sy it were gold.”

“So that’s how the legend got started, you suppose.”

“I am certain of it. Oh, but the ship is quite real, Brother Daniel, I spied her riding at anchor a day or two ago, not half a mile out—I believe that is her, there, in front of Lime-Kiln Dock.” Brother Norman helpfully extended a hand across and downriver, indicating a short stretch that contained a hundred vessels, of which a third were full-sized, ocean-going three-masters. Daniel did not even bother to look. “She is a rakish teak-built sort of Dutch East Indiaman of the later Jan Vroom school, marvelous well-armed, generous tumble-home, a temptation and a terror to pirates.”

“I lived aboard her for two months and yet would never be able to pick her out from that crowd, at this range. Brother Norman, when do you expect that these ships shall set sail for St. Petersburg?”

“July, if God wills it and the cannons are delivered on time.”

“Sir,” Daniel said to his waterman, “I am going to go have a word with Mr. Kikin. While I do, I should be obliged if you would deliver a message to Captain van Hoek of Minerva.”

Daniel got out a pencil and a scrap of paper and wrote out the following on a barrel-head:

Captain van Hoek,

If your intention is to make a return voyage to Boston, then mine is to hire you to collect certain goods there, and bring them back to me here in London, preferably no later than July. I may be reached at the Royal Society, Crane Court, Fleet Street, London.

—Daniel Waterhouse

Mr. White’s Baiting-Ring

HALF AN HOUR LATER

ABOUT THREE-QUARTERS OF THE RING was subtended by standing-room, the remainder by a stand of benches. Daniel shrugged off the pamphleteers and missionaries trying to block the entrance and paid a whole shilling to get a sack of straw to cushion his bony old arse, and admission to the bleachers. He chose a place at the end of a bench so he’d have some hope of jumping clear if the structure collapsed—clearly it had not been engineered by Wren. From there he was able to look directly across the ring into the faces of the two Russians, who had elbowed their way to the front. This was no mean feat, considering that the other groundlings were Southwark shipyard workers. However, the tall one really was enormous, and he was armed. Mr. Kikin simply stood in front of him; his head came up to the other’s breastbone. Behind them, fellow spectators were reduced to taking turns sitting on each other’s shoulders.

Behind the stands a four-horse carriage was drawn up, defended from the Rotherhithe crowd by its staff of white-wigged footmen and coachmen. Daniel found it a bit odd that someone rich enough to own and populate such a rig would come so far to see a bear-baiting. The theatres and baiting-rings of Southwark were in easy striking distance of London; that was a simple matter of ten minutes on a boat. But to get here was a long trip in a coach, through a nasty sprawl of tanneries.

On the other hand, if these people were squeamish, they would never have formed the intention of coming hither. Daniel did not recognize the arms on the door of their carriage—he suspected that they were newly minted—and he could divine little by staring at the backs of the wigs worn by the owner and his two lady companions.

Aside from those three, the stands contained half a dozen other well-heeled persons who had evidently come out by water. These had all come alone. Daniel had to admit that he blended in.

The entertainment hewed strictly to the ancient Classical forms, which was to say it consisted of five minutes of actual excitement preceded by nearly an hour of showmanship. A series of pompous introductions, enlivened by cock-fights, led to some big dogs being trotted out on chains and paraded round the ring, so that wagers could be laid as to which would survive. Members of the audience who were too poor or too prudent to bet amused themselves by surging to the front and trying to make the dogs even angrier than they already were by throwing rocks at them, poking at them with sticks, or bellowing their names. One was King Looie, one was King Philip, another Marshall Villars, and yet another, King James the Third.

A fellow came in late and chose a seat at the end of a bench three rows below Daniel. It was another Nonconformist, dressed all in black, with a broad-brimmed hat. He was carrying a basket, which he set down on the bench in front of him, between his feet.

The gentleman who’d come out in the coach stood up, resting a scarred hand on the pommel of his small-sword, and stared at the newcomer. Daniel found the gentleman’s profile annoyingly familiar but could not quite place him. Whoever he was, he was clearly of a mind to go and eject this Nonconformist, who was as out of place here, as he would have been at the Vatican. The only thing that held him back—literally—was his companions. The ladies seated to either side of him exchanged a meaningful glance behind the skirts of his coat, then reached up in perfect unison, as if they were mirror images of each other, to lay gloved hands on the gentleman’s forearms. The gentleman did not take kindly to this at all, and shook his arms free with such violence that Daniel flinched, afraid that the fellow was going to elbow the ladies in the faces.

This imbroglio-in-the-making was interrupted by an announcement that “The Duke of Marlborough” was in the house. Everyone save the gentleman, Daniel, and the Nonconformist cheered. A score of groundlings were shooed out of the path of a gaudy-painted cart, a booth on wheels, which was being backed into the ring with a ponderous slowness meant to build excitement and enhance wagering.

The gentleman, preparatory to sitting down, put his hands on his arse to smooth the skirts of his coat. He glanced back behind the stands and looked moderately surprised. Daniel followed his gaze and noticed that the coach-and-four was no longer there. For this, the most plausible explanation was that the coachman had decided to move to some place quieter and not so crowded with Bankside rabble; it was certainly the case that many horses would be spooked by the entertainment that was about to begin.

Daniel turned back to look at the gentleman, who patted his belly, blindly groping up the length of a fat golden watch-chain that traversed his brocade vest, and pulled a time-piece out of a wee pocket. The watch-chain had several shriveled brown charms dangling from it—rabbits’ feet? The gent flipped open the lid of the watch, checked the time, and finally sat down.

They had missed nothing: only a mock-pompous ceremony of dragging a length of chain out from under the door of the wheeled booth, and fixing it to a massive stake driven into the ground. Now, finally, the door could be opened to reveal the Duke of Marlborough. And here was where Mr. Kikin and his companion suffered a great let-down. For the Duke might be large, by the standards of European black bears, but he was a runt compared to the brown Siberian monsters that chased people around Muscovy. Worse yet, when the Duke’s muzzle was pulled off by an intrepid trainer, and he opened his mouth to roar, it was obvious that his fangs had been filed down to harmless nubs.

“The Duke’s most fearsome foes: Harley and Bolingbroke!” shouted the master of ceremonies.

A pause for effect. Then the door of an enormous kennel was winched up, like the portcullis of a donjon. Nothing happened. A squib exploded inside the kennel. That did the trick: out came Harley and Bolingbroke, a matched set of poodles with white periwigs strapped to their heads. They rushed out half-blind and deaf, and went separate ways; Harley headed for the edge of the ring, Bolingbroke for the center, where the bear knocked him down with one blow of his paw, then rolled him over on his back and brought the other paw down with a sort of scooping motion.

A big spongy piece of poodle viscera was silhouetted against the white sky. It was throwing off a helix of blood-spray as it spun end-for-end. It seemed to be hanging motionless in the air, which gave Daniel the idea it was headed straight for him; but then it plunged and struck, with palpable momentum, into the bodice of the powder-blue silk gown currently being worn by one of the gentleman’s two lady companions. From there it tumbled into her lap and lodged in her skirt, between her thighs. Daniel pegged it as a lung. She had the good sense to stand up first, and scream second.

This performance, from the detonation of the squib to the almost as explosive ovation given by the groundlings in acclaim for the lady’s role, covered an elapsed time of perhaps five seconds.

The one lady now had to be taken aside and comforted by the other. As their coach had gone missing, this had to be done there in the stands, in full view of all present. It made a sort of side-show to the long-awaited main event: the big dogs were unleashed into the ring. First King Looie and King Philip. They made straight for the bear, until the bear noticed them and stood up on its hind legs; then they had second thoughts, and decided to see what might be achieved with a hell of a lot of barking. Marshall Villars and King James the Third were then let go, and pretty soon it had begun to look like a fight.

The crowd of groundlings were now in a frenzy equal to that of the animals. So much so that they did not notice, for several seconds, when the dogs and the bear stopped fighting, and began to ignore each other. Their muzzles were down in the dirt.

The dogs’ tails were wagging.

The crowd stopped shouting, almost in unison.

Bits of red stuff were hurtling into the ring from somewhere near Daniel, and plumping into the ground like damp rags.

All eyes noticed this and back-traced the trajectories to the Nonconformist. He had stood up and set his basket on the bench next to him. Daniel noticed now that the basket was blood-soaked. The man was pulling great hunks of raw meat from it and hurling them into the ring.

“You men, like these poor beasts, do fight for the amusement, and toil for the enrichment, of men such as this wretch—Mr. Charles White—only because, like these beasts, you are hungry! Hungry for succour, of the physic, and of the spirit! But prosperity temporal and spiritual is yours to be had! It falls from heaven like manna! If you would only accept it!”

To this point the meat-flinger’s performance had been entertaining, after a fashion, and they’d particularly liked it when he’d called a gentleman a Wretch to his face. But in the last few moments it had taken on the aspect of a sermon, which the groundlings did not care for at all. They all began to murmur at once, like Parliament. Daniel for the first time questioned whether he would get out of Rotherhithe today in one piece.

Mr. Charles White—perhaps asking himself the same question—was sauntering diagonally across the stands, casting meaningful looks at several of the blokes who were running the place. From this, and from what the meat-flinger had said, Daniel collected that White was the owner, or at least the backer.

“Splendid proposal, old boy! I do believe I’ll take a bit of this, thank you very mumph.” White’s final word was muffled by the Nonconformist’s left ear.

Now, the removal of said ear was a close re-enactment of a similar undertaking Daniel had witnessed twenty-odd years earlier, in a coffee-house. The hand that gripped the victim’s head, twisting him this way and that to worry the ear off, still bore an ugly stigma from Roger Comstock’s dagger. Daniel had no desire to see such a thing again. But the groundlings were fascinated. This was in other words a shrewd bit of crowd control on White’s part, in that it gave his audience some value for their money; the only value they were likely to get, today.

He got the ear off a lot quicker this time—practice having made perfect—and held it up. The crowd applauded; and as they did, White swiveled the ear back and forth, making it “listen” to whichever side was applauding the loudest. Once they understood this witticism, they went for it with gusto, the left and right flanks trying to out-do each other in noise-making. White meanwhile took this opportunity to dab blood off of his lips with a lace hanky.

“This ear is rather dry and gamy,” he shouted, when the crowd had grown tired of the jest. “I am afraid it has been tanned by listening to too many hellfire-sermons! It does not merit pride of place ’pon my watch-chain. ’Twill serve for dog-meat though.”

White vaulted over the barrier into the ring: a display of physical vigor striking to all. He fed the ear to the surviving poodle, Harley.

This spectacle—a dog eating a piece of a human being—seemed to give the crowd whatever satisfaction they had come for. Though none was pleased by the outcome, none complained. They began to mutter and joke amongst themselves. A few departed straightaway, to beat the crowds. Most milled out in a great herd, occasionally turning their heads back to watch the poodle, its periwig askew, its black lips peeled back from its fangs, grinding up the ear in its back teeth.

It occurred to Daniel to look for the one-eared, meat-hurling Puritan, who, when last seen, had been exiting stage right, making a dreadful noise: half sobbing with pain, half singing a hymn. His basket had been upset during the struggle with Mr. Charles White. Several bits of offal had tumbled out of it, and now lay on the bench in steaming lagoons of dark blood. Daniel recognized an enormous thyroid gland and decided that this had all been removed from a horse, or something equally large, that had been alive a quarter of an hour ago.

The meat-thrower had staggered down out of the stands and into the open space behind, where he was being assisted by a dozen or more of his brethren, who were all showing off forced smiles. Mr. White’s carriage still had not returned; in its place was a conveyance far ruder, and much better suited to this district: a knacker’s wagon, dark and crusty with old gore and bright and runny with new. Daniel from his elevated vantage point was able to see things in the back of that wagon that were hidden from the view of Mr. White, who remained down by the ring’s edge: a newly cut-up horse was in there. Not a worn-out nag but a glossy and well-looked-after steed.

It was one of Mr. White’s carriage-horses.

Mr. White’s footmen and driver were standing very close together a quarter of a mile away, next to a motionless carriage, to which only three horses were harnessed.

Daniel took another look at the Nonconformists and noticed that every single one of them had at least one pistol in his belt.

’Twas an excellent time to be leaving. Daniel descended the benches, trying not to look like a man in a panic, and did not slow or look back until he had put the whole baiting-ring between himself and the scene that had happened, or was about to, behind the stands.

“Mr. Kikin,” he said, having approached from in front, with his hands in plain sight, and offered a formal bow. “I come to you on an errand from Baron von Leibniz, counselor to his Imperial Majesty, Tsar Peter.”

This was an abrupt beginning; but Charles White, on the far side of the ring, was only just now piecing together the picture of how he had been used today by those Dissidents, and was working himself up into a rage limited only by the fact that he was outnumbered by chaps who looked forward to dying, and were carrying loaded pistols. Amid such distractions, the only way Daniel could think of to seize Mr. Kikin’s attention was to invoke the name of Peter the Great.

It worked. Kikin showed not the slightest doubt that Daniel was telling the truth. From this, Daniel knew that Leibniz’s account of the Tsar was on the mark; he did things his own way, be they never so irregular, and his servants, such as Kikin, did not long endure if they wanted the nimbleness to keep pace with his evolutions. Thus Daniel was able to draw Mr. Kikin and his companion aside, and get them clear of the growingly monstrous spectacle in the stands. Mr. White was bellowing threats and execrations at the Dissidents, who were drowning him out with hymn-singing, while a few unusually stupid spectators were darting in to throw stones at them.

HE HAD BEEN TOLD, by people who knew Russians, to expect cheekbones. Lev Stefanovich Kikin (as he introduced himself, once they had edged clear of the brawl, and withdrawn to a quiet corner of Orney’s ship-yard) did have quite a pair. But the slablike elements of Kikin’s face, and his overall fleshiness, hid his bone structure well enough that no one who lived north of, say, the River Seine would have picked him out as having come from a far country that was by all accounts very different from the rest of Christendom. Daniel would have felt more at ease if Kikin had had green skin and three eyes, so as to remind anyone who looked at him that he thought about things differently. As it was, Daniel tried to concentrate on the outlandish hat, and Kikin’s giant companion, who never left off scanning the horizon for Raskolniks.

For his part, Kikin—who was, after all, a diplomat—listened with an air of amused tolerance that Daniel found a bit grating after a while. But never mind; his mission here was not to befriend Kikin (or Orney, for that matter) but to arrange for the Science Crapp to be off-loaded and warehoused here, that it might be shipped to St. Petersburg later. Before an hour had passed, he had accomplished it, and was on his way back across the river. He asked the waterman to convey him to Tower Wharf.

The waterman rowed hard, not to please Daniel, but out of a selfish desire to put a large expanse of water, or anything, between him and Rotherhithe. They cut diagonally through the Pool, crossing from the south bank to the north whilst working upstream about a mile. This brought them to Wapping. From there another mile’s journey took them past the Red Cow, where Daniel and Bob Shaftoe had run Jeffreys to ground, then St. Catherine’s, and then the long wharf of the Tower. This was pierced in one place by the arch that led to Traitor’s Gate. Daniel had talked his way in there once, but saw no merit in attempting it now. So he had the waterman keep rowing.

Just beyond the Tower’s upstream corner, the river seemed to bend around sharply to the right—a trick played on landlubberly eyes by Tower Dock which was a vestige of the outer moat-system. Looming above this stagnant channel was a bewildering complex of land-gates, water-gates, docks, causeways, and drawbridges, all more or less answering to the appellation Lion Tower, and serving as the front door of the entire Tower of London complex. This was where Daniel paid the waterman for the day, and disembarked.

The outer reaches of the complex were open to the public. Daniel got all the way through Byward Gate, and into the beginning of Mint Street, before anyone bothered to ask him what he was doing. He claimed that he was here to pay a call on Sir Isaac Newton. This got him an escort: an Anglo-Irish private soldier of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards, who accompanied him a short distance up Mint Street. This was narrow, noisy, and long. For the first several yards it was lined with the dwellings of some of the Mint workers. Past that, it was pinched between a porter’s lodge on the right side of the way, and on the left, a building that served as the formal entrance to the Mint, with stairs leading to an office on the storey above.

Daniel’s escort ushered him into the building on the left, which Daniel immediately recognized as one of those miserable places where visitors cooled their heels waiting to be admitted.

For all that, it wasn’t so bad. He could use a respite. On the off chance that Daniel really was a friend of Sir Isaac’s, the porter ventured in from across the street and brought him a cup of tea. Daniel sat for a while, sipping it and watching coal-carts rumble in, and manure-carts out, and feeling the throb of the trip-hammers. Presently he was given the news that Sir Isaac was not on the premises, and the opportunity to leave him a note, which he did.

On his way out, as he passed under Byward Tower, he encountered the private who had escorted him to the office.

“Did you serve in the War, private?” Daniel asked. For this fellow did not look like an utterly raw recruit.

“I marched with Corporal John in ’11, sir,” came the answer. Corporal John was what the Duke of Marlborough was called by his soldiers.

“Ah, the outflanking of the ne plus ultra,” Daniel exclaimed. “Thirty miles in a day, wasn’t it?”

“Thirty-six miles in sixteen hours, sir.”

“Magnificent.”

Daniel did not inquire about the campaign of ’12, which had been a disgrace—the Queen had fired Marlborough on the first day of that year. “I once knew a fellow, a sergeant in this regiment—he did me a favor, and I did him one in turn. Since then, there have been twenty-five years of war. He couldn’t possibly still be here—”

“Only one man saw those twenty-five years through, sir,” the private returned.

“That is a dreadful figure. What is that man’s name?”

“It’d be Sergeant Bob, sir.”

“Bob Shaftoe?”

The private rationed himself a grin. “The same, sir.”

“Where is he now?”

“On a Mint detail, sir.”

“Mint detail?”

“Doing a job that needs doing for the Mint, sir.”

“So he is—?” Daniel pointed back up Mint Street.

“No sir, you’ll find him on London Bridge, sir. ’Tis a task of an unusual nature, sir.”

DANIEL SAW NO SOLDIERS doing anything, usual or unusual, as he walked most of the length of the bridge. Here, at least, was a part of London that had changed very little during his lifetime. The clothing worn by the people, and sold in the shops lining the carriageway, was of course different. But it was late in the afternoon and the sun was shining horizontally downriver, throwing the built-up segments of the bridge into a gloom too profound for his old eyes to penetrate, and so in these stretches he could phant’sy himself a ten-year-old boy again, out running an errand in the Puritan republic of Oliver Cromwell. But these day-dreams were interrupted when he came to the open fire-breaks, where the buildings ceased and the bridge hurried on for a stone’s throw as a naked causeway. As he ventured into these gaps, the sun blasted him on the right side of his face, and when he turned his head away from it and looked down the Thames, he saw two thousand ships—which annihilated the dream that he was back in the simple days of old. He scuttled across these open stretches like a rat across an unwelcome stripe of lanthorn-light, and found refuge in the cool dark canyons between the old buildings.

The last and shortest of these open stretches was practically in Southwark, seven-eighths of the way across. On the far end of this gap the carriageway was over-arched by a stone castle, of ancient-looking design, but only about three hundred years old. It was the highest structure on the Bridge, for it served both as watch-tower and as choke-point. It dated to an æra when military operations were of a more straightforward character, so that a bloke on the top of the tower, looking south to discover Frenchmen or Saracens coming up in force, could sound the alarm and slam the doors to the Bridge. It was called the Great Stone Gate.

The last of the old wattle-and-daub houses was supported by one starling, and the Great Stone Gate by the next one to the south, and the fire-break between them, above the carriageway, coincided with the broad stone arch that spanned the interval between the starlings below. The flume of Thames-water that raced through that arch was called Rock Lock, and was the broadest of all London Bridge’s twenty locks. Passengers who were willing to brave the rapids of the Bridge were sometimes offered the option of detouring all the way down here to take Rock Lock, which was the least dangerous, being the widest; but to do so was generally scorned, by your inveterate Bridge-shooters, as unmanly.

The Bridge’s several fire-breaks exerted a mysterious attraction upon contemplative or insane Londoners. Daniel passed one—he was not sure which—standing with his back to the carriageway, looking upstream. He was wearing a pinkish or flesh-colored coat. He was not enjoying the distant view of west London. Rather, his grizzled, scarred, close-cropped head was bent down to look at the starling beneath. He was gesticulating with an ebony walking-stick, and jabbering: “Have a care, have a care, remember the object of the exercise—there’s no point in doing it, is there, if the result is crack-pated, and cannot hold milk.” The words sounded insane, but he spoke them with the weary patience of a man who has been ordering people around for a long time.

A soldier in a red coat was planted to one side of the carriageway, craning his neck to look almost vertically upwards. Daniel stepped to the side, so that he would not be run over, and followed that soldier’s gaze to the top of the Great Stone Gate, where a pair of young men in filthy old shirts were at work.

In company with Ludgate, Temple Bar, Aldgate, &c., this was one of the old gates of the City of London. And in accordance with an ancient and noble tradition, common to most all well-regulated Christian nations, the remains of executed criminals were put on display at such gates, as a way of saying, to illiterate visitors, that they were now entering into a city that had laws, which were enforced with gusto. To expedite which, the top of the tower above Great Stone Gate had been fitted with numerous long iron pikes that sprayed out from its battlements like black radiance from a fallen angel’s crown. At any given time, one or two dozen heads could be seen spitted on the ends of these, in varying stages of decomposition. When a fresh one was brought in from Tower Hill, or from one of the City’s hanging-grounds, the wardens of the gate would make room for it by chucking one of the older heads into the river. Though here as in every other aspect of English life, a strict rule of precedence applied. Certain heads, as of lordly traitors who’d been put to death at the Tower, were allowed to remain long past their Dates of Expiration. Pick-pockets and chicken-stealers, by contrast, were swapped through so rapidly that the ravens scarcely had time to peel a good snack off of them.

Some such operation was seemingly underway now, for Daniel could hear some authoritative chap atop the tower, chiding those men in the ragged shirts: “Don’t—even—think—of touching that one, it is Baron Harland of Harland—peculation, 1707, hanging by a thread as you can see…yes, you may inspect that one.”

“Thank you, sir.” One of the wretches gripped an iron pikestaff and lifted it carefully out of its socket, then brought it round so that the head mounted to its end was face to face with the other wretch—who proceeded to feel the skull all over, like a phrenologist.

“I phant’sy this’n’s sound, sir. It don’t give when I mash it.”

“Bring it down,” shouted the red-coated soldier on the carriageway.

A few moments later the wretch emerged from an internal stair-way, which he had descended with conspicuous gallantry and athleticism. He passed the head under the gaze of the soldier, who responded with a perfunctory nod, and then tucked it back under his arm and sauntered over to the western edge of the carriageway, within arm’s length of the grizzled man in the pink coat. Taking it up in both hands, he hollered, “Oy! Heads up, mate!” and gave it a good toss. Daniel could not see its trajectory, but could read it in the postures of the head-thrower and the pink-coat, both of whom were tracking it carefully: quiet anticipation as the head traced a parabola downwards, then shock and dismay as someone down below bobbled it, ending with explosive relaxation as it was caught. The man who’d thrown it wheeled about smartly, like a soldier in a drill. His face looked very much as if he had dodged a cannonball. He marched back to the Great Stone Gate.

Daniel strolled over to take his place. Looking over the bridge’s parapet he could now see down to the flat top of the starling below: a puddle of rubble circumscribed by a line of pilings, just an arm’s length above the level of the river. Down there were two more redcoats, supervising the labors, but standing well clear, of another pair of unfortunates, who were surrounded by partially decomposed and dismantled heads. These two chaps were working shirtless in the cold, probably because their backs were covered with whip-marks that were still bleeding. But they, too, were vigorous young men. Daniel reckoned they were private soldiers guilty of some infraction, being made to undertake this work as part of their punishment. The work consisted of catching the heads thrown down to them, and cutting off the tops of the skulls with handsaws.

As Daniel was taking in this scene, one of them finished a cut, and the top of a skull fell to the ground. He picked it up, gave it a quick inspection, and then underhanded it straight up in the air. The man next to Daniel snatched it at the peak of its flight, and gave it a careful look. To Daniel the Natural Philosopher, the specimen appeared in excellent condition: the sutures well knitted, the bone thick and sturdy.

“If you are talking to me, Daniel Waterhouse, I cannot hear you,” said the man. “Unlike other men whose ears have gone bad, I have schooled myself not to shout, nor to ramble on and on. But you may have to do both.”

Daniel perceived now that Bob Shaftoe’s coat was an army uniform that had once been red, but lost much of its color from washing. From this, and from the careful mending of it, he deduced that Bob had a wife.

“Abigail is well, thank you,” Bob announced. “Forgive my presumption, but men with bad ears must learn to read minds, as well as lips; and if you were not about to ask about her, why, the fault is yours.”

Daniel smiled, and nodded. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted, and pointed to the skull.

Bob sighed. “The Mint men have been melting down a lot of silver, which was taken from a treasure-galleon on the Spanish Main. When it melts, certain fumes rise out of it—surely you know more on this than I—and the men who breathe in those vapors grow ill. There is only one remedy. Sir Isaac learnt of it from some German coiners he hired during the Great Recoinage. It is to drink milk from a human skull. Several of the Mint-men have lately gone down ill; so the call has been put out for skulls and milch-cows. What are you doing here, guv’nor?”

“In London? I—”

“No, here,” said Bob, pointing to the pavement between Daniel’s feet. “Observing me like a beetle.”

“I was at the Tower on other business, and took it into my mind to pay a call on you.”

Bob did not seem entirely certain that Daniel was telling the truth. He removed his eyes from Daniel’s face and gazed out over the river, towards Whitehall. His thumb had discovered a loose flap of scalp projecting above the rim of the skull-cup, and now he was absent-mindedly peeling the scalp away. The deceased was a red-headed man with close-cropped hair and a freckly bald spot. “I am not available,” Bob said.

“Not available, for what?”

“For the Marquis of Ravenscar’s bloody secret army,” Bob answered. “I serve the Queen, long may she reign, and if the Pretender comes to this island, why, then, we shall have a bit of sorting-out to do, and I shall look to John Churchill for his leadership in the matter. But the Whig Army shall have to get ’long without Bob Shaftoe, thank you very much.”

HOOKE, TWISTED AND BENT as he was, had been in the habit of going everywhere on his own two feet, even though his work as City Surveyor, and as a sort of partner to Wren, had made him rich enough to afford a coach and four. Daniel had not understood it fully until today. For a man who wanted to get things done in London, there simply was not time to go in a vehicle, because of the congestion. The sedan chair was a workable compromise, but still a compromise. The only reason not simply to walk was the dirtiness of the streets, and the loss of dignity. After all he’d seen today, Daniel could not, with a straight face, abhor the streets of London for their squalor. As for dignity, he had very little of that to look after, and the sight of the heads and the skulls had set loose in his mind the usual train of ruminations considering mortality, vanity, and all that. Long sour passages from Ecclesiastes were running through his mind as he tromped back up the bridge and up-hill to Eastcheap where he turned left. The sky was crimson in the west. The dome of St. Paul’s, directly ahead of him, looked bluish against it. The Watch were emerging and beginning to range up and down the streets, giving Daniel reason to believe that it was not utterly suicidal to walk home alone. He happened to reach St. Paul’s as Vespers was beginning, so he went in there to rest his feet for a while.

A new organ was under construction, and Daniel spent more time brooding over it than he did contemplating the meaning of the service. Wren had disparaged it as “a box of whistles.” Daniel understood the complaint. For Daniel, too, had once designed a building, and savored the thrill of seeing it built, only to endure the long indignity of watching the owner clutter it up with knick-knacks and furniture. This box of whistles project was only one of several spats that Wren had conducted with Queen Anne in recent years as to how St. Paul’s ought to be decorated. And so as Daniel looked about at the interior of the place, he understood that certain of the details that met his eye might not be as Wren would have wanted them. And yet, he had to admit that it wasn’t in bad taste at all, at least compared to some other Barock architecture he’d seen. Or perhaps the style was merely growing on him.

Daniel thought that the fantastically complex ornamentation of Barock churches was a replacement for the complicated things made by God, that had used to surround people when they lived out of doors (or that Hooke had seen in drops of water). Entering into a place such as this, they were surrounded by complicated things made by men in emulation of God—but frozen and idealized, in much the same way as the mathematical laws of Natural Philosophy were compared to the reality they tried to describe.

When the service was over, the sun had gone down, and it were dangerous to be out alone. Daniel shared a hackney down Fleet Street to Crane Court.

A note had arrived from Captain van Hoek of Minerva. But it had been written out, and probably composed, by Dappa.

Dr. Waterhouse,

We guess that to carry your freight, though less of an honour ought too to be less of a hazard, than to carry your person, and therefore consent. We aspire to leave the Pool in the latter half of April and to return in July. If this will not be too late, kindly inform us as to the approximate tonnage and volume you wish to reserve on our return voyage.

Dappa will venture ashore some day before we embark, to consult with his publisher in Leicester Square, quite near your current lodgings. With your permission he will meet with you on the same day, to write a contract; for his pen is as versatile and inconstant as his tongue.

van Hoek

Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

12 MARCH 1714

DANIEL SUPPOSED THAT THE MATTER of Orney and Kikin and the Science Crapp was finished and settled for good. But one morning, close to a fortnight later, a note was handed to him by Mrs. Arlanc. This document was not merely dated but timed, for it had been written out in haste half an hour ago.

Monsieur Waterhouse,

A hellish glow on the eastern horizon early this morning gave notice to any Londoner who chanced to look that way of Trouble in Rotherhithe. You may yet observe a column rising from that district, consisting more of steam than of smoak, as the Fire has been put out; but not before it had consumed one of His Imperial Majesty’s ships. I am, naturally, bound thither in haste. This message (for whose rudeness I apologize) comes to you in a hackney-carriage. Kindly inform its driver whether you will join me at Rotherhithe (in which case he shall convey you at my expense) or not (in which case prithee send him away).

Kikin

It was by no means obvious to Daniel why he ought to heed this oblique summons from Mr. Kikin. That there had been a fire at Orney’s ship-yard was unfortunate. But Daniel’s connection to the matter was tenuous. Kikin, who was an intelligent man, must know this. Yet he had gone to some trouble and expense, and had unlimbered his most diplomatic English, to ask Daniel out to Rotherhithe.

In the end he decided to go there, not because he could see any clear reason why, but because he could see no reason why not, and because it was likely to be more interesting than staying at Crane Court. The endless carriage-ride gave him plenty of time to make up his mind that he had decided wrong. But by then it was too late. He reached Orney’s ship-yard around midday. From the point on Lavender Lane where he disembarked from the hackney-carriage, he enjoyed an Olympian prospect over the entire ship-yard.

There was no wind at all today. A silent tide of translucent white smoke had seeped into the maze of stock-piles down on the bank, turning them into blocky islands. These had been little affected by the fire. Daniel’s eyes sought out the pallet where had been piled the Natural Philosophy stuff from Crane Court. Other than a few scorch-marks where cinders had showered down upon the tarpaulin, there appeared to be no damage.

Having satisfied himself as to that, he raised his eyes to the parallel ways where the Tsar’s three ships had been a-building.

The fire had started in the middle of the three hulls. As far as Daniel could make out, no attempt had been made to save this one. But expanses of sail-cloth had been drenched in the river and flung over the unfinished hulls to either side. The cloth looked very much the worse for wear—no one would ever make sails of it—but for the most part it had steamed, not smoked, in the heat of the flames. From footprints in the bankside mud and other such evidence, Daniel could infer that bucket-brigades had been formed to wet down the sail-cloth and perhaps to attack the central fire. A hue and cry must have gone up; Orney and many of his workers must have rushed to the yard. But not soon enough to save the middle ship. The fire must have worked in the belly of that hull for some time before it had been noticed. The hull-planks on both sides were charred through, and it was obvious that the keel had been damaged. It would be rated a total loss by Mr. Orney’s insurer.

This much Daniel could see from a high vantage point at the top of the stairs. Swirling heat-waves still roiled out of the destroyed hull. Through them he could see a weirdly distorted image of men on small boats rowing to and fro, peering at the disaster in something of the same spirit as other men had watched the bear-baiting.

Daniel found a stairway and descended from the lane to the yard. The smoke that lingered in the lanes among the stock-piles smelled like the aftermath of any house-fire, which was to be expected. But mixed with it, Daniel was surprised to nose out a sharp nostril-stinging fragrance that did not belong there: a chymical fume. Daniel had most recently smelled it in Crane Court, the night of his arrival, just after the Infernal Device had gone off. Before that, he had smelled it many other times in his life; but the first time had been forty years ago at a Royal Society meeting. The guest of honor: Enoch Root. The topic: a new Element called Phosphorus. Light-bearer. A substance with two remarkable properties: it glowed in the dark, and it liked to burn. He suffered a pang of incipient guilt, thinking that perhaps this was all a terrible mishap, laid to him; perhaps there had been a sample of phosphorus in among the goods from Crane Court, which had somehow caught fire, and caused the conflagration, and Kikin had called him out here only to prosecute him. This was extremely unlikely—a fair sample of the stupid terrors that continued to bedevil him from time to time. He went and inspected his pallet, and found that nothing of the sort had happened.

Daniel found Orney and Kikin in one of the surviving hulls. This was still draped in sopping sail-cloth, presumably in case the fire in the middle hull should flare up again. Orney and Kikin roamed up and down the length of the hull on a strip of temporary decking—a sort of scaffold. Daniel reckoned it had been put there so that the workers could gain access to the upper parts of the ribs, but in present circumstances it made a suitable command and observation post for the proprietor and his customer.

They took in the curious spectacle of Daniel ascending a ladder, then—since he had survived it—greeted him. Orney was smiling in the way that bereaved persons oft did at funerals. Kikin—whatever emotions he might have felt earlier in the day—was sober, avid, acute, interested in everything. “You have come,” he said more than once, as if this were a significant finding.

Norman Orney mopped his cindery visage with a corner of wet canvas. Seeing this, a boy stepped in with a bucket of beer and offered Orney a ladle-full. “God bless you, lad,” said Orney, accepting it. He quaffed half a pint in a few impressive swallows.

“It started in the wee hours, then?” Daniel hazarded.

“Two of the clock, Brother Daniel.”

“It burned for a long while, then, before anyone noticed.”

“Oh, no, Brother Daniel. In that, you are quite off the mark. I employ a night-watchman, for these banks are infested with mudlarks.”

“Sometimes they fall asleep.”

“Thank you for supplying me with that intelligence, Brother Daniel; as ever, you are keen to point out any mismanagement or incompetence. Know then that my watchman has two dogs. Both began to bark shortly after two of the clock. The watchman smelled a pungent fume, and observed smoke from yonder hull. He raised the alarm. I was here a quarter of an hour later. The fire had spread with inconceivable rapidity.”

“Do you suspect arson?” Daniel asked. The thought had only just come to him; even as he was giving voice to it he was feeling the first flush of shame at his own stupidness. Orney and Kikin made polite efforts to mask their incredulity. In particular, Kikin would presume arson even if there were evidence to the contrary; for these were, after all, warships, and Russia was at war.

What must Kikin make of Daniel?

“Had you, or your watchmen, seen any strangers about the shipyard recently?”

“Other than you, Brother Daniel? Only a pair of prowlers who stole in, night before last, on a longboat. The dogs barked, the prowlers departed in haste. But they can have had nothing to do with the fire; for the ship was not on fire yesterday.”

“But is there any possibility that these prowlers might have secreted a small object in the hull—down in the bilge, say, where it might have gone unnoticed for twenty-four hours?”

Orney and Kikin were gazing at him most intently.

“The ship is—or was—large, Brother Daniel, with many places of concealment.”

“If you find clock-work in the bilge of the burnt ship, please be so good as to inform me,” Daniel said.

“Did you say clock-work, Brother Daniel?”

“It may have been damaged beyond recognition by the combustion of the phosphorus.”

“Phosphorus!?”

“Your men must inspect the bilges and any other hidden cavities in the surviving hulls every morning.”

“It shall be done, Brother Daniel!”

“You have a fire agent in the City?”

“The Hand-in-Hand Fire-Office on Snow-Hill!”

“Pray consider me at your disposal if the Hand-in
-Hand Fire-Office tries to blame this on you, Brother Norman.”

“You may have hidden virtues, Brother Daniel. Pray overlook my stubborn unwillingness to see them.”

“Pray forgive my hiding my light under a bushel, Brother Norman.”

“Indeed,” said Kikin, “there is much that is hidden in you, Dr. Waterhouse. I would see it uncovered. Would you please explain yourself?”

“The pungent reek that your watchman complained of, and that still lingers over yonder, is that of burning phosphorus, and I last smelled it on the evening of the thirty-first of January in Crane Court,” said Daniel. He went on to relate a brief account of what had happened that night.

“Most remarkable,” said Kikin, “but this ship was not exploded. It was set afire.”

“But one who knew how to make an Infernal Device, triggered by clock-work, might rig it in more than one way,” Daniel said. “I hypothesize that the machine uses phosphorus to create fire at a certain time. In one case, that fire might be conveyed to a powder-keg, which would explode. In another, it might simply ignite a larger quantity of phosphorus, or of some other inflammable substance, such as whale-oil.”

“But in any case, you are saying, the machines—and their makers—are the same!” said Orney.

“Then it is a matter for your Constables!” Kikin proclaimed.

“As the evildoers are nowhere to be seen, there is nothing for a Constable to do,” Daniel pointed out. “It is ultimately a matter for a Magistrate.”

Kikin snorted. “What can such a person do?”

“Nothing,” Daniel admitted, “until a defendant is presented before him.”

“And who should do that, in your system?”

“A prosecutor.”

“Let us find a prosecutor, then!”

“One does not find a prosecutor in England, in the way one finds a constable or a cobbler. One becomes a prosecutor. We who are the victims of these Infernal Machines must be the Prosecutors of those who made them.”

Kikin was still in difficulties. “Do you mean to say that each of us pursues a separate Prosecution, or—”

“We might,” Daniel said, “but I suppose it would be more efficient”—this word chosen to delight the ears of Mr. Orney, who indeed looked keen on it—“for you and you, and I, and the Hand-in-Hand Fire-Office if they are so inclined, and Mr. Threader and Mr. Arlanc, to pursue it jointly.”

“Who are Threader and Arlanc?” Kikin asked. For Daniel had left them out of his Crane Court narration.

“Why,” said Daniel, “you might say that they are the other members of our Clubb.”

A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell

EARLY APRIL 1714

“THE RIVER FLEET is a parable—I would venture to say, a very mockery—of humane degradation!” announced Mr. Orney, by way of a greeting, as he stomped down stairs into the crypt.

Here, if he had evinced dismay, turned on his heel, and run back up the steps, no man would have thought less of him.

Mr. Threader—who’d arrived a quarter of an hour previously—had been quite aghast. “It is consecrated ground, sir,” Daniel had told Mr. Threader, “not some pagan Barrow. These souls are Members in Good Standing of the Community of the Dead.” And he had shoved his hand into a tangle of pallid roots and ripped them out of the way to reveal an ancient brass plate, bejeweled with condensed moisture, and gouged with a dog’s breakfast of rude letters, no two the same size, evidently copied out by some medieval artisan who knew not what they signified.

Re-forming them into Latin words and sentences was a job for patient clerks, or clerics. But this was Clerkenwell, where such had been coming to draw water for at least five hundred years. Decyphered, the letters said that behind this plate lay the earthly remains of one Theobald, a Knight Templar who had gone to Jerusalem whole, and come back in pieces. Next to it was another plate telling a similar tale about a different bloke.

Unlike Mr. Threader, Mr. Orney seemed not in the least put out by the surroundings. Daniel had been at pains to set up candles and lanthorns wherever he could, which generally meant the lids of the half-dozen blocky sarcophagi that claimed most of the floor. By the light of these, it was possible to make out a vaulted roof. This was not a soaring, lost-in-dimness type of vaulted roof. It was barely high enough for a bishop to walk up the middle without getting slime on his mitre. But the stones had been well joined, and the room had survived, a pocket of air in the dirt, oblivious to what might be happening above.

Mr. Orney paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs to let his eyes adjust, which was very prudent, then advanced on Daniel and Mr. Threader, dodging round nearly invisible puddles with sailorly grace as he made his way between the sarcophagi. He was showing a lack of curiosity, and a refusal to be awed, that in another man would have been infallible proof of stupidity. Since Daniel knew him not to be stupid, he reckoned that it was a sort of religious assertion; to a Quaker, these Papist crusader-knights were as primitive, and as beside the point, as a clan of Pictish barrow-diggers.

“Why, Brother Norman? Because the Fleet, like life, is brief and stinky?” inquired Daniel politely.

“The stench at its end is only remarkable because the Fleet runs so pure and fresh at the beginning; issuing as it does from diverse wells, holes, rills, and spaws hereabouts. Thus does a babe, fresh from the womb, soon fall prey to all manner of gross worldly—”

“We get the point,” Mr. Threader said.

“And yet the interval between the two is so brief,” Mr. Orney continued, “that a robust man” (meaning himself) “may walk it in half an hour.” He pretended to check his watch, as proof that this was no exaggeration. But it was too gloomy in here to make out the dial.

“Do not let our host see your time-piece, sir, he’ll have it apart before you can say, ’avast, that is expensive!” ’ said Mr. Threader, sounding as if he knew whereof he spoke.

“Never mind,” said Daniel, “I recognize it as the work of Mr. Kirby, probably undertaken when he was journeyman to Mr. Tompion, nine years ago.”

This produced a brief but profound—one might say, sepulchral—silence. “Well discerned, Brother Daniel,” Mr. Orney finally said.

“After the mysterious explosion,” remarked Mr. Threader, “Dr. Waterhouse secreted himself in an attic no less gloomy than this tomb, and would not return my letters for many weeks. I feared he had no stomach for Prosecution. But when he returned to polite society, behold! He knew more of clocks, and the men who make ’em, than any man alive—”

“That is rank flattery, sir,” Daniel protested. “But I will grant you this much, that if our Clubb is to achieve its Goal, we must learn all we can of the Infernal Devices in question. They were driven by clock-work, you may be sure on’t. Now, thirty years ago, I knew Huygens and Hooke, the most illustrious horologists of the æra. But when I returned to London I found that I was no longer privy to the secrets, nor acquainted with the practitioners, of that Technology. In my eagerness to redress this, I did from time to time forget my manners, prising open clocks and watches to examine their workings and decypher their makers’ marks, as Mr. Threader has waspishly reminded me. The result: we are met here in Clerkenwell!”

“Vy the khell are ve meetink khere?” demanded a new voice.

“God save you, Mr. Kikin!” answered Mr. Orney, not very informatively.

“If you had arrived on time,” said the irritable Mr. Threader, “you’d have had an answer just now from Dr. Waterhouse.”

“My carriage is axle-deep in a bog,” was the answer of Mr. Kikin.

“That bog is a valuable discovery,” said Mr. Orney, who waxed jovial when Mr. Threader was in a bad mood. “Put a fence round it, call it a Spaw, charge a shilling for admission, and you’ll soon be able to buy a phaethon.”

The Russian was ill-advisedly descending a slimy twelfth-century staircase into his own shadow. A flickering orange trapezoid was projected onto the floor from above, skating back and forth like a leaf coming down from a tree. It could be inferred that Mr. Kikin’s associate, who was too tall to enter the crypt, was standing in the antechamber at the top of the stairs waving a torch around, trying to get the light around his master’s shoulders.

“This damp will kill us,” Mr. Kikin predicted in a stolid way, as if he got killed every morning before breakfast.

“As long as the candles don’t go out, we have nothing to fear from this atmosphere,” said Daniel, who was deeply sick and tired of hearing semi-learned people ascribe all their problems to damps. “Yes, water seeps in here from the moist earth. But Mr. Orney was only just now remarking upon the marvellous purity of these waters. Why do you think the Knights Templar built their Temple here? It is because the nuns of St. Mary and the Knights Hospitallers both drew their water from the same well here, and didn’t die of it. Why, just up the road, wealthy gentle-folk pay money to soak in these same moistures.”

“Why not meet there?” Mr. Kikin suggested.

“I second the motion!” exclaimed Mr. Threader.

“Because—” Daniel began. But then he heard a snatch of conversation from the top of the stairs. The torch-light trapezoid grew wider and moved sideways. A new shadow appeared in its center. The fifth and last member of the Clubb was making his way down stairs. Daniel gave him a few moments to get within earshot, then continued, loudly: “because we do not wish to draw attention to ourselves! If our Nemesis has employed a clock-maker, or indeed a maker of any sort of fine instrument, why, the knave’s workshop is likely within a musket shot of this Temple.”

“Some would call it a temple, some a mound of rubble in the middle of a swine-yard,” said Mr. Kikin, catching the eye of Mr. Threader and getting a warm look in return.

“Mound is too grand a word, sir. In English we say ‘bulge.’ ”

“Those who did, would thereby show a grievous want of Real Estate Acumen!” Daniel returned, “for of the Three Desiderata: location, location, and location, this ruin has all! The tide of London’s expansion is lapping at its foundations!”

“Are you the land-lord, Dr. Waterhouse?” inquired Mr. Threader, suddenly interested.

“I am looking after the property on behalf of a High Net Worth Individual,” returned Daniel, “who is keen to make this vale into a world-renowned center of Technologickal Arts.”

“How did this individual become aware of the ruin’s existence?”

“I told him, sir,” Daniel said, “and to anticipate your next question, I learnt of it from a fellow of my acquaintance, a very, very old chap, who had knowledge from a Knight Templar.”

“Then he must indeed be very old, as the Templars were wiped out four hundred years ago,” said Mr. Threader, sounding a bit irritated.

“A new building is contemplated?” asked Mr. Orney, as one man of commerce to another.

“Is already underway,” Daniel confided, “to include an arcade of shops and ateliers for makers of watches, and of instruments—not only musickal, but philosophickal.”

He was getting expectant stares, as if he had broken off in mid-sentence.

“Planispheres, heliostats, theodolites, and circumferentors, e.g.,” he tried. Nothing.

“If Longitude is found, I daresay, ’twill be found on this property!” he concluded.

All of this had been taken in by Henry Arlanc, the last to arrive. He was standing silently, and somewhat apart from the others.

“Right!” said Mr. Threader. “The second meeting of the Clubb for the Taking and Prosecution of the Party or Parties responsible for the Manufacture and Placement of the Infernal Engines lately Exploded at Crane Court, Orney’s Ship-yard, &c., is called to order.”

TO DANIEL, IN HIS YOUTH, a club had always been a stick for hitting things with.

In 1664, a Mr. Power, discoursing of barometers, had written, “The Difference of the Mercurial Cylinder may arise from the club and combination of all these causes joined together.”

This extended meaning of “club” had been taken clearly by Daniel and everyone else at the Royal Society, because many of them had lately been at universities where starvelings pooled pennies to buy food or, more often, drink. The slang for this was “to make a club.” Around this time, one often heard Mr. Pepys proposing to John Wilkins and others that they make a club for dinner, meaning exactly the same procedure, save with more money and better results.

During Daniel’s absence from London, Pepys’s merry improvisations had spread out across Time to become perpetual, while losing their freedom in Space by confining themselves to fixed quarters. The notion had struck Daniel as questionable, until Roger had finally lured him to the Kit-Cat Clubb. On entering that place Daniel had said, “Oh, why didn’t you say so!” for he had understood it immediately as a Routine Upgrade of the coffee-houses where everyone had used to pass the time of day twenty years ago—the chief difference being that only certain people were let in. This all but ruled out ear-biting, stab-wounds, and duels.

This Clubb was nothing at all like the Kit-Cat. Its purpose was altogether different, its members (except for Daniel) very unlike Roger’s crowd, its meeting-place even darker and more low-ceilinged.

But certain things about Clubbs were universal. “First order of business: the collection of Dues!” Mr. Threader proclaimed. He had a coin pre-positioned in a tiny pocket of his waistcoat, and now flipped it casually onto the stone lid of a twenty-ton coffin. Everyone did a double-take: it was a pound sterling, which was to say a silver coin, and very crisp-looking, too. Using it to pay Clubb dues was a bit like nonchalantly riding around Hyde Park on the back of a Unicorn.

Daniel threw in a Piece of Eight. Mr. Kikin paid with Dutch silver money. Mr. Orney tossed out a golden guinea. Henry Arlanc upended a purse and poured out half a pint of copper tokens. Nearly all of these had been given him beforehand by Daniel. The other members of the Clubb probably suspected as much.

Daniel had insisted that the Huguenot porter be admitted, because it was theoretically possible that he was an intended victim of the first Infernal Device. Mr. Threader had proposed that the dues be set high, as a way of keeping rabble such as Arlanc out. Orney had agreed for reasons strictly practical: it was expensive to hunt down and prosecute criminals. Kikin had gone along with any and all expenditures because it might help keep his head attached to his neck if he could show the Tsar he was sparing no expense to catch the men who’d burned his ship. So Daniel had ended up paying high dues, not only for himself but for Arlanc.

Mr. Threader opened a small wooden case lined with red velvet, took out a hand-scale, and began to weigh the Spanish and Dutch money against a calibrated brass weight, which, according to tiny but furious assertions graved on its face, was the Platonic ideal of what a pound sterling ought to weigh, as laid down some 150 years ago by Gresham. Mr. Orney took this as a signal to begin reading the minutes of the previous meeting, which had been held at Mr. Kikin’s town-house in Black Boy Alley a fortnight ago.

“With the Membership’s indulgence, I shall elide all that was to no purpose, and summarize all that was merely pedantic…” Orney began.

“Hear, hear!” said Daniel before Mr. Threader could object. He needn’t have worried. Mr. Threader had stuck his tongue out, and his eyes were nearly projecting from his head on stalks as he gauged the weight of Daniel’s Spanish silver.

“This leaves only two items worth mentioning: the interview with the unfortunate Watchman, and Dr. Waterhouse’s discourse on the mechanism. Taking these in order, we interrogated Mr. Pinewood, a Watchman who witnessed the explosion in Crane Court, and was hired, or in some way induced, by verbal representations from Mr. Threader, of a highly ambiguous and still hotly disputed nature…”

“Is all of that really in the minutes!?” said Mr. Threader, glancing up from his scale with a look of mock amazement.

“Believing that he would be compensated, Mr. Pinewood lit out after a sedan chair that had been seen following Mr. Threader and Dr. Waterhouse immediately prior to the explosion,” said Mr. Orney, looking satisfied that he had been able to get a rise out of Mr. Threader. “Mr. Pinewood informed us that he followed the chair eastwards on Fleet Street as far as the Fleet Bridge, where the two men bearing it stopped, set it down, turned on Mr. Pinewood, picked him up…”

“Avast, we know the story,” muttered Mr. Threader.

“…and flung him bodily into Fleet Ditch.”

Everyone swallowed.

“A collection was taken up for Mr. Pinewood’s boils, and prayers said for his other symptoms, some of which medical science has not even devised names for yet. Some contributed more, and prayed more reverently, than others.

“The subsequent movements of the sedan chair may only be guessed at. Dr. Waterhouse lost no time guessing that it had returned to the side-alley whence he himself had seen it issue only a few minutes earlier. ‘I am convinced,’ Dr. Waterhouse informed us, ‘that they had some foreknowledge of our arrival in London, and were positioned to follow Mr. Threader’s carriage through Newgate to the City, and that we foxed them by diverting down the bank of Fleet Ditch to Crane Court.’ There followed some discussion as to whether the occupant of the sedan chair had any connection whatever to the Infernal Device; I opined that ’twere imprudent to follow so closely a vehicle known to be moments away from exploding, and that the sedan chair probably contained nothing more than a venturesome Courtesan. Mr. Threader was quick to take offense at any suggestion that a Whore (to use his term) would look on the arrival of his entourage in London as an Opportunity; the faces of the other members of the Clubb recorded amusement at his pious…”

“I move we choose a new secretary to take the Minutes,” Mr. Threader said. “Monsieur Arlanc, never mind what I’ve said about him in the past, is quiet, dutiful, and literate; I’ll pay his dues if he takes the job.”

The end of Mr. Threader’s sentence was garbled, because while talking he had reached up and inserted a large gold coin between his own molars.

“Mr. Threader,” said Mr. Orney, “if you are feeling peckish, there are Inns up the road at Black Mary’s Hole, and taverns down at Hockley-in-the-Hole, to which we might adjourn; but you’ll get no satisfaction by eating my guinea.”

“It is not yours any longer, but the Clubb’s,” said Mr. Threader, now examining the coin for bite-marks, “and it is not a guinea until I say it is.”

“You’ve already weighed it, so what’s the use of biting it?” asked Mr. Orney, sounding at least as curious as he was peeved.

“ ’Tis a proper guinea,” Mr. Threader admitted. “Pray continue your whimsical Narration, Mr. Orney.”

“In short, I put forth the hypothesis that the sedan chair was a red herring,” said Mr. Orney. “This led to a murky disquisition on clock-work, or so it appears in my notes…”

“For once your notes are accurate,” said Mr. Threader.

“Not in the least!” said Daniel. “All I meant was this. Mr. Orney avers that to place an Infernal Device in a carriage, made to explode at a certain time, and then to follow the same carriage closely down the street, only moments in advance of the explosion, were madness. To which I answer, this depends on how knowledgeable, and how confident, one is of the correct running of the clock-work. A competent horologist would set the Device up properly, and moreover would have some idea how fast or slow ’twould run in a rocking and jouncing carriage on a cold day.”

“So the person in the sedan chair was no horologist!” said Mr. Kikin.

Mr. Threader chuckled, believing that it was a witticism, but Daniel could see that the Russian had taken Daniel’s point, and was wholly serious.

“Indeed, sir. I submit that the Infernal Devices might have been planted by people who had but a very imperfect understanding of how they worked. If that is true, the Device might have been expected to explode hours or even days later than it did—the person in the sedan chair might have been nearly as astonished as were Mr. Threader and I, when it went off in Crane Court.”

“No one doubts that it exploded at the wrong moment,” said Mr. Threader, “so your hypothesis has at least a patina of credibility.”

“It is all neither here nor there,” Mr. Orney said flatly, “as Mr. Pinewood ended up thrashing about in shite, and we know nothing more concerning the sedan chair.”

“I disagree. It suggests a line of attack, by thinking about clock-work. The device that burned your ship went off at the right time: the dead of night. The one in Mr. Threader’s carriage went off too early. I conclude that the device that was used ran too quickly in a moving carriage on a cold day, but ran at the correct rate sitting still in the belly of a ship’s hull. From that I can guess as to what sort of clock-work was used, which might help lead us to him who made the Infernal Devices.”

“Hence…Clerkenwell,” Mr. Kikin said.

“What results can you report to us, from this line of inquiry?” demanded Mr. Orney.

“That is like asking a farmer in April what he has harvested from the seeds he planted a week ago,” Daniel protested. “I had hoped to find some of Mr. Robert Hooke’s notes and test-pieces at Crane Court. He was one of the first to have a go at finding the Longitude with clocks, and knew better than anyone how their rate was influenced by rocking and by changes in temperature. Alas, Hooke’s residue was all rubbished. I have made inquiries with the Royal College of Physicians, and with my lord Ravenscar.”

“Why them, pray tell?” Mr. Threader asked.

“Hooke built the Physicians in Warwick Lane, as well as certain additions to my lord Ravenscar’s house. It is possible that he stored some of his things in those places. My queries have gone unanswered. I shall redouble my efforts.”

“Since we appear to have moved on to New Business,” said Mr. Threader, “pray tell us, Mr. Orney, of all that you have learnt on the piss-boiling front.”

“Dr. Waterhouse assures us that piss-boiling on a very large scale is needed to make phosphorus for these Infernal Devices,” Mr. Orney reminded them.

“His account left little to the imagination,” Mr. Threader said.

“To do it in London would be difficult—”

“Why? London could not smell any more like piss than it does to begin with,” Mr. Kikin observed shrewdly.

“It would draw attention, not because it smelt bad, but because it was a queer practice. So the piss-boiling probably happens in the countryside. But this would require transportation of piss, in large amounts, from a place where there was a lot to be had—viz. a city, e.g., London—to said countryside; a thing not to be accomplished in perfect secrecy.”

“You should make inquiries among the Vault men!”

“An excellent idea, Mr. Kikin, and one I had a long time ago,” Mr. Orney said. “But my habitation is remote from the banks of the lower Fleet where the Vault men cluster, thick as flies, every night to discharge their loads. As Monsieur Arlanc dwells at Crane Court, five minutes’ walk from the said Ditch, I charged him with it. Monsieur Arlanc?”

“I have been very, very busy…” began Henry Arlanc, and was then drowned out by indignant vocalizations from the rest of the Clubb. The Huguenot made a brave show of Gallic dignity until this Parliamentary baying had died down. “But the Justice of the Peace for Southwark has succeeded where I failed. Voilà!”

Arlanc whipped out a pamphlet, and tossed it onto a slate coffin-lid; it skidded to a stop in the pool of light cast by a candle. The cover was printed in great rude lurid type, big enough for Daniel to read without fishing out his spectacles: “THE PROCEEDINGS of the As-sizes of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol-Delivery for the COUNTY OF SURREY.”

Below that the letters got small; but Mr. Kikin bent over and read the subtitle aloud: “Being a FULL and TRUE accompt of ye most surprizing, execrable and Horrid CRIMES committed by the Enemies, and just, swift and severe PUNISHMENTS meted out by the Defenders, of the Peace of that County from Friday January 1, to Saturday February 27, Anno Domini 1713/14….”

Mr. Kikin shared an amused look over the candle with Henry Arlanc. It was possible to buy these pamphlets everywhere, which implied that some people—a lot of people, actually—were buying them. But no man who was literate enough to read them would admit to it. This sort of literature was supposed to be ignored. For Mr. Arlanc to notice it was uncouth, and for Mr. Kikin to derive amusement from it was rude. Foreigners and their ways!

“Forgive me, Monsieur Arlanc, but I have not had the…er…pleasure of reading that document,” said Mr. Threader. “What does it say?”

“It relates the case of a Mr. Marsh, who was driving his wagon down Lambeth Road one night in December, when he met three young gentlemen who had just emerged from a house of ill repute in St. George’s Fields. As they passed each other in the lane, these three young men became so incensed by the odour emanating from Mr. Marsh’s wagon that they drew out their swords and plunged them into the body of Mr. Marsh’s horse, which died instantly, collapsing in its traces. Mr. Marsh set up a hue and cry, which drew the attention of the occupants of a nearby tavern, who rushed out and seized the perpetrators.”

“Courageous, that, for a Mobb of Drunks.”

“The roads down there are infested with highwaymen,” Mr. Threader said keenly. “They probably reckoned ’twas safer to go out and face them as a company, be it ne’er so ragged, than be picked off one by one as they straggled home.”

“Imagine their surprise when they found they’d apprehended not highwaymen, but gentlemen!” Mr. Kikin remarked, very amused.

“They had apprehended both,” said Henry Arlanc.

“What!?”

“Many highwaymen are gentlemen,” said Mr. Threader learnedly. “As ’tis beneath the dignity of a Person of Quality to work for a living, why, when he’s gambled and whored away all his money, he must resort to a life of armed robbery. To do otherwise were dishonorable.”

“How come you to know so much of it? I daresay you are a regular subscriber of these pamphlets, sir!” said the delighted Mr. Orney.

“I am on the road several months out of the year, sir, and know more of highwaymen than do you of the very latest advances in Caulking.”

“What came of it, Monsieur Arlanc?” Daniel inquired.

“On the persons of these three, valuables were found that had been stolen, earlier in the evening, from a coach bound for Dover. The occupants of that coach prosecuted them. As all three were of course literate, they got benefit of clergy. Mr. Marsh does not appear again in the Narration, save as a witness.”

“So all that we know of Mr. Marsh is that in the middle of the night he was transporting something down Lambeth Road so foul-smelling that three highwaymen risked the gallows to revenge themselves on his horse!” said Mr. Orney.

“I know a bit more than that, sir,” Arlanc said. “I’ve made inquiries along the banks of the Fleet, after dark. Mr. Marsh was indeed a London Vault-man. ’Tis considered most strange, by his brethren, that he crossed the River with a full load in the middle of the night.”

“You say he was a Vault-man,” Daniel remarked. “What is he now? Dead?”

“Out of business, owing to the loss of his horse. Moved back to Plymouth to live with his sister.”

“Perhaps we should send one of our number to Plymouth to interview him,” suggested Daniel, half in jest.

“Inconceivable! The state of the Clubb’s finances is desperate!” Mr. Threader proclaimed.

Silence then, save for the sound of tongues being bitten. A face or two turned towards Daniel. He had known Mr. Threader longer than the others; so a decent respect for precedence dictated that he be given the first chance to bite Mr. Threader’s head off.

“We have just doubled the size of our accompt, sir. How can you make such a claim?”

“Not quite doubled, sir, your Piece of Eight came up a ha’p’ny light of a pound.”

“And my guinea is several pence heavy, as all the world knows,” said Mr. Orney, “so you may supply Brother Daniel’s deficit from my surplus, and keep the change while you are at it.”

“Your generosity sets an example to us unredeemed Anglican sinners,” said Mr. Threader with a weak smile. “But it does not materially change the Clubb’s finances. Yes, we have twice the assets today as we had yesterday; but we must consider liabilities as well.”

“I did not know we had any,” said the perpetually amused Mr. Kikin, “unless you have been taking our dues to Change Alley, and investing them in some eldritch Derivatives.”

“I look to the future, Mr. Kikin. One gets what one pays for! That is the infallible rule in fish-markets, whorehouses, and Parliament. And it applies with as much force in the world of the thief-taker.”

Mr. Threader reveled in the silence that followed. Finally Mr. Orney, who could not stand to see anyone—especially Mr. Threader—enjoy anything, said, “If you mean to hire a thief-taker, sir, with our money, you would do well to propose it first, that we may dispute it.”

“Even before disputing thief-takers, if someone would be so kind as to define the term for me?” said Mr. Kikin.

“Apprehending criminals is oft strenuous, and sometimes mortally dangerous,” said Mr. Threader. “So, instead of doing it oneself, one hires a thief-taker to go and do it for one.”

“To go out and…hunt down, and physically abduct, someone?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Threader mildly. “How else do you suppose justice can ever be served?”

“Police…constables…militia…or something!” sputtered Mr. Kikin. “But…in an orderly country…you can’t simply have people running around arresting each other!”

“Thank you, sirrah, for your advice upon how to run an orderly country!” Mr. Threader brayed. “Ah, yes, if only England could be more like Muscovy!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen…” Daniel began. But Mr. Kikin’s fascination prevailed, and he let the argument drop, asking, “How does it work?”

“Generally one posts a reward, and leaves the rest to the natural workings of the market,” said Mr. Threader.

“How large a reward?”

“You have penetrated to the heart of the matter, sir,” said Mr. Threader. “Since the days of William and Mary, the reward for a common robber or burglar has been ten pounds.”

“By convention, or…”

“By royal proclamation, sir!”

Mr. Kikin’s face clouded over. “Hmm, so we are in competition with Her Majesty’s government, then…”

“It gets worse. Forty pounds for highway robbers, twenty to twenty-five for horse thieves, even more for murderers. The Clubb, I remind you, has ten pounds, plus or minus a few bits and farthings.”

“Stiff competition indeed,” said Mr. Orney, “and a sign, to those wise enough to heed it, that ’tis a waste of time to rely ’pon thief-takers.”

Before Mr. Threader could say what he thought of Mr. Orney’s brand of wisdom, Mr. Kikin said: “You should have told me before. If the Clubb’s dues are to be pissed away on inane things, I must be thrifty. But if it is a matter of posting a reward…to catch an enemy of the Tsar…we could have every thief-taker in London working for us by tomorrow evening!”

Mr. Threader looked perfectly satisfied.

“Do we really want that?” Daniel asked. “Thief-takers have a more vile reputation even than thieves.”

“That is of no account. We are not proposing to hire one as a nanny. The viler the better, I say!”

Daniel could see one or two flaws in that line of reasoning. But a glance at the faces of Mr. Orney and Monsieur Arlanc told him he was out-voted. They appeared to think it was splendid if Mr. Kikin wanted to spend the Tsar’s money in this way.

“If there is no further business here,” Daniel said, “I thought a tour of the watch-makers’ shops of Clerkenwell might be in order.”

“To find criminals, Dr. Waterhouse, let us search among criminals, not horologists; and let us not do it ourselves, but have thief-takers—paid for by the Tsar of Muscovy!—do it for us,” said Mr. Threader; and for once, he seemed to speak for the whole Clubb, except for Daniel. “The meeting is adjourned.”

AS A WAVE PASSES THROUGH a rug that is being shaken, driving before it a front of grit, fleas, apple seeds, tobacco-ashes, pubic hairs, scab-heads, &c., so the expansion of London across the defenseless green countryside pushed before it all who had been jarred loose by Change, or who simply hadn’t been firmly tied down to begin with. A farmer living out in the green pastures north of the city might notice the buildings creeping his way, year by year, but not know that his pasture was soon to become part of London until drunks, footpads, whores, and molly-boys began to congregate under his windows.

As a boy Daniel had been able to open an upper-storey window in back of Drake’s house on Holborn, and gaze across one mile of downs and swales to an irregular patch of turf called Clerkenwell Green: a bit of common ground separating St. James’s and St. John’s. Each of these was an ancient religious order, therefore, a jumbled compound of graveyards, houses, ancient Popish cloisters, and out-buildings. Like all other Roman churches in the realm, these had become Anglican, and perhaps been sacked a little bit, during Henry VIII’s time. And when Cromwell had come along to replace Anglicanism with a more radical creed, they had been sacked more thoroughly. Now what remained of them had been engulfed by London.

Yet it was better to be engulfed than to be on the edge, for the city had a kind of order that the frontier wanted. Whatever crimes, disruptions, and atrocities had occurred around Clerkenwell Green while it was being ringed with new buildings, had now migrated slightly northwards, to be replaced by outrages of a more settled and organized nature.

Half a mile northwest of Clerkenwell Green was a place where the fledgling Fleet ran, for a short distance, parallel to the road to Hampstead. Between road and river the ground was low, and shiny with shifting sheets of water. But on the opposite bank, nearer to Clerkenwell, the ground was firm enough that shrubs and vegetables could be planted in it without drowning, and buildings set on it without sinking into the muck. A hamlet had gradually formed there, called Black Mary’s Hole.

A bloke wanting to leave the urban confines of Clerkenwell Green and venture out across the fields toward Black Mary’s Hole would have to contend with a few obstacles. For directly in his path stood the ancient compound of St. James’s, and on the far side of that was a new-built prison, and just beyond that, a bridewell run by Quakers. And the sort of bloke who passed the time of day going up to Black Mary’s Hole would instinctively avoid such establishments. So he would begin his journey by dodging westwards and exiting Clerkenwell Green through a sort of sphincter that led into Turnmill Street. To the left, or London-wards, Turnmill led into the livestock markets of Smithfield, and was lined with shambles, tallow-chandleries, and knackers’ yards: hardly a tempting place for a stroll. To the right, or leading out to open country, it forked into two ways: on the right, Rag Street, and on the left, Hockley-in-the-Hole, which presumably got its name from the fact that it had come into being along a bend of the Fleet, which there had been bridged in so many places that it was vanishing from human ken.

Hockley-in-the-Hole was a sort of recreational annex to the meat markets. If animals were done to death for profit in the butcher-stalls of Smithfield, they were baited, fought, and torn asunder for pleasure in the cock-pits and bear-rings of Hockley-in-
the-Hole.

Rag Street was not a great deal more pleasant, but it did get one directly out of the city. A hundred paces along, the buildings fell away, and were replaced by gardens, on the right. On the left the buildings went on for a bit, but they were not so unsavoury: several bakeries, and then a bath where the Quality came to take the waters. In a few hundred paces the buildings ceased on that side as well. From that point it was possible to see across a quarter-mile of open ground to Black Mary’s Hole. This was, in other words, the first place where a Londoner, crazed by crowding and choked from coal-smoke, could break out into the open. The impulse was common enough. And so the entire stretch of territory from the Islington Road on the east to Tottenham Court Road on the west had become a sort of deranged park, with Black Mary’s Hole in the center of it. It was where people resorted to have every form of sexual congress not sanctioned by the Book of Common Prayer, and where footpads went to prey upon them, and thief-takers to spy on the doings of the footpads and set one against another for the reward money.

Baths and tea-gardens provided another reason to go there—or, barring that, a convenient pretext for gentlefolk whose real motives had nothing to do with bathing or tea. And—complicating matters terribly—any number of people went there for childishly simple and innocent purposes. Picknickers were as likely to come here as murderers. On his first visit to this district, Daniel had heard someone creeping along behind him, and been certain it was a footpad, raising his cudgel to dash Daniel’s brain’s out; turning around, he had discovered a Fellow of the Royal Society brandishing a long-handled butterfly net.

Just at this place where London stopped, on the road to Black Mary’s Hole, was a bit of land accurately described, by members of Daniel’s Clubb, as a swine-yard with a mound of rubble in it. As a boy looking out the window of Drake’s house, Daniel had probably flicked his gaze over it a hundred times and made naught of it. But recently he had got a bundle of letters from Massachusetts. One of them had been from Enoch Root, who’d got wind of Daniel’s plan to build a sort of annex to the Institute of Technologickal Arts somewhere around London.

For a long time I have phant’sied that one day I should find the landlord of the ruined Temple in Clerkenwell, and make something of that property.

Daniel had rolled his eyes upon reading these words. If Enoch Root was a real estate developer, then Daniel was a Turkish harem-girl! It was typical Enochian meddling: he knew there was a Templar crypt under this swine-lot that was about to be gobbled by London, and didn’t want it to be filled in, or used as a keg-room for a gin-house, and he hoped Daniel or someone would do something about it. Daniel bridled at this trans-Atlantic nagging. But Root had a knack for finding, or creating, alignments between his interests and those of the people whose lives he meddled with. Daniel needed a place to build things. Clerkenwell, though it was obviously unstable, muddy, smelling of the knacker, and loud with the screams and roars of fighting beasts, Regarded as Unsafe by Persons of Quality, was a suitable place for Daniel. He could get to Town or Country—or escape from either—with but a few steps, and none of the neighbors were apt to complain of queer doings, or pay any note to nocturnal visitors.

The parcel was an irregular pentagon about a hundred paces wide. Within it, the sunken ruin was situated off-center, away from the road to Black Mary’s Hole, near a vertex that pointed back towards Clerkenwell. The gardens of a neighboring Spaw came up close to it on one side, making the parcel seem larger than it was. It was one of countless crumbs of territory that had been worried off the edges of the Church’s stupendous holdings in Tudor days. Tracing the changes in its ownership since then had been a good job for an unemployed boffin who knew a lot of Latin—Daniel had made two trips to Oxford to research it. He had discovered that ownership of the land had passed into the hands of a Cavalier family that had gone to France during Cromwell days and, owing to an ensuing pattern of marriages, bastardy, suspicious deaths, and opportunistic religious conversions, essentially become French people and were unlikely ever to come back. Twenty-five years of almost continual war between Britain and France had left them profoundly ignorant of suburban London real estate trends. Daniel had passed all of this on to Roger at the Kit-Cat Clubb. Letters had been despatched to France, and a few weeks later Roger had informed him that he could build anything he wanted there, provided it might later be resold at a profit. Daniel had found a mediocre architect and told him to design houses with shops in the ground floor, wrapping around three sides of the property, embracing a court with the ruin in the middle of it.

As he emerged from the half-collapsed anteroom of the crypt—the last member of the Clubb to depart—white blindness came over him because of the brilliance of the cloudy sky. He shaded his eyes and looked down at the luminous grass. A small round wrinkled thing was next to his shoe, looking like a færy’s coin-purse. He kicked it over and realized it was a knotted sheep-gut condom.

His eyes had adjusted sufficiently now that he could look at the nearby hog-wallow without suffering too much. It was all dried up, as the tenant had been encouraged to take his swine elsewhere. Finally he could remove his hand from his brow and trace the lines of surveyors’ stakes marking the foundations of the new buildings. When walls began to rise up upon those foundations, they’d screen this yard from the road, and then the only people who’d be able to see into it would be a few of those Spaw-goers, and perhaps—if they had sharp eyes, or owned perspective glasses—inmates of the new prison on Clerkenwell Close, a quarter-mile distant. But for what it was worth, they’d be the better class of prisoners who could afford to pay the gaolers for upper-storey rooms.

ACCUSTOMED TO THE TEMPO of Trinity College and of the Royal Society, he’d thought that the Clubb’s meeting would go much longer. But Threader, Orney, and Kikin had nothing in common but decisiveness, and a will to get on with it. His watch told him he was very early for his appointment with Sir Isaac Newton. This would have been a blessing to most, for who’d want to be the insolent wretch who kept Sir Isaac waiting? To Daniel, who was looking forward to the meeting about as much as another bladder operation, it was a damned nuisance. He desired some pointless distraction; and so he decided to go call on the Marquis of Ravenscar.

There was no way to get from here to Roger’s house that was not dangerous, offensive, or both. Daniel opted for offensive, i.e., he attempted to walk through the middle of Hockley-in-the-Hole. It lay within earshot, just on the other side of some buildings. What made it offensive was the sort of people gathered there on this Saturday morning: Cockneys come up to watch fights between beasts, and to participate in others. But they also made it safe, after a fashion. Pick-pockets were all over the place, but footpads—whose modus operandi was to beat victims senseless—couldn’t work in a crowd.

At the place where Saffron Hill Road disgorged its push of Londoners into the Hole, two men, stripped to the waist, were circling around each other with their fists up. One of them already had a red knuckle-print on his cheek, and a huge smear of dirt on one shoulder where he’d tumbled into the street. They were bulky coves, probably meat-cutters from Smithfield, and at least a hundred men had already formed a ring around them, and begun to lay wagers. All foot-traffic had to squeeze through a strait no more than a fathom wide between this storm of elbows and the building-fronts along the north side of the Hole: a line-up of taverns and of smudgy enterprises that looked as if they didn’t want to be noticed.

A man was lying full-length on the ground at the foot of one building, dead or asleep, creating further eddies and surges in the crowd as people dodged around him. He looked like an apparition, a prophecy of what would become of Daniel if he were to lose his footing there. So Daniel made no pretense of dignity. He sidestepped as far as he could to the right, so that he was almost cowering against the sheer brown-brick face of a building, and shifted his walking-stick to his right hand so it wouldn’t get kicked out from under him, and put his hand through the wrist-loop in case it did. He let the traffic carry him into the flume.

He had got about halfway through, and begun to sense daylight ahead, when he sensed unease propagating like a wave through the crowd ahead of him, and looked up to see a great brute of a horse, in black leather tack with silver ornament, drawing a small carriage. Its design was outlandish: all stretched out and bent around, recalling the shape of a pouncing cheetah. In the moment before he realized that he was in trouble, his mind identified it as one of the new rigs called phaethons. It was going to squeeze through this bottleneck. Or rather, it would trot through without breaking stride, and let the pedestrians do all the squeezing.

The crowd couldn’t believe it—’twas an impossibility! Yet the vehicle, twenty feet long and eight high, drawn by a ton of prancing, iron-shod flesh, was not slowing down. The ends of the carriage-poles protruded like jousting-lances. One of those could go through your head like a pike through a pumpkin, and if you dodged that, you might still have your foot crushed under a wheel and face the always-tricky dilemma of amputation vs. gangrene. A hundred men did the rational thing. The sum of those rational choices was called panic. Daniel’s contribution to the panic was as follows: perhaps eight feet ahead of him he saw a recessed shop-doorway, and made up his mind that while everyone else was gaping at the phaethon, he could squirt forward between the crowd on his left, and the shop-window on his right, and dodge into it. He ducked under the shoulder of a bigger man and scurried forward.

Halfway there, his left peripheral vision went dark as a large number of onrushing bodies blotted out the white sky.

Daniel saw very clearly that he was going to die now, in the following manner: smashed against the front of this shop by tons of meat and bone. The shop-window would not give way; it was made of small square panes in a grid of wooden mullions as thick as his wrist. Eventually it might buckle under the pressure of the crowd, but all of his ribs would give way sooner. He tried to lunge forward another step, but it only got worse; and his foot came down too soon, on unsteady ground. He had stepped on the torso of the unconscious man he’d noticed moments earlier. He lost his balance, but gained six inches’ altitude, and this triggered some sort of climbing instinct. If the mullions of the window were stout enough to crush his ribcage, then they could at least support his weight while they were doing it. He flung both arms in the air like a Baptist in ecstasy, clutched at a horizontal bar, and pulled himself up while pushing with both feet against that sleeping or dead man, all at the same moment as he was being picked up by the mob, like a reed that has fallen into the surf, and slammed against the building. His feet were no longer touching anything. The force of gravity was countered by several different blokes’ knees, shoulders, hips, and heads, which had all struck him over the course of a brief, bony barrage. If they’d driven him under he’d be a sorry case, but they’d pushed him up. One of his cheeks had slammed up against a windowpane so hard that the glass had popped half out of its frame and was making ominous ticking noises very close to his eyeball.

He no longer needed to support his own weight, so he allowed his left hand to release its grip on the mullion above, brought it down right past his nose, insinuated his fingers between jawbone and window, and crooked his fingers over the edge of the frame, taking advantage of the loose pane by getting a bit of a handhold on its mullion, so that when the crowd collapsed he would not simply fall backwards and crack his head on the ground.

The air inside the shop felt cooler on his fingertips and smelt of pipe-smoke. He had no choice but to stare through the glass for about five seconds. In the architect’s mind’s eye, this had probably been a lovely shop-window where ladies would coo over pretty displays. And maybe it would be that some day, if Hockley-in-the-Hole ever became fashionable. But for now a board had been put up inside of it, a bit more than arm’s length inside the glass. Daniel couldn’t tell whether it was a backdrop for display, or a barrier against intruders. It had been covered with green fabric a long time ago, and the fabric had been bleached by the sun, as this was a south-facing window. It had gone nearly white everywhere except where the sun’s light had been blocked by wares, hung on that board for display. No wares remained on it now. But their caught shadows were clearly visible. Daniel’s first thought was pendulums, because the shapes were circular, depending from slim cords. But no one bought pendulums save Natural Philosophers and mesmerists. It had to have been watches, hanging on chains.

The phaethon clattered past and the crowd relaxed, presenting a whole new universe of hazards to Daniel. A lot of chaps who had been leaning against other chaps who had, in the end, been leaning against Daniel, now decided to right themselves by pushing off hard. So waves of pressure thrust Daniel against the grid, again and again, so hard that he felt it popping underneath him. One of the brass buttons on his coat shattered a pane, spraying the watch-shadows with skewed triangles of glass. Then his support went out from under him and he fell, braking himself—as planned—with the one hand he’d crooked over the windowframe. His hip swung into the store-front and cracked another pane.

Now that the loosened pane was no longer being forced inwards by his cheek, it had sprung back and trapped his knuckles under its sharp edge. He was caught on tiptoe, like a prisoner strung up in a dungeon. But his right hand was free, the walking-stick still dangling by its wrist-thong, so with some ridiculous tossing and squirming motions he got a grip on its middle, raised its knotty head, and bashed out the loose pane to get himself free. The man who’d been lying on the ground rolled over onto his back, sat up convulsively, and blew a cloud of blood from his nostrils. Daniel hurried on; and just as he walked past the front door of the building he felt it opening. Three paces farther along he heard an “Oy, you!” but Hockley-in-the-Hole had become more riotous than ever and he could plausibly ignore this. He simply could not begin a conversation with the sort of person who would lurk in the back of such a building.

He walked faster, following the leftward curve of Hockley-in-the-Hole. A miasma of watery smells, issuing from gutters and crevices in the pavement, told him he’d crossed over the entombed Fleet. He dodged right into Windmill Hill, though it was a long time since there’d been a discernible hill, or a windmill, there. He then forced himself to walk straight west, without looking back, for a hundred paces. That brought him clear of Hockley, and into the center of the largest open place in this part of town, where Leather Lane, Liquor-pond Street, and several other ways came together in a crazed, nameless interchange half the size of Charing Cross. There, finally, he turned around.

“Your watch, sir,” said a bloke, “or so I surmise.”

All the air drained out of Daniel’s lungs. For ten minutes he had felt clever and spry. Now he looked down at himself and saw wreckage. To inventory all that had gone wrong with his clothes and his toilette would take more time than he could spare; but his watch was unquestionably missing. He took a step toward the bloke, then a smaller step. But the other fellow seemed to’ve made up his mind that he’d not pursue Daniel any farther today. He stood and waited, and the longer he waited, the more he seemed to glower. He was a great big cove, built to chop wood all day long. He had the most profound whiskerage Daniel had seen in many a year, and looked as if he could grow a jet-black beaver-pelt out of his face in about a week’s time. He might have shaved forty-eight hours ago. But he’d had little incentive to do it any more frequently than that, since his cheeks and chin had suffered badly from smallpox, leaving scars atop other scars. In sum, the man’s head looked like a Dutch oven forged over a dying fire with a ball-peen hammer. His hair hung round his face in a way that reminded Daniel of the young Robert Hooke; but where Hooke had been sickly and bent, this man was made like a meat-wagon. Yet he was holding Daniel’s watch in the most curious delicate way, the time-piece resting on a half-acre of pink palm, the chain drawn back and draped over the black-creviced fingers of the other hand. He was displaying it.

Daniel took another step forward. He had the ridiculous phant’sy that the man would dart away if Daniel reached out: a reflex Daniel had learned in childhood games of keep-away, and never quite got rid of.

Something did not make sense. He looked up into the man’s gray eyes and noticed crows’ feet. He was older than he looked, probably in his forties. The beginnings of an explanation there.

“You have judged me aright,” the man said, in an encouraging tone. “I am a horologist gone bad.”

“You deal in stolen time—”

“Don’t we all, sir? Each striking his own bargain, as ’twere.”

“I was going to say, ‘time-pieces,’ but you interrupted me.”

“ ’Tis a common error of those who buy time dear, and sell it cheap, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“You know my name? What is yours?”

“My surname is Hoxton. My father christened me Peter. Hereabouts, I am called Saturn.”

“The Roman god of time.”

“And of surly dispositions, Doctor.”

“I have inspected your shop, Mr. Hoxton, quite a bit more closely than I should have liked.”

“Yes, I was just inside the window, smoking my pipe, and observing you in return.”

“You have told me in your own words that you have gone bad. You operate under an alias that is a byword for foul temper. I think I know the nature of your business. Yet you ask me to believe that you are returning me my watch, without any…complications…and you expect me to approach within your reach…” Daniel here trailed off, keeping an eye on the watch, trying not to seem as interested in getting it back as he really was.

“You’re one of those coves f’r whom everything has to make sense? Then you and I are fellow-sufferers.”

“You say that because you are a horologist?”

“Mechanic since I was a lad, clock-maker since I came to my senses,” said Saturn. “The piece of information you are wanting, Doctor, is this: this here is an old Hooke balance-spring watch, this is. When the Master made it, why, it might’ve been the best time-piece ever fashioned by human hands. But now there’s a score of proper horologists round Clerkenwell who can make ones that’ll keep better time. Technology ages, dunnit?”

Daniel pursed his lips to keep from laughing at the spectacle of this new, five-guinea word, Technology, emerging from that head.

“It ages faster’n we do. It can be difficult for a bloke to keep up.”

“Is that your story, Saturn? You could not keep up, and so you went bad?”

“I grew weary of keeping up, Doctor. That is my story, if you must know. I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more æternal nature.”

“Do you claim to have found it?”

“No.”

“Good. I was afraid this was going to turn into a homily.”

Daniel now felt safe in advancing two more steps. Then a question occurred to him, and he stopped. “How did you know my name?”

“It’s inscribed on the back of the watch.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Very clever,” said Saturn. Daniel could not tell which of them was the target of the sarcasm. Saturn continued, “Very well, sir. A certain flash cull of my acquaintance, a file-cly with a specialization in tatlers, who had run afoul of a Harmon in Fleet Street, and been condemned to shove the tumbler from Newgate to Leadenhall, came by my ken of an afternoon, desiring employment of a sedentary nature while his stripes healed. And after taking sensible precautions, which is to say, making sure that he was not running a type of service-lay to slum my ken, I said to this buz, my business here has fallen on hard times because I cannot run it without transitory knowledge. And yet my brain has had its fill of the same, and all I wish to do is to sit in my shop reading books, to acquire knowledge æternal, which benefits me in ways intangible, but in no way helps me to receive and sell stolen property of a horologickal nature, which is the raison d’être of the shop. Therefore, go ye out into the Rumbo, the Spinning-Ken, to Old Nass, go to the Boozing-kens of Hockley-in-the-Hole and the Cases at the low end of the Mount, go to the Goat in Long-lane, the Dogg in Fleet Street, and the Black-boy in Newtenhouse-
Lane, and drink—but not too much—and buy drinks—but never too many—for any flash culls you spy there, and acquire transitory knowledge, and return to my ken and relate to me what you have learnt. And back he comes, a week later, and informs me that a certain old Gager has lately been making the rounds, trying to recover some lost property. ‘What has he lost?’ I inquired. ‘Not a thing,’ came the answer, ‘he is after another cull’s lost property—some gager who was Phinneyed ten years since.’ ‘Go and learn that dead cove’s name,’ says I, ‘and the quick one’s, too.’ Come the answers: Robert Hooke, and Daniel Waterhouse, respectively. Why, he even pointed you out to me once, when you walked past my shop on your way to visit your swine-yard. That’s how I knew you.”

Peter Hoxton now extended his arms. His left hand held the chain of the Hooke-watch, swinging it like a pendulum, and his right offered a handshake. Daniel accepted the watch greedily, and the handshake with reluctance.

“I have a question for you, Doctor,” said Saturn, as he was shaking Daniel’s hand.

“Yes?”

“I’ve made a study of you, and know you are a bit of a Natural Philosopher. Been meaning to invite you into my ken.”

“Did you—sir, did you cause my watch to be stolen!?” Daniel demanded, trying to draw back; but Saturn’s hand had engulfed his, like a python swallowing a gerbil.

“Did you—Doctor, did you fling yourself against my shop-window on purpose!?” Saturn answered, perfectly mocking Daniel’s tone.

Daniel was too indignant to speak, which the other took as permission to go on: “Now philosophy is the study of wisdom—truths æternal. Yet, long ago you went over the sea, didn’t you, to set up an Institute of Technologickal Arts. And here you are back in London, aren’t you, on some similar errand. Why, Doctor? You had the life I dream of: to sit on your arse and read of truths æternal. And yet I cannot make my way through a chapter of Plato without glancing up to see you sprawled against my shop-window like an enormous spate of bird-shite. Why turn away from the study of truths æternal, to traffick in transitory knowledge?”

Somewhat to his own surprise, Daniel had a ready answer, which came out of his mouth before he had had time to consider it. “Why does the minister tell mundane stories during his homily? Why not simply quote direct from sublime works of theology?”

“Anecdotes serve to illustrate the ideas he’s getting at,” Saturn surmised, “and anyway, if those ideas have no relation to mundane things, why, they’re probably rubbish.”

“Then if Newton and Leibniz are sublime theologians, sir, I am an humble vicar. Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the æternal by way of the mundane. Does that answer your question, and may I have my hand back?”

“Yes,” said Saturn. “You have your watch, sir; you have your hand; and you have a parishioner.”

“But I do not want a parishioner,” said Daniel, turning on his heel and walking west into Liquor-pond Street.

“Then you ought to give up preaching, and those religious observances you just spoke of,” said Peter Hoxton, falling into step beside Daniel. “You are a Cambridge man?”

“I am.”

“And is not the ancient purpose of Cambridge to turn out clerics, and send them out into England to minister to the unwashed?”

“You know that perfectly well! But I’ll not minister to you or any other man, Peter Hoxton, for if ever I was a vicar, I am a fallen one now, and not fit to minister to a dog. I went astray early, and have strayed far. The only way I can think of to find my way closer to God is through the strange ministry I spoke of earlier, whereof Hooke and Spinoza were prophets. It is not a way I recommend to any man, for I am as ’stranged from the main line of religion as a stylite monk, sitting on a pillar in a waste.”

“I have strayed further and grown more ’stranged than you, Doc. I have been wandering in that same waste without any pillar to sit upon—therefore, you, perched on your post, are like a Pharos to me.”

“I say to you one more time—”

“There’s that word again! Time. Let me speak of time, Doc, and say to you this: if you continue to walk through Hockley-in-the-Hole unaccompanied, and to wander about the city as you’ve been doing, your time may be measured in days, or hours. You are not leery enough. This fact has been made note of by certain coves who make unleery gagers their prey. Every foot-scamperer and bridle-cull on the upper Fleet pricks up his ears when you trudge out to your swine-yard and disappear into your hole in the ground. Your time will be up very soon, and you will wind up as a scragg’d, naked corpse, floating down Fleet Ditch to Bridewell, if you do not make some large friends soon.”

“Are you nominating yourself my bodyguard, Saturn?”

“I am nominating myself your parishioner, Doc. As you lack a church, we shall have to worship peripatetically, ambling about the streets, as now, and making Hockley-in-the-Hole our Agora. As I am half as old, and twice as big, as you, why, many an idle cove, who does not wot the true nature of our relationship, may ignorantly assume that I am your bodyguard, and, on account of that foolish misapprehension, refrain from stabbing you or bludgeoning you to death.”

They had reached Gray’s Inn Lane. The lawyer-infested gardens and walks behind Gray’s Inn lay to either side of the road here, and beyond them were the settled confines of various Squares: Red Lyon, Waterhouse, Bloomsbury. Roger’s estate was on the far corner of Bloomsbury, where London gave way again to open countryside. Daniel did not want to lead Saturn directly to it. He stopped.

“I am dafter e’en than you guess, Saturn.”

“Why, impossible!”

“Have you heard of a pirate in America, called Edward Teach?”

“Blackbeard? Of course, sir, he is legendary.”

“I say that not so long ago, I heard Blackbeard standing on the poop of Queen Anne’s Revenge, calling for me by name.”

For the first time, Peter Hoxton was taken a-back.

“As you see, I am insane—best leave me alone,” Daniel said, and turned his back on Saturn yet again, looking for an opening in traffic on Gray’s Inn Lane.

“Concerning Mr. Teach, I shall make inquiries among the Black-guard,” said Peter Hoxton.

The next time Daniel dared to look over his shoulder, Saturn had vanished.

Bloomsbury

HALF AN HOUR LATER

“A ROMAN TEMPLE, on the edge of the city. Modest. Nothing gaudy,” had been Roger’s instructions to him, some twenty-five years earlier.

“I suppose that rules out having it be a Temple of Jupiter or Apollo,” Daniel had returned.

Roger had looked out the window of the coffee-house, feigning deafness, which was what he always did when he guessed Daniel was making fun of him.

Daniel had sipped his coffee and considered it. “Among your modest and humble Roman Gods would be…let me think…Vesta. Whose temples, like your house, stood outside the old boundaries of the city.”

“Well enough. Splendid god, Vesta,” Roger had said, a bit distantly.

“Goddess, actually.”

“All right, who the hell was she!?”

“Goddess of the hearth, chaste above all others…”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Worshipped around the clock—or the sundial, I should say—by the Vestal virgins…”

“Wouldn’t mind having a few of those around, provided they were not pedantic about the virginity.”

“Not at all. Vesta herself was almost seduced by Priapus, the ithyphallic God…”

Roger shivered. “I can’t wait to find out what that means. Perhaps we should make my house a Temple of Priapus.”

“Every shack you walk into becomes a Temple of Priapus. No need to spend money on an architect.”

“Who said I was going to pay you?”

“I did, Roger.”

“Oh, all right.”

“I will not make you a Temple of Priapus. I do not think that the Queen of England would ever come to call on you, Roger, if you lived in such a place.”

“Give me another humble, unassuming God then!” Roger had demanded, snapping his fingers. “Come on, I’m not paying you to drink coffee!”

“There’s always Vulcan.”

“Lame!”

“Indeed, he was a bit gouty, like many a gentleman,” Daniel had said patiently, “but he got all the most beautiful goddesses—including Venus herself!”

“Haw! The rogue!”

“He was master of metals—though humble, and scorned, he fettered Titans and Gods with his ingenuity—”

“Metals—including—?”

“Gold and silver.”

“Capital!”

“And of course he was God of Fire, and Lord of Volcanoes.”

“Volcanoes! An ancient symbol of fertility—sending their gouts of molten stone spurting high into the air,” Roger had said meditatively, prompting Daniel to shove his chair away several inches. “Right! That’s it, then—make me a Temple of Vulcan—tasteful and inexpensive, mind you—just off Bloomsbury there. And put a volcano in it!”

This—put a volcano in it—had been Roger’s first and last instructions to Daniel concerning interior decoration. Daniel had fobbed that part of it off on a silversmith—not a money one, but an old-school silversmith who still literally smote silver for a living. This had left Daniel free to design the Temple of Vulcan itself, which had presented no difficulties at all. A lot of Greeks had figured out how to make buildings of that general type two thousand years ago, and then Romans had worked out tricks for banging them out in a hurry, tricks that were now second nature to every tradesman in London.

Not really believing that Roger would ever actually build it, Daniel had sat down in front of a large clean sheet of paper and proceeded to pile element on element: and quite a few Plinths, Pilasters, Architraves, Urns, Archivolts, and Finials later, he had ended up with something that probably would have caused Julius Cæsar to clap his hands over his laureled and anointed head in dismay, and order the designer crucified. But after a brief sell job from Daniel in the back room of a coffee-house (“Note the Lesbian leaf pattern at the tops of the columns…. Ancient symbols of fertility are worked into the groins…. I have taken the liberty of depicting this Amazon with two breasts, rather than the historically attested one”), Roger was convinced that it looked exactly like a Temple of Vulcan ought to. And when he actually went and built the thing—telling everyone it was an exact reproduction of a real one on Mount Vesuvius—nine out of ten Londoners were content to believe it. Daniel’s only consolation was that because of the bald lie about Vesuvius, hardly anyone knew he—or indeed any living person—had been responsible for it. Only the Gods knew. As long as he avoided parts of the world with a lot of volcanoes, he would go unscathed.

During his most melancholy times, he was kept awake at night by the phant’sy that, of everything he’d ever done, this house would last the longest, and be seen by the most people. But with the one exception of being cut for the stone, every fear that had ever tormented Daniel in his bed had turned out, in the light of day, to be not all that bad really. As he plodded westwards on Great Russell Street toward its cross with Tottenham Court Road, passing by Bloomsbury Square, he sensed a massy white Presence in the corner of his eye, and forced himself not to look at it. But at some point this became absurd, and he had to square his shoulders, perform a soldierly right-face, and look his shame in the eye. And, mirabile dictu, it was not so very bad! When it had first gone up, twenty years ago, in the middle of a hog-lot, cater-corner from a timber depot, it had been screamingly bizarre. But now it was in the middle of a city, which helped a little, and Hooke had added on to it, which helped a great deal. It was no longer an alienated Temple but the buckle in a belt of Corinthian-columned arcades that surrounded Roger’s parcel. The wings gave it proportion and made it seem much less likely to topple over sideways. The friezes had been added to the pediment and to the tablatures while Daniel had been in Boston, a tangle of togas and tridents that diverted the viewer’s eye from the underlying dreadfulness (or so Daniel thought) of the architecture. Here Hooke had done him more favors by extending the horizontal features of the Temple into the wings, giving Daniel’s phant’sies and improvisations more authority than they probably deserved. All in all, Daniel was able to stare at the place for a solid five or ten minutes without dissolving in embarrassment; London’s boundaries enclosed much worse.

For the thirtieth time since crossing Gray’s Inn Road, he looked to see if Saturn was following him. The answer was again no. He crossed Great Russell and walked up the steps, feeling like a wee figure sketched into a rendering to show the scale. Passing between two fluted columns he swept across the Portico and raised his walking-stick to beat upon one of the massive front doors (gold leaf, with details in silver and copper, all part of the metallurgical theme). But the doors were drawn open so swiftly that they seemed to leap away from him. It gave him a turn—his eye was foxed into thinking that the doors were stationary, and he falling backwards away from them. He took a step forward to compensate; and, entering the cleavage between the doors, nearly fell into the one between a pair of breasts. It required some effort to stop himself, straighten his carriage, and look the owner in the eye. She was giving him a knowing look, but the dimples in her cheeks said, All in good fun, go on, have a good long stare then!

“Doctor Waterhouse! You have kept me waiting far too long! How can I ever forgive you?”

This sounded like an opportunity for Daniel to say something witty, but it whooshed past him like grapeshot.

“Er…I have?”

Ah, but the lady was accustomed to dealing with numb-tongued Natural Philosophers. “I should have heeded Uncle Isaac, who has spoken so highly of your strength of character.”

“I…beg your pardon?” He was beginning to feel as if he should perhaps hit himself with his stick. Perhaps it would restore circulation to his brain.

“A weaker man would have planted himself right there, where you were just now standing, on his first day in London, and said to all who passed by, ‘Look! D’you see that House? I built it! It’s mine!’ But, you!” and here she actually planted her hands on her hips in mock exasperation. But it seemed funny, not in the least affected. “You, Doctor Waterhouse, with your Puritan ways—just like Uncle Isaac—withstood that temptation for, what, a little more than two months! It is a mystery to me, how you and Uncle Isaac can delay your pleasures with such stony patience, when someone such as I would become frantic.” Then, because this perhaps sounded a bit risqué, she added, “Thank you so kindly for answering my letters, by the way.”

“You are most welcome, it was my privilege,” Daniel answered without thinking. But it took a moment to remember what she was even talking about.

Catherine Barton had come to London round the turn of the century. She’d have been about twenty. Her father—Isaac’s brother-in-law—had died a few years earlier, and Isaac had shouldered the load of keeping the poor survivors fed, clothed, and housed. After a short time staying in the city with Isaac, she’d come down with smallpox and fled to the countryside to recover or die. It was during that time that she’d sent a letter to Daniel in Boston, a letter no less sweet and charming for being cleverly written.

Which reminded Daniel that he ought to say something. “It is fortunate for me that, through your letters, I was able to meet your mind before I was put in any danger of being swept off my feet by…er…the rest of you.”

She’d been trying to figure out why her uncle was the way he was. And not in a conniving way, but, it seemed, out of a sincere desire to be a good and understanding help-meet to this weird old man who had become, in effect, her new father. Daniel had written eight drafts of his letter back to her, for he knew perfectly well that one day Isaac would find it among her effects, and read it. He would read it every bit as shrewdly as a challenge from Leibniz.

Everyone knows Isaac as a brilliant man, and treats him as such, which is a mistake; for he is as pious as he is brilliant, and his piety taketh precedence. Mind you, I speak not of outward, conspicuous piety but of an inner fire, a light under the bushel as ’twere, a yearning to draw nearer to God through exercise of God-given faculties.

“Your advice was of inestimable value to me, after I recovered—thanks be to God—and returned to London. And insofar as I have been of any help whatever to Uncle Isaac, I daresay what you wrote was a boon to him as well.”

“I shall not hold my breath waiting for an expression of gratitude from him,” Daniel said, hoping it sounded like a wry thing to say. She had the good grace to laugh out loud. Daniel got the impression she was accustomed to having men blurt indiscreet things to her, and regarded it as excellent sport.

“Oh, nonsense! You understand him better than any man alive, Dr. Waterhouse, and he is keenly aware of it.”

This—though she said it with dimples engaged—was really more of a threat than a compliment. What was more, Daniel knew that Catherine Barton had said it quite carefully and deliberately.

He decided to stop waiting for the formal introduction of Miss Catherine Barton to Dr. Daniel Waterhouse. It would never happen. She had vaulted over that hurdle with ribbons and skirts a-flying, and obliged him to follow. “You might enjoy a look round,” she suggested, arching her eyebrows spectacularly. She did not need to speak aloud the second half of the sentence: if you could only manage to pry your eyes off me. In truth, she was more presentable than beautiful. But she had some beautiful features. And she was very well-dressed. Not in the sense of showing off how much money she could spend, or how à la mode she could be, but rather in the sense that her attire presented to the world a full, frank, and exhaustive account of all that was admirable about her body. When she spun around to lead him across the vestibule, her skirts swirled around her buttocks and thighs in a way that made their contours fully known to Daniel. Or he phant’sied as much, which amounted to the same thing. He’d been wondering, for as long as he’d been in London, what it was about this woman that caused great and powerful men to recite appalling poetry about her in the Kit-Cat Clubb, and to go all glassy-eyed when her name came up in conversation. He should have known. Faces could beguile, enchant, and flirt. But clearly this woman was inflicting major spinal injuries on men wherever she went, and only a body had the power to do that. Hence the need for a lot of Classical allusions in Catherine Barton love-poetry. Her idolaters were reaching back to something pre-Christian, trying to express a bit of what they felt when they gazed upon Greek statues of nude goddesses.

There were plenty around. The vestibule was an oval room lined with niches that had stood vacant the last time Daniel had seen the place. The decades since had afforded Roger all the time he’d needed to bankroll raiding-parties on Classical ruins, or to commission original works. As he followed Miss Catherine Barton out of the room, Daniel spun round a full three hundred sixty degrees to scan the vestibule. The two servants who had pulled the doors open on Catherine’s command—both young men—were caught staring at their mistress’s backside. Both of them snapped their heads away and blushed. Daniel gave them a wink, turned, and followed her out.

“I have shown this house to visitors an hundred times,” she was saying, “and so all sorts of prattle is on the tip of my tongue—all of it perfectly boring to you, Dr. Waterhouse, to whom this house needs no introduction! You know we are crossing the central hall, and that the important rooms are to the left…” She meant the dining hall and the library. “And the odds and ends to the right…” (servant’s quarters, kitchen, back stairs, House of Office) “and the Withdrawing Room straight ahead. What is your pleasure? Do you need to retire that way?” she asked, glancing to the right. She was asking him if he needed to urinate or defecate. “Or is there anything you would like there?” glancing left—meaning, did he need to take any refreshment. She kept her hands clasped together in front of her bodice and pointed to the left or right with tiny movements of her eyes, obliging Daniel to gaze into them attentively. “To be proper, I should conduct you into the Withdrawing Room where we might have a great argument as to who should sit in which chair. But after the war, French manners are quite out of favor with us—especially us Whigs—and I cannot bring myself to be so formal with you, who are like another uncle to me.”

“I should only make an ass of myself—I who have spent twenty years in a wooden house!” Daniel returned. “Only tell me this, I pray you: if we go into the Withdrawing Room, can I see—”

“The volcano has been moved,” she said, quite solemn, as if afraid Daniel would be furious.

“Out of the house, or—”

“Oh, heaven forbid! No, ’tis the centerpiece of the house as ever, Doctor! It is only that this part of the house, which is to say, the part you designed, began to seem, in some of its rooms, rather more small than suited Roger’s tastes.”

“That is when Mr. Hooke was brought in to add the wings.”

“You know the story, Dr. Waterhouse, and so I shall not bore you, other than to say that the addition contains a ballroom that is at last large enough to exhibit the volcano in the style it deserves.” And with that she wheeled around and pushed open a pair of doors across the hall from the vestibule, allowing light to flood in from the windows of the Withdrawing Room. Daniel stepped in, and then stopped, a-mazed.

When this room had been laid out, those windows had commanded a view to the north across a pasture, soon to become a formal garden: a view near to Daniel’s heart, as it was practically the same as the one from the back of Drake’s old house. But now the garden had been truncated to a court-yard with a fountain in the center, and directly on the other side, a stone’s throw away, rose a Barock palace. This room, which Daniel had conceived as a quiet retreat from which to enjoy a vast prospect of flowers and greenery, had been reduced to a sort of viewing-gallery for contemplating the magnificence of the real house.

“Vanbrugh,” Catherine explained. The same one who was doing Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough.

“Hooke—”

“Mr. Hooke did the wings, which as you can see, embrace the courtyard, and connect your Temple to Mr. Vanbrugh’s, er…”

Fuck-house of the Gods was on the tip of Daniel’s tongue, but he could hardly throw stones at Vanbrugh since he had started it. All he could summon up was, “What an undeserved honour ’tis for me, that Vanbrugh should finish so grandly, what I started so plainly.”

The chairs in the Withdrawing Room were arranged in an arc facing toward the window. Catherine passed between two of them and opened a pair of French doors that in the original scheme had led out onto the long central promenade of the garden. Instead of which he followed her onto marble paving-slabs and pursued her around the kerb of an octagonal pool. It had a bronze fountain in the center of it, a great Classical action-scene: muscular Vulcan thrusting himself forth on massive but bent legs, having a go at Minerva, the cool helmet-head, who was pushing him back with one arm. Swords, daggers, helmets, and cuirasses were strewn all round, interspersed with the odd half-forged thunderbolt. Vulcan’s knobby fingers were ripping Minerva’s breastplate away to expose a body obviously modeled after Catherine Barton’s. Daniel recognized the tale: Minerva went to Vulcan’s forge to acquire weapons and armor; Vulcan became inflamed with lust and assaulted her; she, being one tough deity, held him at bay, and he had to settle for ejaculating on her leg. She wiped it off with a rag and flung it on the ground, fertilizing Mother Earth, who later bore Erichthonius, an early king of Athens, who introduced the use of silver money.

The sculpture was heavy-laden with clews and portents: with her free hand Minerva was already reaching for a rag, and Vulcan was ominously close to making contact with her creamy thigh. Smaller sculpture groups decorated the ends of the fountain-pool; at the end nearer to Daniel’s building, a babe on the lap of a fertility sort of goddess (lots of cornucopiae) being fed grapes from a bunch. Opposite, near Vanbrugh’s building, a crowned King seated on a pile of bullion. As they skirted the pool, Daniel felt a perverse urge to swivel his head and find out just how the sculptor had handled certain particulars. He was especially keen to know from where the water was spurting. At the same time, he couldn’t bear to see it. Catherine was ignoring the fountain altogether; she did not want to talk about it, had turned her face away, her posture rhyming with Minerva’s. Daniel contented himself with pursuing her across the court-yard, albeit with even less success than Vulcan.

What with so many distractions, they were inside the new house before Daniel had really had the time to examine its interior. Probably just as well; he’d gotten a vague impression of lots and lots of statues, prancing along rooftops and balustrades.

“Rokoko, it is called,” Catherine explained, leading him into what must have been the grand ballroom. “ ’Tis all the rage.”

Daniel could only recollect Drake’s house, with its bare walls and floors, and one or two plain boxy pieces of furniture to a room. “It makes me feel old,” he said, baldly.

Catherine favored him with a brilliant smile. “Some say, ’tis the result of a surplus of decorators, combined with a deficit of houses.”

And a want of taste, Daniel wished he could say. “As you are the mistress of the household, mademoiselle, I shall make no comment on what some say.” She rewarded him with dimples. Without meaning to, he had made a sly comment on her Arrangement with Roger.

Daniel found these moments slightly unnerving. For the most part she did not look like Isaac—not even the young, frail, girlish Isaac Daniel had met at Trinity half a century ago. He would never have guessed she had a drop of Newton-blood in her veins if he hadn’t known as much already. But during the moments when she forgot to hide her cleverness, a family resemblance flashed forth, and he saw Isaac’s face for an instant, as if the author of Principia Mathematica were stalking him through a darkened room when lightning struck outside.

“Here is a curious invention you may find worthy of your attention, Doctor. This way, please!”

The volcano stood at one end of the ballroom. It was a great improvement on the volcanoes made by Nature, which were so rude, irregular, and unadorned. This one was perfectly conical, with forty-five-degree-angle slopes converging on a polished brass nozzle or teat at the summit. A semi-ruined Classical temple, complete with half-collapsed golden dome, had been erected there, enclosing the vent, which could be viewed between Doric columns of red marble. The mountain itself was black marble, veined with red, and adorned with the usual tiresome menagerie of nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, &c., all sculpted in gold. It probably stood no more than four feet from base to summit, but was made to seem much larger by the base that supported it: a hollow plinth rising from the floor to waist level, supported all round with caryatids in the shape of Typhon and other gross earthy monsters.

“If you come round back with me, Doctor, I shall a-maze you with the most marvelous Screw.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She had opened a hatch concealed in the back, and was beckoning. He came round, squatted carefully, and peered inside. Now he could see a fat cylinder that began in a copper basin on the floor, and ran up at an angle to the summit of the volcano.

“Roger wanted so badly to have a volcano that would spew rivers of molten silver. It would have been spectacular! But Mr. MacDougall was afraid it would set fire to the guests.”

“Which would have been spectacular too, in a different way,” Daniel mused.

“Mr. MacDougall persuaded Roger to settle for oil of phosphorus. It is prepared elsewhere, and brought here in casks, and poured into the tub. The Screw of Archimedes conducts it upwards, it gushes from the summit, and runs down the slopes as the centaurs and whatnot flee in terror.”

“They—flee?”

“Oh, yes, for it is meant to represent glowing streams of liquid fire.”

“That I understand. But how do they flee—?”

“They are clock-work creatures.”

“Also the work of Mr. MacDougall?”

“Indeed.”

“I remember hiring a silversmith named Millhouse but not an ingénieur named MacDougall.”

“Mr. Millhouse hired Mr. MacDougall to do the clever bits. When Mr. Millhouse died of smallpox—”

“Mr. MacDougall took over,” Daniel guessed, “and could not stop adding one clever bit after another.”

“Until Roger cut him off—somewhat emphatically, I’m afraid,” said Catherine, and winced in a manner that made Daniel want to stroke her hair.

“Is he still alive?”

“Oh, yes, he works in theatres, making apparitions, explosions, and storms.”

“Of course he does.”

“He staged the naval battle that burned down the Curtain.”

“I believe you. How frequently does the volcano erupt?”

“Once or twice a year, for important parties.”

“And Mr. MacDougall is called back from exile on those occasions?”

“Roger has him on retainer.”

“Where does he get his phosphorus?”

“He has it delivered,” she said, as if this were an answer.

“Where may Mr. MacDougall be found, I wonder?”

“The Theater Royal, in Covent Garden, is getting ready to stage a new production entitled The Sack of Persepolis,” Catherine said, tentatively.

“Say no more, Miss Barton.”

Sir Isaac Newton’s House,
St. Martin’s Street, London

LATER THAT DAY

“I’VE A SORT OF RIDDLE for you, to do with guineas,” was how Daniel ended the twenty-year silence between himself and Sir Isaac Newton.

He had been fretting, ever since Enoch Root had turned up in his doorway in Massachusetts, over how to begin this conversation: what ponderous greeting would best suit the gravity of the occasion, how much time to spend reminiscing about student days in Cambridge, and whether to say anything about their last encounter, which had gone as badly as any social encounter, short of homicide, could go. Like a play-wright penning and burning draughts of a troublesome scene, he had scripted this reunion in his head an hundred times, and each time the script had careered off into a bloody debacle like the last act of Hamlet. As it seemed perfectly hopeless, and as he’d been assured by Saturn that he had only hours or days to live in any case, he reckoned, why waste time on formalities?

When the door was opened, and he first looked Isaac in the face from across the room, he did not see any trace of fury or (what would have been more dangerous) fear. Isaac looked resigned. He was feigning patience. He looked like a Duke receiving a long-lost idiot half-brother. And on the spur of the moment, Daniel said this thing about guineas as he was stepping over the threshold. The servant who’d opened the door for him gave him the same sort of look he might bestow on a gibbeted corpse suspended above a crossroads on a warm day, and closed the door behind him.

Daniel and Isaac were alone together in the study. Or Daniel assumed it was called a study. He could not imagine Isaac having a bedchamber or a dining-room. Any room he was in, was a study by default. The walls were paneled in dark wood, surprisingly uneven, almost rustic, compared to Roger’s house. The door was made of the same stuff, so that it vanished when it was closed, making it seem as if Daniel and Isaac were a pair of old desiccated specimens closed up in a shipping crate. The room had windows looking out onto the street. Their massive, elaborate wooden shutters were open to admit some of the light off Leicester Fields, but much of this was blocked by half-drawn scarlet curtains. Isaac was seated behind a great table, the sort of table Drake would’ve owned, and he was dressed in a long scarlet dressing-gown over a good linen shirt. His face had not changed all that much, though it had got heavier, and he still had the long white hair. But his hairline had jumped back, making it seem as if his brain were trying to force its way up out the top of his head. His skin had been white when Daniel had walked in, but by the time he had made it to the end of the room to proffer his hand, Isaac had gone red in the face, as if stealing the color from his robe.

“There is nothing in my life quite so irritating as to be riddled and teased with inane conundrums, meant to prove my wit, and to try my senility,” he answered. “Bernoulli—Leibniz’s pawn—sent me—”

“The brachistochrone problem, I recall it,” Daniel said, “and you solved it in hours. It took me rather longer.”

“But you did solve it,” Isaac commanded. “Because it was a problem of the calculus, meant to try whether I understood the calculus or not! Can you fathom the impertinence of it!? I was the first man who could ever have solved it, Daniel, and you the second, because you had the calculus from me first-hand. To be hectored thus, by the Baron’s lackeys, three decades after I had invented it—”

“In truth my riddle is another sort of thing altogether,” Daniel said. “I really am quite sorry to have wrong-footed you.”

Isaac blinked and heaved a sigh. He seemed inordinately relieved. Perhaps he had feared that Daniel would dispute what he had just said: You had the calculus from me first-hand. That was the key. In Daniel, Isaac saw a witness who could testify to Isaac’s priority in the discovery of the calculus. Whatever other annoying and inconvenient qualities Daniel might have, vanished when placed beside that. Daniel felt the muscles of his scalp and neck easing, felt his lungs filling with air. He was going to be all right. He’d make it out of the room whole, even if he said things that made Isaac a little angry. To Isaac, Daniel was more than a pawn; he was a rook, kept sequestered in the corner of the board until the end-game, then brought out at last to sweep inexorably down the board, driving the foe back to the last rank and forcing surrender. Isaac would put up with a lot, from a rook.

He wondered whether Isaac had, through some machinations, caused Daniel to be brought back to London. Perhaps he had exerted some action at a distance upon Princess Caroline in Hanover.

“What is your riddle, Daniel?”

“Earlier today, I was with a man who knows a good deal more than I do about money. This fellow was trying to judge the value of a guinea.”

“Of a coin that purported to be a guinea,” Isaac corrected him.

“Indeed—I say ‘guinea’ because that is what, in the end, it turned out to be.”

“He should have weighed it.”

“That is just what he did. And he could say nothing against the weight of the coin. Which would seem to settle the matter. But then he did something that to me was very odd. He put the coin in his mouth and he bit down on it.”

Isaac made no answer, but Daniel thought he pinkened again, slightly. Certainly he was interested in the story. He clasped his hands together on the table in front of him, composing himself, rather like a cat.

“Now,” Daniel said. “Even I know that coiners frequently make their counterfeits by joining two faces stamped from gold foil, and filling the void between them with solder. The solder is both lighter and softer than gold. This provides two means of detection: one may weigh the coin, or bite it. Either should suffice. In particular, if a coin has passed the test of weighing, its value should be confirmed beyond doubt! For nothing is heavier than gold. Any adulteration should be betrayed by a want of gravity. The weighing test ought to be infallible. And yet this chap—who really is extremely knowledgeable concerning coins—felt it necessary to make the additional test of biting. Is there any reason for it? Or was he being foolish?”

“He was not being foolish,” Isaac said, and stared at Daniel expectantly. His eyes were great luminous ice-balls hanging in space, like comets.

“Do you mean to say that I was, Isaac?”

“To associate with such a man? Foolish, or naïve,” Isaac returned. “As you have wandered in the wilderness for two decades, I shall grant you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Then cure me of naïveté, and tell me, what sort of man is he?”

“A weigher.”

“Well, he is obviously that, inasmuch as he weighs things, but you seem to invest the word with connotations that are lost on a back-woodsman such as I.”

“In spite of all my efforts to reform the practices of the Mint, and to make each newly coined guinea identical to the last, some variation in weights persists. Some guineas are slightly heavier than others. Such errors are reducible but not eradicable. I have reduced them to the degree that, where honest persons are concerned, no variation exists. That is, most men in London—and I include sophisticated men of commerce—would trade one guinea for another without hesitation, and certainly without bothering to take out a scale and weigh them.”

“I well remember when that was not the case,” Daniel remarked.

“You refer to our visits to Stourbridge Fair, before the Plague,” Isaac said immediately.

“Yes,” Daniel answered, after a moment of awkwardness.

He and Isaac had walked from Trinity to the Fair once, to buy prisms, and along the way, Isaac had made some remarks about fluxions—the beginnings of the calculus. During his recent sea-voyage from Massachusetts, Daniel had summoned that ancient memory to mind, and brought it back to life in his head, remembering certain queer details, like the shapes of the aquatic plants in the river Cam, bent downstream by the sluggish fluxion of the water. It was now obvious that Isaac had been thinking hard, and recently, about the same memory.

To go on prating of coins, when the true topic of the conversation was so close to breaking the surface, were faintly ridiculous. But Englishmen, given a choice, would always prefer the faintly ridiculous over the painfully direct. So, on with numismatics.

“It got even worse—the coinage did—later,” Isaac said.

“I remind you that I did not depart until the middle of the 1690s, when there were hardly any coins left in the country, and our œconomy was a confetti of I.O.U.s.”

“Now England is awash in gold. The currency is as hard as adamant. Our commerce is the wonder of all the earth, and even Amsterdam is in our shade. It were vanity for me to take too much credit for this. But it is simple honesty to say, that it could not happen in the absence of this plain understanding, shared by all Englishmen, that a guinea may be exchanged for a guinea without a second thought. That all guineas are the same.”

Suddenly all that Daniel had observed of Mr. Threader rearranged, in his mind, into a novel, strange, but perfectly coherent picture; it was like watching a pile of rubble spontaneously assemble itself into a marble statue. “Allow me to hazard,” Daniel said, “that a weigher” (he almost said, “Mr. Threader”) “is a chap who to outward appearances believes what every honest, plain-dealing Englishman believes about the value of a guinea. But in secret, he takes every guinea that comes his way, and weighs it ’pon scales of the most exacting precision. Such as are light, or of the mean weight, he returns into circulation. But such as are heavy, he hoards. And when he has hoarded an hundred such—I am only making up numbers for the sake of argument—perhaps he has enough gold, in sum, to mint an hundred and one guineas. He has created a new guinea out of thin air.”

Isaac said yes by slowly blinking his pink eyelids. “Of course, what you have described is only the most elementary of their practices. Those who master it, move on quickly to more nefarious schemes.”

But Daniel was still new to all of this, and stuck on the elementary. “It would only be feasible,” he guessed, “if one were already in a line of work that involved handling large numbers of coins.”

“Naturally! And that is why the practice is so rife among the money-scriveners. I make guineas, and send them out into the country; they scurry about unraveling the tapestry I’ve so laboriously woven, and return the heaviest coins to London, where they invariably make their way to the coffers of the most vile and execrable traitors in the realm!”

Daniel recalled driving past shredded corpses at Tyburn. “You mean that weighers are connected with coiners.”

“As spinners are with weavers, Daniel.”

Daniel was silent for a moment, rehearsing every memory he had of Mr. Threader.

“That is why I was so shocked—shocked half to death, if you must know—to see you traveling in the company of one such!” Isaac said, actually shaking a bit with emotion.

Daniel was so used to Isaac mysteriously knowing things, that he was not as surprised by this very odd revelation as he ought to have been, and did not pay any particular mind to it. “For that,” he remarked, “there is an explanation that you would find miserably boring if you knew it.”

“I have made it my business to know it, and I accept that there was nothing untoward in your temporary association with that man,” Isaac returned. “If I were inclined to be suspicious, like Flamsteed, I should interpret your continued association with him in the worst possible light! As it is, I see plainly enough that you were ignorant of his true nature, and beguiled by his charm, and I trust you to heed my warning.”

Daniel was now very close to laughing out loud. He could not choose which was funnier: the phant’sy that Isaac Newton was not suspicious-minded, or that Mr. Threader possessed charm. Better change the subject! “But my question is not answered yet. Why did he bite the coin, if he had already weighed it?”

“There is a way to fool the weighing-test,” Isaac said.

“Impossible! Nothing is heavier than gold!”

“I have discovered the existence of gold of greater than twenty-four-carat weight.”

“That is an absurdity,” Daniel said, after a moment’s pause to consider it.

“Your mind, being a logical organ, rejects it,” Isaac said, “because, by definition, pure gold weighs twenty-four carats. Pure gold cannot become purer, hence, cannot be heavier. Of course, I am aware of this. But I say to you that I have with my own hands weighed gold that was heavier than gold that I knew to be pure.”

From any other man on earth—Natural Philosophers included—this would amount to saying, “I was sloppy in the laboratory and got it wrong.” From Sir Isaac Newton, it was truth of Euclidean certainty.

“I am put in mind of the discovery of phosphorus,” Daniel remarked, after considering it for a few moments. “A new element of nature, with properties never before seen. Perhaps there exist other elements of which we are unaware, having properties hitherto unknown. Perhaps there is such an element, similar in many respects to gold, but having a higher specific gravity, and perhaps the gold you spoke of was alloyed with it to make a metal, indistinguishable from gold in its gross properties, but slightly more dense.”

“I give you credit for ingenuity,” Isaac said, slightly amused, “but there is a simpler explanation. Yes, the gold I speak of is alloyed with something: a fluidic essence that fills the interstices among its atoms and gives the metal greater weight. But I believe that this essence is nothing less than—”

“The Philosophick Mercury!” Daniel exclaimed. The words came out of his mouth in a spirit of genuine excitement; bounced off the hard walls of dark wood; and, when they entered his ears, made him cringe at his own idiocy. “You think it is the Philosophick Mercury,” he corrected himself.

“The Subtile Spirit,” Isaac said, not excited, but solemn as Rhadamanthus. “And the goal of Alchemists for thousands of years, ever since the Art was taken into the Orient, and removed from human ken, by its past master, King Solomon.”

“You have been searching for traces of the Philosophick Mercury since we were boys,” Daniel reminded him. “As recently as twenty years ago, your efforts to find even the smallest trace of it had met with abject failure. What has changed?”

“I took your advice, Daniel. I accepted the charge of the Mint from my lord Ravenscar. I initiated the Great Recoinage, which brought vast tonnage of gold plate and bullion out from where it had been hoarded.”

“And you adjusted the ratio in valuation of silver to gold, so that the latter was over-valued,” Daniel said, “which as everyone knows, has practically driven all silver off the island, and attracted gold from every corner of the globe where commerce has spread its tendrils.”

Isaac declined comment.

“Prior to your—” here Daniel was about to say something like terrifying spasm of dementia but corrected himself: “change of career, twenty years ago, you were only able to work with such modest samples of gold as you could buy from local sources. Your appointment to the Mint—combined with the policies you have adopted there—have made the Tower of London the bottle-neck through which all the world’s gold flows, and put you in a position to dip your finger into that flow at will, sampling and testing the gold of many different lands—am I getting it right?”

Isaac nodded, and it seemed he looked almost mischievous, in a naughty-old-man sort of way. “The practice of all Alchemists since the time of Hermes Trismegistus has been to presume that the Gold of Solomon had been forever lost, and to attempt to re-discover his lost Art through patient trials and arcane study. This was the course that defeated me, before what you coyly describe as my change of career. But during my recuperation, as I went to inspect the Mint, and conversed with my predecessors there, I came to realize that the ancient presumption of the Esoteric Brotherhood was no longer true. If Solomon went away into the remotest isles of the Orient, why, Commerce has now gone that far, or farther, and in particular the Spaniards and the Portuguese have left no stone unturned, the world over, in their assiduous search for gold and silver. No matter how far Solomon may have journeyed, he would have left behind traces of his passage, in the form of Solomonic Gold, which is to say, gold made through an Alchemical process, bearing traces of the Philosophick Mercury. In the millennia since his kingdom vanished from the earth, this gold might have passed from one ignorant set of hands to another a thousand times. It might have been taken across wastes by caravans, forged into pagan funeral-masks, plundered from fallen citadels, buried in secret hoards, dug up by thieves, seized by pirates, made into jewels, and coined into specie of diverse realms. But through all of these evolutions it would preserve the traces of the Philosophick Mercury that would provide an infallible proof of its origins. To find it, I need not pore over ancient manuscripts for fragments of Alchemical lore, and I need not venture into far reaches to search for ancient gold with my own hands. I need only position myself like a spider at the center of the global web of commerce, and then so arrange matters that all the world’s gold would flow inwards toward me, as every point of matter in the solar system naturally falls inwards toward the Sun. If I then remained vigilant, and sampled all the gold that came into the Mint to be made into guineas, in time I should be nearly certain of finding some traces of the Solomonic Gold.”

“And now you would appear to have found it,” said Daniel, unwilling to weigh in, yet, on Isaac’s side. “How recently has this occurred?”

“For the first several years there was nothing. Not a trace. I despaired of finding it ever,” Isaac admitted. “Then, during the respite in the War, round 1701, I found a bit of gold heavier than twenty-four carat. I cannot summon words, here and now, to convey my emotions then! It was just a flake of gold leaf, found in a coiner’s shop after it was raided, on my orders, by the King’s Messengers. The coiner himself had been slain during the raid—most frustrating! Several years later, I found a counterfeit guinea that was heavier than it ought to be. In time, I hunted down the coiner who had made it, and interrogated him as to where he had obtained his bullion. He had gotten most of it from conventional sources. But he said that he had recently purchased, through a middleman, a quantity of gold in the form of sheet metal, hand-hammered, about an eighth of an inch thick. Six months later I talked to another coiner who recollected having seen a larger piece of such gold. He said it had been marked on one side with a linear pattern of scrapes, and stained on the other face with tar.”

“Tar!”

“Yes. But I have never seen such a sample with my own eyes. I only find evidence of its existence in coins—counterfeit guineas of a level of quality such that I myself am sometimes deceived by them!”

“So, ’twould appear that whoever has this gold, has hoarded it, and used to spend it, in the form of plates stained with tar. But from time to time he will deliver some of it up to a coiner—”

“Not a coiner but the coiner. Jack. Jack the Coiner. My Nemesis, and my prey, these last twelve years.”

“Jack sounds like an interesting chap,” Daniel allowed, “and I ween I shall learn more of him from you anon—but is it your hypothesis that he has a hoard of these gold sheets somewhere, and coins them from time to time?”

“No. They’re of no use to him hoarded. If he had a hoard, he would coin every last ounce of it, as fast as his coiners could do the work. No, it is my hypothesis that Jack knows the owner of the hoard, and that from time to time that person, wanting some money to spend, takes some plates out, and brings them to Jack.”

“Do you have any notion as to who the hoarder might be?”

“The answer is suggested by the tar, and the scrapes. It is coming from a ship.”

“There is a vague association between tar and ships, but beyond that, I don’t follow you,” Daniel said.

“The information you are wanting is that, among sailors and officers of the French Navy, there is a legend—”

“Ah, in truth I have heard it!” Daniel exclaimed. “But I failed to draw the connexion. You refer to a legendary ship whose hull was plated with gold.”

“Indeed.”

“But ’twould seem that in your view this is no legend.”

“I have studied it,” Isaac announced. “I can now trace the descent of King Solomon’s Gold from the pages of the Bible, down through the ages, to the hull of that ship, and thence to the samples that I have assayed in my laboratory in the Tower of London.”

“Pray tell me the tale then!”

“Most of it is no tale at all. The Islands of King Solomon lie in the Pacific. There his gold rested, undisturbed by men, until round the time that you and I were young, and Huygens’s clock began to tick. A Spanish fleet, driven by a typhoon far off the charted sea-lanes that join Acapulco to Manila, dropped anchor in the Solomons, and took on board certain provisions, including earth to pack round the galley-stoves to protect the planks of the ship from fire. During the voyage home to New Spain, the heat of the fire melted gold—or something that looked like it—out of the sand, and it pooled to form nuggets of astonishing fineness, which were discovered when the ships broke bulk in Acapulco. The Viceroy of New Spain, then just beginning a twenty-five-
year reign, was not slow to send out ships to the Solomons to extract more of this gold, and bring it back to Mexico to be piled up in his personal hoard. At the end of his reign, he caused the Solomonic Gold to be loaded aboard his private brig, which sailed back to Spain in convoy with the Spanish treasure-fleet. They made it safe as far as Cadiz. But then the little brig foolishly sailed alone up to Bonanza, where the Viceroy had caused a villa to be built, in which he phant’sied he would enjoy a wealthy retirement. Before she could be unloaded, she was set upon in the night by pirates, dressed as Turks, and led by the infamous criminal known to us as Half-Cocked Jack, the King of the Vagabonds, and to the French as L’Emmerdeur. The gold was stolen and spirited away in long stages to Hindoostan, where most of it fell into the possession of a heathen potentate, an Amazon pirate-queen, black as char-coal, who had not the faintest understanding of what she had netted. But on those shores, Jack and his confederates used their ill-gotten gains to build a pirate-ship. And from some Dutch shipwrights they had the notion—which was in no way a faulty one, as e’en a stopped Clock is correct twice daily—that if the hull of this ship were cladded, below the waterline, with sheets of smooth metal, she would afford no purchase for barnacles, and repel the attacks of the teredo.”

“ ’Tis a wholly reasonable idea,” Daniel said.

“ ’Twas a good idea, most strangely executed! For, vain and extravagant man that he was, this Jack decreed that the metal be wrought out of solid gold!”

“So the tale told by those French mariners was in no way fanciful,” Daniel concluded.

“I should rather say, ’twas none the less true, for being fanciful!” Isaac returned.

“Do you know where that ship is now?” Daniel asked, trying not to sound nervous; for he knew.

“It is thought that she was christened Minerva. But this is not known with certainty, and is of little use, even if true, as hundreds of ships answer to that name. But I suspect that she still roams the seas, and calls at London from time to time, and that some commerce plays out between Jack the Coiner, and those who sail her. Plates of gold are taken out of her bilge—for make no mistake, they were stripped from her hull and replaced with copper, probably in some unfrequented Caribbean cove, many years ago—and delivered to Jack, who coins them into excellent guineas, with which he poisons Her Majesty’s stock of money. That is the tale of Solomon’s Gold, Daniel. I hoped you would find it a diverting yarn. Why do you look so distracted?”

“I find it very odd that the prize you have sought your entire life, should happen to rest in the hands of the man you describe as your Nemesis.”

“My Nemesis, where Mint work is concerned. In other fields, I have other foes,” Isaac reminded him shortly.

“That is beside my point. Why shouldn’t the hoard of Solomonic Gold lie in a vault in Seville, or at the Vatican, or the Forbidden City of Peking? Of all the places in the world where this gold might have ended up, why should it be in the possession of Jack the Coiner—the one man you’d most like to see being dragged on a sledge to Tyburn?”

“Because its density exceeds that of gold, it is valuable to a counterfeiter.”

“It is more valuable to an Alchemist. Do you suppose Jack knows as much, and do you suppose he is aware that you, Isaac, are an Alchemist?”

“He is a mere criminal.”

“Yes, and a very cosmopolitan one, from the sounds of it.”

“I assure you he has not the faintest comprehension of matters Alchemical.”

“Neither do I. And yet I understand that you desire this gold!”

“What does it matter? He knows that I wish to hunt him down and bring him to justice—that is enough.”

“Isaac, you have a habit of under-estimating the intelligence of anyone who is not you. Perhaps this Jack is using the Solomonic Gold to bait you.”

“What matters it if a mouse baits a lion?”

“Depends on whether the lion is being baited into single combat with that mouse, or into a pit-fall with sharpened stakes at the bottom.”

“I do not think your analogy is applicable. But I am grateful for your expression of concern. Now let us end all tedious disputes about Jack, by ending Jack!”

“Did you say ‘us’?”

“Yes! Yes, I did. As there are only two men in this room, I can only have meant, you and I. As we shared a room, and worked together, at the beginning of our lives, so shall we do now, as we near their ends.”

“What possible use could I be in helping to apprehend Jack the Coiner?”

“You have come from America on a mysterious errand. You have traveled in the company of a notorious weigher, and I am told that you are up to some occult doings in a hole in the ground in Clerkenwell.”

“Not true, unless you count real estate development as one of the black arts.”

“If you were now to announce yourself, to the criminal underworld of London, as a weigher, in possession of gold from America—”

“I beg your pardon, but I really do not wish to announce myself to the criminal underworld as anything!”

“But supposing you did, why, you might be able to establish contacts with Jack’s subtile net-work of informants and Black-guards.”

“That is the second time today I have heard ‘Black-guard’ spoken in those portentous tones. I thought a Black-guard was a boy who polished boots.”

“Some of those boys have got rather big, and found employment even lower, and even blacker,” Isaac remarked.

“Then I’ll have nothing to do with any Black-guard.”

“If you have heard some other man speaking the word to-day, ’twould seem that you already do have something to do with them,” said Isaac, amused, “which would hardly surprise me considering the company you have been keeping.”

Daniel was silent. But only because he could not divulge to Isaac that his only motive in speaking to the sort of man who spoke of the Black-guard—men such as Peter Hoxton—was to track down whatever remnants Hooke had left behind.

Isaac read his silence as submission. Given more time, Daniel might have disabused Isaac of any such ideas, and extricated himself. But a servant was knocking at the door. A minute earlier Daniel had heard someone calling briefly at the front door of the house, presumably to deliver a message, and now it had penetrated to the study, and interrupted their discourse at the worst possible moment for Daniel. He wondered whether the servant had been lurking outside the door, waiting to knock at some subtle signal from Isaac: I have sprung the trap, now interrupt us lest he wriggle free!

“Enter!” Isaac commanded, and in came the servant who’d admitted Daniel earlier, holding a rectangle of good paper with a few lines scrawled over it in a lazy, important hand. As Isaac decyphered the penmanship, and considered the import, and discussed it in a hushed, elliptical manner with his servant, Daniel had his first opportunity to review all that had passed since he had breezed into this room with a riddle concerning guineas.

What had he expected? He had expected that, at best, Isaac would be cool and distant. At worst, he’d know that Daniel was striving to preserve some memory of Hooke, and corresponding with and running errands for Leibniz, and would tear Daniel’s beating heart out of his chest then and there, like an Aztec priest. Those had seemed the most likely outcomes. If some oracle had let him know in advance that he was to have a long, cordial, even friendly conversation with Isaac, he’d have accounted it a triumph. And maybe it was—but it was Isaac’s triumph and not Daniel’s. Whether or not Isaac knew of Daniel’s concealed loyalty to Hooke and Leibniz, he had clearly got it into his mind that Daniel needed to be kept close, and kept busy.

“We’ve not even had time to broach the subject of Baron von Leibniz’s pretensions concerning the calculus,” Isaac announced in a chummy voice that was very odd coming from him, “and here it is time for me to be on my way.”

“I consider myself fortunate indeed to have taken up as much of your time as I have done,” Daniel said, trying not to sound ironic about it.

“The good fortune is all mine, and I assure you that the meeting I go to now shall never be half so enjoyable as this!” Isaac returned. “If the Mint were strictly a temple of Natural Philosophy—as it ought to be—supervising it would be pure pleasure. As it is, I waste many hours in meetings of a political nature.” He was getting to his feet.

“Is it Whigs or Tories today, then?” Daniel asked, rising. From here on out it would be all banter: pleasant noises that might as well have been spoken in Iroquois.

“Germans,” Isaac returned, offering him priority out the door. Catherine Barton, or someone, must have taught him manners.

“Really! They’ll be running the country soon enough, why are they pestering you now?”

They paused in a hall so that Isaac could shrug off his scarlet robe and have a vest and coat thrown across his shoulders by a valet. “They don’t pester me, but other men, of higher station—ramifications ensue,” Isaac said. “I would offer to convey you somewhere, but my conveyance only has room for one. May I have a hackney summoned for you?”

“I’ll walk, thank you,” Daniel said. Isaac followed him into the vestibule, which was crowded. Two large men were in here, smelling of the street. Between them stood a vertical black box, open on one side to reveal a crimson leather seat. Isaac sidled into it, smoothing the skirts of his coat under him. A servant stood at the ready to slam the door to.

“I shall hear from you concerning the proposal that I made,” Isaac predicted. “And do let’s not forget to have a conversation, some day soon, about the calculus.”

“Not a day passes without my thinking of it,” Daniel answered. With that the door was latched shut. Isaac had vanished inside the black box. His voice came out of it clearly, “God save the Queen, Daniel,” reminding Daniel that the only thing between them was a sheer black screen through which Isaac could see and hear everything, though he was quite invisible to anyone outside.

“God save the Queen,” Daniel returned, and then he followed the sedan chair out the door and onto St. Martin’s. Isaac was carried rapidly southwards, toward St. James’s and Westminster and all things great and important. Daniel, not wanting the awkwardness of walking along abreast of Isaac’s chair, went the other way.

Passing immediately through a gate at the head of the lane, he came out into an open plaza, squarish, about a bow-shot on a side. This was called Leicester Fields, and on three sides—including the one where Daniel had entered—it was now hemmed in by the sort of new town-houses that had started going up all round here after the Fire. But on the north edge—which Daniel was facing directly across a few hundred feet of open turf—it was walled off by one of the few remaining old-fashioned Tudor compounds: a congeries of red brick and half-timbered buildings called Leicester House. It had formerly been one of the few houses around London deemed suitable for royalty to dwell in, and had been used by diverse Tudor and Stuart princes as a palace. Elizabeth Stuart had dwelt there before she’d gone off to Europe to become the Winter Queen and to spawn Sophie and many others. Changes in the royal line had weakened the sentimental ties to this house, and the re-building of London in a new style had quite over-shadowed it and made it seem a mere English farm-house.

As Daniel came into Leicester Fields, he gazed in that direction curiously, trying to get his bearings, like a mariner looking for the old familiar stars. He saw a lot of horses and vehicles in front of the place, and felt a pang, supposing that the wreckers had arrived to tear it down. But as he strolled across the Fields, creating localized panics among sheep and chickens, he perceived that these were not rubbish-wagons but baggage-carts, and rather well-maintained ones at that. Among them was a carriage, a coach-and-four drawn by a matched set of black horses. A woman was alighting from that carriage, walking away from Daniel toward the house, and servants were drawn up in two lines to greet her. Daniel could not see anything of the woman, other than that she was petite, and trim. Her head was shrouded in a voluminous silk scarf covering a big hat or wig. And he was too far away, and his eyes were too far gone, to resolve lips, eyes, and noses on the faces of those servants. But something in their posture, and in the way they turned their faces and bodies toward the woman as she progressed across the court, told Daniel that they were smiling. They loved her.

At the apex of this formation, where the two lines of servants came together in front of the house’s main entrance, stood a man who was not a servant: he was dressed in the clothes of a gentleman. But there was something odd about him, which Daniel could not make sense of until he went into movement, extending a leg to make a low bow, and accepting the woman’s hand to kiss it. The man’s skin was entirely black. The woman took his arm and the black man escorted her into Leicester House; the lines of servants broke up and everyone made him- or herself busy unloading the baggage carts, &c.

As there was nothing more to see, Daniel turned on his heel and ambled toward the edge of Leicester Fields; and as he did, he became aware that he was only one part of a general slow evacuation. Diverse tinkers, vagabonds, strolling gentlemen, and boot-blacks were also making their way towards the exits, and in the fronts of the new town-houses around the square, curtains were being drawn.

Leicester House

TEN SECONDS LATER

HE WAS OBLIGED TO PURSUE her to the upper storey, for she talked as she went. She stormed a long dangerous wooden staircase and then faltered, only for an instant, as a great splintery-looking wooden door had presented itself in her way. By the time Dappa could get the words “Allow me—” past his lips, she’d clobbered it with her shoulder, got it open, and vanished into a big-sounding space yonder. The door remained ajar, shuddering from end to end.

He took the last few steps with some care. His legs, anyway, were unused to pushing off against things that did not pitch and roll. After all he’d been through, he didn’t want to die falling down a nasty old stairway in a strange English house.

They were now in an isosceles triangle made by the converging planes of the roof and a somewhat dodgy floor of loose deals. In any house made to normal scale it would have been pigeon-nesting space, but here it was large enough to throw a country dance.

Dappa wished he had some sailors with him, so that they could all share a good laugh at this room. Persons who fell into the habit of dwelling on dry land soon acquired queer and comical ways. They forgot that everything in God’s creation moved, and they fell into the phant’sy that an object, such as a wardrobe, could be dragged to a certain position in a room such as this one, covered with a sail, and let go of, without in any way being lashed down, and that twenty years later one might come back and find it just where it had been left.

Certain of these people then let themselves go altogether. Rooms such as this one were the monuments that they built to themselves. The draped furniture, crated paintings, and heaps of books were as chock-a-block as ice-floes driven into a blind cove by a boreal breeze. Spiders had been at work: a Navy of diligent riggers working day and night to tie it all down and lash it smartly together. Eliza was undoing their work, moving down the length of the room in carefully considered lunges and clever sideways darts. Her gown was growing a diaphanous train of cobwebs, and her wake in the air was visible as a serrated line of dust-explosions and plunging vortices. She was thinking hard about which way to go next, and had forgotten to talk.

Wee dormers were cut into the pitch of the roof every few yards, shedding plentiful light, and giving Dappa an excellent prospect of the many ways he could soil his dark suit if he attempted to follow her. Forgetting that this house could be trusted not to move under his feet, he reached up with one hand and braced it absent-mindedly on a tie-beam running between rafters above his head. A small avalanche of pale gray bat-shit tumbled down his sleeve and made itself one with the expensive black wool. “ ’Tis well my head’s grizzled to begin with,” he muttered, and then was struck by how well his voice carried down the utterly silent room.

“Beg pardon?”

“Never mind, only grumbling and muttering.”

“It is all right,” she called back in her alert way. “Do keep in mind, though, that when we are in the presence of others—especially, Persons of Quality—”

“Then you are my noble patroness,” Dappa said, “and I the ink-stained wretch. So very ink-stained, as to’ve become black from head to toe, save the soles of my feet, where I walk about collecting slave-narratives—”

“And the palm of your hand, where you grip your quill. I recognize these phrases from the Apology of your new manuscript,” she said, favoring him with a trace of a smile.

“Ah, you’ve read it!”

“Of course I have,” she answered, affronted. “Why ever not?”

“I was afraid you might have grown weary of slave-tales. I fear they are repetitious. ‘I was seized by raiders from the next village…traded to the tribe across the river…marched to the edge of the great water, marked with a hot iron, put aboard ship, dragged off of it half dead, now I chop sugar cane.’ ”

“All human stories are in some sense repetitious, if you boil them down so far. Yet people fall in love.”

“What?”

“They fall in love, Dappa. With a particular man or woman, and no one else. Or a woman will have a baby, and love that baby forever…no matter how similar its tale might seem to those of other babies.”

“You are saying,” Dappa said, “that we make connections with other souls, despite the sameness—”

“There is no sameness. If you looked down upon the world from above, like an albatross, you might phant’sy there was some sameness among the people crowding the land below you. But we are not albatrosses, we see the world from ground level, from within our own bodies, through our own eyes, each with our own frame of reference, which changes as we move about, and as others move about us. This sameness is a conceit of yours, an author’s hobgoblin, something you fret about in your hammock late at night.”

“In truth, I have my own cabin, and do my fretting in a bed nowadays.”

Eliza did not answer. Quite some time ago she had reached the far end of the room, which Dappa guessed was the front of the house, and during this exchange she had been peering out across Leicester Fields through a tiny round window. If this were a ship, she’d be keeping her eye on the weather. But it wasn’t; so what could she be looking at?

“All that is wanted,” she continued distractedly, “is for a reader to recognize a kindred soul in a single one of your narratives, and that will suffice to prove, for that reader, that Slavery is an abomination.”

“Perhaps we should be printing them up separately, as pamphlets.”

“Broadsheets are cheaper, and may be posted on walls, et cetera.”

“Ah, you are far ahead of me.”

“Distribution is my concern—Collection is yours.”

“What are you looking out the window for? Afraid you were followed?”

“When a Duchess comes off a foreign ship in the Pool and travels through London in a train of a dozen coaches and waggons, she is followed,” Eliza said levelly. “I am taking a census of my followers.”

“See anyone you know?”

“There is an aged Puritan I think I recognize…and some nasty Tories…and too many curtain-twitching neighbors to count.” She turned away from the window and demanded, in a wholly new tone of voice, “Anything good from Boston?”

“They are mostly Angolans there, and my command of that language is not what it used to be. The Barkers have become so aggressive in Massachusetts—handing out pamphlets on street-corners…”

This, which he’d thought she’d find interesting intelligence, bored her right back to gazing out the window. Of course she would know precisely what the Barkers were up to in Massachusetts. “The result,” he continued, “is that the slave-owners there are more watchful than the ones in, say, Brazil, and when they see their slave having a lengthy conversation with a strange well-dressed Blackamoor—”

“You did not collect anything useful in Boston,” she said shortly.

“Am I too discursive in my responses, your grace?”

“Am I too much the Editor?” She was done peering, and was returning to him.

“This room is the reverse of a Bilge,” Dappa realized. “That is, if you took Minerva and capsized her, so that her masts were pointed straight down towards the center of the earth, then her keel would be high and dry, like this ridge-beam above our heads, and the hull-planks would form a pitched roof.”

“And it would still be crowded with stored objects, like this garret.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Starving writers live in them.”

“Is that an offer of lodgings, or a threat of starvation?”

“It depends on whether you bring back some apt Narrations from your next sea-voyage,” she said with a smile. She’d come abreast of him now, and took his arm. “Where to next?”

“Boston again.”

They could see down those stairs now. Servants were standing anxiously below, coming in earshot. “And your grace?” Dappa added, distinctly.

“Oh—do you mean, where am I off to next?”

“Yes, my lady. You’ve just returned from Hanover, I gad?”

“Antwerp,” she whispered. “I am here now, Dappa, for—what do you call it—the long haul.”

They descended the stairs—a simple procedure made longer and more complicated than it ought to have been by the helpful strivings of the servants, and of some members of the Duchess’s household. Dappa’s ear, ever tuned to languages, picked out an exchange in German between two young women. They were dressed as if they were merely Gentle. But Dappa thought they carried themselves Nobly.

DAPPA HAD FIRST SEEN ELIZA some twenty years earlier. He’d been eager to hate her. He, Jack, van Hoek, and Vrej Esphahnian had sailed from Vera Cruz on a ship full of gold, bound for London or Amsterdam, and had diverted to Qwghlm only because of Jack’s infatuation with this woman. The letter that had lured them there had turned out to be a trick, a forgery from the hand of the Jesuit father Édouard de Gex, and Minerva had fallen into a trap laid for them there by the French. A kind of justice had been served on Jack. Dappa, van Hoek, and the crew of Minerva had been allowed to sail away, but only after the gold in Minerva’s hold had been seized by the French. They’d been left with nothing more than the thin plates of gold that had been put on the hull, below the water-line, when the ship had been built on a Hindoostan beach. That, and the ship itself. Minerva was a home and an income, but only as long as they continued sailing her to and fro. They had, in other words, been condemned to spend the rest of their lives in dangerous toils and wanderings. This suited van Hoek perfectly. Not so much Dappa.

They did not own Minerva. The owners were, in order of precedence, Queen Kottakkal of Malabar, Electress Sophie of Hanover, van Hoek, Dappa, Jack Shaftoe, and some old comrades of theirs who at last report were dwelling on the isle of Queenah-Kootah, off Borneo. For the most part these investors were far away and had not the faintest idea of how to reach them, which were good investors to have. Even Sophie reigned over a land-locked Electorate. But in time they received a message written in her hand and bearing her seal, letting them know that she was naming Eliza, Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm, as her proxy, and that they should report to her whenever they dropped anchor in the Pool of London, to hand over Sophie’s share of the profits, and to be managed.

Dappa had gone to the first such meeting with dim expectations. He and the others had heard so much of this Duchess’s beauty from Jack, and, at the same time, had learned to harbor such grave reservations as to Jack’s powers of discernment, that he could only expect to be confronted with some one-toothed, poxy hag.

The event was rather different. To begin with, the woman had been all of about thirty-five years old. She had all of her teeth and had come through smallpox with only moderate scarring. So she was, for a start, not loathsome. She had keen blue eyes and yellow hair, which of course looked bizarre to Dappa. But he’d grown used to van Hoek, a red-head, which proved he could adjust to anything. Her small nose and mouth would have been considered beautiful among the Chinese, and in due time he understood that many European men’s tastes ran along similar lines. If her nose and cheeks had not been disfigured by freckles, Dappa might have been able to bring himself round to thinking she was attractive. But she was small-waisted and bony. In every way, Eliza was the opposite of voluptuous. Voluptuous was what Dappa liked, and from the looks of the sculptures and frescoes he observed round London and Amsterdam, his tastes seemed to be shared by many a European man.

The topic of their first meeting had been Accounting. And so even if Dappa had felt the slightest attraction for the woman at the beginning of the day, it would long since have vanished when he stumbled out the door of her town-house twelve hours later. Eliza, it turned out, had a vicious head for numbers, and wanted to know where every farthing had gone since Minerva’s keel had been laid. Considering all they’d been through, her questions had been impertinent. Many a man would have back-handed her across the face, most would have stormed out. But Eliza was representing one of the most powerful persons in Christendom, a woman who could destroy Minerva in so many different ways, that her only difficulty would lay in choice of weapon. Dappa had checked his temper partly because of that, but also partly because he knew in his heart that Minerva ought to keep her books more carefully. They had lost their two members who knew how to keep accounts: Moseh de la Cruz, who had gone to colonize the country north of the Rio Grande, and Vrej Esphahnian, who had given his life revenging himself on the ones who had ensnared them. Since then, the books had become a mess. He’d known for a long time that a settling of accounts would have to come some day and that it would be ugly and painful. It could have come about in worse ways than over a table with this funny-looking young Duchess.

In the years since, they’d met from time to time to settle accounts. She’d learned of his strange habit of collecting and writing down slave-stories (“Why do you spend so much of our money on paper and ink!? What are you doing, throwing it overboard?”) and she had become his publisher (“We can at least endeavour to make your hobby pay its own way.”). Years had gone by. He had wondered how she would age. Unable to think of her as a woman (for to him Queen Kottakkal, six feet tall and three hundred pounds, was a woman), he had made up his mind, after seeing a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London, that she was a færy. What did an old, or even a middle-aged, færy-queen look like?

THEY SAT DOWN now in a little upstairs chamber of Leicester House, less formal than a Withdrawing Room, and she fearlessly took a seat facing a window. Moreover, a west-facing window that was admitting red sunset-light. Dappa studied her.

“What do you see?” she asked, studying him back.

“I can no longer see you as anything other than my friend, patroness, and Lady, Eliza,” he answered. “Marks of age, health, experience, and character, which a stranger might phant’sy he perceived in your face, are invisible to me.”

“But what do you really see?”

“I have not looked at enough skinny white women to be an apt judge. But I see that bone structure is a good thing to have, and that you have it; lo, the Creator hung you on an excellent frame.”

She found this curiously amusing. “Have you ever seen an Arcachon, or an honest rendering of one?”

“Only you, my lady.”

“I mean, an hereditary Arcachon. Suffice it to say that they are not hung on good frames, and they well know it. And I owe my position in the world today, not to wit or courage or goodness, but to my being hung on a good frame, and being able to propagate it. And what think you of that, Dappa?”

“If it provides you with a sort of purchase on the sheer cliff that the world is, from which to make use of your abundant wit, courage, and goodness, why, here’s to bone structure!” Dappa returned, raising a teacup high.

She lost a struggle with a smile. Creases flourished around her eyes and mouth, but they did not look bad on her; they looked well earned and fairly won. She raised her own teacup and clinked it against Dappa’s. “Now you really do sound like the Apology of a book,” she said, and sipped.

“Are we back to talking of that, my lady?”

“We are.”

“I’d hoped I could ask you about those Hanoverian Countesses who seem to’ve joined your household in Antwerp.”

“What makes you think they are only Countesses?”

Dappa gave her a sharp look, but she had a glimmer in her eye to suggest that she was only baiting him. “ ’Twas only a guess,” he said.

“Then go on guessing, for I’ll tell you no more than you’ve already discerned.”

“Why Antwerp? Meeting with the Duke of Marlborough?”

“The less I tell you, the less likely you are to be interrogated by the sort of men who loiter in my front lawn with spyglasses.”

“Very well…if you put it that way…perhaps we should speak of my book!” Dappa said nervously.

She got a contented look, as if to say that this was a much more satisfactory topic of conversation, and settled herself for a moment—which gave Dappa a warning that she was about to unburden herself of a little address she’d composed ahead of time. “What you must never forget, Dappa, is that I myself might not be opposed to Slavery, had I not myself been a slave in Barbary! To most English people, it seems perfectly reasonable. The slavers put out the story that it is not so very cruel, and that the slaves are happy. Most in Christendom are willing to believe these lies, absurd as they are to you and me. People believe Slavery is not so bad, because they have no personal experience of it—it takes place in Africa and America, out of sight and out of mind to the English, who love sugar in their tea and care not how ’twas made.”

“I notice you do not sweeten yours,” Dappa mentioned, raising his cup.

“And from the fact that I still have teeth attached to my excellent bone structure, you may infer that I have never used sugar,” she returned. “Our only weapon against this willful ignorance is stories. The stories that you alone are writing down. I have in one of my boxes down stairs a little packet of letters from English men and women that all go something like this: ‘I have never had the least objection to Slavery, however your book recently fell under my eye, and, though most of the slave-narratives contained in it were mawkish and dull, one in particular struck a chord in my heart, and I have since read it over and over, and come to understand the despicable, nay execrable crime that Slavery is…’ ”

“Which one? Which of the stories do these letters refer to?” Dappa asked, fascinated.

“That is the problem, Dappa: each of them refers to a different one. It seems that if you put enough stories out before the public, many a reader will find one that speaks to him. But there is no telling which.”

“What we’ve been doing, then, is a bit like firing grapeshot,” Dappa mused. “Chances are that a ball will strike home—but there’s no telling which—so, best fire a lot of ’em.”

“And grapeshot is a useful tactic sometimes,” Eliza said, “but it never sank a ship, did it?”

“No, my lady, grapeshot can never do that.”

“I say we have now fired enough grapeshot. It has had all the effect it is ever going to have. What we need now, Dappa, is a cannonball.”

“One slave-tale, that everyone will take note of?”

“Just so. And that is why it does not trouble me that you failed to sweep up any more grapeshot in Boston. Oh, write down what you have. Send it to me. I’ll publish it. But after that, no more scatter-shot tactics. You must begin to use your critical faculties, Dappa, and look for the slave-story that has something to it beyond the bathos that they all have in common. Look for the one that will be our cannonball. It is time for us to sink some slave-ships.”

The Kit-Cat Clubb

THAT EVENING

“I AM QUITE CERTAIN THAT we are being watched,” Daniel said.

Dappa laughed. “Is that why you were at such pains to sit facing the window? I venture that no one in the history of this Clubb has ever desired a view of yonder alley.”

“You might do well to come round the table, and sit beside me.”

“I know what I’d see: a lot of Whigs gaping at the tame Neeger. Why don’t you come and sit beside me, so that we may enjoy a view of that naked lady reclining in that strangely long and narrow painting above your head?”

“She’s not naked,” Daniel retorted crossly.

“On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse, I see incontrovertible signs of nakedness in her.”

“But to call her naked sounds prurient,” Daniel objected. “She is professionally attired, for an odalisque.”

“Perhaps all the eyeballs you phant’sy are watching us, are, truth be told, fixed on her. She is a new painting, I can still smell the varnish. Perhaps we should instead go sit ’neath yonder dusty sea-scape,” Dappa suggested, waving in the direction of another long narrow canvas that was crowded with stooped and shivering Dutch clam-diggers.

“I happened to see you greeting the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm earlier,” Daniel confessed.

“She goes by de la Zeur—’tis less formal that way,” Dappa broke in.

Daniel was brought up short for a moment, then finally got a wry look on his face, and shook his head. “You are strangely giddy. I should never have ordered you usquebaugh.”

“Too long on land.”

“When do you sail for Boston?”

“Ah, to business! We’d hoped to depart in the second half of April. Now, we think early May. What do you wish us to fetch from there?”

“Twenty years’ work. I do hope you shall have a care with it.”

“In what form is the work? Manuscripts?”

“Yes, and machinery.”

“That is an odd word. What does it mean?”

“I beg your pardon. It is theatre-jargon. When an angel descends, or a soul lights up to heaven, or a volcano erupts, or any other impossible thing seems to happen on the stage, the people behind the scenes, who’ve made it happen, give the name machinery to the diverse springs, levers, rigging, et cetera used to create the illusion.”

“I did not know you ran a theatre in Boston.”

“You jest, sir, the Bostonians would never have allowed it—they’d have sent me packing to Providence.”

“Then how comes it you have machinery in Boston?”

“I used the term ironically. I built a machine there—across the river actually, in a shack about halfway ’tween Charlestown and Harvard—a machine that has nothing to do with theatrical illusions. I need you to bring it to me.”

“Then I must know, in order: Is it dangerous? Is it bulky? Is it delicate?”

“In order: yes, no, yes.”

“In what wise is it dangerous?”

“I’ve no idea. But I’ll tell you this, ’tis only dangerous if you turn the crank, and give it something to think on.”

“Then I’ll take the crank off and keep it in my cabin, and use it only to bash pirates on the head,” announced Dappa. “And I shall forbid the crew to hold conversations with your machinery, unless they are devoid of intellectual stimulation: nothing beyond a polite ‘Good day, machinery, how goes it with thee, does the stump of thy crank ache of a damp morning?’ ”

“I suggest you pack the parts in barrels, stuffed with straw. You shall also find many thousands of small rectangular cards with words and numbers printed on them. These are likewise to be sealed in watertight casks. Enoch Root may already have seen to it by the time you reach Charlestown.”

At the mention of Enoch’s name, Dappa glanced away from Daniel’s face, as if the older man had committed an indiscretion, and picked up his dram to take a sip. And that was all the opening needed for the Marquis of Ravenscar to irrupt upon their conversation. He appeared so suddenly, so adroitly, it was as if some machinery had injected him into the Kit-Cat Clubb through a trap-door.

“From one odalisque to another, Mr. Dappa! Haw! Is it not so! For I take it that you are the writer.”

“I am a writer, my lord,” Dappa answered politely.

“I hope I do not offend by confessing I’ve not read your books.”

“On the contrary, my lord,” Dappa said, “there is nothing quite so civilized as to be recognized in public places as the author of books no one has read.”

“If my good friend Dr. Waterhouse were polite enough to make introductions, I should not have to rely ’pon guess-work; but he was raised by Phanatiques.”

“It is too late for formalities now,” Daniel answered. “When another begins a conversation with a cryptickal outburst on odalisques, what is there for a polite gentleman to do?”

“Not cryptickal at all! Not in the slightest!” protested the Marquis of Ravenscar. “Why, ’tis known to all London now, at” (checking his watch) “nine o’clock, that at” (checking his watch a second time) “four o’clock, Mr. Dappa was on hand to greet the Duchess of Arcachon and of Qwghlm!”

“I told you!” Daniel said, in an aside to Dappa, and put his two fingers to his eyes, then pointed them across the room toward the phant’sied spies and observers.

“You told him what!?” Roger demanded.

“That people were watching us.”

“They’re not watching you,” Roger said, highly amused. Which told Daniel, infallibly, that they were. “Why should anyone watch you? They’re watching Dappa, making the rounds of the odalisques!”

“There you go again—what on earth—?” Daniel demanded.

Dappa explained, “He alludes to a sort of legend, only whispered by discreet well-bred Londoners, but openly bandied about by drunken merry lords, that the Duchess was once an odalisque.”

“Figuratively—?”

“Literally a harem-slave of the Great Turk in Constantinople.”

“What a bizarre notion—Roger, how could you?”

Roger, slightly nettled by Dappa, raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

Dappa proclaimed, “England being a nation of clam-diggers and sheep-shearers, must forever be a net importer of fantastickal tales. Silk, oranges, perfume, and strange yarns must all be supplied from across the seas.”

“If only you knew,” Daniel returned.

“I agree with Mr. Dappa!” Roger said forcefully. “The story of his tête-à-tête with the Duchess is racing up and down Grub Street like cholera, and will be in newspapers tomorrow at cock-crow!”

And then he was gone, as if by trap-door.

“You see? If you were more discreet—”

“Then Grub Street would be unawares. Nothing would be written, nothing printed, concerning me, or the Duchess. No one would hear of us—no one would buy my next book.”

“Ah.”

“Light dawns ’pon your phizz, Doctor.”

“ ’Tis a novel, strange form of commerce, of which I was unawares until just now.”

“Only in London,” Dappa said agreeably.

“But it is not the strangest form of commerce that goes on in this city,” Daniel pressed on.

Dappa visibly put on an innocent face. “Do you have some strange yarn to set beside my lord Ravenscar’s?”

“Much stranger. And, note, ’tis a domestic yarn, not imported. Dappa, do you recollect when we were being harried in Cape Cod Bay by the flotilla of Mr. Ed Teach, and you put me to work, down in the bilge?”

“You were in the hold. We do not put elderly doctors in the bilge.”

“All right, all right.”

“I remember that you obliged us by smashing up some old crockery to make ammunition for the blunderbusses,” Dappa said.

“Yes, and I remember that the location of that old crockery was pricked down, with admirable clarity, on a sort of bill posted on a beam next the staircase. A diagram, shewing how the hold, and the bilge, were packed with diverse goods.”

“There you go again with your confusion of ‘hold’ and ‘bilge.’ We do not pack goods in the bilge, as it is generally full of what I will euphemistically call water, which rapidly turns goods into bads. If you doubt it, I’ll pack some of your machinery in the bilge on our return voyage this summer, and you may see its condition ’pon arrival. If you had any idea of the foulness—”

Daniel was showing Dappa his palms. “Not necessary, my good man. Yet your lading-diagram does include the bilge, and all that lies in that foulness, does it not?”

“Are you referring to the ballast?”

“I suppose I am.”

“The ballast is carefully diagrammed, because it affects the balance and the trim of the ship,” Dappa said. “From time to time we must shift a few tons this way or that, to compensate for an uneven load, and then it is of course useful to have a diagram of where it is.”

“As I recollect that diagram, the bottom-most hull-planks of the ship are covered with flat rectangular iron pigs, laid down side by side, like floor-tiles.”

“Kentledge, ’tis called. We also have some cracked cannons and old faulty cannonballs down there.”

“Atop that, you have piled many tons of rounded stones.”

“Shingle from a Malabar beach. Some use sand, but we use shingle, because it does not foul the pumps.”

“It is atop the shingle that you pile up casks of shot, salt, water, and other heavy goods.”

“As is the common—nay, universal—practice on non-capsizing ships.”

“But I recall that another layer of ballast was shewn on this diagram. It was below any casks, below the shingle, below the scrap metal, below even the kentledge. It was the thinnest possible layer, a mere membrane, and on the diagram it looked like onion-skin. It was pressed against the tarry inner surface of the hull-planks themselves, and it went by some name such as anti-fouling plates.”

“What of it?”

“Why put anti-fouling plates on the inside?”

“They are spares. You must have noticed that we carry extra stores of everything, Dr. Waterhouse. Minerva’s hull is clad in copper sheets—she’s famous for it—and the last time we had a coppersmith make up an order of such material, we had him make more than we needed, so as to get a better price, and to have some in reserve.”

“Are you certain you are not confusing them with the spares that are stowed in crates near the foremast step? I seem to recall sitting on them.”

“Some are stored there. Others are stored against the inside of the hull-planks, under the kentledge, as you described.”

“What an odd place to store anything. To get at them, one would have to unload the ship entirely, pump out the unspeakable contents of the bilge, shovel out tons of shingle, and winch up the massive pigs of kentledge, one by one.”

Dappa did not respond, but had taken to drumming his fingers on the table irritably.

“It seems more like buried treasure than ballast.”

“If you’d care to test your hypothesis, Doctor, you may do so the next time we are dry-docked, provided you show up with your own shovel.”

“Is that what you say to inquisitive Customs inspectors?”

“We are more polite to them—as they generally are to us.”

“But politeness aside, the underlying meaning is the same. The hold may be emptied, if some official demands it. Minerva shall then bob like a cork, but she shall not capsize, thanks to the ballast. But those anti-fouling plates may not be inspected unless the ballast is removed, which would render the vessel unstable—it could only be done if she were beached, or in dry-dock—as she was just a few weeks ago. No Customs inspector ever demands that, does he?”

“This is a very odd conversation,” Dappa observed.

“On an arbitrary numerical scale of conversational oddness, ranging from one to ten, with ten being the oddest conversation I’ve ever had, and seven being the oddest conversation I have in a typical day, this rates no better than five,” Daniel returned. “But to make it less odd for you, I shall now speak directly. I know what those plates are made of. I know that you take some out from time to time, when you are in London, and I know that they find their way into the coinage. It does not matter to me how this is done, or why. But I say to you that you are putting yourselves in danger every time you spend the treasure from that bilge. You imagine that it may be fused, in a coiner’s crucible, with like metal from other sources, and that, once it has been thus con-fused, it has gone out into the world, and can never be traced back to you. But I say that there is one man, at least, who is not con-fused in the slightest, and who has drawn to within a hair’s breadth of divining your secret. You may find him at the Tower of London most days.”

Dappa had been greatly disquieted early in this little speech, but then had got a distracted, calculating look, as if reckoning how quickly Minerva could weigh anchor and get out of the Pool. “And you tell me this—why? To be good?”

“As you were good to me, Dappa, when Blackbeard called for me by name, and you refused to give me up.”

“Oh. We did not do that out of goodness, but stubbornness.”

“Then my warning to you is strictly an act of Christian charity,” Daniel said.

“God bless you, Doctor!” Dappa replied, but he was still wary.

“Until such time as we arrive at an understanding concerning the disposition of the gold,” Daniel added.

“There is something in this word disposition that makes me leery. How do you imagine we’ll dispose of it?”

“You have to get rid of it before it is found by the gentleman I spoke of,” Daniel pointed out. “But if you coin it, ’twill be as if you sailed Minerva under the guns of the Tower at noon, and ran those sheets of gold up the yard-arms.”

“But what good is it, if not coined?”

“Gold has other uses,” Daniel said. “Of which I shall tell you more some day. But not today. For we are approached by Peer, and must bring the oddness of our discourse down to a value of one or two on the scale I mentioned earlier.”

“Peer? Who or what is Peer?”

“For a man who, moments ago, was lecturing me ’pon the workings of Grub Street, you’ve not been attending to your newspapers at all, have you?”

“I know it exists, how it works, and that it’s important, but—”

“I read the papers every day. Let me tell you quickly then: there is a newspaper called Ye Lens which was started by Whigs, when their Juncto held power; several clever men write for it; Peer is not one of them.”

“You mean, he doesn’t write for the Ye Lens?”

“No, I mean he is not very clever.”

“How’d he get the job, then?”

“By being in the House of Lords, and always taking the Whig side.”

“Ah, so he is a peer!”

“A Peer of the Realm, with writerly ambitions. And as he writes for the Lens, and a lens is something you peer through, he has given himself the pen-name of Peer.”

“This is the longest prolog to an introduction I’ve ever heard,” Dappa remarked. “When is he actually going to show up?”

“I believe he—they—are waiting for you to notice them,” Daniel said, pointing with his eyeballs. “Brace yourself.”

Dappa narrowed his eyes, flared his nostrils, and then torqued himself round in his chair until he had—heeding Daniel’s sage advice—braced one elbow on the table.

Facing him from roughly twelve feet away were the Marquis of Ravenscar, planted stolidly on the booze-slickened Kit-Cat floor-boards, and an even better-dressed chap, who was dangling by both arms from one of the Clubb’s low-hanging beams, his impeccably shod feet swinging back and forth just a few inches above the floor.

When this man saw that Dappa was looking his direction, he let go and dropped to the floor with a loud, chesty “Hoo!” His knees bent deeply, creating alarming strains in the crotch of his breeches, and allowing his knuckles to dangle near the floor. After making certain he’d caught Dappa’s eye, he moved in a waddling gait to the Marquis of Ravenscar, who was standing still as a star, his face pinched up in a pickled smile.

Peer now pursed his lips, thrust them out as far as they would go, and, glancing back frequently to make sure he still had Dappa’s attention, began to make little “Hoo! Hoo!” noises while circling cautiously around Roger. After completing a full orbit of Roger, he shuffled in closer, leaned in so that he was almost nuzzling Roger’s shoulder, and began to make snuffling noises whilst cocking his head this way and that. Noting something apparently caught in the tresses of Roger’s splendid wig, he raised one hand off the floor, reached into the luxuriant mass of curls, pinched something tiny, pulled it out, examined it, gave it a good thorough sniffing, then popped it into his mouth and began to make exaggerated chewing noises. Then, in case Dappa had glanced away during this, he sidled around Roger and repeated the performance some half-dozen times, until even Roger became sick of it, raised one hand in the mildest of threats, and muttered, “Oh, will you stop it!”

Peer’s response was extreme: he jumped back out of cuffing-range, came to rest on his knuckles and the balls of his feet, made excited screeching noises (or as near as a member of the House of Lords could come to it), then sprang into the air while flinging his arms above his head. He grabbed the beam again, knocking loose a shower of dust that sifted down, stained his white wig gray, and caused him to sneeze—which was most unfortunate, as he’d been taking snuff. A bolo of reddish-brown mucus hurtled out of his nose and made itself fast to his chin.

The Kit-Cat Clubb had become quiet as a monastery. Perhaps three dozen men were in the place. By and large, they were of a mind to find nearly anything funny. Rarely did a minute tick away without all conversation in the Clubb being drowned out by a storm-burst of booming laughter from one table or another. But there was something in Peer’s performance so queer that it had shut them all up. Daniel, who had phant’sied that the crowding and the hubbub gave him and Dappa some sort of privacy, now felt even more exposed, and acutely spied upon, than ever.

The Marquis of Ravenscar swaggered toward Dappa. Behind him, Peer dropped from the rafters and got busy with a Belgian gros-point lace handkerchief. After Roger had moved along for a few paces, Peer followed him, cringing along in Roger’s wake.

“Dr. Waterhouse. Mr. Dappa,” said Roger with tremendous aplomb. “It is good to see you both again.”

“And you likewise, et cetera,” answered Daniel shortly, as Dappa had been temporarily robbed of the power of speech.

Conversations resumed, tentatively, around the Clubb.

“I pray you will not take it amiss if I refrain from picking lice out of your hair, as my lord Wragby has been so considerate as to do for me.”

“It’s not even my hair, Roger.”

“May I introduce to you, Dappa, and re-introduce to you, Daniel, my lord Walter Raleigh Waterhouse Weem, Viscount Wragby and Rector of Scanque, Member of Parliament, and Fellow of the Royal Society.”

“Hullo, Uncle Daniel!” said Peer, suddenly straightening up. “Very clever of someone to dress him up in a suit of clothing! Was that your conceit?”

Dappa was staring sidelong at Daniel. “I forgot to mention that Peer is my half-great-nephew once removed, or something like that,” Daniel explained to him, behind his hand.

“Who are you talking to, uncle?” Peer inquired, looking past Dappa’s head into a void. Then, with a shrug, he continued, “Do you phant’sy my demonstration worked? I did ever so much research, to get it right.”

“I’ve no idea, Wally,” Daniel returned, and then looked over at Dappa, who was still frozen in the sidelong-glare attitude. “Dappa, did you understand, from what you just observed, that my lord Wragby, here, is a member of my lord Ravenscar’s ape-tribe, and that he plays a submissive role, fully acknowledging my lord Ravenscar’s dominance?”

“Who are you talking to?” said Peer for the second time.

“To whom are you talking!” Dappa corrected him.

A few moments’ silence from Peer, greatly savoured by Roger and Daniel. Peer raised one hand, pointed his index finger at Dappa as if holding him at bay with a pistol, and turned to Daniel with his mouth a-jar.

“What you didn’t know, my nephew,” Daniel said, “is that Dappa was, at a very young age, taken aboard ship by pirates as a sort of pet. And these pirates, being a polyglot group, amused themselves by training Dappa to speak twenty-five different languages fluently.”

“Twenty-five different languages!” Peer exclaimed.

“Yes. Including better English than you, as you just saw.”

“But…but he doesn’t actually understand any of them,” Peer said.

“No more than a parrot does, when it squawks out a demand for a cracker,” Daniel affirmed, then let out a squawk of his own as Dappa kicked him in the shin under the table.

“What a remarkable feat! You should exhibit him!”

“What do you think I’m doing right now?”

“How was the weather yesterday?” Peer inquired of Dappa, in French.

“In the morning it was miserable and rainy,” Dappa returned. “After noon I thought it would clear but, alas, it was still overcast until nightfall. Only as I was getting ready for bed did I begin to see stars shining through gaps between clouds. Could I trouble you for a cracker?”

“I say, the French pirate who taught him that trick must have been an educated man!” Peer exclaimed. Then he got a look on his face as if he were thinking. Daniel had learned, in his almost seventy years, not to expect much of people who got such looks, because thinking really was something one ought to do all the time. “One would suppose there would be no point in holding a conversation with a man who does not understand what he is saying. And yet he described yesterday’s weather better than I could! In fact, I think I’ll use his wording in tomorrow’s edition!” Again, now, the thoughtful look. “If he could relate other experiences—such as his tête-à-tête with the Duchess—as faithfully as he recalls the weather, it would make my interview with him ever so much easier. I had come prepared to do it all in grunts and sign language!” And Peer gave a note-book in his hip-pocket an ominous pat.

“I suppose that whenever one speaks in the abstract—which is to say, most of the time—what one is really doing is interacting with some sort of image that is held in the mind,” Dappa said. “For example, yesterday’s weather is not here in the Kit-Cat Clubb with us. I cannot feel yesterday’s rain on my skin, nor can I see yester-eve’s stars with my eyes. When I describe these things to you (in French or any other language) I am really engaging in some sort of internal colloquy with a stored image inside of my brain. It is an image I may call up on demand, as a Duke might demand that a certain painting of his be brought down out of the garret. Once it is before my mind’s eye, I may see it as if it were there, and describe it.”

“That is all well and good for recollecting what you have gathered in through your senses, and stored in the garret, as it were,” Peer said. “So I could ask you to relate your observations of the Duchess of Qwghlm today, and rely on your account. But as you do not understand the conversation you had with her, or indeed the one you are having with me now, I fear your interpretation of what went on at Leicester House might be wide of the mark.” He spoke haltingly, unsure of how to converse with someone who didn’t understand what he was saying.

Preying on this, Daniel inquired, “But how could he interpret anything if he didn’t understand it?”

This stopped Peer’s gob for a few awkward moments.

“I would refer you to the work of Spinoza,” Dappa said, “whose words are of course perfect gibberish to me, but who wrote in his Ethics, ‘The order and connexion of ideas is the same as the order and connexion of things.’ Meaning that if there are two things, call them A and B, that have a particular relationship to each other, for example, my lord Wragby’s wig, and my lord Wragby’s head, and if I have in my mind an idea of my lord Wragby’s wig, call it alpha, and an idea of his head, call it beta, then the relationship between alpha and beta is the same as that between A and B. And owing to this property of minds, it is possible for me to construct in my head an whole universe of ideas, yet each idea will relate to all of the other ideas in precisely the same way that the things represented by those ideas relate to one another;lo, ’tis as if I have created a microcosm ’tween my ears, without understanding a bit of it. And some of the ideas may be records of sensory impressions, for example, yesterday’s weather. But others may be abstract concepts out of religion, philosophy, mathematics, or what have you—not that I’d know, since to me they are all a meaningless parade of hallucinations. But insofar as they are all ideas, they are all fungible. Whatever their origins may have been, they are now all con-fused into the same currency, and so I may speak of the Pythagorean Theorem or the Treaty of Utrecht as well as I may speak of yesterday’s weather. To me, they are all just crackers—as are you, my lord Wragby.”

“That is quite clear,” Peer said vaguely, for he had gone a bit glassy-eyed round the point where Dappa had begun to use Greek letters. “Tell me, Dappa, were there any German pirates aboard your ship?”

“You mean, native speakers of High-Dutch, or Hochdeutsch? Alas, they are a rare breed ’mong pirates, for the Germans fear water, and love order. Most of them were Dutchmen. However, there was a prisoner, kept in fetters down in the bilge, a Bavarian diplomat who taught me his language.”

“Right then!” And Peer flipped opened his note-book, and began to scan pages filled with laboriously botched cartoons. “Well, Dappa, you may not be aware that we Englishmen dwell on something very much like the sandbars you used to see in your rivers, save that ours is much larger, and free of crocodiles—” He held up a sketch.

“We call it an island,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar helpfully.

“There is a great river of cold, salty water,” Peer said, holding his arms far apart, “ever so much broader than the distance between my book and my pencil, separating us from a place called Europe which is full of nasty nasty apes. In your system of mental ideas, you might liken it to a lot of monkey-bands who are forever screeching and throwing rocks at each other.”

“But sometimes we cross the salty river on things like hollow logs, except much larger,” said the Marquis of Ravenscar, now getting into the spirit of things, “and throw a few rocks of our own, just to stay in practice!” He winked at Dappa, who gave back a brooding stare.

“There is a frightfully enormous and strong old gorilla, a silver-back, of whom we are terrified, just over the river.”

Dappa sighed, sensing that there was no way out. “I think I’ve seen his image on French coins, he is called Leroy.”

“Yes! He owns more bananas than anyone else, has more apes in his tribe, and has thrown a lot of rocks at us.”

“That must be very painful indeed,” Dappa said, not very sympathetically.

“Yes, quite,” said Peer. “But we have a mighty silver-back of our own, a really stupendous and deadly accurate stone-thrower, who, some moons ago, chased Leroy right up a tree! Because of this, our little band, here on our sandbar in the salty river, cannot make out whether to worship and revere our big silver-back as a god, or fear and revile him as a devil. Now, we have an enormous clearing in the jungle, actually not far from where we are right now, where we convene to make obeisance to a certain female silver-back, rather frail—and where we beat our chests, and throw fæces at each other.”

“Ugh! Until you told me that, I was about to say, I should like to see this clearing.”

“Yes, it is rather frightful,” Roger put in, dismayed by Peer’s similitude, “but we have found throwing fæces preferable to throwing rocks.”

“Do you throw your fæces, my lord Wragby?” Dappa asked.

“It is what I do for a living!” answered Peer, shaking his note-book, “and what you see here is the Instrument I use to scrape my Ammunition off the jungle floor.”

“May I ask, what is special about this female silver-back, that you should brave flying fæcal material to pay homage to her?”

“She holds our Stick of Power,” Peer answered, as if that settled it. “Now, to the matter at hand. There are two tribes vying for the favor of the ancient female silver-back. The leader of one of those tribes stands before you.” He indicated Roger, who made a courtly bow. “Alas, we have been driven to the periphery of the clearing by the most incredible and sustained fæces-barrage this jungle has ever witnessed; and the terribly, terribly mighty and enormous English silver-back I spoke of was nearly buried alive in it, and withdrew across the cold, salty river to a place named Antwerp, where it is possible for him to sit and enjoy the occasional banana without being struck in the face by a flying turd. And we who follow Roger, here, are frightfully curious to know if, and when, our big silver-back is coming back over the river, and whether he might be in a mood to throw any actual stones at any of us if, and when, he does, and whether he has any designs on the Stick of Power.”

“And what of Leroy? Is he still up his tree?”

“Leroy is halfway to the ground! And from his distance, with his failing eye-sight, he cannot easily distinguish between apes throwing stones, and apes throwing mere fæces; at any rate, if he thinks we are distracted, why, he’ll scamper right back down to terra firma like the cheeky monkey he is, and we don’t want that.”

“If I may ask a direct question, why are you telling me these things, my lord?”

“That nice female you paid a call on earlier today,” said Peer, “that most admirable yellow-haired chimp, why, she has just crossed over the cold salty river and returned to our sandbar after sojourning, for many moons, in the jungle that lies off where the sun rises every morning, where a thousand different German-speaking ape-tribes vie for the control of individual trees, or, indeed, individual branches of trees. She came over on a giant hollow log that seemed to have a larger-than-normal number of these German-speaking apes on board. She came from the general direction of the place where our formidable silver-back has been biding his time, and enjoying his bananas. Which band does she belong to? For in the country where she was sojourning dwells another female silver-back, who has the run of several biggish trees, and who has her eye on our Stick. Does your friend belong to her tribe? Or is she in the camp of him who bides his time in Antwerp? Or both, or neither?”

Now it was Dappa’s turn to look glazed. After working this through for a moment, he guessed: “You’re trying to work out whether it would enure to your benefit to hurl some fæces at Eliza.”

“I say, you are spot on!” Peer exclaimed. “That Spinozzel chap really was on to something!”

Roger Comstock had a particular way of holding himself, when he wanted to say something, that caused everyone within a pike-length to shut up and turn towards him worshipfully. This everyone now did, because he was holding himself in that way. After collecting himself for a few moments, he held up one hand, thumb tucked into palm, and gave Dappa another wink. “Four silver-backs.” The other hand came up, two fingers extended. “Two Sticks of Power. One of them rather firmly in the grip of Leroy and his heirs and assigns. The other, widely seen as being Up for Grabs. So, let us consider the four silver-backs.” Now he was holding up both hands, two fingers extended from each. “Two female, two male, all very very old, though, ’tmust be allowed, the one in Antwerp is as vigorous as a battle-weary sixty-four-year-old could ever be. The German female has a son, a great oafish gorilla who is going to have our Power-Stick lodged in his fat fist quite soon, if I’ve anything to say about it. Now his mum is hated by the female who presides over our sandbar today; why, she begins to screech and wave the Stick about the moment she detects a whiff of this German on the breeze. So quite naturally the son is persona non grata here. But he has a son of his own, and we’d very much like to see him swinging through English trees and eating English bananas as soon as we can get him over here. So—”

“Then don’t throw shit at Eliza,” Dappa said.

“Thank you.”

“Perhaps we should throw a bit so it doesn’t look as if we are colluding,” Peer suggested, clearly disappointed.

“Perhaps you should go pick some nits out of her hair, my lord,” Dappa returned.

“Thank you, Dappa, that will be all,” said Roger sternly, and led Peer away by the elbow.

“Before you ask,” Daniel said, “that was a ten.”

DAPPA BROODED THROUGH most of the trip to Crane Court.

Daniel ventured: “I hope I did not offend you, in the way I dealt with Peer. I could not think of any other way to respond.”

“To you, he is just a singular imbecile,” Dappa returned. “To me, he is a typical sample of the sort of bloke I need to reach with my books. And so, if I seem distracted, it is not because I am annoyed with you—though I am a little. It is because I am asking myself, what is the point of trying to reach such persons at all? Am I wasting my time?”

“My nephew simply believes whatever the people around him believe,” Daniel said. “If every man in the Kit-Cat Clubb proclaimed you King of England, why, he would fall on his knees and kiss your ring.”

“This may be true, but it does not help me, or my publisher.”

“Your publisher,” Daniel said. “The Duchess. She and you were simply talking about selling books, weren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“She doesn’t speak to you of those matters that so concern the Whigs.”

“Of course she doesn’t. Don’t tell me you were going to ask about it as well?”

“I admit to some curiosity about the Duchess, and what she is up to in London,” Daniel said. “I knew her once, Dappa, many years ago. Recently, she has let me know that she means to renew the acquaintance. I do not phant’sy this is owed to my looks, or my charm.”

Dappa offered nothing. They rattled on wordlessly for a bit. Daniel sensed that this bit of news had only made Dappa more anxious. “Will it create a tremendous hardship for Minerva if you follow my advice, and do not unload the anti-fouling plates?”

“It will create the need for a loan,” Dappa replied, “which will have to be repaid, in gold, upon our return.”

“I can arrange something,” Daniel said.

In the dim light scattering into the carriage he could see Dappa’s eyes flick towards the window, a gesture of annoyance. Daniel could guess what he was thinking: what sort of pass have we come to when we must look to an aged scientist as our banker?

HE INSISTED THAT THE DRIVER let him off at the entrance to Crane Court, rather than squeezing through that narrow arch and driving all the way to the Royal Society’s front door. The short walk would do him some good. He bid Dappa good-bye and tottered on creaky legs through the entrance. The hackney remained where it was for a few moments, keeping an eye on him. But Crane Court was an unlikely place for footpads, as they’d have no way to escape from it if a hue and cry were raised. So presently the horses were given orders to move, and the hackney clattered away, taking Dappa down to White Friars Stairs where he could find a waterman to row him down the Thames to Minerva.

Daniel was alone in the familiar confines of Crane Court; and at that moment he was struck by a monstrous thought.

Now, it had been a very long day indeed, beginning with a journey up to the Templar-tomb in Clerkenwell and continuing through Hockley-in-the
-Hole, an odd conversation with Peter (Saturn) Hoxton, a refreshing visit to Catherine Barton at Roger’s house, the long-dreaded reunion with Miss Barton’s uncle, and later the Kit-Cat Clubb. Too many threads, and too much information for his stiff old brain to cope with. Any part of the day would have given him plenty to think about during his short stroll from Fleet Street to the door of the R.S. But what his mind seized upon was Isaac’s sedan chair.

Just before and after the explosion, a sedan chair had been poised at the very place where Daniel had just alighted from the hackney, there in the arched tunnel where Crane Court debouched into Fleet Street.

Tonight his way up the Court was nearly barred by a vault-wagon drawn up to exhaust the sewage from one of the town-houses. He diverted round it, desiring to give it the widest berth possible, lest he get splashed. But just before he did, he turned round and looked back toward Fleet, peering through the arch. Golden light was gleaming through from whale-oil street-lanthorns on Fleet, just as on the night of the explosion.

On that Sunday evening, the mysterious sedan chair had been framed in the entry, dead center, a black doorway suspended in the arch of light. It had followed them to that point; paused; waited (or so it seemed) for the explosion; and then it had fled, pursued, briefly, by the hapless Watchman.

Isaac had said something, earlier today, to the effect he’d been shocked to see Daniel traveling in the company of Mr. Threader. This could be interpreted more than one way; but the most straightforward was that he literally had observed the two of them together in Mr. Threader’s carriage.

Which could only have occurred along Fleet Ditch in the minutes before the explosion. Perhaps Isaac had been in that sedan chair. Perhaps it had been nothing more than a coincidence that he had fallen in alongside Mr. Threader’s carriage when he had. Perhaps he had been on his way from some errand—and it would have had to’ve been a very dark and strange one indeed—in the dangerous alleys on the eastern brink of the Ditch, en route to his dwelling off Leicester Fields. But then why had he stopped in the entrance to Crane Court?

Daniel turned about and gazed at the arch again, trying to re-summon the fading memory.

But instead of seeing the remembered image of the black box, he saw a limbed shadow detach itself from one side of the arch and flit across the opening. It was a man who had been lurking there, and who had just made his departure onto Fleet Street. A moment later Daniel heard iron horseshoes splashing sparks on the brittle ashlars of the street. It was a rider, who had dismounted, and led his horse quietly to the entrance, so that he could spy on Daniel more discreetly. He had probably lost Daniel in the shadows of the vault-wagon and decided to call it a night.

Daniel had lost his train of thought concerning the sedan chair. He turned and walked quickly until his nostrils and his eyes no longer burned from the ammonia-cloud surrounding the vault-wagon. He was hardly surprised to hear footsteps behind him.

“Are you the gager Saturn names Doc?” said a pre-adolescent boy. “Don’t loap off, I ain’t a scamperer.”

Daniel considered stopping, but reckoned the boy could keep up with him. “Are you of the Black-guard?” he asked wearily.

“No, Doc, but I’ve my Aspirations.”

“Very well.”

“This is for you, then,” said the boy, and held out a folded stick of paper, very white compared to his filthy hand. Daniel accepted it. The boy darted back down the court and climbed aboard the vault-wagon he’d rode in on. “Lovely watch you’ve there—best keep an eye on it!” he called out, as a sort of pleasantry.

Henry Arlanc let him in, and helped stow away his coat and walking-stick. “It is a great honour to have been named Secretary of your Clubb, sir,” he observed. “I’ve just been copying out today’s Minutes.”

“You will do very well,” Daniel assured him. “I only wish our Clubb was one that met in a nice house and offered food and drink.”

“For that, I’ve the Royal Society, Doctor.”

“Yes, but you are not the Secretary.”

“I could be. If a Secretary’s job is to prick down all comings and goings, doings and discussions, why ’tis all here,” said Arlanc—strangely talkative this evening—and pointed to his head. “Why’re you peering at me so, Doctor?”

“I just had a thought.”

Henry Arlanc shrugged. “Would you like me to fetch a quill and—”

“No, thank you. This one will rest secure up here,” said Daniel, and imitated Henry’s head-pointing gesture. “Henry, does it ever happen that Sir Isaac will come here in his sedan chair, on a Sunday evening?”

“Frequently!” Henry answered. “There is always business here, pressing in on him. In the week, he has responsibilities at the Mint. Then, when he comes here, there are so many visitors, distractions. But he has learnt the trick of coming late on Sundays, when no one is in the building except for me and Madame, who understand that he is not to be disturbed. Then he can work late into the night, sometimes even until sunrise on Monday.”

“No one calls for him then, eh?”

“Pourquoi non, for no one knows he is here.”

“Except for you, and Madame Arlanc, and his own servants.”

“All I meant, sir, was that no one who would dare to disturb him knows he is here.”

“Of course.”

“Why do you ask, Doctor?” Arlanc said; an odd and rude thing for a porter to say to a Doctor.

“I phant’sied I had seen signs of his presence round the house on some Sunday evenings, and wondered if I were imagining things.”

“You have imagined nothing, Doctor. May I assist you up stairs?”

Doc,

If you are reading this it means that the boy found you in Crane Court. You may wish to check your pockets, &c.

Know that a representative of mine is scheduled to partake of high tea with a friend of a friend of Mr. Teach on Thursday next. Inquiries will be made.

I went to your hole in the ground and chased out two culls who had gone down there, and not for the usual purpose, viz. buggery. I believe they mistook me for the Ghost of a Knight Templar, from which I conclude, they were cultivated men.

Saturn

Saturn,

Thank you for your diligence. It is what I would expect of an Horologist.

Suppose I had come into possession of some odds and ends of yellow metal; then do you know any of the sort of men who would buy them from me? Any you particularly dislike? I ask purely as an academic exercise, on behalf of a noted Natural Philosopher.

Dr. Waterhouse

Isaac,

I can think of no better way to repay the hospitality you showed me at your house today, than to respectfully inform you that someone may be trying to Blow you Up. Whoever it is, would appear to be well acquainted with your habits. Consider varying them.

Your humble and obedient servant,

Daniel

P.S. Concerning the other topic of our discussion, I am making inquiries.

Crane Court, London

22 APRIL 1714

…whereas here; all, as well Brandy as Wine, and all our strong compounded Drinks, such as stout Ale, Punch, Double-Beer, Fine-Ale, &c. are all drank to Excess, and that to such a Degree, as to become the Poison, as well of our Health as of our Morals; fatal to the Body, to Principles, and even to the Understanding; and we see daily Examples of Men of strong Bodies drinking themselves into the Grave; and which is still worse, Men of strong Heads, and good Judgment, drinking themselves into Idiotism and Stupidity….

—DANIEL DEFOE,

A Plan of the English Commerce

A GUTTER RAN DOWN the centerline of Crane Court, in a weak bid to make Gravity do something useful. The slope was so feeble that when Daniel walked down to Fleet Street, he overtook a floating apple-core he’d tossed into it a quarter of an hour earlier, while standing in front of the Royal Society waiting for Saturn to appear.

Peter Hoxton nearly filled the archway. His hands were thrust in his waistcoat-pockets, his arms akimbo, giving his upper half the same general shape as the planet Saturn viewed through a telescope. He was smoking a clay-pipe whose stem was broken down to a mere knuckle-bone. As Daniel drew nearer, he took this out of his mouth and pitched it into the gutter; then froze, head bowed, as if a need to pray had suddenly come over him.

“Behold!” was the first thing he said to Daniel. “Behold what runs in your gutter here!”

Daniel drew up beside him and followed his gaze down. Where Crane Court’s gutter ran between Saturn’s feet, a sump had been formed by settling of the earth under the stones. In the deepest parts of it, the net-work of crevices between stones was plotted in brilliant lines of liquid argent.

“Quicksilver,” Daniel said. “Probably discarded from the Royal Society’s laboratories.”

“Point to it!” Saturn suggested, still staring fixedly at the quicksilver net-work.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Point to the Royal Society, and make as if you’re offering up some remark about it.”

Daniel uncertainly turned round and pointed up the center of Crane Court, though he omitted any feigned remarks. Saturn turned his head to look that way; peered blankly for a few moments; then turned his back on Daniel and shuffled off into Fleet Street.

Daniel took a few moments to catch up in traffic. The church-bells had struck six P.M. a few minutes ago. Fleet was deadly crowded.

“I phant’sied you’d have a hackney,” Daniel said, hoping to rein Saturn in by starting a conversation with him. “I did mention that all expenses would be reimbursed…”

“No need,” Saturn returned, sowing the words back over his shoulder, “the place is all of two hundred paces from here.” He was walking east on Fleet, glancing over his shoulder for openings between riders and coaches and wagons, sometimes trespassing in front of them to claim right-of-way. The general plan seemed to be that they would cross over to the south side.

“You had intimated it might be near by,” Daniel said, “but I find it startling that a house of that type should lie so near to—to—”

“To a house of the Royal Society’s type? Not at all, Doc. The streets of London are like bookshelves, you can as leave find unlike houses next to each other as find a picaroon-romance shelved alongside a Bible.”

“Why did you need for me to point at the Royal Society, just now?”

“So I might look at it.”

“I did not know one needed leave to look at it.”

“That is because you are used to the ways of Natural Philosophers, who are forever peering at whatever pleases them. There is a kind of arrogance in that, you are unawares of. In other walks of life, one does need leave. And ’tis well we are having this talk en route to Hanging-Sword-Alley. For the ken we are going to is most certainly the sort where, Doc, you do need leave.”

“Why, then, I’ll have eyes only for you, Mr. Hoxton.”

They had come already to where Water Lane broke away to the right, and ran straight down to the river. Saturn made that turn, as if he meant to ramble down to White Friars Dock. The Lane was a straight and broad cleft separating two jumbled, mazy neighborhoods. On the right, the periphery of the Temple. Typical resident: a practitioner at law. On the left, the parish of St. Bride’s. Typical resident: a woman who’d been arrested for prostitution, thievery, or vagrancy and put to work pounding hemp at Bridewell. In his more peevish moments Daniel phant’sied that the only thing preventing those on the right and those on the left from coming together lewdly in the middle of the Lane, was the continual stream of redolent carts booming down it to eliminate their steaming loads upon Dung Wharf, which could be nosed a short distance ahead.

Water Lane was lined on both sides by post-Fire buildings, kept up in such a way as to give the casual stroller a frank and fair synopsis of the neighborhoods that spread behind them; which was to say that whenever Daniel walked down this way to the river, he hewed strictly to the right, or Temple, side, trailing a hand along shop-fronts as he went. When he was feeling bold, and was surrounded by well-dressed law-clerks and brawny, honest tradesmen, he would gaze across the way and disapprovingly regard the buildings on the left side.

There, between a certain pawn-shop and a certain tavern, stretched a narrow gap that reminded him of a missing tooth in a rotten jaw. He had always supposed that it was the result of an error by Robert Hooke, the late City Surveyor, who’d done his work sans flaw in the better neighborhoods, but who, when he got to this district, might possibly have been distracted by the charms of a Bridewell girl. Noting the sorts of people who came and went through that gap, Daniel had sometimes speculated as to what would befall him if he ever went in there, somewhat in the spirit of a seven-year-old boy wondering what would happen if he fell through the hole in an out-house.

When Saturn had entered Water Lane, he had gravitated to (inevitably) the left side, which caused Daniel to lose his bearings, as he’d never seen it from this perspective. The strolling, snuff-taking lawyers across the way looked doltish.

After just a few paces Saturn veered round a corner into a narrow, gloomy pass, and Daniel, wanting nothing more than to stay close, hurried after him. Not until they had penetrated ten paces into it did he turn round to look at the bright façades on the other side of Water Lane, far far away, and realize that they had gone into that same Gap he had oft wondered about.

It were just to describe his movements now as scurrying. He drew abreast of Saturn and tried to emulate his manner of not gazing directly at anything. If this maze of alleys were as horrible as he’d always supposed, why, he did not see its horrors; and considering how briskly they were moving, it hardly seemed as if there would be time for any of them to catch up. He foresaw a long train of stranglers and footpads stretched out in their wake, huffing and puffing and bent over from side-aches.

“I presume this is some sort of a lay?” said Peter Hoxton.

“Meaning…a plan…scheme…or trap,” Daniel gasped. “I am as mystified as you are.”

“Does anyone else know where we are going, and when?” Saturn tried.

“I let the name of the place, and the time of the meeting, be known.”

“Then it’s a lay.” Saturn darted sideways and punched his way through a door without knocking. Daniel, after a clutching, febrile moment of being by himself in the center of Hanging-Sword-Alley, scrambled after him, and did not leave off from scrambling until he was seated next to Peter Hoxton before the hearth of a house.

Saturn spooned coal onto the evidence of a late fire. The room was already stuffy; these were the last chairs anyone wanted.

“This is really not so very dreadful after all,” Daniel ventured.

Saturn rummaged up a bellows, got its two handles in his hands, and held it up for a mechanical inspection. A brisk squeeze slapped lanky black locks away from his face. He aimed it at the pile of coal and began crushing the handles back and forth as if the bellows were a flying-machine, and he trying to raise himself off the floor.

Following Saturn’s warnings, Daniel had religiously avoided looking at anything. But the close, and now smoky, air of this parlour was leavened by female voices. He could not stop himself turning to look at an outburst of feminine laughter from the far end of the room. He got an impression of rather a lot of mismatched and broken-down furniture arranged in no particular way, but swept back and forth across the room by ebbing and flowing tides of visitors. There might have been a score of persons in the room, about evenly divided between the sexes, and clumped together in twos, threes, and fours. At the far end was a large window looking out onto a bright outdoor space, perhaps Salisbury Square in the heart of St. Bride’s. Daniel could not tell, because the windows were screened with curtains, made of rather good lace, but too large for these windows, and tarred brown as naval hemp by pipe-smoke. They were, he realized with a mild thrill, curtains that had been stolen—probably snatched right from someone’s open window in broad daylight. Silhouetted against that ochre scrim were three women, two gaunt and young, the other plump and a bit older, and smoking a clay-pipe.

He forced himself to turn his attention back to Saturn. But as he did so he scanned the room and got an impression of many different kinds of people: a gentleman who would not have looked out of place promenading round St. James’s Square, as well as several who belonged more to Hockley-in-the-
Hole.

By his exertions Saturn had evoked light, but no perceptible heat, from the rubble of coals and ashes on the hearth. That was enough—no heat was wanted. It seemed he’d only wanted something to occupy his nervous hands.

“A lot of females!” Daniel remarked.

“We call them women,” Saturn snapped. “I hope you haven’t been peering about like some damned Natural Philosopher at a bug collection.”

“We call them insects,” Daniel shot back. This elicited a gentlemanly nod from Saturn.

“Without peering,” Daniel continued, “I can see well enough that, though it’s untidy, it’s far from loathsome.”

“To a point, criminals love order even more than Judges,” Saturn said.

At that moment, a boy entered the room, breathing hard, and scanned the faces. He picked out Saturn instantly, and moved toward him with a joyous expression, reaching significantly into his pocket; but Peter Hoxton must have given him a glare or a gesture, because suddenly his face fell and he spun away on his heel.

“A boy who snatches your watch in the street, and runs off with it, does not do so out of a perverse longing to cause you grief. He is moved by a reasonable expectation of profit. Where you see sheep being sheared, you may assume there are spinning-wheels nearby; where you have your pocket picked, you know that there is a house such as this one within sprinting-distance.”

“In its ambience ’tis rather like a coffee-house.”

“Aye. But mind, the sort who’re disposed to abhor such kens as this would say its hellishness inheres in its very congeniality.”

“I must admit, it smells less of coffee than of the cheap perfume of geneber.”

“Gin, we call it in places like this. My downfall,” Saturn explained laconically, peering over his shoulder at the boy, who was now in negotiations with a fat, solitary man at a corner table. Saturn went on to give the room a thorough scan.

“You dishonor your own rules! What are you looking at?”

“I am reminding myself of the exits. If this turns out to be a lay, I shall not bother excusing myself.”

“Did you perchance see our buyer?” Daniel inquired.

“Save my fellow horologist in the corner there, and this gager next to us, who is trying to wash away his pox with gin and mercury, everyone here has come in groups,” Saturn said, “and I told the buyer that he must come alone.”

“Gager is what you call an elderly man.”

“Yes.”

Daniel hazarded a look at said gager, who was curled up on the floor in the corner by the hearth, no more than a sword-length from them—for the room was small, the tables close, and the separation between groups was preserved only through a kind of etiquette. The gager looked like a whorl of blankets and worn-out clothes, with pale hands and a face projecting from one end. Resting on the hearth-stones directly before him were a clay bottle of Dutch geneber and a thumb-sized flask of mercury. This was the first clue that he was syphilitic, for mercury was the only known remedy for that disease. But confirmation could be had by looking at his face, which was disfigured by lumpy tumors, called gummas, rimming his mouth and his eyes.

“Every snatch of conversation you overhear in this room shall be riddled with such flash cant as ‘gager,’ ‘lay,’ et cetera, for here, as in the legal and medical professions, the more impenetrable a man’s speech, the higher the esteem in which he is held. Nothing would be more injurious to our reputation in this house, than for us to speak intelligibly. Yet we may have to wait for a long time. And I fear I may fall into drinking gin, and end up like yon gager. So, let us have an unintelligible conversation about our religion.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Remember, Doc, you are my Father Confessor, I your disciple, and your portion of our bargain is that you shall help me draw nigher to Truths Æternal through the sacrament of Technology. This—” and he scanned the room lightly, without letting his eye catch on anything, “is not what I signed on for. We were to be in Clerkenwell, building things.”

“And we shall be,” Daniel assured him, “once the masons, carpenters, and plasterers have finished their work round the old Temple there.”

“That should not be long. I’ve never seen stones piled up in such haste,” Saturn said. “What is it you mean to make there, then?”

“Read the newspapers,” Daniel returned.

“What’s that s’posed to mean?”

“What’s the matter, you’re the one who wanted to speak in cyphers.”

“I do read the newspapers,” said Saturn, wounded.

“Have you attended to what goes on in Parliament?”

“A lot of screeching and howling as to whether our next King’s son* ought to be given a hero’s welcome in the House of Lords, or barred from the Realm.”

Daniel chuckled. “You must be a Whig, to refer so confidently to George Louis as our next King.”

“What do I look like to you?” said Saturn, suddenly lowering his voice, and looking about uneasily.

“A Jacobite Tory, dyed in the wool!”

Daniel’s chuckling at his own jest was, for a few moments, the only sound in the room. Then:

“There’ll be no such talk in this house!”

The speaker was a short, stout Welshman with a large jaw. He was wrapped in a bulky and bulging black cloak, as if he’d just come in from outside, and was making a sweep through the parlour on his way back to the kitchen. A brace of empty gin-bottles dangled by their necks between the fingers of his right hand, and a full one was gripped in his left. Daniel assumed the fellow was being wry, and chuckled some more; but the Welshman very deliberately swiveled his head around and gave Daniel a glare that shut him up. Most of the people in the room were now looking their way.

“Your usual, Saturn?” the Welshman said, though he continued to stare fixedly at Daniel.

“Have her bring us coffee, Angus. Gin disagrees with me these days, and as you have perceived, my friend has already drunk one bottle too many.”

Angus turned around and stalked out of the room.

“I am sorry!” Daniel exclaimed. Until moments ago he had felt strangely at home here. Now, he felt more agitated than he had out in the alley.

The wretch on the floor went into a little fit of shuddering, and tried to jerk his unresponsive limbs into a more comfortable lie.

“I assumed—” Daniel began.

“That the words you were using were as alien to this place as the Calculus.”

“Why should the proprietor—I assume that’s what he was—care if I make such a jest—?”

“Because if word gets round that Angus’s ken is a haunt of such persons—”

“Meaning—?”

“Meaning, persons who have secretly vowed that the Hanover shall not be our next King,” Saturn croaked, so quietly that Daniel was forced to read his lips, “and that the Changeling* shall be, why, it shall become self-fulfilling, shall it not? Then such persons—who are always in want of a place to convene, and conspire—will begin to come here.”

“What does it matter!?” Daniel whispered furiously. “The place is filled with criminals to begin with!”

“And that is how Angus likes it, for he is a past master among thief-takers,” Saturn said, his patience visibly dwindling. “He knows how it all works with the Watch, the Constables, and the Magistrates. But if the supporters of the Changeling begin to convene here, why, everything’s topsy-turvy, isn’t it, now the house is a heaven for Treason as well as Larceny, and he’s got the Queen’s Messengers to contend with.”

“I hardly phant’sy the Queen’s Messengers would ever venture into a place like this!” Even Daniel had the wit to mouth the name, rather than speaking it aloud.

“Be assured they would, if treason were afoot here! And Angus would be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered at the Treble Tree, ’long with some gaggle of poxy Jacobite viscounts. No decent end for a simple thief-taker, that.”

“You called him that before.”

“Called him what?”

“A thief-taker.”

“Naturally.”

“But I thought a thief-taker was one who brought thieves to justice, to collect a reward from the Queen. Not a—” But Daniel stopped there, as Peter Hoxton had got a look on his phizz that verged on nausea, and was shaking his head convulsively.

“I see you’ve been sending my coal right up the fucking Chimney!” Angus proclaimed, stalking toward them. He had divested himself of the cloak and the gin-bottles and was now being followed, at a prudent distance, by a Bridewellish-looking girl with a mug of coffee in each hand.

“Rather, providing you with the service of keeping the fire going,” Saturn answered calmly, “at no charge, by the way.”

“I didn’t want it going to begin with!” Angus returned. “ ’Twas that lappy-cull who mewled and pleaded for a bit of warmth! Now you’ve gone and got it going again! There’ll be a charge for that!”

“Of course there will be,” Saturn said.

The coffee was served, and money changed hands, in the form of copper tokens, minutely examined by Angus.

“Now why do you say I should attend to the doings of Parliament?” Saturn asked, as they were beginning to sip their coffee. “What connexion could I possibly draw between the situation of the Duke of Cambridge* and your hole in the ground in Clerkenwell?”

“None whatever. Save that Parliament’s more loud and obvious doings may be used as a sort of screen or blind to cover arcane, subtile machinations that might reward your attention.”

“This is worse than being given no information at all,” Saturn grumbled.

A man entered solus, and began to look round the place. Daniel knew immediately it was their buyer. But rather than jumping to make their presence known, he settled deeper into his chair so that he could spend a few moments inspecting the newcomer. In silhouette against the glowing screen of curtains, he could easily be confused with an actual gentleman, for he wore a wig, clamped down by a hat with a vast brim folded upwards in the style then mandatory. A sword dangled from one hip. But when he stood, he crouched, and when he walked, he scuttled, and when he noticed things, he flinched. And when this man came over to the hearth, and accepted a chair pulled up by the uncharacteristically hospitable Peter Hoxton, Daniel perceived that his wig was stinking horsehair, his hat was too small, and his sword was more danger to himself, in its sheath, than it would’ve been to others, out of it. He nearly tripped over it twice, because every time he whacked it off a chair- or table-leg it jumped back between his ankles. He put Daniel in mind of a clown at St. Bartholomew’s Fair, got up to mock a gentleman. Yet the mere fact that he was trying so hard earned him a sort of dignity, and probably counted for something in a house of this type.

“Mr. Baynes, Dr. Gatemouth,” said Saturn. “Doc, say hallow to him we are calling Mr. Baynes.”

“Dr. Gatemouth, ’tis a pleasure as well as an honour,” said the newcomer.

“Mr. Baynes,” Daniel said.

“Would you be one of the Gatemouths of Castle Gatemouth?”

Daniel had no idea what to do with this question.

“Doc is of a very old family of armigerous yeomen in the Gatemouth district,” prated Saturn, sounding bored.

“Ah, perhaps they knew some of my forebears,” exclaimed Mr. Baynes, patting his sword-hilt, “for I am nearly certain that Gatemouth Abbey lies adjacent to a certain vicarage where—”

“It is not his real name,” Saturn snapped.

“Of course, that is obvious, do you think I am a child? I was merely trying to make him feel at ease.”

“Then you failed. Let us speak of the Ridge, so that we may ease him out of this ken.”

Said to a real gentleman, these words would have provoked a duel. So Daniel at this point was one uneasy gager. But Mr. Baynes was unfazed. He took a moment to re-compose himself and said, “Very well.”

“Do you understand that the amount in play is large?”

“A large weight was bandied about, but this tells me little of the actual amount of Ridge, until the purity of the metal has been quoined.”

“How large a quoin do you propose to hack off?” said Saturn, amused.

“Large enough to balance my toils and sufferings.”

“Howsoever much you assay—assuming you truly do—you’ll find Doc, here, is no Beaker. The amount and the weight are as identical as the refiner’s fire can make ’em. And then what?”

“A transaction,” said Mr. Baynes, guardedly.

“But last time I had dealings with you, Mr. Baynes, you were in no position to move such a quantity of Ridge as Dr. Gatemouth has on his hands. A glance at your periwig tells me your fortunes have in no wise improved.”

“Peter Hoxton. I know more of your story than you of mine! Who are you to cast aspersions!?”

Now Daniel had scarcely followed a word of this, so dumbfounded was he by Mr. Baynes’s appearance. But around this time, he was able to formulate an explanation that fit the observed phenomena, viz.: Mr. Baynes had wooden teeth that had been carved to fit a larger mouth. They were forever trying to burst free of the confines of his head, which gave him a somewhat alarming, horselike appearance when it was happening. For him, speech was a continual struggle to expel words whilst keeping a grip on his dentition. Therefore he spoke in a slow, deliberate, and literally biting cadence, terminating each phrase with an incredible feat of flapping his prehensile lips around his runaway choppers and hauling them back into captivity.

The sheer effort expended—so say nothing of the risk incurred—in casting this rebuke at Saturn, gave it telling weight. Peter Hoxton recoiled, fell back in his chair, and raised a hand to run it back through his hair.

Having thus cleared the floor, Mr. Baynes continued, “Supposing a cull did have the resources” (a very difficult word for him to…pronounce…requiring a lip-wrap fore and aft) “to engage in a Transaction of the magnitude contemplated by Dr. Gatemouth—would he come here to meet with a stranger? I think not! He would delegate the matter to an underling, who would in turn choose a trusted intermediary, to make the initial contact.”

Saturn grinned, which only made his unshaven face seem darker, and shook his head. “We all know there is only one coiner in the realm who can act on this scale. There is no need to flinch, I’ll not utter his name aloud in this place. You’d have us believe, I take it, that you are speaking on behalf of some lieutenant of his?”

“A great big one-armed cove, a foreigner,” Mr. Baynes allowed.

And now, a bit of a Moment. To this point, Mr. Baynes had been putting on a passable show. But it was bad form to have volunteered such information, and he knew it.

“You see, I do not bate at divulging such data, such is my confidence that he will deal only through me.”

Doc and Saturn nodded sagely, but the damage had been done, and Mr. Baynes knew, though he might not admit, it.

The syphilitic gager on the floor, who had appeared dead for a while, had been stirring ever since Mr. Baynes had made his entrance. Daniel supposed this was an effect of the way they’d rearranged the chairs, for Daniel had moved to a new spot between the wretch and his precious coal-fire, and was blocking what little warmth spread out of it. The gager now made noises that indicated he was sitting up. Daniel did not turn around to look—he did not have to, as Saturn was watching all with green disgust. Something told Daniel to rise and get out of the way.

He and most other Fellows of the Royal Society recognized syphilis and leprosy as distinct diseases, spread in different ways. But most other persons had conflated the two diseases in their minds, and so recoiled from syphilitics in much the same way as they would from lepers. This explained everything about how Saturn was reacting now. Daniel, F.R.S. though he was, reverted to superstition in the clutch, and allowed the gager the widest possible berth as he half-crawled and half-staggered toward the hearth. Some of his limbs dragged senseless on the floor, while others moved in spasms, as if he were being stung by invisible hornets. Trailing his nest of filthy blankets behind him, he slouched on the hearth, completely eclipsing the light of the fire, and hunched even closer to it, rubbing his paralyzed hand with his twitchy one. His gray hair would be dangling and burning in the coals now if he, or someone, hadn’t wrapped it all up in a sort of bandage-turban atop his head.

“The questions that this foreign gentleman will ask of me, may be easily anticipated,” observed Mr. Baynes.

“Indeed,” Saturn returned. “The Ridge is from America.”

“As Dr. Gatemouth is known to have recently come over from Boston, no one phant’sied it came from Guinea,” Mr. Baynes said, with elaborate meanness. “The foreign gentleman will be curious: have rich new gold mines been discovered on the banks of the River Charles? Because if so—”

“If the foreign gentleman truly does represent the coiner you and I are thinking of, why, he must be a busy man, and disinclined to hear long tedious Narrations of pirate-exploits on the Spanish Main, et cetera,” Saturn said. “Does it not suffice for him to know that it is in fact Ridge? For the entire point of Ridge is that it may be confused with other Ridge, and it matters not where ’twas dug out of the ground.”

“The foreign gentleman thinks it does matter, and further, is ever alert for inconsistencies in Narrations. Indeed, in his world, where commerce is, of necessity, informal and ad hoc in the extreme, to tell a coherent Story is the sole way of establishing one’s credit.”

“Mr. Baynes is correct as far as that goes,” Saturn told Daniel in an aside. “Men of this sort are literary critics of surpassing shrewdness.”

“No convincing Tale means no Credit, and no Transaction. I am here, not to quoin your Ridge, but to assay your Story; and if I do not bring him a ripping pirate-yarn to-night, why, you are finished.”

An odd snuffing noise issued from the hearth, as if a handful of dust had been tossed on the coals. Daniel glanced over to see that the gager was rubbing feverishly at his eyes and his mouth. Perhaps the smoke had irritated his mucous membranes, and had made him sneeze and paw at the encrusted sores that so disfigured his face. Daniel then noticed that the fire was blazing up, but producing a good deal more smoke than light. The smoke was drawing swiftly up the chimney, which was fortunate, because it had an evil, thick, reddish look.

He turned his attention away from the strange actions of the gager, and back to matters at hand: Mr. Baynes, who was still prating about the foreign gentleman, and an empty chair.

The empty chair demanded a second glance, and then a third.

Mr. Baynes himself was only just becoming aware that Saturn was gone. Both of them now turned to survey the parlour, supposing that their companion might have stood up to stretch, or to rid himself of his empty mug.

Twilight had come over Salisbury Square, but enough of it sifted in through the windows to show that Peter Hoxton was no longer in the room.

Most of that light was now blocked. The women who had been perched before the lace curtain were scattering away from it. One seized a fistful of skirt and hauled it clear of her ankles, and used the other hand as a flail to clear impediments out of her course: a straight line to the nearest exit. She looked as if she were of a mind to scream, but had more important things to do just now, and so all that came from her mouth was a sort of hooting noise.

For an instant it was almost completely dark in the room, and then Daniel felt in his soul the impact of something huge upon the window. Stakes of broken wood strode end-over-end across the floor, bounding through a skittering wash of sharded glass.

He stood up. A lot of people seemed to be headed his way, as half the space in the room had been claimed by a black bulk thrust in through the obliterated window. Daniel stepped back toward the chimney-corner, knowing that, in a human stampede, he’d be the first to end up with boot-prints on his face; but suddenly there was a fizzing noise nearby, and the room was plastered with hellish light. The faces of the onrushing guests burst out of the gloom, a choir of white ovals, mouths opened, not to sing, but to scream; then they all raised hands or arms to protect their eyes. They parted to the sides of the room, faltered as they bashed into one another and stumbled over furniture, and finally came to a stand.

The center was now clear, except for a treacherous rubble of upended chairs, and Daniel had a clear view of the thing that had come in. It was a large and heavy-built wagon, like the ones used to transport bullion, but reinforced for ramming, and painted a black so profound that, even in the dissolving radiance that now filled the room, it was nothing more than a brooding blur. One part of it stood out brightly. Fixed to the prow of this terrestrial Ram was a badge of silver metal: a flat plate of polished steel cut into the flashing silhouette of a greyhound in full chase.

Doors flew open on both sides of the wagon, and good boots began to hit the floor; Daniel could see little, but he could hear the jingling of spurs, and the ring of steel blades being whisked from scabbards: Evidence that Angus’s new guests were Persons of Quality.

Daniel half-turned toward the source of the light, shielding his eyes from it with one hand, and looked at Mr. Baynes, who had lost his teeth, and seemed very old and helpless. Of all the strange things that had obtruded on Mr. Baynes’s senses in the last ten heartbeats, the one that owned his attention was the emblem of the silver greyhound. Following Mr. Baynes’s gaze, Daniel began to see it in more than one place: the men piling out of the wagon, and herding Angus’s clients into the corners at sword-point, all wore similar badges on their breasts.

The unoccupied wagon was now withdrawn from the window and dragged off to one side. Suddenly the parlour had become an annex of Salisbury Square. A large cloaked man was cantering toward them on a black stallion, with saber drawn.

He rode right into the center of the room, reined in his charger, and stood up in his stirrups, revealing a silver greyhound pinned to his coat. “High Treason!” he proclaimed, in a voice loud enough to pelt off the opposite side of the square. “I say, on your knees, all of you!”

It was true of beasts and humans alike that when they were terrified—literally scared out of their wits, beyond the pale of reason—they either froze, or ran away. To this point Mr. Baynes had been frozen. Now his instincts told him to flee. He jumped up and turned away from all those silver greyhounds that seemed to be chasing him. In so doing, he turned full into the light. But the light was now coming over him like a burning cloud, seeming to exert a palpable force that pressed him down onto his knees, and then to all fours.

Daniel’s eyes had finally adjusted to the brightness, or perhaps the light was slowly burning out. He could see now that the old gager was gone, his blankets collapsed on the hearth like a snake’s shed skin.

From them had emerged what ninety-nine percent of Christendom would identify as an angel, with flowing white hair and a sword of fire. Even Daniel was tempted to think so; but on a moment’s reflection he decided it was Sir Isaac Newton, brandishing a rod of burning phosphorus.

DURING THE HOUR that followed the descent of the Queen’s Messengers on Angus’s boozing-ken, many vivid and novel scenes presented themselves to Daniel’s organs of sense. But the next time he had a moment to sit and think—which occurred on the head of a sloop anchored in the river off Black Friars, as he was taking a splendid crap into the Thames—these were the salient facts:

Isaac had tossed a handful of some chymical powder on the fire, causing thick smoke to spew out the chimney; this had been the signal for the Queen’s Messengers to mount their assault on Angus’s boozing-ken.

Peter Hoxton and Angus had dived through a sort of bolt-hole that led from the kitchen into the cellar of a neighboring house, gone out the back door into a little poultry-yard, vaulted a wall, streaked through a whorehouse, dodged into another boozing-ken, and taken another bolt-hole into an alley called The Wilderness (this the Queen’s Messengers learned by following their trail and interrogating bystanders).

At its eastern end, The Wilderness dead-ended in the burying-ground behind Bridewell. There, Angus and Saturn had parted ways among unmarked whores’ graves, and got away clean.

The sores on Isaac’s mouth and eyes were fakes, made from the congealed latex, or sap, of a Brazilian tree.

The Captain of the Queen’s Messengers—the big man who had ridden into the ken on horseback—was none other than Mr. Charles White, he of the bear-baiting and ear-biting.

After most of Angus’s clients had been duly scared out of their wits and sent running, the Queen’s Messengers, with Daniel, Isaac, and Mr. Baynes in tow, had barrelled down the length of The Wilderness with no less speed than Saturn and Angus. Before them, Bridewell rose up above its crowded burying-ground. It was a surplus Royal palace, turned over to the poor a long time ago, half burned down in the Fire, and half rebuilt. Daniel had never really taken a good look at it before, as why would anyone want to? But this was probably the right way to see it: catching the last glimmer of blue twilight, and protected from the denizens of St. Bride’s Parish by its muddy necropolis. As they gathered speed down The Wilderness, Daniel phant’sied that they were about to make a frontal assault on Bridewell Palace, galloping across the pocked lumpy glacis of the burying ground to ram down the doors and round up the whores. But at the last moment they veered right on Dorset and charged straight into the timber yard that spread along the riverbank there.

Two lighters had been tucked up against the timber-wharf, screened, by stacks of logs, from the view of any underworld sentries who might have been peering down from high windows of Bridewell. They had been well-manned with oarsmen, and ready to cast off and pull away.

A brief twilight row had taken the Messengers (half a dozen in all), Daniel, Sir Isaac, and their prisoner to this sloop, Atalanta. For tonight’s purposes, she was all bare spars, and incognito; but the coat of arms on one of her furled flags was that of Charles White. Atalanta was his own jacht. No doubt, when the Queen was made aware, she would be most grateful.

Charles White had spent the brief row sitting knee-to-knee with Mr. Baynes, absent-mindedly fondling the collection of dried human ears strung on his watch-chain, and wondering aloud how long it would take them to sail downriver to the Tower of London, where all of the really first-rate implements of torture were to be found. He had held a speculative colloquy with his fellow Messengers, wondering whether it would suffice merely to keel-haul Mr. Baynes en route; whether the effectiveness of said keel-hauling might be enhanced by doing it at the place (a hundred yards away) where Fleet Ditch emptied into the Thames; whether, in other words, Mr. Baynes’s ability to talk would be impaired or enhanced by being made to inhale sewage; or whether they’d have to keel-haul him and then use the facilities in the Tower. The problem being that traitors, who were destined to be publicly half-hanged, castrated, drawn, and quartered anyway, frequently saw no incentive to talk.

One of White’s lieutenants—a younger gentleman, probably picked for the role because he was sweet-faced and blond—then raised the following objection: namely, that Mr. Baynes might not be destined for the man-rated butcher-block at Tyburn at all, as it was not really demonstrated, yet, that he was, in fact, a traitor. He was roundly hooted down. But a minute later he raised the same objection again, and finally was given leave to explain himself.

A wily barrister, he said, might argue that Mr. Baynes was in truth a loyal subject of Her Majesty.

Stay, stay, ’twas not so preposterous! For clearly Dr. Waterhouse was a loyal subject, merely pretending to deal with coiners as a trick to gather intelligence. Could Mr. Baynes’s barrister not advance the same claim?

No, it was ludicrous on its face, retorted Charles White—much to the dismay of Mr. Baynes, who had begun to show stirrings of hope.

For (White went on) Mr. Baynes had not, in fact, proffered any such intelligence, indeed probably did not have any. So drawing and quartering was certainly to be the fate of him, and the only question was: how hideous would his tortures have to be, between now and then, to make him do as he ought?

Daniel had the misfortune, during all of this, to be seated in the prow of the lighter, facing aft. This gave him a clear view of Charles White’s broad back, and Mr. Baynes’s hairless and toothless head, which frequently strained up or sideways to scan the boat for a sympathetic face.

To Daniel it might be perfectly evident that it was a childish masque, scripted to play on Mr. Baynes’s terrors, and to break him without thumbscrews. But Mr. Baynes—an audience of one—was captivated by the show. His disbelief had not merely been suspended; it had been fired out of a cannon into a stone wall. There was little question his resistance was broken. The only open question was: were his wits ruined, too, to the point where he’d be useless?

Would Daniel, put in the same predicament, have been able to see through the ruse so easily? He doubted it.

Though perhaps he was in the same predicament, and the show was being staged for him as much as for Mr. Baynes.

The shit that he took off Atalanta’s head was a masterpiece, exactly two well-formed packages plunging into the river like sounding-leads, and vanishing without a splash—evidence that his gut would keep functioning well after other parts of him had given way to age. He was inclined to sit there for a few minutes with his buttocks cupped in the luxuriously polished wooden annulus of the shite-hole, and to savor this triumph, just as the late Samuel Pepys had taught him to do in the case of urination. But the noises coming from belowdecks told him that he had responsibilities down there, not only to his Queen, but to Mr. Baynes.

For his fears concerning the latter had been realized. The Queen’s Messengers might be very skilled at hounding traitors, but as a theatrical troupe they were rank amateurs, utterly lacking in the all-important Sense of Audience. They had let the show go on too long, and reduced Mr. Baynes to a blubbering imbecile.

Daniel pulled his breeches back on, went aft, and, at the top of the narrow staircase that led belowdecks, nearly collided with a man coming up for some fresh air. The only thing that prevented it was the other chap’s white hair, which shone in the light of the half-moon, and gave Daniel a moment’s warning.

He backed up and allowed Isaac to join him on deck.

“Mr. Hoxton has shown his colours, I should say,” Isaac remarked.

“What—by running off?”

“Indeed.”

“If he had stayed to be keel-hauled, thumbscrewed, drawn, and quartered, we’d know him to be a trustworthy chap, is that it?”

Isaac was mildly affronted. “No such fate would have befallen him, had he shown a willingness to serve the Queen.”

“The only way in which Peter Hoxton can be of service to the Queen—or to you—is to bring me intelligence from the flash world. If he had not run away, he would have thereby declared himself an enemy of all things flash, and become perfectly useless. By escaping, along with Angus, he has enhanced his reputation beyond measure!”

“It is of no account. Your rôle is now played out. And well played. I thank you.”

“Why did you send the smoke-signal? Why not wait to see what else Baynes would divulge?”

“He had already over-stepped, and divulged too much,” Isaac retorted, “and he knew it. He grew reticent, and, to try you, asked you for your story. I knew you had none, or at least, none fit to withstand the scrutiny of this one-armed foreigner, or even of Mr. Baynes. My decision was: Let us advance!”

“What is it you need from Mr. Baynes now, in order to advance?”

AT DANIEL’S INSISTENCE, Charles White and his merry men left Mr. Baynes alone for a few minutes in a cabin, though they made sure to put him in irons first, so that he’d not devise some way to evade justice by committing suicide.

Daniel lurked outside the cabin door until Mr. Baynes stopped sobbing and whimpering, then counted slowly to a hundred (for he himself needed to calm down a bit), then opened the hatch and went through, carrying a lit candle.

Mr. Baynes was on a bench with his hands fettered behind his back. Before him was a plank table. He had slumped forward so his head lay on it. Daniel was certain he had expired from a stroke, until he perceived the prisoner’s pinioned arms slowly rising and falling, as his lungs filled and emptied like the bellows of an Irish bagpipe.

Daniel wished he could fall asleep, too. For a few minutes he sat there nodding drowsily in the light of the candle-flame. But he could hear booted and spurred feet pacing round the deck overhead, and he knew perfectly well that he was not anchored in some placid cove, but only a few yards off Black Friars, London.

“Wake up.”

“Eh—?” Baynes pulled against his irons, then regretted it and sat up, his spine creaking and popping like an old mast taking a gust. His mouth was a dry hole, pushed in like a wound. He refused to meet Daniel’s eye.

“Will you talk to me?” Daniel asked.

Mr. Baynes considered it, but said nothing. Daniel rose to his feet. Mr. Baynes watched him sidelong. Daniel reached into his pocket. Baynes tensed, getting ready to suffer. Daniel drew his fist out, flipped it over, and opened it to display, on the palm of his hand, Mr. Baynes’s set of false teeth.

Baynes’s eyes got wide and he lunged like a cobra, yawning. Daniel fed the teeth to him and he sucked and gummed them in. Daniel stepped back, wiping his hand on his breeches, and Mr. Baynes sat up straight, having seemingly swapped a new and better skull for the faulty one he’d woken up with.

“You are a gentleman, sir, a gentleman. I marked you as such the moment I saw you—”

“In truth I am no gentleman, though I can be a gentle man. Mr. Charles White is a gentleman. He has already explained what he means to do to you. He means what he says; why, I’m surprised you still have both of your ears. Save thine ears, and the rest of thyself, by telling me where and when you are supposed to meet the one-armed foreigner.”

“You know that I shall be killed, of course.”

“Not if you serve your Queen as you ought.”

“Oh, but then I shall be killed by Jack the Coiner.”

“And if not by Jack, then by old age,” Daniel returned, “unless apoplexy or typhus take you first. If I knew of a way to avoid dying, I’d share it with you, and the whole world.”

“Sir Isaac knows of a way, or so ’tis rumored.”

“Spouting Alchemical rubbish is not a way to get in my good graces. Telling me the whereabouts of the one-armed foreigner is.”

“Your point is well taken, concerning mortality. In truth, ’tis not fear of mine own fate that stopped my tongue.”

“Whose then?”

“My daughter’s.”

“And where is your daughter?”

“Bridewell.”

“You fear that some revenge will be taken on her if you assist the Queen’s Messengers?”

“I do. For she is known to the Black-guard.”

“Surely Charles White has the power to get one girl sprung from Old Nass,” Daniel reflected. Then he stopped short, astounded to hear himself speaking like a criminal.

“Aye. Straight from there, to his bedchamber, to be his whore until he has worn her out, at which point he’ll no doubt give her a decent interment in Fleet Ditch!” Mr. Baynes was as upset to imagine this horror, as he would have been to witness it, and had gone all twitchy now; his wooden teeth were chattering together, and clear snot was streaming out of one nostril.

“And you phant’sy I am a decent sort?”

“I said it before, sir, you are a gentle man.”

“If I give you my word that I’ll go to the Spinning-Ken and look after your daughter—”

“Not so loud, I pray you! For I do not want Mr. White to so much as know that she exists!”

“I am no less wary of him than are you, Mr. Baynes.”

“Then—you give your word, Dr. Gatemouth?”

“I do.”

“Her name is Hannah Spates, and she pounds hemp in Mr. Wilson’s shop, for she’s a strong girl.”

“Done.”

“Prithee, send in the Queen’s Messengers.”

DANIEL’S REWARD FOR THIS makeshift act of grace was a free moon-light river-cruise to the Tower of London. This was strangely idyllic. The best part of it was that Charles White and his platoon of feral gentlemen were not present; for after a short conversation with Mr. Baynes, they had flocked on the deck like a murder of crows, clambered back into the row-boats, and set off for Black Friars Stairs.

Even the passage of London Bridge, which, on a smaller boat, was always a Near Death Experience—the sort of event gentlemen would go home and write down, in the expectation that people would want to read about it—was uneventful. They fired a swivel-gun to wake up the drawbridge-keeper in Nonsuch House, and raised a silver-greyhound banner. He stopped traffic on London Bridge, and raised the span for them, and the sloop’s master suffered the current to flush them through into the Pool.

Half an hour later they clambered by torch-light into the dank kerf of a Tower Wharf staircase. As Daniel ascended the stair, and his head rose through the plane of the Wharf, the whole Tower complex unfolded before and above him like a vast black book, writ on pages of jet in fire and smoke.

Almost directly ahead on the wharf stood a jumble of small buildings fenced about with a palisade. The wicket had been opened by one of the Wharf Guard standing the night watch. Daniel moved through it in a crowd, and entered one of the small buildings, troubled by the sense that he was invading someone’s dwelling. Indeed he was, as this Wharf-apartment seemed to be home for (at least) a porter, a sutler, a tavern-keeper, and diverse members of their families. But a few steps on, he felt timbers under his feet and sensed that they’d passed through into a different space: they were outdoors again, crossing over a wooden causeway that spanned a straight lead of quiet water. It must be the Tower moat, and this must be a drawbridge.

The planking led to a small opening in the sheer face of the Tower’s outer wall. On the right hand, a wedge-shaped bastion was thrust out from the same wall, but it offered no doorways: only embrasures and murder-holes from which defenders could shower fatal attentions upon people trying to get across this bridge. But tonight the drawbridge was down, the portcullis was up, no projectiles were spitting out of the orifices of the Tower. The group slowed down to file through a sort of postern gate into the base of Byward Tower.

To their left was a larger gate leading to the causeway that served as the Tower’s main land entrance, but it had been closed and locked for the night. And indeed, as soon as the last of their group had made it across the drawbridge, the postern gate was closed behind them, and locked by a middle-aged bloke in a night-cap and slippers. Daniel had enough Tower lore stored up in his brain to suspect that this would be the Gentleman Porter, and that he must live in one of the flats that abounded in this corner of the complex. So they were locked in for the night.

With the gates closed, the ground floor of Byward Tower was a tomb. Isaac and Daniel instinctively moved out from under it and into the open cross where Mint Street came together with Water Lane. There they tarried for a minute to watch Mr. Baynes being frog-marched off to a dungeon somewhere.

Anyone who entered the Tower of London as they just had, expecting to pass through a portal and find himself in an open bailey, would be disappointed. Byward Tower, through which they’d just passed, was the corner-stone of the outer defenses. All it afforded was entry to a narrow belt of land surrounding the inner defenses, which were much higher and more ancient.

But even an expert on medieval fortifications would be perplexed by what Daniel and Isaac could see from here, which in no way resembled a defensive system. They appeared, rather, to be standing in the intersection of two crowded streets in pre-Fire London. Somewhere behind the half-timbered fronts of the houses and taverns that lined those streets lay defensive works of stone and mortar that would make the Inner Ward impregnable to a pre-gunpowder army. But in order to see those medieval bastions, embrasures, et cetera, one would have to raze and scrape off everything that had been built atop and in front of them, a project akin to sacking a small English town.

Byward Tower was a Gordian knot in and of itself, in that it connected the complex’s two most important gates to its most congested corner. But that was only its ground floor. The building consisted of two circular towers bridged together, and was a favorite place to keep important prisoners. It now stood to one side of Daniel and Isaac. To their other side was the enormous, out-thrust bulk of Bell Tower, the southwestern bastion of the inner wall. But Daniel only knew this because he was a scholar who’d looked at old pictures of the place. Much more obvious were the ground-level structures built facing the street: a couple of taverns right at the base of Bell Tower, more sutlers’ shacks, and small houses and apartments heaped and jumbled against and on top of every ledge of stone that afforded purchase.

Anyone coming into such a crowded place would instinctively scan for a way out. The first one that met the eye, as one came in through Byward Gate, was Water Lane—the strip of pavement between inner and outer defenses, along the river side. This view was half-blocked by Bell Tower and its latter-day excrescences, but none the less seemed like the obvious path to choose, for Water Lane was broad. And because it was open to the public during the daytime, it was generally free of clutter.

The other choice was to make a hard left, turning one’s back on the river, and wander off into what looked like a medieval slum, thrown up against the exterior of a Crusader castle by a lot of bustling rabble who were not allowed to come in and mingle with the knights and squires. The spine of it was a single narrow lane. On the left side of that lane ran a series of old casemates, which in soldier-parlance meant fortified galleries, specifically meant to be overrun by invaders, so that defenders, purposely stranded inside of them, could shoot through the windows into the attackers’ backs and turn the ditch into a killing-ground. In new forts, the casemates were burrowed into the ramparts, and protected by earth. In obsolete ones like this, they were built against the inner faces of curtain-walls. The ones on the left side of Mint Street were of that sort. They rose nearly to the height of the outer wall, obscuring it, and making it easy to forget that all of this was built intra muros. Gunpowder had long since made them militarily useless, and they had been remodeled into workshops and barracks for the Mint.

On the right side, packed in tight as they could be, but never rising above a certain level—like mussels along the tide-line—another line of buildings clung to the higher walls of the inner defenses.

From the corner there at Byward, it all looked like the wreckage of a burnt city that had been raked into a stone sluice where it wanted a good rainstorm to quench the flames, beat down the smoke, and wash it away. The rhythmic crashing noises echoing down the length of this dung-choked ghetto provided the only clue that something of an organized nature was going on in there; but this hardly made Mint Street seem more inviting, even when one knew (as Daniel did) that the incessant bashing was the sound of coins being minted by trip-hammers.

In a funny way, he thought, this burning gutter was a sort of counterpart to Fleet Ditch.

Since the Fleet was full of earth and water, and Mint Street full of fire and air, this was not an insight that ever would have come to Daniel’s mind, if not for the fact that, just a few scant minutes before, he had been staring up the one, and now here he was, staring up the other.

On further reflection, he decided that the two had nothing in common, save that both ran in the same direction to the Thames, and both were cluttered and stagnant and had a lot of shit in them.

He had known Isaac for fifty years, and so he knew, with perfect certainty, that Isaac would turn away from the clear, cool, pleasant prospect of Water Lane, and march into the metallic seething of Mint Street. This he now did, and Daniel was content to follow in his wake. He’d never penetrated more than a few yards into the Mint; the farthest he’d ever gotten was the office that was just inside the entrance, on the left side of the Lane, and up some stairs. Of course Isaac swept past it and kept on going.

The Tower of London was essentially square, though, to be pedantic, an elbow in its northern side made it into a pentagon. The strip between inner and outer walls ran the full circuit. The southern side, along the river, was accounted for by Water Lane; but everything else was Mint Street, which was to say that the Mint embraced the Tower of London on three sides (technically four, taking the northern elbow into account).

Strange as it might seem, in a town with but a single street, it was easy to get lost. The view down the street was obstructed by ten different bastions thrust out from the inner wall, and so one could never see very far. Daniel was of course aware that he was in a horseshoe-shaped continuum, but once he lost count of the towers, this did him little practical good. By walking faithfully in one direction or the other, he would eventually come to an extremity of the horseshoe, and exit onto one end or the other of Water Lane. But the length of the Mint was a quarter of a mile, which for a Londoner might as well have been the distance between Oslo and Rome. Such an interval sufficed to distinguish between the Fleet Ditch and the Royal Society, or the Houses of Parliament at Westminster and the knackers’ yards of Southwark. So by the time he’d followed Isaac past a couple of those bastions, and gone round a turn or two, Daniel felt as if he’d ventured deep into a city as outlandish as Algiers or Nagasaki.

Two hundred feet in, the way was bottlenecked by the handsome semicircular curve of Beauchamp Tower. Directly across from it, crammed against the outer wall, were the long casemates where silver and gold were melted down in great furnaces. Continuing north, they immediately passed more casemates containing the coin-bashers. Then they rounded their first corner, another bottleneck between the bastion of Devereux Tower and a low bulky fort in the vertex of the outer wall, called Legge’s Mount. Both were made very strong, and both were still manned by the Black Torrent Guard, to withstand bombardment from that æternal Menace, London, which pressed in close on the Tower here.

Isaac slowed, and looked at Daniel as if he wanted to say something.

Daniel glanced curiously down the segment of Mint Street that had just come into view. He was strangely let down to see that it was quiet and almost peaceful. He’d been hoping that the Mint would only become more Hellish the deeper he went into it, like the Inferno according to Dante, and that in its deepest penetralia would be a forge of surpassing hotness where Isaac turned lead into gold. But from this corner ’twas plain that the climax had come already—that all the big, hot, and loud bits were close to the entrance (which made sense logistically, he had to admit) and that this northern limb was what passed for a sedate residential neighborhood. It was about as hellish as Bloomsbury Square. Which only went to show that Englishmen could live anywhere. Condemn an Englishman to hell, and he’d plant a bed of petunias and roll out a nice bowling-green on the brimstone.

Isaac now said something the precise wording of which scarcely mattered. The import was that Daniel was an impediment to his arcane nocturnal researches, and would he please go away. Daniel answered with some pleasantry and Isaac hurried away, leaving Daniel alone to rove up and down a quarter-mile of Mint.

He gave it a once-over, just to stop feeling lost. The northern limb sported a couple of houses at first, obviously for high Mint officials. Then it was workmen’s barracks on the left side, and, on the right, milling machines of some sort, perhaps the ones that stamped inscriptions on the edges of coins to foil clippers.

As he approached the northern elbow he found himself among soldiers, and thought he’d somehow wandered astray; but after getting round the turn he began to see, again, Mint dwellings on the left and milling shops on the right. So ’twould seem the conversion of military casemates to monetary workhouses was a work still in progress.

There was another sharp right turn, pinched between the bastion where they kept the Crown Jewels and another defensive mount, like Legge’s, in the outer wall. This brought him round to the eastern limb of the Mint, which ran straight south to Water Lane. A few strangely pleasant houses with gardens soon gave way to more of a smoky, glowing, banging character: probably the Irish Mint, which appeared to run all the way to the end.

By all rights he ought to’ve been tired. But the noise and vigor of the Mint infected his blood, and he ended up walking the entire length of it several times before he began to feel the effects of his long day.

The chapel bell tolled midnight from the Inner Ward as Daniel was rounding the northwest corner, near Legge’s Mount, for the third time. Daniel took it as a signal to duck into a little court along the outer wall, a gap between casemates, which had been beckoning to him. It appeared to belong to one of the Mint officials, who kept a wee casemate-house just next to it, as cozy as a dwelling made from a last-ditch fortress defense could ever be. At any rate, the court had a bench in it. Daniel sat down on that bench and fell asleep suddenly.

His watch claimed it was two o’clock in the morning when he, and all the workers who dwelt along Mint Street, were awakened by a sort of Roman Triumph making its way up from Byward Tower. Or at least it sounded as loud and proud as that. But when Daniel finally got up from his bench, dry and stiff as a cadaver, and tottered out to look, he thought it bore the aspect of a funeral-procession.

Charles White was riding atop the black wagon, which was surrounded by cloaked out-riders—mounted Messengers—and followed by a troop of soldiers on foot: two platoons of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards, who garrisoned the Tower, and who (or so Daniel gathered) were in the unenviable position of being at the beck and call of Charles White, whenever he wanted reinforcements. The black wagon itself was now padlocked from the outside.

A strange parade it was. Yet much better suited to this horseshoe-town than any of your sunlit, gay, flower-strewing, music-playing parades. Daniel could not help but fall in step with it as the wagon came abreast of him.

“So!” Daniel exclaimed, “ ’twould appear that the information provided by our guest was correct.”

He could feel White’s glare on his face like sunburn. “All I’ll allow is that our hen squawked, and laid an egg, whose savour is not yet proved. More eggs had better follow, and they had best be full of excellent meat, or else that hen shall furnish Jack Ketch with a dish of wings and drumsticks.”

White’s hen/egg gambit drew light applause. “How’ll you try this egg we have just gathered, sir?” asked one of the foot-soldiers.

“Why, crack its shell first,” he returned, “and then ’tis a choice, whether to fry it on the griddle, boil it ’til hard, scramble it—or eat it raw!”

Another round of laughter for this witticism. Daniel regretted having exposed himself in Mint Street. But they were now making the turn at the elbow, bringing new buildings and bastions in view, and White had lost interest.

“We have him!” White proclaimed, seemingly talking to the moon. But following White’s gaze, Daniel was able to make out Isaac’s silhouette against a narrow archway on the right side, backlit by several torches; or was that the false dawn of furnace-light?

They’d worked their way round to the best district of the whole Mint: the northeast, where the Master and Warden had their private houses and courts on the left. But Isaac was on the right. The arch in which he stood was some kind of sally-port of the Inner Keep.

“He fought like Hercules,” White continued, “despite being one-armed. And we could not clap him in manacles for the same reason!” Everyone laughed. “This holds him very well, though!” He rapped on the roof of the wagon.

The procession drew to a halt there, under the embrasures of the bastion called Brick Tower. Daniel now perceived that Brick Tower had been conceived as a mustering-place where the very bravest, drunkest, or stupidest knights in the Tower of London would gather in preparation for a sally. When they were ready, they would charge down a stone stair that ran along the front of the inner wall, make a sharp left, and continue down a second flight, erupting from the door where Isaac was standing, into the ditch, where God knows what would transpire between them and any foe-men who’d penetrated that far, and survived the fire from the casemates.

All of which was of primarily historical interest tonight. Save that this sally-stair held, in the crook of its arm as it were, a large storehouse, and next to it a stable, belonging to the Mint. These buildings obscured the lower half of Brick Tower, and for all Daniel knew, might be connected with it through passageways—squinting at old sooty out-buildings in the dark at two in the morning left plenty of lee-way for the imagination.

At any rate, the horses drawing the black wagon were obviously of the view that they were home, and the night’s work finished. It was into those dark buildings that the wagon was now conducted. The Messengers remained within, the Guards emerged and dispersed to their barracks, some of which were all of fifty paces away.

This left Daniel alone in the street. Or so he phant’sied, for a few moments, until he noticed a red coal bobbing up and down in a moon-shadow across the way, and realized that someone was lurking there, smoking a pipe, and observing him.

“Did you participate, Sergeant Shaftoe?”

He was only making an educated guess. But the pipe-coal emerged from the shadows, and the form of Bob coalesced in moon-light.

“I dodged that detail, I do confess, Guv.”

“Such errands are not to your liking?”

“Let some youngster take the glory. Opportunities for action are scarce of late, now that the war is in recess.”

“At the other end of town,” said Daniel, “they do not say ’tis in recess, but finished.”

“What other end of town would that be, then?” demanded Bob, feigning elderly daftness. “Would you be speaking of Westminster?” He said that in a very good accent. But then he reverted to mudlark Cockney. “You can’t mean the Kit-Cat Clubb.”

“Nay, e’en at the Kit-Cat Clubb they say the same.”

“To Doctors they say it, I think. To soldiers they say different things. The discourse of the Whigs is cloven like a devil’s hoof.”

An ugly commotion now arose within the stable at the foot of Brick Tower, which, while Doctor Waterhouse and Sergeant Shaftoe had been conversing, had been lit up with torches. The doors of the wagon had been unlocked, and men were shouting in a way Daniel hadn’t heard since he’d gone to the bear-baiting in Rotherhithe. From where they were standing, it was not loud. But something in the tenor of it made it out of the question for Daniel and Bob to continue their talk. Suddenly it rose to such a pitch that Daniel shrank away, thinking that the prisoner might be about to escape altogether. There was a tattoo of thumps, and a scream or two; then momentary silence, broken by a man calling out in a language of bent vowels and outlandish syllables.

“I have heard curses in many tongues, but this one is new to me,” Bob remarked. “Where’s the prisoner from?”

“He is from Muscovy,” Daniel decided, after listening for a few more moments, “and he is not cursing, but praying.”

“If that is how Muscovites sound when they talk to God, I’d hate to hear their blaspheming.”

After that, all movements inside the stable were accompanied by the clanking of irons. “They put a collar on him,” Bob said learnedly. The sounds receded, then vanished all of a sudden. “He’s in the Tower now,” Bob announced. “God have mercy on him.” He sighed, and gazed down the length of the street in the direction of the full moon, which was swinging low over London. “I had better rest,” he said, “and so had you—if you intend to come.”

“Come where?” Daniel asked.

“Wherever we are directed by the Russian.”

It took a moment for Daniel to work through all that was implied by this. “You think that they will torture him—and he will break—and lead us to—?”

“It is only a matter of time, once Charles White has him in the Tower. Come, I’ll get you a proper billet, away from the noise.”

“What noise?” Daniel asked, because the Mint had been extraordinarily quiet these last few minutes. But as he followed Bob Shaftoe back up the street, he began to hear, through one of the open embrasures in Brick Tower, the sound of a man screaming.

River Thames

THE NEXT MORNING (23 APRIL 1714)

“IN THE END THE MUSCOVITE spoke willingly,” Isaac announced.

He and Daniel were on the poop deck of Charles White’s sloop Atalanta. Twelve hours had passed since the Muscovite had been brought into the Tower.

Daniel had spent one of those hours attempting to sleep in the officers’ quarters of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Then the whole Tower had been roused by a call to arms. Or so it had seemed, from the perspective of one savagely irritable old man who desperately wanted to sleep. In truth, only the First Company of the Guards was rousted. To the other denizens of the Tower it was the most delicious sort of nocturnal alarm: one that gave occasion only to roll over and go back to sleep.

After some few minutes of fuss and bother, which he scarcely remembered since he’d been asleep on his feet, Daniel had been sent out of the Tower of London the way he’d come in, and ushered aboard Atalanta. He had repaired to a small cabin and seized the first thing that looked like a bunk. Some time later he had been awakened by sunlight, and peered out a window to discover that they had moved all of a quarter of a mile from Tower Wharf. Situation Normal: some foul-up had brought the proceeding (whatever it was) to a stand; they had Hurried Up only to Wait. He had pulled a blanket over his face and gone back to sleep.

When he’d finally woken up, not long ago, and dragged himself, stiff and foul and squinty-eyed, abovedecks to piss over the rail, he’d been startled to find open country around them, and the river’s width swollen to a mile. He guessed they were nearing the end of Long Reach, between Erith and Greenhithe, which would put them about halfway from London to the sea.

To get to the rail, he had to “beg your pardon” through many dragoons. The entire First Company—more than a hundred men—had been crammed aboard. Even when half of them were packed in belowdecks, this made the upperdeck so crowded that men could not sit down. Rather than trying to walk upon the deck, the sloop’s able seamen scampered like spiders through rigging overhead. Fortunately, as was the practice on all well-run ships, the aft or poop was reserved for officers; and Fellows of the Royal Society were given honorary status as such. Once he’d dragged himself up the stairs to the poop, Daniel found elbow room to spare, and plenty of space along the rail to get fresh air, to urinate, and to spit out the cottony stuff that had grown in his mouth while he’d been sleeping. A cabin-boy, perhaps alarmed by the volume of fluid this already-shriveled gager was discharging into the Thames, even brought him a ladle of water.

And at some point Sir Isaac appeared at his elbow, making his day complete.

“He spoke willingly,” Daniel repeated, trying not to sound aghast.

“Indeed, for a choice was laid before him: endure confinement and interrogation in the Tower to the end of his days, or tell what he knew, and be returned to Russia. He chose Russia.”

“Well if you put it that way, anyone who speaks under torture does so willingly,” Daniel pointed out. Normally he would have been slower to jab at Isaac, but he was in a wretched state, and moreover, had performed a great boon for Isaac during the previous day.

Isaac retorted, “I saw the Muscovite returning to his cell on his own two feet when it was over. Whatever was done to him was less violent—though it may have been more excruciating—than the beatings that are given to yon soldiers, every day, for trifling offenses. Mr. White knows ways of securing the cooperation of prisoners without inflicting permanent injury.”

“He’ll go back to Muscovy with both of his ears, then?”

“His ears, his eyes, his beard, and all the limbs he came in with.”

Daniel had not yet turned to look Isaac in the face. Instead he was facing abaft, looking at a pair of flat-bottomed river boats that followed in their wake. These were laden mostly with horses, and all the clutter that went with them, viz. saddles, tack, and grooms. No wonder they’d been slow to get underway.

While he’d been conversing with Isaac, the sloop had been negotiating a zigzag in the river, and widening its lead over the horse-barges; now they were swinging wide round a large, marshy lobe in the south bank, and coming in view of a place, a couple of miles downstream, where bright green downs and white chalk-hills crowded the right bank, and gave purchase for a river-side settlement. There, he knew, would be Gravesend. The seamen who were manning the sloop—scattered very thin over the crowd of Guards—became more alert. The laconic, incomprehensible commands of the sloop’s captain came more frequently. They were going to put in there. Indeed, they had few other choices, as once they got below Gravesend there’d be nothing but ooze all the way to the North Sea; and what was the point of barging a lot of horses down the river to drown ’em?

“What do you imagine a Russian was doing here, in business with Jack the Coiner?” Daniel asked.

“Jack enjoys the lavish support of some foreign potentate, most likely the King of France,” Isaac answered. “For make no mistake, the commerce of England is envied by all the world. Those Kings who cannot raise their own realms to our level, phant’sy that they can bring us down to theirs, by polluting our coinage. If the King of France may harbor such ambitions, why, so may the Tsar of all the Russias.”

“You think the Muscovite is a Tsarish agent?”

“That is the most creditable explanation.”

“You said he had a beard?”

“Indeed, a long luxuriant one.”

“How many years’ growth, would you say?”

“Soaked and stretched, it would extend below his navel.”

“He sounds like a Raskolnik to me,” Daniel said.

“What’s a Raskolnik?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. But they hate the Tsar. And one of the reasons they hate him is that he has decreed that they must shave off their long luxuriant beards.”

This silenced Isaac for a while, by forcing him to carry out immense recalculations. Daniel took unfair advantage of it to add: “Not long ago a new warship being built for the Tsar in Rotherhithe was burned by an Infernal Device, secreted in the recesses of the hull during the night-time. It used clock-work to shatter a phial containing white phosphorus, which, when the air touched it, burst into flame. Or so I have inferred from smelling its smoke, and sifting through the residue.”

Isaac was too fascinated by the news to wonder how Daniel had come by it. “That is the same mechanism as was used to set off the explosion in Crane Court!”

“Been looking into it, have you?”

“I did not ignore the warning you sent me.”

“The one-armed Muscovite is no foreign agent,” Daniel prophesied, “but a sort of Phanatique who absconded from Russia for the same reason that my great-grandfather, John Waterhouse, fled to Geneva during the reign of Bloody Mary. At loose ends in London, he somehow became a part of Jack’s criminal net-work. I am quite certain he has not the slightest intention of going back to Russia.”

“Your hypothesis is belied by your own evidence,” Isaac said. He had reverted to a high, magnificent tone that he used for philosophical discourse. “You have convinced me that the same organization that set off the Crane Court explosion, burned the Tsar’s ship in Rotherhithe. But a mere band of criminals does not pursue foreign policy!”

“It may be that the Swedes paid them to destroy the ship a-building,” Daniel said, “which is easier than sinking it after it is launched and armed. Or it may be that the Muscovite, being, as I gad, a sort of Phanatique, did it by himself, as Puritans used to strike whatever blows they might against the King.”

Isaac reflected for a moment, then said, “To carry on discourse, of a speculative nature, about Jack’s organization and its designs, is idle.”

“Why is it idle?”

“Because in a few hours they will be in our power, and then we may simply ask them.”

“Ah,” Daniel said, “I could not tell if we were going to arrest Jack the Coiner, or invade France.”

Isaac briefly made a noise that sounded like laughing. “We are going to lay siege to a castle.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“ ’Tis a Jacobite stronghold,” Isaac said. He was being just a bit facetious.

“So in a sense we are going to invade France,” Daniel muttered.

“One might think of it as a chip of France on the banks of the Thames,” Isaac said, showing a taste for whimsy that was, to say the least, out of character. But (as shown by the laugh and the sarcasm) he’d learned a conversational gambit or two during his decades in London.

For example, prating about the genealogy of noble families: “You remember the Angleseys, I am certain.”

“How could I not?” Daniel answered.

Indeed, the very mention of the name forced him to come awake, as if he had had just been told that the sails of Blackbeard had been sighted on the horizon. He looked Isaac full in the face for the first time since the conversation had begun.

As a young man Daniel had known the Angleseys as a clan of dangerous crypto-Catholic court fops. The patriarch, Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, had been a contemporary, and a mortal rival, of John Comstock, who was the Earl of Epsom and the first great noble backer of the Royal Society. Comstock had been the C, and Anglesey the first A, in the CABAL, the group of five who had run the Restoration government of Charles II.

In those days Daniel had been too naïve to comprehend just how close the connections were between the Angleseys and the royal family. Later, he’d learned that the two sons of Thomas More Anglesey, Louis (the Earl of Upnor) and Phillip (Count Sheerness), were both bastards of Charles II, fathered on a French Countess during the Interregnum, when Charles had been exiled in France. Thomas More Anglesey had then been induced, somehow, to marry the embarrassed Countess and raise the two boys. He’d done a wretched job of it—perhaps he’d been distracted by ceaseless plot-making against John Comstock.

The younger of the two “Anglesey” bastards, Louis, had been a great swordsman, and had used Puritans as practice targets during his years at Trinity College, Cambridge. He’d been there at the same time as Daniel, Isaac, and various other fascinating human specimens, including Roger Comstock and the late Duke of Monmouth. Later, Louis had become interested in Alchemy. Daniel even now blamed him for seducing Isaac into the Esoteric Brotherhood. But there was no point in laying blame today—for the Earl of Upnor had perished a quarter-century ago at the Battle of Aughrim, fending off a hundred Puritans, Germans, Danes, &c. with his rapier, until shot in the back.

By that time his supposed father, the Duke of Gunfleet, had long since died. The Duke’s final years had not been good ones. Having ruined the Silver Comstocks—driven John into rustic retirement, and the rest of them all the way to Connecticut—and having taken over their house in St. James’s, he had seen his own fortunes destroyed, by bad investments, by his sons’ gambling debts (which must have hurt him all the more, as they weren’t really his sons), and above all by the Popish Plot, which was a sort of politico-religious rabies that had taken over London round 1678. He had packed the entire family off to France and sold the London palace to Roger Comstock, who had promptly leveled it with the ground and turned it into a real estate development. In France the Duke had died—Daniel had no idea when, but it would have been a long time ago—leaving only Phillip, Count Sheerness: the older of the two bastards.

Count Sheerness. All of these names—Gunfleet, Upnor, and Sheerness—referred to places round the mouth of the Thames, and had been handed out to the Angleseys by Charles II in reward for services performed at time of the Restoration. Daniel could only recollect a few of the details. Thomas More Anglesey had been in a wee naval scrap off Gunfleet Sands, and sunk a boat-load of die-hard Puritan sailors, or something like that, and had proceeded to the Buoy of the Nore, where he’d rallied a lot of Royalist ships around him.

The Nore was a sandbar—really the extremity of a vast region of shifting sands deposited round the place where the Thames and the Medway joined together and emptied into the sea. A Buoy had always been anchored there, a few miles off Sheerness Fort, to warn incoming ships, and to force them to choose between going to port—which would, God and tides willing, take them up the Medway, under the guns of Sheerness Fort and then of Castle Upnor, and eventually to Rochester and Chatham—or to starboard, which set them on the way up the Thames to London. Anglesey’s makeshift fleet had been neither the first nor the last invasion force to use that buoy as a rallying-point. The Dutch had done it a few years later. In fact, one of the peculiar duties assigned to the naval ships in this part of the river was to sail up to the Buoy and blow it out of the water whenever serious trouble loomed, so that foreign invaders could not find it.

At the time Charles II had come back, the ignominious Dutch invasion lay in the future, and Sheerness and Upnor seemed glorious names. But to any Englishman who’d been alive and awake during the Anglo-Dutch War, most certainly including Daniel and Isaac, such words as “Buoy of the Nore” and “Sheerness” connoted dark doings by foreigners, farcical bungling by Englishmen, grievous humiliation, proof of England’s vulnerability to seaborne intruders.

So if Isaac’s reference to Count Sheerness was the ink, then all of this history was the page the ink was printed on.

If they kept going as they were, they’d be in view of the Buoy of the Nore in a few hours.

“You can’t be serious,” Daniel blurted.

“If I observed faces, instead of stars, and philosophized about thinking, instead of Gravity, I could write a treatise about what I have seen passing over your visage in these past thirty seconds,” Isaac said.

“I wonder if I am arrogant to think that Waterhouses are no less deeply enmeshed in the affairs of the world, than Angleseys or Comstocks. For just when I think that all have passed on, and my connections to them severed—”

“You find yourself on a boat for Sheerness,” Isaac concluded.

“Tell me the tale, then,” Daniel said, “for I’ve not kept up with the Angleseys.”

“They’ve a French name now, and French titles, inherited from the mother of Louis and Phillip, and they dwell at Versailles, save when they are at the exile court in St.-Germain, paying homage to the Pretender. Only Phillip survived long enough to propagate the line—he had two sons before he was poisoned by his wife in 1700. The sons are in their twenties; neither has been to England or speaks a word of English. But the older of the two remains Lord of the Manor in certain pockets of land around Sheerness, on either bank of the Medway.”

“And ’tis unthinkable he’d be anything but a Jacobite.”

“The situation of his properties is most convenient for smugglers—or for agents of France. In particular he is lord of a certain lonely castle that stands off the Isle of Grain, in view of the open sea, and that may be reached directly from the Continent without interference by Her Majesty’s Customs agents.”

“Was all of this information provided by the Russian? For I am not inclined to trust him.”

“The tale of the absorption of the Angleseys into France is well known. The particulars concerning Shive Tor come from the Muscovite.”

“You stated a minute ago that Jack the Coiner was an agent of Louis XIV,” Daniel said, “and that he was generously supported. You are telling me that this thing you call Shive Tor—”

“Has been made available to Jack,” Isaac concluded. “It is the head-quarters of his criminal empire, his treasure-keep, his bolt-hole, his conduit to France.”

It is a convenient explanation, Daniel said to himself, for the fact that a varlet has been able to evade you for so many years. But he knew if he said it aloud, Isaac would heave him overboard.

“You phant’sy that’s where it is, don’t you?”

Isaac stared at him, and did not so much as blink for a long time. After a bit this made Daniel nervous, and as if he needed to fill in the silence with some words. “It would make sense,” he continued, “if the gold—the Solomonic Gold—came off a ship, as you suppose—what better place to unload it, and to store it, than a remote and obscure watch-tower, without most of Her Majesty’s defenses and customs houses?”

“I shall thank you not to divulge this to the others. We must take utmost care until the gold is safe in the Tower of London.”

“What then?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Suppose you find King Solomon’s Gold in Shive Tor and bring it home to your laboratory, and extract the Philosophic Mercury from it—that’s it, then, isn’t it?”

“That’s what, then?”

“It’s the End of the World or something, it is the Apocalypse, you’ve solved the riddle, found God’s presence on Earth, the secret of eternal life—really, this entire conversation is idle, in a sense—none of it matters, does it?”

“There is no telling,” Isaac said, in the soothing tones of one who is trying to calm a madman. “My calculations from the Book of Revelation suggest that the End of the World will not occur until 1876.”

“Really!?” Daniel said, fascinated. “That’s a hell of a long time. A hundred sixty-two years! Perhaps this Solomonic Gold is over-rated.”

“Solomon had it,” Isaac pointed out, “and the world did not come to an end then, did it? Christ Jesus Himself—the Word made flesh—trod the earth for thirty-three years, and even now, seventeen centuries later, the world is a heathenish and foul place. Never did I suppose that the Solomonic Gold was to be the world’s Panacea.”

“What is it, then? What is the bleeding point?”

“If nothing else,” Isaac said, “it will furnish me with the means to give the German a warm welcome when he comes over the sea.”

And he turned away from Daniel and went belowdecks.

Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London

AFTERNOON

SAID LIEUTENANT-GENERAL EWELL THROWLEY, the Lieutenant of the Tower: “I do most humbly beg your pardon, my lord, but I simply did not understand.”

His prisoner and guest, Rufus MacIan, Lord Gy, peered with his one extant eye across the dining-room table into the flushing face of his captor and host. Lord Gy was only thirty years old, but he was big and whiskery and banged-up and haggard. Very clearly and distinctly, he repeated his last statement: “Yeir buird is a fere bit o wrichtwork. A jiner today can never fetch such mastie straiks as these, he must send strags upaland to scaff amang the rammel, an plaister all together oot o skifting his grandfaither would hae tossed inti the chaffer.”

Ewell Throwley was forced to abort, and circle back around. “My lord, we are military men, the both of us, and saw hard service in the late War. This remains true in spite of the revolutions in Fortune that have made you a condemned prisoner, and me the officer in charge of the Liberty of the Tower. I learned in my service, as I daresay you did in yours, that there is a time to set courtly manners aside, and speak plainly, one gentleman to another. There is no shame, no dishonor in so doing. May I speak to you in that wise now?”

Lord Gy shrugged. “Aye, let’s hae it.”

Gy was the name of a river near Arras. Back in the days when he had been named simply Rufus MacIan, this man had, on an impulse, splashed across it and cut a French gentleman in two with one swing of a five-foot-long Claymore. The Frenchman had turned out to be a Count, and a Colonel, with a poor sense of direction. The tide of a battle had been turned as a consequence of that Claymore-stroke. MacIan had been ennobled as Lord Gy.

“I knew that I could rely upon you, my lord, as a fellow-soldier,” Lieutenant-General Ewell Throwley went on. “ ’Tis well. For there is a certain matter never spoken of in polite society, and yet known to all, which will, if we ignore it—pretending that it does not exist—turn what should be a pleasant social occasion into an insufferable ordeal. You do know—or as you would say, ‘ken’—what I speak of, my lord?”

“Crivvens!” exclaimed Lord Gy. “Wha hae foostit ben the heid-hoose!?” Then he added, with unmistakable sarcasm: “Serr’s, a coud gae through the fluir.”

“Brilliant, that is a paradigmatic specimen,” said Throwley. “It is this, my lord: you do not speak English.”

An awkward moment across the table there. Rufus MacIan drew breath to answer, but Throwley headed him off: “Oh, you understand it perfectly. But it is not what you speak. The polite euphemisms are many. We say, my lord Gy has a Highland lilt, a brogue, a burr. But this is to gloss over the true nature of the problem, which is that you simply and in fact are not speaking English. You could if you wanted, but you don’t. Please, I beg of you, my lord Gy, speak English, and consider yourself welcome in my house, and at my table.”

“ ’Twas o the table—the buird—a was discoursing, when ye set in with such an uncanny rant concerning ma accent.”

“It is not an accent. This is my point. My Lord.”

“Sixteen month hae a lodged in the Tower o London,” said Lord Gy very slowly, “and never seen th’inside o this hoose till now. A meant only to offer a compliment on the furnishings.” The Scotsman gripped the edge of the tabletop with both hands and lifted it half an inch off the floor, testing its weight. “These baulks wuid serve to stop bools. Which is to say, cannonballs.”

“Your compliments are accepted with gratitude,” said Throwley. “As to the delay in extending my hospitality—most regrettable. As you know, it is a long-standing tradition for the Lieutenant of the Tower to take tea with Persons of Quality who have been committed to this place. As a fellow-veteran, I have impatiently awaited the day when I could share this table with you. As no one knows better than you, my lord, during the first year of your incarceration, it was felt best to keep you in heavy irons stapled to the floor of Beauchamp Tower. This I do most sincerely deplore. But since then, we have not heard from you the threats, the promises of death, dismemberment, and mayhem; or if we have, we have not understood them. It has been deemed suitable to move you to a Yeoman Warder’s house, like the other guests. You and Mr. Downs have been getting along famously, I presume?”

Both Rufus MacIan and Ewell Throwley now turned their attention to the portly, bearded Beefeater who had escorted the prisoner across the Parade and into the Lieutenant’s Lodgings. Yeoman Downs looked tremendously satisfied. Indeed, had looked that way, without letup, since he had opened the door of his wee house on the green a quarter of an hour ago, and led his guest across the grass in a flying wedge of armed Sentinels.

“We hae gaen alang,” said Lord Gy gravely, “like a hoose afire.”

The Lieutenant of the Tower and the Yeoman Warder alike seemed just a bit uncomfortable with this simile; and so there was now an awkward silence. Lord Gy filled it by humming some sort of weird aimless Gaelic chaunt.

The Lieutenant’s Lodging, which was situated in the southwestern corner of the Inner Ward, was a Tudor sort of house, typical of pre-Fire London; now it was remarkable chiefly in that it had never burned down. Downs, Throwley, and MacIan were in a dining-room that had seen a lot of hard service. Throwley’s maid and steward hovered in a corridor. Another maid—a servant of Lord Gy, who had followed Downs and Gy across the green—tarried in the entrance-hall with a covered basket. Several armed guards stood outside the front door, looking out over the Parade, which was quiet. Drumbeats, and the bellowing of sergeants, could be heard drifting over the fortifications from the direction of Tower Hill, where the garrison was drilling. Too one could hear the sporadic pock, pock, pock of carpenters building the platform where, in seven days, Rufus MacIan’s head would be detached from his body.

“Splendid,” said Throwley weakly, “that is what Mr. Downs has reported, and most fortunate it is that I have been able to share this table with you before your, er, departure.”

“Ye spake a minute or of lang-standin traditions,” said Lord Gy, and looked significantly at the Yeoman Warder. Downs relayed the signal to the young woman in the entry hall, who now ventured into the dining-room. Ewell Throwley raised his eyebrows and blinked, for she was a tall and muscular lass with enough red hair to cover three average heads. As she burst across the threshold of the room she executed a sort of running curtsey and tossed a grin at Throwley.

“On the Muir of Rannoch, they grow braw, or they grow na at all,” MacIan offered by way of explanation.

“Ah, you have imported a…clanswoman from the…country to look after you.”

“A look oot for her, sir…an orphant she is…a trigidy, if ye must know.” MacIan cleared his throat. The red-headed lass withdrew a bottle from the market-basket perched on her arm. She gave it to Downs, then curtseyed and backed out of the room. Gy purred some phlegmy endearment to her. Downs handed him the bottle. Gy clasped it tenderly in both hands. “I have prepared an Oration!” he announced in something quite a bit closer to the English spoken by Throwley. This silenced the house. “Sir, ye treat us well here, for condemned traitors. The Tower isna a bread-and-water sort of nick, if a man will only comport himself civilly. Nay, all manner of victuals are allowed iz, and many a laird dines better in the Tower, after he’s doomed, than he did a free man in London town. ’Tis a tradition, or so a am told, to share with the Warders, the Major, the Deputy Lieutenant, and—sir—the Lieutenant hissell, some moiety o the comforts ye so generously allow iz to partake of. And this hae a done with the other officers. But—sir—not yet with ye, for a hae na the privilege, till this moment, of making your acquaintance.” He raised up the bottle. “Ye alluded afore to my carnaptious first twelvemonth on these premises. A do confess a was frawart and bool-horned. A did misca ye. A wes less than a Highland gentleman should be. But a Highland gentleman is never wantin the comfort of a refreshment that we know as usquebaugh. Some call it the water of life. When a wes allowed to hae it, ma mood an ma manners improved. But today a hae a guid deal more o the water than o life; for ma social calendar says a hae an Engagement on Tower Hill wi one Jack Ketch, a week frae today. And so a wanted ye to hae this, Lieutenant-General Throwley. It came to me frae a blude-friend only yesterday, and as ye can see, the bottle’s never been opened.”

Throwley bowed, but did not reach out to accept the bottle, since Rufus MacIan had not yet formally presented it. He contented himself, for now, with a glance at the label. “Glen Coe, twenty-two years old,” he read. “Why, ’tis as old as the lassie who brought it in!”

Downs laughed in the manner of all subordinates subjected to the boss’s wit. Lord Gy took it gravely. “You’re rare gleg in the uptak, sir, why, the twae ir precisely alike in age.”

“My lord, I know some London gentlemen who make a study of this usquebaugh, in all its varieties, even as Frenchmen do of Burgundy wine. I confess I know little of Glen this or Glen that—but I have at least the wit to recognize that any bottle aged two and a score years must be of rare excellence.”

“Oh, ’tis rare—very few hae survived. Very few. Ye maun learn usquebaugh, sir. For many Jacobites wul be dwellin in this Tower in years to come, an a moiety of ’em wul be Highlanders. Nae man is better poised than ye to make o hissell a collector and a connoisseur.”

“Then do let my collection, and my education, begin to-day! David, bring some dram-glasses,” Throwley called to the steward who had been waiting outside the servants’ entrance to the dining-room. “What can you tell me, my lord, concerning this bottle? What distinguishes it from the common dram?”

“Och, sir, ye maun no consider only its age, but its provenance, or what the French call its terroir. For Scotland’s a big varyand countra, as crazed, riven, and pitted as ma own visage, gowstie here, cosie thare. Nae brae, nae glen, nae ben like the next. Each wi its own clime, its own sile, its own water. Adam’s wine, we call water. A hae known Highlandmen who, when they were lost in smochy weather, could ken just where they were by scoopin up a handful o water frae a burn or a loch, an havin a wee gust.”

“Or, I daresay, a wee dram from the nearest still!” put in Lieutenant-General Throwley, to the great entertainment of Yeoman Warder Downs. But Rufus MacIan accepted the jest with equanimity, and settled the chuckling of the two Englishmen with the calm stare of his clear blue eye.

“Dinna you make fun! ’Tis true. For the usquebaugh is the daughter of the cold clear waters tha dance in those Highland burns.”

“My lord, modest chap that you are, you do not do justice to the men who dwell in those glens. For surely there is skill, there is technique—it is not a mere matter of stirring together a few natural constituents.”

Rufus MacIan raised his eyebrows and held up an index finger. “Point well taken, sir, an a thank ye for gien me a fair opportunity to blaw mynes ain horn!”

Downs and Throwley laughed. A silver tray, a-rattle with small cups, had been brought in and set down. “Please, my lord, sit with us.”

“A wul stand, thank ye, as befits a professor afore his scholars.”

The two Englishmen were left slightly ill at ease, but Lord Gy made it plain by gestures that they were to sit, and even pulled out Downs’s chair for him. He explained: “In that wee tissle at Malplaquet, which ye may hae heard of, ma company were ruggin an rivin wi some Frenchmen. A took a muckle cloot frae a musket butt, fell frae ma horse, an bemang’d my rig.” He put his hands on his kidneys and shoved his pelvis forward. His sporran flew at the Englishmen and a barrage of pops and creaks came out of his lower spine.

“ ’Tis true, he never sits, but drives me mad with his pacing,” Downs put in.

MacIan was at such obvious pains to make them at ease that Downs and Throwley acquiesced, and leaned back comfortably in their chairs to hear the continuation of the lecture.

“As the landscape o ma countra is fractured into diverse muirs, glens, gullions, snibs, howes, scaurs, linns, lirks, et cetera, so ma nation, as is well known, is divided into many clans, and the clans into septs. And it is among the auld men, the lang in the horn as we say, that the wit and the airt of usquebaugh-making is concentrated—I maun wax poetic an say, distilled. As the septs and clans differ, so do the stills and the airt of their use, and so, accordingly, does the produce.”

“Prithee, then, tell us of the sept and clan of this place whose name is on the bottle,” Throwley said. “For some reason the name of Glen Coe is familiar to me; but during the War my head got so over-flowed with outlandish place-names, I can no longer sort them out.”

“Why, ’tis remarkable ye should inquire, sir, for it is ma clan and ma sept!”

Downs and Throwley laughed heartily at this, as it seemed to have been ingeniously laid, like a conjuror’s trick. The Englishmen were looking a bit wide-eyed at Lord Gy now, seeing him anew, as a regular bloke, a merry companion.

The Scotsman made the faintest suggestion of a bow to acknowledge the glow of appreciation on their faces, and continued: “That is why a am givin ye this praisent now, Lieutenant-General Throwley. For a Highlander, the water of life that comes frae his oon glen is as much a part of him as his oon livin blude. A gie ye this so it wul aye be livin on after the deid-strake hae fallen on ma neck on yonder Hill.” And now, finally, he extended the bottle across the table to Throwley. Throwley, with an Englishman’s eye for the ceremonial gesture, stood up smartly and accepted the gift with a bow. When he sat, so, finally, did MacIan.

“But my lord, again modesty obstructs your duty as our professor. We should learn something of the people of Glen Coe before we drink their, er…”

“The water o their life, sir.”

“Indeed.”

“There isna much to relate of MacIan of MacDonald,” said Lord Gy. “We ir a wee sept, much more so of late. Glen Coe is an uncommon high, weather-glim scaup o land in the north of Argyll, no far frae Fort William. It runs from a lofty gowl in the Grampians down to the slate-mines at Ballachulish, at the heid of the loch called Linnhe, which runs down to plash the shores of Mull and spaw into the Atlantic. A wilsome, out o the way place is Glen Coe. When we do receive outdwellars, ’tis ever a surpreese, and more oft than na, they turn out to be lost on the way to Crianlarich. We try to show them hospitality none the less. Hospitality, we have learnt, is an uncannie thing. One may never tell how ’twill be repaid.”

“Is very much usquebaugh produced in Glen Coe?”

“ ’Tis odd that ye should ask, for I believe none is produced there now, or for many years. Aye, the only bottles o Glen Coe ye ir like to hae in yeir collection, shall be very auld ones.”

“What—?”

“The still was shivered. No one hae made it guid.”

“Then the MacIan MacDonalds must have fallen upon hard times indeed,” Throwley said gravely.

“ ’Tis more right to say, hard times fell on thaim. Whan all of us in this room were laddies, an order went oot frae King William that the chiefs o the Highland clans maun all sign a muckle oath o loyalty, spurnin all allegiance to the Stewart—that ye call the Pretender. Alastair MacIan MacDonald, ma chief, did sign that pledge. But dwellin as he was in the back of beyond, and it bein the deid of a vicious winter, he did miss a certain deidline. Now, no long efter, a great doon-come of snow fell ding on in oor glen. The bothies an barns were smoored under it. An then wha should appear but a company o soldiers frae Fort William, that had gang agley in the spindrift. Vagand like a band o runagates they war, fagged half to deeth, sterving, blae—a company o kirkyaird deserters! They dinna hae to beg us. A sakeless hill-run lot we wes, dacent and soothfast, goodwillie toward fellow-men. Shelter we gied them, no in oor barns, mind ye, but in oor own homes, humble as they war. For these war na outdwellars to us, though they war o a different clan. They war fellow-Scotsmen. We turned it into a ceilidh. That’s whaur all o our usquebaugh went! Down the throttles o those ramscallions! But we dinna mind.”

Now an extraordinary thing happened, which was that the sound of bagpipes became audible.

The Lieutenant’s Lodging was packed into the corner of the Inner Ward. Indeed, though the front wall was half-timbered, the back was simply the ancient curtain-wall of the Tower of London, looking down over Water Lane. Windows had been made in the upper reaches of that wall so that the Lieutenant could see out over the Lane, and the outer fortifications, wharf, and river beyond. Both Water Lane and the Wharf were open to the public during the day-time. It seemed likely that Throwley’s housekeeper had opened those rear windows to let April breezes air out the bedchambers, and haply a strolling bagpiper had wandered by, playing a Highland melody in hopes that strollers or soldiers would toss coins at him. It was the same tune that Lord Gy had been humming a few minutes previously.

Strong emotion had begun to tell on MacIan’s face as he related the tale of the lost soldiers and the impromptu ceilidh that his kin had thrown for them in the snowdrifts of Glen Coe. When the bagpipe’s snarl drifted through the room, his eye became watery, and he began to paw at the patch that covered the other. “Och, a need a dram,” he confessed. “Ir ye havin difficulty, sir, gettin that open?”

“I must confess with all these layers of wax, lead, and wire, the contents of this bottle are as closely guarded as this Tower!”

“Haud yeir tung, much more so!” said Lord Gy dismissively. “Gie it me, there is a trick to getting it open, a’l hae oor drams poured out smairtly.” He accepted the bottle back from Throwley.

Downs had been looking queasy these last few minutes. “I do confess, my lord, your tale has struck a chord, a melancholy one, in my memory. The details escape me. But I doubt its ending.”

“Then a’l make it quick, and make an end o it. Efter twae weeks o dwelling amang us as blude-friends, gutting our winter victuals, burning up oor peat-bings, an dancin the reel o Bogie wi our lasses, those mangrels waukened one day at five in the morning and put the MacIan MacDonalds to the fire and the sword. Our glen they made into a knacker’s midden. Some of us fled to the crags, yawin an yammerin, heart-scalded. We lived on snow an wrake-lust until the murthering wichts had gaen away. Only then durst we gae doon amang the bones an cinders to hack common graves into the frozened erd o Glen Coe.”

Yeoman Downs and Lieutenant-General Throwley were sitting gobsmacked. They were petrified for now, though a harsh word or sudden movement from Rufus MacIan might have scattered them from the house.

Noting this, he closed his eye for a moment, then opened it, and managed a wry smile.

That, to the Englishman, seemed the moral to the story. It said that in spite of the horror he had witnessed as a boy, Rufus MacIan had grown up into a gentleman, and found a kind of solace in the self-control and civility that was expected of such.

“Now,” he said, “wuid ye care for a dram?”

“My lord,” said Throwley huskily, “ ’twere disrespectful to refuse.”

“Then let me get the damned thing open,” said Rufus MacIan of MacDonald. He rubbed moisture from his eye on the shoulder of his coat, and drew in a big snuffle before it could escape from his nostrils. “Mr. Downs, as a mentioned, there’s a trick to it. Shards o glass may fly. A entreat ye to look the other way—unless ye want me to leave ye this eye-patch in ma last will and testament!”

Mr. Downs permitted himself a controlled smile at this faint jest, and averted his gaze.

Lord Gy gripped the bottle by its neck and swung it sideways until it exploded against Downs’s temple.

He was left holding only the neck of the bottle. But projecting from it was a steel dirk nine inches long, dripping usquebaugh. He was up on the table before Lieutenant-General Throwley could rise from his chair.

From the next room could be heard the sound of the red-headed maidservant throwing the door bolts to.

Rufus MacIan of MacDonald was squatting in the middle of the dining table now, giving Throwley a clear and close view of whatever it was he kept underneath his kilt. It seemed to have paralyzed the Lieutenant of the Tower. Which made his visitor’s next move a simple matter. “Can ye understand this?” MacIan asked, and rammed the dirk into Throwley’s eyeball until it stopped hard against the back of his skull.

Sloop Atalanta, Gravesend

AFTERNOON

THEY DREW ALONGSIDE A WHARF at Gravesend. It was near where the tilt-boat ran up the river to London, and so a sizable and curious crowd was there watching them, and calling out questions. Perhaps Isaac thought his outburst about “the German” really was an intelligible end to the conversation, or perhaps he did not care to stand in the open on the poop and be peered at.

Daniel sensed he was being peered at from another quarter. A certain gentleman had been haunting the corner of Daniel’s eye for above a quarter of an hour. From his dress, he was an officer of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards.

“Colonel Barnes,” the man said, in response to what must have been a lapse in Daniel’s mean, flinty outlook.

“I am Dr. Daniel Waterhouse,” Daniel returned, “and I have heard criminals introduce themselves to me with greater formality and courtesy than what you have just shown.”

“I know,” said Colonel Barnes, “one of them came up to me and did just that, a few hours ago, on Tower Wharf.”

“Colonel Barnes, ’twould seem you have duties ashore, I’ll not delay you—”

Barnes glanced out over the sloop’s upperdeck, which had now been joined to the wharf by gangplanks in two places. Dragoons were streaming across, driven by cursing sergeants on the deck and exhorted by lieutenants on the wharf; as they came ashore they clustered by platoon.

“On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse, I’m to stay ’board ship. Suits me better.” He made a loud rapping noise on the deck, and Daniel looked down to discover that one of the colonel’s legs was a rod of carven ebony with a steel tip.

“You are a Black Torrent man to the bone,” Daniel remarked. Every regiment had its own type of wood, used to make swagger sticks and the like, and ebony was the trade-mark of the Black Torrent Guards.

“Indeed, been with them since the Revolution.”

“Surely you need to supervise the disembarkation—”

“Dr. Waterhouse, you do not understand Delegation of Authority,” Barnes returned. “Here’s how it works: I tell my subordinates to get all but two platoons off the boat, and they do it.”

“Who has delegated you to harry me round the poop deck?”

“Why, the aforementioned very polite criminal.”

“A colonel commands a regiment, is it not so?”

“That is correct.”

“Do you mean to tell me that a colonel, in turn, is commanded by a Black-guard?”

“That is the custom in most armies,” Barnes returned dead-pan. “True, ’twas sometime different under my lord Marlborough, but since he was stripped of command, why, it has been Black-guards all the way to the top.”

Daniel had a natural impulse here to laugh; but some other part of him was recommending that he proceed cautiously with this Barnes. What the colonel had just said was witty, but it was also reckless.

Most of the Guards were off the ship now, leaving only two platoons of some fourteen men each, each under its own sergeant. One of them had congregated at the forward end of the deck, the other aft, directly below where Colonel Barnes and Daniel were standing. This left a large clear space amidships, claimed by Sergeant Bob Shaftoe. He was facing toward the wharf, so Daniel was viewing him in profile; but now he adjusted his posture slightly toward them and glanced, for a quarter of a second, in Barnes’s direction.

“Your sloop, Cap’n,” Barnes sang out.

The skipper retaliated with a series of histrionic commands that caused the gangplanks to be drawn back onto the wharf, and the sloop’s lines to be cast off.

“You and Sergeant Bob make war together,” Daniel said. “It is what you do.”

“If that’s true, our life’s work has been a failure!” Barnes answered, mock-offended. “I should prefer to say, we make peace, and have achieved success.”

“Say it however you like. Either way, you’ve spent a quarter-century marching around with him, and have heard every joke and anecdote he knows how to tell, a thousand times over.”

“ ’Tis a common outcome in our line of work,” Barnes allowed.

“Now you phant’sy you know everything about me, because ten or twenty years ago, in a tent along the Rhine or a bothy in Ireland, Sergeant Bob told you a tale about me. You suppose you may approach me in a companionable way, and divulge things to me, and thereby make me your bound accomplice, as when two boys cut their thumbs on purpose and bleed on each other and then say that they are brothers. Please do not be offended if I recoil from your tender. There is a reason why old men are aloof, and it has nothing to do with being pompous.”

“You should renew your acquaintance with Marlborough,” Barnes said, putting on a little show of being impressed. “The two of you would get along famously.”

“An unfortunate choice of adverb, that.”

Barnes was silent for a while now. The two horse-barges were coming up to the wharf at Gravesend to discharge the loads. The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard were dragoons, meaning that they fought on foot, using the tactics and the arms of infantry. But they maneuvered round the field of battle on horseback. To put it crudely, they were shock troops. Clearly the companies that had disembarked had orders to mount, get on the turnpike that paralleled the river, and ride east, pacing the sloop.

“Everyone is scared to death just now,” Barnes said. He sidled up to Daniel along the rail and offered him half a small loaf of bread, which Daniel practically lunged at. “Why, to listen to certain Whigs, a Jacobite invasion is just over the horizon, driven on a Popish wind. And yet Sir Isaac fears the arrival of the German! ’Tis an impossibility for both the Hanovers and the Jacobites to occupy the same space. Yet the Whigs’ fears, and Sir Isaac’s, are equally real.”

When he alluded to the impossibility of two objects occupying the same space, Barnes was resorting to a verbal tic that had its origins in Descartes. He had, in other words, been to Oxford or Cambridge. He ought to be a vicar, or even a Dean, in some church. What was he doing here?

“When Sir Isaac refers, with such trepidation, to the German, he does not mean George Louis.”

Barnes looked startled, then fascinated. “Leibniz—?”

“Yes.” And this time Daniel could not prevent himself smiling a bit.

“So it’s not that Sir Isaac is a Jacobite…”

“Far from it! He fears the arrival of the Hanovers, only in that Leibniz is the advisor to Sophie, and to Princess Caroline.” Daniel wasn’t entirely certain he ought to be telling Barnes so much, but it was better for Barnes to understand the truth than to harbor the suspicion that Isaac was a covert supporter of the Changeling.

“You skipped a generation,” Barnes said puckishly. Or as puckish as a maimed colonel of dragoons could be.

“If George Louis has any interest whatever in philosophy—for that matter, in anything at all—’tis a secret close kept,” Daniel returned.

“So am I to understand that the present expedition has its origins in a philosophical dispute?” Barnes asked, looking about himself as if seeing the sloop in a new light.

Atalanta had reached the middle of the channel now and, freed from the slow horse-barges, spread more canvas to the wind than she had done before. They were sailing due east on Gravesend Reach. On their right, the chalky hills would draw back from the river, widening the marshes that spread at their feet. The town of Tilbury was on the left. It was the last port on that bank of the river, for beyond it the Thames sloshed between mud-flats instead of streaming between proper banks. Even at their improved pace, they had a few hours’ sail ahead of them; and Isaac was nowhere to be seen. There was no harm, Daniel concluded, in conversing with a philosophy-hobbyist.

He glanced around the sky, looking for a convenient Cœlestial Body, but the day had slowly become overcast. Instead he fastened upon the river-water rippling along the hull-planks, and glanced too at the mud-flats below Tilbury. “I cannot see the sun—can you, Colonel Barnes?”

“We are in England. I have heard rumors of it. In France I saw it once. But not today.”

“And the moon?”

“She is full, and she set over Westminster as we were loading on Tower Wharf.”

“The moon’s behind the world, the sun’s behind clouds. Yet the water that buoys us is obeying the dictates of both, is it not?”

“I have it on good authority that the tides are operational today,” Barnes allowed, and checked his watch. “Sheerness expects a low tide at seven o’clock.”

“A spring tide?”

“Uncommon low. Why, feel how the river’s current bears us along, hastening to the sea.”

“Why does the tide rush out to sea?”

“The influence of the sun and the moon.”

“Yet you and I cannot see the sun or the moon. The water does not have senses to see, or a will to follow them. How then do the sun and moon, so far away, affect the water?”

“Gravity,” responded Colonel Barnes, lowering his voice like a priest intoning the name of God, and glancing about to see whether Sir Isaac Newton were in earshot.

“That’s what everyone says now. ’Twas not so when I was a lad. We used to parrot Aristotle and say it was in the nature of water to be drawn up by the moon. Now, thanks to our fellow-passenger, we say ‘gravity.’ It seems a great improvement. But is it really? Do you understand the tides, Colonel Barnes, simply because you know to say ‘gravity’?”

“I’ve never claimed to understand them.”

“Ah, that is very wise practice.”

“All that matters is, he does,” Barnes continued, glancing down, as if he could see through the deck-planks.

“Does he then?”

“That’s what you lot have been telling everyone.”

“Meaning the Royal Society?”

Barnes nodded. He was eyeing Daniel with some alarm. Daniel, cruelly, said nothing, and let Barnes simmer until he could stand it no more, and continued, “Sir Isaac’s working on Volume the Third, isn’t he, and that’s going to settle the lunar problem. Wrap it all up.”

“He is working out equations that ought to agree with Mr. Flamsteed’s observations.”

“From which it would follow that Gravity’s a solved problem; and if Gravity predicts what the moon does, why, it should apply as well to the sloshing back and forth of the water in the oceans.”

“But is to describe something to understand it?”

“I should think it were a good first step.”

“Yes. And it is a step that Sir Isaac has taken. The question now becomes, who shall take the second step?”

“You mean, is it to be he or Leibniz?”

“Yes.”

“Leibniz has not done any work with Gravity, has he?”

“You mean, it seems obvious that Sir Isaac, having taken the first step, should be better positioned to take the second.”

“Yes.”

“One would certainly think so,” Daniel said sympathetically. “On the other hand, sometimes he who goes first wanders into a cul-de-sac, and is passed by.”

“How can his theory be a cul-de-sac if it describes everything perfectly?”

“You heard him, a short time ago, expressing concern about Leibniz,” Daniel pointed out.

“Because Leibniz has Sophie’s ear! Not because Leibniz is the better philosopher.”

“I beg your pardon, Colonel Barnes, but I have known Sir Isaac since we were students, and I say to you, he does not strain at gnats. When he is at such pains to gird for battle, you may be sure that his foe is a Titan.”

“What weapon could Leibniz possibly have that would do injury to Sir Isaac?”

“To begin with, a refusal to be over-awed, and a willingness, not shared at this time by any Englishman, to ask awkward questions.”

“What sort of awkward questions?”

“Such as I’ve already asked: how does the water know where the moon is? How can it perceive the Moon through the entire thickness of the Earth?”

“Gravity goes through the earth, like light through a pane of glass.”

“And what form does Gravity take, that gives it this astonishing power of streaming through the solid earth?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Neither does Sir Isaac.”

Barnes was stopped in his tracks for a few moments. “Does Leibniz?”

“Leibniz has a completely different way of thinking about it, so different as to seem perverse to some. It has the great advantage that it avoids having to talk rubbish about Gravity streaming through Earth like light through glass.”

“Then it must have as great disadvantages, or else he, and not Sir Isaac, would be the world’s foremost Natural Philosopher.”

“Perhaps he is, and no one knows it,” Daniel said. “But you are right. Leibniz’s philosophy has the disadvantage that no one knows, yet, how to express it mathematically. And so he cannot predict tides and eclipses, as Sir Isaac can.”

“Then what good is Leibniz’s philosophy?”

“It might be the truth,” Daniel answered.

Cold Harbour

THE SAME AFTERNOON

THE TOWER MIGHT HAVE ENDURED forever with very little upkeep, had it not been for a nasty infestation of humans. From a janitorial standpoint, the problem with this particular race was not that they were de-, but avidly con-structive, and would on no account leave off bringing new building-stuff in through the all-too-numerous gates, and fashioning them into shelters. Left to the elements, such improvisations would break down naturally in decades or centuries, leaving the Tower as God and the Normans had intended it to be. But the difficulty with a human was that where he found a shelter he would occupy it, and when it broke, fix it, and if not prevented, build annexes onto it. To the management of the Tower, it was less an infestation of termites than a plague of mud-daubing wasps.

Every time the Constable brought in a surveyor, and compared his work to the plan his predecessor had drawn up some decades before, he would discover new nests that had insensibly grown in the corners, as dust-balls under a bed. If he went to eject the people who lived in them, so that he could tear them down, he would be confronted with documents and precedents, showing that those people were not squatters but tenants, and that they’d been paying rent for decades to some other squatter-cum-
tenant, who in turn paid rent or performed necessary services for some Corporation or Office or other sui generis queer ancient Entity that claimed long standing or warrant Royal.

Short of a concerted arson campaign, the only brake on this infestation was a lack of space within the walls that circumscribed the hive. It came down, then, to a question of how much crowding human beings could endure. The answer: not as much as wasps, but still rather a lot. In fact, there was a certain type of human who thrived on it, and those types gravitated naturally to London.

Dart the Barber lived in a garret above a storehouse in Cold Harbour. Most of the year, Cold Harbour was cold without a doubt. To Dart and his roommates—Pete the Sutler and Tom the Boot-black—it was also a sort of metaphorical harbour. But beyond that the name made no sense at all. It was nowhere near the water, and performed no harbour-like functions. Cold Harbour was a patch of turf and a few storehouses in the middle of Tower Green, just off the southwest corner of the ancient Conqueror’s keep called the White Tower.

A wee hole had been worried through the wattle near the vertex of the gable, just large enough to admit a pigeon, vent smoke from a rush-light, or frame a man’s face. At the moment it was giving Dart a sort of dove’s-eye-view of the Parade. Accounting for about half of the Inner Ward, the Parade was the largest open space in the Tower. A well-tended patch of English turf it was. But it was scarred, below Dart, with ridges of rain-worn stone: the exposed foundations of walls that had been thrown down, æons ago, by long-dead Constables. For perhaps the only thing that could stir a Constable to use force against the gnawing accretion of sheds, annexes, pop-outs, &c., was the combined awareness of (a) his own mortality and (b) the fact that there was no place left in the Tower complex to dig his grave. At any rate, there was evidence here that Cold Harbour had once been a bigger thing than it was now. From ground level, these ruins were a meaningless maze of tripping-hazards. From Dart’s privileged viewpoint they could be made out as a page of rectilinear glyphs stroked in gray and yellow paint on green baize.

If Dart had been as keenly interested in the several centuries just past as he was in the several hours just beginning, he could have decyphered that grassy palimpsest to tell a tale about the fortifications of the Inmost Ward, and how they had changed over time, from a picket to keep out die-hard Angles, to the innermost of half a dozen lines of circumvallation, to a security checkpoint for a royal palace, to an outmoded slum, to a tripping-hazard. The part where Dart dwelt had only been suffered to remain standing because it was easily made over into storehouses.

And if Dart were one for profound introspection he might ponder the queerness of his circumstance: he (an illiterate barber), a sutler, and a Black-guard (as boys who polished boots were called) sharing an apartment twenty paces distant from William the Conqueror’s chief Fort.

However none of these thoughts came to him, or even came near him, as he peered out through the gable-vent on the afternoon in question, heaving ruby-colored blood up from his lungs onto a crusty brown rag. Dart was living for the moment.

The Parade stretched an hundred paces from east (the line of barracks huddled along the footing of the White Tower) to west (a wee street of warders’ houses backed against the west wall). A hundred and fifty paces separated its north (the Chapel) from its south (the Lieutenant’s Lodging). The Cold Harbour dwelling of Dart the Barber, Tom the Black-guard, and Pete the Sutler was about half-way ’long the eastern edge of it. So to his left Dart had a good view over the northern half of the Parade, but to his right all was obliterated by the high White Tower, which squatted in the heart of the complex like a solid cube of stone. Its formidable lines had been cluttered, on its western and southern sides, by low skirts of identical barrack-houses, jammed in wall-to-wall so that their peaked roofs merged to form a sawtooth fringe. Two companies of the Guard regiment lived in these and similar ones near by. The other dozen companies were packed into various spaces around the periphery of the Inner Ward, along Mint Street, or wherever space could be found for them. All told, they numbered near a thousand.

A thousand men could not live without victuals, which was why sutlers’ houses had been allowed, nay, encouraged to occupy various crannies around the Tower and the Wharf. Pete’s was one such; he was the tenant of this garret, and he sublet hammock-space to Dart and, more recently, to Tom.

The Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards often drew duty of a ceremonial nature, such as greeting foreign ambassadors on Tower Wharf, and so they were more than normally concerned with the upkeep of their kit. This meant no lack of work for Tom and the other boot-blacks. And any congregation of humans required barbers to dress wounds and see to the removal of redundant hairs, whiskers, bodily humours, and necrotizing limbs. So Dart had been permitted to wind some bloody gauze round a pike and plant it outside a certain door in Cold Harbour as the customary hall-mark of his trade.

He was not plying that trade now but nervously honing a razor, again and again, on a leather strop, and peering down the line of barracks doors, watching Tom the Black-guard make his rounds. Most of the garrison was extra muros on Tower Hill; in their absence Tom was going to each door in turn to polish the boots that had been left out by the soldiers. To look at him, Tom was a boy of about twelve. But he spoke with the voice, and answered to the urges, of a grown man, which made Dart suspect he was really a bloke who’d not grown properly.

Tom had been doing this for the best part of two hours and had settled into a fixed routine, which was that he would squat down to polish a pair of boots, then stand up when he was finished, as though feeling a need to stretch, and look idly around the Parade, then glance up into the sky to see if any change in the weather was coming. Then he would turn his attention to the next pair of boots.

The only thing more tedious than to perform this duty was to watch it. Even though Dart had been told that he must on no account take his eyes off Tom, he found it hard going to keep his eyes open. The sun was beating against a white haze that steeped the garret in drowsy warmth. Cool gusts found their way to Dart’s face from time to time and reminded him to open his eyes. True to form, he, being the barber, had the worst shave in the whole Tower. His stubbly chin pricked him awake when he nodded off and let it rest on the dove-shit-covered sill of the tiny window. The only thing he could do while he bided his time was to whet the tools of his trade. But if he did so any more, they would become transparent.

Tom the Black-guard had a yellow cloth slung over his shoulder.

It had not been there a minute before. Dart was seized by guilt and fear, and already justifying himself: I did not take my eyes off him for more than a heart-beat!

He looked again. Tom bent down to start in on another pair of boots. The yellow cloth stood out like a lightning-bolt against the usual black-stained rags.

He closed his eyes, counted to five, opened them, and looked a third time to be sure. It was still there.

Dart the Barber stepped away from the window for the first time in two hours, raked his strops, shears, and razors together into a bag, and made for the stairs.

The garret had been turned into a maze by stacked sacks of flour and kegs of salted meat, as well as by hams and gutted rabbits dangling from the rafters, and the hammocks where Dart and Tom and Pete slept. But Dart moved through adroitly, and minced down a fatally precipitous stair to the ground floor, where after a brief scamper down a stunningly foul-smelling passage no wider than his shoulders he was discharged into a somewhat wider L-shaped alley that ran from the Bloody Tower gate to the Inner Ward. Scuttling round the bend of that L, he emerged onto grass before the southwestern angle of the White Tower. Then, reversing his direction round to the left, he entered the Parade.

He’d been warned not to look about, but could not help glancing at Tom, hard at work over a boot. Tom was turned his way. Though his head was bent down over his work, his eyes were rolled up in their sockets so far that they had turned white, enabling him to mark Dart’s progress over the grass.

Dart made bold to glance this way and that, trying to guess what Tom had seen. For it had seemed, during those two hours, as if Tom had been scanning the sky for something. Over the western wall of the Tower, nothing was visible except for the columnar Monument, some half a mile distant, and beyond that, the dome of St. Paul’s. He turned his head to the right and looked north over the storehouses and barracks that lined that edge of the Inner Ward. Here was something: shreds of smoke were climbing up to vanish against the white sky. The source seemed near to hand. But not as near as the Mint, which lay just on the far side of those barracks. He guessed it was coming from Tower Hill. It was probably not from gunpowder, for Dart had not heard the Guard discharging any weapons. Possibly someone had lit a rubbish-fire in one of the courts tucked away in the maze of the Tower hamlets. Or possibly ’twas something more than a rubbish-blaze.

He faltered. He had made it most of the way across the Parade. But suddenly the door of No. 6, one of the warders’ houses, had opened. Three Sentinels were there, in place of the usual one. It seemed that the Scotsman was due to be aired out. A Yeoman Warder emerged. It was Downs. He lived in No. 6 with the Scotsman, and he had been very particular about getting a good shave this morning. Now he’d gone it one better by donning his best coat. He was followed by Lord Gy, a bulky man in a kilt. Then out came his maidservant, the big red-head, with a basket over her arm. Lord Gy and Yeoman Downs began to walk due south towards the Lieutenant’s Lodging, beneath the parapet of Bell Tower. The three Sentinels formed a triangle around them and the red-head brought up the rear. Dart stopped to let them pass in front of him, and doffed his hat. The Laird ignored him; Yeoman Downs made an answering wink. All of this passed from Dart’s mind as soon as it moved out of view. Few events were more routine than a social call by a noble prisoner on the Lieutenant of the Tower.

A lone Sentinel—a private soldier of the Black Torrent Guard—was stationed before the door of No. 4. Like No. 6, No. 4 was a Tudor sort of house that wouldn’t rate a second glance if it were dropped along a village green in Essex and its peculiar occupants replaced with a petty tradesman and his family.

When Dart drew close enough to make it obvious he was headed for No. 4, the Sentinel reached round behind himself and rapped on the front door. A moment later Yeoman Clooney thrust his head out an open window nearby and inquired, “Visitor for my lord?”

“Barber,” answered the Sentinel.

“Is he expected?”

Clooney always asked this. It was the most feeble of challenges. Even so, Dart had to stifle a momentary impulse to run away—or, worse, to break down and confess. But he could sense the Black-guard’s eyes prodding him in the back like a pistol-barrel. “Sir,” he gargled. He had to cough up some bloody phlegm and swallow it before he could continue: “I told my lord I would come this week, he is due.”

Clooney’s head drew back into the house. A brief exchange of murmurs could be heard through the open window. Then floor-boards cracked and door-locks snapped. Yeoman Clooney opened his front door and nodded in a confidence-inspiring way to the Sentinel. “His lordship will see you,” he proclaimed, in a trumpety heraldic tone that reminded Dart what an honor it was to mow an Earl’s scalp, and how unworthy Dart was of it. Dart hunched over, picked up his bag, and hustled into the house, tipping his hat at the Sentinel, then making a nod at Yeoman Clooney.

The house had a front parlour looking out on the Parade through the very window Clooney had been using to exchange words with the Sentinel. The light was good there, and so that was where Dart spread out his drop-cloth. He set a chair in the middle of it.

The Earl of Hollesley was spending the twilight of his life in this house because he had been entrusted with some of H. M. Government’s money during the War of the Spanish Succession, and had used it to put a new roof on his country house, instead of buying saltpeter in Amsterdam. He was near sixty, and as far as Dart knew, his entire life consisted of sitting in a chair and having his hair cut. Other prisoners strolled round the Liberty, killed themselves, or staged spectacular, improbable escapes; the Earl of Hollesley spent all his time in No. 4. Except for Dart, once a fortnight, he rarely entertained visitors. When he did they tended to be Catholic priests, for the Earl had gone Popish in his dotage. When he entered the room on Yeoman Clooney’s arm, Dart said to him, “M’lord,” which was all he was encouraged to say.

Yeoman Clooney had the easy, but unfathomably tedious job of keeping an eye on the Earl twenty-four hours a day. He took a chair in the corner while Dart got the Earl seated and tarped. “Sir,” said Dart in a kind of stage-whisper to the yeoman, “I’ll take the liberty of shutting the window, as the day’s a bit gusty, and I don’t want hair blowing round your tidy abode.”

Clooney feigned interest in the window for a few moments, then drifted off. Dart went to it, looked out across the Parade, and found Tom the Black-guard gazing back at him. Before pulling down the sash Dart drew his rag from his pocket, loudly and distinctly hacked into it, then spat on the ground.

It went without saying that the Earl of Hollesley wore a periwig. But he still had to be shorn every so often. He preferred to have his head shaved. It ruled out lice.

By the time Dart had got his brushes and razors organized, and taken up his tonsorial post beside the Earl, Tom the Black-guard was half-way across the Parade, and staring at him curiously through the window. Which was well. For otherwise Dart could never have done, nay, even contemplated it. An Earl, or even a Yeoman Warder, was so great, so potent, so terrible to an insect like Dart. But there was a cold power behind Tom the Black-guard that overbalanced even an Earl. Dart might evade a Justice of the Peace, but blokes like Tom could nose him out even if he ran all the way to Barbados. If Dart did not do as he’d been instructed, he’d forever be a rabbit, trapped in a warren, pursued by an army of ferrets. Which is what gave him the courage—if courage was the right word for it—to announce: “Yeoman Clooney, I say that I have a blade to my lord Hollesley’s throat.”

“Er—what?” Clooney had been very close to drowsing off.

“A blade to his throat.”

The Earl was reading The Examiner. He was hard of hearing.

“So, you are giving him a shave as well as a haircut?”

This was unexpected. Clooney was supposed to understand a blade to the throat of a Lord.

“I am giving him neither, sir. I am making a threat to kill my lord.”

The Earl stiffened, and rattled his Examiner. “The Whigs will be the death of this country!” he announced.

“What possible reason could you have for doing such a mad thing?” Clooney wanted to know from the corner.

“The Juncto!” the Earl went on. “Why don’t they come out and call it by its real name, a Cabal, a Conspiracy! They are trying to drive Her Majesty into her grave! It is assassination by another name.”

“I know naught of reasons. Reasons are for Tom. Tom is at the door,” Dart said.

“It’s all right here!” the Earl continued, and leaned forward suddenly, so that he’d have cut his own throat if Dart hadn’t reacted in time. “The Duke of Cambridge. What, his German title isn’t good enough for him? You’d think he was a proper Englishman, wouldn’t you?”

There came a knock at the door from the Sentinel. “Boot-black,” came the call.

“Admit him, sir,” Dart said, “and make no sign of distress to the Sentinel, for Tom shall be watching you avidly. Tom shall explain all.”

“No wonder Her Majesty is wroth! ’Tis a calculated insult—calculated by Ravenscar. Where Age and Ague have failed to bring down our Queen, he shall do it with Aggravation, may God forbid!”

Clooney left the parlour. Dart stood for a few moments with his blade-hand a-tremble, expecting that the Sentinel would appear in a moment to blow his head off with a pistol-shot. But the door opened and closed without any commotion, and Dart could now hear the slithering voice of Tom the Black-guard, speaking to Clooney in the entrance-hall.

“That Sophie is a circling vulture,” Lord Hollesley proclaimed. “Not content to wait for a dignified succession—she sends her grandson before her, like a kite to peck at our Sovereign’s withered cheeks!”

Dart was straining to hear the conversation between the Black-guard and the Yeoman, but the Earl’s fulminations and paper-rattling drowned out all but a few words: “Muscovite…Wakefield Tower…vertebrae…Jacobites…”

Then all of a sudden Tom thrust his head into the parlour and gave him a flat inspection, like a coroner viewing a corpse. “Stay here,” he said, “until it happens.”

“Until what happens?” Dart asked. But Tom was already on his way out the door, and Yeoman Clooney beside him.

Dart stood there, resting his tired blade-hand on the Earl’s collar-bone, and watched the two of them angling across the green toward Wakefield Tower—where, according to scuttle-butt, a one-armed Russian had been chained up the night before.

There was nothing else to do. So he began to soap the Earl’s head. Presently he began to hear the ardent tolling of several bells on the north side of Tower Hill. This was a fire-alarm. Somewhere beyond the moat, a building was burning. Normally Dart would’ve been one of the first on the scene, for he loved a good fire. But he had solemn obligations here.

Sloop Atalanta, the Hope

LATE AFTERNOON

HAVING TAKEN DELIVERY of some Enlightenment, for which he’d have had to pay handsomely at Oxford or Cambridge, Colonel Barnes could hardly deny Daniel a look at the map. They descended to the upperdeck and spread it out on a barrel-head so that Sergeant Bob Shaftoe could brood over it in company with them. ’Twas not one of your noble maps hand-penned on gilded parchment, but a common thing, a woodcut stamped out on foolscap.

He could see a cartographer making a strong case that this part of the world did not rate mapping, for nothing was there but muck, and what features it had changed from hour to hour. The map was pocked with such place-names as Foulness, Hoo, the Warp, and Slede Ooze. ’Twas as if England, when she had worn out certain words, threw them into the gutter—like a man discarding his clay-pipe when its stem was broke down to a nub—and the Thames carried those words down-country along with litter, turds, and dead cats, and strewed them up and down the estuarial flats and bars.

The ever-widening flow swept round to the left just ahead of them. The map told Daniel that a mile or two later it would right its course again and shortly lose itself in the sea. This stretch of river was named the Hope, and an apt name it might be for Sir Isaac.

The Hope limned a hammerhead-shaped protrusion of Kent with no particular boundary between marsh and water, but instead a mile-wide zone between high and low tide—the river halved its width at ebb. Because Daniel knew where they were going, he traced the flat top of the hammerhead eastwards until he reached the semicircular peen at its seaward end. This was labeled the Isle of Grain. The Thames flowed along its northern cheek, the Medway along its southern. The two rivers met just off the Isle’s eastern tip. And like a couple of porters who drop their loads in the middle of the street to engage in a fist-fight over which had right-of-way, these two rivers, at the place where they came together, let go of all the muck they’d been carrying out to the sea. In this way was built up a vast bank, a bulge growing eastwards from the Isle of Grain’s indefinite shore, and as that bulge reached out into the sea, mile after mile, it narrowed, converged, refined itself into a slim prod sticking far out into brackish water between Foulness Sand on the north and the Cant on the south. At the extremity of that bar was the Buoy of the Nore. The estuary yawned east like a viper’s mouth, the Nore spit thrust out in its middle like a barbed tongue. It was in that cursed in-between depth, too shallow for most vessels and too deep for any beast.

But far short of the Buoy, just off the Isle of Grain’s coast, was a place that might be reached by boat or beast, depending upon the tide. It was a tiny thing, like a gnat crawling on the page. Daniel did not have to bend down and squint at those crabbed letters to know it was Shive Tor.

Raising his eyes from the map to scan this indistinct coastline he saw a few places where the old bones of the earth almost poked out, knuckle-like, through the flesh spread over them by the rivers. The Shive, which lay a mile off the high-tide line of the Isle of Grain, was one of those. It even had its own system of pools and bars, echoing the greater system of which it was a part. Daniel guessed that some daft person had long ago seen fit to convey stones out to this stony Hazard and pile them up, making a cairn from which to watch for Vikings or light signal-fires, and later generations of the daft had used it as the foundations of a permanent tower.

He glanced up to find Colonel Barnes gone—called away to lay plans on the quarterdeck—and Bob Shaftoe favoring him with what was very nearly an evil look.

“Do you blame me for something, Sergeant?”

“When last you slept in Tower, guv,” Bob returned—referring to something that had happened on the eve of the Glorious Revolution—“you told me the following tale: namely that you had with your own eyes seen a certain babe emerging from the Queen of England’s vagina in Whitehall Palace. You, and a roomful of other notables.”

“Yes?”

“Well, now that babe is all growed up and living at St.-Germain and phant’sies he’s to be our next King, is it not so?”

“That is what they keep saying.”

“And yet the Whigs call this same bloke the Changeling, and say he’s a common bastard orphan smuggled into Whitehall in a warming-pan, and never passed through the vagina of a Queen at all—at least not until he got old enough to do it t’other way.”

“Indeed, they never leave off saying it.”

“Where’s that put you, guv?”

“Where I ever was. For my father was running about London a hundred years ago proclaiming that all Kings and Queens were common bastards, and worse, and that the very best of ’em was not fit to reign over a haystack. I was raised in such a household.”

“It matters not to you.”

“Their bloodlines matter not. Their habits and policies—that is different.”

“And that is why you consort with Whigs,” said Bob, finally gaining a measure of ease, “for the policies of Sophie are more to your liking.”

“You did not suppose I was a Jacobite!?”

“I had to ask, guv.” Bob Shaftoe finally broke off staring at Daniel’s face, and looked about. They had been traveling northwards down the Hope, but were reaching the point where they could see to the east around the river’s final bend and discover the startling prospect of water stretching unbroken to the horizon.

“My lord Bolingbroke, now, he is a Jacobite,” Bob remarked. Which was like opining that Fleet Ditch was unwholesome.

“Been seeing a lot of him?” Daniel inquired.

“Been seeing a lot of him,” Bob said, turning his head slightly toward the quarterdeck and glancing up at the banner that flew at the mizzen, carrying the arms of Charles White. “And you must know he is the whip that Bolingbroke cracks.”

“I did not know it,” Daniel confessed, “but it rings very true.”

“Bolingbroke is the Queen’s pet,” Bob continued, “and has been ever since he drove Marlborough out of the country.”

“Even a Bostonian knows as much.”

“Now the Whigs—your friend in particular—they have been raising a private army, they have.”

“When we met some weeks ago on London Bridge, you alluded to that, very darkly,” Daniel said. He was now beginning to experience fear, for the first time since he had awoken. Not the bracing, invigorating fear of shooting under London Bridge in a small boat, but the vague smothering dread that had kept him bedridden the first few weeks he’d been back in London. It was familiar, and in that, oddly comforting.

“Whigs’ve been whispering in a lot of ears,” Bob continued, glancing at the place where Colonel Barnes had stood a moment earlier. “Are you with us or against us? Will you stand up and be counted? When the Hanovers reign, shall they know you as one who was loyal, who can be trusted with command?”

“I see. Hard to resist that sort of talk.”

“Not so hard, when there is Marlborough, just over there,” nodding at the eastern horizon, “but contrary pressure, even greater, comes now from Bolingbroke.”

“What has my lord Bolingbroke done?”

“He’s not come out and done anything just yet. But he is making ready to do something that will make some of us uneasy.”

“What is he making ready to do?”

“He’s drawing up a list of all the captains, the colonels, and the generals. And according to White—who lets things slip, for effect, when he is pretending to be drunker than he really is—Bolingbroke will soon order those officers to sell their companies and their regiments, unless they sign a pledge that they will serve their Queen unconditionally.”

“Sell them to Jacobite captains and colonels, one presumes.”

“One presumes,” Bob returned, a bit mockingly.

“So that if the Queen were to decide, on her deathbed, that the crown should go to her half-brother (I’ll dispense with the pretense of calling him the Changeling), the army would stand ready to enforce that decree and welcome the Pretender to England.”

“That is how it looks. And it puts a bloke like Colonel Barnes in a bit of a spot. The Marquis of Ravenscar’s entreaties may be shrugged off, provided it is done civilly. But Bolingbroke offers a choice, like the Buoy of the Nore—we must go one way or t’other, and there’s no going back once the decision’s made.”

“Yes,” Daniel said. And he held back from saying what was obvious: that Barnes, with his loyalty to Marlborough, would never go Bolingbroke’s way. But as Bob had pointed out, he had to choose one path or the other. He could not say no to Bolingbroke without saying yes to Ravenscar.

Daniel stood for a time brooding and fuming over the stupidity of Bolingbroke, who would force men like Barnes into the arms of the opposing camp. It was an act of panic. Panic was notoriously catchy; and the questions Barnes and Shaftoe had been directing his way suggested it was beginning to spread.

Which raised the question of why on earth they would think of him. Barnes owned a regiment of dragoons, for Christ’s sake, and if a tenth of the hints dropped by him and Sergeant Bob held true, they were in communication with Marlborough.

What was it Barnes had said just a few minutes ago? Everyone is scared to death just now. On its face this was about Isaac and his fears concerning Leibniz. But perhaps Barnes was really speaking of himself.

Or of anyone. Obviously Bolingbroke was scared. Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, was too outward merry to let on that he was scared; but then he was apparently deep into mustering a Whiggish army, which was not the act of a man who had been sleeping soundly.

Who wasn’t scared? The only person Daniel could think of who wasn’t, was Sir Christopher Wren.

If the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm was scared, she was not letting on.

Perhaps Marlborough wasn’t scared. There was no telling as long as he remained in Antwerp.

Those were the only ones he could think of.

Then he had one of those moments where he suddenly stood outside of his own body and beheld himself, as from a seagull’s perspective, standing on the deck of Mr. Charles White’s sloop running down the tide in the Hope. And he came to ask, why was he, who had little time left on earth, devoting these minutes to drawing up a tedious inventory of who was, and was not, scared? Was there nothing better for a Doctor and Fellow of the Royal Society to do with his time?

The answer was all around him, buoying him up and keeping him and the others from drowning: Hope. According to myth, the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s Box. Feeling Fear’s clammy arms reaching around him, Daniel had an almost physical longing for Hope. And perhaps Hope was no less contagious than Fear. He wanted to be infected with Hope and so he was trying to think of someone, like Wren or Marlborough, who would give it him.

It was an hypothesis, anyway. And it described the actions of others as well as it did his own. Why had Princess Caroline summoned him from Boston? Why had Mr. Threader wanted to make a Clubb with him? Why did Roger want him to find the Longitude and Leibniz want him to make a thinking machine? Why did the likes of Saturn trail him through Hockley-in-the-Hole, asking for spiritual direction? Why did Isaac solicit his aid? Why did Mr. Baynes expect Daniel to look after his wayward daughter in Bridewell? Why were Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe asking him these pointed questions today?

Because they were all scared, and, just like Daniel, they longed for Hope, and sought anyone who might give it to them; and when they drew up their mental inventories of who was and wasn’t scared, why, somehow—through what was either a grotesque error or a miracle—they put Daniel in the “wasn’t scared” column.

Daniel laughed when he understood this. Bob Shaftoe might’ve been unnerved by that. But because Bob had got in the habit of thinking Daniel wasn’t scared, he read it as further evidence of Daniel’s supreme and uncanny self-confidence.

What to make of it? Daniel briefly considered hiring one of the printers in St. Paul’s Churchyard to make up a broadsheet in which he, Daniel Waterhouse, declared to the whole world that he was scared shitless nearly all the time. And in other times this might have been a fair course—humiliating to be sure, but honest, and a sure way to be rid of all these needy people who wanted to feed from his supposed rich store of Hope.

But that was to take a child’s view of the Pandora’s Box story, and to conceive of Hope as an angel. Perhaps what Pandora had was really just a jack-in-the-box, and Hope had never been anything more than a clock-work clown, a deus ex machina.

God from the machine. Daniel had spent enough time with theatrical machinery to watch its workings, and its effect upon audiences, with a cynical eye. Indeed, had passed through a long phase of despising the theatre, and the groundlings who paid money to be fooled.

But coming back to London (which had theatres) from Boston (which didn’t), he had seen that his cynicism had been ill-founded. London was a better city, England a more advanced place, for its theatres. It was not wrong for people to be fooled by actors, or even by machinery.

And so even if Hope was a contrived thing—a mechanism that popped up out of Pandora’s Box by dint of levers and springs—it was by no means bad. Which signified that if a crowd of people had somehow deluded themselves into phant’sying that Daniel was un-afraid, and, from that, were now generating Hope and courage of their own, why, that was an excellent practice. Daniel was obliged to remain upon the stage and to play his role, be it never so false. Because by doing so he might defeat the contagion of panic that was leading men like Bolingbroke to pursue such abysmally stupid gambits. False, machine-made Hope could make real Hope—that was the true Alchemy, the turning of lead into gold.

“Charles White is very like my lord Jeffreys, would you not say?”

“In many respects, yes, guv.”

“Do you recall the night we hunted Jeffreys down like a rabid dog, and arrested him, and sent him to justice?”

“Indeed, guv, I have dined out on the tale for a quarter-century.”

Which explained much, for the tale had probably grown in the re-telling, and made Daniel seem more heroic than he’d been in the event.

“When you and I were leaving the Tower that evening, we encountered John Churchill—I use his name thus since he was not yet Marlborough in those days.”

“That I do remember. And the two of you drew aside for a private conversation, in the middle of the causeway where you’d not be overheard.”

“Indeed. And the subject of that conversation must remain as private as ever. But do you recall how it ended?”

“The two of you shook hands, very pompously, as if closing a Transaction.”

“You are almost too keen for your own good, Sergeant. Now, from what you know of Marlborough, and of me, do you phant’sy either of us is the sort to renege on a Transaction, solemnly entered into in such a pass: before the very gates of the Tower of London, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution, when both of our lives hung in the balance?”

“Of course not, sir. I never—”

“I know. Stay. Only let me say to you now, Sergeant, that our Transaction is still alive, even today; that the present voyage and mission are part of it; that all is well, and the Revolution only grows more Glorious with each passing day.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear, guv,” said Bob with a little bow.

Daniel resisted the urge to say I know it is.

The Monument, London

LATE AFTERNOON

HALF-WAY UP THEY STOPPED to pant. The two younger pilgrims shared a stone ledge lit by a wee air-hole; some stone-masons had gone to a lot of trouble, here, to frame a toenail of gassy white sky in thunderous vault-work.

“Pity ’tis such an indifferent day,” said one, but not until after he’d lunged at the window and worked his lungs, for a minute, like black-smith’s bellows.

“We’ll have to gin up our own meteorology,” answered the other. He jammed a shoulder into a crevice of light that had opened up between the frame of the window and his fellow-pilgrim’s ribs, pried him out of the way, and availed himself of some air. Being London-air it could not be called fresh, but it was an improvement on the congealed miasma that filled these confines: a sort of well-shaft two hundred feet high.

An older pilgrim, several turns of the helix below them, stumbled. He was too short of breath to curse. He had to be content with inhaling and exhaling in a very cross way. “Out…of…my…light!” he then managed, one syllable per stair-tread.

The younger two—who were not really all that young, being in their middle thirties—moved up. Then they came aware of an impending need to make way for three young gentlemen who were descending. These had all prudently removed their small-swords from their hangers, so as not to trip on them, and were carrying the weapons before them like saints with crucifixes.

The two ascenders by the window were garbed all in black, except for their white collars, and even had black capes reaching below their knees. They were evidently Nonconformists: Quakers, or even Barkers. The three descenders were gaudy Piccadilly boys reeking of snuff and gin.

“Beg pardon, we have been up to view Heaven,” sang one of the latter, “and found it ever so boring, and now we are in a great hurry to reach Hell.” His companions laughed.

The pilgrims had their backs to the light and their faces to the dark. Otherwise, un-pilgrim-like amusement might have been seen.

“Make way for them, brother,” said the uppermost of the two young Dissidents, “Heaven can wait for us; Hell’s hungry for these.” He flattened himself against the wall, back to the chilly stone. But his brother was disfigured by an enormous hump on the back, and had to retreat to the window, and lean backwards into the cavity.

“You’re in my fucking light!” re-iterated the old one, now barely visible as a disembodied white collar spiraling up the dusky shaft.

“Making way for some unrepentant sinners, father,” explained the humpback. “Do thou comport thyself as a good Christian pilgrim.”

“Why don’t you take ’em hostage!? We need hostages!”

This extraordinary suggestion welled up out of the gloom just as the foremost of the three young fops was squeezing past the pilgrim who’d backed against the wall. They were so close that the latter could hear the former’s stomach growling, and the former smelt oysters on the latter’s breath. They shared a Moment there, each in his own mind weighing the threats. One had a sword, but his back was to a hundred-foot abyss. The other was pinned to a stone wall, but carrying a long pilgrim’s staff.

The Heaven-bound one averted his gaze politely—not a thing to be done with ease, as he had the look of one who had never lost a staredown—and called to the one below, “O Father, I have spoke with them, and found that they are all Englishmen. Not French dragoons as we had first supposed.” He then winked at Sword Boy—who, getting it, said, “Ah,” then, “ ’tis well—no fit place for an Engagement, this!” and then went on to maneuver past the humpback. A few moments later, the three Hell-bound could be heard bidding good day to the old pilgrim with the offensive politeness reserved for the mad.

“Time for a swop,” said the humpback. He moved up from the window, shedding some gray glare on the staggering old man, and threw off his cape to reveal a great long helmet-shaped object strapped to his back. Getting it off, and transferring it to the other, was several minutes’ feverish work. By the end of it they had made themselves near as irritable as the elder.

He had caught up with them and leaned towards the window to catch his breath. The light shone on a face imprinted with more odd and unwholesome tales than a warehouse full of Bibles. “An indifferent day,” he repeated mockingly. “I know not what you mean. The weather does not make the day. We make the day, as suits us. This day it suits me to destroy the currency of the Realm. The weather is fine.”

“This bloody stair has holiday-makers tramping up and down, can’t you keep a secret, Dad?” said the foremost, who was now trapped in a web of lashings that bound the helmet-shaped thing to his spine.

“As long as that is in plain view, ’tis farcical to make a great show of discretion, Jimmy,” returned Dad.

Taking the point, Jimmy’s brother—who now stood straight-backed, and carried the pilgrim’s staff—threw the cape over Jimmy’s shoulders, turning him into a bent hunchback. “Is there really no better way to gain entry to the Tower, Dad?”

“What do you mean!?”

“There’s public taverns crowded right against the foot of the wall. From there, a grapnel tossed up to the battlements—”

“The prisoners have maid-servants who go to and from market every day. You could disguise yourself as one of them,” suggested Jimmy.

“Or hide in one of the Mint’s hay-wains.”

“Or in one of those great bloody wagons they use to bring in the Cornish tin…”

“Or pretend to be the barber to some noble traitor…”

“I myself have sneaked in with night-time burial processions, just to have a look around the place…”

“You could bribe the Wharf-guard to overlook you when they lock the place up for the night…”

The old man said, “Danny boy, if you hadn’t spent the last month at Shive Tor making all ready; and Jimmy, if you hadn’t been toiling over the coin-presses; you’d know that half of our number did. But for me to enter by some such subtile way would not serve the purpose now, would it? Don’t stand there a-gawping at your Dad, move along, let’s get it done before the whole venture misfires! And if you get ahead of me, and you meet with any decent London folk who’d make good witnesses, why, don’t be foolish, take ’em hostage! You know how it’s done!”

A few minutes later they burst out into the light, and found themselves sharing a square stone platform with four Jews, two Filipinos, and a Negro.

“ ’Tis like the set-up for one of those tedious jests that are proffered in Taverns by Imbeciles,” muttered the old pilgrim, but no one heard him.

Jimmy and Danny were flabbergasted by the view: the new dome of St. Paul’s in one direction, about a mile away. Opposite, and only half as far, the Tower of London. Just below them, and so close that they could hear the grinding of the Dutch water-engines being impelled by the out-going tide, was London Bridge.

“Tomba! What are these bloody Sons of Israel doing here!?” he demanded of the Negro.

Tomba was sitting crosslegged at the southeast corner of the platform. In his lap was a pulley, or in nautical jargon a block, as big as a bull’s head. He removed a whalebone fid from his mouth and said, “They came up to look at the view, mon. They’ve caused us no troubles.” He had a spray of dreadlocks that would fill a bushel basket.

“Really I meant, in a larger sense, why do I encounter them everywhere I go,” said the old pilgrim—though he was now stripping off the collar and cape to reveal conventional breeches, a long-skirted coat, and a breathtaking waistcoat made of cloth of gold with silver buttons. He made sure that the Jews saw it. “Amsterdam, Algiers, Cairo, Manila—now here.”

Tomba shrugged. “They got here first. You can’t pretend astonishment, when you see ’em.” He was working on a splice. This platform on which they all stood was impaled, as it were, on the shaft of the Monument: an immense fluted column that stood alone on Fish Street Hill. Supposedly its foundation covered the place where the Fire had started in 1666. Or so ’twas asserted by the Latin inscription on its base, which blamed the conflagration on Popish incendiaries, despatched from the Vatican. At any rate the middle of the high viewing-platform was occupied by a stone cylinder, which was the upper terminus of the stairway, as well as the support for diverse Barock decorations, knobs, lanthorns, &c. piled on top to make the Monument that much taller. Several turns of rope had been laid round this by the two Filipinos, who’d set out their street-shoes in a tidy row so that they could work barefoot, sailor-style. The same ropes passed through the eye of the huge block on Tomba’s lap. To look at it, a landlubber would phant’sy that the pulley had already been made fast to the top of the Monument; but the Filipinos were riggers, and would not let it rest until a good deal more splicing, seizing, stropping, and serving had been effected. They’d been busy enough, until now; but the arrival of the man in the golden waistcoat threw them into a lather, and even the Jews backed away from them, lest they get jabbed by a marlinspike or bludgeoned by a heaver, and find their forelocks unfathomably convolved with a turk’s-head.

The father of Jimmy and Danny went the long way round to the east side of the platform. A spyglass emerged from his pocket and snicked out to length. He scanned some third of a mile of London, stretching from the square at the base of the Monument to the vast killing-ground of Tower Hill. Fifty years before, this had all been smoking cinders and puddles of liquefied roofing-lead. It followed that all the buildings standing there today were Stuart, and all of ’em were brick, except for a few Wren-churches, which had a lot of stone to them. Closest was St. George’s, so near by that he could jump from here and splatter on its roof. But he had no use for St. George’s today, save as a landmark to establish a heading. Raising his glass then brought him straight to a view of St. Mary-at-Hill, five hundred and some feet from the Monument’s gaudy plinth. A bloke with a spyglass was perched in its cupola; he took the instrument from his eye and waved. It seemed a cheerful gesture, not a warning, so he did not let his gaze linger there, other than to verify that there was a crossbow-man on the roof of that church, standing next to a copper tun and facing across the street (St. Mary Hill) toward a block of buildings on the eastern side. Beyond those, a few degrees to starboard, was a great hulk of a church, St.-Dunstan-in-the-East. Unauthorized personnel had likewise gained access to roof of same. It lay all of a hundred yards from St. Mary-at-Hill; and another hundred yards to the east of it was another bulky fabrique whose roof too was infested with crossbow-men and other unlikely trespassers. This would be Trinity House, the Guild or Clubb of Thames river-pilots. The lower floors would be sparsely occupied with retired tillermen drunk on sherry and wondering what all the confounded fuss was about.

Diverting now a bit to port, and some five hundred feet down-range, he found All Hallows Church, easily picked out by Barking Churchyard, which wrapped around it north, east, and south. Other than a sole sentry in the steeple, the place looked innocuous; the only activity was a funeral-procession making its way into the churchyard from Tower Street.

Beyond that was Tower Hill, an open glacis between the buildings of London and the moat of the Tower. It was put to diverse uses, viz. site of public decapitations, place for drilling of troops, and picnic-ground. Some ventured to name it a green. Today it was wholly brown, but enlivened by stripes of red. The garrison of the Tower used it as a place to rehearse their tedious drills and maneuvers. This explained why it was brown, for the grass had not been able to maintain a grip on the pounded mud. The troops were drilling at this very moment, which explained the red stripes; for the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard, despite their name, wore red coats. They were grouped by company, which made it easy to number them even without aid of a spyglass. Indeed their orderly battle-lines looked like nothing so much as tally-marks scratched in red chalk on a clay tile.

“I make them a dozen! There are fourteen companies in all; the First is downriver; twelve are there on Tower Hill; one, as is customary, standeth watch over the Tower. Of those, how many are out on the Wharf? Have you tallied them yet? No, never mind, ye’ll be assembling a certain Device…where is my damned bagpiper? Ah, now I see him, strolling on Water Lane…why, I phant’sy I can even hear his Heathenish Strains. Too bad for the Lieutenant! Now, where’s my Fire?” He twitched the glass hard to port, sweeping it across the whole expanse of the Tower. The northern wall and the moat flashed by, and then the stretch of Tower Hill that lay due north of the complex. This was but a narrow patch of open ground, for the city stretched out a lobe toward the Tower here, nearly pinching the Tower Hill green in half. At its closest approach, some of the buildings along Postern Row came within a stone’s throw of the Moat. These belonged not to the city of London but to the Tower of London itself; they were called the Tower hamlets, they had their own militia, their own Justices of the Peace, and their own Fire Brigade. Which was not merely a pedantic observation. For one of the buildings in the Tower Hamlets was on fire. The trail of smoke above it told that it had been smouldering for a long time; but just now, orange flames began to billow from its windows. The Fire Brigade had been called out from the taverns where they patiently waited, day in and day out, for an excuse to do their duty, and they were hastening out of the hamlets’ diverse courts and culs-de-sac, out of Distiller’s Yard and Savage Gardens into Woodruff Lane. But they were outnumbered, and generally out-run, by persons who merely wanted to see a building burn down. This was the ever-present Mobility; or, for short, the Mobb.

“My people!” exclaimed the man mawkishly. Satisfied, he took the glass down from his eye, blinked a few times, and attended to the near-at-hand for the first time in several minutes. A huge Indian, blinded by sweat, was emerging from the stair carrying a bucket of silk thread. One of the Filipinos had scaled the stone knob at the top of the Monument, a good twenty feet above, and lashed himself to the base of the lanthorn. He caught a coil of rope underhanded to him by his partner. Tomba spliced away, wielding that fib like a scribe with a pen, and glancing up alertly from time to time. The four Jews had made a cabal in the southwest corner and were avidly speculating as to what the hell was going on. The only ones completely useless were Jimmy and Danny, still gazing, gobsmacked, down into the Tower.

“Wake up, ye bloody prats!” said the old man in the golden waistcoat. “Lest I come over and knock the dust out o’ yer skulls.” Then, before he could summon up any more such endearments, he was distracted by items of interest in the river Thames.

On the downstream side of the Bridge, a derelict-looking barge was tied up to the fourth starling from the near end. A short distance downstream, a sloop could be seen anchored in the Pool. She was in the act of weighing anchor. This was not remarkable. But she was running out her guns, which was; and to boot, some hands were busy on her aft end, preparing to hoist a blue flag covered with gold fleurs-de-lis.

But even more than these, what truly commanded his attention was a huge wagon coming across the Bridge from Southwark, drawn by a team of eight horses. It looked like the sort of wagon that might be used to convey great building-stones from rural quarries into the precincts of the city. But its burden was covered by worn-out sails, and it was preceded and followed by a swarm of jubilant Black-guards who, if they were keeping to form, were probably picking pockets, purses, and shop-windows clean as they went, like grasshoppers progressing through a field of ripe grain. As they crossed the Square—the open fire-break in mid-span—a man jumped off the wagon, darted to the downstream side, leaned over the parapet, and waved a swath of yellow cloth over his head a few times. His eyes were directed toward the fourth starling. There, a cutlass severed a painter. The barge began to drift down with the tide.

“My boys. My doves,” said the man in the golden waistcoat. “Every varlet in a mile radius is doing me a favor of some description, save you twain. Do you not wot how long it took me to hoard all of the favors I am spending in this hour? Favors are harder to get than money. Faith, what I am doing here now is like shoveling guineas into the sea. Why am I doing it? Simple, boys: ’tis all for you. All I want is to provide you lads with a proper Mum to look after you.” His voice had gone thick; his face had collapsed and now bore no trace of anger. “Starin’ at yon Tower as if you’d never seen the minars of Shahjahanabad. Remindin’ me of my own self, a wee mudlark boy, first time Bob and I sallied up the river. Fascinating it might be to you, who’ve been ’tending to other matters, and ’tending well, I might add. But I am so bloody sick of the place, e’en though I’ve ne’er set foot in it. A thorough study of the Tower of London your father has made. Where the Tower is concerned, I am, as our friend Lord Gy would say, a dungeon o’ learnin’. No small toil for one as unused to study as I. Spent many hours plying with drink your Irish outlaws who have garrisoned it, and know its odd corners and passages. Sent artists in to sketch me this or that tower. Stood up here on howling bitter days peering at it through a perspective-glass. Wooed the Tower’s maid-servants, bribed and blackmailed the Warders. To me ’tis now as familiar as a parish church to its aged vicar. I have traced through fœtid streets the invisible boundary of the Liberty of the Tower. I know which prisoners are close kept, and which have been granted that Liberty. I know the amount of the stipend that the Constable of the Tower is paid for looking after a Commoner-of-
means and a Commoner-without-means. Of the guns that look out o’er the river, I know which are in good order, and may not be fired because of dry rot in their carriages. I know the number of dogs, how many of them are pets, how many are strays, and how many of the latter are mad. I know which prisoner dwells with which Warder in which house. I know the amount of the customary tip one must give to a Warder to gain entry to the Inner Ward. When the Gentleman Porter goes into the country to take the waters, and cannot ’tend to his customary duty of locking the Tower’s gates at half-past-ten in the evening, who takes over that duty for him? I know. Did you know that the Steward of the Court of the Liberty of the Tower does double duty as its Coroner? Or that the Apothecary serves by warrant of the Constable, whereas the Barber is a wholly informal and unsworn position? I do, and indeed the Barber is one of our number. All these and numberless other things I know concerning the Tower. And at the end of my studies I have concluded that the place is naught more than just another queer English town, with a rickety wooden gaol and a parish church, and the only thing of note about it is that money is made there, and its leading citizens are all Lords committed for High Treason. I inform you of this now so you’ll not be let down anon when it’s amply shown ’tis true; and also, so that you’ll stop gawping at it, and count the redcoats in the Wharf Guard, and assemble the fucking Rocket!”

Jimmy and Danny had begun to rouse from their stupor round the point in the soliloquy when their father had brought up the subject of rabid dogs—even for those who lived a life of danger, this was a certain attention-getter. The terminal word “rocket” jolted them like the noose at a rope’s end. Jimmy shrugged off his cape and let it crumple to the stone deck. For a few moments Danny looked to be committing fratricide as he worked with a dirk under his brother’s arms, but he was only cutting away the web of ropes that bound the helmet-shaped burden to his back.

“Damn me, I should watch more and discourse less,” remarked their father, surveying the rooftops below through his glass. “They’ve strung the lines while I was prating.”

A thread of gossamer now connected the steeples of St. Mary-at-Hill and St. Dunstan-in-the-East, and thence ran almost in a straight line to the roof of Trinity House. But haply he focused on the streaming gutter of Tower Street just in time to see a crossbow-bolt flying above it. This pierced the copper roof-skin of All Hallows Church. It had only lodged there for a few moments when a dark-skinned, barefoot man scrambled to it, and commenced a curious hand-over-hand pantomime. He was pulling in yards of silken thread, too fine to be resolved by the glass. It was originating from a smooth-rubbed copper vat on the roof of Trinity House, and it got thicker as he pulled it in, so that if one had the patience to stand there and watch, it might in the end become visible.

He diverted his glass a few arc-seconds down into the adjoining churchyard, where the funeral had taken a macabre turn: the lid of the coffin had been tossed aside to reveal a helmet-shaped object with a long stick projecting from its base. Stored in the foot of the sarcophagus was another vat of coiled thread.

From there it was a flick of the glass to Tower Hill. The red lines were gone! The companies of soldiers had marched away. He scanned the Hill until he’d found them again: they had done just as he’d hoped. They had marched toward the smoke and the fire. As how could they not, for the fire had broken out in a building not far from Black Horse Stables, where these dragoons kept many of their horses. The protocol of London fires was as fixed and changeless as that of a coronation: first the fire brigades came, then the Mobb arrived, and finally soldiers marched out to drive away the Mobb. All was proceeding according to tradition.

He took the glass from his eye to make sure that his sons were doing their bit for the Plan. Indeed, they had lashed the pilgrim-staff to the rocket-head, and leaned it against the railing, aimed in the general direction of St. Mary-at-Hill. Several yards of iron chain trailed from the end of the stick and were now being spliced to a loose end of cord that trailed over the brim of the kettle that the Indian had lugged up here. So that was as it should be. He glanced straight down to verify that the large wagon was booming into position at the foot of the column. Then he moved in the direction of the river, to check on his naval maneuvers; but as he came near the stair exit, his progress was all of a sudden blocked by a tall slender fellow in a long robe, who emerged not even breathing hard.

“Bloody Hell—our Supervisor’s here, boys.”

In response, spitting noises from Jimmy and Danny.

The robed one cast back his hood to reveal black hair with gray streaks and an unfashionable, but admittedly handsome, goatee. “Good day, Jack.”

“Say instead Bonjour, Jacques, so that our hostages shall make a note of your Frenchitude. And while you are at it, Father Ed, make the sign of the cross a few times to show off your Catholicity.”

Father Édouard de Gex switched happily to French and raised his voice. “I shall have more than one occasion to cross myself before we are finished. Mon Dieu, are these the only hostages you could arrange? They are Jews.”

“I am aware of it. They’ll make better witnesses, as being impartial to the quarrel.”

Father Édouard de Gex’s nose was a magnificent piece of bone architecture surmounting nostrils big enough to swallow wine-corks. He put them to good use now, literally sniffing at the Jews. He threw back and cast off his long robe to reveal the black cassock of a Jesuit, complete with swingeing crucifix, rosary, and other regalia. The Jews—who had supposed, until now, that the business with the pulley was part of routine Monument maintenance—now could not choose between astonishment and fear; We came up to take in the view, they seemed to say, and never expected the Spanish Inquisition.

“Where are the coins?” de Gex demanded.

“On your climb, did you nearly get tumbled off the stair by a great Indian who was on his way down?”

“Oui.”

“When next we see him, he’ll have the coins. Now, if you do not mind, I’d gladly have a look at the river.” Jack skirted de Gex and raised his glass, then faltered, as he did not really need it. The barge was drifting downriver with the tide-surge, and had covered perhaps a quarter of the distance to Tower Wharf. Men had emerged onto its deck and busied themselves with now-familiar preparations involving ropes and rockets. As for the sloop, she had now run out her French flag for everyone in the Pool to see, and seemed to be making a course for the Tower. Men were suddenly crowding her decks: men dressed all alike in powder-blue coats. If Jack had bothered with the spyglass, he could have seen ropes, grapnels, blunderbusses, and other Marine hard-ware in their hands.

The question was: was anyone in the Tower bothering to look? What if Jack threw a Boarding Party, and nobody came?

Behind him de Gex, in the universal manner of Supervisory Personages, was asking useless questions. “Jimmy, what think you?”

“I think too much pivots on outcomes within the Tower,” was Jimmy’s bleak answer.

De Gex seemed pleased to’ve been served up this opportunity to discharge the priestly office of succouring those who despaired. “Ah, I know the Tower is of an aspect very formidable. But unlettered man that you are, you want historical perspective. Do you know, Jimmy, who was the first prisoner ever held in the Tower of London?”

“No,” answered Jimmy, after deciding not to exercise his other option, viz. flinging de Gex off the Monument.

“It was his holiness Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham. And do you know, Jimmy, who was the first prisoner to escape from the Tower?”

“No idea.”

“Ranulf Flambard. This was in the year of our Lord eleven hundred and one. Since then very little has changed. The Tower’s inmates refrain from escaping, not because the place is so competently looked after, but because they are mostly English gentlemen, who would look on it as bad form to leave. If the place were managed by Frenchmen our plan would be certain to fail, but as matters stand—”

“Come, they’re not so bad,” Jack put in, “see how the redcoats swarm to the Wharf. The alarm has gone up.”

“Excellent,” de Gex purred. “Then a Russian and a Scotsman may achieve what no Englishman would dream of.”

Sloop Atalanta, off the Isle of Grain

LATE AFTERNOON

WHEN NEXT THEY SAW COLONEL Barnes, they were well down the last reach of the Hope. The tide was rushing away from them so ardently that it threatened to ground Atalanta on the floor of an empty Thames. The river drew narrower every minute as its contents fled to the sea, exposing vast gray-brown slatherings to the air. Southend could be seen a few miles off the port bow, stranded in a mud desert. But what dominated the prospect was the sweep of the open ocean, which now subtended a full quarter of the horizon.

To starboard a fat sinuous river could be seen meandering out through the Kent marshes and nearly exhausting itself as it struggled across the ever-widening flat, trying to connect with the Thames.

“It is Yantlet Creek,” announced Colonel Barnes. “All that lies beyond it is not the mainland, but the Isle of Grain.”

“How can a creek form an island?” Daniel inquired.

“Questions such as that are the penalty we suffer for inviting Natural Philosophers,” Barnes sighed.

“Sir Isaac asked, too?”

“Yes, and I’ll give you the same answer.” Barnes unrolled his map, and traced the S of Yantlet Creek inland to a place where it joined up with a ganglion of other creeks, some of which flowed the other direction, into the Medway on the opposite side of the isle.

“Gravity seems to be mocking us here—who can explain the flow of these streams?” Daniel mused.

“Perhaps Leibniz can,” Barnes returned, sotto voce.

“So it is truly an island,” Daniel admitted, “which raises the question: how will your mounted companies be able to cross over to it? I assume that is what they are doing.”

Barnes used one dirty fingernail to trace the line of a road from the ferry wharf at Gravesend eastwards along the foot of the chalk hills. Where the Thames had jogged north to swing round the hammerhead, the road angled south to cut across its narrow handle, and then to follow the higher and drier ground a few miles inland of the Thames. “Here’s where they should have got ahead of us,” Barnes said. “And here is the bridge—the only bridge—over Yantlet Creek to the Isle of Grain.”

“Military man that you are, you lay great stress upon the onliness of that bridge,” Daniel remarked.

“Military man that I am, I have made it mine, for today,” Barnes stated. “My men have crossed over it, and hold the Isle end.” Then he checked his watch, to reassure himself. “Jack and his men are pent up now on that Isle, they cannot escape by land. And if they should attempt it by sea—why, we shall be waiting for them, shan’t we?”

He could learn nothing further from the map, so Daniel looked up. He could now see a rectangular keep sticking up out the top of a cairn-like foundation, perhaps a mile ahead of them.

At high tide, Shive Tor might make, if not a pretty picture, then at least a striking Gothick spectacle, jutting out of sparkling water off the shore of the Isle of Grain, brooding over the traffic of ships through England’s front gate. But at this moment it stood alone in the middle of an expanse of drained muck the size of London.

“If Jack lives up to his reputation, he’ll have a vessel at his disposal—perhaps a bigger and better one than this,” Daniel said—less to raise a serious objection than to egg Barnes on.

“But look beyond—behold what lies in the distance!” Barnes exclaimed.

Daniel now gazed past Shive Tor and perceived that there was water again, a mile or two beyond it. It required a moment or two to persuade himself that this must be the channel of the Medway. On the far bank of that lay a system of fortifications with a fishing-village cowering behind it: Sheerness.

“If Jack breaks for France, we need only signal Sheerness Fort. The Admiralty shall see to the rest,” Barnes said. He said it distractedly, as he’d telescoped a brass perspective-glass to full length and was using it to squint at Shive Tor. “Not to worry, though—as we expected, he’s high and dry. There’s a ship-channel, you see, so that the Tor can be serviced by water, and Jack’s been dredging it deeper and deeper, so he can sail right up to the Tor with larger and larger vessels—but it’s no use during a spring tide. A longboat would scrape the bottom of that ditch this evening.”

Round the time Shive Tor had emerged from behind the Isle of Grain, a new wind had flooded over the starboard bow. For the last few minutes the sailors had been attending to it, trimming the canvas. Their business masked the more subtle operations of signalmen, who were at work with flags trying to communicate (or so Daniel assumed) with the dragoons who had disembarked at Gravesend. There was, in other words, a bit of a lull. Quite obviously, it would not last, and then there was no telling when Daniel would have another opportunity to speak to Barnes.

“Don’t mind Roger,” he said.

“Beg your pardon, sir?”

“The Marquis of Ravenscar. Don’t be troubled. I shall send him a note.”

“What sort of note, precisely?”

“Oh, I don’t know. ‘Dear Roger, fascinated to hear you are raising an army, oddly enough, so am I, and have already invited Colonel Barnes to be my Commander-in-Chief. Do let’s be allies. Your comrade-in-
arms, Daniel.’ ”

Barnes wanted to laugh but could not quite trust his ears, and so held it in, and went apoplectic red. “I should be indebted,” he said.

“Not at all.”

“If my men were to suffer, because of some political—”

“It is quite out of the question. Bolingbroke shall live out his declining years in France. The Hanovers shall come, and when they do, I shall extol you and your men to Princess Caroline.”

Barnes bowed to him. Then he said, “Or perhaps not, depending upon what happens in the next hour.”

“It shall go splendidly, Colonel Barnes. One more thing, before we are embroiled—?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Your superior wanted to convey some message to me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Black-guard who accosted you on Tower Wharf this morning.”

“Ah yes,” Barnes said, and grinned. “Great big chap, dark and a bit gloomy, would’ve made a fine dragoon. Spoke in words I did not fully understand. Which was probably his intent. Wanted me to tell you that it was a lay.”

Daniel was frozen for a count of ten.

“You all right, Doctor?”

“This breeze off the sea is quite bracing.”

“I’ll get you a blanket.”

“No, stay…. Those…those were his words? ‘It’s a lay’?”

“That was the entire message. What’s it signify? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“It means we should all turn around and go back to London.”

Barnes laughed. “Why’d we want to do such a thing, Doctor?”

“Because this is a trap. No, don’t you see? They somehow—Jack somehow—knew.”

“Knew what, Doctor?”

“Everything. He led us on.”

Barnes took a moment to think it through. “What, you’re saying the Russian was planted?”

“Just so! Why else would he have divulged so much, so soon?”

“Because Charles White had his testicles in a vise?”

“No, no, no. I’m telling you, Colonel—”

“Too fanciful,” was the verdict of Barnes. “More likely, the Black-guard’s in the pay of Jack, and, in a last-ditch gambit to stop us from coming out here, tried to scare us off with words.”

There was no changing Barnes’s mind. Daniel had committed a grave error by instilling Barnes with Hope first, then trying to make him afraid. If a want of hope made men desperate, a surfeit of it made them stupid in a wholly other way. Hope was tricky business, it seemed, and ought to be managed by someone with more experience of it than Daniel.

They were accosted by a lone musket-shot from shore. The captain ordered his seamen to slacken the canvas until they were only just making head-way. A skiff had pushed off from the indistinct shore of the Isle of Grain. News of it rapidly penetrated the quarterdeck and brought Charles White and Sir Isaac Newton up to the poop.

In a few minutes the skiff came alongside them, carrying a lieutenant of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. It had been commandeered from a local fisherman and his boy, who did all the work. They were not so much put out by this turn of events, as incredulous.

The lieutenant brought a cargo of words, and unloaded it with no small pride on the poop deck. These words were accepted as valuable military intelligence by all present save Daniel, who construed them only as additional tricks put in their way by Jack the Coiner.

The gist of it was that a brilliant success had been achieved. The dragoons had galloped over the Yantlet Creek bridge half an hour ahead of schedule, and posted a platoon there to hold it. The rest of the company had made for that stretch of shore-line nearest Shive Tor, and posted a lookout on St. James’s Church. This was built on the nearest thing the Isle of Grain had to a hill, and looked straight out across the tide flats. There the command post had been established. Most of the company was now deployed below it, at the high tide line, ready either to intercept any counterfeiters fleeing from the Tor on foot, or to mount a charge across the flats and storm the building. All of which had been noted by the inmates of the Tor, who had burned a few documents (or so it could be guessed from interpreting smoke) and then tried to escape by water.

Moored on the seaward side of the Tor, in the dredged channel, had been a boat of perhaps sixty feet in length, built on the lines of a Dutch ocean-going fishing vessel called a hooker. As Daniel, son of a smuggler, knew, this would be an ideal sort of craft for illicit traffic across the North Sea. Drake had used boats with flatter bottoms, because he tended to unload in shallow coastal creeks, but since Jack had his own ship-channel, he could carry out a thriving trade with a deeper-draught vessel such as this hooker. The occupants of Shive Tor had hastily loaded some items onto the hooker, raised sail, and tried to take her down the channel to open water. But she had run aground almost immediately, no more than a bowshot from the Tor. They had flung out enough stuff to refloat her, then let the wind—which was abeam—push her to the side of the wee channel, where she had run aground for good. This had opened the channel again and enabled at least some of them to make their escape in a sort of whaling boat: not much bigger than a longboat, but equipped with a mast and a sail, which had been raised once it had been rowed free of the channel. The whaler’s flight was being watched from St. James’s Church. But not much longer; in another hour, darkness would fall.

Having concluded this narration, the lieutenant awaited orders. Now, Mr. Charles White, who was quite obviously the master of this expedition, had the good form to look expectantly at Barnes, giving him leave to utter the command.

Barnes considered it for a long time—to the shock, then irritation, of Charles White and Isaac Newton both. Finally he shrugged and gave orders. This lieutenant was to be rowed back to shore, where he was to order an advance across the tidal flats to Shive Tor. Atalanta was to raise sail and pursue the fleeing whaler, pausing only to drop its longboat at the mouth of the Tor’s dredged channel so that an advance party could reach the Tor, arrest anyone who hadn’t made it onto the whaler’s passenger list, and salvage the grounded hooker before the resurgent tide floated it off.

These orders produced intense activity from all except Charles White, who responded with a sigh of mock relief and a roll of the eyes: what had taken Colonel Barnes so long? Precious seconds had been wasted as he pondered what was obvious!

Barnes had turned his back on White immediately after giving the command. He thumped over to Daniel.

“You’re correct,” Barnes said. “It’s—what did your friend call it? A lay.”

“What brings this change of mind, Colonel Barnes?”

“The fact that I had no decision to make. An imbecile could have given those orders.” He glanced over at White. “And one almost did.”

“Is it your intention to remain aboard, or to go to the Tor in the longboat?”

“A peg-leg’s no use in muck,” Barnes said.

“Daniel, I should benefit from your assistance at the Tor,” announced Sir Isaac Newton, breaking in on their conversation from behind Barnes. He was shrugging on a coat, and had brought up a wooden case that, from the way that he glared at anyone who came near it, Daniel assumed must contain Natural-Philosophick or Alchemical instruments.

Barnes pondered for a moment.

“On the other hand,” he said, “I could always hop about on one foot.”

Lieutenant’s Lodging, the Tower of London

LATE AFTERNOON

BY THE TIME HE GOT up to the late lieutenant’s bedchamber, no fewer than four grappling-irons were already lodged in the sills of its open windows. As he approached, a fifth erupted through a sash, and flying glass nearly accounted for his remaining eye. He spun away, backed to the window, thrust his hand out into the breeze, and skated it back and forth until he heard an answering cheer from below.

Sixteen months ago, MacIan had been arrested for a violation of the Stabbing Act. The stabbee had been an Englishman: a Whig who had mocked him in a coffee-house, pretending that he could not understand a word the Scotsman was saying. The Prosecutor had been the Whig’s widow: a more formidable opponent. By dint of various connivings and intrigues, she managed to trump up a few moments’ impulsive dirk-work into an act of High Treason. Exploiting the fact that her late husband had been a Member of Parliament, she had convinced a magistrate that the imbroglio had, in truth, been an act of international espionage carried out by a Scottish Jacobite Tory against an important member of Her Majesty’s Government. So MacIan had been committed to the Tower instead of Newgate Prison. He had not set foot beyond the Inner Wall since then. Now, though, he staged half of an escape by thrusting his head and shoulders out the window.

It was a different world out here. The only thing he had an eye for at first was doings on the river: not the easiest page for a one-eyed man to read, given the number and variety of ships strewn over the Pool. As a boy he had thought ships wonders. As a veteran he saw them differently, each vessel a coagulated Motive, a frozen Deed.

His eye soon picked out the triangular sails of a sloop, and a blue French naval banner, and, below them on the deck, an assembly of blue-coated soldiers. In case this were not a clear enough message, the sloop now fired a spotty barrage from its collection of swivel-guns. That, MacIan knew, served two ends: it let the Wharf Guard know that these invaders were not a mirage. But it was also a cue to the other actors in the play, letting them know that MacIan had hit his mark, and appeared in a certain window.

Within the Moat and on the Wharf, at this moment, should be seventy-two private soldiers, four corporals, four sergeants, two drums and a single lieutenant, that being a single Company, and the minimum complement deemed necessary to guard the place.

Of that number, a quarter of them—one platoon—would normally be concentrated along the Wharf, which was by far the most vulnerable face of the complex in that anyone in the world could come up to it on a boat. The other three platoons would be scattered round the complex at a plethora of sentry-posts and guard-houses: at the gates, causeways, and drawbridges, of course, but also before the doors of the Yeoman Warders’ houses, in front of the Jewell Tower, and at diverse other check-points.

There were also about two score Yeoman Warders. These were, in a somewhat technical sense, soldiers—The Yeomen of the Guard of Our Lady the Queen, “the Queen’s Spears,” the vestiges of a sort of Praetorian Guard that Henry VII had organized after Bosworth Field. But MacIan was rather less concerned with them, for they were scattered amongst their cottages looking after prisoners, they were not well armed, and they were not really run after the fashion of a military unit.

Normally Charles White and a few of the Queen’s Messengers—who actually were rather dangerous lads—would be hanging around the place. But they were off on a river cruise today.

At least in theory there was a Militia of the Tower Hamlets. But to muster these would take days, and to get their firelocks in working order would take longer. Most of them dwelt on the wrong side of the Moat anyway.

There was a Master Gunner, and under him four Gunners. By this time of day the Master Gunner could be counted on to be dead drunk. Only two of the Gunners would be on duty. And this meant sitting in a dungeon taking inventory of cannonballs—not manning the battlements ready to put fire to a loaded Piece. To actually load and fire the cannons and mortars on the Wharf and along the parapets of the walls required quite a few more bodies than that, and so it was a duty for the Guard. When the guns were fired on the Queen’s Birthday or for the arrival of an ambassador, much of the regiment was kept busy looking after them.

So the task at hand was to account for the some fifty-four guards who were not presently on the Wharf, and put them out of action.

What Rufus MacIan wanted to hear, he heard now: the drummer on the Wharf hammering out a tattoo that meant Alarm, Alarm! He could hear it clearly through this window, indeed could’ve thrown a stone over the low outer wall and hit the drummer-boy on the head. But it booted nothing for him to hear it. The question was, could it be heard by the Guards sprinkled round the Mint and the Inner Ward over the alarms of the fire that was burning in the hamlets, north of the Moat?

There was no better vantage-point from which to answer such questions than the building he was in now: the Lieutenant’s Lodging. MacIan turned his back on the window and strode north, exiting the room and stepping across a corridor. This brought him, for a moment, in view of a staircase. Angusina, the big red-headed lass, was coming up with a fistful of skirt in one hand and a loaded pistol in the other. Her face was flushed beneath the freckles as if someone had been flirting with her. “The Centinells ir flichtered!” she proclaimed, “weengin away like a flocht o muir-cocks at the buller o’ the guns.”

“The guns, aye, but can they hear the tuck o the drum?” MacIan wondered, and ducked into a small room under the gables. A long stride brought him to a mullioned window that framed a view of the Parade. What he saw was to his satisfaction: “A see reid,” he announced. “ ’Tis a beginning.”

As MacIan knew from having watched their interminable drills through the window of his prison, when an alarm sounded, the company on guard was supposed to form up at their barracks and march as quickly as possible to the Parade. This was more or less what he was seeing now, albeit from a different window. One platoon was there, wanting a few men, and enough privates had strayed in from other platoons to assemble a couple of additional squads.

The fact that Rufus MacIan had just stabbed the Lieutenant of the Tower to death in his own dining-room had no effect at all, and would not have made a difference even if these men had been aware of it. They were carrying out standing orders, which was exactly what was wanted at this stage of the Plan. If the Lieutenant (Throwley) had been alive, or if the Colonel of the regiment (Barnes) or even its Master Sergeant (Shaftoe) had been present, any of them might have countermanded those standing orders, and dashed the whole enterprise. As matters stood, none of them was in a position to put his superior intelligence to use here. Besides them, only three other personages stood in the chain of command: the Constable of the Tower (the late Ewell Throwley’s superior) and the Deputy Lieutenant and the Major (Throwley’s subordinates). The Constable was presently taking the waters in the country, trying to rid his system of three dozen faulty oysters he’d tucked into yesterday afternoon. The other two had been drawn away for the afternoon on some pretext. And so the Tower guard, like a killed chicken dashing around the farm-yard, was aping the remembered commands of a head that had already been thrown to the dogs.

The ranking sergeant was in the middle of the Parade, screaming a bit of tender abuse at each solitary lobsterback who came running in. Squads were schooling like fish on the green. It put Rufus MacIan in mind of the War: of the glorious carnage of Blenheim, piercing the French lines at Brabant, crossing the morass on the right end of the line at Ramillies, breaking the French cavalry before Oudenaarde. A thousand tales of gallantry that had become mere stuff between veterans’ deaf ears. Part of him wanted to stride across that green Parade, rally those troops—for excellent troops they were—and lead them to the Wharf. But his status as condemned traitor and sworn enemy would be an impediment there. To settle his mind on the task at hand was easy enough—he need only turn around and look at that red-headed girl, and remember the day when he had picked her up from the cold blue breast of her dead mother and wrapped her in bloody bed-clothes and borne her up screaming into the crags above Glen Coe.

The ranking sergeant had turned his purple face to the south. For a moment MacIan was wary of being spied in the lieutenant’s window. But the sergeant was not looking his way; his gaze was directed, rather, towards Cold Harbour—no, towards Bloody Tower, the chief portal to Water Lane from where he stood. MacIan could not see what the sergeant was looking at, but he could discern from the man’s silence, and his posture, that he was soaking up commands. It must be the officer in command of this company. That would fit. The lieutenant, on hearing the guns on the river, and the alarm from the Wharf, would run to investigate. Seeing the improbable, the unthinkable, but not-to-be-denied sight of a party of French Marines bearing down on the Wharf and blazing away with swivel-guns, he would dash back across Water Lane and get in view of the Parade the quickest possible way, which was through the stalwart arch in the base of Bloody Tower, and order all available units to “follow me!”

The sergeant on the green answered the only way he knew how: methodically. With a deliberation that was as agonizing to Rufus MacIan as it must have been to the wild-eyed lieutenant on the threshold of Bloody Tower, he drew and raised his sword, bellowed a catechism of marching orders that caused the one company and the three squads to stiffen, shoulder arms, wheel to the south, and—finally, bringing the sword down—forward march. And once some momentum had been established he even went to the extreme of telling them to double-time it.

MacIan went back to the bedchamber on the south side and found that Angusina had already applied herself to the task of pulling in the grapnels and making rope-ends fast to the frame of the lieutenant’s massive bed. Her imposing pelvis was framed in a window like an egg in a snuff-box as she hand-over-handed some burden up on a rope. Rufus MacIan thrust his head out another window and looked off to the left down Water Lane just in time to see the head of the column of redcoats sally from the base of Bloody Tower. A jog to the left then took them across the lane and into the base of St. Thomas’s tower, which they could use as a bridge to the Wharf.

He was distracted by a clanging noise nearby, and glanced down to see a Claymore bashing against the stone wall as Angusina hauled it up on a rope. The blade was almost naked, clad only in a sort of thong used for hanging it on the back. Scabbards for Claymores did not exist; such weapons were to be used, not worn. This particular blade had suffered worse, and MacIan was not troubled by its sparking collisions with the wall.

The lot below numbered a round dozen. They were ordinary London tavern rabble by their looks. Or to be precise, ordinary post-war London tavern rabble. For the Mobility had suddenly become a lot younger and rougher in the last twelvemonth, when much of Her Majesty’s army had been disbanded. Some of the veterans had gone off to be pirates or soldiers of fortune. But these happy few had been making themselves common, unremarkable features of a couple of drinking establishments spackled to the plinth of Bell Tower and the adjoining stretch of wall—directly beneath the very windows that Angusina and Rufus were presently looking out of.

“A praisent for thee, uncle, an weel to be seen!” called Angusina, and heaved the Claymore up into the room. After it several rods of iron clattered in series over the windowsill. For the great sword had been affixed to the top of a collapsible ladder, made of forged rungs separating a pair of knotted ropes. Angusina held the weapon out so that Rufus MacIan, wielding his bloody dirk, could slash the twine that bound it to the uppermost rung. This accomplished, he tossed the Claymore onto the bed—there was not room in this low-ceilinged chamber even for a practice swing—and helped the wench fix the head of the ladder to a Tudor armoire the size of a naval shot locker. Then it was back to the windows, as now came perhaps the chanciest bit of the entire Plan.

These windows were desperately exposed to view, and to more dangerous attentions, from the Wharf. What they had done until now—rope and ladder work—was visible but not, all things considered, conspicuous. Soldiers on the Wharf, distracted by the apparition on the Thames, could see it if they turned around and looked—but it was just as likely they’d not. What was going to happen next, on the other hand, could not be missed by anyone.

He hauled up a faggot of muskets on the end of a rope, slashed them apart, and began to charge one with powder and balls that Angusina had pulled up in an earlier load. A bit of covering fire couldn’t hurt. But what was really wanted here was cavalry.

“They’re so doughty,” cooed Angusina. “Yon blae-coatit Jocks oot on the River. And whaur were such stout-hertit Marines enlisted, uncle?”

“A bankrupt theatre,” he answered. “Yon French Marines ir no French, nor Marines, nor doughty, nor stout-hertit, nor aye soldiers. They ir actors, lass, an they hae been told they ir playin in a wee masque for the amusement o the Dutch Ambassador.”

“Never!”

“Aye.”

“Losh! They ir in for a stamagast then!” Angusina exclaimed.

“Fire!” came a distant scream from the Wharf. The cry was instantly buried under a barrage of mighty, hissing thuds as perhaps two score soldiers discharged their muskets. Then silence, except for a howl of dismay from the company of actors aboard the sloop.

“And that’s it for thaim,” said Rufus MacIan. “They’ll fleg off now. Tach! Whaur is ma bludie cavalry?” He had the musket loaded by now and he approached the window, wanting in the worst way to look to the right, towards Byward Tower and the causeway over the Moat. But prudence demanded that he scan the Wharf first. The soldiers were still in line with their red backs to him, the sergeant in profile watching them reload. But the drummer—blast, the dummer was looking right at him! His grip tightened on the stock of the musket. But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.

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

The musket could not be wielded fast enough through the small window. “Ye there,” he said to the lower ladder-climber, “throw me your pistol and hold fast.”

It was an exceptional sort of request. But MacIan had learned how to utter such requests in a way, and with a look, that ensured they would be heard and heeded. Shortly the pistol flew at him butt-first. MacIan caught it just as the Yeoman was swinging the window open, and cocked it as the Yeoman was thrusting his own pistol out, and pulled the trigger an instant before the Yeoman did. This had not left time for taking aim, and so the ball spalled a chunk out of the window-frame and went zooming away with a weird noise, like a drunken wasp. But it had the desirable effect of spoiling the Yeoman’s aim. His shot grazed the wall short of the ladder. The man who’d thrown the pistol took advantage of the reloading-interval to scamper up the last half-dozen rungs and dive through the window; and as soon as he was out of the way, a white line flicked up from Water Lane and vanished into the sniper’s window. “God damn it!” shouted the Yeoman.

Rufus MacIan looked down to discover an archer standing in the lane in front of the tavern, calmly fitting a second shaft to his bow-string. This man looked up at MacIan as if expecting a commendation; but what he got was, “Can ye see down the fookin’ causeway? If ma bludie cavalry dinna come soon—” cut off by a crash and crack as a musket-ball from the Wharf smashed into the wall near MacIan’s head. MacIan dropped to the floor of the bedchamber and buried his face in his sleeve for a few moments, as it felt to have been shredded on one side by numerous skirps of rock.

But he got an answer to his question. For in the sudden quiet he could hear many iron horseshoes, and a few iron wheel-rims, assaulting the paving-stones of the causeway. They could be any group of riders, followed by a wagon. But the piper down the lane, who’d been silent these last few minutes, now let pent-up breath sing in his drone, and began to play a battle-song of the MacDonalds: a tune Rufus MacIan hadn’t heard since the eve of the Massacre of Glen Coe, when the soldiers had danced to it. The tune came in not through his ears but his skin, which erupted in goose-pimples all over; ’twas as if his blood were oil, and fire had been laid to it, and serrated flames were racing from his heart to his extremities, and probing through the uncanny mazes and dark recesses of his brain. And this was how he knew that they were not just any riders but his kinsmen, his blude-friends, riding at last to slake the wrake-lust that had burned in them for twenty-two years.

There was answering musket-fire now from Angusina and the few men who’d scaled the ladder. When his ears cleared he heard shod hooves biting into wood—MacIan’s cavalry, drawn to the sound of the pipes, had reached the wooden drawbridge that spanned the last few yards of moat before the Byward Tower gate. They were moving at a canter—meaning that they’d seen no reason to rein in their mounts—meaning that the tavern-contingent had accomplished its paramount charge of making sure that the portcullis was not dropped.

There was an epidemic of hammering noises, and the room became very dusty. A barrage had been fired from the Wharf into the windows. Taking advantage of the reload-interval, he raised his head above the windowsill. Two more men were clambering up the ladder as sprightly as they could go. A platoon of lobsterbacks, now with their backs to the river, were lined up on the Wharf reloading; one had been shot and was curled up on his side. The other soldiers who’d been on the Wharf were no longer in sight. Indeed, since the menacing sloop had suspended its attack, there was no reason for them to remain out there. The lieutenant must have perceived this and ordered them to march back through St. Thomas’s Tower. They would be flooding into the Lane at any moment—

Horseshoes below. He looked plumb down to see a line of a dozen riders in kilts trotting into the Lane from the gate; and sweetest of all, heard the Byward Tower portcullis hurtling down behind them, sealing the Tower off from London. “Fuck-all ahint ye,” he informed them, “Englishmen afore, comin athort the Lane—get the bastarts!” And without bothering to wait and watch his orders being put into effect, he whirled to the bed, grabbed up the Claymore in its rude back-holster, and bore it in front of him out of the room and down the stairs.

AS A LAD HE HAD plotted his wrake, his revenge, in day-dreams a thousand times. He had always seen it as a straightforward matter of wading through the intestines of Campbells and Englishmen swinging his Claymore. Fortunately, a dozen years of professional war-making had intervened between those laddish phant’sies and the opportunity of this day, and taught him that he must go about it systematically.

So he did not fly out onto the Parade and go looking for Englishmen to slay, but bided his time by the door for a moment and made a study of the place as he hung the great sword on his back.

The Parade was empty except for a single redcoat running from the barracks toward the Bloody Tower gate.

No, never mind, someone had just shot him, probably from Cold Harbour. The Plan called for ten men, give or take a few, to have slipped into the Inner Ward and taken up positions from which they could shoot over the Parade or throttle this or that choke-point. Which appeared to have been done. The Yeoman Warders looking out the windows of their houses would have seen the redcoat fall, and would understand that to step from their front doors was death. But this did not mean that the Parade was available to Rufus MacIan. For a Yeoman, or a stray soldier of the Guard, could just as easily shoot through a window or over a parapet. It had to be considered a no-man’s-land for the time being.

“I need to ken if the Bloody Tower portcullis is dropped,” he remarked, just thinking aloud. But hearing a man clear his throat behind him, he turned around to discover half a dozen lads, flushed in the face and breathing hard from the scramble up the ladder and the dash down the staircase, but all in the pink of health and ready to go with loaded muskets.

“Beg pardon, my lord, but we worked out a signal for that.”

“And ye ir—?”

“Gunnery Sergeant, retired, Dick Milton, my lord.”

“Ti the windie then, Milton, an look for thy signal.”

“There it is,” Milton replied after a glance across the Parade. “See there, the Chapel has a clear view of Bloody Tower, as we’ve a clear view of it. We’ve a lass in there. Came in last night for a funeral, stayed all night to pray, and stayed all day to keep an eye on Bloody Tower for us. Do you mark the yellow cloth in the middle window there? She put it up to let us know that the portcullis is dropped.”

“Then the Black-guard maun hae sprung the Russian,” said Rufus MacIan, “an the Russian maun hae duin his job. Crivvens! It’s a clinker.”

“A clinker, my lord?”

“A wadna hae believed it, tha a one-airmed man could fell so many. But he hae surpreese on his left flank, an mad panic on his right, an either o the twae, by itself, is more mauchty than Hercules. Ir ye all guidwillie, now, to practice your auld profession?”

“Aye!” and “Yes, my lord,” came the answers.

“Then count to five, and follow.” MacIan flung the front door open and stepped out onto the Parade, as casually as if he were the Lieutenant of the Tower on his way to church.

“One,” chanted the men crouched in the building he’d just left behind.

Smoke jerked from the window of a Yeoman’s house.

“Two.”

A musket-ball buzzed in like a massive bumblebee, ruffled the whiskers of MacIan’s beard, and destroyed the window he had lately been peering out of.

“Three!” chanted the gunners, except for one who was screaming.

Musket-smoke spurted from half a dozen odd places around the Inner Ward: from dovecotes and barrel-stacks in Cold Harbour, doors of barracks, and corners and crannies of ancient walls.

“Four!” Another musket-ball, much too high, dug a crater from the front of the Lieutenant’s Lodging. “Paltry,” was the verdict of Rufus MacIan. “A dowless effort.” But his comments were drowned out by the echoes of the recent fire rolling around the Parade, as several other shots had just been fired to suppress the efforts of those Yeomen who were taking pot-shots at him.

“Five!”

Three men piled out the door, dropped to a kneeling position on the gravel track that ran along the front of the house, and raised muskets to their shoulders, taking aim at windows where they thought Yeomen were holed up. Their fire heaved up a cloud of smoke that covered the emergence of a second three.

Rufus MacIan was running east down the gravel track, along the fronts of the houses that looked out over the Parade. Halfway to Bloody Tower, he stopped, and cold-bloodedly turned his back to the Parade so that he could scan the windows of a house for snipers. All he could make out was the head of a maidservant peering out an upper window. No worries there; but he readied his firearm just in case a musketeer should present himself elsewhere. The second group of three men ran to a spot a couple of yards behind him, threw themselves down, and got ready to fire across the Parade. In the meantime Angusina and a few of the Water Lane tavern crew had fired a covering fusillade from the upper storeys of the Lieutenant’s Lodging. The first group of three left their empty and smoking muskets on the ground, and sprinted down the track towards Bloody Tower, passing between MacIan and the other three just as the latter discharged their muskets in no particular direction.

A red garment flashed in the window of one of the houses off to MacIan’s left. He wrenched the barrel of his musket that way, but the soldier saw him and dove to the floor before MacIan could pull the trigger.

The second group of three, likewise leaving their muskets on the ground, got up now and ran after their fellows towards Bloody Tower. MacIan took up the rear, following after them. But he moved only at a stroll. Partly this was because he expected a few more gunners to emerge from the Lieutenant’s Lodging. And he was not disappointed, for two and then another two came out helter-skelter and ran towards him, taking their chances against sporadic musketry from the windows of a few die-hard Yeomen. But partly it was to keep an eye on this house where one or more lobsterbacks were prowling.

Of the motley line of half-timbered houses that stretched along the southern verge of the Parade, the Lieutenant’s Lodging lay farthest to the west. The one Rufus MacIan was concerned with was at the opposite, easternmost end, therefore closest to Bloody Tower. It was thrust out into the green in a manner that, to the military eye, recalled a bastion. Between its eastern face and Bloody Tower was an open ground perhaps fifteen yards across—a narrow enough interval to allow for targeted musket-fire. In other words, Guards barricaded in that house could spoil their plans vis-à-vis Bloody Tower.

Another flash of red—a soldier had passed by a window in a hurry, seemingly on a downward trajectory. As if descending a staircase.

The door-handle was moving! MacIan watched in fascination from no more than ten feet away. The front door moved outwards half an inch. Oblivious, the last two of MacIan’s gunners ran by, headed for sanctuary in Bloody Tower. The soldier inside could see them, but he could not see MacIan. What would happen next was suddenly as clear to MacIan as if he’d witnessed it. He set his musket down and strode at the door of the house, reaching back behind his head with both hands and groping for the Claymore. He found it, and pulled it up out of the back-holster just as the door was swinging open. A musket emerged first, held in white hands.

MacIan drew the handle down through the air as fast as he could get his arms to move. But this was nothing compared to the swiftness achieved by the tip of the four-foot blade, which moved so rapidly that it spoke out with a wicked noise like the uncoiling of a bullwhip. Something messy happened and the musket fell to the ground outside the door. MacIan’s blade had passed through the man’s forearm and struck the edge of the door at an angle, skiving off an acute angle of wood and stopping when it struck a nail. The soldier had vanished inside without MacIan’s ever seeing his face. Suddenly the grip of the Claymore was jerked nearly out of his hands as the door was pulled shut. The tip of the blade struck the door-frame and was knocked free so briskly that the weapon, shuddering from end to end, sprang back into the air. MacIan caught it by the cross-guards. He heard door-bolts being thrown inside—from which he guessed that there was another soldier within.

MacIan flattened himself against the wall of the house and spent a few moments getting the Claymore hung on his back, and judging the number of steps to the musket he had left on the ground. Yeomen were taking pot-shots at him from the opposite corner of the Parade. But at such a distance a musket-ball would merely accept suggestions—not obey orders. The balls were smashing out windows above him and probably creating as much of a problem for the soldiers inside as they were for their intended target.

MacIan ran, snatched his musket off the ground, wheeled, and charged round the corner of the house to the open space between it and Bloody Tower. If they had been hoping to shoot down at him, they’d now have to present themselves at different windows, and perhaps move to different rooms.

The tactic worked, as cheap simple tactics commonly did: through a ground-floor window he could see a door flying open, and a man in a red coat running through it and wheeling toward the light—then freezing up in horror as he realized he had just blundered into the enemy’s sights. This gave MacIan the moment that he required to center the musket on the red breast of his foe. But as he did so he noticed a sash being flung open on the upper storey, and another flash of red appearing there.

And now a very rapid calculation: the ground-floor soldier was his. All that was required was a small movement of the trigger finger. As for the one above, if this Jock had a weapon in condition for use, then Rufus MacIan was about to be shot, no matter what he did; and if he tried to raise his musket-barrel and draw a bead on the new lad, he would probably miss. So he pulled the trigger.

What happened after that was anyone’s guess, since all he could see was powder-smoke. But a moment later an answering blast came from the window above, and he felt the ground jolt beneath his feet. This, he reckoned, must be the impact of a musket-ball on his body, being transmitted down his legs into terra firma; and if he stood still for a few more moments he would feel the first hot shards of pain traveling away from the entry-wound, would feel an unaccountable need to clear his throat as his lungs filled up with blood.

But none of these things happened. The smoke was drifting away. MacIan looked up at the window, out of a sort of professional curiosity, wanting to lay eyes on the soldier so incompetent that he could miss that shot, wanting to relish the humiliation in the Englishman’s eyes when he kenned he’d fired into the ground.

But when the smoke finally cleared, he saw no such thing, but rather an unbeast, a nightmare vision, like one of the horrors from Malplaquet that cluttered his brain, like so many stuffed monsters in an old hunter’s attic, and came alive each night to torment him just as he was about to drop off to sleep. This unbeast moved, and slid limp from the window, landing on its head in the grass before him. It did not come to a decent position of repose. Rather the corpse was propped up on something: a half-pike or javelin that had transfixed its ribcage, like an enormous alien bone that had grafted itself onto the man’s skeleton.

MacIan looked up into the vacant window but saw no one there—so it must have come in to the window from outside. But he was the only man in the yard, and he had no memory of chucking any spears lately. It had to have come from above, then. He turned around to face Bloody Tower and ran his gaze up forty feet of sheer stone to its parapet.

There, framed in a slot between two crenels, and silhouetted against the sky, was a very large man with a beard flowing down his front. Smaller men were active around him, hustling among the gun-carriages that were situated on the roof of this Tower, wheeling them about to aim toward the River, chocking them up with thick quoins so that they were aimed, not at the shipping in the Pool, but down upon the soldiers on the Wharf.

The big man with the beard was gripping in one hand another half-pike. He raised the other to make a gesture. It was not a hand but a barbed hook with a skein of moist detritus swinging from it, possibly hair or shreds of clothing. With this he pointed up, away from the river, drawing MacIan’s eye away from the toils of the gunners and towards the penetralia of the Tower of London. Over the roofs of the Cold Harbour storehouses he pointed, and over the soldiers’ barracks and the gate of the Inmost Ward, to the lofty prize that stood in the center of all, commanding the complex, the River, and the City from its four turrets: the White Tower. He thrust his hook at it thrice.

The Hero of the Gy needed no more urging. Dropping his empty musket, he unslung his Claymore for what he guessed would be the last time, and hurried between droning musket-balls towards Cold Harbour Gate.

LIKE ANY SELF-RESPECTING CONDEMNED traitor, MacIan had spent plenty of time plotting dramatic escapes from the Tower of London. He knew where the exits were. Today, though, he must think of them as entrances.

There were five gates to the Inner Ward. One of them was an old sally-port in the northeast corner, near Brick Tower, leading into the Mint. It was of no concern today. The remaining four gates were spaced unevenly along Water Lane. Bloody Tower and Wakefield Tower each contained a gate. These two structures were so close together as to constitute virtually a single, misshapen building. A stroller moving east on Water Lane would spy the Bloody Tower gate first and then, after rounding the bastion of Wakefield, see its gate. But though close together, these two portals were as divergent as they could be. The first was a broad, massive, handsome Gothick arch that led directly onto the Parade via the court where Rufus MacIan was now standing. Thanks to the Russian, the light shining through that arch was reticulated by a massive grid of iron bars. Beyond it MacIan could see several redcoats lying still in the middle of Water Lane. They’d marched back from the Wharf expecting to re-enter the Inner Ward through that arch, but had been stopped by the ancient portcullis. And at that moment a dozen Scots horsemen had charged down on them swinging sabers. When horse attacked foot the outcome was never in doubt, unless the foot had pikes, and were well drilled. The Wharf Guard of the Tower of London did not carry or use pikes.

The second gate was a little postern giving entry to the circular ground floor of Wakefield Tower. Thence one could cross into a long L-shaped gallery that ran up through Cold Harbour and broke into the open just short of the White Tower. This was not a fit way for cavalry to come in. If things were proceeding according to plan, Tom the Black-guard was ensconced beneath a window near the vertex of the L, commanding both legs of the passage, with a large number of loaded firearms in his lap. Few if any of the Tower’s would-be defenders would pass in or out through the Wakefield Tower gate. But some of its attackers should have come running in that way on the heels of the cavalry charge.

MacIan ran north along the verge of the Parade, passing by the Cold Harbour storehouses on his right. There was still a damnable lot of musket-fire coming from Yeomen’s windows, but none of it was directed his way any longer. When he reached the corner of the last storehouse and ducked around it, he at last had a safe vantage-point from which to appreciate why. The appearance of a few gunners atop Bloody Tower and the adjoining stretch of wall, aiming Her Majesty’s cannons down across Water Lane toward the Wharf, had compelled the Wharf Guard to pitch their muskets into the river and stand helpless. They were no longer able to shoot at men climbing the rope ladder into the Lieutenant’s Lodging. And so a continual parade of invaders was now emerging from the front door of that house and sprinting down to Bloody Tower where they could take stairs up to the battlements and man yet more cannons. As they did, they drew what little fire the Yeomen could muster. But even this was being suppressed by occasional fusillades from firing-points that the invaders had set up along the southern edge of the Parade.

He heard a gate groaning behind him and so turned his back to the Parade, which had become a sort of closed chapter anyway.

He had been engaged, these last few moments, on a project of looping north round the end of Cold Harbour to get from the Inner Ward (a parade for Guards and a village green for Yeomen) into the Inmost Ward (the court of a Royal Palace). He was facing now into an interval some ten or fifteen paces wide separating the Cold Harbour buildings from the corner of the White Tower. That opening was walled off; but there was a gate in the wall, which was being very considerately opened for him by a man in a kilt.

“At last, someone I can talk to,” MacIan said. “Welcome to the Tower, lad.”

“And welcome to the Inmost Ward, uncle,” returned this young man, and stepped back to let him enter.

This was a mere bowling-green compared to the Parade. It seemed even smaller than it was because it was mashed between the immense White Tower on the north and, on the south, Wakefield Tower (a palace unto itself) and a congeries of bulky office buildings and storehouses belonging to the Ordnance. Somewhere in the midst of that would be another tiny postern—the third of Water Lane’s four portals—communicating with the Constable’s Lodgings, and of no interest today. Far more important was the last gate, a proper arch, large enough for Highlanders to ride through without dismounting. That gave access to a sort of barracks-street along the eastern perimeter of the Inmost Ward, and thence to another gate, a partner of the one MacIan had just walked through…where was it, though? His eye, no judge of distances, had trouble making sense of the place. But the piper had taken up a position at the head of the barracks-street to lead the cavalry onwards. The sound of the music crashing from the stony environs gave MacIan the information he wanted to decypher the place. He found the gate in question. It was open. Men were beginning to ride through it. Some were slumped over in their saddles, clutching at battle-wounds earned in Water Lane, or perhaps earlier, when they had galloped out of the streets of London town to astonish the sentries posted at Lion Gate. But most were riding straight-backed and proud, and one—bless him—carrying the unfurled colors of MacIan of MacDonald.

“So that is the famous White Tower,” said the lad who had opened the gate for him, “Feich! It’s not even white!”

“The Englishmen have no self-pride. If you read their history you will see that they are nothing more than a lot of doxy and mistemious bog-stalkers. Think: what would a few gallons of white paint cost the Queen of England?”

“For the love of God, I’d come down and paint it myself just so I wouldn’t have to look at it. Everywhere you go in this cursed city, there it stands, a blot on the horizon.”

“I’ve a more expeditious solution,” MacIan answered. “I know of one place, not far from here, where you can look in any direction you please without having to suffer the sight of this rubble-heap.”

“Where’s that, uncle?”

“The inside of it!” And MacIan beckoned to the banner-carrier.

“What—how do you get in?” inquired the lad.

“Through the bloody front door. They built it high off the ground, you see, there—to make it easy to defend—but the English, lazy as they are, have built a lovely timber staircase so they need not strain themselves.”

“I cannot see it.”

“The barracks are in the way. Follow me!” MacIan entered the front door of a sort of gatehouse pent between two barracks.

“I’ll go before you, uncle!” cried the lad; and behind him, like exclamations could be heard from other warriors who were hastily dismounting in the Inmost Ward and running to catch up with them, encumbered by diverse cutlasses, Claymores, blunderbusses, and granadoes.

But Rufus MacIan strode out the back of the gatehouse and began climbing a rude wooden staircase towards a simple round-headed archway cut into the White Tower’s south wall. “You do not understand,” he called over his shoulder. “You are looking forward, now, to a pitched battle for the White Tower. As if this were a picaroon-romance. But the battle is over. You have fought it and won it.”

A Yeoman Warder suddenly stood framed in the arch. He drew an old rapier from a scabbard at his hip, held it up above his head, and began to charge down the timber stairs, screaming. Rufus MacIan did not bother reaching for his Claymore. The Yeoman was butchered on the hoof by musket-balls flying in from half a dozen different angles. He sprayed and faltered at each impact, disintegrating before their eyes, and then collapsed and rolled down the stairs leaving much of himself behind.

“He’s been reading picaroon-romances, too,” observed Rufus MacIan. “Watch your step, lads, it’s a wee bit slippery.”

He took the last steps two at a time and strode across the threshold of the White Tower, saying, “I claim thee for Glen Coe.”

The City of London

LATE AFTERNOON

HE WAS PRESENTABLE. He was amiable. He’d been taught to sign his name—assuming Jones really was his name—on command. Beyond that he was, and always would be, perfectly illiterate. This rendered it out of the question that Seaman Jones of the good ship Minerva would ever be an officer, or a man of commerce.

Jones did not chafe under his limitations—if he was even aware he had any. They had picked him up in Jamaica. His story at the time was that he was a wholesome North Devon lad who had been abducted from the shore round Lynmouth by a boat-load of sailors from a Bristol slave-ship anchored in the Channel—in other words, that he’d been press-ganged—and that, after a run to Guinea to pick up slaves, he had jumped ship in Jamaica. They had always assumed that Jones would jump ship again one day, and avail himself of his first chance to get back to his family farm on the edge of Exmoor. But that had been years ago. Jones had proved immune to the temptations of Exmoor on several occasions, as Minerva frequently called at Plymouth, Dartmouth, and other ports convenient to his supposed homeland. Indeed, he gave every indication of being perfectly content with his lot aboard Minerva. There had been some trouble with rowdiness at first, providing a hint as to what Jones was running away from, but as years and voyages had gone by he had ripened into a steady, reliable, if somewhat limited crewman.

So on the liability side of Jones’s account, to illiteracy could be added a mysterious, probably criminal past, and a want of ambition. He had, however, one asset that was not possessed by the officer who was walking next to him up Lombard Street: he was a white-skinned Englishman. From time to time Jones was called upon to make the most of this asset by dressing up in a pair of breeches, leather shoes, a waistcoat, a long watch coat of a somewhat nautical cut, and a very plain horsehair periwig. This was the sort of get-up that a ship’s officer might keep stuffed in a footlocker while crossing an ocean, and pull out after dropping anchor in some harbor, so that he could go ashore and look minimally decent in the eyes of money-scriveners, victuallers, ship-chandlers, and insurance underwriters.

If these two were to hail a hackney coach and travel a couple of miles west to the new streets round Piccadilly and St. James, where shopping rather than shipping was the order of the day, their roles, in the eyes of most casual strollers, might be reversed. For people with an eye for clothes would notice that Dappa’s actually fit him, that they were of recent make, well cared for, and cleverly picked out. The lace around his shirt-cuffs had never been dragged through beer-foam, goose-grease and damp ink; his shoes shone like wax fruit. The sophisticated toffs of the West End would then take in the fact that Dappa was older, that he was alert to everything going on around them, and that when they came to street-corners Dappa went where he would, and Jones followed. Jones looked about himself curiously, but he was not really paying attention in the way that Dappa was. A West Ender, watching this procession of two stride past, might conclude that Dappa was a Moorish diplomat from Algiers or Rabat, and Jones his local guide.

But this was not the West End. This was the City of London. They were only a stone’s throw from Change Alley. No one paid much heed to clothing here, unless it was as a truly vulgar and shocking exhibit of wealth. By that standard both Dappa and Jones were invisible. Dappa, darting ahead through the crowd of money-men, was assumed to be the servant—a meat souvenir picked up on a trading-voyage—beating a path through the jungle, as it were, and keeping a shrewd eye for hazards. Jones, strolling in Dappa’s wake, was obviously the master, and what might in other settings have been seen as a stupid or vacuous expression could be taken, here, as the meditative phizz of a financial savant who was trying to plumb the meaning of the latest trend in Sword Blade Company share prices, and couldn’t be bothered to dress himself elegantly or indeed to find his own way down the street. His absent-minded way of taking in everything around him was proof that his was a mind tuned to follow the divagating strains, and quiver in sympathy with the startling chords, of the Market.

Or so Dappa told himself, to check his own impatience, when Seaman Jones paused to chat up a pretty orange-girl on a street-corner, or reached out to accept a handbill from a dirty, bawling pamphleteer. When they came at last to the doorway of Worth’s Coffee-House on Birchin Lane, just across the way from the Heraclitean riot of Change Alley, Dappa fell to the rear. Jones strode forward and entered the coffee-house first. A few moments later Dappa was pulling Jones’s chair out for him as he seated himself at a vacant table, and scurrying after a maid to make Mr. Jones’s desires known.

“We are early,” Dappa told Jones after he had got back to the table with the coffee, “and Mr. Sawyer is ever late, and so make yourself comfortable, as I cannot. After this, there’s no more leisure until we reach Massachusetts.” And Dappa took up the pose of a servant, standing behind Jones, ready to dart forward and tend to emergent needs.

Everyone else in the place was either involved in a conversation or, if alone, reading something. Worth’s Coffee-House was the haunt of a sub-species of petty financier who provided bridge loans, and other, less easily explained financial instruments, to the shipping trade. Of the singletons scattered about the place, some were salts consulting tide-tables or almanacks. Others looked like money-scriveners or money-goldsmiths. Their choices in reading material leaned towards London newspapers. Jones, here, was the odd man out in that he could not read at all. But at the corner of Gracechurch and Lombard, he had accepted a libel from a nasty tub-faced tout who looked and smelled as if he’d washed his face with rancid tallow, and who had bestowed an evil look on Dappa as he’d walked by. Jones had rolled it up and carried it here in one hand, looking for all the world like a man of affairs toting a Bill of Exchange to be redeemed. But now, in an effort to blend in with this literate crowd, Jones unrolled the handbill and smoothed it out on the table, and bent over it, aping the poses of the readers around him.

He had it upside down! Dappa bent his face toward the floor, and stepped forward so that he could discreetly knee Jones in the arse. But Jones was quicker than Dappa gave him credit for. Though he knew nothing of letters, he had figured out on his own that the document needed to be spun around. For this bill was illustrated: at the top of the page was a fist-sized blot of ink, a butcherous woodcut of a savage black-skinned man with spraying dreadlocks. His throat was clasped in a white lace cravat, his shoulders dignified by good English tailoring. Printed beneath this portrait in crusty letters an inch high was the word

DAPPA
followed by

A SLAVE, property of MR. CHARLES WHITE, ESQ., is missing and presumed stolen or astray. A REWARD in the amount of TEN GUINEAS shall be given to the first party who brings this Neeger to the dwelling of Mr. White on St. James’s Square.

And then finer print, which Dappa would need glasses to read. But he could not get his glasses out of his breast pocket, because not a muscle in his body would move.

Sloop Atalanta, off the Shive

SUNSET

HE WISHED HOOKE WERE HERE. A Natural Philosopher could not but be enthralled by all that was laid out for view by such a rare low tide. The sun had sunk low in the west and, behind London’s dome of smoke, shone the color of a horseshoe when the farrier beats it out on the anvil. That light was skidding across the tidal flats all round, making them seem not so flat at all. The surface of the muck was rippled, as if it were a pond that had been disturbed by a chill wind, then frozen. But more remarkable to Daniel was the shape of Foulness Sand, a few miles to the north, across the mouth of the Thames. This country of muck, larger than some German principalities, lay concealed beneath the water most of the time. It was devoid of any features such as rocks or vegetation. Yet when the tide drew off, the great quantity of water that had been stranded in the dells of all those frozen ripples drained away, not as a streaming sheet, and not by quiet seepage into the earth, but by finding its way to the low places. One hand-sized puddle would erupt in upon its neighbor, and those two would join forces and go looking for a nearby place that lay a hair’s breadth lower, even as every other dollop of water for miles around was pursuing a like strategy. The result, integrated (to use Leibniz’s terminology) over the whole of Foulness Sand, was that entire systems of rivers and tributaries sprang into being. Some of those rivers looked as old as the Thames, and big enough to build cities on; yet in a few hours they’d disappear. Existing in a state of pure alienation, unsoftened by reeds or willows, and not encrusted by the buildings of men, they were pure geometry. Albeit geometry of an irregular and organic cast, repugnant to Euclid or, Daniel suspected, to the silver-haired knight who was standing next to him. But Hooke would have seen beauty and found fascination there, and wrought pictures of it, as he had done with flies and fleas.

“Do the same rivers always spring up? Or is it new ones, in different places, at every tide?” Daniel mused.

“One will recur, again and again, for years, perhaps undergoing slow alterations from tide to tide,” Isaac answered.

“It was a rhetorical question,” Daniel muttered.

“Then some day, perhaps after a storm or an exceptional high tide, the water draws back, and it is gone, never to be seen again. There is much in the subterranean realm that is as opaque to the mind, as it is to the eye.”

Isaac now moved across the poop deck to view Shive Tor. Daniel felt compelled to stay at his elbow.

To their left, gray spread to infinity. Ahead, it extended only to the shore of the Isle of Grain, a couple of miles distant. Most of the isle barely rose above the horizon, but there was one hill, perhaps fifty to a hundred feet above sea level, grassy, with a few weather-shocked trees flinging their arms back aghast. Atop that stood a small, blocky, ancient stone church. It stood broadside to the sea, as if the masons had begun by erecting a wind-wall so that they would have something to stand in the lee of, then topped it with a steep roof to deflect the gales heavenwards. On its western front was a square tower with a flat roof and a crenellated top, which the Black Torrent Guard had pressed into service as a watch-tower.

Between Atalanta and the foot of that hill, the gray expanse was divided into an upper and a lower part by an irregular line of heaving froth. Below, this was tinged with blue and aqua. Above—nearer the land—it was washed with brownish and yellowish and greenish hues and mottled by scattered swellings in the mud. Sea-birds skimmed along just above it, moving in twos and threes as if hanging together for safety. From time to time they would alight and skitter about on twiglike legs, pecking at the mud. Some of them were doing so around the very foundations of Shive Tor, which stood high, but not dry, halfway between Atalanta and the foot of the hill.

The Tor’s dredged ship-channel was aimed obliquely downriver, so to find its entrance Atalanta would have to glide a short distance past the Shive and come about. The sailors were making ready to accomplish that and to launch the longboat, and they were going about it smartly, for it now seemed quite possible that they might lose the fleeing whaler in the dark. A silver-greyhound flag had been produced from somewhere and was being lashed to a stunted flagpole on the longboat’s transom, so that, for what it was worth, everyone who saw them would know that they were the Queen’s Messengers. Two dragoons had been pressed into service throwing sounding-leads over the rail and calling out depths, one on the port and one on the starboard side of the bow.

Barnes was arguing with the sloop’s captain as to which of them would need more dragoons. The latter wanted it understood that this was Mr. Charles White’s pleasure-jacht, not an Admiralty ship, and that, in consequence, he did not have any Marines aboard; and as the fleeing whaler probably contained the leaders of Jack’s organization—possibly even Jack himself—at any rate, the most notorious and dangerous criminal traitors in the Realm—most of the dragoons really ought to remain aboard the sloop.

“But you are overhauling a single boat,” Barnes was saying. “We are assaulting a stone fortress. There’s no telling what we shall find—”

But it was useless. Charles White—who would be staying on the sloop, that he might have the glory of catching Jack the Coiner—came down on his captain’s side, and pointed out that Barnes’s party would in a few minutes be reinforced by nearly a full company of dragoons charging across from the Isle of Grain. The number of dragoons put off in the longboat, not including Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe, would be eight. If that was not enough, they could always draw back and await the onslaught from shore.

“It is like playing a part in a masque,” Daniel heard Barnes muttering, “a farce entitled ‘How bad plans are made.’ ”

“If Jack understood the true nature of the Solomonic Gold, he would not use it to coin false guineas,” Isaac said to Daniel, apparently feeling some need to justify his tactics aloud. “To him it is only gold. Slightly above common gold in value, but still gold. Finding himself under attack, he would get it out of the Tor and aboard the hooker. But when the hooker ran aground, he would resolve to abandon it. For he would have other hoards elsewhere.”

“You think he threw it overboard?”

“The band of criminals on the hooker, in their panic, might have thrown anything heavy overboard. So we might find it strewn along the bank of the dredged channel. Or it might still be aboard the hooker. I don’t think it is in the Tor, or on the whaler—come! It’s now!” And Isaac moved with short quick steps to the head of the stair that ran down to the upperdeck. His box of gear was slung over his shoulder on a leather strap, and it banged on his hip as he went, and threatened to pull him off balance. Daniel scurried up behind him and put a steadying hand on the box, and in this way the two old philosophers moved down the steps and across to where the longboat was a-dangle from a pair of out-thrust yards. Soon enough they, Barnes, Shaftoe, eight dragoons, and an able seaman from the sloop’s crew were aboard; though Daniel nearly toppled into the water, and in the scramble, lost his periwig. Lines were worked, and the boat jostled and slanted beneath them. They fell into the looming shadow of the sloop’s hull. Between the darkness and the loss of his wig, Daniel felt chilly, and called for someone to throw a blanket down to him. Soon a wadded-up lump of gray wool thudded down, followed by a knit watchman’s cap, which Daniel gratefully pulled down over his naked skull. As the sloop pulled away from them he saw his wig spinning in a vortex, its long white ponytail pointing this way and that, like a compass needle that has lost its fix on true north.

The sloop—which seemed to move so slowly when one was aboard—sprang away from them. Or perhaps it only felt that way to one who was being marooned. Within a minute they were beyond shouting-range, and might signal the larger vessel only by having a dragoon fire a musket into the air.

The platoons on the Isle of Grain were not moving nearly so quickly. When this plan had first been conceived, Daniel had phant’sied that Atalanta, and those mounted platoons, would converge on the Tor at the same instant. But here they were in this longboat at the mouth of the dredged channel, perhaps a musket-shot from the Tor, and the companies on the isle had not stirred yet. Supposedly they were at the foot of the hill, below the steeple of the church. But they were hidden in the dusky shadows, and obscured by grass. That they existed at all was merely a comforting assumption, like that there was a God and that He meant well.

And so for a moment Daniel, and everyone else on the boat with the probable exception of Isaac, were overcome with the sense that it was all a terrible mistake.

Then they could hear the faint sound of a horse blowing air through its lips, out somewhere along the shore. Then faint crackling sounds that came and went in pulses. For the isle was belted with a strand of cockleshells rejected by the surf, and some men must be treading on them as they came down on to the tide flats.

“Let’s go for a bit of a row then,” Barnes said. “I’ll wager Jack has some claret inside.” He addressed these words to Bob Shaftoe, who bellowed something to his dragoons who were manning the oars. And rowing boats might not have been their métier; but they applied themselves to it cheerfully enough and began bashing their oars against each other. “Move some bloody water!” Bob told them. “This ain’t duelling with quarter-staves. Do I look like Robin bloody Hood to you? Stop banging ’em together and get ’em in the water!” And much more in that vein as the longboat began to spin and dodge forward across the pale water that lay thin on the mud-bank. They had crossed over the surf-line now, and the foam of the breakers looked as if it were above their altitude. This illusion was mildly unnerving even to Daniel, who had the advantage of being in a boat; it could not have been comforting to the approaching dragoons.

Finally a horn sounded from the marshes, a cheer went up from the dragoons, and the edge of the island turned red as the First Company of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards emerged from the grass, all in a wide line, and began to advance over the flats at a trot.

Daniel looked at the Tor. It was square-floored, each face of the building something less than ten yards wide. Perhaps twenty yards’ altitude separated its gaptoothed parapet from its foundation—a pile of boulders atop a lens of greasy black stone that poked up through the bank. “Shive” was a primeval English word for knee-cap, and Daniel, who had sliced a patella or two from cadavers, could see how the rock had come by its name. Slime and barnacles coated the lower reaches and made it difficult to tell where the natural plinth left off and the man-made work began. The Tor had been built up out of bulky brown boulders probably prised from a quarry upriver, barged down at high tide, and rolled overboard. White mortar held it together. There was but a single door, which looked out onto a silted pool at the terminus of this long gouge that they were fitfully navigating. The threshold was an arm’s length above where the fur of wee crusty creatures and rank weeds gave way to bare, wave-washed stone. So that was where they had built a floor. From the situation of windows (if that was not too grand a term for them) higher up, Daniel estimated there was a wooden platform above, forming an upper storey, and above that a roof, on which lookouts and gunners might stand to look out over, or through, the woebegone parapet.

“Is there room here for so many horses, when the tide comes in?” Daniel asked.

“First you were worried they would not come at all—I could see it in your phizz—now you’re worried because they’re coming!” Barnes returned. “It is nonetheless a question that deserves an answer. We are dragoons, Doctor. The horses are mere vehicles. When the men are here, the beasts will be sent back straightaway—they’ll be back on the Isle of Grain half an hour from now.”

“I do beg your pardon, Colonel. As a wise man once told me, we are all scared.”

Barnes nodded gracefully. But he could sense a Newtonian glare boring into the other side of his head, so without delay he said to the sergeant, “Let us advance, and see if we draw fire from the Tor.”

“I did not understand that Sir Isaac Newton’s rôle was to draw fire,” Daniel shot back peevishly, then bit his tongue as even Isaac was smiling at Barnes’s jest. Annoyed now with everyone on the boat, including himself, Daniel snatched the blanket—ten pounds of greasy Qwghlmian wool—and settled it over his shoulders. It prickled him through his clothes like a heap of thistles, but it would eventually be warmer.

The longboat balked mulishly as it scraped its keel on the sandy bottom every few yards. Sergeant Bob became exasperated, then profane, to the point where Sir Isaac became visibly offended. Half of the dragoons divested themselves of their powder-horns and granadoes, and vaulted over the gunwales to land waist-deep in the channel. This lightened the boat’s load enough to get its keel out of the muck, and it enabled them to move it along by pushing on it with their shoulders, as if it were a gun-carriage mired in Flanders. “Take advantage of the shallow water,” Barnes said approvingly, “we’ll not have it much longer.” The colonel had mostly been keeping an eye on the parapet, clearly worried about snipers. Isaac’s gaze was fixed on the hooker, which was now rolling freely on the bank of the channel—the direction of the tide had reversed! The sergeant was attending to his men.

Daniel was the only one aware that the charge of the First Company from the Isle of Grain had come to a halt as soon as it had got started. Only a few yards beyond the cockle-belt, a few of the horses had gone down. The rest had halted, and the line of redcoats had split and spread into two wings, trying to probe around some obstacle. A pistol-shot tolled for a broken-legged horse. This got everyone’s attention. They heard, too, a distant thudding noise: an axe striking wood.

“Jack’s men drove pilings into the mud,” was Bob’s guess, “and stretched chains between ’em, to stop the horses. This they would’ve done in the highest and driest parts, where the best footing was to be had; which tells us that the flanks are now in a mire. Someone is trying to chop through a piling with an axe.”

“There are nails embedded in that piling, then, and his axe is already ruined,” announced Isaac absent-mindedly, without taking his eyes off the hooker.

“Sir Isaac has good ears,” Daniel explained to the incredulous Bob.

“Then he’d best plug them,” answered Bob and picked up a musket. A moment later the boat flinched from its recoil as he fired it into the air. He handed it to one of the dragoons, who set about furiously reloading.

“As long as you are wasting balls and powder, waste them on the parapet,” said the Colonel.

Within a few moments, several other muskets had been fired at the top of the tower, and a large glutinous mass of smoke had been set adrift on the calm evening air. No answering fire came back from Shive Tor. But the little fusillade had the effect Bob wanted: the dragoons off the Isle of Grain were dismounting, sending their horses back to dry land, and advancing on foot. Daniel was noticing that they now looked like dark motes against the gray sand. A few minutes ago their coats had been a proud red. The difference was not that they were all covered in greasy mud now (though they probably were), but that it was getting dark, and the colors were draining from everything. The evening star had come out, very bright, near the Tor.

A colossal thud came out of the far west. It was impressive enough to divert Isaac’s concentration from the hooker. “What was that?” he demanded—the first voice to violate the stillness that had descended upon all.

“A lot of powder was touched off at once,” said Colonel Barnes. “On a field of battle, it would signify a dreadful accident. Here, I guess it was the bridge over Yantlet Creek being demolished by a mine.”

“Why did you mine the bridge, Colonel?”

“I didn’t.”

Isaac was gobsmacked. “Then—who did!?”

“Now you ask me to speculate, Sir Isaac,” Barnes said coldly.

“But you have men posted at that bridge,” Isaac said.

“Or had, sir.”

“How could it have been mined, when it was under guard?”

“Again, speculation: it was mined in advance, the mine concealed from view,” Barnes said.

“Then, pray tell, who put fire to the fuse?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“No man was needed to put fire to it,” Daniel said.

“Then how was it lit?” Barnes demanded.

“The same way as that was,” Daniel answered, and shrugged an arm free of the blanket to point at the Tor.

Moments earlier he had seen a blue spark in his peripheral vision, and mistaken it for the evening star coming out near Shive Tor. But by now it had become brighter than any heavenly body save the Sun, brighter by far than any Comet. And it was not in the sky, but in one of those small irregular windows in the wall of the Tor.

Everyone was now looking at it, though it was growing brilliant enough to burn the eyes. Only Daniel and Isaac knew what it was.

“Phosphorus is burning inside the Tor,” Isaac remarked, more fascinated than alarmed.

“Then someone must be in there,” said Bob reaching for a musket.

“No,” Daniel said. “It was lit by an Infernal Device.”

The door of the Tor swung inward, shouldered out of the way by a waxing draught. The archway was a gem of yellow light. A small mountain of split and dried cord-wood had been piled on the floor, and had now been set a-blaze. Sparks had begun to fountain up into the sky, jetting through orifices that had been hacked through the upper floor and the roof.

“It is an admirable piece of work,” said Sir Isaac Newton, flatly and with no trace of rancor. “The rising tide obliges all to run inward to the Tor. But packed as it is with excellent fuel, this will soon become a furnace, and anyone near it will be roasted like a suckling pig. It truly is a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

Barnes stood up in the boat, putting all his weight on his one leg and bracing his peg against a bench. He cupped his hands round his mouth and bellowed towards the darkling isle: “Turn back! Retreat! There is not room for you here!” And then he fell back on his arse as the boat was lifted and shoved by a tidal swell. “I do not wish to hear my First Company being drowned,” he said.

“Colonel, let us row toward the Isle of Grain—you can warn them all, and rescue most,” Daniel suggested.

“Leave me on yonder vessel,” Isaac demanded, gesturing toward the hooker, which was now upright and adrift.

“I cannot abandon Sir Isaac Newton on a derelict fishing-boat!” shouted Barnes, exasperated.

“Then do you stay with him, Colonel,” suggested Sergeant Bob, “and take a few men. I’ll row toward the land, advancing with the tide—warning the men off as I go, rescuing the mired.”

A thud and crackle from the Tor as a floor-beam gave way. A billion orange sparks spewed from the openings and schooled in the dark.

“I too shall remain with Sir Isaac,” Daniel heard himself saying, like a man lying in state, listening to his own eulogy. “We’ll get the hooker clear of the fire, and navigate by the stars. Sir Isaac and I have some knowledge of the stars.”

The Monument

SUNSET

“FIRE,” SAID JACK, down on a knee, perspective glass steady on the railing.

This command—given in a mild conversational tone—was not answered with the expected hellish noises and exhalations. He peeled his eye from the lens and was abruptly reminded that he was two hundred feet above London. A bad time for a dizzy spell. He spanked the railing, clenched his eyes shut, and announced: “The Scotsman is inside the White Tower; I say, Fire!” Then he opened his eyes, got up, and backed round the stony bole of the Monument, for these things were as likely to explode as to fly. He heard Jimmy and Danny murmuring to each other, then a sputter as the fuse caught, then running feet. The lads came into view. Immediately a basilisk-sound, half hiss and half scream, erupted on the other side and rapidly dwindled.

Jack ran around to see a ray of black fog cantilevered out over the city. On the near side its billows were weirdly lit up, like a squall-line at sunset. But this paled and dissolved in a few moments. The only evidence that remained of this grievous and execrable crime against all known precepts of safe rocketry was a house with a hole in its roof, just short of Mincing Lane, and a gossamer thread connecting said hole with the large pulley lashed to the lantern of the Monument above their heads. From there it ran almost straight down into a polished copper kettle about three paces away from Jack, between the feet of a large Red Indian. The Indian grabbed the thread in one hand lest all of what remained be sucked from the kettle by its own weight.

Jack looked over the railing and saw the filament plunge down and away toward the east. He lost track of it in the Monument’s shadow. But he could see a lot of boyish ferment on the roof of the Church of St. Mary-at-Hill, five hundred feet away: some leaping, some hopping into the air, some hurling of stones with strings tied to ’em. To any observer who did not know, as Jack did, that a thread of silk was floating in the air a few yards above these people’s heads, it would have looked like the cavorting of men and boys made mad by witchcraft or syphilis, a kind of Bedlam al fresco.

A distant rocket-scream sounded from near the Tower of London. Such was the speed of this second rocket’s flight that by the time its sound carried to the top of the Monument, and drew Jack’s gaze that way, it was gone, and there was nothing to be seen but a black rainbow bent over Tower Hill and the Moat, connecting the Barking Churchyard behind All Hallows Church to the battlements of the White Tower. “Not a pot of gold, but close to one,” Jack remarked. He was fortunate enough, now, to be looking in the right direction to see yet another dart of white flame jump up from the River Thames, pulling a shroud of black powder-smoke behind it. It reached apogee above Tower Wharf and then winked out. Momentum carried it north over the Outer Wall to crash in Tower Lane. “Damn, too short!” Jack cried, as the sound of the launch reached them.

“They’ve spares on the barge, Dad,” Danny said.

He glanced down onto the Church of St. Mary-at-Hill. The men and boys on the roof had settled down noticeably—in fact, most of them were running away, which was, of course, the normal practice, from the scene of their crimes. Only two remained. One was working on his lap. The other was acting as a sort of lookout. He needn’t have bothered; the rocket that had screamed over his head a few moments ago had ignited a fire in the attic of that house on Mincing Lane, and there, rather than the church’s roof, was where the attentions of the (paltry number of mostly self-appointed) authorities and the (vastly more energetic and numerous) Mobb were now directed.

The one who had been working on his lap suddenly sprang back, jumping to his feet, and elevated his chin, as if he had released a carrier pigeon and were watching it take flight. The Indian beside Jack began to pull in string, hand-over-hand, as rapidly as he could. “Look out below!” called Jimmy, as he picked up the copper string-vat and simply dropped it over the rail.

A curse from Danny: “Hit the Lanthorn Tower this time.” Then another whooshing scream from the river. Jack glimpsed another smoke-prong in the distance.

The kettle made a funny noise, a cross between a splat and a bong, as it hit the pavement below them. Tomba was grinning beneath a perspective glass. “Men in kilts on the battlements of the White Tower,” he announced.

“And just what are those men doing?” inquired Jack, whose attention was fixed on the roof of the church of St. Dunstan-in-the-East, where a scene had just played out remarkably like that moments earlier on the roof of St. Mary-at-Hill.

“It appears that they are drinking usquebaugh and line dancing,” returned Tomba.

“One day your wit shall be the death of you, and my hands around your throat shall be the instrument,” Jack remarked calmly.

“Some of them are pulling in the string from Barking Churchyard,” Tomba returned, “others raising a banner.”

“Raising a banner!? I gave no instructions touching a banner,” Jack hollered.

“A Cross of St. Andrews, and—”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Is any of those Highlanders concerning himself with a pulley?”

“The pulley is being worked on—hold—oh, my God!” Tomba exclaimed, and drew back from the perspective glass laughing.

“What is it?”

“The rocket. It nearly knocked one of them down,” Tomba explained, as yet another basilisk-shriek reached them from the river.

“So the last one flew true?”

“Skipped across the roof of the White Tower itself like a flat stone on a pond,” confirmed Danny, who had watched with his naked eyes. “Passed between a Scotsman’s legs and smacked into the north parapet.”

“I hope that the Scotsman has had the presence of mind to stomp on the string.”

“They appear to be pulling it in—there’s a chap working by the pulley now—good! The pulley is threaded—”

“The roof of Trinity House is cleared!” Tomba mentioned, having trained his spyglass on a building halfway between them and the White Tower.

“Take up the slack smartly now!” Jack called down over the railing. He was awash in fiery light up here. The men at the base of the column were toiling in blue dusk, pulling in loose thread from above as fast as their hands could move. They were working in a clear space, a sort of defensive perimeter that had been set up round the base of the column. Around it the black lint of the Mobb was rapidly gathering, kept at bay by very large hoodlums with whips, and archers who had scaled the plinth of the great column to take up sniping-positions under the wings of its dragons.

“What rumor did you put out?” Jack asked of Jimmy. Directly below he could see the flattened kettle gleaming like a newly minted coin.

“That Jack the Coiner would appear atop the Monument at sundown and throw guineas,” Jimmy answered.

“Barking Churchyard is clear!” announced Danny, which meant that although none of them could see it, the silken filament now stretched in a single uninterrupted catenary from the great pulley, above their heads, across a distance of a bit less than half a mile to a similar device that the Scotsmen had strung from the southeastern turret of the White Tower. From there it ran over the inner and outer walls, above the Wharf, to a barge that had drifted down the river during the last hour or so and then tossed out an anchor. Though this would not have been obvious to anyone viewing it from the level of the water, it was plain from this elevated viewpoint that a great wheel, several yards across, was mounted in that barge. Its axis was vertical, so its rim was parallel to the deck. It was not a mighty sort of wheel, not like an anchor cable’s windlass, but more like a spinning-wheel laid on its side. A dozen or more crewmen stood around it, and now, evidently on some signal from the White Tower, they began to turn that wheel—reeling in the same string that they had sent rocketing over the battlements a minute ago. Within a few moments the result of their exertions could be detected up atop the Monument. For a change in the string’s angle was plainly visible as the tension increased.

“Supply!” screamed Jack to the men below, who were gathered round an exceptionally large wagon chocked at the foot of the Monument. A patchwork of work-out sails had covered its contents until now. These were flung off to expose a huge cylindrical vat in which miles of cordage had been expertly coiled. But this was not ordinary line, of uniform thickness. That up here at the top of the Monument, running through the pulley at an accelerating clip, was fine silken cord. But what was emerging from the vat was noticeably coarser. And what was coiled in the bottom-most part of the vat was as thick as a man’s wrist.

“Righto,” Jack said, and caught the eye of the Indian. “And so ’twould seem that very soon I shall require the Chariot of Phaethon. And another for His Reverence.”

His Reverence let it be known that he was amused. The Indian heaved a sigh and shambled through the door to begin the long journey down stairs.

“What are you snickering at?” Jack demanded, making a semicircular excursion round the column to discover Father Édouard de Gex. The Jesuit had, for lack of a better word, cornered the four Jewish tourists at the southwestern vertex of the platform. At his feet rested a black strong-box. The lid was open. Diverse gnarled keys and hand-hammered padlocks littered the deck all round. He had mostly emptied the casket by this point, but some of its contents could still be seen: it had been full of small leathern bags, each bag filled with something of High Specific Gravity that clinked as de Gex transferred them one by one into a stout ox-hide satchel. A second satchel, already full, sat next to the one he was packing.

“You lay a curse on yourself without knowing it,” de Gex answered. “You should call it the Chariot of Apollo.”

“Apollo is the sobriquet of Leroy—I was trying to show deference.”

“All right, Helios then. Never Phaethon.”

“Half the young blades in town are rattling about in Phaethons,” Jack returned, “why can’t I fly above London in one?”

“Phaethon was a sort of bastard son of Helios. He borrowed his papa’s gleaming Vehicle and went for a heavenly Drive. But seeing the great height to which he had ascended, and terrified by the Heroes, Legends, and Titans hung in the sky by the Gods as Constellations, he lost his wits; the chariot ran out of control, scorching the earth; Zeus struck him down with a thunderbolt and he crashed into a river. So when you refer to your conveyance as the Chariot of Phaethon—”

“The import of your Tale is not lost on me,” Jack let it be known, watching de Gex transfer the last of the clinking bags into the satchel. Then, in a different tone, he reflected: “It is curious. I always phant’sied that the rites of the ancient Pagans, prosecuted as they were in airy temples by naked maidens and prancing butt-boys, and enlivened by feasts and orgies, must have been infinitely more diverting than the insufferable ceremonies of Christians; yet the dramatick yarn of this Phaethon, intoned by Your Reverence, is as dry, tedious, and didactic as the litanies of the Baptists.”

“I am speaking to you, Jack, of your pride, of your ignorance, and of your doom. I am sorry that I can not make it any more festive.”

“When night fell, who rode the moon-chariot?”

“Selene. But that was of silver.”

“If those layabouts on the barge do not spin that wheel any faster, we shall be compared to her.”

“The twilight will linger for a while yet,” de Gex predicted.

Jack went to inspect the rope coming up from below, and passing over the pulley and out into the air above London en route to the said barge. He was surprised to find that it had already waxed to the thickness of his finger. Surprised, and a bit dismayed, for he’d been hoping that it would snag on a weathercock somewhere and snap while it was still slender and fragile. But now that it had achieved such a thickness it was unlikely to break. He would actually have to do this thing.

Some minutes passed. London as always continued in roiling feverish busy-ness: the Mobb around the base of the Monument, swollen to a thousand, chanting for their promised guineas, here parting to make room for a mad dog, there clumping to assault a pick-pocket. The fire brigades at their pumping-engines in the Tower hamlets and now in Mincing Lane, surrounded by more of the Mobility, protected by cordons of lobsterbacks. The Highlanders atop the White Tower, victorious but somehow forlorn, as no one seemed to have noticed what they’d accomplished. The men on the barge spinning the giant wheel, like the main gear of an immense clock. The ships on the Pool as ever, going about their toils and quotidian adventures perfectly oblivious to all of these things.

Phaethon himself was just in the act of crash-landing on the upper Thames, some leagues to the west of town. With any luck he’d set fire to Windsor Castle on his way down. The radiance of his final approach sprayed flat across London and made the whole city jagged and golden. Jack looked at it all, most carefully, as he had once looked out over Cairo, and indeed the place suddenly looked as queer and as outlandish to him as Cairo once had. Which was to say that he saw all through a traveler’s dewy eye, and perceived all that was overlooked by the Cockney’s brass-tacks stare. He owed it to Jimmy and Danny and all his posterity to look at it thus. For de Gex was right, Jack was a bastard who had ascended to a great height and hob-nobbed with Heroes and Titans and seen things he was never meant to see. This might be the last time in many a generation that a Shaftoe might gaze down from such a vantage-point and see so much so clearly. But what was he seeing?

“Dad,” Jimmy was saying, “it’s time, Dad.”

He looked over. The rope was as thick as his wrist now, and it no longer moved; it had been tied off down below, the plinth of the Monument pressed into service as a bitt. Half a mile distant, out in the river, the barge had chopped its anchor-cable, and flung great bags of heavy fabric—sea-anchors—into the river. The flow of the Thames had inflated them. They pulled the barge downstream with immense force, exerting tension on the full length of the rope that could be sensed from here—for the rigging that bound the great pulley to the top of the Monument had now begun to groan and tick like that of a ship that has been struck by a blast of wind. Riding on that taut hawser, now, above their heads, was a traveling block: that is to say a grooved pulley spinning on a well-greased axle in a casing of forged iron. Dangling from it were two chains that diverged slightly and fastened to opposite ends of a short length of plank. Jimmy was gripping one of those chains, Danny the other. The Chariot of Phaethon was available for boarding. Everyone up here—even the Jews, who’d left off being scared and were now fascinated—was looking at it significantly, and then looking at Jack.

“All right, all right,” said Jack. He strode to it. De Gex handed him one of the two satchels and Jack slung it over his shoulder. “Padre, I’ll see you anon,” Jack said dismissively. Even de Gex sensed that he should draw away now. Jack climbed up to the plank, which hung about at the level of the railing. Seating himself upon it, and situating the heavy satchel in his lap, he braced his feet on the rail as if afraid the boys might pitch him off before he was ready. Which was a quite reasonable fear, as he was set to give them Advice.

“Now, lads,” he said, “either this’ll work or it won’t. If it goes awry, never forget there’s other places to be besides England; you’ve seen more of ’em than most, I don’t need to tell you twice. The Great Mogul is always hiring good mercenaries. Queen Kottakkal would be delighted to have you back in her court, to say nothing of her bedchamber. Our partners in Queena-Kootah would give you a hero’s welcome at the foot of Eliza Peak. Manila’s not such a bad place, either. I do not recommend that you go to Japan. And remember, if you go the other way, to the shores of America, and travel west long enough, you ought to cross the path of good old Moseh, assuming the Comanches haven’t made him into moccasins. So there’s no purpose to be served in tarrying here, lads, if I end up at Tyburn. Just do me a favor before you leave.”

“All right,” said Jimmy grudgingly.

Jack had avoided looking into his sons’ faces during this Oration, because he reckoned they’d not wish to be seen with tears streaming down their faces. But looking up at Jimmy now he saw dry eyes and a quizzical if impatient phizz. Turning the other way, he saw Danny gazing distractedly at the White Tower.

“Did you hear a single fucking word I said?”

“You want us to do you a favor,” Danny returned.

“Before you embark on a new life overseas, assuming that is your fate,” Jack said, “find Eliza and tell her she is my true love.” And then he jerked the chains loose from the restraining grip of first Jimmy, then Danny. He leaned forward, pushed off against the rail with both feet, and launched himself into space above London. His cloak spread in the wind of his flight like the wings of an eagle, revealing, to anyone who might be gazing up into the sky, a lining made from cloth-of-gold that glistered in the rays of the setting sun like the chariot of Apollo. He was on his way down.

Worth’s Coffee-house, Birchin Lane, London

SUNSET

DAPPA STOOD FROZEN for a count of ten. As if standing still would make him white.

“Sir,” said Jones, chuckling, “why, this looks like you! What’s it say?”

Thank God for Jones, and for his being such a perfect imbecile. Many a ship’s officer, caught in storm or battle, and seized by a natural tendency to freeze up in terror, was moved to action by the vivid helplessness of his crew.

Dappa’s body was not answering well to commands from the quarterdeck, so in stepping forward he bashed the table with the brawn of his thigh, nearly toppling it. But he got the libel in his hand and snatched it away. He looked round the coffee-house and met a few eyes, but they showed nothing beyond momentary curiosity at the unbalanced movements of the Blackamoor. None of them had seen this handbill.

“What’s it say?” Jones repeated.

Dappa shoved it into the hip pocket of his coat, where it was about as welcome as a turd. But at least it was hidden. “It says something that is not true, about me,” he said, “a perfect and abominable lie.” And he wished that he could have said it in a low and quiet voice. But passion made him squawk like a strangled hen. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to think. “An attack,” he said, “ ’tis an attack on me by Charles White—a Tory. Why on me? No reason. Thus ’tis not an attack on me but on what I am a part of, namely, Minerva.” He opened his eyes. “Your ship is under attack, Jones.”

“I am well enough accustomed to that, sir.”

“But not with cannonballs. This is a paper attack. Shore artillery is firing on you—what must you do?”

“Firing on us, you mean, sir,” Jones returned, “and since shore batteries are difficult to silence, we must move out of their range.”

“Correct. But the indenture that we came here to sign—it must be signed or our obligations to the ship-chandler shall not be met. We must meet those obligations, Jones, or our credit and our good name will be spoilt, do you understand? Mr. Sawyer is honest, as such men go—when he comes here, pretend to read whatever he places in front of you, and sign it. Then run down to the river and hie to Minerva and tell the Captain to begin raising anchor now.”

“Are you going to leave me alone here, sir?” Jones inquired.

“Yes. I shall try to get back to the ship. If I’m not aboard at the next high tide, though, then you and Minerva must leave me.” Dappa glanced up toward the window and saw the worst thing he could have seen: the tout who had been handing out the libels had hunted them through the crowd, and was now pressing his shiny face against the window. He met Dappa’s eye. Dappa felt the way he had once in Africa, a little boy playing near the river, when he had looked up and seen the striped eye of a crocodile looking back at him. It was as if a thousand ancestors were standing round him in a great invisible chorus, screaming, “Run! Run!” And run he would have, but for the knowledge that he was the only black man in a mile, and could never run far or fast enough.

A shadow fell over the coffee-house now, like that of a cloud passing before the sun. But it was not a cloud, but a great black coach, drawn by four black horses, pulling up in front of the coffee-house, coming to a stop.

The tout paid no mind to the coach-and-four. He had got a wild triumphal look on his face—the only thing that could have made him any less pleasant to look at. Keeping his eye fixed through the window, he began sidestepping toward the entrance.

“Repeat the instructions I gave to you,” Dappa said.

“Wait for Mr. Sawyer. Look at the indenture like I’m reading it. Sign it. Run to the ship. Get underway at high tide with or without you.”

“And when you return from Boston, God willing, we shall sort it out then,” Dappa said, and stepped out from behind the table. He began moving toward the door.

Before he could reach it, the door was pulled open from outside. The view into the street was blocked by the glossy black flank of the coach. Dappa drew his right hand up his hip, twitched the skirt of his coat behind him, and reached around to the small of his back. There, in the waistband of his breeches, was a dagger. He found its handle with his fingers but did not draw it yet. The tout appeared in the doorway, blocking his way out, ecstatic, hopping from toe to toe like a little boy who needed to piss. He looked to one side, desperately wanting to catch someone’s eye—to get a witness, or recruit an accomplice. Dappa supposed he was looking at whomever had pulled the door open. The tout’s head swivelled round to bear on Dappa again, and he raised one hand and pointed his index finger at Dappa’s face, like aiming a pistol. He had dropped his stack of handbills and they were blowing round his ankles, tumbling into the coffee-house.

A larger man came into view just behind the tout, and over his shoulder. He was blond and blue-eyed, a young bloke, better dressed, and he had something in his hand: a walking-stick, which he was tossing straight up into the air. The brass handle at its stop leaped above his head. He caught the stick about halfway along its length and in the same motion snapped it down. The brass ball at the top stopped hard against the back of the tout’s head. The tout’s face and then his whole body lost tone, as if all 206 of his bones had been jellied. Before the tout could fall to the ground and block the door, the blond man stepped in beside him and checked him out of the way. The tout disappeared from view, except for his feet, which lay twitching on the threshold. The big blond man allowed his walking-stick to slide down through his fist until the brass grip was back in his hand. He bowed to Dappa in the most genteel way imaginable and extended his free hand toward the carriage, offering Dappa a lift. And it was not until that moment that Dappa recognized this man as one Johann von Hacklheber, a Hanoverian, and a member of the household of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm.

DAPPA WAS IN THE WOODEN womb of the carriage. It smelled like Eliza’s toilet-water. Johann did not climb inside with him but closed the door, slapped the side, and began distributing commands in High-Dutch to the driver and a pair of footmen. The footmen sprang from their perch on the back of the vehicle and began wading through the litter on the street, snatching up every copy of the libel that they could find. Dappa watched this through the coach’s window, then, when it began to lurch forward, drew the shutters, leaned forward, and buried his face in his hands.

He wanted to weep tears of rage, but for some reason they would not come. Perhaps if this had unfolded into a speedy and clean getaway he might have relaxed, and then released the tears. But they were on one of the most congested streets in all of London. Yet he felt no urgency to give the coachman instructions, for it would be a quarter of an hour before they came to any sort of turning-point. That would be at the intersection with Cornhill, a hundred feet away.

After some moments he reached into his pocket and took out the handbill. He smoothed it out on his thigh and cracked the window-shutters to spill light on it. All of which required conscious effort and a certain fortitude, as in all ways he wanted to lean back and enjoy the gentlemanly comfort of this coach and pretend that this wretched, abominable, vile, vicious thing had never been done to him.

He did not know exactly how old he was—probably about three score. His dreadlocks were black at the tips but gray at the roots. He had circumnavigated the terraqueous globe and knew more languages than most Englishmen knew drinking-songs. He was an officer of a merchant ship, and better dressed than any member of the Kit-Cat Clubb. And yet this! This piece of paper on his thigh. Charles White had printed it up, but any Englishman could have done the same. This particular configuration of ink upon the page had made him into a hounded fugitive, laid him at the mercy of a loathsome street-corner tout, forced him to flee from a coffee-house. And it had put a cannonball in his stomach. Was this how Daniel Waterhouse had felt when a stone the size of a tennis ball had dwelt in his bladder? Perhaps; but a few minutes’ knife-work and such a stone was gone. The cannonball in Dappa’s stomach was not so easy to remove. Indeed he knew that it would return, every time he recalled the last few minutes’ events, for the remainder of his days. He might be able to reach Minerva and sail out of range, but even if he were in the Sea of Japan, Charles White’s cannonball would hit him in the belly whenever his mind was idle and his thoughts returned to this day. And return he would, like a dog to his vomit.

This, he now perceived, was why gentlemen fought duels. Nothing else would purge such dishonor. Dappa had killed several men, mostly pirates, and mostly with pistol-shots. The chances were better than even that, in a fair duel, he could put a pistol-ball into Charles White’s body. But duels were for gentlemen; a slave could not challenge his master.

Stupid idea anyway; he needed to get to Minerva, to escape. The coach was negotiating a right turn onto Cornhill, therefore working its way back round toward the Pool. If it had turned left it would mean they were taking him toward Leicester House, where Eliza lived with a nest of Hanoverians. Yes, better to get out of town.

And yet the notion of challenging Charles White to a duel, putting a bullet in him, had seemed so delicious. Really the only thing that had given him any satisfaction since the shock of seeing his own name on this document.

He opened the shutters a bit more and looked round through the side and rear windows. Johann was looking right back at him from no more than twelve feet away. He was following in the wake that the coach had made through the crowd. He told Dappa, with a sharp movement of the head, to close the shutters. Then he turned round to look behind him. Dappa saw now that they were being tailed, at a leisurely walking pace, by a pair of men, each of whom was clutching a copy of the handbill. Scanning the width of Cornhill he saw more copies of the libel being handed out. He supposed that the only thing that prevented a hue and cry from going up was the reward, and the fact that those who seized him would not wish to divide it by the whole number of the Mobb. So for the nonce his pursuers were only two, and they were being held at bay by Johann, who had a sword; but Charles White could stamp out new pursuers as fast as printing presses could be operated.

How strange a thing that was! How could he have explained it to the villagers he’d grown up with in Africa? These bits of metal, put in a frame, smeared with black stuff, and pressed upon these white leaves, had the magical property that they would make one man out of a whole metropolis into a terrified fugitive, while every other man whose eyes were exposed to the incantation would become his implacable pursuer. Yet the same bits of metal put in the same frame, but in a different arrangement, would have no effect. Indeed, Dappa wondered whether he might print up some handbills naming Charles White his escaped slave, and putting some price on his head.

The notion was appealing—even more so than that of putting a lead ball through White’s body. But it was idle to think of such things. Escape Dappa might hope for. Revenge was not to be thought of.

They had come to the broad intersection of Cornhill and a large north-south-running street that changed its name from corner to corner. If they turned left here they’d be north-bound on Bishopsgate, headed for the South Sea Company, Gresham’s College, and Bedlam. More likely, though, they would go right, placing them south-bound on Gracechurch Street. This soon became Fish Street Hill and ran past the Monument straight down to London Bridge.

The coach halted in the middle of this intersection, for an uncommon number of persons were gathered here. When Dappa looked out the right side he tended to see the backs of their heads, and when he looked to the left he tended to see their faces; for most of them were gazing at some spectacle to the south. Dappa could not tell what. He looked to the left, trying to read the answer in their faces. He found no useful information there, save that what they were looking at was rather high up in the air. But he did catch sight again of South Sea House, a very large compound one of whose gates was situated a couple of hundred yards away, on the left side of Bishops-gate. It was bigger, and newer, than the Bank of England. It was, in a way, the Anti-Bank; its collateral, the Thing of Value against which it lent money, was the Asiento: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, wrested from Spain last year in the war.

A sudden exclamation came up from the crowd. Dappa glanced to the right, and thought he perceived a trail of black smoke drawn through the air from near the top of the Monument. And then he made a second glance, for the lantern at the top of that colossal spire was disfigured by some sort of jury-rigged block-and-tackle device. A vulgar entertainment for the Mobb, was his guess.

But back to South Sea House. The sight of this evil place, looming like a pirate-ship off his larboard beam, had caused certain notions to fall together within Dappa’s mind. A plan—not a sketchy one but a Plan whole and entire—had suddenly presented itself in his mind, and it was so obviously the right thing to do that he put it into effect with no deliberations whatsoever. For this Plan had the miraculous effect of removing the enormous ball of lead from his stomach.

He dropped to his knees on the floor of the coach and flipped the libel over on the facing bench. Out of his pocket came a pencil, and touching it to his tongue, as if this would put eloquence into it, he wrote

Your grace, my lady—

Johann did his duty bravely and well. Pray do not rebuke him when this carriage is found empty.

When last you and I conversed, we spoke of my career as author of books, and teller of slave-stories. A similitude was formed, in which my works to date were likened to so many balls of grapeshot, which when fired at our Enemy pose a nuisance but can never send any slave-ships to David Jones’s Locker where they ought to be all. You exhorted me to leave off gathering more grapeshot and to turn my efforts to finding a single cannonball.

Until today, I assumed that the cannonball—by which is meant, the story that will convince Englishmen, once and for all, of the absurdity and the enormity of slavery—would be found in some slave-auction in São Paulo, Kingstown, or Carolina. But to my surprise I, this afternoon, found that cannonball in the pit of mine own stomach. Minerva sails on the morning tide but you may find me in a gaol somewhere in London. I shall require paper, ink, and your prayers.

Your humble and obedient servant,

Dappa

Leaving this on the bench he flung open the door on the carriage’s left side. A small open space welcomed him, since no spectators would stand where the view to the south was blocked by the coach. Johann did not mark him; he was as fascinated as anyone else by the spectacle at the Monument. Dappa strode, but never ran, north through the crowd onto Bishopsgate. He phant’sied he might hear reward-seekers pursuing him through the crowd; never mind, if those did not, others would soon enough.

In a few moments’ time he was seated in a coffee-house literally in the shadow of South Sea House, sipping chocolate and pretending to read the Examiner. As if he’d a right to be there.

Busy men were all around him, unrolling documents on tables: charts of the Bights of Benin and Biafra, loading-diagrams of slave-ships, ledgers heavy with human assets. Familiar names flew around the place: Accra, Elmina, Ijebu, and Bonny. He felt, strangely, at home. Even more strangely, he felt at peace. Flipping the newspaper over, he licked his pencil again, and began to write.

Shive Tor

DUSK

IN A FEW MINUTES SIR Isaac was on the deck of the hooker, his hair gleaming like a comet’s tail in the fierce light of the burning Tor. Daniel stood near him, flat-footed under the weight of his Blanket, peering from beneath his rumpled Cap. A team of four dragoons were bent over the hooker’s rail, straining to heave-ho Colonel Barnes aboard without snapping off his other leg.

Very quickly the longboat rowed away from them, for the water was now deep enough that it could move free of the dredged channel. The hooker drew a bit more water than that, and was confined to the channel for the time being. Pulling his cap off so that he could feel the flow of air over his scalp, Daniel verified his suspicion that the burning Tor was drawing in a powerful flood of air, some of which was catching on the hull and the bare spars of the hooker. She was being sucked directly into the pillar of fire, like a moth into Vulcan’s forge.

Barnes was aware of it. The dragoons had begun exploring the ship, looking for an anchor, or anything that would serve the same end. There were none, as the anchor-cables had been chopped through in the coiners’ haste to escape.

“Is there anything that seems heavy down there?” Barnes demanded of a dragoon who had been groping around belowdecks.

Isaac pricked up his ears, as he too was very keen on finding something heavy.

“Only a great bloody chest,” the dragoon answered, “too heavy to move.”

“Did you look inside of it?” Isaac inquired, tense as a starving cat.

“No, sir. ’Tis locked. But I know what’s in it.”

“How do you know what is in it, if you did not look inside?”

“Why, I can hear it, sir. Ticking away just as steady as you please. It is a great big clock.”

As if the tips of their noses were joined by a hawser that had just snapped taut, Daniel and Isaac swiveled their heads toward each other.

Daniel spoke to the dragoon, though he was looking Isaac in the eye. “Is it so heavy that it could not be carried abovedecks and hurled over the side?” he asked.

“I heaved with all my might and could not budge it a hair’s breadth, sir.”

Daniel was asking himself whether he ought to let the dragoons know what was obvious to him and Isaac: that they were trapped on a derelict vessel with a ticking Infernal Device. But Isaac made up his mind quicker, and said: “Pray forgive Dr. Waterhouse’s curiosity on so trivial a matter. He and I are amateurs of clock-work. As we have little else to do just now, perhaps he and I shall retire belowdecks and amuse ourselves with Horologickal chit-chat.”

“And I’ll join you,” said Barnes, who had caught on, “if you’ll have me, that is.”

“Please be our guest, Colonel,” said Daniel. He then led Isaac and Barnes toward an open hatch, which, against the fire-lit deck planks, stood out as a crisp black rectangle.

The White Tower

DUSK

FATHER ÉDOUARD DE GEX of the Society of Jesus stood up on one leg, for he’d damaged an ankle, and turned around to survey the debris trail he had left across the roof of the White Tower. Chiefly he desired to know where the contents of his satchel were. It seemed a good deal lighter now than when he’d jumped off the Monument a few moments earlier.

Under the groaning rope, and interspersed with flattened Scotsmen and their far-flung dirks, sporrans, and tam-o-shanters, was a Milky Way of coins and the small leather bags they’d just sprayed out of. De Gex hobbled back along his track snatching them up and stuffing them into his bag. Ashamed to see a man of the cloth performing stoop-and-pick labor in their midst, the stunned and bruised Highlanders drew themselves up, shook the dust from their kilts, and went to work gleaning coins and wee bags from the roof.

But de Gex did not leave off collecting and counting them until he had worked his way back to the west parapet. There he encountered the first man he had knocked down: a bulky fellow with a patch over one eye, who spoke to him in tolerable French. “In the name of the Auld Alliance,” said he (referring to an extremely spotty but æon-spanning series of diplomatic trysts between Scotland and France) “I bid you welcome to the Tower of London. Please consider it the property of France—”

“Pourquoi non? Since it was built by us.”

“—and yours to command!”

“Very well, my first command is that you take down the banner of MacIan of MacDonald!” answered de Gex.

Lord Gy was not pleased to hear this. That much was on his face, as plain as a laceration. But he bore it with the insolent calm of one who has heard worse and would like you to notice that he is still alive. “I apologize,” he said, “the lads were a trifle high-spirited. The sobriety and discretion of Paris are foreign to young blades who have just galloped down from the heather.” And making a small bow, he turned in the direction of the banner. So did de Gex.

But both of them were astonished to find no banner at all: only a flag-pole that had been severed at waist level by one stroke of a very good blade. Next to it, the banner-carrier—a being made entirely of freckles, perhaps fourteen years old—was sitting in a gun-slit pinching a bloody nose.

Rufus MacIan hurried over to make inquiries. Édouard de Gex, after the obligatory rolling of the eyes, looked about and noted, for the first time, that Jack was nowhere to be seen. In the commotion of de Gex’s descent upon the White Tower, Jack must have taken the matter of the banner into his own hands. He must then have gone down stairs; and the nearest way down would have been through a door, now standing open, in the round turret that held together the northeastern vertex of the building. That turret loomed above the place where MacIan was interrogating the bloody-nosed freckle-boy, and it was obvious that MacIan would be headed that way in a moment.

De Gex commanded the Highlanders around him to remain at their posts, and strode toward the round turret. Several of the Scotsmen affected not to have grasped his order, and followed him; but MacIan, who was now aimed for the same door, turned round, his face very choleric, and bit off a few words in Scots that sent them all glancing away. He entered the round turret only two strides ahead of de Gex.

“Pity,” said the latter, looking around the perfectly barren room, “all the astronomical devices are gone.”

Lord Gy was already in the stair, on his way down. “Eh?”

“Didn’t you know? This was where Flamsteed worked, in the days before the Royal Observatory was moved to Greenwich. The Prime Meridian of the English once passed through this room—”

Which was perfectly trivial and beside the point, as de Gex well knew. But he did not like the look on the face of Lord Gy, and wanted to break his concentration. The gambit might have worked on a French nobleman whose social reflexes had been trained to quivering perfection in the salons of Versailles. It failed on Lord Gy, who had ascended to the nobility by cutting such a Frenchman in twain, and who at this moment looked as if he were ready to do it again.

The purpose of the round tower was to support a spiral stair. Finding Jack was a matter of winding down and gazing into each doorway that presented itself. They shortly tracked him down on the middle of the building’s three floors. This space, formerly the royal court of a King, had been given over in recent centuries to the storage of official documents. Jack was squatting with his back to them in the middle of a cavernous fireplace shaking powder from a horn onto the Scottish banner, which he had folded a couple of times and stuffed beneath an andiron. On his career through the former throne-room he had swiped an armload of rolled-up papers from a dusty shelf and piled them under and around the banner to serve as kindling.

“Jacques—” de Gex began.

“Pardon me while I destroy the evidence, your virginity.”

“Ye baistart!” exclaimed Lord Gy.

“Did I say, destroy the evidence?” Jack said, looking over his shoulder to see MacIan. “I meant that this sacred banner became torn and dirtied in the fray, and the only respectful way to dispose of it now is by a cleansing flame.” And he held a pistol—an unloaded one, as it turned out—next to the banner and pulled the trigger. Sparks from the flint sprayed across powder-smeared fabric and became something more than sparks. A fizzy conflagration spread across the banner, like flames across a field of harvested stalks, only faster. Jack recoiled, staggering out of the fireplace to get clear of the smoke. Since a draught had not yet been established in the chimney, a good deal of the smoke followed him—indeed, was sucked into his wake so that he seemed to be trailing it behind him like a rocket. “Right, let’s go somewhere we can breathe,” Jack suggested, and strode past de Gex and MacIan, headed for the stair.

Now de Gex had seen a few duels in his day. These were at least as formal, and as premeditated, as weddings. But he’d also seen a sufficient number of sudden murderous stabbing-brawls to have understood that even they were not as spontaneous as they looked.

If you were strolling in the gardens of Versailles, you might one day hear sudden noises, and turn around to see, some distance away, one fellow—let’s call him Arnauld—going after another—call him Blaise—with a drawn blade. From which, if you were a careless observer, you might think that Arnauld had just snapped without warning, like an ice-covered bough falling from a tree. But in truth the Arnaulds of the world were rarely so reckless. A careful observer, watching Arnauld for two or three minutes prior to the onset of violence, would see some sort of exchange between him and Blaise—a calculated insult from Blaise, let us say, such as a refusal to let Arnauld through a door ahead of him, or a witticism about Arnauld’s wig, which had been so very fashionable three months ago. If Blaise were a polished wit, he would then move on, blithe, humming an air, and giving every appearance of having forgotten the event.

But Arnauld would become a living Exhibit. Symptoms would set in that were so obvious and dramatic as to furnish a topic of study for the Royal Society. Why, a whole jury of English savants could stand around poor Arnauld with their magnifying lenses and their notebooks, observing the changes in his physiognomy, noting them down in Latin and rendering them in labored woodcuts. Most of these symptoms had to do with the Humour of Passion. For a few moments, Arnauld would stand fast as the insult sank in. His face would turn red as the vessels in his skin went flaccid, and consequently ballooned with blood from a heart that had begun to pound like a Turkish kettle-drum signalling the onset of battle. But this was not when the attack came, because Arnauld, during this stage, was physically unable to move. All of his activity was mental. Once he got over the first shock, Arnauld’s first thought would be to convince himself that he had reined in his emotions now, got himself under control, was ready to consider matters judiciously. The next few minutes, then, would be devoted to a rehearsal of the recent encounter with Blaise. Affecting a rational, methodical approach, Arnauld would marshal whatever evidence he might need to convict Blaise of being a scoundrel, and sentence him to death. After that, the attack would not be long in following. But to one who had not been there with those Fellows of the Royal Society to observe all that had led up to it, it would seem like the spontaneous explosion of an Infernal Device.

De Gex was standing behind MacIan and had watched the banner-burning over the other’s epaulets. The backs of MacIan’s ears had gone cherry red. He’d not so much as twitched an eyelid when Jack had strode past him to the stair. De Gex knew what would be coming soon. There was nothing he could say now to interrupt the proceedings going on in MacIan’s brain: the marshalling of the arguments, the sure and inevitable judgment. But there was something he could do. He let his satchel down to the floor, and reached silently into the pocket of his cassock. It was not a lined pocket, but a slit that went all the way through the garment, and gave him access to what was beneath.

Father Edouard was a member of the Society of Jesus, but he was a participant in the society of men—to be specific, the men of London, the most beastly city he had ever seen, though he’d circumnavigated the globe. In his waistband, his fingers found the hilt of a splendid watered-steel dagger he’d picked up from a Banyan in Batavia. He drew it silently from its leather sheath. MacIan still hadn’t moved. The room was silent except for the crackle of the flames spreading to the pile of ancient documents Jack had strewn around the flag. De Gex broke the silence, a little, by stepping forward.

But this triggered a greater sound from behind him. Before de Gex could turn to see what it was, his dagger-hand had been seized from behind and twisted up behind his back. The fingers opened and the weapon dropped, but did not fall to the floor; it was intercepted by another hand. An instant later that hand appeared in front of him and brought the dagger to his throat. He had been embraced from behind by a man who smelled of sweat-sodden wool, of horses, and of gunpowder. One of the Highlanders had tailed him silently down stairs.

“Ye ir a man of kirk, so a sal gie ye benefit of clergy,” said the Highlander into his ear, “binna ye speik sae much as a word, an then it’ll be atwein ye and St. Peter as ti whaur ye sal be expoondin yeir next sermon.”

Rufus MacIan turned around. His ears were no longer red. With barely a glance towards de Gex he strode to the spiral stair and followed Jack down to the first storey.

IT WAS PACKED TO the ceiling with gunpowder. Not wanting to blow what remained of his clan to kingdom come, MacIan removed a pistol from his waistband, made sure it wasn’t cocked, and laid it on a sill before turning his attention into the great room that accounted for most of the first floor.

“What were you thinking?” asked Jack.

Jack the Coiner was standing at the head of an aisle between stacked powder-kegs. He had not drawn his blade, but he had pulled it a few inches out of its scabbard to loosen it, and he was standing in a sideways attitude that, in a society where men routinely ran each other through with swords, was implicitly menacing.

MacIan kept his distance. “I dinna expect to live this lang,” he said, “I hae nae thoughts concerning what we should dae after.”

“Let me supply you with some thoughts, then,” said Jack. “We are finished here.”

“Finished!?”

“We have done all that we needed to do,” said Jack, “excepting some trifles in the Mint which Father Édouard and I shall attend to after you and the others are…gone.”

“Gone!? An how dae ye expect to hold the Tower of London agin a Regiment, with nae one to man the defenses?”

“It was never my intention to hold it,” Jack returned. “So fly. Now. Escape to the heather. Savor your revenge. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you prefer to go out as a hero of the United Kingdom, defending this house of your Stuart queen.”

“Now that is insufferable,” said Rufus MacIan. “That isna to be endured.” Both hands came up in front as if he were going to clasp them in prayer. But they did not bate before his face, but kept rising and reaching back until they had found the handle of the Claymore projecting up above one shoulder. With one jerk it was out and in front of him. Suddenly Jack’s weapon was likewise exposed, a handsome watered-steel blade, curved like a saber, and, in the Turkish way, slightly broader at the tip than at the guard. He held it in one hand. It would be an odd, ragged, improvised sort of duel: a medieval longsword against something that was not a cutlass and not a rapier.

“Very well,” Jack said, “hero of Britain it is, then.”

Jack had the lighter and swifter blade. It would be suicide for MacIan to stand and await an attack, because it was unlikely he could move the Claymore fast enough to parry it. So he came on like a bull from a chute, feinting this way and that to make Jack commit himself, then winding up and swinging the weapon down at Jack’s head with all his might. It was a blow that could not be fended off with any lighter weapon, and so Jack was obliged to spin back and away. MacIan pursued him into an aisle between stacked powder-kegs. In these narrower confines he would have less room to swing his long blade. But Jack had done nothing to break the momentum of the great sword and so MacIan was able to swing it around and ring down another terrible blow at Jack’s head. Jack barely had time to get his sword-hand up. If he had held his lighter weapon horizontally, trying to bar altogether the descent of the Claymore, it wouldn’t have gone well for him. But he had the luck, or the presence of mind, to make the pommel the highest part of the weapon, and leave the point angled downwards toward the floor. The Claymore came down with little loss of speed, but it was deflected laterally, missing Jack and crashing into the stone floor, where it sent a shower of sparks against the base of a keg of gunpowder.

There was, in Rufus MacIan, a responsible and level-headed military officer. For the last few moments this person had been muscled out of the way by another that shared the same skull: the raving Celtic berserker. The sight of those sparks striking that keg caused the latter to vanish like a will o’ the wisp and the former to be reinstated. There was a momentary pause as Rufus MacIan waited to see if they and the White Tower were to remain in existence. But the sparks winked out, and nothing happened.

“Lucky that,” MacIan remarked, and cleared his throat, for suddenly his lungs were congested. He noticed that Jack was standing rather close—too close to be struck with the long Claymore. Indeed, he had his foot on the tip of MacIan’s sword. Rufus MacIan coughed, and felt something hot and wet soaking his beard. Glancing down, he noticed the hilt of Jack’s sword, all encrusted with heathenish designs, pressed up against his chest.

“Oh, it’s because I am a lucky lucky fellow, my lord,” said Jack—though MacIan was feeling oddly distracted, and the words did not really register. “In every respect, save the one that most matters.”

“TO THE PYX, THEN,” Jack said, stepping back and snapping his sword horizontally through the air. Blood rushed down the blade, jetted from the tip, and struck a nearby wall with a sizzling noise, making a long dripping slash across the dry stones.

De Gex was frozen for a three-count. He rolled his eyeballs down in their sockets to verify that his dagger was now lying on the floor, i.e., no longer anywhere near his throat. The weight, and pressure, and the fragrance of the Scotsman were all gone. He bent down and snatched up the dagger, then spun around to face Jack—and nearly lost his footing on a spreading hot puddle. The Highlander who’d been holding him at bay was curled up on the floor, eyes half open, face gray.

“That was very risky,” remarked de Gex.

“Oh, I’m sorry, we’re going to begin accounting for risk now?” Jack returned, astonished. “Do you have any idea what just nearly—”

“That will do,” said de Gex crisply, for he knew that once Jack had got into a mocking mood it was as difficult to cure as the hiccups.

They descended to the first floor of the round turret. Though the most ancient door of the White Tower was situated in the opposite corner, along the Inmost Ward, a more recent one was available at the base of the turret stair. It deposited them upon a strip of green on the north side, between the White Tower and a row of storehouses that lined the inner surface of the curtain wall. Here Jack broke his stride for a moment, because the storehouses were as regular as shocks of grain in a field-row, and offered no points of reference by which he could establish his bearings. But raising his sights above their saw-toothed roof-line he saw the slotted parapets of three bastions behind them. Here, the fire that still burned in the Tower hamlets north of the moat came in useful, as very little light was now left in the sky. But the red fire-glow shone crisply through the crenellations on those bastions. Being now a dungeon o’ learning where the Tower was concerned, he knew that these three were, from left to right, Bowyer, Brick, and Jewel Towers.

Someone was hollering to him from high above. Jack couldn’t make out a word. He spun on his heel, leaned back, cupped his hands round his face, and bellowed: “Run away!” to the Scotsmen on the roof of the White Tower. Then he continued striding north across the green with de Gex. He was looking for a portal that would take him through the line of storehouses and get him to the base of Brick Tower—that being the middle of the three bastions. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the twilight, he thought he could see it: a break in the half-timbered house-fronts, right in the center. It was a wide gate where wagon-loads of stuff could be trundled in or out. Standing in it were two men, one a giant and the other the size of a boy: Yevgeny and Tom the Black-guard.

“I have found the way through to the sally-port,” Yevgeny announced.

“You have a Yeoman?”

Yevgeny pointed to a Beefeater who was standing inside the storehouse with his arms pinioned behind his back.

“I’m glad you’re finally here, mate,” said Tom to Jack, “I been trying to explain to the Muscovite, here, this ain’t the right way in!” He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder. “This here is Brick Tower! Jewel Tower’s the next one down!” Tom stepped forward onto the green and pointed down the line to the bastion that stood in the northeast corner of the Inner Ward. A dozen or so men, who from their looks could have stepped off Blackbeard’s flagship a quarter of an hour ago, were Loitering with Intent in that vicinity, and looking shrewdly at Jack.

“And of what significance is that?” Jack demanded.

An awkward silence.

Tom could be seen looking a bit pale.

De Gex sidled up and whispered something into Jack’s ear.

“Oh, yes, of course, the Jewel Tower,” Jack said. “That’s where they keep the, what do you call them—”

“The Crown Jewels, sir,” whispered Tom, now quite rattled.

“Yes, now I see where you are going—yes—of course! The Crown Jewels. Right.” He considered it for a good long time. “Would you like to have a go at stealing the Crown Jewels, then, as long as we are here?”

“I thought that was the entire point of the Lay, sir,” Tom answered, seeming very boylike indeed now.

“Oh, yes! To be sure!” Jack hastened to say, “by all means, yes, that’s all I’ve ever wanted, really, to have some great bloody lump of gold with jewels stuck in it to put on my head. Diamonds, rubies—I’m mad for them really—go! Run along!”

“Don’t you wish to—?”

“You’ve done splendidly to this point, Tom, and that lot in the corner seem trustworthy. Go and see what you can find in Jewel Tower and I’ll meet you back here—”

Yevgeny cleared his throat.

“Strike that, I’ll meet you at, oh, Black Jack’s Boozing-Ken at Hockley-in-the-Hole tomorrow evening, after the bear-baiting.”

Jack had accompanied these improvised remarks with any amount of nods, gesticulations, nudgings, and shovings, all directed toward the a-mazed Tom and all meant to impel him toward the fabulous Jewel-trove in question. Finally Tom began to move that direction, but he walked backwards, keeping a sharp eye on Jack. “D’you really think Black Jack’s Boozing-Ken is a good place to be cutting up the Sovereign’s Orb?”

“Cut it up where you will, bring me some bits in a sack. Whatever you think is fair. Off you go, then!”

Tom—who was about halfway to the claque of piratish-looking blokes—scanned the roofs of the storehouses while Jack spoke these words, expecting that this was all a sort of test of Tom’s loyalty, and that if he made the wrong move he’d get a crossbow-bolt through the heart. But there was nothing to be noted save a few furious Highlanders starting to boil from the door of the White Tower. Which anyway forced him to make up his mind. “Right!” he exclaimed, then turned, and sprinted for the Jewels. Jack did not even see this, for he’d already bolted, along with de Gex, into the portal where Yevgeny had been awaiting them. Yevgeny barred the heavy storehouse door behind them.

“Your name?” Jack said to the Yeoman Warder.

“Clooney! And whatever it is you want—”

“Why, Yeoman Clooney, you make it sound as if I am some sort of nefarious villain. All I want is for you to be my boon companion these next several minutes, and to survive the night in good health.”

“I should not love to be your companion for any length of time.”

“Then I shall remind you that I am, in truth, a nefarious villain. You may follow me on your own two feet, or I shall have the Rus put a leash around your neck and drag you up and down stairs on your beef-stuffed belly.”

“I shall walk,” announced Clooney, eyeing Yevgeny. By this time he had probably watched the Muscovite do any number of appalling things and was more afraid of him than of Jack.

A brief, dark, tortuous walk through the bowels of the Tower followed. After the third change of direction Jack became utterly lost. He guessed that they’d broken the plane of the curtain-wall and entered the bastion of Brick Tower.

Then a stone stair was before them, descending into a gloom that was beyond the power of their lanthorns. A man more superstitious than Jack might have recoiled, seeing it as a prefigurement of prison, death, and descent into the world below. But in the catalog of gloomy and hair-raising locations into which Jack had ventured during his lifetime, this scarcely rated notice. Down the stairs he traipsed, turning left at a landing, and then jogging left again at the foot of another flight. They must now be down in some oubliette of the Normans. But passing through a door, he found himself under the sky on, of all things, a street: Mint Street. Directly across that street was a house, a wreck of a thing, nearly black with soot. The door of this house stood open, and a single light burned within. Door and street were guarded by three men—men well known to Jack—each of whom carried the ne plus ultra of Mobb control weapons, a blunderbuss. And not without effect, for what crowd there was—a few grubby Mint workers—remained far away down the street, ready to duck for cover behind the elbow of Bowyer Tower if there was need.

There was no need. Jack checked his stride in the middle of the street, set his black satchel down as if to rest a weary hand, and turned around to see what was keeping the others. This movement caused his gold-lined cloak to swirl around him in a flourish that could not be missed by the cowed Mint-men. As it turned out, the black-robe was right on his heels. So Jack turned again, snatched up his satchel, and carried it into the house of the Warden of the Mint.

It was abandoned. Warden of the Mint was a profitable sinecure, usually granted to some man who knew little and cared less about coining but who had places in high friends. Such a man would not dream of living in this house, even though it was provided by the government for his use. He would as like live by a knacker’s yard on the outskirts of Dublin than dwell on this smoky street in the midst of soldiers. And so most of the place went unused. But not all. Following the glimmer of lamp-light, Jack descended a stair to a vault-door, which hung open.

The vault itself was barely an arm-span in width, and the apex of the arched ceiling was scarcely high enough for Jack to stand upright. It was dank and dripping, for it was down close to the level of the moat. But it was soundly made. At the far end stood a table. On the table was a black chest with three hasps. Two of these were going unused at the moment, and opened padlocks dangled from their loops like freshly killed game from the butcher’s hook. The third hasp was still closed by a padlock the size of a man’s fist. Sitting before it on an overturned basket was a bulky man whose face was obscured by black hair hanging down. He was peering at the lock from a few inches away, gripping it in one great hand while the other manipulated its inner works with a steel toothpick. None of which was in the least remarkable to Jack, for he had expected all of these things, except for one.

“That’s it?” he exclaimed.

“This is the Pyx,” answered the man who was sitting on the basket. He spoke as if he had entered the serene trance of a Hindoostani mystic.

“You know, in any other country, they’d go to a bit of trouble, wouldn’t they, to make it be dazzling. But this is just a bloody box.”

“All objects that perform the essential functions of a box, are unavoidably boxy,” said the other. “If it makes you feel any better, the locks are excellent.”

“Those two don’t appear to have been excellent enough,” Jack remarked.

“Ah, but this one. I am guessing that the other two were those of the Comptroller and the Warden. But this is the lock of the Master.”

“Newton.”

“Yes. Some admirer—some royal sycophant from the Continent—must have given it to him.”

Jack was conscious now of de Gex breathing behind him. He said, “You of all people ought to be more alive to the passage of time.”

“But Saturn was Time’s lord, not its servant.”

“Which are you?”

“Both. For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock—or a lock—that time stops.”

“The clock stops, you mean.”

“No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me—I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire’s gone out, and the sun’s gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock—” now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. “Or an opened lock.” Saturn could not stand in this confined space, but he sat up straight, heaved a vast sigh, then drew the padlock out of the loop of the third hasp with great care, not wanting to bang it up on the way out.

“I thought you said that Newton’s lock was something extraordinary,” Jack said.

Saturn held it up near a candle-flame so that all could admire its Baroqueness. It had been fashioned after the style of the portico of an ancient temple. The style was Classical. But the tiny figures all around were seraphim and cherubim, rather than the gods of Olympus, and the inscription on the frieze was in Hebrew. “It is the Temple of Solomon,” Saturn explained.

“There is no keyhole!” Jack said.

The front of the temple, between the pillars, was closed by a small doorway with more Hebrew on it. Saturn flicked this open with a blackened fingernail to reveal, hidden beneath, an impossibly complex keyhole, shaped like a maze. It had been cut into a block of what appeared to be solid gold, which was shaped like a flame burning on the temple’s altar.

“You were right,” Jack said, “it’s bloody amazing.”

“Decorative,” Saturn admitted, “and clever. But still a lock.”

He flipped open the vacant hasp, then grabbed the handle on the lid of the Pyx, and pulled.

The Pyx groaned open. Jack stepped forward. De Gex hastened to his side.

Shive Tor

TWILIGHT

ABOVEDECKS, BY THE LIGHT of the flaming Tor, the soldiers toiled with poles, pushing the hooker back from the conflagration one yard at a time. Below, in the gleam of a lanthorn that Colonel Barnes had had the presence of mind to bring over from Atalanta, Sir Isaac Newton and Daniel Waterhouse regarded the big locked chest, and listened to it tick.

Barnes had worried the point of a bayonet under the edge of the iron-bound chest and tried to lever it up, but they had seen no movement. “It is not that this is heavy, though it is,” Barnes had announced, “it is rather that the whole thing has been bolted to the very keel of the ship. And the bolt-heads are presumably locked up safe inside it.”

Isaac was saying nothing. Indeed, he had been perfectly silent ever since he had descended into the hooker’s hold with Daniel, and found it empty, save for the ticking chest.

For once, Daniel had Isaac at a disadvantage. Isaac had boarded this hooker still believing that he had sprung a trap on Jack the Coiner and was about to recover Jack’s hoard of Solomonic Gold. That he’d been trapped by Jack was only just now trespassing on the frontiers of his awareness, and would take a good long time to march in to the core of his brain.

Daniel’s instinct, of course, was to withdraw to the bow or stern, to get as far away from the device as he could. With luck he might then live through the explosion. But it was now clear that the hooker’s keel would be snapped like a twig, and she’d go down fast in the cold dark water.

Daniel went abovedecks, carrying the lanthorn so as to literally leave Sir Isaac in the dark. He was afraid that if Isaac had light he might try to tamper with the Device. Barnes followed Daniel.

Shive Tor had become a red-hot obelisk jutting straight up from the sea.

The hooker’s rigging had been sabotaged and her rudder cast away, so all she could do was drift where the currents and the winds might take her. This was very much in doubt, for the flows of the Thames and of the Medway here joined to war against the incoming tide in a wild melee of tows and vortices. But they would tend to drift into the center of the estuary, where the united rivers would flush them out to sea. The shore of the Isle of Grain was not so very distant; perhaps there was still time to summon Sergeant Bob, who was rowing about in yonder darkness salvaging the men of the First Company from the inrushing tide. Bob could not have failed to note the burning of the Tor; but he would have no way of guessing that an Infernal Device was bolted to the keel of the hooker.

Out of the hooker’s butchered rig the dragoons had chopped down two spars, and were using them as push-poles, standing at the gunwales and hugging the spars to their chests (they were heavy) to jab them into the mucky bottom. When Daniel had gone below with Isaac a few minutes ago this had been strictly a matter of keeping the hooker from getting sucked into the flames of the Tor, and it had not been especially difficult, in that the water had been barely deep enough to float the vessel, so that the spar-tips found the bottom easily. Now it was different. They’d put a safe distance between them and the cherry-red pillar. The light was fainter now. It created extreme contrasts between what was lit and what was in shadow, so Daniel’s mind labored to construct a picture of events from a few strewn arcs, points, and patches of light, and dreamlike snatches of men’s faces. But he could see that the dragoons were leaning dangerously over the sides, struggling to maintain control of the spars, most of which were now submerged. The tide had moved in on them, or they had pushed themselves out into a river-channel. At any rate, they were fast losing the power to affect their own movements.

The Tor—which was really the only thing visible outside of the ship—had until recently remained in a fixed position off their larboard quarter. But now it was executing a swift and dramatic traverse across the horizon, and it was dwindling. They were being pressed out to sea by the force of the rivers.

“What happens if you fire a musket while the ramrod is in the barrel?” Daniel inquired of the darkness.

“Sergeant Shaftoe thrashes you within an inch of your life!” answered a dragoon.

“But what happens to the ramrod?”

“Flies out like a spear, I suppose,” said the dragoon, “unless it jams in the barrel and the whole thing blows up in your face.”

“I would like to make a hole in a locked box,” Daniel explained.

“We’ve an axe,” said the dragoon.

“This box is bound and sheathed in iron,” said Daniel.

But he had already discarded the idea of firing a ramrod, or aught else, into the ticking chest. For all he knew, this was as likely to detonate, as disrupt, the Infernal Device.

A sense of relief now washed over him as he came to a realization: they were altogether doomed.

He went belowdecks to inform Isaac. Daniel might have expected Isaac to be furious over having been left in the dark. But as the light of the lanthorn invaded the hold, it revealed Isaac curled up on the decking with one ear pressed against the side of the chest, like one of Queen Anne’s physicians trying to make out whether she was still alive.

“It is a Tompion balance-spring movement,” Isaac proclaimed, “of curiously massive construction—like a watch wrought for a giant. But well-wrought. There is no grinding in the bearings, the gears mesh cleanly.”

“Shall we try to force it open?”

“The art of building lethal traps into lock-boxes is far more ancient than that of constructing Infernal Devices,” Isaac returned.

“I understand,” said Daniel, “but if the alternative is to do nothing, and be blown to bits—” But he stopped there, for Isaac’s eyelids had fluttered shut, his lips had parted, and he shifted to press his skull even harder against the cold iron frame of the chest.

“Something is happening,” he announced. “A pin was engaged. A cam revolves—” he opened his eyes and drew back as if it had only just entered his mind that he was in danger. Daniel caught one of Isaac’s hands and assisted him to his feet—then caught him in his arms as the boat was heaved beneath their feet by a swell coming in from the sea.

“Well,” Daniel said, “are you ready to find out what comes next?”

“As I told you, there is some mechanism—”

“I meant, after we die,” Daniel said.

“For that I have long been ready,” said Isaac; and Daniel was put in mind of Whitsunday 1662, when Isaac had repented of all the sins he had ever committed, and begun a ledger of sins committed since then. Did that ledger still exist somewhere? Was it still blank?

“And you, Daniel?” Isaac inquired.

“I made myself ready twenty-five years ago, when I was dying of the Stone,” Daniel said, “and have oft wondered when Death would bother to come for me.”

“Then neither of us has anything to fear,” said Isaac. Which Daniel agreed with on a purely intellectual level; but still he flinched when a hefty mechanical clunk sounded from the chest, and its lid sprang open, driven by a pair of massive springs. Daniel missed what happened next because (as he was ashamed to realize) he had jumped behind Isaac. But now he stepped clear. He let the lanthorn drop to his side. It was no longer of any use. The chest was emitting its own light. Fountains of colored sparks gushed from several metal tubes that splayed from its rim, a bit like the iron pikes that adorned London Bridge’s Great Stone Gate. Their light blinded him for a few moments. But when his eyes adjusted he saw a little carved and painted figure—a poppet—jutting from the top of the box, bobbling up and down atop a coil spring that had thrust it into the air. The poppet was adorned with a motley fool’s cap with wee bells on the ends of its tentacles, and its face had been carven into a foolish grin. Illuminated from beneath by the fizzing sparklers, it wore a ghoulish and sinister aspect.

“Jack in the Box!” Daniel exclaimed.

Isaac approached the chest. The poppet had sprung up out of a mound of hundreds of coins. These had avalanched over the rim of the chest when the lid had sprung open, and were still tumbling to the deck in ones and twos. One of them rolled to within inches of Isaac’s toe. He stooped and picked it up. Daniel, ever the lab-assistant, held the light near to hand. Isaac stared at it for a quarter of a minute. Daniel’s lanthorn-arm began to ache, but he dared not move.

Finally it occurrred to Isaac to resume breathing. A tiny smacking noise came from his mouth as he re-animated his parts of speech.

“We must get back to the Tower of London straightaway.”

“I am all for it,” Daniel said, “but I’m afraid that the currents of the Thames and the Medway disagree with us.”

Book 7

Currency

There was the usual amount of corruption, intimidation, and rioting.

—SIR CHARLES PETRIE, DESCRIBING A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION OF THE ERA

Hanover

JUNE 18 (CONTINENTAL) / 7 (ENGLISH) 1714

Do not pity me. I am at last going to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things, which even Leibniz could never explain to me, to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness…

—SOPHIE CHARLOTTE, QUEEN OF PRUSSIA, ON HER DEATHBED AT AGE THIRTY-SIX

“ONCE UPON A TIME there was a penniless orphan girl named Wilhelmina Caroline, or Caroline for short. Father was a brilliant if odd man, who died young of the smallpox, leaving Mother at the mercy of his son by an earlier marriage. But this son had inherited neither his father’s wisdom nor his love for the beautiful mother of Caroline; and, conceiving of her as a wicked stepmother, and of the infant as a future rival, he cast them out. Mother took little Caroline up in her arms and fled to a house deep in the woods. The two lived almost as Vagabonds for some years, making occasional sojourns in the houses of more fortunate relations. But when the compassion of her family was spent, Mother was left with no choice but to marry the first suitor who came along: a brute who had been hit on the head when he was a child. This fellow cared little for Caroline’s mother and less for Caroline. He relegated them to a miserable life on the fringe of his household while he openly made love to his vile, ignorant, and wicked mistress.

“In time both stepfather and mistress died of smallpox. Not long after, Caroline’s mother also perished, leaving the little girl alone, penniless, and destitute.

“Only one heirloom passed to Caroline upon her mother’s death, for it was the only thing that could not be separated from her by pestilence or theft: the title of Princess. Without this inheritance, she would soon have ended up in a poorhouse, a nunnery, or worse; but because, like her mother before her, she was a Princess, two wise men came and bore her away in a carriage to a palace in a distant city, where a clever and beautiful young Queen named Sophie Charlotte took her under her wing, and gave her all she needed.

“Of all that was offered to Princess Caroline in the years that followed, two mattered above all others: first Love. For Sophie Charlotte was both an elder sister and a foster mother to her. And second Knowledge. For in the palace was a great library, to which Caroline was given a key by one of the wise men: a Doctor who was the Queen’s mentor and advisor. She spent every minute that she could in that library, doing what she loved most, which was reading books.

“Years later, after she had grown to a woman and begun to have children of her own, Caroline was to ask the Doctor how he had been so clever as to know that she would want a key to the library. The Doctor explained: ‘As a little boy, I lost my own father, who, like your royal highness’s, was a well-read man; but later I came to know him, and to feel his presence in my life, by reading the books he left behind.’ ”

Henrietta Braithwaite trailed off hereabouts, and shaped her brow into a tasteful and courtly little frown. Her finger plowed a crooked trail back up the terrain of the last paragraph, like a pig’s snout rooting for a truffle. “Rather fine to this point, your royal highness, but the story becomes confused when this Doctor enters into it, and you begin to jump back and forth between tenses, and tell things in his voice—pray, how does a Doctor enter into a færy-tale anyhow? Up to here, it’s all palaces, stepmothers, and houses in the woods, which fit. But a Doctor—?”

“Es ist ja ein Märchen—”

“In English if you please, your royal highness.”

“It is indeed a færy-tale, but it is also my story,” said Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, “and my story has a Doctor in it.”

She glanced out a window. Today’s English lesson was in a salon of the Leine Schloß, on the side that faced away from the river. The view was across a small paved courtyard that spilled onto a busy Hanover street. Leibniz’s house was only two or three doors down—near enough that she could shout a philosophical inquiry out the window and half expect to get an answer back.

“The next chapter will treat of persons, and happenings, not found in færy-tales,” Caroline continued, after a pause to get the English words queued up in the right order. “For what I have written on the leaves you hold in your hands only goes up to when Sophie Charlotte died—or, as some say, was poisoned by the Prussian court.”

Mrs. Braithwaite now turned in a workmanlike effort to conceal her horror and loathing of the fact that Princess Caroline had given voice to this thought. It was not that this Englishwoman had any particular love for the courtiers who infested the Charlottenburg. Mrs. Braithwaite, wife of an English Whig, would have taken Sophie Charlotte’s side in just about any imaginable debate—supposing she had the kidney to choose sides. What troubled her was Caroline’s forthrightness. But the ability to say things directly, and get away with it, was a birthright that came along with the title of Princess.

“It has indeed been an eventful nine years since that dolorous day,” Mrs. Braithwaite allowed, “but it would still read much like a færy-tale to the common reader, if you but changed a few words. The Doctor could become a wizard, the aged Electress a wise Queen—no one in England would object to that change!”

“Except for all those Jacobites who want Sophie dead,” Caroline returned.

This was a bit like sticking her leg out in front of Mrs. Braithwaite when she was trying to tiptoe, skirts hiked up, down a turd-strewn alley. The Englishwoman faltered and pinkened but did not come to a full stop. As everyone in Hanover, including Caroline’s husband, had noted, she was the very soul of poise and grace. “The other characters and events of your last nine years—the handsome and brave young Prince, the long war against an evil King, a lost kingdom across the sea, rightfully yours, which sends emissaries—”

“Emissaries,” Caroline said, “but other busy persons too, not fit for færy-tales at all.”

Mrs. Henrietta Braithwaite, Caroline’s dame du palais and English tutor, was also the official mistress of Caroline’s husband. Caroline did not really object to her “brave young Prince” having sex all the time with the wife of an Englishman—and a rather dodgy Englishman at that. On the contrary. Sex with the Electoral Prince George Augustus had been mildly pleasant more often than it had been downright painful. But most of the time, like trimming one’s fingernails, it had been a body-chore that no longer seemed gross after it had been done a few hundred times. Four children—one Prince, three Princesses—had ensued so far, and there would probably be more, provided George Augustus did not spill all of his seed into Henrietta Braithwaite. The arrival of this Englishwoman at the Court of Hanover two years ago, and her speedy promotion to maîtresse en titre of Young Hanover Brave (as Caroline’s husband was styled by Whiggish Brits), had relieved Caroline of one of the less fascinating tasks that she had to put up with as a wife and a Princess, and given her more time to sleep at night and to read during the day. So there was not anything like rancor between her and Henrietta.

But relations between one who was a Princess and one who was not were governed, not by what the Princess was really feeling and thinking, but rather by certain forms that were supposed to ensure the steady functioning of the Court, and, by extension, the sæcular world. By those lights, Caroline—who was married in the sight of God to George Augustus, and who had been endowed by her mother with the incredible and priceless faculty of generating new Princes and Princesses—stood in the same wise, to the likes of Henrietta Braithwaite, as Hera to some dung-flecked shepherdess who had lately been rolling in the clover with Zeus. Caroline was expected to remind Mrs. Braithwaite of her inferiority from time to time, and Mrs. Braithwaite was expected to receive it meekly and submissively. As how could she not, for the grandchildren of Caroline would reign over the British Empire while the Braithwaites would spend their lives losing at cards and killing themselves with gin in mildewy London salons.

“It is with the greatest pleasure that I shall read the next chapter of your royal highness’s færy-tale,” Mrs. Braithwaite predicted. “In this Household it is an oft-told tale that when your royal highness was stricken with the smallpox, two years after your wedding, his royal highness George Augustus spurned the counsel of the physicians, and placed his own life at risk to sit by his young bride’s bedside and hold her hand.”

“It is true. George did not leave my bedside until I was well.”

“To me—as to every other woman who can never hope to be the object of such pure adoration—that is a færy-tale we would fain read over and over, until the pages crumbled,” said Mrs. Braithwaite.

“I may write it then,” answered Princess Caroline, “or I may keep it to myself, as a thing rightfully mine, and not to be shared with any who does not merit it.”

Some two years earlier, at a courtly soirée that had brought many noble persons together, Princess Caroline had overheard another Princess saying something rude about Sophie. The words that had passed between them were long since forgotten. What was remembered was that Caroline had thrown a punch at the other Princess. It happened to land on the jaw. The other Princess was carried out of the room, feigning unconsciousness.

It was not really in Caroline’s nature to do some of the cruel things that a Princess was required to do. But as her færy-tale had mentioned, she well knew that being a Princess was the only thing that had kept her from ending up as a child whore in a Saxon mining-camp. So to pretend otherwise—to play with the ancient laws of Princesshood—was idle.

Suddenly weights were falling and springs unwinding in the belfry of the big old church across the square from Leibniz’s house. A large piece of metal was mercilessly pounding on a bell, which stood still for it, quivering and moaning. Here in the Leine Schloß it was time for Caroline to leave off of the ritual drubbing of Mrs. Braithwaite, and to go out on her daily excursion to Herrenhausen. A skirmish of curtseys got the Englishwoman out of the Presence without violating any etiquette-laws.

Minutes later—having nipped into several nurseries and schoolrooms along the way to kiss her little Prince and Princesses good-bye—Caroline was in the courtyard of the Leine Schloß telling the stable-hands that they had got it all wrong. Herr Schwartz, the retainer who was in charge of the stables, had reached an age when he phant’sied he could foretell the weather by the pains in his joints. Today, his hip and his elbow were united in prophesying rain. Accordingly, he had given orders for the coach-and-four to be made ready. But Caroline’s senses assured her that it was a perfect sunny day, and too sultry to be pent up in a wooden box. So she chided Herr Schwartz, in a playful way, and ordered that her favorite mare be saddled. The mount was led out, ready to go, before she had finished uttering the command—Herr Schwartz knew her well enough. She hitched up her skirts, ascended a little Barock stair, and perched on the saddle. A few moments later she was riding out onto the street without so much as a look back. She knew that a small escort would be not far behind; or if it weren’t, the persons responsible for deploying her escort would be sent down in disgrace and replaced with others.

Anyway, the Leine Schloß was not the sort of thing any cultivated person would take the trouble to look back at. The hundred or so paces that separated it from Leibniz’s house vaulted an architectural chasm. Leibniz’s house was much bigger than a bachelor really needed, because he cohabited with a library. It was one of those Hapsburg wedding-cakes, thickly frosted in high-relief friezes of queer and heinous goings-on from the Bible. Next to it, the Leine Schloß need never worry about accusations of gaudiness. In a continent that was now freckled with more or less embarrassing knock-offs of Versailles, the Leine Schloß was Proud to be Dowdy. It was trapped between the sluggish Leine on one side and an ordinary Hanover street on the other, and so it would never have gardens or even a decent forecourt. To be sure, embedded in the heart of the Schloß was a single, stupefyingly gaudy room called the Rittersaal, built by Sophie’s husband thirty years ago after Leibniz had come back from Italy bearing evidence that he was at least as Royal as his Sophie. But no common person riding along the street or floating down the river past the Schloß would dream that anything colorful, ornate, decorative, or lively was contained in those walls. It was a mashing-together of several blocky, four-storey wings ventilated by many rectangular windows, all of a common size, and arrayed in rows and columns. The first thing Princess Caroline saw every day, when she opened her eyes, parted her bed-curtains, and glanced toward her window to check the weather, was two intersecting stone walls of window-grid, marching off in an infinite logarithmic progression.

Merely seeing it would put Leibniz into a funk. What was only boring to Caroline was troubling to him, because he felt partly responsible. The Doctor had grown up in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War when many towns did not have buildings at all—only ruins and shanties! The structures that survived were round-shouldered half-timbered things, as same and yet as various as a basket of apples. But the buildings of today were informed by geometry; which meant that each one betrayed the particular Idea of geometry that its architect had drilled on in school. A hundred years ago this might have meant parabolas, ellipses, surfaces of revolution, involutes and evolutes, and parallel curves. Now it meant Cartesian rectilinear coordinates—the cruel gridiron to which all of those soaring arcs had been lashed fast by the toiling algebraists. A plaything for hares had fallen among the tortoises. The non-helpless minority of Christendom—those who could read, who could travel, who were not starving—had (Leibniz brooded) got only the most superficial notion of what had been happening in Natural Philosophy and, rather than going to the trouble of actually understanding it, had fastened on to the Cartesian grid as a relic or fetish of enlightenment. A result was grid-buildings. Leibniz could not bear to look at them because more than anyone else he was responsible for Cartesian coordinates. He who had launched his career with an epiphany in a rose-garden! So he and Caroline tended to meet, not in the waffle iron of the Leine Schloß but out beyond the ramparts along the gently curving banks of the Leine, or at Sophie’s garden.

Leibniz was out of town. Caroline did not know why. Court-rumors from the East had it that the Tsar’s new fleet was massing in St. Petersburg, making ready to sally into the Baltic and ream it clear of troublous Scandinavians. Caroline and most of the other people who mattered in Hanover knew that Leibniz had something going on the side with Peter Romanov. Perhaps this accounted for the savant’s absence. Or perhaps he’d merely nipped down to Wolfenbüttel to sort his books, or journeyed to Berlin to settle some tussle at his Academy.

Hanover was a city, and a city was, above all else, an organism for repelling armed assaults. The Leine, which flanked Hanover on the south and east, had always had some part to play in keeping the place from being sacked and burned. This explained why the Schloß rose straight from the river’s bank. But the precise nature of the Leine’s military duties had changed from century to century as artillery had gotten better, and gunners had learnt math.

Just past Leibniz’s house, Princess Caroline turned left towards the river, and so began a sort of voyage through time. This began on a quaint, curving Hanover street, which looked essentially medieval, and concluded, a quarter of an hour later, on the outskirts of the city’s fortification complex: a sculpture in rammed and carved earth as à la mode, and as carefully tended, as any lady’s hairstyle in the Grand Salon of Versailles. The Leine threaded its way through this in whatever way was most advantageous to the engineers. In some places it had been compressed into a chute, like meat funneled into a wurst-casing, and in others it was given leave to spread out and inundate ground that was considered vulnerable.

Fort-makers and fort-breakers alike were playing a sort of chess-game with geometry. Light, which conveyed intelligence, moved in straight lines, and musket-balls, which killed over short distances, nearly did. Cannonballs, which broke down forts, moved in flattish parabolas, and mortars, which destroyed cities, in high ones. Fortifications were now made of dirt, which was cheap, abundant, and stopped projectiles. The dirt was mounded up and shaved into prisms—volumes bounded by intersecting planes. Each plane was an intention to control its edges. Lines of sight and flights of musket-balls were supposed to skim along these, seeing and killing whatever presented itself at the creases. It was hoped that cannonballs would come in perpendicularly and dig their own graves, as opposed to glancing off and bounding to and fro like murderous three-year-olds. Cavalry-stables, infantry-barracks, powder-houses, and gangways were etched into the dirt-piles in the places where cannonballs were least likely to reach. The human parts were utterly subordinated to the demands of geometry. It was a desert of ramps and planes.

All of which was actually somewhat interesting to a Princess who had learnt geometry sitting on the knee of Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. But artillery got better very gradually, and gunners now knew all the math they would ever know, and so none of this had changed much during the decade or so that Caroline had been passing through it almost every day. Riding among the fortifications was a time to brood or to day-dream. Her senses did not engage the world until she was crossing over the second of two causeways, strung across an inundated waste, put there to keep Louis XIV’s guns at a decent remove. The extremity of the fortifications was a timber gatehouse at the place where the planking of the causeway turned into gravel.

From here Caroline could look down a straight riding-path to Sophie’s orangerie, at the corner of the gardens of Herrenhausen, a mile and a half away. The Allee was striped with four parallel queues of lime trees washed with pale jackets of green moss. These lines of trees staked out three ways that ran side-by-side to the royal house. The road in the center was broad, suitable for carriages, and open to the sky. The entire length of it was visible; there were no secrets here. But it was flanked on either hand by narrower paths, just right for two friends to stroll arm-in-arm. The branches of the trees met above these paths to cover each with a canopy. Gazing down the length of the Allee, Caroline saw the entire mile and a half foreshortened into a single compact view, interrupted here and there by a little straggling line of courtiers or gardeners cutting across.

Sophie was as much an imperialist with her gardens as Louis XIV was with his fortresses. If nothing were done to stop them, her hedges and floral borders would someday collide with his barrière de fer somewhere around Osnabrück and conclude a stalemate.

Caroline’s first stroll in the gardens of Herrenhausen had been ten years ago, when Sophie Charlotte had brought the orphan princess out from Berlin to be flirted with by George Augustus. Young Caroline had known Electress Sophie for a few years, but had never before been granted the honor of being Summoned to Go for a Walk.

Leibniz had walked with them on that occasion, for he and Sophie Charlotte shared a kind of Platonic infatuation with each other. As for Sophie, she did not mind having the Doctor tag along, as it was often useful to have an ambulatory library in which to look up obscure facts.

The plan had been of admirable simplicity and, as one would have thought, fool-proof. The garden, which measured five hundred by a thousand yards, was edged by a rectangular riding-path, which in turn was framed in a waterway. Sophie, Sophie Charlotte, and Caroline were to set out from Herrenhausen Palace, which rose up above the northern end, and execute a brisk lap around the path. Leibniz would do his best to keep up with them. The exercise would bring color to Caroline’s cheeks, which normally looked as if they had been sculpted out of library paste. Just before they completed the circuit, they would dodge in to the maze, where they would bump into young George Augustus. He and Caroline would “wander off” and “get lost” in the maze together—though of course Sophie and Sophie Charlotte would never be more than two yards from them, hovering like wasps on the other side of a thin screen of hedge, jabbing away whenever they perceived an opening. At any rate, through some winsome union of George’s level-headedness and Caroline’s cleverness, they would escape from the maze together and part company on blushing terms.

The Electress, the Queen, the Princess, and the Savant had set out from the palace of Herrenhausen precisely on schedule, and Sophie had put the plan into execution with all the bloody-minded forcefulness of the Duke of Marlborough staving in the French lines at Tirlemont. Or so it had seemed until they got some two-thirds of the way round the garden, and entered into a stretch of the riding-path that was overhung with branches of large trees, seeming wild and isolated. There, they were ambushed by a sort of raiding-party led by Sophie’s son and heir, George Louis.

It happened near the wreck of the gondola.

As a fond memento of his young whoring days in Venice, Sophie’s late husband, Ernst August, had imported a gondola, and a gondolier to shove it round the perimeter of the garden, along the waterway that Sophie called a canal and that George Louis insisted on calling a moat. Maintaining a gondola in North German weather had proved difficult, maintaining gondoliers even more so.

At the time of this, Caroline’s first garden-walk, Ernst August had been dead for seven years. Sophie, who did not share her late husband’s infatuation with the fleshy pleasures of Venice, and who felt no affinity with his phant’sied Guelph relations, had suffered the gondola to run hard aground on a mud-bank. There, ice-storms and earwigs had had their way with it. By chance, or perhaps by some ponderous scheming of George Louis, the mother and her entourage encountered the son and his at a place on the riding-path very near the wrack of the gondola, which rested askew, occasionally shedding a dandruff of gold leaf into the canal, almost as if it had been planted there as a memento mori to make young princes reflect on the fleeting and fickle nature of their youthful passions. If so, George Louis had misread it. “Hullo, Mummy, and to you, Sissy,” he had said to the Electress of Hanover and the Queen of Prussia respectively. And then after a few pleasantries, “Is it not sad to come upon the dingy old ruin of Papa’s gondola here among all of these flowers?”

“Flowers are beauty that lives and dies,” Sophie had answered. “Does this mean that when the petals begin to fall, I should order my garden plowed under?”

There followed a complicated silence.

If this had been Versailles, and if George Louis had been the sort who cared, Sophie’s remark would have fallen into the category of “warning shot fired into the shoulder”: nonfatal, but enough to render the victim hors de combat. But in fact this was George Louis’s back yard, and he was not one who cared—supposing he even noticed. Sophie’s remark had taken the form of a similitude between wilted blossoms and the decaying gondola. George Louis had difficulty with such constructions, as some men could not see the color green. And further he had, for better or worse, the vis inertiae of an ammunition cart. It took more than warning shots to stop him, on those exceptional occasions when he got moving. Sophie, of all persons in the world, knew this. Why, then, did she bother? For by making the analogy to flowers she was in effect speaking in a secret language that her son could not decypher. Perhaps the Electress was thinking out loud; or perhaps the message was intended for others.

Years later Caroline was to understand that it had been intended for her. Sophie was trying to teach the little Princess how to be a Queen, or at least, how to be a Mother.

One of George Louis’s companions had worked at least some of this out, and now stepped forward. His motives could only be guessed at. Perhaps he wanted to receive Sophie’s next shot in the breastbone, to show his loyalty. Perhaps he hoped to deflect George Louis. Perhaps he wanted to be noticed by Caroline, who was not, as yet, betrothed. At any rate, he made a courtly bow, letting everyone get a load of his plumage. “If it please your royal highness,” he said in strangely distorted French, “a gardener might be instructed to pinch off the dead blossoms, to give the garden a more pleasing aspect.”

This was Harold Braithwaite, who had begun coming over from England round about then to escape prosecution in London and to curry favor in Hanover. He had done something reckless, and got lucky, at the Battle of Blenheim. Now he was an earl or something.

“My English is not good enough for me to understand your French,” Sophie had returned, “but I collect that you were setting in front of me some advice as to how I should manage my garden. Please know that I love my garden as it is: not only the living but also the dying parts of it. It is not meant to be some phantasm of eternal and perfect life. Such a garden did exist once, or so the Bible instructs us; but it was brought to an ill end by a snake who fell out of a tree.” This with a very dubious head-to-toe look at Braithwaite, who turned magenta and backed off.

George Louis had been a bit unnerved, not by the content of Sophie’s remarks (which seemed to have quite flown past him) but by their tone, which was that of a Queen at war rejecting a proffered treaty. Another man would have sensed danger, recoiled, and made amends. But inertia was all for George Louis. “I don’t care about flowers,” he said. “But if we cleared the gondola out of the moat, there would be room for galleys at Carnival.”

It was an old family tradition to stage a Venetian-style Carnival in the spring.

“Galleys,” Sophie had repeated in a distant tone, “aren’t those the Ships of Force that are paddled around the Mediterranean by stinking, wretched slaves?”

“Such are too large to fit in our little moat, Mummy,” George Louis had returned helpfully, “I had in mind little ones.”

“Little ones? Does that mean, only a few oar-slaves?”

“No, no, Mummy. Just as Louis XIV at Versailles stages floating processions and mock sea-battles upon the Canal, for the entertainment of all the persons of consequence who dwell there, so might we enliven our next Carnival with—”

“If the next is any more lively than the last, it is likely to kill me!”

“Lively, yes, Mummy, our Carnivals have always been so. And fittingly for a sort of—”

“A sort of what?”

“Queer, peculiar family tradition. Delightful to us. Perhaps a bit impenetrable to outsiders.” A tiny glance towards Braithwaite.

“Perhaps I do not wish to be penetrated by outsiders.”

The War of the Spanish Succession was at its zenith. Marlborough, at the head of mighty Protestant legions, was storming round Europe at will. The Whig Juncto in England was trying to get Sophie to move to London to be a sort of Queen-in-waiting until Anne sputtered out. And so perhaps George Louis could be forgiven for seeming a bit preoccupied with his place in the world. If so, no forgiveness seemed to be coming from Sophie’s direction. George Louis kept at it nonetheless, a breakaway ammo cart plunging down a bank. “This house, these gardens, are soon to become, to Britain, what Versailles is to France. Our home, Mummy, is to be a place of great consequence. What was a place for the femmes to dally in the garden, is to become a site of important conversations.”

“Oh, but it already is, my little prince,” Sophie had returned, “or I should say it was, until ours was interrupted, and replaced by this one.”

This had seemed merely funny to Caroline, as in truth they had been discoursing of the tendency of a cousin of theirs to gain weight when her husband was away at the front. But she did not smile for long. It had become apparent to all that Sophie was very angry, and so her words lanced out into a febrile silence. “The blood of the house of Plantagenet flows in these veins,” she said, exposing a milky wrist, “and in yours. The little Princes in the Tower died, the Houses of York and of Lancaster were united, and six perfectly delightful ladies sacrificed themselves on the bed of our ancestor, Henry VIII, to make it possible for us to exist. The Church of Rome was cast out of Britain because it was an impediment to the propagation of our line. For us, the Winter Queen roved across Christendom as a Vagabond through the Thirty Years’ War. All so that I could be born, and so that you could. Now my daughter rules Prussia and Brandenburg. Britain shall be yours. How did it all come about? Why do my children rule over the richest swath of Christendom, not his?” She pointed to a gardener shoving a wheelbarrow of manure, who rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“B-because of that divine ichor that runs in your veins, Mummy?” answered the Prince, with a nervous glance at the wrist.

“A shrewd guess, but wrong. Contrary to what your sycophants may have been telling you, there is nothing ichor-like and certainly nothing divine about the contents of our veins. Our line does not endure because of eldritch contaminants in our blood, or anything else hereditary. It endures because I go for walks in my garden every day and talk to your sister and your future daughter-in-law, just as my mother, the Winter Queen, did with me. It endures because even in the fifteenth year of war I exchange letters almost every day with my niece Liselotte at Versailles. You may—if it pleases you—flatter your vanity by phant’sying that riding across the countryside in hot pursuit of vermin is a kingly pastime, and makes you fit to one day rule a dominion that stretches to Shahjahanabad and to Boston. I shall allow you that much folly. But never shall I suffer you to trespass upon what keeps our line alive down through plagues, wars, and revolutions. I say that you are guilty of such a trespass now. Get out of my garden. Never again interrupt us at our work.”

This, which would have reduced any other man in Europe, except Louis XIV, to a lump of smouldering coal, only elicited a blink from George Louis. “Good day, Mummy, good day, Sissy,” he announced, and trotted away, followed by Braithwaite and the other courtiers, who rode stiff and red-necked, pretending they had not heard it. Caroline and Sophie Charlotte exchanged warm looks behind Sophie’s back, trying not to get the giggles.

Leibniz had dropped onto a bench like a sack of turnips kicked off a cart, and put his head in his hands. He pulled the wig back to expose his bald skull, glistering with sweat, so that the breeze could stream over it. This had only made Caroline more disposed to giggle, as it seemed that her teacher was being comically faint of heart.

Later she had come to understand matters more clearly. Sophie would die one day, and George Louis would be Elector of Hanover, King of England, and Leibniz’s boss. On that day Sophie Charlotte would still be the Queen of Prussia, and Caroline might be the Princess of Wales; but Leibniz would be the strange, incomprehensible man who had too much influence with those ladies who had ruled and humilated George Louis all his life.

Leibniz’s anxiety on that score had increased tenfold a short time later when Sophie Charlotte had suddenly taken sick and died. If he’d been spending a lot of time talking to Russians since then, it might be so that he would have at least one safe harbor in which to live out a future exile.

But Caroline had no intention of allowing that to happen.

THE HERRENHÄUSER ALLEE was bedded in a swath of pleasant countryside that had been allowed to grow a bit wild. No one would devote time or money to keeping it up, partly because it was in the flood-plain of the Leine, and partly because it was in obvious jeopardy of being gobbled by any future expansions of Sophie’s garden. So by default it had become a sort of park, shaped liked a folded fan, narrow near the city but broadening toward the Palace of Herrenhausen. The result—intended or not—was that at the outset of the journey Caroline felt pent between a high road on one side, and the Leine on the other. These were equally laden with traffic, fæces, and flies. But as she rode up the Allee, the road and the river insensibly spread away from her. By the time she got to the place where she could see archipelagos of green fruit hanging in the windows of Sophie’s orangerie, she was riding up the center of a cone of silence, smelling nothing but the freshness of growing things.

A foreign princess paying a call would here swing round the fronts of the Orangerie and other outlying pavilions and enter into a street lined, for some distance, with the summer palaces of diverse noble families. Herrenhausen Palace had started as one of these, and grown. It looked across the road to an older and smaller garden that cushioned the family sepulchre. The visitor would allow some hours to be announced, greeted, introduced, and otherwise processed by the Court before being let into the Presence. Caroline instead nipped in through a side-gate and approached the Palace from the garden side. Her mare knew where to take her, and where to stop, and which of the stable-hands was most likely to have a green apple in his pocket. Caroline was afoot in the northeast corner of Sophie’s garden without suffering her train of thought to be interrupted by anyone. Not for a Princess were idle pleasantries. Caroline could not say hello to some random Countess in a Herrenhausen salon without giving the encounter as much forethought, and as keen attention, as George Augustus would devote to mounting a cavalry charge. If she were to say it in the wrong tone of voice, or give the Countess more or less attention than she deserved, the news would be all over Hanover by sundown, and a fortnight later she could expect a letter from Liselotte in Versailles inquiring whether it was true she was having an affair with Count so-and-so, and another from Eliza in London wanting to know if she had quite recovered from her miscarriage. Better to slip into the place incognito.

This end of the garden, closest to the Palace, was divided into a grid of squarish parterres, perhaps tennis-court-sized. What drew the eye here was not the plantings but the statuary: the inevitable Hercules, Atlas, &c. The Gods and Heroes of Rome rose out of a sort of fanatically maintained tundra: boxwood cut down into micro-hedges no more than a hand’s span high and wide, and flowered figures crowded with bees maintaining a continual low hum of golden commerce. It was a fine place for high-strung nobles—to use Sophie’s phrase, the sort who took every fart for a thunderclap—to promenade about for a few moments before darting back into the Palace to regale the court with tales of their wilderness adventure. Really it was nothing more than a roofless annex of the Palace. Herrenhausen rose above these parterres in a moderately impressive way, while its wings, only a single storey high, reached out to embrace them. The central structure of the Palace couldn’t have housed Louis XIV’s gardening implements. A mere dozen windows were distributed among its three floors. But Sophie liked it that way. Versailles was a penitentiary for every person of consequence in France, and needed to be large. Herrenhausen was a place for getting things done, and needed to be small and tidy.

Caroline knew that she had likely been sighted from certain of those windows, and so she turned her back on the Palace and began to march away, following a gravel division between parterres. Shortly she arrived at a high hedge trimmed into a slab-wall, and penetrated it through a square opening. If the garden was a palace built of living things, then the parterres were its formal parlour, whence passageways led off to more private and peculiar spaces beyond. To one side was an outdoor theatre, walled by hedges and guarded by marble cherubs. To the other was the Maze where she had begun her courtship with George Augustus. Caroline, however, went out the back. A row of small reflecting ponds formed a quiet buffer between the front and the back half of the garden. Each was surrounded by a garden plot a little less austere than the parterres. Passing between two of these, she twirled round for a glance back at the Palace. On the parterres she had been exposed to view from any window. Now she was about to lose herself in the garden, and wanted to be certain, first, that she had been noticed. Indeed, a contingent of stable-hands had rushed together with a squadron of porters and footmen at the very head of the garden, where a pair of stairways curved down from the main floor of the Palace to the level of the ground. They were setting the stage for the ritual masque that was played every time Sophie emerged from her dwelling. Caroline only watched it until she noticed herself smiling.

She turned round again and plunged through a higher and darker barrier: a row of trees trimmed to form a wall as high as a house. In the back half of the garden, plenty of mature trees and dense hedges made it possible for her to phant’sy that she was a day’s ride from the nearest building. This part was loved not only by her and Sophie but even by George Louis, who at fifty-four still went riding along the surrounding path, imagining that he was out patrolling the wild marches of some frontier duchy. Here one’s lines of sight, and vectors of movement, were funneled into narrow clefts between stands of trees. Sounds carried oddly, or not at all. It seemed ten times the size of the front half.

A teeming buller had started up back in the woods. At first it might have been mistaken for a gust of wind becoming snared in the branches of the trees. But it grew relentlessly, and began to take on spattering and searing overtones. Somewhere far outside the boundaries of the garden, a man was hauling on a great wheel, flooding buried pipes that conducted Leine-water here. Caroline picked up her skirts and rushed to a nearby intersection of diagonal ways where she turned inwards toward the great round pool that stood in the center of the garden’s darker and wilder half. It had already been brought to a rolling boil. A vertical jet had emerged from a stone orifice in the center and shaped itself into a blunt probe, fighting its way upwards like a sailmaker’s needle pushing through a stack of heavy canvas. As it grew, it began to cast off a mantle of writhing vapor. From here, this looked almost like smoke generated by its rubbing against the air. The jet grew higher and higher until it seemed finally to reflect off the white sky (for the day had become overcast). There it shattered into an incoherent cloud of white spray. The whole garden now was suffused with the roar of the artificial tempest, perfecting the illusion that it was some wild and remote place. The clouds of mist hurled forth by this fountain spread outwards from the pool and infiltrated the corridors among the trees, blurring details of what was near and erasing what was more than a bow-shot away, so soon did things in this gleaming cloud lose their distinctness and fade into the darkness of the trees.

The land about the garden was flat, and provided no heights from which to spy down into it. There was a church-steeple nearby, with a black pyramidal roof that loomed like a hooded Inquisitor glowering down on the pagan spectacle below. Supposing anyone was watching from that belfry, by walking round the pool Caroline could vanish behind the upside-down cataract of the great fountain. By the same trick the gloomy spire was eliminated from her prospects and she was left perfectly alone.

The breeze was out of the south. It stretched the fountain-mist out into shimmering, rippling curtains that raced across the pool and rushed up the broad path that led directly to Sophie’s house. The Palace was visible indistinctly, as if seen in a befogged mirror. Caroline thought she could resolve a white frock on one of the stairways, and a white head of hair above it, and a white arm waving off the carriage that had been trotted out, and shooing away the offered sedan chair.

Sophie always told Caroline to stand in the mist because it was good for her complexion. Caroline had managed to get married and have four children notwithstanding all grievances that might be leveled at her skin. But she always tried to stand in the mist anyway because she knew it would please Sophie. It was cold on her cheeks, and smelled fishy. The sheets and vortices of mist looked like pages of ghostly books tumbling towards her. Over the pool they were so white and substantial she could almost read them. But once they hurtled past her they quickly paled and vanished, diluted by vacant air.

A man was standing near her at the rim of the pool. He was already too close. A stranger should never have been in the garden anyway! But she did not cry out, for he was very old. He was not looking at Caroline, but at the fountain. He was habited something like a gentleman, but no wig covered his bald pate and no sword dangled at his side. He was encompassed in a long traveling-cloak. This was no mere affectation of style, for the garment was rumpled and spattered, and the man’s boots had not been touched by a servant in weeks.

When he sensed that Caroline was looking his way, he reached into a cloak-pocket, drew out a gravid purse of crimson leather, and worried it open with parsimonious movements of his worn-out fingers. Out of it he plucked a large golden coin. This he flipped into the air above the pool. It shone, a yellow mote, for an instant before the silver torrent smashed it down into the pool.

“A penny for your royal highness’s thoughts,” the man said, in English.

“To me it looked like a guinea,” she returned. She was annoyed beyond words that this interloper was here; but she was well-brought-up, and would no sooner let her annoyance be known than George Augustus would fall off his horse while inspecting the royal guard.

The old man shrugged, then pulled the purse all the way open and turned it inside out with a thrust of his thumbs, disbursing a shower of golden guineas into the pool.

“A village could live on that for a year,” Caroline observed. “When you have excused yourself I shall have those coins taken up and put in the poor-box.”

“Then do you be prepared for your Lutheran vicar to send them back to you with a curt note,” the old man returned.

“To what effect?”

“He might write, ‘Your Royal Highness should save these artifacts and give them to paupers in England, where they have some worth, because the Sovereign says they do.’ ”

“This is a very odd conversation—” Caroline began.

“Forgive me. I come from people who are no respecters of royals. Our byword is the equality of all men before God. And so when a Princess inflicts upon me an odd, unlooked-for conversation, I cannot rest until I have sought her out and repaid her.”

“When and where did I do you this injury?”

“Injury? Nay, ’twas a sort of curious favor. When? Last October, though you must have set it in motion long before. Where? Boston.”

“You are Daniel Waterhouse!”

“Your humble and obedient servant. Oh, how it would goad my father to hear his son saying that to a Princess.”

“You deserve honors, Doctor, and all the comforts I can afford you. Why are you come to me in the style of a Vagabond? And why do you open with these queer remarks about guineas?”

Daniel Waterhouse was shaking his head. “Queen Anne has writ another of her letters to Sophie…”

“Oh, dear.”

“Or rather Bolingbroke has, and set it before the poor woman to paw her signature at the end. The letter has been sped hence by a delegation of Englishmen: a few Tories, to inflict the humiliation, and some Whigs, to suffer it. The former are grand and consequential—many who would be in Bolingbroke’s graces vied for few positions. But for the whipping-boy slots, there was very little enthusiasm shown, among Whigs. Rather, a few dried-up third-raters had to be herded aboard the ship at Tower Wharf, like so many Blackamoors on the Guinea coast. I construed this as an opportunity to come and repay my debt to your royal highness.”

“What, with guineas?”

“Nay, not a monetary debt. I refer, again, to when you surprized me in Boston with a queer and unlooked-for conversation, which led presently to sea-voyage and adventure.”

“It pleases me to be having the conversation,” Caroline said, “and to be sure, I should like nothing better than to be repaid with a sea-voyage and an adventure. But such things are for picaroon-romances. Not for Princesses.”

“You shall have the voyage soon enough, though it be nothing more than a Channel crossing. Once you set foot on English soil at Greenwich, an adventure—of what sort I daren’t guess—will be inevitable.”

“That much was true whether or not you came here,” Caroline said, “so why did you come? To see Leibniz?”

“He is not in town, alas.”

“It bears on the guineas, does it not?”

“It does.”

“Then by the same token it must have something to do with the man who makes them: Sir Isaac Newton.”

“Leibniz told me that you required little instruction—that you worked things out for yourself. I see that this was more than avuncular pride.”

“Then I am sorry to let you know I have come to the end of my deductions. I asked you to go to London. It pleased me very much that you did. You have sought out Sir Isaac there, and renewed your old acquaintance with him—this is praiseworthy.”

“Only in the sense that a geek at a fair is to be praised for swallowing a sword.”

“Pfui! To cross the Atlantic in winter and enter into the Lion’s Den is a Herculean labor. I could not be more pleased with what you have accomplished to this point.”

“You forget that I do not care whether you are pleased. I do nothing to earn your praise. I have undertaken this work simply because I phant’sy that my ends are akin to yours; and to those ends, you have provided me with some of the means.”

Caroline had to turn her face full into the mist to cool it now—like a red-hot iron that must be tempered in water lest it shatter in proof.

“I have heard that there were still men like you about England,” she said finally, “and it is good that I have now met you privily and in advance, lest I should spoil my first weeks there crying ‘Off with his head!’ several times each day before breakfast.”

“What is at issue today, is whether you, or George Louis, or Sophie, shall ever reign in England at all,” Daniel Waterhouse said. “Or will a Jacobite Mobb, or a Stuart King, cry off with your heads?”

This thought was less frightening than it was interesting. Princess Caroline quite forgot her anger, and entertained it. “Of course I am aware that England contains many Jacobites,” she said. “But the Act of Settlement has been the law of the land since 1701. Our right to the throne cannot really be in question, can it?”

“We decapitated Sophie’s uncle. I was there. There were sound reasons for it. But it brought unforeseen perils. It put the heads of Princes and Princesses into play, as it were, like kick-balls on a field, to be booted back and forth by whichever gang of players was most numerous, or most adroit. Do you believe what some say, that Sophie Charlotte was assassinated in Berlin?”

“We will not speak of it!” Caroline announced; and here she really would have ordered his head to be struck off if any guards had been in earshot. Or done the deed with her own hand, given a sharp object. Her rage must have showed, for Daniel Waterhouse now raised his white eyebrows, elevated his chin, and spoke in a voice that was so soothing and gentle that it dissolved like sugar in the murmur of waves along the pool’s edge.

“You forget that I know Leibniz, and that through him I shared his sweet love for that Queen, and his grief. Grief and anger.”

“He thinks she was poisoned?” This was one of the few topics Leibniz refused to discuss with Caroline.

“The manner of her death is not as important as the consequence. If half of what people say about her is true, she had made Berlin into a Protestant Parnassus. Writers, musicians, and scientists converged on the Charlottenburg from every quarter. But she died. Quite recently her husband went to join her. Where the former King of Prussia amused himself by attending the opera, the new one plays with toy soldiers…I see amusement on your face, your royal highness. Familial affection, I think this must be, for this cousin of yours who adores parades and goose-stepping soldiers. But to those of us who do not share in the family joke, it is dreadfully serious. For the war is over; most of the great conflicts have been sorted out; Natural Philosophy has conquered the realm of the mind; and now—today—as we stand here—the new System of the World is being writ down in a great Book somewhere.”

“The System of the World—that is the title of the book we have anticipated for so many years from Sir Isaac Newton. A new volume of Principia Mathematica…or am I mistaken?”

“Indeed. But I refer to a different unfinished work: mine and yours. We have lost Sophie Charlotte, and with her we have lost Prussia. I do not wish to lose you, and lose Britain. Those are precisely the stakes.”

“But this is why I have sought you out in Massachusetts!” Caroline protested. “I cannot manage a house divided between partisans of Leibniz on the one hand, and of Newton on the other. As German and British dominions are united under one crown, so German and British philosophy must be brought together under a grand unification. And you, Doctor Waterhouse, are the one—”

But she was speaking into a cloud. Daniel Waterhouse had vanished. Caroline looked far up the path to see a crone storming towards her with a letter whipping back and forth in one hand.

Sophie as usual moved at the pace of a dragoon. But the garden was large. Caroline would have a few moments, yet, to collect herself. She turned toward the fountain, for if shock were still written on her face it were better that Sophie not read it. But all told, she was not as rattled by the conversation just finished as the average Continental princess might have been. For as long as she had been in Hanover, strange people had been coming over from England, bearing cryptic messages and making odd requests. None of it made much sense to her, since she’d never visited the place. She and George Augustus had been invited to come over by some people called Whigs—a challenging term for Germans to pronounce—but some other English called Tories were dead set against their coming. It was all academic anyhow, since George Louis had forbidden his son and daugher-in-law to leave.

High above her head, where the towering water-jet surrendered to gravity, Caroline could see clumps of water that somehow held together even as the rest of the flow shattered. These could be seen as dark streaks against the incoherent spray. But those water-clumps came down with much greater speed and force than the dissipating clouds, and as they fell, each broke apart into a shower of smaller lumps that left spreading comet-trails behind. Swarms and squadrons of these comets raced down to the pool, messengers carrying strange information from above.

She strolled round until she was very close to where most of the plume struck the pond. The spray made a solid white hiss and roar, and her dress grew heavy as it stole water from the air. She tried to follow the comets. When they smashed into the foaming surface of the pond they made indistinct noises, like individual voices trying to shout messages in the midst of the Mobb. But whatever intelligence the comets were carrying down from on high was swallowed up by the pool. When the bubbles burst and the froth died away, nothing was left but the clear water of the pond, a bit choppy from the breeze. Caroline supposed that the information was still there to be decyphered, if she’d only stand and stare into the pool long enough. But all she could make out was a constellation of yellow speckles on the stone floor of the pool.

“This cannot be a coincidence.”

“Good morning, Grandmama.”

Sophie was staring at the coins. At eighty-three she had no difficulty seeing them without glasses. She could even tell heads from tails, and recognize the portrait of Queen Anne stamped into the former.

“I see that bitch going and coming,” she remarked.

Princess Caroline said nothing.

“It is a symbol, a sign,” the Electress of Hanover announced, “planted here by one of those horrid visiting Englishmen.”

“What do you think it signifies?”

“That depends on what you think of the English money,” Sophie replied. “Which is the same thing as to ask, is it worth anything?”

This, being oddly similar to some remarks made moments ago by the horrid visiting Englishman in question, caused Caroline to look away from the coins, and gaze into Sophie’s face. In order to do this Caroline had to look slightly down, for Sophie had lost a few inches of height. She had the loose skin that one would expect in a woman of that age, but this had lent to her eyes a marvelous clarity. The walls of Herrenhausen and of the Leine Schloß were adorned with old family portraits, not only of Sophie and her sisters but of their mother. These women stared out from the canvases with arched brows, enormous eyes, and tiny mouths, seeing much and saying little. They were certainly not the first girls in a salon that an insecure young man would approach, and engage in conversation. Now Caroline knew as well as anyone that portraits of royals must be taken with a grain of salt. But the visage she was regarding now did not look all that far removed from the ones in those paintings. The eyes, the mouth were the same. More so the feeling of self-possession, of completeness, the sense that this woman was by no means standing around waiting to be joined, or wishing that someone would talk to her. The only changes were in clothing. Sophie, though never responsive to fashion, had adopted the fontange, a tall vertical screen of white lace that rose from the hairline, added some inches to her height, and kept her thinning white hair out of view, and out of the way of those wonderful eyes.

Caroline had a funny thought then, which was that Sophie and Daniel Waterhouse might be a match for each other. For he had great staring eyes too, and a disposition to match Sophie’s. They could threaten to chop each other’s heads off well into the Eighteenth Century.

“Have you spoken to any of the English? I mean the ones who have just arrived, not of the Braithwaite type.”

“Briefly.”

“Come, I wish to be away from those coins, and that woman,” Sophie said, turning her back on the pool and leaning towards Caroline, knowing that she’d find a strong arm there. The two women clasped together like halves of a locket and began to walk away from the pool’s rim. Sophie steered Caroline firmly in the direction she wanted. But she had nothing further to say for a little while.

This half of the garden was partitioned into quadrants, each of which was laid out around a fountain much smaller than the great one in the center. Small paths radiated from each of those fountains, sectioning each quadrant into several pie-wedges. Each of those wedges—thirty-two all told—had been made into a little garden-plot, and each was a bit different: some as clean and tidy as parlours, others as dark and overgrown as the Thüringer Wald. Sophie steered Caroline to one that was screened by a high wall of trimmed trees. Passing through a gap they found themselves in a pleasant green atrium with a little pool in the center, and stone benches around it. Sophie let it be known that she wished to sit on one of these—unusual since for her, a walk in the garden was precisely that.

“One of the English was using a funny word yester evening—‘currency.’ Do you know it?”

“It is the quality that a current has. They speak of the currency of the River Thames, which is sluggish in most places, but violent when it passes under London Bridge. It is just the same as our word Umlauf—running around.”

“That is what I supposed. This Englishman kept discoursing of currency in a way that was most fraught with meaning, and I thought he was speaking of some river or drainage-ditch. Finally I collected that he was using it as a synonym for money.”

“Money?”

“I’ve never felt so dense! Fortunately, Baron von Hacklheber is visiting from Leipzig. He was familiar with the term—or quicker to decypher it. Later I spoke with him in private and he explained all.”

“What an odd coinage.”

“You are too witty for your own good, girl.”

“The Englishmen cannot get away from this topic. Their relationship to money is most peculiar.”

“It is because they have nothing but sheep,” Sophie explained. “You must understand this if you are to be their Queen. They had to fight Spain, which has all of the gold and silver in the world. Then they had to fight France, which has every other source of material wealth that can be imagined. How does a poor country defeat rich ones?”

“I think I am supposed to say ‘the grace of God’ or some such—”

“If you please. But in what form is the grace of God manifested? Did piles of gold materialize on the banks of the Thames, as in a miracle?”

“Of course not.”

“Does Sir Isaac turn Cornish tin into gold in an alchemical laboratory in the Tower of London?”

“Opinions differ. Leibniz thinks not.”

“I agree with Baron von Leibniz. And yet all the gold is in England! It is dug up from Portuguese and Spanish mines, but it flows, by some occult power of attraction, to the Tower of London.”

“Flows,” Caroline repeated, “flows like a current.”

Sophie nodded. “And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for ‘money’ as if no distinction need be observed between them.”

Caroline said, “Is this the answer to your question—how does a poor country defeat rich ones?”

“Indeed. The answer is, not by acquiring wealth, in the sense that France has it—”

“Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows—”

“But rather to play a sort of trick, and redefine wealth to mean something novel.”

“Currency!”

“Indeed. Baron von Hacklheber says that the idea is not wholly new, having been well understood by the Genoese, the Florentines, the Augsburgers, the Lyonnaise for many generations. The Dutch built a modest empire on it. But the English—having no other choices—perfected it.”

“You have given me new food for thought.”

“Oh? And what think you? What think you now of our prospects, Caroline?”

To Sophie’s generation of royals, this question was shocking, absurd. One who was heir to a throne did not have to think about his prospects. Royal succession just happened, like the tide coming in. But it was different now; and Sophie deserved credit for having adjusted to this new state of affairs, where many of her contemporaries had passed from ignorance to indignation to senility.

Caroline answered: “I am pleased by the cleverness of this trick that the English have played, to win wars against their betters by tinkering with what wealth is. Because of it, I do not have to marry some inbred Bourbon, as poor Eliza did, and live out my days at Versailles, or in the Escorial. But I am troubled by the uncertainty that all of this brings. To paraphrase a wise man I know, it is as though a new System of the World has been drawn up. And not by us but by some strange Natural Philosophers in a smoky room in London. Now we must live by the rules of that System. But it is not perfectly understood; and I fear that where the English have played a trick with money, to gain a temporary advantage, some other trick might be played upon them to reverse the field.”

“Just so! And now you have come round to the meaning of Anne’s letter!” Sophie proclaimed, and flogged the parchment several times with her ivory fan. At the same time, the tree-wall behind them let out a gasp as it was struck by a fist of cold air. The wind had changed from south to west; new weather was coming; Herr Schwartz’s joints had not misled him. The tree-wall flexed toward them as if trying to spread shelter above their heads, and a dry sleet of brown leaves and twigs made the air and the ground restless with tiny itchings and fidgetings. Sophie—who of all persons was least disposed to take a fart for a thunderclap—paid this no heed whatever. Perhaps she was too absorbed in conversation to care. Or perhaps she was so comfortable in this place that she could not muster any sense of concern.

If Sophie did not wish to speak of the weather, ’twere hopeless, as well as rude, to force the topic, and so Caroline contented herself with gestures: she arched her back against the cool breeze, clasped her hands together on her knee, and glanced skyward. Then she responded, “The Queen’s letter has to do with money?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, she doesn’t know what money is. And would never write of anything so vulgar even if she did. The letter concerns family matters. Several paragraphs are devoted to your husband.”

“That is even more chilling to me than this recent change in the wind.”

“She refers to him by his English titles: Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Milford Haven, Viscount Northallerton, Baron Tewkesbury,” said Sophie, reading the outlandish names from the letter with parched amusement.

“Now you are teasing me, by not reading what the letter says.”

“I am not teasing you but doing you a favor, dear heart.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It is the worst yet.”

“Has my father-in-law seen it yet?”

“George Louis has not read it.”

“My husband and I would be in England now,” Caroline complained, “and he would be sitting in the House of Lords, if George Louis merely had the backbone to let us go. Another such letter from Queen Anne only cows him all the more, and delays our departure another month.”

Sophie smiled, showing sympathy. “George Louis cannot read this letter if you and I get caught in a rain-shower, and the ink is dissolved.”

A cold drop came through the sleeve of Caroline’s dress and sent a thrill up her arm. She laughed. Sophie did not move. A raindrop pocked into the letter. “However,” Sophie continued, “you must not deceive yourself. My son won’t let you go to England, it is true. But this is not simply because Queen Anne hates the idea. George Louis has his shortcomings. No one knows this better than his mama. But spinelessness is not among them! He keeps you and George Augustus pent up in Hanover, because he is envious of his son—his poise, his battle-glory—and distrustful of his son’s women.”

“You mean Mrs. Braithwaite?”

Sophie flinched. “She is a dust-mote. Everyone knows that except you. You, Eliza, the late Sophie Charlotte, and I—the women who walk in the garden—are to George Louis like some witch-coven. He is appalled that his son and heir is comfortable among us, and shares intelligence with us. For this reason he will never give George Augustus, and you, leave to move to England. He may use this as an excuse—” and she held up the letter so that many collected raindrops, black with dissolved abuse, tumbled down over the Queen of England’s signature “—but you must never be deceived.”

A strong wind-burst came through now, and cracked a branch somewhere. All the rainwater that had gathered on the leaves above was knocked loose and rushed down around them. Sophie looked around herself for the first time, becoming aware that this might develop into something more than a June shower. Her starched fontange was beginning to wilt.

But now it was Caroline’s turn to be oblivious to weather. “When we sat down here you said that the letter had some import, having to do with currency—?”

“Not the substance but the tone of it,” Sophie returned, raising her voice to match the volume of the wind. “Her previous letters, you know, written after the Whigs invited your husband to England, were petulant. Bitter. But this one is—or was—written in a haughty tone. Triumphant.”

“Something has changed in the last month or two—?”

“That is what she believes, I fear.”

“She phant’sies we are never coming at all. She’s going to give the throne to the Pretender.”

Sophie said nothing.

“But the throne is not all hers to give away. Parliament has some say in the matter. What could have occurred in the last few weeks to give the Jacobites such confidence?”

“A blow has been struck against the currency. An interruption in the flow.”

“That is just the sort of thing I was talking about a moment ago.”

“Perhaps you are a witch, dear, with powers of divination.”

“Perhaps I receive unscheduled visits from ‘horrid Englishmen.’ ”

“Aha!” Sophie glanced in the direction of the great fountain.

“Something must have gone awry at the English Mint.”

“But Sir Isaac Newton has charge of the Mint! I have been studying it,” Sophie said proudly. “When I’m Queen of England we shall all go to the Tower of London and see it.” Then she slapped her knee, meaning it was time to get up. For it was absolutely raining now, and search parties had probably been sent out from the Palace. Caroline got to her feet and gave Sophie an arm, helping her up off the bench. Meanwhile Sophie went on, “Sir Isaac has reformed the English coinage, which was the world’s worst, and now it is the best.”

“But this proves my point! All you are saying is that English coins have an excellent reputation…Let’s get out of here.” Caroline led the way this time, ushering Sophie out the nearest gate and onto one of the radiating paths. But then she pulled up short. The way back to the Palace was not obvious, even to one who knew the garden well. Sophie sensed her hesitation. “Let us wait it out in the pavilion,” she decreed, inclining her ruined fontange toward a diagonal path that would conduct them to the edge of the garden, where a stone dome overlooked the canal.

Caroline did not favor this idea because it would take them to a distant and unfrequented corner, and the way was hemmed in by dense wooded plots that were black and opaque and loud in the rain.

“Don’t you think we should return to the great fountain? Someone should be looking for us there.”

“If someone finds us, we shall have to stop talking!” Sophie answered, very provoked.

That was that. They turned their backs on the fountain and entered into a cleft between stands of trees. “It’s only water,” Caroline said philosophically. But Sophie seemed to have had quite enough of it, for she yanked on Caroline’s arm and began pulling her onwards, trying to quicken their pace. Caroline let herself be pulled.

“I take your point,” Sophie said. “A coinage based upon silver and gold has a sort of absolute value.”

“Like Sir Isaac’s absolute space and time,” Caroline mused. “You can assay it.”

“But if value is based upon reputations—like stocks in Amsterdam—or upon this even more nebulous concept of flow—”

“Like the dynamics of Leibniz in which space and time inhere in relationships among objects—”

“Why, then, it becomes unknowable, plastic, vulnerable. For flow may have some value in a market-place—and that value might even be real—”

“Of course it is real! People make money from it all the time!”

“—but that sort of value cannot survive the refiner’s fire at a Trial of the Pyx.”

“What on earth is a Pyx?” Caroline asked. But no answer was coming. Sophie pulled sharply on her arm and at the same moment fell into her. Caroline had to bend her knees and whip her free arm round Sophie’s shoulders to avoid falling down. “Grandmama? You wish to go in this way?” She glanced at the dark stand of trees to the left side of the path. “You wish to visit the Teufelsbaum?” Perhaps Sophie had changed her mind, and wished to take shelter under the trees instead of going all the way to the pavilion.

Some sound came out of Sophie’s mouth that could not really be understood. The clatter of raindrops on leaves made it difficult to hear even well-spoken words. But this utterance of Sophie’s had not been well spoken. Caroline doubted that it was even words. Relying on Caroline for support, Sophie shuffled and hopped on one leg until she had brought them face to face with an iron gate. For the plot of the Teufelsbaum, the Devil’s Tree, was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence as if it needed to be kept in a cage.

Sophie nodded at the gate, then looked up at Caroline with a kind of lopsided sneer: half of her face pleading, the other half sagging and vacant. Caroline reached out for the handle of the gate. At the same moment that the cold wet iron touched her skin she knew that Sophie had suffered a stroke. For this was not the first half-paralyzed face Caroline had ever seen. The symptoms were more difficult to recognize in a face she knew so well and loved so much. For a moment she froze with a hand on the gate-latch, as if some spell had turned her own flesh to cold iron. She ought to go for help, to find the doctors.

But then Sophie did something telling, which was that she looked up and down the garden path, and she did it furtively. This from someone who had never been furtive in her life.

Sophie could not speak and could hardly stand up, but she knew what was happening. She was afraid of being seen. Afraid of being rushed to the Palace, bled by the surgeons, pitied to her face and mocked behind her back. Her instinct was to hie to the deepest and darkest part of the garden and to die there.

Caroline shoved the gate open and they stepped into the dark.

The Teufelsbaum was a curiosity that Sophie had brought back from the family holdings in the Harz Mountains: a worthless tree that crawled along the ground and climbed up things, with all the mass and might of a great tree, but the writhing habit of a vine, enclosing other things and growing round them. Its boughs twisted round and divided and forked and kinked bizarrely. The bends looked something like elbows and knees, and the smooth bark and sinewy shape of the wood made the whole thing look like unidentifiable limbs of strange animals, melted into one another. The woodcutters of the Harz hated it, and cut it back wherever they could, but here Sophie had given it leave to spread. Now the Teufelsbaum returned the favor by embracing Sophie and Caroline in its sinuous arms. Caroline settled Sophie down in a crook of the tree, up off the cold ground, and then sat on a flat place and cradled Sophie’s head in her lap. The rain-shower had now abated somewhat, or perhaps the leaves gentled it. Time became stretched and immeasurable as they listened to the rain, Caroline stroking Sophie’s white hair, and holding the one hand that had not lost its power to grip back. But the garden was a place of quiet and of relaxation. Presently Sophie relaxed her grip on Caroline’s hand, and on the world.

Caroline had a long list of questions she had been meaning to ask Sophie, concerning how to be a Queen. She could have asked them there under the Teufelsbaum, but it would have been tactless, and Sophie would not have been able to answer.

Or rather she couldn’t have answered with words. Her true answer, the one that mattered, had been arranged long in advance: it was this moment and this place. Sophie’s dying here was the last thing she said to Caroline.

“I am the Princess of Wales,” Caroline said. She said it to herself.

Westminster Palace

11 JUNE 1714

Resolved, Nemine contradicente, that the House doth agree with the Committee in the said Resolution, That a Reward be settled by Parliament upon such Person or Persons as shall discover a more certain and practicable Method of ascertaining the Longitude, than any yet in Practice; and the said Reward be proportioned to the Degree of Exactness to which the said Method shall Reach.

—Journals of the House of Commons, VENERIS, 11° DIE JUNII; ANNO 13° ANNÆ REGINÆ, 1714

IN WESTMINSTER, A HALL darkened Thames-
bank, like a load of gloaming spilt by a sloppy sky-god during the primordial rush to raise the vault of the stars. Efforts had been made to pretty it up, or at least screen it behind new work. The marshes from which it had upheaved had been filled and flattened to support the Hall’s contagions and encrustations. Some of these were styled as minsters, some as forts, others as houses—all mere words, since none was ever put to its builders’ purpose. A man debarking on that Bank and tunneling into the Pile, if he had a compass, and became not a-mazed in the gaudy labyrinth of out-buildings, might penetrate to the Hall.

It was empty. Oh, law-courts, screened behind plank barricades, had colonized the southern corners, and shop-stalls ran like baseboards along the sides, so that the persons who came and went through the emptiness could buy books, gloves, snuff, and hats. But these only pointed to the problematic immensity of the Hall; for what was the point of putting up a building so large that it could not be used until smaller buildings were erected within it? The carven angels at the ends of the out-thrust hammer-beams looked out on a tub of gray space. The bareness of the place, the splintery time-stained reach of its roof-timbers, betrayed it as a somewhat oversized Dark Ages Viking-Hall. Beowulf could have strode in to the place at any moment and called for a horn of mead. He would have felt and looked more at home there than any of the periwigged Persons of Quality who darted across its stone floor, nervously, like stoats trying to make it across a darkling sandbar before owls could stoop on them. The smaller buildings huddled against Westminster Hall, stealing integrity from its flying buttresses, were better suited for plots, machinations, skullduggery, and arcane rites: the timeless occupations of men. So into the peripheral warrens they scurried, abandoning the hall to those bleak angels.

If this grave void at the heart of Westminster had any purpose, it was like the empty chamber that made up most of a violincello. The strings, bridge, bow, and the player itself were all to the outside. Nothing moved, nothing happened in the dark cavity; yet none of it would work unless it were built around a central emptiness that held the parts in their proper relation to one another, and withstood the relentless pulling of the strings while sympathizing with their tiniest stirrings.

There was only one man on this day who did not quicken his steps to cross that floor. It was an elderly knight who had arrived at the north end of the place in a black sedan chair, and bid his porters let him off there. He alit near the pillory, where a fat man was being whipped, writhing and hopping as each new stripe decorated his back, but refusing to cry out. The old man from the sedan chair swung wide of the post so he wouldn’t be flecked by hurtling blood, and stepped into a gap between a pair of coffee-houses that had been troweled onto the ancient façade of the hall, nearly hiding its main entrance. He needed no wig, for his hair, though thin, still grew long and straight, and smallpox had left little mark on him. And he needed no powder, for his hair had been white as salt for half a century. He strolled the length of the Hall slowly, raising his protruberant eyes to meet the gaze of certain of those omniscient angels, paying others no mind. He glanced about from time to time, as if his ears could detect echoes and discern resonances to which all others were deaf. In time he reached the south end of the vault where traffic was funneled between the two makeshift law-courts. With a visible hardening of his face he forced himself into a dissolving noise beyond. He was gone from the Hall. Perhaps he had changed it in his passage, added some faint strain that echoed after he was gone, and echoes there still.

Tribes, clans, factions, sects, classes, houses, and dynasties had raised their standards, and seen them thrown down, in the Hall’s out-buildings for six hundred years. It was to Power what Covent Garden was to vegetables. No point in trying to follow the ins and outs, until you stepped over the threshold. At the moment, as for the past centuries, there was here a thing called Parliament, consisting of two parallel or alternate renderings named Commons and Lords, each the ground of an on-going war between Tories and Whigs, the sons and heirs of Cavaliers and Roundheads, the sons and heirs of Anglicans and Puritans, &c., &c. Each styled itself The Party and the other The Faction. Milling about in the gloom behind them, brandishing money and weapons, were descendants of ancient warlords, currently going by the names of Jacobites and Hanoverians. The battle itself was carried forward daily with words as many as granules of gunpowder on a battle-field.

The silver-haired knight had been summoned into a high-walled Gothick chapel that for quite some few years had been claimed, occupied, and defended against all comers by the body calling itself Commons. It was dominated by the Tories just now. His summoners were a committee or subset of Commons that happened to consist largely of Whigs. Why had a body of Tories suffered a band of Whigs to form a committee that could arrogate to itself the power to summon Knights into this hallowed Chapel that they used as their Clubb-house? Why, only because the subject of that committee’s deliberations was so abstruse, so recondite, and, in a word, so boring that they were only too pleased to let Whigs expend their powder on it.

“I HAVE BEEN made aware of four diverse Projects for discovering the Longitude,” said Sir Isaac Newton.

“Only four?” asked Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar: a Whig, and the bloke who had invited Newton here. He belonged to Lords, not Commons, and was therefore a guest in this chamber. “At the Royal Society, it seems we are exposed to four a week.”

That Roger did not belong to this body at all, would seem to call in question the propriety of his having invited a stranger to come and address them. But he had many friends in the room willing to overlook this and other enormities.

“I know of only four, my lord, that are true in theory. Of the others I make no account.”

“Is that of Messieurs Ditton and Wiston among the fortunate four, or the phantastickal multitude?” asked Ravenscar.

Everyone in the chapel began barking like a dog except for him, Newton, and Messrs. Ditton (who had turned the color of a pomegranate seed, and begun moving his lips) and Whiston (whose eyelids thrummed like hummingbirds’ wings as sweat coursed in gleaming rills from under his wig and pincered in on the corners of his eyes).

“Their theory is as correct as their ambitions are feeble,” answered Newton.

The House of Commons became silent, not out of shock at Newton’s cruelty, but out of professional admiration. “Supposing their scheme could be executed—a supposition that might be debated, at the Royal Society, as long and as fiercely as the late War was in this House—I say, disregarding all of the practical difficulties entailed in their Project, and supposing it were effected by some latter-day Dædalus—it would not suffice to navigate across an ocean, but only to enable the most diligent mariners to avoid running aground, when they wandered close to a Shore.”

General amusement in the Chapel now, occasioned by the facial expressions of Messrs. Ditton and Whiston, who were no longer even putting forth the effort to be angry or agitated. They now looked as if they were resting on slabs at the College of Physicians, about halfway through their own autopsies.

Not partaking of the entertainment was the Marquis of Ravenscar, who had just been handed a slip of paper by a page. He opened and read it, and for only a moment looked as dismayed as Ditton and Whiston. Then he got the better of himself. Like the deaf dinner-guest pretending that he heard the bon mot, he adopted a knowing grin, and allowed the mood of the House to infiltrate his phizz. He glanced down to review the documents spread out on the table before him, as if he had forgotten the subject of this hearing and needed to jog his memory. Then he spoke: “Merely to avoid ramming the odd continent is a low bar. What of the other three Projects that are true in theory? For it seems to me that if such Herculean efforts are to be made to practice a scheme, they were better directed to schemes that should enable our sea-captains to discover the Longitude anywhere.”

Sir Isaac Newton’s answer comprised many many words, but contained no more than the following information: that one could do it by telling the time with an excellent sea-going chronometer, which no one knew how to make yet; or by watching the satellites of Jupiter through an excellent sea-going telescope, which no one knew how to make yet; or by looking at the position of the moon and comparing it against calculations derived from his, i.e., Sir Isaac Newton’s, lunar theory, which was not quite finished yet but would be coming out any minute now in a book. In the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title: Volume III of Principia Mathematica, entitled The System of the World, available shortly where books are sold.

The Marquis of Ravenscar only heard this peroration in its general outlines because he spent the whole time jetting notes onto scraps of paper and stuffing them into minions’ hands. But when his ears detected a lengthy silence, he said: “These, er, calculations—would they be similar to what are already used for finding latitude? Or—”

“Infinitely more complex.”

“Oh, bother,” said Ravenscar distractedly, still scribbling notes, like the naughtiest schoolboy in the entire history of the world. “I suppose every ship would then require an extra deck crowded with computers, and a flock of geese to keep ’em in quills.”

“Or else we should need every ship to carry an Arithmetickal Engine,” Newton returned. Then, not trusting the House to detect his sarcasm, he went on: “—a chimærical phant’sy of the Hanoverian dilettante and plagiarist, Baron von Leibniz, which he has abjectly failed to complete lo these many years.” And it seemed as if Newton were prepared to enumerate the Baron’s defects at much greater length, but he was interrupted, and distracted, by the hot arrival in his palm of a note still damp from Ravenscar’s quill.

“So the lunar method too requires an apparatus we do not know how to make yet,” Ravenscar said, moving to sum up with an abruptness, a dispatch, that had not been seen in this House since the last time a Papist had tried to blow it up. The benches rustled with the stirrings of many expensively clad arses. A positive start was running through the Chapel.

“Yes, my lord—”

“And so it is your testimony that our ships shall persist in running aground and slaughtering our brave mariners until we shall learn how to make certain things we do not know how to make yet.”

“Yes, my—”

“Who shall invent these remarkable devices?”

“Projectors, entrepeneurs, adventurers, my—”

“What incentive could lead such a man to wager years of his life on attempting to devise a new Technology—if I may borrow a word from Dr. Waterhouse—that may turn out to be infeasible?” Ravenscar asked, standing up, and holding out his hand to let it be known that it was now permissible for someone to hand him his walking-stick. Someone did.

“My lord, some monetary—” testified Sir Isaac Newton, standing up as well—for he had read the note.

“A monetary prize—a Reward! To be awarded to such Person or Persons as shall discover a more certain and practical Method of ascertaining the Longitude? Is that your testimony? Yes? Sir Isaac, once again the Heavens resound with your brilliance and all Britannia gapes in awe at your lapidary ingenuity.” Ravenscar was crossing the floor while he thus orated, a novelty that roused to full wakefulness many a senior back-bencher who had lost, or never found, the faculty of walking and talking at the same time. “ ’Twere a crime to waste any more of the time of the world’s foremost savant on details,” Ravenscar proclaimed, arriving at Newton’s side and snatching his arm. “I have unbounded confidence that Mr. Halley, Dr. Clarke, and Mr. Cotes can bat down any further questions from Commons—as for myself, I have business with certain troublous Lords—I may as well see you out, Sir Isaac, as we go the same way!” By that time he and Sir Isaac were out the door, leaving a House of more or less dumbfounded Commons; Ditton and Whiston, half-murdered but still breathing; and the three lesser savants mentioned, who had been summoned as mere acolytes to the High Priest, and been left in charge of the Rite.

NEWTON NEARLY LOST AN ARM in the lobby of Commons, for he moved left—towards Lords—as Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, who had possession of the arm, moved right—towards Westminster Hall. “We are summoned by Lords,” Ravenscar explained, re-socketing Newton’s shoulder-joint, and trying it with a wiggle, “but not to Lords.” Dodging round a few bends and negotiating diverse stair-flights they came into the cleft between the two plank law-courts, and entered the great Hall again—just as devoid of Vikings, and strewn with inappropriate modern-day Englishmen, as ever. A man in quasi-genteel clothes browsed a bookshop, to let all the world know he was literate; a straw projected from his shoe, as a signal to barristers that he would give false testimony in exchange for money. A stirring in the air created a serial heaving down rows of sunfaded, smoke-stained, bullet-holed banners: the colors of French regiments that had been taken by Marlborough at Blenheim and other places. These had been hung on the walls to add a bit of color, and been promptly forgotten. A fair bit of noise was coming into the north end of the Hall from the New Palace Yard. The man who’d received the whipping there earlier had been left in the pillory, and a few score common Londoners had gathered in his sight, to fling handfuls of mud and horse-manure at his face in hopes that they might induce suffocation. This sort of thing was common enough in London that most persons could will themselves not to see it. Ravenscar, uncharacteristically, was gazing directly at the scene. His eyes were too old, and too far away, to resolve the details; but he knew what it was. “Ah, fortunate man!” he said wistfully, “if only I could trade places with him for the next hour!”

Newton straightened up and, prudently, slowed down. He glanced up and around as if wondering whether any of the over-looming angels had heard. “Where are we going, my lord?”

“Star Chamber,” Ravenscar announced, simultaneously tightening his grip on Newton’s arm lest these fell words cause the eminent Natural Philosopher to spin away and make a break for it. Sir Isaac did no such thing; but he was startled. He had expected that Roger Comstock would name one of the buildings of the Exchequer, which in recent decades had advanced far, and on a broad front, from the Hall’s northeast corner, so that they nearly filled the space between it and the River. Star Chamber, on the other hand, was small, and ancient; Kings of England had used to meet there with their Privy Councils. “Who has summoned us?” Newton asked.

As if the answer were self-evident, Roger said, “The Eel.” Saying out loud this mysterious epithet seemed to bring his concentration back. “We are only seconds away from the place. We could get more time by walking slowly; but I wish to stride into the place enthusiastically. The importance of this cannot be overstated. You must therefore listen carefully, Sir Isaac, as I’ll only have time to say this once.

“It seems,” Roger continued, “that I have only been given leave to distract myself with Longitude so that my honorable lord, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, could prepare some sort of poppet-show. The invitation was sprung upon me while you were testifying. I am sure Bolingbroke would fainer have tied it round an arrow and shot it into my stomach, but such proceedings, though frequently seen in Lords, are still frowned upon in Commons. You, Sir Isaac, have been given a Backstage Pass to the poppet-show, which makes me suspect that you shall be called upon to play the lead role.”

Sir Isaac Newton now became quiet and still, which was his customary way of showing rage. “It is an affront. I came here to discourse of the Longitude. Now you say I am caught up in an ambuscade.”

“I beg of you, Sir Isaac, be anything but affronted. For it is when men become old and important, and peevish over the odd ambuscade, that they become most vulnerable to just such tactics. Be baffled, unconcerned, gay—what’d be best of all, sporting about it!”

Newton did not look very sporting just now. The portal to Star Chamber was now as large in Ravenscar’s sight, as the whale’s maw to Jonah. “Never mind,” he said, “be as affronted as you please—just don’t volunteer anything. If you see what appears to be an opening in debate, remember that it was ingeniously laid down in front of you by Bolingbroke, as coquettes drop handkerchiefs at the feet of men they would ensnare.”

“Has anyone ever actually done that to you, Roger?” They had been joined by Walter Raleigh Waterhouse Weem, a.k.a. Peer, who was, like Roger, a Whig Lord. “I’ve heard of the practice, but—”

“Nay, ’twas just a figure,” Roger admitted.

But this Weem/Comstock insouciance—in truth a sort of Yogic exercise to relax nerves—misfired in Newton’s case. “What’s the point of participating in a debate if I’m to disregard every opening?” he demanded.

“This is no more a debate than is Hanging Day at Tyburn Cross. Viscount Bolingbroke would be our Jack Ketch. Anything we are allowed to say shall be strictly in the nature of Last Words. Our reply, supposing we can muster any, shall consist of deeds not words, and it shall be delivered…outside…of…this…Chamber!” Roger timed it so that he stepped over the threshold at the moment he uttered the last word. Newton dared not respond, for the Chamber was crowded with Lords Spiritual and Temporal, Knights, Courtiers, and Clerks. And it was as silent as a parish-church when the vicar has lost his place in the middle of the sermon.

“SOMETHING MONSTROUS WAS MADE to happen in the Tower of London a month and a half ago.”

It was terribly unkind for Roger to have dubbed one of his fellow-men “The Eel.” And yet a visitor from another place and time, blundering into Star Chamber, not knowing any of the men in the place, would have been able to pick out the one Roger meant. Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and Secretary of State to Her Britannic Majesty, was strolling about the open center of the chamber as he talked. All others were backed up against the walls, like so many small fry sharing a tank with something toothy and sinuous.

“London’s Persons of Quality—members of the Party and of the Faction alike—have done what they could to draw a curtain over the late events in the Tower, and to promulgate the sham that it was a momentary up-welling of the Mobb, quickly suppressed by the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard. A stable-fire on Tower Hill distracted the locals, and laid a smoke-pall over all—fortunate, that. It shall be writ down in history-books as a civil disturbance, if it is noted at all. But it would be a moral as well as an intellectual sin to mistake the events of April 23rd for anything other than a whited sepulchre. The matter must be investigated. Those responsible must be held to accompt. My lord Oxford, in his capacity as Lord Treasurer, has disappointed me by failing to do anything about it.”

This frank and frontal assault on his fellow Tory Lord was new. It created a buzz in the room. Bolingbroke held his tongue for a few moments, and let his gaze stray over the heads of some of the wallflowers. These reacted as if they’d been switched across the face by a horse-tail. Bolingbroke was not looking at them, however, but simply gazing in the general direction of the various offices, courts, and receipts of the Exchequer.

After that, Bolingbroke’s words poured out into a carefully maintained silence. Even men who were under attack (several of Oxford’s lieutenants had been shouldered to the front rank) said nothing. This was, in other words, no kind of Parliamentary proceeding. Depending on the diurnal velleities of Queen Anne, Bolingbroke was either the first man in England, or the second, after Oxford. Today he certainly believed he was first; he might have come here direct from the right hand of the Sovereign herself. Though Star Chamber was, like Commons and like Lords, an appendage of Westminster Hall, it had nothing to do with Parliament—which was a place to discuss things—and everything to do with Monarchy of the ancient, off-with-their-heads school. The murderous Court of Star Chamber had been abolished during Cromwell days, but this room still did service as a venue for the Privy Council to effect their plans and resolves—some dictated by primordial ceremonies and others improvised moment-by-
moment. This seemed to be one of the latter. In any case, no one spoke unless Bolingbroke asked him to; and he hadn’t asked.

“In the Tower of London is a place called the Mint,” Bolingbroke continued, allowing his gaze to slide over Newton’s face. Newton did not glance away—a detail, but a noteworthy one. Roger Comstock, or any other worldly man, would have advised Sir Isaac to lower his gaze, as this was thought to have a calming effect on mad dogs and Lords of the Council alike. But Newton spent most of his time in other worlds. Those aspects of this world considered most important by men like Ravenscar and Bolingbroke, Sir Isaac was most apt to find trivial and annoying.

Bolingbroke did not know Isaac Newton. Newton was a Puritan and a Whig, Bolingbroke a man of no fixed principles, but with the brainstem reflexes of a Jacobite Tory. Bolingbroke was one of those hommes d’affaires who had sought and obtained entry to the Royal Society because it was the done thing. Out of its recondite deliberations, certain Whigs such as Pepys and Ravenscar had summoned forth magic: Banks, Annuities, Lotteries, National Debt, and other eldritch practices that had conjured latent money and power from out of nowhere. One couldn’t blame a man like Bolingbroke for thinking that the Royal Society was, therefore, all about power and money. Newton’s abandonment of Cambridge for the Mint only confirmed as much. If Bolingbroke had known of Newton’s true reason for being at the Mint—if full understanding of Newton could have been inserted, whole, into the mind of Bolingbroke—it would have been necessary to carry Her Majesty’s Secretary of State out of the room on a door, and give him tincture of opium for days. As it happened, he assumed that Newton had taken the job because the highest thing a man could aspire to was to be a time-serving hack with a sinecure, a pompous title, and as few responsibilities as possible.

And now Newton was staring him directly in the eye. Only a few men in all of Christendom had the kidney for a staredown with Bolingbroke, and until this moment, Bolingbroke had thought he knew who all of them were. For this was his first encounter of any significance with Newton, and his first hint that Newton was at the Mint for reasons that were not obvious.

“How stand matters in the Realm of the Coin, Sir Isaac?” Bolingbroke inquired, manipulating his snuff-box—which gave him a pretext to break contact with Newton’s blood-freezing glare.

“Her Majesty’s coinage has never been more sound, my lord—” Newton began, then stopped as Ravenscar put a hand on the small of his back. Bolingbroke had spun away as if to hide from Sir Isaac, while exhibiting to a rank of his supporters an expression of surprise and mirth that had come over his face. For as any well-brought-up person ought to discern, Realm of the Coin was a play on words, a mere witticism, tossed out as a sort of ice-breaker, to establish a feeling of welcome and camaraderie, while giving Newton an opening to respond with a bon mot of his own. Newton had missed this, which showed lack of breeding, and taken it as a literal request for information, which showed he was oddly nervous, keyed-up, trigger-happy. Odd, that! Why so defensive? Bolingbroke took snuff and composed himself, then turned back around to face Newton—but not before all of these things had been communicated to the men standing behind him, and registered on their faces, visible to everyone else in Star Chamber. All were mortified on Sir Isaac’s behalf, except for Sir Isaac, who clearly just wanted to be asked questions so that he could answer them and get away from these people.

“Of course, Sir Isaac—more on that anon. I welcome you, and only wish that more Lords of the Council had not seen fit to attend you.” This as an aside between two players on a stage. Then, a straightening and clearing of the windpipe, and a soliloquy: “Her Majesty’s coins come out of the Mint. Her Majesty’s name and her noble visage are impressed upon every one of those coins. Coinage, therefore, has ever been a State, as well as a Treasury matter. Much as Charing Cross, over yonder, is neither the Strand nor Whitehall, but rather the crux and joint of the two, so coinage is a sort of con-fusion of State and Treasury. The Secretary of State has some interest in it,” Bolingbroke continued, meaning himself. “This marks the beginning, though ’tis far from being the end, of the public phase of the Secretary of State’s investigation. I have been pursuing it quietly for some weeks now, and had not intended to make it known so prematurely; but when I learned that Sir Isaac Newton, who has the honor to be Master of the Mint, was coming to Westminster to testify on some trifling matter ginned up by the fevered minds of the Faction, I resolved to invite him to this Chamber that his visit would not be a perfect waste of his time.”

Bolingbroke’s coiling movements about the room had now led him into a position whence he could gaze directly into Newton’s face across some yards of rather good wool carpet. “Sir Isaac,” he said, “my investigation has already established that you were absent from the Tower on the day of the assault. But no doubt your famous curiosity got the better of you when you returned and found that a small war had been conducted there while you were out. You must have looked into those events, asked questions of those who were there. What conclusions have you reached as to the true nature and purpose of the outrage?”

“My lord, it was an attempt—mostly successful, I am sorry to say—by a gang of Black-guards, very likely led by no less than Jack the Coiner himself, to steal the Crown Jewels,” said Sir Isaac Newton. Behind him, Ravenscar was wondering if he would get away with elbowing Newton in the throat to disable his voice-box.

“Perhaps it would help to clarify your mind as to that, if I told you that my investigators have already captured some of the Black-guards in question. Oh, they attempted to flee to Dunkirk in a boat that was overhauled and searched by a brig of the Royal Navy,” Bolingbroke explained, amused by Newton’s naïveté, but tolerant for now. “The missing jewels were recovered. The men were kept apart and questioned separately. They have testified, to a man, that even when Jack the Coiner had gained the Inmost Ward, and held the Tower in the hollow of his hand, as it were, standing within bow-shot of the open and unguarded Jewel Tower, he did ignore the lure of those baubles, and held them of no value. Instead he made straightaway for the Mint, and went to the vault where the Pyx is kept.”

“That is absurd,” Newton said. “The Pyx holds but a few samples of pennies and guineas. The Crown Jewels are infinitely more valuable.”

“The theft of the Crown Jewels was an improvisation, carried out by ignorant pawns who never knew the true purpose of the assault. This much is proved by the ease with which those men were captured. I say that Jack the Coiner went to the Pyx.”

“And I hear you saying it, my lord; but I say nothing was stolen from that Vault.”

“Note the careful selection of words,” Bolingbroke mused aloud to a squadron of smirking Tory admirers. “Is this a sentence, or a mathematickal riddle?” Then he whirled to face a closed door, which led not to the exit but to an inner chamber. “Bring it in!” he commanded.

The door was heaved open by a page, revealing several men who had been loitering within. The biggest led them out. He was booted and spurred, and dressed very well, complete with a cape. Dangling on his breast was a silver medallion in the shape of a greyhound. Four other men, similarly got up, followed him, each holding an end of a pole. They looked almost like porters carrying a sedan chair, and this caused a frisson to charge through Star Chamber as everyone phant’sied that the Queen herself was being hauled out. But the burden of those poles was smaller, yet heavier, than the Queen. It was a boxy thing hidden under a velvet cape.

“You’ll all know Mr. Charles White,” said Bolingbroke, “Captain of the Queen’s Messengers. And, as of some weeks ago, provisional commander of the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard, in relief of the disgraced Colonel Barnes.”

A murmur of diffident greeting welled up about the place and collapsed to silence as the four Queen’s Messengers set their mysterious fardel down in the center of the floor, directly between Newton and Bolingbroke. Charles White, who as the proprietor of a bear-baiting ring in Rotherhithe knew a few things about how to play on the anticipation of an audience, allowed a five-count to elapse, then stepped up smartly and whipped off the cape to reveal a black chest with three padlocks suspended from its hasps.

“As my lord commanded,” White said, “direct from the Mint in the Tower of London, I give you the Pyx.”

“OH, PRAY DON’T BE SO absurd, this is not a Trial of the Pyx!” Bolingbroke exclaimed some time later, when everyone had calmed down a bit, and stopped murmuring in one another’s ears. “As every man in this Chamber ought to know, a Trial would require the presence of the Queen’s Remembrancer, as well as the Lord Treasurer, who has not seen fit to be with us this day. Oh no no no. Quite absurd. This is not a Trial, but a cursory Inspection, of the Pyx.”

“Pray, what is the, er, procedure for such an inspection, my lord? It is a thing I have never heard of,” said Ravenscar. He was acting as a second for Newton, who was still unable to speak; or so Ravenscar guessed from the fact that beneath Newton’s thinning white hair his scalp was red, and covered with goosebumps.

“Of course you have never heard of it, for it is extraordinary. It has never been done before. It has never been necessary. For until recent times, the Pyx was always looked after by guards who could be trusted. To guard it has been a duty of the Tower garrison. Several regiments have had the honor. Of late it has been entrusted to the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guards: a regiment that enjoyed flashes of distinction until my lord Marlborough quite lost his way, and quit the country. Under a Colonel Barnes it fell into degeneracy. He has been relieved of his commission. There is an old master sergeant of that Regiment, a Robert Shaftoe. This Chamber will no doubt be astonished to learn that Sergeant Shaftoe is none other than the brother or half-brother of one Jack Shaftoe, thought to be the same person as Jack the Coiner. In spite of which, this Robert Shaftoe was allowed—through a systematic dereliction of responsibility by Marlborough, extending over many years—to remain in the regiment, under the pretext that he had become estranged from Mr. Jack Shaftoe and had not seen him in many years. It is he, and others like him, who have been given charge of the Mint in general, and the Pyx in particular, since the war ended and their Regiment was brought home. After the events of April 23rd, as I have said, Colonel Barnes was relieved, and more recently Robert Shaftoe has been moved to new quarters. Oh, he still resides within the Tower, no longer in his accustomed billet. He has been given lodgings of a rather different character. There, he has had conversations with Mr. White. Thus far, these conversations have not been terribly illuminating—but I trust this will change, as Mr. White has shown himself to be a skilled and forceful seeker after the truth. Since these changes were put into effect, the Pyx has been safe from any tampering—I dare say, as safe as the Crown Jewels. But it is impossible to know what might have been done to it during the year that it lay bare to the irresponsibility, if not the outright depredations, of Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe. And that is why we are gathered in this Chamber today for an event without precedent: an Inspection of the Pyx.”

“AND SO, TO SUM UP, I must confess that I too was absent during the onslaught of these Black-guards—
a shame that I shall never out-live,” said Charles White, who had just related, to an astonished Chamber, an improbable yarn about a wild goose chase down the River Thames: a venture that had been undertaken on the strength of assurances from Colonel Barnes and Sir Isaac Newton that it would culminate in the capture of Jack the Coiner, but that in fact had ended with a fire in a broken-down, abandoned coastal watch-tower, and a lot of confused and misled dragoons storming around in benighted mud-flats. A boat or two had been sighted, and pursued, until darkness had fallen. Sir Isaac had been rescued from a drifting wreck where he and another aged Whig Natural Philosopher had been found down in the bilge playing with a jack-in-the-box.

“Your sense of duty is an example to us all, Mr. White,” Bolingbroke protested, in a voice soaked with amusement over the concluding detail of the jack-in-the-box. “If you were misled, ’twas only because the Byzantine intrigues that were afoot on that day, are so alien to the mentality of an honest Englishman. Tell me, when you returned to the Tower, and found that indescribable scene, were you concerned as to the Crown Jewels?”

“Naturally, my lord, and hied thither straightaway.”

“Does anyone really hie nowadays?” asked Roger.

Perfect was the silence at his levity.

Charles White cleared his throat and continued. “Finding several of the jewels missing, I supposed, at first, that this explained all.”

“In what way, Mr White?” Bolingbroke inquired, now in a sort of friendly cross-examination mode.

“Good my lord, I reasoned that the Black-guards had been after the Crown Jewels, and that all of the day’s happenings in the Tower had been parts of their plan to steal them.”

“But you are using the past tense, Mr. White. Your opinions on the matter have undergone some change?”

“It was not until some weeks after, when some of the Black-guards were caught, and made to tell what they knew, that I began to perceive faults in that hypothesis.” He pronounced it wrong.

“But it seemed a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, didn’t it? No one would have found fault with it, had the prisoners not given us the information that Jack the Coiner evinced no desire to see the Crown Jewels.”

“It did indeed seem reasonable, my lord, or so I tried to tell myself for quite some little while; but viewed with a more critical eye, it does not hold up.”

“Why does it not, Mr. White?”

“The journey downriver, which I have just related, was, as my lord will have plainly seen, a diversion, meant to remove me and the first company of Guards from the Tower.”

“So it would seem.”

“It must therefore have been arranged, with some cunning and forethought, by some who were secretly confederated with Jack, and who would profit by the success of Jack’s undertaking.”

“A reasonable enough supposition,” Bolingroke allowed. Then he reminded White, “We look forward to a confession to that effect from Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Consider it done my lord—but Robert Shaftoe is just a sergeant. A very senior one, true, but—”

“I do take your point, Mr. White. Perhaps Colonel Barnes ought to be questioned. He would have the authority—”

“Would have, my lord, but—and I have turned this over in my mind a thousand times—Colonel Barnes did never exercise any such authority on that day. I requested that he send a company on the expedition to Shive Tor, because, to hear Sir Isaac tell it, we would need a whole company, or more, to subdue the small army of Black-guards we would find there.”

“Mr. White. Certainly you are not accusing yourself of complicity!”

“Even if I did, my lord, ’twould never stand; for the record now shows that the true butt at which Jack the Coiner aimed his shaft was not the Jewels but the Mint—to be specific, the Pyx. And how would I benefit from some compromise of the Pyx?”

“How could anyone conceivably benefit from it?” Bolingbroke wanted to know.

“It is of no account,” Isaac Newton broke in, “as the Pyx was never compromised!”

“Sir Isaac Newton! We’ve not heard from you yet. For the benefit of those here who have never seen the Pyx, would you be so good as to explain its workings?”

“It would be my pleasure, my lord,” said Newton, stepping forward, eluding the hand of the Marquis of Ravenscar who had groped forward, out of some instinct, trying to yank him back from the abyss. “It is closed by three locks—all three must be removed for the lid to be opened. The top, as you can see, is fashioned with a hatch, devised in such a way that a small object may be deposited into the Pyx without opening the locks. But it is impossible for a hand to reach in and remove any object.” Newton operated the mechanism, letting everyone get a look at a pair of swinging doors rigged just as he had claimed.

“How is the Pyx employed at the Mint?” Bolingbroke inquired, accurately feigning the sort of elevated curiosity that was good form at Royal Society meetings.

Newton responded in kind. “Of every lot of coins that is minted, some are plucked out, and deposited. I shall demonstrate, behold!” Newton opened his own coin-purse and spilled a guinea and some pennies—freshly minted, of course—onto his hand. He borrowed a sheet of foolscap from a clerk, laid it on the Pyx, arranged the coins in the center of the page, and then rolled and folded the paper around the money to make a neat little packet. “Here I have done it with paper—at the Mint we use leather. The Sinthia, as we call this little packet, is sewn shut. The worker writes on its outside a notation as to when the sample was taken, and stamps it with a seal, kept for that purpose alone. Then—” Sir Isaac slipped the Sinthia into the Pyx’s hatch, and tripped the mechanism. It vanished and dropped within.

“And from time to time, as is well known to that scholar of all matters monetary, my lord Ravenscar, the Pyx is brought hither to the Star Chamber by order of the Privy Council,” Bolingbroke said, “and opened, and its contents assayed by a jury of goldsmiths drawn from the most respectable citizens of the City of London.”

“Indeed, my lord. Anciently it was done four times a year. Of late, less frequently.”

“When was the last Trial of the Pyx, Sir Isaac?”

“Last year, my lord.”

“You say, ’twas around the time that the hostilities on the Continent ceased, and the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard returned to garrison the Tower.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And so the Pyx, as of April 22nd, contained samples of all lots of coins minted during the months that the Black Torrent Guard controlled the Tower.”

“Er, indeed, my lord,” said Newton, wondering what that had to do with anything.

Bolingbroke was only too happy to lead him out of his confusion. “Mr. Charles White is of the view that those who were responsible for the assault on the Tower, phant’sied that they could somehow benefit more from compromising the Pyx, than from stealing the Crown Jewels! How could such a thing possibly be, Sir Isaac?”

“I do not know, my lord, and I hold it to be idle, for the Pyx was never compromised.”

“How do you know that, Sir Isaac? Jack the Coiner might have spent as much as an hour with it.”

“As you can see, it is sealed with three padlocks, my lord. I cannot attest to the other two, for one is the property of the Warden of the Mint and the other belongs to the Lord Treasurer; but the third is mine. There is only one key to that lock, and I am never without it.”

“I have heard that there are men who can open a lock, without a key—there is a word for it, they say.”

“Lock-picking, my lord,” someone said helpfully.

“Trust a Whig to know such a thing! Could Jack have ‘picked’ the locks?”

“Locks such as these, perhaps,” answered Newton, passing his hand over two of them. Then he turned his attention to a third, much larger and heavier. He hefted it like Roger Comstock cupping one of his mistress’s breasts. “To pick this one is almost certainly impossible. To pick it and two others in an hour is absolutely impossible.”

“So a clever fellow could get the Pyx open in an hour, if he had your key, by ‘picking’ the other two locks. But without your key—impossible.”

“Just so, my lord,” said Newton. He was distracted by violent stirrings in his peripheral vision, and glanced over to see Roger Comstock now frantically waving his hands about and drawing his finger convulsively across his throat. But Newton seemed to take these gestures as an inexplicable roadside mum-show.

Bolingbroke noticed, too. “My lord Ravenscar has imbibed too much coffee again and come down with the spasms,” he guessed. Then he turned his attention back to Newton. “Pray take your impregnable lock away, Sir Isaac.” He turned around and gestured at a pair of fellows who were standing together in a corner, each nervously fingering an elaborate key. “The Warden of the Mint has joined us,” Bolingbroke said, “and even the Lord Treasurer has deigned to send a representative bearing his key. We would view the contents of the Pyx.”

It was three-quarters filled with a jumble of leathern packets. Newton’s paper-packet had tumbled down into a corner. He bent down to retrieve it; and though Newton was oblivious to this, others in the room noted that the eyes of White and Bolingbroke tracked every movement of Newton’s, as if they were expecting to catch him out in some sleight-of-hand.

“Is this what you expected to see when the lid was opened, Sir Isaac?” asked Bolingbroke.

“It appears to be in order, my lord.” Newton reached into the Pyx a second time, plucked out a Sinthia, glanced at it, and dropped it back in. He plucked out another. This time, he hesitated.

“Is everything quite all right, Sir Isaac?” Bolingbroke inquired, the soul of gentlemanly concern.

Sir Isaac raised the Sinthia higher, closer to window-light, and turned it this way and that.

“Sir Isaac?” Bolingbroke repeated. The Chamber was very still. Bolingbroke flicked his eyes at the Warden of the Mint, who stepped forward and stood on tiptoe to peer over Sir Isaac’s shoulder. Newton had frozen.

The Warden of the Mint’s eyes widened.

Newton dropped the packet into the Pyx as if it had caught fire. He staggered back, towards the Marquis of Ravenscar, like a blinded duellist seeking refuge among his friends.

“My lord,” explained the Warden, “something’s a bit queer about that last packet. The handwriting—it looked forged, somehow.”

Charles White raised a knee and kicked the lid of the Pyx. It closed with a boom like a cannon-shot.

“I say that the Pyx is evidence in a criminal matter,” Bolingbroke proclaimed. “Put the locks on it again, and bring out my seal. I shall set my seal on this evidence to show any further tampering. Mr. White shall return the Pyx to its customary station and use in the Tower but he shall keep it under heavy guard, twenty-four hours a day. I shall bear these tidings to the other Lords of the Council. We may safely presume that the Council will order a Trial of the Pyx forthwith.”

“Good my lord,” said Peer, stepping forward, “what evidence suggests that such tampering occurred? The Warden has asserted that one of the packets looked a bit queer, but this hardly constitutes proof. Sir Isaac himself has said nothing at all.”

“Sir Isaac,” said Bolingbroke, “what is perfectly clear to most of us, is impenetrable to this Whig. He requires evidence. No man is more eligible to testify in such a matter than you. Is it your testimony, before this assembly, that all of the coins in this Pyx were minted in the Tower, under your direction, and placed therein by your hand? I remind you that every coin in the Pyx is subject to assay during a Trial, and that you are under an indenture to Her Majesty; the consequences of a failed Trial are severe.”

“By ancient tradition,” said Roger Comstock behind his hand, “false coiners are punished by amputation of the hand that did the deed, and castration.” From anxiety he had moved on briefly to horror; but now from horror to fascination.

Newton tried to answer, but his voice did not work for a moment, and only a bleat came out. Then he swallowed, grimacing at the pain of swallowing, and got out the words: “I cannot so testify, my lord. But without a more thorough examination—”

“There shall be one anon, at a Trial of the Pyx.”

“I beg my lord’s pardon,” said Peer, who had out of some blind herd instinct blundered out to act as scape-goat for his entire Party, “but why bother to have a Trial of the Pyx, if the Pyx has been tampered with?”

“Why, to get all false coins out of it, so that we shall know that all coins put in thereafter shall be genuine samples of the Mint’s produce—and not frauds put in as a desperate gambit to hide long-standing flaws in the coinage!”

“The poetry of it!” Roger exclaimed, though these reflections were concealed under a hubbub, the sound of Parties and Factions mobilizing and arming. “Sir Isaac dares not assert that the Pyx is clean, for fear that Jack may have salted it with debased coins—which would be found out at the Trial, and laid to Sir Isaac. To save his hand and his balls, he must admit that it has been compromised; but in doing so, he calls his own coins into question, and names himself as a suspect in the assault on the Tower!”

“My lord,” said a Tory, “it is suggested that a year’s coin-samples are now simply gone—stolen by Jack the Coiner! If that is so, how can we gauge the present soundness of Her Majesty’s coinage? Our enemies in the world shall say that the Mint has spewed out false and debased guineas for a year or more.”

“It is a question of extraordinary gravity,” Bolingbroke allowed, “and I say that it is a State affair, since the security of our State is founded on Trade, which is founded upon our currency. If it is true that the conspiracy has deprived us of our Pyx, why then we can only prove the soundness of our money by collecting samples of coins that are in circulation, and bringing them in for assay.”

Ravenscar had told Newton not to pick up any handkerchiefs dropped in his way by Bolingbroke: advice that Newton, with the serene confidence of a man who had nothing to hide, had steadfastly ignored. Now was not the time for him to mend his ways. “But my lord, I protest!” he said, “there is a reason why the method you have just described is never used, and it is that a sampling of coins in circulation shall perforce include a number—an unknowable number—of counterfeits, slipped into circulation by the likes of Jack Shaftoe. ’Twere unfair and unreasonable to lay at my feet an assay of counterfeits!”

Bolingbroke seemed impressed by Newton’s sheer consistency. “Sir Isaac, as a part of my investigations, I have read an Indenture with your name on it, kept under lock and key in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey, just across the way. We can stroll over and have a look at it, if you should like to review its contents. But I can tell you that, in this solemn contract, you are sworn to pursue and prosecute coiners. Until now I have assumed that you were tending to your duties. Now you astonish this Chamber by testifying to the contrary! Tell me, Sir Isaac, if we make an assay of circulating coins, and discover that they are rife with base metal, is it because you have failed in your duty to prosecute coiners? Or is it because you have debased the coinage produced by the Mint, to enrich yourself and your Whig backers? Or did you debase the coinage first and then allow coiners to flourish in the Realm, so as to cover your traces? Sir Isaac? Sir Isaac? Oh well, he has quite lost interest.”

In fact, Sir Isaac had lost consciousness, or was well on his way to it. During the last speech of Bolingbroke he had gradually softened and crumpled to the floor of Star Chamber, like a candle placed in an oven. He was breathing fast, and his extremities had gone into violent trembling, as if he were having fever-chills; but the hands pressed to his forehead felt a dry and cool brow and thumbs touched to the base of his heaving neck were drawn back in alarm at the furious drum-beat of his pulse. He was not so much sick as seized in an unstoppable paroxysm of mad, animal terror. “Get him into my coach,” commanded Roger Comstock, “and take him to my house. Miss Barton is there. She knows her uncle well, and she shall tend to him better than—God forbid—any physician.”

“You see?” Bolingbroke was remarking to Charles White, who was standing at his side, in the role of wide-eyed ’prentice a-gawp at the Master’s skill. “It is not necessary to bite their ears off. Oh, this is nothing. I have seen others drop dead in their shoes. One needs an apoplectic for that.” He seemed ready to offer up more advice in this vein, but his attention was drawn by the Marquis of Ravenscar, standing serenely on the opposite side of the Chamber as other Whigs bent their backs to the very odd job of dragging out Isaac Newton. Ravenscar held out a hand. Someone slapped a walking-stick into his palm. He hefted it. Charles White, anticipating physical violence, took half a step forward, then realized he was being absurd, and brought his hands together in front of his silver greyhound medallion, absent-mindedly rubbing at an ancient dagger-scar that went all the way through one palm. Bolingbroke merely elevated an eyebrow.

Roger Comstock raised his walking-stick until it was pointed up at the starry ceiling, and brought the butt of it to his face, then snapped it down briskly. It was a swordsman’s salute: a gesture of respect, and a signal that the next thing to come would be homicidal violence. “Let’s to the Kit-Cat Clubb,” he said to Peer and a few other Whigs who had not yet been able to get their feet to move. “Sir Isaac has the use of my coach; but I am in a mood for a walk. God save the Queen, my lord.”

“God save the Queen,” said Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. “And do enjoy your walk, Roger.”

Garden of Herrenhausen Palace, Hanover

JUNE 23 (CONTINENTAL)/12 (ENGLISH) 1714

“I LOVE YOU.”

“I loaf you.”

“I love you.”

“I lubb you.”

“That’s not quite it.”

“How can you tell? This ‘I love you’ strikes my ear like the sound of a tin sheet being wobbled. How can I say ‘ich liebe dich’ with such noises?”

“To me you can say it any way you please. But you need to work on certain vowels.” Johann von Hacklheber raised his head out of Caroline’s lap, faltered—his ponytail had snagged in a pearl button—worked it free, sat up, and spun around on the bench so that he could get face to face with her. “Watch my lips, my tongue,” he said. “I love you.”

There the English lesson ended. Not that the pupil had failed to observe the master’s lips and tongue. She had done so most attentively—but not with a mind towards improving her vowels. “Noch einmal, bitte,” she requested, and when he arched his sandy eyebrows and opened his mouth to pronounce the “I,” she was up and on him. His lips and tongue went through the movements for “love,” but Caroline felt them with her own lips and tongue, and heard not a thing.

“That was much more informative,” she said, after a few more repetitions of the étude.

His ponytail was coming undone, which was largely her doing, for she had her hands to either side of his head and was tugging blond locks free from the black ribbon that bound them in back, bringing him into a state of beautiful déshabillement. “They say that your mother was the loveliest woman in all of Versailles.”

“I thought that honor was reserved for the King’s brother.”

“Stop it!” She gave him the tiniest tap on the cheek-bone. “I was going to say, she gave her looks to you.”

“What are you going to say now?”

“I am about to ask where you got your wit from, for it is not as pleasing to me.”

“I do beg your royal highness’s forgiveness. I did not know that you had such affection for the late brother of the King of France.”

“Think of his widow, Liselotte, who lives still, and who exchanged letters almost every day with the lady we are laying in her tomb today.”

“The connexion was so tenuous I—”

“No connexions are tenuous on a day such as this. All Christendom mourns for Sophie.”

“Excepting certain drawing-rooms in London.”

“For this one day, spare me your wit, and let me enjoy your looks. You need a shave!”

“The Doctor must have taught you about solstices and equinoxes.”

“What does that have to do with shaving? Behold, if I were wearing gloves, they should be snagged and ruined by these boar’s bristles!” She dug a thumb in along his jaw-line and shoved the skin up to his cheek-bone. No longer did he look like the son of the most beautiful woman in Versailles, and no longer were his vowels perfectly formed when he said, “A tryst in the garden at dawn’s first light is a romantic conceit, and I do confess that this peachy morning-light makes your face more radiant than any flower, and more succulent than any fruit—”

“As it sets your golden mane, and your spiky hog-bristles, aglow, my angel.”

“However, as we dwell at above fifty degrees of latitude—”

“Fifty-two degrees and twenty-odd minutes, as you’d know, if the Doctor had drilled you as he did me in the use of the back-staff.”

“In any case, given that we are within a few days of the Solstice, ‘dawn’s first light,’ at this latitude, works out to something like two o’clock in the morning.”

“Pfui, it’s not that early!”

“I note that your Ladies of the Bedchamber have not had a crack at you yet—”

“Hmph.”

“Which suits me very well,” Johann added hastily, “as powder, lacings, and beauty-spots can only detract from one who is perfect to begin with.”

“ ’Twill be double powderings and lacings this day,” Caroline lamented. “The usual one, that I may receive our noble and royal guests, and a second, for the funeral.”

“It is well that you have a sturdy husband to take the brunt of the ceremonies,” Johann reflected. “Stand behind him, fan yourself, and look bereaved.”

“I am bereaved.”

“You were, and are becoming less so by the day, I think,” Johann said. Which was not the gentlest thing he could have said. But he had spent enough time among royals to know their heart-ways. “Now your mind has already begun to turn elsewhere. You are getting ready for the burden to fall on your shoulders.”

“I wish you had not reminded me. Now the mood is spoiled.”

Johann von Hacklheber got to his feet. He was careful to take Caroline’s hand in his own first, and to keep it clasped. “Oh, I’m afraid the morning was ruined for me before it began. I have an extraordinary engagement. One that I could not get myself out of by pleading, ‘I am very sorry but I shall be busy at that hour cuckolding the Prince of Wales.’ ”

She smiled, though she tried ever so hard not to. “He’s not technically the Prince of Wales yet. We have to go to England and get coronated.”

“Crowned. Try pronouncing that—it’s got a W in the middle of it. I shall see you in a few hours, my lady, my princess.”

“And—?”

“My lover.”

“Fare well on your mysterious errand—my lubber.”

“Oh, ’tis nothing—just an insomniacal Englishman who wants to go for walkies.”

“Val-kees?” Caroline repeated. But Johann had tossed the troublesome word over his shoulder as he unlatched an iron gate, and stepped out into an avenue of the great garden. All she heard after was the clank of the gate closing, and the diminishing crunch-crunch of Johann’s boots on the gravel path. Then she was alone under the writhing limbs of the Teufelsbaum.

She had not mentioned to Johann that this was the place where Sophie had died. She had been afraid that having such a thing in his mind would make him less amorous. Perhaps she needn’t have worried, for nothing seemed to make men of his age (he was twenty-four) less amorous. As to herself, she had lived through the deaths of her father, her mother, her stepfather, her stepfather’s wicked mistress, her adopted mother (Sophie Charlotte), and now Sophie. Death and disease only made her more amorous—eager to forget the bad parts of life and to enjoy good flesh while it lasted.

Now she distinctly heard another gravel-crunch. It seemed to come from one of the triangle of paths that outlined this plot where the Teufelsbaum grew in its iron cage. Her hope that Johann had changed his mind was evanescent, for the first crunch was not followed by a second. After a rather long time she did hear another, but it was faint and prolonged, as if a foot were being placed very cautiously. This was followed by a “Ssh!” so distinct that she turned her head around to look.

Everyone who mattered knew that Caroline’s husband had a mistress named Henrietta Braithwaite, and anyone who bothered to ask around could find out that Caroline had her Jean-Jacques (which was the pet name that she used for Johann). As a setting for trysts, intrigues, and tiptoeing about, the Grosse Garten almost aspired to the level of Versailles. So it was not as if Caroline had any great secret to keep here. She was not worried about eavesdroppers. Of course there were eavesdroppers. This was, rather, a point of etiquette. For such persons to be audibly shushing each other, a few yards away, was like farting at dinner. Caroline inhaled deeply and fired off a sharp sigh. That should fix them!

But she’d never know whether the message had struck home, for now iron wheel-rims, and the shoes of a four-horse team, could be heard above all else. This team was coming her way, and the horses were blowing as if very tired. Had they been driven all night? If so, they weren’t the only exhausted horses hereabouts. The nobility of Europe were converging on Herrenhausen, using Sophie’s funeral as an excuse to stage a reunion of the largest, most bizarre, violent, and incestuously cross-linked family in the world. Caroline had scarcely been able to sleep last night for all the nocturnal arrivals.

She rose from the bench. Through the tree-limbs she glimpsed a couple of tawny blurs loping down the path. “Scylla! Charybdis!” called a gruff voice, and they stopped.

Stepping away from the bench and ducking under a low-hanging bough, Caroline saw a pair of large dogs, panting and drooling. She was protected from them by the iron fence, and saw no danger in moving closer, picking her way over Teufelsbaum-limbs that undulated along the ground, unable to decide whether they were roots, branches, or vines. Along the path came the team—four matched sorrels—and behind them a black carriage, once shiny, now dusty all over. Mud-comets radiated from the wheels and lashed the polished wood. Nevertheless she could make out the arms on the door: the Negro-heads and fleurs-de-lis of the House of Arcachon quartered with the gray pinnacle of the Duchy of Qwghlm. Above that, an open window. Framed in it, a face strikingly similar to the one she’d been kissing a few minutes earlier—but without the bristles.

“Eliza!”

“Stop here, Martin.”

Eliza’s face was now blocked from view by a spray of leaves, but Caroline could hear the smile in her voice. Martin—evidently the driver—reined in his team. Their gait collapsed and they pocked gradually to a stop, taking the momentum of the carriage in the breeching straps slung round their backsides.

Caroline had by now advanced to the iron fence. The Teufelsbaum had been pruned back from it, leaving a clear space for the gardeners to walk the perimeter. Caroline hurried along for some yards, letting her hand count the iron verticals, in case her gown-hem should snag on a shrub and trip her.

A pair of footmen had clambered down from their perch on the back of the carriage, moving as if splints had been bound to their arms and legs. No telling how long they had been standing there, hands stiffening round the railings as they held on for dear life. Eliza lost patience with them and kicked the carriage door open. The edge of it nearly sheared off a footman’s nose. He recovered in time to set down a wee portable stair and assist the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm down to the path—though to be honest it was not so obvious who was assisting whom. The mastiffs Scylla and Charybdis had circled back. They had planted their eyes on Eliza, and their butts on the path, where they were sweeping out neat gravel-free quadrants with their tails.

Eliza was dressed for mourning, hard travel, or both, in a dark grim frock, with a black silk scarf over her head. She was in her mid-forties, and if she were starting to gray, it was not easy to tell, as she had been light blond to begin with. An attentive observer—and this Duchess had many—might phant’sy that the gold was now alloyed with a small proportion of silver. The skin around her eyes and the corners of her mouth gave a fair account of her age.

The number of her male admirers had not diminished over the years, but their nature had changed. When she’d been an eligible mademoiselle at Versailles she had caught the eye of the King and been pursued round the place by a horde of lust-blind fops. Now, having passed through marriage, maternity, smallpox, and widow-hood, she was the kind of woman that important forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-
old men were always talking about in hushed corners of Clubbs and Salons. From time to time one of these would screw up his courage, sally forth from his redoubt, and buy her a château or something, always to retreat, defeated but not humiliated, honorably scarred, and ennobled in reputation, clustered around by other gentlemen who desperately wanted to know what had happened. To be spurned by a lady who was rumored to have bedded the Duke of Monmouth, William of Orange, and Louis XIV was to enter into a sort of communion with those figures of legend.

None of which mattered to Caroline, of course, for Eliza never spoke of it, and when the two of them were together, it was of no account to either one of them. But when they were in the company of others—as they would be for most of the day—she had to forcibly remind herself of it. To Caroline the reputation of Eliza was nothing, but to others it was all.

“I’ll walk in the garden with her royal highness, Martin,” Eliza called. “Drive to the stables, tend to the animals, and tend to yourself.”

It was not entirely usual for ladies of Eliza’s rank to be so concerned with such minutiae; but she had much concern for details, and little for class. If Martin was surprised he didn’t show it. “My lady,” he answered placidly.

“Our grooms and stable-hands will see to the animals—you may tell them I have said so,” said Caroline. “You look after yourself, Martin.”

“Your royal highness honors me,” said Martin. He sounded weary—not of the long night drive, but of noble and royal ladies who phant’sied he was incapable of looking after his own horses. He allowed the team to move forward, taking up the slack in the harness. The two footmen, finally unlimbered, sprang back to their perches, and the dogs began to whine, not knowing which group to follow. Eliza silenced them with a glare and Martin summoned them with a grunt.

“Let’s to the gate, and not converse through bars of iron,” Caroline said, and began to walk in the same direction as the carriage was moving. Eliza walked abreast of her on the gravel side of the fence. They were separated by an arm’s length, but the Princess was on a march through the forest while the Duchess strolled on a groomed path. “You couldn’t possibly have come all the way from London—?”

“Antwerp.”

“Oh. How is the Duke?”

“He sends his respects, and his condolences. He was a great admirer of Sophie, as you know, and much desired to attend her funeral. But the late reports from London are most troubling to him and he did not wish to put himself so far out of his countrymen’s reach.”

They had come to the gate. Caroline reached for the latch but Eliza was quicker; she got it open and stepped through it decisively, closing with Caroline and flinging her arms round the taller woman’s neck with a kind of passion, even abandon. A very different thing from the restrained and courtly greetings that would fill the rest of this day. When she let go, which was a good long time later, her cheeks, which were devoid of any powder or rouge, were shiny with tears.

“When I was a girl of some sixteen years, I was sorry for myself, and angry at the world, because I had been separated from my mother, first by Slavery and then by common Mortality. Now, as I reckon the sum of your losses, I am ashamed that I ever so indulged myself.”

There passed a moment when Caroline said nothing. This was partly because she was touched, and almost embarrassed, by this bold statement from a woman so renowned for wit and discretion. It was also partly because of a noise behind her. Martin had gotten his team to negotiate the sharp turn at the plot’s acute vertex, which had not been easy, and was now rumbling along another side, not far away.

“Sometimes I think that I am the sum of my losses,” Caroline finally said. “And if so, then every loss that I suffer enlarges me. I hope my discourse does not strike you as too grim,” she added, for a little sob-shudder had run through the Duchess’s body. “But this is how I make sense of my world. And if you must know, in some moments I phant’sy that I am a sort of heir to the Winter Queen—though I am not linked to her by blood—and that it is my destiny to go back to England and reclaim it for her. That is why I asked you to buy Leicester House, for she was born there.”

“I did not buy it but invested in it,” Eliza returned.

“Then I hope your investment will turn out to have been a prudent one.”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Your tidings from Antwerp—and other news that has reached me of late—make me doubt whether I shall ever see Britain, much less rule it.”

“You shall, my dear. What concerns Marlborough is not the fate of the Realm but of a single Regiment, near to his heart, lately fallen under the sway of Jacobites. He is fretting about certain of his officers and sergeants, trying to make out what has become of them.”

“What has happened to one Regiment might happen later to the whole Realm,” Caroline said. Then she looked away, distracted by an eruption of barking on the far side of the vast Gordian knot of the Teufelsbaum. Martin was chastising the dogs in Dutch. They had probably lit out after one of the garden’s regiment of squirrels.

When she turned back, she found that Eliza had been appraising her. The Duchess seemed to approve of what she had seen. “I am most pleased that my son has found you,” she said.

“So am I,” Caroline confessed. “Tell me truly, now—did you enter the garden in search of me, or of him?”

“I knew that the two of you would be together. It would appear that I just missed him,” Eliza said, and reached out to pluck a long blond hair from a pearl button at Caroline’s midsection.

“He hoped you’d come—and knew you’d do so without warning. He has gone for a walk with an Englishman.”

Eliza got a wary look and stepped forward, pressing Caroline aside with a firm hand. Her other hand strayed to the waistband of her frock. A man came crashing through the Teufelsbaum, headed directly for them. Meanwhile Scylla and Charybdis were pelting hell-for-leather around the fence, trying to find a way in.

The man emerged into plain view and stopped. The first thing they noticed about him was that he was brandishing a dagger; the second, that he was one of Eliza’s footmen. His wig had been stripped off as he’d charged through the reaching arms of the Teufelsbaum, but he was recognizable by his livery. Less so by his face, which was red, and distorted by fear and rage—battle-lust, Caroline thought.

“Jan? What is it?” Eliza demanded.

Jan ignored the question. He scanned the path until he was certain that Scylla and Charybdis had found it, and were circling around to guard the rear. Then he spun round, turning his back on Eliza and Caroline, searching the woods.

Something slammed into Caroline’s shoulder. It was Eliza’s body. Caroline tried to plant the opposing foot wide, to absorb the blow, but Eliza had expected this, and had already swung a leg around and hooked Caroline’s ankle. Both of them fell down. Caroline hit the ground first. Eliza, rather than smashing full-length into Caroline’s body, took most of the impact on her hands and knees, and wound up straddling the fallen princess, looking about herself alertly.

The second footman had circled around the other way, and now joined Scylla and Charybdis at the gate. He too had a dagger out. But Eliza stayed over Caroline, refusing to let her up. Presently the carriage roared and rattled back up the path, drawn by four insanely irritated horses who were controlled only with difficulty by poor Martin.

“What happened?” demanded Eliza, as Martin was reining them in.

Martin was in no great hurry to respond either. He stood up and scanned the woods on all sides. He had a pistol out, and was careful to keep its barrel perfectly aligned with his gaze, so that shooting could follow seeing in an instant.

“Opposite, on the far side of this weird tree, the dogs scented men who had bad intentions,” he finally said, in a mild voice.

Ever the Natural Philosopher, even when pinned to the ground under a Duchess, Caroline inquired, “How do you know it wasn’t a well-intentioned squirrel?”

“The dogs told me as much by their emotions,” Martin returned, plainly irritated to have been questioned on such a matter. “They followed the scent from the iron fence—which these men must have vaulted—to a neighboring part of the garden, yonder, before I called them back, and told them to go and find my lady. Then, as I was rounding the corner, over there, trying to get back to you, I glanced over and saw two men running as fast as they could down the path.”

“Towards us?”

“Away from you, my lady.”

“Bows? Muskets?”

“They had neither, my lady.”

This was the signal for Eliza to get up at last. She extended a hand and did the work of hauling Caroline to her feet, as the footmen were still prowling about with daggers drawn.

“That was an unusual procedure,” Caroline remarked.

“It is not so unusual in Constantinople.”

“Where did you hire your staff?” Caroline wondered.

“The deck of a privateer in Dunquerque. I once had a friend in the business, one Jean Bart, who doted on me, and wanted to see that I was well looked after.” Eliza turned her attentions back to Martin. “Could you recognize those two men if you saw them again?”

“My lady, they had covered themselves in long dark hooded robes, such as friars wear, and the hoods were drawn up over their heads. I wager we might find those robes discarded on the ground within a musket-shot of where we now stand—”

“And the assassins will have blended in among the funeral-guests before we get back to the Palace,” Eliza concluded.

“More than likely,” Caroline agreed; then: “I beg your pardon, did you say assassins!?”

“THE LETTER BY which Princess Caroline summoned me was sealed in the presence of Enoch Root, and put into his hand before the wax had cooled. He traversed the west road from here to Amsterdam in no particular haste—but without let or delay. A day after, he was in Scheveningen, and three days after that, in London. A wait of one week sufficed to get him aboard a New York–bound ship. The voyage was not particularly lengthy. After no more than a night’s rest on the island of Manhattan he proceeded on horseback to Boston. He delivered the message into my hand on the day he arrived. It had never left his person since the moment it was sealed in the Leine Schloß.” The strange old Englishman nodded down the leafy prospect of the Herrenhäuser Allee toward the smoky bulk of Hanover’s fortifications.

The young baron, noting that he had fallen a pace behind, hurried along to draw abreast. “Did you and Enoch—I call him Enoch, for he is an old friend of my family—”

“I thought he was supposed to be a member of your family, long ago, when he affected a different name.”

“That is another conversation for another day,” said the Baron, in good English. “I say, did you and Enoch discuss the matter aloud, in the presence of others, in Boston?”

“In a tavern. But we were discreet. I did not mention the author of the letter even to my own wife. I told her only that someone of great importance had asked for me.”

“What of the letter itself?”

“That’s a different matter. Mr. Root did allow some persons to see the Seal. So it could be inferred that I had been summoned from Hanover.”

“Pray continue.”

“Well, ’tis very simple. I was aboard Minerva that very night. We were held back by contrary winds for a month. Then one day a whole bloody pirate-fleet descended upon us. My god, what a thing it was. In all my days I have never lived through such a—”

Johann von Hacklheber, sensing that his Narrator was about to wax discursive, interrupted: “Pirates are said to be as common along the New England coast as fleas on a dog.”

“Yes, we had some of that type, too,” said Daniel Waterhouse, strangely enthusiastic. “Caitiffs in row-boats. But we shook those off easily. I am referring to a literal fleet of formidable pirate-ships, under a disaffected British sea-captain named Edward Teach—”

“Blackbeard!” said Johann, before he could stop himself.

“You have heard of him.”

“He has already been the subject of picaroon-romances, which are sold by the barrel-load at the book-fair in Leipzig. Not that I would ever read such a thing,” Johann said, and then waited tensely, fearing that this Daniel Waterhouse was the sort who would miss the jest, and assume he was being a snotty little baron. But the old man caught it, and batted it back: “In your researches, have you learnt that this Blackbeard is aligned with Jacobite interests?”

“I know that his flagship is christened Queen Anne’s Revenge, and I collected, from this, that he had some axe to grind.”

“He assaulted the ship I was on—Minerva—and sacrificed one and possibly two ships of his fleet to get at me.”

“To get at Minerva, you mean, or—”

“To get at me, I say. He asked for me by name. And any other sea-captain would have given me up; but Otto van Hoek would not give a pirate a wormy biscuit, much less a passenger.”

“Now, if I may play devil’s advocate,” Johann said, “for Enoch to come into this Bostown, which you describe as a sort of backwoods encampment, waving a document with a Hanoverian seal, must have drawn attention. Your departure must have been the talk of the town.”

“No doubt they are talking about it still.”

“In every port are men of low character who pass along such intelligence to criminals, pirates, and the like. You said that a whole month elapsed while you were becalmed—”

“I should rather call it, ‘bestormed,’ but yes.”

“That is more than enough time for word to have spread to every pirate-cove in New England. This Teach must have heard the news, and surmised that you were a man of importance, who might be held for ransom.”

“This is what I was telling myself all the way across the Atlantic, to calm my nerves,” Daniel said. “I even trained myself to overlook the chief fault in that hypothesis, which is that, outside of Barbary, pirates do not, as a rule, hold hostages for ransom, and especially not old men who are likely to drop dead at a moment’s notice. But when I reached London, efforts were made to blast me, or someone close to me, to pieces. And during the months since, I have had intelligence from two distinct sources, one high, one low, that there is, here in Hanover, a spy who passes information to the Jacobites in London.”

“I should like to know more concerning that,” said Johann, who had been trying a moment ago to soothe the old Englishman’s ridiculous fears, and now found himself in need of some soothing.

“An old acquaintance of mine—”

“Acquaintance, but not friend?”

“We are such old friends that we refuse to speak to each other for decades at a time. An Infernal Device, packed with gunpowder, exploded. It might have been meant for me, for him, or for both of us. He has begun to investigate the matter using his own resources—and you may be assured that his resources vastly exceed mine in almost every respect. He has heard that highly placed Jacobites—”

“Bolingbroke?”

“—highly placed Jacobites are receiving information from a source close to the Electoral Crown—someone who, to judge from the timeliness and accuracy of his despatches, comes and goes freely in the Leine Schloß and in Herrenhausen Palace.”

“You said that you had a low as well as a high source?”

“I know a man with many connections among London’s Flash: coiners, Black-guards, et cetera—the same element from which Blackbeard recruits his seamen and what I shall politely call his ‘longshoremen.’ ”

“You trust such a man?”

“Unaccountably, irrationally, inadvisably, I do. I am his father confessor. He is my disciple and bodyguard. It is another conversation for another day—”

“Touché.”

“This fellow has made inquiries. He has found evidence that the order to hunt me down was despatched to Ed Teach from London.”

“I did not think pirates took orders from London.”

“Oh, on the contrary, it is an ancient, celebrated practice.”

“So by combining these data you have settled upon a hypothesis that some spy here became aware of the letter that her royal highness sent to you via Enoch Root; that this spy sent word to an important Jacobite in London; who then sent a despatch to Ed Teach off the coast of Massachusetts, using some London Black-guard as his Mercury.”

“That is my hypothesis, admirably stated.”

“It is a good one. I have one question only.”

“Yes?”

“Why are we walking down the Herrenhäuser Allee in the wee hours of the morning?”

“What, the sun’s been up for hours!”

“My question still stands.”

“Do you know why I came to Hanover?”

“Certainly not for the funeral, as Sophie was alive when you got here. If memory serves, you were a part of the delegation that brought Sophie the letter that is said to have killed her.”

“I haven’t heard anyone say that!”

“Its contents are said to have been so vexatious as to have struck the Electress dead on the spot.”

“The Viscount Bolingbroke is known to have a genius for such word-play,” Daniel mused, “and he probably penned it. But it is neither here nor there. Yes, I was included in the delegation, as a token Whig. No doubt you have already met my Tory counterparts.”

“I have endured that honor. Again, why are we walking down the Herrenhäuser Allee at this time?”

“It occurred to me, on the journey hither from London, that if the Jacobites did have a spy in Hanover, why then my Tory companions would make every effort to arrange a tryst with him, or her. So I have been alert since we arrived—while spreading the rumor, and fostering the illusion, that I was senile, and deaf to boot. Yester evening, at dinner, I heard two of the Tories asking questions of a minor Hanoverian noble: what is that park that extends from the Herrenhäuser Allee north and west to the banks of the Leine? Is it solid ground, or marsh? Are there any notable landmarks, such as great trees or—”

“There is a noble oak-tree just ahead and to the right,” Johann remarked.

“I know there is, for that’s just what this Hanoverian said.”

“So you guessed that they were arranging a spy-tryst, and needed to choose a place. But how did you settle upon such a horrid time of day?”

“The entire delegation shall attend the funeral. Immediately after, we depart for London. This was the only possible time.”

“I hope you are right.”

“I know I am.”

“How do you know it?”

“I left word with the servants that I wanted to be awakened at the same time as the other Englishmen. A servant woke me up at dawn.”

With that Daniel Waterhouse cut sharply in front of Johann von Hacklheber, forcing the younger man to shorten his stride. Daniel stepped off the central road of the Allee and passed between two of the lime trees that screened it from the narrower paths to either side. Johann followed him; and as he did, he glanced down the length of the road and saw a lone man on horseback approaching from the direction of Hanover.

Daniel had already hiked off into the adjoining park and found a winding lead between shrubs and trees. Johann followed him for a minute or so, until his peripheral vision was darkened by the crown of an enormous oak. In the distance he could hear voices conversing, not in German. It struck his ear rather like a sheet of tin being wobbled.

He nearly tripped over Daniel, who had squatted down behind a bush. Johann followed his example, and then his gaze. Gathered a stone’s throw away beneath the spreading limbs of the oak, and looking for all the world like artists’ models posing for a pastoral scene, were three of the English Tories who had come with Daniel from London.

“Sir, my admiration for your work is mingled with wonder that a man of your age and dignity is out doing things like this.”

Daniel turned to look him in the eye; and his creased face was grave and calm in the morning light. He looked nothing like the daft codger who had come to dinner yesterday evening and embarrassed the other English by dribbling wine down his shirt-front.

“Listen to me. I did not wish to be summoned by your Princess. Summoned, I did not wish to come. But having been summoned, and having come, I mean to give a good account of myself. That’s how I was taught by my father, and the men of his age who slew Kings and swept away not merely Governments but whole Systems of Thought, like Khans of the Mind. I would have my son in Boston know of my doings, and be proud of them, and carry my ways forward to another generation on another continent. Any opponent who does not know this about me, stands at a grave disadvantage; a disadvantage I am not above profiting from.”

It was then that the hoof-beats out on the road turned into soft thuds as the lone rider from Hanover drove his mount off the beaten track and into the park. He was headed directly for the oak. At a glance they could see he was richly attired, hence, probably had begun his ride in the Leine Schloß. On a second look Johann recognized him. He crouched down lower and spoke into Daniel’s ear: “That is the Englishman—supposedly a staunch Whig—Harold Braithwaite.”

“IT SEEMS SO OBVIOUS in retrospect,” Johann lamented, a quarter of an hour later, after they had stolen back through the park to the Allee, and begun walking back toward Herrenhausen Palace.

“Great discoveries always do,” Daniel said, and shrugged. “Ask me some day how I feel about the Inverse Square Law.”

“He and his wife came here, what, five years ago, just as things began to go awry for the Whig Juncto. Oxford and Bolingbroke were plotting the Tory resurgence, getting the Queen’s ear—as I recall, there had been a run on the Bank of England, occasioned by rumors of a Jacobite uprising in Scotland.”

“Is that what Braithwaite said when he showed up here penniless? That he’d been ruined in the bank run?”

“He mentioned that the Mobb had rioted against the Bank.”

“That it did. But this has little to do with Braithwaite. He is the sort of Englishman who is exported with great enthusiasm by his countrymen.”

“There were rumors—”

“Just enough, I am certain, to make him out as a saucy picaroon, and get him invited to dinner.”

“Indeed.”

“The true story is depressingly familiar. He spent his inheritance gambling. Then he became a highwayman—not a very good one, for on his first outing he scuffled with one of his victims, and gashed him with a cutlass. The wound suppurated, the victim died, the victim’s family—Tories, who had money—posted a reward so high that every thief-taker in London cleared his calendar. Braithwaite fled the Isle, perhaps the only prudent thing he has ever done.”

“He painted himself as an arch-Whig.”

“In that there was some truth, for his oppressors were Tories. But he has no principles whatever.”

“That much is now proved. But why would such a man act as a spy for the Tory Lords?”

“His legal situation is awkward. This means he might benefit enormously from some adroit manipulation of certain affairs in London. He must make his peace with whatever Faction has the power to assist him; behold, the Whigs are out, and the Tories are in.”

“What did you think of the letter?” Johann asked; a non sequitur that prompted Daniel to twitch his head around. They had come so close to the end of the path that they could smell the green fruit in the orangerie, and hear the stables and kitchens awakening: sharp crisp sounds hushed and muffled by the distant teeming of the great fountain.

“What do you mean, mein Herr?” Daniel asked, slipping unconsciously into etiquette now that they were in earshot of a palace. For they had moved off the Allee and were passing between stables toward the parterres at the garden’s northern end, where a few early-rising nobles were already out stretching their legs.

Johann continued, “I mean, how was it written—the letter you received from Caroline? Was it in French?”

“No, English.”

“Good English?”

“Oh yes, very proper. I see where you are going now.”

“If it was in proper English, then her English tutor must have helped her write it. And that is Mrs. Braithwaite.”

“It shall be most awkward,” Daniel pointed out, “if the mistress of the Prince of Wales proves to be a spy for men who are dead set against his family acquiring the Crown.”

“I know the woman. She is immoral but not malicious, if you know what I mean. After she helped Caroline write that letter, she probably mentioned it, innocently, to her husband, who, as we have seen, is the true spy.”

“Difficult to dispose of him, without a scandal in the household—” Daniel observed.

“Oh, not really,” Johann murmured.

Now that they had entered the garden, his notice had been drawn by a coach and four emerging from the hill of mist that shrouded the environs of the great fountain. As its outlines became more distinct, he remarked, “That looks like my mother’s carriage,” and then, “but the lady looking out the window, there, is not my mother but Princess Caroline. Odd for them to ride, when they could walk. I shall go and bid them good morning.”

“And I shall excuse myself,” said Daniel Waterhouse, “as there is no plausible excuse for me to be seen in such company.”

Princess Caroline’s Bedchamber,
Herrenhausen Palace

LATER THAT MORNING

“MRS. BRAITHWAITE, I SHALL depend on you to have the ivory thing near to hand at all times,” said Princess Caroline.

“I know just where it is, my lady.” Henrietta Braithwaite rose from the stool where she had been fussing with the Princess’s wig, twirled herself about in beautiful and attention-getting style, and crossed the room to where a selection of implements was arranged on a tabletop. These could have been mistaken for the trade-tools of a cook, physician, or torturer, save for the fact that the surface on which they rested was a slab of polished pink marble, topping a white-and-gilt dressing-table-cum-sculpture done up in the new, hyper-Barock style named Rokoko. It was adorned, for example, with several cherubs, bows drawn, eyes a-squint as they drew beads on unseen targets, butt-cheeks polished to a luster with jeweler’s rouge. It had, in other words, all the earmarks of a gift that had been sent to the Princess by someone with a lot of money who did not know her very well. On it were diverse mortars and pestles for compounding makeups; trowels, spatulas, and brushes for inflicting it; and certain objects whose purposes were not so obvious. Henrietta picked up a long-handled implement whose business end consisted of a gently curved tongue of polished ivory, stained pink around the edges from use. “See to it that it has not become stiff, as sometimes happens when these things get old,” Caroline commanded, “and inspect it for any rough edges—last time, I got an ugly welt.”

“Yes, my lady,” said Mrs. Braithwaite. With a curtsey, she turned her back on the Princess. Three other ladies-in-waiting were engineering her clothes, hair, and jewelry, some of which were already mounted on Caroline, others on wooden effigies. The Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm sat across from her, keeping her company. She was already dressed, albeit more simply. For anyone below the rank of Princess, dressing for mourning could be a simple undertaking. Eliza’s yellow hair was screened behind a fontange of stiff black lace and the rest of her was in black silk. It was expensive and well executed as such costumes went, but still deserved the name traditionally given to such garments: weeds.

“My son has reprimanded me,” announced the Duchess.

Caroline gasped and put a hand to the base of her throat in a gesture of mock outrage, as she understood that Eliza was being facetious. Henrietta Braithwaite, who knew the Duchess only by gossip, had to turn around and look to discern as much. Then, realizing she had been obvious, Henrietta turned back to the work at hand: running her fingertips over the ivory tool, inspecting for rough places.

“And why would such a well-brought-up young man speak to his mother so?” Caroline demanded.

The Duchess leaned closer, and spoke a bit more softly. All of the ladies in the room suddenly found ways to do whatever they were doing in nearly perfect silence. On the pretext of needing better light, Henrietta Braithwaite turned towards a window, bringing one ear to bear upon the target.

“I am sorry!” the Duchess said. “Until he told me, I had no idea that I had stupidly interrupted something! I thought I had found you alone in the garden.”

“You did find me alone—but only because, when he heard a carriage approaching, he took flight, not knowing it was only you.”

“Isn’t that just like a mother! Interrupting her son at such a moment! You should have shooed me away!”

“Oh, no, it is perfectly all right!” the Princess assured her. “We were never truly alone anyway, for I thought I could hear one or two people skulking about.”

“Spies!?”

“Oh, no, Eliza, this is not some Byzantine, spy-infested court such as Versailles. Doubtless they were some guests, here for the funeral, who simply forgot their manners.”

“Those must be the ones my dogs barked at. Naughty dogs!”

“It is nothing. This evening, at dusk, Sophie shall be at rest across the way. The English delegation, and most of the noble and royal visitors, will have departed. Then he and I shall meet where we met this morning, and resume where we left off.”

“I thought my son seemed…frustrated.”

“It is good for men to be frustrated,” Caroline announced, “that is when they behave in the manner that is most pleasing to us, with beautiful displays of daring and gallantry.”

The Duchess considered this for a long time before answering, “There is truth in that, your royal highness. But some day when we have more time I might tell you a tale of one whose frustration became perhaps too enormous.”

“What did he do then?”

“Behaved in a manner that was perhaps a bit over-daring, and too gallant, and kept it up for rather too long.”

“All for you, Eliza?”

Again this had to be considered. Eliza, who had shown no reluctance to discuss Caroline’s affairs of the heart in front of an audience, was suddenly reticent. “At the beginning, perhaps it was all for me. As it went on and on—it is difficult to say. He became rich, and powerful after a fashion. Perhaps he then began to act out of a desire for worldly increase.”

“So out of love for you, he did deeds of phantastickal gallantry and daring over many years—then went on to become rich and powerful? Why haven’t you married him yet?”

“It is complicated. Some day you will understand.”

“I see that my words have struck deeply into your heart, Eliza, for all of a sudden you are patronizing me.” Caroline said this cheerfully enough.

“Please forgive me, your royal highness.”

They were into it now.

“I do know something of complications—not a hundredth of what you do—and I know that there is always a way to surmount them. Do you love him?”

“The man I spoke of?”

“Is there any other man under discussion?”

“I believe that I did love him once, when he had nothing.”

“Nothing except you?”

“Me, a sword, and a horse. It was later, when he began to conceive absurd schemes for getting things, that we fell out.”

“Why should he concern himself with getting when he had you?”

“That is what I tried to tell him. It hurt my feelings, in a way!”

“If half the stories are true, you could have made more than enough to support yourself and him as well—ah, there’s the rub—it was masculine pride, wasn’t it?”

“That, and a perverse desire to better himself—to prove he was worthy of me, by becoming more like me. What he did not understand—and what I could not tell him—was that I loved him precisely because he was unlike me.”

“Why don’t you tell him now? Is he coming to the funeral?”

“Oh, no no no! You don’t understand, highness, I do not speak of recent events. This happened thirty years ago. I’ve not seen him since. And be assured he is not attending the funeral!”

“Thirty years.”

“Yes.”

“Thirty years.”

“….”

“THIRTY YEARS! Longer than I have been alive. The whole time I have known you, this has been going on!”

“I should not say anything was ‘going on.’ It is an episode of my girlhood, forgotten.”

“Yes, I can see how well you have forgotten it.”

“….”

“Where is this man? England?”

“Two people can be a world apart, even when both are in the same city—”

“He’s in London!? And you have done nothing!?”

“Your royal highness—”

“Well, this is another good reason I must go there and become Princess of Wales, or Queen as the case may be, so that I can wield my monarchical powers to patch up your love life.”

“I beg you not to—” said the Duchess, looking thoroughly rattled for the first time. Then she stopped, for there had been an interruption.

“The rite is about to begin, your royal highness,” announced Henrietta Braithwaite, gazing out a window over a crowd in black wool and black silk, funneling itself toward the entrance of the family chapel. She turned to face the Princess, then cast her eyes down in submission, and held up the ivory tool. “This is smooth,” she added. “Be assured that no matter how many times we are forced to use it, your royal highness may go out this evening perfectly unmarked.”

“Henrietta,” said the Princess, “my life would not be the same without you.” An ambiguous statement—but Mrs. Braithwaite chose the most flattering interpretation, and responded with a curtsey and even a blush.

“I HAVE A PROBLEM, MADAME,” said the dark lean figure who had marred Eliza’s peripheral vision for the last quarter-hour, “and you have an opportunity.”

“Ugh, not another one!” Eliza said, and turned finally to confront this fellow, who had been following her around like a doppelgänger despite her efforts to shake him off in the crowd of mourners.

They were outside the Palace of Herrenhausen, among the parterres of the northern end of the garden. Inside the palace was a private chapel, not nearly large enough to contain all of the mourners. Sophie’s funeral service had begun an hour ago. Caroline and other members of the family were within; the others were scattered like a flock of black doves across the white gravel of the paths.

In the corner of her eye Eliza had noticed that this troublesome man was dressed in black, and that his wig was white; but the same was true of every man here. Now, looking him squarely in the face for the first time, she saw that the white mane, though it was certainly fake, was no affectation. He was quite old.

“Even on the brightest days I have no desire to be pestered by men with opportunities. On a day like this—”

“It has to do with our absent friend.”

Eliza was almost certain this meant Leibniz. He had not arrived yet. The remarks that several courtiers had made concerning his absence were like wisps of smoke concealing an underlying fire of gossip. Who could this fellow be, then? An old Englishman who knew her, and was a friend of the Doctor—

“Dr. Waterhouse.”

He lowered his eyelids and bowed.

“It has been—?”

“To judge from appearances, a hundred years for me, and half an hour for you. If you prefer to go by calendars, the answer is twenty-five years or so.”

“Why have you not come to call on me at Leicester House?”

“Before I received your summons, I accepted one from another Lady,” Daniel said, glancing toward the Chapel entrance, “and it has kept me busy. I do hope you will forgive my rudeness.”

“Which rudeness? Not calling on me? Or pursuing me with an opportunity?”

“If you are discomposed by it, consider that I am acting as a proxy for the Doctor himself.”

“When I first met the Doctor he was at work on a scheme: a windmill to pump water from the mines of the Harz,” Eliza recalled fondly. “He hoped they would then produce enough silver to finance his world-library-cum-logic-mill.”

“Odd that you should say so. When I first met him, which was at least ten years before you did, he was working on the mill itself. Then he got distracted by the calculus.”

“What I am trying to say to you, in a gentle way, sir, is that—”

“The Doctor’s schemes are mad? Yes, I had already taken your meaning.”

“As much as I love the Doctor and his philosophy, and as much as you do—”

“Stipulated,” said the old man, and smiled warmly, pressing his lips together to hide whatever dental wreckage might be underneath.

“If he cannot make his project succeed with the resources of the Tsar at his back, what use am I?”

“It is of this that I wish to speak to you,” Daniel began. But the doors to the family chapel now swung open. Sophie’s coffin was borne out by a lot of Kings and Electors and Dukes.

They set it on a gun carriage, drawn by a single black horse. The rest of the family came out of the chapel. The coffin and carriage set out, followed by all of the mourners who were fit enough to accompany Sophie on her last walk. A procession took shape, moving southwards down the central axis of the garden towards the great fountain. Daniel strolled along at the rear of the column. Presently Eliza found him.

Daniel said, “You have probably guessed that Leibniz’s absence has to do with the work that he is doing for the Tsar. I believe that the Doctor is in St. Petersburg now.”

“Then no further explanation for his absence is wanted,” Eliza said. “For news to reach him there, and for him to make the journey back, when there’s a war on between the Russians and the Swedes—”

“Impossible,” Daniel agreed. “And you have not even addressed the question of whether he would be allowed to leave.”

A pause, a few steps down the gravel path, before Eliza answered, in a different voice altogether: “Why shouldn’t he be allowed to leave?”

“The Tsar is not renowned for his patience. He wants to see something that actually works.”

“Then our friend may be in grave difficulties indeed.”

“Not so very grave. I have been attending to it.”

“In London?”

“Yes. The Marquis of Ravenscar has supplied funding to erect a Court of Technologickal Arts in Clerkenwell.”

“Why?” Eliza asked sharply, thus proving that she knew something of the Marquis.

“Longitude. He hopes that some invention for discovering the Longitude shall be devised by the men who toil in this Court.”

“And they are—?”

“The most ingenious horologists, organ-makers, goldsmiths, mechanicks, and makers of theatrickal Machinery in all of Christendom.”

The procession had reached the plaza surrounding the great fountain, which would probably be described in any number of diaries this evening as howling with grief, and filling the heavens with its tears. They made a slow orbit around it, reversing their direction, and then began to trudge back toward the Palace. Eliza’s black fontange trapped some fountain-mist and began to wilt.

“If Leibniz is trapped between Peter the Great at one end, and Roger Comstock at the other, I fear he is beyond your help, or mine,” Eliza said.

“It is not so dire. What is wanted is not capital but financing.”

“Something in the nature of a bridge loan?”

“Possibly. Or, perhaps, an independent investment in an allied enterprise.”

“I am waiting,” said Eliza with the diction of one who is biting on a musket-ball waiting for the barber to saw her leg off.

“Your expertise with commodities is celebrated.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know of Bridewell—where whores are sent to pound hemp and pick oakum.”

“Yes?”

“To build the Logic Mill we shall need a large, inexpensive force of workers to carry out certain operations of a repetitive nature. We have made discreet inquiries among the wardens of Bridewell. We are optimistic that an arrangement can be made to put those women to work at a new task. No longer will they produce hemp.”

“And so the price of hemp will rise,” Eliza concluded. “This is not an investment opportunity but more in the nature of a Hot Tip, sir. And a reminder, as if I wanted one, of why Natural Philosophers are not often seen haunting the ’Change—except when one has been put in the pillory by his creditors.”

“If the ‘hot tip’ makes you money, why, then, you might be able to invest in—”

“Stop—don’t say it—I already know: The Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire.”

“Indeed, madame.”

“It is beyond astonishing. After all these years, we have come full circle: the Doctor wants me to invest in an amazing new device for pumping water out of mines!”

“In truth, the Doctor knows very little of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire.”

Now there was another interruption in their discourse as the procession met and absorbed the mourners who had stayed behind at the Palace. Several of these had boarded sedan chairs or carriages, which enlarged and enlivened the procession. A diversion round one wing of the Palace got them out of Sophie’s great garden. The main road from Hanover westwards ran across the other front of the Palace. They crossed over it directly, but slowly, for a crowd of common people of Hanover had come out to stand here and pay their respects to their Sovereign. Once again, Eliza found Daniel in the crowd.

“Then this is not a silver-mining scheme? For I have had enough—”

“As have I, madame,” Daniel returned.

“Tin-mining I might consider, for Cornwall is famed for it.”

“And lead, and others as well. But this is not about silver, tin, lead, or any other metals, noble or base.”

“Coal?”

“Nay, ’tis not a question of any sort of mining! I speak to you rather of Power.”

“It is a frequent topic of conversation in many settings high and low,” Eliza observed, glancing in the direction of the King of Prussia. He was walking arm in arm with Caroline. They were interrupted by a pair of Prussian ladies, probably Countesses or something, who threw themselves at Caroline and took turns pressing their soggy cheeks against hers several times each. Caroline exchanged politenesses with them, and then made her escape, as the gun-carriage had finally plunged across the road and entered the older and smaller garden that spread away from the Palace on that side. The crowd of mourners, pursuing the coffin, thinned out suddenly. Caroline turned around and found Henrietta Braithwaite in formation behind her. The Princess thrust her face forward, adopting the pose of a ship’s figurehead, and closed her eyes. Mrs. Braithwaite stepped in close, raised up the implement with the curved ivory blade, and scraped it quickly down Caroline’s left cheek, then her right, shaving off the cloud of tear-caked face-powder, and the slick of rouge, that had been deposited by the mourners. Caroline opened her eyes, mouthed “Danke schön,” and spun away. Mrs. Braithwaite wiped the ivory clean with a rag that had already seen a lot of use today.

“I am using the word Power in a novel sense,” Daniel explained, when the milling and jostling of the crowd had brought him and Eliza together once more. By this time they were halfway along the path that ran from the main door of Herrenhausen Palace straight up the middle of the Berggarten (as this park was called) to an extremely squat and heavy Doric temple that sat in the middle, guarded and shaded by fine old trees.

Daniel continued, “I use it in a mechanickal sense—to mean a sort of general ability to effect change, in a measurable way. Pumping water out of mines is one thing to spend Power on, but if you had a fund of such Power you might put it to other uses as well.”

“Such as pounding hemp?”

“Or moving the parts of a Logic Mill. Or other purposes we have as yet failed to imagine. Once this Idea or conception of Power has entered your mind, madame, you shall find it difficult to shake off. Everywhere you look you shall see opportunities to put Power to use; and you shall see so many enterprises that suffer from a want of Power that you shall wonder how we have gotten along without it.”

“There is much to consider in your discourse, Doctor, and little leisure, here and now, to consider it. I would be alone now with my grief for Sophie.”

“And I would too, madame, and I thank you.”

“When we are back in London I should like to see this Court in Clerkenwell, and hear more of your plans for the women of Bridewell.”

They had reached the stone temple, and pooled round it. The building was windowless. A pair of doors in the front gave entry to private crypts within; but those were storage for dead cousins and stillborns. The doors were not used today. In the front portico two immense slabs had been set into the floor, cut with the names of Johann Friedrich—the one who had brought Leibniz to Hanover—and Ernst August, Sophie’s late husband. A fresh rectangular hole, of equal size, had recently been let into the floor, and a grave dug in the earth beneath it. A slab bearing Sophie’s name lay to one side, ready.

The rest of the proceedings, then, were of an obvious nature. All grieved, some more sincerely than others, none more so than Caroline. But when the grave had been filled in, with handfuls of dirt from the family, and shovel-loads from almost as sad laborers, Caroline could be seen dusting the dirt from her hands, and uttering some witticism that caused several around her to erupt in shocked and shocking laughter. The procession made its way back to Herrenhausen in a gradually improving mood. None was gayer than Princess Caroline. But only Henrietta and a few others knew that she had something to look forward to.

THE SOLSTICIAL DAY HAD STRETCHED into its eighteenth hour. The English delegation had stayed long past its scheduled date of return so that they could represent Her Britannic Majesty at the funeral, and in doing so they had emptied their purses and worn out what little welcome they had enjoyed to begin with. With a celerity that was conspicuous, verging on rude, they got out of town, banging away along the west-road in a train of carriages and baggage-carts, hoping there’d be enough daylight to reach the inn at Stadthagen.

They had left behind one of their number, a frail codger, who was rumored to have been an indifferently clever chap in his prime, but who now was sadly far gone, and probably never should have attempted such a journey in the first place. He had become debilitated by the long journey to Hanover and was in no condition to make a forced march back to the Dutch coast. Some kind-hearted member of the Hanoverian court had stepped in and offered to arrange a slow and easy return journey for this man, one Dr. Waterhouse, and even to send him in a coach full of nurses and physicians if need be. The other English had accepted this proffer hastily, and with more than a few winks and smirks—seeing it as a calculated attempt by some nobody to get himself Noticed in London.

More than half of the other noble and royal funeral-guests had already gone, many headed eastwards toward Braunschweig, Brandenburg, and Prussia, others going back to wherever Sophie had family, friends, or admirers, which meant radiating to all points of the compass.

Most of those who had stayed behind at Herrenhausen had done so for a reason. That reason was George Louis, Elector of Hanover, out from under his mother’s thumb at last, and next in line to the British throne. And so in spite of the long hours of afternoon sun, the mood of the place had gone just a bit chilly.

Or so it seemed to Baron Johann von Hacklheber as he strolled through the garden, on another sort of mission entirely. Like a black bumblebee he was zigzagging from one flower-bed to the next. He was gathering a bouquet to award to his lady love whenever she showed up. The fundamental laws of the universe governing young men waiting for young ladies applied here as everywhere else, and consequently it was becoming a very large arrangement. Some while ago it had grown too large for one person to hold. In fact it had now become a sort of flower-dump atop the pedestal of a conveniently located statue. Every time Johann added to the pile, he would say a little prayer to Venus—for she was the pedestal’s tenant—and look up at the Palace of Herrenhausen, and lock his gaze on a window in the west wing where Caroline was being fussed over by her attendants. As long as the lace curtains remained drawn, she was a work in progress. So Johann would step back, examine the flower-pile, and ponder the balance of its colors and the variety of its shapes. He would hold an imaginary colloquy with the mute and unhelpful Venus. Then he would launch out in search of the one blossom that would make it perfect. The garden was parted into polygons—triangles and quadrilaterals mostly—and as the wait stretched out he measured with his strides many of their perimeters. A gardener of a suspicious temperament, observing his movements from a distance, might think he was some sort of spy performing horticultural espionage.

Anyone observing him more closely, though, would note that he spent more time gazing outwards toward the perimeter than in on the flower-beds. On the road that surrounded the whole garden, along the bank of the enclosing canal, a sparse but relentless traffic of riders went pointlessly to and fro on expensive horses. Mostly they traveled in groups of two and three. Spurs were jingling all round. Their sound infiltrated the garden’s humid fragrant air like midsummer færy-bells. When groups met, murmuring picked up where jingling left off. Someone unaccustomed to Courts in general, and Herrenhausen in particular, would have found it as annoying as it was mysterious. Johann von Hacklheber was used to it, understanding that courtiers literally had no other way to spend their lives. Once more he was put in mind of the wisdom Sophie had shown in situating the riding-path on the extreme frontier of the garden—shouldering all equestrian conspirators out away from the part she loved.

Spotting a likely rosebud, he drew his left hand up the outside of his thigh, black wool purring under his fingertips, and over the line of tiny silver buckles that fastened his rapier’s black leather scabbard to the end of a broad black leather strap—a baldric, it was called—slung diagonally over his body. Continuing up and back, his hand passed under the skirt of his black wool coat, peeling the hem up to expose its black satin lining. He bent his elbow and supinated his wrist. The back of his hand glided up his buttock and over the black leather belt that kept his breeches from falling down, and stopped above his left kidney. He closed his hand on something hard: the handle of his dagger, which lived in an angled scabbard fastened to his belt at the base of his spine. An outward movement of his elbow drew it from its sheath. He got it out in front of him smartly before his coat-skirts could settle back upon the blade and be damaged by it. This precaution would not have been necessary with many daggers of recent make, which were designed for poking, parrying, and nail-paring, and had little to nothing in the way of a cutting edge. Johann owned several such. But all of them were gloriously decorative, and so did not go well with the funeral-weeds he wore today. The same was true of his collection of swords, which was neither especially large nor small compared to those of other gentlemen. But in the back of his wardrobe he did have this old set, which he’d inherited from a great-uncle. It had been made in Italy at least a hundred years ago when styles of sword-fighting, and hence of weapon-making, had been rather different. The rapier was huge. Its blade was a good eight inches longer than his arm, and somewhat broader than was common today, bringing its weight near the practical limit of a one-handed weapon. The edge had been notched in practice or combat, and re-ground, so many times that the blade no longer looked straight, but instead, as one sighted down it, rambled from side to side.

But in this it had nothing on the dagger, which was a serpentine blade of watered steel, astonishingly sharp on both edges. This style had become necessary when some Italian fighters, more sophisticated than Johann would ever be, had learnt the trick of reaching out with one hand to grab the blade of the foe’s dagger. The tactic actually worked, if the grip was firm and the dagger’s blade was straight; but it was most inadvisable to try it with a dagger such as this one. At any rate, the hilts of this dagger and this rapier were comparatively simple: Renaissance rather than Barock, and a world away from Rokoko. The scabbards were as plain as they could be, being simple undecorated black leather. Johann had belted them on this morning. Round midday he had finally stopped whacking the huge scabbard against tables’ legs and funeral-guests’ ankles. Now he was using the dagger to harvest flowers.

The light now came predominantly from the orange western sky, not the direct rays of the sun. The bouquet had to be re-examined in this new light. Johann returned to Venus, sheathing the serpentine dagger with extreme caution, and devoted a few moments to sifting through the pile of blossoms he’d made. Then he looked back at the palace, more out of habit than hope. But he noticed that clear orange sky-light was now shining in one side of Caroline’s apartment and out the other. The sheers had been drawn back from the windows; she was on her way. In a panic—convinced, suddenly, that all his flower-hunting efforts had been misspent—Johann rummaged through his harvest and drew out a generous arm-load of flowers that caught his fancy. He left the remainder as a sacrifice to the love-goddess and began moving toward the compound of the Teufelsbaum in the comical gait of one who is trying to put distance behind him as quickly as possible without breaking into a run. For there was only one portal in the triangular fence that imprisoned the serpent-like tree, and it was a good distance from here; meanwhile a carriage had set out from the palace stables and was moving down the garden path at a healthy clip. God help him if he were late.

Johann reached the iron gate with some moments to spare and slipped through it into the realm of the Teufelsbaum, which was an hour deeper into twilight than the rest of the garden. Having passed through, he about-faced, thrust his head back out over the path, and turned it to look both ways, making sure that no evening stroller had seen him entering the place where the Princess would soon arrive for two hours’ silent and solitary meditation.

Satisfied that no one was there, he drew back and closed the gate, carefully, so as not to make a clang. And there he stood, at attention, in the pose of a musketeer at port arms, save that he cradled a bouquet instead of a weapon. Presently a single great draught-horse boomed around the corner, constrained between a pair of long stout carriage-poles, which led back to a little coach. The driver had a terse exchange of noises with the horse. The horse slowed, passed the gate, stopped, and then (for he’d gone a bit too far, and the driver was remonstrating) backed up until the carriage’s side door was aligned with the iron gate. Quelled, the driver now set the brake, perhaps showing an excess of prudence. Johann stepped forward and opened the iron gate. Then he reached up to unlatch the carriage’s side door.

He swung it open to reveal a pair of mastiffs.

Their eyes were rolling and bulging. Their nostrils were seething, as each was being straddled by a strong man with both hands clasped around its muzzle to keep it from barking. Johann stepped out of the way. The dogs were launched.

Neither Scylla nor Charybdis appeared to touch the ground until they were twenty feet inside the gate. They bounded into the Teufelsbaum, bashing branches out of the way like runaway gun-carriages. Only after they had disappeared did they think to bark, and then as an afterthought. These were not hunters, bred to bay. They were workers.

On the path that ran along the back of the plot, hooves were cantering—then they changed over to a gallop. Johann looked up to the intersection just in time to see the rider flash across drawing a cutlass. It was one of his Leipziger cousins. From the back of the Teufelsbaum came a welter of furious barking and a yelp of pain. The two dog-wranglers—Eliza’s footmen—dove out the open door and ran after the dogs. Johann dropped his bouquet, for it had served its purpose, and followed them. He thought of drawing his rapier, but it would get hung up in the unfathomable windings of those branches. So he drew his dagger instead, and transferred it to his right hand.

He need not have bothered. By the time he stumbled to the back fence, the matter had been concluded. One of the dogs—Johann could not tell them apart in this light—was back in the corner, attending to a long dark robe that had fallen to the ground. On the off chance that the garment was a foe, he was doing battle with it. And on the assumption that it was a vertebrate, he was shaking it back and forth in a bid to crack its spinal column like a bullwhip.

The other dog was being soothed and attended to by one of the footmen—this had suffered a diagonal gash across the muzzle, which was bleeding a lot, though it was not an especially serious wound.

The second footman was kneeling beside a man in a dark robe who lay sprawled on his stomach near the fence. This footman must have been a student of anatomy, for with both hands he was methodically driving a dagger with a foot-long blade into diverse carefully selected locations in the fallen man’s back.

The injured dog—which had reluctantly been squatting on its haunches—got up. But its legs were twitching and it could not remain standing. It fell onto its side and gagged convulsively.

Johann went over to the dead man—for he had to be called dead now, even if his heart were still beating—and picked up with great care a small dagger that lay on the ground near his right hand. He raised it up into a shaft of light that still pierced the branches. One edge was red, and glistening wet, with the dog’s blood; but the entire blade gleamed with a shiny brown coating glazed with an oily rainbow sheen.

“Don’t touch it,” said a familiar woman’s voice. “Some are absorbed through the skin.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“I CANNOT IMAGINE A STATE of affairs more awkward than this,” Eliza thought out loud. They were walking back toward the palace, she picking up her skirts and breaking into a run from time to time to keep up with his strides. Normally Johann was more considerate. This evening, his mind was elsewhere. She wanted it back.

“Two dead assassins in the Electress’s—I mean, the Elector’s garden? Yes, I should say so.”

It was only a few moments since they had witnessed the terminal moments of some unpleasantness in the canal. They were walking along one of the garden’s transverse paths, glancing to the right at every intersection, looking for a straight route back to the palace. Now suddenly they saw it sprawling against a purple and orange sky at a distance of some five hundred Johann-paces, or seven hundred of Eliza’s. Johann snapped the right turn like a soldier at drill, and stormed on.

“No, the hashishin are easily managed,” Eliza said. “One died in the woods, the other in the canal—we’ll say that the latter got drunk, fell in, and drowned. The former has already vanished.”

“Then what is so damned awkward about it? By your leave.”

Eliza let it be seen that she was exasperated. “Think, son. Spies are ubiquitous, obviously. But this spy works for the Jacobites, and he—or to be precise, his wife—is Caroline’s lady-in-waiting—”

“She can be replaced.”

“—and the declared mistress of George Augustus!”

“Again, Mother, almost the whole point of mistresses is that they may be hot-swapped.”

“Caroline says that her husband is quite infatuated with this Henrietta. Short of actually dragging the corpses of the hashishin into his Presence, it is difficult for me to see how we can get him to comprehend—”

“Pardon me for interrupting, Mother, but Caroline also says that Henrietta is unlikely to be the spy. So perhaps it is Harold Braithwaite we ought to be speaking of.”

Eliza did pardon the interruption, if only because she had to stop talking anyway to catch her breath.

“They are married to each other, the Braithwaites are,” Eliza reminded her son, “joined together in God’s sight.” They had plunged out into the northern half of the garden, nearer the palace. This meant they’d emerged from a realm of higher trees, and deeper shadows, onto an open flat plain of clear light. A row of four rectangular pools stretched across their way. The water was perfectly smooth, and reflected the fiery colors of the heavens, creating an illusion that these were but Hell’s sky-lights, lit from below.

Johann had a ready answer to this, but he bit it off. Fifty more strides along, he said: “If spoken to in the right way he might elect to remove himself.”

“In a minor provincial court, who would mind such an arrangement? But when George Augustus is King of England, it will not be acceptable for his mistress’s husband to be permanently absent.”

“Very well, Mother, I agree with you! It is most awkward.” Johann spoke the last sentence sotto voce as they were drawing near to a couple of strolling courtiers—like Braithwaite, English Whigs who’d moved here recently to curry favor with the man they were gambling would be their next Sovereign. They had names and even titles; but for all that it really mattered, they could be called Smith and Jones.

“I beg your pardon, sirs, but have you any notions as to where I—we, rather—might find Mr. Braithwaite?”

“Yes, mein Herr, we spied him not a quarter of an hour ago, showing some French guests round the garden. They went to see the Maze,” said Smith.

“The Maze, now that is an excellent place for such an a-mazing fellow.”

“No,” said Jones, “I do believe that that is Mr. Braithwaite and his party, just yonder, bound for the other side of the garden.” He pointed to several men in black struggling across in front of the palace.

“Finished with the Maze so soon!” exclaimed Smith.

“I’m sure it is but a miserable imitation of the French labyrinths, and quite disappointing to his companions,” Johann said.

“They are going to the theatre, I’ll wager,” said Jones. “Oh, there is no play to-night. But they might be going to have a look round.”

“And who better to escort them than Mr. Braithwaite, who is an actor of note,” reflected Johann. “Mother, would you please go to the palace and relate all of the very latest gossip to our friend? She will be on tenterhooks.”

Eliza suddenly looked young, because uncertain. She glanced after Braithwaite.

“I shall be in with you momentarily, after I have spoken to Mr. Braithwaite concerning his travel plans.”

“Is Mr. Braithwaite to go on a journey?” asked Smith.

“A lengthy one, ’tis rumored,” Johann confirmed. “Mother? If you please?”

“If these two gentlemen would be so good as to accompany you—” Eliza suggested.

Smith and Jones exchanged a look. “Braithwaite is a merry sort of chap, he shan’t be offended if we cross paths with him—?” said Smith.

“I see no reason to suppose otherwise,” said Jones.

“Very well. I will see you in a quarter of an hour,” said Eliza, in adamant maternal style.

“Oh, Mama, it shall not even be that long.”

Eliza departed. Johann stood for a few moments, watching her go, then announced, distractedly: “Let’s to it. We are losing the light!”

“Er, why do you need light, my lord?” Smith inquired, after he had caught up, which took some exertion. Jones was already miles behind.

“Why, so that Mr. Braithwaite can see the going-away present that I will give him!”

THE GARDEN-THEATRE WAS A SLOPING rectangle of ground, walled in by hedges, and guarded by a picket line of white marble cherubs. These were charming in daylight but now took on the spectral, glabrous appearance of stillborns. A raised stage was at one end. Several of the French guests had climbed atop it and were amusing themselves with the trap-door. Braithwaite stood below the stage, in the orchestra, conversing with a man who like everyone else was dressed in black. But his clothing did not consist of the usual breeches, waistcoat, &c. but rather a ground-seeping cassock with a hundred silver buttons. As Johann drew nearer he recognized the man as Father Édouard de Gex, a Jesuit of noble birth, who’d figured into some of mother’s more disturbing Versailles anecdotes.

Johann stopped about ten paces short of this pair—close enough to interrupt their conversation. Bringing both hands together at his left flank, he gripped the junction of scabbard and baldric with his left, and the hilt of the rapier with his right. He drew the blade out a foot or so—enough to loosen it. But knowing the weapon was too long to pull free in a single movement, he then raised the whole rig—rapier, baldric, and scabbard—up in front of his face and lifted it clear of his shoulders. A sideways gesture sent the leather goods hurtling away into the cheap seats, leaving him free of all encumbrances, with exposed rapier in hand. His left hand was now free to draw the serpentine dagger as before. He stood squarely facing Braithwaite, dagger and rapier in front of him, both tips aimed at the hollow at the base of Braithwaite’s throat, knuckles down and backs of hands facing outwards, for Johann had been trained by Hungarians.

By this time Braithwaite, and all of the Frenchmen save one, had got their own swords half drawn—a cultivated reflex. De Gex had slipped his right hand into a slit-pocket in the breast of his cassock.

“Father de Gex,” Johann announced, “you shall not be needing whatever that is.”

De Gex’s hand dropped to his side. Johann made sure it was empty. “This is not a melee but a duel. Your presence is requested, padre; first, to act as Mr. Braithwaite’s second; after, to give him last rites. My second is one of these two gentlemen behind me; I care not which, and leave them to sort it out. If I should be struck by a meteorite during this combat, and killed, they will convey my apologies and my love to my mother.”

Johann guessed that he might have derived some low entertainment from observing the faces of Smith and of Jones at hearing this unexpected news; but having gone this far, he could not now remove his gaze from Braithwaite’s eyes until Braithwaite’s heart had stopped beating. De Gex uttered something that caused all of the Frenchmen to re-sheathe their swords. Then he said something rather different to Braithwaite; but Braithwaite remained frozen with his blade half out.

“Braithwaite! It is my prerogative as a gentleman to make you defend yourself with that weapon you are forever carrying around; will you please act like a gentleman, and draw it?”

“I propose tomorrow at dawn—”

“By which time you shall be where? Prague?”

“A proper duel is never conducted in haste—”

“This looks like dawn to me,” Johann answered. He could not even tell what language he was speaking now. He advanced a step, quickly, which finally prompted Braithwaite to draw his small-sword. Johann continued, “Dusk and dawn come so close to kissing at this time of year I never know which is which.”

Braithwaite had finally extracted his small-sword, and, with some assistance from de Gex, got himself disentangled from the scabbard and its strap-work. He got into a stance resembling Johann’s, but with the hand oddly curled under, in the English style. De Gex withdrew. Braithwaite had already cornered himself by standing with his back to the stage. Johann advanced. Braithwaite raised his weapon. Johann stung it out of the way with his dagger, put the tip of his rapier against Braithwaite’s solar plexus, shoved it in six inches, and then punched the hilt downward. Then he jerked it out, turned around, and walked back towards the palace where his mother and his sweetheart were waiting for him. “So much for awkward,” he said.

DANIEL WATERHOUSE REMOVED a handkerchief from his breast pocket, draped it over his hand, and used it to grip the handle of the assassin’s dagger. The weapon had been borne into the room—a servants’ pantry near Princess Caroline’s apartment—on a silver tray, like an hors d’ouevre. Daniel held it several inches above a candle, so that the blade split the current of warm air rising from the flame. Then he leaned forward and got his beak into a position some distance above that. He gave the air the tiniest sniff, then recoiled and turned away from it. The dagger he set back on the tray, and the handkerchief he wadded up and threw into a cold fireplace in the corner of the pantry.

Johann could smell it now, too: an acrid, smoky reek that reminded him of something.

“Nicotine,” said Daniel.

“Never heard of it.”

“That may be, but you have some in you right now, if you have smoked a pipe in the last few hours.”

“That’s what the smell reminds me of, a bit—an old pipe-bowl that has never been cleaned out.”

“It is an extract of the tobacco plant. When I was your age, it was in vogue, among certain Fellows of the Royal Society, to prepare this poison and inflict it on small animals. It is soluble in oil. It is bitter—”

“You’ve tasted it?!”

“No, but persons who have, invariably remark on its bitterness before they stop breathing.”

“How does it kill?”

“I have just told you—the victim stops breathing. But not before becoming twitchy and spasmodic for a brief time.”

“That was true of the dog, when I saw it. Then I lit out in pursuit of the other assassin. He had been pursued to the edge of the canal, and jumped in rather than perish at sword’s edge. He was sloshing about—for the water was but chest-deep—looking for some apt place to scale the opposite wall of the channel. Then he stopped moving, and sank below the surface. When we pulled him out he was dead.”

“Did water drain from his lungs?”

“Now that you mention it, no.”

“He did not drown then,” Daniel said. “If you examine the corpse carefully you shall find some place where he nicked himself with his dagger, or let it brush against his skin.” Daniel planted a hand to either side of the silver platter and gazed at the weapon. “This is an expert preparation, solved in some fine light oil, such as whale-oil. Smeared on the skin it would convey the nicotine into the capillaries and thence to the lungs in a few minutes’ time.” He looked up at Johann. “When you smoke your pipe, you feel an initial rush of stimulation, followed by a calmness, a steadying of the nerves. This is but a trace, a shadow, of nicotine poisoning. If you were cut with this dagger, that relaxation of the nerves would advance to the point where you would simply forget to breathe, and drown in air…every time you smoke tobacco, you are prefiguring your own death.”

“Horrid…it makes me want to smoke something just to calm down.”

“Mr. Hooke experimented with an herb called bhang that would cure what ails you—alas, it is harder to get.”

“I shall make inquiries. It is strange. During the events, I had a clarity of mind, a sharpness of perceptions, I’d never known before. Now, sitting here, I am terrified.”

“As I should be, if I had just received such a tongue-lashing from the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm.”

“You could hear it this far away?”

“I do believe that the King of France sat up in his bed at Versailles wondering what new war had broken out in Germany.”

“It’s true, I have never seen her so angry. She did tell me never to duel. And I did promise. But this—”

“You chose the moment well,” Daniel assured him. “Physical violence is a means that I have never employed for any purpose. The risks are enormous, and a man of my mentality, who sees dangers where they are and are not, can always find a reason to take some other course. You are young and—”

“Stupid?”

“No, but less perceptive of risk. When, God willing, you have reached the age of forty, you’ll sit up in bed in the middle of the night, covered in sweat, with the memory of this night fresh in your mind, and say, ‘My God, I cannot believe I once fought a duel!’ Or so I hope.”

“Why do you hope for me to sleep poorly?”

“Because though I have not done violence I have seen rather a lot of it. Not all of the men who employ it are stupid, or evil. Only most of them. The rest use it reluctantly, as a way, when all else has failed, of seizing the main chance. Thus you tonight. Your mother will understand this and get her equilibrium back. But like a man who imbibes tobacco-smoke, you have died a little death tonight. I do not recommend that you become addicted to it.”

“It is very good advice. I thank you for it. As I thank you, again, for giving us information that saved Caroline’s life. You may expect that she will reward you—”

“I would glady forgo all thanks and rewards if I could simply take a nap.”

“You can nap in the carriage, Dr. Waterhouse,” said a woman’s voice. Hoarse, as if she’d been screaming a lot recently.

Daniel and Johann both looked over to see Eliza in the pantry’s doorway. She looked a good deal calmer.

“My lady,” Daniel said, and sighed, “from any other woman I should interpret this as a jest or non sequitur, but from you I fear—”

“It is well known that you stayed behind in Hanover, being too ill for arduous travel—”

“Thank you for reminding me, my lady, my infirmity had quite slipped my mind.”

“It is expected that you will take the slow way back, attended by a nurse. I give you your nurse.” Eliza came all the way into the room now. She was followed by a young woman dressed in a severe habit, her head swaddled in a length of white linen that had been wrapped around so as to conceal all of her hair, and a good bit of her face—hardly à la mode, but not particularly unusual in a time and place when nearly everyone sooner or later got smallpox, and some emerged in good health but almost impossible to look at. “This is Gertrude von Klötze, a petty noblewoman of Braunschweig, who after suffering and surviving a grave illness, has dedicated the remainder of her life to succouring others in need.”

“A noble woman indeed. It is my very great pleasure to meet you, mademoiselle,” said Daniel, adroitly looking past the fact that this woman was, in fact, Princess Caroline.

“Fraülein von Klötze shall accompany you all the way to London.”

“And how shall sweet Gertrude get back?” Johann demanded—having taken a few moments to recover from the abrupt transfiguration of his lover into a masked nurse. He made a step toward Caroline, but she sent him back with a dart of the eyes. “Surely her family will miss her!”

“Perhaps she won’t have to come back, as her family may be moving to London soon anyway,” Eliza said. “Gertrude shall lodge at Leicester House until we make rendezvous with her later.”

“I did not know that I was—we were—going to London!” Johann answered.

“We are,” Eliza said calmly, “but not before a detour to the chateau at Schloß Ubersetzenseehafenstadtbergwald.”

“Eeyuh, that place? Are you joking? What’ll we do there, hunt bats?”

“Some minutes ago, you may have heard a woman screaming in this wing of the palace.”

“Indeed, my ears are still ringing.”

“That was Princess Caroline.”

“Are you certain? For during the time this screaming reached my ears I observed movements of your lips, Mother, curiously synchronized—”

“Your wit is tedious. ’Twas the Princess. Her grief over the death of Sophie is even deeper than was realized. Her braveness earlier today a mere affectation, masking a profound derangement of the nerves. Not long ago, she simply dissolved. She has been given tincture of opium and is under strict seclusion in her bedchamber. Before the sun is up, she shall be taken out in a sedan chair and loaded into my carriage. You, son, and I shall convey her to the Schloß I have mentioned—one of the most remote and desolate out-croppings in Christendom. There, her royal highness shall spend several weeks in seclusion, tended only by a few trusted servants, turning away all visitors.”

“Especially ones carrying poisoned daggers—?”

“Rumors of assassins in the garden are absurd,” Eliza said, “They are chimæras, figments of her royal highness’s fevered brain. Even if they did exist, they would face grave difficulties gaining entrance to the place to which we are taking her, which, as you know if you have been studying your family history, was built on a rock in a lake by a rich Baron so concerned for his personal security that he believed that even the birds of the air were wind-up toys invented by hashishin to fly in his windows and put anthrax into his beer.”

“Oh, was he the chap who invented beer-mugs with lids on them?” Daniel wondered aloud.

But Eliza was in no mood. “I should like it very much, Dr. Waterhouse, if you were to fall down and suffer a medical crisis.”

“I am here to serve, my lady,” Daniel returned gallantly, and began looking round the pantry for a comfortable place to hit the floor.

“Might I spend a moment with ‘Gertrude’ first?” Johann inquired. “There is much, er, advice I would give her concerning London and—”

“There is no time,” Eliza said, “and your advice is of little value, as ‘Gertrude’ does not expect to participate in any sword-fights.” And Eliza drew breath as if to expound upon this theme at greater length. But Daniel’s withered hand suddenly lay gentle on her arm. She faltered. “Gertrude” and Johann had locked their eyes together across the room. Eliza could have detonated a barrel of gunpowder and they would not have heard it.

“Let’s to London, then,” Daniel said.

Between Black Mary’s Hole and
Sir John Oldcastle’s, North of London

DAWN, 18 JUNE 1714

Enlisting Soldiers without Authority. An ingrossed Bill from the Lords, intituled, An Act, to prevent the listing of her Majesty’s Subjects to serve as Soldiers, without her Majesty’s License, was read a Second time.

Resolved, That the Bill be committed.

Resolved, That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the whole House.

Resolved, That this House will, To-morrow Morning, resolve itself into a Committee of the whole House, upon the said Bill.

—Journals of the House of Commons, JOVIS, 1° DIE JULII; ANNO 13° ANNÆ REGINÆ, 1714

IT WAS SAID THAT Mahomet had banned bells in the masjid, not because they were, in and of themselves, repugnant to Allah, but simply because the Franks were so fond of them, and used them so much, that merely to hear one tolling was to be put forcibly in mind of the profanities of the infidels. If that were true, why a devout Mussulman with the misfortune to be encamped on the fields north of Clerkenwell would have suffered the rudest of all possible awakenings on this Friday: the damp, dark, chill, sewage-scented fog that served, hereabouts, in stead of an atmosphere, was alive with the sounds of church-bells. And none of your merry pealing carillons ringing diverse changes, but the slow stomach-walloping bongs of great solitary bells, gravid with doom.

The tolling conveyed several meanings. First that the day had begun—a fact that most Londoners could only have determined with careful use of ephemeris and chronometer, as it was still dark. Second, that London was still there. The buildings, despite appearances, had not drifted away from one another in the night-time, like ships of a fog-bound fleet. Though invisible, they were still where they had been the evening previous, and a cockney with a good ear might even find his way round town by them, triangulating from the distinct voices of St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Thomas Apostle, St. Mildred, and Bennet Fink as mariners plotted courses by the lights of Ras Alhague, Caput Medusae, and Cynosura.

Heard from these fields, the sounds of the bells came not only from the south, but from east and west as well, simply because London was that big and Clerkenwell that close to it. Once he had scrambled out of his tent, stuffed Egyptian cotton into his ears, and struck his camp, the offended sojourner would therefore head north to get away from the infernal bonging. But in this he would be balked at every bridge and crossroads. For all of the traffic—mostly pedestrians—was south-bound.

Many had slept rough on these fields and greens the night before, and when the bells had begun to ring, they had arisen and begun to shuffle through the fog, like a whole battle-field of dead soldiers resurrected and ordered to march upon their respective parish-churches. All of them moved southwards, toward High Holbourn. For the tolling of so many melancholic bells had a third meaning: this was Hanging-Day. It happened eight times a year.

The people tromping southwards through the fog were common at best. Honest folk among them tended to move in packs, keeping purses stuffed deep inside their cloaks, and supporting themselves on walking-sticks that were strangely oversized. For there was a stiff proportion of Vagabonds and worse in this throng. They all hoped to make it to Holbourn before broad daylight, so that they could claim places in the front of the crowd, affording them clear views of the condemned journeying to Tyburn Cross. Failing that they might withdraw to side-streets, and execute great westward flanking maneuvers, converging finally on the vast open parks and fields surrounding the Treble Tree.

To a foreign visitor—or even to a good many Englishmen—there would be so much in these sights that was odd, and so much about the atmosphere that was gloomy, eldritch, and macabre, that he might easily over-look one or two peculiar phænomena. But the sort of person who attended Hanging-Marches eight times a year would note an anomalous gathering near an elbow in the road between Sir John Oldcastle’s (a compound of stately buildings and trees, about to be enveloped by Clerkenwell) and Black Mary’s Hole (a tiny alienated settlement on the banks of the upper Fleet).

Stopped by the roadside, harnessed to a team of four horses who were all in their feedbags, was a coach. The driver, with his whip, and two footmen, with cudgels, prowled around it, discouraging Vagabond-boys from coming up to ingratiate themselves with the beasts. A stone’s throw away, in a field strewn with human turds and other evidence of last night’s hanging-jamboree, an old man bestrode a horse. Too much horse. It was feeding selectively on whatever grew in the field, and wandering wherever it pleased to find the choicest herbs. The rider, who was wrapped in a cloak, arms crossed over his torso for warmth, occasionally unfolded himself, grasped the reins, and compelled his mount to repent of its latest wanderings. It was a big gray gelding, obviously military, with simple tack.

The old man on the gray gelding was accompanied by four other horsemen. Of these, two rode mounts similar to the first, but they kept theirs under better control. These men were big and young, dressed in very plain common garments such as yeomen might wear to venture forth on a long cross-country errand.

Even through dimness and fog, everything about the other two riders—save one detail that shall be attended to in a moment—marked them as youths of a privileged class. They had small-swords (actually not all that useful on horseback). Their horses were to the gray geldings as færies were to fishwives. In short, either one could have ridden direct to St. James’s Park and gone for a genteel trot up and down Rotten Row and not drawn a second glance from the toffs and fops who frequented that place.

But first they’d have had to don wigs. Bewigged, they’d have blended in perfectly. Dis-covered, they looked more at home in the wilds of North America. For each of these young swells had carefully shaved all of his hair—all, that is, save in a longitudinal stripe, three fingers wide, running from the hairline to the nape. This had been allowed to grow to a length of several inches and then stiffened with some mysterious tonsorial compound so that it stood straight out from the head. Washed, flattened, and tucked under a periwig it would disappear, but thus deployed it looked (to the Classically educated) like the crest on an ancient helmet, or (to readers of Romances) like the battle-coif of the Mohawks.

Now, a wagon had been working its way across the torrent of Hanging-watchers. It was laden with barrels of the type used to transport ale. It seemed to be coming from the general direction of east London, and executing a movement around the northern frontier of the city to strike at Tyburn Cross around mid-morning: an excellent plan. Progress was impeded by a throng of would-be revelers who followed the wagon like sea-gulls swarming a herring-boat. But the brewer had a formidable van-guard of cudgel-men and a rear-guard of dogs, so he kept firm control of his inventory and made respectable speed. His route happened to bring him past the elbow in the road where the coach, and the five riders, were unaccountably loitering. There he stopped the wagon. Several Vagabonds rushed it. They were driven back, not only by the brewer’s dogs and club-men, but also by the four younger riders, who had wordlessly joined forces with them.

The brewer and an assistant—by looks, his son—deployed a plank from the back of the wagon, making of it a ramp extending to the ground. Down this they rolled a large barrel. It seemed unusually light-loaded, for they did not much exert themselves. But the contents must have been delicate, for they took their time. While his boy stowed the plank, the brewer set the barrel upright on the ground and gave it an affectionate triple thump. When he returned to his bench at the head of the wagon, he was startled to discover a single golden guinea resting in the place where he was about to sit.

“Thank you, guv’nor,” the brewer said to the old man on the gray horse. “But I couldn’t possibly.” And he tossed the coin back. The target was too blind to see it coming through the fog, but stopped it with his chest. It tumbled down into his lap. He trapped it under his hand.

“If it was some other bloke in there,” the brewer explained, “I’d take your money, guv. But this one’s on the house.”

“You are a credit to your profession, sir,” returned the old man, “as if it needed any. When next I visit the Liberty of the Tower, I shall buy a round for the house—nay, for the whole garrison.”

Even large objects vanished soon in this miasma, and that was true of the beer-wagon. The four riders now devoted a minute or two to cantering back and forth driving away inquisitive Vagabonds. Then all converged on the barrel. The two Mohawks stood guard while the two common blokes dismounted and went to work on the barrel—carefully—with hatchets. Presently they tipped it over on the grass. One held the barrel. The other bent down, reached into the open end, got a grip on the payload, and dragged it out. It was a human form. From his general looks, no one would have been surprised to learn that he was dead. If so, he had expired recently, for he was still floppy. After a minute, though, he began to stir. In three minutes he was sitting on the barrel, drinking brandy, glaring at the two Mohawks, and conversing with his two rescuers. He called these by their Christian names and they called him Sergeant.

“Sergeant Shaftoe,” said the old man, “I do pity the Grim Reaper on the day that he shall finally come for you in earnest. I fear you’ll use him so roughly that he shall have to go on holiday for a fortnight.”

“And what would be the harm in that?” croaked Sergeant Shaftoe. His voice was very raw, as if he had been shouting or screaming quite a bit in recent days. His wrists were adorned with bracelets of festering scabs.

“Oh, think of the havoc it would play with Her Majesty’s annuities! Think of the carnage at Lloyd’s Coffee-house!”

Sergeant Shaftoe let it be seen that he did not think much of the other’s wit. “You’d be Comstock,” he said, after a suitably uncomfortable silence had passed.

“I would draw nigh and shake your hand—”

“ ’Tis all right, my hand does not work just now.”

“—but I do not trust myself on this animal.”

Shaftoe shook off a brief urge to smile. “Not to your liking, is he?”

“Oh, as an arse-warmer, he has done splendid service. But God help us all if I should essay to ride him.”

“I s’pose it’s you I have to thank for my liberty, then,” Shaftoe remarked.

“From the fact that you are here, and alive, I collect that all went off as planned?”

“En route from the dungeon to the cooperage were some misadventures. Without those, it would have been as routine as removal of horse-dung. The Regiment is under new, not very competent direction.”

“What of the Queen’s Messengers?”

“All they do is stand in a Mobb around the Pyx day and night.”

Comstock permitted himself a dry chuckle. “You are a man of many words but few specifics. You’d do well in Parliament.”

Shaftoe shrugged. “I’m old. Your hirelings, who broke me out of the Tower, they are young lads, and were moved greatly by each little happening. Ask them to relate the story to you, and you shall hear a yarn far longer and more diverting than any I would tell.”

“And less strictly true, I suspect,” said Comstock.

“What’s it to be now, guv’nor?” Shaftoe asked, and decided to try standing up. This he accomplished with a rolling tocsin of cracks and pops.

“Sergeant Shaftoe, ’twere absurd for me to go to the trouble of making you a free man, only to take away your liberty in the next instant by telling you what to do.”

“My mistake, guv’nor. I am accustomed by long habit to being in a chain of command.”

“Then, if it would be of any comfort to you, know that your longtime superior, Colonel Barnes, is now my guest. Oh, not here in London! He is at my seat, Ravenscar, on the North York Moors, above the sea.”

Shaftoe looked to the two dragoons who had pulled him out of the barrel. They confirmed it with nods.

“Am I to gather that Colonel Barnes is not alone there?” Shaftoe asked.

“I daresay the best part of your regiment is drinking up my wine-cellar.”

One of the dragoons could be heard supplementing Comstock’s account, muttering about “three companies.” Sergeant Shaftoe was not the sort who would admit to being startled or impressed by anything; but at least he did not look bored or contemptuous—a signal achievement for Roger Comstock.

“I know all about your Whig Association,” Shaftoe said. He had advanced now to walking, and tottered a few steps in Comstock’s direction. “I have heard the rumors about all the money you have raised from the merchants of the City. And as to your efforts to recruit soldiers away from Her Majesty’s regiments, and sign them up in your private army: I recruited them first, and trained them, so do not think that a single one has escaped my attention.”

“I shouldn’t dare to, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“I am too young to’ve witnessed the Civil War with these eyes, but as a lad I heard tales of it from ones who managed to survive. And I have seen all of the improvements that War made in Ireland and Belgium and other places. I could not be less inclined to take part in such an action on English soil.”

“Then don’t.”

“Pardon?”

“Don’t take part, Sergeant Shaftoe. Oh, by all means go to Ravenscar—” and here Comstock launched into the procedure of dismounting from his horse—so evidently fraught with perils for man and beast alike that the sergeant stepped forward to intervene. “Take this steed—yes—there—oh, no! I beg your pardon—thank you—that was most painful—I am in your debt—may I please have my teeth back—there! Whew! I say, take this steed, Sergeant Shaftoe, which is as glad to be rid of me, as ridden by you—ha—these two fine dragoons who, as I believe, are known to you, shall accompany you all the way to Ravenscar. Go there, drink Colonel Barnes’s health, recuperate, trout-fish, as you like. There is not going to be another Civil War, Sergeant Shaftoe, if I have aught to say about it—which, as it happens, I do.”

“What if you are wrong?”

“Then you are welcome, nay, encouraged to retire from military service.”

“And in what way does this benefit you?”

“Always an important question to ask. I am presently engaged in a sort of duel with the Viscount Bolingbroke—the same chap you have to thank for your recent travails in Tower-dungeons. In a duel, it is customary for each participant to have a second: a friend to stand behind him to back him up. The second rarely has to do anything. You may think of the Whig Association’s battalions as my second. As for Bolingbroke, he has always had the Queen’s Messengers, and now, too, he has much of your old Regiment in his pocket. Most of the other regiments are too cowed to stand against him. It is important that I not be cowed, Sergeant Shaftoe. Having an army in Ravenscar gives me a warm feeling.”

“But what’s the end of it? Mr. Charles White was asking of me a lot of odd questions concerning the Pyx, and the Mint, and my ex-brother. He is planning something—”

“Oh, he planned it ages ago. Presently he is doing it. It is I who am planning something.”

“A war?”

“Much nastier: a Parliamentary inquiry. Today I have punched Bolingbroke in the nose by causing his favorite witness—you—to vanish from the Tower. Tomorrow at Westminster I shall hit him over the head with a sledgehammer. He’ll be frightfully angry with me. I shall fear his anger the less if I know, and if he knows, that you and others like you are drilling on the North York Moors.” Ravenscar now forcibly put the horse’s reins into Shaftoe’s stiff and swollen hand.

“What in God’s name are you going to do to him?” asked Shaftoe.

“Let us say I have told all of my friends to sell South Sea Company stock short.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means that grim days lie ahead for that Company. We shall be here all day if I try to explain all—go! Be off! The Hanging-March shall cover your movements, but only for so long! Mount up!”

Shaftoe did. Then he sat grimacing for a few moments as various parts of his body registered their protests. The two dragoons converged on either side of his horse and set to work lengthening the stirrups.

A dozen Barkers emerged from the fog, singing a hymn—bound for Tyburn to protest something. The two Mohawks rode out to herd them off in another direction. One of the Barkers was pushing a wheelbarrow that, because it was heavy-laden with libels, kept getting stuck in the muck.

“I wish I could be there to see it—whatever you’re doing to Bolingbroke, that is, guv’nor,” said Sergeant Shaftoe, sounding as close to wistful as a man of his character could.

“No,” Ravenscar assured him, “no, you don’t. Believe you me, the great happenings of Parliament are better to hear about than to suffer through. But make no mistake, it shall be a great event. After I have let the World know what I know concerning Bolingbroke, and what he has been doing with the Asiento money, we’ll hear no more about a Trial of the Pyx, at least for a little while.” Roger took a step back and slapped the horse’s croup. It began to trudge forward. The two dragoons, who had mounted up, fell in behind. Roger shouted after them: “And I daresay I’ll get my Longitude Act passed as a soupçon!”

Clerkenwell Court

19 JUNE 1714

Ordered, That the Directors of the South Sea Company do lay before this House an Account of all Proceedings in the said Company relating to the Assiento trade; together with all Orders, Directions, Letters or Informations which the Directors, or any Committee of Directors, have received concerning the same.

—Journals of the House of Commons, VENERIS, 18° DIE JUNII; ANNO 13° ANNÆ REGINÆ, 1714

A QUARTER OF A MILE south of the dogleg in the road where Roger Comstock had met Bob Shaftoe, the frontier of London could be discerned by the Wise in the Ways of Real Estate. The most infallible sign of which was that, here, the track leading to Black Mary’s Hole had been improved with a name, Coppice Row, devised to conjure forth, from the fevered brains of would-be buyers, phant’sies of a cozy and bucolic character, be they never so removed from Truth. Along Coppice Row, buildings were going up, or had gone up so recently that they were still redolent of the horse-hair mixed into their damp plaster. On the left side of the road, as one departed from London, the sprawl had been baffled for the time being by the stand of trees, and root-ball of ancient property-rights, surrounding Sir John Oldcastle’s. On the right were a few indifferent buildings, all made of red brick still warm from the kilns. These had shop-arcades facing the street, and flats above. The largest of these buildings commanded a frontage of some hundred feet, sliced into a dozen shop-fronts of various widths. Most were quite narrow, and most still wanted tenants.

One of them had been rented by a clock-maker. Or so it might be guessed from the new-made sign that had been hung out over the street on a clever wrought-iron cantilever. This sign had been constructed around the carcass of an ancient clock that looked to have been salvaged from a bell-tower in some Continental town—perhaps a Belgian hôtel de ville laid low by a mortar-bomb during the late war. At any rate it had been very old even before whatever sequence of fiery disasters, salvagings, soakings in brine, and rough trans-shipments had brought it to Clerkenwell. With its bent, gap-toothed gears and its scabrous corrosions it served better as an Emblem, than as a Keeper, of Time. All by itself it might have served as a conversation-piece, like a Roman ruin. But to it had been added a muscular figure, put together of wood and plaster, and styled after a God, who was with one hand supporting the clock and with the other reaching up to adjust its hour-hand. All this to advertise a shop so small that its proprietor could stand in the middle of it and touch both side-walls with his fingertips.

Clerkenwell Court—as this edifice was styled—was not badly situated, for it was along a way that holiday-makers might traverse en route to the tea-gardens and Spaws of Lambs Conduit Fields. And it was not too distant from Gray’s Inn and diverse Squares round which wealthy persons had built their town-houses. But it was not especially well situated, either, for the place was difficult to reach without passing through one or more infamous Dens of Iniquity, Nests of Vipers, Pits of Degradation, &c., viz. Hockley-in-the-Hole and Smithfield.

None of which had prevented one noble Lady from making the trip out in her carriage early of a Saturday morn. She was well escorted, with a driver, two footmen, and a dog on the outside of the coach, and, on the inside, a young armigerous gentleman and a female attendant. Accompanied by the latter two, she passed through the door below the outlandish clock-sign and pulled on a bell-rope. A distant jingling was audible off beyond the back wall of the shop. She pulled again, and again. Presently a door in the back was opened. Through it the visitors glimpsed, not the expected store-room, but an expansive, crowded, noisy, complicated Yard. Then the whole aperture of the doorway was blocked by the form of a great hulking dark bloke, coming towards them. He entered the shop, stopped, and looked straight over their heads and out the shop’s front window to the carriage waiting there along Coppice Row. A moment sufficed to read the coat of arms on the door. Then he pivoted out of the way and extended an arm toward the back door. “Enter,” he rumbled. Then, in case this had not been a sufficiently florid, courtly greeting, he added, “Welcome.”

Johann von Hacklheber—that being the sole visitor who was male and visibly armed—had stepped in front of the two women when the big dark man had appeared. His left or dagger hand was looking a bit twitchy. This detail did not escape the perception of their host, who flung his great hands up in the air as proof that he was not armed, or as a gesture of exasperation, or both. Then he turned his back on them and vanished the way he had come.

A minute later, his place was taken by Daniel Waterhouse.

“Saturn says that he has all but scared you away,” he began. “He forwards his apologies. He has gone off to brood over his unfitness as a retailer. Please come back. There is nothing here, save a pretense of a horologist’s shop, which does not pay its rent.”

Greetings and salutations of a more formal nature also passed among them, but these were so rote that they made little impression on anyone. Save one detail: Eliza, indicating her young woman attendant, made the following claim: “I present to you Fraülein Hildegard von Klötze.”

“A familiar name—”

“As she would tell you, if she spoke more English, she is a half-sister of Gertrude von Klötze.”

“The nurse who accompanied me on my journey from Hanover. That explains why her eyes are likewise shockingly familiar to me,” said Daniel. “Welcome to London, Fraülein,” he said with a bow—a rather deeper and more formal bow than would normally be directed to a lady-in-waiting. “And welcome, all of you, to the Court of Technologickal Arts. If you would only be so good as to follow me.”

“WHEN I WAS A GIRL in Constantinople,” Eliza said, “I one day worked up the nerve to venture out from the harim of the Topkapi Palace and to explore certain reaches of that motley Pile that ought to have been forbidden to me. This I did by climbing up grape-vines, clambering over rooftops, and the like. And after a while I arrived at a place whence I could look down into a court-yard. This place was occupied by men of a mystickal sect called Darwayshes, who wore costumes, and observed rites, setting them apart from the rest of al-Islam. I lurked there for a few minutes, watching them, and then, having had my fill of strange sights, crept back to the harim.”

“The similitude is a good one,” said Daniel Waterhouse. “Yes, now you are in another court full of Dervishes, as queer in their own way, yet as easy around their own kind, as those you spied in Constantinople.” He and Eliza had paused in a relatively stagnant corner of the court. Above them, a beam had been thrown across a gap to make a lifting-point. Suspended from its middle was an elephant’s tusk, an ivory crescent eight feet in diameter if it was an inch. Diverse clever baffles and charms had been fixed to its rope to prevent rodents from abseiling down for midnight picnics; the only creature allowed to gnaw at this treasure was a journeyman ivory-carver who was having at it with a fine-toothed saw. Nor was this the only oddity or wonder in the Court of Technologickal Arts. The yard was an irregular pentagon a hundred feet in breadth. It was closed in by an arcade of work-stalls, each little more than a lean-to sheltering some odd collection of tools. At a glance Eliza saw a glass-blower, a goldsmith, a watch-maker, and a lens-grinder, but there were many others who had their own collections of specialized lathes, mills, hand-tools, and paraphernalia that were every bit as particular, especial, and jealously looked-after. Perhaps that old Jew with the stubby telescopes strapped to his face had once called himself a jeweler, and the obese German overflowing yon tiny stool had been a toy-maker, turning out music-boxes. Now whatever they did had been subsumed in a larger and more obscure purpose. Others simply could not be classified at all. There was a bloke who had a stall to himself, off in the corner—an exile even among Dervishes—where he had mounted a glass sphere on an axle. Spinning this around with the aid of a wan, jittery apprentice, he produced unearthly crackling noises and summoned forth small lightning-bolts.

The open space of the court had mostly been claimed by one faction or another and filled up with works both prodigal and practical. There were too many furnaces and forges to count at a glance, all of them quite small, and devoted to some sub-sub-specialty. These were fashioned of brick and mortar, each to a particular shape, reminding the visitors of so many shells cast up on some outlandish beach. There was a crane, moved by two men each trudging along in a great wooden wheel. This was situated in the back of the court where a gate led in from a warren of country cowpaths, none of which had yet been ennobled with a picturesque name. The court was further enlivened by diverse derricks, rigs, presses, frames, and Overhead Lifting Devices of unknown nature and purpose. There was even a barrow: a stony hummock that might have deserved the appellation of Ruin half a millennium ago, but had by now been mostly resorbed by the earth.

“Your budget for stationery must be generous,” Eliza said. For another curious feature of the place was that scraps of paper were blowing round it like autumn leaves, and each had something scribbled on it. “I am put in mind of the ’Change.” She snatched a scrap that had been dancing in a current of air in front of her, and stretched it out: it had been slashed, scribbled, and cross-hatched with furious pen-strokes. Once it might have been a fair rendition, in perspective, of something three-dimensional. But other hands had added, subtracted, modified, and annotated it so many times that half of the page was covered by ink. Perfected, it had been thrown away.

“We do spend a good bit on ink and paper,” Daniel admitted, “but men such as these cannot think without them.”

“I suppose I am meant to be impressed; but instead I confess myself bewildered,” was the verdict of Johann von Hacklheber, who had never strayed more than arm’s length from “Hildegard,” but had never touched her, as they strolled round the court.

“The difficulty lies in the fact that there is little, so far, in the way of finished work,” Daniel said, “and what has been finished has been shipped to Bridewell Palace.” Then there was a respite as Johann attempted to explain the concept of Bridewell to the German girl, a project that did not seem to go very well.

“Allow me to demonstrate,” Daniel said. He strode off across the court. Johann, “Hildegard,” and Eliza followed, forming a queue that snaked and wended among forges, furnaces, and less namable constructs until it stopped at the foot of the barrow-mound.

This had been endowed with a set of wrought-iron gates, exceptionally massive, and closed with a lock the size of a Folio Bible, as might be seen on an Arsenal-Gate. Daniel had the key: a pound of brass wrought and carved into a lacy labyrinth. He blew on it, then inserted it into a hatch on the lock’s front with the care of a surgeon lancing a King’s boil. Snicking and clicking noises emanated from the penetralia of the device as it issued mechanical challenges, which were rebutted by the key; finally Daniel was given leave to spin a brass wheel that drew back several bolts. The gates came a-jar. Daniel excused himself and stepped through the opening. Peering round him the guests could just make out a sort of vestibule within: a small stone-paved landing at the top of a pit. Some torches were soaking in an oil-pot. Daniel drew one out, shook off lashings of excess oil, and handed it to Johann. “If you would be so kind,” he said. Johann had no difficulty finding an open flame in this court, and handed it back, a-blaze, in a few moments. “I shall be back soon,” Daniel announced. “If not, send down a search party in half an hour.” With that, he stepped over the brink of the pit. “Hildegard” gasped, thinking that he was about to plummet straight down some old well-shaft. But it presently became obvious from the nature of Daniel’s movements that he was in fact descending a stairway, hidden in shadow. Soon he was gone from view, and they were left to watch a quivering rectangle of fiery light, and to hear diverse scraping, squealing, and clanking noises. Then the light again became concentrated into a bobbing fire-brand, followed at a short interval, first by the face of Daniel Waterhouse, and then by a gleaming quadrilateral that he was carrying under one arm like a book.

“This was lent to me by a friend who suffered from an embarrassment of riches,” Daniel explained after the torch had been extinguished and stowed, and the gate locked. They were examining a squarish plate of what appeared to be gold. It had been treated very disrespectfully and was scraped, battered out of plane, salt-caked, and tar-stained. But it was still obviously gold, hand-hammered to a thickness of perhaps an eighth of an inch. “As you have probably guessed, there are more of them stowed below; but we only withdraw as much as can be wrought in a single day.”

For some minutes they followed Daniel around the court as he carried this treasure to several stations. A workman scrubbed it in a barrel of water to get rid of the salt. A goldsmith grasped it with tongs and thrust it into a furnace; for a few moments it was enveloped in fumes and colored flames as impurities were burnt off. Then it resolved to a pure glowing slab. He tugged it out, quenched it in water, and snipped off a corner for assay. Then Daniel took it to a weigher who tediously balanced it on a scale, and noted it in a book. Then it was across the yard to a mill consisting of two great brass rollers, one above the other like a mangle. A man fed the plate into the crevice between these as a boy whirled a crank on an elaborate gear-train. The rollers turned almost as slowly as minute-hands. What emerged from them was no longer a neat square: it had been mashed to an irregular oval blob, like pie-crust under a rolling-pin, thinner than a fingernail. It came out onto a kind of skid that had been fashioned from a whole ox-hide stretched over a frame the size of a dining-table. The plate lay on this like a lake of molten gold, almost smooth enough to bear reflections. Four men—one at each corner—now bore this across the court to a stall where a large shearing-machine had been established. The ox-hide pallet was mated to this, so that the golden sheet could be slid directly into the jaws of the shear. Two men now went to work slicing the lozenge of gold into a large number of strips, each about a hand-span in width. When this was finished they rotated the strips ninety degrees and fed them through a second time, cutting them into squares. Some of the cuttings, from near the edge, came out imperfectly shaped, and were pitched into a discard basket. The rest were piled into a neat stack. When they ran out of gold the shear-men twice counted and re-stacked the cards (for the gold squares resembled nothing so much as a deck of great playing-cards). All of the proceeds—including the basket of scraps—were given back to Daniel. He took them back to the weigher, who accounted for every iota of gold. Daniel then returned the scraps to the locked crypt.

The tour-group reconvened in the shop of the man called Saturn. The golden cards had been stacked and counted one more time, and loaded into a purpose-built, velvet-lined chest that was just the right size for them. They gathered round it instinctively.

“Well, Dr. Waterhouse, we now understand perhaps a tenth of the oddities housed in your court,” said Eliza. “When shall we understand the remainder?”

“When we go to Bridewell!” Daniel returned, and picked up the chest as if he meant to leave.

“WE ARE LIKE JEWELS in a pirate’s treasure-chest,” said the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, trying to get her fellow-passengers to look on the bright side.

Daniel, Eliza, Johann, and “Hildegard” were sharing this booth-on-wheels, not only with a small chest of gold cards, but also with several bales of libels. To judge from their smell and their tendency to rub off on people’s clothing, these had come off the press very recently. Everyone shied away from them save Daniel, who was dressed in clothes that were black to begin with.

According to some unwritten but universal rule of etiquette, people mashed together in a confined space tended not to look one another in the eye, or to converse. The fact that “Hildegard” was, in truth, obviously Princess Caroline of Hanover only exacerbated it. Thus Eliza’s efforts to make cheery conversation.

After they had jolted some distance southwards along Saffron Hill, Daniel, mortified and bored, managed to work one of his arms free of the pile-up, and got a hand on the window-shutter, which he shot open. In London, actual sun-beams were too much to ask for; but he was rewarded with a nebulous in-flow of smoky gray light, which fell on the top-most sheet of a libel-bale.

LIBERTY
by Dappa

My Persecutor has been heard to say that my libels are used only to stop up chinks, and plug diverse other windy orifices, in the garderobes of Bankside gin-houses. Which if true raises the question of how he would know anything of such places; but let us pass over this mystery. For if Mr. Charles White’s assertion is true, then you, reader, are enjoying but a few minutes’ peaceful interlude in a House of Office somewhere in Southwark, and I had best get to the point before you have done with your business.

If you put your eye up to the chink that was vacated, when you pulled this document from its rightful place, you may be able to see a street—an eastward continuation of Bankside, tho’ a bit further from the shore, running in front of Winchester Yard; that is called Clink Street, and forms a part of the boundary of the Liberty of the Clink. This parcel, ’tis said, long ago belonged to some abbots; but they granted it to the Bishop of Winchester, with the stipulation that that noble prelate would put it to work saving mens’ souls, and gathering alms. Accordingly, a long line of Bishops ran brothels there for many hundreds of years. These were none of your latter-day whore-houses, infamous for disease and the degradation of women; nay, this was in the Halcyon days before the French Pox, and a certain great Patron and Regulator of Brothels, who dwelt not far off in St. James, issued a decree that no woman be forced to work in such a place against her will. So keenly were these Institutions inspected and ruled by the King and the Bishop that Labor, Management, and Customers all got along famously, and few disputes arose. But as in any human intercourse, trouble was foredoomed, and so a Prison was constructed here. It is from the Clink prison that I pen these words. Do not be concerned for my welfare. I am in a commodious flat, with a river-view; for this I have my patroness, and several of my readers, to thank. Below are several windowless chambers where some hundreds of my fellow-prisoners dwell, heavily ironed and lightly fed.

Why, you may ask, should the Clink be so crowded with wretches, when those Kings and Bishops had such care to make of this place an earthly Paradise? Why, because of certain degradations that have come with time. The Pox shut down the old Stews; the brothels moved from their proud stations on Bankside to a Diaspora of back-rooms, salted all over the Metropolis, where the Lords Spiritual and Temporal can scarcely find, much less rule, them. The Temples of Aphrodite were replaced by bull- and bear-baiting rings, which I should describe as Fields of Mars, if there were anything martial about them; but this is giving them more than they deserve. The Muses flourished here too, until Cromwell shut down the theatres. The merry god Dionysus once gamboled in the Liberty of the Clink, but alas, the good old drinks of ale and wine have been quite driven out by that infamous new-fangled poison, Genebre. Pox, poison, and pit-bulls rule this Clink now. It is a sad prospect, and enough to make a sapient prisoner reflect upon the nature of Liberties in general. For we all love to phant’sy that we live in some sort of Liberty—if not of the Clink, then of the City of London or some other Jurisdiction where men are proud to style themselves Free. But under close inspection, how often do we find those Freedoms to be Chimaeras, and our cherished Liberties to be little better than my private flat in the upper storey of the Clink? We may put it down, I suppose, to the nostalgia for Merry Olde England, whereby all things, be they never so modern or outlandish, are viewed through a perspective-glass of ancient design, which promises to deliver a true image, but in truth colors and distorts all that is seen through it. Merry Olde England did not have the modern Pox; and so brothels are no longer what they used to be. Bloody and vile baiting-pits it did not have either, at least, not in the numbers seen to-day, and not frequented nor managed by respectable men. And Merry Olde England did not have slavery: that queer institution whereby a man may own another, simply by saying that he does. But the true England of to-day has all of these things. So I do not much bemoan the fact that I am in the Clink while you, reader, are at Liberty; for the Liberties in which we dwell are but delusions. I would fainer dwell in a meaner Liberty with fewer delusions than roam about a great one while being used by the lies and deceptions of the Party in power.

“What do you think?” Eliza asked. She’d been watching Daniel read it.

“Oh, as an essay, ’tis well enough wrought. As a political tactic, I question whether ’tis well considered.”

“When he writes ‘reader, this’ and ‘reader, that’ it is no empty figure,” Eliza said. “He does have readers—though few of them would admit to it, in the current climate.”

“There is the rub, my lady,” Daniel said. He slammed the window to, for they were now rattling along the banks of Fleet Ditch, not all that far from the Royal Society’s headquarters in Crane Court, and the ammoniacal stench had choked him and flooded his eyes with tears. “By publishing such things you are gambling that the Whigs shall win and the Tories shall lose.”

Eliza seemed a bit put out by the criticism. But Caroline had been listening to their discourse, and was ready with an answer: “Ve are all gambling on zat, Doctor Vaterhouse. Including you.”

IF JOHANN HAD NOT told Caroline that Bridewell was a whilom Royal Palace, she would have alighted from her carriage, swept her gaze over it, and dismissed it as a half-Gothick, half-Tudor ruin-cum-slum. But knowing what she knew, she was bound to stand a-mazed for some minutes, trying to reconstruct it in her mind’s eye.

Visiting Dukes might once have passed an afternoon bowling in that court over yonder, which was now home to an immense Gordian tangle of worn-out cordage, fated to be worried into oakum by the chapped fingers of incarcerated whores. In that high window, where a twelve-year-old pick-
pocket had just thrust his penis out between iron bars to urinate into plain air, a Princess might once have gazed out onto the Fleet, back when it had been a brook instead of a sewer. Knights might have stabled their chargers in that long building that was now a booming, dusty work-shop.

A young woman of a more romantic disposition might have been at hard labor, all day long, trying to make a presentable phant’sy out of this social and architectural midden. Caroline only sustained the effort until cat-calls from diverse barred and grilled windows reminded her that they were out of place, tarrying here in a court normally used to receive new prisoners.

“Pay them no mind,” Daniel recommended, ushering them through a gateway to an inner court. “Persons of Quality come here frequently to gape at the prisoners, though ’tis said that Bedlam provides an infinitely more lurid spectacle. The inmates will all suppose that we are tourists.”

It had become evident that the palace had at least two wings, albeit not very well matched. “We shan’t go that way,” Daniel said, nodding to the left, “it is all men: pick-pockets, procurers, and ’prentices who’ve broken their masters’ noses. Please follow me to the women’s side.” He spoke deliberately, but moved in haste: a tactic intended to make them hurry along and to ignore the countless distractions strewn in their path. “I shall be preceding all of you through many doors—committing an unforgivable breach of etiquette each time—but as you have gathered by now, this palace is no Versailles. Do watch your step.” This as he negotiated a series of pantries, stairs, and corridors that might once have been the province of some lower servants. Then he shouldered his way through a door that flushed them into a space that was startlingly broad and high-roofed: some sort of ancient Hall, where perhaps Earls had dined at long tables. But today it was populated mostly by women. There were two predominant types of furniture: blocks, and stocks. The blocks were nothing more than slices of great tree-trunks, rising to mid-thigh. Before each of these stood a woman. All of the women were young, for their task was too strenuous for girls or dowagers. Each of them wielded a huge mallet: a segment of hardwood tree-trunk a hand-span in diameter and a foot long, impaled on an axe-handle. Snaking along the tops of the blocks were punnies of retted hemp, which is to say, stalks of the hemp plant, a yard taller than a man, and a few inches in diameter, which some months ago had been shorn of their foliage and flung into stagnant ponds in the Lambeth Marshes and weighed down with stones. There, the water had infected and rotted the tissues of those stalks, attacking the interstitial glop that bound the fibers together, but sparing the fibers themselves. Dried in the sun, these had been barged across to Bridewell and piled up in a monstrous faggot at one end of the hall. Fresh punnies were continually being jerked out of this heap by younger girls, dragged down the pavement, and offered up as for sacrifice on vacant blocks. A punny had no sooner come to rest than a prowling man in an apron raised one hand in the air, brandishing a cane, and gazing hungrily at the sight of a woman’s back, protected only by a thin layer of calicoe. If she did not raise her mallet and smash it down on the punny within a heartbeat, the cane would come down with no less violence on her back. Each punny had to be beaten over and over again, all up and down its length and round its circumference, to break loose the snot of rotted and desiccated pulp from the long dark fibers. The hammers boomed on the blocks in a never-ending fusillade, the debris fell to the floor like dirty snow, or shot up into the air in a roiling cloud. Caroline and Eliza immediately reached for their head-scarves and covered their coifs lest their hair be adulterated with coarse hemp-fibers. Soon enough both of the ladies had drawn the tails of those scarves across their mouths and noses too, for the air was saturated with a gas of tiny fiber-scraps that could not be seen but could most certainly be felt when they lodged in the throat or the eyes.

Besides blocks, the other furnishing in the hall was stocks. These had been erected around the walls at regular intervals. Each consisted of two planks mounted in a vertical frame so that they could be slid up and down, and pegged at various discrete altitudes by means of carved shear-pins. Matching half-moon-shaped notches, of diverse sizes and spacings, had been cut into the edges of these planks, so that wrists and necks of varying gauges could be fixed in whatever place and height was most inconvenient to the prisoner, and pleasing to the whims of the responsible official. Most of the stocks were vacant—signifying a well-run shop—but three were occupied by women with their hands stretched up high above their heads. The backs of their dresses were black with oozing and clotting blood.

“Now you know all that is known about the making of hemp and the reformation of morals,” Daniel remarked, after they had darted out through a side exit and gotten into a stairway, where it was possible to hear and to breathe. There was a decent pause so that everyone could brush themselves off and blink debris from their eyes. “It astonishes me,” Daniel reflected, “that men will see what we have just seen—and yet go out the next day to patronize a brothel. Personally I can imagine no scene less likely to stir amorous feelings in general, or an interest in prostitutes in particular—” but Johann harrumphed and Eliza glared. Caroline seemed to find the discourse interesting enough, but she’d been out-voted. “Very well, then, to the apartment of Miss Hannah Spates we go now. Do watch where you step,” Daniel added, unnecessarily, as turds were plainly spread around all over the place.

BRIDEWELL PALACE WAS TYPICAL English in that, outside of whatever historical process had caused it to end up the way it was, it made no sense whatever. Like Botany, it could be Memorized but not Understood. The visitors had lost their bearings immediately, and by this point in the tour, none of them would have been surprised if Daniel had flung open a door to reveal a secret tunnel under the Thames, or a back entrance to the Inferno. But instead they found themselves on the uppermost storey of some wing, addition or out-building. Hannah Spates and her colleagues lived and worked here, in a large space under the heavy-burdened rafters of an ancient slate roof. It must have been as cold in the winter as it was stifling today; but it was dry, did not stink, had light from a few windows, and was not decorated with bleeding women. The rafters were steeply sloped, as if trying to shrug off their burden of stone flakes. This gave it the ambience of a Gothick church whose builders had succumbed to Black Death before they could kit it out with pews and pulpit.

It did at least have an organ—or so the visitors thought at first. The largest single object in the room was a box, the size of a Vagabond-shack but much more finely wrought, of oak planks cleverly joined together, and caulked at the corners with tar and oakum. To one side of it was a row of four large bellows, with a wooden rail mounted a few feet above them. Two women were gripping the rail. Each of them divided her weight between a pair of bellows, one under each foot; these had been rigged in such a way that as one foot descended, expelling air into the great wind-chest, the other inhaled and rose up. The women seemed to be scaling an endless stair. They were a matched set of great busty hippy frazzle-haired wenches with apple-red cheeks, getting riper and shinier by the moment, and they seemed to find this great fun. While gazing with open curiosity at the visitors, they kept an eye on a glass U-tube filled with mercury, which started one way whenever one of them took her weight off of a foot, and jerked back as she shifted it to the other. A level had been marked on one side of the tube by tying a red ribbon around it. None of the visitors needed to have it explained that the goal of the exercise was to make the mercury climb until it reached the height of that ribbon.

To the other side of the wind-chest was a console looking somewhat like the keyboard of a pipe-organ. But it had only thirty-two keys, with no sharps or flats, and a few of them were stuck down. The organist was a young woman with long cinnamon hair put up in a loose bun. Like every other woman in Bridewell she wore a dress that appeared to have been plucked by a blind man from a parish poor-box; but it was clean and she had obviously devoted many an hour to patching it and taking it in to respect the general shape of her body. As Daniel approached with his guests in train, she sat up straight, reached out, and pulled on an ivory knob. A sigh came from the works and the stuck keys all came unstuck at once.

“Your grace,” Daniel said, turning to Eliza, “I present Miss Hannah Spates. Miss Spates, this is the lady I told you about.”

Hannah Spates rose, and made a pass at a curtsey.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” said Eliza, having instantly donned a sincere but distant affect commonly seen among high-born philanthropists obliged to visit hospitals, orphanages, poor-houses, &c. “Pray, what is this instrument? Are we to hear a performance?”

Hannah was wrong-footed by the words “instrument” and “performance” but soon enough decrypted the question without any aid from Daniel. “It is the card-punching machine, your grace,” she answered, “it cuts the bits out, as I’m to show you.”

“We shall balance the books first,” Daniel announced, and led his guests onwards to a back corner of the room, where a semblance of a banca had been established. There was a large desk, manned by a clerk. Standing behind him was a gentleman of about fifty, who now stepped forward to be introduced. “Mr. William Ham,” Daniel identified him, “my nephew, and the money-goldsmith who tends to our affairs in the City.”

Pleasantries were exchanged; Eliza allowed as how she had heard of Mr. Ham from friends of hers who were pleased to have done business with him, and William Ham made it known how honored he was by this. He seemed startled and pleased to have been recognized at all, as he was a quiet, well-dressed, but indifferent-looking sort, typical of the newish breed who had taken over the banca trade from the menagerie of chandelier-swinging adventurers, intoxicated poltroons, and pathological liars who’d launched it when Daniel had been a young man.

To business: Daniel handed the little box of gold cards to William Ham, who carried them over to a standing-desk by the window and weighed them on a scale. He called out numbers to the clerk, who repeated them aloud and pricked them down in a book. The cards were then placed in a strong-box that squatted on the floor-boards next to the banca. All, that is, save for one of them, which was handed to a third man: an aproned overseer, struck from the same mould as the ones down in the hemp-pounding shop, save that he was not brandishing a cane. With the care and pomp of a priest bearing the consecrated host across a chancel, he took this to the organ-like device, and set it down, for the nonce, on the music stand above the keyboard. Then he gripped a pair of heavy black wrought-iron handles that projected from the machine’s front panel, just above the keyboard, and gave them a mighty jerk. A slab of iron emerged from the machine like a tongue being thrust out. It was flat and smooth as if it had been extruded from a rolling-mill, and for the most part it was devoid of markings or features of any kind. But at the back of it was a shallow square depression perforated by a dense grid of holes, so that it looked like a grille or screen. The overseer plucked the gold card from the music-stand and laid it into the depression, where it fit perfectly and covered up all of the holes with a margin to spare around the edges. Then he put the heels of his hands against the two iron handles and rammed the slab, along with its golden burden, back into the bowels of the machine. As it boomed into place, the discriminating listener could hear a metallic snap, as though some latches had engaged to hold it all in place.

He stepped back. Miss Spates now took up her perch on the bench before the keyboard, and smoothed out her patched skirt. Her first act was to bend forward and peer into a prism mounted on the top of the console. Evidently she did not like what she saw, and so she reached up with both hands and began to turn a pair of iron cranks this way and that, making some adjustment to the position of the pallet. When she was satisfied, she folded her hands demurely in her lap, and looked at Daniel’s knees.

“Here is where I am suffered to play a small rôle,” Daniel remarked, reaching into his breast-pocket and drawing out a card of stiff paper that had been the object of several hours’ or days’ attention from a fine quill-pen. Its edge was decorated with strings of digits and its interior mostly filled with writing in a cramped hand: blocks of text in LATIN and English, runes in the Real Character, and brief outbursts of digits. This he handed, with a suggestion of a bow, to Hannah, who rotated it and set it in place on the music-stand.

“She can read!?” Johann said incredulously.

“Actually, she can—thanks to her doting father—
but this is unusual, and not strictly necessary,” Daniel answered. “All they need to be able to do, is to distinguish between a one and a zero—as you may see for yourself by inspecting the card.”

Johann, Eliza, and Caroline crowded in behind Miss Spates to peer over her shoulders at the specimen on the music-stand. It bore many styles of numbers and characters; but she had oriented it so that she could read a long string of digits printed along the edge. Every one of those digits was either a 1 or a 0. As the others had been talking, she had been sliding a finger along the keyboard, shoving down some keys but not others. Whenever a key was depressed, snicking and clunking noises would sound from some system of rods and levers back inside the mechanism, and the key would stay where she had put it. It was plain to see that the pattern she was making of those keys was the same as the pattern of ones and zeroes written on the edge of the card: wherever she saw a 1, she depressed the corresponding key, and wherever she saw a 0, she skipped over it.

The minute and exacting toil of Miss Spates was accompanied by loud, sweaty, vigorous labor from the bellows-pumping wenches, who had put on a crescendo, trying to stomp the mercury up to the red ribbon. “By your leave, sir,” one of them gasped, “sometimes we sing a song, as sailors do when they heave on a hawser.”

“Pray carry on!” Daniel returned, to the dismay of the overseer who had just opened his mouth to ban it.

Oh have you met Miss Sally Brown

The country’s fairest daughter,

She works the handle up and down,

To pump the farmer’s water

Pumpin’ Sal, pumpin’ Sal,

No one does it like that little gal,

Jump to the pump and work that rod,

And make your fellow a lucky sod!

Sally moved to London Town

And soon became misguided,

She pumped the men who came around,

And sent them home delighted.

Pumpin’ Sal, pumpin’ Sal, [etc.]

Sally lives in Bridewell now

Pumping is her chore ’gain.

She wears her legs out for to power

A Virtuoso’s Organ.

Pumpin’ Sal, pumpin’ Sal, [etc.]

At the final beat, the quicksilver in the tube finally shot up to kiss the ribbon. Hannah Spates hauled back on an ivory knob that she had been gripping in sweaty expectation. The machine hissed, not from one place but from many, like fragments of a burst cannon raining into the sea.

Mounted to the top of the wind-box was a row of what had at first appeared to be organ-pipes. Each was several inches in diameter and a yard long. They were arranged in a segment of an arc whose center was a dense complex of rods and levers atop the console, and whose radius was a couple of yards. The pipes were joined to the console by brass levers that fanned out from the center like rays of the sun. Some of these, but not others, suddenly went into motion.

It now became obvious that pistons were concealed within those cylinders, and some of them were being pressed up by air from the wind-chest. As they moved they elevated the ends of the brass levers. Each lever pivoted around an oiled fulcrum that was far from the piston, and close to the central mechanism, giving it a large mechanical advantage at the latter end. The rapid upward thrust of each piston caused the opposite end of its lever to press downward slowly, but with great force; and each of those lever-ends bore down upon a slim vertical rod. The rods were thirty-two in number, arranged in a regular picket-line; each of them resisted movement for a few heart-beats and then gave way, as if some barrier had been breached. This sudden yielding enabled the piston at the opposite end to fly up until it tripped a lever affixed to a vertical pushrod on the outside of its pipe. The pushrod transmitted force down to some air-gate at the base of the pipe, which sprang open, allowing the piston to fall down to its starting-place. It was all over in a few moments. Miss Spates pulled the knob that caused all the keys to pop up to the zero position.

The coda to the performance was a faint skirling noise that emanated from the works for a few seconds. Then a little golden spume jetted from a cavity on the front of the console, and was caught by a porcelain bowl beneath. Daniel snatched this and showed it to the visitors. It contained several tiny disks of gold, like færy-coins, some of which were still spinning and buzzing round on their rims. “These bits,” Daniel said, “are all of a common weight, which means that to weigh them is to count them; the count is then tallied.”

“Tallied in what way?” Johann asked.

“The clerk examines the card,” Daniel said, indicating the snarled document Miss Spates had been reading from, “and checks the sum of each number, to know how many bits ought to have been punched out; if this agrees not with the number of bits in the bowl, the card is in error, and is sent back to be re-melted. A rare occurrence, for Miss Spates does not make Mis-takes!”

Indeed Miss Spates had already reached up to grip a brass lever, and hauled back on it once; this had ratcheted the iron pallet a short distance deeper into the machine, as she verified by a glance into the prism. The bellows-wenches were singing again, and Miss Spates had found a new number on the card, and was registering it upon the keys. In a few moments came another climax of singing, hissing, and clunking; another convulsion of many levers and another rill of golden bits. After several more repetitions, Hannah Spates rose and got out of the way; the bellows-wenches climbed down and headed off in the direction of a beer-bucket; and the overseer stepped in to haul the iron pallet backwards out of the machine. He retrieved the golden card, which had been Swiss-cheesed by scores of neat round holes. Each of these was situated at an intersection of the Grid of Monsieur Descartes; but not all of the intersections had been punched. The result was a curious admixture of order and randomness, perhaps akin to what one would observe in a neatly printed message that was, however, written in some inscrutable cypher.

“My understanding of Clerkenwell Court has been much advanced,” was Eliza’s verdict, “and yet there remains much that is mysterious. I see, for example, why you have recruited organ-makers. But not the man who makes lightning.”

“We bought a stock of parts from a Dutch organ-maker who was returning to his home country, and so this machine was fabricated using the tricks of that trade,” Daniel allowed. “A toy-maker, a horologist, or electrical enthusiast might have reached the same destination, via a different route.”

“But this is not, as I gather, the machine that does the thinking?”

“The Logic Mill will be a different machine entirely,” Daniel said.

“Will be? And so it does not exist yet?”

“The punching of the cards will take a great deal of time, even if we build many more machines like this one, and put all of Bridewell to work,” Daniel said. “Moreover, the Logic Mill cannot be designed, built, or tested, until we have some samples of cards to give it. And so in our work to date we have borne down very hard on the card-punching problem. As you have seen, that problem is solved. Additional machines like this one are now being made; but most of our efforts may now be devoted to the Logic Mill.” Daniel cleared his throat delicately. “A significant infusion of Capital would be most welcome.”

“I should say so!” Johann exclaimed. “Why are you making the cards out of gold?”

“It is ductile, hence easily made into cards of perfectly uniform thickness. Yet it is durable, for it is the only metal that does not rust or tarnish. But that is not why we need capital. Strange to relate, we already have enough gold locked away in our vault to transcribe all of the paper cards that I brought with me.”

“Please say more on that—?” Eliza requested.

“Oh, when I came here from Boston I brought several boxes of these paper cards—enough to inform the logical kernel of a machine.”

“Why did you?”

“Because, madame, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts has been generously supported by men of some importance, and I thought they might like to see tangible evidence that I had actually been doing something. No, I did not anticipate any of this.” He extended a hand toward the machine, and followed up with a judicious hooding of the eyelids, and a nod at Caroline.

“There are more cards still in Boston, then?”

“I left almost all of them behind in Massachusetts. But God willing they are at this very moment being loaded into the hold of a ship, Minerva, which I believe is known to you. She sailed from London in late April, and ought to have reached Boston Harbor last week.”

“When Minerva, God willing, returns to London, then you shall have need of more gold for making into cards,” Johann observed.

“By a happy coincidence,” Daniel said with a dry smile, “more gold is expected to reach us, by sea, at the same time. And so when I speak of our need for capital, I am not referring to gold for card-making.”

“As a sort of technologickal adventurer, Doctor, you are suffered, nay encouraged, to imbibe of a sort of optimism that in other disciplines—such as finance—would be reckoned incompetence,” Eliza said. “I am being asked to act as a financier, and can afford myself no such luxury. I say that you are gambling too much on the likelihood that two ships—one freighted with cards, the other with gold—shall arrive in London safely and at the same time.”

“The point is well taken,” Daniel said, “and so let me simplify matters by letting you know that the cards and the gold are on the same ship.”

“Minerva carries both?”

“And I think you know what a fine ship she is. I would sooner trust gold to the bilge of Minerva than the vaults of many a banca. It is safe to predict that, round the beginning of August, she will drop anchor in the Pool, and we shall have all of the requisites to punch a large number of these cards. What is wanted, in the meantime, is financing to sustain the operations of Clerkenwell Court, so that we may build the Logic Mill.”

“May I presume that you have already tried and failed to get additional support from your benefactor?”

“Roger Comstock is the one who proposed that I consult you, madame.”

“I never thought one such as he could run out of money.”

“Properly speaking, it is a question of liquidity. Much now hangs in the political balance, as you know. The perils that have forced Princess Caroline to seek refuge far from the gardens of Hanover, have not failed to press in, almost as hotly, on the Marquis of Ravenscar. He has extended his resources to the utmost, readying and arming himself for the coming struggle against Bolingbroke.”

“And not without effect, if yesterday’s news from Parliament be true,” Johann put in.

“Yesterday was a victory for Comstock—but it was little more than a skirmish. Ahead lie battles.”

“It is a wonder he has time or money for Logic Mills at all,” Johann remarked.

“In truth, he does not, and has quite forgotten about us for now,” Daniel said.

“So you require a sort of bridge loan,” Eliza said.

“Indeed, madame.”

“A bridge-builder cannot practice his trade, unless he knows the length of the span to be made—”

“The length is from now until a Hanover is crowned King or Queen of Great Britain.”

“That could be never.”

“And yet, as a wise woman once remarked, we are all gambling on it.”

“It could be years, then.”

“Queen Anne is as likely to live to the end of 1714 as I am to go to Naples and sell myself in the town square as a gigolo,” Daniel averred.

“What is the amount you seek?”

“A stipend, delivered at regular intervals. Mr. Ham has drawn up some figures.”

“That sounds boring,” Eliza said, “and so I propose a parting of the ways. Johann, who has a head for numbers, can look at Mr. Ham’s. Hildegard may wish to stay with him.”

“And you, madame?”

“I have a head for relationships,” Eliza said, “and so I shall join you in my carriage as you are delivered back to Clerkenwell Court, and I shall discourse to you of the relationship—or to be blunt, what precisely is to be my security for the proposed loan.”

“IT IS A CURIOUS sort of Mint that you have created,” Eliza remarked.

Daniel was startled out of a drowsy reverie. The Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm had been silent, staring out the window, as her carriage had taken them up the bank of Fleet Ditch and round the western approach of Holbourn Bridge. Now they were stuck in the absurdly mis-named Field Lane, a clogged chute of brick and horse-shit.

London had come awake reluctantly. The Mobility had devoted all of their energies, yesterday, to the Hanging-March; even those who had not actually pushed their way through the crowd to glimpse the awful Derrick raised above Tyburn Cross, had busied themselves picking the pockets, filling the bellies, or satisfying the urges of those who had. As for the Nobility, they had been as preoccupied with a violent and ghastly spectacle of a different character: down in Westminster, the Whigs had suddenly begun to ask pointed questions as to what had become of certain Asiento revenues. Persons of Quality had devoted yester evening and much of the night to liquidating their holdings in the South Sea Company, and gathering in Clubbs and coffee-houses to misinform one another.

But it was now mid-afternoon, and everyone, hanging-watchers and Parliamentarians alike, was finally awake. Except for Daniel Waterhouse, who had almost drifted off when pricked awake by this curious remark from Eliza. “I beg your pardon?” he mumbled, buying time to wake himself up.

“I am trying to hatch a similitude for what you are doing at Bridewell,” Eliza returned. Then, sensing that this answer had been none too informative, she straightened her spine, like a cat, and turned her face toward Daniel. She was so beautiful that he flinched. “Gold is meant to be fungible—an ounce of it here is no different from an ounce in Amsterdam or Shahjahanabad.”

I wish someone would explain that to Isaac, Daniel mused, then felt bad, as Isaac was a sick man just now—he’d collapsed in Westminster Palace a couple of weeks ago, and was still lying on a sick-bed at Roger Comstock’s house.

“A financier, asked for a loan, carries out a diligent summing-up of the debtor’s assets, to ensure that the loan shall be secured by something of worth,” Eliza continued. “You have gold. This gold could be weighed, to find its worth. There could be no better security for a loan. But there is a complication. You are not using the gold as gold. You are using it as a medium for storage of information. Or I might say it thus: you are informing it. Once informed by the card-punching organ, it possesses value—to you, at least—that it did not have before. If it were to be melted down, it would lose that value. The only like procedure that I can call to mind, is that whereby blank disks of gold are informed by the blow of a die at the Mint, making ’em into guineas, and thereby imbuing ’em with additional worth—seigneurage, they name it. And so I say that your organ at Bridewell is like a little Mint, and your punched cards are the Coin of a new Realm.”

“You have convinced me,” Daniel said. “I only hope that Sir Isaac does not hear of it, and denominate me a rival.”

“If the rumors as to Sir Isaac’s condition are true,” Eliza said, “you or some rival may soon be running the Mint at the Tower. But that is beside the point. Supposing you build the Logic Mill, and it works. Then the value—and I mean value not moral, æsthetic, or spiritual, but œconomic—of your Institute inheres in the ability to carry out logical and arithmetical work using the cards.”

“Indeed, madame, that is all we can offer.”

“If the cards were foreclosed upon by a creditor, and melted, the information would all be con-fused, the Logic Mill would not do work, and the value we just spoke of would be annihilated.”

“True.”

“It follows that the gold, once wrought into punched cards, becomes a poor form of security indeed, as it cannot be spent, in a monetary sense, without destroying your enterprise.”

“I agree without reservation that the gold cannot secure the loan.”

“Moreover, if I understand the nature of the project, the cards and the machine are to be shipped to the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg when they are finished.”

“That is true of the first set.”

“But subsequent ones, supposing you build more, shall become the property of the Marquis of Ravenscar.”

“As currently envisioned, yes.”

“All that I would be left with would be some news that I might use to my advantage in certain markets. This is a sort of game I played to great advantage when I was young, and had nothing to lose, and no one who depended on me. But now I require tangible equity in exchange for my investments. I invest with my head, not my heart.”

“And yet it is plain that you support Dappa, and I have heard that you contribute generously to hospitals for Veterans and Vagabonds.”

“As charities, yes. But it is too late for you to remake your Institute as a charity.”

“Then let me tell you something of the Logic Mill that not even Roger knows,” Daniel sighed.

“You have my attention, Doctor.”

“It will not work.”

“The Logic Mill will not do logic?”

“Oh, yes, of course it will do that. Doing logic with a machine is not so very difficult. Leibniz took it up where Pascal dropped it, and I built upon Leibniz’s work for fifteen years in Boston. Now I have turned it over to a cabal of ingenious fellows who in fifteen weeks have advanced further than I did.”

“Then what do you mean, when you say it will not work?”

“When I returned from Hanover two days ago I devoted some time to reviewing the schemes that the ingénieurs have devised. I am most pleased with the results. But then I discovered a grave difficulty: we want power.”

“Ah, you spoke to me of this in Hanover.”

“Indeed, for then I had begun to suspect what I now know: that the Logic Mill shall require a source of Power, in the newfangled Mechanickal sense of that word, that is both mighty and steady. A very large water-wheel in a great river might serve; but much better would be—”

“The Engine for Raising Water by Fire!”

“If you were to invest in that, madame—and rest assured that it does want investors—you could obtain a controlling interest with little difficulty, thereby satisfying your requirement for Equity. With a new financial wind at his back, Mr. Newcomen could clear certain shoals on which the work has recently run aground, and drive on into open and beckoning seas. Meanwhile, here in London, the Logic Mill project shall arrive at an impasse, because of the dearth of Power. It shall happen soon—less than a year from now. You may then take the matter up with the Tsar, or with the Marquis of Ravenscar, or both; they will bargain with you then, madame, having no other choices.”

Eliza gazed out the windows for some minutes. By now they had run the length of Saffron Hill, and the driver had made a detour to the edge of Clerkenwell Green and up Rag Street so as to spare himself, his horses, and his passengers a disagreeable and perilous transit of Hockley-in-the-Hole, where at this very moment outrages were being committed that would be punished six weeks hence at the next Hanging Day.

They had entered into the extension of Rag Street called Coppice Row, bringing them full circle. Daniel, gazing forward out his window, spied a carriage stopped before Clerkenwell Court. His heart forgot to beat when he recognized it. Matters were about to become more complicated than he’d have liked them to be. He thumped on the roof, and the driver reined in his team at the corner, a stone’s throw short of the other carriage. “I will alight here,” Daniel said, “as this is an easier place to get your lovely carriage turned round.” Before Eliza could protest he opened the door, and one of her footmen jumped down to help him out.

“You have cast a new light on the matter,” Eliza announced, giving him a prim smile that was the beginning of good-bye. “I am now willing to consider the proposal. But I cannot come to any conclusions until I have become well acquainted with the gentleman who founded the company.”

“The Earl of Lostwithiel,” said Daniel, raising his voice, as he was now out in the street, addressing Eliza through the open carriage-door. “For some weeks he has excused himself from the House of Lords. The illness of his third son forced him to withdraw to the west country. The poor child’s demise extended his absence. I suspect that complications relating to the Engine have drawn it out even further. But even now, news is speeding westwards of yesterday’s doings in Parliament. Lostwithiel must return now. He will be back in London anon. I shall see to it that he pays a call on your grace at Leicester House.”

“THIRTY-SEVEN MINUTES AGO,” said the big horologist named Saturn, “a strange old Tory appeared at our gates and begain baying for Doctor Waterhouse.” He nodded at the carriage parked in front of his shop.

Daniel had already recognized it. “Where is Mr. Threader now?” he inquired.

“I have plied him with tea, and given him a brief look round the place—not letting him see any of the good bits—and then advanced from tea to brandy. He is drinking it three doors down, in that shop where the plasterers were finishing up yesterday.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hoxton,” Daniel said, putting a hand on the door to go out.

“You are welcome,” Peter Hoxton said, in a guarded way, “but I must say, if I had known, when Fate brought us together, what sort of persons you associate with, I should never have pursued the acquaintance.”

Daniel exited smiling. His expression changed over to one of surprise as a second carriage—a battered hackney, its wheel rims thumping from dents and clotted horse-turds—came up Coppice Row at reckless speed, and halted, in serial and ramshackle style, just ahead of Mr. Threader’s. The door flew open. Out stepped a red-faced, white-haired, black-suited Nonconformist. Immediately behind him came a small man in breeches, waistcoat, &c., of a more conventional cut, though made of materials so florid as to be almost tribal. And behind him came a common-looking bloke who was even bigger than Saturn. He stayed behind to flick coins into the outstretched palm of the coachman.

“Brother Norman. Mr. Kikin. What a pleasure,” Daniel said, moving to intercept them before they could reach the door of the clock-shop, and further damage Saturn’s esteem for him. “I had not been notified that our Clubb was to meet to-day; but I welcome you to Clerkenwell Court, and I shall welcome our Treasurer too, when I have run him to ground.”

“Mr. Threader is here?” said the astonished Mr. Kikin, and cast a comical look up and down Coppice Row. This was then mimicked by his bodyguard, who had taken up his usual station behind Mr. Kikin’s shoulder.

“Why?” demanded Mr. Orney; but just then the door of a vacant storefront burst open, and out came Mr. Threader, already red in the ears from brandy.

“I haven’t the vaguest notion of why you two are here,” he proclaimed, “but since you are, I hereby call to order an emergency meeting of the Clubb for the Taking and Prosecution of the Party or Parties responsible for the Manufacture and Placement of the Infernal Engines lately Exploded at Crane Court, Orney’s Ship-yard, et cetera!”

“First order of business: selecting a shorter name,” Mr. Orney suggested.

“The first order of business, as ever, shall be the Collection of Dues—presuming as always that you are still solvent, Mr. Orney.”

“If news from Westminster is true, it is not my solvency that bears examination—Mr. Threader.”

“It is of Parliament that I would discourse—which is why that is to be the second order of business—those Members who arrived late must wait their turn.”

“How can we be late for a meeting that was called after we arrived!?”

“Gentlemen,” Daniel said, “I fear we are disturbing our neighbors in Hockley-in-the-Hole. May we—please—take this inside?”

IT MIGHT ONE DAY serve as a pub or coffee-house, but for the nonce it was an empty room, freshly plastered, strewn with straw. The walls were white, darkling to overcast gray in the corners where still-damp plaster emitted palpable warmth and a nostril-stinging fragrance. The Clubb set up an impromptu Parliament there, using overturned buckets as chairs, and an upright barrel as lectern. These were improvised by Saturn and Mr. Kikin’s bodyguard during the time that Mr. Threader raked in the Dues with all the weighing, biting, and microscopic examination of coins, and injurious commentary, that had become a Clubb custom. Then it was time for Mr. Threader to take command of the barrel. As he all too soon discovered, this was empty, and when struck with the fist emitted a tremendous boom, useful for rhetorical effect.

“When a Ship of Force appears before the breakwater, and lobs a mortar-shell (boom) into the town (boom), you may be certain of two things: first (boom) that the enemy has been laying its plans for many months in advance; second (boom) that more (boom) mortar (boom) shells (boom) are shortly to follow (boom boom boom).”

“More brandy, Mr. Threader?” suggested Mr. Orney; but Threader ignored him.

“Yesterday,” continued Mr. Threader, “the notorious leader of the Faction dropped (boom) a bomb (boom) in the House of Lords, discomposing the awful dignity, and shattering the traditional somnolence, of that August Body!”

“I have heard it said that if there were a way to invest in Apoplexy, one could have gotten rich in Westminster yesterday,” said the Russian.

“As you are a Foreigner, sir, your amusement, like your person, are tolerated even if not welcomed. Those of us who live here must consider it soberly.” He shot Orney a warning look to nip in the bud any plays on the word. “To revisit my similitude of the Ship and the Mortar-Shell, we must ask, how long has Ravenscar been planning this? And where will the next (boom) shell (boom) fall (boom)?”

“It’ll fall on your head if you keep striking that barrel-head,” Mr. Orney muttered.

“I have heard that yesterday was a lively one indeed for the South Sea Company, and doubtless for your enterprise, Mr. Threader,” Daniel said. “In fact, such must be the demands upon your professional services, that I am astonished to find you here. Yes, Comstock has put Viscount Bolingbroke on the spot regarding that Asiento money. But what has that got to do with our Clubb?”

“It has been a strange fortnight for men whose business is to handle money,” Mr. Threader said.

“Thank you for sharing that reflection with us, sir,” returned Mr. Orney. “How does it bear on the very reasonable question just asked by Brother Daniel?”

“Men have been gathering up guineas, removing them from circulation, paying for them with French coins or other specie. It is all part of a subtile and covert investigation of the coinage, set afoot, ’tis said, by Bolingbroke.”

“I move,” said Daniel, “that we suspend Mr. Threader’s remarks, and move him away from the Barrel, until such time as he professes a willingness to divulge, plainly and tersely, why the hell he is here; and in the meantime that either Brother Norman or Mr. Kikin take the Barrel and explain why they are here.”

This motion passed by acclamation. Threader turned his back on all of them, a sullen gesture that elicited some hooting. Orney rose to speak; and in his Nonconformist get-up, standing before a barrel on a straw-covered floor, he looked for all the world like an itinerant preacher-man convening a barn-load of rustic believers.

“Though hangings might yesterday have been the talk of the Newgate-Tyburn axis, and the vanished Asiento money the sensation of Westminster and the City, the great happening of the day in Rotherhithe was the arrival—I shall employ dry understatement, and call it startling—of a Russian war-galley. She rowed here direct from St. Petersburg. To judge from the number of available places on her benches, she was driven with a speed fatal to several oarsmen; and the diverse large-caliber holes in her hull attest to at least one encounter with the Swedish Navy. At any rate, she got here, and now graces one of my docks, for she wants repairs. No sooner had she been made fast to my pier than several furry emissaries came down the gangplanks and fanned out into the city—”

“Rats?” guessed Mr. Threader.

“Russians,” said Orney, “though of course there were some rats, too. One of the Russians brought a message to Mr. Kikin. Another brought one to me.”

“No doubt the Tsar is running low on warships, and wants to know when you will be finished with those you are supposed to be building for him,” said Mr. Threader.

“Oh I am building them, sir,” Orney returned, “notwithstanding the best efforts of Infernal Engine-makers.”

“I applaud you, Brother Norman,” Daniel said, “for being the first man to say anything that is actually relevant to this Clubb’s purpose.”

“What shall your answer be, to the impatient Tsar?” Threader asked cruelly.

“Progress is being made,” Orney said, “though I do confess it would be made faster if my fire-office would deign to make good on the losses for which they were supposedly insuring me.”

“A-ha!” exclaimed Mr. Threader, satisfied.

“Why should your fire insurer not compensate you for what was plainly a fire?” Daniel asked.

“The policy that I bought from them contains an exemption for fires consequent to Acts of War. They have taken the position that the ship was set fire by Swedish incendiaries.”

This was too much for Mr. Threader, who put both hands over his face to stifle a guffaw. Mr. Orney’s deadly adversary he might be in nearly every regard; but in their hostility towards the insurance industry, the two men were as blood brothers. “Oh yes,” he burst out, “a Londoner can scarce set foot out of his house nowadays without being set on fire by a roving Mobb of Swedish Incendiaries!”

“I think you have made your predicament clear, Brother Norman,” said Daniel. “You require that the Clubb achieve its stated goal, so that you may claim the money you are due from your insurer; complete the ships; and escape the wrath of the Tsar.” He turned now to the Muscovite. “Mr Kikin, are you at liberty to disclose the import of the message brought to you yesterday?”

“His Imperial Majesty made some references to Mr. Orney. To relate these now were redundant,” said Kikin. “He takes the side of the insurance company in suspecting Swedish Incendiaries.” A pause to clear his throat and inspect his nails as another juicy spate of laughter escaped from behind the hands of Mr. Threader. “His Imperial Majesty then wrote, or I should say, dictated to his scribe, a surpassingly bizarre discourse concerning some gold plates, which he desires ardently, notwithstanding the fact that they have been, in some sense, damaged; and he puts it all down to a fellow named Doctor Daniel Waterhouse—a name I never dreamed I should stumble across in an official communication from the Tsar of All the Russias.”

“It’s a long story,” Daniel said, to end the long and profound silence that ensued—for Mr. Kikin’s revelation had left even Mr. Threader dumbstruck.

“The Tsar has a long memory—and a long reach,” Kikin reminded him.

“Very well, it’s like this,” Daniel said, and flipped open the latch on the little card-case he had been carrying around. At Bridewell he had dropped off the blank cards made this morning, and swopped them for ones that had been punched by Hannah Spates, and audited by the clerk. He displayed one to the Clubb, holding it up to a window so that light would shine through the holes. “As you can see, to describe it as damaged reflects an error in translation or transcription—what the Tsar meant was that it would have a lot of holes punched in it.”

“It is hardly the first strange request that His Imperial Majesty has made,” said Kikin. Indeed, the Russian was taking this much more matter-of-factly than Orney or Threader, who were so befuddled that they almost looked frightened.

Daniel said, “By the time that Brother Norman has this galley ship-shape, which will be—?”

“A week,” said Orney. “God willing.”

“By then I shall have damaged quite a few more, and they shall be ready to ship to St. Petersburg. If the Tsar is pleased by the results, the project in question may then move forward. But as this has nothing to do with the Clubb, let us set it aside for now.” And he literally did, putting the card back in the chest and setting it aside.

“Well, if we’re to speak no further of Brother Daniel’s entanglements in Muscovy,” said Mr. Orney, “perhaps Mr. Threader would now care to explain his presence.”

“I would speak to the Clubb of an Opportunity,” said Mr. Threader—who had finally composed himself and re-established his customary dry and dignified mien. He was gazing pensively out the window, and so did not witness the other members rolling their eyes and glancing at their watches. After a pause for effect, he made a half-turn and began looking them in the eye, each in turn. “Dr. Waterhouse has raised the possibility that the Infernal Device that nearly killed him and me in Crane Court, might not have been intended for either one of us—but rather for Sir Isaac Newton, who was known to frequent Crane Court late of a Sunday evening. This hypothesis was roundly hooted down at our previous meeting, and I shall be the first to confess that I was extremely skeptickal of it. But everything has changed. In the Clubbs and coffee-houses of the City, one name is now on every tongue: Jack the Coiner. At Westminster, in Lords, and in Star Chamber, who is the man they speak of? The Duke of Marlborough? No. Prince Eugene? No. It is Jack the Coiner. At the Tower of London, rumors abound that Jack the Coiner goes in and out of the Mint at will. Why is my lord Bolingbroke investigating the fineness of Her Majesty’s coinage? Why, because he fears it has been adulterated by Jack the Coiner. Why has Sir Isaac Newton suffered a nervous collapse? Because of the mischief committed against him by Jack the Coiner. Now, I ask you men of the Clubb: supposing, for the sake of argument, that we credit the extraordinary hypothesis of Dr. Waterhouse as to the intended victim of the first Infernal Device: what man would have a motive to assassinate him whose charge it is to prosecute all coiners, and send them to Tyburn to be torn apart? Why, a coiner! And among coiners, which would command the resources, which would have the cunning, to build and to place an Infernal Device?”

Kikin and Orney were silent, sullenly declining to participate in Threader’s call-and-response.

“Jack the Coiner,” said Daniel dutifully—since it was, after all, his hypothesis.

“Jack the Coiner. And therein lies the Opportunity I spoke of.”

“An opportunity to have our throats slit from ear to ear?” Mr. Orney inquired.

“No! An opportunity to be of service to great men—men such as Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State Viscount Bolingbroke, Mr. Charles White, and Sir Isaac Newton!”

“Ah, yes, that would seem like an Opportunity for some,” said Mr. Kikin, “but not for me, as I am already quite busy being of service to the Greatest Man in the World. Thank you anyway.”

“As for myself,” said Mr. Orney, “I am put in mind of Our Saviour, who made Himself of service to the poor by washing their feet with His own hands. Following His example as best a sinner may, I can have no larger ambition than to be of service to my common ordinary brethren, the salt of the earth. The Viscount Bolingbroke can look after himself.”

Mr. Threader sighed. “I had phant’sied I might fire this Clubb with renewed lust for the pursuit.”

Daniel said, “Mr. Kikin and Mr. Orney each has his own reason to join in that pursuit, as they have just explained to us—so why don’t let’s each pursue Jack for his own motives. If you wish to construe it as an Opportunity, it is of no account to me one way or the other.”

“I have been making inquiries about this knave Jack,” Mr. Threader said. “It is rumored that he is from time to time seen around the warehouses of Mr. Knockmealdown.”

Orney scoffed. “That is like saying he has been spotted in England,” he pointed out, “since the hideaways and bolt-holes of the East London Company spread across half of the Borough.”

“Who is this person? What is this company?” Mr. Kikin wanted to know.

“Mr. Knockmealdown is the most notorious receiver of stolen goods in the metropolis,” Daniel said.

“That is no mean distinction,” Mr. Kikin said, “as this place has as many fences as constables.”

“To be sure, there are thousands of those,” Daniel assured him, “but only a few dozen receivers of note.”

Orney put in, “There is only one who has amassed capital sufficient to receive goods on a large scale—say, the whole contents of a pirated ship, as well as the ship itself. That is Mr. Knockmealdown.”

“And this man has a company?!”

“Of course not,” Orney said. “But he has an organization, which has ramified and spread from Rotherhithe—where I am sorry to say he got his start—up the bank to encompass a considerable part of the Bermondsey and Southwark waterfronts. Some wag once, drawing a facetious comparison to the British East India Company, dubbed it the Irish East London Company, and the name has stuck.”

“So Mr. Threader has tracked our quarry as far as the south bank of the River Thames,” Daniel said. “Meanwhile our missing member, Henry Arlanc, has, he assures me, been pursuing his investigations among the Vault-men of Fleet Ditch, so far to no practical effect. Has there been any progress in retaining a thief-taker?”

“I spent, or rather wasted, some time on it,” said Mr. Kikin. “I posted a reward, and heard from several who feigned interest. But when I explained the nature of the work to them, they quickly lost interest.”

“If the hypothesis of Brother Daniel and Mr. Threader is correct, this explains itself,” said Mr. Orney. “Thief-takers, as I understand them, are petty scoundrels—poachers of small game. Such a varlet would not dare challenge Jack the Coiner.”

“Perhaps, rather than posting a reward, it were better to find one thief-taker who is resolute, and treat with him directly,” Mr. Threader suggested.

“It is most generous of the two of you to share these notions with me,” said Mr. Kikin, “but I have anticipated you, and made efforts to reach Mr. Sean Partry.”

“And that is—?” Orney asked.

“The most famous of all living thief-takers,” Kikin announced.

“I have never heard of him,” said Threader.

“Because you are a City man—why should you? Rest assured he enjoys a high reputation in the demimonde—several of the petty thief-takers who came to me after I posted the reward, mentioned his name with great respect.”

“Supposing that he is all that he’s reputed to be—even so, can he challenge the likes of Jack the Coiner?” Daniel asked.

“More to the point, will he?” Threader added.

“He will,” Kikin returned, “for ’tis said that his younger brother was slain by a member of Jack’s gang. As to whether he can, this shall be discovered before we have to pay him very much money.”

“Very well, provided we can settle on a clear definition of this troubling phrase very much money, I would be amenable to further contacts with Mr. Sean Partry,” said Mr. Threader; and the others seemed to say, with little nods of their heads, that they did not disagree.

“We’ve not heard from you, Brother Daniel,” said Orney. “Have you continued in your own investigation? How goes it?”

“It goes splendidly,” Daniel returned, “but it is a slow strategy that I am pursuing, one that shall reward our patience. Notwithstanding which, results are beginning to develop: both the Marquis of Ravenscar and the Royal College of Physicians have been victims of burglary in the last month. I could not be more satisfied.”

The other three exchanged looks, but none would be first to admit that he could not understand what Daniel was talking about. He was developing a reputation, it seemed, as a strange bloke who wandered about London in possession of perforated gold plates badly wanted by the Tsar; and the instincts of Mr. Orney, Mr. Threader, and Mr. Kikin were not to pry into the Pandora’s Box that, it seemed, was the life of Dr. Waterhouse.

Westminster Palace

25 JUNE 1714

THE HOUSE BEING INFORMED, That the Secretary of the South Sea Company attended;

He was called in; and, at the Bar, presented to the House, a Book containing the Proceedings of the Directors of the South Sea Company, relating to the Assiento Trade; together with all Directions, Letters, and Informations, which the Directors, or any Committee of Directors, have received concerning the same.

And then he withdrew.

The Title of the said Book was read.

Ordered, That the said Book do lie upon the Table, to be perused by the Members of the House.

—JOURNALS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, VENERIS, 25° DIE JULII; ANNO 13° ANNÆ REGINÆ, 1714

Dr. Daniel Waterhouse
c/o the Royal Society

Crane Court

London

Mr. Enoch Root

Thorn Bush Tavern

Boston

25 June 1714

Mr. Root,

Forgive the use of that barbarous convenience, the Pencil. For I write these words over a cup of Java in Waghorn’s Coffee-house, which as you may know is a sort of annex to the lobby of the House of Lords.

From which you may infer that I am pressed in on all sides by that species of bipedal parasite known as the Lobbyer. Indeed, you may even be tugging fretfully at your red beard, wondering whether I have become a Lobbyer. The fact that I am writing a letter—instead of sidling up to well-dressed gentlemen and feigning interest in their children’s welfare—is evidence to the contrary. My sojourn to Westminster today was occasioned by the need to speak to the Longitude Committee, and is being extended by my hope—vain, as it turns out—that Lords shall wind up their deliberations in a timely manner so that I may have a few words with one of their number. So perhaps in the end I am a Lobbyer.

I write to you because I wish to communicate with my son, Godfrey. This might seem a curiously indirect way of doing it. Indeed I often send the lad birthday-greetings and short paternal homilies, addressed to him care of my beloved wife. The little notes that come back to me months later, veering across the page in his deranged, expansive hand, and riddled with ink-bursts, are evidence that Faith is passing my correspondence on to him. Why, then, should I route this letter through the circuitous channel of Mr. Root’s Table at the Thorn Bush Tavern? Because what I wish to convey to my son is not easily set down in phrases that a boy of his age has the wit to parse rightly.

It is known to everyone who has studied the life of my son’s namesake, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, that when he was a boy, he was, for a time, locked out of the library of his dead father. A petty nobleman of Leipzig, learning of this atrocity, intervened on the boy’s behalf, and saw to it that the library-door was unlocked, and little Gottfried was given the run of the place. What is less well known is that the mysterious nobleman was named Egon von Hacklheber—a contemporary of the mighty and orgulous banker, Lothar, who made the House of Hacklheber what it is, and is not, today. Rather than offering a physical description of Lother’s little-known “stepbrother” Egon, I shall make this letter a good bit shorter by saying that he looked like you, Enoch. He vanished shortly after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War and was presumed murdered by highwaymen.

Now in Boston lives a boy Godfrey William who may shortly find himself in the same plight that Gottfried Wilhelm faced in Leipzig sixty years ago. To wit, it is likely that his father shall turn up dead, and that the boy shall find himself in the care of a mother who is loving and well-intentioned but entirely too apt to be swayed by the counsels of neighbors, teachers, ministers, &c. I have spent enough time around Puritans in general, and Boston Puritans in particular, to know what these people will tell her: lock up the library! Or in other words—since I left only a paltry library behind—raise the boy to think of his father as a kindly but inept, fanciful but harmless character (rather like our neighbor, Mrs. Goose), who wandered off on a fool’s errand, and met with a wholly predictable, and therefore richly deserved, fate—a sort of fate that Godfrey may avoid, by steering clear of his father’s eccentricities and enthusiasms. In other words, Faith will let the boy partake of whatever nourishment he wants, provided it smacks not of Philosophy.

I charge you, Enoch, with saving the boy. A weighty burden I know; but much is afoot here. To assist you in this difficult task, I shall from time to time send you letters such as this one, that you may read in a few minutes what I have done in a few weeks. If these are shown to Godfrey when he is older, their contents may help to dispel any illusions as to my sanity and my seriousness that may have been planted in his mind by his fellow colonists. Months may pass, however, during which I do not have leisure to write to you again, even hastily with a pencil, as now. The odds are high that during those months I shall have an encounter with a nicotine-smirched poniard, a Black-guard’s bludgeon, a court-fop’s epee, or Jack Ketch’s rope. I may even—unlikely as it now seems—die of natural causes.

I have just been interrupted for some minutes by an acquaintance, one Mr. Threader. He is flitting and hopping about Waghorn’s and the Lobby like a sparrow whose nest has just been blown down in a wind-storm. Most of his energies are directed towards what is going on in Lords, which has to do with some Asiento money that has gone missing (if you have not heard of this scandal, vide any of the newspapers on the ship that brought you this letter). But he has graciously spared a few minutes to feign some concern for Sir Isaac. Two weeks have passed since Newton came here to discourse of Longitude before Commons, was pulled aside to treat of Mint matters in Star Chamber, and suffered a nervous collapse. Countless rumors have circulated concerning the nature and gravity of his illness, and Mr. Threader has just recited all of them to me whilst studying my face. I cannot guess what my phizz told him, but my words let him know that the stories are all falsehoods. The truth of the matter is that Newton has been moved back to his house in St. Martin’s, and is recovering satisfactorily. Today I addressed the Longitude Committee in his stead—not because he is really all that sick, but because no inducement will now prevail on him to come back to Westminster Palace, which he looks on as a thriving nest of vipers, hornets, Jesuits, &c., &c. If he ever sets foot in this place again—which will happen only if he is compelled to, by a Trial of the Pyx—he will not come naïve and unready, as he did a fortnight ago. He will come in the habit of a Grenadier, viz. as bedizened with Bombs as is the Apple Tree with Fruit.

You will be shocked to learn that gambling is the order of the hour, here in Waghorn’s. The lobbyers have all lobbied one another to exhaustion, and still the Lords show grievously bad form by continuing to deliberate behind closed doors. Nothing is left to the lobbyers, as a way of passing the hours, than Vices. Having drunk up all the spiritous matter and smoked up all the air in Waghorn’s, the only feasible vice left to them is the laying of wagers. Coins brought hither this morning for the honest purpose of bribing legislators, are being put to base uses.

When I began writing this letter, they were laying odds on whether Bolingbroke would achieve his paramount goal, which is to induce the Privy Council to call for a Trial of the Pyx. But the scraps of paper and snatches of gossip percolating out of Lords seem to say that things are not going Bolingbroke’s way. His very survival may be at stake; the Pyx gambit, though excellent, may have to be set aside, for now, so that he may mass all his efforts on rebuttal of the Asiento allegations. Those who gambled on a Pyx trial an hour ago, have given up as lost whatever money they staked then, and are now trying to recoup their losses by betting that Her Britannic Majesty will prorogue Parliament simply to save her Secretary of State from going down—and perhaps taking the South Sea Company with him.

The doors to Lords have been opened. I shall close for now and continue when I can. A lot of money is changing hands. Lostwithiel is approaching.

I am writing this on my lap, sitting on the edge of the Thames embankment, legs adangle above the flow. I am, I should estimate, the ninety-fifth in a queue of a hundred, waiting for watermen at Westminster Stairs. The other ninety-nine regard me with scorn for my boyish posture; but as the eldest man in the queue I have certain perquisities, viz. I may sit down.

The reason I am so far back in the queue is that I stayed late at Waghorn’s to chat with the Earl of Lostwithiel and with Mr. Threader, who irrupted upon us and would not be moved away. He noted, more than once, that by barging in upon us he was effecting a small re-union of three who were together in Devon in January. Indeed, it was there that I first drew Mr. Threader’s notice by endorsing Lostwithiel’s venture, the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, and causing a small run on Mr. Threader’s stock of capital, as several of his clients were (improbable as this must seem) moved by my discourse to invest. This was but the first disturbance I caused in Mr. Threader’s well-regulated and steady life. Since then there have been explosions, arguments about politics, letters from the Tsar, and diverse other novelties: making me into a persistent and alarming presence in his life.

My relationship with the Silver Comstocks is ancient, and ambiguous in the extreme; but recent generations have seen fit to denominate me a friend of the family. So hereinafter I shall refer to my lord the Earl of Lostwithiel as Will Comstock. Will confirmed what was already implied by the settlement of diverse wagers all round us, namely, that the day had gone badly for Bolingbroke and the Tories. The Marquis of Ravenscar has—by dint of plots, maneuvers, and skirmishes too diverse and far-fetched for my tired brain to hold or my cramped hand to write down—literally called the Secretary of the South Sea Company on the carpet. The call went out (sensationally) a week ago. It was answered a few hours ago, when the said Secretary appeared before the bar in Commons, and presented a book—a compendium of all the Company’s documents relating to the Asiento. The Tories regard this book as a lit granadoe, the Whigs as a golden apple, and it has moved back and forth between Commons and Lords this afternoon as the factions have exhausted all resources to put it where it can deal the most or the least damage. Important men have been reading from it aloud. It contains nothing to explain or excuse the disappearance of the slave-trade revenues. This shifts the burden of culpability to Bolingbroke, who was never viewed as an honest chap to begin with—even by his admirers.

Note that only yesterday Commons voted to post £100,000 as a reward to anyone who apprehends the Pretender should he dare to set foot on British soil. So the tide, which was running strongly in Bolingbroke’s favor a fortnight ago, has quite reversed.

Thus news. I confess I did not attend closely to young Will during his narration, so fascinated was I by the phizz of Mr. Threader. As a rule there is nothing to see in his face; but today it was a fascinating study in warring passions, such as no van Dyck could have rendered. As a Tory, Mr. Threader is troubled to see the Tories back on their heels, and as a money-scrivener he is horrified by the public airing of the South Sea Company’s soiled bedsheets. And yet, when Will told us that a Trial of the Pyx had been postponed indefinitely, it was impossible not to perceive relief, even elation, upon Mr. Threader’s face. He has lately been coming by at all hours, or mailing me curious, hastily written notes, concerning the investigation of the coinage that has been set afoot by Bolingbroke. H.B.M.’s Sec’y of State pursues this (as everyone knows) to discredit the Whigs; yet it causes Mr. Threader the most intense anxiety. When Will let it be known that the Pyx would be unmolested for at least two months, Mr. Threader’s face was suddenly illuminated from within, like a Jack-o’-lantern receiving its candle. He excused himself and lit out for the City.

Will and I both marked this. But Will is better bred than I, and does not like to gossip about others behind their backs. So he changed the subject, or rather deflected it, with a wry remark: “Mr. Threader’s worries about the direction of the markets would be as nothing if the Duchess of Qwghlm got her hands round his neck.” I inquired as to why Eliza would wish to strangle an old money-scrivener. Will replied that he and Eliza had met recently to discuss the Prop. of the Eng. for R.W. by F. Will had mentioned in passing that Engines were, in certain applications, an alternative to Slavery—and thereby triggered a spate of ranting from the Duchess as to the evils of that Institution, of the So. Sea Co., and all who like Mr. Threader credit its loathsome Equity. I had been chary of over-stressing this during my talks with Eliza, for fear that I would seem to manipulate her well-known passions on this subject, however it was clear from Will’s account that she has been pondering it. The recent turning of the tide against the So. Sea Co. may give comfort to Eliza that to invest in the P.E.R.W.F. is not only Shrewd but Righteous. At any rate, Will seemed to say, by a well-timed wink, that such an investment is now in the works. He then changed subject again, inquiring as to the progress of the Logic Mill, and expressing polite curiosity about the same. I let him know that, just as a printer sends proof-sheets to his client, we were making ready to ship a sample of our golden cards to our investor in the east. True to form, I did not fail to mention that we would benefit from certain financial expediencies. Will seemed to expect this; he allowed that he might be the bearer of some news concerning it, and handed me a sealed message from Eliza. Then he drained his coffee-cup and most courteously excused himself.

As I glance downriver I see a flotilla of watermen’s boats approaching, drawn hither by the comely spectacle of a long queue of fuming Quality stamping their spurs in frustration. So I shall conclude directly. I opened Eliza’s message. Out of it fell a smaller piece of paper. The message describes Will—grudgingly—as “a good Tory” and “worth knowing” and states that she and he have arrived at an agreement. This by itself would have been enough to improve my day considerably; but it was perfected by the smaller document, which was a goldsmith’s note, drawn on the House of Hacklheber, and made out to your humble correspondent. There is enough here to support the operations of Clerkenwell Court for a week, and I flatter myself that she will see fit to provide another installment when it has been spent. We should have three card-punching organs installed at Bridewell within a fortnight; Hannah Spates is already training the women to make them work.

The queue is coming to life, like a torpid snake warmed by the sun; I close for now; an errand of a rather different nature awaits me.

Another damned coffee-house environs me—this time, it is in Warwick Court, behind the Old Bailey, and hard by the College of Physicians. I am surrounded half by barristers and half by Physicians, and cannot say which group I like less. Were I in legal trouble or sick or both I should of course change my tune.

When I reached the head of that queue I was complaining of, I took a water taxi to Black Friars Stairs, and thence a sedan chair up to the Old Bailey. It was even more crowded than the Houses of Parliament, for the Court of Sessions had been at work there for much of the day, and had just adjourned. I looked about until I saw a man who stood head and shoulders above the crowd. When I made my way over to him I discovered, as usual, Mr. Kikin, somewhere down about his midsection. He let it be known, by the look on his face, that I was late. After a curt exchange of greetings he turned his back on me and marched into the court-yard where the accused and their supporters and detractors mill about under the open sky, shelterless against rain and judicial wrath. In this he was working upstream against the flow of that Mobb who had come to mourn or to cheer the decisions of the magistrates. But he used his bodyguard to good effect, as a sort of human ram. Had he not been so precipitious I’d have counseled him to wait for the crowd to disperse, and the air to clear. By venturing in among them thus he was exposing himself to the gaol-fever, which is easily spread from the sheeppen where the prisoners are kept, to the spectators, and thence out into the streets of London. But it was too late. I was on the horns of a dilemma: follow Kikin and risk the pestilence, or stay behind, alone, to be enveloped by a Mobb of persons no less dangerous than the convicted who were even now being herded off to their fates. I followed Kikin, not without some buffeting in that bottle-neck that leads into the court-yard from the street.

Once we had debouched into the yard, the crowding abated, and I breathed a little freer. Weather has been dry of late, so it was more dusty than muddy. The brazier in which the branding-irons are kept at the ready was still glowing, and spinning up a plume of sharply scented coal-smoke, which I phant’sied might cleanse the air of whatever miasma causes the gaol-fever. I stood near it, reading the red-hot letters of iron strewn about in the coals, viz. V for Vagabond, T for Thief, &c., and keeping an eye on Mr. Kikin to see where he would alight. The magistrates, clerks, &c., had already abandoned the high covered veranda from which justice is dispensed. Most of the spectators, as I have mentioned, had already departed. Those who remained had all gravitated to the wooden walls of the pens where the men and women prisoners are kept. They were reaching over the barriers to pass purses of coins, loaves of bread, apples, &c., to their friends, children, wives, and husbands on the other side, who raked in these prizes with fettered and scabrous hands. The bailiffs were of course herding all of the prisoners towards the Janus Gate. They made no move to interfere with the transactions I have just described, well knowing that most of the money being handed over in those shabby little purses would presently be in their own pockets. Of course, material goods were not all that passed over that barricade; there were kisses, hand-clasps, weeping, wailing, and declarations of love æternal, particularly in the cases of the ones who’d just been given tickets to Tyburn. But I will elide these, on a pretext that they are not germane. In truth, it is too pathetic for words.

Standing at the northeast extremity of the yard, round the pillars of the Janus Gate, were several men who did not weep, wail, or proffer coin-purses. They only stood, backs to the gate, facing the flow of prisoners, and watched. It was a wonder to see them. From their postures you might identify them from a distance as mere idlers. But as I approached—following Mr. Kikin—I noted that these men wore curious expressions on their phizzes: each was as intent as a cat in the instant before it pounces upon an unsuspecting bird. These men were not idling, but working, practicing their profession with as full attention as the late Mr. Hooke when he would peer through his microscope at a swarm of animalcules. Some of the prisoners passing through the Janus Gate were oblivious; their faces were scanned and committed to memory. Others, wiser in the ways of the flash world, recognized these loiterers as thief-takers, and hid their faces behind their sleeves, or even walked backwards until they had passed safely through the gate. Some of the thief-takers stooped to childish but effective tricks, as calling out names: “John! Bob! Tom!” which made certain prisoners turn their way, the better for their faces to be inspected and their moles, scars, missing teeth, &c., to be memorized.

The only prisoners who are of no interest to the thief-takers are those who’ve just been condemned to Tyburn. The others stand a fair chance to get out of Newgate alive, and to return to their former ways and dwelling-places. Once a thief-taker has committed such a man’s face to memory, he is liable to be re-arrested and prosecuted at any moment. It makes little difference whether he has in truth committed a crime; the Court wants a culprit, and the thief-taker wants reward-money.

Sean Partry was conspicuous, among thief-takers, by his age (I should estimate he is in his middle fifties) and by a bearing—I am tempted to call it dignity—wanting in the others. He has a good head of hair, only a bit thin on top, blond going gray, and sea-green eyes. He has an excellently carved set of teeth, but displays them rarely. He has a trim figure—unusual in a profession that consists largely of loitering round taverns—but any illusion that he is especially fit is dispelled when he begins to move, for he is a little bit halt and a little bit lame, stiff in the joints, and given to frequent sighs and grimaces that hint at pains internal.

Partry would on no account look us in the eye, or pay us any heed whatever, until the last of the prisoners had been herded through the gate. Then he began to interrogate us rather brusquely, wanting to know who we were, whom we represented, and why we desired to know so many things about Jack the Coiner. He was indifferent, and almost hostile, until we began to give substantive answers to his questions. Then he showed us more favor, and even consented to let Mr. Kikin buy him a drink at a public house down the way. He seemed well-informed as to politics, showing interest in my relation of the day’s events at Westminster.

I told the story of the explosion in Crane Court, and listed the names of those who might have been its intended victim: Mr. Threader, Sir Isaac, Henry Arlanc, and your humble correspondent. Partry made some small remark about each, guessing rightly that Arlanc was a Huguenot name, and showing genuine curiosity about Newton. This is not so remarkable, as Newton has had many occasions to treat with thief-takers in catching and prosecuting coiners, and for all I know, might even have lined Partry’s own pocket with some reward-money. He showed rather less interest in Mr. Kikin’s account of the burning of the Russian ship at Rotherhithe. Partry is of the view that the latter event was a job that Jack was paid to do by Swedish or other foreign agents, and as such, offers little insight into Jack’s motives. That Partry has bothered to consider this matter at all, and has already formed views on it, gave me a favorable character of the man. Kikin seemed to agree. We asked Partry whether he thought he might be of service to us, and he allowed as how he might; but not terribly soon. “My methods are my methods,” he announced, by way of explaining that he would not be able to offer us any news until Friday, the 30th of July, or shortly before it. Kikin was dismayed. Partry reminded him that it would probably take that long anyway to negotiate a fee. Then he departed.

My conversation with Mr. Kikin now went into a few minutes’ recess, as he does not like to stay in any one place for more than a few minutes. We paid our bill and wandered round a few corners to the coffee-house where I now sit writing these words. Kikin was nonplussed by the way Partry had moved from the vague assertion that it would take a long time, to the specific one that it would happen on the thirtieth of July. I treated it as a riddle, asking the addled Russian, could he not think of any event on that day that would explain Mr. Partry’s confidence.

In the end Kikin resorted to pulling out the little waste-book where he writes down his social engagements. Flipping forward to 30 July, he found a page that was blank, save for one notation: HANGINGS. Meaning that the next Hanging-March to Tyburn was to be on that day, and so he had avoided making any appointments, knowing how difficult it would be to move through the Mobb-choked streets.

“Several men have lately been found guilty of coining,” I explained. “On the thirtieth they shall be taken to Tyburn to be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered. Such men, being coiners, may have information about Jack. Being as they are afraid of Jack, they’ll not let a word slip for the time being. But as the thirtieth of the month looms nearer, fear of Jack Ketch will grow to out-weigh fear of Jack Shaftoe. In those last few days, they may be persuaded, by one such as Sean Partry, to tell what they know concerning Jack, in exchange for lenient treatment at the Fatal Tree.”

“You mean Partry can arrange a pardon!?” demanded Kikin, who was ready to be scandalized by our judicial laxity.

“No. But if we supply money to Partry, he may pass some of it on to Jack Ketch, who will then see to it that the prisoner in question receives a quick hanging—a neck-snapper instead of a slow strangler—so that he’ll not be alive to know he is being disembowelled.”

“This is a strange country,” Kikin observed. I could say nothing.

Kikin is aghast that it will take so long to get answers. I believe he has made a mental calculation of how long it might take for the Russian galley, presently at Orney’s Ship-yard in Rotherhithe, to get back to St. Petersburg, and then to return to London bringing some furious Russian count empowered to sack Mr. Kikin and bring him home in chains.

I let him know that I had a package of golden cards ready to ship out on that galley, which is supposed to depart very soon. This cheered him up, and he resolved to go to Clerkenwell Court that very instant to collect the plates. He is gone now, and I await here a trusted messenger who will bear the Duchess of Qwghlm’s goldsmith’s note to my banker in the City, William Ham. I am left, a strange man in a strange country, wondering how I got here, and what shall befall me next.

Your humble and obedient servant,

Daniel Waterhouse

Westminster Palace

9 JULY 1714

A Message from the Lords, by Mr. Holford and Mr. Lovibond:

Mr. Speaker,

We are commanded by the Lords to acquaint this House, That they, having this Day under their Examination Matters relating to the South Sea Company, which are of great Consequence to the Trade of this Kingdom, do desire that this House will give Leave to such Members of this House as are of the Committee of the South Sea Company for the Assiento; and William Lowndes Esquire; may have Leave to attend the House of Lords this Day.

And then the Messengers withdrew

Resolved, That this House doth give Leave to such Members…to go to the House of Lords, if they think fit.

And the Messengers were called in again, and Mr. Speaker acquainted them therewith.

Jovis, 8° die Julii;

Anno 13° Annæ Reginæ, 1714

Ordered, That a Message be sent to the Lords, to desire, That they will direct the Painted Chamber, the Lobby, and the Passage to the House of Peers, to be cleared from any Crowd, when this House shall come up thither, by her Majesty’s Command, to attend her Majesty.

Ordered, That Mr. Campion do carry the said Message.

Ordered, That the Serjeant at Arms attending this House do clear the Lobby of this House, and Passage leading to the Painted Chamber, from the Persons therein, for the better Passage of this House to the House of Peers…

A Message from her Majesty, by Sir William Oldes, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod:

Mr. Speaker,

The Queen commands this honourable House to attend her Majesty in the House of Peers, immediately.

Accordingly, Mr. Speaker, with the House, went up to attend her Majesty, in the House of Peers: Where her Majesty was pleased to give the Royal Assent to several publick and private Bills:

After which her Majesty was pleased to make a most gracious Speech to both Houses of Parliament:

And afterwards the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, by her Majesty’s Command, said

It is her Majesty’s Royal Will and Pleasure, That this Parliament be prorogued to Tuesday the Tenth Day of August next: And this Parliament is accordingly prorogued to Tuesday the Tenth Day of August next.

Veneris, 9° die Julii; Anno 13° Annæ Reginæ, 1714

A PAIR OF RAVENSCAR’S strangely brawny aides had knocked Daniel up at Crane Court this morning, and bundled him into a sedan chair with such urgency that he could not discern whether he was being summoned or abducted. Encased in this box like a desiccated Specimen—a curious relic of the Cromwellian Epoch—he had been delivered up to Westminster’s Old Palace Yard, and ejected in front of Waghorn’s. A chap with a keen ear, if he’d sidled up close to Daniel about then, could have heard him muttering diverse outrageous calumnies and execrations against the Marquis of Ravenscar. For Daniel had been quite content at Crane Court with his pot of tea, one of Mrs. Arlanc’s pastries, and a stack of vile newspapers. This place was dirty, crowded, and riotous. Not with the merry riotousness of Hockley-in-the-Hole on the eve of a Hanging-Day, but the snitty, bitchy sort practiced by men who were animated by the same base passions but who had too much to lose by giving them free rein. Everyone was in a hurry save Daniel. Most were in a hurry to get inside. They hustled along at cross-purposes to a small but troublesome moiety who were trying to move laterally between Commons and Lords, using the Old Palace Yard as a short-cut to circumvent the galleries and chambers within—which, it could be inferred, were too crowded to permit movement. There were scattered outbreaks of courtesy. But the third time Daniel saw some outraged second-rate hanger-on reach, in a theatrical manner, for his sword, he concluded that the place was not merely unpleasant but dangerous. He turned on his heel and began to walk away. Once he broke free of the crowd he could be at the Kit-Cat Clubb in half an hour…but then this lovely phant’sy was shivered by the words: “Dr. Waterhouse! I feared I should never reach you! If you’d care to follow me, we have saved a place for you at Waghorn’s.”

Daniel knew the voice. He had forgotten the name; but no matter, the chap’s hairstyle was extremely memorable. He turned around expecting to see a young man coiffed as a Mohawk warrior. Alas, all he could make out were a lot of blokes in white periwigs. But one of them was staring right at him. If the wig were mentally subtracted, and the Mohawk added, the result was one of those young Whig gallants who were always prancing around on Roger-errands. Today’s errand: rescue the doddering Doctor, frogmarch him into the Palace.

In Waghorn’s, he sipped coffee and held a newspaper in front of his face, partly to read it, and partly as a barrier to conversation—for what he most dreaded was that the Mohawk had also been charged with keeping him company. Parliamentary babble surged and crashed about him like waves on rocks. They talked of everything save what was really going on. Mostly it was the Acts and Bills that had clogged their registers in recent weeks: Preventing the Growth of Schism (Bolingbroke’s pet bill), Finding the Longitude (Roger’s), the perennial issues of Woollen Manufacture, Quieting Corporations, endless Inclosures, and diverse Divorces, contested estates, and Insolvent Debtors; and what had come to be known as the Six R’s: Raising the Militia, Running Brandy, Reducing Interest, Revenues of Scotch Bishops, Restraining the Growth of Popery, and (awkwardly) laws Relating to Vagrants. It was all hogwash. Either that, or they were speaking in a substitution code wherein every Act mentioned was a veiled reference to its sponsor.

The smoke and babble became too much for him at about the same time that his bladder—never his strongest organ—began to complain of all the coffee. He dropped the paper to discover that his Mohawk had vanished on some other errand—perhaps called away to a raiding-party on the upper Hudson River. So Daniel went out and found a place he could urinate (which actually was easier than finding a place he couldn’t) and then took to strolling up and down the Painted Chamber and the Long Gallery. Consequently, he was swept up in the portentous series of room-clearings and gallery-evacuations ordered by Commons. Indeed, he was on the verge of being flushed clean off the Palace grounds when a different Mohawk found him, and escorted him, via circuitous back-passages, closets, and committee-rooms, into the House of Lords itself, and encouraged him to stand in Ravenscar’s cheering-section, and to act as if he belonged there.

This gave Daniel over to grave forebodings. He had seen Charles I’s head spurt and roll. He had attended Charles II almost to the moment of his death, fighting a bitter rear-guard action to keep the royal physicians at bay. He had watched, and been tempted to take part in, a tavern brawl that bloodied James II’s nose, and more or less signalled the end of his reign. Quite prudently, he had absented himself from the country during the deaths of William and of Mary. But now he was back, and they were bringing the Queen to him. If she chose this time and place to give up the ghost, would every wigged head in the room turn and look at him? Would they tear him limb from limb on the spot, or ship him downriver for a proper beheading at the Tower? Would it come out that he had lately been riding round town in a carriage with a certain foreign Princess who was here incognito and uninvited?

These and other broodings so preoccupied him that he scarce noted a sudden silence, and the entry into the House of a rather gaudy sedan chair. He (and, admittedly, as many others as could be packed into the room) was in the Presence! ’Twas a Historick Moment! Or, at least, the sort of moment so apt to be writ down in History-Books. Yet despite this—or perhaps because of it—Daniel was afflicted by a maddening inability to attend to it. His own broodings were of greater interest—a sign of unforgivable arrogance?

Other men seemed to’ve been blessed with the ability to live in the moment, and to have experiences (Daniel imagined) in the raw vivid way that animals did. But not he. How would the ceremony, the pageantry of the Queen’s visit to Parliament look, to one who could see them thus? Colorful, magnificent, mesmerizing, Daniel supposed. He’d never know. Daniel could only see this as a sick old lady paying a call on a room full of anxious blokes who hadn’t bathed in a while.

The Kit-Cat Clubb

AN HOUR LATER

ISAAC NEWTON MUST THINK every room silent, for every room went silent when he walked into it. Even this one!

Daniel had recovered from the strange absence of mind that had troubled him during the Queen’s address to Parliament. He was fully engaged in the moment. It must have had something to do with that here he could drink chocolate. Moreover, he could move about, talk to people, and attend to what he found interesting. Until Isaac hushed the place by walking in, this had been the spectacle of Roger—holding court at his favorite table—receiving the thanks, in the form of bad poetry, and the congratulations, in the form of expensive gifts, of Great Britain, one Briton at a time. Because this was the Kit-Cat Clubb, all of these encomia had to be delivered in verse: pithy epigrams if Roger were lucky, rambling trains of heroic couplets otherwise. One of the formal constraints observed in the Kit-Cat school of doggerel was that no one could be referred to by name. Classical allusions were de rigueur. Roger was almost always Vulcan.

Thus some viscount or other:

Vulcan* in his smoaky Forge† did smite
of Gold bright Bolts‡ to fortify his Better§

And, lest the Captives of the Gods take Flight,

Titanic manacles and Olympian Fetters.

Prometheus** who unwisely played with Fire

Is bolted to a crag now all Alone

When Juno †† did incite young Vulcan’s ire

His clever hand’work chained her to her Throne‡‡

This particular Viscount, as everyone understood, could never have crafted such lines himself. He was accompanied by one of the young poets who loitered about the Clubb tossing off epigrams in exchange for pies and wine. Sir Isaac Newton broke in upon the touching exchange and began speaking to Roger. He had not gotten out of bed for a fortnight after his bludgeoning in Star Chamber, but he was now walking about as spry as a twenty-year-old scholar gamboling on the banks of the Cam. He was completely unaware that he was jumping to the head of a snaking and redoubling queue of men who out-ranked him. Daniel had made slower head-way through the revelers because, unlike Isaac, he bothered to excuse himself as he went. So he could not hear Isaac’s words at first. But he knew that Isaac must have been drawn hither by the news, and that he must be congratulating Roger on having so backed Bolingbroke into a corner that he had been forced to call for Mummy to come and rescue him. Substantial men, one after another, had been saying as much to Roger for hours now, and he had been receiving each plaudit with a nod so perfunctory it had dwindled to a vestigial tic. And yet when Isaac Newton said much the same sort of thing to him, Ravenscar took it with (if a play on words could be permitted) the utmost gravity. As if other men went about congratulating people almost at random, but Newton really meant it. Perhaps it helped that he was speaking in prose.

Daniel had thought that Roger seemed a bit distracted, even melancholy, as he’d sat there receiving the adulatory versifications of Whigdom. And Daniel thought he knew why. Roger loved the counterattack. He’d spent the last month readying one, but now it was spent. He was in the position of a pistol-duellist who has discharged his weapon, and now stands defenseless, not knowing whether the foe is wounded mortally; merely dazed; or relishing the power to blow his brains out. He needed to be readying himself for Bolingbroke’s riposte; instead he had to sit here and listen to bad poetry.

Roger took Isaac companionably by the arm and led him toward Daniel. By way of excusing himself he shouted: “Gentlemen—a moment, if you please—I have heard that the Queen to-day hath given the Royal Assent to the posting of a reward for him who finds out the Longitude!” He was feigning amazement at this turn of events. “And it is rumored that Sir Isaac knows something about it.

“If you would hope to find the Longitude,

“Find Newton first—and give him Food!”

Roger improvised, to light applause and heavy drinking. “Mr. Cat! If you would! Mutton-pies, please.”

But by the time Daniel effected his rendezvous with Roger and Isaac, they had moved on to altogether different topics. “You are looking in the pink—splendid!—does this mean I shall get Catherine back? My household has gone to ruin since its Mistress went off to nurse her nuncle.”

“Indeed, my lord, she has already gone back to resume her duties,” Newton returned, bored, and a bit uneasy, with this subject.

“The house will be glowing in a few days, if she tends to it as well as she has to you.”

“She has done well by her uncle,” Newton allowed, “but in truth, the recent news from Westminster, and the prospect that Bolingbroke would be baffled, and a Trial of the Pyx put off indefinitely, were the physic that cured me.”

“Then do you and Dr. Waterhouse carpe diem and place your new-found vigor in service of some well-wrought plan of attack,” Roger suggested, “for Parliament is only prorogued until the tenth of August, and that is more than enough time for such as Bolingbroke to dig a counter-counter-mine, and blow us all up to the sky.”

“Dr. Waterhouse and I are accustomed to people attempting to blow us up,” Newton returned. It was hard to make out whether this was a dry witticism or a clinical observation. Isaac startled Daniel, now, by looking him dead in the eye. “It is good that you are here. I wish to speak to you.”

“Then with your indulgence I shall withdraw,” Roger said, “that the two of you may speak. Please, speak of weighty matters, and keep your discourse to the matter at hand—for there is no more potent weapon for the Jacobites than to make the City, the Country, and the Mobb believe that the Whigs—and by extension the Hanovers—have secretly debased the coinage to make themselves rich!”

This was an awfully blunt thing to say to the Master of the Mint. Newton was shocked, which had probably been Roger’s intention. Roger hovered just long enough to be certain that Newton was not going to collapse twitching on the floor. But instead Newton just glared at him. Daniel caught Roger’s eye and threw him a wink. For Daniel had seen Isaac in this mood many times before, and it usually meant that he was going to work for forty-eight hours at a stretch until some problem or other was solved. Roger bowed and withdrew—depositing the whole burden on the shoulders of Daniel, who could already feel himself sagging.

“WE MUST HUNT DOWN JACK the Coiner, clap him in irons, and force him to testify that he adulterated a Pyx that, until he put his filthy hands into it, was filled with sound coins,” said Sir Isaac Newton. He and Daniel had found a table in the corner. “What would be even better than his testimony, we might compel him to yield up any good guineas that he might have stolen from the Pyx, which would exonerate me beyond even the powers of Jesuits.”

“If that is your wish, Isaac, I am pleased to let you know that the pursuit of Jack has been underway for some months, and that it is being pressed forward by—”

“Your Clubb—yes, I know about your Clubb,” Isaac said. “I shall require membership.”

“The bylaws require a vote on such matters,” Daniel said.

This was a jest. Isaac in this mood was not very receptive to it. “It should not be an obstacle. I propose, in effect, to merge the Mint’s investigation of coiners with your Clubb’s pursuit of those who wrought the Infernal Devices, since we have abundant reasons to believe that they are the same. The advantages to the Clubb are obvious.”

“Then let us anticipate the Clubb’s vote, and act as if you were already a member in good standing,” Daniel said, placing both palms flat on the tabletop, and pressing himself up to his feet. Isaac rose, too. The mutton pies were coming toward them on a silver platter; Daniel redirected the waiter to an exit.

“The timing is felicitous,” Daniel continued. “Haply, I have become aware of an important witness who wishes to have an interview with me.”

Isaac was already in movement toward the exit. “I have hired a carriage for the day,” he threw back over one shoulder. “Where shall I tell the driver we wish to go?”

“Tell him,” Daniel returned, “that we are going to Bedlam.”

The Carriage

MINUTES LATER

“…AND SO WE HAVE MADE an arrangement with Mr. Partry—but not disbursed any money to him, of course—nor do we expect to, until the end of this month,” Daniel said. He’d given Isaac an account of the Clubb’s late doings, mercilessly abbreviated because of the aroma of the mutton pies, which were waiting on a platter in his lap. The platter was a twenty-pound slab of silver done up in full Barock style and engraved with miles of tangled script: a paean to the sexual powers of Newton’s niece. Here she was referred to as Aphrodite, a code that Isaac was not likely to penetrate.

In an apt demonstration of the principle of Relativity, as propounded by Galileo, the bawdy platter, and the steaming morsels thereon, remained in the same position vis-à-vis Daniel, and hence were, in principle, just as edible, as if he had been seated before, and the pies had been resting upon, a table that was stationary with respect to the fixed stars. This was true despite the fact that the carriage containing Daniel, Isaac Newton, and the pies was banging around London. Daniel guessed that they were swinging round the northern limb of St. Paul’s Churchyard, but he had no real way of telling; he had closed the window-shutters, for the reason that their journey to Bedlam would take them directly across the maw of Grub Street, and he did not want to read about today’s adventure in all tomorrow’s papers.

Isaac, though better equipped than Daniel or any other man alive to understand Relativity, shewed no interest in his pie—as if being in a state of movement with respect to the planet Earth rendered it somehow Not a Pie. But as far as Daniel was concerned, a pie in a moving frame of reference was no less a pie than one that was sitting still: position and velocity, to him, might be perfectly interesting physical properties, but they had no bearing on, no relationship to those properties that were essential to pie-ness. All that mattered to Daniel were relationships between his, Daniel’s, physical state and that of the pie. If Daniel and Pie were close together both in position and velocity, then pie-eating became a practical, and tempting, possibility. If Pie were far asunder from Daniel or moving at a large relative velocity—e.g., being hurled at his face—then its pie-ness was somehow impaired, at least from the Daniel frame of reference. For the time being, however, these were purely Scholastic hypotheticals. Pie was on his lap and very much a pie, no matter what Isaac might think of it.

Mr. Cat had lent them silver table-settings, and Daniel, as he spoke, had tucked a napkin into his shirt-collar—a flag of surrender, and an unconditional capitulation to the attractions of Pie. Rather than laying down arms, he now picked them up—knife and fork. Isaac’s question froze him just as he poised these above the flaky top-crust. “Is it the Clubb’s intention to remain idle for the entire month of July?”

“Each member pursues whatever lines of inquiry strike him as most promising,” Daniel returned. “As you and I are doing at this very moment.” And he stabbed Pie.

“And the other members?”

“They have had little to report. Though at the most recent meeting, Mr. Threader mentioned that he had come by a scrap of information: Jack the Coiner is an associate of Mr. Knockmealdown, the infamous Receiver, and frequents the kens of the so-called East London Company in the Borough.”

Now this, actually, shut Isaac up for long enough that Daniel was able to pitch a steaming load of mutton and gravy into his pie-hole. Isaac’s eyes remained fixed in the direction of Daniel’s face, but not focused on him—a good thing, since his phizz was in a state of gustatory rapture.

“You know my opinion of Mr. Threader,” Isaac said.

Daniel nodded.

“He has had dealings with Jack—you may be certain of it,” Isaac continued.

To Daniel this seemed about as likely as that his wife in Boston was secretly in league with Blackbeard. But his mouth was full of pie, he was contented, and he did not raise an objection—merely an eyebrow.

“Mr. Threader must be terrified that the recent investigation of the coinage, set afoot by Bolingbroke, will discover his sordid dealings with Jack. Men have been quartered at Tyburn Cross for less.”

Here Isaac let it drop, in true mathematician’s style, leaving the rest as an exercise for the reader. Daniel tried to communicate, with what he supposed were highly expressive shrugs, sighs, and brow-furrowings, that Isaac had quite lost him. But in the end the only thing for it was to swallow and say: “If Mr. Threader is so terrified of Jack’s being apprehended, why should he volunteer information as to the man’s habits?”

“It was a subtile message,” Isaac said.

“To what effect?”

“To the effect that Mr. Threader is a willing turn-coat—for if there is little honor among thieves, there is even less among weighers and coiners—and would assist in catching Jack, in exchange for lenient treatment.”

“Lenient treatment…from his own Clubb!?”

“From the Master of the Mint,” Isaac said. “He wots perfectly well that you and I know each other.”

“Thank you for making such a hypothesis known to me—unassisted, I never could have dreamed such a thing—so fanciful is it,” Daniel said, a bit surly, and suspended further debate with more Pie.

LIKE A MELANCHOLICK in the corner of a crowded salon, Bedlam turned its broad back upon the City of London. It faced north across Moor Fields, the largest green space in the metropolis. Lunaticks with the good fortune to be lodged in north-facing cells enjoyed a pleasant prospect across half a mile of open ground that separated the hospital from the next edifice of any size: Mr. Witanoont’s Vinegar Yard on Worship Street at the foot of Holy-well Mount. The broadest part of Moor Fields, directly before Bedlam, had been outlined with a quadrilateral, and striped with a St. George’s Cross, of broad lanes bordered with regularly spaced trees. The trees were all about forty years old, as they’d been planted by the order of Hooke.

The lane forming the southern boundary of Moor Fields was hemmed in between a picket-line of such trees on one side, and on the other, an extremely formidable fence. A small iron-mine must have been exhausted to supply those segments of this barrier that consisted of wrist-thick pickets, and a quarry must have been eviscerated to build up the parts consisting of stone blocks. As soon as this awesome maniac-stopping technology appeared out the right-hand window of the hackney-carriage, Daniel tossed down his flatware and began cleaning himself up with his napkin, whilst scanning the little poem that—by long-standing Kit-Cat tradition—had been carved into the bottom crust:

Ye Product of Pie & ye Radius, Squared,

Doth yield the Size of the Pan,

An area vast enough to’ve been Shared,

Not gobbled entire by One Man!

Hooke had made the damned building something like seven hundred feet long—as wide as the whole Tower of London complex—a luxury afforded only to architects working immediately after the Fire. Though Daniel tried, he could not stop himself peering through the iron bars to see if any inmates were out disporting themselves. All he saw were roaming claques of holiday-makers, and lone prostitutes. No great loss; the really interesting madmen were not given liberty to walk around out of doors.

Eventually the fence veered away from them on the right, and the trees did likewise on the left, as they rattled into a broad oval forecourt spread below Bedlam’s central cupola. This was lined with concentric rings of carriages and sedan chairs waiting for their owners and renters to grow bored of the entertainments within. As he and Isaac disembarked, Daniel paid the driver to take the silver back to the Kit-Cat Clubb.

Despite being aged and distinguished Natural Philosophers, they had to wait in the queue just like everyone else. The Gate where every visitor had to pay his penny was commensurate with the Fence. Vaulting over it was a stone cornice: a matched pair of gracefully curving ramps, rising up to almost kiss in the center. Each appeared to serve as a kind of chaise for a sculpted figure to lounge upon: on Daniel’s left, like a straw-man that has been blown down from its armature, Melancholy reclined, gazing off dully into the space above Moor Fields. On his right, Mania perched, touching the cornice only with his elbows, hip-bone, and ankles, as every muscle in his body was chiseled taut. His fists were clenched as he strained against his fetters and his eyes rolled back as he gaped crazily up into the weather. Daniel knew these two stony fellows well, and even took a sort of godfatherly interest in them. He had visited Hooke in his atelier under Bedlam’s cupola when Hooke had been sketching them, and had even dared to make suggestions, which Hooke had of course ignored. After they had been realized by sculptors, and hoisted into position, Daniel had walked beneath them many times, going to visit Hooke or to partake of the Royal Society’s crack-pated madness-experiments. Never until today, though, had he felt such a kinship with them. For today Daniel, who on so many days was the personification of Melancholy, was standing in this queue to the left hand of Sir Isaac Newton: Mr. Mania himself. He looked back and forth a few times between sculpted Mania—or, as the Vulgar styled him, Raving Madness—and Isaac, hoping that the latter would note the similarity. For Daniel could not quite muster the nerve to voice his thoughts. Finally Isaac sighed, rolled his eyes, and said, “Yes, it is very droll.”

In due course they ascended some broad steps to the gate and paid their pennies. This gave them liberty to ascend more steps to the entrance of the building, where they were given opportunities to pay supplementary bribes to the staff members loitering around the door. This was not strictly necessary, but would ensure that they’d be ushered straightaway to see the most entertaining madmen and -women in the whole establishment. Daniel merely scanned their faces and, not marking the one he sought, led Isaac into the building.

“I beg your pardon?” Isaac said, for he had heard Daniel muttering. “Did you say something?”

A deep voice behind them said, “Begging your pardon, Sir Isaac, but you need pay him no mind. Whenever Dr. Waterhouse crosses yonder threshold, it is his habit to say a prayer that he shall be permitted to leave.”

Isaac made a point of ignoring this, supposing that the words had come from some inmate who was lurking by the door, hoping to receive a coin in payment for his waggish remarks. Which was a good guess, but wrong. Daniel turned about to face the man who had spoken. Finally Isaac did, too.

This was no lunatick, for his hair was long and lank. Inmates had their heads shaved. And his wrists and ankles were unfettered. Isaac stiffened, and drew back a step even as Daniel was approaching this fellow to shake his hand. For Isaac had recognized Saturn as a fellow with whom he had once had an encounter of an extremely dubious nature in a boozing-ken out back of Bridewell. But after a few moments’ consideration—finding himself surrounded by shaven-headed, chain-dragging maniacs and melancholicks—Sir Isaac made up his mind that the company of Saturn was not so very distasteful after all.

At almost the same moment a fourth man, who’d been loitering near Saturn, presented himself for introduction. “Mr. Timothy Stubbs,” said Saturn, “who as you can see from his red tresses does not live here. But as you may guess from his indigo suit, he does work here. Take your hand out of your pocket, Dr. Waterhouse; he has already been bribed.”

“We have been attending to John Doe as you prescribed, Doctor,” announced Timothy Stubbs after more formal introductions had been dragged out of Saturn. “He has been given every physic, every therapy known to modern medicine—but alas, he shows no sign of repenting from his delusions.”

“Fancy that!” Daniel exclaimed. “I suppose you have had to keep him close, then.”

“Indeed, Doctor, or he’d have knocked holes in all the walls by now. He is kept in a cell above.”

“Where the most dangerous maniacs are pent up, on the upper storey,” Saturn translated.

“Pray, where is Mr. Doe now?”

“He is in the Machine for Calming Violent Lunaticks, sir,” said Stubbs, a bit startled by the question. “Just as you prescribed—four hours a day.”

“Have the purges worked?”

“If you mean, do they purge him, sir, why, yes, they do, mightily. But if you mean, have they cured his madness, I am afraid not—so we have doubled them again.”

“Excellent!” Daniel exclaimed. “Which way to the Machine?”

“It lies at the end of the men’s wing—a bit of a walk, I’m afraid,” said Stubbs, leading them carefully around a shaven-headed man who was lying on his stomach on the floor, darting his eyes from side to side and mumbling a stream of what sounded like military jargon, interrupted every few moments by spasmodic flinching as he reacted to imaginary shell-bursts.

“Not at all,” Daniel returned cheerfully. “Bedlam is justly famed as the best Dry Walk in London.”

“Small comfort on a sunny day I’m afraid,” said Stubbs, skirting a group of three young men in Mohawk coiffures, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder critiquing the performance of a maniac who was playing a fiddle and dancing a jig at the same time:

“I’ll give you a penny if you play another—and tuppence if you stop!”

“Why do we stand and watch this wretch, when there are dishevelled madwomen but a few paces away?”

“When you see what a dishevelled madwoman actually looks like, your question shall be answered.”

They passed out of the central hall and entered a gallery that stretched away for some hundred yards. On the right it was lined with windows admitting light from the sky over Moor Fields. On the left was a succession of closely spaced doors, each sporting a small barred window at head-height. Except for the very noblest and the most destitute, the full range of Londoners—men, women, gentry, commoners, adults and children, small gangs of rowdy apprentices, flocks of well-dressed young women, solitary females even better-dressed (these were whores), doughty gaffers and crones taking their constitutionals, dashing squadrons of boys, strutting Mohawks, preening dandies, and perpetually amused Cockneys—strolled from door to door, peering in at each window to behold whatever spectacle lay within. Costermongers fed and beered the visitors from their push-carts. From place to place a knot of indigo-suited attendants ganged up on some inmate who had gotten out of hand. But for the most part the prisoners mixed freely with the visitors, or as freely as men could when ankle was fettered to ankle, and wrist to wrist, with generous lengths of heavy chain. Some of them—melancholicks—sat huddled on the floor, or shuffled to and fro, ignoring even those visitors who poked them in the ribs with walking-sticks. Others—maniacs—carried on furious disputes with entities not visibly present, or raved about whatever phant’sy was most on their minds; the most animated drew small crowds, which laughed at those rantings of a sexual or political nature, and goaded them to further outbursts. A maniac was trying to tell the world that Louis XIV was controlling London from a secret ærie atop the dome of St. Paul’s, employing an army of Jesuits who could, through sorcery, metamorphose into gray doves. A young man told him that a whole flock of such doves had been sighted entering the cupola of Bedlam through a broken window. This news drove the maniac into transports of horror and sent him back to his cell as fast as he could waddle. The violent jangling of his chains mixed with the laughter and applause of the onlookers, making the gallery too noisy for conversation.

After it had died down, Stubbs announced “We’ve had to swop out the straw in John Doe’s cell five times a day,” in case Daniel still had lingering doubts as to the efficacy of those purges. “The other inmates have learnt to stand clear of him—except for the coprophiliacs, of course, who must be beaten back with sticks.” He nodded to a door a short distance ahead. Coincidentally or not, an umber bullet flew out of its window and impacted on the wig of a passing fop, sending up a pretty burst of white powder. “He should have paid for a guide,” Stubbs remarked, leading Daniel, Isaac, and Saturn on a long arc to keep them out of turd-range. “I do wonder whether Mr. Doe might respond well to beatings,” Stubbs continued wistfully. “I know you have forbidden it, Doctor, but if you would allow me to have a go at him with the cane—”

“No,” Daniel said. “Your message to me yesterday stated that he had requested an interview—”

“Indeed, guv’nor. Begged for it, more like.”

“Let us withhold the cane, then, and see what the interview yields.”

By this time they had come near enough to the end of the gallery to hear a persistent low hollow grinding and booming noise. Stubbs threw open a door at the end and led them into a spacious room—for they had entered into a sort of bastion anchoring the western end of the hospital, like the fist at the end of an arm—where that noise was a good deal louder. This salon was as cluttered with peculiar exhibits as the Court of Technologickal Arts at Clerkenwell, and as crowded with obstreperous madmen as a meeting of Her Majesty’s Privy Council. But the biggest object in the room—and the source of the noise—was an immense wooden drum, mounted above the floor like a wheel. Its axle spanned the interval between a pair of massive upright timbers, each of which rose to slightly above Daniel’s head. The drum was shaped like a fat coin, perhaps a yard thick. Its rim nearly grazed both floor and ceiling, which would make its diameter rather more than twelve feet. The circular faces of it—the heads and tails of the coin, as it were—had been fabricated in the same way as primitive cart-wheels, viz. of broad deals fastened side-by-side with long iron straps. The rim consisted of more planks pegged crosswise between these two disks.

Projecting from one end of the axle was an enormous crank with a handle as long as an oar. A stout little stairway led up to a platform, large enough for two or three men to stand abreast and bend their backs to the operation of that crank. One crew was doing so now, and another stood by, quaffing beer to replace the moisture they’d sweated into their clothes.

As the great wheel ground away on its axle of greased iron, muffled thumps and booms sounded from within: sometimes a steady tattoo, as of running feet, always culminating in a series of thuds like a man falling down stairs.

“The therapy is compleat!” Stubbs announced. The laborers gladly let go and stood up straight to stretch their tired backs, whilst keeping wary vigil on the crank-handle, which continued to rotate—its vis inertiae might break the jaw of an unwary man. After the drum had slowed to a low idling speed they seized the crank again and nudged it around a quarter-turn or so. It was now possible to see that the near face of the drum was fitted with a long narrow hatch nearly spanning the interval between hub and rim. The crank-men made sure that this was down and vertical, like an hour-hand at the stroke of six. Then they tromped down the stairs in quest of refreshment.

Stubbs leaned into the space between axle-support and drum-side and unlatched the door. It flew open all the way and banged against the outside of the Machine, revealing that its inner surface was entirely covered by a quilted canvas bag, so filthy that it gleamed with a hard shine, stuffed with straw or horse-hair. The open hatchway was mostly empty; but down low, something reminiscent of a human figure could be seen draining lumpily onto the floor, like a half-melted wax statue being poured out of a saucepan.

“You see?” Stubbs announced. “The Machine works!”

The man who had emerged from the Machine seemed to want in the worst way to get clear of it. But he knew better than to stand, or even sit. He straightened himself out on the floor, supporting himself on his forearms and his forehead, and began to creep along like an inchworm, pausing every few inches for an episode of dry heaves. In a minute or so he reached a waiting chamber-pot, dashed its lid off with a blind arm-swing, hugged it, and used it to pull himself up off the floor. With some further exertions, and the aid of a man in indigo, he got himself seated upon this vessel and immediately began to generate sounds of a hydraulic and pneumatic character.

“Has he assaulted any more walls?” Daniel asked.

“Only the one, Doctor. It is a part of his mania that he phant’sies he knows just where the treasure is hidden.”

“What treasure do you refer to?” Isaac asked.

“Why, the same one all the lunaticks are searching for, sir,” said Stubbs, “the Gold of King Solomon.”

JOHN DOE WAS in no condition for an interview just yet. While the attendants busied themselves putting Doe’s chains back on his wrists and ankles, and returning him to his cell, Daniel, Isaac, and Peter Hoxton ascended to the storey above and walked back to the center of Bedlam along a gantlet of cells similar to those below. Fewer visitors came up here. The ones who did tended to be gangs of bloody-minded ’prentices, or the most distasteful sort of fops, or solitary men who looked as if they might themselves benefit from a few hours in the Machine. The prisoners here remained locked in their cells, and for the best reasons. Daniel prudently walked as close to the windows, and as far from the doors, as was practical, and tried not to hear the mutterings of the faces framed in some of those little door-hatches. He led the others on, and they gladly followed, at a brisk pace. Presently they exeunted from the men’s wing and entered the central part of the edifice, above the main entrance, and below the cupola. Here they ascended another stair into a vaulted space: technically an attic, but a carefully finished one, airy and well-lit.

Seen from Mr. Witanoont’s Vinegar-Yard, Bedlam’s center looked as if a squarish funnel had been turned upside-down and clapped on top of it. The broad part of the funnel was a high mansard roof enclosing the ample space in which Daniel, Isaac, and Saturn were now standing. The narrow nozzle was the cupola, which pierced the ceiling, admitting sky-light and (as its windows were ajar) exhausting the fouled air of the asylum. “This was Hooke’s favorite part of the building, his ærie and his atelier,” Daniel said, “though it then looked much different.” He approached a railing and gazed down into the central well that vented cupola-light into the entrance hall. “This had planks thrown across it, making it into one great floor, uninterrupted.”

“I only paid one visit, and that was for your going-away party,” said Isaac.

This was of interest to Saturn, who had been distracted, leaning over the rail and beckoning to some blokes loitering on the ground floor, two storeys below them. Now those fellows were ascending the stair in a gang. A man in indigo was moving to intercept them on the landing. Saturn, whilst keeping an eye on their progress, attended to Daniel. “Was that before you went off to Massachusetts?” he inquired.

“Long before. I departed for Massachusetts, at long last, in 1695. The party to which Sir Isaac refers was in 1689.”

“That makes no sense,” Saturn pointed out. Then he leaned over the railing, turning his attention to what was happening on the landing below: the man in indigo had barred the path of the blokes—four in all—who had answered Saturn’s call. They were big, rough-looking lads who could have mowed this man down in an instant, but they had piled to a stop anyway, and were looking up to Saturn for their cue.

“ ’S al’right, sir,” Saturn called, “they’re with us.”

“And who the hell are you?”

Daniel silenced Saturn with a hand on his shoulder, and gave the answer: “Sir Isaac Newton, the Master of Her Majesty’s Mint, investigates an act of High Treason. You are impeding his deputies. Pray stand aside.”

Isaac was as startled to hear this, as was the indigo-suited maniac-wrangler, and stepped up to the railing. He did this not for effect, but simply to see what in heaven’s name was going on. But the apparition of the ancient white-haired sorcerer-knight struck the attendant, and moved him aside, like a blast of wind blowing a door open. “I do beg your pardon, guv’nor,” he said, in a much more moderate tone, after Saturn’s ruffians had filed past him. “Is there any way I can be of service?”

“Prevent sight-seers from coming up here, thank you,” Daniel returned, then wheeled round and began to scan the walls. This upper storey was not as prized by the Governors of Bedlam as it had been by Hooke; rather than situating their best offices here, they had sprinkled tables and trunks about the place, making it into a dovecote for clerks, and a dump for little-used documents.

“When we were here for my party it looked much as it does now,” Daniel said to Isaac, “which is to say that these inward-sloping walls—which are, of course, the inner surface of the roof’s structure—had been plastered over.”

“Yes.”

“But I often visited Hooke here much earlier—back in the seventies. This part of Bedlam went up first—as you’ll recall, the wings took years to complete.”

“Yes.”

“I am trying to recollect what it looked like, before lath and plaster were put up. I phant’sy that behind these surfaces are large cavities—particularly—if memory serves—here, between where the chimney is hidden as it pierces the roof, and the corner. There are four chimneys—hence, four such cavities.” Daniel had been dragging a hand along the plaster as he spoke, occasionally thumping with his knuckles. He’d stopped at a place, near the corner, where it answered with an especially resonant boom. Without allowing his hand to move, he turned round now to scan the other three corners. His gaze lit on one that was stained with fresh plaster. Then—fortuitously—he noticed that Timothy Stubbs had finally caught up with them.

Pleasantly baffled might have described Stubbs’s state of mind when he’d reached the head of the stairs; horrified was nearer the mark now. Daniel favored him with a thin smile. “Does my discourse have a familiar ring to you, Mr. Stubbs?”

“Indeed, Doctor, it is very like what John Doe was saying to his confederates, after I followed them hither that night.”

“You showed commendable nerve, Mr. Stubbs, in sneaking up on a gang of madmen.”

The praise caused Stubbs to relax a bit. “Wish I’d been so cool as to’ve tackled all of ’em, guv.”

“You did just the proper thing by capturing their leader. Is that the place, over yonder, where they attacked the wall?” Daniel asked, pointing to the fresh plaster.

“Indeed, sir.”

“Mad as hatters—or so ’twould seem,” Daniel mused. “On the other hand, suppose there really is treasure, or something, hidden in one of these corners. Then John Doe is no madman, but a burglar or worse; and all of the treatments I have prescribed for him are to no purpose. They might even be detrimental! He should in that event be at Newgate awaiting justice, not at Bedlam seeking a cure. The only way to be certain is to look. I take it that Doe found nothing, when he broke through the wall?”

“Wasps’ nests and bat droppings only,” Stubbs returned, speaking slowly, as he was a bit lost.

“That is not surprising. Mr. Hooke would have placed his cache in the corner most sheltered from the prevailing winds—there,” Daniel said, and pointed along the wall to the next corner. Saturn looked at him, and Daniel nodded. Saturn turned his back to the others and sauntered to the corner indicated. He gave his right arm a little twitch as he went, and a loggerhead of black iron dropped out of his sleeve, fat end first. His fingers closed round the narrow end just in time to keep it from dropping to the floor. Then with a sudden movement he brought it diagonally up and across his body, and with a ponderous swing of his whole trunk delivered a massive back-hand blow to the wall. The loggerhead burst through the plaster and the underlying lath like a musket-ball piercing a melon. Saturn drew it out, transferred the loggerhead to the other hand, and shoved half of his arm through the hole.

Mr. Timothy Stubbs was not in the least pleased by any of this, and looked as though the only thing preventing him from adding Saturn to Bedlam’s roster was the implicit threat of the four lads Saturn had summoned up. But Peter Hoxton quickly settled the issue by declaring: “The verdict is in. John Doe is no lunatick, but a common burglar.” And he drew his arm out of the hole, and held up, as proof, a rolled sheaf of dusty papers. “Or perhaps an uncommon one.”

“ ’TWOULD APPEAR YOU HAD WARNED Mr. Stubbs to be on alert for madmen who would wish to knock holes in the walls,” Isaac said, “but how could you have anticipated this?”

He and Daniel had retreated to the opposite corner of the upper storey to get away from the dust and noise created by the assault on the wall. Saturn’s lads, who had come with diverse crowbars, steve-dore’s hooks, &c., secreted on their persons, had demolished a few square yards of plaster and lath, exposing a prism of dark space in which two or three bodies might have been concealed, if Hooke had been that sort of chap. Instead, he had packed in two wooden trunks, and a few leather wallets, then caulked the interstices with wadded or rolled papers. The dust was now settling to the point where Daniel and Isaac were tempted to approach. But first Isaac wanted an explanation.

“The story is not wholly known to me,” Daniel said. “Several of Hooke’s buildings, including the Royal College of Physicians and my lord Ravenscar’s house, have recently been invaded.”

“Catherine told me about the attack on her domicile,” Isaac said. “A queer lot of burglars they were—knocking holes in my lord Ravenscar’s walls to discover naught, while ignoring treasures that were sitting out in plain view.”

“Simple extrapolation told me that Bedlam might be next. I paid Mr. Stubbs to show especial vigilance. John Doe was captured a week ago. He has done his utmost, I am told, to keep up the façade of a raving lunatick. Now that he knows what treatment lunaticks may expect in Bedlam, he may confess to simple burglary.” Daniel caught Stubbs’s eye—which was not easily done, as Stubbs was paralyzed with astonishment to see what was being dragged out of the walls. “Pray go to John Doe’s cell. Tell him nothing about what has really occurred. Rather, tell him that Dr. Waterhouse has knocked holes in all four corners, and found nothing—proof that Doe is a madman indeed, who may, therefore, look forward to a stay here of indefinite duration.”

Peter Hoxton had been carrying out a rough sort of the booty from the wall. Which was to say, he had raked out all that was of Saturnine interest and put the discards in another, larger pile. He had already culled out enough to keep him rapt for weeks: for the trunks were packed with small wooden chests, and the chests with fine instruments wrought of brass, and even of gold. Many of these were obviously clock-work. Saturn, wary of the dust, peered quickly at these, then closed them up and stacked them out of harm’s way, covering them with a large drawing which he pressed into service as a tarpaulin. But the drawing itself—a phantastickal rendering of the skeleton of a bird—had now cozened him into rigid fascination. Isaac too was drawn to it. “I thought it were a rendering of a bird, at first,” Saturn said, “until I spied this cull—” and he pointed to a snarl of lines that Hooke had, over the course of a few seconds’ lazy yet furious drawing, scrawled and slashed onto the page. These by some miracle added up to a perfectly intelligible rendering of a man in breeches, waistcoat, and periwig, standing with arms raised above his head to support one joint of the wing. If this was supposed to be a bird, it would have a wingspan several times that of the largest albatross. But where a bird would have muscles to pull, this skeleton had pistons and cylinders to push, the great bones of the wings. It was inside-out and backwards, exoskeletal.

Daniel’s gaze fell on a great leather wallet, gnawed at the corners by rodents, but still intact. He unwound the ribbon that held it closed, and spread it out on the lid of a trunk. It was a stack of foolscap sheets rising to the thickness of three fingers, creased and compressed from long immurement, but still perfectly legible. It contained notes, written in Hooke’s hand, and illustrated with more admirable diagrams, on divers subjects:

Dr. Dee’s Book of Spirits expos’d

Animadversions upon Dr. Vossius’s Hypothesis of Gravitation

Acerbity in Fruits

Plagiarism in the Parisian Academy

Cryptography of Trithemius

Sheathing ships with lead, as practic’d by the Chinese

Telescopick Sights for Instruments Vindicated

Inconceivable Distance of the Fixt Stars

Parisian philosophers evade Proof from Observations, when they are unwilling to allow Consequences

272 Vibrations of a String in a Second, make the sound of G Sol re ut

Python explain’d

Of the Rowing of Ancient Gallies

Structure of Muscles explain’d

Iron and Sp. Salis take fire with explosion

Unguent for Burns, a Receipt

Ideas are corporeal, with their Explication, and the possible number that may be formed in a Man’s Life

Monkeys wherein different from Men

How Light is produced in putrifying Bodies

Micrometer of a new contrivance

A Cause hinted of the Libration of the Moon

Flints: of their formation and former fluidity

French Academy have published some Matters first discovered here

Why freezing expands water

Effects of Earthquakes on the Constitution of Air

Hills generated by Earthquakes

Hob’s Hypothesis of Gravity defective

Flying Fish, and of Flying in general

Center of the Earth not the Center of Gravity

Decay in human bodies observed

Anthelme’s Opinion of Light refuted

The Genuine Receipt for making Orvietano

Why heat is not sensible in the Moon’s Rays

Gravity and Light the two great Laws of Nature, are but different Effects of the same Cause

Hodometrickal Method for finding the Longitude

Effects on one Experimenter of the Plant, call’d Bangue by the Portugals, & Gange by the Moors

Mechanical Way of drawing Conical Figures

Burning-glasses of the Ancients

Implicit was that Hooke had concealed these in the walls of Bedlam because he would not entrust the Royal Society—specifically, Newton—with his legacy. And so Daniel began to read these titles aloud as a sort of rebuke to Isaac. But having started in on such a Litany, he found it difficult to stop. This was a sort of concentrated essence of that quicksilver spirit that had animated Daniel’s, and the Royal Society’s, halcyon days. To handle these pages was to drink deep from the Fountain of Youth.

What eventually stopped him was a page written, not in English like most of the others, and not in Latin like some of them, but in a wholly different alphabet. The characters on this page bore no relationship to any from the Roman, Greek, or Hebrew script; they were not Cyrillic, not Arabic, and yet bore no connection to any of the writing-systems of Asia. It was an admirably simple, clean, and lucid way of writing—if only one could understand it. And Daniel almost could. The sight of it stopped him cold for a minute. He was just beginning to decipher the glyphs of the title when Saturn put in: “I have already come across several of those, Doc—what tongue is that?”

Isaac, gazing at the leaf in Daniel’s hand from three yards away, answered the question: “It is the Real Character,” he said, “a language invented by the late John Wilkins, on philosophical principles, in hopes that it would drive out Latin. Hooke and Wren adopted it for a time. Can you still read it, Daniel?”

“Can you, Isaac?” Daniel asked; for it might be important for him to know this.

“Not without revising Wilkins’s book.”

“It is a receipt,” Daniel said, elevating the page slightly, “for a restorative medicine, made from gold.”

“Then pray do not waste time translating it,” Isaac said, “for we all know of the late Mr. Hooke’s susceptibility to quackery.”

“This is not Hooke’s receipt,” Daniel said. “He wrote it out, but did not invent it. He gives credit to the same fellow who shewed the Royal Society how to make Phosphorus.” To Saturn and diverse other eavesdroppers this signified nothing, but to Isaac it was as good as saying Enoch the Red. As such it drew Isaac’s full and disconcertingly sharp attention. “Pray go on, Daniel.”

“It begins with a sort of narration. An account of something Hooke witnessed somewhere…” A long pause now for difficult translation, then sudden knowledge: “No, here! Just here, where we are standing. The date given is…if my arithmetick is to be credited…anno domini 1689.”

“The same year, and place, as your strangely premature going-away party,” Saturn reflected.

This tripped Daniel up for a moment, being an acute observation on Saturn’s part, and one that Daniel had entirely missed. But Isaac urged him to go on, and so he did, haltingly: “It began with a medical—no, a surgical procedure on a subject—human—male—aged two score and three.”

“Ah, a contemporary of you two gentlemen!” Saturn put in. “Perhaps you knew him.”

“He was quite ill because of a stone. A stone in his bladder. Hooke performed a lithotomy.”

“What, here!?” Saturn exclaimed, looking about.

“I have seen them done in the street,” Daniel said.

“It would not be the strangest thing Hooke did here,” Isaac assured Saturn.

“That becomes the clearer, the more we go through his leavings,” Saturn mused.

“Pray continue, Daniel!”

“The procedure went normally. However, the patient…the patient died,” Daniel translated. He had begun to feel unaccountably woozy, and took a moment now to sit down atop a dusty trunk, lest he lose consciousness and topple over the balustrade into Bedlam’s Well of Souls. “I beg your pardon…the patient died, as often happens, of shock. No pulse was evident. Whereupon the learned fellow I spoke of earlier emerged from a place of concealment, from which he had been observing the procedure.”

“How convenient!” Saturn scoffed. “What, are we to believe this Alchemist lurks in Bedlam’s shadows just waiting for someone to give up the ghost during an impromptu tabletop lithotomy?”

“The truth is not so fanciful. He had been present, earlier in the evening, for a social gathering. He overstayed to keep an eye on the procedure,” Daniel said. This much was not written down on the page—it came from Daniel’s memory.

“A social gathering—the oft-mentioned premature going-away party, perhaps!” Saturn said. He meant it as a jest. But neither Daniel nor Isaac laughed.

Daniel continued with the translation: “Hooke had in this room a Reverberatory Furnace, which was already hot for another experiment. The Alchemist went to work in some haste, using some chymicals from Hooke’s own cupboard—which I can testify was well-stocked. For example, he used something that is rendered, on this page, as a bone-cube-cup…”

“Hooke must have meant a cupel.”

“Ah, well done, Isaac. A cupel, and certain materials that he carried on his person in a small wooden chest. The receipt is not easy to translate—I too shall have to revise Wilkins.” He skipped a page, then another. “The result: a small quantity of a light-bearing compound. Placed in the mouth of the dead patient, it caused his heart to resume beating, and cured him of his shock. Several minutes after, he came awake, and professed to have no memory of what had transpired. The Alchemist had by then departed, taking all the residues of the receipt with him. Hooke set it down as best he could from his recollections.”

“This explains much,” said Sir Isaac Newton, eyeing Daniel very oddly indeed. Daniel hardly cared; he had leaned back flaccid against the wall, and was gazing mindlessly at the oculus of silver light in the cupola. He felt no more alive than stone Melancholy.

“Yes, it does!” Saturn returned, “we now know what John Doe was looking for!” Then he shut up and swallowed hard, noting the odd, wordless tension joining Daniel to Isaac. “Or were you referring to something else?”

IN BOSTON DANIEL had known many Barbadian slaves, bred in the Caribbean from stock imported, a generation earlier, by the Duke of York’s Royal Africa Company. They were the most superstition-ridden people he had ever met. It seemed that the most flimsy and volatile elements of African culture had survived the Middle Passage, even as the ballast of history and wisdom had been chucked overboard. Exported to northerly outposts, these slaves stepped off the gangplanks bedizened with voudoun fetishes and spouting the most bizarre words and phrases—’twas as if they lived in a perpetual hallucination. When such persons were placed in the households of literal-minded Puritans inclined to see devils and imps everywhere, the result was poisonous—as several Salemites had learned.

One phrase that Daniel had heard, more than once, from some such slaves, was dead man walking. It came out of a belief, endemic to the Caribbean, that corpses could be re-animated through sorcery, and made into sleep-walking Myrmidons who would do the sorcerer’s bidding.

It was impossible for Daniel to bar such thoughts from his mind for a little while. He was as helpless, as susceptible, as a man being tumbled in the Machine for Calming Violent Lunaticks. He was, if not a Dead Man Walking, then a Dead Man Sitting on his Arse for at least a quarter of an hour, as Saturn and his lads began to pack up the Hooke treasure and make it ready for shipment.

Gradually, that part of his mind where Enlightenment virtues were enshrined got the better of that part where grotesque supersitions waited for opportunities to jump out of the shadows and shout, “Boo!”

Precisely what Enoch Root was, was not known to Daniel. But Root most certainly was not a voudoun sorcerer. If he had ministered, in some wise, to Daniel following his lithotomy, he had not done so by necromancy. More likely, Daniel had not actually died, but gone into a coma, and Root had brewed up a stimulant to bring him back. It might have been as simple as smelling salts. Seeing which, Hooke—who was gullible about quack medicines—had let his imagination carry him off.

It was amusing, though, that Daniel had written Root a letter, just the other day, stating his opinion that he, Daniel, was not likely to survive the next few weeks.

Isaac’s repetition of the phrase “Crane Court” broke in on Daniel’s reverie. While Daniel had drifted away, Isaac had stepped in and begun issuing writs. He was telling them to take all of Hooke’s treasures away to the headquarters of the Royal Society—precisely what Hooke had not wanted.

“Speaking as one who lives in the attic of the Royal Society,” Daniel said, “I can witness that there is no room there. None.”

“We can always make room,” Isaac pointed out, “by rubbishing some beetles.”

“But we do not wish to in this case,” Daniel insisted.

“Where do you propose to take it, then?” Isaac asked, and sharp was his gaze on the document in Daniel’s hands.

Before he forgot about this, Daniel folded it up the middle and slipped it into his breast pocket. “I propose it be stored at my lord Ravenscar’s house,” he said. “I go there frequently on Longitude and other business, so I can always get to it there. And as your niece is mistress of the household, you too may visit whenever you please.”

“Then it were no different from keeping it at Crane Court.”

“Pray walk with me, Isaac, to pay a call on Mr. John Doe, and I shall explain it as we go.” Daniel rose to his feet, and found that he was as alive as he’d ever been. A live man walking.

“THE PIECE OF INFORMATION you are lacking,” Daniel explained as they strolled down the gallery, “is that I suspect Henry Arlanc of involvement with the Infernal Devices.”

“What, the porter?”

“Yes.”

“But he is a member of the Clubb, is he not?”

“Indeed. I saw to it that he was made a member, on the pretext that he was nearly killed by the first Infernal Device, and so was as much a victim as any of us. But really I did so because I suspected him.”

“On what grounds?”

“First: shortly after I arrived in London, some months ago, I began to make inquiries about the location of Hooke’s papers and instruments. Henry Arlanc was the first man I asked. Not long after, I learned that word of my interest had spread through the demimonde with incredible rapidity, which made me suspect that Henry had talked to someone. Second: supposing that you, Isaac, were the intended victim of the first Infernal Device—that this was an attempt by Jack the Coiner to assassinate you, his most formidable foe—how would Jack have known that it was your habit to work late Sunday evenings at Crane Court? For you went to some pains to prevent this from being widely known, specifically so that you would not be disturbed by favor-seekers. Only Arlanc and a few others knew of this.

“Then I should say you have evidence enough, already, to prosecute Arlanc.”

“But I would rather use Arlanc, somehow, to draw Jack out,” Daniel returned. “We ought to do nothing that would make Arlanc phant’sy he is under suspicion. But it were obvious folly to place the items found today in the house where Arlanc dwells!”

“Very well. To the Temple of Vulcan they shall go, and I shall send a note to Catherine directing her to place them under lock and key. There is a vault in the cellar—”

“Can’t think of a better place,” Daniel said.

“I hope it is now plain to you that Threader is a villain,” Isaac said. “Whatever evidence you may have to implicate Arlanc, is as nothing beside the fact that the Device was secreted on Threader’s baggage-wain.”

“Then do you add my name to the roster of those under suspicion,” Daniel said, “as it was placed in my trunk. But in all seriousness, Isaac, I’ll agree to this much: the Device could not have been placed where it was without the connivance—perhaps unwitting, or unwilling—of a servant in Threader’s retinue.”

“And it is certain that such Black-guards are numbered among his entourage. For Jack is a shrewd fellow, and would be at pains to plant spies in the households of his confederates.”

They had paused before the door to John Doe’s cell. Daniel said, “His confederates, yes—as well as his enemies. For as strange as it seems, he appears to have done just that in placing Arlanc at the Royal Society.”

Isaac listened to this gravely, and then devoted a few seconds to a sort of clinical examination of Daniel’s face: perhaps looking for symptoms of resurrection. “I suppose it does seem strange,” he allowed. “On any other day, Daniel, I should be quite amazed.”

The Launch Prudence

MONDAY, 12 JULY 1714

MR. ORNEY HAD SAID only that Prudence was a Simple and a Virtuous Vessel. No further warning was needed by the other members of the Clubb. They had come down to the stairs this morning laden with cushions, oilskins, umbrellas, spare clothes, food, drink, tobacco, and anti-emeticks. All of them were soon put to use as Prudence wallowed across the Pool of London and made a slow pass upstream before the waterfront of the Borough, struggling against the rain-swollen flow of the Thames towards London Bridge, which taunted them cruelly with visions of pubs and chocolate-houses.

Orney might be oblivious to rain, but, anticipating that the others would whinge about it, he had pitched a tarpaulin over Prudence’s midships. This was waterproof except along the seams; wherever anyone touched it; where it had been patched; round any of its constellations of moth-holes; and wherever else it happened to leak.

Prudence was, in essence, a fat cargo hold partitioned off from the rest of the universe by a carapace of bent planks, with a nod, here and there, to requirements of propulsion: diverse oar-locks, and a stubby mast with elementary rigging. There was no wind to-day—the rain was a steady soaker, not a lashing howler—and so he had hired four Rotherhithe lads to kneel on the deck and stir up the Thames with oars. The oarsmen were situated out-board, along the gunwales, sheltered by naught but big-brimmed hats of waxy canvas. They looked as wretched as any Mediterranean galley-slaves. Daniel, Orney, Kikin, and Threader were in the hold, where Orney had improvised a bench by throwing a plank between two clapped-out sawbucks. When this was augmented by cushions, it rose just high enough that the four Clubb members could sit on it, all in a line like worshippers on a pew, and gaze out through a narrow horizontal slit between the fraying and weeping tarp-hem above, and the bashed and tar-slopped gunwale below. This would make them perfectly invisible to any who might spy on them from the shore or the Bridge, as Orney had pointed out several times already, and would persist in doing until a plurality of the Clubb agreed with him, or told him to shut up. Orney used Prudence to make runs up and down and across the river for supplies, e.g., oakum, brown stuff, tar, and pitch, all of which the hold smelled like. There were other vessels like it scooting about the Pool.

“The point is granted,” Mr. Threader said finally. “As a means to reconnoiter the demesne of the infamous Mr. Knockmealdown, it is better than packing a water-taxi with gentlemen in periwigs and sending them forth on a sunny day with parasols and spyglasses.”

“There!” cried Daniel, who was tilting a hand-drawn map toward the feeble light lapping in through the slit, and menacing it with a Royal Society burning-glass the size of a dessert plate. This artifact, which was encrusted with a Rokoko frame and handle, had been a gift to Natural Philosophy from some member of the House of Tuscany. Beneath its splendour, the map looked very mean. The map had been cobbled together, as Daniel had explained, from rumors, recollections, and suppositions given to him by John Doe, Sean Partry, Peter Hoxton, Hannah Spates’s father, and any of their drinking-companions who’d been in earshot when Daniel had inter-viewed them. “Mark yon brick warehouse,” Daniel continued, indicating Bermondsey.

“There’s been naught but brick warehouses for two hours,” Threader pointed out, in a deprecating tone that moved Mr. Orney to muse:

“A man of the City, who lives off Byzantine manipulations of the Commerce of the Realm—like a fly, influencing the movements of a noble draught-horse by chewing on its arse—cannot perceive the beauty of this prospect. He will prefer the waterfront of Southwark: Bankside, and the Clink. For these were fashioned during indolent times, for the pleasure of idle wretches narcotized by Popery: being a succession of theatres, whorehouses, and baiting-pits strung together by a corniche well-made for preening strollers, beaux, fops, pimps, nancy-boys, et cetera. A lovely prospect doth it make—to a certain type of observer. But below the bridge, most of what meets the eye has been built in recent times—an age of industry and commerce. The same fellow who adores the Vanity Fair of Southwark will complain that Bermondsey and Rotherhithe are a monotonous succession of warehouses, all built to the same plan. But an industrious chap who lives by simple and honest labour will see a new Wonder of the World, not without a sort of beauty.”

“The only wonder of the world I have seen to-day is a man who can speak for ten minutes about his own virtuousness, without stopping to draw breath,” returned Mr. Threader.

“Gentlemen!” Daniel almost shouted, “I draw your notice to the Church of St. Olave, near the southern terminus of the Bridge.”

“Does Mr. Knockmealdown also control that?” asked Mr. Kikin.

“No, though he is not above posting look-outs in the belfry,” Daniel said. “But I point it out only as a land-mark. Directly below it, as seen from here, along the riverfront, may be seen a pair of wharves, of equal width, separated by a warehouse. The one on the right is Chamberlain’s Wharf. The other is the Bridge Yard. Each communicates with streets in the hinter-land by a labyrinth of crazed alley-ways, whose tortuous wrigglings are only hinted at by this map. The warehouse between ’em, likewise, though it presents to us a straight and narrow front, rambles and ramifies as it grows back into the Borough—like—”

“A tumor spreading into a healthy organ?” suggested Mr. Kikin.

“A hidden fire, spreading invisibly from house to house, sensible from the street only by a smoak-pall of pick-pockets, outraged women, and abandoned property?” tried Threader.

“The abcesses of the Small-Pox, which present themselves first as a diaspora of tiny blisters, but soon increase until they have merged with one another to flay the patient alive?” said Mr. Orney.

For Daniel had employed all of these similitudes and more while drawing their attention to other East London Company facilities.

The oarsmen were giving them curious looks.

“I was going to liken it to a tree-stump in a garden,” Daniel said forbearingly, “which to outward appearances stands alone, and may be easily plucked out; but a few minutes’ work with a mattock suffice to prove it has a vast hidden root-system.”

“Is it in any sense different from any of the other such places you’ve pointed to?” Threader asked.

“Without a doubt. Being so near the Bridge, it is convenient to the City, and so it is where Mr. Knockmealdown conducts a certain type of commerce: trade in objects small enough to be carried across the Bridge by hand, yet valuable enough to be worth the trouble. Whereas bulk contraband, as we’ve seen, is handled downriver.”

“It certainly enjoys a fair prospect of the Bridge,” observed Mr. Kikin, who had half-risen to a beetle-like squatting posture so that he could swivel his head back and forth.

“As does the Bridge of it,” Daniel said. “The place is called the Tatler-Lock, which means, the Watch-Fence. We shall learn more of it in coming days!”

“Is that the end of the reconaissance?” Mr. Orney asked. “For we are getting into the turbulence of the Bridge, which on this rainy day, threatens to upset our boat.”

“Or at least our stomachs,” said Threader.

“Can we make it to Chapel Pier?” Daniel asked, pointing north across the flow to a mole that had been built upon the largest of the Bridge’s twenty starlings, midway along the span. “For I have something to shew the Clubb, not far from it, that shall be of great interest.”

“I vote we make the attempt,” said Mr. Threader, “on the condition that Dr. Waterhouse desist from any more such foreboding, vague, oracular adumbrations, and simply come out and tell us directly what he means.”

“Hear, hear!” said Orney, and after collecting a nod from Kikin, directed the oarsmen to turn north and cut across the river, allowing the current to sweep them away from the Bridge. Following which they were to turn Prudence’s blunt bow into the flow and work up to Chapel Pier. They executed their first turn directly in front of the Tatler-Lock, which Daniel gazed at raptly, as if he had a whole poke full of nicked watches he longed to fence there.

“Next order of business,” said Mr. Threader, “to extract from Dr. Waterhouse an explanation of why we are here; which ought to include some intelligence as to why our Clubb’s treasury, so prudently and jealously husbanded these months, is of a sudden brought to such a desperate pass.”

“Our newest member—though he could not join us to-day, and forwards his regrets—will presently help make it whole,” Daniel assured him.

“That is fortunate—if true—for our other absent member is in arrears.”

“Mr. Arlanc has provided us with a wealth of information instead,” Daniel returned.

“Then why is he not here, further to enrich us?”

“He does not know how useful he has been. I mean to keep him ill-informed.”

“And the rest of us, too, ’twould seem,” returned Mr. Orney, earning him a rare nod from Mr. Threader. As for Mr. Kikin, he had gone into the mode of the Long-Suffering Russian, smoking his pipe and saying naught.

“John Doe confessed he was no madman,” Daniel said—for during lulls he had already narrated to his fellow passengers the first part of the tale of his and Isaac’s raid on Bedlam. “But he said there was nothing we could do to him, to induce him to tell what he knew.”

“A familiar predicament,” mumbled Kikin around his pipe-stem. “He is more scared of Jack than of you. I know some tortures—”

“Sir!” huffed Mr. Threader, “this is England!”

“We bribe people here,” Daniel said. “The negotiations were lengthy, the tale tedious. Suffice it to say that according to the parish records John Doe is dead, and a grave is being dug for him in Bethlem Burying Ground.”

“How did you kill him?” Kikin inquired politely.

“The hole will be plugged with a cadaver from the cellars of the Royal Society, where it will never be missed. A man having marked similarities to John Doe, but a different name, is en route to Bristol. He will ship out to Carolina next week, to work for some years as an indentured servant. And as reward for having seen to all of these arrangements—which were complicated and expensive—we have had from him a full account of why he was knocking holes in the plasterwork of Bedlam.”

“And may we hear it? Or will you, too, insist on being made a farm-hand in Carolina?” Threader said.

“That will not be necessary, thank you,” Daniel returned politely. “John Doe let us know that he was only one of several Hoisters, Dubbers, and Mill-Layers—these are different specialties under the broad heading of House-Breakers—who took it upon themselves to respond to an Opportunity bruited about the Tatler-Lock and other such kens by a personage whose identity was not announced but who was suspected to be Jack the Coiner. This personage let it be known he was interested in certain buildings—specifically for what might be concealed in the walls of those buildings. Anyone who entered a building on the list, and extracted aught from its walls, was to take it to the Tatler-Lock and give the personage an opportunity to buy it. He is only interested in certain items, not others—so each must be carefully appraised before ’twill be paid for.”

“Jack must desire these things—whatever they are—quite ardently, if he is truly willing to expose himself thus,” said Orney.

“Perhaps this gives us a means to entrap him!” said Threader.

“Alas, it is not quite so simple,” Daniel said. “For the goods were to be fenced through an Arabian auction.”

Mr. Kikin was amused by the blank expressions on the faces of Orney and Kikin. “Shall I explain it?” he offered to Daniel. “For it is how Russians trade with Turks, even when we are at war with them.”

“Prithee.”

“When the Arab wishes to trade in dangerous circumstances—for example, across the Sahara with the Negro—he drives his caravan south to some oasis, and goes out some distance into the open waste, and piles up on the sand those goods he offers for trade. Then he withdraws to some remove beyond spear-range, yet still nigh enough that he is able to keep watch over his goods. The Negro now feels safe in venturing to the same place, where he piles up nearby those goods he offers in exchange. He withdraws and the Arab ventures out again, inspects the Negro’s offerings, and adds to or takes from his pile. And so it goes, back and forth, until one is satisfied, which he betokens by packing up and hauling away the counterpart’s offerings. The other waits until he has withdrawn, then goes out a last time to take possession of what remains.”

“Provided one is willing to do without the exotic accoutrements of dunes, camels, et cetera, the same can be done in any empty room of the Tatler-Lock,” Daniel said. “The Hoister and the Client need never see each other. They need only trust Mr. Knockmealdown—which, be it prudent or no, they do.”

“I have a foreboding of what it is that you intend,” Mr. Threader said, “since you are, as of three days ago, in possession of loot from the walls of Bedlam. But do you not think that a Fellow of the Royal Society, if he participates in this Arabian auction, shall be noticed by the sort of man who frequents the kens of Mr. Knockmealdown, and that word of the anomaly shall soon reach the ears of Jack?”

“The plan was proposed by none other than Sir Isaac himself,” Daniel said. “He likened it to the hunter’s stratagem whereby a goat or other expendable beast is tethered to a stake out in a clearing in the woods, to draw predatory animals to a place where they may be easily shot. We know not what Jack seeks, but very likely it is included among the goods we have found in Bedlam—therefore we have what is needed to establish a Stake-out of our own. Mr. Threader avers that this will never work if one of us attempts it. Sir Isaac has foreseen this objection. He suggests that we adopt his practice of going into the ken disguised as members of the criminal element.”

This notion produced frigid silence among the Clubb. Before the others could recover their wits and throw Daniel overboard, he continued: “Fortunately we have already an understanding with Mr. Partry, who is as comfortable in such kens as Mr. Orney is in church. He has agreed to act as our representative in the auction.”

“That is even worse!” Kikin cried. “Partry hunts and prosecutes thieves for a living!”

“No, no, no. You still don’t understand,” said Mr. Threader, finding Kikin’s slowness just a bit distasteful. “The whole point of thief-takers is that they are themselves criminals—else, how could they get anything accomplished?”

“So you are going to give some valuables to a thief, entrusting him to take them to the most colossal thieves’ market in Christendom, where he will sell them at auction to another thief—?”

“He is a very reputable thief,” returned Mr. Threader. “I really do not understand you, sir—you are the one who recruited him.”

At this Kikin could only roll his eyes, in the universal manner of foreigners in collision with Anglo-Saxon logic. He sighed and withdrew to his end of the plank.

“The Stake-out commences to-day,” Daniel announced, patting a wooden chest on his lap. “We are going to make rendezvous with Partry at our head-quarters on London Bridge.”

“That’s another thing—I see that you have arrogated to yourself the authority to lease real estate on behalf of the Clubb!” Threader said.

It was Daniel’s turn to roll his eyes. “Mr. Partry and Mr. Hoxton have, on our behalf, evicted a whore and twenty million bedbugs from a room above a tavern. If that is leasing real estate, then Prudence is the Spanish Armada.”

“For the amount you have spent, we could have gotten the Spanish Armada,” Orney returned, “but I supposed good old Prudence were less apt to draw fire from the Tower.”

THE MEN WHO WERE PASSING the time of day under umbrellas and shed-roofs on and around Chapel Pier were oblivious to the charms and virtues of Prudence, and some even ventured out into the rain and tried to wave her off. Most of them were watermen who envisioned that the bulky launch would block half the Pier and create an Impediment to Commerce for some indefinite number of hours. They had ample opportunity to say so, by words and gestures, as Mr. Orney’s stolid oarsmen fought up-current, closing on the Pier’s butt at slower than walking speed. But after a little while the inhospitable watermen were joined by a man bigger than the rest, who ambled to and fro along the brink of the Pier, striking up a chat with each waterman he found. These exchanges tended to be brief, and always ended in the same manner: the obstreperous waterman turned away and withdrew to the shelter of the Bridge. By the time Prudence worked close enough for Orney to cast a line onto the Pier, this bulky cove was the only man left. He intercepted the lead with a flailing arm, passed it thrice around a bitt, and leaned back on it, inexorably ratcheting Prudence forward until she bumped against pier-side.

“Mind the Gap,” Saturn suggested. The passengers did, and crossed it without any fatalities. Orney sent Prudence back to Rotherhithe. Saturn led them over the stony lid of the Pier to an uneven stair, perhaps under desultory repairs, perhaps ne’er finished. They ascended it in the hunched, splay-armed gait of drunks on ice. This got them to the upper world of the Bridge: an ordinary London shop-street that just happened to be thrust up into the air on stone stilts. To their left it was vaulted over, which is to say, the Bridge itself was bridged, by an ancient Chapel. To their right spread the open fire-break called The Square. Following Saturn’s lead, they turned their backs on this and on London, and proceeded southwards, as if they were going off to the Borough to inspect the Tatler-Lock from the street. But far short of this—only a few score paces beyond the Chapel—Saturn sidestepped into a medieval doorway too narrow to admit him square-shouldered. Bracketed to the front of the building above this was a contraption consisting of a wooden platform, about the size of a cutting-board, impaled on a vertical spar, all cobwebbed with lank strands and net-works of hempen cord: a copy in miniature of ship’s rigging, rotted by weather and deranged by nest-building birds. Standing on the platform was a miniature figure of a man, raising a grog-ration; and painted below upon the wall, for the entertainment of literate customers, was the name of the establishment: Ye Main-Topp.

Pursuing Saturn through this door, the Clubb found themselves in a public house, whose floor had been strewn with fresh hop-vines in a plucky but hopeless bid to freshen the air. Some half a dozen patrons were scattered against the walls as if they’d been blown into their current positions by the explosion of a shell in the center of the room. They were not mere seamen, for they had shoes; but neither were they Captains, for they wanted wigs. It could be inferred that the Main-Topp catered to the low middle class of Bridge people: ships’ mates, watermen, hackney-drivers, &c. Several conversations were put in recess so that drinkers could devote all their powers of concentration to the newcomers. The barkeep, barricaded in his corner fortress, gave them all a nod. The Clubb nodded back and muttered diffident greetings, having no idea what sort of story Saturn had told the proprietor about the strange guests who’d soon be arriving. A door in the back of the room led to a steep and lightless staircase, which had no need of a banister, as a normal man could arrest his fall simply by squaring his shoulders against both sides and inhaling. In some way Saturn squirted to the top of it and through another elf-door into a room.

Though in truth ’twas not the Room they saw first, but what lay beyond its windows, which faced to the east: the Pool of London, so crowded with vessels of all sizes and descriptions that it struck the eye not so much as a body of liquid water as a morass, congested and nearly rafted over by floating wood. Aboard Prudence they had been maneuvering through it—which was to say, they’d been part of it—for a few hours, and so one might not expect the scene to’ve drawn their notice as strongly as it did. But viewed from above, and framed thusly in the lattice-work of the windows, it gave an entirely different impression; the hundreds of ships, variously bobbing, rocking, steaming, smoking, loading, unloading, undergoing diverse mendings, splicings, paintings, caulkings, and swabbings, shrugging off the rain from above while holding back and riding upon Thames-pressure from below, seemed as if they had been arrayed thus solely to be viewed by the Clubb from these windows. As if some tyrant prince had conceived an enthusiasm for seascape-painting and commanded that all the Realm’s trees be cut and all its men pressed into service to create a striking Scene below his easel.

The room’s floor was simply the obverse of the tavern’s ceiling. It was fashioned of planks, generously spaced, so that stripes of light and fumaroles of tobacco-smoke leaked up through the fissures.

Over them was the roof of the building. It was thatched—a quaint touch never seen any more in parts of the city that had been reached by the Fire. This drew undue notice, for some moments, from the Clubb, who stood gaping up at it as if to say, Ah yes, I have heard that once we made shelters out of grass.

Buildings on London Bridge tended to be made by trial and error. Starting with a scheme that was more or less sane, in the broad sense that it had not fallen down yet, proprietors would enlarge their holdings by reaching out over the water with cantilevered add-ons, buttressed with diagonal braces. This was the trial phase. In the next, or error phase, the additions would topple into the Thames and wash up days later in Flanders, sometimes with furniture and dead people in them. Those that did not fall into the river were occupied, and eventually used to support further enhancements. Countless such iterations, spread thick over centuries, had made the Bridge as built-up as the laws of God and the ingenuity of Man would allow.

Daniel, venturing across springy floor-planks to this room’s eastern extremity, found himself embraced by windows—for this had originally been a sort of experimental balcony that had been encased in glass after it had failed to collapse for several consecutive years. Like a curd held up out of the whey by a strainer, he was being kept out of the Thames by perhaps a finger’s thickness of gappy planking. Between the boards he could see a gut of the river clashing and foaming along the edge of a starling. Vertigo—Hooke’s nemesis—claimed his attention for a few moments. Then he got the better of it and turned to gaze southeast at the Borough. A few moments sufficed to identify the Tatler-Lock, whose façade of blackened bricks rose up from the bank no more than two hundred yards away. For the better viewing of which, a perspective-glass lay on the windowsill. Above it, a single diamond-shaped pane had been punched out to allow for clear viewing. Hidden as it was beneath the furry, dribbling brow of the thatched eave, this would never be noted from the Tatler-Lock.

“Enjoy a good look, then,” said a new voice. “The glass is as good as any at your Society.”

Daniel turned to spy Sean Partry sitting crosslegged in a back corner, surrounded by ironmongery, tamping tobacco into a pipe.

Daniel picked up the glass, telescoped it to full length, and set its wide end into the vee of the missing diamond, which had thoughtfully been lined with a rag. This held it perfectly steady, while allowing him to swivel the narrow end to and fro. Putting his eye to it, and making some small adjustments, he was rewarded with a magnified view of some windows on the upper storey of the Tatler-Lock. Several were boarded over, or else veiled with remnants of sails. One was but a vacant window-frame. Through this could be seen the floor-boards of an empty room, starry with bird-shit.

“There is little to see,” Partry admitted. “Mr. Knockmealdown has a violent aversion to eavesdroppers.”

“It is very good,” was Daniel’s verdict. “The hunter who stakes out bait, must establish a nearby blind, from which to observe his quarry. But not too close, lest the beast nose him, and be put on his guard. This room shall do. And you are correct, Mr. Partry, about the glass. The opticks were ground by a master.”

A concentration of dust-bunnies and feather-shards marked the location of the previous tenant’s Bed and Engine of Revenue. This had been cast into the river and supplanted by more furniture of the plank-and-cask school, on which Threader and Kikin had already claimed seats. Orney moved towards the windows to mark Prudence’s progress downriver but pulled up short as he felt the balcony losing altitude under his weight.

“What have you told the proprietor about who we are, and what we are doing?” Mr. Threader was asking Saturn.

“That you are Royal Society men making observations of the daily currency of the river.”

“He’s not going to believe that, is he?”

“You didn’t ask me what he believes. You asked me what I told him. What he believes, is that you are City men investigating a case of insurance fraud by spying on a certain ship anchored out in the Pool.”

“Fine—our true purpose shall not be suspected as long as he is telling people that.”

“Oh no, he’s not telling people that. He’s telling them that you are a Sect of Dissenters forced to meet in secret because of the recent passage of Bolingbroke’s Schism Act.”

“Let the blokes in the tap-room think we are Dissenters then, is all I’m trying to say.”

“That’s not what they think. They think that you are Sodomites,” Partry said. This silenced Threader for a while.

“No wonder we are paying such exorbitant rent,” reflected Mr. Kikin, “considering the vast scope of activities going on in this one room.”

Partry had spread a trapezoid of sail-cloth over the planks in the corner of the room and was sitting on it. He’d have looked like a tailor, except that he was working with the tools of the thief-taker’s trade: an array of manacles, fetters, neck-rings, chains, bolts, and padlocks, which he was sorting, inspecting, and oiling. Probably this had done nothing to improve their reputation among the regulars drinking porter six feet below.

“What is it we are to put up for auction to-day?” Partry inquired.

Daniel stepped away from the window, handing the glass to Mr. Orney, and retrieved a small wooden chest he had earlier set down on a barrel-head. “Since you are a connoisseur of Opticks, Mr. Partry, you’ll find this of interest. It is a collection of lenses, some no larger than mouse’s eyes, but ground to perfection.”

Partry narrowed his eyes. “You think Jack the Coiner has gone to so much trouble to get a box of lenses?”

“I think he desires Hooke-stuff. I know not what, or why. By proffering these, we show him our bona fides. That is, we prove that we have Hooke-stuff to sell, for only Hooke made lenses like these. Whether Jack buys them or not, we’ll have his attention after to-day.”

“To-day, or tomorrow, or a week hence,” Partry corrected him. “There is no telling how long this will sit in the Tatler-Lock before Jack, or his deputy, comes round to appraise it.” With that Partry accepted the box from Daniel, and tucked it under a sort of pea-coat he had put on as protection from the rain. He descended the stairs. Saturn followed after, and through the floor the Clubb could hear him asking the proprietor to send up four mugs of flip.

And so the Stake-out commenced. Daniel dragged an empty crate over to the balcony and sat down where he could keep an eye on the Tatler-Lock. It was unlikely there’d be anything to see, but he felt he ought to do this for the sake of form. Four mugs of steaming flip arrived on the shoulder of a fascinated bar-maid. It was, as a rule, a winter beverage, but suited them in to-day’s weather. Orney produced an octavo Bible from his pocket and began memorizing it, oblivious to displays of withering scorn being directed his way by Mr. Threader. Kikin put on glasses and began to read an impressive document in Cyrillic letters. Threader grubbed a pencil out of his pocket and began to dash off notes using a barrel-head as desk. Daniel had not thought to bring anything to pass the time. Partry’s hobby of fetters and chains held no allure. But Peter Hoxton, who was avidly literate, had already strewn reading materials about the place, viz. an English translation of Spinoza. This was too weighty for Daniel’s mood. He picked up a libel instead.

A Diplomatick OVERTURE from the Queen of Bonny, to Her Britannic Majesty translated from the Africk by DAPPA, Ambassador to the Liberty of the Clink.

APOLOGY

Owing to a spell of confusion that hath gripped the mind of Mr. Charles White, and induced him to believe that he owns me, I have lately suspended my former habit, viz. of wandering about the Terraqueous Globe, for a life of dignified repose in the Clink where I am detained ’pon suspicion of having stolen myself. ’Tis a charge difficult to refute; for the Magistrate hath shrewdly asked me whether it was not true, that I was in possession of myself, and I, having always prided myself on being a self-possessed fellow, did answer in the affirmative. Whereupon the magistrate did bang his gavel and order me clapp’d in irons and dragged away to the Clink for the crime of receiving stolen goods.

My stationary habit has not been without benefit to the stationers of this and other Realms. For many of my old friends and relations, who had given up in despair of hitting such a restless target with a well-aim’d letter, have reached me here. Not a day goes by that I do not receive a weather-beaten and worm-eaten note from a far-off land. To-day I have got one that came in a ship lately active in the Assiento trade. This vessel came to London direct from the Slave Coast, bearing a chest laden with Spanish pieces of eight—part of the bounty due H.B.M.’s government, under the late Treaty of Peace, for the commerce between Africa (a great producer of Negroes) and the Caribbean (a ravenous gobbler-up of same). The treasure-chest was removed by Mr. White, who carried it ashore in the company of several fellows, all of them bedizen’d with curious silver-greyhound badges. Later the same company was spied across town in Golden-Square, paying a call upon the Viscount Bolingbroke, who keeps a fine house there; but alas, somewhere along the way, the chest had sprung a leak, and those pieces of eight had dribbled out into the streets of London. Upon Mr. White’s arrival at the Viscount’s house, the chest was observed to be nearly empty. In haste his Messengers re-traced their path through the city, hoping to pick up what had spilt, but alas, the coins had already been plucked up by ordinary Londoners. As most common Englishmen have never laid eyes upon a coin of silver—pounds sterling being as rare in England as plain-spoken Tories—no one recognized them for what they were. But seeing that each one was stamp’d with a face bearing the features of a Bourbon, these patriotic Englishmen took offence and flung the despicable medallions into Fleet Ditch, where they sank presently to the bottom. So the Assiento revenue is gone; though ’tis rumored among the Vault-men that on moonless nights a man resembling the Viscount Bolingbroke may be observed standing on the brink of that noisome arroyo, holding a cloak, and a fine suit of clothes, all embroider’d with Greyhounds, while a naked man splashes about in the flume below, like a pearl-diver in a Tropick lagoon, breaking the surface from time to time with a shiny new Bourbon piece of eight in his teeth. For which the man on the brink presently rewards him by tossing him an ear, much as a hunter doth take all the meat of the game while throwing the bones, gristle, &c. to his dogs, who are so foolish as to believe that they are being shown great favor.

Thus the latest shipment of Assiento money. But I am pleased to relate that a satchel of mail, brought to London on the same ship, escaped such a fate. For it was brought ashore by honest men who saw to it that the letters were delivered to their proper destinations—even such humble ones as the Clink.

Thus have I come into possession of a letter from Her Africk Majesty, the Queen of Bonny. It is addressed to Her Britannick Majesty. But since neither Queen Anne nor any of her Ministers is conversant with the tongue spoken by so many of her Caribbean subjects, H.A.M. has sent the letter to me, that I may have the honour of translating it to English. Which I have now done; but efforts to post it onwards to H.B.M. have failed. As many times as I send it, it comes back with a note to the effect that the recipient declined to pay. I see that the late disappearance of revenues, which hath led to such controversy at Westminster, hath been felt at St. James’s. So as a favor to H.B.M. I have decided to publish the English text of the letter from H.A.M. in the form of this Libel or Broadside, in hopes that a gust of wind may loft it into St. James’s, effecting, at no cost to H.B.M.’s Government, a delivery that otherwise were fiscally burdensome.

The letter begins thus:

Mon Cousine,

Such is the Radiance of your Enlightenment that the People of my Country, who formerly were as pale as Orphans in an Irish Work-House, have now been Tann’d quite Black…

[Translator’s note: I here elide much more in the way of such lofty Apologies, Compliments, &c., and move directly to the substantive part of H.A.M.’s letter.]

Word hath reached me of late, that certain monies, sent to your Majesty as due profits of the Slave Trade, have not reached your coffers, and an assiduous search hath failed to turn them up. Which news, if true, is most remarkable, for Lapses of a similar nature have been observ’d at the other two Vertices of the Triangular Trade. Viz. to the Caribbean are supposed to be deliver’d a certain number of my subjects. At diverse slave-forts along the Guinea coast, these are packed aboard ship by captains who count ’em with exacting care, and prick ’em down in strict Inventories. Yet the same ships arriving some weeks later at the slave-marts of Jamaica, Barbados, &c., are found to be half-empty; and the few living slaves that are discharg’d from their stinking Hulls so wretched that many must be abandoned ’pon the Strand, as no planter is willing to buy ’em. Meanwhile, a failure of a like nature is easily to be observed from where I sit, in my royal palace of Bonny. For it was given us to understand that the Triangle Trade would deliver to our shores Civilization, Christianity, Enlightenment, and other vertues. Instead of Civilization, we are receiving daily ship-loads of white Sauvages who pillage our shore like so many Vikings having their way in a Nunnery. Instead of Christianity, we are the recipients of a Pagan mentality which holds Slavery to be good, because ’twas practiced by the Romans. And instead of Enlightenment, we are Benighted by the fell effects of the sins and outrages I have mentioned.

In consideration of the fact, which I have now prov’d beyond question, that no part of the Triangular Trade works as it is supposed to—viz. Civilization not reaching Africa, Slaves not reaching America, and Assiento money not reaching Your Britannick Majesty’s coffers—I propose we denominate it a fail’d Adventure, and bring it to an End immediately.

I have the honour to be,

Your Britannick Majesty’s Humble Servant,
though not [yet anyway] her obedient Slave,

BONNY

Daniel looked up with a bright expression on his face, and was about to begin reading the libel aloud, when he was frozen by a cobra-like glare from Mr. Threader. “Tomorrow I shall supply this room with a copy of the King James Version,” Threader announced, “so that Dr. Waterhouse may follow the fine example set by his co-religionist” (flicking his eyes at Orney) “and advance from Libels, to Bibles.”

Daniel set the leaf down and gazed out the window for a time. After several minutes had gone by, his eyes were drawn to a tiny movement in the front of the Tatler-Lock. Something had changed in one of the upper windows. He rose slowly to his feet, not daring to take his eyes off of it; for so vast and various was the prospect of London, the Pool, and the Borough from these windows, that this iota was as easy to lose as a single bubble on a stormy sea. To get the perspective-glass extended, aimed, and focused took entirely too long. Nevertheless he was able to get a clear view of a window, mostly veiled behind canvas, but with a human arm, seemingly disembodied, projecting across the front of it and gathering it out of the way (he supposed) so that some light might spill into the room behind. The arm was attached, in the customary manner, to a man, who was standing in the room with his back to the curtain and had hooked his elbow round the edge of the canvas to pull it aside. Presently that man let his hand drop. His arm vanished as the curtain tumbled back to block the whole aperture of the window. At this moment, many a chap would have glanced away to say something to the others, and thereby lost track of which window he’d been gazing at; but Daniel, out of a mental discipline earned fifty years ago, remained still until he had memorized certain peculiarities of the Window in Question: the way a seam in the canvas angled across the upper right corner, and a pair of bricks in the sill that were not as dark as the rest. Only then did he begin to swing the telescope laterally, causing the image to sweep at greatly amplified speed. He counted the windows to the edge of the building—three—then reversed the movement and made sure he could find the Window in Question again. Only then did he withdraw his eye from the lens and announce to the others that he had seen something.

Partry was back half an hour later, and Saturn came in ten minutes after that. It had been their policy for Partry to go alone, and for Saturn to amble along some distance behind him to see if Partry was being followed—which was much more likely to happen on the return leg of the expedition. So Saturn had found a gin-house across the way from the Tatler-Lock and had tarried there until some minutes after Partry had quit the place. Partry, he reported, had indeed been followed up the Bridge by a pair of young culls; but it was Saturn’s professional opinion that these were not spies of Jack’s or Mr. Knockmealdown’s, but merely a couple of enterprising young file-clys who, having consummated one transaction at the Tatler-Lock, were sizing up Sean Partry as a prospective next victim. Saturn knew the lads, and was known by them, because of certain past professional entanglements on which he was not keen to elaborate before the Clubb. Approaching them as if by happenstance on the Bridge, Saturn had remarked on the fact that none other than Sean Partry, the infamous thief-taker, had just gone into the Main-Topp, wearing thus-and-such. This had sent the boys off in quest of less dangerous prey.

Partry then told the tale—which was brief, as little had happened—of his visit to the Tatler-Lock. There was a sort of lobby, where refreshments could be got, and where (he speculated) loitering visitors were spied on through holes in the paneling. After having stated his business, and having waited for some time, he had been summoned by one “Roger Rodgers,” a minion of Mr. Knockmealdown’s, who had explained that the master of the establishment was downriver at one of his other factories, but that he had left standing orders as to how situations like this one were to be handled—orders that Rodgers had been at pains to carry out. But something in the way he did so gave Partry the idea that this was the first time any house-breaker had ever come in to the Tatler-Lock claiming to have the sort of goods called for in the general summons posted, so many weeks ago, by Jack. There was mounting confusion, leading to low comedy, as Rodgers led Partry from room to room trying to find a suitable place in which to conduct the Arabian auction. Here they stumbled upon a Pharaohanic hoard of stolen watches, there upon a whore dividing her attentions among three eleven-year-old pick-pockets, all addled with gin. Partry had begun to think aloud: a room with some light would enable the buyer better to appraise the proffered swag. A place in the back—towards the river-front—would afford more privacy. Something above street level were less tempting to the depredations of running-smoblers. By offering up such reflections just at those moments when Rodgers seemed most confused, Partry had insensibly driven and steered him to an upper room above the river, and even induced Rodgers to draw back the canvas hanging in front of its window—which he’d hoped would be noticed by one of the Clubb from their blind in the Main-Topp, as it had been.

So the first bid in the Arabian auction had been placed, and all had gone by plan. The Clubb’s deliberations now became radically tedious. This was a favorable omen, as this was the sort of tedium that men like Threader and Waterhouse excelled at, and profited from. The Stake-out ought to be maintained around the clock henceforth. Saturn volunteered to sleep here every night; this made the deliberations briefer than they might have been, and freed Saturn to bid them all good-bye and duck out. A schedule was drawn up whereby Orney, Kikin, Threader, and Waterhouse would take turns keeping an eye on the Tatler-Lock during the hours Saturn was not there. Some gaps remained in the schedule; it was hoped these might be plugged by Newton or even Arlanc. Partry was to stop by the Tatler-Lock once or twice a day to see if the buyer had placed a bid yet, then, after dodging round a bit to make sure he was not followed, come to the Main-Topp to report to whomever was on watch there. That person would make an entry in a log-book so that other members of the Clubb would know what had been going on.

THE PROGRESS OF THE STAKE-OUT, though it extended across never so many hours and days, could thenceforth be known by a few moments’ study of the Log. The first entry was dated 12 July, and merely recounted what had just happened. It was written out by Daniel, who took the first watch, between the time that the rest of the Clubb departed and the time that Saturn returned, shoving a bed-roll up the stairs before him.

13 JULY A.M.

Passed a pleasanter than expected night. Amused self by lashing Mr. Partry’s perspective-glass into a fix’d attitude, so that ’twill ever be pointed at the Window in Question. Not so much as a glimmer of candle-light rewarded my steadfast Attentions. Let us all pray that the “Stake-out” winds up before winter, as the room is cool at night even in this season—further explanation, as if any were wanted, for the previous Tenant’s habit of remaining in bed night and day. At dusk, bats emerge from covert places between thatch and ridge-beam, and fly out between the floor-boards. But these should not trouble you of Diurnal habits.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

13 JULY MIDDAY

Nothing.

Kikin

13 JULY P.M.

Mr. Partry called at four of the clock, having just come from the place of the auction. He reported finding a single copper token, of the lightest weight, laid down as proffer for the lenses. Sent word to Dr. Waterhouse. The next move is ours. Gentlemen?

Threader

13/14 JULY—NOCTURNAL RUMINATIONS

He might as well have offered us nothing. But he offered us something. It is difficult to make out the true signification of this humble disk of copper. But after a long night counting bats, here is what I believe: Jack (or his proxy) does not want the lenses. So he offers payment that is insultingly low. But he does wish to continue the Arabian auction. Our next move ought to be to make some adjustment to the contents of our Pile.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

14 JULY MIDDAY

I agree with Saturn’s hypothesis ( vide supra). Have brought the diagram of the flying-machine discovered in the wall of Bedlam. Will whoever next sees Mr. Partry please ask him to convey it to the Tatler-Lock and bring back the box of lenses.

Dr. Waterhouse

14 JULY P.M.

A most peculiar heathenish Negotiation. Have understood the instructions set forth above by Brother Daniel and read them aloud to the illiterate Mr. Partry. He has departed bearing the diagrams. God willing, he shall return the lenses. N.B. evening watch is vexatious owing to the singing and smoking of Main-Topp regulars below. Am willing to trade my evening watch scheduled for 17th, for a morning watch any day save tomorrow.

Orney

15 JULY A.M.

Lenses were returned by our Mercury* last night in good condition. Round midnight I detected light emanating from the Window in Question. A look through the perspective-glass revealed the enlarged and distorted shadow of a man cast on the canvas window-covering by (one guesses) a candle or lantern within. Regret that I am unable to offer a useful description of him who cast the shadow. After some minutes the light waned and vanished.

At 2 A.M. a man knocked on the door hoping to find a Sodomite. I sent him away gravely disappointed.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

15 JULY MIDDAY

No singing, no Sodomites, no Mercury.

Kikin

15 JULY P.M.

I renew my plea for some Respite from the damnable Vices practiced so freely Below. Will exchange evening for morning hours at favorable rates.

Partry reports a silver penny in fair condition has been offered for the diagrams. Sent word to Brother Daniel.

Orney

16 JULY A.M.

Yester eve the loneliness to which I’d grown accustomed was relieved by the unlooked-for, but welcome arrival of Dr. Waterhouse at five minutes past nine of the clock. He had received the note sent by Mr. Orney. He looks on today’s news as supporting the view that Jack or his proxy is more interested in Hooke’s writings than in his artifacts. He brought a wallet containing some of the chymical Notes, Receipts, &c., found in Bedlam’s walls, and proposes that they be left in place of the Flying Machine Diagram. The response should then tell us whether we are (to borrow a figure from a children’s game) getting Warmer or Colder.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

16 JULY P.M.

I propose to Mr. Orney that in exchange for my taking his four hours scheduled tomorrow eve., he take my 18th A.M. and 19th midday watches.

Threader

P.S. Nothing happened.

P.P.S. I find the singing, etc. perfectly innocuous and even join in the choruses.

17 JULY WEE HOURS

Round seven of the clock, Mr. Orney, Mr. Partry, and I fortuitously overlapped. Mr. Partry collected the chymical Notes and departed for the Tatler-Lock at 7:04, saying he should be back shortly. But when the bells of St. Olave and of St. Magnus Martyr next resumed their hourly dispute as to what time it was, he still had not returned. Keeping watch, I noted that the curtain had been drawn back entirely from the Window in Question, so as to flood the room of the Auction with what remained of the evening’s light. Peering through the glass I saw a stout red-headed fellow, whom I believe to have been Mr. Knockmealdown, pacing about the room. Sitting at the table was a man dressed in a dark suit of clothes, going through the contents of the wallet in a methodical way—which told me, at least, that Mr. Partry had reached the Tatler-Lock and made his delivery. Moved partly by concern for the welfare of our thief-taker and partly by hope that I might contrive to get a better look at this dark-clad fellow (for the seeing through the window was poor), I departed the Main-Topp at 8:10, leaving Mr. Orney to man the post, and hurried south on London Bridge, reaching what I shall denominate the main entrance of the Tatler-Lock at 8:13. This door leads into the so-called lobby. Chary of exposing myself to the many prying eyes of that place, I did not go inside, but ambled about the surrounding streets for some little while—an exercise I do not recommend to any of the Clubb, as Mr. Knockmealdown’s factories are as be-swarmed with footpads, &c., as a knacker’s yard with flies—until at 8:24 my notice was drawn to a carriage (hackney, unmarked, unremarkable) emerging from an alleyway that is surrounded on three sides by out-buildings and other excrescences of the Tatler-Lock. I followed this on foot as far as the Great Stone Gate which it cleared at 8:26:30. Thence I watched it all the way across the Bridge. It passed St. Magnus Martyr, which is to say, it vanished into London, at 8:29:55: rather good time, as traffic on the Bridge was light. Be it noted that the City of London and the head-quarters of Mr. Knockmealdown are separated by a mere two hundred seconds—material for a Sermon should one of you homilists care to write it up. Returning towards the Tatler-Lock I encountered Mr. Partry in Tooly Street, carrying the Flying Machine Diagram under his arm. As is our practice, we pretended not to know each other. I swerved round several corners and followed him, at a distance, up the Bridge to the Main-Topp.

Mr. Partry explained that this auction is akin to a wheel that rubs and balks the first few times it is turned, but presently warms, and runs smoother. Previously the buyer did not come to inspect our proffers for a day or more. But today, as Mr. Partry was swopping the chymical Notes for the Flying Machine Diagram, he encountered Mr. Knockmealdown himself, who bruited that if Partry were to make himself comfortable and partake of some refreshment, he might afterwards nip back up to the Auction-room and find an answer waiting. So Partry did just that—not in the “lobby” but in a more congenial and private tap-room reserved for personal guests of the mismanagement—and at 8:23 (for I had taught him to tell time, and kitted him out with a watch, running in synchrony with mine), receiving the high sign from one of Mr. Knockmealdown’s minions, returned to the auction-room to find evidence that the wallet had been perused, and a gold coin—a louisd’or—left as counter-proffer. Partry let it lie, which was a way of saying to the buyer that he might have more to add to our pile in a day or two.

Mr. Orney departed to convey this news in person to Dr. Waterhouse. Before he departed, he took up a difficult matter with me, as follows. Mr. Orney is of the view that Mr. Threader’s offer of a two-for-one swop is beneath contempt, and unworthy of a civil response. He was at a loss as to how this information might be conveyed to Mr. Threader. I told him that as I am a thoroughly uncivil person, no one was better qualified than me to distribute this information. Consider it done.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

18 JULY A.M.

Will members of the Clubb hereby desist from misusing the Log as a bazaar for haggling over hours. The schedule is now all wrong anyway, consequent to last night’s events. I have conferred with Sir Isaac. He has a notion of what it is that the buyer desires, and I agree with him. But we are loath to sell the original to this buyer, whoever he is, and so we are presently hard at work crafting a forg’d copy, with certain details altered, so that it shall not be of any use (the document in question is a chymical receipt, inscribed in a sort of philosophickal language that might as well be a cypher; I know enough of the language, and Sir Isaac knows enough of Alchemy, to produce a convincing fake). Meanwhile Mr. Hoxton has been directed to spend his days, and if need be his nights, at Clerkenwell Court fabricating two wooden chests that look the same.

Other Clubb members, please confer amongst yourselves as to who shall accept which watch, and do not involve this log-book.

Dr. Waterhouse

18 JULY P.M.

Spent nearly twenty-four hours here, alone. It is not the most disagreeable thing I have done, or would do, in service of the Tsar.

Kikin

18 JULY MIDNIGHT

Extemporaneous Jottings are best confin’d to Waste-books, not to be perus’d by others. It is my Policy to write out several Draughts of any Document that is important enough to pass under the eyes of Strangers or Colleagues. But the Circumstances that have brought the Clubb into being, and lately conferred upon me the Honour of Membership, are most extraordinary, and may permit me to set down in this Log some rude and hastily improvis’d Lines.

Dr. Waterhouse [who, as I write this, is sleeping on the Floor nearby] and I did profit from the lengthy Vigil of Mr. Kikin thusly: we have produced a Manuscript of several Leaves, similar in all observables to one that was written in 1689 by the late Mr. Hooke, viz. written on the same sort of Paper, with similar Ink, in a similar Hand, expressed in the stately but obscure Cadences of the Philosophick Language, and written in the stark runes of the Real Character. Like Mr. Hooke’s original, whence ’twas in large part Cribbed, it claims to be a Receipt for a restorative Elixir of such Potency as to bring back the Dead, couched as a Narration of a strange Evening under Bedlam’s Cupola. In truth, the Receipt is of no practical utility, for the two reasons set forth below.

First, that, like Mr. Hooke’s Original, it requires, as one of its Constituents, a mysterious Substance; and as the nature of this Ingredient is not made clear, there is no way for Mr. Hooke’s result to be duplicated by any other Student of Chymical Arts [not the first time such a Gravamen could be leveled at that Author’s work—and perhaps sufficient Explanation of why he plaistered it up in a Wall].

Second, that certain of its Instructions were deliberately altered, at my direction, to ensure that any effort to follow them would lead to production of a formless and stinking Pot of what is denominated, by Alchemists, fæces.

During our chymical Lucubrations in the Temple of Vulcan, Mr. Hoxton and several Apprentices were as busy in the Court of Technologickal Arts (as it is styl’d by my somonolent Colleague) fabricating two handsome Chests of Ebony-wood and Ivory. These were made to be indistinguishable from each other by the simple expedient of making two of each Part and assembling them side-by-side on the same Bench. Each has a hing’d Lid closed by a Hasp that is not, however, presently hinder’d by a Lock. Any Document, placed within such a Receptacle, is imbued by it with seemingly greater importance and higher value—or so may it seem to an impressionable Mind.

One of the twinned Chests bides at Clerkenwell where Mr. Hoxton is committing further Improvements. The other has received the forg’d Receipt and been convey’d to the Main-Topp by me and Dr. Waterhouse. We relieved the steadfast Mr. Kikin and waited for the arrival of Mr. Partry.

As Partry is not able to read what is set down in ink on these pages, I shall permit myself greater Liberties, in discoursing upon his Character, than I should if I suspected he might one day acquaint himself with what I write down here. I beg the forbearance of the Clubb as I proffer Advice for which they never asked. For though its members be worldly and season’d Gentlemen all, yet the Clubb itself is of an age such that, were it an Infant, it should not yet have the ability to crawl, or even to roll over in its Cradle. Though I am its newest Member, it cannot be disputed that I have been engag’d in Pursuit of Coiners for nigh on a score of Years now; which giveth me Reason to suppose that some of my thoughts and opinions, carefully considered, & judiciously set down, might be of sufficient Interest to the Clubb as to be worth the few minutes it shall take to read them.

I would not have hired Partry. This gambit of hiring a thief-taker to venture into the vile and perilous Haunts that are the natural Habitat of Coiners, is easily understood; for to habituate such places is naturally repugnant, as well as dangerous, to a Gentleman. But Dias would never have found the Cape of Good Hope, save by braving the journey, and putting his own person in harm’s way; and many are the tales in the annals of the Royal Society of Natural Philosophers who expos’d themselves to disgusting and dangerous Circumstances, even to the point of sacrificing Limb or Life, because no other means could be found to their desir’d Ends. In consideration of which, it has long been my Habit to alter my appearance, viz. by applying Latex of Brasil to my face to give me a pox-mark’d Visage, &c., &c., and, thus disguised, to go out incognito into Gaols, Boozing-Kens, Taverns, &c., to see and hear with my own Organs of Sense what I will not trust any villainous Thief-taker to perceive clearly nor recount coherently.

Partry was already on the Clubb’s pay-roll when I was given the honour of membership, and I do not presume to suggest that he be removed now. To fire Partry at the current stage of the Auction would in any event only incite the gravest Unease in the mind of the Buyer. In perusing this Log, however, I cannot but note that all of the Clubb’s impressions of the Tatler-Lock, save a few fleeting and poorly resolved glimpses through the Window, have been supplied by Mr. Partry. To be certain that he has not been, like Hamlet’s uncle, pouring Poison into your Ears while you sleep, I resolved to accompany Mr. Partry to the Tatler-Lock on his visit this evening. Dr. Waterhouse, because he is concerned for my welfare, advised me not to go, and, because he knows me well, surrendered before his warnings became tedious. To this plan Partry expressed a violent opposition, which at first excited my suspicions; but after the first flush of astonishment had subsided he gave his assent. He did so grudgingly at first, but upon seeing how my appearance was transfigured by a few moments’ work with Latex and Spirit-Gum, a change of clothing, and adoption of a different posture and gait, he made peace with the idea, and offered no further complaints. We set out for the Tatler-Lock ten minutes apart. I went first, on the pretext of being a seller of watches, fallen upon hard times, who wished to replenish his inventory at prices not within reach of honest men. Only after I had ensconced myself in the Lobby did Mr. Partry enter the building, carrying the chest, wrapped up in a black cloth. Contained within it was the first page of the Receipt prepared by me and Dr. Waterhouse.

To relate further details were idle, since all that I observed there was more or less as Mr. Partry has led you to believe. My Suspicions, at least in so far as concern the Tatler-Lock and the operations of the Auction, are proven to be unfounded. The chest is in the Auction-room, awaiting the attention of the Buyer. Partry has gone away to wherever he spends his nights. During our absence Dr. Waterhouse fell asleep in the middle of his Watch: in the Army, a flogging offence, in the Clubb, I know not what. I shall take the first part of the night-watch myself and awaken him at the stroke of two.

Sir Isaac Newton

19 JULY A.M.

Sir Isaac did not fail to awaken me at the time mentioned. I have obsvd. naught since. But I should not be perfectly honest if I stated that my eyes were open for the whole duration of my watch.

Dr. Waterhouse

19 JULY MIDDAY

If Brother Daniel had found the Discipline to keep his eyes open, he might have seen candle-light in the Tatler-Lock during the wee hours. For Mr. Partry called at ten of the clock, bringing the News that a five-guinea piece (sic) has been laid down in the Auction-room. Someone has perused the first page of the Receipt, and liked what he has seen; I’d wager five guineas of my own that he’ll offer us another such Coin for another Page.

Orney

19 JULY EVENING

Sent Partry to the Tatler-Lock with Page 2; but I do not like the Direction we are taking. What is to prevent the buyer from simply copying out the Receipt and then paying us nothing?

Threader

20 JULY VERY EARLY A.M.

Lights have been burning behind the rude Veil of the Window in Question for better than an hour, which would seem to confirm Mr. Threader’s fears. I can allay these with a few particulars as to the Chest. As shall be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a few moments’ inspection, it has a false bottom. There is a locked compartment beneath. This can only be opened with a key, which we have not offered yet. If the buyer reads all the way to the end of Page 4 he shall reach a Notation to the effect that an Ingredient, essential to the Receipt, is concealed in the bottom of the Chest. Merely to copy out all four pages shall avail him nothing, save writer’s cramp. He must have the Chest and Key, and these he shall not get until he pays for them.

I also remind Mr. Threader that the purpose of the exercise is not to get paid, but to ensnare the Buyer.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

20 JULY MIDDAY

Nothing.

Orney

20 JULY EVENING

Mr. Orney would have won his wager had anyone been foolhardy enough to accept it, for Partry reports a second five-guinea piece has been laid on top of the first. I have taken the liberty of sending down Page 3.

Kikin

21 JULY EARLY A.M.

Further Lucubrations obsvd. I suspect the Buyer is copying or translating the Receipt.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

21 JULY MIDDAY

The point is conceded, that our Undertaking is a snare and not a legitimate commercial Transaction. But as this pile of five-guinea pieces ascends toward the sky I find myself sorely tempted to enter into the business of selling philosophical Arcana. Partry reports that the price offered is now fifteen (sic) guineas. I sent him back with the fourth and final Page.

Threader

21 JULY MIDNIGHT

Curtain was open in early eve. and I glimpsed our dark Philosopher at work once again. He goes hooded—this explains why I have not been able to see his face. Perhaps he is pox-marked, or burned in an Alchemical mishap. A gray goose-quill bobbed in the gloom next to his shoulder as he stain’d page after page of a Waste-book with ink. Later the curtain was dropp’d again, and my view replaced with dim flickerings that lasted until 11:12:30.

Peter Hoxton, Esq.

22 JULY MIDDAY

Disaster. Partry reports the five-guinea pieces are all gone, replaced by a silver penny.

Orney

22 JULY EVENING

I beg to differ with Brother Norman. This is not a disaster, but a clear sign from the Buyer that he has correctly decyphered the Receipt and understands that it is not useful to him without the Ingredient that is supposed to be contained in the bottom of the chest. I have sent Partry back to the Tatler-Lock with the key. Henceforth I shall remain here at the Main-Topp until the culmination of the Stake-out.

Dr. Waterhouse

23 JULY MIDDAY

Mr. Partry has been at the Tatler-Lock since day-break. He has persuaded Mr. Knockmealdown to allow him to sit vigil in a store-room directly beneath the place of the Auction. Such are the floor-boords of that edifice that not even a cat could stalk from the door to the table without producing a fusillade of cracks and booms. As soon as Mr. Partry hears anything of that nature he is to—

“Your pint, sirrah.”

“That is very kind of you, Saturn,” said Daniel, setting the quill into its pot, and glancing once more at the distant window where Partry was puffing on his pipe. “How did you guess I was in the mood for a pint?”

“I am in the mood for one,” Saturn said.

“Then why didn’t you bring up two?”

“You forget that I am a Paragon of Sobriety. I shall derive my pleasure from watching you drink yours.”

“I am happy to oblige,” Daniel said, and took a swallow. “There has been no signal from Mr. Partry,” he said, for Saturn’s dark eyes had strayed to the page of the Log, still dewy with unblotted ink. “I was merely refreshing the account.”

“I must ask, why you do not write it in the Real Character,” Saturn teased him, “if it is as excellent as all that.”

“It is excellent. A much better way of setting down knowledge than Latin or English. Which is why I have devoted some years to making it more excellent yet, by transliterating it into numbers.”

“Ah,” said Saturn, “are you saying, then, that the cypher in which the women of Bridewell punch the cards, is a descendant of the Real Character?” By now he had changed places with Daniel, and taken up that position on the balcony of which they had all grown so weary in the last eleven days.

Daniel moved the Log over to its customary station on a crate-top, and busied himself blotting the latest entry with sand. “Not so much a descendant as a sibling,” he said. “The father of both is the Philosophic Language, which is a system of classification of ideas. Once an idea has been enrolled or registered in the tables of the Philosophic Language, it may be addressed with a number, or a set of numbers—”

“Cartesian coordinates,” Saturn mused, “for plotting the wand’rings of our thoughts, like.”

“The similarity only holds to a point,” Daniel cautioned him. “To avoid ambiguity, the Philosophic Language—Leibniz’s version of it, anyway—employs only prime numbers. In this, it is quite different from the number-lines of Descartes. In any case, the Language, as it consists of ideas and numbers, may be writ down using any scheme one may care to choose. The binary cypher of our Logic Mill is one such. But when I was a young man, John Wilkins devised another—the Real Character—which for a time was all the rage in the Royal Society. Hooke and Wren used it fluently.”

“Who uses it now?”

“No one.”

“Then how is the Dark Philosopher able to read it?”

“The same question has been bedeviling me.”

“This Wilkins cove must have published a dictionary or key—”

“Yes. I helped write it, during the Plague. The page-proofs were burnt up in the Fire. But it was published, and can be found in any number of libraries. But in order for our mysterious Buyer to go to such a library, and consult the book, he must first recognize the outlandish glyphs on the page as belonging to something called the Real Character. Think—if I shewed you, Peter, a page writ in the script of Malabar, would you know to consult a Malabar-Dictionary?”

“No—for these eyes, though they’ve seen much, have never seen Malabar-letters, and would not know ’em from Japanese or Æthiopian.”

“Just so. Yet our buyer seems to have known the Real Character on sight.”

“But is that really so extraordinary, when one considers that the same buyer knew that Hooke-stuff was to be found hidden in the walls of Bedlam? From which it’s evident he knows much of your Society.”

“I believe that the knowledge of where to look for the stuff came to the buyer through Henry Arlanc: the Royal Society’s porter.”

“I know who he is.”

“Oh really? How do you know him?”

“He worked for a Huguenot watch-maker, with whom I had professional contacts before I turned to drink, and fell on black days. Several Fellows of the Royal Society patronized this horologist—that is how they got to know Henry Arlanc, and that is how Arlanc got the position at Crane Court.”

“Until recently,” Daniel said, “I had supposed that Arlanc was passing intelligence to Jack the Coiner, or someone in his organization, who was, at bottom, ignorant of Natural Philosophy.”

“There’s a hole in that hypothesis, Doc. Why’d such a cull want to rake through the mouse-eaten leavings of a dead Vertuoso?”

“Ignorant men have fanciful notions of what may be found in such residue. Alchemists frequently work with gold. Perhaps—”

“Still, the hypothesis does not hold up well under close examination.”

“I agree!” said Daniel, exasperated. “I no longer believe in it.”

“Well, now is a fine time to say so,” said Saturn. “What’s the new hypothesis?”

“That the buyer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, or else has made a close study of the Society’s early years. He knows a great deal about Hooke and about the Real Character, and…” Daniel paused.

“And?”

“And about poison,” Daniel said. “An attempt was recently made on the life of Princess Caroline. The weapon was a poniard smeared with nicotine, excellently prepared.”

“Bloody peculiar,” reflected Peter Hoxton, “when this benighted world doth so abound in simpler means of killing.”

“During the ’sixties—Hooke’s heyday, and the æra of the Real Character—several Fellows of the Royal Society took an interest in nicotine.”

“It’s obvious then, isn’t it?” Saturn said.

“What is obvious?”

“The villain must be Sir Christopher Wren!” Saturn clearly meant this as a preposterous jest, and so he was appalled to see Daniel considering it seriously. “Because he is one of the very few still living from that æra, you mean,” Daniel finally said. “It is a good thought. But no. This is not being done by Wren, or Halley, or Roger Comstock, or any of the others who were in the Royal Society in those days. Supposing I wanted to kill someone—would I brew up nicotine? No. No, Peter, this is being done by someone of a more recent generation. He has conceived a diseased Fascination with the Royal Society of the 1660s. He has poured an unhealthy amount of time into studying what we did, and reading our annals.”

“Why?”

“Why? When a young man falls under the spell of a particular young woman, and will not leave her alone, though her father and brothers menace him with daggers drawn, ask you why?”

“But this is different.”

“Perhaps.”

“Trust me, ’tis different. The buyer desires something. I believe you know what the something is. Will you please let me in on the secret?”

“I have held it back, not because I wish to keep secrets from you,” Daniel sighed, “but because I find the entire subject painfully embarrassing. The buyer seeks the Philosopher’s Stone.”

Saturn slapped his forehead theatrically. “Why’d I even take the trouble to ask?”

“He has heard at least part of the story about the man who died in Bedlam when Hooke cut him for the stone, and who was (some would say) resurrected by the elixir of Enoch Root.”

“Ah, that is the name of—?”

“Of the Alchemist in that story, yes. If you are the sort of chap who believes in Alchemy, then it is implicit, in that story, that the elixir must have been made using something akin to the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, according to the lore of the Alchemists, that Stone is made by combining the Philosophic Mercury with the Philosophic Sulphur. Where, might you ask, does a bloke get his hands on such ingredients? The answers are many and various, depending on which Alchemist you talk to. But many believe that King Solomon was an Alchemist, who knew how to get, or to make, the Philosophic Mercury, and who used it to turn lead into gold.”

“Ah, that would explain why he was so rich!”

“Just so. Now, the story goes that if you could find some of King Solomon’s gold and put it in a crucible, you could extract from it minute traces of the Philosophic Mercury. I believe that our buyer somehow got wind of this yarn about the Alchemical Resurrection in Bedlam twenty-five years ago, and reckoned that the shortest and quickest way for him to get his hands on a sample of the Philosophic Mercury was—”

“To ransack London for Hooke’s old notes and knick-knacks.”

“Yes. Now, consider that, when I got back to London at the end of January, the first thing I did was to begin searching for Hooke’s old notes and equipment. Arlanc was the first man I questioned. He must have mentioned this to his contact in Jack’s organization. Shortly, word must have got round to our buyer.”

“Who was already disposed to believe that this thing of infinite value had been hidden away, somewhere, by Hooke.”

“Yes. Imagine the effect the news must have had upon him!”

“He must have been frantic,” Saturn said, “believing that you were in quest of the same goods, and would get to them first.”

“Indeed. As we now know, this led to the series of burglaries. I had only a dim and fragmentary understanding of these matters until a fortnight ago, when we found that document in the wall at Bedlam. Then all became clear. But, too, it was clear that the buyer’s search was doomed to failure, for Hooke’s receipt mentions a certain ingredient without offering any explanation of how to obtain it. For that reason, the document was useless as bait for the Stake-out.”

“Which is why you and Sir Isaac had to produce the fake.”

“The fake, and the box that it came in,” Daniel said. “The buyer believes that a small amount of the Solomonic Gold is locked in the compartment in the bottom of that chest.”

“Not for long,” Saturn remarked. He was gazing fixedly out the window.

“Why do you say so?”

“Because Sean Partry is waving his arms at me from below the Window in Question.”

Daniel’s arm jerked and spilt his ink-bottle. It slicked the page of the log-book with a black parabola that streamed over the edge and spattered to the floor.

Saturn was on his feet. He waved back, but did not take his eye off the Tatler-Lock.

“Which direction is Partry indicating?” Daniel asked backing carefully away from the mess. The ink had already found a crevice between floor-planks. Sounds of havoc and dismay were coming up from the tap-room.

“He points toward the Bridge,” said Saturn, and finally glanced away from Partry so that he could give his watch a study.

“Then the buyer ought to be coming our way—”

“In no more than two minutes,” Saturn agreed. “But traffic is heavier now than when I clocked him before. I shall loap along the Bridge a-foot, and may out-pace him. Do you try to summon a hackney, or a sedan.” And he preceded Daniel out the door, and down stairs. Which was fortunate for Daniel, as several ink-spattered Main-Topp patrons had by now formed up at the base of the stairs, in a retaliatory mood. Their ardor cooled when Saturn sallied forth, and through the little Mobb broke a path that Daniel was not slow to follow. “Our work above is concluded,” Saturn announced, over his shoulder, as he went out, “and all losses shall be compensated anon—but not now.” And with that he burst out the front door of the Main-Topp and into the streaming crowd of the Bridge.

Saturn glanced left—towards Southwark and the Tatler-Lock—but turned right, anticipating that the buyer’s carriage would overtake him presently. By the time Daniel made it out the door, Saturn had already advanced several long strides in the direction of London. Daniel followed his example and glanced left—but it availed him nothing. He lacked both Peter Hoxton’s height, which would have enabled him to see over the crowd as far as the Great Stone Gate, and his youth, which made eyes quicker to adjust to the sudden brightness of the unroofed street.

All he had was a vague instruction to hire a coach or a sedan. No hackney of sound mind would await customers in front of the Main-Topp. Daniel guessed there might be chairs or coaches for hire in the Square, a short distance to the north. So he turned right, and began to thread his way through the jostling crowd.

Like the captain of a brittle ship hemmed in on all sides by massive ice-floes, Daniel could not make his own path, but had to move along with the general flow, and avail himself of any leads that snaked open before him before they drew shut and crushed his ribs. He made feeble progress compared to Saturn. Before he had progressed so far as the vault of the Chapel, he had lost sight of Saturn’s black head.

The artificial isles that supported the Bridge were called Starlings; the chutes between the Starlings, through which the divided River coursed, were denominated Locks. Daniel, unable to see much but heads and shoulders, estimated, by a kind of dead reckoning, that he must be passing over Long Entry Lock, which was the narrowest, hence most dangerous of them all, as the Chapel Pier to its north side had grown so fat over the centuries as to nearly pinch it shut. Then, looking up, he saw a stone vault overhead, and knew he was passing under the Chapel. Next (counting the Locks and Starlings in his head, like a Papist going through the Rosary) would be Chapel Lock—also quite narrow—but then St. Mary’s Lock, one of the widest on the whole bridge, hence, popular among watermen. Directly over St. Mary’s was the open fire-break called The Square. And it was there, Daniel reasoned, that hackney-drivers and sedan-porters would flock in hopes of swopping passengers with the watermen below.

Such was his plan. But as commonly happened to clever Natural Philosophers who have hatched elaborate schemes, he was overtaken by simple events. The crowd, hemmed in under the vault of the Chapel, suddenly pressed him from all sides. It was like being an atom of a gas in Boyle’s Rarefying Engine when the piston was slammed down by a terrific weight. A carriage was trying to force its way through—and succeeding. The crowd, sensing danger not so much from the carriage itself as from its bow-wave of panic, surged out from the dangerous confines of the vault, and Daniel, like a wine-cork tossed into Long Entry Lock, was spewed forth.

He was in the open now, tottering, looking about warily lest some eddy of the Mobb-rush take him unawares and crush him against a store-front. So he saw the carriage that had caused the trouble as it emerged from the vault, pressing on toward London.

He did not doubt that this was the one. Its window-curtains had all been drawn and its driver had evidently been paid to force his way to the other end of the Bridge with no concern for life, limb, or liability.

They were over Chapel Lock. The Square was only ten yards farther along—but this hackney had already passed Daniel by, and at its mad pace would soon overtake Saturn as well. Daniel still nursed some hope that he might be able to summon a carriage or a chair in the Square—but it would not be easy to persuade a strange driver to light out in hot pursuit of a hackney being driven as recklessly as this one. They needed to keep the buyer in sight as long as they possibly could; for there was no way of telling how long he would wait to put the key he had just paid for into the key-hole in the bottom of the chest, and turn it.

Daniel had, by default, staggered into the sudden open space left in the wake of the hackney. He was so close that he almost could have reached out and climbed aboard, if he’d been that spry. So he could hear—or so he phant’sied—a muffled pop from within, like a musket misfiring. Then flickering light shone through the curtains, and he heard from within a man shouting “Sacré bleu!”

Without being aware of how fast he was moving—for if anyone had asked, he’d have insisted he was too old to run—Daniel had followed the hackney right into the Square. The way widened slightly here. He saw Saturn standing to one side. He’d been conversing with a sedan-porter, but had broken off to stare at the buyer’s hackney.

Indeed many were now staring at it, for it was smoking. And it was making booms as the passenger flailed against the roof, signalling the driver to stop. The door on the right side flew open and disgorged a cloud of brown-gray smoke. So dense and voluminous was this, that a long and careful inspection was needed to see that there was a man in the middle of it. He was staggering away from the carriage, headed for the parapet that surrounded the Square to limit the number of pedestrians who toppled into St. Mary’s Lock. The passenger looked like a figure from Ovid: a Cloud metamorphosing into a Man. For the smoke had saturated the long hooded cloak that he wore, and was still billowing out of it. Gagging, he shuffled toward the parapet. The hackney-driver scrambled round to the open door, probed into the smoke with his whip-handle, and after a bit of scratching about, dragged out a blackened carapace: a burnt box, still sputtering and jetting a sturdy plume of thick yellowish smoke. Its lid was open to reveal a sheaf of pages, still legible though they’d been burnt to gray leaves of ash; these tumbled onto the pavement and Daniel, only a fathom away, saw the angular glyphs of the Real Character. But then he turned his attention back to the buyer, who had finally cast off his raiment of smoke, and stood at the parapet, feet spread wide, hands planted to support him as he retched into St. Mary’s Lock. Like a monk or wizard out of medieval times he looked in that robe. Then he was joined by a larger man who stepped in from the left and clapped his right hand on the other’s left shoulder.

The response of the hooded man was immediate—too quick for Daniel, who had a foreboding of what was about to happen, to shout a warning. The hooded man spun toward Saturn, pivoting around the shoulder that Saturn had gripped. Much was hidden by the robe and by smoke; but the movements of his shoulders told that he was driving his right hand toward Saturn’s belly.

But Peter Hoxton, by luck or by foresight, was ready for this. There had been something in the man’s stance at the parapet that had looked posed, and poised: perhaps it had roused in Saturn’s mind the same suspicions as in Daniel’s. Saturn got his left arm well inside of the other’s attack, and shouldered it aside. But then he jumped back. For as was now plain to everyone in the Square, the robed man was holding a small dagger in his hand. And as was clear to Daniel and to Saturn, the blade had been smeared with something.

In this brief melee the hood had fallen from the buyer’s head to reveal his face. It was not burnt or pox-marked. On the contrary, it was a well-formed head of noble bearing. He had black hair going silver, and a goatee. That much was obvious as he surveyed the crowd on the Square, which had formed a ring around him and Saturn, well beyond dagger-range. Daniel recognized him (though it took a few moments) as Édouard de Gex.

De Gex made a move toward the parapet. Saturn, not very prudently, reached out and grabbed him. That stopped de Gex in his tracks. Or so it seemed for an instant until Daniel stepped forward through a shoal of smoke and perceived that de Gex had gone over the edge into St. Mary’s Lock, leaving Saturn standing there alone, holding an empty robe.

Royal Society, Crane Court

24 JULY 1714

“WHEN I WAS A BOY, traveling the roads of France with my father—may God have mercy on his soul—and my brother Calvin, we would from time to time overtake a traveling knife-grinder, sweating with the labor of shoving his rig, which was very heavy because of the massive round grindstone. My father, God rest him, was a trader. A merchant. Everything he needed to conduct his business he carried in his head, or in his purse. This Calvin and I considered to be the normal state of affairs. How strange it was, therefore, to see these knife-sharpeners, who could not earn their bread without a great heavy stone! One day Father heard me and Calvin make some mocking comments after we had passed one of these poor hard-working men. He chided us for our arrogance, and gave us a lesson: the grindstone was set in motion by a shove, and kept turning by occasional slaps of the grinder’s hand. If it lacked weight, it would run down so quickly as to be useless. But because of its tremendous mass, it continued to turn with the greatest impetuosity once set in motion. The stone acted, my father said, as a sort of banca, storing up the work that the grinder did sporadically with hand-slaps, and releasing it steadily. This faculty was so essential to the knife-grinder’s work that he willingly pushed that heavy stone up and down hills every day of his life, like Sisyphus.

“When Jack Shaftoe came back to London, he had in his pocket some money given him by the King of France to finance certain schemes and intrigues that Jack was supposed to set afoot here. And, too, there was the promise that more money would be sent to Jack from time to time if Le Roi was pleased with his work. The gold he had in his pocket was like the first great shove that sets the grindstone in motion, and the sums promised later would be like the hand-slaps that keep it from losing its speed. But Jack had the wit to understand that he needed a banca, a store-house of wealth and power in London, so that his operations would run smooth and steady, even when the subsidies were balky and sporadic. It was not possible for him to rely upon proper bancas, and so he had to create one of his own, tailored to his designs. Making the acquaintance of a Mr. Knockmealdown—who in those days was a modestly successful fence, running a Lock in Limehouse, buying goods that had been rifled from ships by mudlarks—he offered up the following Proposition: that he, Jack Shaftoe, would use his ‘French gold and English wits’ to make Mr. Knockmealdown into a Colossus among receivers, vastly expanding his holdings, and building up his inventory. Mr. Knockmealdown would become a rich man, and his Irish East London Company, as ’twas waggishly called, would become, for Jack, the grindstone that would store up the produce of his labours.

“For the first several years that Jack was back in London, he applied himself to little else. And his wisdom in doing so was demonstrated presently, when the War of the Spanish Succession began to go badly for France, what with all the great blows struck at the armies of Le Roi by Marlborough and Prince Eugene. You may be sure that Louis sent Jack very little gold in those grim years. Jack should have been reduced to the estate of a Vagabond, and been rendered useless to Le Roi, had he not been able to sustain himself from the profits of the East London Company. As it was, Jack prospered even as Louis declined, and by the time that Marlborough crushed the French at Ramillies, and stood poised to drive into the heart of France (or so it seemed), Jack had built Mr. Knockmealdown up into the most powerful Receiver in Christendom: a sort of Pirate-King, able to absorb into his warehouses the entire contents of a stolen ship as a dog swallows a fly, and, on the same tide, to load the same ship to the gunwales with swag. The East London Company thereby became the Foundation upon which Jack could build his dark Edifice. Only in recent years has he built it high enough for men such as you to note it; but you may be certain it was a-building for many a year before then.”

Here Henry Arlanc paused to sweep his gaze around the table. He gave each Clubb member a searching look in the eye, until he came to Sean Partry, who sat closest to him. Then he dropped his eyelids and bowed his head slightly, showing the thief-taker more respect than any other man in the room—even Sir Isaac. Perhaps this was for the simple reason that Partry had on his ring the keys to the manacles that now encircled Arlanc’s wrists, and the fetters around his ankles. Arlanc raised his hands up out of his lap, which required some exertion as they were linked by twenty pounds of chain, and closed them round a mug of chocolate that his wife had brought to him.

Mrs. Arlanc had been horrified but not the least bit surprised when, at the beginning of the Clubb’s meeting, as the first item of New Business, Sean Partry had stormed into the room and clapped her husband in irons. The prisoner, by contrast, had been astonished; but once this had faded he had shown no strong emotion, seeming to accept his personal ruin with true Huguenot fatalism. If anything, he seemed relieved.

“Explain to the Clubb how you became a minion of Jack Shaftoe,” Sir Isaac demanded, “and do you speak slowly and clearly, that every word may be pricked down.” For in lieu of Arlanc—who had, until minutes ago, been the Clubb’s Secretary—they had brought in a Clerk from the Temple, who was scratching away with a quill as fast as he could, writing in shorthand.

“Very well. You will already have heard many tales of the horrors visited upon the French Calvinists after the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and so I shall spare you another, save to say that my father was caught up in a dragonnade and made a galley-slave—but not before he had contrived to smuggle me and Calvin across the Manche to England, packed in barrels, like herring. Later the galley on which my father served was destroyed in a battle against a Dutch fleet in the Mediterranean.”

“But that must have occurred several years after the Edict,” said Mr. Kikin, ever the student of history.

“Indeed, sir,” said Arlanc, “for the War began, by most reckonings, in 1688, when Louis took the Palatinate and William took England.”

“We prefer to say that England took William,” Orney corrected him.

“Be that as it may, sir, the engagement that destroyed the galley of my father was a part of the said war, and it took place in the summer of 1690, off Crete.”

“He was lost at sea, then, as I take it?” asked Mr. Threader, in a touchingly genteel and delicate way.

“On the contrary, sir—he was rescued by a pirate-galley commanded by none other than Jack Shaftoe.”

At this claim, Kikin rolled his eyes, and Orney let out a “Poh!” Isaac took no note of them, but sharpened his gaze, which remained locked on Arlanc’s face. “It is consistent,” he announced. “Jack Shaftoe turned Turk in the late 1680s. His Corsairs are known to have raided Bonanza during the summer of 1690. Thence they fled through the Gates of Hercules into the Mediterranean. By late summer they had reached Cairo, as all the world now knows. Mr. Arlanc’s account is plausible.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Henry Arlanc. “Jack and his band of corsairs rescued my father, and other galériens, from the wrack of that galley. This much Calvin and I knew from letters we received in Limerick. But beyond that—”

“Hold. How did you and your brother get to Limerick?” asked Orney.

“I was getting to that, sir. When we were let out of our barrels in England, a pair of young lads, not yet fully grown, we could, I’m ashamed to say, muster very little interest in following our father’s example and becoming merchants. We lusted after revenge—preferably violent, and if possible, glorious. We joined one of the Huguenot cavalry regiments forming in the Dutch Republic. By the time that William and Mary had come to England, we had risen in the ranks a bit—Calvin had become an assistant Chaplain and I was a non-commissioned officer. Our regiment was one of those that were despatched to Ireland during the early years of the war, to drive out the Pretender. We participated in the Siege of Limerick during the winter of ’90 and ’91, and that is where we received the miraculous tidings that our father—whom we had given up for dead—had been pulled out of the sea by the King of the Vagabonds.”

“Did you receive any further communication from him?” asked Isaac.

“Not for several years, sir, as we were all so much on the move.”

“If your father remained in the service of Jack Shaftoe, he would have called at such places as Mocha and Bandar-Congo during 1691 and followed the monsoon to Surat the year after,” Newton said. “Beyond that it is difficult to reconstruct Jack’s movements for several years. It is well known that he participated in a battle somewhere between Surat and Shahjahanabad in late 1693, and that in 1695 he had begun to organize a ship-building project.”

“In February of 1698 our father posted us a letter from Batavia, where that ship had called to take on spices,” Arlanc said. “We did not receive it until late in the year. By that time the war was over.”

Orney snorted.

“Or so everyone believed at the time,” Arlanc hastened to add. “In retrospect, of course, this was nothing more than a brief respite in a war that extended over twenty-five years. But few foresaw this, and so our regiment, like so many others, was disbanded the following year, when the Treaty of Partition was signed by William and Louis.

“It was difficult to find work in London with so many discharged veterans about, and dangerous to be there for the same reason. Calvin and I were more fortunate than some, for enough time had passed since the Edict of Nantes that the Huguenots had established themselves in England, and begun to prosper. Calvin secured a position as a pastor in a Huguenot church just outside of the city, and has been there ever since. I took jobs here and there as a servant to Huguenot businessmen.

“The last letter we received from our father was posted from Manila in August of the year of our Lord 1700, and it stated—”

“That Jack’s ship was about to attempt the crossing of the Pacific,” said Sir Isaac, “and he would be aboard it.”

“Just so, sir. It is uncanny how much you know of Jack’s movements about the world. Father said he would write to us again from Acapulco. But he died of scurvy en route, may God have mercy on his soul.”

At this little prayer everyone in the room observed a respectful silence. Even Partry seemed moved. The first to speak was Sir Isaac. “And how, precisely, were you delivered this unhappy news?”

“Jack told me,” said Arlanc.

This information silenced Isaac for a bit longer. Mrs. Arlanc could be heard indistinctly, sobbing into the shoulder of a scullery maid in the Royal Society’s kitchen. But presently Isaac stirred again and said, “This would have occurred after his return to London in the last months of 1702.”

“Again you are correct, sir.”

“Do you phant’sy that Jack Shaftoe arranged this interview with you solely to deliver word of your father’s passing?”

Here Henry Arlanc looked discomfited for the first time—odd, considering he was heavily ironed, and on his way to Newgate. He cast an uncertain glance at Sean Partry, and another at Sir Isaac. Then he answered: “Of course not, sir. However, I must tell you something you ought to know about Jack Shaftoe, which is that he is not utterly black-hearted. Did he have a selfish motive for paying a call on me? Of course, and I shall address that next. But his affection for my father was unfeigned, and when he told the tale of my father’s passing, and his burial at sea, almost within sight of California, he shed tears. And I believe that the affection may even have been mutual, for by Jack’s account, my father’s dying words included certain warnings for Jack—warnings he’d have been well-advised to have heeded.”

“How touching,” Isaac said, very much as if he wanted to skip over this part as quickly as possible. But curiosity had already got the better of Daniel, who asked: “What did these warnings concern?”

This earned him a glare from Isaac, and so Daniel went on: “Forgive me, but it is clear that my father and yours had much in common with each other, Mr. Arlanc, and I cannot guess what sort of warnings a man like my father would have issued to a man like Jack, unless it was that his immortal soul was doomed to the Lake of Fire!”

Orney slapped the table and chuckled silently.

“My father implored Jack to beware of a certain passenger whom they’d plucked out of the Pacific following the wrack of the Manila Galleon. A Jesuit priest he was—an agent of the Inquisition, named Father Édouard de Gex.”

Isaac, who had barely been able to hold back a sneer moments ago, was distinctly taken a-back. After a moment to compose himself he asked Partry to take the prisoner out of the room (which he did, a bit roughly) and out of earshot (which was seen to by Mrs. Arlanc, who rushed forth to embrace her husband and wail).

“He knows nothing of what happened yesterday on the Bridge,” Daniel insisted.

“It is too soon for accounts to have appeared in newspapers,” observed Mr. Kikin, an astute reader of all that spewed forth from Grub Street.

“Could Partry have mentioned anything to him? A slip of the tongue, perhaps?”

“Impossible,” said Orney. “Partry and I spent all afternoon, and evening, scouring the banks of the Thames for evidence of de Gex.”

“And I came here with Saturn, specifically to keep an eye on Arlanc,” Daniel said. “He received no visitors.”

“This is a singular piece of news, if it is to be credited,” Isaac said. “For years it has been assumed, by many at Court, that de Gex—who spends much time in London—was an agent of the King of France. And many rumors have reached my ears that he was entangled, somehow, with Jack the Coiner. I had assumed that de Gex and Shaftoe operated hand-in-glove.” He nodded at the place where Arlanc had just been sitting. “But this talk of a warning that went unheeded hints at a conflict of fourteen years’ standing between the two of them.”

“It hints at something else, too,” Orney said. “If it is true that this de Gex survived the destruction of a ship on the open ocean, and stayed afloat long enough to be rescued, it implies that he knows how to swim—which means we cannot simply assume that he drowned in the Thames yesterday.”

“Let us continue the interview,” Isaac said.

“WHEN JACK FIRST RETURNED to London, the war had resumed under its new name of the War of the Spanish Succession. But the armies had not yet been fully mobilized, and so many unemployed soldiers and sailors were still about, making the city infamously perilous. Jack had the wit to see that these men would presently be called back into service, and so he recruited as many as he could during his first months back. His interview with me was partly with an eye towards getting me to work for him.”

“In what capacity? And did he succeed?” asked Isaac.

“Anyone who has paid the least notice to the newspapers, and to the discourse of Parliament, during the last decade, will know that war breeds corruption as flesh breeds maggots. The vast movements of men and matériel entailed by the maneuvers of the Allied Powers afforded Jack opportunities for profit that were almost inconceivably vast. For every case of peculation that was talked about openly in London, you may be certain there were a hundred others that went unremarked upon—and of those, Jack was probably involved, somehow, in fifty. His method was simple: he recruited soldiers and sailors before the Crown did, and he treated them better.”

“You have answered my first question,” Isaac said, “namely, in what capacity did Jack wish to hire you. But you have not touched on the second.”

“Only because the answer is obvious,” Arlanc said, and held up his manacles. “Oh, I did not do terrible things. But I am ashamed to say that I did look the other way when my regiment’s deliveries of gunpowder, and other commodities, came up a bit short. This I did less out of a desire for profit than fear of a certain suttler who I’m sure would not have hesitated to cut my throat, or arrange for me to be shot in the back, had I raised any objection. God in his mercy took me out of this peril, for in ought-five I suffered a wound that forced me to retire from Her Majesty’s service. I came back to London and, after I recovered, went to work as a porter for Monsieur Nevers, the horologist—”

“Which led in due course to your knowing several Fellows of the Royal Society, who hired Monsieur Nevers to make instruments,” said Daniel.

“Yes, sir, and that is how I ended up working here.”

“But you were also working for Jack,” Isaac pointed out.

“Yes, sir, after a fashion,” Arlanc admitted. “Though it hardly seemed like work. From time to time—perhaps once or twice a year—I was invited to go and meet a certain gentleman at a certain pub, and have a chat with him.”

“If the work was all that trivial, why did you bother?” Isaac asked.

“Jack had power over me, as a result of our previous dealings,” said Arlanc. “With a word he could destroy my marriage or blacken the reputation of my brother Calvin. What he asked of me seemed harmless—so I did it.”

“What did you and this man talk about when you met in the pub?” asked Orney.

“He was an educated Frenchman. He professed to be a sort of Enthusiast, an amateur of Natural Philosophy. He simply wanted to know what the Royal Society was like. He asked all sorts of questions about what happened during the meetings, and what the Fellows were like—Sir Christopher Wren, Edmund Halley, and especially Sir Isaac Newton.”

“Did you ever mention to this amateur that Sir Isaac made a practice of coming to Crane Court on Sunday evenings, and working late?” asked Daniel.

“I don’t remember for certain, sir, but it is quite possible—that is the sort of thing this fellow loved to hear about, sir.” Arlanc then paused, for everyone in the room had exhaled, and some who’d been studying his phizz for the last several minutes were now looking at their fingernails or gazing out the window. “Did I do wrong, sir?” asked Henry Arlanc. He was addressing the question to Daniel. “Foolish question! I know perfectly well I did wrong. But was it a crime? A crime for which a man can be charged, and brought before a magistrate?”

Daniel, moved by sympathy, looked him in the eye and got ready to say, Of course not! but Isaac was quicker: “You are guilty of Conspiracy, and to prove as much before a judge shall be simple enough. Mr. Partry, you may take this man away to Newgate Prison.”

With no more ceremony than that, Partry loomed over Arlanc’s shoulder and gathered up a fistful of lapel at the nape of the Huguenot’s neck, by which he hauled him to his feet. Partry kicked Arlanc’s chair aside and began to drag him backwards out of the room, leg-chains raking across the floor-boards. Approaching the exit the pair halted for a moment so that Partry could open the door with his free hand. Arlanc took this opportunity to say: “Beg pardon, sirs, but if I could add a word or two, concerning the man you seek—?”

“You may,” answered Isaac, with a confirmatory nod at Partry. Partry remained in the doorway, watching over Arlanc’s shoulder, while keeping a loose grip on the scruff of the other’s neck. It seemed then to Daniel that this pair looked like a ventriloquist at a country fair, and his marionette. Arlanc began to speak. “I’ve been a student, you might say, of Jack for some years now—as Mr. Halley watches the movements of comets, and understands their nature without being able to alter their courses, why, so it is with me and Jack Shaftoe. And I say that if you think Jack is a slave of Le Roi, and dreams only of doing the bidding of Louis, why, you are underestimating the man. That hypothesis—if I may borrow a Royal Society word—does not do the man sufficient credit, and does not explain his actions.”

“And what is your hypothesis, Mr. Arlanc?” asked Daniel.

“He’s gone around the world, Jack has. He’s had a pile of gold, lost it, got it back, and lost it again. He’s been a Vagabond, a King, and everything in between. He has more swag now than a man could ever need. You must ask yourselves: what could move such a man? When Jack gets up in the morning, what does he think of? What does he desire?”

“You have been given leave to supply us with answers—not to ply us with questions,” Sir Isaac pointed out.

“Very well then, sir, I’ll tell you the answer. It is love that Jack seeks. The love of a woman. A certain particular woman, whom he loved once, and has never forgotten.” Arlanc was looking Daniel in the eye. “She is known to some of you. Her name is—”

“I know her name,” Daniel said, to cut off Arlanc’s maudlin discourse before he could sully the name of some blameless lady or other; but he needn’t have bothered, for Partry at the same instant had jerked back on Arlanc’s shoulder so violently as to throttle his wind-pipe and draw him back through the door.

“Thank you, Mr. Partry,” Isaac called out as Arlanc was removed with a fantastic cacophony: scraping and clanking of chains, gagging and coughing of the prisoner, curses from Partry, and above all the wailing and sobbing redux of Mrs. Arlanc. Doors up and down the hall were being hauled open, and diverse savants and vertuosos were thrusting their heads out to see what was the meaning of this. Kikin did the Clubb the favor of closing the door on that scene. This muffled the sound to the point where it was mere noises off: distracting but ignorable. There was a pause for the Clubb to regain its composure. Then Mr. Orney, who was running the meeting, said: “Right. Are there any other items of new business?”

“I have one,” said Mr. Kikin, “which is that we all lie down and take a damned nap.”

IF THE OTHERS WENT to sleep, Isaac did not, and neither did Daniel, for Isaac wanted to have words with him. They met in a study off the Library, where Isaac was wont to hold forth as President of the Royal Society.

“You will have seen the deficiency in Arlanc’s account,” was how Isaac opened the conversation.

“What, that nonsense about a woman?”

Isaac got that queasy look signifying that Daniel was being unforgivably slow. “For the Infernal Device to have been placed where it was, it was not sufficient simply for Jack to know that I work late here on Sunday evenings. He must have known, futhermore, that you were coming, in company of Mr. Threader, and that you should arrive on a Sunday evening.”

“I sent more than one letter ahead, which Arlanc would have seen, to inform the Royal Society of my intentions…”

“Your intentions in general, yes. But the specific information that you should arrive on a Sunday evening—the fact that the Device was placed in your trunk on Mr. Threader’s wagon—all this points to Threader’s involvement.”

“We have been over this before. That Jack has a spy in Threader’s retinue I am willing to believe. But to say Mr. Threader himself is a hashishin is absurd!”

“Did you mark how quiet he was just now?”

“You call it quiet. I call it asleep. We have all been awake thirty-six hours!”

“You have learned from Arlanc how Jack builds power: he wheedles a small favor from someone, then comes back again asking for a larger one, and so on, until that person is ensnared, and has lost the power to refuse. Is it so difficult to believe that such a thing could have happened to an inveterate Weigher such as Mr. Threader?”

“I will consider it,” Daniel said, “on the condition that you will entertain another, just as repugnant possibility: that the Royal Society harbors another, of infinitely higher rank than Henry Arlanc, who is working in league with Jack the Coiner.”

Clerkenwell Court

27 JULY 1714

“I CAME AS SOON AS I COULD.”

Daniel thought this very like Isaac: to open the conversation by defending himself against imagined allegations of tardiness. Since Daniel was the only man in the room (Saturn’s clock-shop along Coppice Row), some might see it as an excess of caution; but when you were him you could never be too sure.

“Stunning alacrity is the phrase I should have used to describe your response to my message,” Daniel assured him. “I did not expect you for another hour, and do not expect the rest of the Clubb to show up at all.”

In case Daniel’s reassurances were not in good faith, Isaac went on to bolster his rebuttal. “Some kind of storm has broken over the Court of St. James today. The Quality are all out in the streets—it is as if, at some moment in the middle of the day, every courtier and politician in London suddenly decided he was in the wrong place.”

“That is not a bad description of what happened.”

“I was at the Royal Society, going over some documents relating to Leibniz, and when I received your note, I found it nearly impossible to get out onto Fleet Street. At first I feared the Queen must have died; but the bells do not toll for her.”

“I know a few things about what happened at St. James’s today,” Daniel said, “but as you came hither, instead of going thither, I presume you are more concerned with happenings at Newgate.”

“When did he escape?” Isaac asked.

“Sometime during the night. Mr. Partry is there now, interviewing the gaolers.”

“As we could not trust Mr. Partry to keep Mr. Arlanc in the gaol, I see no reason to entrust him with further responsibilities.”

“It was not his task to keep Arlanc at Newgate but to deliver him there—which he did. There, the chains that Partry had put on him were removed, and replaced by much heavier ones, as is the usual practice of the gaolers.”

“It is also their usual practice to accept money to replace those heavy chains with lighter ones.”

“Indeed. After Arlanc had spent a night heavily ironed in the Condemned Hold, he got a new set of chains, which were so light as to be mere tokens, and he was moved—”

“To the Press-yard and Castle!?” Isaac shook his head, and turned his gaze to the traffic moving down Coppice Row. “Someone—obviously Jack, or one of his agents—came in and spread some money round the gaolers, then. They gave him a pleasant flat for a night and then looked the other way as he slid down a drainpipe. I should have anticipated it.”

“Perhaps the reason you did not, was that it does not really matter.”

“I serve under a solemn Indenture, Daniel. To me, the administration of Justice always matters.”

“Let me say it otherwise, then. All that was left in Arlanc’s future was punishment. We should not have gotten any more information from him. This much was obvious. So the tedious business of looking after his incarceration and trial moved to the back of your mind. As it did to mine.”

Both men now saw through the window Peter Hoxton and Sean Partry. They had been coming up Coppice Row from the general direction of Newgate. Saturn was walking in the lead, breaking a trail through the traffic, almost all of which was moving the opposite way.

This was Tuesday. Friday was a Hanging-Day at Tyburn. The streets would be impassable then, and on Thursday. Meat that was brought into the city on the hoof today or tomorrow would fetch a good price later in the week; accordingly, every few minutes a drover would come by, moving a small herd of doomed cattle down towards Smithfield. So the usual traffic of hay-wains, manure-carts, and holiday-makers coming back down from the open swales to the north of town, had to be crammed into the intervals between these herds. Northbound pedestrians, such as Saturn and Sean Partry, had a bad time of it. They entered the shop in a choleric mood, smelling of all the cow-shit they’d been forced to step in. But compared to Newgate this smelled like the gardens of Shalimar.

“There is not a man at Newgate but will aver that the disappearance of Henry Arlanc is a bottomless mystery,” Partry announced, with no preliminaries. “From which you may assume—as you likely have done already—that it was arranged by that infamous Black-guard Jack Shaftoe.”

“It was not worth your going to Newgate to collect that intelligence,” said Newton, who might have been getting ready to accuse Partry of padding his bill.

But Partry was too quick for him. “In attending so keenly to Arlanc, Jack has forgotten about another inmate, scheduled to be drawn and quartered on Friday, whose testimony might be more useful to the Clubb, and more damaging to Jack, than that of Arlanc.”

“Ah, you are speaking of that man who was convicted of coining some weeks ago, and whom you were planning to approach this week. I had quite forgotten about him,” said Daniel.

“Do not punish yourself, Doc, for Jack has forgotten about him, too, and therein lies our opportunity.”

“I have never heard of him,” Isaac protested.

“You’d know his name, if I spoke it,” Partry assured him, “he was caught up in one of your coining investigations some time ago, and duly convicted. But he made me swear I’d not reveal his name, and so you’ll not know who he is until Thursday evening, at the Black Dogg, in the cellar of Newgate Prison.”

“And then he shall be willing to talk to us of Jack?”

“Yes, sir—provided you come with guineas to put in his pockets.”

“A gratuity for Jack Ketch so that this coiner shall die a swift merciful death the next day at Tyburn. It shall not be the first time I have enriched Mr. Ketch thus, to further my pursuit of bigger game,” Isaac said, in a tone of exhausted resignation.

At this Partry nodded, and seemed satisfied—but only for an instant, because Daniel pulled him up short with a warning look, and a shake of the head. “Hold,” he said, “the transaction as you have set it forth won’t do.”

“What do you mean it won’t do?” asked Partry.

“Pray make yourself comfortable here, Mr. Partry,” said Daniel, moving toward the back door, and staring at Isaac until Isaac noticed, and began staring back. “Or down the street at the pub, if you please. I must go for a stroll with Sir Isaac, and discuss with him certain complications.”

Partry chewed his tongue for a few beats, and answered: “I shall husband my energies for yet another journey to Newgate and back. I wish you a pleasant stroll and a non-fatal.”

“I’ll see to the latter,” offered Saturn, and followed Daniel and Isaac out the back into the Court of Technologickal Arts.

“WHAT IS IT YOU WISH to shew me here?”

It was necessary for Isaac to ask this, for as always the Court was a riot of invention. One of Mr. Newcomen’s acolytes had come out from Devon with parts of an Engine, which had lately been put together in the middle of the yard to form a great smoking and steaming, sucking and thrashing terror, thronged with grimy admirers. In another corner, Mr. Hauksbee was trying out a new and yet more dangerous spark-maker, which had drawn in those few who were not fascinated by the Engine.

Daniel had hoped that Isaac would be enthralled. But he was not. And the tone in which he spoke, his rigid posture, his flared nostrils, all seemed calculated to let Daniel know that he did not especially like what he saw. It was perhaps a small act of mercy that Isaac did not ask any questions more grueling than What is it you wish to shew me here? For as Daniel surveyed the Court, he noted that very little progress was being made on the Logic Mill. If he were more responsible-minded, he should have been alarmed by that. Had he styled himself a leader of men, he should have taken measures to bring these aimless ingénieurs back to order. But he did not feel so moved. He had brought these men together here and given them what they most longed for: freedom to make things, and to work on whatever they found most interesting. For several months, the most interesting thing had been the Logic Mill, and all of them had glady worked together on it, without having to be told to. Of late they had become interested in new adventures. For a little while Daniel had been annoyed by their fickleness. Then he had reflected that the world, as of July 1714, was of a sudden crowded with interesting projects for men such as these: enough to keep them all busy for hundreds of years. If they let their attention drift from the Logic Mill, who was Daniel to command them not to be interested in sparks, or steam? And if Isaac was bored by the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, what power or right had Daniel to forbid it? It was nothing more than the Boyle/Hooke Rarefying Engine, built larger, and that was from fifty years ago.

“Nothing,” Daniel finally answered. “It is merely a convenient way to get out of doors without being overrun by cattle.” He led Isaac toward a side-exit of the Court, and Saturn—who’d fallen behind, as he’d gone to roust a pair of young culls who’d been playing at dice on a barrel-head—rushed up to grip its heavy bolt and toss it out of the way. The two dice-players fell in behind Daniel and Isaac, each stepping along smartly with a massive walking-stick in his hand, though neither of them seemed to have any trouble with rheumatism.

Preceded by Saturn and followed by the two bludgeon-men, Daniel and Isaac now embarked on a mockery of a country stroll. They were moving through a ragged net-work of paths and alleys chalking out small plots of dirt on the fringe of the metropolis—some still grazing sheep or growing turnips, others active construction sites. One day these would be streets, but now they were too narrow, soft, and wandersome to support any traffic other than a pair of elderly strollers and their van- and rear-guards. “From here we may ramble north without too much unpleasantness.”

“What is north of here that is worth a walk?” Isaac wanted to know. Daniel ignored the question, and Isaac, after a moment’s hesitation, fell in step alongside.

“The arrangement proposed by Mr. Partry won’t do,” Daniel insisted. “We must have answers tomorrow—even tonight, if the prisoner can be induced to talk.”

“Does this have something to do with whatever it was that happened at St. James’s today?” Isaac asked. “For I have not heard such urgency from you before now.”

“Events have overtaken us; we must catch up,” Daniel said. “Bolingbroke has a plan. I know not what it is. It may be a perfectly stupid plan, or brilliant. Strangely, that does not matter. What matters is that he has a plan, he moves, he acts, and all others are forced to observe him and to respond. He is the center of all attention, which, I begin to suspect, is more important to him than to achieve any particular goal. Who does not have a plan is my lord Oxford, until recently the Lord Treasurer—”

“What do you mean, until recently? Am I to understand that this Realm has a new Lord Treasurer today?”

“I didn’t say that—only that Oxford is gone. He surrendered the White Staff to the Queen today in Council.”

“Of his own volition or—”

“She demanded it of him. Strange to think of anyone so frail demanding anything; but that is what they say.”

“And she still holds it?”

“She has not bestowed it on anyone else just yet, according to my sources.”

“Who are your sources, Daniel? They seem to be better than mine—certainly quicker.”

“That is another conversation. The point is that Oxford—and with him all the moderate Tories—are out. Thus has the Queen let all the world know, today, that she favors Bolingbroke and the Jacobites. She has set in motion events that shall lead to the overturning of the Settlement Act, the rejection of the Hanovers, and a Catholic King.”

“In her dreams,” Isaac corrected him. “In truth, Britain will sooner have a second Civil War than a Popish King.”

“Of course. Now, consider Bolingbroke’s position. He has captured the Queen, and in the same instant, gained unquestioned dominance of the Tories, and hence of Parliament. His next move will be to parley with the Whigs: his only remaining opposition.”

“Why should he bother?” Isaac asked. “I should think he is in a position to dictate terms.”

“Behold Sir John Oldcastle’s,” was Daniel’s answer. For they had come out into an open place where they could look across a hay-mow to an estate, on the other side of the main road, consisting of a few stately old buildings at the southern end, and a small wooded game-park extending to the north for perhaps two hundred yards, where it covered the slopes of a knobby little hill. Daniel drew Isaac’s attention to the hill, which would have gone unnoticed and unnamed in most parts of England. Here on the boggy floodplain of the Fleet it was really something. One could see for hundreds of yards from its top! And indeed, three men were standing atop it right now, enjoying the prospect. “What do you make of them, Isaac? They put me in mind of observers posted on a height-of-land above a battlefield.”

“That is a very romantick notion, I’m sure,” Isaac said, “but in truth they are likely friends or kin of the Oldcastles, enjoying an afternoon ramble through the coppice.”

“What? Through all of those tents, you mean!” Daniel answered, and pointed into the little wood. The growth at this time of year was too dense to allow a clear look, but a careful, keen-eyed observer—Sir Isaac Newton, for instance—could glimpse, through gaps between branches, taut canvas, and the occasional hemmed edge, tent-pole, or staked rope.

“Why, there is a little encampment there,” Isaac said, “probably Vagabonds come to watch the hangings.”

“Do you really think the lord of the manor would permit Vagabonds?”

“What is your explanation, if you do not favor mine?”

“That is a military encampment. But it is not one of the Queen’s battalions. Ergo, a militia.”

“Whig, or Tory?”

“Remember that Sir John Oldcastle was an early Protestant. The Oldcastles of today are not so fiery as he, but they still lean that way.”

“Very well. It is a Whig Association company, then,” Isaac said. “I have heard about them. But I admit that to see them out in force on the edge of London is a different matter.”

“Let us stroll up a bit farther, and see what goes on up yonder, round Merlin’s Cave,” Daniel proposed, pointing north across fields to another up-cropping of buildings and trees, a quarter of a mile away. This was a good bit smaller, newer, and meaner than the Oldcastle estate, being a Spaw lately thrown up round a natural cave at the foot of the rise that led up eventually to Islington.

Presently it was hosting several who had ridden out from town on horseback. Though it was difficult to resolve much at this distance, it was obvious from the way these men handled their mounts that they were young, and skilled horsemen all, inclined to gallant and reckless displays. It was almost as if they were showing off in front of some ladies; but even at a quarter-mile it could be seen that no women were present. They were showing off for one another. As Daniel and Isaac drew nearer, which only took a minute or two, it became clear that all of these men affected the Mohawk. They, or rather their servants, were piling up branches to make a bonfire later.

“You have seen their like before. Whig gentlemen’s sons,” said Daniel, and stopped. “If we rambled deeper into the countryside we should see more like them, scattered about here and there, in parks and hamlets, or on high places where signal-fires may be kindled.” He turned his back on the Mohawk camp before Merlin’s Cave, and began walking back towards Clerkenwell. Isaac, after a pause for a last look, followed him.

Daniel continued, “Those we have seen are the spear-head. On a signal from my lord Ravenscar they should be the first to march down Saffron Hill and in through Newgate to take London. If we went to different suburbs, we should observe, on certain large estates, similar formations of Tory militia, who’ve already sworn allegiance to the Pretender.”

Isaac was silent most of the way back.

Then he said, “What is going to happen tomorrow?”

“A dinner party,” Daniel answered, “in Golden Square.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bolingbroke has sent word round to Roger and the other Whigs, inviting them to join him tomorrow at his house on Golden Square. All of these great men who have been playing the game for so many years, and with such enormous stakes, must finally lay their cards on the table tomorrow evening. Bolingbroke has chosen the time and place of it, and he has done so most cunningly. The Queen is faring poorly indeed. After the meeting of the Council today she collapsed from the strain—strain placed upon her by Bolingbroke, perhaps with malice in his heart, or perhaps because he is oblivious to the damage he leaves in his own wake. Whatever the case may be, she is not expected to live long. And so Bolingbroke has this one moment—perhaps a day, perhaps as much as a week—when everything is perfect for him. Parliament is prorogued, and so he need not concern himself, for the moment, about the Asiento money. Oh, he has the money, mind you, or the influence he has bought with it, but has not yet begun to suffer the consequences of having stolen it. The Tories are united behind him; he has the Queen’s favor; she is too weak to oppose him, but not weak enough to die; he has thrown all of us Dissidents and Nonconformists back on our heels with his Schism Act; and he has the Pyx. These are the cards he shall lay on the table tomorrow evening. What has Ravenscar in his hand? A few strong cards, to be sure.”

“But we may strengthen his hand immeasurably,” Isaac said, “and at the same instant weaken Bolingbroke’s, by capturing Jack the Coiner, and exonerating the Pyx. It is very clear to me now. Thank you for the walk, Daniel.”

“IT WILL NOT BE an easy negotiation,” Sean Partry said, after giving the matter thorough consideration. “For it matters nothing, to this condemned wretch in Newgate, how high the political stakes may be. A civil war? Why should he care, when his boiled and tarred head shall watch the battle from the top of the Treble Tree?”

“Has he any family?” asked Daniel.

“Dead of the smallpox. Only one thing in all the world matters to this cull, and that is, how much pain shall he suffer on Friday?”

“Then it is a simple affair of bribing Jack Ketch,” Daniel said. “I fail to see—”

“It is a not-so-very-simple affair,” said Partry, “of bribing him most and last, even as Jack’s men—who, as we’ve seen, infest Newgate Prison—are disputing the issue with us. This is why I was keen to do it on Thursday night. ’Twould afford Jack less time to offer a counter-bribe. But to do it on Tuesday evening—” He shook his head.

“Let us forget about today, then, and have a go at it on Wednesday,” Daniel suggested.

“That will help—a little.”

“But it must be in the afternoon—we cannot wait until the evening.”

Partry mooted it, and finally gave up a shrug. “Anything is worth a try,” he said. “But you had better show up with pounds sterling in your purse, and be ready to buy your information a word at a time.”

“If it is simply a matter of showing up with pounds sterling,” Isaac said, “then I know where I can get some.”

Golden Square

LATE AFTERNOON, 28 JULY 1714

“HOW MUCH HARM COULD a stiff drink possibly do you, at this stage of the game?” asked Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. “You and I are already off the charts of the Royal Society’s annuity tables—living affronts to the Actuarial Profession.”

“Hadn’t you better go in there sober?” Daniel asked. He was facing, and Roger was showing his arse to, the best house on the Square. It put Daniel in mind of the stage of a theatre: not the new opera-house style, in which the actors were pent up behind a proscenium arch, but the W. Shakespeare wooden O, consisting of a flat patch of dirt (here the Square) walled in by galleries crowded with well-heeled voyeurs (the houses all round) and dominated by one magnificent edifice thrust out and over all (Bolingbroke’s place) and cunningly shot through with passages, chutes, ladders, and stairs interconnecting diverse balconies, cupolas, windows, &c., where, at any moment, important personages might pop up for a conversation, tryst, complot, or sword-fight that would in some way move the drama along. An Arsenal of Possibilities it was. The groundlings salted about the Square could not take their eyes off of it. Except for Roger. But then, Roger was not a groundling. He was no mere spectator, but a leading man—a Capulet or a Montague, take your pick—who was using the Square as a sort of Green Room. He was making ready to enter stage left, and begin his performance; but his lines had not been written yet.

No wonder he was drinking. “You’ve been hoisting tankards in the Black Dogg. Fair is fair.”

The mere idea of putting his lips against any of the available receptacles in the Black Dogg sent exquisite shudders up and down the length of Daniel’s alimentary tract. “I would not even sit down there, much less drink.”

“We’re not sitting down here,” Roger pointed out, “and that’s not stopping me.” One of his less dangerous-looking servants had drawn nigh, bearing a tray, desolate save for two amber thimbles. Roger pinched one off and projected its contents into his ivory-decked maw. Daniel snatched the other, only to prevent Roger from having a double.

“Your unwillingness to come right out and say how the negotiations are going is a kind of torture to me,” Roger explained. Then, to the servant: “Another round, please, to dull the pain inflicted on me by my reticent chum.”

“Stay,” Daniel said, “we have not spoken to the prisoner yet.”

Roger went into an orgasm of coughing.

“It is good news!” Daniel assured him. Which was so brazenly false that it silenced Roger, and straightened him up.

“You toy with me, sirrah.”

“Not at all. Why should our prisoner be so apprehensive that he’ll not even consent to show his face in the Black Dogg?”

“Because he’s a bloody coward?”

“Even a coward should have naught to fear from Jack—unless he possessed information that was dangerous to Jack in the extreme.”

“I have a question for you, Daniel.”

“Pray ask it then, Roger.”

“Have you ever participated in a negotiation in your entire life? For a quality oft found in persons who have, is an ability to look past some of the more fanciful assertions made by the adversary.”

“Roger—”

“Like Cloudesley Shovell, seeing the Rocks of Scilly emerging from the murk, only after ’twas too late to turn his Fleet aside from its fatal Course, I now, on the very threshold of Bolingbroke’s den, perceive my error in despatching you and that other Natural Philosopher to parley with this wily Black-guard.”

“It is not quite as dismal as all that, Roger.”

“Tell me something, then, that is not perfectly and utterly abominably bad news.”

“We got an early start this afternoon, and have worked through all of the preliminary rounds of the Negotiation, using Sean Partry as our go-between. All of the posturing, bluffing, and nonsense is behind us. Now we are down to the final exchange. The prisoner holds out. We are taking a little recess, now, so that he may cool his heels and contemplate the terrors that await him on Friday. Meanwhile I come to you, wanting to know: what is the most we could offer this man, supposing he could bring us information, today, that should enable us to catch Jack—or at least prove that Jack tampered with the Pyx?”

“If it came down to that—Daniel, look me in the eye,” Roger said. “You must not offer this save as a last, desperate measure, and then only if it is sure to bring about our victory.”

“I understand.”

“If this chap can help me bring down Bolingbroke, I’ll break him out of Newgate Prison and set him up with a farm in Carolina.”

“Splendid, Roger.”

“Not a manor, mind you, but a patch of dirt, a pointed stick, and a chicken.”

“It is more than he deserves, and more than I’d hoped for.”

“Now get thee gone to the Black Dogg. I can only draw out the evening’s game for so long.” Roger finally permitted himself a glance toward Bolingbroke’s house. At least three Viscounts were looking back at him, from different windows. This reminded Daniel of something.

“We are to re-convene in an hour,” said Daniel, checking his watch.

“An hour!?”

“Then all should go quickly. And I shall use that hour to our advantage. Enjoy your dinner, Roger, and don’t drink too much.”

“All I need do is drink less than my opponent. Easy.”

“But I would that you were sober enough to enjoy your victory.”

“I would that you were drunk enough to act a little less deliberately.”

But Daniel was already scurrying up the portable steps of the phaethon that Roger had lent him. “Leicester Fields,” he said to the driver.

Leicester House

HALF AN HOUR LATER

“IN THIS COUNTRY, as you may know, there is a tacit rule, observed by all the Nobility and Quality, Tory and Whig alike, forbidding the use of the Mobb in politics.”

“I had no idea,” said Princess Caroline, “but then I suppose that is what makes a thing tacit.” Her English had gotten rather better during her weeks in London.

“No doubt when your royal highness shall reign over a peaceful and contented Britain, the rule shall be observed without fail,” Daniel continued, “as it has been now for at least a quarter of a century.”

“Except for during Parliamentary elections, of course,” put in the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm.

“Naturally,” Daniel said, “and the odd church-burning or assassination. But I cannot be certain that it shall be obeyed tonight. On both sides of the Whig-Tory division I have lately seen a worrisome want of discretion. Bolingbroke’s position, just now, is at once formidable, and fatally precarious. He is like a man who has scaled most of a stone wall with his fingernails and reached the point where he can just peek over the top, and see a safe place to stand—even as the danger of losing his grip and falling to the rocks below has never been greater. Now he will flail about and grasp at anything that might enable him to heave himself to safety. Why should he stick at violating this rule concerning the Mobb, just this once?”

They were in a chamber in Leicester House that had probably been styled a Grand Salon on the architect’s drawings, æons ago. By the time the plaster had dried and the Stuarts had moved in, it had probably been called a salon; nowadays it would be a salle, or a walk-in closet. None of your froth of Rokoko plasterwork here. It was lined with wooden panels that never stopped popping. They were a shade of brown that was darker than black. Its several windows looked out over Leicester Fields, but these had been annihilated by clever shutters that could not be distinguished from wall-panels without assiduous knuckle-rapping. It was small, dark, and mean, but Eliza seemed to like it, and Daniel had to admit that on an evening such as this one there was something comforting about the place.

“This Mobb is oft spoken of, but never seen,” said the Princess.

Daniel Waterhouse and Johann von Hacklheber, at the same instant, filled their lungs and opened their mouths to explain to her that she was wrong. But each hesitated, thinking to let the other speak first, and so the next voice heard was Caroline’s. “You are about to curdle my blood with Mobb-tales, I know,” she said. “But to me the notion is philosophically offensive. Doctor Leibniz has given much deep thought to the question of collective entities, such as a herd of sheep, and concluded that these must be regarded as aggregations of monads. What is true of a herd of sheep is more true of a Mobb of Londoners. They are all individual souls. This Mobb is a fabrication of minds too lazy to treat them as such.”

“Yet I have seen the Mobb,” said Daniel. “Some would say, I have been it.”

“And yet you are as intelligent a man as ever God made,” Caroline said. “This proves that the Mobb is an incoherent concept.”

“I got a taste of the Mobb, the day Dappa was chased down Threadneedle Street with a bounty on his head,” said Johann von Hacklheber. “Though made up of individual souls, it did have a sort of collective will about it.”

“Pfui!”

“This is idle,” said Eliza, “you can take it up with the Doctor in Hanover. We must tend to matters at hand. Johann, on the day that Dappa was taken, the Mobb had been incited by hand-bills printed and distributed by Charles White. How do you suppose Bolingbroke might animate the Mobb in the present crisis?”

“Understand, your grace, that ninety out of a hundred in the Mobb are simply criminals who want only the lamest of pretexts to run riot,” Daniel said. “They are like the charge of coarse powder in a musket’s barrel. It is detonated by a pinch of fine powder in the weapon’s pan. Which is to say that one provocateur, moved by Party Malice, might incite ten or a hundred of the rabble to run amok. Bolingbroke will have such provocateurs posted in squares and streets where they can sway as many as possible. In order to inspire them—to put fire to the pan-powder—he needs only some small scandal or incident. Among other things, he might expose the presence of Hanoverian spies in London.”

“I see,” said the Princess. “It was foolish for me to have come, then.”

“No, for it may have spared your royal highness’s life from the assassins of de Gex,” said Daniel.

“It would have been foolish,” said Johann, “to have come here without having been prepared for this night.” He locked eyes with his mother as he said this. Eliza stood up.

“Mother and son have been cleverly at work,” Caroline guessed, “while the silly Princess has been delighting in her naughty adventure.”

“ ’Twas ever thus, and ever shall be, as long as we have Royals,” said Eliza. “You may repay our labours by doing deeds that are beyond our scope.”

“Easily said,” said the Princess. “At this moment, what can I—”

“You can fly, and fly well,” Eliza said. “Royal flight is a grand tradition. Elizabeth, Charles II, Louis XIV, the Winter Queen, all had to fly at some point in their lives, and all carried it off well.”

“James II did it poorly,” Daniel reflected. Then, not to be a party-pooper, recovered with: “But you are made of better stuff.”

“And unlike him, the Princess has friends, and a plan,” said Johann, “though she doesn’t know it. I can set this plan in motion with a word. Is that what you recommend, Dr. Waterhouse?”

Now this was a rather weighty matter to have placed on Daniel’s shoulders. As a younger man he’d have been paralyzed by the responsibility. But all decisions had come to him easier, somehow, since he had learnt that he was supposed to be dead anyway. “Oh, by all means,” he said. “You must fly. But I would have a word with her grace, if the plan permits it.”

Eliza smiled. “The plan calls for Johann and Caroline to change clothes first of all,” she said, and excused the two of them with a smile, and a flicker of the eyelids. Johann turned away, blindly thrusting a hand behind him, and Caroline’s hand dove into it like a falcon stooping on game, and thus they made for the door, he striding, bent forward, and she floating, erect as a Princess was supposed to be. As they gained the anteroom, Johann began to distribute commands, in German, to various persons who had quietly convened there during the quarter of an hour since Daniel had arrived. One of these thrust his head and arm into the room, favored Eliza with a deferential nod, and Daniel with a flash of the whites of his eyes, and pulled the door to so sharply that every panel in the room gave a sympathetic pop.

“You are alone with me,” Eliza observed. “A scenario oft sung of by the poets of the Kit-Cat Clubb.”

Daniel smiled. “If they sing of this, I shall be likened to Tithonus, who was granted æternal life, and turned into a cricket.”

“As a ploy,” Eliza said, “your modesty serves. I see how it must work on those who are young, vain, and do not know you well. To me who know you better, it is grating. Please speak plainly, without flattering me or deprecating yourself; we do not have time.”

Daniel inhaled deeply, like a man who has just been doused with icy water. Then he said: “I bring you news concerning Jack Shaftoe.”

It was Eliza’s turn to gasp. She turned her back on him so quickly that the hem of her skirt sawed at his ankles. She retreated several steps, then arranged herself on a bench between two of the shuttered windows. Daniel stood sideways to her, so as not to dwell on the pinkness of her face.

“I was led to believe you were pursuing him. How can—”

“I am doing so, and I will catch him,” Daniel said, “but this has not prevented him, clever chap that he is, from contriving a way to place in my ear certain words that were plainly intended for you.”

“And what are those words, sir?”

“That everything he has been doing lately, he has been doing out of love for you.”

“That is a very strange way of showing love,” she returned. “Making counterfeit money for the King of France, and blowing people up.”

“He has not actually blown anyone up,” Daniel reminded her, “and as for the King of France, some would point out that he is also the liege-lord of Arcachon.”

“Thank you for pointing it out,” she said. “Is that the entire message?”

“That he loves you? Yes, I believe that is it.”

“Well, when you catch him, you may give him my answer,” she said, rising to her feet, “which is that the decision he made at the wharf in Amsterdam was the sort that cannot be unmade; and as proof, one need only behold what Jack has become in the thirty years since—all of which might have been predicted from the choice he made on that day.”

“I have an inkling that Jack is now striving to become something rather different,” Daniel said, “which you may not have predicted.”

“That is what young Jack—who, I must admit, was a dreamy lad—would have done,” Eliza said. “The wretch that he is now is not capable of it.”

“Never was a mailed and spiked gauntlet more harshly thrown down. I am off to the Black Dogg now,” Daniel said, excusing himself with a careful bow, “and I shall deliver that fell challenge to Jack, if fortune leads me to him.”

Newgate Prison

HALF AN HOUR LATER

WHATEVER THE PLAN WAS that Johann von Hacklheber had laid for the extraction of Princess Caroline from the snares of London, it evidently did not rely on stealth. Such was the crowd and the commotion that Daniel half feared that the much-discussed Mobb had already conquered the stables of Leicester House. But not to worry, they were loyal servants and retainers all. Daniel found his phaethon and commanded the driver to take it round Leicester Fields and collect Sir Isaac Newton. This was achieved shortly and in absurdly conspicuous style. The diverse spies planted in and around Leicester Fields by political factions, foreign governments, nervous speculators, and Grub Street newspapers, would all report to their masters that a cricket-like geezer had scurried out of the London home of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, hopped into an inappropriately seductive and libidinous Mode of Transport, swung round to snatch the World’s Greatest Natural Philosopher, and thundered off in the direction of—Newgate Prison. What the recipients would make of this information was anyone’s guess. Daniel was past caring.

THEY ENCOUNTERED PARTRY in the Gigger, which was a pit just off Newgate Street, under the actual Gate, where free men could swop words with prisoners through a grate. Partry was using it in lieu of an anteroom to the Black Dogg. “What news from Ravenscar?” came his voice through the grille.

“First, shall we have the privilege of meeting the other party to the negotiation?” Daniel asked. “It is difficult to parley with a phantom.”

“As you are but a phantom to him, he would likely agree.”

“Then let us get together in the same room at least!”

“It is arranged,” Partry said. “I have rented the Black Dogg for the evening. We shall meet him there—the privacy of an empty tavern should loosen his tongue. But you must be prepared to loosen your purse-strings.”

“That has been arranged as well,” Daniel assured him. “If need be, we may offer the prisoner liberty, and a farm in Carolina. But only if need be.”

“Now that is excessive!” Isaac said. “The promise of a quicker than usual hanging should be more than sufficient.”

“As perhaps it shall be,” Daniel said, “but if it does not suffice, why, we shall have room to bargain.”

“Very well,” said Partry, “to the Black Dogg! Mind your step as you descend the stairs, for they are quite slippery with crushed lice.”

“More so than usual?” Daniel asked.

“Indeed,” said Partry, “for as I just told you, I have cleared out the Dogg, and many have passed this way, only a few minutes ago, who had not stirred from their bar-stools and corners in a long while; there is no guessing what may have scattered from out of their rags.”

“Aye, all of London is astir to-night!” Daniel remarked.

“All, save what is on the treads of these stairs,” Partry insisted. “Pray, let me go ahead of you, and light your way with my lantern.”

Following Partry, and preceding Isaac, down toward the Black Dogg, Daniel said: “How curious that to me it seemeth like any other stone stair-way in the world.”

“Why is that so curious?” Isaac wanted to know.

“We speak of Newgate as a dread place,” Daniel said, “but emptied of its prisoners, ’tis but another building—a bit stinkier than most, perhaps.”

“The same might be remarked of its Pub,” said Partry, heaving wide an iron-bound dungeon-door to release a surprising flood of candle-light, and an even worse than expected front of midden-stench.

“So it is really the people of Newgate who inspire us with dread, you are saying,” said Isaac.

“Has the Black Dogg ever been so lit up in its whole sorry history?” asked Daniel as he passed through the door. For the place was as littered with candles as the steps had been with lice. And they were proper wax tapers, not rush-lights. Even the dining-room of Viscount Bolingbroke was not so finely illumined to-night. The Black Dogg was not the sort of tavern that contained a great deal of furniture—patrons either stood, or lay on the floor. There was a bar, of course, in the literal sense of a bulwark erected between the prisoners and the gin. This was now a palisade of burning tapers. Sean Partry led them over to it. Daniel followed half-way, but stopped in the center of the room to have a look round. His eyes were yet adjusting to the brightness, but he could see plainly enough that no one else was here.

“Where is the—” he began.

“How much in God’s name has been spent on candles!?” Isaac demanded. “A fortune! Have you gone mad?”

“My going mad days are done,” said Partry, turning his back on the bar, so that he became a shade halving the beam of fire. “Do not concern yourselves about it. I have paid for the candles with my own money. When we are finished I’ll give ’em away to prisoners who cannot afford to buy even the mean grease-lights that are peddled by the gaolers, and whose eyes have forgotten light.”

“You presume much,” Isaac said. He and Daniel were shoulder-to-shoulder now, facing Partry, the heat of the candles on their faces like summer sun. “Nothing shall be paid you until we have achieved our goal. Where is the prisoner?”

“There is no prisoner,” said Partry, “and never has been. I’ve been lying to you the entire time. Any information you are given to-night, concerning the whereabouts of Jack Shaftoe, shall come, not from some suppositious prisoner, but from me.”

“Why have you lied to us?” Isaac asked.

“Lying to you enabled me to set up a meeting on neutral ground,” answered Partry, and stomped his foot on the pavement. “Here, I feel safe in divulging my information.”

“And what is that information, at long last?” Isaac demanded.

“That I am Jack Shaftoe,” answered Jack Shaftoe, “alias Jack the Coiner, alias Quicksilver, and many other nick-names and titles besides; and that I am willing to wind up my career to-night, provided the right terms can be struck.”

Golden Square

THE SAME TIME

IF THE POINT OF A dinner-party was to bring interesting people together and lay excellent food and wine in front of them, then the Viscount Bolingbroke’s soirée was the event of the year. Some would complain that the guest-list was weighted too heavily to Whigs; but then, as of yesterday, Bolingbroke was Torydom, and as such needed no coterie. On the other hand, if the point of a dinner-party was to start fascinating conversations, then this was the grossest failure, to date, of the Age of Enlightenment; why, Robert Walpole was actually humming to fill in the silences. A dozen men were at the table; only two of them—Bolingbroke and Ravenscar—had authority to parley; and yet these two seemed perfectly content with plate and bottle, and with the dreadful silence of the room. From time to time one of the younger Whigs would try to launch a Topic of Conversation, and like a spark struck into moss it would sputter and smoke along for a few moments, until Bolingbroke or Ravenscar would dump a bucket of water on it by saying, “Pass the salt.” The meal sprinted from one course to the next, as the guests had nothing to pass the time save chewing and swallowing. It was not until pudding that Bolingbroke could be troubled to make a Gambit. “My lord,” he said to Roger, “it has been ages since I could free myself to attend a meeting of the good old R.S. Oh, are there any other Fellows present?” He looked round the table. His eyes were too close together, his nose was high-bridged and long: features more suited to a carnivorous beast than a human. So he was far from good-looking; yet his ugliness was of that sort that suggests caution, rather than mockery, to the onlooker. His mouth was tiny and pursed. But then, the muzzle of a gun was not so very large either. Bolingbroke’s one adventure in the realm of fashion had been to wear a radically small and simple periwig one day, when he went to pay a call on the Queen. She had rewarded him by asking if, next time around, he intended to show up wearing a night-cap. Tonight he had donned the full wig: white curls tumbling down beyond his shoulders, over his lapels, to somewhere between the latitude of his nipples and of his waist. His cravat was white, and wrapped many times round his neck, like a bandage. It and the wig framed his face like an ostrich-egg swaddled in a shipping-crate. This was the face that scanned down the left, then up the right side of the table, until it fell upon the Marquis of Ravenscar, who was seated at his right hand.

“No, my lord,” said Ravenscar, “there are only we two.”

“The study of Natural Philosophy has not captivated the Whigs of the new generation,” Bolingbroke concluded.

“The Royal Society has not captivated them,” Ravenscar corrected him. “What they study besides politics and wenches, I know not.”

At this, cautious laughter, less of amusement than of relief that a conversation seemed to be getting underway.

“My lord Ravenscar tries to stir up the old rumor that I know as much of wenches as Sir Isaac knows of gravity.”

“Indeed, like gravity, the fair sex doth exert a continual pull on us all.”

“But you change the subject—granted, to a more fascinating topic,” Bolingbroke said. “Is not the Royal Society the world’s foremost salon for the discussion of Natural Philosophy? How can a man claim to be an amateur of learning, and yet not aspire to become a Fellow? Or has it gone into decline? I’ve no way of knowing. Haven’t been to a meeting in ages. A shame really.”

“We have reached that part of dinner when we shove our chairs back, throw our napkins down, and pat our bellies,” Ravenscar observed. “Does that signify that your party has gone into decline?”

“I understand,” said Bolingbroke, after allowing those close-set blue eyes to wander round the ceiling for a few moments, as if deep in thought. “You mean to say that the Royal Society gorged itself on learning in the early decades, and now takes a respite, to digest all that it took in.”

“Something like that.”

“Too, is it not necessary, when one has acquired much, to defend it?”

“That sounds as if it might have a double meaning, my lord.”

“Oh, don’t be tedious. It has a single meaning, to do with Sir Isaac, and the fraudulent claims of the infamous Hanoverian plagiarist, Baron von what’s-his-name—”

“All the Hanoverians I have met are sterling characters,” said Ravenscar stolidly.

“Obviously you’ve not made the acquaintance of George Louis’s wife!”

“No one can make her acquaintance as long as he keeps her locked up in that Schloß, my lord.”

“Ah yes. Tell me, is it the same Schloß in which Princess Caroline is said to have taken refuge, when she took it into her mind that hashishin were stalking her through the gardens?”

“I haven’t heard that story, my lord—or if I have, I have not listened to it.”

“I have heard and listened—but I do not believe. I suspect that the Princess is somewhere else.”

“I have no idea where she is, my lord. But to get back to the Royal Society—”

“Yes. Let us do get back to it. Who can blame Sir Isaac, really?”

“Blame him for what, my lord?”

“For setting aside the pursuit of Natural Philosophy to defend his legacy from the aggression of the German.”

“You place me in an impossible situation, my lord—I almost feel as if we are in the House of Lords again, disputing an Act. But I shall answer a question you have not asked, and say that if fewer young men are coming to the Royal Society of late, it is perhaps because listening to Sir Isaac rant about Leibniz; perusing the latest incriminating documents about Leibniz; and sitting on committees, tribunals, and Star Chambers intended to prosecute Leibniz in absentia, simply does not happen to be their notion of a Good Time.”

“Von Leibniz. Thank you for reminding me of the man’s name. How shall we keep all of these dreadful German names straight if not for the Whigs, who know them so intimately?”

“It is difficult to acquire the German tongue, when French ones are perpetually thrust into one’s ears,” Ravenscar answered; a jest that was greeted with awed and terrified silence round the table.

Bolingbroke reddened, then had a good chuckle. “My lord,” he sputtered, “look at our fellow-revelers. Have you ever observed a more wooden bunch?”

“Only on a chessboard, my lord.”

“It all comes of the fact that we have drifted off into prating of Natural Philosophy—the surest way to kill a conversation.”

“On the contrary, my lord, you and I are having an excellent conversation.”

“Indeed—but they are not. Which is why we have Withdrawing Rooms, you know, and the like—so that enthusiasts may cabal in the corners and not bore the company to death!”

“If this is all some sort of a ploy to get us to drink port wine, it is needlessly elaborate,” observed Ravenscar.

“But where shall we drink it?” Bolingbroke asked.

“I dare not say, my lord, for ’tis your house.”

“So it is. And I say that these chaps, who plainly do not give a fig for Natural Philosophy, may drink it in the comfort of my Withdrawing Room; but you and I, inveterate enthusiasts that we are, shall repair to the observatory, three storeys above—far enough away that the other guests shall not suffer our philosophical prattle.”

“The Lord of the Manor has spoken; all must obey,” announced Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar, and shoved his chair back; and that was how he and Bolingbroke ended up on the roof of the house, ogling the latter’s Newtonian reflector. But as it was still twilight, and the stars were not out yet, her Majesty’s Secretary of State had to content himself with aiming it at terrestrial targets. The facility with which he did so gave Roger the idea that this was not the first time he had used the instrument to spy upon neighbors, near and far.

“The seeing is excellent this evening,” Bolingbroke sighed, “as the day was warm, and few have bothered to light fires.”

“This port is of the best,” Roger said, for they had brought a bottle up with them: the closest thing to manual labor that Bolingbroke’s servants would suffer the master to perform.

“Spoils of political conquest, Roger. We all lust after such spoils, do we not?”

“The profession of politics would be altogether too disagreeable,” Roger allowed, “without compensations above and beyond what is strictly appropriate.”

“Well said.” Bolingbroke was hunched over the eyepiece, twiddling the tube of the telescope this way and that, homing in on a target to the east. Roger phant’sied he might be pointing it at the dome of St. Paul’s, two miles away; but no, his host had trained it downwards, as at some target nearer to hand. By far the biggest and closest structure along that general bearing was Leiceister House, seen from here as a great rambling L-shaped manor. It stood in its own compound, which was nearly as extensive as the green square of Leicester Fields to the south of it.

“Presently night shall fall and Venus shall shine forth—we shall admire her beauty then. But while we await the Goddess of Love, we may content ourselves peering at some of her earthly worshippers.”

“I shouldn’t think you of all people would need a telescope for that,” Roger said, “other than the one God gave you.”

Leicester House presented to the Fields a public façade with a small forecourt below, where callers could dismount from carriages, &c. This was all that most people could see of it. Looking down on it from the excellent vantage-point of Bolingbroke’s roof, half a mile away, Roger was reminded that the house had quite a bit of property in back, hemmed in by newer buildings, so that most Londoners had no inkling it was there. Of this, about two-thirds, on the side nearer to Bolingbroke’s, was a formal garden. The rest was an enclosed stable-yard. Separating them was a long thin wing extending from the main house—really little more than a gallery.

“Pity. They are not out this evening,” Bolingbroke remarked.

“Who or what are not out, Henry?”

“The young lovers. A chap, strapping, blond, well-heeled, and a young woman, long chestnut hair, and an uncommonly erect—some would say noble, or royal—bearing. They tryst in yonder garden most every evening.”

“Touching.”

“Tell me, Roger. You, who know so much of these Germans who design to take over our country—have you met Princess Caroline?”

“I have had that honor once, on a visit to Hanover.”

“They say she has the most lovely fall of chestnut hair—is it true?”

“It is a fair description.”

“Ah! There she is now!”

“There who is, my lord?”

“The young lady I spoke of just now.”

“Which young lady, my lord?”

“Come, have a look, and tell me.”

Roger stepped forward with some reluctance.

“Oh, come and look!” Bolingbroke urged him. “It’s harmless. Half the Tories in London have peered through this eyepiece, and seen her.”

“That hardly constitutes a recommendation, but I shall humor you,” Roger said, and bent to the task.

Through the tiny lens of the eyepiece shone a bubble of green light, which swelled in his sight as he moved towards it; then it was his whole world. A moment’s work with the knob brought it to focus.

The gallery dividing the garden (foreground) from the stable-yard (background) was pierced in the center by a high vaulted pass-through: a gate, which was presently open. So Roger’s view to the stable-yard was blocked by the gallery, except for in that one place, where it was possible to peer through the open arch-way and see a narrow swath of yellow gravel in the yard beyond. That was enough to make it obvious that the stables were busy this evening: hooves, booted feet, and carriage wheels were passing back and forth, all foreshortened, by the telescope’s optics, into a flat impression, a living back-drop. Against which a solitary woman was visible, crouching in the center of that arch-way, in a sort of traveling-dress. She was changing out of her shoes, and into a pair of boots. The shoes discarded on the pavement beside her were mere slippers, only fit for wearing indoors. An open portmanteau rested nearby, overflowing with clothes. Suddenly a servant burst into the frame carrying a dress over her arm, and shoved it into the bag, then began hammering the contents down with the heel of her hand.

“I should call it a hasty departure,” Bolingbroke said in his ear. “More Mercury than Venus.”

Roger ignored him and sharpened the focus, trying to get a clear look at the young woman changing into her traveling-boots. She undoubtedly had a long fall of chestnut hair, which swept down over one shoulder and grazed the ground.

No, it was on the ground. In a heap. Roger blinked.

“What did you see!?” his host demanded. “Did you recognize her?”

“Stay, I’m not certain.”

The hair had most definitely fallen to the ground. The woman calmly finished tying her boot-laces and then picked it up. She had light blonde hair, going a bit silvery, all pinned up close to her skull. She held the chestnut wig out at arm’s length and gave it a shake, to make the tresses fall straight. Then she lifted it up and set it back in place atop her blonde head. The servant, who had somehow managed to get the bag closed, came round behind her to tug it into place and secure it with a long hair-pin.

“I’ll be damned,” Roger said. “The hair gives it away. If that young lady isn’t Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, then I am not a Whig.”

“Let me see! What is she doing now?” said Bolingbroke, and so Roger got out of his way. After a moment to adjust the focus and get his bearings, Bolingbroke said, “I can only see her from the back—her beau is nowhere to be seen—she is climbing into a carriage, I do believe.”

“Then I believe it too, my lord.”

The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison

THE SAME TIME

IT HAPPENED SOMETIMES in the practice of physics that the student, having wrestled for hours with a recalcitrant equation, would suddenly find a way to wreak some drastic simplification upon it. Of a sudden, two terms, which he had copied out time and again, and which had become as familiar to him as his own signature, would, through some insight, or the providence of some new scrap of information, turn out to be equal to each other, and vanish from the equation altogether, leaving a wholly new mathematical sentence to be pondered. The student’s first reaction was exhiliration: pride at his own cleverness, mingled with a sense that at last he was getting somewhere. But soon sobriety took over, as he pondered the remade equation and became aware that he was really just starting on a new problem. Thus Daniel in the Black Dogg, trying to re-think all. For example: Jack Shaftoe was wearing a sword. When he had been Sean Partry, Daniel had scarce noted this, for many men went armed. But for Jack to be armed, here and now, was no mere affectation. He had set it all up so that he could kill Daniel and Isaac, if it came to that. And the king’s ransom in fine bright candles: from Sean Partry this had been simply bizarre, but from Jack it was a way to get a good look at his interlocutors’ faces whilst keeping his own phizz cloaked in the dazzle. And these were just the simple and superficial matters. Daniel would be puzzling over the deep bits for weeks.

“Newton is gobsmacked; Waterhouse nods as if he suspected this all along. Perhaps Waterhouse is cleverer than they give him credit for,” said Jack.

“I knew something was going on; else I could not make sense of recent happenings,” said Daniel. “But I did not expect this.”

“Can you make sense of it now?”

“No,” Daniel said, and glanced over at Isaac, who for once was lagging pitiably behind; his bulging eyes strayed to the hilt of Shaftoe’s sword, lingered for a moment, then began to sweep the walls for exits.

“The entire month’s work: Bedlam, the Main-Topp, and the Stake-out: why? What was the point?” Daniel asked.

“Ask de Gex,” Jack said. “I had less than you might suppose to do with that tedious poppet-show. Through the most of it I was an amused spectator only. And an enraged, when I spied him swimming away, and knew he had survived.”

“So it is true that you and he are at odds.”

“Have ever been,” Jack corrected him, “though he did not wot it, I think, until your nice bit of jugglery went off in his coach, and set him on fire. Now he seems at last to’ve got it through his head that I am not his friend.”

“Because you engineered a double-cross,” Daniel said.

“The whole time it has been my misfortune to know the man, he has turned minutes into hours, and hours into days, with his jabbering about Alchemy. The last few months—since he learned that you had been summoned home from Boston—it has been worse than ever. As he has made me suffer so much with it, I reckoned it mere justice to use it to kill him.”

The mention of Alchemy had brought Isaac composure, and somehow made him willing to take part in the conversation. (This struck Daniel as an extremely familiar pattern; for when had Isaac ever been sociable, save when the company was Alchemists, and the topic Alchemy? Not for nothing did they call it the Esoteric Brotherhood. It was the only way he had ever made new acquaintances, with the sole exception of Daniel; it was his entire system for getting along with people, and that was its true magic.) “If ever was a moment, and a place, to ask a grossly indelicate question, ’twere now, and here,” Isaac began.

“Let her rip, Ike,” said Jack.

“If de Gex has been your hated foe for so long, why did you not kill him long ago? For unless I am mistaken this would not be difficult for one such as you to arrange.”

“You who have slaughtered so many at Tyburn may suppose it is an easy thing to do, and may phant’sy that I have kllled as many as Tamerlane,” Jack returned, “but killing a wretch through the machinery of the Law is easy, compared with how it must be accomplished in my world, when the victim-to-be is Father Confessor to the Queen of France.”

“So in de Gex’s obsession with Alchemy you perceived a way to get rid of him indirectly,” Daniel said.

Jack sighed. “It almost worked,” he said. “And may work yet, through some convolution or other. But now is a perilous time, which is why we need to set matters straight, and get it done smartly.”

“I cannot fathom your arrogance in supposing that, after all you have done, matters may simply be set straight!” Isaac exclaimed.

“Maybe you had better square that, guv, with the Marquis of Ravenscar,” Jack returned. “If he’s willing to give freedom and a farm in Carolina to a varlet who’ll merely give information leading to my capture, why, what would he offer me, if he were in this room? What would you give me to have the former contents of the Pyx delivered to your house in St. Martin’s this evening?”

Daniel’s fear of being locked in a dungeon of Newgate with London’s most infamous criminal had suddenly been shoved out of his mind by fear of what Roger would have to say when he learned just how utterly Daniel had bungled the negotiation.

In his distraction he was overtaken by Isaac, who, after a slow start, had now got up to full speed. “Supposing that there is anything to that offer,” Isaac said, “how can you reconcile it with your duties as a paid agent of the King of France?”

“Ah, good, very important,” Jack said. “Leroy is a far-sighted chap. Deserves all that’s been said of him. Developed a scheme, in the respite between the wars, to win the next one by destroying the money of England. Excellent idea. Needed someone to do it for him. Haply I came along. I knew London. Knew of metals and coining. Had managerial experience, viz. Bonanza, Cairo, and other exploits. Was lacking in gentlemanly polish, though, and was of extremely dubious loyalty. How then to make good these deficits, that my salutary qualities might be put to work? De Gex. He knew me already. Is as noble as they come. Working in concert with me in London, he could get invited to salons—never my strong suit. He’d seen me make a fool of myself, more than once, over one Eliza—yes, Dr. Waterhouse, I spoke her name aloud—and knew she was the ticket to securing my loyalty. For by certain twists wrought on her by that perverted bitch Fortune, Eliza had married the young Duke of Arcachon, bore his children, and habitually spent half her time in France among the nobility of that land, who are prolific murderers of their own siblings, parents, et cetera. To poison her, or worse, should be as easy, for de Gex, as yanking out a troublesome nose-hair. Thus was the deal struck: Jack would to London to carry out the destruction of the vaunted Pound Sterling under the supervision of his tiresome overseer, de Gex, and in exchange, Eliza would be left alone.

“What a difference twelve years makes! The war is over, my friends, and France won. Oh, England wrung some scraps from them, but make no mistake, that is a Bourbon on Spain’s throne. Leroy would still see Jamie the Rover on the throne of Great Britain, but that is not as important to him, now, as was securing the Spanish Empire in 1701! This undertaking I have toiled at, of undermining the currency, has taken on a new cast. Before, the objective was to bring about a crash in this country’s foreign trade—its only means of paying for war. Now, it is a petty matter: to create a scandal, and get the rich men of the City up in arms against the Whigs. Don’t look so indignant, Ike, you know perfectly well this is what I’ve been up to. I am in a position to accomplish this now, or as soon as Bolingbroke can arrange a Trial of the Pyx. Shall I? Shall I betray my country to France? Perhaps! For there is much to hate about this place. Do I feel strongly moved? No longer. For Eliza’s a widow. Her French children are grown up, dividing their time ’tween Paris and Arcachon. Her German boy is with her all the time. It has been two years since she graced the soil of La France. In sum it is a much more difficult matter, now, for de Gex to bring about her death—and it shall become more difficult yet, if I bring about his.”

“Is this going to conclude with you asking for something?” Daniel asked.

“All I seek is a dignified retirement from the brawls of the World,” Jack said, “though, since you mentioned the farm in Carolina, I think I should like to give that to my sons. They’ll only get into scrapes if they stay in London.”

“Oh yes,” Daniel said, “it is quite unthinkable that anyone should get into trouble in America.”

“Different trouble is all I seek for my lads,” Jack said. “Wholesome trouble out in the fresh air.”

Monmouth Street

THE SAME TIME

The Mob are outragious every where when they think themselves provok’d.

—The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS, ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

FROM THE STABLES of Leicester House, Johann and Caroline had borrowed a pair of gray geldings: good but indifferent-looking riding-horses in simple tack. They rode side-by-side up Monmouth Street. Caroline was straddling her mount like a man, which was made easier by wearing a man’s pair of breeches. Her hair was stuffed up under a man’s white periwig and she even had a small-sword joggling from her left hip. Johann was dressed similarly, though he was armed with the big old rapier he had been carrying around ever since mysterious persons had begun making attempts on the lives of people who were close to him. They were supposed to look like a pair of young gentlemen out for a ride in the town.

Caroline frequently turned round to look back towards Leicester Fields. Johann had suggested that she not; but it was difficult for a royal to accept such mundane suggestions. She was quite certain that they were being followed by a fellow riding on a black horse. But Monmouth Street curved steadily round to the left as it went, so she lost sight of that rider from time to time. For the same reason they could only see ahead for a certain distance, and every pace brought new complications into view.

“When I made the plan, I had no way of knowing on what day it might be set into motion,” Johann said, “and so I did not take Hangings into account.”

“Hanging-Day is not until Friday, is it not so?” asked Caroline. It was Wednesday evening.

“Indeed. Tomorrow evening I should expect a crowd gathering along the route,” said Johann. “I did not expect one this evening—but—” He trailed off as they rounded the final deflection. A stone’s throw ahead, Monmouth Street joined together with two others, like tributaries of a river, to form a short but very wide thoroughfare that exhausted directly into a place called Broad St. Giles’s. Their view into that district was blocked by a wide but shallow building erected square across their path, like a sandbar at the mouth of a river. It was brick below and timber above, with a pocked tile roof, and was so generally mean in its appearance that from this distance it might have been taken for a stable. But it had a few too many chimneys for that, all of them tottering into the weather like elderly pallbearers leaning into a gale. On the side facing Johann and Caroline it had a little front court running its whole width, supervised by a veranda. Several white-haired, gray-faced chaps were strewn upon some benches there. This was the St. Giles’s alms-house, where parishioners who had outlived their means, their families, or their welcomes could be parked until they were ready for permanent berths in the nearby church-yard. For whatever reason, it had been built in the middle of the intersection so that Monmouth Street traffic must divert around it.

Now ordinarily, not being able to see into Broad St. Giles’s would have been accounted some small act of Grace. It was not precisely a street, and not a square, but a kind of drain-trap plumbing High Holbourn (which ran off to the right, toward the City) to Oxford Street (left to Tyburn Cross). As a district of Greater London it no doubt had a history and a perfectly legitimate reason for existence; but as a conduit for traffic between Tyburn and London it was a lamentable improvisation. A few kegs of gunpowder detonated in the slum to the north side of it would create a direct through line uniting the two thoroughfares, and relegate Broad St. Giles’s to a stagnant ox-bow lake, alienated from the main stream; but such improvements still lay in the future as Johann and Caroline rode toward it.

Tonight, however, not being able to get a clear view of what lay ahead was perilous. The district seemed more than normally crowded tonight. People—mostly roving tribes of young men—formed a slack eddy around the foundations of the alms-house. They did not appear to be bound for anywhere, unless Trouble could be considered a Destination; and some were already staring at Johann and Caroline, and pointing.

“Why so many people—the hanging?”

“Too soon, too soon—oh, if we asked one why he was here, he might claim it was for the Hanging-March—”

“But to believe it would be naïve,” Caroline said. “You think then that it is as Dr. Waterhouse warned us.”

“Yes—the Whigs and Tories have used the Hanging as a pretext to move their sympathizers—whatever you care to call them—”

“Militia?”

“Perhaps a little less than militia and a little better than the Mobb. I don’t know. At any rate they are here, getting ready to light bonfires—”

“Look, they have done it already,” Caroline said.

They had reached the place where the way broadened out, just before the front court of the alms-house. Off to their right, a bonfire had been kindled. It must have been carefully laid, and lit only a moment ago, for it suddenly flared very high, lofting a storm of incandescent twigs and leaves into its smoke-tower. It stood in the center of Broad St. Giles’s, which was a good hundred feet wide there.

“That is meant to be a gathering-beacon for some faction or other, I’ll wager,” said Johann, rising up in his stirrups and looking about. Indeed, many had altered course, and set their faces toward the flame: some reporting to it smartly, others merely falling in, drawn by the curious instinct of the herd. “It is good for us. Look, the crowd dwindles over yonder, to the right side of the way—we shall slip through and be on High Holbourn presently. Then straight on to the city. Let’s go!” and he drew back on his mount’s right rein, demanding a sharp turn. Caroline did likewise; but she could not resist a look back down Monmouth. There was the fellow on the black horse, now so close behind that she could have called out to him. He was making no effort to hide himself, but waving his hat back and forth above his head as if trying to catch someone’s eye. Succeeding in that, he then pointed deliberately at Johann and Caroline, and held up two fingers; then he joined those two fingers together to form a little blade, and drew it across his throat.

Caroline snapped her head round so sharply that her wig—an unfamiliar article—went askew on her head. She clapped a hand on it to hold it in place while she looked up and across the square, tracing the gaze of the man on the black horse. Immediately she saw a man standing on the roof of the alms-house, perched on the ridge, and keeping one hand on a chimney for balance. This fellow scrambled round as quickly as he could without falling, turning his back on Monmouth Street to gaze north across Broad St. Giles’s and east to one of the street-ends that spilled into that side of it.

“Charles! Come, come!” Johann was calling. Caroline’s name would be Charles for as long as she was wearing breeches. He had ridden about two lengths ahead. “Charles” could not answer without revealing her sex to anyone in earshot. She waited for a queue of boys to thread past, then rode up toward Johann. She was hoping to draw abreast of him so that she could talk, but he spurred his mount on as she drew within a length, and began to lead her through the crowd in the direction of London.

Caroline was beginning to perceive drawbacks to the plan. It had sounded too simple to go wrong. Eliza, wearing an outfit that made her look, from a distance, like Caroline, had boarded the finest carriage available at Leicester House and driven south, parading round the perimeter of Leicester Fields in full view of all the spies who had been loitering there. She was to have gone out near Sir Isaac Newton’s house and then to have worked her way west in the direction of St. James’s, as if trying to reach the Duke of Marlborough’s house, which was not far from there. This was the sort of thing a conspiracy-minded Tory would expect Princess Caroline to do, had she been flushed out into the open; Marlborough was not back in the country yet, but had been conspicuously remodeling the house as a signal that his advent was drawing nigh. He had long-standing connexions with the Hanovers, and Caroline could seek refuge in his house in full confidence that no Mobb, Militia, or Faction would dare to molest her there.

Meanwhile Johann and Caroline had set out in the opposite direction, planning a ride of three miles or so straight through the heart of London to Billingsgate Stairs, immediately downstream of the Bridge, where a longboat would take them out to a Hanoverian sloop. A few days later they would be at Antwerp, and a few days after that, back at Hanover. So much for the plan; but Caroline had not considered until now that if the disguise worked, and caused their enemies to believe that she was not Caroline the princess, but Charles the nobody—why, what would it matter if such a nobody were found in Fleet Ditch with his throat cut and his purse missing?

An open space had appeared next to Johann, on his left side. She dug her heels into the horse’s sides twice and goaded it until it was alongside him. “What lies over that way?” she asked, and gestured in the same direction (left, or north across Broad St. Giles’s) that the man on the roof of the alms-house was looking.

Johann considered it. Several street-ends were visible on that side. From one of them a bobbling stream of manes, periwigs, and horse-tails issued: four, maybe as many as half a dozen riders. Their faces were indistinct at this range—but they caught the light of the bonfire clearly, as all of them were gazing up and across toward the alms-house. Caroline looked back that way; her view of the spy on the roof was now mostly blocked by the chimney, but she could see an arm gesticulating, waving the riders on a course to close with Johann and Caroline.

“The one where the riders are coming out is Dyot Street—it leads up to Great Russell, and—”

“Ravenscar’s house?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think we have confused our enemies, in a way that could be dangerous to us,” Caroline said. “I think they believe that we are messengers, sent out from Eliza with an important note for the Marquis of Ravenscar, or whatever Whig commanders may be gathered at his house—those riders, I fear—”

“Were posted along Dyot to intercept any such communications,” said Johann, “and now they are after us. Let us ride a little faster—but not gallop, we must not show fear—and turn to the right, on Drury Lane. That will lead us away from Ravenscar’s and throw doubt on this idea that we are messengers.”

“I have heard things about this Drury Lane—”

“We shall look like a pair of young gentlemen out questing for whores,” Johann agreed. “Do not be concerned. Drury Lane is the frontier of a chancy district. Many of those who live there have strayed up to Broad St. Giles’s this evening. Riding the border is not so terribly dangerous. Going through it would be a bad idea—but we shan’t do that. Straight down Drury it is, all the way to the Strand.” And with that Johann guided his mount round a right turn onto Drury Lane. Caroline’s horse lurched forward in an effort to keep pace, and she almost lost her wig again. From here Drury Lane looked infinitely long, and hellishly disordered even by the standards of London: it narrowed and widened, narrowed and widened as if no surveyor had ever stretched out a line here, and buildings leaned away from it, or slumped over it, like a bench of drunks in a gin-house. She did not see any bonfires, which she counted as a sort of good news; perhaps Drury Lane would be left to the whores, procurers, and pickpockets tonight, even as other streets and intersections were employed as squares on the Whig/Tory chessboard.

“I saw something,” she said, “a gesture. I fear that violence is going to be used against us.” She could not help glancing at Johann’s Italian rapier, wagging from his left flank.

Johann tried to deflect this with humor. “Then it is good that my right arm is free,” he said, waving it in the air, “and on our vulnerable flank,” indicating the benighted neighborhood on their right. “And good as well that you have a sword.”

“A small one.”

“Indeed, that is what they call it: a small-sword. No one carries the rapier and dagger any more. I am kitted out like an old man.”

“I am glad of it,” said Caroline, for Johann’s weapon looked a fell relic of bygone times, much more formidable than the jeweled toothpick on her hip.

She could not help, now, turning round once more to look back. Drury Lane sported very few men on horseback at this hour and so it took but a moment to see two riders who had just entered from Broad St. Giles’s. They let their mounts dawdle for a moment, as they took in the sordid prospect, and got their bearings; then, catching sight of Johann and Caroline, they spurred them forward at a trot.

Caroline did not care to argue the matter with Johann and so she kicked her mount up to a trot, which obliged him to do the same.

“As you can see the right side of the Lane is perforated by countless alleys,” Johann said, loudly, in the manner of a jaded man about town explaining the lay of the land to his country cousin, “but there is a very broad street a short distance ahead that leads direct to Covent Garden Market, where are many wenches we euphemistically call flower-sellers and orange-girls. From there, several broad avenues lead to the Strand.”

Caroline wanted to ask Why are you telling me this but she dared not speak aloud, for she sensed a pedestrian close by on her left hand. Then she was distracted by some commotion off to the right, not in Drury Lane but back in what she assumed to be a maze of alleys behind. Shod hooves were sparking on pavement back there, and a voice commanding, “Make way, damn you!” She knew enough English by now to know that this was the voice of someone well-bred, someone with the right to bear arms. She looked behind again to see that the two men following had made up half the distance separating them; then, turning back to give this news to Johann, she observed that he was gone, with no good-bye other than a tattoo of hoofbeats down an alley, and murmur of prostitutes in his wake.

What had he told her? Do not ride into the alleys; look for a broad avenue on the right. She did so, and almost did not see it, for it was much closer than she had supposed. A rider was just emerging from it, on a bothered and winded horse that he was forcing to walk. She hoped it might be Johann, but the horse was the wrong color (chestnut) and the rider was the wrong chap altogether. He was staring her in the face, and could easily have made her out to be a woman in disguise had the sun been shining.

This man, she reckoned, must have split off from the squadron that had ridden out of Dyot a minute ago, and galloped round through the alleys behind Drury Lane to cut them off here. But Johann, hearing the commotion that this fellow had made, had surmised what was going on, and had broken away to outflank the flanker.

The man on the chestnut horse showed the palm of his hand to the two riders who were trotting along after Caroline, seeming to ward them off. She could hear their mounts drop to a walk, then stop altogether. With his other hand he reached up to tip his hat to Caroline as she approached. Lacking a hat, she returned the greeting with a swirl of the hand and a nod. Whether she did it convincingly or not, she’d never know, for he did not bother to watch; he had already turned his gaze elsewhere, wondering what had become of Caroline’s companion.

He was attending to his two friends behind Caroline. She looked back. They were pointing into the alley Johann had ridden into, and shouting. Caroline was forgotten; she was free to go; Johann’s gambit was working.

Or did work, anyway, until someone stole her sword.

She felt a sharp tug and heard a hissing sound as the small-sword was plucked from its scabbard. This sound quite naturally got the attention of the man on the chestnut stallion; gentlemen who ignored the sound of a sword being drawn were not likely to live through their twenties. Caroline looked down belatedly, to see a boy of perhaps sixteen, missing his two front teeth, leering back at her with a fanged smile. He had brought the small-sword around so that it pointed at her. This was plainly a threat, but Caroline did not know what to make of it until the partner of the tail-drawer (as sword-thieves were known) came after the even more valuable scabbard. This hung at her hip from a rig called a baldric, which was just a broad leather strap that ran diagonally across her body and over her right shoulder. The second thief was smaller and nimbler—perhaps a younger brother—and his method of stealing it was straightforward: he grabbed it with both hands and yanked on it so hard that he lifted himself clean off the ground, while giving Caroline the following choice: fall sideways off the horse, or be decapitated by the strap. Long years of tedious riding-lessons had trained her to stay on the horse no matter what; she squeezed it hard between her legs, caught the saddle’s rim with her right hand, and held on for dear life even while listing drastically to the left. The thief had planted a foot on the horse’s flank and was leaning back almost horizontally, supporting his weight solely by the baldric. Caroline had no choice but to lean toward him even farther and cock her head over so that the baldric was stripped off over her head. It nearly sheared off her right ear as it went. She reached up to check if the ear was still attached to her head. It was; but the hair around it was her own. Not a wig. The wig was lying like a dead animal in the middle of Drury Lane. Or was, anyway, until a wig-thief darted in and snatched it. The tail-drawer let out a curse and lit out in pursuit of the wig-snatcher, menacing him with the weapon; the scabbard-stealer, who’d fallen hard on his arse, staggered to his feet and hobbled along behind.

Someone nearby was shouting: “It is the Princess! It is the Princess!” Caroline turned to see that it was the man on the chestnut stallion.

Another rider was galloping up behind him on a gray horse; this chap had his feet out of the stirrups and his boots up in the air, which looked like bad form indeed. Sharply the boots came down. The gray trotted riderless across Drury Lane. The chestnut was buckling as its hindquarters now supported the weight of a second man. It reared. The man in back threw his arms around the rider in the saddle, to keep from falling off backwards; one of his hands had something silver in it. A hand was beneath the rider’s chin, pulling his head back; the silver object traveled sideways beneath it, not with a quick slash, but working its way through the neck one tube and ligament at a time. The rider fell over sideways, broadcasting a fan of blood that hissed down the wall of a nearby tavern. The man behind kicked the other’s feet out of the stirrups and toppled him over into the street. Then Johann von Hacklheber took over the saddle. He scabbarded his bloody dagger, found the reins with that hand, then drew out his rapier with the other. He spurred the chestnut horse out into Drury Lane, nearly managing a head-on collision with Caroline’s gray. As he went past he brought the flat of his sword down sharply on the croup of her mount, which responded by taking off with a lurch that nearly somersaulted her back out of the saddle. Lacking instructions from its rider, the horse headed for open space: the wide avenue that led to Covent Garden.

She was almost there by the time she got rightly arranged in the saddle again, and fished up the reins. Then she reflected that she was going west—the wrong direction—and did not really wish to appear in such a manner, viz. galloping across a large open square with her hair flowing behind her like a Hanoverian flag.

She ought to go back and help Johann. But whatever had happened in Drury Lane must be over and done with already; and if she showed up in the middle of it, he would be distracted and probably get killed. What, then, was the best way to help Johann? To follow his directions, so that he would know where to look for her. He had mentioned that from the vicinity of Covent Garden several streets led down to the Strand, which (even she knew) could take her east at least as far as St. Paul’s. So she pulled back hard on the reins, bringing her mount to a skidding stop just short of the open space of the Garden, and insisted on a left turn down a promisingly broad street. This, inevitably, took her only a short distance to a tee with a smaller street. Guessing at a direction, she came to another, smaller tee; and so it went, as if the street-plan of the place were a diabolical snare made for one purpose only, which was to get people lost. By the third turn, she’d lost all sense of which direction she was going. By the fifth, she had a small crowd of boys after her. By the sixth, the boys had been joined by a couple of rough-looking men. The seventh turn led to a way that was very narrow indeed. Moreover, it was a cul-de-sac.

Yet, when she cast a glance back over her shoulder, she was astonished to see that all of her followers had disappeared.

Down at the end of the street were a few sedan chairs, waiting. Their porters stood about smoking and talking; though one by one they fell silent as Caroline rode up. There was a door at the very end of the street, lit with lanterns, and adorned with a sort of inn-sign in which was depicted a cat playing a fiddle. Beyond it, she could hear a lot of men chattering and laughing. A man was standing framed in that doorway, wearing porter’s livery: a bit more nicely turned out than the ones who carried sedan chairs through gutters and puddles. He stirred as she rode closer, and removed the stem of his pipe from his mouth, and addressed Princess Caroline in a way no man had ever done before: “Well ’ello, missy, ain’t you a smart lass in your britches, and all got up like a man! I can see one of our honourable members is planning a special evening indeed. You did bring your riding crop?”

It took her a moment to remember this word, for crop had diverse meanings, but then it came to her: it was Reitgerte, the little whip. One was dangling from her wrist. She groped it into her hand, and raised it up uncertainly.

The porter grinned and nodded. “I’ll wager you’re here for the Bishop of—”

“What is this place?” she asked.

“Oh, you’ve come to the right place, never fear,” he answered, reaching for the door-handle.

“But what is it called?”

“Don’t be a silly girl, this is the Kit-Cat Clubb!”

“Aha!” Caroline exclaimed, “is Doctor Waterhouse here? He is the one I would see!”

Leicester Fields

THE SAME TIME

ELIZA HAD RUN diverse errands fair and foul, and embraced many sacrifices, on behalf of these Hanover women, but this was in some ways the most disagreeable of all: going for a carriage-ride, here and now. For a carriage, be it never so finely decorated, and perforated with doors and windows, was unavoidably a box, and to shut herself up in a box at such a pass went against everything in her nature.

She had never quite got out of her mind a day when she and several other harem-girls, all in their burqas, had been herded into a tunnel beneath Vienna to be put to the sword. To hear the screams of the women, and smell their blood, and know what was going on while only being able to see a tiny patch of light, and being unable to use her hands, save by gripping things through the slippery fabric: this was for her the worst moment of her life, the thing she’d spent all her time since trying to put behind her.

Her view out the window of this carriage was no better than that from a burqa, and her ability to reach out and grab things even less. True, it was mounted on wheels, and pulled by a team of horses. But her usual retinue of dogs and armed footmen were absent, as they would have destroyed the illusion that this carriage contained Princess Caroline in disguise. The driver was trustworthy, but all someone had to do was aim a pistol at him, or knock him out of his perch and seize the reins; then she’d be even more helpless than she had been on that horrible day in Vienna.

Still and all, she rated the chances as good that the carriage would speed her to Marlborough House without let. The distance was less than half a mile as the crow flew, and once they worked clear of a few narrow streets south of Leicester Fields they would be speeding down such broad open avenues as Hay Market and Pall Mall. Whether it came to a good or a bad end, the ride would be over quickly, the revulsion she felt at being shut up in a wooden burqa she’d only have to tolerate for a few minutes.

It began well enough: an uneventful half-circuit of Leicester Fields, traversing the east side of the square, then swinging round to head west along its southern edge. This ought to have been a straight shot to Hay Market; but the driver called for a turn too soon, and she felt the box revolving leftwards onto St. Martin’s. Out one window she could see a narrow burqa-view of Sir Isaac Newton’s house; out the opposite, a flare of light where none ought to be. Someone had lit a bonfire in the southwestern corner of Leicester Fields, blocking the outlet to Hay Market. And they’d done it in the last minute or so, for Eliza had scanned the square carefully before suffering herself to be boxed, and seen nothing.

No matter; St. Martin’s Street offered two different outlets that would lead them west. They reached the first of these in only a few moments, and slowed so that the driver could gaze down the side-street to see if it was clear. Eliza did the same. No more than fifty yards away, what looked like a squadron of cavalry was cantering into position to block them. They did not have banners, drums, or bugles, and did not wear uniforms, unless you considered Mode to be a kind of uniform. But they moved with a shared purpose, and Eliza sensed that they were looking to one man, in particular, for orders: a chap in a long cloak, on a black horse.

Before Eliza could take in much more, or say anything, the driver had made up his mind to try the second and last side-street. His whip skirled and cracked, touching off a barrage of noise: sixteen iron-shod hooves and four iron-rimmed wheels accelerating over cobblestones as the box creaked, bobbled, and thudded in its suspension. To communicate with the driver was now next to impossible; she could pound and kick on the roof all she pleased, and scream through the grate until she was hoarse, and he likely would not hear a thing.

It was not clear what she should say to him. To maintain the illusion was all. To reach Marlborough House would be good, insofar as it enhanced the illusion. But it was not essential, and certainly not worth anyone’s getting killed. To rattle around aimlessly for a while would serve as well, and perhaps better.

At the end of the street, where it turned to the right, there was enough room for the team and carriage to make a rapid sweeping turn. This the driver did—so swiftly that the carriage lost traction and slewed sideways for a yard or two, until its wheel-rims caught hard on a scarp in the road. Then its skid was arrested so sharply that the whole box lifted up and slanted as two wheels left the pavement for an instant. Presently the slack went out of the rig and jerked it forward again on its new, west-going course. The carriage crashed back down on four wheels again and Eliza was hurled to the right, then back as the team accelerated. She was left with the troubling memory of a momentary sound that, because it had been so sharp, had reached her ears even through all of the noise of this maneuver: the crack of the whip perhaps, or even a pistol-shot. But it had seemed to come from just outside the left window. She phant’sied it had had a splintering quality. Perhaps a wheel-spoke giving way as the lateral skid of the carriage had been arrested. Perhaps the driver should be directed to avoid violent right turns. Or had he heard the sound, too, and wanted no advice?

Her hatred of the box and passion to know what was going on urged her to shove her head out the window and look forward. Simple prudence said otherwise. The horses were galloping now. In a few yards they’d reach a tee, and be obliged to turn left or right on Hedge Lane; she braced her feet against the opposite bench, and her hands against the sides, and prayed they would go left. For she was convinced now that the heartbeat-like thumpa-thumpa-thumpa she heard on the left, and felt through the bones of the carriage, was a bad spoke or two.

This tactic—ramming-speed in the streets of London—seemed insane from within the box. But it was not really so, for (as she was recollecting) the carriage had a long pole—not unlike a ram on a galley—that extended all the way forward, between each pair of horses in the team, and to which all the harnesses were connected. People got killed by these things all the time: some by impalement and others by having their brains dashed out. Even supposing there were a squadron of Jacobite cavalry trying to bar their escape onto Hedge Lane—and that had to have been a phantasm, hadn’t it?—all of them would get well clear of that deadly pole, once they perceived that it had built up too much speed to stop. What they might do then, when they’d regrouped and got their blood up, was another matter—but no point in fretting about that now.

It seemed to have worked, anyway, for the carriage’s speed slackened even as she was tensed for a crash, and it began to manage a turn—a left turn, thank God, and not so fast—onto Hedge Lane. And really not so much a full turn as a quick leftward jog into the next west-going street, Little Suffolk, which would run straight to Hay Market, and dump them out directly across from the triple-arched façade of the Italian Opera House that Vanbrugh and the Whigs had built there.

She heard horses all round during this maneuver, and voices shouting; but could not make out words until they had got well established on Little Suffolk, and built up to a steady canter that would bring them to the Opera House in considerably less than one minute. There seemed no point in letting those seconds go to waste. Eliza could hear the riders all around shouting absurd things such as “Halt!” and “I demand that you stop this carriage.” She wanted no such thing to occur; but neither did she want the driver to press forward if someone was about to shoot him. The important thing was the illusion.

She shot open the window on the carriage’s left side and got a burqa-impression of several riders, all of whom abruptly went silent; which was so gratifying that she slid over to the right and shot that window open as well. She risked a peek out and forward, and saw a row of building-fronts ahead. This might have been any of London’s newer streets. But her eye was arrested by one building-front twice or thrice as broad as its neighbors.

Like them it was made of brick, but so much of its façade was spoken for by arched windows and doorways, and by the massive grooved voussoirs that framed them, and the stacks of deeply rusticated blocks that ascended from its corner-stones, and the broad friezes and cornices that spanned its width between storeys, that it really seemed to have been fabricated out of massive clods of pale stone, with brick and mortar spackled into the narrow traces between. It was meant to look as dramatic as what went on inside of it: for this was the Italian Opera, and it stood in the Hay Market. Though Eliza loved and, like a good Whig, subscribed to it, it was of no utility whatever tonight, save as a landmark. Narrow streets such as Little Suffolk might be barricaded by a few men and a bonfire, but the Hay Market was nearly a hundred feet in breadth. It would take a company to stop them there.

“Ignore these men!” she said, “straight on, and stop for no one!” Which was only an indifferent snatch of libretto, as it went; but what made all the difference was that she uttered it in German. Eliza had been in many a salon, in Versailles and Amsterdam and elsewhere, and spoken many a clever or shocking mot, and created many a frisson—but all were as nothing compared to the effect that these words had on the riders around her. “It is she! It is the Princess!” one of them shouted, and spurred his horse to a gallop, riding forward to the intersection with Hay Market, now perhaps fifty yards away. Eliza was so pleased by this that she feared she might be recognized as an impostor, and spoil the effect; so before any of the riders on the right side could get too long a look at her, she withdrew and skidded back to the left side to have a look out that window.

But there enjoyment ended. Ahead, she saw meteors of flame bobbing and swirling on the end of torch-handles. One of these stooped to the pavement and vanished in an orb of dull fire-glow, which broke open into a rush of brilliant yellow flame. Someone had put a torch to the base of a well-laid bonfire. The carriage faltered as the horses saw it. The driver cracked his whip over and over, and permitted the team to divert to the right as much as they could in the confines of Little Suffolk. Hope that they could skirt the fire, and fear of the whip and of the shouting riders, drove the horses into an undisciplined rush forward. Just as they burst through into Hay Market, someone tossed a handful of firecrackers into the flames. They went off in a barrage so close and hot that Eliza felt bursts of heat reaching in through the window to slap at her face. She tried to move to the right. But the team had gotten a worse scare than she, and moved away from it with all the power of several tons of muscle. The carriage veered right, and went up on its left wheels. Eliza would have dropped straight into the left door had she not lashed out to grip the sill of the window on the right. For a moment she was suspended, gazing up through the burqa-slot to see nothing but chimney-tops, storks’ nests, and stars in the sky.

Then the left wheel collapsed. The entire carriage dropped an arm’s length or so, and landed with its full weight on the end of the left axle. Or so she collected from the sounds and the movements. Her right hand was jarred loose from the windowsill, so she dropped like a sack of barley into the left door. Its latch gave way and it fell open; but it could only open so far, as it was nearly skidding along the pavement. The only thing holding it above the cobbles of Hay Market was that axle, which projected beyond the side of the vehicle for a short distance. And so Eliza, lying on her back on the broken door with the wind knocked out of her, was able to turn her head and see pavement rushing away only a few inches from her nose, taking her chestnut-colored wig with it.

But presently the pavement slowed and stopped. The horses—who must be driverless now—had decided that the place they had reached—the front court of the Opera, by the looks of it—was safer than any other place in view, and resolved to stop here. Eliza began trying to squirm out of the half-open door; she phant’sied there was enough space between the ground and the flank of the carriage to admit her body. This very soon turned out to have been overly optimistic, for the door was not open quite wide enough to let her out. She got her head, a shoulder, and an arm free, but the remainder of Eliza would not come unless the door were removed. It was held in place by hinges of ox-hide. Eliza’s left arm was still imprisoned, but she could move it around, and find one of the hinges by groping. She had a little Turkish watered-steel dagger in the waistband of her dress: a nasty old habit. She found it with her left hand, and drew it out. A few moments later she was sawing away at one of the leather hinges.

And she was thus busily engaged when a pair of polished black riding-boots presented themselves before her face. The hem of a long dark cloak roiled about them like a cloud. A chestnut wig fell to the pavement. “You are not the woman I was looking for,” said a voice in French.

Eliza looked far, far up to see the face of Father Édouard de Gex staring down at her. He was perspiring freely. “But you will do, madame, you will do.” In his gloved hands he was twirling a dagger that gave off an oily sheen in the light of the bonfires that were springing up all around.

The Black Dogg, Newgate Prison

A FEW MINUTES EARLIER

“I HAVE THE HEAVY GOLD. You know this,” Jack said.

“The Solomonic Gold?” Isaac corrected him.

“Funny, that is what Father Ed calls it, too. Whatever you call it, I have it, and I know where I can get more. Now, suppose Bolingbroke demands a Trial of the Pyx. The refiner’s furnace shall be set up in Star Chamber. A jury of London money-men shall open up the Pyx and take out a sample of coins—”

“Coins that you put in,” Isaac said.

“That you can’t prove—but in any case, you are personally responsible for every one of those coins,” Jack reminded him. “They shall be counted and weighed first. And it may astonish you, Ike, to hear that the coins I put in there shall pass this first test. I made the blanks a bit thicker, you see—not enough so as you would notice, holding one between your fingers, but enough to make them of legal weight, even though they are allayed with base metal.”

“But when they are assayed—?” Daniel said.

“When those same coins are melted in the cupel, and the quantity of gold in them is measured, they’ll be found wanting. And this is where I may be of service to you, Ike, and to that Marquis who got you your post at the Mint.”

“You can supply me with heavy gold, as you call it.”

“Indeed. Which, slipped into the cupel by a bit of prestidigitation—easily arranged, have no fear—will give the assay greater weight, and make all the numbers come out as they should.”

Isaac Newton, who had been strangely unmoved by all that infiltrated his nostrils and stuck to the soles of his shoes here in Newgate, was nauseated by this. Jack Shaftoe was quick to note it and to know why. “I disgust you, Ike, for the same reason I disgust Father Ed, which is that to me the heavy gold is only that. And when I offer it to you as a part of our present transaction, I offer it, not as a mystical essence for use in your divine sorcery, but as a bit o’ spare weight to save your nuts during the Trial of the Pyx that is soon to come. Our conversation here would seem a good deal nobler, wouldn’t it, if it were about that rather than this; if it were about that, why, you could phant’sy yourself living out a sort of latter-day sequel to the Bible, and Newgate, foul as it is, would be like those leper-towns where Jesus walked: not so foul, because part of a fair story. But because it is about this, namely, Ike Newton not getting his balls and his hand chopped off, why, you look about yourself and say, ‘Eeeyuh, I am in the Black Dogg of Newgate Prison and it stinketh!’ I see this clearly only because I have seen it so oft on the face of Father Ed, for whom all of London might as well be Newgate Prison when it is compared to Versailles. But I shall solace you with the same words I have spoke to Father Ed when he turns thus green about the gills.”

“I am astonished that you have any words left,” said Isaac. “But as I have heard so many, a few more can do no harm.”

“It is simply that when all of this has played out, and you are left holding a bit of that Solomonic Gold, why, you may believe, concerning it, whatever you choose, and do with it what you will.”

“A question,” Daniel said. “Since you know that Sir Isaac desires it, and you know he is aware that you have got some, why this elaborate scheme concerning the Pyx? Why did you not simply treat directly with Sir Isaac long ago?”

“Because there were other parties to be accounted for. On my side, there was de Gex, who had a say in the matter until I began trying to kill him a couple of weeks ago. On your side, Ravenscar, who does not believe in Alchemy any more than I do. To extract anything from him I needed something a bit more substantial than a spate of malarkey about King Solomon.”

“Since you hold my views on the matter in such contempt, this conversation cannot be any more pleasant for you than it is for me. Let us bring it to a head directly,” Isaac suggested. “You have offered a way to get me out of difficulty in the event that Bolingbroke demands a Trial of the Pyx. But this is of no utility to me if he doesn’t. For as all the world knows, he has been gathering in guineas of late, preparing to assay those coins that have been circulating in her majesty’s currency. Many counterfeits shall be encompassed in any such sample. At any time of Bolingbroke’s choosing he may change his tune, and say, ‘Behold, the Pyx was tampered with by Jack the Coiner, its contents are no reliable sample of the Mint’s produce, we must instead assay the coins in circulation.’ Such an assay shall prove deficient, both in the weight of the coins, and the fineness of the metal, because it shall include so many counterfeit guineas.”

By way of an answer, Jack reached into the pocket of his breeches and drew out a little packet, which he tossed across the Black Dogg. Isaac got his hands up quickly enough, bobbled it, and trapped it against his breast. Daniel did not have to look to know what it was. “One of the Sinthias you stole from the Pyx in April.”

“I have the rest stored away nice and safe,” Jack said, “and can produce them when and where needed, to prove that you put only good coins into the Pyx, Ike. So, you see, whether Bolingbroke orders a Trial of the Pyx or no, I can save you: if he does, by supplying heavy gold, and if he doesn’t, by supplying the rest of those.” Jack nodded at the packet, which Isaac was now fondling near a candle-flame.

“In exchange for which, I suppose you require that you not be prosecuted, and that your sons get the farm in Carolina.”

“My sons, and Tomba,” Jack said. “That is an African who has been with me since we met him racing horses on the beach near Acapulco. Fine lad.”

“I remind you that there is a reason why we insisted that this conversation happen this evening,” Daniel said.

“Bolingbroke has Ravenscar backed up against the wall,” Jack returned, “and Ravenscar needs something.”

“Yes.”

“Show Bolingbroke that, then.” Jack nodded at the Sinthia. “It’ll hit him like a bolt between the eyes; for he has pestered me without letup these many months, wanting them from me.”

This silenced Daniel and Isaac for some moments. They had to look at each other for a while, before they looked at Jack. “Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, her majesty’s Secretary of State, has been pestering you?”

“Call him by as many names as you like, the answer is yes.”

“Let us go and see your good friend Bolingbroke, then,” Daniel suggested, with a not very subtle look at his watch.

“He is not my friend, but a damned nuisance,” Jack returned, “and I’d not go in to his house again even if he invited me. But you may have that packet, as proof of my bona fides, and I shall ride with you to Golden Square, and go for a constitutional round the green, as you go in to strike your bargain with him. When you have done, come out and tell me the results. I’m keen to know whether the next English King is going to be German or French.”

“The only defect in your plan is a terribly mundane one,” Daniel said. “We came in a phaethon.”

“What a rake you are, Dr. Waterhouse! Do stay away from my sons!”

“Two may fit inside, only with a lot of stuffing and bending.”

“Then do you stuff and bend yourselves into it,” said Jack, walking over to the door. He hauled it open and extended a hand to say, after you. “I shall ride on the running-board, like a footman, as befits my station in life, and if any footpads or Jacobite fops get after us, why, I’ll run ’em through.”

The phaethon had been waiting in the Press-Yard next to the gaol. This opened onto Newgate Street intra muros. Driving west, they passed immediately beneath the vault of the city gate: a Gothick castle housing wealthy prisoners. Thence they could have got directly to Holbourn and taken a northerly route toward Golden Square, but Daniel knew it was an infernal gantlet of bonfires to-night: the bright line where Whig and Tory orders of battle were being drawn up. So he requested the southerly approach. The Old Bailey connected to the street extra muros and took them south to Ludgate Hill which, going west, became the last bridge over the Fleet Ditch, which became Fleet Street, which became the Strand.

The scheme of placing Jack on the running-board worked well, for the phaethon was equipped with a grate, situated next to where a footman’s face was likely to be, so that master and servant could mis-communicate as freely and grievously on the road as they did at home. Daniel left it open. Jack was able to chat with the passengers almost as easily as if he were sharing the compartment with them. He was in a cheery mood—more so than Isaac, certainly—and offered up wry comments upon the Old Bailey, the odor of the Fleet, the Royal Society’s headquarters, Drury Lane, the Kit-Cat Clubb, and other exhibits as they rattled past. Daniel took most of these in good humor, but Isaac, who suspected that Jack was baiting him, fumed quietly, like a beaker just tonged from a furnace. There were bonfires, fist-fights, and dogs fucking each other in Charing Cross, and Jack was silent for a while, because alert. But Roger’s driver—who was of the best—negotiated this adroitly and got them on the short street called Cockspur that would soon fork into Pall Mall and Hay Market just before the Opera House.

“There must be an opera tonight,” Jack remarked through the grate.

“ ’Tis not possible,” Daniel returned. “It is out of season. I do believe they are erecting sets, and rehearsing, for a revival of The Alchemist by Ben Jonson.”

“I saw that a hundred times as a boy,” Jack said, “why ever are they reviving it now?”

“Because Herr Handel has written new music for it.”

“What? It is a play, not an opera.”

“Styles change,” Daniel said. “Mr. Vanbrugh’s theatre, there, is nothing like the theatres of your boyhood: it is all indoors, and ornate beyond description, and the actors are imprisoned on a stage, behind a proscenium.”

“Stay, I have been to a few such,” said Jack. “I could not hear a damned word. My ears are ruined; too much early horseplay with firearms.”

“Your ears are fine. No one can hear what the actors are saying, in a place like that. And this one in Hay Market is worse than most.”

“When Vanbrugh designed it,” said Newton, suddenly thawing, “it was styled the Theatre Royal. When it opened, nine years ago, and the audience thought they were witnessing a mum-show, then they had to change the name of it to the Opera, which empowered the performers to make themselves heard, by bellowing at the tops of their lungs in the style that is customary in that Art.”

“It chagrins me to hear that the good old Alchymist is being subjected to such perversion,” said Jack. “I’ve a mind to pop Mr. Handel in the gob.”

“It might not be so bad,” Daniel said. “When yonder Opera got into financial straits—which did not take long—my lord Ravenscar stepped into the breach, and remodeled the inside—made it smaller, lowered the ceiling, et cetera.”

“Ah, and that fixed the problem?”

“Of course not. So he had to rip it out and redo it again—anyway, he defrayed the expense by selling subscriptions for half a guinea.”

“Only half! I’d have bought one, had I known.”

“I shall ask my lord Ravenscar to throw one in as a soupçon,” said Daniel.

“While you are at it, let him know his Opera is invested by the Mobb,” said Jack. “For what I at first took to be the fireworks to celebrate an Opening Night, now takes on the appearance of a small Riot. There are several blokes on horseback, and I do believe I see a formation of infantry flanking them from behind the Opera House.”

“Infantry!?”

“Some would call it more Mobb, but to my eye their movements are altogether too orderly and platoonishly clumped. They are some militia. Ah, and there is something else, just before the entrance: I think it is an overturned carriage.”

Just then they swung round a curve onto Hay Market, and the Italian Opera House became visible out the left side of the phaethon. It was all as Jack had described it, save that Daniel did not see any of the phantom infantry spoken of by Jack. But he knew there was an open lot behind the building that was a perpetual construction camp as the theatre was gutted and remodeled by Ravenscar in his never-ending quest to make his performers audible, and where sets were erected for the operas. That was a very likely place for some Whig Association militia to have bivouacked. If it was really true that Jack had seen infantry, he’d have seen them there.

The phaethon bounded up on its suspension, as if they had driven over a sudden rise. Jack had jumped off. Looking back through the grate, Daniel saw him receding. He was standing in the middle of Hay Market, squarely in front of the Italian Opera. “I have just recognized that overturned carriage,” he called. “I have deeds to do here.”

“Our transaction is not finished!” Newton shouted back.

“It cannot be helped. I shall try to meet you in Golden Square later.”

“If you do not, you may consider that the deal is null and void,” Newton returned, his voice faltering, as he was no longer so sure that anyone was listening. Jack had dissolved into the Mobb.

The Fabrick’s Finish’d, and the Builder’s part

Has shown the Reformation of his Art.

Bless’d with Success, thus have their first Essays

Reform’d their Buildings, not Reform’d their Plays…

Never was Charity so Ill Employ’d,

Vice so Discourag’d, Vertue so Destroy’d;

Never Foundation so abruptly laid,

So Much Subscrib’d and yet so little Paid.

—FROM DANIEL DEFOE’S ATTACK ON THE OPERA HOUSE IN HAY MARKET, THE REVIEW, NO. 26, 3 MAY 1705

The Kit-Cat Club is now grown Famous and Notorious, all over the Kingdom. And they have Built a Temple for their Dagon, the new Play-house, in the Hay-Market. The Foundation was laid with great Solemnity, by a Noble Babe of Grace. And over or under the Foundation Stone is a Plate of Silver, on which is Graven Kit-Cat on the one side, and Little Whigg* on the other. This is in Futuram re Memoriam, that after Ages may know by what Worthy Hands, and for what good Ends this stately Fabrick was Erected.

—JACOBITE JOURNALIST CHARLES LESLIE, THE REHEARSAL OF OBSERVATOR, NO. 41 (5/12 MAY 1705)

BROAD AS IT WAS COMPARED to the town-houses hemming it in on left and right, the part of the Opera House fronting on the Hay Market could not contain a whole theatre. As anyone would discover who entered into one of its triad of massive arched doorways, this was only a lobby. The auditorium proper, and the set-shops and backstage spaces, were all under a mountainous roof that loomed in the interior of the block like a mountain-range over an Alpine town, and threatened to bury the adjoining houses under an avalanche of roof-tiles someday. Tonight the roof was hidden by darkness, occasionally blushing a lambent red as a bonfire flared on the street below, and betraying the presence of silent watchers posted on its roof. It over-shadowed a stretch of Hay Market running some two hundred feet from Bell Inn on the north (rumored to contain a secret subscribers’ entrance, used by the Kit-Catocracy) to the even narrower and darker alley of Unicorn Court on the south (which, for those brave enough to follow it all the way to its dead end, gave access to the backstage). Overall this was neither the grandest nor meanest fabrique in London and one could easily go past it without a second glance; but it happened to be the place where a lot of Jacobite Tories had lit bonfires tonight. The squadrons of un-uniformed Tory cavalry that had roved through the district to intercept messages between Marlborough House and the Kit-Cat Clubb, or Marlborough House and Leicester House, had converged hither, and turned their attention inward, toward the fires they had lit and the carriage they had brought to bay, which was rumored to contain the Electoral Princess of Hanover, here in London to spy and to cabal with Whigs incognito. Not a one of them noted the sentries on the high dark roof of the Opera, who, for the last several minutes, had been busy with signal-flags. Those faced not towards the imbroglio in the Hay Market but west toward certain parks and undeveloped parcels of land, not far away, which in recent days had turned into strangely well-ordered Vagabond-camps.

“Money, and all that comes with it, disgusts me,” said Father Édouard de Gex, speaking apparently to his own boots. For he had planted one to either side of the head of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, and clamped her head between his ankle-bones, forcing her to look up into his face. “Within living memory, men and women of noble birth did not even have to think about it. Oh, there were rich nobles and poor, just as there were tall and short, beautiful and ugly. But it would never have entered the mind of even a peasant to phant’sy that a penniless Duke was any less a Duke, or that a rich whore ought to be made a Duchess. Nobles did not handle money, or speak of it; if they were guilty of caring about it, they took pains to hide it, as with any other vice. Men of the cloth did not need money, or use it, except for a few whose distasteful duty it was to take in the tithes from the poor-box. And ordinary honest peasants lived a life blessedly free of money. To nobles, clerics, and peasants—the only people needed or wanted in a decent Christian Realm—
coins were as alien, eldritch, inexplicable as communion wafers to a Hindoo. They are, I believe, an artifact of the pagan necromancers of the Romans, talismans of the subterranean Cult of Mithras, which St. Constantine, after his conversion to the True Faith, somehow forgot to eradicate, even as the temples of the idolaters were being pulled down or made over into churches. The makers, users, and hoarders of money were a cult, a cabal, a parasitical infestation, enduring through many ages, no more Christian than the Jews—indeed, many were Jews. They convened in a few places like Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, and Seville, and spun round the globe a web or net-work of links along which money flowed, in feeble and fitful pulses. This was repugnant but endurable. But what has happened of late is monstrous. The money-cult has spread faster across what used to be Christendom than the faith of Mahomet did across Araby. I did not grasp the enormity of it until you came to Versailles as an infamous Dutch whore, a plaything of diseased bankers, and shortly were ennobled—made into a Countess, complete with a fabricated pedigree—and why? Because you had noble qualities? No. Only because you were Good with Money—a high sorceress of the coin-cult—and so were adored by the same sort of degraded Versailles court-fops who would gather in abandoned churches at midnight to recite the Black Mass.

“It was then that I formed my resolve to burn you at the stake, Eliza. It is to me what the Holy Grail was to Sir Galahad: an ambition that has sustained me through many trials and journeys. Oh, by itself, to see you slowly consumed by fire would be only an idle pleasure. Do not imagine I am so self-indulgent. Burning you, Eliza, was to be the climax, the catharsis of a great Work of purification. England was to fall to the armies of the Most Christian King, and the Dutch Republic was to fall next. Not just you but many were to have been consumed in autos da fé that would have illuminated the face of Europe as these bonfires do the Hay Market to-night. It was to have been the end of heresy—the heresy of the so-called Protestants, of the Jews, and, most of all, of the money-cult. Great canvases and frescoes would have been painted of the event, by the Michelangelos of a new age, who would work not for money but for the glory of God. These paintings would have been vast tableaux of countless figures; but in the center of all, taking pride of place, would have been you, Eliza, bound to a stake in Charing Cross, burning. During my voyage round the world, when I was sick or cold or exhausted, and my faith began to fail, I would think on this, and find new strength. The love of it beckoned me ever onward, even as fear of it drove Jack like the crack of a whip at an ox’s ear.”

All during this curious discourse, Eliza was trying to saw away, with her dagger, at the ox-hide strap that served as the hinge of the carriage door. This was difficult to achieve without a continual movement of the shoulder that must have been obvious to de Gex, and so she was trying to go about it subtly. Which meant slowly. He was evidently in no hurry to get on with her auto da fé; but she feared he was now drawing to some conclusion, and about to set fire to her carriage, or something. So she asked him a question. “It is just the opposite of what one would think, given your passion for Alchemy—who would’ve phant’sied you’d such an antipathy for money?”

De Gex shook his head sadly, and took his eyes away from Eliza’s for the first time in a long while. The light of a bonfire glittered in the oily blade of his dagger, and caught his eye; he gazed into it, and twiddled it idly as he went on: “Of course some Alchemists are charlatans, seeking wealth; they are a mockery of people like you, sharing your avarice, wanting your artifice. But can you not see that Alchemy is the avenging angel to destroy your heresy? For what value shall your money have, if gold may be made as easily as straw?”

“So that is the end you seek,” Eliza said, “to overturn and scatter the new System that has been built up, during your lifetime, by the ineffable workings of Money.”

“Indeed! What right do Britain, and the Dutch Republic, have to exist? God did not mean for men to live in such places, or if He did, He did not mean for them to prosper here. Look—look at this opera house! Built on the edge of the world by frostbitten shepherds—yet in its size, its glory, truly a monster, an abomination, only possible because of the unnatural distortions that Money has wreaked on the world. The same is true of all London! It should all burn. And you should be the spark to kindle it.”

“Should be, or shall be?” Eliza asked. The ox-hide hinge was nearly sawn through; one good slash ought to drop the carriage-door to the pavement, and give her hips room to slither out. But this did her no good when her head was clamped between de Gex’s feet. She arched her neck, pointing her chin up at de Gex’s face, and thereby gained an upside-down view of a bonfire just a few paces away. If she could tempt him to go over and root around for a firebrand, she might be out from under the carriage by the time he got back.

“Grand beautiful schemes,” said de Gex, with a regretful smile, “such as the one I have just laid out, oft arise more from pride than piety. To create an auto da fé here in the Hay Market to-night would gratify my pride. But it were too grand and gaudy a scheme, under present circumstances. I must show humility, instead, by doing the work quickly, with nicotine. You may take it as a moral lesson: though you have lived expensively, and in grand style, you shall die a simple and humble death in the gutter of Hay Market.”

“Ain’t it a shame,” said an English voice, somehow familiar to Eliza, “when a noble holy man, who despises money, has to cut corners, and kill meanly, all because he and Leroy don’t have two louis d’or to rub together.”

At the first sound of this voice, de Gex stepped back half a pace, and broadened his stance. This freed Eliza’s head. She turned it toward the speaker—who was framed in the center arch of the Italian Opera, as if just emerging from a play. Since there was no performance to-night, it seemed more likely that this was a chap who knew his way around the nearby alleyways. Unable to break through the cordon of Jacobite riders and flaming barricades, and the Mobb attracted thereby, he must have entered the Opera House covertly through the side entrance at Bell Inn, and worked his way through the building to burst in on their discourse from a direction unexpected and unwatched. So much so, in fact, that most of de Gex’s riders, who were still out patrolling the fringe of the fire-light, did not even know yet that an interloper had penetrated to the core of their position.

Eliza, because startled, had let several seconds go to waste when she might have been cutting herself free. She went back to work now with the dagger.

De Gex took a step towards the interloper. “This is stupid even for you,” he said. “You are sure to be dead within a few moments—behold, you are surrounded.”

“You’re a-mazed, Father Ed, because I’ve been such a shrewd and calculating sort the whole time you’ve known me. But in my youth I used to do stupid things, and even profit from them, all the time. All the cleverness I’ve shown since I got back to London has been to one end, namely, that I might get into position, as it were, to do something foolish for my Eliza. Here I am; now’s the time.”

“As you like it!” said de Gex. “It shall be my very great pleasure to punish you for your impulsiveness, Jack.”

When this name reached Eliza’s ears, her arm jerked, and the hinge slashed through. The carriage-door fell to the pavement under her weight, and made a crack. De Gex—who had taken a step toward Jack—hesitated, and looked back. Eliza did not have time to wriggle free. She flung the dagger at de Gex. It caught him in the back of the thigh, but was too light to penetrate more than a quarter of an inch. Still, it stung like a hornet, and he reached back to paw it out. “Bitch whore!” he cried, rounding on her and bringing his own dagger up to strike.

Jack flew down the steps of the Opera House, lunging toward de Gex and thrusting one hand forward. He looked less like a duellist than a wizard casting a spell, for no blade was in his hand, and the distance between them was too great for him to land a punch. But he had been cradling a small object in his palm, which flew outwards, spinning so fast that it made a buzzing hum, like the wings of a small bird. It shot past de Gex’s upraised dagger-hand, but then, impossibly, reversed its direction and whipped around his wrist, going into a spiral orbit whose velocity waxed as its radius waned, finally becoming a whizzing blur that collided with his hand, and stuck there: for the thing that Jack had thrown was studded with glinting blades.

Jack drew back the hand that had thrown it, and de Gex’s jerked toward him at the same instant, for the two were now joined by a silken cord that had been spooled about this curious throwing-weapon. Jack’s other hand now came down. It was swinging a sword with a curved blade. The tip of it slashed the dagger out of de Gex’s hand, and severed the cord. The dagger skittered away and was lost in darkness.

De Gex showed, now, that he had studied the art of defencing at some point in his life, for he spun away from Jack even as Jack wheeled into position to guard Eliza. His left, or dagger-, hand had been mangled by Jack’s sword-stroke, but his right was still hale. With it he drew out a small-sword. He faced Jack, who had a watered-steel blade of Turkish design in his right, and nothing in his left. This would have created a reasonably even match, were it not for the fact that they were surrounded by armed men on horseback.

“Greetings Eliza,” said Jack, “supposing that is you. I am back in your life, for better or worse, and I forgive you for harpooning me. Once you prophesied I should never look on your face again. To this point, it holds true, for I must keep a sharp eye on this de Gex until he and I have finished our duel. But after that—”

Eliza, busy squirming free, did not answer.

“A duel would be lovely, Jack,” de Gex was saying, “but a commander on a field of battle must not so indulge himself.” He was holding up his bloodied left hand, beckoning to someone out of Jack’s field of view. His slashed glove flapped like a black flag, dripping blood onto the pavement. Hooves could be heard approaching; one of the gentleman riders trotted in from the perimeter, and stopped, framed in the arch of light through which Jack had just passed. Their route of escape had just been cut off. Eliza got to her feet finally. Jack, whilst keeping his eyes fixed on the face of de Gex, had maneuvered round between the latter and Eliza, and stood now with his back to her, guarding her.

“Captain Shelby,” de Gex said to the horseman, “have you a pistol?”

“Indeed, my lord.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Naturally, my lord.”

“Do you fancy you can hit that bloke, there, him with the Turkish sword?”

“It should pose no great difficulty, my lord.”

“Then pray do so. Good-bye, Jack; and please know that Eliza shall very soon be joining you on the shores of the Lake of Fire.”

The next sound was the report of a firearm; but it came from the roof of an adjoining town-house, not from Captain Shelby. The only sound that came from Captain Shelby was a distasteful spattering, as his brains showered the forecourt of the Opera, followed by a thud as his body, all but decapitated, tumbled out of the saddle.

“That was one English musket-ball,” said a voice, oddly similar to Jack’s, from the parapet of the Opera above. “We have more.”

“Identify yourselves!” demanded de Gex, raising his bloody hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the building’s entrance.

“You are in no position to give orders. But it suits my purposes to let you know that you have been surrounded by the First Company of the First Regiment of Dragoons of the Whig Association Militia, once known, and soon to be known again, as the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. We have been bivouacked not far away to defend Marlborough House should the need arise, and were drawn here by all of your disorderly conduct.”

“Then do you return to your post, Captain,” said de Gex.

“I am a lowly Sergeant, alas.”

“Then get thee to Marlborough House, Sergeant,” said de Gex, “for I daresay it shall require some defending, before the night is through. What goes on here is no concern of yours; you are away from your post without leave.”

“It is, if truth be told, of direct concern to me, sir,” said the Sergeant, “being a sort of family matter. For unless my eyes are telling me lies, my brother, who has ever been a disgrace to the family name, is down there attempting to redeem himself, and repent, and redress his sins, and so on and so forth, by the ancient and honorable trial of single combat—for the honour of a fair lady, no less! I have sworn, many times in the past, that I’d slay my brother myself if given a chance. And perhaps I will someday. But I’ll not abandon him to be slain when he is about to do something honourable for once in his life. So have at it; but if any of your Horse try to intervene, they’ll be as dead as Captain Shelby. We are Dragoons, and to make short work of foppish cavalry is our bread and butter.”

So spoke Bob Shaftoe. The mounted Jacobites below all heard him, and heeded him; but Father Édouard de Gex missed the last bit, for he had darted inside the Opera House. Jack had lit out after him. After only a moment’s pause, Eliza called out, “Thank you, Bob…”

“No time for it. You hesitate on the threshold,” Bob said, “one part of you saying go with Jack, another saying you’ve no need of such a Vagabond wretch in your life. My voice bids you go in, Eliza, if a Sergeant may command a Duchess. The rabble beyond the fires, there, does not have the discipline or the discretion of these Jacobite riders. In a moment we may have open war here. Get inside! Stay near an exit. If you smell smoke, drop to your hands and knees, crawl out of the building, and run in any direction as fast as you can.”

Bolingbroke’s House, Golden Square

THE SAME TIME

“WE POLITICIANS,” quoth Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, re-filling his goblet with port for the eleventh time, “are like men who live in frosty climes. It is the habit of such men that whenever they have nothing else to take up their time, they hie to the chopping-block, take up the axe, and set to work splitting and stacking cord-wood. They do it even in the heat of August, for they are ever driven by the memory of having been cold once. You and I have each had our days of bitter cold, Roger, and so whenever we are not otherwise busy, we go to work stacking up our political cord-wood. Each of us has a mountain of it. Other men, seeing the size of the woodpile, would call it enough, and leave off chopping. But you and I know ’tis meant to be burned, and shall burn quickly once lit. This whole Realm that we call the United Kingdom is one great pile of cord-wood now, or rather two piles, one called Whig and one called Tory. They are so near to each other that one cannot be lit without setting fire to the other. All that is wanted is tinder, and a spark. London is packed with tinder to-night, which is your doing, and mine: the militias, and the Mobb. They have been gathering round their bonfires in Hay Market, Holbourn, Smithfield, and Charing Cross, as we have stood here and watched them.”

As Bolingbroke said this he drew Roger’s attention to the districts named, sweeping his arm from one great intersection to another. He spoke truly, for once. Overhead, the stars had come out. One minute they weren’t visible, the next they were. But they did not flare out all of a sudden, but asserted themselves quietly, as shoals rose from the sea while the tide ebbed. London this evening had become a constellation of bonfires in like fashion; they had not been lit at any one instant, yet every time Roger turned around and looked, there were more of them. Entire districts were dark, but between and among them was laced a flickering and pulsing net-work of fire, strewn, stretched, and rent like an old cobweb. Roger knew that like an old cobweb it was rooted, sticky, tenacious, no easy thing to sweep away. Really it had been present all the time, but invisible, like the strands of spider-silk one walks into in the dark. Fire only lit it up, and made glorious its immensity.

He gazed far downriver, past the dome of St. Paul’s and the Monument to an old citadel by the side of the river, with a high, four-turreted keep in the middle: the Tower of London. It was dim and quiet tonight, for the Mint was idle. Tower Hill, the belt of open ground surrounding the moat, was speckled with bonfires. Roger lifted his gaze from that distraction and found the dark bulk of Legge Mount, thrust out toward the troublous City like a fist. Thence he indexed round the Tower walls anti-clockwise until he found Bloody Tower and Wakefield Tower, which were joined together side-by-side like misshapen conjoined twins, looking out over the Pool of London from the center of the southern wall. On the roof of each, a signal-fire had been kindled. Two fires, small sparks, easily resolved from this distance. One might have been just a fire. But two were a signal, sent by one who had an excellent view of goings-on in the Pool.

“I don’t much care for your firewood similitude, Henry,” Roger said, “for it is too obviously meant to affright me. And moreover, I know what you are about to say next: that your pile of firewood is greater than mine. You cannot deter me now with such loose hobgoblin-talk about civil war. For as bad as that would be, what you propose in its place is worse: you would take us all the way back to the days of Bloody Mary.”

“Not so, Roger, not so! His Royal Highness is a Catholic, true, but—”

“As to the other thing, I am not yet overawed by your forces and your powers. Princess Caroline, whatever you might phant’sy about her, is not in London.”

Bolingbroke laughed. “But, Roger, you told me, only an hour ago, that you had seen her through my telescope!”

“But, Henry, I was lying.” It was Roger’s turn to take up the de-canter and replenish his glass. As he did, he turned his gaze south toward Hay Market. A contagion of bonfires had lately been spreading up and down its length, threatening to link up with a larger nexus in Charing Cross. They were particularly hot around the Italian Opera, which troubled Roger, for he’d put a lot of money into it, and did not want it burned down by a Mobb. His old eyes could not resolve individual figures from here, but he could see patterns: round and among the fires, dark currents swelled, ebbed, swirled, and splashed: the Mobb, yet wanting any clear purpose. But currents of order and purpose moved through the chaos, like rivers in the sea: disciplined groups, probably militia. The sight of it, so near to his beloved Opera, threw him into a woozy fit, and reminded him how much easier it would be to surrender to Bolingbroke.

But then his eyes picked out a black corpuscle, moving up Hay Market with implacable purpose, gleaming like a bead of lacquer as it slalomed round bonfires. At the great cross with Piccadilly it made the turn that would angle it up Shug Lane toward Golden Square. He knew then that this was his phaethon, hurtling across London like a black panther through a forest fire. He could not know what message it conveyed; but something in its desperate speed gave him hope it might be good news.

“We shall soon enough see whether you were lying then or now,” said Bolingbroke—who had taken a moment to regain his hauteur. “But I would speak to you of the other matter—of the Prince.”

“George Louis of Hanover? Splendid chap.”

“No, Roger. His royal highness James Stuart, who by right, even if not by law, is our next King.” He held up a hand. “The Queen has made up her mind, Roger. She cannot, will not abandon her own flesh and blood. She will make him her heir.”

“Then let him have the china, the silver, the furniture for all I care. But not Great Britain. We are past this, Henry.”

“We are never past what is right.”

“Sometimes I phant’sy I am speaking to a medieval relic, when I talk to a Tory,” Roger said. “What magical quintessence do you suppose it is that imbues a Stuart with the right to reign over a country that hates him and that espouses a different religion!?”

“The question is, shall we be ruled by Money, and the Mobb—which are one and the same to me, as neither serves any fixed principle—or by one who serves a higher good? That is the point of Royalty, Roger.”

Roger paused. “ ’Tis an attractive prospect,” he said. “And I do understand, Henry. We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads us to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there. I am not blind to the glories of the Sun King. I know Versailles is better than anything we have here, in many ways that count. But for every respect in which we are inferior to France, some compensation is to be found in the new System a-building here.”

“It is a bankrupt System already,” said Bolingbroke. “Come, it grows chilly up here, I have certain matters to attend to in my study.”

He insisted that Roger precede him through the door and down the attic stairway. Presently they came to a small study on the second floor of the house, which had a view over Golden Square that must be pleasant in the daytime. Now, Golden Square had a view of them, for Bolingbroke had left the curtains open, and many lights burning. On the rooftop observatory they’d had privacy; it had been like the backstage of a theatre, where actors banter, out of character, before they go on.

But now they were on. Their audience was everyone in Golden Square. This included some late arrivals, who’d just drawn up in a phaethon. Roger could hear an argument beginning to catch fire between one who had just emerged from the carriage, and a servant of Bolingbroke’s who had gone out to meet them. Clasping his hands behind his back Roger ambled over to a window and looked down to see Sir Isaac Newton saying something peremptory to Bolingbroke’s butler, who was nodding and shrugging a lot—but not budging. Daniel Waterhouse paced slowly back and forth behind Newton, seeming at once agitated and bored.

Meanwhile Bolingbroke had gone straight to a standing desk—which had been situated directly in front of another window—where a gloriously ingrossed document was laid out, complete in every particular save that it wanted a signature.

“Gentlemen do not speak of money, as a rule…”

“Beg pardon, Henry?”

“I was remarking a minute ago that your System is already bankrupt. I did not wish you to think me uncouth.”

“Furthest thing from my mind. But I do say, it is a bit stuffy with all these lights burning—mind if I open a window?”

“Please make yourself comfortable here, Roger. It will soon be very warm for you everywhere else. I have here a warrant, to be issued by the Privy Council to-morrow, calling for a Trial of the Pyx.”

Roger was standing sideways to Bolingbroke, sliding up the window-sash. It shuddered as it rose, and caught the attention of Daniel Waterhouse outside. Daniel glanced away for an instant, then snapped back to stare at Roger.

“It pains me to stoop to this, Roger. But the bankruptcy of the Whigs is financial as well as moral and intellectual; and the insolvency of their accounts and the debasement of their money is a menace to the Realm. It must out.”

Roger scarcely heard this. It was more speech than conversation, and besides, he knew what Bolingbroke was going to say before he said it. Roger was trying to work out a way to exchange a few words, at least, with good old Daniel, who was but a dozen feet below and twenty distant. Daniel had a preoccupied look, and was moving about curiously on the street, apparently trying to work clear of some shrubs and tree-branches that reached between him and Roger’s window.

“I am placing my signature upon the warrant now,” said Bolingbroke above scratching noises. “You may be my witness.”

Roger turned his head to watch Bolingbroke marring the parchment, making the quill hop and skip across the page, like a dancer en pointe, as he dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s.

Then something whacked Roger on the side of the face. It thudded to the floor.

“What did you say, Roger?”

Roger blinked haze out of the impacted eye, and squatted down to pluck the missile off the floor. He knew it immediately. Hefting it in the palm of his hand, he strolled over to the desk, where Bolingbroke was blotting ink.

“Henry, since you have such a fascination with coins and coining, I thought you might like to have this as a souvenir of this evening. You might like to take it off to exile in France.”

“Exile in France? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Your future, Henry, and mine.” Roger clapped the object—still warm from Daniel’s pocket—down atop the gaudy Warrant. It was a leathern bundle, sewn shut, written on in ink, and heavy as only gold could be.

“A Sinthia from the Pyx,” Roger announced. “There are more, many more, where this came from. Jack the Coiner is ours. He has yielded all, and told all.”

The Italian Opera

THE SAME TIME

SERGEANT BOB HAD given her good counsel, which was to seek refuge in the Opera, and not be swayed one way or the other by the knowledge that Jack was in the place. She moved quickly through the lobby, trying not to spy herself in any of the mirrors. The pins that had held her hair up underneath the Caroline-wig had either been torn out, or had gotten skewed around so that they dug at her scalp and tugged at her hair. She drew them out as she ran and let them tinkle to the floor, then gathered up her loose hair and whipped it around into a loose overhand knot behind her neck. Music beckoned: a strange sound on a night such as this. It meant Order and Beauty, two items that were in short supply in London generally, tonight particularly. She moved toward it, skidding on a thin spoor of blood that, she guessed, had dribbled from de Gex’s wounded hand. It led away through a little door in the corner of the lobby. This blood-trail had already been smudged, here and there, by footprints: Jack pursuing de Gex. So, if her desire was to watch those two men fight with swords, she knew which way to go. But more appealing was the music of violins and violincellos: the modern instruments that could fill a whole opera-house with sound, be the acoustics never so wretched. She passed through a grand gilded door and into a dim foyer, redolent of Mr. Allcroft’s Royal Essence for the Hair of the Head and Perriwigs. From there she entered into the back of the auditorium.

The house was sixty feet wide, and fifty from where Eliza came in to the front of the orchestra pit, where a man in a wig was standing with his back to her, moving a staff up and down in time with the music. The floor was scored into semicircular tracks by low walls that sprang in concentric arcs from one side-wall to the other, all focused inwards on center front stage. It recalled a Greek amphitheatre, without the weather and without the Greeks. An aisle ran down the middle in a straight line connecting Eliza to the man with the staff. She began to walk down that aisle. Bob had recommended she stay near an exit, in case the theatre should be torched by the Mobb; but the musicians did not suspect they were in any peril, and she ought to warn them. It would have been reasonable to shout out an alarum from the back of the house. But theatre-etiquette had somehow taken over from street-instincts, and she was disinclined to make a fuss. By the time she reached the place where she could rest her arms on the top of the little parapet that enclosed the orchestra pit, the music seemed to be drawing to some sort of coda; the up-and-down movement of the conductor’s staff became more pronounced, and when he feared that matters were getting out of hand, he allowed it to slip down in his grip, so that it produced an audible thump on the floor with every beat.

The music stopped.

“Herr Handel,” Eliza said, for she had recognized the conductor, “pardon me, but—”

She was interrupted by a voice from the stage, incredibly loud. It was Sir Epicure Mammon in the latest fashions, prancing across a London square with his dodgy sidekick, Surly.

Come on, sir. Now, you set your foot on shore

In novo orbe; here’s the rich Peru;

And there within sir,

[gesturing at the front of a noble town-house fronting on the square] are the golden mines, Great Solomon’s Ophir!

Eliza cowered for a moment—those theatre-going habits again. Then she returned to the pit wall to discover Georg Friedrich Handel looking at her, a bit slack-jawed. Having confirmed that this really was the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, albeit in a state of déshabille only dreamed of by most gentlemen, he executed a perfect court-bow, deploying his conducting-staff as counterbalance.

“I am sorry, I did not understand that this was a full rehearsal!” she exclaimed.

Behind Epicure Mammon and Surly, a carpenter was kneeling down to tack a bit of stage-dressing in place, and to one side, a painter was daubing away at a trompe l’œil sky. Mammon scowled at her. She raised a hand to her mouth in apology.

“My lady,” exclaimed Handel, reverting, in his astonishment, to German, “what has brought you here?”

“This night,” insisted Mammon, “I’ll change all that is metal in thy house, to gold. And early in the morning, will I send to all the plumbers, and the pewterers, and buy their tin, and lead up; and to Lothbury, for all the copper.”

“What, and turn that, too?” asked Surly, expertly feigning amazement, but at the same time, somehow managing to favor Eliza with a wink; Mammon might scorn her, but Surly knew a beautiful woman when he saw one.

“Yes,” said Sir Epicure Mammon, “and I’ll purchase Devonshire, and Cornwall, and make them perfect Indies! You admire now?”

“No, faith,” said Surly. But he muttered the line distractedly. Having Eliza below was bad enough; but, too, it was impossible to ignore the uncouth noises off from stage right: blurted exclamations, grunts, and ring of steel on steel. Even the musicians, who had been transfixed, for a few moments, by the apparition of a Duchess, had begun turning their heads to look.

The stage of the Italian Opera was uncommonly deep, making it famous among those who loved magnificent sets, and infamous among those who wanted to hear the words. A vast canvas had been stretched across the back of it, and painted to look like an idealized vision of Golden Square, stretching off into a hazy distance; before it, model town-houses had been erected, to perfect the illusion. It tricked the eye very well until a bloody, slashed-up man vaulted over the parapets and rolled to the ground in the deep upstage; he looked like a giant, thirty feet tall, fe-fi-fo-fumming around Golden Square and bleeding on the bowling-green. Which was most inexplicable, until a moment later the very fabric of the Universe was rent open; for a blade of watered steel had been shoved through the taut canvas upstage, and slashed across it in a great arc, tearing the heavens asunder. Through the gap leapt Jack Shaftoe; and then giants duelled in Golden Square.

Jack had a blade that would slash through limbs as if they were melons, but it was heavy and slow. With his tiny small-sword, de Gex could not slash, but he could poke a man through in five places before the victim could say “ouch.” Jack kept humming his scimitar through the space separating him from de Gex, to keep the other from advancing in range for a fatal lunge. De Gex maneuvered round those terrifying cuts, though diverse slashes on his arms suggested he had only just avoided some. He was studying Jack, awaiting the one mistake that would give him an opening to lunge through.

Epicure Mammon and Surly had conceded center stage to the duellists, and now stood at the edges of the proscenium—bit players, forgotten. The painter and the carpenter were on their feet, each torn between fear of the blades, and lust to avenge the damage wreaked on their work by Jack and de Gex respectively. It presently became clear that each of the duellists had a strategy as well as tactics. De Gex was waiting for Jack to become exhausted, which must happen soon. Jack was backing de Gex towards the brink of the stage; this would put him in a position to be hacked to pieces, unless he wanted to chance a jump down into the pit. Understanding this well enough, the musicians had already gone into motion: the violins and woodwinds were crowding into the corner farthest from de Gex and filing out through a door, not far from Eliza, that gave access to the floor of the house. The cellists and bassists were trying to decide between saving themselves, and saving their instruments. Handel was absolutely disgusted. “Get back in your chairs, all of you! You are being paid for five acts, not two!” But de Gex’s boots were already at the edge of the stage, his blood was dripping onto the kettledrums, with faint sounds like reports of distant cannons, and the pit was depopulated. Handel tried to collar a fleeing cellist, and wound up holding a cello. Eliza passed its owner on his way out as she was going in. For she feared Handel did not reck the danger. She rushed across the pit and divested him of the cello and set it down on its tail-pin, cradling its narrow neck in her hand. “Let us find a way out,” she said. She reached to place her hand on his epaulet but grasped only air, for the composer was storming toward the kettledrums. “Let us leave these very dangerous men to—”

But all was now overturned in an instant. Jack had got de Gex where he wanted him, and was winding up for a death-blow, when the painter ducked in, and flung a whole bucket of white paint into Jack’s face.

There was a moment of stillness. Then de Gex began hopping round into a new position: he’d been ready for a leap into the percussion section, and now needed to make a lunge for Jack’s heart. He had nearly gotten ready when Handel, standing below him in the pit, tossed his staff straight up, caught the end of it in both hands, and swung it round in a mighty hay-maker, catching one of de Gex’s shins with such violence that the blood-slick foot was knocked back and off the edge of the stage. The rest of de Gex shortly followed. He made a flailing backwards fall into a kettledrum. One leg and an arm—his sword-arm—ruptured the drumhead and ended up beneath him in the immense copper kettle. The other limbs sprawled over its rim like claws of a lobster that does not wish to be cooked.

Handel had been left off-balance by his mighty swing. De Gex lashed out with his free hand and caught the composer’s lace cravat in a bloody grip. He jerked hard, desperately trying to pull himself out. Eliza reacted before she could think. Her free hand dropped to the bridge of the cello. She raised it on high as her other hand levered the neck down toward the floor, and she launched it across the pit in a high arc. It rotated as it hurtled through apogee, and came down like a javelin, its whole weight concentrated behind the tail-pin. When it stopped, it was sitting on de Gex’s chest. It lodged there at an angle, emitting a spectral chord as the life sighed out of de Gex. He let go of Handel’s cravat.

The composer picked up his staff from the floor and righted his periwig. “Fifth page, second bar!” he called out. But the musicians were slow to return.

Eliza looked up and found a burst of paint where Jack had been, and a trail of white footprints leading out to backstage and Unicorn Court.

She was thinking about the prophecy Jack had alluded to. Jack styled it a prophecy, anyway; in her mind, it had been more in the nature of a blunt promise. She had spoken it to Jack twelve years ago, in the Petit Salon of the Hôtel Arcachon in Paris, with Louis XIV as witness. Most inconveniently, she had forgot the exact wording of it. It had been something along the lines of that Jack would never see her face nor hear her voice until the day he died. Eliza being something of a stickler for promises and commitments, she now reviewed the last few minutes’ events in her mind, and satisfied herself that this one had not yet been broken. At no time had Jack gotten a look at her, for his gaze had been fixed on de Gex the whole time, or at least until he’d gotten a bucket of paint in the face. And she had not spoken any words he was likely to have heard.

And now he was gone, and could neither hear nor see her.

She turned around to face the house. Musicians and Actors had withdrawn to the farthest corners, and were looking to her, as if for a cue.

“It is safe now,” she announced. “Jack Shaftoe has left the building.”

Golden Square

THE SAME TIME

“YOU TOLD HIM WHAT!?” said Daniel.

“You heard me,” said Roger; then, when he had grown weary of Daniel’s gape and stare, “Really.”

“Really? What does that mean?”

“You are so tediously parson-like sometimes. I think it must be the lingering influence of Drake.”

“I am being pragmatic. What if Bolingbroke demands proof that we have Jack? I haven’t the faintest idea where the man is.”

“Daniel, look about you.”

Daniel did. He and Roger were at a corner of Golden Square, down the way a bit from Bolingbroke’s house, in a sort of caravan-camp of pricey coaches and good horses: the field headquarters of Whigdom. Isaac had already gone home in the phaethon. Mohawks were galloping hither and cantering thither proclaiming news, and shaking encyphered writs. The house of Bolingbroke was desolate: the curtains and shutters had been drawn, most lights had been snuffed, and it was not really known whether Bolingbroke himself was still in the place. Rumor had it he’d gone to his club.

“Behold,” Roger said, “we have won.”

“How do you know that!?”

“I can just tell.”

“How?”

“I saw it in his face.”

Roger excused himself, not by word, or by gesture, but by somehow changing, for a moment, the way his eyes looked at Daniel. He strolled over to a little war party of Mohawks who were standing near their horses, and addressed them: “We have won. Let the word go forth; light the beacons.” He then turned round and began making his way toward some cluster of notables. The Mohawks behind him began hip-hip-hooraying, and pretty soon everyone in Golden Square was doing it.

Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-running: not only the Quality from their town-houses, but hooligans and Vagabonds from bonfire-strewn fields to the north, to throng around Roger and cheer him. Not because they agreed with his positions, or even knew who he was, but because he was plainly enough the man of the hour.

Billingsgate Dock

A BIT LATER

“IT IS A WONDER,” exclaimed Johann von Hacklheber, wrapping an arm tight round Caroline’s waist, and lifting her off the brink of the wharf, “how many people will do favors for one who is expected to be the next Queen of England.” He was ankle-deep in Thames-water on Billingsgate Stair; severed fish-heads nuzzled his boot and ogled Caroline’s bum as he toddled round and got in position to set her into the waiting longboat. She had her arm round his neck very tight, as if meaning to shut him up by stuffing one of her breasts into his mouth. He did not complain, but only gripped her buttock that much tighter through her breeches. All of these mutual gropings could be excused on grounds that the Princess must not be allowed to fall into the cold stew of fish-innards that was Billingsgate Dock. It was a chancy maneuver; the night was dark and the steps slick. Johann thought he was being decorous enough. But the thirty or so men who had brought Caroline here, in a royal progress of coaches, sedan-chairs, and out-riders, were having none of it. They were all drunk as lords. As a matter of fact, to judge by the escutcheons gilded onto their carriage-doors, most of them were lords. There was no aspect of the scene on the stairs that was not suggestive, to them, of something.

“I smell fish!” one of them shouted. And there were a hundred other remarks, most of them a good deal more direct and to the point.

“Gentlemen!” Johann shouted, once Caroline was in the longboat, and her tit was out of his gob. “We are at Billingsgate, it is true; but this does not mean you must try to out-do the fishwives in execration. They are not here now. Return in the day-time and woo them then.”

“I say, who are these fishwives?” exclaimed someone, so intoxicated that his tongue was swishing around in his mouth like a mop in a bucket. “He makes them sound like very merry wenches indeed.” He snorted a great draught of that bracing fish-market atmosphere into his nostrils. “And I do fancy their perfume.”

Johann was getting it from both directions now. “You are too cynical, love,” said Caroline from the longboat, “and now you see I am pouting like a great big fish. They are gallant, nothing more. They do not even believe I am a Princess! They think I am a whore who came for Dr. Waterhouse.”

“They know perfectly well who you are,” said Johann. He offered a bow, sarcastically obsequious, to the men of the Kit-Cat Clubb, who stood above them at the top of the stairs, all spread out in a tableau, but difficult to make out in the dark—like a group portrait of themselves gone almost black from tobacco-smoke.

The bow was returned many-fold, but Johann saw none of it, as he had turned to vault over the gunwale into the longboat. Caroline was waving to them—somehow even that made them think of indecent things and spew libidinous ravings up and down the dock.

“We truly are safe from exposure now,” Johann muttered. “For those men, when they are sober, shall be ashamed to relate this story, and no one would believe it if they did.”

The longboat was unnecessarily large for its present mission, viz. to ferry a Baron and a Princess to a ship in the Pool. It had five oars on a side, and ten stout sailors to swing them. As such it could quickly out-distance a waterman’s boat, or most other craft that might try to pursue them. Johann and Caroline sat up in the bow to stay clear of the rowers.

“I am glad you had the wit to come here directly,” Johann said.

“Not so directly, for I was made to be the object of several toasts in the Kit-Cat Clubb,” she said.

Indeed, the toasting was not over yet. Enough time had elapsed, since it had become evident that she was going to depart by water, for the following to have been improvised by one of the crowd of domesticated poets who went round with Kit-Cats.

Off the sea came Aphrodite,

To the Greeks whose lust was mighty.

Soft of wit and firm of P—,

Romans worshipped foam-borne Venus.

’Pon the River dark as wine,

Rides Britons’ love-queen, Caroline.

“That is lovely,” Johann said. “It appears that Dr. Waterhouse shall have some explaining to do, at his Clubb.”

“As shall I,” Caroline said, “to my husband.”

From Billingsgate a lone wag was chanting

May her Womb

Be Popery’s Tomb

But pray the German

Keeps his sperm in.

He was immediately shouted down by indignant, even scandalized Kit-Cats. Really! Some chaps knew no bounds! Someone drew a sword halfway, and made a great show of having to be restrained, all the while glancing river-wards to be sure his gallantry was being noted by Caroline. But the longboat had been swallowed by shadow, from their point of view. The sword-fight fizzled. The Kit-Cat Caravan began to mount up: and so the last they saw of the Clubb were scintillations of cut-crystal stirrup-cups and of the silver trays on which they were brought around, faint as gleaming of fish-scales on the black waters that lapped at Billingsgate Stairs.

“I pray that we are vanishing from their ken as much as they from ours,” Johann said. “We are going downriver some miles to make rendezvous with a sloop that rides at anchor before Greenwich. If we board the sloop quickly and get underway without delay, perhaps no one shall know that your royal highness is aboard.”

“It is all a great farce,” was Princess Caroline’s verdict. In the darkness she could not see Johann collapsing, but she could see the air coming out of him. “I am sorry,” she said.

“On the contrary. La belle dame sans merci is a role that becomes you—’twill serve you well when you are Queen, and Greenwich is one of your country houses.”

“I am being without mercy to myself,” Caroline said, “not just to you. It was stupid for me to have come to England.”

“On the contrary—you were not safe, in Hanover, from that assassin.”

“That assassin, who followed me to London without the least difficulty,” Caroline said, “and might be preying on Eliza at this very moment.”

“She is my mother, you do not need to remind me,” Johann said. “But she knew you as a little child. When has she ever held back from letting you know her mind? If she felt, or if I did, that your being in London was unwise, we would have said so.”

“But I am entitled to form my own views. I say that I stayed too long.”

“Naturally it will seem so, when we are departing in such haste—it would be better if you had left a week ago, in leisurely fashion. But we could not have anticipated any of this then.”

“How long has it been since Sophie’s funeral? Six weeks. By the time we are back in Hanover, make it seven or eight weeks.”

“That is not such a terribly long time for a grief-stricken Princess to be absent from Court.”

“From Court and from Husband.”

“Husband has other ways of sating himself.”

“I wonder about that,” said. “After what happened that night, can he have kept Henrietta Braithwaite as maîtresse-en-titre? Or will he have sent her packing, and acquired a new one? Or—?”

“Or what?”

“Or will he be looking forward to the return of his long-absent wife? His letters, lately, have been more interesting.”

“More interesting than what? Or than who? Stay, you need not answer, we have gone into a place where angels fear to tread.”

“It is a place where you went, knowingly and willingly, when you wooed a married Princess.”

Johann was silent.

“There, you see? Now again I am la belle dame sans merci. I hope you fancy her.”

“That I do,” Johann said, “stupid plodding knight-errant that I am.”

“Brave magnificent shining knight,” Caroline said, “who needs to keep his visor closed, when he is whingeing.”

That was the end of conversation for a while. The row down the Thames was long. Caroline struggled against drowsiness, and fought the urge to nestle up against Johann. Some of the time, negotiating the crowded Pool was a bit like running through a forest in the dark. At other times, watchmen on anchored ships mistook them for mudlarks, and shone lanterns at them, and aimed threats and blunderbusses their way. But as they rounded the bend before Rotherhithe and swept down along the Isle of Dogs, the ships became fewer and larger. Though the oarsmen were tired, the boat picked up speed, as it could now run down the current on a straighter course. Now that they had broken free from the noise and clutter of the city, they perceived small matters that before would have been lost among other impressions: bonfires being kindled upon hilltops, and riders galloping down the streets that flanked the river to right and left. It was impossible not to phant’sy that the fires and the riders alike bore strange information out of the city, into the country and down the river to the sea. Signal-fires on Channel cliffs might even speed news to the Continent this night. But what the news consisted of, and whether it be true or false, could not be known to the refugees on the longboat.

The transfer to the sloop went quickly, as Johann had hoped. The anchor was taken up and sails raised to catch what feeble breeze there was. Thus began a strange night-journey down the river, which to Caroline was a continuation of the longboat-passage, with everything spread out on a larger field: for queues of bonfires continued to grow across the countryside, radiating outwards from the city, and not a minute went by that her ears did not collect the faint report of galloping hooves on the post-road. In the end she only lulled herself to sleep by telling herself that this sloop, gliding silently down the dark river bearing a mysterious passenger, must be as sinister and disturbing to the riders on those horses, and the watchers on the hilltops, as they were to her; and perhaps with good reason, since (as she still had to remind herself) she intended to rule the country some day.

Sophia, Mouth of the Thames

MORNING OF THURSDAY, 29 JULY 1714

HANOVER WAS LANDLOCKED. Its greatest body of water was a three-mile-wide puddle. The rich might invest in, the rash might sail on, proper ships; but they had to travel abroad to Bremerhaven first. For most Hanoverians, the preferred way of getting to the other side of a body of water was to wait for it to freeze, then sprint across. Sophia, the sloop that Caroline and Johann had boarded in the dead of night off the Isle of Dogs, was technically a Hanoverian vessel, in that she carried impressive-looking documents asserting that she was. But the crew consisted mostly of boys from Friesland, the skipper was an Antwerp Protestant named Ursel, and the lads who had muscled the oars of the longboat last night had been hired, along with the boat, from a Danish whaler that was having her hull scraped in Rotherhithe. Those Danes were now waking up with sore backs in East London. Much water, some fresh and some brackish, had passed beneath Sophia’s keel in the meantime.

Left to form her own opinions, Caroline might have judged that they were now out in the sea, and well on their way to Antwerp. The fog made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, but Sophia was being shouldered from one brawny roller to the next like a child being passed around by a crowd at a hanging. The temperature had dropped (which, as the Natural Philosopher in her knew, must account for the fog), and the air smelled different. But that this was pure landlubberly foolishness could be known by watching Ursel, who was no happier, here and now, than a Hanoverian, half-way across the Steinhuder Meer, when the ice he is treading on begins to crack and tilt. “This is why no one does this,” he said to Johann, in a pidgin halfway between Dutch and German.

The second this, taken in the context of all that had happened in the last several hours, probably meant “to sneak out of the Pool in the middle of the night so that the Customs officials at Gravesend shall not board the vessel, inspect her cargo, and receive their customary gratuity, and then to run down the Hope, navigating by sounding-lead, in hopes of squirting past the fort at Sheerness before dawn so as not to be blown out of the water by the coastal artillery situated there for that purpose or overhauled by naval vessels sent out to run down smugglers.” All of which looked to have been accomplished, to landlubberly eyes. A huge bell had bonged nine times, not long ago, and one of the mates, who knew the Thames, had identified it as the Cathedral in Canterbury. To Caroline, who had studied maps, this suggested they were well clear of the river’s channel.

It was less clear what Ursel had meant by the first this. It was something so bad as to render self-evident the folly of having attempted the second this. Caroline looked at Johann. He was even more exhausted than she (for Caroline had slept and he had not), and more sea-sick to boot. It was clear from the look on his face that he did not know anything more than she did about the nature of the first this. And so Caroline stopped looking to him for answers, and watched the Frieslanders. They were very busy with sounding-leads, on port and starboard; one would think, to watch them, that Sophia was under assault by swimming pirates with daggers clenched in their teeth, and her only weapons were these slugs of lead on the ends of ropes. She had seen this procedure done before. Usually it took a good deal longer, as the lead took some time to strike bottom, and the rope had to be drawn back up one double arm-length, or fathom, at a time. These chaps were tossing their leads several times a minute, and calling out fathom-soundings without even bothering to draw in the lines. The numbers sounded funny in the dialect of Friesland; but they were small numbers.

She worked her way round the poop-deck rail toward Johann. “They all began to get terribly excited when the cock crowed.”

“I heard no cock crow,” answered Johann.

“Because you were crowing at the same moment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Vomiting,” she explained. “But a cock did crow, distinctly, over there.” She waved vaguely to starboard.

Johann managed a confident smile. “Do not worry. Sounds carry strangely in fog. It could have been miles away. Or perhaps it was aboard another ship.”

A cow mooed.

“The cock-crow could have a second meaning as well,” Caroline pointed out, “no less troubling than the first: namely, that the fog is lifting.” She had to raise her voice and lean closer to Johann, because Ursel had begun screaming. Like expert flautists, who could use the trick of circular breathing to play long continuous notes, Ursel had the ability, oft seen among sergeants, schoolteachers, wives, and other leaders of men, to scream for several minutes without letting up to replenish his lungs. “He has had an epiphany,” Caroline said. “For quite a while, we wandered lost in the fog. Now, suddenly, he knows where we are.”

“Yes,” said Johann, “the wrong place.” Which was so obvious that it was bad form for him to have mentioned it. For the issue of all Ursel’s shouting, and the exertions of the sailors, was that Sophia came about, and, after a pause to carve her initials in the mushy bottom-sand with her keel, began to make head-way along a new course. In a few minutes’ time, the soundings began to aspire past five, nay, even six fathoms. Of livestock the calls became less distinct, and the smell was replaced by that of creatures with fins and shells. The sky brightened from gray, to silver, to gold, and Caroline began to sense its warmth, faintly, on her lips, as she sensed Johann’s body heat on cold nights in her bedchamber. Finally they emerged from the fog altogether. A shadowy blot off their port beam resolved itself into a Royal Navy brig parallelling them, and going about the task of opening up her gunports.

“At other moments during the execution of the present Plan I have had occasion to question whether it had been well-wrought; and yet troubles resolved, and we got this far,” Johann said. “I shall pray to God and trust in Providence that this is not as bad as it would plainly seem on its face.” His face was red: in some circumstances, adorable, here not a good sign.

“Poor Jean-Jacques. As out of place here as a rooster.”

“If we could have galloped to Hanover, I would have so arranged it,” he admitted. “But it is not for you to show concern for me in this pass.”

“If we are overhauled, I shall put on the black sash that says I am in this country incognito,” Caroline said. “Somewhere on yonder brig must be an officer, a man of breeding, who shall know what it means.”

“The incognito worked for Sophie when she would go to visit Liselotte in the halcyon days of Versailles,” Johann brooded, “but to expect Tories and Whigs to observe such a quaint conceit, in present circumstances, is like asking two gamecocks to toast the Queen’s health before they commence slashing. No, I think I shall have to take responsibility, if it comes to that.”

“What does that mean? You shall claim that you kidnapped me and brought me to London against my will?”

“Something like that.”

“It is foolish. I will simply deny that I am who I am.”

The discussion went on thus, tediously, circularly, and without result, even as the skipper Ursel was carrying on a parallel exchange with the captain of the Royal Navy brig. By signal-flags, the brig ordered Sophia to allow herself to be overhauled. Sophia affected not to see, then, not to understand, the message; the brig stiffened it with a cannon-shot across Sophia’s bow. Sophia, which by now had maneuvered into broader and deeper waters off Foulness Sand, raised sail, and began to make run for it by sailing closer to the wind than the square-rigged brig was capable of. This got them several miles nearer the open sea, for the wind was generally out of the east, which was the direction they wanted to go. They zigzagged, sometimes sailing a few points north, sometimes a few points south, of due east. The brig did likewise, but had to take wider and more pronounced zigzags, which ought to have made it slower. So it looked favorable for Sophia, at least by this simple account. But as the morning wore on, it became evident to Caroline (who was observing closely, as she looked forward to inheriting a Navy) that this was very much a devil-in-the-details sort of matter. The brig was capable of moving through the water faster than Sophia, so the difference in net speed was not quite as great as all that. And the brig had a proper pilot aboard, who knew where the shifting sands at the mouth of the river were today. Whereas Ursel had to work from a chart that had been printed ten years ago and was now a palimpsest of confusing hand-drawn cross-hatchings, and angry and emphatic notes in diverse Northern European languages. On account of which Sophia’s actual course, far from being the stately zigzag she would have traced across deep blue water, was a jangled fibrillation about due east, careering to one side or another whenever Ursel phant’sied they were approaching some peril rumored on the chart, or when the trend of the soundings was inauspicious, or the color of the water or the texture of its surface did not please him. Much time was spent, and much of Sophia’s forward momentum pissed away, in frequent course-changes, even as the brig loped easily back and forth across the estuary, plotting each tack to pierce invisible gaps between the Middle, the Warp, the Mouse, the Spile, the Spaniard, the Shivering Sand, and other Hazards to Navigation too small or too ephemeral to waste names on. It was altogether tense, chancy, and perilous, and so ought to have been thrilling. Yet it stretched out over half the day, and as much as an hour would sometimes go by without anything in particular happening. It was a bit like sitting by the bedside of a loved one with a grave illness: momentous, all-consuming, yet boring, hence exhausting.

In the end exhaustion caught up with Ursel. Or perhaps he had simply been outmaneuvered by the brig, which late in the morning began to draw within firing range of Sophia, and seemed as if she might be trying to get into position to fire a broadside. Forced suddenly to choose between cannon-fire and shallow water, Ursel chose the latter, and promptly ran Sophia aground on a ridge of ooze that in retrospect was implied by a squiggle on the chart. They were between Foreness and Foulness, in a place where the way was above twenty miles wide, and a river only in name; the entire eastern half of the horizon consisted of ocean, a full one hundred and eighty degrees of mockery to the poor skipper. When Caroline asked Ursel what they ought to do next, Ursel informed her that he was not competent to offer an opinion, for he was a skipper of ships, and Sophia was no longer that, but a wrack, owned not by Hanover but by whomever first happened along to salvage it. Then he retreated to his cabin to drink gin.

“Well, I know nothing of Admiralty law,” said Caroline, “but this looks more ocean than river to me. I say we are on the high seas, minding our own business.”

“We are aground,” Johann insisted.

“Then we were on the high seas minding our own business,” Caroline said, “when along came that nasty brig and forced us to run aground. It is an act of piracy.”

Johann rolled his eyes.

“We were on a pleasure cruise out of Antwerp when it happened,” Caroline went on.

“What, and just happened to cross the North Sea by accident?”

“Blown off course in the night by that unusual easterly wind. Happens all the time. Come, don’t be difficult! Last night in London you said I must do deeds beyond your scope. Re-writing history is a royal prerogative, is it not?”

“So ’twould seem, if you read much history.”

“Who do you phant’sy is the more inventive writer: Queen Anne, or the woman before you?”

“That laurel goes to you, my love.”

“Very well. In a trunk belowdecks is a Hanoverian flag. Run it up the mast. Let us show our colors, that all ships passing by may plainly see what rank piracy is committed this day by the Royal Navy!” And she struck a royal enough pose in the bows, gesturing with an arm to the waters spread out before them, which were flecked with sails of great ships.

“If it pleases your royal highness,” Johann said.

“It does. Hop to it.”

In response to Sophia’s having run aground, the brig had to conduct certain maneuvers that occupied close to half an hour: viz. breaking off her tack, coming about, reducing sail, and making slow head-way to a point in deeper water some half a mile distant where she could tarry long enough to deploy a longboat without having to worry that wind, current, or tide would drive her aground. By the time all of these things had been achieved, Sophia had run a large set of Hanoverian colors to the top of her otherwise bare mast. And this seemed to give the brig’s skipper second thoughts. For the arms of the House of Hanover were so close to those of the royal family of Great Britain as to be indistinguishable from this distance. The brig might be menacing Sophia with open gunports and run-out cannons; but Princess Caroline had just pressed a loaded pistol to the forehead of the brig’s skipper.

Last night, perhaps, some messenger, despatched from London by Bolingbroke, had galloped into the fort at Sheerness and presented this captain with an order to scour the estuary for such-and-such a sloop, and to capture the foreign spies aboard it. Which might have sounded straightforward enough at the time. Bolingbroke’s seal dangling from the document, the exhausted post-horse blowing outside, the spattered and red-eyed messenger, the urgent missive in the dead of night: just the sort of thing ambitious naval officers prayed for. He had done his duty well this morning. But now something had gone awry: he had been presented with an opportunity to think. The royal arms rippling from the mast-head of the grounded sloop gave him much to think about, and much incentive to think carefully.

The brig’s longboat was lowered, but not manned. Then it was supplied with oarsmen; but there seemed to be a debate in progress on the poop deck as to which officers should venture out. Was this a boarding-party? A rescue mission? A diplomatic envoy? Were the passengers on the sloop foreign spies, fleeing smugglers, or the future owners and admirals of the Royal Navy? It was not the sort of situation that lent itself to speedy resolves.

And it only grew more complicated. For immediately after Sophia had shown her true colors, one of the great ships passing from the ocean into the Thames had altered her course, and had been growing ever since: a tiered battlement of white canvas spreading wider and looming higher by the minute. This thing was to the brig as a bear to a bulldog. She had three masts to the brig’s two, and more courses on each mast, and more deck to carry cargo or guns—but mostly guns, for she was (as rapidly became obvious) an East Indiaman, hence not really distinguishable from a warship. She had at least thrice the brig’s displacement. Farther up the Thames, her size would have put her at a disadvantage, but there was adequate room to maneuver here, at least, provided one had accurate charts and knew how to use them. This East Indiaman seemed every bit as confident as the brig in steering around unseen shallows. This despite the fact that she was not an English ship at all, nor a Dutch, but—as became clear, when she finally ran out her colors—

“Mirabile dictu,” said Johann, who had two-fistedly jammed a prospective-glass into his eye-socket. “What are the odds that two Hanoverian ships should meet?”

“What are the odds that there would exist two Hanoverian ships?” Caroline returned. She wrested the glass from Johann, and spent a minute admiring the Indiaman’s figurehead: a bare-breasted Pallas, poised to bash her way through seas with her snaky-headed Ægis.

“My mother invested in a ship once,” Johann said, “or rather Sophie did, and Mother handled the numbers.”

“Let me try to guess the name of that ship. Athena? Pallas? Minerva?”

“That was it. Minerva. I thought she was in Boston, though.”

“Maybe she was,” said Caroline. “But now she’s here.”

Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

31 JULY 1714

“SHE IS A FAIR ENOUGH young lady, composed, civil, even when being man-handled off a sandbar by a boat-load of Filipino and Laskar swabbies. But, I was greatly relieved to get her off of my ship.”

Otto van Hoek had the skin and the disposition of a hundred-year-old man, and the vigor of one closer to thirty. He had a steel hook in place of his right hand, and when he was distracted or nervous he would paw at things with it. Taverns, chambers, and cabins habituated by van Hoek sported sheaves of scratches on tabletops and walls, as if a giant cat had been there sharpening its claws. Now he was scoring the lid of a packing-crate lately off-loaded from Minerva. It rested on the wharf of Mr. Orney’s Ship-yard in Rotherhithe. The address read

DR. DAN’L WATERHOUSE
COURT OF TECHNOLOGICKAL ARTS
CLERKENWELL
LONDON

The planks of the lid were already scored half through, for van Hoek kept his hook sharp, and it had been a long and anxious morning for him. Minerva was in the dry-dock: a ditch slotted out of the bank of the river and walled off from it by doors wrought of whole tree-trunks. These, though they creaked alarmingly, and leaked copiously, held back the River. Minerva was propped up on many timbers rammed into the dry-dock’s mucky and puddle-pocked floor. Her hull put Daniel in mind of a potato that has been left too long in the cellar and sprouted many tendrils, for one could phant’sy that the ship had thrust out a hundred bony legs below the water-line and crawled up out of the river. He had supposed that putting a ship as large as Minerva in dry-dock must be a stupendous operation extending over weeks, and had hoped that he’d arrive in time to see its opening phases. But it had been over and done with when he’d walked into the yard at eleven o’clock in the morning, and the only record of the adventure was a hundred parallel hook-scratches in the lid of this crate.

“I know that there is a—”

Daniel had been about to say superstition. “—a tradition that it is unlucky to have a woman aboard ship.”

Van Hoek considered it. Van Hoek considered everything, which made it difficult to engage him in idle chitchat. “The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Édouard de Gex.”

“He’s dead, by the way.”

“Again? I am glad to hear it. After that voyage, we did come in to some bad luck, to be sure; but I would have to be some sort of imbecile to blame it on the lady de Obregon, when the cause was obviously the malice and cunning of de Gex.”

“That is just,” Daniel said. “So you are not a believer that women are bad luck on a ship?”

“Such a belief would be difficult to reconcile with the well-established record of success of the Malabar pirate-queen.”

“And yet it made you uneasy to have Princess Caroline aboard. But I suppose there were other reasons for that. From the sounds of it, the Navy was after her.”

“We had been tarrying in certain coves and inlets of Essex, frequented by smugglers—”

“I know those coves well,” said Daniel with a smile, “it is where my father made his fortune.”

“On the night of the 28th we received word that it was safe for us to enter the Thames—for the information that the Whigs were gaining the upper hand had been transmitted from London, at great speed, by signal-fires. I felt confident of this, or I should never have approached the Nore in the first place. When I spied that Navy brig harrying that sloop, I guessed that her skipper simply had not received word of the changes that were afoot in London. And indeed, as we made our way upriver with the Princess, we presently saw more than one Navy ship flying an ensign bearing the arms of Lord Berkeley—a Whig.”

“And yet still you were glad to get her off your ship.”

“Certain cargo is more trouble than it can possibly be worth,” said van Hoek, and turned away from Daniel to regard Minerva. Cranes and windlasses were at work hoisting stout boxes of round river-rocks and cannonballs out of her bilge.

“You are not speaking only of Princesses, I detect,” Daniel said.

“It was only meant to act as a sort of buffer, to see us through lean times,” van Hoek said. “As a merchant keeps silver plate in his home, which may be melted down and coined when liquidity is wanted, so we have had those gold plates in our bilge. Not a single Customs inspector has ever suspected they were there. Most of our seamen do not even know. From time to time we would coin a little. I had no inkling we were in such peril.”

“The only reason it was dangerous was that the Master of our Mint has an especial interest in this type of gold. As long as you did not coin it, you were safe. But to strike even one guinea and place it into circulation was like firing a pistol into the air in a church.”

“Before he was arrested, Dappa said you had devised some scheme whereby we could extract the value of this gold without coining it,” van Hoek said, “but beyond that, his discourse became murky. I thought I should hear the story from him during the passage to Boston; but of course we were forced to flee without him.”

“Briefly, we have a buyer in Muscovy who will buy the gold from us, once we have altered its form in a particular way.”

“You are going to make something out of it?”

“Yes, and then he will buy that something, and pay for it in ordinary gold. Or such was the plan, on the day Dappa was kidnapped, and you sailed for Boston.”

“Do you mean to say there is a new plan now?” asked van Hoek, and made a deep gouge in the crate-lid.

“There might be,” Daniel said. “Your erstwhile partner—”

“Jack?”

“Jack. Jack seems to have struck a deal with the Master of the Mint. Perhaps the danger I spoke of has passed. It might not be necessary to ship this gold—” and Daniel nodded at Minerva “—to Muscovy after all.”

“It is of no account to me whether the Tsar or the Master buys it from me, provided we get the cursed stuff off our ship,” van Hoek said, “but you had best make up your mind quickly.” He had turned his gaze toward the river. Daniel turned around to espy a many-oared vessel crawling across the water, bearing directly for Orney’s wharf.

“That is a very odd thing to see on the Thames,” Daniel remarked. “What flag does she fly?” For van Hoek had unlimbered his prospective-glass.

“The double eagle. She is a war-galley of the Russian Navy,” van Hoek said. Then, after a moment’s pause, he laughed at the absurdity of such a thing.

“Come to collect the three warships that Mr. Orney has been building,” Daniel surmised. “A great day for Mr. Orney!”

“And for Dr. Waterhouse?”

“It is all good. This is as I have expected.”

“You do not say that with as much sincerity as I would like.”

“I am not insincere, but distracted. Much has happened in recent days. The matter is far more complex than I have let on.”

“Stab me! They do grow them big in Russia.”

“What do you mean?”

“That man on the poop deck! If the others around him are of normal stature, then that is the biggest man I have ever seen. How he towers over that poor man who is getting the noogies!”

“You have me at a disadvantage. May I—?”

With some reluctance van Hoek handed over the perspective glass. Daniel found a place where he could brace it against the side of a piling, and arranged it so that he could get a view of the on-coming galley. She was still a bow-shot away from Orney’s wharf; the oars continued to pulse, but more and more slowly as she lined up for the last few strokes. Daniel found the poop deck, which was exceptionally high, as was common with military galleys. Right away he saw the man van Hoek had been talking about. To judge his height rightly was made difficult by the presence of several dwarves around him. But there were some who seemed to be of normal stature: one pacing along the rail wearing an admiral’s hat, after the French style. An old man with a long gray beard and a bald head protected under a dome of black felt. And a third about whose neck the tall man had wrapped one arm. Only the top of his bald pate was visible, as the giant had him bent forward in a headlock, and was rubbing the knuckles of his other hand over the poor fellow’s skull. The broad grin on the giant’s face, and the glee on the dwarves’ faces, suggested it was all in good fun; the way that the victim hopped from toe to toe, and flailed his hands around, suggested he took a different view. Finally the big fellow released him, for the galley was now manuvering to the wharf, and passing between a pair of brand-new frigates riding at anchor before Orney’s, which he seemed to find interesting. The victim scurried over and snatched up his periwig, then straightened his posture (slowly and judiciously, for he was an old man) and placed the adornment on his head. Not until he had patted it into place was Daniel able to focus distinctly on his face.

Daniel sighed.

“What is it?” van Hoek asked.

“Everything has suddenly become very complicated.”

“I thought you said it was complicated before.”

“Yes, I rather thought it was—before His Imperial Majesty Peter the Great showed up with Baron von Leibniz.”

“That is the Tsar?”

“So I am guessing.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I know not. But he is attired as a mere gentleman, with a black sash, hence incognito.”

“Perhaps he has been routed by the Swedes, and fled here to exile.”

“It does not have that air about it. A vanquished refugee does not show up attended by Dwarves and Philosophers.”

“Why’s he here, then?”

“I hope it is a whim.”

“Why?”

“Because if it is not a whim, then it probably has something to do with me.”

“I REGRET THAT I missed the funeral of Sophie,” said Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. He had been on English soil for about an hour. Leibniz had never been precisely handsome, and never would be. But in the years since Daniel had last seen him, he had developed creases in his face, and shadows that went with his dark eyes, and (once he had put his wig on, and covered up the Tsar’s knuckle-prints) at least made him look serious and formidable.

Peter was inspecting one of his new warships, accompanied by most of his entourage and by the startled but game Mr. Orney.

“Those who know and love you anyway, assumed your absence was for good reason,” Daniel said. “Those courtiers who hold other opinions of you, had those opinions bolstered—if they noticed you were missing at all.”

Leibniz nodded. “In May I had been summoned to St. Petersburg to work on the establishment of the Russian Academy of Sciences,” he explained.

“Funny that I never get summoned on such errands.”

“It is not all as delightful as you suppose. The place is literally and figuratively a swamp. Peter wants to do everything personally.” Leibniz nodded at one of the new ships, which was still on the ways, ready to be launched; Peter was clambering up the rat-lines like a three-hundred-pound fly in a monstrous web, leaving his entourage on the deck below, helpless to do anything but cringe or applaud. “When he is out of town fighting the Swedes,” Leibniz continued, “which is most of the time, then nothing happens at all. Then, when he returns, he is outraged that his projects have stagnated, and wants everything done immediately. The result, anyhow, is that I could not work out a way to leave.” Here Leibniz trailed off and turned to look in the direction of the Tsar. His attention had been drawn thither, not by some sudden noise, but by its sudden absence. Peter Romanov had reached the mizzen-top and struck a pose there, peering through a perspective-glass as if he were commanding a naval engagement in the Baltic. As a matter of fact (as Leibniz had already mentioned to Daniel) he had been doing exactly that only a few days earlier, and his galley had the cannonball-holes and bloodstained decks to prove it.

But now Peter’s glass was aimed, not at the distant sails of some Swedish fleet, but at the two aged Natural Philosophers conversing in Orney’s yard below.

“Uh-oh,” said Leibniz.

“HIS TSARISH MAJESTY has commanded that the plates be brought forth,” confided Mr. Kikin to Daniel. For Kikin had dashed out from London as soon as he had got word that a Russian galley was approaching Rotherhithe and, to his credit, had only been struck catatonic for thirty seconds or so after he had walked into the ship-yard to be confronted with the spectacle of the Tsar of All the Russias debating the fine points of hull design with Mr. Orney. Now, he was acting as English interpreter.

“Which plates would those be?” Daniel asked.

“The very same ones we shipped to him, late in June,” Kikin said.

Up and out of the war-galley’s hold now came a solemn, and yet gaudy procession. First to emerge was the wig, the head, and then the body of a young gentleman, presumably of Peter’s household. But he seemed to have been pressed into service as a sedan-carrier, for his arms were straight down to his sides, and in each hand was the end of a pole, carven of an immense tusk, and capped at the end with gold. Close behind him emerged the burden supported by those ivory poles: not a sedan-chair after all, but a box. To call it a box was like calling Versailles a hunting-blind, for this object was wrought mostly of amber, and what was not amber was ivory or gold. At a glance, from a distance, Daniel guessed that the finest jewelers in Christendom had devoted years to carving it. Not that his old eyes could resolve the details from here; he could just tell that it must be so, for this seemed to be how Peter went about things. Succeeding the amber chest, and supporting the aft ends of the tusks, was an outlandish-looking chap whom Daniel pegged as a Cossack. And bringing up the rear was the elderly man with the long gray beard and the black skullcap whom Daniel had noted earlier standing next to Peter on the poop deck. He was a Jew. What made Daniel realize as much was his juxtaposition against this phantastickal box-on-poles, which looked like nothing so much as the Ark of the Covenant, reinterpreted by Russians, and re-wrought in Nordic media and French styles. It was borne through a hushed entourage and set down upon a crate.

Leibniz cleared his throat and spoke in a voice meant to be heard by all. “The plates for the Logic Mill, which you were so good as to send us some weeks ago, arrived at the Academy in St. Petersburg on the tenth of July (reckoning it in English dates). Your humble servant, and His Tsarish Majesty’s other representatives” (here he seemed to be looking at the old Jew) “have examined them thoroughly and reported to his majesty that they are in order.” Kikin was trying to relate all of this in Russian, but Peter seemed to know more or less what was being said, and went over to the amber box. He lifted its lid and made as if to toss it aside; the Cossack intercepted it before it struck the ground, bowed, and backed away. Peter reached into the chest’s velvet-lined interior and drew out several of the plates. The gold flashed in the midday light. Mr. Orney cringed and lifted his gaze to the public road that ran along the inland side of his shipyard. A sizable picket-line of mudlarks, freelance longshoremen, thief-takers, Black-guards, Vagabonds, bridle-culls, baggage-men, foot-scamperers, and runagates had already formed up there, like flies on the rim of a cider-glass.

Daniel was struck by a change in the appearance of the plates: while generally they seemed to have been well-treated, each of them was missing a piece. Someone had systematically sheared a fingernail-sized piece off the corner of each plate.

The Tsar noticed that Daniel had noticed. “I commanded Monsieur Kohan to assay the plates,” he explained via Kikin, and nodded at the aged Jew.

“Solomon Kohan at your service,” said the Jew in English. Beyond that, he had to resort to Latin to make himself understood. “Since none of the plates had holes punched in the corners, I reasoned that these corners were of no importance to the workings of your Logic Mill. And so I cornered, or quoined, each one of them, to try the fineness of your gold, as commanded by Cæsar.”

All of which made sense to Daniel except for the reference to Cæsar. Then he recollected that “Tsar,” or “Czar,” was simply a rendering into Russian of that ancient Latin title.

“And what did you report concerning the quality of the gold to Cæsar?”

“The truth, of course.”

“Of course. But different men have different views as to what truth is, and I would fain know yours, sir.”

“No. The entire point of the assay is that it is not subject to opinion, taste, or debate. It is what it is.”

“You invoke the Tetragrammaton. And yet men may dispute the meaning even of that. What were your findings?”

“The same as yours, I’m sure.”

“That gold is gold?”

Peter broke in now, and there was a pause as Kikin translated: “The Tsar has decreed that, since the finest gold on earth was used to make the first batch of plates, with which he is well pleased, the remainder of the plates are to be made using the same stuff. What the hell do you suppose he means by that?”

Leibniz rolled his eyes. “Some have put it into his head that there exists a superior form of gold.” He regarded Solomon Kohan none too benignly.

Meanwhile Peter had been unburdening himself further. Kikin translated: “Every plate sent to St. Petersburg henceforth shall, before it is accepted, be quoined in the same manner by Solomon Kohan.”

“For your sake, and for your friend’s,” said Solomon to Daniel, with a glance toward Leibniz, “I hope you have an adequate supply of this type of gold.”

“Perfectly adequate, thank you,” said Daniel, and nodded at Minerva. He let a few moments elapse for Kikin to translate. By the time Daniel was ready to resume speaking, all the others had followed his gaze, and marked certain members of Minerva’s crew bringing up out of her hold flat packets of something heavy, wrapped in sack-cloth.

“Is that a Vroom?” asked Peter in Dutch. “She is a beauty.”

“Indeed!” broke in van Hoek, who had been loitering on the edge of the crowd, “she is the last ship that the great Vroom ever designed, and if his Tsarish Majesty would care to—”

“I would,” said Peter, and then he and van Hoek went off ranting in Dutch ship-jargon for some minutes. A lot of throat-clearing and eyebrow-wiggling on Daniel’s part finally penetrated the awareness of van Hoek, who with reluctance brought the Tsar’s attention back round to Daniel.

“Months ago,” Daniel announced, “we set in motion work that has culminated, within the last few days, in the arrival of that Vroom that his Tsarish Majesty is admiring. She brought the gold that is to be used for the completion of the Logic Mill. It is being down-loaded at this very moment…” here Daniel trailed off, for Peter was already bounding across the muck of the yard to intercept one of those burlap bundles. Kikin ran after him, translating as he went, and the rest of the group hustled along behind. Daniel found himself bringing up the rear, alongside Solomon Kohan.

“It is curious,” said Daniel, “that you take so keen an interest in this matter.”

“It is curious,” returned Solomon, “that you incorporate such gold into your device and expect that it shall go unnoticed by the Wise.”

Solomon stared at Daniel with eyes that rarely blinked and that were such a pale gray as to be nearly colorless, though they were rimmed and flecked with black. His features were generally Semitic. This gave Daniel the idea that Monsieur Kohan had been born with dark eyes, befitting his race, but that they had become washed out and faded over time, like garments that have seen too many washings and too much sun. Immersed in that gaze, Daniel felt like a lump of sugar plunged into a stream of warm water. He was at a loss to answer, and so trudged across the churned muck of the yard in silence until he and Solomon had re-joined the group. All were gathered round a bundle that Peter had wrested from a barefoot seaman, thrown down on a barrel-head, and slashed open. The package was perhaps a foot and a half wide, four long, and an inch thick. Peeled bare, it was revealed as a metal plate, scratched and speckled, but unquestionably gold. Solomon muttered something in Hebrew. Peter regarded it with mild curiosity. “He says it looks like any other gold,” Kikin explained.

“As how could it not,” Leibniz said, “as there is no difference—” but here he was cut off by a sudden commotion. Mr. Orney, who as a rule was not the sort of chap one looked to to disrupt any proceedings with spontaneous outbursts, had thrust his way into the middle of the group, gathered up the dangling shreds of burlap, and begun trying to cover up the exposed gold as if it were no less shocking to him than a naked woman. Peter watched the frantic efforts of the Nonconformist with the same hungry curiosity as he applied to everything else, and asked Kikin a question. Kikin explained, gesturing to the scores of fascinated loiterers watching from along the road, from the branches of nearby trees, and from the roofs of houses. Suddenly Peter understood, and looked back at Orney, seeing him in a new light, and comprehending the reason for his pronounced nervousness. The Tsar looked over toward a formation of some two dozen Cossacks who had been prowling around the perimeter of the yard, and shouted some command at them.

“Nyet!” Kikin exclaimed; but the Cossacks were already fanning out towards the road, drawing sabers.

“What did he say?”

“ ‘Kill them all,’ ” Kikin said, and then began trying to explain to the Tsar something complicated that the Tsar was not in any sort of mood to learn about. Anyway, half of his words were drowned out by noises off. Cossacks were at large, and the game was afoot, in Rotherhithe, and the amount of shouting and screaming was prodigious. Peter plainly enough told Kikin to shut up. Kikin looked around pleadingly. Daniel spoke, catching Peter’s eye briefly, afterwards staring at his belt-buckle. “So lax is the treatment of criminals here, and so disorderly is this country as a result, that even if his Tsarish Majesty had brought a whole regiment of Cossacks, and put everyone within a mile radius to the sword, the security of Mr. Orney’s establishment could not be vouchsafed once the sun set, if the gold were known to be here. It must be transported to safekeeping in London. We could summon wagons; or—” and he nodded at the Russian galley.

“The Doctor’s proposal is accepted,” announced Kikin in due course. “Aboard the galley is yet more gold: some to pay Mr. Orney for the ships, provided they pass a thorough inspection, and some to pay the Institute of Technologickal Arts for the next phase of the Logic Mill. All of it must be conveyed safely to various places in London. His Tsarish Majesty has therefore decreed that the special gold from Minerva be transferred into the galley immediately. We shall then set out for London, all of us.”

Van Hoek relayed all of this to his crew. Meanwhile Orney said: “As much as part of me is pleased to see the blood of the Mobile running in the gutters of Rotherhithe, I would respectfully beseech Brother Peter to summon the furry chaps with the sabers back to the confines of my property.”

“It shall be done,” said Kikin after the usual pause; though Daniel thought Peter looked just a bit wounded. But then the Tsar’s face screwed itself around as the result of some sort of neurological cock-up, and the moment passed.

Billingsgate Dock

LATER THAT DAY

PETER SPIED A queue of massive coal-wagons before the steelyard of Billingsgate, and decided that these were a better way to convey tons of gold around London than the frail coaches and sedan chairs scurrying like cockroaches up and down the river’s banks. And so all commerce in fish and coal was suspended for an hour as the galley forced its way into Billingsgate Dock. It was most inadvisable for anyone but a visiting Tsar. Anyone the least bit English-looking would have been torn limb from limb by the fishwives the moment he stepped onto the wharf. Daniel—who did happen to be English-looking—was paralyzed by anxiety throughout this maneuver. But within thirty seconds of the Tsar’s leaping from the gunwale of the galley to the scaly lid of Billingsgate Wharf, he was in the driver’s seat, and holding the reins, of an empty coal-wagon. Its owner, seeing Peter stride toward him, had simply flung the reins at the Tsar’s head and jumped out. Later he tossed the whip up in case Peter had need of it. The fishwives, too, were strangely compliant; they abandoned their stalls and lined up along wharf’s edge to enjoy the spectacle. That, Daniel realized, was what enabled Peter to get away with it: not that he was the Tsar (for no one knew this), but the pageant of his coming. It did not matter how much business these people were losing; any money they made to-day would be spent to-morrow, but this event was one they’d tell tales of for as long as they lived. Moreover, the place was after all a Market, not a Palace, Parliament, College, or Church. Markets drew a particular sort of person, just as those other places drew different sorts. And the sorts who found a market a congenial and rewarding place to be, were those who thought quickly on their feet, and adapted to unlooked-for happenings with facility; they were, in a word, mercurial. The driver of that coal-cart had perhaps ten seconds in which to make up his mind what he ought to do. Yet he had decided. And probably rightly. Daniel noted at least one purse being tossed at him by an aide of the Tsar.

They drove through the streets of London in this wagon, made to carry chalders of coal, now creaking under as great a mass of gold, Cossacks, and Natural Philosophers. The load was lightened somewhat on Threadneedle Street, where the gold that was to pay for the ships was deposited into the vaults of the Bank of England, and credited to an account controlled by Mr. Kikin. After that Daniel was made to sit in the driver’s seat next to Peter, so that he could supply directions to Clerkenwell Court.

Kikin had been relegated somehow to the back of the coal-cart, where he was conversing in Russian with Solomon Kohan and a nobleman who seemed to have some say over affairs financial. Peter and Daniel, lacking an interpreter, batted sentence-fragments back and forth in diverse tongues until they settled on French. The Tsar spoke it passably, once he had set his mind to it; but to discourse in a second language demanded more patience than Peter generally had. Sensing as much, Daniel limited his remarks to the likes of “turn left at the next corner” and “to run over pedestrians is frowned on,” &c. But after a while his curiosity got the better of him. Partly it was that they were passing along the back of Bedlam, and Daniel was terrified that Peter would take an interest in it, and go inside to learn all about lunaticks. “Alors,” Daniel said, “that Solomon Kohan is an interesting chap. Where on earth did you find him?”

“The Sack of Azov,” Peter replied. “He had wandered there for some reason, and was dwelling in the Palace as a guest of the Pasha, when we laid siege to the place. Why do you ask?”

“Er…I don’t know, really. Call it a commoner’s curiosity as to how an Emperor goes about assembling his staff.”

“There is no secret. Find the best people and don’t let them go.”

“How did you know that Monsieur Kohan was one of the best people?”

“The sheer quantity of gold we found on his person,” Peter said, “served as his credentials.”

They exited London at Cripplegate and thereby passed within a block of Grub Street. Yet they were not noticed, which confirmed in Daniel’s mind a doubt that had been nagging him about newspapermen, and their choices as to what to be interested in, which struck him as bizarrely random. Though, as they worked their way to the west, he began to understand how it was that a gigantic Tsar could drive a coal-wagon full of gold and Don Cossacks through the city without attracting all that much notice. They were drawing nigh to Smithfield, with its connotations of cattle-drives, meat-markets, burnings at the stake, and seekers after violence. Many of the bonfires that had been lit on Wednesday evening were still burning now, on Saturday; for die-hard Tory Mobbs had persisted in clashing with their Whig counterparts all day Thursday, even as Ravenscar had been pressing his advantage on the loftier fronts of Whitehall and Westminster. Those disturbances had insensibly blended into the usual riotous panoply of the Hanging-March yesterday. So Smithfield, and all to its west, were now one vast smoking reeking aftermath. Peter had spoken of the Sack of Azov; Daniel wondered if it had looked anything like what they were now driving through. Shopkeepers and residents were beginning to place doors back on hinges, shovel human turds out of their forecourts, &c., but the place was still infested with feckless young men. Daniel mentally sorted these into such categories as armed irregulars, phanatiques, Vagabonds, and hanging-watchers—hasty judgments all, built on slight evidence. Any commerce-minded person passing through here must find it impossible to believe that any œconomically productive activity ever happened in England at all. And yet England prospered, and Peter knew it; how could he reconcile it with the evidence before his eyes?

“This place used to lie beyond the edge of the city,” Daniel explained, “and bloody-minded young men would come here to practice at sword-play, or even to fight. This was more than a hundred years ago, when it was the fashion to have a wee shield on the left hand—a buckler. The sound of rapiers swashing against bucklers could be heard from far away, when they fought. Young men of that mentality came to be known, in the vernacular, as—”

“Bucklerswashers! Yes, I have heard of this,” said Peter. “Which way do I go here?”

“Take the left fork, if you please, your Tsarish Majesty,” Daniel said, “and then straight on to Clerkenwell.”

As for sense supernatural, which consisteth in revelation or inspiration, there have not been any universal laws so given, because God speaketh not in that manner but to particular persons, and to divers men divers things.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

UPON ARRIVAL IN Clerkenwell Court, Daniel discovered that Roger Comstock, or someone claiming to speak for him, had quartered two squadrons of Whig Association cavalry in the Court of Technologickal Arts: one Mohawk, the other normally coiffed. He was past caring, and no longer capable of being surprised by anything. It was fortuitous. The Templar-tomb made an impressive vault, with its new set of ironbound doors. The presence of the cavalry only made it seem that much better suited for storing a pile of gold, in Peter’s eyes.

Daniel had been steeling himself, on the drive over, for a long day or two of explaining all of the marvels and oddities on view in the Court of Technologickal Arts—for really it was the worst kind of Peter-the-Great-bait. But most of the ingénieurs and projectors who frequented the place had locked their stuff up, or taken it away, when they had moved out to make room for the cavalry. So there was relatively little on view. Peter did venture underground for a cursory inspection of the Templar-tomb. But the ceiling was too low for him, and he seemed as bored as any other royal on any other ceremonial inspection, which gave Daniel the idea that hidden vaults of bizarre ancient military-religious sects must be altogether common and unremarkable in Russia. Solomon Kohan showed more interest in it than his boss. And so while Baron von Leibniz and Saturn (who had recovered admirably after having been rousted from bed at saber-point) showed the Tsar some of the machinery pertaining to the Logick Mill, Solomon and Daniel sat round a slate sarcophagus down below, and oversaw the transfer of the gold plates from Minerva into the Tomb of the Templars. This was a matter of weighing all that was brought down, and pricking down the weights in ledgers, and getting all of the numbers and the sums to agree: not especially demanding labor for two men such as these. During lulls they engaged in Solomon Kohan’s idea of small talk:

“This is an interesting place.”

“I am pleased you find it interesting.”

“It puts me in mind of an operation I used to have in Jerusalem a long time ago.”

“Now that you mention it, the full name of the Templars was the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. So if you are that Solomon—”

“Do not play word games with me. I refer, not to this hole in the ground, which is but an indifferent crypt for long-forgotten knights, but to what lies over.”

“The Court of Technologickal Arts?”

“If that is what you call it.”

“What would you call it?”

“A temple.”

“Oh? Of what religion?”

“A religion that presupposes that we may draw closer to God by better understanding the World that He made.”

“That being the only evidence available to us, you mean, as to what He was thinking.”

“Available to most of us,” Solomon allowed.

“Oh? Is there a rest of us who have other ways of knowing God?”

“In truth, yes,” Solomon said, “but it is dangerous to say so, for almost all who claim to belong to this rest are charlatans.”

“How gratifying, then, that you judge me fit to partake of this secret. Does this mean you have found me worthy to distinguish between the majority of charlatans and the minority of—”

“The Wise? Yes.”

“Does that mean I am Wise?”

“No. You are not Wise but erudite. You are a member of the Societas Eruditorum.”

“Leibniz has spoken of it, but I did not know I was a member.”

“It is not like these guys,” Solomon said, rapping a knuckle on a Templar-sarcophagus, “with bylaws and initiation-rites and such.”

“Are you a member?”

“No.”

“Are you Wise?”

“Yes.”

“Which means you have ways of knowing things that we erudite fellows don’t. We have to be satisfied with practicing our religion.”

“You make it sound unsatisfactory. Change your mind about this. It is better to know why you know things than simply to have things revealed to you.”

“Enoch Root—is he Wise?”

“Yes.”

“Leibniz?”

“Erudite.”

“Newton?”

“Hard to say.”

“It seems as though Newton just knows things. Finished knowledge appears in his head—no one else can make out how he did it; and no one else has a chance in hell of doing what he did.”

“Yes.”

“Is it a black-and-white distinction, Wise versus Erudite, or shades of gray? If I get lucky on some days, and a good idea pops into my head, am I being Wise?”

“You are partaking of the quality of Wiseness, or Wizardry, or whatever it is called in English.”

“How many Wizards are there just now? You, Enoch, that’s two. Possibly Isaac.”

“I have no idea.” But here Solomon was distracted by a faint noise from the direction of the stairs. He and Daniel looked that way, expecting to see a Cossack bearing more gold; but instead it was Saturn. He stepped toward them quietly. Daniel had no idea how long Saturn had been in the room with them, how much he might have heard. “Are you two quite finished with your sums?” he asked weakly.

“They are not all that difficult,” Daniel returned. “Why do you ask? Is there some need of us?”

“Monsieur Romanov is anxious to go.”

“Oh, really? Where does he wish to go all of a sudden?”

“During a lull in the conversation,” said Peter Hoxton, “we heard the sounds of a crowd assembling in Hockley-in-the-Hole. He inquired. I made the mistake of telling him that it was most likely a bull-baiting. Now he ardently wishes to go and see it.”

“Then who are we to keep him waiting?”

A Tavern, Hockley-in-the-Hole

LATER

“TWO SAVANTS AND A JEW walk into a bar…” Saturn began.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Never mind.”

“Most people would call me a mere Natural Philosopher, not a savant,” Daniel corrected him. He nodded across and down the table at Leibniz. “Now he is a savant.”

“Yes,” Saturn agreed, “and so is he.” And he nodded toward the entrance of the tavern.

Daniel looked up just in time to see Sir Isaac Newton come through the door.

When the bull-baiting had concluded (the bull had lost), Peter the Great had insisted on buying a round of drinks, and turned to Saturn for a recommendation as to taverns. They had paraded into this place.

It had been Daniel’s observation that all Public Houses fell into two categories, viz. ones that were much smaller than they looked from the outside, and ones that were much larger. This was one of the latter type, which was a good thing for several reasons. Item, that even when it had been shorn of Cossacks, dwarves, and other impedimenta, Peter’s entourage still numbered a dozen. Item, that two of them (Peter and Saturn) were very large blokes. And item, that when Isaac suddenly walked into the place, Daniel at least had a few moments to compose himself as he made his way to the back.

Daniel and Saturn were sitting next to each other, facing the windows and the front door. Leibniz and the Tsar were on the opposite side of the table.

“Why would he suddenly show up here?” Daniel wondered.

“When we were at Clerkenwell Court,” Saturn said, “the Tsar sent out a message. It seems that when he visited London some years ago, Sir Isaac gave him a tour of the Mint, which made a lively impression on him. Today when he saw the equipment we have made for handling the gold, he remembered this, and took it into his head that he wished to renew his acquaintance with that curious chap who once showed him around the Mint.”

Peter stood up and turned around, which obliged everyone else to stand up, too. The exact moment of the meeting between Sir Isaac Newton and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz went unobserved by Daniel, who had become so upset that the blood stopped flowing to his brain for a little while; he remained standing, though, and his eyes stayed open, but it was as if his consciousness had gone into a total eclipse for half a minute or so.

When he was next aware of his surroundings, Saturn was tugging gently at his sleeve. Daniel looked round to discover that he was the only one still on his feet. The Tsar had moved around to Daniel’s side of the table to make room for Isaac. Daniel wedged his skinny pelvis into the slot between the two Peters, Hoxton and The Great, the largest men in the room. Facing them across the table, Newton and Leibniz sat side-by-side in the most awkward arrangement imaginable. They were silhouettes against the window-light, and perhaps it was some small act of mercy that Daniel could see nothing of their facial expressions, only the shapes of their periwigs.

Through Kikin, Peter the Great said to Newton: “I thought of you today.”

“I am honored, your Tsarish Majesty. May I ask in what connexion?” Newton’s head-silhouette angled slightly toward Leibniz. He was guessing it had something to do with the calculus. And so imagine his surprise at Peter’s response:

“Gold! I have never forgotten the day you showed me the Mint, and explained how gold flows to the Tower of London from every corner of the world to be made into guineas there. Today I have taken part in that currency. I have brought ordinary gold from Russia to your Bank, and heavy gold from the ship Minerva to Dr. Waterhouse’s vault around the corner.”

Lengthy was the silence of Newton. Daniel sensed, though he could not see, Isaac’s gaze on him. His face was warm, as if feeling the heat of Isaac’s wrath, and he wondered if his skin was still capable of turning pink.

Damn it anyway. This matter of the Solomonic Gold (he reminded himself) was not Daniel’s affair. He could not care less about it. As a favor to Leibniz, whose name was being dragged through the mud every day by Newton, and as a way to further his own work on the Logick Mill, Daniel had brokered a one-for-one swop of normal for “Solomonic” gold that had finally and improbably been consummated within the last few hours. Minerva was at last free of her cursed burthen. Jack Shaftoe was well on his way to being free of the threat of prosecution and punishment for his past work in coining that gold. The stuff was sitting in the Templar-tomb now, legally under Ravenscar’s control, but effectively Daniel’s to do with as he pleased. Daniel had been working toward this moment for some months now, and ought to have been hoisting a glass or two in carefree celebration. There was this one complication, having to do with Isaac’s notions about Alchemy; but Daniel had gotten better, with age, at accepting and ignoring the quirks and difficult peculiarities of his friends, perhaps even unto the point of self-induced blindness, and so he had not considered this very much until now.

What had ruined it all was the appearance of Monsieur Kohan. Most likely he was a lunatick; but indisputably he knew about the so-called Solomonic Gold, and looked forward to the day when every last ounce of it would be delivered to his custody in St. Petersburg. Whether or not Alchemy was claptrap, some believed in it, and some of them happened to be important, even dangerous. It might have been foolish for Daniel to have swallowed the phantastickal conceit that the heavy gold was infused with divine quintessence. But it would have suggested safer actions, which, had they been taken, would have led to simpler ends.

“That is a very remarkable thing, your Tsarish Majesty,” said Isaac, “and explains much that until this moment has been obscured from me.”

The front door of the tavern was kicked open. A huge man was standing there.

All went black, which Daniel, given his age, and his level of anxiety, was inclined to put down as resulting from the sort of devastating neurological event that was normally followed in a few minutes or hours by massive swelling of the brain and death.

On second thought, he was perfectly fine. Saturn had gripped the edge of the table and flung it up in the air whilst rising to his feet. The table—twelve feet long, and a hundred pounds of thick fir deals—had flipped up to create a barrier between all those sitting on that side of it, and the tavern’s entrance. But only for an instant; then, as Newton might have predicted, gravity had its way, and the table fell edge-first to the floor. The number of toes broken on impact would be difficult to estimate, for it came down in between the two rows of men who had been sitting across from each other. Daniel looked down to see a quivering shaft, eight feet long if it was an inch, embedded in the tabletop. It had struck the table with such violence that its honed steel tip (for it seemed to be some sort of spear, or harpoon) had penetrated the entire thickness of the wood, and burst out the other side for an inch or two, creating a little wigwam of splinters lit from within by the gleam of the metal. Standing up (for everyone was getting to his feet) and bending forward a bit to see the other side, Daniel got a moment’s horrifying glimpse of a human head impaled and spiked to the table. Then he understood it was nothing more than Leibniz’s periwig. For the harpoon (it was clearly a harpoon) had passed through a narrow space between the two greatest brains in the world, albeit closer to Leibniz’s, so that it had snagged the outer bulwarks of his out-moded, double-wide wig, and stripped it clean off his pate. The missile would have hurtled over the table and straight into the Tsar’s chest if Saturn had not had the presence of mind to flip the table up.

So now there was a second awkward silence. The harpooneer was still standing in the doorway, in a deflated posture. His beard was almost as long as that of Solomon Kohan. One of his arms had been truncated near the elbow and enhanced with a prosthesis, which looked heavy.

“It is him,” cried Mr. Kikin, “Yevgeny the Raskolnik! Where is my bodyguard when finally I need him!?”

“You do not need him, sir,” said Saturn, stepping over the table, and reaching down to grip the shaft of the harpoon, “for as a long-time resident of Hockley-in-the-Hole, I take it as a personal affront that such incivility has been shown to our guest.” He jerked the harpoon-shaft free from its steel head, which was going to remain embedded in the table for a long time. “I do view it as a personal obligation to now stave in the head of this Yevgeny.” Saturn took a step towards the door, and Yevgeny took a step back, to get out in the clear and gain some melee-room; but Saturn’s attack was arrested when a hand even larger than his closed over the harpoon-staff, and took it from him. “Your willingness is duly noted by his Tsarish Majesty,” Kikin explained in a hurry, “but the conflict is strictly a Russians-versus-Russians sort of affair, most difficult to explain, and honor dictates that it be settled without em-broiling our gracious hosts. Pray be seated and talk amongst yourselves.” And he rushed out the door in pursuit of the Tsar.

Further developments were obscured by the crowd that gathered instantly around any conflict in this district, be it bulls vs. terriers or Tsars vs. Raskolniks. Out the window they could see only a lot of blokes’ backs. Owing to the exceptional height of the combatants, they were from time to time able to glimpse a whirling quarter-stave, a hurtling flail, or a spray of blood silhouetted against the sky. But for the most part the progress of the duel had to be guessed at from watching the spectators, who moved in curious sympathy with the combatants. In much the same way as a man playing at lawn-bowls will twist and lean his body this way and that, as if he could thereby influence the course of a ball that has already left his hand, so those fight-watchers, almost in unison, juked and jived their shoulders and pelvises this way and that as they saw an opportunity to strike a blow, or cringed, smarted, and groaned when one was struck.

Saturn had been quite let down when Peter had disarmed him and gone forth into the fray. He did not recover for a minute or so; then, bewitched by the eldritch sympathy that conjoined all of the spectators, he squared his shoulders and headed for the exit, saying: “It has been great fun having the Tsar here incognito, but I suppose it was inevitable that word would get out and that this sort of thing would start to happen.”

Of the group who’d been sitting round the table, the only ones now left were Daniel, Isaac, Leibniz, and (in the corner, a bit removed from the others) Solomon Kohan. The table itself, of course, was still resting on one edge.

“Had I not heard it direct from the Tsar,” said Isaac to Daniel, “I could never have credited such a conceit: that, after all that has passed between us—”

“All that has passed between me and you, Isaac, is as nothing compared against the doings and machinations and skullduggery attending the damned gold. As to myself, I no longer give a fig where it goes. I would have been happy to give it all to you, until a few hours ago, for I phant’sied you were the only man on earth who knew of it, or cared.”

“And what has changed so much in the last few hours?” Isaac asked, quite shocked.

“There is now, in the Ointment, not merely a Fly, but a Praying Mantis,” said Daniel, nodding in the direction of the Peter-melee, “and one equipped with a mind that is excellent, not only by the standards of Mantises, but of men. He has claimed the Solomonic Gold. I am sorry.”

Daniel now gave a few moments’ thought to whether he should try to introduce Solomon, and how; but Isaac had got to his feet and stalked away. As Isaac went out the tavern-door he brushed past a chap who was coming in. Though this was not the most noble person who had ever set foot in the establishment (an honor that would have to go to Peter, or—who knows?—Solomon), he was unquestionably the best-dressed, and identifiable, from a thousand yards, as a courtier. Daniel, pent up behind the table, waved one arm in the air until he got the attention of the newcomer, who approached, looking befuddled. “Was that—?”

“Sir Isaac Newton? Yes. Daniel Waterhouse at your service.”

“Frightfully sorry to intrude,” said the courtier, “but word has reached the Household that an Important Man has come to London incognito.”

“It is true.”

“From Muscovy, ’tis said.”

“Also true.”

“The Lady of said Household is deathly ill. On her behalf, I have come to greet the said Gentleman, and to observe the requisite formalities.”

Daniel nodded out the window toward the melee. “As we say in Boston: get in line.”

“Look for the chap in the sable hat,” said Leibniz in French, “that is the chamberlain, you may take it up with him.”

The courtier bowed and left.

“As may be obvious,” Leibniz said, “my coming to London was brought about by force majeure, and was not part of any coherent plan. But as long as I am here, I thought I might stay on a bit, and try to patch matters up with Newton.”

“Then I am sorry to tell you,” Daniel said, “that your timing could not have been worse, for this matter of the gold will make it all much more complicated than you appreciate.”

He was afraid he would now have to enter into discussion of Alchemy; but Leibniz nodded and said, “I knew a gentleman in Leipzig, also very interested in this gold.”

“The heavy gold is of great political importance here, in that it could mean the difference between Newton’s surviving a Trial of the Pyx, or not.” And here he was forced to explain a great deal concerning Jack the Coiner, Bolingbroke, and the Clubb.

On balance, Leibniz seemed to take it as good news: “It sounds as if this difficulty can be cleared up, then. If this deal that you negotiated with Jack goes through as planned, Newton shall get what he requires to survive the Trial of the Pyx; and if not, why, how difficult can it possibly be to track down this gang of coiners when Newton, Waterhouse, and Leibniz are numbered among the thief-takers, and when two of the master-criminals—Édouard de Gex and Yevgeny the Thief-taker—have recently been slain in brawls?” For it was plain that the melee outside was over, and if the Tsar had lost, they probably would have heard about it by now.

“I find it difficult to believe, Gottfried, that, at this point in your career, what you really want to do is hang around the worst parts of London pursuing a band of criminals.”

“All right, I admit it’s only a pretext.”

“What then is your real reason?”

“I would attempt, one last time, to attain some reconciliation with Newton, and to settle the calculus dispute in some way that is not squalid.”

“A much sounder and nobler motive,” Daniel said. “Now, let me explain to you why it shall not work, and why you should simply go home.” And then he did, against his better judgment, discourse of Alchemy for a little while, explaining that Newton’s desire to control the Solomonic Gold arose not simply out of a practical need to survive the Trial of the Pyx but out of a quest to obtain the Philosophick Mercury and the Philosopher’s Stone.

But it was to no avail. It only confirmed Leibniz’s desire to remain in London. “If what you are saying is true, Daniel, it means that the root of the problem is a philosophical confusion on Newton’s part. And as I need not explain to you, it is the same confusion that underlies our disputes in the realm of Natural Philosophy.”

“On the contrary, Gottfried, I think that the question of who invented the calculus first is very much one of the who-did-what-to-whom type; a what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it sort of affair.”

“Daniel, it is true, is it not, that Newton kept his calculus work secret for decades?”

Daniel assented, very grudgingly. He was perfectly aware that to admit to any premise in a conversation with Leibniz would lead to a Socratic bear-trap banging shut on his leg a few minutes later.

“Who started the Acta Eruditorum, Daniel?”

“You, and that other chap. Listen, I stipulate that Newton tends to hide his work while you are very forward in publishing yours.”

“And hiding one’s results—restricting them to dissemination among a tiny fraternity—is a characteristic of what group?”

“The Esoteric Brotherhood.”

“Otherwise known as—?”

“Alchemists,” Daniel snapped.

“So the priority dispute would never have arisen if Sir Isaac Newton were not thoroughly infected with the the mentality of Alchemy.”

“Granted,” Daniel sighed.

“So it is a philosophical dispute. Daniel, I am an old man. I’ve not been in London since 1677. What are the chances I shall ever return? And Newton—who has never set foot outside of England—will not come to me. I shall not have another opportunity to meet with him. I will remain in London incognito—no one need never know I was here—and find some way to engage Newton in Philosophick discourse and help him out of the labyrinth in which he has wandered for so many years. It is a labyrinth without a roof, affording a clear view of the stars and the moon, which he understands better than any man; but behold, when Newton lowers his gaze to what is near to hand, he finds himself trapped and a-mazed in dark serpentine ways.”

Daniel gave up. “Then consider yourself a member of our Clubb,” he said. “You have my vote. Neither Kikin nor Orney shall dare with-old his support from a savant whose pate still glows with the knuckle-prints of Peter the Great. Newton would doubtless vote against you. But he came to a separate peace with the Clubb’s quarry a few evenings since, and no longer has any reason to attend our meetings.”

YEVGENY THE RASKOLNIK had fallen like a tree in the dust of Hockley-in-the-Hole. From the looks of things he had given a fine account of himself. In this posture, viz. lying on his back, his face to the sky and framed in the iron-gray burst of his hair, it was obvious that he must be close to sixty years old. Had he been closer to Peter’s age (the Tsar was forty-two) and in possession of both of his arms, the fight might have gone differently. As it was, Daniel could only interpret this as a spectacular form of suicide. He could not help but wonder whether Yevgeny knew about today’s transfer of the gold from Minerva, and had somehow taken the notion into his head that, as a result, his time in the world was finished.

“This was an odd bloke, who was loyal to Jack for many years, but went his own way in recent years, and tried to burn the Tsar’s new ships in Rotherhithe even as he was conniving with Jack to invade the Tower and sully the Pyx,” Daniel explained to Leibniz. “He was a great villain. But it is a shame to see him, or anyone, lying thus unattended.” At that moment, though, he spied Saturn approaching, with a few lads behind him and an empty wagon.

Daniel, Leibniz, and Solomon caught up with Peter and his entourage at Clerkenwell Court, just as they were mounting up to travel back to Rotherhithe. Daniel sent with them a note to Mr. Orney, giving him the news that the incendiary who had attacked his shipyard was dead. Leibniz took his leave of the Tsar, and Solomon promised to rejoin the party later at Orney’s. For it would take a few days to inspect and take delivery of the new ships, and to man them; then they would sail directly into combat against the Swedes in the Baltic. Then the Tsar and his company departed.

Daniel did not know why, but he now felt more energetic than at any time in the last few weeks. Perhaps that was what made a Tsar a Tsar: the ability to move those around him to great exertions. Perhaps the sight of the dead Yevgeny had reminded Daniel, as if he needed it, that he should not live forever. Or perhaps it was a simple desire to get the Solomonic Gold moving, to get it out of his possession as fast as he could. Others who toiled in the Court of Technologickal Arts seemed to feel likewise, for suddenly—after having avoided the place for nearly a week, because of Whig/Tory strife and Hanging-shenanigans—they began to show up and pry the planks off the fronts of their little workshops around the Court and heave the dust-cloths off their machines. Saturn came home, having seen to the transfer of Yevgeny’s body to a Russian church somewhere, and by sundown the Court was in full production. They rolled, cut, and weighed the largest batch of plates they had ever made in a single day. Then Daniel pressed half a dozen idle but relatively sober Mohawks into service as escorts, and they took the plates down the banks of the Fleet to Bridewell.

The very first cargo unloaded from Minerva upon her arrival on Thursday had been the paper cards on which Daniel had, over the course of a dozen years’ toil at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, written out the tables of the Logick Mill. These had already been forwarded to the card-punching workshop in Bridewell, which now sported half a dozen organs.

“It’s all right,” insisted Hannah Spates, upon being rousted from bed, “all the girls are accustomed to working nights anyway.” And so presently the shop was alight, and alive, with Hannah and five other nimble-fingered girls working the keys of the organs, and several pairs of big strumpets spelling each other on the bellows, fueled by beer from a barrel that Saturn fetched from a brewery across the ditch in Black Fryars. Some of the cards were punched even before he returned with this enhancement, and a good many more after—though Daniel insisted that the six women at the keys must remain dry. The entire batch was finished before three in the morning, and the banker William Ham, who’d been abducted by a Mohawk raiding-party from his bed in the city, did the sums, and weighed the cards and the bits that had been punched out of them, to the evident satisfaction of Solomon Kohan. The Jew had watched all with the keenest interest, but occasionally scowled at those aspects of the operation that looked as if they might be vulnerable to theft or embezzlement.

Daniel now presented him with a tiny purse sewn of the finest kid. It was no larger than a walnut, but plumped heavily in the palm of the hand, like a globule of quicksilver. “These are the tiny disks punched from the cards by the organs,” Daniel explained. Solomon nodded; he had already observed how these motes of gold were harvested from the machines and weighed by Mr. Ham. “As a rule we take these back and melt them down to make more card-stock. Tonight I make an exception and give them to you, Monsieur Kohan, as a memento of your visit to London, and a token of my esteem.” Solomon clapped the wee purse between his hands and accepted the gift with a bow.

“Now,” Daniel continued, “if you do not mind staying awake a little longer, you may see our provisions for keeping the finished plates safe until they are ready to be shipped to St. Petersburg.”

Solomon said he didn’t mind, so they loaded the chest of new plates into an open wagon and drove it through the streets of London, which were deserted save for the circulation of Vault-wagons to and from the brink of Fleet Ditch. Through Ludgate in the shadow of St. Paul’s they entered into the city, and Daniel told the story of riding past Old St. Paul’s, before the Fire, at the height of the Plague, when the City had been as empty and quiet as it was tonight, and the doomed church surrounded by a rampart of half-buried corpses. Presently they came out of the churchyard onto Cheapside and trundled east to the threshold of the money-district where the way forked into several streets: Threadneedle, Cornhill, and Lombard. They chose Threadneedle, and went up but a short distance to the fabrique of the Bank of England.

After a brief conversation with William Ham, the night porter suffered them to enter, and even offered to relieve Saturn of the burden in his arms: a strangely heavy locked chest. Saturn politely declined. William Ham dismissed the porter and sent him back to his bed. Lanthorns were distributed. Monsieurs Kohan, Waterhouse, Hoxton, and Ham moved through the Bank in their own pool of light, quickly leaving behind the parts of the establishment that looked like a bank (finished rooms with windows and furniture) and descending into its cellar.

By no stretch of the imagination could this be understood as a proper and rational basement. The ground under the Bank was a foam of cavities, some recent, some ancient, but mostly ancient. Most were connected to at least one other. This made it possible to navigate through the foam without resorting to shovels and blasting-powder, provided only that one understood the graph of their connexions. This was a job for a banker if ever there was one. Mr. Ham changed direction incessantly, but gave them all some reassurance by only rarely stopping to think, and only once backtracking. Anyone who had even a layman’s knowledge of structures could see at a glance that, over the ages, more than one building had been erected on this site, and many a builder had stayed up late at night worrying about whether the foam could support it. The diverse vaults, arches, timbers, pilings, footings, and rubble-walls that threw back the light of their lanthorns, and forced William Ham into catastrophic reversals, were what those builders had effected when they had gotten worried enough. The timbered tunnels, linteled doorways, and arched passageways through which William conducted them were evidence that other builders had gambled that the inter-locking foundation-works were strong enough, and would not give way if judiciously undermined.

“It is just the sort of hidden mare’s nest about which one has bad dreams when putting one’s money in a Bank,” Saturn reflected, at a moment when he and Daniel were several convolutions behind Mr. Ham and Monsieur Kohan. But a moment later they caught up to find William Ham looking a bit huffy. He was directing their attention to a Gothik arch sealed off by a new portcullis of iron bars. Pyramidal beams of lanthorn-light, shining through the interstices, careered around the space on the other side. Slivers of gold and silver winked between the planks of crates. “The inherited complexities of the property,” said Mr. Ham, “are, as you can see, giving way to a steady programme of rationalization. Where weaknesses are found, they are made strong. Several entire chambers have been infilled. Where sound vaults are discovered, they are fortified, as here.” Mr. Ham then took them on a lengthy detour intended to bolster these and other assertions with evidence visual and anecdotal. By this point Daniel could no more have made his way out to the street than he could have balanced the Bank’s accounts on his fingers. But he did feel that they were on average descending, for the air got damper and colder as they went, and the architecture changed. There was less wood, and what there was of it was rotten, and being replaced by masonry. They passed through a Gothik stratum into a Romanesque, or perhaps Roman—boundaries were ambiguous, as the site might have gone unchanged for half a millennium after the Romans had pulled out. Evidence of dampness was all round, though actual standing water was rare. It looked, in other words, as though they had found a way to channel groundwater and drain it out of the place—probably to Walbrook, a local creek that was famous because, at some point after the Fall of Rome, it had gone missing.

They came at some length to a chamber, sealed by a massive ironbound door, which William unlocked with a key big enough to double as a bludgeon should the Bank come under attack. It was large for a subterranean vault, small for a parish church. Like a church, it had an aisle up the center, which had been made useful as a gutter. A trickle of groundwater two fingers wide meandered through crevices between close-set paving-stones. To either side of the aisle was a raised platform, also paved. Crates, lock-boxes, and money-bags had been piled up on these. William Ham led them up to the far end of the room, where the platforms gave way to a clear open space, and the trickle of aisle-water disappeared into a hole in the floor. He identified an open space at the end of a platform, and by a gesture indicated that Saturn should set the chest down there. Saturn did; but Solomon did not witness it, as he was inspecting the room.

Solomon shoved a sack of money aside to make a clear space on the platform, into which he spat, and then rubbed the saliva with a thumb until he had smeared away the patina of dust and congealed slime to reveal, in the light of Daniel’s lanthorn, a few chips of colored stone set into the surface. A glimpse of a Mosaic.

“Roman?” Daniel guessed. Solomon nodded.

“As I think I have now demonstrated, the plates will be perfectly safe in this sealed vault until the time has come to ship them to St. Petersburg,” William said to Solomon, as the ancient Jew came up to join them at the head of the chamber. But Solomon was staring at the floor. “Pray lend me your key,” he said, holding out a hand.

William Ham did not like this proposition at all. But he could come up with no reason to refuse. He placed it in Solomon’s hand. Solomon squatted down, felt the floor with his fingertips for some moments, then inserted the key’s handle—which looked a bit like a very ornate trowel—into the drain-hole. A bit of exploratory wiggling and prying led to the sudden appearance of a large crescent-moon-shaped crevice. Saturn stepped forward. “Careful!” Solomon continued, “it will be a well.”

“How do you know?”

“This is a Temple of Mithras, constructed by Roman soldiers,” Solomon said, “and every such temple contained a well.”

Saturn got his fingers into the crevice and pulled. A disk perhaps two feet in diameter came up out of the floor. It had been fashioned recently out of heavy planks. A lanthorn, let down into the cavity, revealed a well-shaft, lined with stones all the way down to the level of the water, which was perhaps three fathoms below.

“Your workmen found the well, and covered it,” said Solomon. “But more for their own safety, than the Bank’s security. I would wager the contents of this Bank that I could now leave the premises and meet you out in the street in half an hour’s time without passing out through the building’s front door.”

“That is a bet I could not accept, even if the money were mine to wager,” said William Ham, “for I can smell and feel the current of air rising up from the shaft as well as you.”

“Indeed, the well has a side-channel!” exclaimed Saturn, who was on his stomach with head and shoulders thrust down into the shaft. “About halfway down. I have a mind to fetch one of the workmen’s ladders and investigate!”

This was daft. But once Saturn had proposed, none could resist, it. Ladders were all over the place. They stabbed one down the well and planted it on the floor of the side-channel that Saturn had noticed. He went down first, and reported that the masons of the Temple of Mithras had carried out their duties well.

“As how could they not,” Solomon returned, “for Mithras was the god of contracts.”

“The god of contracts!?” exclaimed William Ham.

“Indeed,” said Solomon, “and so it is a good thing for you that you have founded your Bank on his Temple.”

“This Mithras does not appear in any Pantheon I have ever heard of.”

“He was not a god of Olympus but one that the Greeks borrowed from the Persians, who had in their turn borrowed him from Hindoostan. From the Greeks his cult spread to the Romans, and became popular around the hundredth year of what you call Anno Domini. Or, as I would put it, some years after the destruction of the Temple of Solomon. Especially among soldiers, such as garrisoned Londinium, along the banks of the Walbrook.”

Solomon had been clambering onto the ladder as he spoke.

“You aren’t going down there?”

“Mr. Ham, I was sent here by the Tsar to investigate the Bank’s security,” said Solomon, “and inspect it I shall!”

Daniel followed Solomon down the ladder. Three of them now squatted together in a vaulted tunnel that ran off into the earth, sloping gently down toward the well so that it, too, acted as a drain. William Ham was left to sit sentry in the Temple of Mithras, and to run for help if they never emerged. But after a very brief shuffle down the tunnel they sensed space above their heads, and found stone steps, which turned to the right and led them down to the level of the groundwater. A creek, perhaps eight feet in breadth, ran sluggishly off into the dark, wending round pilings, moles, and foundations one could only assume supported buildings up on the street. In rainy weather they might have had to stop and turn back. But it was the first day of August and the level did not rise above their ankles as long as they stayed along the side of the channel. So they ventured downstream, shining their lights on walls and foundations as they went, and speculating as to which belonged to which building.

“During the Plague,” Daniel said, “my uncle Thomas Ham—William’s father—enlarged the cellar of his goldsmith’s shop, which cannot be more than a stone’s throw from us. He discovered a Roman mosaic, and diverse pagan coins and artifacts. My wife in Boston is wearing one of them in her hair.”

“What did the mosaic depict?” Solomon asked.

“Some figures that called to mind Mercury. Mr. Ham styled it a Temple of Mercury and made of it a good omen. But it contained other images that would call his opinion into question—”

“Ravens?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Carox, the raven, was, to Persians, a messenger of the Gods—”

“As Mercury was to the Romans.”

“Indeed. The worshippers of Mithras believed that as the soul descended from the sphere of the fixed stars to be incarnated on Earth, it passed through all of the planetary spheres along the way, and was influenced by each in turn. In passing through the sphere of Venus the soul became amorous, and so on. The innermost sphere, and the last to wreak its influence on the soul, was that of Mercury or Corax. The practitioners of this cult believed that as the soul prepared for death, and a return to the sphere of the fixed stars, it must reverse that transmigration, shedding first the trappings of Mercury-Corax, then those of Venus, et cetera, and finally—”

“Saturn?” guessed Saturn.

“Indeed.”

“I am honored to be closest to the fixed stars, and least worldly of vices.”

“Accordingly, there were seven ranks. For each rank was a chamber—always subterranean. Your uncle’s cellar was that of Mercury-Corax, where new initiates were taken in. Later they would move through a gate or passage to the next chamber, which would have been decorated with images of Venus, and so on.”

“What was the big chamber under the Bank?”

“You shall be pleased to know it was the chamber of Saturn, for the highest-ranking members,” Solomon said.

“I did feel wondrously at home in the place!”

“If it is true that we are passing the foundations of the Ham goldsmith shop,” said Solomon, “then we are traversing the hierarchy in reverse order, following the same course as souls coming down from the Cœlestial Sphere to be incarnated in the World.”

“Funny that,” Daniel said, “for I have just recognized the name of an old friend of mine, who’d be pleased to know where his work stood in the hierarchy.”

They had stopped before a pile of relatively new stone-work, where heavy blocks had been laid to repair some ancient foundation, and to make it ready to support a new building. For the most part it was an uninterrupted bulwark of massive stones; but in one place a long slab had been laid like a lintel across a gap between two others, creating a low squarish opening through which the cellar on the other side could drain if need be. Carved on that lintel in spidery Roman letters was:

CHRISTOPHER WREN A.D. 1672

“This is the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook,” said Daniel.

“No better place for souls to enter the world,” Saturn mused.

They crawled up the drain—a tight fit—and emerged in the church’s tombs. The bell was tolling above. “A grim birth,” Daniel said. It took him a few moments to get his bearings, but then he led Saturn and Solomon up a stair to a room at the back of the church. They were surprised to see daylight coming in through windows—but not half so surprised as the vicar’s wife was to see them. Her eyes were swollen half-shut from weeping, her cries of terror were relatively subdued, and her efforts to chase the muddy interlopers out of the building were desultory. No service was in progress, yet, strangely, many of the pews were occupied by persons who had come to do nothing but sit and pray in silence. Daniel, Saturn and Solomon stumbled out into the half light of early morning. A man was shuffling down Walbrook Street, headed for the Thames, bonging a hand-bell and shouting: “The Queen is dead, long live the King!”

Book 8

The System of
the World

It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

—NEWTON, Principia Mathematica

Marlborough House

MORNING OF WEDNESDAY, 4 AUGUST 1714

’Tis a notion in the pamphlet shops that Whiggish libels sell best, so industrious are they to propagate scandal and falsehood.

—FROM A LETTER TO ROBERT HARLEY, 1ST EARL OF OXFORD, QUOTED IN SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, Marlborough: His Life and Times, VOL. VI

THE LEVÉE, OR RITUALIZED, semi-public getting-
out-of-bed-in-the-morning, was an invention of Louis XIV, and like many of the Sun King’s works was frowned upon by all right-minded Englishmen, who knew of it only from lurid yarns told of Versailles court-fops’ prostituting their daughters to wangle an invitation to hold a candlestick or carry a shirt at a levée of the Sun King. This was all Daniel knew of the subject as of nine of the clock on the morning of August 4th, when a messenger knocked him up at Crane Court to inform him that he, Daniel, was one of half a dozen who had been summoned to take part in the Duke of Marlborough’s first levée in London, which was going to commence in an hour’s time.

“But my own levée is not yet finished,” Daniel might have answered, wiping porridge from an unshaven chin. Instead he told the messenger to wait downstairs and that he would be along presently.

Marlborough House was invested by a crowd of several hundred Englishmen, the giddy-tired residue of an ecstatic Mobb that had sung the Duke through the streets of London yesterday: a Roman triumph thrown together on the spur of the moment by disorderly plebeians.

The Duke and his Duchess had reached Dover late on the 2nd. Yesterday had been devoted to an all-but-Royal progress through Rochester and other burgs lining the road to Londinium. So many of the Whig Quality had turned out to ride in the procession, and so many commoners had lined Watling Street, as to rouse suspicions in Daniel’s mind that the rumors spread for so long by the Tories were true: Marlborough was the second coming of Cromwell. Now, to his very first levée, he had invited Daniel, who could still remember sitting on Cromwell’s knee when he was a little boy.

Next to St. James’s Palace, which was getting to look like a heap of architectural elements flung into a bin, Marlborough House shaped up as a proper building. The fence around its forecourt was a giant iron strainer, stopping everyone except for Daniel. The excluded had formed drifts of flesh on the other side, and watched eagerly, faces wedged between bars. As Daniel was helped down out of the carriage, and walked to the front door, he wondered how many of the crowd knew who he was, and of his ancient connexion to the terrible Puritan warlord. Some of them had to be Tory spies, who would mark Daniel, and note the connexion instantly. Daniel guessed that he had been summoned here to send a message of a vaguely threatening nature to all Torydom.

Vanbrugh had been remodeling the place in the expectation that the Duke would settle in for a long stay. Much of this work was still in its most brute stages and so Daniel had to be conducted under scaffolding and between piles of bricks and of timbers by a member of Marlborough’s household. But as they got deeper into the building, it became more finished. The Duke’s bedchamber had been done first, and the renovations propagated outwards from there. Before the Grinling Gibbons custom-carved double doors, a maid handed Daniel a large silver bowl full of steaming water, swathed in towels so it would not burn his hands. “Set it down beside my lord,” he was instructed, and the doors were pulled open.

Like a beetle on a glacier the Duke of Marlborough sat in a chair in the white immensity of his bedchamber. Next to him was a table. The stubble on his scalp was dense: obviously it was Shaving-Day, and high time for it; as everyone had now heard, the Duke and Duchess had been held back in Ostend by contrary winds for a whole fortnight. Daniel, knowing no more of levées than any other Englishman, feared for a moment that he was about to be asked to lather the Duke’s skull and scrape off two weeks’ growth. But then he noted a valet standing by, stropping a razor, and understood, with immeasurable relief, that the blade-work would be left to a trained artisan.

Of the half-dozen who had been summoned to the levée, Daniel was the last to arrive—this much he could see even though his eyes were dazzled by August sunshine glancing off many tons of new plasterwork. So lofty was the ceiling that a Natural Philosopher could be forgiven for thinking that the festoons and friezes up along the ceiling had been carved from natural accumulations of snow and ice.

The Duke was in a dressing-gown of something that gleamed and whispered, and his neck had been swaddled in miles of linen in preparation for the shaving. It was as far from Puritan severity as one could possibly imagine. If there were any Tories without, on Pall Mall, who phant’sied that Daniel had come to pass the torch to the next Cromwell, a moment’s glimpse into this room would have extinguished their fears. If Marlborough had come back in triumph to take over the country, he’d do so not as a military dictator but as a Sun King.

Marlborough half rose from his chair and bowed to Daniel—who nearly dropped the bowl. The other five participants in the levée—candle-holders, shirt-bearers, wig-powderers, mostly Earls or better—bowed even deeper. Daniel could still see little, but he could hear snickers as he staggered the last few yards.

“Dr. Waterhouse does not yet know about what was found in Baron von Bothmar’s lock-box to-day,” the Duke hazarded.

“I confess utter ignorance, my lord,” Daniel said.

“The Hanoverian ambassador, Bothmar, brought with him a lock-box that was to be opened upon the death of Queen Anne. It contained orders from his majesty as to how the Realm was to be administered until such time as his majesty could come here to receive the crown, orb, and sceptre,” explained the Duke. “This morning it was opened in the presence of the Council, and read out. The King has named twenty-five Regents to act in his stead until he arrives. You, Dr. Waterhouse, are one of the twenty-five.”

“Bollocks!”

“Oh, it is quite true. And so when we bow to you, my lord, it is to acknowledge your authority as a Regent. You, and your two dozen colleagues, are the closest we have, just now, to a Sovereign.”

Daniel had never been addressed before as “my lord,” and certainly had never guessed that the first person ever to do so would be the Duke of Marlborough. It required some presence of mind not to spill the bowl. But he brought it home, with the help of a guiding hand from the valet, and stepped back, his formal duties completed. The valet rolled a sponge into the bowl, wrung it out, and placed it on the Duke’s head like a soppy crown. The Duke blinked a rivulet out of his eye, elevated his chin, and commenced going through some papers that were on his lap—for apparently one of the attractions of the levée was watching the great man read his mail.

“Grub Street must be ten miles long now,” the Duke remarked, tossing aside one newspaper after another.

“You may soon wish it were a good deal shorter.”

“As may you, Dr. Waterhouse—your new prominence shall make you a Butt for innumerable Shafts.” Marlborough had now cocked his head back so that soap would not run into his eyes, which placed him in the odd position of not being able to see into his own lap. He was groping through the papers there, golden cuff-tassels flailing, occasionally holding something up at arm’s length. “Ah,” he announced, finding today’s Lens, “I give you this, Dr. Waterhouse. Just now, I was reading it aloud to these gentlemen, as we waited for the late arrival—you may read it yourself.”

“Thank you, my lord, I am sure ’twas vastly more amusing than having me here on time.”

“On the contrary, my lord, it is we who ought to amuse you,” said the Duke, and jerked in his chair as the razor planed off a ridge of scar-tissue. His noggin had acquired more than its share of high and low relief as he had overseen the deaths of several hundred thousand English, French, and other soldiers in the wars against Louis XIV. They now lurked below a fortnight’s stubble like shoals under a murky tide, unseen Hazards to the blade’s Navigation.

“What is it I am to read, my lord?” Daniel inquired, reaching out to accept the proffered newspaper.

Marlborough’s eyes—which were uncommonly large and expressive—strayed for a moment to Daniel’s hand. People did not, as a rule, bother to look at Daniel’s hands—nay, neither the left nor the right. They had the full complement of fingers, they had not been branded in the Old Bailey, and they were unadorned—as a rule. But today Daniel wore, on his right hand, a simple ring of gold. Never having worn jewelry before, he was astonished at how this object caught people’s attention.

“A Meditation upon Power,” Marlborough answered, “second page.”

“It sounds meet, if I am as powerful as you say. Pray, who wrote it?”

“That’s the thing,” said Marlborough, “the extraordinary thing. There is a chap who goes by the nom de plume of Peer—”

“He wrote it!?”

“No, but he has discovered in the Clink a Blackamoor, a most remarkable specimen. He is not, of course, a sentient being—but he possesses the singular gift of being able to write and speak exactly as if he were one.”

“I have met him,” Daniel said. His eyes had finally adjusted to where he could make out the byline DAPPA. He glanced up at the Duke, then glanced away, as a thick bead of blood was coming out in front of his right ear and coursing along his jaw-line to stain the linen beneath his chin. The Duke jerked again. “Have a care, sirrah, I did not come hither to perish of lockjaw.”

Daniel scanned the other five attendees, who favored him with excruciating smiles of a sort he’d not seen directed his way since he had been semi-important in the court of James II.

The Duke was bald again. Two valets were hovering behind him with rags, occasionally darting in to stanch gore. The Duke found a hand-mirror, held it up for a moment, and grimaced. “My word,” he said, “is this a shaving or a trepanning?” He set the mirror down hastily, as if a lifetime of musket- and sword-battles had hardly prepared him for this. There was a lot of mail in his lap—more than Daniel received per decade—and it was taking him some time to find what he was looking for. Daniel studied the Duke curiously. John Churchill had been the most beautiful young man in England, perhaps even in Christendom. The divine unfairness endured even now unto the Duke’s sixty-fifth year. He was old, doughy, bald, and bleeding, but he actually did have a noble countenance—far from being true of all nobles—and his eyes were as large and beautiful as ever, unmarred by the sagging flesh and writhen brows that so oft made old Englishmen fearsome to behold.

“Here it is!” he announced, and whacked a letter against his knee a few times, as if this were necessary to get its words stacked up in the correct order. “From your fellow Regent!”

“My lord Ravenscar was also on Bothmar’s list?” Daniel asked, for he had already spotted the handwriting and the seal.

“Oh my word, yes,” said Marlborough, “odds-on favorite to be the next Lord Treasurer, you know. For who knows more about the workings of Bank, Mint, ’Chequer, and ’Change than Ravenscar?” He scanned the letter from Roger. “I shall not read it all,” he assured them. “Greetings, congratulations, et cetera—and he invites me and Mrs. Churchill to attend a soirée at his house on the first of September.” He lifted his eyes from the page and gazed at Daniel, a trace befuddled. “Do you think it is decent to have a party so soon after the Queen’s death, my lord?”

“A month of mourning shall have elapsed, as of September the first, my lord,” Daniel tried, “and I’ve no doubt it shall be a tasteful affair, duly restrained—”

“He promises right here to make his volcano erupt!” This elicited titters from the hitherto silent Five.

“Whilst mourning our late Queen, we must not omit to celebrate our new King, my lord.”

“Oh, well, since you put it that way, I do believe I will attend,” said the Duke. “I’ve never seen the famous Volcano, you know.”

“It is said to be worth the trip, my lord.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. I shall post an answer presently to the Temple of Vulcan. But if you should happen to see my lord Ravenscar, perhaps at one of the meetings of your Regency Council, you will tell him, won’t you?”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“Splendid! Now, may I arise, or shall it be necessary to cauterize my wounds?”

With the head-shaving, Daniel’s direct relevance to the leveé had ended. The Duke shifted his attention to others, whose roles it was to present him with shirt, wig, sword, &c. Each of these phases led to some chit-chat that was of essentially no interest to Daniel. Indeed, much of it was incomprehensible, because it was about people whom Daniel didn’t know, or whose identities he could only guess at, as the Duke was referring to them by their Christian names, or in even more oblique ways. Nevertheless, Daniel had the clear sense it would be bad form to excuse himself. He was offered a chair on account of his age, and accepted it. Time passed. His eye drifted to the newspaper.

A MEDITATION UPON POWER
by Dappa

The Liberty of the Clink is as one with all of GREAT BRITAIN in lamenting the passage of our beloved Queen; the Prisoners have swopped their light, gay summer restraints for heavy mourning-fetters, and changed their gray rags for black, and all night long I am kept awake by moans and wails from the dungeons beneath, which proves that the inhabitants of the place are as sensible of the Tragedy, as my lord B—.

A week ago, that man was at the summit of the great mound of corpses that is Politics, and was accounted by many the most powerful in all the land. Since the Queen’s demise, we hear nothing from him, or of him. What has become of B—?

It is an idle question, for no one cares what has become of that man. When people ask it, what they really mean is: what has become of B—’s Power? For a week ago he was agreed to have a great amount of it. To-day it seems he has none. Where has it got to? Many would fain know, for more men desire power than desire gold.

From Herr Leibniz we have heard that there is a Property of bodies called vis viva, and another called the quantité d’avancement, both of which are conserved through all collisions and transformations of a system. The first is equal to the product of the mass and the square of the velocity, and the second is simply the product of the mass and the velocity. At the beginning of time the Universe was endowed with a certain fund of both, which neither waxes nor wanes with time, but is merely exchanged among bodies, like silver pennies in a market-place. Which leads one to ask: is Power like the vis viva, and the quantité d’avancement, i.e., is it conserved by the Universe? Or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next?

If Power is like stock-shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof, lately lost by B—, has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock-crashes, it never seems to turn up. But if Power is conserved, then B—’s must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say ’twas scooped up by my lord R—, who hid it under a rock, lest my lord M—come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any Power lost by a Tory, is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the People; but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the Clink for B—’s lost Power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many People in those dark salons.

I propose a novel Theory of Power, which is inspired by the lucubrations of Mr. Newcomen, the Earl of Lostwithiel, and Dr. Waterhouse on the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. As a Mill makes Flour, a Loom makes Cloth, and a Forge makes Steel, so, we are assured, this Engine shall make Power. If the Backers of this Device speak truly—and I’ve no reason to deprecate their honesty—it proves that Power is not a Conserved Quantity, for of such Quantities it is never possible to make more. The amount of Power in the world, it follows, is ever-increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of these Engines are built. A Man who hoards Power is therefore like a miser who sits on a heap of Coins, in a Realm where the Currency is being continually debased by production of more coins than the market can bear; so that what was a great Fortune when first he raked it together, insensibly becomes a slag-heap, and is found to be devoid of value, when at last he takes it to the market-place to be spent. Thus my lord B—and his vaunted Power-hoard. What is true of him is likely to be true of his lackeys, particularly his most base and slavish followers, such as MR. CHARLES WHITE. This varlet has asserted that he owns me. He phant’sies that to own a Man, is to have Power; yet he has got nothing by claiming to own me, while I, who was supposed to be rendered Powerless, am now writing for a Grub Street newspaper that is being perused by you, esteemed reader.

As the Duke of Marlborough got dressed and accessorized, he told various of the courtiers to shove off, which they did, with deep bows, and almost tearful gratitude for having been invited; and before the hour of noon, Daniel found himself alone in the bedchamber with the Duke, suddenly formidable in full snow-white periwig, and understated yet shockingly fashionable suit of clothes, and small-sword. They went for a stroll in a rose-garden outside the Duke’s bedchamber, which led to more conversation concerning roses than Daniel was really game for. Not that he didn’t like roses as much as the next chap; but to talk about them was to miss the point.

“I have accepted Ravenscar’s kind invitation,” the Duke finally said, “and moreover I have done so in the presence of those other five, who are among the worst gossips in London—so much so that Roger has probably got wind of it already. But there is a proviso to my acceptance, which I did not mention to them. Neither shall I write it in the very courteous note I’ll presently send to the Temple of Vulcan. I tell it privily to you, and rely upon you to convey it to him.”

“I am ready, my lord,” said Daniel, trying not to let his voice betray a certain here we go again weariness.

“Let me remind you of the agreement on which you and I shook hands, on the night of the Glorious Revolution, as we stood together on the causeway of the Tower.”

“I recollect it clearly, my lord, but there’s no harm in reviewing it.”

“I said I would be your friend if you would help me to understand, or at least to keep track of, the machinations of the Alchemists.”

“Indeed.”

“I flatter myself that I have been of service to you, as occasions warranted, in the twenty-five years since then,” said John Churchill. For now it seemed they were speaking not as Duke and Regent but as John and Daniel.

“Now that you mention it, it is a bit odd that my name turned up on Bothmar’s list.”

“I had many occasions, during and after the War, to sing the praises of certain Englishmen to the Electoral Prince,” John said, “and the high esteem in which you are held by Princess Caroline cannot have hurt your chances, either.”

“You have done the son of Drake unexpected honor, then,” Daniel said.

“Now, Daniel, since we made our compact, much has changed—Roger’s Juncto re-shaped the country. He placed the world’s leading Alchemist in charge of the Mint. That Alchemist is still there, and shows no sign of faltering. By some accounts he is diligent beyond compare. But reports have reached me concerning the Pyx, and such arcane and eldritch matters as the Solomonic Gold and the Philosophic Mercury and other such semi-occult doings as have no place in this the Eighteenth Century. Now that Anne is gone—may God rest her—and George is coming, I bear upon my shoulders the greatest imaginable responsibilities to help our new King—nay, our new Dynasty—understand what is going on in his Kingdom. I will ensure that the Mint is in the hands of officials sane and competent, and that the coinage is sound. Can Newton be trusted to run the Mint, Daniel? Will he run it as a mill for turning out disks of metal, or as a laboratory for Chiliastic researches? Is he a bloody sorcerer, Daniel? And if so, is he any good at it?”

The Temple of Vulcan

AN HOUR LATER

“WHAT DID YOU TELL HIM?” asked Roger, slightly more fascinated than aghast. He and Daniel were strolling in Roger’s rose-garden, which was ten times the size of Marlborough’s, though not so well located—Roger’s gardeners couldn’t nip over the fence and borrow a spade from the King of England’s.

“I fear I was a bit too evasive for the Duke’s taste,” Daniel answered, after pondering it for some moments. “I assured him that whatever Newton does, he does very, very well, hence if he is a sorcerer, he must be a right clever one.”

“Oh my lord,” Roger exclaimed, “this cannot have improved the Duke’s mood.”

“I don’t know. I believe I convinced him that Isaac is not a lunatick. That is no bad start.”

“But it is only a start. Hmm.”

“The point of the conversation, Roger, was not to condemn or exonerate Isaac. It was to send you a sort of warning.”

“I am ready.”

“Marlborough has accepted your invitation.”

“Yes, I had the news hours ago.”

“Consequently all the Quality will attend, whether you invite them or no.”

“I have already laid in supplementary help, to cope with party-crashers. Is that the warning? That lots of people will come to my party?” Roger’s attention had begun to wander, and his eyes lit on Daniel’s gold ring. His brow furrowed, his lips parted. Daniel interrupted before he could change the subject to jewelry.

“No. Marlborough is profoundly unhappy about all of the mysteries and controversies surrounding the Mint. He is going to call for a Trial of the Pyx around the time of the Coronation—a couple of months from now, probably—to get all of those coins out of the Pyx, and ensure that all of those minted under George shall be free from any taint. In the meantime, he wishes to see progress made toward the resolution of these Mint troubles. He wishes to feel confident about Newton. If the situation has not begun to improve as of September the first, he’ll not show up for your Party.”

“Oh, horrors!”

“The humiliation shall be exquisite, and conspicuous. All London shall know that you are in disgrace, and shall never be made Lord Treasurer, or even Lord Dogcatcher. The first of September shall, in other words, mark the first day of your retirement.”

After a suitably awe-full pause, and perhaps a few moments’ silent prayer, Roger boomed: “Then let us ready the Volcano!” He revolved about his walking-stick, turning his back on Daniel, and marched through the garden to the main house. It was a fine show of bravado; but Daniel got the sense that Roger did not want Daniel, or anyone else, to see his face for some moments. And so Daniel did not inspect Roger’s phizz too closely, but instead pretended to look at the plumbing of the Volcano.

And of its Maker; for MacDougall had removed one of the curved plates that made up the Volcano’s slopes, and set it aside, and shoved his head deep into the apparatus.

“Your arse-crack is showing, Mr. MacDougall,” Ravenscar shouted, “which I ever take as a sign of hard productive labor, in a man of your profession.”

The arse in question began to shimmy as MacDougall attempted to disengage. There were two thuds and a curse. Then a head, crowned with a torch-flame of embarrassingly red hair, appeared. MacDougall’s hair and cheeks were so red that everything near him looked dusky.

“MacDougall,” Daniel said.

“It is a pleasure to see you, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“Have you obtained the phosphorus yet?” Daniel asked.

“It’s as I told you the other day, sir—I don’t purchase it direct from the maker, but through a sort of go-between.”

“And have you placed your order with this go-between yet?” Roger demanded.

“Oh, yes, my lord. Did it yesterday.”

“Then go back to him and double it!” Roger commanded.

“Oh, I’m not certain they can make so much so fast, my lord!”

“Double it anyway, and if the Eruption of September the first is not the grandest ever, then the fault shall lie with our deficient phosphorus industry, and no man shall be able to claim that the Marquis of Ravenscar stinted or scrimped!”

“My lord, let’s see if they don’t rise to the challenge! I’ve a feeling they just might do it!”

“That is splendid, MacDougall,” Daniel said, “will you please join me at my Clubb to deliver your report in person?”

“Oh, Dr. Waterhouse! I should be honored!”

“Then do you gather your tools together and meet me and my lord in the front of the house when you are ready.”

Roger and Daniel departed the ballroom and circumvented the plashing fountain of Vulcan coming on Minerva’s thigh. “Where is the lovely pair to-day?” Daniel inquired, unable to get his eyes off the goddess.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Roger—a bit distracted himself.

“Catherine Barton, and her Body.”

“Ah. They are out shopping—the Body requires a new dress for the party.”

“Magnificent.”

“Say,” Roger said, “you have quite foxed me. Why are you taking MacDougall to your Clubb?”

“I know MacDougall well. He has proved most invaluable at the Court of Technologickal Arts. Most ingenious.”

“Very well, but what has he to do with your Clubb?”

They left the fountain behind and entered the part of the house that Daniel had designed: the original Temple of Vulcan, as it had been before the improvements of Hooke and Vanbrugh.

“The Infernal Devices used phosphorus,” Daniel said. “Ergo, the chaps who built them must have had dealings with local suppliers. MacDougall is now dealing with them too, thanks to you. This provides the Clubb with a new line of investigation. Mr. Kikin and Mr. Orney are very keen to pursue it.”

“But I thought you had struck a deal with Jack Shaftoe that would obviate the Clubb’s purpose.”

“We have not heard from Jack since he jumped off the back of your phaethon in the Hay Market a week ago, and, according to rumor, became embroiled at the Opera House—”

“Distasteful, that. Impaling Jesuits with ’cellos—not the done thing—I shall have to give him a sharp reprimand if he ever turns up.”

“Well, that is the question, isn’t it? Will Jack turn up? Isaac has already suggested that by jumping off the carriage before the transaction could be consummated, Jack forfeited anything he might have gained in the Black Dogg.”

“Newton has already spoken to me concerning the Black Dogg,” Roger confided. “He now maintains that everything said there, was said under duress—Jack had a sword, you didn’t—and may be considered null and void.”

“What think you, Roger?”

“I think that the Black Dogg deal was perfectly reasonable—if a bit over-generous to Jack—and so I find it disquieting that your Clubb is continuing to pursue him.”

“Because it might queer the deal, and lead to the Duke not showing up for your party, you mean.”

“Yes.” They had reached the anteroom of the Temple, and now stood where they could enjoy the breeze coming in the house’s open front door. They gazed down the steps like two priests of Vulcan taking a break from their sulphuric devotions.

“I cannot control Orney or Kikin,” Daniel pointed out, “and of course to manage Isaac is impossible. You might have to fire him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Marlborough is right, Roger. A sorcerer has no place at the Mint. It pains me to say for this, for Isaac is an old friend, and he makes good guineas. But he ought to be replaced with some chap who just wants to make coins.”

“That is all well and good, but I do not have the power to fire him.”

“Oh, really? You’re a Regent, aren’t you?”

“As are you, Daniel. Why don’t you fire him?”

“It may come to that.”

MacDougall emerged from the penetralia of the Temple, listing to starboard, as he carried a clanking tool-satchel in that hand. Sensing that the two Regents were embroiled in a State matter, he cringed and scurried out the door and did not check himself until he had dived into Daniel’s hackney out on Great Russell Street and pulled the door shut after him.

“How much does Churchill hate Alchemists?” Roger asked. “Can he ever trust Newton?”

“Here is what I told the Duke of Marlborough concerning Alchemy,” Daniel said, which brought Roger to attention. “It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently, in the subterranean places beneath the Bank, have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive. When we have stronger microscopes I should not be surprised to discover yet smaller and simpler organisms within those animalcules. And so I say that Alchemy shall not vanish, as I always hoped. Rather, it shall be encapsulated within the new System of the World, and become a familiar and even comforting presence there, though its name may change and its practitioners speak no more about the Philosopher’s Stone. It shall be gone from view but it shall continue to run along beneath, as the lost river Walbrook streams beneath the Bank of England.”

“Nice,” said Roger, “but did the Duke buy it?”

“Unknown,” said Daniel. “But I believe there is no harm in hedging our bets by continuing to investigate Jack, as we wait for the volcano to erupt.”

The Kit-Cat Clubb

AN HOUR LATER

“SPLENDID BAUBLE,” SAID MR. THREADER, elevating his nose so that he could peer through his half-glasses at Daniel’s hand. “I say, you’re not turning into a Fopp, are you?”

“If I’d known all the fuss it would create I would never have put it on. May I have my hand back, please?”

“Who’s the German?”

“Our newest member.”

“I must remind you, Dr. Waterhouse, that this Clubb is bound by rules. Admission of new members is governed by several pages of the Bylaws, which you would do well to familiarize yourself with before showing up with—”

“The Baron is a court philosopher of Hanover, very influential there—”

“Right. He’s in! What’s his name?”

“He is here incognito. Just pretend you know who he is.”

In an apt demonstration of the principle just expounded by Daniel, of systems encapsulated within systems, this claque of frustrated prosecutors had been swallowed up by the Kit-Cat Clubb. It was all because Newton had joined, and thereby endowed it with Mystery and Prestige. They met in a private room in the back, so that blokes like Saturn and MacDougall could take part. There was now a waiting list twenty names deep of men who wanted to join—none of whom had more than a vague idea of the Clubb’s purpose. The fact that a Baron from the court of Hanover had secretly jumped this queue, on the very same day that a different member had been named a Regent, was going to make them all frantic. The Clubb would have to begin meeting in the Temple of Mithras just to get some privacy.

“Being a Regent has changed you!” Leibniz remarked, eyeing the ring.

“This damned thing is a present from that Solomon Kohan,” Daniel confided.

“He does not strike me as the gift-giving type.”

“After our visit to Bridewell, I presented him with a small purse containing bits of gold punched out of the cards. A few days later this ring was delivered to me by a Jew who has a goldsmith’s shop along Lombard. With it was a note from Monsieur Kohan. He had the bits melted down and poured into a ring-mold. This is the result.”

“It seems very courteous of him,” Leibniz said.

“I agree.”

But before they could enter into speculation as to Monsieur Kohan’s real motives, that Silence fell over the room that heralded the arrival of Sir Isaac Newton. It was a different room, and a different meeting suddenly. Isaac made his way around shaking the hands of the Members and Guests: Mr. Kikin, Mr. Orney, Mr. Threader, Saturn, MacDougall, Leibniz, and finally Daniel. There was something markedly chilly in the way he looked at and spoke to Daniel. His greeting of Leibniz was warm by comparison. It was almost as if by some sorcery Isaac had listened in on the things Daniel had been saying about him earlier in the day.

“I must have a private word with my lord Regent,” Isaac announced to the Clubb.

Shortly he and Daniel were facing off across a small table in the main room of the Kit-Cat. The intensity with which Isaac stared at Daniel held at bay any glad-handing Kit-Catters who might have wanted to come over and congratulate the new Regent.

“It is but a week since we spoke to Jack the Coiner in the Black Dogg,” Isaac reminded him. “What are your intentions?”

“The Duke of Marlborough wants a Trial of the Pyx at the time of the Coronation,” Daniel said, and paused for a moment in case Isaac was going to have a stroke. Isaac flinched and colored but went on living. “In the absence of any communications from Mr. Shaftoe—have you heard from him?”

“No.”

“Neither have I. We must continue as before. If he wishes to resume negotiations, we may then deal from a position of greater strength.”

Isaac was not even looking at him.

“What is your position?” Daniel asked.

“I desire what I have always desired,” Isaac said. “Your machinations with Baron von Leibniz have made it harder to get—for much of it is now locked up in a tomb in Clerkenwell, and promised to the Tsar. But Jack might yet have some. Ergo, I must redouble my pursuit of Jack.”

“What if a situation were to arise, Isaac, in which you were presented with a choice: on the one hand, striking a deal with Jack that would end the peril he poses to the currency and to the King, but leave you wanting what you seek. On the other, pursuing Jack to the bitter end in the hopes of getting his gold, but at the risk of failing the Trial of the Pyx?

“You ask questions like a Regent,” Isaac said.

“Like it or not, I am one, and must ask such questions. And the question boils down to this: Do you respect the authority of the King, or of Regents appointed to act in his stead, and do you place the Mint and the Currency above other, more personal interests? Or does the Philosoper’s Stone come first?”

“I find it astonishing that the son of Drake would even be capable of forming such a question in his mind, let alone asking it. Did you learn nothing from him?”

“You mistake me. I do not care a fig for the King. In this I am one with Drake. But Drake also taught me the value of money. I may not love money as much as some, but I do respect it. Do you?”

“Do you, Daniel, really believe that I left the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and came to the Mint, solely out of an interest in numismatics?”

“Well answered,” Daniel said. “Since we agree it is in our interests to continue the pursuit of Jack, let us rejoin the others in back.”

YET ANOTHER NEW GUEST HAD come in through the alley-door, and joined the group in the back room, while Daniel and Isaac had been talking. He was a humble humble man, so hunched, so cringing in his posture that one might think Fellows of the Royal Society had waylaid him in the alley and surgically removed his collar-bones. He was kneading his hat to keep his hands from trembling. He smelled bad, and unlike many who do, he well knew it. Yet Mr. Threader was clapping him on the shoulder as if he were a favorite nephew being sworn in to the Bar. “I present Mr. Marsh!” Threader proclaimed. “Mr. Marsh has been the subject of the Clubb’s deliberations before.”

“I have forgotten those deliberations,” Daniel confessed, “and some of us have never heard them in the first place.”

“Infernal Devices require phosphorus,” Threader said, “and we have already heard from Mr. MacDougall about the large order he has recently placed for same. It shall lead, in coming weeks, to the boiling-down of a stupendous volume of urine.”

“We covered this in our meeting two days ago,” Daniel reminded him, “but who is Mr. Marsh?”

“The last time the Clubb attempted to trace the flow of urine from Town to Country, we deputized Monsieur Arlanc, the now infamous, to canvass the Vault-men of Fleet Ditch. He directed our attention to the sad tale of a particular Vault-man who, for reasons unexplained, had driven his load out into Surrey. There he ran afoul of some young blades who were so offended by the fragrance of the vehicle that they drew their swords, and slew his horse, on the spot, depriving the poor owner of his livelihood. Henry Arlanc claimed he had made inquiries, up and down the lower Fleet, as to where the unfortunate fellow might be found, and had been assured that he had gone off to dwell with his family far away.”

“Now I remember it,” Daniel said. “We threw up our hands and no more pursued this thread of the investigation.”

“Arlanc lied,” Mr. Threader proclaimed. “After he was led away in chains, I asked myself, could we credit the representations he had made to us concerning the Vault-man? Since then I have made inquiries of my own. Very little effort was required to learn the truth: the Vault-man had not fled the city after losing his horse, but had gone to work for another chap in the same line of work, and could be found on the brink of the Fleet any night of the week. Last night, I found him. I present to you Mr. Marsh.”

This actually produced a light round of applause—from the looks of it, not a familiar sound to the ears of Mr. Marsh.

“Long have I looked forward to asking you one question, Mr. Marsh,” said Orney. “On the night your horse was slain, what on earth had induced you to drive your load into Surrey?”

“I was to be paid, guv’nor,” said Mr. Marsh.

“Paid by whom?”

“By certain blokes in those parts who pay money for piss from time to time.”

“Who are they, and where do they live?”

“No one knows, guv’nor.”

“But if you bring them urine, and they pay you money, how can you not know?”

“You takes your wagon to a certain crossroads at midnight, and you blindfolds yourself. When they see you’re blindfolded, they come out of hiding, and get into the driver’s seat beside you without saying a word. Round and round and up and down and to and fro they drive, for an hour or more, so you’ve no notion of where you are. Finally you comes to a place where the wagon is emptied. Then they drive you back by the same mazy way you came. Off comes the blindfold. You’re back where you started. A purse of money is on the seat beside you.”

There was a silence as Mr. Marsh’s singular narration was considered. Then Newton spoke: “Your horse is slain. But what became of your wagon?”

“It is still in Surrey, guv’nor.”

“Then let us go and fetch it, and bring it to the Court of Technologickal Arts—assuming that Dr. Waterhouse gives his consent—for some repairs, and some alterations,” Isaac said. “I have an idea.”

Orney’s Ship-yard, Rotherhithe

MORNING OF 13 AUGUST 1714

DANIEL ARRIVED EARLIER THAN most, and sat on a bale of Bridewell oakum. It was not a bad place to await the other members of the Clubb. The day was perfect. Later he would be hot, but for the nonce his suit was perfectly matched to the warmth of the sun and the temperate breeze off the river. Before him, three great greased skids declined into the Thames. They had exhausted their burdens—the Tsar’s warships—and lay open to new projects. One of Orney’s shipwrights stood at the head of the middle way. When he did not move for some minutes, Daniel guessed that something must be wrong. But then the man shifted his weight, cocked his head minutely, froze for a few seconds, then hunched his shoulders and let his chin drop almost to his breast-bone. Daniel perceived, then, that the man was thinking. And it was no aimless woolgathering, but a sort of work. As some built ships in bottles, this man was building one inside of his skull; and if Daniel had the fortitude to remain on this perch for some weeks or months, why, he would see the vision in the shipwright’s mind take material form. A year hence, men would be sailing around on it! This Daniel found wondrous. He envied the shipwright. Not simply because he was a younger man but because he was being left alone in a quiet place to create something new, and, in sum, seemed, by grace or by craft, to have ensconced himself in a simpler and sweeter Story than the one Daniel was doomed to act out.

So much did he enjoy this interlude on the oakum, that he had to master a distinct flash of annoyance when the tick, tick, tick of a certain approaching wagon obtruded. The shipwright—lucky man—was free to ignore it. Daniel must attend.

The wagon was a great rank barrel mounted in a shallow wheeled box. Hunched on a plank bench at the front was a man, manipulating the reins of a single listless nag. He drove the rig down in to the middle of Orney’s yard, then leaned back and let his head loll. Members of the Clubb were converging from diverse places round the Establishment where they had been smoking pipes, bowling, chatting, or tending to their very important correspondence.

When Mr. Marsh—for it was he—recovered from his exhaustion sufficiently to open his eyes and have a look round, he found himself surrounded by most of the would-be Prosecutors he had met nine days earlier at the Kit-Cat Clubb. The only one missing was Kikin. But Kikin’s bodyguard was there, and so was Saturn. These two squatted down beneath the wagon and went to work with prybars. Another man in his position might have raised objections to having his wagon dismantled while was still sitting on it, but Mr. Marsh seemed past caring. Planks were removed from the vehicle’s flat underbelly; Saturn stood and tossed them into the bed of the wagon while the big Russian carefully extracted a smuggled burden from a hidden cavity. This looked, for a moment, like a bale of clothing; but presently it sprouted extremities, and began to stretch, writhe, and complain. The bodyguard stood it upright next to the wagon. The head of Mr. Kikin could now be seen, wigless, hatless, hairless, red-eyed, blinking, and emitting swear-words that would make Cossacks clap their hands over their ears and run home to their mothers. A wig was produced and jammed over Kikin’s pate. He was disgorging all manner of stuff from his pockets: paper scraps, pencil stubs, a compass, a watch.

“I ween we shall now hear a long disquisition from Mr. Kikin,” said Mr. Threader. “Once, that is, he has remembered his manners. Let us hear first, and briefly, the report of Mr. Marsh.”

“Oh, from that I am here, and alive, you must know that it came off as planned, sirs,” said Mr. Marsh.

“You met the mysterious personage in the night-time? You were blindfolded and conveyed to the place where the urine is collected? You emptied your load, and were returned to the lonely crossroads, and were paid, and were sent on your way?” Threader inquired. Marsh answered with a stately procession of nods.

“Very well, then,” said Daniel Waterhouse, “as we agreed, the horse is yours, and you are free to go forth and ply your trade. We ask only that you speak of this to no one.”

“Right, guv’nor,” answered Marsh, with a slight roll of the eyes: his way of pointing out that it would be suicidal for him to relate the story anywhere in Christendom. Then, exhausted though he was, he drove out of Orney’s Ship-yard and began putting distance between him and the mad Clubb as fast as his new cart-horse could manage.

Mr. Orney had spread out a large-scale map of Surrey on an open-air table normally used for unfurling ship-plans. Kikin, moving in a stiff tottering gait, brought his paper-scraps and began to arrange them according to some inscrutable scheme while quaffing beer from a sort of earthenware tureen. Breezes discomposed the scraps; rocks were procured. Kikin placed his pocket-compass on the map. The three Natural Philosophers all noted that Orney—as always, a master of detail—had so oriented the map that its north-arrow was aligned with the compass’s needle.

When Mr. Kikin felt himself capable of human speech, he announced, with no greetings, complaints, or other preliminaries: “We commenced from here.” And he deposited a pebble on a Surrey crossroads not far off the high road from London Bridge. “To the southeast we proceeded, on a good road—”

“You were able to perceive the compass in the dark, then?” Orney asked.

“The phosphorus paint compounded by Freiherr von Leibniz, and daubed upon its card by Mr. Hoxton, performed as expected. It was right in my face, as bright as a full moon. I say we were going southeast on a good road—almost certainly this one,” insisted Kikin, streaking his finger across the map. “I counted, er…” and here he consulted his notes. “Seventy-eight revolutions of the wheel.” For Newton had proposed, and Saturn had constructed, a little device that produced a click every time the wheel went round.

“One thousand and thirty feet, then,” said Newton, having worked out the product in his head. For all of them knew by heart the circumference of the wheel in question.

But here Orney had anticipated, and prepared: he produced a ribbon of paper, marked with regularly spaced pen-lines, each neatly indexed with a number: 50, 100, 200, and so on. It was a scale that he had drawn up, demarcated not in feet, furlongs, or miles, but in revolutions of the wheel of Mr. Marsh’s vault-wagon. By snaking it down the road drawn on the map (for the road was not perfectly straight) he was able to show that, at a place near the eighty mark, there was an intersection with a smaller road. “That must be it,” Kikin said, and reviewed a spate of Cyrillic notations. “Yes, west-southwest for fifty ticks—then an elbow in the road, bringing us round to almost due south—three hundred and thirty ticks later we went up and over a stone bridge.”

This led to some back-tracking and head-scratching, for it was not clear which of several possible roads the wagon might have taken; but presently Leibniz noticed a bridge whose position was found to be consistent with all of Kikin’s data, and so they went on reckoning from there.

All in all, Kikin had marked down a couple of dozen changes in direction, three bridges, diverse segments of noticeably good or bad road, and the odd hill, village, obstreperous canine, or swampy bit. It became obvious, as they plotted his trajectory as a line of pebbles on the map, that the route was circuitous by design. But eventually it had come to an end in some place described by Kikin as reeking of sal ammoniac. There the wagon had been emptied. A different winding and looping course had then been traced to bring Mr. Marsh (and his hidden stowaway) back to the starting-place. Getting the outbound and the inbound data to agree with each other, so that they started and ended in the same places, while not blatantly contradicting the map’s assertions as to the locations of bridges, hills, &c., took twice as long as had been required for the wagon to actually cover the ground, and devolved into a lengthy progress of disputes about applied Euclidean geometry and the nature of absolute space: arguments that Newton and Leibniz were perhaps a bit too eager to engage in, so that Daniel had to intervene from time to time and ban Metaphysics. The accuracy of Mr. Kikin’s observations was called into question; he defended himself with less and less vehemence as the morning wore on, and in early afternoon could be seen dozing on a piled cargo-net. Factions developed, fissures opened within factions, alliances were forged and betrayed, outrage was manifested against the turncoats, who professed dedication only to higher principles of Truth.

But at some point it all fell into place and they came up with an answer—Daniel’s gold ring, set down at a particular location on the map—that was obviously right, and made them wonder why they had not seen it right away. Mr. Kikin, who only minutes earlier had been characterized as an innumerate poltroon, under suspicion of having fallen asleep between observations, was now hailed as the best chap ever; toasted; and likened to Vasco da Gama.

It was Daniel who ruined the celebratory mood by asking the question: “Now what?”

“If the map is to be trusted,” said Newton, “Jack’s urine-boiling operation is situated on a large estate, high in the North Downs.”

“As it would have to be,” Orney put in, “or the neighbors would complain of the stink.”

“Taking into consideration the size of the estate, the openness of the countryside, and the notorious and vicious character of Jack’s gang, I say ’twere foolhardy to approach the place without a company or more of armed men.”

“Then it is fortunate that you are a member of the Clubb, Sir Isaac,” Saturn said, “for I have seen you summon up just such a force when you were in need.” He was referring to the raid on the boozing-ken in St. Bride’s.

“The men you saw—and escaped from—on that occasion were Queen’s Messengers,” Newton said, “though of course they are called King’s Messengers as of two weeks ago. They are under the command of Mr. Charles White, who is a loyal minion of Bolingbroke. He aided me then, only as part of leading me into a trap. I do not phant’sy Mr. White will be disposed to aid us now.”

“But the power of Bolingbroke is destroyed,” said Kikin, “or so people are saying.”

“Not destroyed, sir,” Newton corrected him, “as long as his man guards the Mint, and the Pyx.”

“Is the Queen’s—pardon me, the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard not garrisoned at the Tower, and charged with guarding the coinage?” Orney inquired.

“Yes, but they are also under the command of Charles White,” said Newton.

“After Jack compromised the Pyx in April,” Daniel explained in an aside to Leibniz, “Bolingbroke made hay of it in Parliament, and said that this shewed the Whigs could not be trusted with the Mint. Thus did he gain authority over such matters.”

“Which he then delegated to White?”

“Indeed. Now, he is bound to be stripped of that authority when the Hanovers come in and the Whigs take power; but for now he commands both the King’s Messengers and the Black Torrent Guards; and he controls the Mint, and the Pyx.”

All faces had turned their way. Daniel’s sidebar with Leibniz had become the center of attention. Newton, in particular, was gazing into Daniel’s eyes, and had an expectant look about him.

“Since the events of a fortnight ago,” Daniel volunteered, “tensions between Whig and Tory, Hanover and Jacobite, have ebbed, but not altogether vanished. The troops of the Whig Association are still bivouacked all round the capital, ready to be called out in the event Bolingbroke attempts to seize power. Perhaps a company of such troops could be detailed to assist us in this matter. I shall make inquiries among men who have a say in such matters.”

The meeting went on for some little while after that, but in truth Daniel’s utterance had been the end of it. Isaac soon thought up a pretext for leaving. Kikin was gone a few minutes after that, and he took Leibniz with him so that they could transact unspecified Tsar-business en route. Threader and Orney were left to bait each other, as was their practice; though neither of them would dream of admitting to it, they had developed a kind of friendship.

Daniel and Saturn shared a water-taxi. Long before it reached London, Saturn had cause to regret this, for Daniel—who had been so content at the beginning of the day, sitting on his bale and watching the river flow by—had now become gloomy and brooding even by Saturnine standards. “Isaac will bring this to a head,” Daniel predicted. “Not for him the dodge, the accommodation, the quiet understanding. The armistice we made with Jack in the Black Dogg is forgotten. He must slay the bête noire. Ha! I wonder what he has in mind for me.”

Saturn had been squinting at some inconsequential thing on the river’s bank, hoping that his fellow-passenger would shut up if ignored long enough. This last remark, however, caused him to turn his head and fix his gaze on Daniel. “Why should he have anything in mind for you?”

“I am all that stands between him and the Solomonic Gold, or so he imagines.”

“Is it true?”

“The Tsar, and various of his minions, such as Monsieurs Kohan and Kikin, would have something to say about it, if Isaac confiscated the stuff,” Daniel allowed, “but they are far away, and not really part of Newton’s world. He will not take such persons into consideration. Me he will hate for having done the wrong thing.”

“What are the practical consequences of being so hated?” Saturn wondered.

Daniel thought of Hooke, and how Hooke’s legacy had disappeared. But if that happened after one was dead, did it really matter?

Saturn went on, “He is civil to you when the Clubb is together—”

“And I had wondered why, until today,” Daniel said. “Isaac no longer has the King’s Messengers and the Black Torrent Guard at his disposal. Bolingbroke has stripped him of the temporal power he had, or phant’sied he had, a few months ago. To act against Jack the Coiner, Isaac requires that sort of power—and I have got such power, at least indirectly, through Roger.”

“But why on earth,” asked Saturn, “should you consent to any such thing, if you hold it to be the case that Sir Isaac counts you as a foe, and would sweep you out of his way?”

“A perfectly sensible question,” said Daniel. “I think it is simple for him, complicated for me, snared as I am in a mare’s nest of compromises and accommodations, which to him would seem like one of those hair-balls we used to pull from cows’ bellies—a nasty mess that ought to be swept away. He’ll not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of Bolingbroke, Charles White, Jack Shaftoe, Leibniz, and—if I’ve been so foolish as to get tangled up with ’em—me. Peter, I cannot summon anything like the fury of Newton, hot as a refiner’s fire. Perhaps I and the others really are nothing more than schlock to be raked off the top of his crucible and dumped on the ground to harden and blacken.”

Surrey

BEFORE DAWN, 15 AUGUST 1714

And armes shal stand on his parte, and thei shal pollute the Sanctuarie of strength, & shal take away the dailie sacrifice, & they shal set up the abominable desolation.

—DANIEL 11:31

When ye therefore shal se the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holie place (let him that readeth consider it). Then let them which be in Iudea, flee into the mountaines. Let him who is on the house top, not come downe to fetch anie thing out of his house. And he that is in the field, let not him returne back to fetch his clothes.

—MATTHEW 24:15–18

HE HATED TO BE LEADING troops across English soil. Ireland, Belgium, Holland, and France were the natural champs de Mars; armies roamed across and fed off them like sheep on English downs. But to lead a company of armed troopers across an English field made him reconsider his choice of profession.

That was, as he knew, confused and stupid thinking, for armies were no more natural and no more welcome in Belgium than they were here; but anyway it was how he felt. As always, he would be keeping those feelings to himself.

They had crossed over to Lambeth on the horse ferry two hours after midnight and marched, or rather walked, south on the Clapham road. The beating tromp of a proper march would be heard for miles across this drowsy landscape, and they did not want alarms to race across the countryside. So they had broken stride, separated into platoons, and made their way southwards, dividing and merging around the odd settlement. Watchmen, insomniacs, and busybodies who came out on to the road to pose troublesome questions, were told to mind their own business, and then asked for directions to Epsom. The strategy was to march faster than Rumor, but if some eager messenger were to get out ahead of them on horseback, they hoped he would spread the lie that they were going generally southwest. Which was just what they did, for some hours; but then, having gathered together in a dell off to the side of the way to eat their rations of biscuit, they executed a sharp change in direction, double-timed four miles eastwards along a road, then took to the fields. Scouts led them up and down gentle slopes that they could feel but not yet see. He thought there was rather more of up, than of down, but then it always felt thus to a tired infantryman. His ears were bad, and so he could not hear the rustling of leaves, but he sensed the presence of trees by their auras of stillness and of scent. These developed into copses that had to be circumvented, lest in walking through them the soldiers disperse, rustle leaves, and pop branches.

The light sifted down out of the sky like motes and flakes of ash from a burning city. At some point there was suddenly enough of it that he could make sense of the blobs and vestiges that, for the last hour or so, had marred the darkness. He stopped to look round. He had imagined, until now, that they had been marching across open ground, diverting around the occasional wood. But it was not like that. Trees grew more or less densely everywhere, and made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, except where a hill rolled up in the distance. Through the mottled shadow of the wood meandered a pale river: a way paved with grass that was becoming prickly and tinder-like in the summer heat. This chalky soil was as powerless to retain moisture as the fingers of a skeleton to hold money. It set off a hue and cry in his mind: he had marched a company into a high place where ponds and streams would not exist! In a few hours they would be out of water! He silenced these alarms by means of elaborate thinking and exhausting mental effort; ten paces later they started back up again, and reigned over his mind for an age. The thoughts became dry and worn-out, like straw that has been slept on too many times, and finally disintegrated in the first clear light of the morning.

Like boys who have waded along a creek-bed to the place where it loses itself in river, the troops had come to a broad swale that rolled up from undulating farm-country below—generally to their left—and, to their right, fetched up against the limey buttresses of a chalk hill—a down, as they named it in this part of the country. There this convenient highway of dry fescue and sporadic trees was barred by a furry tonsure of beeches that gripped the rougher parts of the down, indeed seemed to cover it all the way to the top—until he peered through spare places in the wood and saw pale, sere meadows on the high side.

The order of battle would have been clear to him at that point, even if he’d been a private soldier with no hand in its planning: there was an estate on the top of this down, hedged on this approach by the beech-belt. Proper visitors would approach it by (he guessed) some sort of carriageway that would come up the gentler slope on its yonder side; he and his company, however, were going to assault it from its (he hoped) unguarded and unwatched rear by toiling up the wooded chalk-bluff until they could break out of the trees and into the open ground above and beyond.

As he was collecting all of this together in his head, the wee hairs on the back of his neck stirred. He turned and drew this new breeze into his nostrils. It was damp and smelled of the river. It was going to precede them up through the trees.

He spoke now for the first time in hours, and gave the word to begin at once, each platoon holding hands, to use a figure of speech, with those to either side of it, so that they’d not lose one another in the fog, and fragment the line. “What fog, Sergeant?” someone asked, for the air was as clear as snow-melt. But Sergeant Bob only turned his back on this fellow and began stalking up-hill. One measure of soldierly experience, he had found, was how long it took for a man to wot that an engagement had commenced. For Bob Shaftoe, it had commenced the moment this moist breeze had begun its journey up from the Thames, and the battle was now more than half over. For this chap who had just asked him “What fog?” the onset of the battle still lay at some indefinite point in the future. Taken to its extreme, this particular form of military incompetence led to men being surrounded and slaughtered while sleeping, or eating. In less extreme forms it caused excessive casualties. Bob knew of no remedy for it other than to act, which would shock and embarrass laggardly sergeants and corporals to follow him. By the time he reached the verge of the beech-wood, he could feel the moisture clammy on his arms. By the time he led his company out on to the high pasture-land on the lid of the down, it was hushed under a new fog. He had not gone ten paces into this hilltop estate when a dog began to bark. The company had been moving with admirable quiet; but the breeze was at their backs, their scent had preceded them, indeed was now a mile in their van, and the dog knew they were coming.

They were now seven-eighths of the way through this engagement that, in the minds of most of his men, still lay in the future. Bob was not the only one who heard the dog barking: voices up ahead were calling it by name, telling it to shut up. If Bob was lucky, they’d still be lying in their beds cursing the dog at the moment he kicked the door down. But that would have been very lucky indeed. A squall of whinnies and hoofbeats erupted from far ahead, off to their right: Whig Association cavalry, which had converged on this place from another quarter. Even Bob’s wrecked ears could make out that much, and one of the younger soldiers insisted that he could hear a carriage moving somewhere off to their right. It was too soon for the inhabitants of this farm, estate, or whatever it was, to have gotten a carriage of their own out on to the road, and so Bob supposed this must be some officers or gentlemen come to observe, remark, criticize, countermand, or otherwise improve upon Bob’s conduct of the operation.

“Permission is given to be audible,” he said, loudly, and loudness spread like panic down the line to his left and to his right. Though because of the fog it was not so much a line as a chopped-up scribble. The drummers began to beat an advance, and sergeants began to scream in outrage as they understood, from that, just how badly spattered over the field they had become. One platoon was far to the rear, and confused, and (what was much worse) unwilling to accept just how badly they’d got it wrong; Bob crossed them off his mental Order of Battle as hors de combat. Other platoons seemed to be moving perpendicular to the line of march. And so Bob finally screamed an order that all should simply march toward the barking dog. This worked better than anything else he had tried. It forced them to go up-slope. Word propagated up the line that a wall had been encountered on the right, and Bob ordered them to hold there. Presently the middle, and finally the left, found that wall, and stopped, forming (Bob supposed) an arc a few hundred yards long, curved inwards to face in the general direction of the dog. Its barking had been joined by the blowing of a post horn; shouting; colliding blades; and pistol-shots. The wall was a linear rock-pile, snarled and teeming with hedge-life. Bob vacillated there, for a few moments, until he heard cavalry behind him, and noted that the fog was beginning to dissolve into the light of day. Then he gave the order to clamber over the wall and proceed double-time toward the melee. They would serve better as beaters than as hunters. The horsemen coming round across their rear could round up anyone who dashed through their line.

THE STREETS OF LONDON, EACH so particular and unique to the terrified, benighted pedestrian, were, to a coach-passenger, as anonymous and same as waves on the sea. As Waterhouse, Newton, and Leibniz had sailed through them during the early hours of the morning, Daniel had teased himself with the phant’sy that they would settle the Calculus Dispute now, perhaps with Christian reconciliation or perhaps with a roadside duel in the dead of night. But Sir Isaac had made it plain that he had no intention of talking about anything, and had pretended to sleep, and shifted and glared when Leibniz and Waterhouse disturbed his repose with candle-light and chit-chat. This made perfect sense. Isaac held the upper hand in the dispute, and was going to triumph; why talk to Leibniz at all? Leibniz would have to make Newton want to talk.

Daniel neither slept, nor pretended to. As soon as there was light, he dropped the carriage’s window-shutters, giving them a pleasant enough view of a tree-lined Surrey carriageway. But this lasted only for a quarter of an hour or so before it dissolved in fog. Leibniz, then Newton, stirred from feigned or genuine sleep. “Do you suppose we are riding to the Clubb’s final meeting, then?” Daniel asked, now desperate to get them talking about something.

“If by that what you are really asking is, ‘are we about to catch Jack?’ then I should say no,” Isaac answered. “This does not seem his sort of place. It looks like the country house of some lord.”

“You seem disquieted by that,” Leibniz said, “but has it not been obvious from the beginning that Jack must be conniving with men of high rank?”

“Of course,” said Isaac, “but I had not expected to drive right through the gate of some Duke’s country-house! Where are we?”

“Be at ease,” said Daniel, who sat facing forward, and had a view ahead. “We are being hailed by one of Roger’s pseudo-Mohawks. He is bidding the driver turn left.”

“And what is to the left?”

“A lesser road—not so impressively tree-lined as this. Perhaps it leads away to some humble down-top farm-stead.”

But having turned on to that road they immediately drove through a stone gate: clearly not the formal main entrance, but a side door, of some substantial demesne. It seemed to Daniel, as they trundled along the rutted road, that they must be following in the steps of the Whig Association Foot, who must all have paused along this stretch to void their bladders. But then he got it. And for once in his life, he got it slightly quicker than Newton or Leibniz. The last few minutes’ travel—the roads, the turns, and the odor—tallied with the penultimate leg of Mr. Kikin’s journey. They were there—almost. “Driver!” Daniel exclaimed, “tell me—do you see, up ahead, a place where one might turn to the right, and go up-hill a short distance on an old track that is paved in patches with flat stones?”

“No, guv’nor,” said the driver. But then they rounded a bend and he saw just what Daniel had described. As did Newton and Leibniz, who by this point had their heads thrust out of windows. “Go that way!” they all began to shout, for all of them recognized this from Mr. Kikin’s narration. The driver complied. They were now ascending a knoll.

At its top was a cluster of old Norman-looking farm-buildings, very down at heels. A dog was barking. Hooves sounded behind; it was their minder from the cavalry. “Turn about! You are going the wrong way!” he called.

“We are going the right way!” insisted Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse in unison; which set them all to laughing, and sent the dog into a frenzy.

“Who goes there?” came a call from far away down the hill, and something in the tone of voice gave Daniel the idea that this was not some resident of the place, challenging an intruder, but a fellow intruder, trying to make out what was going on. Which was quite striking, and (an instant later) a wee bit disturbing. Until now, he’d been supposing that they were going over ground that had already been traversed, and laid claim to, by friendlies, operating according to some coherent plan. But now he could hear a simply ludicrous amount of effort being expended by several units and individuals, all within earshot of one another, and all on the same side, for the simple purpose of trying to make out who the other blokes were, what direction they were headed, et cetera. So for all he knew, he and Newton and Leibniz might be in front of the rest of the force. And finally—as a sort of crowning ornament to this edifice of startling realizations that had been set a-building by the shouted “Who goes there?”—he understood that all military operations were this way, that no one here, other than Daniel, was surprised by any of it, and that (as in so many other situations in life) no remedy was possible and no apologies would be forthcoming.

It kept his mind occupied, anyway, until they crested the knoll and found themselves lost in and surrounded by the Odor: a stench of sal ammoniac so bad that it panicked the horses and forced the driver to use every bit of his wit, will, and whip-skill to rein them in, wheel them about, and drive them up-wind, out of the bad air. This confused and wild U through the hilltop lasted for all of ten seconds, and left a farrago of weird impressions in Daniel’s mind: the hysterical dog at the end of its tether, the gutted buildings, stained ground. The phrase “abomination of desolation” hung in his head; he could hear the voice of Drake intoning the words out of the Geneva Bible. The ancient half-timbered buildings of the farmstead—which had probably been in ruins even before Jack and his gang had gotten to them—had been attacked, as beetles scavenge a fallen carcass, and holed, torn, gutted, stripped, and remade into some monstrous novelty. The sides that faced out into the surrounding countryside had not been changed much, but the middle of the compound had been turned into something that was part giant machine, part Alchemist’s laboratory. Vast boilers, stained black with smoke, narrowed to serpentine tubes of hammered copper, frosted with dripping beads of solder and fuzzy with fertile encrustations of chymical crystals. Patches of soil lay burned and dead where they’d been plashed with murderous tinctures.

It finally occurred to him to look at Isaac to see how the arch-Alchemist reacted to this glimpse of the Art writ large. Daniel saw in Isaac’s face neither fascination nor disgust but a kind of pensive bewilderment: the look he got when he was drawing connexions in his mind that were beyond Daniel’s powers. But he looked suddenly at Daniel and remarked, “Clarke’s house.”

Which was a reference to a thing he had taken Daniel to see fifty years earlier, on a visit to Grantham, Lincolnshire: an apothecary’s house where Isaac had boarded as a schoolboy. Clarke had dabbled in Alchemy and had filled a side yard of the house with wreckage of his experiments. It was much smaller than what they had just seen, but to young Isaac must have seemed as large, and as glamourous with hazards, and as seething with mystery. In the half-century since, all things Alchemical had become familiar to Isaac; but what he had just seen must have jolted him with the same emotions he had known as a boy making illicit forays into Mr. Clarke’s laboratory.

For Daniel’s part, he wanted to loathe what Jack had made of this good old farm, and to be outraged, and to hate Jack all the more for it. But none of these feelings came to him. They would never come, because Daniel had already seen in Devon the works of Mr. Thomas Newcomen, which were like a harbinger of this thing. Or perhaps the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, and Jack’s phosphorus-mill, were both harbingers of something else, which he could scarce picture in his mind—and scarcely wished to. He had once said to Mr. Threader, in a very self-righteous way, that England did not need Slaves, if she could learn to make Engines, and that Engines, being clever, were a more English sort of thing than toiling Negroes; but now he was beginning to think that he ought to be more careful of what he wished for. The first phosphorus laboratory ever made—that of the Alchemist Heinrich Brand—had been so clever that it had inspired Leibniz to write a poem about it. But Daniel could see from the look on Leibniz’s face that he’d be writing no poems about this place, unless it was a supplementary Canto of Dante’s Inferno.

They debarked from the carriage, for the horses would on no account draw any nearer to the noisome Works. They knew that the dog was tethered, for they had nearly run over it, and they knew that no humans would be about, because who could or would sleep atop such a hell-mouth? So Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse strode rather than crept toward the Factory, and when they heard hoofbeats coming up behind, none of them paid it much mind, knowing that it was the young Mohawk who had been detailed to keep an eye out for them.

The last breaths of the fog had at last blown off from this hilltop, though the low places among the downs were still gloomed under fat gray rivers. One could see ten miles from this place—and anyone save a Natural Philosopher would turn his back to the ugly scene in the center to enjoy the prospect. But these men, who thought nothing of dissecting a beautiful corpse to examine a necrotic ulcer, had eyes only for the phosphorus-works.

The compound was ringed by an old hedgerow that had been viciously trimmed back by its new tenants, and cut down to the height of a man’s mid-section. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse passed through a gap where it was pierced by a little side-track, and the Mohawk, who was angling in from another direction, jumped it easily on his mount, wheeled round, and trotted toward them. Waterhouse, well knowing his place, assumed the tedious duty of talking to the rider so that the great ones’ observations would not be disturbed. “Never mind what orders you have been given,” said Daniel, “this place is the objective of the day—it is why we have all come here.”

“Shall I go and summon others?”

“I do not think it necessary—they’ll find us anon.”

“I meant, sir, in case we should meet with resistance.”

“There will be none,” said Daniel, “except for that!” And he pointed toward the dog, who was sprinting for them.

It turned out that this animal’s tether was very long indeed, so that it could range over the entire hilltop, provided it did not commit the classic error of getting the rope wound around anything—and it was one of those dogs who was clever enough to avoid that. Having (or so it imagined) chased off the carriage of Newton, Leibniz, et al., it had found employment on the opposite side of the compound, barking at some untoward noises. But now it was coming for them, angling in on their larboard quarter. It faltered as it perceived a choice between going for Newton and Leibniz—who were several paces ahead—or Daniel and the mounted Mohawk. Wisely, it chose the former. Newton and Leibniz, so different in matters of high philosophy, were absolutely the same when it came to being chased across a farm-yard by a huge ravening mastiff. They cheated to the right, and got up against the hedgerow, prepared to clamber over it if they had to—but this was a last resort, at their age. Then they hustled forward, hoping to get out of the tether’s fatal radius. But that tether simply kept uncoiling—just when it looked as if it were about to jerk taut, fresh miles of it would appear, as if by some conjuror’s trick. Newton almost tripped over something, and Leibniz bent down and picked it up: it was a long wooden paddle, chymically gnawed and stained, its handle snapped off at one end, but still a fathom long. For they had drawn nigh the boiler where such implements were used to stir and test the thickening coction. Leibniz waved this find around, sending a message that the dog collected instantly; it broke off the frontal assault and shifted fluidly into a feinting-and-lunging style of flank-attack. Daniel caught up with the others about now, and, passing behind Leibniz’s defense, went to haul Isaac Newton up off the ground. Meanwhile the Mohawk had ridden up behind the dog and was shouting to draw its attack: a plan his mount well understood and little favored, so that this rider must devote all his powers to managing the mental states of the dog on one hand and the horse on the other.

Isaac was down, not because he had tripped, but because he had gotten interested in something. He held out his hand. A reddish nodule lay in the middle of his palm. “Behold,” he announced, “Jack has learnt the art of making red phosphorus. It is scattered all about.”

“That would be the source of ignition for the Infernal Devices, then,” said Leibniz over his shoulder. He was still en garde with the paddle, protecting the other two, who were crouched behind him at the base of the hedgerow. But this was less and less necessary, as the Mohawk now had the dog’s undivided attention. The horse kept rearing so that it might bring down its hooves on the mastiff’s head.

The rider had his pistol out.

“Hold your fire, sir,” said Daniel, who long ago had grown sick of seeing dogs killed in the name of Natural Philosophy. He stood up, and pulled Newton to his feet. Something in that word fire was troubling him.

“Hold your fire!” cried Leibniz, who had glanced down to see red phosphorus all over the ground. But the Mohawk heard them not. The dog’s tether had come round to touch the horse’s hind legs, and made it panic. The cavalryman leveled his gun at the dog. Leibniz whirled about, turning his back on what was about to happen. Seeing the others a few paces away, side by side, he spun the paddle round to make it horizontal, and held it before him at chest height. Then he hurled himself forward. The implement caught Daniel just below the collar-bone and forced him back until the stiff old vegetation of the murdered hedgerow chopped him just below the buttocks. His last clear impression was of a bolt of fire jerking out of the muzzle of the pistol. Then the sky spun round him—a Ptolemaic illusion, of course, as in truth he was executing a backward somersault over the hedgerow. He—and Newton beside him—tumbled all the way over on the other side, and ended up sprawled face down in the lee of the hedge. The backs of his calves were being broiled by a sea of white flame that had reached over the wall like sunrise.

BOB HAD LOST THE FACULTY of hearing sounds of a high sharp timbre, but had grown very keen to thuds, bumps, and rumbles, which he heard not with his ears but with his feet and his ribs. What he listened for, with said organs, was hoofbeats, door-slams, gunfire, &c. Of guns he had heard only a little thus far. Hooves were spattering the earth to their rear: the Whig Association cavalry, dashing across the back of the line. Bob was leading his company across a pasture toward a hedgerow that bordered its up-hill side. Like all the other hedgerows on this estate, it had been trimmed short, which Bob looked on as a military preparation; the height was good for men to kneel behind and shoot over.

Three such hedgerows, dividing perhaps a quarter mile of more or less open ground, stood between Bob’s line and a hilltop farm that seemed to be the source of the barking. Bob glimpsed a carriage careering to and fro up among its buildings but could make no sense of this, and so forced himself to ignore it. His line had instinctively wheeled so that it was parallel to the next hedgerow. When they were just reaching it, and slinging arms and breaking stride to clamber over, Bob felt something in his feet, and shouted, “Cavalry! Less than a squadron—much less. Hold the line. They are coming from beyond those trees.” Which was merely a reasonable guess, based on the fact that he could not see them yet. His men’s heads all turned—they were hearing something he couldn’t. Following their eye-line, Bob locked his gaze upon the edge of the little copse ahead of them—it was growing in a little pocket of the landscape—and saw horses’ legs, lit by the orange-amber sun of early morning, scissoring against tree-trunks.

A moment later three riders tore around the corner of the wood and made straight for them. They’d been apt in their timing—waiting for the moment when the approaching foot broke stride to address the hedge-climbing project. “About face—backs against the hedge!” Bob commanded, and they did it.

The three riders had formed a diagonal spread as a result of wheeling round the corner of the wood—the one who’d taken the outside track now trailed. The one in the middle was—his eyes had to be deceiving him—black. Had he been burned? A weapon burst in his face? No time to ponder it now. Bob drew out his sword in case he needed to parry a saber-cut from above. But none of the riders had drawn. The foremost jumped the hedgerow very near Bob, and Bob was almost felled, not by any physical contact but by dizzy awe at the magnificence of the horse and the power of its movement. The black man made the jump just behind Bob. At the same moment a flash lit up the top of the hill, and a moment later came a roaring whoosh and a clatter of booms. The third rider was just fixing to jump the hedgerow when all of this occurred; his mount faltered, clipped the top of the hedge, landed awry, and broke a leg.

The rider tumbled free and rolled to his feet only a little hurt. But two platoons of Foot were crouching with their backs to the hedgerow, all aiming their muskets at him from such short range that his riddled corpse would be scorched by powder-burns if Bob gave the order to fire.

“Take that bloody thing out of my face and shoot my horse,” said this fellow to the nearest.

The other two riders—first the black man, then the white—wheeled about in the middle of the pasture, a stone’s throw away. In the distance Bob saw several Whig cavalry rounding to intercept them. “Jimmy! Tomba!” shouted the dismounted man. “Go! You can get through ’em! It’s a few fops on some nags, and they don’t know the territory, and they won’t fight!”

All of which, Bob suspected, was true. If “Jimmy” and “Tomba” had kept on at a gallop they could, with a bit of luck, have survived a volley from Bob’s musketeers and probably shot through the Whig line. But they showed no gust for it. They exchanged a look, then turned back, and began riding toward their comrade. Bob came out from the shade of the hedgerow, glancing back one time—unnecessarily—to verify that all three of the men had muskets trained on them. A word from Bob and they were dead. They knew this. But they took no notice of Bob or anyone else. As the white rider approached, he said, “Don’t be such a tosser, Danny. We are not a devil-take-the-hindmost sort of family, are we?”

Bob now recognized these two—Jimmy and Danny—as his nephews, whom he had not seen in about twenty years.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said.

It was an expression of disgust and chagrin—hardly of surprise. He had been running into too many Shaftoes lately to be surprised by anything. Hearing the oath, they turned to look his way, and knew him in turn. “Aagh! Shit!” exclaimed Danny.

“I knew ’twould come to this sooner or later, uncle,” said Jimmy, with a sad, wise shake of the head, “if you kept trafficking with the legitimate authorities.”

“You know this man!?” said the black fellow, his mop-like hairdo all a-swing.

“He’s our friggin’ uncle,” said Danny. “Hope you’re satisfied, Bob.”

Bob’s heart was thudding. His feet were, too; that because of the cavalry, who were charging across the pasture, having perceived, in all of this, an opportunity to lop some heads, or at least limbs—the sort of entertainment Horse-men lived for. This clear and present danger unfroze Bob’s tongue, and his legs. He stumbled out into the path of the cavalry, and held up a hand to stay them; their captain had the good sense to call off the attack. They dropped to a canter and came on in a line to seal off any possible escape.

“You boys have been Absent Without Leave from the King’s, and then the Queen’s, and then the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard for twenty years,” said Bob.

“Don’t be such a prick!” was Danny’s response; but Jimmy—dismounting—said: “You don’t be such a friggin’ idiot, brother of mine. Our Uncle Bob phant’sies he’s doing us a boon by bringing us under military justice, so’s we’ll be hanged fast instead of drawn and quartered at Tyburn Cross.”

Danny was impressed. “Good one, uncle! Sorry I called you a prick. But just as Jimmy and Tomba would not abandon me, so me and Jimmy won’t leave Tomba behind to be gutted by Jack Ketch all by his lonesome, will we, Jimmy? Jimmy? Jimmy? Seamus Shaftoe, I be talking to ye, shite-for-brains!”

“I suppose not,” said Jimmy at last, “but it does put a friggin’ strain on me like this, having to do the decent thing twice in, what, two friggin’ minutes.”

“You’ve had twenty years to do the wrong things,” said Bob. “These two minutes won’t kill you.”

“What about the two minutes at Tyburn?” was Danny’s answer—which left Bob so tongue-tied that Tomba laughed out loud at him.

DANIEL HAD NEVER HEARD ISAAC admit to feeling pain, until he and Leibniz each took one of his hands and pulled him to his feet. Then Isaac got an astonished look, as though he’d never hurt before in his life, and let out an “Ooh-oh! Ah! Ah!” He clenched his eyes shut, grimaced, and steepled his brow, then froze just long enough to convince Daniel that he was suffering a cardiac event that would terminate his life. But finally the pain appeared to leak away in slow increments, and his conscious mind assumed control over the nerves that led to the muscles of the face. He could now wear the expression he wished to: one of forced unconcern. “It is,” he said, and stopped to sip air, “nothing. The muscles…about the ribs…were not ready…for Baron von Leibniz’s…intervention.”

“Might you have broken a rib?” Daniel asked.

“I do not believe so,” said Newton in one long down-hill gout of breath. Then he regretted having said so much at a go, as this obliged him to breathe deeply once. The grimace came back.

“Let us fetch the carriage, so you do not have to walk,” suggested Leibniz. “Daniel, you might remain with Sir Isaac?”

Daniel stood by Newton while Leibniz—who because of gout moved in an awkward shrugging-and-rolling gait even on a good day—went off to find their carriage. Its team must have fled screaming when the top of the hill had gone off. The place had not precisely exploded—though embedded in the event had been many small explosions. It had, rather, caught fire and burned to cinders very rapidly, as if a fire that ought to have extended over some hours had been compressed into as many seconds. The place had been a kind of slum, growing and running without plan—senseless. But unlike a normal slum, which about itself created middens of bones, gristle, shit, and ash, this one had become filthy with chymical wastes and by-products, many of them highly inflammable. The fire kindled by the Mohawk’s pistol-shot had hopped and rushed across the phosphorus-pocked soil until it had struck a vein: a rivulet of waste trickling from one of the boilers. It had raced up this fuse and ignited, then exploded, one or more of the giant copper retorts, and this blast, like the firing of powder in a musket’s pan, had ignited the main conflagration: some large store of red phosphorus in what had been a barn. The barn had been erased. Not even wreckage remained. The boilers were strewn scraps of copper, some of which was still molten. The dog, horse, and rider were steaming, intertangled bone-piles; they’d been incinerated by the roasting heat of the burning barn—a sort of action at a distance whereby heat was transmitted across space like gravity. It traveled, like light, in straight lines. This explained why Leibniz, Newton, and Waterhouse still lived, for in tumbling over the hedgerow they had fallen into its shadow, and so intercepted none of the fire’s radiance. The side of the hedgerow facing the barn was now a sterile stone spine with a few stalagmites of charcoal reaching out of it. The opposite side, a few inches away, was unchanged.

These and other impressions fully occupied their Natural-Philosophick faculties for some minutes. Then Daniel’s attention began to wander about. He had never taken a proper look round the area. First fog, then flames had baffled careful observations. He had no idea where they were, save that it was in Surrey, on some elevated stretch of the North Downs. Casting an eye down the hill, he saw undulating country spread out for many miles, church-steeples poking up here and there. Turning about, he saw a sort of cottage a few hundred yards down the road. But before he could gather many impressions of that, his eye was drawn to a much larger building spreading its wings across the breadth of a rise in the distance, and embracing one end of a system of formal gardens. “By god, that is a Great House!” he exclaimed. A stupid remark, but one that had to be gotten out of the way. His eyes were now able to find the tree-lined carriageway from which they had turned off some minutes before. It led around to the opposite face of that house and came up, he supposed, to its front door. “Whose is it?”

Newton had not noticed it before. But when he did, he looked bemused rather than surprised. “If you were a Tory, you would know it by heart. That is a place that my lord Bolingbroke bought, some years ago, from my lord—” and Isaac mentioned the name of a Whig lord who had famously gone bankrupt during an especially festive run on the Bank of England.

“I did not know Bolingbroke had a house in these parts,” Daniel confessed.

“That is because he has not occupied it yet,” said Isaac, “only subjected it to an endless series of remodeling-projects.” Then he paused to sift his own words. “Remodeling means that diverse tradesmen are forever passing in and out of the place with wagon-loads of stuff. The local people grow accustomed to such traffic…”

“You are saying that a criminal enterprise, headquartered on some of the out-buildings of the manor, could conceal its presence and its activities by blending in with such traffic,” said Daniel. He did not want to oblige Isaac to speak any more than was necessary, as it was quite obviously painful. “It is remarkable. We have suspected some link between Bolingbroke and Jack. But who would have imagined that the Secretary of State would suffer such goings-on in his own property?”

“Perhaps not so remarkable,” said Isaac. “He does not actually live here. We have lately seen that Bolingbroke was weaker, and more desperate, than we had supposed when he was at the zenith of his power and we in terror of him. He may have been beholden to Jack in ways we can only guess at. So for Jack to make use of some out-buildings on a piece of surplus property owned by Bolingbroke, and probably paid for by the King of France…” Newton shrugged to indicate it was not all that surprising, but then he wished he hadn’t, as the movement seemed to ignite racking pains in his ribs.

“I see another carriage headed this way,” said Daniel, “probably that of Monsieurs Kikin, Orney, and Threader.” He waved to it and the driver waved back. “Let us sit down and await it.”

“I prefer to stand,” said Isaac, “so that I shall not have to get up again.”

“Whither shall we ask the driver to convey us?” asked Daniel, hoping Isaac would say, the nearest physician.

“To yonder cottage,” Isaac said. “Let us discover what Jack has got going in there. Though I think I know already.”

“IT IS AS I THOUGHT,” he was saying twenty minutes later. He was seated at a work table in the cottage. Daniel, Leibniz, Orney, Threader, and Kikin were gathered about, standing on shards of glass that had been blown out of the frames during the recent entertainments. The carriage in which Daniel, Newton, and Leibniz had come out from London had been hunted down and driven back here, and a certain box of instruments fetched from it. From this Newton had selected an excellent convex lens mounted in a loupe, which he was using to inspect some pieces of evidence they had found lying out in plain sight on this table.

On the upper storey of this cottage, in a bedchamber, under a bed, the “Mohawks” had found three men who spoke no English. One was middle-aged and the other two might have been apprentices, sons, or both. They had been herded down stairs, and Leibniz had figured out that they were Saxons. They were relieved he could speak German but terrified that he was a Baron. He had been conversing with them, and Kikin (who knew German) had listened in, while Newton had inspected the exhibits on the work table. Left with nothing to do, Orney and Threader stood by, and Daniel was struck by the difference in their faces: Orney as ebullient as he was ever likely to get, Threader curiously distracted and rigid.

“Before I relate my findings,” said Newton, “have you learned anything from these men, Baron von Leibniz?”

“This will hardly surprise anyone, given the nature of these tools and workpieces,” said Leibniz, “but these men are engravers. They came from Dresden.”

“And the elder is quite obviously a master,” said Newton. “Please tell him who I am, and give him my highest compliments.”

Leibniz did so. The mention of Newton’s name nearly struck the Saxons dead with terror, but the compliment that followed close on its heels caused the oldest of the three to go all pink. He bowed very low—then, perhaps fearing that this was not obsequious enough, he got down on both knees. The younger men followed suit. Daniel had rarely seen humans so abject. “Isaac,” he said, “they are probably wondering whether you intend to kill them.”

“What they have been doing here would be High Treason, were they Englishmen,” Isaac allowed. “Whether Saxons can be accused of treason against the United Kingdom is a question for scholars of the law.”

“They have told me,” said Leibniz, “that they were induced to come here on false pretenses. Having arrived, they were made prisoners in this cottage, and told that they would neither be paid nor allowed to depart until they had accomplished a certain work, which is now nearly finished.”

“That it is!” said Newton. From the table before him he picked up a dun-colored wafer that earlier had come in for prolonged inspection under his glass. “This is a wax impression of a die for a one-guinea piece. I invite you all to inspect it.” He handed it to Daniel. It was quite familiar, and at the same time very strange.

“This bears an image of George Louis of Hanover!” he exclaimed.

“A fortnight ago, I directed the engravers at the Tower Mint to begin work on a die for the new King George guineas,” Newton said. “Since then—as many can testify—I have not once set foot in the Liberty of the Tower. I have never seen the dies from which that wax impression was struck. And yet here in this cottage in Surrey—the property of my lord Bolingbroke—we find the impression, and—” he picked up a cylinder of metal, bearing on one end an engraved mirror-image of the relief on the wax “—an essentially perfect copy of the die, which may be put to use in coining counterfeit guineas! This evidence, and the testimony of the Saxons, have delivered our enemies into our hands. Those charged with guarding the Mint—under the command of Charles White—have quite obviously colluded in making the wax impression, and delivering it here, where we have found coining-equipment, and caught the two sons of Jack Shaftoe red-handed. And since I have taken care not to enter the Mint, Bolingbroke cannot accuse me of having had a hand in any of this. I’ll see them all at Tyburn—and as for these Saxons, they shall be free to go home after they have assisted us with our inquiries.”

Norman Orney—a heavy-built man, but strong and even spry from working in his ship-yard—was able to catch the smaller and frailer Mr. Threader before he struck the floor.

Assisted by one of the younger Saxons, he carried Threader upstairs and heaved him on to a bed. Hankies were waved, hands rubbed, feet propped up, &c., and presently blood seeped back in to the old money-scrivener’s face and he woke up. But, plainly enough, he wished he hadn’t.

“Oh, Sir Isaac,” he said, and began flailing for a handhold. “Help me to rise,” he said to no one.

“I think you should stay down,” said Daniel.

“That moment has arrived I prayed would never come,” said Threader. “I must get down on my knees and pray to Sir Isaac Newton for my life—or, barring that, an honorable death—or if that is not feasible, an expeditious.”

“Then you admit collusion with coiners?” said Isaac, quite as bored as the others were astonished.

“You figured it out ages ago, didn’t you, Sir Isaac? Yes. Collusion with coiners. With the coiner. Now, mind you, in the beginning—”

“It seemed like nothing,” said Isaac, and waved his hand as if shooing off a wasp. “Forgive me, but I detect the onset of a long and well-rehearsed narration, for which I have no sufferance. The longer you make the story, the more gradual, insensible, and innocent seems your descent into…High Treason.”

Threader jumped, if such a thing was possible for a man lying flat on his back.

“But no matter how you stretch it, the beginning and the end are the same, are they not?” Isaac continued. “At the beginning you fall into the seemingly harmless practice of weighing guineas, and culling out those that are infinitesimally heavier. At the end you have been thoroughly compromised by Jack the Coiner. He has placed his agents in your company—he owns you so completely that he can even place an Infernal Device in your luggage-wagon, in the hope of assassinating the Master of the Mint at the Royal Society.”

“Oh, Sir Isaac, I did not know about that!”

“That much I believe. Jack would have had no reason to warn you—on the contrary. Yet even if the matter of the Infernal Device is left out of the accompt, you too are guilty of High Treason!”

“Oh, but what if I testify? Put me before a magistrate, Sir Isaac! No counter-tenor at the Italian Opera ever sang as I shall!”

“I do not need to hear you sing,” said Isaac. “Your offer has come too late. With no assistance from you, I have obtained all I wished for.”

“What if I could give you Jack the Coiner?” said Mr. Threader. Which struck Daniel and the others as frightfully dramatic; but Newton smiled thinly, like a chess-master who always knew that his foe would bring his Queen out eventually.

“Then there is an opportunity for negotiation,” said Newton. “Give me what you have.”

“Every Sunday evening, it is my lord Bolingbroke’s habit to go to a certain Clubb frequented by Tories. There is a back room, a private salon with a servants’ door leading back into the kitchens. At a certain signal Bolingbroke withdraws to that room on some pretext or other. Meanwhile Jack has entered the same Clubb through the back, in the guise of a knife-grinder who has come to whet the cooks’ cutlery. He comes into that salon through the servants’ door and doffs his disguise, and there the two villains hatch their plots and coordinate their schemes. It should happen again, just as I’ve said, in only a few hours, this being Sunday.”

“Perhaps Jack will have heard about what has happened this morning, and will know better than to attend the meeting,” said Isaac.

“Who shall bring him intelligence of it? The estate has been sealed off.”

“Everyone in the county saw the top of the hill explode.”

“Perhaps news of it shall reach Jack, perhaps not,” said Mr. Threader. “He must still meet with Bolingbroke from time to time. If this fails, why, I know other things about Jack, and can suggest other stratagems.”

“Then let us go to London so that the snare may be laid,” said Newton; and with that, the Clubb’s most eventful meeting (to date anyway) was adjourned, and its Treasurer manacled.

Library of Leicester House

MORNING OF 18 AUGUST 1714

For the sovereign is the public soul, giving life and motion to the commonwealth; which expiring, the members are governed by it no more, than the car-case of a man, by his departed, though immortal, soul.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

THE PLACE HAD NOT been fixed up in more than a hundred years, and was irredeemably Tudor: one could easily imagine Gloriana calling Sir Walter Raleigh on the carpet in here. No books by living authors were in evidence. The coastlines on the globe were hopelessly out of fashion.

Sir Isaac Newton did not have leisure to peruse this convex Artifact, however. He had been escorted to the library by young Johann von Hacklheber—a Leipziger baron. And so he was not extremely surprised to recognize a second North German baron—Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz—rising from a chair to bid him welcome. Newton’s face showed that he was annoyed to have been ensnared into yet another extraordinary and irregular meeting with his Nemesis, but that he would stiffen his upper lip and get through it. He glanced for only a moment at the young woman seated in an armchair near the globe. His eyes then snapped back to Leibniz. “I was led to believe I should be paying a call on the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm,” he began. But his protest trailed off as his eyes wandered back to behold the young woman. It was not just that she was good looking, though she more or less was. It was rather that she was turned out in clothing and jewels—especially, jewels—the likes of which Newton had not feasted his protruberant eyes on since the last time he had been summoned into the presence of Royalty. The woman was, in fact, wearing an actual tiara, and something in her bearing told Newton that it was no affectation, and that the sparkly bits were no rhinestones.

Johann von Hacklheber had already ducked out. Leibniz had the floor. “Your royal highness,” he said to the young woman, “this is Sir Isaac Newton. Sir Isaac, it is my honor to present Her Royal Highness Caroline, Princess of Wales, Electoral Princess of Hanover, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Stay! Do not move, Sir Isaac,” said Caroline, causing the savant to freeze in the opening of what promised to be a deep and lengthy formal bow. “We have heard already the story of how you were injured in our service—an inadvertent consequence of Baron von Leibniz’s heroics. You are in no condition for courtly bowing. Pray sit down.”

“You need not narrow your eyes thus at Freiherr von Leibniz,” said another voice, from the corner. Newton looked over to see Daniel Waterhouse, who had been delving into a brown and crusty Tome. “It is I, not the Baron, who related the story to her royal highness, and I who ought to be blamed for any misapprehensions I may have planted in her mind. True, it’s not every day that a German Baron has a go at Sir Isaac Newton with a great stick. Some might be tempted to make something out of it; but I suffered the same, and have forgiven him, and thanked him.”

“As do I,” said Newton easily, and then sat down—with conspicuous stiffness—in the side chair indicated by Caroline. Now it was Caroline in the big throne-like armchair next the globe, symmetrically flanked by Newton and Leibniz. Waterhouse prowled about the dim periphery, like a furtive librarian or, as it were, a philosophick Butler.

Caroline broke the ice—which was passing thick and cold—with small talk of the last days’ events in London. Were the rumors true?

This was just the gambit to use on Sir Isaac, who desired more than anything to set the new Dynasty’s mind at ease about the coinage of their Realm.

“Jack Shaftoe is ours!” he proclaimed. “The Coiner shall coin no more in this world.”

“If our understanding of the thing is correct,” said Caroline, “then this is momentous news indeed, and I am surprised I have not heard more of it.”

“Ah, but your royal highness, I did not know you were in London until I stepped over the threshold of this room—otherwise your royal highness should have been notified within the hour of Mr. Shaftoe’s arrest.”

“That is not what I meant. I refer to the fact that we have not heard anything of it from Grub Street.”

“He was taken in the back room of a certain Clubb, only a few minutes’ walk from here, frequented by Tories—many of whom, you may be sure, are sorely embarrassed. Certain Whigs would make political hay of it—and presently shall. I bear most of the men of this Clubb no ill-will and did not wish to expose them to obloquy. The true villain of the piece is a certain Tory Lord who was the first man in England for a time—”

“I know who you mean.”

“He may deserve exposure and shame, but this is not to be achieved without grave embarrassment to the entire Realm. The matter is delicate—” and here Isaac looked, uncharacteristically, to one who would know more about it: Daniel Waterhouse, Lord Regent.

Daniel responded by raising his voice in the direction of a side door of the library, which stood ajar. “Bring it in,” he commanded.

The door was drawn open by some unseen servant. Another servant, a butler, came in gripping a tray mostly covered by a blue velvet cushion. Bedded in that were two ingots of metal, deeply wrought with intricate circular depressions, made so that they could be clapped together like a huge locket. These were borne over to the Princess so that she could inspect them; Newton and Leibniz stole sidelong glances. “It is my honor,” said Daniel, “to present to your royal highness the Seals that are used by His Majesty’s Secretary of State on his official correspondence. Until yesterday these were, of course, in the possession of my lord Bolingbroke. But as your royal highness may have heard, Bolingbroke has decided to spend more time with his family.”

“Yes—in France,” said Caroline drily.

“He was last seen southbound at a speed normally seen only among men who have been projected from high cliffs,” Daniel allowed. “Of course, being a man of honor, he first gave the Seals of his former office to one of His Majesty’s Regents. I had the privilege of catching them when they slipped from his sweaty and trembling hands, and now present them to your royal highness. They are your family property. You may take them back to Hanover or—”

“They shall be ever so much more useful here,” said Caroline. “You and the other Regents will look after them, won’t you?”

“We shall consider it our honor and our privilege, highness.”

“Very well. Then since Bolingbroke appears to have departed the stage, I would that these be set aside, and I would hear more of Jack Shaftoe. Did he fight?”

The butler backed away and set the Seals on a library table near Daniel, then backed out of the room bowing. This gave Newton some moments to frame a response. Isaac, who until now had been at pains to respond instantly to the Princess’s every word and gesture, bated for a moment before answering. Daniel searched his face and thought he perceived a quiver of triumph—a rare self-indulgence for a Puritan. He was sitting at the right hand of the Princess of Wales telling the tale of how he’d caught the arch-villain Jack the Coiner, and, as a soupçon, the Seals of his most terrible persecutor had been brought in as a sort of trophy. Only Bolingbroke’s scalp on a stick would have given satisfaction more complete.

“Fight? No. Rather, he feigned a sort of boredom, or so I am told by the bailiffs who arrested him.”

“Boredom?”

“Yes, highness, as if he had known all along that he was walking into a trap.”

“Is he in the Tower of London, then?”

Isaac could not prevent a patronizing smile from spreading across his face. “As Mr. Shaftoe is a traitor and an important one, your royal highness anticipates, correctly, that he shall be held in the Tower. In this case, however, there are extenuating circumstances that have dictated a less conventional accommodation. Jack the Coiner and his gang seized the Tower complex in an elaborate coup de main some months ago. It was hushed up, explained away. But the fact is that he did it; from which we may conclude that he had, and has, many confederates among the people who dwell there, and that he knows its secrets all too intimately. Effective control of the Tower is still vested in Charles White, captain of the King’s Messengers, and he is an old crony of Bolingbroke.”

“I should have thought the Regents might have found another man for such a position,” said Caroline, shifting her attention to Daniel.

“In England such changes are not made lightly or swiftly,” said Daniel, “and rarely without cause. We have no firm evidence against Mr. White—though this might change—”

“If Jack talks to us, and tells us what he knows,” Newton concluded.

“I see,” said Caroline, “which is yet another reason to keep him out of the Tower, and out of the Power, of Charles White. Where then is he?”

“He is in Newgate Prison,” said Newton, “and others of his gang are in Fleet Prison. We deemed it wisest not to put all of them together in one building.”

“Indeed,” said Caroline, looking a little dismayed. “But is Newgate not a very common pit? Can he be kept close in such a place?”

“Newgate is several prisons lumped into one,” said Daniel. “The most notorious part of it is indeed an execrable dungeon. But connected with it is the Press-Yard and Castle, where Persons of Quality are held, if they can afford it.”

“We are paying the Gaolers of Newgate to keep him in an apartment there, heavily ironed,” Newton announced.

“Can Jack not pay them even more?”

“Perhaps. But if they collude in his escape, the gaolers lay themselves open to charges of High Treason. And, working as they do at Newgate, and discoursing with Jack Ketch every day, they know better than most what is the penalty for that crime.”

“I thank you, Sir Isaac, and Dr. Waterhouse, for acquainting me with these things,” said Caroline, in a tone of voice, and with a shift of posture, that made it plain that this part of the conversation was at an end. “Now I would hear of matters far more important.” She settled back in her chair, letting its padded arms support her elbows, and as she talked, her right hand strayed over to rest upon the antique globe and nudge it this way and that in its felt-lined cradle. Her pose recalled that of a Monarch with one hand on an Orb, though the other hand seemed to be missing its Sceptre. “As you may know, Sir Isaac, I have known Baron von Leibniz for many years, and learned from him much of what I know of Mathematicks, Metaphysicks, and the younger discipline of Natural Philosophy. Concerning the first of these, reports have reached me of an unpleasant dispute concerning the origin of the Calculus. The particulars are tedious. Lesser minds, confronted with such complexities, have seized on simple explanations. One such is that you stole the calculus from Freiherr von Leibniz; another is that he stole it from you. I find both of these hypotheses unconvincing.”

During Caroline’s remarks Daniel had observed a change in the weather pass across Isaac’s face. If he had expected lavish thanks and praise, he had been disappointed; Caroline had found the news of Jack and Bolingbroke interesting but, in the end, not all that remarkable. ’Twas as if the exhausted and bloodied Knight had dragged a pair of freshly slain dragons into the forecourt of the Princess’s castle, and after a look-see and a polite question or two, she had gone back to filing her nails. Isaac had been irked for a moment, then resigned himself to it. ’Twas ever thus, for Isaac. Everything he had done had been under-appreciated and over-criticized. The pink flush of victory, which earlier had been so plain on his face, had vanished, to be replaced by the visage he was used to wearing: gray and stiff as the figurehead on a worn-out ship.

“Your royal highness knows Leibniz better than I,” said Newton. “As you have confided your view in me, highness, I shall accept it, and say nothing against it, either here, or in public. Of course, I have no power to compel other philosophers to adopt that, or any other, view.”

“Then let us wash our hands of the Calculus Dispute and move on to Metaphysicks and Natural Philosophy. For I have long suspected—and Dr. Waterhouse will support me on this—that the Calculus Dispute was really an epiphenomenon of a far more profound, interesting, and momentous debate. Baron von Leibniz has served my House well as court philosopher; Sir Isaac, I trust, is desirous of doing likewise.”

“It is chief among my aspirations, highness,” Newton responded. This elicited a slight eye-roll from Leibniz, who glanced toward Daniel for support, but Daniel affected not to notice, and remained grave of aspect.

“I wonder if any royal House in the history of this world has enjoyed the distinction of being served, at the same time, by two such eminent philosophers! It is a rare thing, and I mean to make the most of it. You are both Christians, believers in a living and active God. You both hold that humans are made in God’s image, possessing free will. In Mathematicks and Natural Philosophy, your interests run on very similar lines. And yet there is between you a schism as deep as that between Scylla and Charybdis—a fundamental divergence of views that makes it impossible for you to collaborate with each other. Which were not such a bad thing, perhaps, if I were still Princess of Ansbach or some other tiny place, and you, sir, a Librarian and you, sir, a Vicar. But I am Princess of Wales. The House you both now serve is a great one—some would say, second only to the House of Bourbon. If the philosophy of that House is confused, why, it shall have dreadful consequences, dificult to foretell. A year ago, I asked Dr. Waterhouse to journey hither from Boston, that we might go to work healing this breach. That you, Sir Isaac, and you, Baron von Leibniz, are here together in this room now, is all his doing; but he did it at my command. His part in the thing is done and he has my gratitude forever. Your parts, gentlemen, begin now.”

“Highness,” said Newton, “I am grateful to you for having stated with such clarity the truth of my views on God, the human spirit, and free will. For Baron von Leibniz, I am sorry to report, has disseminated the slander that I am some sort of Atheist. While it is true that I reject the doctrine of the Trinity, please know that I do so only out of a belief that the Homoousian doctrine promulgated at the Council of Nicaea was an error, a straying from what Christians had believed until then, and ought to believe now—”

“Any person who seeks slander need not look so far afield, nor delve so deep!” Leibniz exclaimed, rising to his feet so forcefully that he had to take half a step toward Newton to steady himself. “I saved this man’s life three days ago, and gossip has already reached my ears that I am guilty of assaulting him! These willful distortions, sir, do nothing to bring us nigher true Philosophy!”

“I cannot imagine any slander more base than that I am an Atheist!” returned Newton. Because of his ribs, it was much more difficult for him to rise from his chair, but now he got his walking-stick under his folded hands as if he were about to give it a go.

“An Atheist? No. Never would I spread such a calumny—on my honor! But spreading doctrines that incline others toward Atheistical views is another matter. Of that you are, I regret to say, culpable.”

“Can one believe the incoherence of the man?!” Newton burst out, and regretted it, for it hurt to speak so vehemently. As long as his ribs were complaining anyway, he rose to his feet, then continued the outburst in a voice distorted by pain. “I am not an Atheist, he claims to admit—then he turns around and accuses me of spreading Atheism! It is typical of his slippery discourse, his slippery metaphysics!”

They were interrupted, but only for a moment, by a thud emanating from the floor between them. For Princess Caroline, disgruntled and bored, had used the palm of her hand to roll the globe up out of its cradle and over the rim of the felt-padded Great Circle that held it captive. It had tumbled to the rug between Newton and Leibniz. She put a foot up on it—a most undignified posture, for a Princess—and began to roll it back and forth idly as the argument went on.

“I do not think it is the least bit slippery,” said Leibniz. “You may be the most sincere Christian in the world, sir, but if you publish doctrines that are obscure, incoherent, contradictory, and impossible for readers to follow, why, they may go a-stray in their thinking and tend towards doctrines you would never espouse.”

“This is how you make amends for a false accusation of Atheism—by saying my life’s work is incoherent and contradictory? Pray do not make any more such apologies, sirrah, or I shall have to make amends to you by challenging you to a duel!”

Princess Caroline gave the globe a hard shove, and it rolled for a few yards across the carpet and scored a goal, as it were, in a large fireplace that accounted for most of one wall of the room. The hearth was slightly lower than the floor of the room, so the globe lodged there, and came to a stop between two andirons. “That globe will never do, for a modern Monarch,” she announced. “When the Prince of Wales and I move to this house, it shall have to be replaced by a new one, with more of geography and fewer of monsters and mermaids. One that shall be ready to receive Lines of Longitude whensoever that Roger Comstock finds someone to award his Prize to.” She rose now to her feet, and Newton and Leibniz, finally remembering their manners, turned to track her as she walked toward the fireplace. First, though, she wrenched a burning taper from a chair-side candelabrum. “As a rule I am averse to burning things found in Libraries, but this must be reckoned no loss at all, compared to the damage that the two of you are inflicting on Philosophy by your bickering.” She bent her knees and executed a graceful descent until she was sitting on the floor beside the hearth, skirts arranged around her. “I see things sometimes, in dreams or in day-dreams—some of them I quite fancy, for they seem to carry meaning. Those I remember, and think back on. There is one such vision that has got stuck in my head, quite as melodies often do, and I can’t seem to get rid of it. I shall try to do justice to it thusly.” And she reached out with the candle and let its flame lave the underside of the globe. The globe was of wood, and too heavy to catch fire readily; but paper gores printed with images of continents had been pasted over it. The paper caught fire, and a ragged flame-ring began to spread, consuming the cartographer’s work and leaving behind it a blackened and featureless sphere. “Sophie kept trying to tell me, before she died, that a new System of the World was being made. Oh, it is not a terribly novel thing to say. I know, and Sophie knew, that the third volume of your Principia Mathematica bears that name, Sir Isaac. Since she died, I have become quite convinced that she was correct—and moreover that the System is to be born, not at Versailles, but here—that this shall be its Prime Meridian, and all else shall be reckoned, and ruled, from here. It is a pleasing notion that there is to be such a System, and that I might play some small part in being its midwife. I think of the globe, with its neat parallels and meridians, as the Emblem of this System—what the Cross is to Christianity. But I am troubled by the vision of such a Globe in flames. What you are looking at here is a poor rendition of it; in my nightmares, it is ever so much more lovely and dreadful.”

“What do you suppose that vision signifies, highness?” asked Daniel Waterhouse.

“That this System, if it is set up wrong, might be doomed from the start,” said Caroline. “Oh, it shall be a wonder to behold at first, and all shall marvel at its regularity, its œconomy, and the ingenuity of them who framed it. Perhaps it shall work as planned for a decade, or a century, or more. And yet if it has been made wrong at the beginning, it shall burn, in the end, and my vision shall be realized in a manner infinitely more destructive than this.” She gave the smoking globe a nudge. It had been wholly scoured by the flames and become a trackless black orb.

Daniel now stepped over and gave her a hand up. “I do not concern myself so much,” said Caroline, turning toward Leibniz and Newton, “with bankers, merchants, clock-makers, or Longitude-finders, and their rôles in the creation of this System. Or even with Astronomers and Alchemists. But I am terribly concerned with my Philosophers, for if they get it wrong, then the System is flawed, and shall burn, in the end. Stop your bickering and get to work.”

“As it pleases your highness,” said Sir Isaac. “What would you have us work on?”

“Baron von Leibniz may be on to something,” said Caroline, “which is that, though you, and most other Fellows of the Royal Society, are true Christians, and believers in Free Will, the very doctrines and methods that the Royal Society has promulgated have caused many to question the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the authority of the Church, the premise that we have souls endowed with Free Will. Why, Dr. Waterhouse himself has lately given me the lamentable news that he has quite abandoned all such doctrines.”

This earned Daniel perturbed and puzzled looks from Newton and Leibniz. All he could do, in the face of such disapproval from such minds, was make a frail smile and shrug. Caroline continued, “As so much of civilization is rooted in those beliefs, this strikes me as one way in which our System of the World might be set up wrongly and thus self-doomed. Neither you, Sir Isaac, nor you, Baron von Leibniz, sees the slightest contradiction between your Faith and the true and fearless pursuit of Natural Philosophy. But you differ radically in how you reconcile the one with the other. If you two cannot manage it, no one can; and so I would like for you to work on that, if you please.”

“Your royal highness’s discourse concerning the System of the World, and the threat of its running awry at some future time, puts me in mind of a thing I do not understand in the philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton,” Leibniz began. “Sir Isaac describes that System by which the heavenly bodies are kept in their gyres, and made to orbit round and round forever. Fine. But he seems to say that God, who created this system and set it in motion, must from time to time reach in and tinker with it, as a horologist adjusts the workings of his clock. As if God lacked the foresight, or the power, to make it a perpetual motion.”

“You are over-reacting to a passage from my Opticks that is really not all that important,” Isaac began.

“On the contrary, sir, it is very important indeed, if it is wrong, and puts wrong ideas in people’s heads!”

“Then as you are at such pains to correct my errors, Herr Leibniz, let me return the favor in kind. This similitude, likening the universe to a clock, and God to a horologist, is faulty. A horologist is presented with certain laws or facts of nature, viz. that weights descend towards the center of the earth and springs push back when deflected. Taking these as givens, he hacks away at his bench to produce some mechanism that exploits these properties in a more or less ingenious way. Ones who are more ingenious, make clocks that require adjustment less often, and one who was perfect would, I suppose, make one that would never need it at all. But God does not merely compose the objects and forces that were given to Him, but is Himself the Author of those objects and forces. Author, and preserver. Nothing happens in this world without His government and His inspection. Think of Him not as a watch-maker but as a King. Suppose there were a Kingdom where all things ran forever in an orderly and regular way without the King ever having to attend, make judgments, or exercise his powers. If it were, in sum, so ordered that the King could be removed from it without any diminution, then he would be a King only in name, and not deserving of the respect and loyalty of his subjects.”

“Like the God of Spinoza,” said Caroline, “if I am following your similitude correctly.”

“Indeed, highness. And so if Baron von Leibniz is of the view that the world can go on forever without the continual inspection and governance of God, why, then, I say that it is his philosophy that shall incline men towards Atheism.”

“That is not my view, as I think you know,” said Leibniz equably. “I believe that God takes part in the world’s workings at every moment—but not in the sense of mending it when it has gone awry. To say otherwise is to say God makes mistakes, and changes His mind. Instead of which I believe in a pre-established harmony, reflecting that God has foreseen all, and provided for it.”

To which Sir Isaac was about to make some rejoinder when he was interrupted by Daniel. “This, I believe, is the least interesting topic that the two of you could debate. It is really an argument about the signification of certain words, and the applicability of certain metaphors: the clock-maker, the King, et cetera.”

Both Leibniz and Newton were pressing their lips together to keep all of their objections and rejoinders from bursting forth in a Pandoran onslaught. Rather than see the rest of the day devoted to the aftermath, Daniel turned to Princess Caroline and continued, without letup: “Or to put it another way: your royal highness, are you willing to stipulate that Sir Isaac and Baron von Leibniz both believe in a God who is aware of and active in the Universe? And that this God, in framing the Universe, was not chargeable of any errors?”

“Indeed, Dr. Waterhouse, it is plain to see that both of them believe as much—though I wish you would believe it, too.”

“I am not really a participant, highness, so let us leave my views out of the reckoning.”

“On the contrary, Dr. Waterhouse,” said the Princess, “every philosophical dialogue I have ever read, requires one interlocutor who is of a Skeptickal habit of mind—”

“Or of a Stupid,” Daniel put in.

“Be he Skeptickal, Stupid, or both, the others try to win him over to their view of things.” Caroline had suddenly gone all flushed and girlish, and looked to Newton and Leibniz for their support in the venture. Phant’sying she saw what she wanted, she turned back to the bemused Daniel, who was saying: “Am I to understand that the purpose of the discussion is now to subject me to a religious conversion?”

“You are the one who complained, a moment ago, of feeling Stupid,” said Caroline, a bit miffed. “So listen, and be enlightened.”

“I am yours to command, highness, and ready for Enlightenment. But I’d have you know that my Stupidity and my Skepticism are two sides of the same coin, and are of a very particular kind, which is carefully thought out. John Locke was of the same mind, and set it down in words better than I ever could. To go into it here would be half an hour’s digression; suffice it to say, that as a result of being near men like Newton and Leibniz, men like Locke and I are all too keenly aware of the limits of our own intellects, and the dullness of our own senses. And not only of ours but of most other people’s, too. And as a result of studying Natural Philosophy we have got glimmerings of the immensity and complexity of the Universe that were not available to anyone until of late, and are known only to a few now. The imbalance between the grand mysteries of the Universe as opposed to our own feeble faculties, leads us to set very modest expectations as to what we shall and shan’t be able to understand—and makes us passing suspicious of anyone who propounds dogma or seems to phant’sy he has got it all figured out. Having said which I must concede that if anyone can figure it all out, it would be these two; and so I’ll listen, provided they confine their discussion to topics that are interesting.”

“And what would you denominate interesting, Doctor Waterhouse?” asked the Princess.

“The two labyrinths.”

Caroline and Leibniz both smiled; Newton looked stormy. “I do not know what this is meant to signify.”

“Doctor Leibniz mentioned to me long ago that there are two sorts of intellectual labyrinths into which all thinking people are sooner or later drawn,” said Caroline. “One is the composition of the continuum, which is to say, what is matter made of, what’s the nature of space, et cetera. The other is the problem of free will: Do we have a choice in what we do? Which is like saying, do we have souls?”

“I’ll agree with Baron von Leibniz at least to this point: these are interesting questions, and so many spend so much time thinking on them that the similitude of a labyrinth is well taken.”

Daniel reminded them, “The Princess has requested that this discussion be productive of a better System of the World. I put it to you that the latter question—free will, and the spirit—is, as far as that goes, the more important. Myself, I am comfortable with the notion that we are Machines made of Meat, that there’s no more free will in us than there is in a cuckoo-clock, and that the spirit, soul, or whatever you want to call it, is a færy-tale. Many who study Natural Philosophy will arrive at the same conclusion, unless the two of you find a way of convincing them otherwise. Her royal highness seems to be of the view that such beliefs, if they should be imbued into the new System that her House is erecting, shall lead to the realization of her nightmare. So, if I am to be Simplicio in this dialogue, pray explain how it is that there may be such a thing as free will, and a spirit that may do as it pleases, unbound by the Mathematick laws of our Mechanical Philosophy.”

“Well, if you put it that way, it’s an old problem,” said Leibniz. “Descartes saw straight away that Mechanical Philosophy might spell trouble for free will, in that it led to a new sort of predestinationism—not rooted in theology, like that of the Calvinists, but rather growing out of the simple fact that matter obeys predictable laws.”

“Yes,” said Daniel, “and then he got it all wrong, by putting the soul in the pineal gland.”

“I’d rather say he got it wrong before then, by dividing the universe into matter, and cogitation,” Leibniz said.

“And I’d say he got it wrong even before then, by supposing that there was a problem,” said Newton. “There’s nothing wrong in recognizing that part of the universe is a passive mechanism, and part of it is active and thinking. But Monsieur Descartes, seeing what was done to Galileo by the Papists, was in such terror of the Inquisition that his resolve failed.”

“Very well, in any case we agree that Descartes perceived a problem, and came up with a wrong answer,” said Daniel. “Does either of you have a better one to offer up? Sir Isaac, it sounds as if you deny the very existence of any such problem.”

“You may read Principia Mathematica without finding discourse of souls, spirits, cogitation, or what-have-you,” said Isaac. “It is about planets, forces, gravity, and geometry. I do not address, and certainly do not pretend to solve, the riddles that so confounded Monsieur Descartes. Why should we attempt to frame hypotheses about such matters?”

“Because if you do not, Sir Isaac, others, of less brilliance, will; and they will frame the wrong ones,” Caroline said.

Newton bristled. “My work on gravity and opticks has brought me a kind of fame, which is a thing I never sought, nor wanted. It has done me nothing good, and much bad—as now, when I am expected to utter profundities on topics far afield from what I have chosen to study.”

“So says the public Sir Isaac Newton,” said Daniel, “Author of Principia Mathematica, and Master of the Mint. But this is a private gathering, which might benefit from the participation of the private Sir Isaac: the author of the Praxis.”

“Praxis has not been published,” Isaac pointed out, “and not because I have deemed it somehow private but because ’tis yet unfinished, and so not fit to talk of.”

“What is Praxis?” Caroline inquired.

“What Principia Mathematica was to Mechanical Philosophy, Praxis would be to Alchemy,” said Isaac.

“A laconic answer! May we hear more?”

“If I may say so, highness,” said Daniel, “Sir Isaac learned early that anything he openly professed was liable to come under attack, to his great aggravation and embarrassment, and so became chary of professing anything until he had got it perfect, and made it impervious. Praxis is not ready yet.”

“Then it seems I shall not have any satisfaction whatsoever!” said Caroline, a bit poutingly.

“Which is entirely my fault, for having mentioned Praxis,” Daniel hastened to say. “But I had a reason for doing it, which was to say that, though the public Sir Isaac might profess not to see the problem that so captured the attention of Descartes, I believe that the private Sir Isaac has been working on just that problem.”

“As I state quite plainly in Principia Mathematica,” said Isaac, in a bit of a high clarion self-righteous tone, “it is not my intention, in that work, to consider the causes and seats of Force. That gravity exists, and acts at a distance, is taken as a given. Why and how it does so are not considered. I would not be human if I did not have some curiosity as to what gravity was, and how it works; and even if ’twere otherwise, Baron von Leibniz and his Continental supporters would never allow me a moment’s peace on the matter. So, yes! I would understand Force. I have toiled at it. The ignorant have styled my toils Alchemy.”

At this Daniel threw him an irritated look, which Isaac, to his credit, did not fail to notice. “C’est juste!” Isaac said. “It’s not wrong to call this work Alchemy, but that word, so laden with the baggage of centuries, doesn’t do justice to it.”

“May I ask a question about your research in this area—however you choose to denote it?” Leibniz asked.

“Provided it contains no hidden barbs or spryngs,” Isaac allowed.

Leibniz now achieved the difficult feat of rolling his eyes, heaving a great sigh of exasperation, and voicing his question all at the same time. “If I understand what ‘force’ means, in your metaphysicks—”

“Which is the only coherent definition of ‘force’ that I know of!” Newton slipped in, glancing at the Princess.

Leibniz, with some visible straining, affected a saintly mien during this. “It appears to mean some invisible influence, acting across what you think of as the vacuum of space at infinite speed, which causes objects to accelerate—even though nothing seems to be touching them.”

“Setting aside your strangely hedged and qualified way of talking about ‘vacuum’ and ‘space,’ that is a reasonable description of gravitational force,” Newton allowed.

“Now in your metaphysicks—which I concede happens to be that used by just about everyone—there is this thing called space, which is mostly empty, but has lumpy bits here and there, called bodies; some big heavy spherical ones which we call planets, but also any amount of clutter, such as this poker, yonder candelabrum, the rug, and these bipedal animated bodies answering to the names Daniel Waterhouse, Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, et cetera?”

“That much is so obvious that some of us are amazed to hear a learned man waste breath pointing it out,” said Newton.

“Some of those bodies answer only to the deterministic laws of the mechanical philosophy,” said Leibniz, “such as the globe, which rolled into the fireplace because her royal highness gave it a shove. But the bodies denominated Daniel Waterhouse, et cetera, are somehow different. True, they are subject to the same forces as the globe—our friend Daniel plainly feels Gravity’s pull, or else he would float away! But such bodies act in complicated ways not explainable by the laws set forth in your Principia Mathematica. When Dr. Waterhouse sits down to write an essay, let us say about the Latitudinarian philosophy espoused by him and the late Mr. Locke, we may observe his quill maneuvering all over the page in the most complicated paths imaginable. Here are none of the conic sections of the Principia! No equation can predict the trajectory of Daniel’s nib over the page, for it results from innumerable and unfathomable minute contractions of the small muscles of his fingers and his hand. If we dissect a man’s hand, we find that these muscles are governed by nerves, which may easily enough be traced back to the brain, as rivers come from springs in the mountains. Remove the brain, or sever its connexions to the hand, and lo, that limb becomes as simple as yonder globe; that is, we may predict its future movements from the Principia, and plot them in Conics. And so it is evident that, to the Force of Gravity—which acts on everything—are superadded other forces, observable only in animals,* and productive of infinitely more complicated and interesting movements.”

“I am with you so far,” said Newton, “if all you are saying is that forces other than Gravity act on Dr. Waterhouse’s pen when he is writing something, and that such forces do not appear to motivate rocks or comets.”

“Hooke was fascinated by muscles,” Daniel put in, “and looked at them under his microscope, and labored at making artificial ones, so that he could fly. Those, I predict, could have been described by Mechanical Philosophy; after all, they were naught more than practical applications of the Rarefying Engine, and as such, subject to Boyle’s Law. With more time and better microscopes, Hooke might have found, within muscles, tiny mechanisms, likewise describable by mathematical laws, and thereby put to rest any supposed mysteries—”

But he stopped as both Newton and Leibniz were making the same sort of hand-waving gestures employed to bat away farts. “You miss the point!” said Leibniz. “I have no interest in the physics of muscles! Think, sir, if Hooke had made his flying-machine, driven, in a deterministic fashion, by Rarefying Engines, what more then would he have had to add to this device, to make it flutter to a safe perch atop the cupola of Bedlam, and balance there as ’twas buffeted by divers wind-gusts, and take flight again without o’ersetting and tumbling to the ground like a shot squab? I am trying to draw our attention to what it is that comes down those nerves from the brain: the decisions, or rather, the physical manifestations thereof—the characters, as it were, in which they are writ—and transmitted to the muscles, that they may inform what would otherwise be without form and void.”

“I understand that,” said Daniel, “and I say it is all pistons and cylinders, weights and springs, to the very top. And that’s all I need to explain how I inform ink on a page, and how a bird informs the air with its wings.”

“And I agree with you!” said Leibniz.

This produced a dumbfounded pause. “Have I converted you to the doctrine of Materialism so easily, then?” Daniel inquired.

“By no means,” said Leibniz. “I say only that, though the machine of the body obeys deterministic laws, it does so in accordance with the desires and dictates of the soul, because of the pre-established harmony.”

“Of that, we must needs hear more, for it is very difficult to understand,” said the Princess.

“Chiefly because it is wrong!” said Sir Isaac.

Caroline now had to literally step between the two philosophers. “Then we are all in agreement that further discourse concerning the pre-established harmony is wanted from Baron von Leibniz,” she said. “But first, I would fain hear Sir Isaac address the phænomena of which Drs. Waterhouse and Leibniz have just been discoursing. Sir Isaac, we have heard from both of these gentlemen that they are wholly satisfied it is all mechanism to the very top. What of you? Do you require something more?”

Newton said, “If we allow, not only the muscles, but the nerves, and even the brain itself, to be ‘pistons and cylinders, weights and springs’ as you put it, whose machinations might be observed and described by some future Hooke, then we must still explain how those mechanisms are informed by the soul, spirit, or whatever we are going to call it—the thing that has free will, that is not subject to deterministic laws, and that accounts for our being human. This is ultimately the same problem as we discoursed of earlier—the problem you find boring, Daniel—of God’s relationship to the Universe. For the relationship that our souls bear to our bodies, is akin to the relationship that God bears to the entire Universe. If God is to be something more than an Absentee Landlord—something more than the perfect watch-maker, who sets His clock a-run, and walks away from it—then we must account for how He influences the movements of things in the world. This gets us round to that mysterious phænomenon called Force. And when we discourse of animal motion we must in the end address a like problem, namely of how the soul that inhabits a body may influence the operation of what is in the end just a big soggy clock.”

“I could not disagree more, by the way,” said Leibniz. “The soul and body influence each other not at all.”

“Then how does my soul know that yonder candle is flickering?” asked Princess Caroline. “For I can only know such a thing through my eyes, which are parts of my body.”

“Because God has put into your soul a principle representative of the candle-flame and everything else in the Universe,” said Leibniz. “But that is most certainly not how God perceives things! He perceives all things, because He continually produces them. And so I reject any such analogies likening God’s relationship to the Universe and ours to our bodies.”

“I do not understand Baron von Leibniz’s hypothesis at all,” Isaac confessed.

“What is your hypothesis, Sir Isaac?”

“That most of the animal body is a determined machine, I’ll grant. That it is controlled from the brain, has been proved, by Willis and others. It follows, simply, that, by laws of God’s choosing, the soul has the power to operate upon the brain, and thereby to influence animal movements.”

“This is just Descartes and the pineal gland all over again!” Leibniz scoffed.

“He was wrong about the pineal gland,” Newton said, “but I’ll grant a certain formal resemblance between his way of thinking about it, and mine.”

“In each case,” Daniel translated, “there is some sense in which a free, non-corporeal, non-mechanical spirit can effect physical changes in the workings of the machinery of the brain.”

“I think that much is obvious; as is the fact that God—Who is likewise a non-corporeal Spirit—has power to effect physical changes—that is, to exert Force—upon any thing whatsoever in this Universe.”

“And is it the case that when you study the causes and seats of Force in your Praxis work, you seek to understand Forces of that type as well?”

“I do not think that any account of Force that failed to address this topic could be deemed complete.”

“When Sir Isaac was working on the Principia,” said Daniel, “I paid him a visit up at Trinity. He had requested what seemed to me to be an odd lot of information: tables of the tides, data on a certain comet, astronomical observations of Jupiter and Saturn. Well, it was a long ride, and by the time I had reached Cambridge I’d managed to work out that there was a common thread running through all of these: gravity. Gravity causes the tides and determines the orbits of comets and planets alike. To us it is obvious now; but back then it was by no means agreed that a comet, let us say, might be bound by the same force that kept the Earth in its gyre. Isaac’s triumph was to perceive that all of these phænomena were attributable to the same cause, working everywhere in the same way. Now, I have long been nonplussed by Isaac’s Alchemical research, but as years have gone by I have perceived that he would achieve a similar triumph by finding a single common underlying explanation for phænomena that we think of as diverse, and unrelated: free will, God’s presence in the Universe, miracles, and the transmutation of chymical elements. Couched in the willfully obscure jargon of the Alchemists, this cause, or principle, or whatever one wants to call it, is known as the Philosopher’s Stone, or other terms such as the Philosophic Mercury, the Vital Agent, the Latent or Subtile Spirit, the Secret Fire, the Material Soul of Matter, the Invisible Inhabitant, the Body of Light, the Seed, the Seminal Virtue.”

“You are confusing a number of different ideas,” said Isaac, “but this does at least prove that you perused my notes before burning them.”

At this Caroline was taken aback for a moment; then curiosity got the better of her. “What is this Agent or Spirit? Have you seen it, Sir Isaac?”

“I see it now, in the emotions and thoughts flickering across your face, highness. I see its effect everywhere,” was the somewhat evasive response of Newton. “In Nature I perceive two categories of actions: mechanical and vegetable. By mechanical I mean, of course, just the sort of thing that Drs. Waterhouse and Leibniz discoursed of earlier: in a word, clock-work. By vegetable I do not mean turnips. That is a new and vulgar meaning of the word. I use it in its ancient sense of something animate, living, growing. It describes generative and creative processes. Clocks, even good ones, run down and wear out. The mechanical world decays. Counterpoised against this tendency to decline must be some creative principle: the active seed—the Subtile Spirit. An unimaginably tiny quantity of this, acting upon a vastly larger bulk of insipid, dead, inactive matter, wreaks immense, even miraculous transformations, to which I give the general name vegetation. Just as the general principle of Gravity manifests itself in diverse specific ways, such as tides, the orbits of comets, and the trajectories of bullets, so the vegetative principle may be perceived, by those who know how to look for it, in diverse places. Just to mention one example, which we discoursed of earlier: a flying-machine, constructed of artificial muscles, would be a mechanical device, whose fate, I believe, would be to crash to the ground, like the corpse of a bird that has died on the wing. If that machine were to take flight—which would mean sensing every fluctuation of the air, and responding in the correct way—I should ascribe that, ultimately, to the workings of some sort of vegetative principle. But Daniel is correct in thinking that it is also related to such matters as souls, miracles, and certain of the more profound and astonishing chymical transformations.”

“But do you think that there is ultimately some physical substance at work—something you could touch and observe?”

“Yes, I do, and have been searching for it. And I think I know where to find some,” Isaac said, and turned to glower at Daniel. But the Princess missed this, as she was turning to Leibniz. “Baron von Leibniz,” said she, “can your view be reconciled with Sir Isaac’s?”

Leibniz sighed. “It is…awkward,” he said. “To my ears, all of this sounds like a rear-guard action fought by a good Christian retreating before the onslaught of Mechanical Philosophy.”

“That could not be more wrong!” snapped Newton. “There is Mechanical, and there is Vegetable. I study both.”

“But you have already ceded half the battlefield to Mechanical!”

“There is no ceding, sir. Have you not read my Principia? The Mechanical world exists, the Mechanical philosophy describes it.”

“Dr. Waterhouse would say that Mechanism describes not just half, but all of it,” Leibniz said. “I take the opposite view, which is that Vegetable is all, and what we think of as mechanical is only the superficies of underlying processes that are not mechanical at all.”

“We await a coherent explanation,” said Isaac.

“Philosophers of a Mechanick frame of mind break all things down into atoms, to which they ascribe properties that, to them, seem reasonable—which means Mechanical properties. Mass, extension, and the ability to collide with and stick to one another. Then from this they try to explain Gravity and Souls and Miracles. It leads them into difficulties. Instead, I break all things down into monads, to which I ascribe what some would call soul-like properties: they can perceive, thnk about their perceptions, decide, and act. From this it is no great difficulty to explain those things that are so troublesome, in a mechanical-minded Atomic philosophy—everything that you put under the rubric of Vegetation, including our own ability to think, decide, and act. However, it is difficult to explain the things that are, in an Atomic philosophy, idiotically simple and obvious. Such as space and time.”

“Space and Time! Two minor omissions that no one is likely to notice,” grumbled Newton.

“If I may say so, your own conception of Space is by no means as straightforward as it seems at first,” Leibniz said, very much in the style of one who was firing the opening salvo of another long argument. But before this could get going, the door of the room opened, and Johann von Hacklheber could be seen standing there, holding, in a very significant way, a Letter. Behind him Eliza was pacing back and forth with a fist balled up in front of her lips.

Princess Caroline stared into Johann’s eyes, and cocked her head. She did not say aloud I told you not to bother me, but it came through so distinctly that all heads turned back toward Johann, expecting from him an immediate apology. Instead he raised his eyebrows and stood his ground.

Caroline closed her eyes and sighed. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse stepped back to clear her path out of the room. For they had all understood at the same moment that there was only one person who had this authority: Caroline’s father-in-law, the as-yet-uncrowned King of England.

“Dr. Waterhouse, pray accept the rôle of my knight-errant, and put this thing to rest,” she said, and swept out.

“Well! That’s a bit of a tall order,” Daniel reflected, after the door had been closed behind her.

“Not so,” said Newton, “if you’ll only release the Solomonic Gold.”

“That Jew who works for the Tsar,” said Daniel—not wishing to utter the name Solomon, for fear it would send Isaac into chiliastic transports—“has detected that the trial batch of plates were made of heavier-than-normal gold, and the decree has gone forth from the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg that all succeeding plates be made of the same stuff. If we disobey, punishment will ensue, in the Russian style. Were it not for this, I’d swop the gold without hesitation. For I believe it has no special properties whatsoever.”

“Then how do you explain your personal resurrection, at the hands of Enoch Root, in 1689?”

“Say what!?” asked Leibniz.

“Or,” said Isaac, “is that the one thing Hooke wrote, in all his life, that you’ll not believe?”

“Hooke’s account states that Enoch gave me some medicine, which helped.”

“Helped!? You have a marvelous gift for understatement, Daniel.”

“It could have been anything…or nothing. It has been known to occur that seemingly dead men will revive after a few minutes.”

“I hated Hooke,” Isaac admitted, “but even I will admit that he was the most acute observer who ever lived. Do you really expect me to believe that he, of all people, could not distinguish between a living patient and a dead?”

“I see that your mind is quite made up. What point is there in debating it?”

Both Newton and Leibniz laughed out loud.

“What is funny?” Daniel demanded.

“You have made us debate for hours!” Leibniz exclaimed. “Now that you are challenged on a troublesome question, you claim to see no point in it.”

“I need only a small sample, Daniel,” said Newton. “Do not forget that for many years I have sought evanescent traces of this in samples of gold that had been infinitely diluted and debased. My techniques are now highly developed. I do not need a brick of the stuff. Just an ounce, or less—a scrap.”

“I tell you that Peter’s assayer weighed every ounce of it. There are no ounces to spare. I could ask him for permission to take a small sample, but…”

“No,” said Isaac, “I do not think it would be wise for you to tip your hand.”

At this remark Daniel was suddenly conscious of the ring on his finger: the one that Solomon had given him, made of con-fused bits punched from the plates at Bridewell. A tingle ran up his arm to his scalp; but he froze there, and said nothing, and hoped that Isaac would not take note of his horripilation.

“Isaac,” said a voice. Daniel had to look up to verify that it was that of Leibniz: a bit shocking, only in that the German had addressed Newton by his Christian name, without the “Sir.”

“Gottfried,” said Newton, not to be gainsaid.

“Thirty-seven years ago I came incognito to these shores to propose an alliance between myself and you. It was about two years after I’d developed the calculus, only to realize I was only following in your footsteps. It had occurred to me that we might share other interests as well, and that by joining forces we might achieve more, sooner. Daniel had encouraged me in this.”

“I well remember the match, and the matchmaker,” said Isaac, “and his weakness for playing with matches.”

This witticism, because it was such a rare thing from Isaac, cut all the more deeply. Daniel’s right arm had begun to feel terribly heavy, as if the ring were weighing it down—or as if the strain of the day had caused him to suffer a stroke. He put the heavy hand in the pocket of his breeches, and hung his head.

“Then you remember as well as I that the match flared, only to fail,” said Gottfried. “Now I am back, certainly for the last time. Will you not reconsider, Isaac? Will you not obey your Princess—my Princess—and work with me, and lay a strong foundation beneath the System of the World?”

“I am and have been working on just that,” said Isaac. “Should I not ask you, Gottfried, if you would work with me? It might entail giving up on monads, by the way. Ah, I see by your look that you have no thought of doing so.”

“The answer then is no.”

“The answer is yes. But it is a question of timing, sir. It is not for you, or me, or our Princess, to dictate how long it shall take, and when it shall be accomplished! She would have it settled now—today! You are likewise in a great hurry. For you are an old man—we are all old men—and fearful of running out of time. But this is neither here nor there. Nature will reveal her secrets at times of her own choosing, and has no thought of our convenience. Principia Mathematica might never have come about had Nature not sent a spate of comets our way in the 1680s, and so arranged their trajectories that we could make telling observations. It might be ten years, a hundred, or a thousand before she sends us the clew that will enable us to solve the riddles we have been speaking of today. Though the Gold of Solomon might be might be just that clew—I don’t know until I can inspect some of it.”

Daniel smiled. “You are infinitely patient, it seems, save where the Solomonic Gold is concerned. It is amusing. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who is convinced he is really going to die soon—both of you, Isaac and Gottfried, are believers in life æternal. Why don’t you have the courage of your convictions, and agree to re-convene the discussion a few centuries from now, or whenever there are sufficient data to resolve these issues philosophically?”

Which was a little bit of a cheap trick—forcing their hands thus, by challenging the sincerity of their religious convictions. But Daniel was exhausted, and could see that the thing was doomed, and wanted only to wind it up.

“I accept!” said Leibniz. “It is a sort of duel—a philosophick duel, to be settled, not with weapons, but with ideas, at a time and on a field yet to be chosen. I accept.” And he held out his hand toward Isaac.

“Then I’ll look for you on that field, sir,” said Newton. “Though our philosophies are so different that I do not really expect both of us can possibly be there; for one of us must be wrong.” He shook Leibniz’s hand.

“Every duellist needs a second,” said Leibniz. “Perhaps Daniel shall act in that capacity for both of us.”

Daniel snorted. “Isaac may believe I was resurrected, but I did not think you would hold with such beliefs, Gottfried. No, if you require seconds, it now seems that there are any number of immortal personages who shall be willing to show up on the appointed date, and hold your coats: for you, Gottfried, there is Enoch Root, and for you, Isaac, that ancient Jew who works for the Tsar and calls himself Solomon.” And so he did not take his right hand from his pocket to shake hands with them, for the ring felt terribly heavy and obvious, and he had a sort of lurid phant’sy that Gottfried and Isaac would suddenly recognize it for what it was, and fall to scuffling over it.

“BRR, MY FATHER-IN-LAW is frightfully cross with me,” Caroline announced, “at least, if I have made sense of his letter correctly.” She had read through it three times as Johann and Eliza watched. Leicester House resounded with booming and dragging noises: the sound of Royal baggage being packed and positioned.

“So much time has passed, and so many things have occurred, since I claimed I was going away to that Schloß to recover from June’s traumas, that I had quite forgotten that his majesty was expecting me back. But now he seems to have figured out where I am.”

“Probably some intelligence reached him after our little adventure on the Thames,” Johann suggested. His discourse had been clipped and gloomy, and he’d been supporting his head on his fingertips—or perhaps that was self-administered massage. To Caroline, being bawled out by the King of England and Elector of Hanover might have been a trivial family dust-up, but for him it was a different matter.

“Very well,” said Caroline, “it’s back to Hanover I go, then.”

“Right!” said Johann, and got up and strode out. If anyone had had the temerity to stop him and ask him why, he’d have said he was off to do something ever so practical and important. But as both Caroline and Eliza understood perfectly well, the fact of the matter was that he had become so agitated that he’d go mad if he spent any more time sitting and talking.

“Off to Hanover,” Caroline repeated, “only to return in a few weeks! It says here that his majesty intends to reach England late in September. Supposing that the Prince of Wales and I are to accompany him, that means that as soon as I reach Hanover I shall have to turn round and come right back.”

“Geographically, yes, you shall return to the same latitude and longitude,” said Eliza, after thinking about this one for a moment. “But you will no longer be incognito. And so socially you shall be coming to a city you have never before visited, and to a different life altogether.”

“I suppose that shall be quite true, as long as we dwell in places like St. James’s Palace, with all the courtiers and the ambassadors, and the Duke of Marlborough right next door,” said Caroline. “But if there’s one thing I learned from Sophie, it’s that there are very practical reasons for a Princess to have more than one Palace. For her, the Leine Schloß served as St. James’s shall for me and George Augustus. But at every chance she got, she removed herself to Herrenhausen, where she could live as she pleased, and walk in the garden. That’s why I have been so keen on this place. It’s going to be my Herrenhausen,” Caroline announced, “and you are going to be its doyenne.”

“Thank God,” said Eliza, “I was afraid you were about to say, ‘dowager.’ ”

“Lady of the Bedchamber or Mistress of the Stole or something,” Caroline said, a bit absently. “We shall have to choose the right English title for you. Whatever you’re called, the point is that I’d like you to live here, at least part of the time, and walk in the garden with me, and talk to me.”

“That doesn’t sound too onerous,” said Eliza with a smile. “But know that any place where I live is liable to have a flux of odd persons running through it, connected with the work that I pursue on the abolition of Slavery, and so on.”

“So much the better! It’ll remind me that much more of the Charlottenburg back when Sophie Charlotte was still alive.”

“Some of my lot may be odder and rougher yet…”

“You have a faraway look in your eye when you say that…are you thinking of your long-lost beau?”

At this Eliza sighed and threw Caroline a mean look.

“I have not forgotten our fascinating chat in Hanover,” Caroline said.

“Let’s speak of a different fascinating chat!” said Eliza. “What tidings from the Library?”

“When I left, they were still having at each other. They are both very proud men. Newton, especially, is not of a mind to back down. The court is coming here, and leaving poor Leibniz behind in Hanover. Advantage Newton. Newton has won the calculus dispute, or so it is believed by the savants of the Royal Society. And the recent controversies surrounding the Mint have cleared up, or so it would seem.”

“Is that what he told you? Now that would be some kind of a miracle, if true,” Eliza said.

“Why do you say so?”

“Is it not the case that the Pyx is still under the control of Charles White? And is Newton not still answerable to a Trial of the Pyx?”

“That is what they tell me,” said Caroline, “but Newton seems to believe he has now got the upper hand where that is concerned, by arresting the arch-villain known as Jack the Coiner. The fiend is now utterly in Sir Isaac’s power, and doomed to be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn Cross…Johann? Johann! Bring the smelling salts, the Duchess has got the vapors!”

Johann banged into the room only a few moments later, but by then his mother had got her color back, and prevented a slide to the floor by getting a white-knuckled grip on the arms of her chair. “It is nothing,” she said, swiveling her eyes at her first-born. “Carry on, please, as you were.”

Johann departed, seething and quizzical.

“It is just a sort of catalepsis that comes over me sometimes, when suddenly I have got rather a lot to think about all at once. Shortly it passes. I am fine. Thank you for your expression of concern, highness. Moving on—”

“We shall not move on!” announced the Princess of Wales. “We shall stick right here, on this, the most fascinating topic of conversation in the history of the world! You are in love with the most infamous Black-guard ever!”

“Stop that! It’s not like that at all,” said Eliza. “He happens to be in love with me, that is all.”

“Oh, well, that’s different altogether.”

“There is no call for sarcasm.”

“How did you meet? I love to hear stories of how true lovers met.”

“We are not true lovers,” said Eliza, “and as to how we met—well—it’s none of your business.”

Another door whacked open and in came Leibniz. He bowed to the ladies, looking very solemn. “I take it that a departure for Hanover is planned, and soon,” he said. “If your royal highness will have me, I will accompany you.” He turned toward Eliza. “My lady. The friendship that began in Leipzig thirty years ago, when our paths crossed at the Fair, and I shared a little adventure with you and your Vagabond beau—”

“Aha!” shouted Caroline.

“Draws now to a close. The Princess’s noble and splendid attempt to effect a philosophical reconciliation—so ably and patiently assisted by Dr. Waterhouse—has, I am sorry to say—”

“Failed?” said Caroline.

“Adjourned,” Leibniz said.

“For how long?”

“Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.”

“Hmm,” said Caroline, “that will be of little practical utility to the House of Hanover, when it comes time to select a new Privy Council.”

“I am sorry,” said Leibniz, “but there is no rushing certain things. While other matters, such as my departure from London, happen entirely too soon.”

“Where are Sir Isaac, and Dr. Waterhouse?” the Princess inquired.

“Sir Isaac has taken his leave, and forwards apologies for not having said good-bye in person,” said Leibniz, “but one gets the idea he had terribly important things to do. Dr. Waterhouse said he would await you in the garden, just in case you might be of a mind to behead him for failing in his mission.”

“By no means! I shall go and thank him for his good offices—and I’ll see you on the boat tomorrow!” said Caroline, and swept out of the place.

“Eliza,” said the savant.

“Gottfried,” said the Duchess.

London Bridge

THE NEXT DAY

“IT WAS NOT HALF so blubbery as it might have been,” said Leibniz, “when one considers how long the Duchess and I have known each other, and all we have been through, and whatnot. We shall keep in touch, of course, through letters.”

He was describing his leave-taking from Eliza at Leicester House the day before; but he might as well have been talking of the one that was happening now, on London Bridge, between him and Daniel.

“Forty-one years,” Daniel said.

“I was thinking the same thing!” Leibniz said, practically before Daniel had got the words out. “It was forty-one years ago when you and I first met, right here, on this very what-do-you-call-it.”

“Starling,” Daniel said. They were standing on the one beneath the Square, near the mid-point of the Bridge, and not awfully far from the Main-Topp where the Clubb had of late conducted its Stake-out. But Daniel’s memory of that, though only a few weeks old, was already quite washed-out and indistinct compared to what Leibniz was speaking of: the day in 1673 when a young Leibniz (no Baron in those days) with an Arithmetickal Engine tucked under his arm had disembarked from a ship that had brought him over from Calais, and been conveyed to this starling—to this very spot—by a lighter, and first made the acquaintance of young Daniel Waterhouse of the Royal Society.

Leibniz’s memory was no less distinct. “I believe it was—here!” (tapping a flat rock at starling’s edge with his toe) “where I first touched down.”

“That is how I remember it.”

“Of course we are both wrong, if Absolute Space is correct,” Leibniz went on. “For during those forty-one years the Earth has rotated, and revolved about the Sun, and the Sun, for all we know, has careered for some vast distance. So I did not really touch down here but in some other place that is now far out in the interstellar vacuum.”

Daniel did not rise to this bait. He was fearful that Leibniz was about to burst out into some bitter declamation against Newton and Newton’s philosophy. But Leibniz drew back from that brink, even as he was drawing back from the stony rim of the starling. A longboat was working up towards them. It was the lighter that would take Leibniz out to the Hanoverian sloop Sophia, where Princess Caroline had already settled into her cabin.

“What do I remember of that day? We were espied, and glared at, by Hooke, who was over yonder surveying a wharf,” said Leibniz, pointing at the London bank. “We went to pay a call on poor old Wilkins, who lay some great responsibility on your shoulders—”

“He wanted me to ‘make it all happen,’ ” said Daniel.

Leibniz laughed. “What do you suppose the rascal meant by that?”

“I have thought about it a million times,” said Daniel. “Religious toleration? The Royal Society? Pansophism? The Arithmetickal Engine? I cannot be sure. But all of those things were linked together in Wilkins’s mind.”

“He had a prefiguring of what Caroline calls the System of the World.”

“Perhaps. At any rate, I have tried to preserve in my mind, since then, that linkage—the notion that all of those things must move together, somewhat like prisoners on a common chain—”

“A cheerful image!” Leibniz remarked.

“And if there has been any plan whatever to my life in those forty-one years, it’s been that I have tried to keep an eye out for whichever of them was lagging farthest behind, and chivvy it along. For two decades, the laggard has been Arithmetickal Engines and Logic Mills, et cetera.”

“And so you have toiled on that,” said Leibniz, “for which you have my æternal gratitude. But who knows? With the support of the Tsar, and the motive Power of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, perhaps it shall be laggardly no more.”

“Perhaps,” said Daniel. “It grieves me, now—especially since yesterday—that I went off into seclusion, and did not involve myself in the Metaphysickal rift until it was too late.”

“But if you had, you’d be now berating yourself over having neglected some other matter—good Puritan that you are.”

Daniel snorted.

“Remember that in those days Newton was known chiefly as a very clever telescope-maker,” Leibniz went on. “Wilkins could not have foreseen the rift you spoke of—and so could not have charged you with healing it. You are clear of any such burthen.”

“But the grand project of Pansophism was a thing he saw very clearly, and, I’m sure, wanted me to support in whatever way I could,” Daniel said. “I wonder now if I did the best possible job of it.”

“And I should say the answer is yes,” said Leibniz, “for that we live in the best of all possible worlds.”

“I hope that is not true,” said Daniel, “as it seems to me now that my journey here from Boston, which I confess I undertook with a certain kind of foolish and thrilling hope in my heart, has concluded in tragedy—and not even grand tragedy but something much more futile and ignominious.”

“After we visited Wilkins on his death-bed,” said Leibniz, “we went to a coffee-house, did we not, and talked. We spoke of Mr. Hooke’s observations of snowflakes—their remarkable property, which is that each of the six arms grows outwards from a common center, and each grows independently, of its own internal rules. One arm cannot affect the others. And yet the arms are all alike. To me this is an embodiment of the pre-established harmony. Now, Daniel, in like manner, there grows out of the core of Natural Philosophy more than one system for understanding the Universe. They grow according to their own internal principles, and one does not affect another—as Newton and I demonstrated yesterday by utterly failing to agree on anything! But if it’s true—as I believe—that they are rooted in a common seed, then in the fullness of time they must adopt a like form, and become reflections of one another, as a snowflake’s arms.”

“I hope the poor snowflake does not melt before it reaches that perfection,” said Daniel, “in the heat of those fires that Caroline dreams of.”

“That is beyond our ability to predict or prevent. We can only do all in our power to move the work forward,” said Leibniz.

“Speaking of which,” said Daniel, “here is something for you.” During Leibniz’s remarks he had from time to time glanced up at the traffic coming out of London on the Bridge. Now he raised a hand and waved to someone up in the Square. Leibniz followed his eye-line up to behold William Ham, the banker, waving back from atop a cart that had just drawn to a halt at the head of the stairs. It was populated by a conspicuously large number of beefier-than-average porters, some of whom remained where they were, engaging all and sundry passersby in stare-downs. Others hopped off and went to work carrying several small crates down the stairs and piling them at Leibniz’s feet. At about the same time, the lighter from Sophia drew close enough to pelt them with rope-ends, and several watermen who loitered on the starling caught them out of the air and made the boat fast. A Hanoverian servant vaulted over the gunwale and bent to take and move the first of the crates; but Leibniz asked him in German if he would terribly mind waiting for a moment. “If these are what I think they are—” he said to Daniel.

“Indeed.”

“Then later they shall be counted by men who are ever so sharp when it comes to weights and measures; and I would that all of the numbers add up!”

So the crates accumulated until the wagon up above was empty. Each had been sealed with a medallion of wax bearing the imprint of the Bank of England—for that is where they had been stored until a few minutes ago, and one could still smell the damp of the Bank’s cellars escaping from the pores in the wood. William Ham came down with a great wallet of musty paperwork, on which was traced the provenance of what was in the crates, beginning with Solomon Kohan’s accompt of the gold taken from Minerva, and passing through all of the intermediate stages of rolling and cutting at the Court of Technologickal Arts and punching at Bridewell. Leibniz examined it all, and finally counted the crates (7) and counted them again (7) and asked Daniel to verify the count (7). Finally he signed the papers GOTTFRIED FREIHERR VON LEIBNIZ in diverse places, and Daniel counter-signed as Witness. At last Leibniz gave leave for the crates to be moved aboard the lighter; but he counted them as they were moved (7).

“It is a start,” Daniel said. “There are many more yet to come, as you know. But as long as you were making a journey to Hanover anyway, I thought I might as well give you all that we have managed to bang out so far.”

“It adds a most pleasing coda to what might otherwise be a melancholy parting,” said Leibniz, and squared off before Daniel, forcing his features into a simulacrum of a smile. “And it really ought to put to rest any mistaken thoughts that might have been troubling your sleep as to whether you have done right by Wilkins. You have, sir, done him proud.”

Daniel was now helpless to say anything and so he stepped forward and embraced Leibniz hard. Leibniz returned the embrace, giving as good as he got, then broke away and turned his back on Daniel before Daniel could see his face and vaulted into the boat almost in the same motion. He counted the crates, or pretended to, one last time as lines were cast off and the boat fell away and yawed in the turbulent gulf of the lock.

“Seven?” Daniel shouted.

“Seven exactly!” came the answer. “I shall see you, Daniel, on Parnassus, or wherever it is that Philosophers end up!”

“I think they end up in old books,” said Daniel, “and so I shall look for you, sir, in a Library.”

“That is what I am building,” said Leibniz, “and that is where you shall find me. Good-bye, Daniel!”

“Good-bye, Gottfried!” Daniel shouted, and then stood and watched for some time as the boat became indistinct, and quite lost itself, in the welter of shipping in the Pool of London, there below the charred battlements of the Tower. It was almost a mirror image of the way Leibniz had appeared, out of nowhere, forty-one years earlier, except that the mirror was a misty and a streaky one. For much had changed in those years and Daniel could not watch with the clear eyes of a young man.

Greenwich

A MONTH LATER (18 SEPTEMBER 1714)

Let other Princes, surrounded with couching Slaves, glory in the unlimited Obedience of stupid Wretches that have no sense of Liberty, and little else to brag of, than that like so many Stocks or Stones, they can bear being kick’d and trod upon, whilst a King of Great Britain, almost alone in all the Universe, may boast himself to be a Monarch over Rational Creatures.

—The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS, ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

“NOW THERE IS SOMETHING you don’t see every day!” exclaimed Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar. It was the first thing he had said in a quarter of an hour—a long time, for him—and it prodded Daniel out of a sort of walking coma into which he had sunk during this, the third hour he and Roger had spent standing in this queue.

Daniel started awake and looked round.

Philosophers came to Greenwich all the time, and some even lived here, for the Observatory was up on the hill. Kings and Queens came here rarely, even though the place belonged to them. Architects came here frequently, and almost always wished they hadn’t. For building-projects at Greenwich always had money trouble, and things seemed to decay faster than they could be erected. Inigo Jones had been adroit enough to scamper in and out of this Slough of Despond and actually get a thing built and roofed before it got bogged down: this was the Queen’s House, and the secret to its success was that it was small. The bloody thing seemed to be a mile from the river. Or so it felt to Daniel and the others in the queue, whose head was lodged somewhere in Mr. Jones’s Opus and whose tail wandered all the way to bankside. Some stone steps descended to the river there. A gaudy barge had been made fast. Beyond, anchored in a deeper part of the Thames, was the Navy ship that had fetched George, King, over from the Eurasian landmass. Daniel was only able to see these things because he and Roger had, at long last, reached the foot of, and (half an hour later) trudged to the top of, one of the curving stairways that led up to the terrace of the Queen’s House. From there a few minutes’ shuffling and doddering had got them as far as the front door. They were on the threshold. Daniel had his back to the entrance and was enjoying the view—such as it was—down to the river. Roger, with his stoat-like instinct for dark, seething, infested places, faced opposite. The open doors expired a miasma of rose-water and armpits, cut with the tang of new paint, a-throb with a sort of Beowulfian mélange of German and English. Daniel couldn’t bear to turn round and see whatever Roger found so interesting, and so he and Roger passed over the threshold in this Janus-like configuration. Daniel was convinced he had caught a glimpse of Sir Christopher Wren, about an hour behind them in the queue, and had been trying to work out some way of getting Wren’s attention, and of inducing him, by furtive gesticulations, to jump the line. But it was perfectly hopeless; this was the worst place in the world for it. Twenty-some years ago, Wren had been brought in to impose some order on this place, as only Wren could. It had been his place ever since. He was working for free—the idea was to build a hospital for Naval pensioners. Queen Mary had started flogging the plan after the battle at La Hougue in ’92, but she had expired in ’94. There was no telling when a driblet of cash might spill forth from the Royal coffers. Whenever this occurred, Wren would blow it immediately on great blocks of stone and slam them down at the corners, and later along the perimeters, of the things he proposed to build here. For he could see perfectly well that he’d be dead before it went up. Later, and lesser, architects might botch the details, but none would be able to place the actual buildings other than where Wren had flung these plinths into the earth. His deputy Nick Hawksmoor, perceiving the genius of this strategy, and very much getting into the spirit, had lately bought a great bloody block of sculpture-grade marble at some scandalously low price and arranged for it to be vomited up on to the riverbank; when they could get enough money to hire someone to beat on it with a chisel, they’d make it into a brilliant statue of whomever happened to be King or Queen then. And so the general picture that Daniel was seeing from the terrace—and that owned Wren’s attention—was one of colossal foundations, laid by giants: a tiered echelon of rectangles—a Pythagorean dream. In that it was all foundations and no actual buildings, it seemed to confirm all that the Princess of Wales had said, a month ago, about the System, and the importance of putting it on a sound philosophical base. But what Newton and Leibniz had come up with—or failed to—seemed rickety compared to the works of Wren: further evidence that Wren had chosen wisely by turning away from pure philosophy and applying his genius to architecture.

Daniel gave up all hope of catching Wren’s eye and turned round to see what Roger was on about.

“All right,” he had to admit, after a few moments’ taking it in, “you don’t see it every day.”

Two jowls, stapled together by a grimace, and supervised by a stare: the face of George. Lots of clothing to hide his body—nothing unusual there, though, beyond that the clothes were nicer than those of the people massed around him: his Court. Most of these Daniel recognized from his visit to Hanover. He pointed out a few of them to Roger, who had heard of all of them—knew more about them, as it turned out, than Daniel did—but needed a sort of key by which rumors, slanders, calumnies, and salacious anecdotes could be mapped to faces. Pretty soon they were all shooting chilly looks Daniel’s way, even though he was only about the dozenth person in the queue. Perhaps it was because they had caught him pointing and muttering to Roger. More likely, though, it was because the last time they’d seen him, in Hanover, round the time of Sophie’s death, he had been pretending to be senile and useless. Then he had been named a Regent. No proof of compos mentis, that, but they’d read into it that he had pull over someone. Certainly not George. By process of elimination, then, he’d been influencing Princess Caroline.

Caroline did not even seem to be in the room. No, on second thought, there she was in the corner with her husband. They’d already drawn their own little shadow Court of mostly young, witty Londoners, all talking too much, laughing, and drawing evil looks from the old and not so witty, who tended to keep their faces turned toward the new King. It was weirdly obvious and bold: if you thought you’d live long enough to march in George I’s funeral procession, why then you would gravitate toward the future George II. Most had the decency and good form to hew to this general principle, but Daniel Waterhouse was fouling it up by being an old man in the young people’s camp. And here he was on the arm of the Marquis of Ravenscar!

“I’d best stop pointing and staring now, as we seem to’ve been noticed,” he said to Roger, trying to look as if he were making a remark about yesterday’s weather, “but in closing I’ll just add that you can see plainly enough the fat one and the skinny one.”

As tout le monde knew, these were George’s mistresses; his actual wife, of course, was still locked up in a dank Schloß somewhere beyond the Weser.

“I had already marked them, sir,” said Roger drily. “And they seem to have marked me—for death!”

“I think you altogether misinterpret their glaring,” Daniel said, after verifying that the fat one and the skinny one were, in fact, attempting to set fire to Roger’s eyebrows with the heat of their scrutiny. “A she-wolf in the Thüringerwald stares thus at her prey, before pouncing. But it is not out of hate that the feral bitch of the north does so, but rather a cool understanding that it’s from the hapless rabbit, sheep, or what-have-you, that she is to derive her sustenance.”

“Oh, is that all they want? Money?”

“In a word, yes.”

“I’d supposed that they wanted me to draw out my sword and plunge it into my own vitals, or something, from the way they were looking at me.”

“No,” Daniel confirmed, “they want your money.”

“It is good to know this.”

“Why? Are you going to give them some of your money now?”

“That would be impolite,” said Roger, blushing at the very thought. “But I see no obstacle to giving them someone else’s.”

Finally they had drawn near enough that it was no longer the done thing for them to acknowledge anyone other than their (as yet uncrowned) King. For once Daniel got precedence over Roger, because of being a Regent; and his majesty even recognized him. “Dr. Vaterhouse of der Royal Society,” he rattled off, as he allowed Daniel to kiss his hand—the very last occasion, or so Daniel hoped, that Daniel would ever give his Puritan ancestors occasion to roll over in their graves. Daniel was so consumed by the horror of what he was doing, and by wondering whether he was going to catch anything from that hand, which had already been kissed, today, by half of the syphilitics in England, that he failed to attend to what the King was saying. The problem was that his majesty had jumped over to some other language—some language, that is, that he actually spoke—and Daniel had not kept up—had not re-tuned his ear to follow it. With his unkissed left hand, George was gesturing toward the windows in the back, or south wall of the house, which provided a pleasant enough view over a rising green lawn, crossed here and there by paths, and tufted with carefully managed outbreaks of trees. Jutting from the biggest and most elevated of these, off to the right, was the queer edifice known as the Royal Observatory: two bookends imprisoning one book. But other than that, few buildings were visible, as the whole point was for it to be a park.

Daniel, belatedly coming alive to the fact that he was being personally addressed in an as-yet-unidentified language by the King, got only a single word: Rüben. What did it mean? To rub something? Perhaps the King was remarking that the custodians of the Queen’s House had rubbed the windows very clean? Daniel was just beginning to nod when the King helpfully said “navet.” Daniel realized in some horror that he’d switched to French to make himself better understood—but Daniel still didn’t understand! Was he talking about the Navy? That would be reasonable in a way, since the activities of the Royal Observatory were of great importance to the Navy. Daniel kept nodding. Finally Bothmar intervened—Baron von Bothmar, who’d been the Hanoverian ambassador to the Court of St. James back in the days when Hanover and England had been different countries. “His majesty hates to see good land go to waste,” Bothmar translated, “and has been eyeing yonder open space all morning, wondering how it might be put to some practical use; the difficulty being that it inclines toward the north and does not, in consequence, receive good sunlight. Knowing that you, Dr. Waterhouse, are a man of great Natural-philosophick acumen, his majesty asks you whether you are in agreement with him in thinking that, in the springtime, one might, with some hope of success, plant on that ground Rüben—navets—turnips.”

“Tell his majesty that if I had a shovel I’d go plant some right now,” Daniel said hopelessly.

The King, having been made aware of this, blinked and nodded. He had got a distant look now in his eyes, which reflected the green light of the future turnip-patch. Daniel could almost see the man’s jowls fill up with saliva as he envisioned a grand turnip-feast in a year’s time.

Ravenscar was chuckling. “How your shovel-work would discomfit those prancing, Frenchified Tory courtiers,” he remarked, “who, seeing such an excellent plot of land as that, have not the wit to imagine any use for it save to parade about on their gaudy chevals.”

“The Marquis of Ravenscar,” von Bothmar explained, and Daniel now had to avert his gaze from the not especially appetizing spectacle of Roger planting a smooch on George’s hand.

When Daniel felt it was safe to look back, the King seemed to have been put in mind of something. He was casting about for an eye-line to the Duke of Marlborough, and presently got one—Marlborough was one of the few actual English people suffered to stand anywhere near the King of England. Much as iron filings stand up and get organized in the presence of a magnet, certain facts and memories that had been scattered round the King’s periwig came into alignment when his visual cortex was stimulated by the face of Marlborough. He harrumphed and began to burp out some phrases having to do with a soirée and a Vulkan that were translated into prose, and into English, by Bothmar. “His majesty has heard from my lord Marlborough that the Duke very much enjoyed your recent party, at which the famous Volcano was made to erupt. His majesty would fain witness this amusement. Not now. Later. But my lord Marlborough spoke well of how the Royal Mint has been looked after, and of the quality of the coinage. His majesty will require good men to look after the Treasury. Good men—not a good man. For such is the importance of this task that he has decided to change the tradition of appointing a Lord Treasurer, and place that office in commission. His majesty is pleased to nominate my lord Ravenscar First Lord of the Treasury. And he is also pleased to nominate Daniel Waterhouse a member of that same Commission.”

All of which came as news to Daniel—though Roger had been winking at and elbowing him even more than usual in recent days, which ought to have given him a clew.

Rather a lot of bowing and scraping occurred round now, as tremendous gratitude had to be expressed, et cetera. Daniel happened to glance Marlborough’s way, and caught the Duke glaring at Roger. Roger, who had peripheral vision subtending a full three hundred and sixty degrees, was well aware of it; it was some sort of arranged cue. “What will be my lord’s first act as First Lord of the Treasury?” inquired Bothmar, who, too, had taken part in these silent, fevered exchanges.

“Why, to make a clean start of his majesty’s coinage!” Roger answered. “Not that there was anything wrong with that of Queen Anne—this is well established. It is more of a procedural matter—some would call it superficial pomp, but we English have a weakness for that sort of thing—there is this special box, called the Pyx, which we keep in the Tower, all locked up, and put samples of the new coins into it as they are produced. And from time to time his majesty’s council will say, ‘Let’s have a look at the old Pyx, shall we,’ just as a routine precaution, as gunners try their powder before a battle. And so out comes the Pyx, and it is carried in a sort of solemn procession to the Star Chamber at Westminster where a furnace has been set up for the occasion, and the Pyx is unlocked in the presence of his majesty’s Lords of the Council and the coins are taken out and assayed by goldsmiths from the City and compared against a trial plate, which is, as a rule, kept locked up in a crypt below Westminster Abbey along with a lot of old saints’ bones and whatnot.” Here the new King’s attention began to drift very noticeably and Roger seemed to come aware that he might as well be a witch-doctor dancing about in a fright wig and a carven mask. “Never mind, it is quite the rite, and it gives the City men a warm feeling. And when they have such a feeling it is rather a good thing for your majesty’s commerce.”

Bothmar had taken to raising his eyebrows at Roger so violently that it seemed they might fly off and stick to the ceiling. “Anyway,” Roger concluded, “time to clean out the Pyx! It is half full of most excellent coins bearing the stamp of the late Queen Anne, R.I.P. One Charles White has been looking after it—you may inquire among others as to the man’s character. In fact, you’ll probably meet him today!”

“In about ten minutes,” said Bothmar, and glanced over toward the door. “That is, if you’ll finish.” Daniel couldn’t help following Bothmar’s gaze, and had his day ruined by the sight of Mr. White, just inside the threshold, staring at him interestedly.

Roger polished it off thus: “To put to rest any possible confusion, I say, before we begin throwing new King George guineas into the Pyx, and mixing them up with Anne’s, why, let’s have a Trial of the Pyx, empty the thing out, kill the rumors, and start off your majesty’s reign with a lot of sparkling new coins.”

“For a while the schedule is terribly busy—”

“Not to worry,” Roger assured him, “the Mint would not go into production anyway until after the coronation, which I’m told is scheduled for the twentieth of October. Give us, then, say, a week for the festivities to subside…”

“Sir Isaac Newton suggests Friday, the twenty-ninth.”

“Worst possible day, I am afraid. That is a Hanging-Day at Tyburn. Impossible to move.”

“Sir Isaac is aware of the fact,” said Bothmar, “but says it is good, because on that day the Coiner shall be executed.”

“I see. Yes. Yes. On one day—practically at the same moment—the Pyx shall be put to the trial, Sir Isaac shall be vindicated, and the most notorious of all coiners shall be put to death before an audience of, oh, half a million. Practicalities aside, Sir Isaac’s proposal is, come to think of it, very clever.”

“Well,” Bothmar pointed out, “he is a genius.”

“That he is!”

“And,” Bothmar added, “his majesty thinks highly of Sir Isaac’s philosophickal prowess.”

“Did Sir Isaac have an opinion about the turnips?” Daniel inquired, but Roger stepped on his foot and Bothmar politely omitted to translate it.

“So,” said Bothmar, “unless you object—”

“Not in the least! Friday, October the twenty-ninth, it is! Get the Privy Council to wave a quill over it, and we shall make ready for a Trial of the Pyx!”

ROGER AND DANIEL were permitted to stay and mingle. But Daniel hated mingling worse than anything. He launched a desperate escape attempt via the terrace in the back, but could not work out how to get round to the Thames side and flag down a passing Ship without making a spectacle of himself. He stared across the Lawn and pretended to philosophize about the turnip farm. When he felt this pretense might be wearing a bit thin, he stared up the hill at the Observatory and wondered if Flamsteed was awake yet, and whether he’d raise objections if Daniel went up there to tinker with the equipment. This too was wearing thin when haply he came across that old last resort of introverts at cocktail parties: a document that he could pretend to be utterly absorbed in. It was a broadside, lying face down on the stone pavement of the terrace with gentlemen’s boot-prints all over it. Daniel raked it up over his toe with the tip of his walking-stick and from there was able to coax it up into a hand, and flip it over.

At the top of the sheet were two portraits of equal size, arrayed next to each other. One looked like an ink-blot. It was a miserable rendering of a black-haired black man in a black suit with two white eyes poking out. Beneath was a caption: Dappa as rendered in April 1714 by the renown’d portraitist, Charles White. The other was a rather good engraving of an African gentleman with silvery dreadlocks and a beard, dusky, of course, but with a range of skin tones suggested by the hatchures and other tricks of the engraver’s art. It was captioned DAPPA as rendered in September 1714 by—, and here was given the name of a highly regarded artist. Looking more closely Daniel saw, in the background of the picture, a barred window, through which could be espied the skyline of London rising above the Thames. It was the view from the Liberty of the Clink.

The title was ADDITIONAL REMARKS on FAME by DAPPA. Daniel began to read it. It took the form of a sugary and, Daniel suspected, sarcastic encomium to the Duke of Marlborough.

“That was inadvertent,” remarked a man who had been standing nearby, smoking a pipe. From the corner of his eye, Daniel had already marked this chap as a military man, for he was wearing an officer’s uniform. Reckoning him to be a fellow non-Mingler, he had had the simple decency to ignore him. Now this general or colonel or whatever he was had shown the poor form to irrupt in on Daniel while he was pretending to read something so as not to have to talk to anyone. Daniel looked up and saw, first, that the facings, piping, cuffs, &c. of the uniform were those of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. Second, that this was Marlborough.

“What was inadvertent, my lord?”

“When you came to call on me at my levée, just after I returned to this city, a month and a half ago, I had been reading some of this chap’s work,” said Marlborough. “Must have made some remark. Those other chaps must have gone forth and spread the rumor that I was a devotee of Mr. Dappa’s work. It seems he has only become more popular since. People have sent him money—he lives now in the finest apartment that the Clink has to offer, and strolls on a private balcony there, and is called on by fops and whatnot. He says in the document you are holding in your hand there, that he has all but become a white man as a result, and presents these portraits as evidence. He still wears chains; but those are less restrictive than the chains of the mind that bind some to out-moded ideas such as Slavery. So he deems himself a Gentleman now, and has begun to place donations in escrow, in the hopes that he may purchase Charles White as soon as the price drops low enough.”

“My word! You practically have the thing memorized!” Daniel exclaimed.

“I have had to spend many hours of late waiting for his majesty to wax talkative. Dappa writes well.”

“You have command of your old regiment again, I gather?”

“Yes. The details are quite unfathomable. Others are toiling away at them. Colonel Barnes has been located, and put in charge of rounding up certain elements who were scattered during the amusements of the summer. I am glad I was not here. It all would have vexed me to no end. I understand congratulations are in order for you.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel. “I have no idea what are the duties of a member of the Treasury Commission—”

“Keep an eye on my lord Ravenscar. See to it that the Trial of the Pyx goes rather well.”

“That, my lord, hangs on what is in the Pyx.”

“Yes. I was meaning to ask you. Does anyone really know what’s in the bloody thing?”

“Perhaps he does,” said Daniel, and inclined his head toward a nearby window. A red-wigged gentleman was in there, mingling with Germans, but glancing frequently at them.

“Charles White,” said Marlborough, “is, it’s true, still in command of the King’s Messengers, who pretend to guard the Pyx. I am pleased to let you know that they are now surrounded, and carefully observed, by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. So Mr. White cannot make any more mischief with the Pyx. And Colonel Barnes has related to me that White was downriver with you and Sir Isaac Newton at the moment that the Pyx was molested in April.”

“Very well,” said Daniel, since, plainly enough, Marlborough had figured this all out on his own: “The only one who really knows what is in the Pyx is Jack Shaftoe.”

“Hmm. If that is the case, then I am astonished that there is not a queue before Newgate Prison quite as long as that yonder.”

“Perhaps there is,” Daniel said.

White came out on the terrace and bowed. “My lord,” he said to Marlborough. “Doctor Waterhouse.”

“Mr. White,” they both said. Then they all took turns saying, “God save the King.”

“I trust you’ll be even more busy than usual,” White said to Daniel, “now that you’ve two Mints to look after.”

“Two Mints? I do not understand, Mr. White. There is only one Mint that I know of.”

“Oh, perhaps I was misinformed,” said White, mock-confused. “People are saying there is another.”

“Do you mean Jack Shaftoe’s coining house in Surrey? The Tory Mint?” Daniel asked, and let the handbill snap in the breeze, hoping that White would notice it. He did.

“You really ought to have better sources of information. Don’t read that rubbish. Listen to what Persons of Quality are saying.”

Marlborough turned his back, which was a rude thing to do; but the way this was going, it would soon become a duelling matter unless the Duke pretended he wasn’t hearing it.

“And what are Persons of Quality saying, Mr. White?”

“That Ravenscar is coining, too.”

“People are accusing the Marquis of Ravenscar of committing High Treason? Seems audacious.”

“Everyone knows he raised a private army. ’Tis a small step from that, to a private Mint.”

“Bored toffs in drawing-rooms may believe any phant’sies they please! Such accusations require at least some evidence.”

“They say that evidence may be found in abundance,” said White, “at Clerkenwell Court, and at Bridewell, and in the cellars of the Bank of England. Good day.” And he left. Which was fortunate for Daniel. A few seconds ago he had been amused at the sheer idiocy of the notion that Roger had been coining. Now he had become too flustered to speak.

“What was that about?” Marlborough very much wanted to know.

“It is a philosophical project I have been undertaking with Leibniz,” said Daniel, “that, to make a long story—” and he gave a sketchy account of the thing to the Duke, explaining the movement of the gold from Clerkenwell to Bridewell to the Bank to Hanover. “Someone seems to have gathered rather a lot of information about it,” Daniel concluded, “and spreads now a twisted version according to which it is a coining operation.”

“We know who is spreading it—we have just been conversing with him,” said Marlborough. “It matters not where the rumor originated.” To this Daniel said nothing, for a sickening awareness had come over him that this might all have originated with Isaac.

“What does matter—very much—is that two members of the new Treasury Commission are mixed up in it,” said Marlborough.

“Mixed up in what? A science experiment?”

“In something that looks a bit dodgy.”

“I can’t help it if it looks dodgy to an ignoramus!”

“But you can help that you are mixed up in it.”

“What do you mean, my lord?”

“I mean that your experiment is at an end, sir. It must stop. And the moment it has stopped, responsible persons, trusted by the King and the City alike, must go to this Clerkenwell Court, and to Bridewell, and into the vaults of the Bank, and inspect them, and find nothing of what Mr. White has been talking of.”

“It could be stopped at any time,” Daniel said, “but to wind it up properly and cast away the residue is impossible in a day, or a week.”

“How long will it take then?”

“October twenty-ninth,” said Daniel, “is the date that has just been set for the Trial of the Pyx, the execution of Jack the Coiner, and the elimination of all doubt as to the soundness of his majesty’s coinage. No later than that date, my lord, you’ll be able to visit the places mentioned with as many inspectors as you might care to bring along with you—including even Sir Isaac himself—and you shall find nothing save Templar-tombs at Clerkenwell, hemp-pounders at Bridewell, and Coin of the Realm at the Bank.”

“Done,” said the Duke of Marlborough, and strode away, pausing to bow to a young lady crossing the terrace alone: the Princess of Wales.

“Dr. Waterhouse,” Caroline said, “I need something from you.”

Roger Comstock’s House

3:30 A.M., FOUR DAYS LATER (22 SEPTEMBER 1714)

DANIEL HAD BARELY GOT in the front door when the most exquisite body in Britain was pressed up against him, hard. He wondered, not for the first time, how the world might have been different had said body been united in one person with her uncle’s mind. Not much was separating him from Catherine Barton; having been rousted by a most urgent message, he’d come over in his nightshirt. She was wearing something diaphanous that he only glimpsed in the fraction of a second before she impacted on him. She smelled good: not an easy thing to accomplish in 1714. Daniel began to get his first erection since—since—well, since the last time he’d seen Catherine Barton. It was most inappropriate, as she was distraught. She was most certainly the sort of girl who would notice—but not the sort who would take it the wrong way.

She took him by the hand and led him back through the courtyard, round the fountain, and into the Ballroom, which smelled of oil, and was eerily lit up by the white-green glow of kaltes feuer: Phosphorus. A new thing had been added to the place. Seen from the entrance it looked like the rounded prow of a ship that happened to be made of silver, wreathed and festooned with garlands smitten of gold. Some manner of bas-relief Classical frieze had been molded into it. A sort of ram projected up and out of the thing, explicitly Priapic; Daniel recoiled and edged round this, for its tip was like to have caught him in the face. Iron rings, straps, &c., dangled from it. Coming now round the side of the object he discovered that it sat between a pair of wheels, made of wood but covered in gold leaf. This solved the mystery of how so heavy an object could have been moved into the ballroom. It was nothing less than a chariot—a huge one, eight feet wide. It was, he realized, a Chariot of the Gods. Coming finally around the open back of it, which faced towards the Volcano only a few yards away, he saw that the whole floor of the vehicle was a tongue-shaped expanse of Bed: as wide as the Chariot and ten feet long, upholstered in crimson silk and bestrewn with furs, and silk- and velvet-covered pillows in diverse glandular shapes. Sprawled in the middle of it was Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. A laurel wreath was awry on his bald head. Mercifully, his purple toga had not been altogether torn off, but the middle of it was poked up, producing a Turkish tent effect that echoed the shape of the nearby Volcano. But the Volcano, mechanism that it was, still pumped away faithfully, its hidden Screw sending spurt after spurt of Oil of Phosphorus down its slopes. Whereas Roger was, or had been, animated by what Newton would call a Vegetative Spirit, which had quite fled his body. The toga-lifter was rigor mortis. He’d have to be buried in a special coffin.

“He was sworn in today as First Lord of the Treasury,” said Miss Barton—who, bless her, had the presence of mind to know that some explanation was wanting. “And so we celebrated the Rites of Vulcan.”

“Of course you did,” said Daniel, who was crawling on all fours up the treacherous (because silky as well as oily) slope of the stupendous Bed, glancing up from time to time to navigate by the landmark of the Pole Star.

“It is a thing Roger liked to do, to celebrate a great triumph. The last time was after he crushed Bolingbroke. The Rites are lengthy and elaborate—”

“I had already inferred that,” Daniel said. He had finally got to the place where he could behold Roger’s face in softly pulsing phosphorus-light.

“Just at the moment of the—Eruption—he suffered an attack—”

“Stroke, probably.”

“He said, ‘Get Daniel! No Bleeders—I don’t want to go out like King Chuck.’ I ran out to send you the message. When I returned, he was—like he is now.”

“You mean, dead?” said Daniel. For he had completed the rite of checking for a pulse. It was superfluous—no man had ever looked more dead than Roger. But his engorged Member had raised doubts.

DANIEL REMAINED STRANGELY CALM UNTIL servants sledded Roger’s corpse down to the Chariot’s threshold, transferred him to a litter, and took him away. Even when he was dead, it seemed, Roger’s presence had some chymical power to reassure Daniel, to make him feel sure everything would come out all right. But something in the way Roger’s limbs tumbled as he was being moved, cruelly struck Daniel as proof that Roger’s adroitness, his intelligence, his force were all flown. By the time the ballroom doors had slammed behind the retreating litter, Daniel had already begun to dissolve.

The Chariot, as it turned out, had a cover: a sort of brocaded tarpaulin that could be drawn over its open top and rear, probably to catch dust and bird-shit when it was languishing in Roger’s stables awaiting a Triumph. This had been reefed and tied about the vehicle’s rim with many tasseled golden ropes. The Priestess of Vulcan went round undoing these, and presently unfurled the cover, and drew it down to envelop the whole bed. Daniel was sitting up in the middle of it, elbows on knees, hands clamped over his phizz, tears leaking out.

“I do not wish to live in a world that does not have Roger in it,” he heard himself saying; and then he thanked God that Roger was not alive to hear him talking this way. “He was my Complement—my protector—my partner—my patron—it’s almost as if he were my wife or something.”

“Or you his,” said Miss Barton. Having finished with this project of enclosing Daniel in the womb-like interior of the Chariot of Vulcan, she hitched up her skirts and knee-walked up the slope of the bed until she reached Daniel’s side, then put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“God! I really am on the wrong Planet henceforth!” Daniel exclaimed. “What am I going to do?”

“Roger has made out the most exacting Will. He showed it to me. There is money for the Royal Society. For a Museum he wishes to have made here. For the Kit-Cat Clubb, the Italian Opera, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts.”

Daniel did not say what he was thinking, which was that for every asset Roger could claim, there would be equal or greater liabilities. He had held his creditors at bay by amazing them, threatening them, distracting them, and drinking them under the table. But now, like ants swarming a defenseless carcass, they would come.

Daniel pulled his hands from his face and made himself leave off blubbering. “No. It is not that sort of thing I am thinking of. I have much to do before the twenty-ninth of October. Much to do! It seemed nearly impossible even when Roger was about to do most of it for me. The others on the Treasury Commission are mountebanks and time-servers. So it is I who must organize the Trial of the Pyx. What do I know of it? Nothing! Clerkenwell Court and Bridewell must be shut down, liquidated. The Institute of Technologickal Arts has got to be considered dead—I’ll send word to Enoch to sell the cabin. What else!? Oh, yes. The Princess of Wales wants me to help a dear friend of hers sort out her love life—which happens to be more fraught with dangers and complexities than, let us say, the foreign policy of the Venetian Republic.”

“I am sorry to laugh, on such a sad occasion,” said the Priestess of Vulcan, “but that strikes me as most absurd!”

Which Daniel might have taken in a resentful spirit, had she not begun to knead the tight muscles at the base of his neck and between his scapulae.

“In some things you are a very clever chap, or so Roger always used to say. But what would a man such as you know of affairs of the heart? Why, your muscles tie themselves up in knots at the very mention of these things! Roll over on your belly, sir, or else the oil will run down your back.”

“Oil? What oil!?”

“This oil…”

“Oh, my word!”

“That’s better. Now I can straddle you—your buttocks can take most of my weight—thus—and it becomes easier for me to reach those parts of you that are most in need of lubrication and a good stiff massage.”

“Is this how Roger did it?” Daniel said wonderingly, a long time later.

“No, Roger liked to get up on all fours like a—”

“No, no, no, Miss Barton. I meant something different. Is this how Roger managed to—to keep so many balls in the air—as it were—and not go mad?”

“Now you ask me to speculate on matters quite beyond my scope, Dr. Waterhouse. Roll over on your back!”

“I was just reflecting that those affairs that so troubled my mind only a little while ago, seem to have quite fled my mind—oh, my goodness, Miss Barton!”

“It sounded as if your troubles were beginning to sneak back into your awareness,” she explained, “and so I rather phant’sied some drastic action was called for.”

“What…what…what troubles, Miss…Miss…Miss Barton?”

“My point exactly. Tilt your pelvis t’other way, if you please, sir…there! Much better, you’ll admit. Now, leave the rest to me, sir—the balance of this chariot can be a bit…tricky…the ride…a bit rough.”

Indeed, the axle-bearings of the Chariot of Vulcan presently began to creak as it got to rocking forward and back, forward and back, on its wheels. Daniel was old, and the ride was correspondingly long. But the primum mobile—the Body of Miss Barton—was young and, as everyone in London agreed, in the most superb condition, and more than equal to the work. Daniel felt a-drift in Absolute Space, and phant’sied that the Chariot had worked its way out the ballroom doors, off the property, down Tottenham Court Road, and was gliding across the dewy turf of Lambs Conduit Fields…on and on…until suddenly it toppled down a well. He opened his eyes. It was over. She executed a back-somersault off of him, and rolled to her feet, poking up the tarpaulin with her head, and artfully stuffed a fistful of Roman priestess vestments up between her thighs.

“Perhaps your uncle knows something after all,” Daniel said. “It seems so obvious, when one contrasts a dead Roger with a live Daniel, that there is something one lacks and the other has!”

“You have a bit less of it now,” Miss Barton said playfully. Then she turned her head to one side, attending to some subtle noise without, that Daniel had not heard. “Who is there?” she called, and gathered up an arm-load of tarp, ready to give it a heave. “Don’t!” Daniel called, for he was most indecent.

“The servants have seen ever so much worse!” she returned with a roll of the eyes, and heaved. The curtain flew back and ended up creased over Daniel’s head like a little roof. He gazed out upon the face of Sir Isaac Newton, who was standing there with his back to the volcano, beaming lanthorn-light at him.

“I came as soon as I heard the dreadful news,” he announced crisply, at some point during the approximately half an hour during which Daniel was rendered speechless. Isaac had not evinced the slightest surprise at seeing Daniel here, in this pose. This raised interesting questions. Had he been eavesdropping the entire time, and therefore had ample time to master his rage and astonishment? Or was his opinion of Daniel’s character now so abyssal that he simply felt nothing at all?

“It seems, however,” Isaac went on, “that matters are well in hand here.”

“That they are, uncle,” said Miss Barton, and glided down off the bed of the chariot to give her kinsman a chaste peck on the cheek.

“Is there any way that I might be of assistance?” Isaac was desirous of knowing.

Daniel could not think of anything to say. He would have ample time to re-live the moment later, to savor and amplify his embarrassment. What struck him now, as he sat there in a half-ripped-off night-shirt, gazing upon fully dressed Isaac, was that word of Roger’s death must be out; and all over the metropolis at this instant, people were awake, and out-maneuvering Daniel in ways that he probably would never even know about.

The Castle, Newgate Prison

29 SEPTEMBER 1714

A TURRETED CASTLE BESTRODE Holborn. On the side where the gentleman and his host were taking tea, the building sported a noble façade, to make a great impression on riders entering into London from the west. The ground floor was mostly accounted for by the vaulted arch of the gateway. The floor above that contained the machinery for raising and lowering the siege-grade portcullis; this was hidden behind a row of niches in which Liberty, Justice, and other noble ladies took shelter from the rains. This had not prevented their turning a mottled black from coal-smoke. So they glared down like Furies at all who passed beneath. But the next floor up was adorned by a triple Gothick window centered above the highway, rather like the hatch at the top of a German clock, whence the cuckoo popped out on the hour. Behind those windows lay Jack’s new abode. He would not be popping out, however, as they were heavily barred. Indeed, the first resident of this flat must have been a blacksmith, who must’ve lived there for a month, forging those gridirons and setting them into the stone frames. But they were excellent windows, taller than Jack and wider than the span of his arms, and despite the massive bars they admitted a fortune in light.

The Castle, as this part of Newgate Prison was called, was meant for Prisoners of Quality. So it lacked certain facilities that were present in abundance in other parts of the gaol, e.g., iron wall-rings to which difficult prisoners could be fettered. The gaolers had been forced to improvise. A hundred pounds of chain had been looped round some of the window-bars and dragged along the floor to Jack and locked to his ankle-fetters. The chain was long enough that he could hobble to any part of the apartment, save the exit. For the nonce, he was seated at his table, sipping tea.

Standing before his great window and gazing through the grid-work, the visitor enjoyed a view along the road up Snow Hill to the place where it bridged the Fleet Ditch some quarter of a mile away. Beyond that it swelled to twice or thrice the width, and rambled off among posh squares and courts that had been cow-pastures when Jack was a lad. Much nearer to hand, no more than a bow-shot away, to the right, lay the Church of St. Sepulchre. It was an ancient English church of that school of architecture known to scholars as A Big Pile of Rocks. There, Jack and his fellow Tyburn commuters would be subjected to a tedious rite in one month’s time. So Jack preferred not to let his gaze rest on that Church and especially not its Yard, which had swallowed more dead than it could cleanly digest.

“All of the best apartments in London, it seems, are in bloody Prisons,” said the visitor, “and all of them are occupied by men who are troublesome to me, in one way or another.”

Against those windows he made a perfect Fopp-silhouette, like something snipped out of black paper by an ingenious miniaturist on the Pont-Neuf. From the high-styled ringlets of his periwig down to the bows on his shoes, back up the curves of his well-muscled calves and the perfectly cut skirts of his coat, traveled the eyes of Jack. He wore a scabbard and a small-sword, and Jack thought of flattening him with a swing of the mighty chain, and snatching the weapon. But this would boot him nothing and so to think of it was idle. Jack snapped out of this hyper-violent reverie, and tried to make conversation.

“What, are you speaking of that bloke in the Clink? The famous Dappa?”

“You know that I am,” said Charles White, and turned his back to the view. He reached out absent-mindedly and stroked Jack’s chain where it was looped about the window-bars. “Before this country became so disorderly, all of those who were troublesome to their betters were pent up in places such as this. I am pleased that there are still remaining some vestiges of civilization.”

“But isn’t that Dappa more trouble for you in the Clink?”

“I have plans for Dappa,” said White, “and I have plans for you. And that is why facilities such as the Clink and Newgate are so useful; they hold men like you in one place long enough for men like me to make plans.”

“All right,” said Jack, “I knew we’d get round to this, and I am ready for it. You are a tedious and obvious bloke, Mr. White. So I need only ask myself, what’s the most tedious and obvious plan that a man could devise? Why, to have me done away with. Not much of a threat, as one month from to-day I’ve an appointment with Mr. Jack Ketch at Tyburn Cross; and there is no way you could murder me here that could be worse than how he’ll carry it off there. So you are powerless to issue threats. You must, therefore, offer inducements.”

“You rush ahead so!” White exclaimed. “It were proper, first, to speak of what it is that you must do.”

“There’s nothing in the world I must do,” Jack reminded him. “In that sense I’m the freest man in the world. What is it that you are trying to get me to do?”

“You are charged with High Treason in the form of coining. Sir Isaac Newton has enough to prove it; there’s little point in offering up a defense. You’ll be asked to plead, guilty or not guilty. It is a necessary formality. If you refuse to enter a plea, you’ll be subject to the peine forte et dur—pressing under weights—until you die, or change your mind.”

“I have been coming to Newgate since I was a wee lad, and well know the Standard Procedures,” said Jack. “What is your point?”

“If you agree to make a statement, I’ll see to it that several men are present—not just Sir Isaac. In the presence of those men, you will say that Sir Isaac Newton debased the coinage, and took the gold that he skimmed from Her Majesty’s coffers, and—”

“Pocketed it?”

“No.”

“Gave it to prostitutes?”

“No.”

“Drank it up?”

“No. Used it to perform Alchemical research in the Tower.”

“Oh! Of course. Stupid me,” said Jack, and slapped himself in the forehead so briskly that his ankle-chains jingled. “That were a far more credible accusation.”

“My lord Bolingbroke got wind of it,” White went on, in a peculiar singsong cadence meant to remind Jack that this was the made-up Romance that he was supposed to be memorizing, “and quite properly began to make preparations for a Trial of the Pyx. Hearing of this, the guilty Newton flew into a panic, and reached you, Jack, and induced you and your gang—”

“Gang. Gang. Why is it ever ‘Gang?’ Don’t call them that. It sounds so—I don’t know—criminal. They are my family and friends.”

“Induced you and your associates to break in to the Tower, open the Pyx, remove the debased guineas that would prove Newton’s guilt, and replace them with sound ones. To make this possible Newton led me and others on a wild goose chase to Shive Tor. You achieved your mission; but it went awry in some small way—here you can make up something plausible—and people found out about it, and now Newton is trying to commit judicial murder on you and your…associates, to cover his traces.”

“ ’Twould make for a lively half-hour, relating such a yarn in the presence of my persecutor, and a panel of a-mazed Big-wigs,” Jack admitted. “As if ’twere a Statue set up in the middle of my Apartment, I shall, in weeks to come, circle round your Proposition and view it from diverse angles and in different lights, and peruse it for Defects.”

“Did you say, weeks?” asked the amused/perplexed White. “Because—”

“There is ample time for me to consider it,” Jack said authoritatively. “And I shall consider it far more seriously if you can let me know what I might get out of it, other than a few minutes’ entertainment.”

“Escape,” said Charles White. “Escape to America for you and your…associates in the Fleet Prison.”

Now at this Jack felt moved, at last, to bestir himself, and shuffled across the floor, dragging the chain behind him until he stood at the window, next to Charles White. It had been the tendency of White to gaze down the street and off to the right, which was his not especially subtle way of trying to draw Jack’s attention to the Church of St. Sepulchre, and other grisly land-marks and way-stations along the route of the Hanging-March. But Jack looked rather to the left. Several buildings of note happened to be arranged in a straight line marching off to the southwest. Nearest to hand, just within musketry range, and therefore almost as convenient to the Old Bailey as Newgate, was the Fleet Prison. It was a great thick wall of Building, fuzzy with myriad chimney-pipes, spreading along the banks of the mighty shit-ditch after which it was named. Beyond that, on the opposite side of said ditch, and down a bit, sprawled Bridewell, infested with Females in Trouble. Then there was the Thames, and finally, miles off, he could see the odd spire belonging, he thought, to the Hall or the Abbey at Westminster. All of these were packed firmly in a matrix of unremarkable London buildings, post-Fire, therefore made of coal-blackened brick, and built wall to wall with nothing green, except for the odd fleck where some nest-building bird had stolen a bit of moss or turf from somewhere and been forced to drop it to evade assault by ravens, Nature’s footpads. The only reason that the Fleet Prison could be identified as a separate Institution was that its buildings rose up from the middle of an open plaza; it had grounds, and a perimeter.

“You’d have me believe, then,” said Jack, “that you can spring three blokes out of there, as well as me out of here, on the same night? For you’ll have to do both at the same time. To me it would seem a most difficult thing to put into execution—even if the Whigs hadn’t beaten the stuffing out of your party and sent half of ’em packing to La France.”

“I must say that I am disappointed to hear such timid and doubtful words from the conqueror of the Tower,” White said.

“I had resources. You—”

“You underestimate the tenacity and the wealth of my Party. Do not be misled by the temporary departure of Bolingbroke. Rebellion is brewing, Jack. It might take a year or two, but mark my words: Jacobite armies will soon be on the march in this country and shall sweep away the Spawn of the Usurper.”

“That would be the King of England you’re referring to, there?”

“As some style him. To arrange a simple jail-break, or two of them on the same evening, is really a trivial matter, Jack. Particularly from Newgate Prison, which has a history of escapes, by prominent prisoners, almost as illustrious as that of the Tower.”

“As to that I shall have to accept your word,” said Jack, “since none of the blokes I knew here as a lad, ever escaped save via the Treble Tree.”

“Then only ponder the immense value, to my Party, of discrediting Sir Isaac Newton, the coinage of this Realm, and the Whigs, all at a stroke; set aside which, the cost of arranging two jail-breaks is derisory.”

“Sir, you may consider your proposal On the Table,” said Jack, “and after I have waited a decent interval for competing proposals to join it, I shall weigh them all, and arrive at some judicious decision, provided that my old mate, the Imp of the Perverse, does not get the better of me.”

The Black Dogg of Newgate

4 OCTOBER 1714

NEWGATE WAS THE MOST versatile building in town. It was the Middlesex county gaol, not only for malefactors, but for debtors of both the honest and the dishonest type, and for fines as well. But this was also the City of London’s prison for criminals. It was in that capacity that it now played host to Jack Shaftoe, and hundreds of others who only wished they were Jack Shaftoe. But grades and distinctions could be found even within that class. Not all London criminals were footpads, horsepads, shoplifters, file-clys, night-gamesters, running-smoblers, or till-divers. There were also the Unfortunate Gentlemen, guilty of Treason, Murder, Highway Robbery, Rape, Scandal, Debt, Duelling, Bankruptcy, or Coining. Of all of these except for Rape and Debt, Jack Shaftoe was guilty as charged.

To create a distinct Ward or Hold for each of these classes were a task to which only Noah were equal. But to mix them all in one room were unnatural, or, at least, un-English. Accordingly, Newgate possessed three great divisions. Below the aristocratic confines of the Press-Yard and Castle, where Toffs in Trouble paid their debts to society playing cards in ventilated apartments, but above the loathsome flesh-pits of the Common-Side, was the Master-Side of Newgate. One part of this was for Felons, the other for mere Debtors, but in practice they were all commingled, especially in that part of the prison called the Black Dogg.

Inhabitants of the Press-Yard and Castle looked indistinguishable from any other Persons of Quality, save that they were fettered. Common-Side prisoners tended to be flagrantly, almost gloriously wretched, and even without the heavy chains that they were obliged to wear, could never have been mistaken for anything other than prisoners. Occupants of the Master-Side, however, bore to free Londoners the same relationship as a dried and salted cod, hanging on a rack, did to a live one swimming in the sea: which was to say that most of the same bits were there, and with some squinting, head-cocking, and generous dollops of imagination, you could make in your mind’s eye a picture of what they’d once been. Family and friends would show up from time to time bearing clothing, food, candles, and toiletries, and so most of these were able to keep up some vestiges of whatever looks they’d had before they’d been clapped into irons.

The Visitor looked like one of those. The patches that held his clothing together might have been taken as stigmata of poverty up on Newgate Street, but down here in the Black Dogg, people were apt to look on them as badges or decorations proving that someone out there still knew his name. His black periwig, so ratty and bedraggled, would have earned him mockery had he worn it in Charing Cross, but in the Black Dogg it proved—well, it proved he still had a periwig. More remarks in the same vein could be made concerning his shoes, his stockings, and the three-cornered hat pulled down low over his face. Even his insistent, raspy cough was very typical of Newgate prisoners, as was his low murmuring way of speaking. All in all, anyone familiar with Newgate would have marked him, without a moment’s thought, as a long-term Master-Side Debtor. But then, upon a second look, they would have noted two oddities about the man: one, that there were no irons round his ankles. He was free to leave. Two, that the ankle-chained bloke he was conversing with was a clean and well-dressed Press-Yard and Castle prisoner, only slumming for a short interval here in the Black Dogg. Divers cudgel-wielding Gaolers and Bailiffs had crowded into the place to keep an eye on this inmate while he passed the time of day with his visitor. But soon enough it had become evident that this old, coughing, out-of-breath, patched, raggedy, down-at-heels gager could not possibly be here as part of any scheme to break Jack Shaftoe out of prison. Or if he were, he could be stopped simply by throwing him an elbow. So the guards had relaxed, and shooed prisoners off benches and away from tables, and taken seats, bought drink from the prisoner-barman, and bided their time, each keeping an eye on Jack from across the room.

“Thank you for coming round,” Jack said to his visitor. “I’d have nipped round to see you, but I’m chained to a great bloody window-grille most days.”

The Visitor twitched and coughed.

“Thought you might like to know,” Jack continued, “that I have been receiving offers from other quarters that are right tempting. More attractive, by a long chalk, than aught that I’ve heard from you.”

The Visitor murmured some hot words, and, when words failed him, made flat slicing gestures.

“Oh, I’ve no illusions as to that,” Jack assured him. “All has changed since we met here on the 28th of July. There is abundant evidence—as people never tire of telling me—to send me and the boys to Tyburn. So, I am not about to ask you for what we spoke of before: the farm in Carolina. That is a pipe-dream. But for Christ’s sake! A man of your intelligence must know that this is no kind of tempting offer! A merciful hanging, that is to say, a long drop, a short stop, and a decent burial for me and the boys. You cannot seriously expect me to assist you in exchange for such floor-sweepings. Bloody hell, if I want to die fast, I can make it so in the privacy of my own apartment!”

The Visitor spoke for some little while now, but was cut off, at the end, by a coughing fit; which seemed to bring him such discomfort that he shifted about and writhed on his chair.

“Sore ribs,” was the diagnosis of Doctor Jack Shaftoe. “Oh, I’ve had what you’ve got, sir, a time or two. Bloody torture, ain’t it? An arm or a leg heals in a trice, but ribs take forever.” This seemed to be a sort of patter while he waited for the Visitor’s fit to subside. When the other had finally stifled himself with a handkerchief to the lips, Jack went on: “It is easy enough for me to stand up before anyone you like, put my hand on a Bible, and testify that the coins I took out of the Pyx—your coins—were sound, and the ones I put into it—my fakes—were debased. But you quite correctly ask, who the hell is going to take my word for it? No one in his right mind. So. Yes. Indeed. You, sir, require hard evidence, in the form of the hard currency that I stole. Where is it, you’d like to know? Well, I already told you before that I gave all of that swag to the late Marquis of Ravenscar. I hoped that’d satisfy you. But as you have been so tiresome on this topic, I have, since the Marquis’s death, made certain inquiries among those of my friends you’ve not yet murdered, thrown into prison, or chased out of the country. And they tell me, sir, that those Sinthias from the Pyx were taken out of Ravenscar’s house after he died by that friend of his, that Daniel Waterhouse, and that this Waterhouse cove placed ’em for safekeeping in a vault or something below the ground out in Clerkenwell—I see by your face that you know the place I mean!” For the greasy wig had begun to bob up and down as the Visitor nodded.

The Visitor pointed something out, and then it was Jack’s turn to nod. “You’ll never come out and say what you mean, but I can translate it well enough into plain talk: without the King’s Messengers to act as your bully boys, you must go through channels now. You can no longer just raid a place like Clerkenwell Court on your personal say-so. You must secure the Authority first. If you would like me to testify before a magistrate that the Pyx coins are secured in that vault, why, I’ll do that, sir, I will. But in exchange I must have freedom for Jimmy and Danny and Tomba. And for myself I want life, is all. Keep me locked up forever, if that is your will; but I’ll not be subjected to all of that rudeness out at Tyburn, and my parts pickled in Jack Ketch his Kitchen.”

The Visitor mumbled something, and clawed at the tabletop until he’d dragged himself to his feet. “See you in a week, then!” Jack said. The Visitor said nothing in return, but turned round, keeping his face to the wall, and tottered out of the Black Dogg.

NOW SOME OF THE GAOLERS were of a mind to jump up and fetch Jack straightaway back to his parlor up in the Castle. But others had not yet finished their pints. Jack himself had ordered a round for the house only a minute earlier, and had not even begun to quaff from the fresh mug that had just been set before him. It seemed indecent to drag him out just now. So Jack sat, and shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with several prisoners who had the temerity to approach his table, and even kissed a Common-Side wench—almost certainly a Felon, by the looks of her—on the cheek. But after a few minutes there was movement from an adjacent table. Two free men had been sitting there all through Jack’s interview with his visitor: one, younger and quite bulky, the other, of indeterminate age (because of a wig and a turned-up collar) but with the bony physique of one of those fortunate chaps who has found the knack of spiting age. The big one stayed in his chair, only shifting position so as to bring Jack’s table into the corner of his eye. The slight one got up, went into the corner, and helped himself to a seat. He was gripping a mug—courtesy of Jack! He had not, however, brought it to his lips. Rather, he kept it clenched between his hands so that they would not shake so much. They wanted to shake with rage. No, they wanted to close round the throat of Jack Shaftoe.

Jack enjoyed watching his new visitor for a few minutes. For it took that long for the old man to contain his fury enough to speak.

“How long,” he finally said, “how long have you been whispering those—those abominable lies into the ear of Sir Isaac Newton?”

“For as long as I have been privy to his eager ears,” said Jack, “going on two months now. It is something I never looked for. Great men in this town will do backflips to get Ike’s attention for even a moment. Who’d have thought he would listen so avidly to a Vagabond? And yet since he clapped me in irons, I’ve had better entrée to him than the bloody King of England himself. I snap my fingers—there he is, ready to listen for hours.”

“Since the Marquis of Ravenscar went to his long home,” said Daniel, “Isaac Newton is my oldest friend. Or was; for your lies have made him into a bitter and dangerous enemy.”

Jack snorted. “I could see what excellent friends you were when you came here to parley with me on the evening of July the 28th. The suspicion on old Ike’s face was quite obvious. Oh, not suspicion of you only but of everyone. I knew then that a few words from me would set him off. And so now you are enemies. Which is of as much significance to me, as that flies are, at this moment, swarming on camels’ arses in Cairo. Your old friend, enemy, or whatever he is, wishes to tear me limb from limb. Now. This bloke, who would do this terrible thing to me, is, it seems, a sorcerer or alchemist of some stripe, straight out of a bleeding færy-tale! Just like elves and trolls, his sort are fading away, and soon to vanish from this world. A state of affairs that is as plain to them, as it is to you and me! But where you and I look on this as a dying-off—and good riddance!—Ike and his chums mistake it for an Apocalypse that will be their great and final triumph. Ones such as he used to come and pester us in Vagabond-camps, and we would sport with them, lacking other diversions. Just as the proprietor of a gin-house uses his customers’ lust for booze to get money to feed his family, why, I am using Ike’s lust for the Solomonic Gold to get what I require for myself and the boys. Which I’ll go on doing until I have achieved satisfaction. If the result is a raid upon the Whig Mint hidden at Clerkenwell Court, and if in consequence you and your learned associates are brought hither in chains, it is nothing to me.”

“Fine. It is all clear. What is it then that you want?”

“Jimmy, Danny, Tomba, and I, free men, on a ship bound for America.”

“It is so noted,” said the other. “However, there is a complication of which I am obliged to make you aware.”

“My glass is only half empty, Dr. Waterhouse, and you have not even touched yours; so it seems there is ample time, if you will abandon this guarded cryptic way of speaking and only come out and say what you mean.”

“You may—supposing some escape were to be possible—board ship and go to America. But she will not.”

Jack almost shot back some waggish riposte, but then a serious look spread over his phizz, and he settled back, and waited. “You cannot possibly be talking about what I think you’re talking about!” he said finally.

“I know it is difficult to believe,” said Daniel.

“Even supposing—well—supposing any number of things I’m unwilling to suppose—why would she employ you as a go-between?”

“It is an eminently reasonable question,” said Daniel. “The answer is that she is not. I am doing this at the bidding of another—a friend of the lady in question.”

“Then I do not think much of this person’s friendship,” said Jack, “for a true friend would not dream of trying to mend what was broken so long ago. Some friend! Ha!”

“None the less,” Daniel said, “I have been asked, by the friend in question, to make inquiries. The friend is young, and she has fanciful notions concerning the power of true love, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Yes, as depicted in plays,” Jack said. “And by that I do not mean the vile, merry plays of the Restoration but older ones such as I attended as a lad.”

“Of a simpler æra.”

“Indeed. Yes. Though I am by no means fatuous enough to believe in such mawkish phant’sies, sir, I know how it is that young ladies, perhaps over-fond of the Theatre and the Italian Opera, can fall under its influence for a time, until Age and Experience slap them back to their senses. And so I’ll allow that this young lady who sent you may be merely daft, and not the least bit malicious.”

“She will be ever so gratified,” said Daniel, “to know that the King of the Vagabonds thinks so.”

“No need to jab at me, there, Doctor. ’Tis a sufficiently trying conversation, even without your biting asides. I am getting round to telling you something of great moment, which you must relay to this meddlesome lass, and that is as follows: the woman in question said to me, a long time ago, that I’d never again see her nor hear her voice until the day I died. And she’s not the sort to renege.”

“Well, then, it follows that if you escape death, and board ship for America, you won’t get to see her or speak to her,” Daniel pointed out.

“That were a very sad fate indeed,” said Jack, “but it is the fate to which I have been doomed for twelve years; and another few years of it wouldn’t kill me; whereas hanging around London would.”

Fleet Prison

AFTERNOON OF 5 OCTOBER 1714

’TWAS NATURAL TO ASSUME of a prison that, like the Inferno of Dante, it would only get worse as one worked one’s way in through the gate and pierced its concentric wards. Daniel had been circumventing the Fleet—a largely autonomous city of about a thousand souls—since he’d been tiny. The prison building proper (burned down in 1666, rebuilt in 1670) was a bit shy of two hundred fifty feet in length from the Poor Side common-room on the south end, to the Chapel on the north; forty feet deep; and forty high (sufficient for five storeys of low-ceilinged apartments, if one counted its half-buried cellar). But this structure, big as it was, could no more be confused with the Prison as a whole, than, say, the White Tower could be mistaken for the Tower of London complex. The Fleet Prison, as Daniel had always known it, was a squarish town about five hundred feet on a side—so, on paper, six acres or so. But seen up close it was like one of those writhing horrors that Hooke used to view under his microscope, which was to say it felt a thousand times larger than it was, because so complex and seething. Its outer boundary was understood to run, on the western side, right up the bank of the Fleet Ditch. On the north, all of Fleet Lane lay within it, but the buildings on the north side of the street lay without; so a prisoner could walk down the lane, trailing a hand along the fronts of the buildings, but if he or she stepped thro’ a doorway it would be deemed an Escape, and set in motion a train of financial consequences for the Warden. Similarly on the street called the Great Old Bailey (which coincided with the eastern boundary) and Ludgate Hill (southern), though along the latter it was more complicated because the prison had thrust out three narrow tendrils along as many small Courts that depended from the south side of Ludgate. Thus the squarish, six-acre rules (as it was, for some reason, called) within which certain prisoners could roam about un-chained and unguarded, provided that they had taken out a Warrant of Attorney to confess a judgment to the amount of the debt with which the prisoner stands charged, with a defeazance on the back declaring it is to be void in case no escape should take place. This and other such securities, by very long-standing tradition, made it at least theoretically possible for those who’d been put in prison for debt—which meant most of the Fleet’s population—to move, and in some cases set up domiciles, outside of the Prison proper but within the rules, which was nearly indistinguishable from other seedy neighborhoods of London. The only way you’d really know you were in a prison was that certain chaps had odd habits of locomotion—in the interior of the six acres they’d move about like anyone else, but as they approached the boundary streets they’d become tentative, as if they could sense an invisible barrier, and would sidle along cautiously, lest a misstep or traffic accident push them over the border and make them guilty of Escape.

All of this was an accommodation that like other institutions in this country had grown up insensibly during the half-dozen centuries since the Norman Conquest. When those actual Normans had burst in on the place, they’d found a patch nearer to one acre in extent, shaped like the hoof-print of a horse, its flat side defined by the bank of the Fleet River (in those days, one phant’sied, a babbling rural freshet) and the rest of it bulging out to the east. In any case it had somehow picked up a privileged legal status: the Bishop of London had authority over all the land around it, but not this one-acre hoofprint. Which anomaly could presumably be traced back to some more or less interesting yarn involving mailed Angles whaling on each other with gory battle-axes, but none of that mattered now—what mattered was that this oddity had somehow been leveraged, over the better part of a millennium, into the hoofprint’s current status as the Prison for the Courts of Common Pleas, Chancery, Exchequer, and Curia Regis. It had served in like capacity for the Court of Star Chamber until that had been abolished, and so Drake had once been chained up here, before Daniel had been born. In those days, for that reason, it had been a more interesting place, and more profitable to the Warden. But now it was thought of almost entirely as a debtors’ prison. There were a few exceptions to that rule, which had lately become very important to Daniel. But in order for him to come to grips with the exceptions he had first to know and understand the norms.

This had entailed a negligible amount of preliminary research. Negligible because small, but also because he simply could not believe what he’d been reading about how the place was run. Like a general planning a campaign, he’d sought to draw up an Order of Battle: a list of the opposing forces, an inventory of their battalions. Yet no matter how many documents he perused, or debtors he bought gin for in the sad taverns that competed against cut-rate slaughterhouses and brothels for real estate in the rules, he could only turn up references to the following officials:

•  A Warden, who had bought the title as a sort of Investment—possibly the most complicated financial security in the history of the world—and who was never there.

•  A Deputy Warden, who had entered into some manner of indenture with the Warden, so as to shield the Warden from the liability he ought to have incurred whenever a prisoner was found to have escaped—the details made Daniel’s head spin, and were not important—suffice it to say that the arrangement only made sense if the Deputy Warden were essentially no better than an imprisoned debtor himself, so that when any liability fell on him as a result of an escape, he could simply shrug off the now inconvenient title, plead insolvency, and dissolve back into the Fleet’s general population.

•  A few Tipstaffs, who were officials charged with escorting prisoners to and from the several Courts; these were not resident in the Prison and had no weapons [other than painted staves] and no power to help or hinder Daniel.

•  A Scavenger, who as far as could be made out was a parasitical species of janitor.

•  A Crier.

•  A Chaplain.

•  Three Turnkeys.

No matter how many times he went over the list, Daniel could not fathom how order could be maintained over a one-acre prison housing, every night, upwards of a thousand men, women, and children, by a staff whose executive arm, as it were, numbered three turnkeys. He would have to go and see it. Anyone could do so; they did not charge a fee for admission, as at Bedlam. Daniel blended in as long as he wore old clothes and did not go around announcing that he was a Lord Regent.

The Fleet presented itself along the bank of the Ditch as a sheer wall, ventilated by a few stoutly gridironed windows where the poor debtors would sit all day long rattling tin cups that they thrust out between the bars. Passers-by could chuck coins into these; but since to be a passer-by meant to stroll along the brink of the Sceptered Isle’s Cloaca Maxima, these were not superabundant. Hooke had wanted to bridge the whole Ditch over, i.e., to bury it. This would have perked up the cup-rattling business no end; but it had not been done.

Next to the poor debtors’ begging-grate was a massive archway tunneling, for an intimidating distance of some forty feet, through this wall of Prison buildings that rose above the Ditch-brink. The tunnel was lined on both sides by stone benches occupied, most of the time, by Disagreeable Persons. In entering this tunnel one crossed over the ancient boundary and so departed, albeit temporarily, from the see of the Bishop of London. Wretched ministers sat here all day long, hoping to earn a shilling or two by performing quick no-questions-asked weddings. The same rite, celebrated a few yards away, would be illegal and illegitimate, but here the Bishop had no power to ban it. There were too many such men of the cloth to fit on the finite bench space under the arch; the more enterprising were all parading up and down the bank of the Fleet hoping to draw in business.

The other people on the bench tended to be male and female prostitutes, or their customers, hoping to conduct business, which was to be negotiated here, and consummated within the Prison.

At a certain point the arched passage was severed by a stone wall no more than about eight feet high, with a row of iron spikes protruding cheerfully from its top. Set into the middle of this was a grated doorway. Anyone could pass in, but only some could pass out. Daniel slowed as he approached this. Peter Hoxton had been acting as a sort of rear-guard, and almost piled into him. “You are permitted to go on,” Saturn pointed out, looking this way and that at the Bench-people. For these had noted Daniel and begun to tender diverse proposals. Daniel ignored him, and them. He was staring at his feet. He flipped his walking-stick around and rapped its massive head against the paving-stones, moved to the side a couple of feet, and did it again. Finally he resolved to go in. But he got into a nasty collision, just before the door, with a young man. It was not nasty in the sense of being violent, nor in the sense of being acrimonious, for the young man tried to avoid it, and proffered a sort of apology after. He had been walking along behind Daniel and Saturn in traffic, and when they’d bated before the door, he had sought to go around them. The nastiness came from that he was a butcher’s boy, employed probably by one of the many shambles out in the rules along Fleet Lane, and so his clothes were soggy with blood and other body fluids of dead animals, and clotted with fæces and brains and feathers and hair. Some of it ended up on Daniel. The boy was aghast, particularly when he got it in his head that Saturn might retaliate; but Daniel smiled benignly and said, “After you, young man,” and held out a hand. The boy pushed through the door, smearing it anew—for it looked as if many of his colleagues had preceded him—and civilly held it open for Daniel. Daniel and Saturn went in, passing by a whore (tertiary syphilis) and client (primary) waiting to go out, walked through the scrutiny of a turnkey, and emerged from the tunnel into one side of a stripe of open ground that lay athwart their path. The Prison building was directly ahead of them, an immense barrier stretching more than a hundred feet to the left as well as to the right, and looming high above. In half a dozen strides they could have ascended a few steps and gone right into it. But Daniel drew up short, and stopped again. His attention had been seized by a peculiar triptych of figures who were standing just within the gate, and who had no thought of getting out of Daniel’s, or anyone’s, way. One was a scruffy and beaten-down-looking chap, who kept turning to the left and right, as if mounted on a vertical spit. Next to him, looking on, was a fellow, slightly better dressed, leaning on a staff daubed all over with paint. A few paces distant stood a grim, heavy man who was staring at the first fellow in a way that normally would have provoked a row. The staring went on for an uncannily long time, and Daniel began to collect that it was some sort of rite. He noticed that the turnkey who was stationed by the gate was also staring, when he was not busy scrutinizing the faces of departing visitors; and this detail solved the puzzle for him, just as Saturn—who had been amusing himself watching Daniel try to make sense of it—gave the explanation: “New prisoner. These turnkeys have a faculty in common with thief-takers: they never forget a face, once they’ve given it a keen study.”

Daniel now felt a strong disinclination to be studied, or even glimpsed, by men with such gifts, and so he moved forward, and stopped in a place a bit nearer the Prison and away from the eldritch scrutiny of the turnkeys. He rapped on the pavement again, and looked both ways. They were in a sort of choke-point; the prison grounds were narrowest here, broader to the right (south) and more so to the north. That was because the bit to the north was separated from the Ditch outside, not by a thick row of buildings, as here, but only by a stone curtain-wall, twenty-five feet high, with rotating spikes at the top. To spruce things up it had been painted, down low, with scenery. But Daniel only glimpsed a few vertical splints of this because the place was crowded with smokers, strollers, and conversationalists. The day was a bit nippy, but the walls and the Prison’s bulk kept out all wind, and so the prisoners and the guests were making the most of it. Which gave him an insight. Seeing self-described poor debtors begging outside, he’d always assumed they were committing a tautology. But now that he was on the inside, he could see debtors who were affluent, and so he understood that the cup-rattlers without called themselves poor to distinguish themselves from these.

Daniel turned his back on the Painted Ground, as the yard to the north was called, and, at a prudent distance, followed the butcher’s boy who had collided with him a moment earlier. The gruesome lad moved purposefully but was obliged to meander somewhat over the course of a sixty-pace journey, channeled between the Prison on his left and the backs of the Fleet Ditch–facing buildings on his right. He was headed for a row of small buildings put up against the base of the Prison wall, directly ahead of him, which was to say along the southern verge. Even from a distance Daniel could tell plainly enough that this was a Convenience, a Necessary House, a Shite-Hole. The boy went in to use it, and Daniel said a silent prayer for whomever would have to use it next. Presently the boy emerged, retraced his steps, walked past the turnkey (who studied him shrewdly, but did not move or speak), merged with the incoming and outgoing traffic of visitors, whores, &c., and went out.

Daniel Waterhouse and Peter Hoxton meanwhile had paused about halfway between the gate and the privy, for two reasons.

(1) The Prison building consisted almost entirely of apartments, no better and no worse than any other London slum-apartments, to which prisoners had their own keys. Nevertheless, it did have a few strong-rooms, or, less politely, dungeons in which people could be placed without the privilege of having a door-key! Daniel was especially curious about these. There was a row of them in the Ditch-facing buildings whose back doors and windows were on Daniel’s right hand as he looked south toward the privies. But to inspect these closely would have been indiscreet.

However, haply

(2) Another strange rite was getting underway to the left side of the gate-privy axis. They had approached the Poor Side of the prison: a couple of very large rooms at the extremity of the south wing, where prisoners who could not afford apartments slept and lived all crowded together. Against the exterior wall of one of those teeming halls was a cistern, fed by a pump. This was sunk into the earth less than a hundred feet away from Fleet Ditch itself and so Daniel had to will himself not to imagine what sort of water came out of it. A dozen or so persons were approaching it: a tight cluster of four, surrounded by a ragged entourage. They spread out around the cistern and Daniel perceived that one of them had his elbows pinioned behind his back with a shaggy hank of twine. He was uncovered, and being frogmarched by others who were every bit as down-at-heels as he was but had managed to round up artifacts recognizable as hats and wigs. Heads turned toward the oldest of these, and he went into a peroration that sounded, for all the world, like a legal judgment: certainly it went on that long, and was that hard to follow. It was as pompous as these men were shabby, but when the leprous verbiage was scraped away to expose its grammatical bones, what it said was that these fellows (except for the one who was tied up) were something called the Court of Inspectors and that he, the one who was talking, was the Steward thereof, and that in some proceeding just concluded they had found the bare-headed one guilty of having entered so-and-so’s apartment yesterday and stealing a clay bottle containing gin from out of a hole in the wall where its rightful owner was generally known to park it, when not pressing it against his lips; and that the sentence for said crime was to be carried out forthwith. Whereupon the gin-nicker was spun around so that his back was to the cistern, and its rim behind his knees, and then shoved back so that his feet went out and up, and his head pierced the glaze of scum that covered the reservoir, and went under. Maintaining a fierce grip on the man’s shoulders, his captors maneuvered him so that his face was directly beneath the spout of the pump, and a third officer of the “Court of Inspectors” set to work jacking the pump-handle as vigorously as he could. It was difficult to monitor the results because a crowd of prisoners had gathered round to be edified by it. Daniel glimpsed the prisoner’s feet dancing an air tarantella. Debtors had gathered in all of the Prison’s windows to learn from the booze-hound’s errors. Saturn had a fair view, being tall. Daniel sidled around behind him and stood with his back pressed against Saturn’s and looked the other way, at what he took to be the strong-rooms.

These certainly looked the part, having heavy doors with redundant bars and locks, and little to nothing in the way of windows. He’d heard that some of the strong-rooms were near the Ditch, the Privies, and the prison’s dung-midden, and that was true of these, though the stench was not so bad as all this implied because it was a crisp day. But Daniel did not see any of the precautions he’d have expected if members of the Shaftoe gang had been locked up here. Moreover, at their other side, these rooms faced the Ditch-brink, and might have windows or grates communicating with the outside, which made them a less fitting place for locking up really infamous criminals.

The gin-thief having been fully reformed, the pumping ended, and its beneficiary was dragged out half-dead and left on the ground next to the cistern. The crowd dispersed. Some of them went south round the nearer end of the great building, squeezing through a narrow and loathsome pass between it and the privies and the midden; here the surrounding wall was forty feet high, because it came so close to the upper-storey windows of the building that it put anyone who looked at it in mind of rope-based strategies. But once Daniel and Saturn had rounded the corner and turned north again, now on the east side of the building, the space between it and the wall broadened decisively into a close a hundred feet or more across, which Daniel identified from his preliminary readings as the Racket Ground. This adjoined the north or Master’s Side of the prison, where more affluent debtors dwelled in apartments that were more or less crowded depending on how much money they had—this being one of the Warden’s primary Engines of Revenue. Despite the chill in the air there were too many games of rackets, bowls, skittles, &c. underway here for Daniel to sort out. Around the edges were a few scabrous tables where it looked like card-games might be prosecuted during summer. Daniel took a seat at one of these to rest his legs. His back was to the prison wall and he could survey the entire Racket Ground and the Master’s Side opposite. Some distance off to his right, the prison’s northeastern lobe was described by the curve of the wall. Nestled in its lee were a few separate buildings: a kitchen, which had its own pump and cistern. To one side of it, another midden, threatening to engulf another privy—all of this disconcertingly close to the prison chapel. To the other side, a building in the crook of the wall that Daniel would have been hard pressed to identify—that is, if not for the fact that two armed soldiers were standing in front of it. Two tents, standard military issue, and a cook-fire encroached on the Racket Ground nearby.

Daniel had been carrying a map-case slung over one shoulder. He unlimbered it now and unbuckled its lid. When he overturned it, the first thing that emerged was a wee avalanche of dust and of plaster-crumbs still bound together in clusters by horse-hair. But with a bit of shaking he was able to produce a roll of documents.

Saturn had last seen these when he’d rooted them out of a shattered wall in the cupola of Bedlam. “When you were abusing the pavement with your stick, some of the prisoners espied you, and speculated you were mad,” he said. “Now I do begin to wonder—”

“It suits me very well for them to suppose I am mad!” Daniel exclaimed, pleased to hear about it. “You may explain to them that I am not only daft but senile, and convinced that treasure was buried here long ago by a counterfeiter—”

“Counterfeiter! Here?”

“Yes, from time to time coiners and smugglers have been committed to this place by the Court of Exchequer or Curia Regis. So the story makes sense to that point, as all madman-stories must, in their beginnings. I’ve got it into my head that I can find this treasure. You are a manservant, charged, by my exasperated family, with following me around, keeping me out of trouble, and tending to my needs.”

“In that capacity,” said Peter Hoxton, “I’ll just nip down to the Tap-Room, if it’s all the same to you, and get chocolate for myself and—?”

“Coffee for me, thank you,” said Daniel, and began to wrestle the drawings out on the pitted tabletop, weighing them down at the edges with shattered bowling-pins. Saturn ambled across the Racket Ground, dodging airborne or rolling balls as need be, and giving the cold shoulder to an acquaintance who’d recognized him. He worked his way north round the aperture between kitchen and chapel so that he could go in at the northern extremity of the building—the Tap-Room and coffeehouse were there, hard by the chapel.

As he had been doing on and off for fifty years, Daniel communed with the mind of Robert Hooke through Hooke’s curious notes and jottings, and his exquisite pictures.

Anno Domini 1335 ye Warden of ye Fleet hired laborers to dig a Moat around ye Prop’ty (ye Court & ye Building withal). Width of ye Excav’n was 10 Feet. Of Necessity (or else how could it have been Filled with Water) we say that this communicated with ye Fleet at two places, forming an ox-bow lying to ye East side of that River, & that its Pos’n agrees approx. with ye present Wall…a later Record complains that Sewers & Tannery-drains & as many as 1 doz. Latrines have been made to discharge into said Moat from adjoining Prop’ties, making of it an open Sewer that must needs have been no less Offensive then, than is the Fleet Ditch to-day…ye Moat no longer exists, & yet ye Rec’ds want any sugg’n of its having been Filled. Whence I venture to Conclude, ’twas never Filled, but rather Roofed, to shield ye Environs from its noisome damps, & yet discharges into ye Fleet, most probably at A and B, & doth account for much of what is loathsome about that Ditch… and here Hooke went on to develop his argument that the same treatment ought to be given to the Ditch itself.

A and B referred to two locations on the east bank of Fleet Ditch, near the prison’s northwest and southwest corners. These were marked on a survey plat, done by Hooke after the Fire. Comparing this against what he could see from his present vantage point, Daniel had now the satisfying experience of its all coming together coherently in his mind. Few human monuments were as permanent, as un-moveable, as a stone shithouse—especially one that by long-standing tradition was used by everyone in a crowded neighborhood. If Fleet Lane butcher’s boys were taking a shite at the southern end of the place in 1714, it probably meant they’d been doing so in 1614, 1514, 1414, &c. That row of privies must be among the dozen or so that had been erected over the moat. And the privy that Daniel was now looking at, next to the kitchen, must be over the moat, too—but on the opposite prong of the ox-bow. The back of that edifice was the Prison wall. Just on its other side would be a row of buildings that fronted on Fleet Lane. Some of these were slaughterhouses that, long ago, must have gathered along the north brink of that moat like flies, and employed it to carry away their offal. Likewise the prison kitchen, just there next to that privy.

And the next building along was the one that was being guarded by the soldiers.

Daniel had read legal filings made by prisoners who had been incarcerated in a certain strong-room on the Master’s Side of the Fleet, and who had hired lawyers to get them out of it at all costs. For such prisoners tended not to be debtors. They had been put there by Curia Regis or Star Chamber, and were dangerous and wealthy. The place was described, in these documents, as being situated on the south side of a ditch, which made no sense unless it was taken as a reference to the vanished moat. The dungeon was described as “infested with toads and vermin” and “surcharged with loathsome vapors” and “impervious to the least ray of light.” Prisoners there were chained to floor-staples and condemned to lie in sewage—their own (for there was not even a bucket) as well as what seeped in through the walls.

These happy ruminations were interrupted by Saturn, who had come back with a serving-woman in tow. She set out the drinks. Saturn had borrowed some newspapers from the Tap-Room (which was said to be as well-stocked with current reading material as any Clubb in the metropolis) and sat down to peruse these over his chocolate.

Daniel scrutinized the woman—though perhaps not as rudely as a turnkey—and guessed she was no whore, but perhaps the wife of a debtor, obliged to live here for a long time (perhaps forever) and trying to make some pin-money by helping out in the Tap-Room (another Engine of Revenue for the Warden). She gave as good as she got in the way of scrutiny, from which Daniel knew that Saturn had already told her the daft treasure-hunter story.

“My good woman,” Daniel said, rooting his coin-purse from his pocket so that she would not wander off, “are you connected with the Management?”

“Y’mean, the Court of Inspectors, like?”

Daniel smiled. “I had in mind the Warden—”

The woman was taken aback that the Warden should be brought into the conversation, even by a senile madman; Daniel might as well have asked her if she took tea with the Pope of Rome.

“The Court of Inspectors, then, if they are the responsible parties.”

“They are responsible for a lot of parties, know-
what-I-mean!” She exchanged a twinkly look with Saturn: having a bit of harmless fun baiting the gager.

“Those men with the muskets would not allow me to investigate yonder dungeon!” Daniel complained, pointing to the soldiers. “I had been led to believe that the Fleet was open to all, but—”

“You’re in luck, then,” the woman announced.

“How so, madame?”

“Well, it’s like this: if you wanted near aught else, it’d be a cold day in Hell ’fore the Steward would give you the least bit of satisfaction, ’less you paid him, of course. But on the matter of them soldiers, the Steward is exercised, he is, and been making all manner of tedious speeches at the Wine-Clubb and the Beer-Clubb, and filing briefs against the Powers that Be! Your complaints shan’t fall on deaf ears, sir, if you go to the Steward direct—’specially if you make a contribution, like, know-what-I-mean.”

During this Daniel had been extracting coins from his purse and sorting them on the tabletop, which had not gone unnoticed. He placed the tip of an index finger on one of modest value and slid it across the table so that the woman could take it—which she did. Her gaze was now rapt on Daniel’s index finger, which continued to hover above the array of coins.

“Am I correct in gathering, then, that the garrisoning of armed soldiers in the Fleet is an unusual procedure?”

It took her a moment to decode this. “Armed soldiers here unusual, why yes! I should say so!”

“They’ve not been here long, then?”

“Since August, I’d say. Guarding them new prisoners—or so ’tis claimed. The Steward scoffs—calls it a ruse—a press-what-do-you-call-it—”

“A precedent.”

“Yeah.”

“That must not be allowed to stand, lest the Fleet insensibly begin to lose its ancient privileges,” Daniel guessed, exchanging a look with Saturn. Which might have sounded incredibly pretentious and high-flown; but Saturn had insisted that the debtors of the Fleet spent a third of their lives sleeping, a third drinking, gambling, smoking, &c., and a third pursuing abstract legal disputes with the Warden.

“The Steward is the chief of the Court of Inspectors?” Daniel asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Elected, or—”

“It’s complicated, like. Most often he is the eldest debtor.”

“The senior debtors run the place through this made-up Court, then.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Course!” Then they narrowed. “But ain’t all Courts made-up?”

Daniel liked this so much that he paid her more than it was probably worth. “Now, you say that there is a Wine-Clubb?”

“Yes, sir, Monday nights. And Beer-Clubb Thursdays. Leastwise, men gather and drink, and call it a Clubb.”

“Prisoners or visitors or—”

“Both.”

“So it is finished at ten of the clock?”

The woman had no idea what Daniel was on about, so he had to explain: “At that hour, the turnkeys call ‘strangers all out,’ do they not?”

“What matters it, if they do? The Clubbs roar until one or two in the morning, sir, and then they disperse to apartments, and carry on through sunrise.”

Daniel slid her another coin, feeling stupid in retrospect. For everyone said this was the greatest brothel in London, and how could such a thing be, if everyone really was shooed away at ten?

“Of the Wine-Clubb and the Beer-Clubb, which is the loudest?”

“Loudest? Wine-Clubb, loud early, quiet late. Beer-Clubb, other way round, know-what-I-mean.”

“Do the soldiers ever partake?” asked Daniel, nodding at the tents.

“Ooh, every so often a pair of ’em’ll nip round for a pint,” she said, “but it’s been dicey, ’tween us ’n’ them, know-what-I-mean—”

“Because of the Steward’s legal proceedings.”

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s it.”

“How can they sleep, in those tents, with all of the noise from the tap-room nearby?”

“They can’t. But sleep’s always a problem in the Fleet,” she said, “for them as have ambitions of sleepin’, know-what-I-mean.”

“I know precisely what you mean, madame,” said Daniel, sliding a final coin. “Do take this and buy some cotton to stuff in your ears.”

“Thank you ever so kindly, sir,” she said, backing away. “Hope to see you on Monday or Thursday evening, as you prefer.”

“IF THIS GETS ANY EASIER,” said Daniel to Saturn, “I shall feel a bit let down.”

“It doesn’t look easy to me! Have you seen the locks on that dungeon?”

“It shall be as easy as throwing a party,” Daniel returned. “Now, come—let’s go out—supposing that the turnkeys will let us!—and look for real estate on Fleet Lane.”

Saturn looked gloomier than usual.

“What, the idea doesn’t please you?”

“It is no more displeasing than any of your other recent notions,” said Peter Hoxton, Esq.

“Is that your idea of diplomacy?”

“It is the best I can muster just now. You should not have looked in Hockley-in-the-Hole, if you sought a diplomat.”

“Then as long as we are being blunt,” said Daniel, “this is as good a time as any for me to inform you that I know you made the Infernal Devices for Jack.”

“Was wondering,” said Peter Hoxton, motionless and red.

“I had suspected, but it became more than obvious in July, when you crafted that excellent snare that caught de Gex.”

Peter Hoxton commenced inhaling now, and, over the next quarter-minute or so, drew into his lungs a few hogsheads of air, and grew and grew until it seemed his ribcage was going to press up against the building to one side and the wall to the other, and begin cracking the masonry. But finally he reached his limit, and let all of the air out in a whistling hurricanoe.

“Was wondering,” he repeated, as if he’d only been trying the phrase on for size, the first time he’d said it. “Have been on tenterhooks, a bit.”

“I know you have.”

“I am gratified” said Saturn, cherishing this word, “gratified that you did not simply prosecute me.”

“No one was killed,” Daniel pointed out. “The explosions did not continue.”

“One of the reasons I sought you out in the first place, you know, was that…”

“You wanted to keep an eye on me, and my investigation.”

“Oh, to be sure, but also because…”

“You felt bad that you’d had a hand in Blowing me Up.”

“Yes—exactly! It’s as if you read my mind.”

“I read your face, your manner, which is what a Father Confessor is supposed to do. What do you know concerning the Pyx?”

“I opened it. Jack took some things out, placed others in.”

“What did Jack put in? Was it fine gold? Or allayed with base metal?”

Saturn shrugged. “I sometimes purchase gold to make watches,” he said, “but that is all I know of gold.”

After this Daniel was silent for such a long time that Saturn progressed through diverse stages of irritability, nervousness, and melancholy. He looked up and regarded the Fleet Prison. “Would you like me to go yonder and pick out a cell, then, or—”

“Wrong place for Infernal Device makers. You would find the company of debtors tedious. You would fall to drinking.” Daniel pushed himself to his feet and drained his coffee, which had been tepid when served and was cold now. “Now, about that real estate,” said Daniel. “My life began getting really complicated round the time the King of England blew up my house, and killed my dad; now I may have to blow up another house to make things simple again; if so, I’ll need a man of your skills.”

Saturn finally stood up. “That, at least, is more interesting than what we have been doing, and so I shall join you.”

NOTICE
of a PUBLICK AUCTION
to be conducted in the LIBERTY of the CLINK
ONE WEEK FROM TODAY
[that is, on the 20th October A.D. 1714]
Item for sale: MR. CHARLES WHITE, ESQ.

’Tis well enough known, alike to the Nobility and the Mobility, that when the Earl of O—[known in some Clubbs by the sobriquet, Last of the Tories] was presented to the King of England at Greenwich, and crept up to kiss the King his hand, his majesty only glared at the poor Supplicant, then turned the royal Backside without suffering a Word to spill from his lips. Whereupon the blushing Earl fled in almost as profound Disgrace as his fellow Tory, my lord B—, who was last seen on the packet to Calais practicing his genuflections to any French gentleman who strolled near enough.

From these and diverse other Auspices we may see that Torydom is bank-rupt. It is an ancient Tradition that when the final Scion of a noble House breathes his last, an Executor—by tradition, a respected Gentleman of the town—disposes of the surviving Effects, viz. livestock, wine-bottles, furnishings, carriages, &c.—by the expedient of a publick Auction. And indeed ’tis a very beneficial and ennobling practice; for many a Viscount, &c., of recent Coinage, whose grandpère was a cobbler or a smuggler, would otherwise be unable to stuff his town-house with family heirlooms dating back to the Norman Conquest.

So dismal and thorough-going has been the Tories’ fall, that there is little left to sell off to the triumphant Whigs, and to my knowledge no good man has yet stepped forward to proffer his service as Executor [many would gladly nominate themselves for the rôle of Executioner; but that position is spoken for by one Jack Ketch, and he is said to be passing jealous of it, and a dangerous man to get on the wrong side of, as he has slain many].

Having as I do much time on my hands [for I can only spend so many hours per diem counting my readers’ generous Contributions] and enjoying to no small degree the respect of the Duke of M—and other august figures [as how else could it be explained that the Whigs now print my scribblings in their Paper], I have lately stepped forward to appoint myself Executor of the wretched leavings that answer to the name of the Tories’ Estate. I approached this responsibility with aweful Trepidation, supposing I should have to toil for years at selling off the Tories’ abandoned Assets: mountains of debas’d paper Currency, acres of country-house-lawns, a warehouse of ill will, and diverse odds and ends such as French-English phrasebooks and Papist regalia. To my considerable relief, however, I have found that even these feeble assets are gone, dissolved, liquidated, and so my task is infinitely simpler than I had supposed. For the Tories have only one thing remaining, and that is Mr. Charles White, who professes to be my owner. Mr. White’s vocal and oft-repeated support for Slavery [a primitive and savage custom whereby one soul may own another] has simplified what would otherwise have been a most awkward matter. For thanks to the generosity of my readers I am sanguine that I have coin sufficient to purchase Mr. White at auction, which will be conducted immediately following the new King’s coronation on the 20th instant. Owning Mr. White, who asserts a claim to ownership of me shall mean, infallibly, that I shall then be the owner of myself again; which is all that I really seek. I shall then eliminate the middle-man, as ’twere, by confiscating all of Mr. White’s assets, including myself. Mr. White I shall set free, naked as the day he was born, so that he can hie to France and mug some Fopp for his clothes; though I may prevail on him first to shine my boots—which, being such a notorious Black-guard, he is well capable of doing.

Signed,

DAPPA of the LIBERTY OF THE CLINK
13 October A.D. 1714

The Tap-Room, Fleet Prison

BEER-CLUBB NIGHT (THURSDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1714)

DAPPA HAD ONLY WRITTEN THE bloody thing yesterday and the Tap-Room was already plastered with them—as was every other coffee-house and Clubb in the metropolis. Or so Daniel assumed, as he sat in the corner, pretending to have a beer, and reading it. He had not actually set foot in the Kit-Cat or any other such place since his memorable encounter with Jack Shaftoe in the Black Dogg ten days earlier. Rather, this Tap-Room had become his new College, and the debtors—especially the elders of the Court of Inspectors—his new fellows. They were no more tedious than most of the Kit-Cat’s membership, and Daniel often found them easier to get along with, as they had no purpose in life other than to go on existing as merrily as possible. Daniel could make them a good deal merrier by purchasing the occasional round for the house.

And also by discoursing of buried treasure. For that yarn, which Daniel had made up on the spur of the moment, had spread through the Fleet’s population as quick as pink-eye. Not one in ten believed a word of it, of course; but that still left a few dozen who were ready to assault with spades and prybars any snatch of ground, floor, or wall whereon Daniel fixed his gaze for more than a few moments. Daniel had never meant to draw so much attention to himself, and was now worried that, if he did break the Shaftoes out of prison somehow, he’d be identified and prosecuted. But it was too late. All he could do now was fling out red herrings that might slow the investigations of future prosecutors. He wore a large brown wig, and gave out that his family name was Partry, and encouraged the prisoners of the Fleet to call him “Old Partry.”

This, he now understood, was how men like Bolingbroke got into big trouble—not by doing anything identifiably stupid, but through an insensible narrowing of choices that compelled them, in the end, to take some risk or other.

Of those credulous souls who believed in the buried-gold story, not a single one belonged to the Court of Inspectors. This led to some tension between the two factions whenever Daniel took up his seat in the Tap. For the Steward and his Court desired proximity to “Old Partry” so that they might get free drinks, and the gold-diggers wanted to hear about his latest researches. Daniel played them off against each other shamelessly—not a prudent long- (or even medium-) term strategy, but just barely sustainable for ten days. He began to drop hints that he had narrowed the gold’s location down to the prison’s northeast corner—that being the one where Jimmy and Danny Shaftoe and Tomba were locked in the strong-room. It did not take more than an hour for the gold-digging faction to arrive at the furious conclusion that the soldiers lately garrisoned in that corner were really there to provide cover for a treasure extraction project being conducted, illicitly of course, by High Officialdom, probably Tories under the control of the sinister Charles White! The Court of Inspectors did not credit a word of it, but saw merit in the legend anyway, in that it gave them yet another pretext to file writs against the Warden, and so they began disingenuously to spread and to foster the story, and even to improve upon it. This was all so absurd that Daniel’s orderly mind could never have predicted it; never would he have advanced any such thing as a strategy. But once underway, it could not be stopped.

Two days had sufficed for him to learn everything worth knowing concerning the Fleet and how it worked. He had then pissed away nearly a week learning something he ought to have known already: in London, real estate, be it never so smelly and disreputable, was valuable, and jealously looked after. The shambles along Fleet Lane might have seemed unutterably disgusting and mean, but to them who labored in their back rooms and dwelled, or operated brothels, on their upper storeys, they were little kingdoms, and every square foot was looked after as carefully as a statue or flower-patch in Versailles. Daniel knew, as well as he knew that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, that in the backs of these buildings’ cellars must be drains—the most execrable hair-raising drains conceivable—that communicated with the Fleet Prison’s long-buried ox-bow moat—the same moat whose contents were seeping, through porous walls, into the cellar where the Shaftoes were locked up. But in several days’ hard trying, and phantastickal lying, he was not able even to get past the front rooms of these establishments, much less down into their backs. Those drains were valuable, because they would carry away the objectionable byproducts of certain types of profit-making activities, e.g., butchery and soap-making. Men made livings and supported families on those drains. They found it senseless that an elderly stranger ought to be let in to see these miracles, simply because he voiced curiosity about them. He could have offered money in exchange for a look-see, but this would only have drawn even more attention.

Points A and B on Hooke’s drawing—the places in the sheer bank of Fleet Ditch where it connected to the moat—were clearly identifiable, but they had been sealed by a pastiche of iron grille-work and masonry with gaps between bricks to let stuff flow through. Saturn with a skiff and a powder-keg could have made short work of these, but it would have been rather noticeable, there in the midst of the city, all of a quarter-mile from St. Paul’s Churchyard.

In the end the only way to gain access to that sealed-off moat was via Fleet Prison itself, by capitalizing on its very peculiarities, and on the unlooked-for currency of the buried gold story. “Old Partry,” well into his cups during the Beer-Clubb of Thursday, 7 October, had let slip a notion that the soldiers might be circumvented, and the treasure reached, by tunneling in from the moat. The following morning, it was found that the privy adjacent to the kitchen, along the north wall of the Prison, had been vandalized. This was a two-holer: a wooden bench having a pair of orifices that communicated (as was obvious enough, after it had been vandalized) with a common shaft that descended into an inscrutable and noxious blackness. Half the bench was still in good working order, but the other had been gone at with a hatchet, and the hole made a good deal broader and ruder.

Now this was a grave matter to the general population of the Fleet, because the buildings were famously in decay, and the Warden infamously reluctant to dent his cash flow by effecting repairs. The Court of Inspectors would have to prosecute lawsuits for an hundred years before the Privy got fixed. The Steward came round and had words with “Old Partry.” The aged, daft visitor and his huge manservant were welcome to pass the time of day in the Tap-Room or the Racket Ground, but all buried-treasure talk must cease forthwith. Some of the less acute inmates were getting ideas, and beginning to tear the place up. The privy-basher, if found, would be Pumped.

Another thing that Daniel had been learning was that even if real estate was expensive, people were cheap. Which ought to have been obvious to him from that, in exchange for tiny bits of silver, people were forever shinnying up chimneys, climbing into bed with syphilitics, or taking musket-balls in Belgium. But like most who did not do such things, he went out of his way not to dwell on it, and had quite put it out of his mind until it was brought to his notice forcefully by Peter Hoxton. In exchange for what he wanted people to do for him, Daniel offered a lot of silver, relatively speaking; and even as Saturn had forewarned him, word got round, and they had to turn people away and deflect their efforts to under-bid those who’d already been hired.

The work consisted of going into Fleet Prison ostensibly to take a shit; entering the vandalized privy when no one was paying especially keen attention; and jumping down the hole. The first boy who did it got paid extra, because there was no telling what he would find, or what would find him; but he climbed back up the (provided) rope a few minutes later with the sensational intelligence that he had found himself in a long, gently curving tunnel with a firm floor beneath several inches of slimy muck, and, flowing sluggishly over that, sewage that came up to mid-thigh.

The young men that Daniel hired went down that hole with bags on their backs (nothing bulky enough to draw the notice of the turnkeys) and came up empty-handed. They constructed a wooden ladder down below so that they might re-ascend to the privy without having to use climbing-ropes (as the pioneers had done). They went down with measuring-ropes and came up with numbers in their heads, which were mapped by Saturn: eight feet to the east of the privy-orifice, on the north side of the tunnel, was a drain-opening two hand-spans in breadth, which from time to time vomited cattle-guts. Eleven feet beyond that was the output shaft of a House of Office that must be in the back room of some other edifice. Two fathoms beyond that, on the right, a drain that must belong to the prison’s kitchen. Thirty sloshing paces beyond that, around a bend, a tiny in-flow of fresh water: the overflow drain of a pump and cistern that stood between the Prison kitchen and the dungeon. Up and down the tunnel these explorations spread, a picture filled in, one scrap at a time, by the accounts of the eager, reeking lads who emerged from the privy at all hours. Within a day they had found a stretch of rotten masonry wall, ninety to a hundred feet east of the privy, that could not be anything other than the outside wall of the dungeon itself. By listening with ears pressed against this, they convinced themselves that they heard chains rattling: the massive irons that the Warden of the Fleet had borrowed from Newgate Prison to bind the Shaftoe Gang. Now they went down with iron bars, chisels, and muffled hammers to peck and scrape away the crazed mortar that held that wall together. After two days of this, a chap on the other side—black, and so presumably Tomba—pulled a brick out of the way to make a fist-sized hole, and said that the miners must on no account remove any more material, lest their gaolers notice changes in the wall. So after that they moved on to other sorts of preparations. Several privy-shafts were ascended by boys recruited from London’s surplus of chimney-sweeps, hence, very much at home in filthy and cramped verticals. A particularly accommodating one was identified, and mapped to a house of prostitution in a corner of Bell Savage Inn: one of several culs-de-sac that lay just outside the prison wall, in the smoaky labyrinth of boozing-kens and spunging-houses between it and the Great Old Bailey.

For a few days in the second week of October, Daniel felt as though Thursday Night Beer-Clubb would never roll around. For the traffic in and out of the damaged privy had begun to attract notice—not so much the comings and goings of the boys themselves (for they employed a system of lookouts, so that their entries to and exits from the shaft would not be be seen by ordinary privy-users), but the trail of nostril-singeing moisture that they tended to leave on their way out. This admittedly was not as obvious in a dark, wet, stinking London prison shit-house as it might have been in some other settings, but some had noted it and begun to talk, which made Daniel very ill at ease. Not that there was any want of other things to feel ill at ease about! The more time he spent in the Tap-Room, the worse he felt; but during the final days, he could not tear himself away from the place for more than a few hours at a time. During the afternoon of the fourteenth, he read Dappa’s auction piece half a dozen times, between re-reading that day’s newspapers, and yesterday’s. But finally the sky got dark and the place began to fill up with Beer-seekers, and Saturn ambled through and gave him a wink, and then, of course, it was all coming too fast! Happening too soon! He wasn’t ready! It was a little bit like a year ago, when Minerva had been stalled off the coast of Massachusetts for week after tedious week by contrary winds, and Daniel, irreligious though he was, had prayed for a shift in the wind—only to be assaulted by Blackbeard’s pirate-fleet when that day finally arrived. Another change was in the air now, and another adventure in the offing. He was alarmed. But he reasoned with himself thus: men like Jack Shaftoe had adventures all their lives. Even his maths tutor at Cambridge, Isaac Barrow, had once duelled Corsairs in the Mediterranean. Everything since Enoch had come to his door a year and two days ago, had been an adventure, albeit with lulls. So why not let’s get on with it!

Daniel summoned one of the Tap-Room’s crack staff, and ordered that a certain keg of beer be tapped, and paid for it in gold. This was received, by the Debtors, with no less awe than a Biblical miracle. They responded with a miracle of their own: they transmogrified a full keg into an empty one. Daniel bought another, for word had gone out into the rules and beyond that Old Partry was buying a round for London, and people were thronging the place—coming in through the gate, Daniel was informed, in such a solid stream that no one could get out. To Daniel it only seemed like a more crowded than usual Beer-Clubb (and a more appreciative!), but when finally he was hoisted up onto the shoulders of several debtors, and huzzahed a good many times, and made the object of divers toasts, he was able from that vantage point to see over the heads of the Clubb and out the open door and windows into the Racket Ground, where he saw: fog. Not the usual London sea-fog, but the condensed breath of hundreds of persons who had backed up outside the doors because the Tap-Room was full. It might have been alarming, had these been Red Indians or Turks. But they were Englishmen. Daniel recognized here only the normal traits of Englishmen, viz. a wont to convene, drink, and be sociable, especially on chilly dark nights. He deemed this an apt moment to trigger another English predilection: joining together in mad projects.

“I have spent all of my gold,” he announced, when a speech had been called for, and the Clubb had got as quiet as it was ever likely to. “I have spent it all,” he repeated, “and my family, who look a-skance at my researches, would opine that I am now likely to become your fellow-inmate here in the Fleet; which they would be ashamed of, but I would deem a higher honor than to be made a Knight of the Garter.” Now, a pause for toasting and huzzahing. “But this is not to happen. I have only spent my gold thus in the Tap-Room, because I am so sure of finding more anon, out yonder. For lately I have uncovered new documents that shall enable me positively to fix the location of the cache of coins buried in these precincts one hundred and forty years ago by coiners locked up on orders of Sir Thomas Gresham!”

This utterance had begun promisingly, but then degenerated (in the opinion of most) into a windy and recondite history-lesson, and so the applause was not as vigorous as it might have been, had he simply ordered another keg tapped. But that suited his purposes well enough. The true believers in the buried-gold story had suspected, all evening long, that some new ferment was at work in Old Partry’s mind, and they now surged toward him, waving shovels and pointed sticks. The Court of Inspectors were extremely dismayed, and of a mind to have Daniel Pumped; but they were helpless as long as engulfed in a Mobb of visitors whose bellies were full of beer paid for by Old Partry.

“Now if you would be so accommodating as to bear me round to the Poor Side,” Daniel said, “I shall find the treasure, and we shall extract it, and divide it up! I make only one demand of you, which is that you remain well clear of the soldiers, and in no way menace or molest them. They are armed, after all; and if we are so rash as to hand them a pretext, why, they might just seize what’s rightfully ours!”

This, he thought, percolated to the edge of the crowd reasonably well. As well, it gave the Court of Inspectors an excuse to exercise their authority. He saw the Steward and three of his high council making for the dungeon straightaway, presumably to explain to the soldiers what was going on.

“To the Poor-Side Cistern!” Daniel commanded, and in a few moments was borne there, followed by a thrilled company of shovel-men. This was the place where Daniel had seen a prisoner Pumped on his first visit. He drew out a document. It was written in the Real Character: perfectly impenetrable to even the literate among the debtors, which was a good thing, since it was actually a description of a clock-work mechanism written a long time ago by Hooke. “The inscription says, proceed from here along a line parallel to the Ditch for fifty paces, until a certain Tree is reached,” he announced, and let it be known that he wished to dismount. His bearers let him down, and he backed up to the edge of the cistern, faced north, and began to pace: “One, two, three…”

By the time he had reached ten, they had begun to count along with him. Fifty found them all goose-stepping and chanting in perfect unison in the Painted Ground.

“No tree,” Daniel observed in the silence that ensued. “Of course, it was burned in the Fire. We must proceed anyway, keeping in mind that there is likely to be some error.” He scrutinized the document, turning it this way and that, until many had grown restive, and some had even begun to dig holes. “ ‘Turn to the right and go another hundred,’ it says, which foxed me for a bit,” said Daniel, gazing up at the wall of the Prison, which barred all rightward movement. “Until one considers that the prison that stood in those days was smaller. We must measure a distance of one hundred paces that way.” And he thrust his hand at the Prison.

Now, everyone in the whole party had a different notion of how this was to be achieved, and so for ten minutes the Fleet seemed to have swopped inmates with Bedlam, as all over the place people were clambering through windows, stretching bits of twine across other inmates’ cells, pacing along exterior walls, and dragging sticks through dirt. But after a while, two-thirds of them reconvened on the near edge of the Racket Ground. Smaller clusters of dissident pacers and measurers staked out more or less far-flung positions which they insisted were the correct ones.

“There is supposed to be another tree here, but it’s gone,” said Daniel. He spent a while reading, and squinting up at the dome of St. Paul’s. “Of course the turret of old St. Paul’s was in a slightly different place,” he reminded them, “but fortunately I am old enough to remember it.” He paced toward that remembered landmark all the way across the Racket Ground, parallelled by the several dissident groups, who counted his paces jealously. He stopped just short of the Prison wall, then sidestepped five paces to the left, until he was standing on the rim of a shallow stone gutter that ran for some distance along the wall’s base. He looked both ways, pretending to check for landmarks; but really he was performing reconaissance on the soldiers. All dozen of them had been rousted from their tents by their sergeant, and now stood in a picket-line across the front of the dungeon-building, facing outwards, with fixed bayonets. The sergeant stood in front of the line. In front of him were several worthies of the Court of Inspectors, who seemed to want to create a buffer between the soldiers and the shovelers. All of these had been watching Daniel alertly, as he had drawn to within half a dozen yards of the nearest soldiers. But that was as close as he came. “Here is where the instructions tell us to dig,” he announced, and stamped the ground. And then he danced out of the way, lest his foot be taken off by the blade of a shovel. He glanced up to see the soldiers looking somewhat relieved. In the dimness behind them, a large man sprinted at the privy as though his bowels were about to give way. Old Partry had been quite forgotten, and was shouldered to the edge of the crowd, and his wig knocked off (actually, he abetted this by shaking his head at the right moment). In the shadow of the Prison wall he shrugged off his cloak, and then stepped out into the clear, uncovered, and dressed in shabby attire that blended well with what most people wore around here. He walked south, all the way around the poor wing, and doubled back along the western side of the prison and walked north past the cistern and the main gate (thronged, now, with Beer-Clubbers wishing to go home, so that all three turnkeys were kept busy inspecting their faces). Up across the Painted Ground he strolled, and then around the north end of the prison building. The vandalized privy was directly ahead of him. He had made almost a complete circuit of the Fleet to reach it; but in this way he had been able to approach it without parading in front of the soldiers. He entered, sat on the bench, took a deep breath, raised his knees, and spun around on his arse until his feet were poised above the hole. As soon as he dipped them in, strong hands grabbed his ankles and pulled down. Faster than he’d have liked, the rest of him followed. Only his head and shoulders were still showing when he was blinded by sudden lanthorn-glare. Someone was coming in the door of the privy! There was a gasp. Daniel was yanked downwards, barking his chin on the edge of the hole. A scream sounded from the world above, and a crash as the visitor dropped the lanthorn. The ragged oval of light above was snuffed out.

“Do you s’pose she got a good look at your face?” Saturn grunted in his ear. But Daniel was unable to respond. A kind of paralyzing dismay had come over him, as precursor to horror and, in all likelihood, sickness. He was finally now understanding what it really meant to be in a London sewer—and he wasn’t even really down in it yet, for Saturn was bearing him over one shoulder, sloshing down the tunnel toward a source of illumination hidden round the curve of the ox-bow.

Daniel would have fled, if not for the shameful knowledge that he’d been paying other people to do this for a week.

He suffered. Time passed. They were in a different part of the tunnel, with more light and more people. A great hole had been knocked through the wall. Men were working in a low-ceilinged vault. On its far wall was a massive door; wedges had been driven into the crack between it and its jamb, so that even if the soldiers heard something above the din of the Mobb and came down to investigate they would not be able to get it open. Three of the worst-looking wretches Daniel had ever seen were reclining on the floor, as if taking their leisure; but of course they were sick, and weak, and fettered by hundred-pound irons from Newgate. A bloke with a hammer and a punch was striking the irons off of them, one wrist or ankle at a time. By the time Daniel reached them, one was free, and sitting up to rub his wrists. “We been complainin’ for weeks they didn’t give us a latrine,” he observed, “and now we’re going to go down one.”

“Up one is more like,” said Saturn. “I hope you are in condition to climb a ladder, Danny.”

“I hope that gager slung over your shoulder is,” Danny returned.

“He has hidden reserves,” Saturn said.

“He’d better stop hiding them,” said the black man—though it was not easy to discern skin tones under these circumstances.

Moved, finally, by this and more such mockery, Daniel wriggled, and insisted that he be set upright in the tunnel. The stuff came up to his knees. He got through it by reminding himself that he would, in some sense, survive. “If some of us are ready to go, then let us go,” he suggested.

“We’ll stay together, thank’ee kindly,” said Danny. Tomba had been struck free, but the hammer-man was only beginning to work on Jimmy. “But feel free to lead the way—supposin’ there is one.”

“Oh, there is,” Saturn assured him, “Only the final inch needs to be cleared.” And he hefted a thick iron bar.

THE FINAL INCH CONSISTED OF planks. It was a floor built over a relatively wide shaft that led down into the sewer. It was all that separated that cloacal world from the House of Office in the back of the brothel in Bell Savage Inn.

Saturn was, in general, not one to throw his weight around, and make much of his bigness; he was a big man of the understated type. Which made it all the more impressive when he decided to make the most of his endowments. Nothing could have prepared the ladies of the establishment for the sight of him erupting from the floor of their toilet in a volcano of shards and splinters. They made no pretense of trying to puzzle it out, but only ran for the exits, abandoning customers in various states of déshabille and divers levels of excitement. The brothel had two bouncers: these were naturally posted at the front door, and so some minutes passed before they were made to believe that their services were needed in the House of Office. Eventually they came, swinging coshes, and found themselves outnumbered, out-muscled, and out-weaponed by seven filthy men who had, by that time, emerged from the hole inaugurated by Saturn.

“If you have come to eject us,” Daniel said to them, “you might like to know that our only desire is to leave. Pray, where is the exit?”

OUT IN THE CLOSE of Bell Savage Inn a large flat-bed cart was biding its time behind a four-horse team. Upright in the back of it was a barrel of fresh water, and a lad with a bucket, who cheerfully doused them as they were clambering aboard. This did not even come close to making them clean, but it knocked away what was more solid, and diluted what was more wet, and made them feel better. Best of all, it did not take very long. They threw the empty barrel out on to the ground. Of those who’d taken part in this project, half had escaped via the broken privy and would be going out via the prison gate, and two others had come up via the brothel. These two now walked away. Jimmy, Danny, Tomba, Saturn, and Daniel lay side-by-side in the bed of the wagon. The lad flung a tarp over them. They kicked off fouled boots and breeches as the wagon negotiated the labyrinthine ways of the rules. Anyone who tried to track them would find an obvious trail of discarded clothing across Prujeon Close, Black and White Court, and other such attractions. But then they would come out into The Great Old Bailey, a broad and busy London thoroughfare, and not know which way to turn. For once the cart had gone beyond that point, they took care to throw no more clews out of it.

Southward, The Great Old Bailey ran to Ludgate. Thence, under the name of Water Street, it went to Black Fryars Stairs along the river.

Northwards, a stone’s throw away, the Court of Sessions lay on the opposite side of the street, and just up from that was Newgate Prison. A pursuer might be forgiven for supposing that the escapees would have turned south toward the river and freedom, not north toward judgment and the worst prison in the city. But north was where they went, and in a very short time the wagon had stopped. Saturn stood up, shouldering the tarpaulin aside, and fetched a lanthorn from the driver. Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba sat up and looked about, bewildered. They were at a crossing of The Great Old Bailey with another street, even broader. That street was bridged, only a few yards away, by a mighty turreted Gothick castle that brooded over the square, and barred the great way with a portcullis.

“Newgate Prison,” Jimmy said.

“Do not attend too much to the low dark places,” said Saturn, opening the lanthorn’s shutters, “but elevate your gaze, and regard the great treble window, there, above those statues.” He looked up to demonstrate. The windows in question were thirty feet above the level of the pavement. A single candle was gleaming between the iron bars. It leapt up, briefly illuminating a face—but only long enough for the flame to be blown out. And yet in that instant the face had been recognized.

“Da—” cried Jimmy, but the final consonant was muffled by the hand of Tomba, which had clamped down over his mouth.

From that alone, Jack Shaftoe might have guessed who was in that wagon; but Saturn now removed all doubt by playing the lanthorn-beam over the faces of Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba in turn. Then, finally, he illuminated Daniel. For that they’d escaped was only part of what had to be communicated to Jack; who was responsible for it was as important.

“You must all fly like birds,” Jack said. He was not shouting, but somehow projecting his voice right at them. “Fly, and stop for nothing until you’ve reached America.”

“You mean, ‘we’! Don’t you, Dad!? It’s we all who must fly together!” Jimmy called.

“If wanting, alone, could tear down prisons, all men would be free,” Jack returned. “No. I am here. You are there. Tomorrrow I’ll be here still, and you had better be far away!”

“Dad, we can’t just leave you up there,” Danny said.

“Shut up! You must go now. Now! Listen. I have been saying for thirty years that I must provide for my boys. It was all bollocks until this moment. But now I’ve done it, finally! That is what you must remember me by—none of the other shite. Go! Go to America, find wives, have children, tell them what Grandfather did for his sons—and tell them they’re expected to do no less. Good-bye!”

His voice broke as he got to the end of this, and he swam dimly into view once more as he sagged against the bars. Saturn gestured to the driver, who popped his whip and got the wagon turned west out of town, making a cacophony that drowned out the farewell cries of the three escaped prisoners. Their dim and distant view of Jack Shaftoe was killed by the descent of the tarpaulin. The wagon rattled away. The square was left empty. High above it, five human forms could be made out: Jack slumped against the window, and below him, in their niches, the statues of Liberty, Justice, Mercy, and Truth. These all seemed to have turned their backs on Jack, and they pointedly ignored the muffled sobbing noises that continued to escape from the window for some minutes after.

THEY STAYED ON HIGH HOLBOURN only as far as Chancery Lane. There they doubled back south toward the river, and passed down through the middle of the Temple to the stairs, where a boat waited, manned by several oarsmen who had been well paid to be deaf, dumb, and blind for one night. All five of them boarded this, and it sprang away from Temple Stairs and angled across the river and upstream, headed for a row of timber wharves along the Lambeth bank.

“There’s no telling when your escape will be noted,” Daniel said, once he felt that they’d recovered sufficiently from that brutal leave-taking that they might hear and mark his words. The escapees had been stuffing their faces with bread and cheese and boiled eggs waiting for them in the boat, and their eyes turned toward him as he spoke. He got the idea, from this, that they were used to listening with care, and heeding instructions.

“First thing they’ll do is send word downriver to look for men matching your descriptions trying to get out via Gravesend. So, you don’t go that way. Swift horses and clean clothes await you on yonder shore. There is a man there who shall guide you to a place in Surrey, where you’ll change over to fresh horses—and so on all the way to Portsmouth. With luck you can ship out there tomorrow, on a vessel bound for Carolina—you’ll be in the guise of indentured servants, going in company of many such to labor on Mr. Ickham’s plantation there. But if word of your escape should reach Portsmouth before the ship sails, you may have to pay some smuggler or other to take you over to France.”

“Dad said he wants us in Carolina, though,” Danny said, “and so Carolina’s where we’ll go.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Daniel said. “America will suit you, I think.”

“We know,” said Jimmy, “we’ve already friggin’ been there.”

SO ACCUSTOMED WERE THE MEN of the Shaftoe organization to dashing night-time escapades that they had galloped off into the darkness of Lambeth before Daniel had even climbed out of the boat to bid them farewell. There was nothing to do but sit down and let himself be rowed, along with Saturn, back over to the London side.

“I never knew how bloody complicated it was, to be a criminal master-mind,” Daniel complained. He had been excited until a few minutes ago but was now feeling more exhausted than he had in years.

“Most people work their way up to it gradual-like, beginning with simpler jobs, such as snatching watches,” Saturn said. “It is very unusual to go straight to the top. Only a distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society could have managed it. My hat would be off to you, sir, if I had one.”

“I wonder if my inexperience will be looked on as a mitigating circumstance when I am put on trial for all of this.”

“If, not when. Though it would behoove you to think about going back to America.”

“Fine. I shall think about it,” Daniel said. “First, though, we have got more sewer-work to do.”

“Oh, I’ll never again look on Walbrook as a sewer—not after tonight,” said Saturn. “It is more like a wee brook that has been walled up, and made privy to us and a few other in-the-know blokes.”

CRANE COURT WAS LESS THAN a quarter of a mile away. Daniel hired a sedan chair and reached it in a few minutes’ time. Isaac Newton, as it turned out, had been working here late. But someone had found him, and got word to him. A carriage had been sent round to fetch him, and it all but blocked the narrow court. Daniel bade the sedan chair’s porters to move off to one side of the street and make way.

Isaac emerged, white in the shine of the street lights, drawn, coughing. He settled himself in the carriage and immediately opened all the windows to get more air.

“To Newgate,” he commanded. “I’ll sit up all night watching Jack Shaftoe, if that is what I have to do; and tomorrow I’ll have him before a magistrate. We’ll see how much trouble he can cause when he is pinned under a ton of stones.” This was what he was saying as the carriage rattled past Daniel’s sedan chair, only an arm’s length away, and it seemed he was addressing some important person or other who was facing him. But as Isaac spoke, he stared out the window full into Daniel’s face. Daniel was hid behind a dense black screen, and knew he must be perfectly invisible; but he caught his breath anyway, and for the next few moments found himself a little short of wind, like a prisoner being pressed.

Under a Pile of Lead Weights, the Press-Room,
Newgate Prison

20 OCTOBER 1714

Then said Apollyon, “I am sure of thee now,” and with that he had almost pressed him to death, so that Christian began to despair of life.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

MERCURY DID NOT KNOW the way to Newgate. Strange that the Messenger of the Gods should absent himself from a great Gate astride a high Road leading into what Jack Shaftoe was pleased to denominate the greatest metropolis in the world. Yet Mercury had never been spied here. Nor (for that matter, and to be perfectly honest) was he wont to visit most of the other locales where Jack had spent his life. For that swift prancing God, accustomed to the swept marble floors of Olympus, would never wish to get shit on his dove-white ankle-wings. Indeed, considering the places he had frequented, Jack might have lived his life in a perfect informational void—and been a happier man for it—were it not for the fact that fastidious Mercury had three cupbearers or, in plain language, butt-boys, viz. Light, Sound, and Stink. These swarmed and ranged round him somewhat as Panic and Terror were said to do around Mars, and conveyed news into and out of places where the Boss feared to tread.

Light was rarely seen around Newgate. For that matter ’twas not oft spied in London generally. There was a yard at one end of the prison, so narrow that a young man could stand with his back against the building and piss against the enclosing wall. On days when the sun appeared above London, it shone into that yard for some minutes about noon. But for that very reason, the apartments (as they were styled, despite a lot of stout ironmongery about the windows) that looked out on that yard were reserved for prisoners who had a lot of money.

Jack had a lot of money—much of which he had, indeed, manufactured himself—but he was not in one of those apartments on this day, for reasons having to do with certain auncient hallowed canons of the English judiciary. He was, rather, in the Common Felons’ side, where Light was a stranger, unless a shred of it be arrested, and sentenced to a brief term of imprisonment in a lanthorn.

By and large, Sound, that lusty runagate, had a much easier time of it here than his ethereal brother Light. The inmates of Newgate loved Sound, and never let off making as much of it as they could. Partly it was the want of Light, which made Sound their only medium for the exchange of intelligence, or, as the case might be, stupidity. And partly it was that everyone in the place—rich, poor, felon, debtor, male, female, adult, child—had the means of making noise with every movement, in that they all wore iron fetters from the moment they were admitted to when they were discharged. Rich could afford light chains, poor must make do with heavy, but chains they all had, and they loved to make them clink and rattle. As if sheer volume of noise might shake the stench from the air, and scare away the lice.

Jack lay in the Press-Room in the center of the prison, on the second floor. Next door was the Women Felons’ hold, which contained about a hundred females packed head to foot like chocolate soldiers in a box. Their sole source of diversion was to scream the most foul things they could think of out a grate set into the stone wall at one end of the room, communicating with the street. And as it turned out there were plenty of free Londoners who had nothing better to do than to stand out there and listen to them. As this practice had been continuously practiced and maintained on this spot for something like one thousand years, with only occasional lapses attributable to plague, fire, gaol-fever, or wholesale tear-downs and re-builds of the prison fabrique itself, it had been developed to a high art. To blaspheming, these women were what the Duke of Marlborough was to generalship. Fortunately for Jack, who liked a bit of quiet so that he might lapse into unconsciousness from time to time, the Press-Room walls were thick, and muffled those execrations into a vague clamor.

But if Jack heard more than he saw, he smelt a thousand times as much as he heard. For, of all of Mercury’s aides-de-camp, that base, insinuating wretch, Stink, was most at home in Newgate. Mostly what Jack smelt was himself, and what had lately been squeezed out of him. But from time to time he got a whiff of fire being kindled, and then he nosed hot oil, pitch, and tar. For the Press-Room lay near Jack Ketch his Kitchen, where that high official took the heads and limbs of his clients to boil them in the substances mentioned, so that they should endure longer when put up on spikes round city gates.

He had been put into this place on the eighteenth of October. After he had been here for a long time, the door had opened, and a gaoler had come in and stuffed a heel of black bread into his mouth. Then another long time had elapsed. Then the door had opened again, and another gaoler had come in with a ladle that he had dragged through a puddle on the floor a few moments earlier. He had poured the proceeds into Jack’s mouth to spit out or swallow as he saw fit. Jack, impetuous fellow, had swallowed. Now, he knew that a prisoner on bread and water (e.g., himself) was served once a day, the bread alternating with the water. He’d had two servings; ergo, it must be nigh on the twentieth of October. On that date the new King was to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, a mile and a half from here.

What a shame that he could not attend the Coronation! Oh, he had not been invited. But then, he had made a long career of venturing into places where he’d not been welcome, and so this need not have stopped him.

The diverse parades, processions, and rites of the Coronation were attended by respectable men and women: bishops, doctors, yeomen, and earls. Every single one of them hoped and trusted that major portions of Jack Shaftoe would end up in Jack Ketch his Kitchen soon. For that to happen, though, he should have to be convicted. Specifically, he’d have to be convicted of High Treason. Mere robbers, murderers, &c. were only hanged. And a hanged body, entire, was a grocery too gross to maneuver up the stairs to yonder Kitchen. The penalty for High Treason, on the other hand, was to be hanged until half dead (whatever that meant), then cut down, drawn, and separated—with the aid of four teams of horses galloping in opposite directions—into at least four pieces, of a convenient size for the oil, pitch, and tar spa operated just a few steps away from here by Jack Ketch. Shaftoe had been booked for a lengthy and painful round trip via Tyburn, and only one formality prevented it: in order for Jack to be convicted, there’d have to be a proper trial; and according to the rules of such things, the trial could not progress beyond a certain point until Jack pleaded one way or the other.

Accordingly the bailiff, two days ago, had rousted him from his clean, well-lighted apartment in the Castle, and chivvied him down a long narrow alley, a sort of sheep-chute that ran direct to the holding-pen of the Old Bailey. Thence into a Yard where a magistrate (or so it could be presumed from his mien and his Wig) had peered down at him from a balcony (for it had been learnt long ago that magistrates who swapped air with Newgate prisoners soon died of gaol fever). Jack had declined to plead, and so the usual procedure had been effected: back up that alley to Newgate. But to the Press-Room instead of his lovely apartment. There Jack had been stripped to his drawers and very very strongly encouraged to lie down flat on his back on the stone floor. The four corners of the Press-Room were adorned with iron staples set into the floor. These had been connected to his wrists and ankles by chains. Then, in an uncanny prefigurement of the penalty for High Treason, the chains had been drawn tight, so that he was spread-eagled.

A stout wooden box, open on the top—therefore reminiscent of a manger—was suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room by some tackle. This had been let down until it had dangled a few inches above Jack’s breast-bone. The gaolers had gone to work ferrying lead cylinders from a strangely tidy display against the wall, and piling them into the manger with unnerving hollow booms. They had kept at it for rather a long time, and like lawyers they had cited precedents the whole way—now we are above the hundredweight mark, which is for elderly ladies and tubercular children—now we are at two hundred pounds, which was enough to induce Lord so-and-so to plead after a mere three hours—but we have more respect for you than him, Jack—so now we are up nearing three hundred pounds, which killed Bob the Stabber but which Jephthah Big withstood for three days.

And now, Jack, we are ready for you. As you’re plainly ready for us.

They’d let the box of weights down onto him then, the pulley overhead supplying all of the squeals and screams that Jack would’ve, if he could’ve. The weight had not hit him all at once, but had grown and grown, like the tide. He’d understood right away why so many of the people alluded to by the gaolers had broken, or simply died: it was not the weight, and not the pain, though both were extraordinary, but rather the sheer gloom of it. This Jack was able to master, though just barely, by reminding himself that this was not the worst spot he’d ever been in. Not by a long chalk. And this kept him settled until that thread was broken that connected him to the here and now, and his mind, unleashed, began to dream of the old days.

Through many old stories his mind rambled then, and like a translucent ghost he haunted vivid scenes of Port-Royal in Jamaica, the Siege of Vienna, Barbary, Bonanza, Cairo, Malabar, Mexico, and other places, seeing faces he well remembered, loving most of them, hating a few. To some of those persons he called out. He called out so loud that the gaolers of Newgate heard him, and came in to the Press-Room to see whether he had given up, and was ready to plead. But they found only that he was a-mazed in his own memories, and not conscious of his true surroundings. And he was in a kind of anguish, not because of the weights—for he’d ceased to be aware of them—but because those memories were fixed, and would in no way respond to his outcries. He might as well have been in a Chapel calling out to the frescoes on the ceiling: gorgeous, but dead, and deaf. One time he saw Mr. Foote, in a flowered tunic, hoisting a colorful drink on a Queenah-Kootah beach, as if drinking Jack’s health; but this was the nearest anyone came to taking notice of him.

Strangely, the only one who would speak to him was the one he hated the most: Father Édouard de Gex.

“Of all the people! I can’t imagine anything more offensive!” Jack raged.

“Yes, but you have to admit I am just the sort who would turn up in a time and place such as this.” De Gex had dropped that annoying French accent.

“Well, yes…you have me there,” Jack said weakly.

Jesuit that he was, de Gex was ready with a glib explanation: “The others who haunt your memories, Jack, are still alive, or else gone on to their destinies, and are too far removed from this world to hear you. It is only I who haunts this world thus.”

“You didn’t go to Hell? I had you prick’d down as a straight-to-Hell man.”

“As I once told you in a moment of weakness, my status was, and is, ambiguous.”

“Ah, yes—your devious cousine muddied those waters, did she not—I had forgotten.”

“Not even St. Peter can sort the matter out,” said the ghost of de Gex, “so I must wander the earth until Judgment Day.”

“What do you do to pass the time, then, Father Ed?”

Father Ed shrugged. “I seek to redeem myself, by giving good advice, and steering others, who still have some prospect of reaching Heaven, into the path of righteousness.”

“Haw! You of all people?”

De Gex shrugged. “Since you’re chained to the floor, you have no choice but to listen to, but it is your choice whether you shall heed, my advice.”

“And what is your advice? Speak up, you are fading.”

“I do not fade,” de Gex explained. “The gaolers have heard you shouting at me, and opened the door of your cell; voilà, it’s morning, the windows of Newgate Prison have been opened to admit fresh air, light floods in to the place. I remain here with you. Ignore the gaolers; they are confused, they see me not, they suppose you to be not in your right mind.”

“Ha! Fancy that! Me, not in my right mind!”

“You have accepted the proposal that was tendered by Daniel Waterhouse…why?”

“Oh, I adjudged him the most capable of bringing it off. Charles White is a powerful man, but in a precarious spot, liable to be chased out of the country at any moment. I dared not gamble all on him. Newton I simply could not fathom. Waterhouse, though…he’s dependable, he is, and was in touch with Saturn, and had every incentive to see the matter through. He has already sprung the boys out of the Fleet—that explains why Sir Isaac was so furious yester evening…”

“That was three evenings ago, Jack,” said de Gex, “and they put you under these weights two days ago, on the eighteenth.”

“Stab me, that’s a hell of a long time, I had quite lost track.”

“You have held out longer than anyone; word has leaked out, through the windows of Newgate, into the streets, and the Mobb have begun to sing songs about you:

“Put another Weight on the Stack

Said the Vagabond Half-cocked Jack

For the night is still young

I’ve got air in me lungs

And I don’t think I’m ready to crack.”

“Is that what they were caterwauling? I had wondered. It is not so bad, I suppose, for a snatch of Mobb doggerel. And very touching. But I trust that the Mobb can improve on it. Perhaps take up a collection and hire a proper Poet, with some taste. I’d fancy something in heroic couplets, iambic hexameter perhaps, and capable of being set to music…”

“Jack! Has it occurred to you to wonder why you can hear me, a departed spirit, while none of the gaolers knows I am in here?”

“No, but it has occurred to me to wonder why you leave me alone here for two whole bloody days—then show up to trouble my repose with ghastly Advice.”

“The answer is the same in both cases. You are standing before the threshold of the portal that joins your world to the next.”

“Is that a poetickal way of saying I’m about to croak?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I shall see you in a minute or two, then, I can feel myself going…I can hear the bells of Heaven ringing…”

“Actually, those are the bells of Westminster Abbey, carrying down the river on the morning breeze.”

“Why? Someone died?”

“No, it is the tradition to toll the great Bell of the Abbey as the carriage of the new Sovereign draws up before the west door. That Bell is calling all England to the Church, Jack, to celebrate the Coronation of George.”

“Did they reserve a seat for me?”

“Try and concentrate, Jack, or the ringing of that bell will be the last thing you ever hear.”

“I would like to remind you that the alternative is for me to plead. No matter how I plead, I’m bound for Tyburn, where I’ll die a much worse death than this. Hell, this is practically painless!”

“Are you not forgetting an important part of the plan?”

“What? The plan of Daniel Waterhouse?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, no. I know where you are leading me now, Father Ed, and it’s not a place to which I will be led. You did this once before: forged a letter from her, to draw me in to a snare!”

“You are spread-eagled to the floor of Newgate Prison with three hundred pounds of weight on your chest and you have sixty seconds to live. It strikes me as funny that you are so wary, at such a moment, of being drawn in to a trap!”

“I just don’t wish to be made a fool of again, is all. That’s all I ask for, is a bit of pride.”

“Pride is not what you are wanting. You’ve plenty. Has it got you what you desired? No. You don’t want pride. You want Faith.”

“Oh, Jesus Friggin’ Christ!”

“All right. Barring that, wouldn’t you like to stay on another nine days, just to see how it all comes out in the end?”

“If dying means that I end up on the same plane of existence with you, and must suffer more of your prating, then nine days here begins to sound pretty good.”

“So—?”

“Oh, all right. What the hell. I’ll plead.”

“Say it louder!” de Gex implored him. “They can’t hear you! They are hearkening to the fanfare of distant trumpets!”

“Funny, so am I—I phant’sied I’d died, and that was angels blowing golden horns for me!”

“It is the trumpeter of the Household Royal announcing the entry of George Louis to Westminster Abbey. And those are the drums of his solemn procession!”

“I’ll friggin’ plead!” Jack shouted, “now take this shit off of me, already, and eject yonder Ghost.”

Westminster Abbey

20 OCTOBER 1714

LATER, THE QUALITY who had witnessed it (as well as many who only wanted people to think they had) would swear that the villain’s lips had parted, baring his teeth, and that a hungry and feral look had come over his face. For Charles White had been a great man in the land, and it was no small matter to bring him down. He had to be made over, first, in people’s minds, into a kind of beast.

It happened before the west front of Westminster Abbey. All of the great persons of Britain, as well as Ambassadors and other guests from other realms, were standing about, a little bit dumbfounded from several hours of Church. For the Coronation of George was nothing more or less than an uncommonly tedious church-service, spiced up, here and there, with trotting-out of the gaudiest Regalia this side of Shahjahanabad. Through diverse Processionals and Recessionals they had sat, or stood, and every time the King had shooed away a fly it had been answered by a fifteen-minute Fanfare and a solemn Incantation. The Archbishop, the Lord Chancellor, the Chamberlain, and everyone on down to the Bluemantle Pursuivant had all checked in with one another to verify that George Louis of Hanover was the correct chap, and then they had double- and triple-checked, and run it by various phalanxes and bleacher-loads of Bishops, Peers, Nobles, et cetera, who could never affirm anything with a quick nod or thumbs-up but must bellow out pompous circumlocutions in triplicate, bating whenever the trumpet-section, organist, or choir got a whim to break out in half an hour of joyful polyphony. A busy traffic in Bibles, Faldstools, Chalices, Patens, Ampoules, Spoons, Copes, Spurs, Swords, Robes, Orbs, Sceptres, Rings, Coronets, Medals, Crowns, and Rods had cluttered the aisle, as if the world’s poshest pawn-shop were being sacked by a Mobb of under-employed Clerics and Peers, and not a jot or tittle of this swag could ever be moved from Point A to Point B without several prayers and hymns pointing out what a splendid and yet frightfully solemn event it was. Paeans flew thick and fast. Prayers were a penny a pound. The name of Our Lord was just about worn through. Christ’s ears burned. Everything was pretty resounding. Spit-slicks sprawled between trumpeters’ feet. Bellows-pumpers were sent down with busted guts. The boys’ choir grew beards.

When finally the new King had lumbered down the aisle in his purple robe and left the building, the congregants had scarce believed their eyes—as when the world’s most tedious and tenacious dinner-guest finally exits at four in the morning. There had followed a supplemental half-hour of programmed recessionals as the various guests had retreated, and gone outside to stand, blink, mingle, and chat. All the church-bells in London were pealing. The King, and the Prince and Princess of Wales, had long since gone their separate ways.

It was then that the person of Mr. Charles White had been violated by a hand that had clapped him on the shoulder. As Captain of the King’s Messengers, he was dressed for the occasion in a glorious and out-moded get-up. But even through his tasseled epaulet, he felt the hand on his shoulder, and knew its meaning. It was then—some said—that the hungry look came over him, and his lips parted.

He rounded on the fellow who had dared touch him. But then he was dismayed, and stopped. He had been looking for an ear to bite. But the man who stood before him—middle-aged, solid, well-dressed, in a yellow wig—did not have an ear on the right side of his head, just a lumpy orifice. And this so flummoxed Charles White that he quite lost the moment. He looked around to notice that he had been discreetly surrounded by several gentles and nobles, notorious Whigs all, and that they were ready to draw their swords.

“Charles White, I arrest you in the name of the King,” said the man in the yellow wig. And it was then that White knew him: this was Andrew Ellis. White had bitten his ear off twenty years ago, in a coffee-house, as Roger Comstock, Daniel Waterhouse, and a roomful of Whigs had looked on. Ellis was a Viscount or something now, and in and out of Parliament.

“I do not recognize the usurper King,” White announced—a rather impolite thing to say, under the circumstances—“but I do recognize the threat of those weapons you are so eager to draw, and so I shall go, under duress, as a man being kidnapped by Black-guards.”

“You may name it kidnapping or any thing else,” said Ellis, “but make no mistake, it is an arrest, upon the authority of the Lord Chancellor.”

“And am I allowed to know the charge?”

“That at the behest of the King of France, you did conspire with one Jack Shaftoe and Édouard de Gex to trespass upon the Liberty of the Tower and adulterate the Pyx.”

“So Jack Shaftoe has broken,” White muttered, as he was being walked, in the midst of this knot of armed Whigs, across the Old Palace Yard, toward the Stairs where a boat waited to take him down to the Tower.

“He has denounced you,” Ellis returned. “No one knows whether he is broken, or pursuing his own ends.”

“His own,” said White, “or someone else’s.”

But the men who were arresting or abducting him were merely amused by that, and so to any passer-by who had stood on the bank of the Thames to watch them bundling their catch into a waiting river-barge, they’d have seemed a merry band of Englishmen, pleased to have a new King and to have survived his Coronation.

The Court of the Old Bailey

20 OCTOBER 1714

“GUILTY!” SAID THE MAGISTRATE.

“That’s what I said,” said Jack Shaftoe. He worried that the magistrate had not heard his plea. His voice was enfeebled, as his breathing-musculature was fashed from having worked against three hundred pounds of resistance for days. And the other people sharing this patch of dirt with him were making a lot more noise than he was capable of.

“This court finds you, Jack Shaftoe, Guilty of High Treason!” the magistrate said, in case it had been missed in the uproar.

“This court doesn’t have to find me Guilty, as that is how I pleaded!” Jack protested, but it was useless.

He was a bit giddy from the removal of the weights, and from the light and food and water that had been lavished upon him when he had cried uncle, and owned up to invading the Tower of London, and blamed the whole thing on Charles White, and agreed to come down here and plead. So he saw things in an odd way, like a traveler from China to whom everything is impossibly strange. Some sort of judicial proceeding had been underway here, involving him. But he had paid no attention to it at all. He just could not bring himself to attend to the wigged chap up on the balcony. Of much more interest was the scene down here.

Court was a good English word meaning a yard. A slab of earth. A patch of dirt. Some courts, such as those on the Isle of Dogs when Jack had been a boy, were surrounded by scraps of wood, and full of pigs and of pig-shit. Other courts were surrounded by stone walls with arrow-slits in the top; people on the insides of such courts tended to have a better time of it than those who shared their courts with swine. The Queen had a court. No, scratch that, the Queen was dead. Long live the King! The King had a court. It was infested with courtiers. The theatres of Southwark were a particular type of court. There were countless other specialized types, e.g., tennis courts, forecourts, and the Court of Directors of the East India Company. One entire category of Courts was devoted to inflicting punishment on bad men. This, the Old Bailey, was one such.

Jack had familial ties to the Irish nation and knew that Baile Atha Cliath was their name for the city of Dublin. Bailey, it seemed, was just another word for Court. The bailiff brought you to the bailey and put you in the bail-dock, and you dasn’t stray from his bailiwick until you posted bail.

During this mental divagation of Jack’s, on the subject of Courts and Baileys, the magistrate up on the balcony had been washing the place down with a spate of legal mumbo-jumbo, as well as a homily about the error of Jack’s ways, and the error of his mother’s ways, and his father’s, and their mothers’ and fathers’, all the way back to the progenitor of their race, presumed to be one Cain. Little of this reached Jack’s ears, because of the uproar, and none of it penetrated his head, because he was not paying attention. He knew what the magistrate was saying: that Jack was a bad man—beyond bad, if truth be told—so surpassingly and transcendently bad that it was necessary for him to be put to death by the most gruesome and, hence, entertaining means that the English mind could conceive of.

The Old Bailey employed a man called a crier, whose chief qualification was that he could engrave his own words on a pane of glass, simply by shouting at it. He was deployed, from time to time, to quell the uproar. For the groundlings in this court cared naught for the words of the Justices. But the crier they respected for his loudness. He put it to work now: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! My Lords, the King’s Justices, strictly charge and command all manner of persons to keep silence while Sentence of Death is passing on the prisoner at the bar, on pain of imprisonment.” By the time he was finished, the crowd had actually heeded his words. No one was talking except for a few daft and/or deaf stragglers tucked away in the corners, who were quickly shushed by the others. Silence was a rare thing around Newgate, and fragile; but this was a different kind of silence altogether, it was contagious as smallpox.

The magistrate was on his feet, treading heavily up to the railing of his balcony. Clearly he was in a foul temper. He’d rather be at the Coronation festivities, drinking the health of the fresh-minted King. Really, the whole country ought to count this a holiday. It was extraordinary that a Judicial Proceeding was underway here on such a day! What could account for it? Certain Powers must have reached into a courtly revel with a long shepherd’s crook and fetched this magistrate out by the neck.

“The law is,” he bellowed, “that thou shalt return from hence, to the Place whence thou camest, and from thence to Tyburn Cross, where thou shalt hang by the neck, but not unto Death; that thou shalt thereafter be drawn and quartered, till the body be Dead! Dead! Dead! And the Lord have Mercy upon thy Soul.”

Those milling shades in the dimness behind the magistrate’s belcony must be those selfsame Powers, practically hopping from foot to foot in their eagerness to run back to Westminster and proclaim the news: Jack Shaftoe was broken by the peine forte et dure, he came to the court, he pleaded, and even now lies in chains in the Condemned Hold! That was the preordained Moral of the Morality Play being enacted in this place, which looked more like a theatre the longer Jack stood here. There were even extras, or, in Theatrical cant, spear-carriers. For the Justice’s kind final words, and the Lord have Mercy upon thy Soul, were nearly drowned out by the humble-bumble of many boots on the stairs within the building, and before the audience could even consider launching a riot, they found themselves surrounded by a company of Guards brandishing half-pikes.

Some might welcome the new King with toasts, medals, statues, or concubines. But there were men in London who could not think of any better party favor to present to their new Sovereign than Jack Shaftoe’s head on a platter. At an earlier stage of his life he’d have strained his eyes to resolve the faces lurking back there in the shadows behind the balcony, perhaps shouted something of a defiant nature. But he really could not care less about them now. Truth be told, he hadn’t heard a word the magistrate had uttered (aside, that is, from the terrible Sentence) in the last quarter of an hour. It was all because of the noise of the people who were down here in the dirt—the Court—the Old Bailey—with him. His people.

Something got crushed down atop his head. His knees buckled in alarm for a moment. But he was not being assaulted from behind. Someone had bestowed a hat on him. By the time he turned round, that someone had been chased back into the chanting rabble by a furious corporal of the Guard. But the rabble were very pleased by what they saw. A chant formed of the roar: “God save the King! God save the King! God save the King!”

The magistrate had stood up to make himself heard, his face was red, he was bellowing with such force that his wig was shuddering, but nothing reached the court. A bailiff snatched the thing from Jack’s head and flung it down. Before his boots crushed and treaded it down into the mud of the Bailey, Jack saw what it was: a makeshift crown, sporting a letter V in the middle. Not that Jack knew much about letters; but he recognized that one, because the same symbol was burnt into the brawn of his right thumb, and had been there for most of his life. For Jack had first been branded Vagabond when he’d been a young man.

It was a common designation. King of the Vagabonds, however, was a high title indeed, and one that had not been attached to his name until he had, through inconceivable exertions, earned it.

The Tower of London

LATE AFTERNOON, 20 OCTOBER 1714

“SO-NEAR-AND-YET-SO-FAR. That what you’ve been thinking all this time?” said Charles White. He spoke with remarkable aplomb for a man whose elbows were bound together behind his back with rope. He was displaying those elbows to the whole room, almost as if it was the latest fashion from Paris. For he had turned his back on Newton, and on the Beefeaters who were now guarding him, so that he could gaze out a window that overlooked Mint Street.

As Master of the Mint, Newton could have claimed whatever space he’d taken a whim to. But he’d always been a most practical Master, keen to better the productivity of the place, and so he had situated his personal atelier so as not to impede the coiners’ work. It was about forty feet on a side, divided into several closets, a wee chamber that communicated with the interior of Brick Tower and thence to the Inner Ward, and a single great laboratory-cum-office that commanded a view up, and down, and across this leg of Mint Street. Scarlet late-afternoon sun was angling in through rents in northwestern clouds, setting White’s left cheek and shoulder aglow, but only because they were elevated above the ground here; below them, Mint Street had already fallen into twilight, being over-shadowed by the glum row of casemates that lined the near surface of the outer wall. The casemate situated across from Newton’s laboratory and a bit off to the right was at once the best and the worst of these. Its sole practical function, lately, had been to enclose the Vault that housed the Pyx. As such it had been guarded round the clock by men identifying themselves as Queen’s, and more recently King’s, Messengers. Which amounted to that they wore silver-greyhound badges and had bits of paper bearing the signature and the seal of Charles White.

This view of the house—which was to say, Sir Isaac Newton’s view—was one that Charles White had never had the opportunity to enjoy until a few moments ago, when the Yeomen had frogmarched him in to the laboratory. He was making it clear now that he was well pleased with the picture his hand-picked Messengers made, standing there as a finely dressed and heavily-armed barrier between Newton and his magic box. When the Messengers spied White up in the window, lit up by the sun, they took to hip-hip-huzzahing him, perhaps not realizing that he was under arrest, and on a serious charge indeed—

“High Treason,” Newton was saying. He was seated at a vast table, which had turned black from hard employment. He was still wearing the crimson robes he had donned, this morning, for the Coronation. “I cannot think of any other word to describe what you stand accused of doing.”

“Accused!?” White asked merrily, and now, at last, tore himself from the window, and turned in to the room to face Newton. The sunset-light filled the laboratory like a refulgent gas, making all dull-colored things, such as the table and the faded beams of the low ceiling, even dimmer than they were. But anything that had an iota of shine or of color gleamed out of the dark like colored stars: Newton’s robes, the ribbons trapped between pages of his fat, ragged, ancient books, the brass and gold of his many scales and balances, samples of gold and silver piled here and there. “Who has accused me?”

“Jack Shaftoe.”

“Don’t suppose that has anything to do with your putting three hundred pounds of lead on his chest?”

“I do not suppose so,” said Newton, “for I suppose that you are quite guilty. But I do admit that an adroit barrister could build a case that Jack Shaftoe is an unreliable witness to begin with, made more so by the torment of the peine forte et dure.”

White now, for the first time, seemed taken aback. He had not expected Isaac Newton, of all people, to lend him a hand in erecting his legal defense. “You care not what happens to Jack—whether he is believed, or no!” White tried.

“I care not whether he was your puppet, or you his, or both of you de Gex’s.”

“But you need to establish that the Pyx was adulterated by someone, so that you’ll not be held responsible for what is found there. And Jack’s testimony, perhaps, is not deemed reliable enough to prove that beyond doubt. You need my word on it.”

“You shall have adequate time to develop that and other theories in your new lodgings,” said Newton, who stood up abruptly, and nodded to the Beefeaters. He had heard some sort of commotion down below, and wanted to go have a look. As did White; but, obeying gestures from Newton, the Yeomen laid hands on the prisoner and dragged him back before he could get near Newton, or the window. White became agitated for the first time, and cursed and made unrealistic demands, then fanciful threats as the Beefeaters dragged him back to the inner chamber, and thence into Brick Tower; from there, it would be a short march across the Parade to one of the Yeomen’s houses where White would be an involuntary guest from now on.

A Letter

20 OCTOBER 1714

Charles White, Esq.

The Tower

Dappa

The Clink

Mr. Dappa,

It has been brought to my notice that in the press have appeared diverse libels, broadsides, essays, &c., supposed to have been written by you, in which my name is dishonoured. I demand satisfaction of a kind that may only be achieved if you and I come together in the same place for a short time: preferably an open field, removed from crowds and habitations. You will, I am certain, take my meaning.

I am unable to set foot beyond the Liberty of the Tower without in so doing sacrificing my honour as a Gentleman; consequently, I must beg your indulgence in a small favour, viz. that you might pay a call on me here, that we may settle the thing in these precincts.

This cannot be achieved while you remain imprisoned on charges of thievery. As you will remember, I preferred these charges against you some months ago, but the prosecution has been delayed and stretched out by the machinations of the diverse lawyers retained on your behalf by your notorious Benefactress. Know then that I shall tomorrow (21 October) inform the Magistrate that no further efforts shall be made to advance your Prosecution and that you should be released forthwith. Accordingly, I shall look for you at the Tower of London at dawn of the 22nd instant.

It is a tradition that when one gentleman challenges another in this wise, the challengee shall have the privilege of choosing the weapons to be used. As you are no gentleman, you might not have been aware of this; and one must rate it as unlikely that you shall possess the mastery of the art of Defensing that would be required in order to contend with one such as me. It is my expectation, therefore, that you shall elect to try the matter with firearms, at such-and-such number of paces. If your estate as a recently freed prisoner, your blackness, or your poverty render it infeasible for you to lay hands on two suitable weapons, pray inform me and I shall see to it that they are provided.

I am, until daybreak of the 22nd,

Your Humble & Obedient Svt.,

Charles White, Esq.

Mint Street, the Tower of London

DUSK, 20 OCTOBER 1714

SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR, White had said; but emerging from the sally-port stairs into the purple shades of Mint Street, Isaac Newton was nearer yet, and yet more far than he had been half a minute ago. A lot of men had arrived at once, and they had come in two distinct blocs: the first, which he had spied from his window, was a posse of half a dozen noblemen, generally young, and all of them mounted: at a glance, most likely cavalry officers, still in their Coronation plumage. These had ridden up to, and surrounded, the knot of King’s Messengers who guarded the door of the Warden’s House. The latter were at a prohibitive disadvantage, being on foot. But they all possessed a little of their master’s bluster, and were making a terrific show of thrusting their chests in the air and nudging their swords out of their scabbards, and letting it be known, in an oratorio of sonorous vowels and a rush of trilled R’s, just what a grievous and unsconscionable and actionable affront this all was.

But this hubbub was dying away at the moment Newton emerged from the sally-port and came out into the Street—where, for the first time in a while, no one paid him any note. All eyes had collected on one of the mounted nobles: a young man, well-but not extravagantly dressed, who had remained silent through all of the insults and the bluff of Charles White’s Messengers. In the moment before the man moved or spoke, there was a cæsura; and during it, one could hear the muffled tromp of massed boots coming up Mint Street. The second, larger bloc of men was marching this way.

The leader of the riders peeled back his cloak to reveal a prodigious Document sealed by a swingeing ruby of wax.

“The German’s been busy with his dictionary,” cracked one of the Messengers.

A nearby rider commanded, “Silence, and pay due respect when speaking of our King.”

“Long live the King,” said the leader of the riders, and all of his companions echoed it. The Messengers could summon up no more than an incoherent murmur. The rider now broke the seal, unrolled the page, and read it: “Know all men by these presents that I, George, by the Grace of God King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, et cetera, do hereby relieve Mr. Charles White, Esq., of the post of Captain of the King’s Messengers, and appoint in his place William, the Earl of Lostwithiel.” He lifted his gaze from the document and began to roll it up. “I am the Earl of Lostwithiel,” he let them know, almost shyly, “and as Captain of the King’s Messengers I hereby relieve you all of your positions—” sweeping his eyes across the faces of the men on foot “—and bid you stand down. The men you see around you are the new King’s Messengers, and have assumed all of your duties and responsibilities.”

During all of this the tromp, tromp, tromp of the soldiers’ boots had been growing louder; it echoed from the fronts of the casemates down around Mint Street’s northern elbow, where the Moneyers lived, and had been dining in their halls. But they had all put their faces in the windows to see what was going on. A white charger came into view, followed, at half a length, by a gray one, both ridden by men wearing uniforms of officers in the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard; behind them marched a column of regulars. Even if the Old Messengers had been of a mind to cross swords with the New and be massacred there in the middle of Mint Street, this might have given them second thoughts. One, then another, then all of them punched their swords back in to their scabbards, peeled off their silver-greyhound badges, and flung them on the cobbles, turned their backs, and walked away in the direction of Brass Mount, dividing to pass round Isaac Newton who was coming the other way.

“My lord,” said Newton.

“Sir Isaac,” said Lostwithiel, and doffed his hat.

“I am pleased that his majesty has been so quick to rid the Mint of those men. I welcome you to the Tower. It is a great day.”

“Here’s thanks for that,” said Lostwithiel, and doffed his hat again.

“Those men, you must know, have stood between me and his majesty’s Pyx ever since that day in June when I was made aware that it might have been compromised.”

Even as Newton was speaking these words he was edging nearer the door of the Warden’s House, watched interestedly by all of the new Messengers.

The column of soldiers stomped to a halt just at the elbow in the street below Bowyer Tower. The second officer—a Colonel, it could now be seen, with a peg-leg—gave some inaudible command to some subordinates in his wake, touching off a long train of ramifications that ended with sergeants bellowing incomprehensible things to the troops. The outcome was that the troops marched away towards their barracks-houses all around the Liberty of the Tower.

Meanwhile the officer on the white charger—a General—rode forward to join the King’s Messengers, and presently drew up alongside the Earl of Lostwithiel. This was the Duke of Marlborough, and so a bit of time was devoted, now, to everyone’s showing him various degrees of respect. His peg-legged colonel was bringing up the rear; and behind him was a platoon that had not yet been given leave to go back to its quarters. But this kept a respectful distance, and so Newton was left the sole unmounted man on the street, a smudge of red, and a head of white steam, in a gloomy crevasse.

“My lord,” Marlborough announced to Lostwithiel, “in yonder House is a Vault. Within that Vault is a lock-box belonging to his majesty, denominated the Pyx. The Pyx has a unique status in this Realm. It is a repository of Evidence. From time to time that box is opened and the evidence subjected to a judicious examination by a jury of men who have been chosen by the Sovereign. The object of that Trial is to find out whether or not the Master of his majesty’s Mint—” and here Marlborough permitted himself a cock of the head toward Newton “—has been fulfilling the terms of the solemn Indenture that bears his name. You will appreciate that the Trial of the Pyx is a matter of utmost gravity; and yet it is only meaningful insofar as the evidence being weighed—which is to say, the Pyx—has been kept sacrosanct. No one who has an interest in the outcome of that Trial, which shall occur in nine days, must be suffered to approach the Pyx. This is the will of the King.”

“My will, your grace, is to please his majesty.”

“Very good, then,” said Marlborough. “Colonel Barnes, you will assist my lord Lostwithiel in keeping an eye on the place, won’t you?”

“With pleasure, your grace,” said the peg-legged colonel, and then made a head-jerking move that sent the platoon of Black Torrent Guards in to motion. They took up positions flanking the house’s doors, and a moment later they were joined by the new Messengers, who had begun to dismount. The Duke of Marlborough turned his charger around and rode away. Newton turned around and went back to his laboratory.

A Letter

21 OCTOBER 1714

Dappa

The Clink

White

The Tower

Mr. White:

Am in receipt of yours of yester evening.

Gentlemen do not fight duels with slaves, nor do they honourably quit claim on property that by rights belongs to them, and so I, along with all London, shall interpret this as a renunciation of the doctrine of Slavery. To rid the world of that repugnant Institution shall require many more such renunciations, as well as legal precedents hard fought and slowly won, but by your letter you have done so much to further this cause that I shall politely overlook the fact that it is really nothing more than a way for you to commit suicide, homicide, or both, before Jack Ketch can lay a glove on you.

I look forward to despatching you on Tower Hill tomorrow at daybreak. In supposing that I would prefer firearms to swords, you have guessed correctly; but once again you have under-rated me by supposing that I’d not be able to supply the requisite hard-ware. On the contrary, I have made arrangements for a matched set to be on hand, and, in accordance with the traditions that govern such things, I shall give you the choice as to which weapon you shall prefer.

The gaolers are coming to take my chains off.

See you tomorrow.

Dappa

The Condemned Hold, Newgate Prison

21 OCTOBER 1714

Newgate is the Horse of Troy, in whose Womb are shut up all the Mad Greeks that were Men of Action.

—Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

THERE WAS AN OLD JOKE that Newgate must be like Heaven, for the way to it was straight and narrow. It must have originated with a waggish prisoner, not with any free man. For a free man would approach Newgate through ways (from the west, Holborn, from the east, Newgate Street) that were broad and crooked. For the convenience of Newgate’s exclusive membership, however, there was a short-cut, a chute or gutter running straight and narrow for about an hundred paces from the holding-pens of the Court to the southeastern corner of the Prison. It was one of those sacred and inviolable English rights-of-way, hemmed in by high walls to either side. For the owners of the properties to the left and to the right sides of it did not love to see long necklaces of chained prisoners marching to and fro across their back yards.

In particular, the property to the right, as one went from the Bailey to the Prison, had notably fastidious and particular tenants. For that parcel, a good acre and a half, was the demesne of the College of Physicians. Your common Newgate felon knew it only as a mystery and a terror. A mystery because no part of it could be seen, owing to the high featureless wall that lined the chute. A terror because the bodies of poor men, cut down from the Treble Tree, were sold to that College by the enterprising Jack Ketch. And there, instead of being given a Christian burial, they were cut up into pieces, ensuring that the unquiet spirit that once animated those dismembered parts must roam the earth until Judgment Day.

To Jack Shaftoe it was no terror because when Ketch had done with him there’d be little left of him to cut up. And neither was it a mystery. For he had made a bit of a study of the place. Just on the other side of that wall, he knew, was a garden, where Physicians could stroll about and stretch their legs, or relax on benches, after a long night of cutting up dead criminals. The remainder of the ground was claimed by a great building that had been thrown up, after the Fire, by one Robert Hooke. It was famous because its turret was decorated with a large golden Pill. But it faced the other way, toward Warwick Lane, turning its back upon Newgate. Dead prisoners were brought in through the back way: a cul-de-sac, running from Prison to College, called Phoenix Court.

In the Old Bailey yesterday, a certificate had been bestowed upon him, a sort of diploma. A considerate bailiff had toted that rare document back up the straight and narrow way to Newgate, following Jack and Jack’s entourage of cudgel-toting gaolers, and presented it to the officialdom there. The import of this paper was that Jack had graduated from the Press-Room, and might now be admitted to the Condemned Hold.

According to the ways of the place, this meant that he exchanged the Press-Room’s lead weights for fetters of iron.

These now sprawled around him on the oaken planking. For the Condemned Hold was furnished with wooden shelves that kept some of its occupants up above the floor, and at the moment Jack had the whole place to himself. Jack did not feel the weight of his chains unless he attempted to move.

The discomforts that the chains inflicted upon his body, though, troubled him less than the unmistakable whiff of Mockery present in these arrangements. What ink was to a writer, fine metals—mercury, silver, gold, and watered steel—had always been to Jack.

That metals consisted partly of water was obvious from the fact that, when you heated them up, they became fluids. But some other substance must be combined with water in order to create a metal. The missing ingredient was supplied by invisible rays from the planets, which penetrated the ground and combined with the water that was there in the earth. The rays from that dimmest and most sluggish of planets, Saturn, created the basest of all metals, lead. Jupiter was responsible for tin and Mars for iron. Venus did copper, the moon silver, Mercury, obviously, accounted for mercury, and the Sun made gold. This was why the gold-hungry Spaniards, in their explorations and conquests, had never strayed far from the Equator, for that was where the Sun beat down most directly, and produced the richest deposits of its precious Element.

As even the most ignorant miner understood, base metals were continually being transmuted into nobler ones by a kind of dark vegetation within the earth. A deposit of lead, left to ripen in the ground for some centuries, would become silver, and silver would in time become gold.

For many years Jack had derived pride and fame from a supposed affinity between himself and Quicksilver, that shimmering fluid spirit. According to a learned man Jack knew, by the name of Enoch, Mercury (the planet) ran closer to the Sun than any other body, and whipped round it at terrific speed, without being consumed. Jack had flattered himself by seeing, in that, a token of his relationship with the Sun King. For as the Alchemists loved to jabber, “What is above is as that which is below, and what is below is as that which is above.” Jack might have sprung from the basest imaginable stock, the commonest folk in the whole world, but he had been transmuted over time into a man linked in the common mind with quicksilver and with gold.

Which made it all the more offensive that, since he had been brought to Newgate, he’d been been immobilized by the basest of metals, substances that did not in any way partake of the spirit of quicksilver. The best face he could put on it was that he had moved from lead (in the Press-Room) to iron (in the Condemned Hold)—a small but indisputable step up the ladder.

These Alchemical ruminations were now most rudely broken in upon by a persistent choking and gagging noise. Some one else had entered the Condemned Hold; and, from the sounds of it, he had swallowed his own tongue. This was most irregular. It was a common enough thing for free men to pay a gaoler to let them go in to the Condemned Hold for a few minutes’ time and gape at the soon-to-be-dead men, much as people would go to Bedlam to see the Raving Mad; but the practice had been suspended for as long as Jack Shaftoe was in the place, for Ike Newton was leery of escape-plots. So this choking wretch, whoever he was, must have some special dispensation. Jack rotated his head—carefully, for the iron neck-collar had a few nasty burrs on it—and saw naught save a wee hand gripping a rope. Rotating his head a bit more, and sacrificing some neck-skin, he at last got sight of a boy, standing on tiptoe, and hanging himself. That is, he had a noose round his neck and was holding the free end of the rope up above him, acting as his own gallows. Seeing that he had at last got Jack’s attention, he now went in to a phantastickal parody of a hanged man, rolling his eyes, pawing at the noose with his free hand, and dancing about the Condemned Hold on tippy-toe when he wasn’t spasmodically twitching.

“It is not bad,” was Jack’s verdict after a particularly affecting round of convulsions, “but I have seen better. In fact, I have done better. I once followed your trade, boy.”

“What trade is that, Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds?” asked the boy, letting the rope drop.

“That of hanging from condemned men’s legs to make ’em die faster, and thereby undercutting Jack Ketch, who demands far too much silver for a quick death.”

“Then you know why I’m here,” said the boy.

“Knew it the moment I spied the noose. What’s the going rate nowadays?”

“A guinea.”

“Oh, you’re a sly one. Don’t you know I can’t afford guineas?”

“Everyone knows. Don’t hurt to ask, though.”

“Very shrewd. I commend you. But tell me this: does the Mobb mock me now, for having had so much, and lost it?”

“No,” said the boy, “they love you for it.”

“Never!”

“When you were Jack the Coiner, and flyin’ above London in yer Sky-Chariot, in a golden waistcoat, with that Papist henchman, they din’t care for none of that,” said the boy. “But now you’ve been brought low, and lost all, and are Jack the Vagabond again, why, the people are sayin’, he’s all right, he is! One of us, like.”

“And that is why they came to the Court of Sessions to crown me even as the King was being crowned at Westminster,” Jack said. “So ’twasn’t mockery at all.”

“Blokes are raising pints and saying ‘God save the King,’ and they don’t mean George the German.”

“You know, I got a homily the other day, when I was being Pressed, from the ghost of that Papist henchman, as you called him, and he had some things to say concerning Pride. And my mind went back to Amsterdam, 1685, when I had to choose between two Opportunities. One, to go out into the world and become a man of affairs and make a lot of money, all to impress a certain Lady and make her think I was the right man for her. Two, to write off that venture, lose all, remain in Amsterdam, and go on being the feckless Vagabond I’d always been, and to rely upon the said Female for food, shelter, et cetera.”

“Which did you choose?” asked the boy.

“Don’t blame you for not being able to guess,” said Jack, “for as all London knows, I have been a money-man, Jack the Coiner, and I have been a Vagabond, too, in the estate you see me here. The answer is, I chose to seek my fortune. Failed. Lost all. Then got a fortune I had not ever looked for. Lost it though. Got it back. Lost it. Got another—the story is somewhat repetitious.”

“Yes, I was noticing.”

“Anyway, point is, now I’m back where I started again, and have been presented, I am beginning to realize, with the same choice as before—yet now all is changed! If I’d stayed in Amsterdam, would she’ve loved me—or found me tiresome company? Would I’ve loved her? Or found her too bossy and tight-laced?”

These and other rhetorical questions and imponderable Mysteries of Creation spilled from Jack’s lips, until he became aware that he had thereby driven the boy away, or put him to sleep. He was alone again in the Condemned Hold, and would be for some time yet. It was a bargaining ploy on the part of the gaolers, no less effective for being crude and obvious. In time they would come and offer to lighten his chains in trade for some silver, or move him to an apartment along the Press-Yard, in exchange for gold. Obviously they might expect to fetch a higher price if they let him suffer for a while first. The Condemned Hold was not as dark as the Press-Room was, for there was a window high in the wall that admitted some light from Newgate Street. But in due time the sun set and that window went dark. Jack, who had not even a copper to buy himself a candle, was left with naught to entertain him but remembered images.

He was thinking back to that straight and narrow passage. At its far end there was a sort of wicket, called by some the Gate of Janus, where prisoners entering the Bailey from the prison went to the left if they were females, and to the right if they were males, so that each sex was conducted into a different holding-pen. This was done strictly for appearances. Within Newgate, men and women mixed freely. But visitors to the Old Bailey saw strict segregation in the pens, and ( Jack supposed) heaved great sighs of relief to see that the place was run in a virtuous manner. As the sessions proceeded, the prisoners were let out of the pens one by one, and each returned a few minutes later. The lucky ones were literally smoking from freshly applied brands, the unlucky came back whole and unmarked, as they were destined for Tyburn, or for America. But at the end of the session, all of them—male and female, branded and condemned—were bottlenecked together through the Gate of Janus where they began their return up the chute to Newgate Prison. And just there, in the Old Bailey, near that gate, was a place where a free person might stand and gaze directly into the face of every prisoner who passed by.

Most of the men who collected in that place were thief-takers. Plenty such had been there yesterday, after Jack had been sentenced. But Jack, reviewing the scene in his mind, phant’sied that there had been a woman there, too, a woman veiled in black scrim so that he could not see her face. But she wanted to see his, evidently. He was just drifting in to a delightful reverie, concerning this, when he was molested by sudden lanthorn-light, and then by a hand shaking his shoulder. He opened his eyes a crack, then grumbled and closed them. The light waned as it was directed elsewhere. Jack opened his eyes full, and gazed up into the face of Sir Isaac Newton.

The Gallows, Tower Hill

DAWN, 22 OCTOBER 1714

WHEN IT GREW LIGHT enough for them to move around without having to tote flaming objects, four men converged on the scaffold that stood in the middle of Tower Hill. Two came from the sea: a black man, and a short red-head with a hook in place of a hand. Two issued from the outlying fortification of the Tower known as the Bulwark; both of them gentlemen, but afoot, and surrounded by several Yeomen of the Guard, and followed, at a respectful distance, by half a dozen mounted dragoons.

The gallows would not be put to use today, save as a landmark by which the two gentlemen from the Tower, and the two seafarers, could find each other. For Tower Hill was a considerable expanse, mostly open parade-ground, but complicated here and there by earth-works where the Tower’s garrison might conduct rehearsals for Continental siege-wars. It would not be suitable for the duellists to blunder about trying to find each other until daylight had washed broad over the land, and so they had agreed to meet at the scaffold where sometimes the Tower’s lordly inmates were put to death. The Yeomen who had conducted the two gentlemen out the Bulwark’s gates peeled away as soon as the timbers of the scaffold came in view, and kept their distance. The legalities were interesting. There was nothing unusual about a noble prisoner strolling about the Liberty of the Tower, of which Tower Hill was a part. Nor for such a prisoner to be shadowed, on his perambulations, by Yeomen of the Guard, to make sure he would not escape or engage in treasonable discourse with free men. But duelling, though a frequent enough practice, was illegal. And so it could be inferred that Charles White had arrived, in advance, with some understanding with the Lieutenant of the Tower. He would go for an early-morning stroll on Tower Hill. At some point the Yeomen might lose him, for a few minutes, in the fog. A pistol-shot or two might be heard. White would be found dead or alive. If dead, he’d be buried. If alive, he’d go back to his lodging in the Tower. Either way the incident would be explained: the strollers had run afoul of footpads; there’d been a struggle; White had wrested a pistol from one of the attackers; et cetera. It was threadbare, but no more so than any of the other fictions that were routinely put forth to explain duels. Accordingly the Yeomen kept their distance, so as to sustain the lies that they would have to tell in an hour’s time; but the dragoons spread out to surround the area, lest White try to flee into the streets of London, only a hundred running paces distant.

“Where are the pistols?” White demanded.

If his opponent, and his opponent’s second, had been gentlemen, he might have greeted them first. But these were Vagabonds of the sea and so that was how he said hello.

“Pistols? What pistols?” asked Dappa.

“You stated in your letter that you would supply a matched set of pistols,” White said, suspecting tomfoolery.

“Firearms are what I said I would supply,” said Dappa, “and I said I’d let you choose. If you will now follow me and Captain van Hoek, please, I’ll show you the first of ’em.” And Dappa strode into the fog. Van Hoek stepped out of the way to let White and his second—a young gent name of Woodruff—follow. They were leery of being followed by van Hoek and so after an awkward few seconds’ feinting and after-youing, they all fell into step abreast of one another and out of mutual stabbing-range.

“Where is it?” Charles White demanded.

“Less than a hundred paces from here,” Dappa returned.

The ground reared up under their feet. They had come to the base of a brief but stiff rise in the Hill, which traditionally was employed as a natural viewing-stand for Londoners eager to see Lords being hanged. Rather than attempting to scale this slope, Dappa deflected to the right and walked along its base, following fresh wheel-ruts that scarred the ground.

He led them to an artillery-piece, mounted on a two-wheeled carriage, and turned round so that the earth rose up behind it. Directions were not easy to keep track of in this dim light, but it seemed to be aimed generally toward the bank of the river. Resting on the ground beside the piece were a powder-keg, a pyramidal stack of five balls, and relevant tools, viz. scoop, ramrod, &c.

Before White could fully take this in, Dappa had made an about-face and begun goose-stepping toward the Thames, counting paces: “One, two, three…”

They were approaching the base of another rise in the ground: this one part of the earthen rampart that surrounded the Bulwark. The sky had brightened, and the fog dissolved, to the point where they could see that he was leading them toward another field-piece, arrayed in the same manner as, and aimed back towards, the first; which loomed down on them from its shelf halfway up Tower Hill.

The hundred paces had given White time to grow accustomed to the idea—even to see humor in it. “Where did you get these guns?” he wanted to know.

“It is a passably entertaining story,” Dappa answered, “but if you are about to die, there’s no point in relating it to you. And if I am, then one of the ways I mean to spite you is by leaving you in the dark. Technically, by the way, they are called Hobbits, or Haubitzes,” said Dappa. “Not guns. A gun has a longer barrel, and is much heavier; it throws heavy balls at great speed, to batter down walls. A Haubitz is like a horizontal mortar: it uses a smaller powder-charge. I judged it a more suitable weapon, for a duel. Cannon-shot would carry in to the city, if we mis-aimed. Haubitz-balls, being lighter, will fall to the ground nearby.”

“How can they be lighter if they are made of the same stuff?” asked Woodruff, who had apparently been studying his Natural Philosophy.

“They are hollow, you see,” said Dappa, picking one of them up with only modest effort, even though it was a good six inches in diameter. He spun it over between his hands to reveal a drilled orifice, and a spray of gray strings, radiating outwards, like meridians, to cover one hemisphere of its surface. “Hollow, so that they may be packed with powder. Otherwise, we’d be here all day trying to hit each other with a lucky shot. These shells will burst and kill anything within a few yards.”

“I see. It is quite practical,” said Woodruff, though he seemed a bit preoccupied by the implications of that for him. Van Hoek was eyeing him with amusement.

“Please take as much time as you will to inspect these bombs, the Haubitzes, and anything else you please; I assure you they are quite identical.”

“No need,” said White, “and little time. Quite obviously the most advantageous position is the one on high.” He nodded up toward the first Haubitz. “For that reason, you’d look to me to choose it, and if one of the Haubitzes were deficient, that’s where you’d place it. And so I choose this; you may have the high ground.”

“Very well,” said Dappa, “shall we to the midway-point then?”

They stood back-to-back on the field, each staring in to the muzzle of the gun he’d soon be loading. Their seconds stood off to the side, watching to be sure that all of the rules and formalities were observed.

“It is perfect,” White reflected. “Over yonder I have had victory over Newton, and the Whigs; for make no mistake, he will fail the Trial of the Pyx a week hence. Here I shall have victory over you, or else die; either way I could hardly have expected better.”

“One,” said Dappa, and took a pace away from him—as much to shut the man up as anything else.

“Very well. One,” said White, and took a pace. Thence they counted, and paced, in unison; and round about the time they reached forty (for they were taking very long paces) they dropped all pretense of dignity and fell to work upon the Haubitzes.

White was aided, in this, by his second. Dappa wasn’t. Van Hoek stood with his back to the Haubitz, as if he were an early-morning perambulator pausing to take in the view of Tower Hill’s lower reaches and the Pool. When Dappa gave him a dirty look, van Hoek licked his hook and held it up in the air as if to test the wind.

Dappa cuffed him on the back. “Stop it!”

“Look at them scurrying around down there,” said van Hoek. “They have no idea what they are doing.”

“That’s what concerns me.”

“In Cairo you were much cooler,” van Hoek reminded him, “and it was I who looked on irritably.”

“In Cairo I had nothing to lose!” Dappa reminded him. He had rolled the powder-keg to a safer distance from the Haubitz, and was prying the bung out with a dagger. “Did White and Woodruff move their keg?”

“Ah, you see? Now you ask for the knowledge that I have been collecting.”

“You could have collected it, and done something else useful, at the same time.”

“Oh, very well,” said van Hoek, and ambled round to the butt of the Haubitz. He sighted down the barrel, then changed focus to the target. “Yes. They moved their keg. But not as far as they ought to’ve.” He picked up a stone and used it as a mallet to whack the quoin under the weapon’s butt, depressing its muzzle slightly. “Do you think we need to allow for the rotation of the Earth?”

Dappa studiously ignored this baiting. He had filled a long-handled scoop with powder, and now introduced it to the muzzle. The scoop’s diameter was markedly smaller than the weapon’s bore. “This is the part they are likely to get wrong,” Dappa reflected, as he prodded away, trying to get the scoop into a narrower chamber concealed in the butt. “I hope they’ll charge it full bore, and blow themselves up!”

“That would not be sporting,” van Hoek chided him, and used his hook to scrape away some chymical encrustation surrounding the touch-hole. Because of his disability, he could not very easily pick up a shell, and so this duty fell to Dappa, who stuffed in a ball, then set to beating it down the barrel with a ramrod, while gazing attentively down-hill.

“This is what you get for your slowness!” he pointed out. For both he and van Hoek had noticed that White, with a grin, was putting fire to the touch-hole of a fully loaded and ready-to-go Haubitz.

A cloud of flame the size of a parish church appeared between them and their opponents, then winked out and was smoke.

“And that is what they get for their lubberly haste,” said van Hoek.

As both van Hoek and Dappa understood, White and Woodruff had over-charged the weapon. The force of the fire had crushed the shell inside the barrel, causing it to vomit forth a cloud of gunpowder, most of which (fortunately for them) had burned in the open air.

There was nothing to do until the smoke-cloud drifted over them and gave them a clear view of White and Woodruff, who looked woozy and badly sunburned. Then van Hoek put fire to the touch-hole. The Haubitz discharged correctly and, as they were standing nearly behind it, they got to glimpse the shell in flight for a fraction of a second. It spattered against the stone wall of the Bulwark, above and behind and a bit to the left of the opposition, and failed to ignite altogether. Instead it sprayed shell-shards and powder-corns all over White and Woodruff, who scarcely noticed, as they had shaken off their shock and turned their attention back to the Haubitz.

“Now’s when they’ll blow themselves up,” Dappa offered, thrusting a swab into a bucket.

“On the contrary, they found the water you so considerately left out for them, and are swabbing out their Haubitz just as you are. But we have the advantage—we got information about how to adjust our aim, and they did not.” Van Hoek belabored the quoin some more, then kicked at one of the gun-carriage’s wheels to adjust its azimuth. Dappa meanwhile re-loaded. After which he was very keen on firing; but van Hoek kept presenting himself at the weapon’s muzzle with sticks, handfuls of dry grass, leaves, and other such debris, which he stuffed in to the bore until it was full, and even over-full; it ended up looking like a bronze vase sporting a dead bouquet. Dappa grew most peevish and took to waving the torch over the touch-hole, and feinting toward it. Van Hoek was oblivious, and did not even turn around when White’s second shot screamed past his shoulder and buried itself in the embankment behind them. But he saw it strike, and pointed it out to Dappa, who spat on his fingers and reached into the cave it had made, then yanked out a fizzing net-work of fuze. He flung it on the ground and cursed. Van Hoek finally left his blocking-position before the Haubitz’s barrel and used his hook to catch the bail of their water-bucket; he went over to the fizzing and writhing fuze, and doused it. While he was thus occupied Dappa put fire to their Haubitz and got off their second shot; it struck the ground just at the base of the embankment behind White and Woodruff, and a couple of yards to the right of them. Instead of burying itself in the earth, this one caromed straight up in the air and disappeared. Several seconds later, having apparently risen to an apogee and begun to drop, it exploded perhaps ten yards above the ground, and not terribly far from White and Woodruff. But they had marked its ascent and descent, with avid finger-pointing, and scampered clear of it and flung themselves to the ground. They were not injured.

Van Hoek was disgusted. “I’ve a mind to walk down there and put one through White’s skull,” he said.

“Why? It is my duel, not yours,” said Dappa, busy again.

Van Hoek began to rake up such sticks and dry grass as had escaped his first sweep. “As your second, it is my job to have a go at your opponent if he tries to run away. White ran away.”

“It is a gray area,” Dappa averred. “It is expected of a ship-captain in battle that he’ll not flinch when broadsides come at him; on the other hand, if a fizzing shell lands nearby, he is not expected to stand there and watch it burst.”

“Hmmph,” said van Hoek, repeating his performance of barrel-stuffing; and this time, as if to add emphasis, he ripped off his auburn periwig and jammed it down the throat of the gun to tamp down all of the loose vegetation he’d emptied into it. A shell flew past him. This time, White and Woodruff had used less powder yet, and so it had already caromed once off the ground by the time it reached them. It went by knee-high and executed a loop-the-loop off the hillside, landing directly in front of Dappa: a black, smoking sphere with a burning fuze projecting from one side. It was rolling down-hill, but too slowly for their purposes, and so Dappa bolted toward it and kicked out wildly; missed; drew his leg back, and gave it a hard shove. In almost the same motion he spun round and flung himself full-length on the ground. Van Hoek meanwhile had turned his back on the thing and embraced the powder-keg, spreading out his coat around him to make it a curtain against sparks. The shell rolled and toddled down-hill for one, two, three heartbeats and then blew up.

It was answered a moment later by a second boom, for it seemed that a spark had flown close enough to their Haubitz to ignite the powder in the touch-hole, and fired the weapon prematurely. Dappa and van Hoek were both several moments getting to their feet, as each had suffered survivable wounds from shell-fragments or pebbles, and both were a bit stunned. They saw their shell explode over the Thames.

The blast of White’s shell had knocked their Haubitz askew. A trail of smouldering sticks and grass was, however, spread down the hillside like a road of fire, and Woodruff could be seen kicking furiously at something that emitted dense smoke, and kept adhering to his foot in a way that made him very cross: the wig. White meanwhile was making preparations to re-load.

It was then that they ceased to exist. Dappa’s and van Hoek’s view of the Bulwark was eliminated, replaced by a sphere of flame with ugly dark bits spiraling out of it. Once again they threw themselves to the ground. Burning debris began to shower their position. They jumped up and ran, putting distance between themselves and their stock-piles of explodables. They made rendezvous at the scaffold, which was gaily decorated by the prostrate forms of several Beefeaters who had all sought cover there. About then a ripping BABABA sounded from below as all of White’s shells detonated. This was the signal for Dappa and van Hoek to depart at a sprightly pace for the waterfront. If any of the Yeomen of the Guard lifted his head to watch, he saw them simply disappear into a storm-front of powder-smoke that now obnubilated the lower reaches of the Hill.

Within that immense pall, however, it was possible to see for short distances. And so Dappa and van Hoek paused, or at least slowed down, as they passed by the erstwhile position of White and Woodruff. They did not see anything identifiable as a body; though Dappa was fairly certain he had tripped over someone’s spine.

“Here’s a marvel,” van Hoek said reflectively. He was staring at something down on the scorched earth, using his hook in lieu of an index finger to count several small objects, over and over again. “One, two, three, four, five! One, two, three, four, five!”

“What is it?”

“There are too many ears!” van Hoek exclaimed.

Dappa went over and touched heads with him. There were, indeed, five ears: four all together, all wizened, and, off to one side, a fifth, which looked fresh, as it had blood on it.

“This is explainable, actually,” said Dappa, kicking some dirt over the four dry ones, “but not now. Let’s back to my ship, if you please. The Yeomen, the Watch, the Dragoons: they’ll be all over us!”

“They’ll all be scared shitless.”

“The point is granted; but I really am eager to see my ship again.”

Dappa and van Hoek still could not see far, but they both stumbled down-hill: an infallible trick for locating oceans. “I hope this means you have finally put an end to this writing foolishness. It has grown most tiresome.”

“I have discharged my cannonball. I shan’t be quick to re-load. As a writer, however, I am ever a devoted slave to the Muse, whose privilege it is to command me…”

“Then let’s do get to the ship,” said van Hoek, quickening his pace, “and prepare to sail out on to the high seas where the bitch won’t be able to reach you with any such directions.”

The Press-Yard and Castle, Newgate Prison

23 OCTOBER 1714

STRANGE WHAT A DIFFERENCE was made by moving twenty feet. For that was the distance separating Jack’s four-posted feather-bed in the Castle from the middle of the Press-Room, which happened to be situated just on the other side of the apartment’s back wall. A few days earlier, he’d lain naked on a stone floor with a box of weights on his chest; now, clad in a clean linen nightshirt, he reclined on goose-down.

A month or two ago, Jack could have bought his way into this apartment without difficulty. But since then most of his assets had been spent. And what hadn’t been spent had been seized, or otherwise put out of his reach, by his febrile Persecutor, Sir Isaac Newton.

There was no fixed rent for the apartments of the Press-Yard and Castle. Rather, the Keeper applied a sliding scale, depending upon the Degree of the personage imprisoned. A Duke—let us say, a rebel Scottish lord—would be expected to pay a premium of five hundred guineas upon admission to the gaol, simply to escape from the Common-Side and Master-Side. Having got over that hurdle he would, each week, then have to pay the gaoler about a mark, or thirteen shillings and change, for the privilege of staying in a room such as this one.

Now Jack was going to be dead in a week, and so the rent would not add up to much—not even a pound. But the premium was a different matter. A commoner with means, having no other distinctions to his name, would be charged at a much lower rate than a Duke—say twenty pounds. What, then, would be the rate for a Jack Shaftoe? Some would say he was less than a commoner, and ought to pay fewer than twenty pounds sterling. But others—probably to include the Gaoler of Newgate—would insist he was greater, in his way, than a Duke, and ought to pay a king’s ransom.

In sum, he could not possibly have been sprung from the Condemned Hold for less than several hundred pounds. He did not have such money, not any more. Neither did any of his surviving friends. Where had it come from?

This was not part of the deal he’d struck the other night with Sir Ike in the Condemned Hold. Newton had asked for Jack to dictate an affidavit, stating that evidence of a Whig coining-ring was to be found in a subterranean vault in one of the late Roger Comstock’s real estate developments in Clerkenwell. Newton had tediously rehearsed the statement with him all night long, it seemed, and Jack had prattled it back to a Stenographer and a line-up of dumbfounded worthies the next morning. But Newton had not offered to put Jack back into his Castle apartment, and Jack hadn’t asked, because he sensed that Newton was running low on money. The quid pro quo, rather, was that Jack’s punishment might be reduced: at the very least, to a conventional (and speedy) hanging, perhaps even to a fine he’d never be able to pay, so that he’d spend the rest of his life on the Master Debtor’s side of Newgate.

No, someone else—someone with lots of money—had caused Jack to be moved here. It was a further step on the road to Faith that de Gex had prated about: Jack had nothing, but he was somehow being cared for and looked after. It hurt his pride, yes, but not as much as some things he could mention.

It seemed unlikely that his benefactress (for Jack liked to indulge himself in the phant’sy that it was a female) had done so only to make Jack more comfortable during this, his final week on Earth. Jack preferred to suppose that this had been meant as some way of sending him a message. To decypher that message was now the only thought in his mind; but he soon stopped making any progress on the riddle, and postponed further work on it, pending arrival of fresh clews.

Instead he divided his time between thinking about Eliza and cursing himself for being so fatuous as to think of her. On the other hand, he had to admit, there was no great harm in it. It could no longer lead him astray, as it had done in years past. He was now as astray as it was possible for anyone to be in this world. He was at a pole. Van Hoek had explained to him once that if you went to the South Pole, then east and west and south would cease to exist, and any direction you went would be north. Thus Jack’s current status in the world.

Clerkenwell Court

MORNING OF 23 OCTOBER 1714

ROGER WOULD SOMEHOW HAVE got advance intelligence of this raid. Roger would have confronted them—no, strike that, he would have had coffee and hot cross buns waiting, and he would have served them up to Isaac Newton, the Earl of Lostwithiel, and the King’s Messengers, so that by the time they invaded the Court, the whole affair would have been re-conjured into a guided tour, invitation-only.

But Daniel was not Roger, and so, by the time he arrived, the raid had already been in progress for two hours. It would have been over and done with, had it been better managed. But more than one apparatus of His Majesty’s Government had become interested, and so it had waxed cumbersome, and been both over- and under-planned. There had been meetings; that much was obvious. Bright young things had attended them, shaped the agendas, had their say, been noted down in the minutes. Someone had anticipated a need to remove the doors of the Vault by main force. Petards, winches, ox-teams had been concatenated to the Bill of Necessaries. Delays and misunderstandings had propagated. No one had showed up at exactly the right time. Important men had missed opportunities to see the humorous side. Obstinacy and indignation were the order of the day. The foot-soldiers cooled their heels, awaiting orders, and shook their heads incredulously.

This, in sum, was what Daniel walked in to at about nine of the clock. Walked because the raid and its unintended consequences had blocked traffic on Coppice Row and forced him to abandon his sedan chair a quarter of a mile short of the destination. This was for the better. The sedan chair would have dumped him into the midst of the broil; he’d have been noticed, and men who’d been to those meetings would have been keen to exchange words with him. As it was, he approached the thing gradually and quietly.

With one exception: halfway there, he passed the carriage of the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm, stuck in traffic.

“Coming to look in on your investment, my lady?” he inquired, as if talking to himself, as he walked past the helpless vehicle.

There was a rustle within; he guessed she was at her correspondence.

“Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse. May I call on you there, in a few minutes’ time?”

“I invite you to let yourself in to the vacant apartment on the first floor, above the clock-shop,” Daniel called back over his shoulder. “Think of it as a private box from which you may view the Comedy of Errors.”

A minute later, he was there. He went in through a side-wicket and got in to the middle of the thing before anyone had recognized him; then they all wanted to know how long he’d been there. “Dr. Waterhouse!” exclaimed the Earl of Lostwithiel, “how long have you been here?”

“Long enough,” said Daniel, trying to be oracular.

“It’s a bit of a shame,” said the Earl. Which Daniel found most irritating, until he recollected that the Earl was a man of breeding, and tended to understate things to the point where they were nearly subliminal. He was trying to let Daniel know that he was very sorry. Daniel tried to respond in kind. “It must have been awkward for you.”

“Not at all,” said the Earl, meaning it has been a living hell.

“The thing became complicated, didn’t it,” Daniel went on. “Your responsibilities as Captain of the King’s Messengers, of course, supersede all other considerations. I see you have discharged them well.”

“God save the King,” said the Earl, which, Daniel guessed, was a way of saying you have got it right and thank you for not being cross with me.

“…save the King” said Daniel, meaning you’re welcome.

“Sir Isaac is…below,” said the Earl, looking down toward the gates of the Templar-tomb, which stood open and, as far as Daniel could make out, unwrecked.

“How did you get them open?” Daniel asked.

“We stood about them, discussing the use of force, until finally a great big chap showed up and undid the lock for us.”

Daniel took his leave and walked towards the gates, ignoring two different Persons of Quality who spotted him and demanded to know how long he had been there.

“HOW LONG HAVE YOU been here?” asked Sir Isaac Newton.

The Templar-tomb was a bubble of warm, oily smoke, for many candles and lanthorns had been brought down. The steam pulsing from the nostrils of half a dozen shovel-and-rake-wielding workmen, and the moist vapors rising from all of those lights, condensed on the chilly stone and brass of the sarcophagi and streaked them with rivulets.

“Long enough,” Daniel snapped. There was much here for him to be peevish about, but the worst of it was that Isaac, who was capable of being so interesting, had, by involving himself in these worldly doings, made himself so dull.

But it was all for the most ethereal of reasons. Daniel must keep reminding himself of that.

“This cannon-duel that was fought on Tower Hill the other day: it’s all about that, isn’t it?” Daniel tried.

“That, and the escape of the Shaftoes,” Isaac admitted. “My witnesses have a way of disappearing when they are most needed. Only Jack now remains.”

“You are not going to find anything by digging up these poor Templars,” Daniel said. “It must be obvious to you that what was here, has been moved.”

“Of course it is,” Isaac said, “but other Powers have involved themselves in the thing, as you can see, and they are not as quick to notice what is obvious, as you and I.”

This sounded almost like a compliment: Isaac reaching down to pull Daniel up to his plane for a moment. Daniel was pleased, then wary.

“It is all White’s fault,” Isaac went on. “I do think that he meant to die—to put himself beyond the grasp of Justice. But the manner of his death he could not have foreseen—and it has wrought in my favor.”

“By throwing the new government into a sort of panic, you mean.”

By way of an answer, Isaac spread his hands, and looked about at all of the perfervid diggers. “When they have grown as bored as I am with the ransacking of this place, they’ll move on to Bridewell, and if nothing is found there, they’ll follow the trail to the Bank of England.”

Daniel knew that there was an appendix to this sentence, which need hardly be spoken aloud: unless you help me by giving me some of what I need. And for a moment Daniel was ready to nip down to the Bank and fetch out a bit of Solomonic Gold for good old Isaac. Why not? Solomon Kohan would notice that it had gone missing, and Peter the Great would wax wroth, but there would probably be a way to patch it up.

Then Isaac spoke: “They say that to hide the escape of the Shaftoes from the strong-room of the Fleet, an old gager got the Mobb drunk, and told them tall tales of buried gold.”

This curdled the whole thing. Daniel remembered, now, why he had good reason to hold on to every grain of the gold: because people wanted it, and so having it gave Daniel power he might need. And, too, he was reminded of the farcical nature of the whole Alchemical world-view. So he said nothing more of substance, but excused himself, and went up above ground, and a minute later had joined the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm in that vacant apartment above what had been the Court of Technologickal Arts.

“YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE LEFT me alone here,” she said to him.

Somehow Daniel did not get the idea that she was complaining of a social faux pas. “Your grace?”

She was standing at a window that looked out over the Court, and talking over her shoulder at him. He approached, and drew up next to her, but well off to the side, so that the scurrying big-wigs below would not see them together in the window.

“Something has been troubling me about this investment ever since I agreed to it,” she continued.

These words, had they been spoken in anger, might have made Daniel spin on his heel and run all the way to Massachusetts. But she was bemused and a little distracted, with the makings of a smile on her lips.

She explained, “It came clear to me when I looked out this window. The last time I saw your Court of Technologickal Arts, it was a bazaar of the mind—all those clever men, each in his own wee shop, pursuing his peculiar interests, but exchanging ideas with the others when he went to fetch a cup of coffee or to use the House of Office. That seemed to work very well, didn’t it? And because I am curious about the same things, I was cozened by it—I admit that I was! And yet as enchanted as I was, a little voice kept whispering to me that it was not, au fond, a sound investment. Today I came here and found it all gone. All the clever fellows have packed up their tools and absconded. Only the land and the building remain. For those, your investors have overpaid. This place is destined to be just another suburban shop-block, of no greater value than the ones to the left and to the right.”

“As to the value of the property, I agree,” Daniel said. “Does that mean it was not a sound investment for you and for Roger Comstock?”

“Yes,” she said, again with a smile, “that is what it means!”

“In an accompt-book, maybe that is true—”

“Oh, believe me. It is.”

“But Roger never set much store by strict accompts, did he? He pursued more than strictly financial gain.”

“That is perfectly all right,” Eliza said. “You misunderstand me. I too have many goals that cannot be assessed or rendered in an accompt-book. But it has been my practice to keep those separate, in my head, from the sorts of projects that would make sense to any investor. In the case of the Court of Technologickal Arts, I made the error of confusing one with the other. That is all. I do not think one can ever own the quicksilver spirit that circulates among the minds of philosophers and ingénieurs. It is like trying to catch in a bucket the electrickal fluid of Mr. Hauksbee.”

“So it is hopeless, then?”

“Is what hopeless, Dr. Waterhouse?”

“Trying to support, to invest in such projects?”

“Oh, no. Not hopeless. I think it could be done. I got it wrong the first time. That’s all.”

“Is there to be a second time?”

Silence. Daniel tried again. “What is to be the final accounting, then? Even if I did not have any interest in the thing, I should need to know, for I am involved in the settling of Roger’s estate.”

“Oh. You need to know what this is all worth,” Eliza said.

“Yes. Your grace. Thank you.”

“It is worth whatever the building next to it is worth. You could, then, pursue claims on the value of the discoveries that were made here. Conceivably. For example, if six months from now a horologist who was once a tenant here builds a clock that wins the Longitude Prize, then Roger’s estate could lay claim to some part of the money. But it would be a fool’s errand. It would only enrich lawyers.”

“Very well. We shall write it off. But what of the Logic Mill—?”

“I heard that the card-punching organs had been torn out of Bridewell, and cast into the river.”

“Oh, yes. I made sure of that. Everything is gone from Bridewell.”

“The cards themselves—?”

“Are to be shipped to Hanover, and thence to the Tsar’s Academy in St. Petersburg.”

“So they neither add to nor subtract from the balance-sheet. What is it, then, that you are asking me about?”

Daniel was appalled, in some sense, by the pitiless brutality of this financial discourse. But he was also fascinated. It was a bit like vivisection: savage, but just interesting enough to keep him from slinking out of the room and going straight to the nearest boozing-ken. “I suppose I am asking you about the whole structure of ideas that gives the cards of the Logic Mill their value,” he said.

“Value?”

“Power, then. Power to effect computations.”

“You are asking, what are those ideas worth?”

“Yes.”

“That depends on how soon a true Logic Mill can be made. You have not made one, have you?”

“No,” Daniel admitted. “We learned much from making the card-punching organs—”

“We meaning—” and Eliza cocked her head out the window, reminding him of the vacant stalls being pillaged by soldiers and Messengers.

“All right,” Daniel admitted, “the we no longer exists. We have been scattered. It shall be most difficult to re-assemble the we.”

“And the organs are on the bottom of the river.”

“Yes.”

“You have drawings? Plans?”

“Mostly in our heads.”

“Here’s what I would say, then,” Eliza began, “if I were rendering this accompt. The ideas are very good ones. The quality of the work, excellent. However, they are Leibniz’s ideas, and they stand or fall with the Doctor and his reputation. His repute is very low with his House, the House of Hanover, which is now the sovereign power in this Realm. Caroline loves the Doctor, and has tried to effect a reconciliation between him and Sir Isaac, but this came to naught. Even when she is Queen she will have little power to change this—so irreconcilable are Leibniz’s ideas with Newton’s. It would be different if Leibniz’s ideas were useful, but they are not—not yet, not compared to Newton’s. It might be a long time before a Logic Mill can be constructed—a hundred years or more. And so the answer is that it is all devoid of monetary value at this time.”

“Hmm. My life’s work, devoid of value. That’s hard to hear.”

“I am only saying that you’ll never find anyone who’ll give you money for it. But you have a great Prince in the East who is happy to support the work. Ship it all to him. The golden cards, your notes and drawings, all that Enoch Root shipped over from Boston—send it all into the East, where someone values it.”

“Very well. I have been arranging to do just that.”

Eliza had turned away from the window and made Daniel Waterhouse the object of her scrutiny. She had, in fact, quite backed him into a corner. Something had occurred to her just now: a wild idea she did not like very much. “You phant’sy that’s all there is, don’t you? When you, Daniel, speak of your life’s work, the only thing you include in that is what you have done on the Logic Mill.”

Daniel showed empty hands to her. “What else is there?”

“At the very least, there is your son Godfrey, whom you ought to go home and look in on! One child in Boston today is a million descendants at some time in the future.”

“Yes, but in what estate, in what sort of country?”

“That is for you to determine. And setting aside Godfrey—consider all you have done in the year since you received the letter from Princess Caroline!”

“I feel it’s all been a muddle.”

“You have done much for this country. For the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. For the abolition of Slavery. For Newton and Leibniz both, though neither of them might appreciate it.”

“As I said before, ’tis all a muddle to me. But I am a great brooder, and you have given me something to brood on for the rest of my days.”

“Don’t only brood on it, if you please. Work it out. See what you have done.”

“In your rendering of the accompt,” said Daniel, “do you find anything at all in the way of assets?”

“Oh, yes,” Eliza said. “The Engine for Raising Water by Fire shall more than pay for all of the losses that I have complained of.”

“I didn’t feel that you were complaining so much as facing facts,” Daniel said.

“I lose money all the time,” she assured him. “I have spent rather a lot on this Slavery project, and it is only beginning—it’ll take at least as long to do away with Slavery as it will to construct a proper Logic Mill, of that I’m sure.”

“Ah, so I’m no worse than you—very kind of you to say so. What is to be your next project, if I may inquire?”

“As far as this investment is concerned? To cut the losses, liquidate what is to no purpose, and redouble investment in what is actually working: the Engine.”

“It seems very reasonable when you put it that way,” said Daniel, for some reason feeling quite relieved. “If the Engine succeeds, by the way, it will help your Cause, by reducing the demand for slave labor—”

“And yours,” she said, “by supplying motive Power for a Logic Mill. Now you are beginning to understand.”

“As Roger liked to say, ’tis a good thing to be educable.”

“Very well!” she said, and clapped her hands. “But there are details for us to attend to, aren’t there, before we become distracted by these grand schemes?”

“We have a way to keep the cards safe from men of that type,” said Daniel, gesturing with his head in the direction of the authorities sacking the Court.

“I had guessed as much. I was thinking of Friday.”

“Two things are happening on Friday: the Trial of the Pyx, and the Hanging-March,” Daniel reminded her. “Which of them do you mean?”

Eliza got that rueful half-smile again. “Both,” she said simply, “for they are one thing now.”

“Then you and I have arrived at the same conclusion,” Daniel said. “It is between Isaac and Jack. For Jack almost certainly placed base metal in the Pyx. If he testifies to that effect, Newton is absolved, and the currency is upheld.”

“Would there be any way to save Newton, and the Currency, without such testimony from Jack?”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to persuade Jack to testify? That would have the added benefit of saving Jack from execution, supposing a deal could be struck—”

“A very questionable supposition, that,” she pointed out, “and at any rate, I don’t want him to make any such deal. I want him to be executed on Friday.”

Daniel was so dumbfounded by this bald utterance that he kept on talking, like a man who has been shot through the head but keeps walking a stride or two before he crumples. “Er—well—even if that is what you want—why not strike a deal that would give him a quick merciful hanging, at least?”

“The original sentence,” she insisted, “is what I want to be carried out against Jack Shaftoe on Friday.”

“So—” Daniel blinked and shook his head, unable to fathom her placid cruelty. “So you are asking me, is there a way for Newton to triumph, in a Trial of the Pyx, even without testimony from Jack?”

“That is what I am asking you, as a Natural Philosopher.”

“You are asking me, then, if the Trial of the Pyx can be rigged!”

“Good day, Dr. Waterhouse; both of us have many things to tend to before Friday,” said Eliza, and walked out of the room.

The Chapel, Newgate Prison

24 OCTOBER 1714

I beseech you, Brethren, by the Mercies of God, that you present your Bodies a Living Sacrifice, Holy, Acceptable unto God; which is your Reasonable Service.

—ROMANS 12:1

ENGLAND’S POWERS TEMPORAL WERE NOT precisely finished with Jack Shaftoe. But they’d done everything to him that was within their scope, found him guilty of the worst of all crimes, thrown him in the worst of all places, sentenced him to the worst of all punishments. They were spent. Their Avenging Sword needed a good working-over with a whetstone, and their terrible quiver was empty. And so they had turned him over to the Powers Spiritual of the Realm, viz. the Church of England. This was the first time—and quite obviously the last—in Jack’s life that he had attracted the notice of that organization. He did not know how to behave under its strange gaze.

The Vagabond-camps of his youth had been more than amply supplied with lunaticks. Indeed Newgate was the only place he had ever been since that contained a higher proportion of madmen.

He and Bob had learnt very early that the Nation of the Insane comprised diverse classes, sects, and parties, each of which must be treated with in a different way. A matched pair of starving ragamuffins, roving around a camp in the middle of some ducal game-park, exerted a powerful draw on maniacs of many types. But for those boys to survive, they had to learn to distinguish between, say, the religious Phanatiques and the pædophiles. For the consequences of being caught by them were wholly different. A Phanatique might even take it upon himself to defend a couple of boys from the sort of mad Vagabond who was bent on buggery. For this service he might exact a price, namely, to make them hear a sermon. It was in his nature to give sermons, just as it was to lambaste sodomites. As these two behaviors expressed the same nature, they could not be teased apart. The boys had to accept one with the other. From such sermons had the Shaftoe boys learned everything there was to know about the Anglican Church.

Later in his life, Jack was to recollect those open-air sermons with the skepticism of a world-weary adult. The sermonizers were religious maniacs who’d liefer rove the countryside in the company of pestilential Vagabonds than submit to the authority of Anglicans; and so how could such be expected to give a fair and impartial account of what went on in the Church of England? Of the slanders and calumnies that they flung against that Church’s shiny red door, most were probably hallucinations; the remainder might have a germ of truth, but must still consist mostly of perfervid phant’sies. It was not that Jack had any affinity for the Church, any need to hold up their end of the argument. It was rather that he got sick of preachers early on. If he were to give credit to their ravings about the Anglican Church, he must give equal credit to their assertions, so tediously repeated, that he was bound for Hell. He preferred to take a dim view of everything they said, rather than picking and choosing.

This chapel he was sitting in now made him think that everything those Phanatiques told him might have been literally true.

The Phanatiques said that Anglican churches—unlike the open-air conventicles and simple barnlike meeting-houses of the Nonconformists—were divided up into boxes called pews. And lest this sound too attractive to a lot of bored Vagabonds who were standing in the mud or, at best, sitting on logs, they likened those pews to livestock pens, in which the churchgoers were pent up like so many sheep waiting to be fleeced, or slaughtered.

Now, here Jack sat, in his first ever Anglican service, and what did he observe but that the floor of the chapel—which was situated on the uppermost storey of Newgate Prison—was indeed divided into boxes. These were pens, and then some. Pens were open to the sky; but these pews (as they were styled by the management) had stout lids on them, to prevent Malefactors from vaulting over the top, or Dissident holy men from ascending directly into Heaven without the intermediation of a deputized representative of the Church of England.

The Phanatiques said that in Anglican churches, Persons of Quality got the best seats; the classes could not mingle freely, as they did in a Gathered church. Sure enough, the pews of Newgate chapel were strictly segregated according to degree. Prisoners from the Common Side were penned on one side of the aisle, to the left hand of the Ordinary as he stood in his corner pulpit. Those from the Master Side went to the right. Debtors were boxed separately from Felons, Males walled off from Females. But the very best seats in the house, directly below the pulpit, were reserved for the aristocracy: persons lately condemned to die at Tyburn. These were granted the luxury of an open pew, though they were chained to it, like galley-slaves to their bench.

The Phanatiques said that the Anglican Church was a place of death, a portal to Hell. Which sounded like lunacy; but this place was hung in black, swathed in funeral-shrouds. Directly before the Condemned pew, between it and the pulpit, was a stout altar; but what rested upon the Lord’s Table was not a breakfast of bread and wine, but a coffin. And lest they fail to apprehend the message, the lid of that coffin had been removed, to make it plain that it was vacant, and wanted a lodger. It yawned at them through the service, and the Ordinary wasted no chance to direct their attention thither.

The Phanatiques said that people went to Anglican churches, not to hear and heed the Word of God, but to see and be seen. That it was a Show, nothing better than a play in a theatre, and probably worse, in that plays made no bones about being vile and bawdy, while Anglican services arrogated to themselves a sort of holiness. It was a claim difficult to make about the front of this chapel, which was full of smelly persons in boxes, peering out through grates. But when Jack tired of staring at the open coffin on the altar, and let his attention wander up the aisle, he noted that the back half of the church was supplied with several rows of open pews, and that they were packed full of churchgoers. Not “parishioners,” mind you, for that would mean people who lived in or near Newgate, but “churchgoers,” meaning, in this case, free Londoners who had got out of bed this morning, put on their Sunday best, and made a positive decision to travel here—a place so miasmic, that passersby had been known to drop dead in the street from breathing what wafted out of its gratings—and sit in a place draped all in black and listen to a gaol-house preacher rant about Death for a couple of hours.

Never one to affect false modesty, or any sort of modesty at all for that matter, Jack knew perfectly well that they had come to stare at the Condemned, and particularly at him. He stared right back. The Ordinary had been explicating a paltry few lines from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans for more than an hour. No one was paying attention. Jack screwed himself around, looked back, and met the eye of each churchgoer in turn, challenging him or her to a stare-down, and he won every one, knocking them down one pew at a time like archery targets pinned to a fencerail. Except, that is, for one whose gaze he could not meet, because her face was hidden behind a veil. It was the same woman who had gone to the Gate of Janus the other day, just to get a look at him. On that occasion, she had flashed by so quickly that he hadn’t fixed her clearly in his memory. This Sunday morning, he had a good hour to stare at her. Her face might be hidden, but he could see plainly enough she was rich; there was a lacy fontange perched atop her head, adding six inches to her height, and serving as a sort of mainmast from which the veil was deployed. Her dress was far from gaudy, being almost as dark and dour as mourning weeds, but he could see the sheen on the silk from here; the fabric alone probably cost as much as the whole contents of an average Londoner’s wardrobe. And she’d brought a bloke, a young man, bit of a bruiser, blond and blue-eyed. Not a husband and not a beau, but a bodyguard. Jack lost the stare-down with him, but only because he, Jack, was distracted. Something was afoot.

Halfway Along Cheapside

DAWN, MONDAY, 25 OCTOBER 1714

“DID ROGER COME TO YOU in a dream, or something?”

“I beg your pardon!?”

Saturn opened his eyes for the first time since he had upended his body into the carriage, back at Clerkenwell Court, a quarter of an hour ago. Since then he had only made himself more comfy with every bump and swerve. Confronted now with evidence that his companion had been conscious, and cogitating, the entire time, Daniel was mildly indignant.

Saturn pushed himself up a notch. “It is so unlike you to know of something before it happens. I wondered if you had had a spectral Visitation from the Shade of the late Marquis of Ravenscar.”

“My intelligence came from another source.”

“The Earl of Lostwithiel?”

“Shut up!”

“I thought so. Mortification was writ all over his lordship’s face the other day, at the Sack of Clerkenwell.”

“It’ll be worse if word gets round that he has been talking to me, and so please curtail this!”

“Hmph. I do not think that Ravenscar got people to be discreet by shushing them. I think rather he was an ingénieur of a sort, who balanced interests.”

“What is your point, other than that I am no substitute for Roger?”

“Clerkenwell Court was to me what a Gathered Church was to your dad’s lot. Now what you Gathered has been Scattered by the Powers that Be. Just as certain of your co-religionists, in such a pickle, would abscond to Massachusetts to erect a City on a Hill or something, I phant’sy that I shall get out of this bloody town and go to what, for a Mechanick, will be what Plymouth Rock was for Puritans.”

“And where, pray tell, is that?”

“Another place called Plymouth, but older, and easier to get to.”

The carriage, following Daniel’s instructions, had managed a right turn; Daniel had lost track of where they were, and was disoriented for a moment, until he saw the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook go by to their left. A light or two was already burning in a window there; good.

Saturn seemed a little provoked that Daniel had not risen to this most excellent bait. “Plymouth is where Mr. Newcomen is building his Engine, is it not?”

“Close enough,” Daniel said. “I shall buy you a map of the west country as a going-away present, and on the journey you can master the fine distinctions between Plymouth, Dartmouth, Teignmouth, et cetera.”

“ ’Sblood, the place has as many Mouths as Parliament,” Saturn muttered, and watched Daniel carefully—warily, even. Perhaps he had been worried as to how Daniel would react.

Daniel said, “I shall give Mr. Newcomen an excellent character of you.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll not say a word about Infernal Devices, or bursting out of whores’ toilets in the dead of night.”

“I would be indebted.”

“Please don’t think of it in that light…look on it rather as a selfish deed on my part,” Daniel said. “Newcomen needs fewer smiths, and more men like you.”

“I heard he was banging out great bloody monstrosities.”

“That he is. But where he wants help is in the fabricating of the small clever bits—the valves, and so on. Just the job for a Horologist Gone Bad.”

“Right! Let’s sort this, then!” said a radically more energetic Peter Hoxton, rolling out the carriage door even though it had not yet come to a full stop. Daniel smelled River, and felt it condensing on his brow; they’d pulled round on the Three Cranes, a wharf not far from where the lost river of Walbrook buried itself in the Thames. A row of warehouses fronted on it, running parallel to the riverbank and a stone’s throw back from the water. Separating two of these buildings was a narrow chink that anyone might have overlooked in the dark and the fog. Daniel was only able to pick it out because a light was burning some distance along this alley-way, on its right side. As Saturn shambled toward this, his head or shoulders would occult it from time to time. After a minute this stopped happening. Daniel heard a door opening, and eroded stumps of a few words, and then the door closing again.

The alley would broaden, after some distance, into the spacious back-court of the Vintners’ Hall. Many of the establishments around it, including the one Saturn had gone into, were cooperages.

“Back to the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook,” Daniel said to the coachman.

WILLIAM HAM WAS WAITING FOR them there, out front of the church where he’d been baptized. He climbed through the carriage door and settled into Saturn’s former perch with a grunt. “Never has a church been put to such uses,” he remarked.

“I’ve explained to the vicar—and will gladly explain again if need be—that it is all in pursuit of a righteous and Christian undertaking.”

“Pray don’t speak of undertaking, uncle. Not today.”

That got them as far as the front entrance of the Bank of England, all of seven hundred feet away.

“I would like you to know something,” Daniel said, as William was fumbling with his keys. For Daniel had the sense that William’s slowness, his clumsiness, were not due to cold fingers alone.

“What is that, uncle?”

“I’ve never spoken of this to you before, as I know it is delicate. But after your father passed away, and his Vault was opened—forcibly—by order of the Lord Chancellor, I was among the party that went down into it, and found that it was empty.”

“It is a very odd time for you to bring that up,” William said, right snappishly, and smacked the Bank’s door open. His irritation had at least got the blood running through his fingers, and perhaps to his brain. There was now a short interlude in the foyer while he soothed the porter’s nerves, and urged him to get back in bed. Then he began to lead Daniel down into the labyrinthine basements and sub-basements of the Bank. While they walked, Daniel talked.

“Your choler is up, William. And no wonder! King Charles took from your father the plate, specie, and bullion that had been entrusted to the House of Ham by its depositors. The House was ruined. Your father died of shame. Others in the goldsmith trade had suffered likewise—though not as much—and understood that your father had been given no choice. The King had taken the gold by invoking his divine right to it. That’s why you’ve never wanted for a position in the banking trade—because the story is proverbial among money-goldsmiths, and you are a living link to it.

“Anyway,” Daniel continued, “after we found your father’s vault empty we went up on the roof of your house—”

“We?”

“Your uncles Raleigh and Sterling and I, and Sir Richard Apthorp. And do you know what happened up there on the roof?”

“Can’t imagine.”

“Sir Richard founded the Bank of England.”

“What do you mean!? This was not founded until twenty years later! And in any case, how can one man found a bank on the roof of a goldsmith’s shop that is being burned down by the Mobb?”

“I mean he saw it all together in his head. He saw that banks would never work right if the King could sack their vaults whenever he ran low on revenue. This was a revolutionary thought. Probably would not have entered his mind had he not been thrown together with the sons of Drake the King-killer, the enemy of Divine Right, the champion of Enterprise. But when Sir Richard put those elements together in his mind, he created—all this.”

“Bully for him,” said William. “Wish I’d been the one to do that. You know. Redeem the family honour and whatnot.” He had stopped before the door to the vault where the Logic Mill cards had been accumulating, as they had been brought in from Bridewell. There would be more messing about with keys now. Daniel relieved his nephew of the lanthorn and stood there Diogenes-like, shining light on his hands while he worked.

“As you know perfectly well, you were too young to found a Bank,” Daniel reminded him. “Instead, you are redeeming the family honour now. At this moment.”

“How do you reckon?” William said, gingerly pushing a gaudy key into one of the door-locks.

“The King—or some limb or other of his government—is coming, in a little while, to steal what I have deposited here. Oh, it is not my property. But is it the King’s?! He has no bloody right to it. If you were to hang your head and let him steal it, the family curse would be confirmed—it would be indelible, then.”

William Ham hauled open the Vault door. Stale air drained out of it. Daniel caught a whiff of sewer—nothing like the Fleet, but enough to stir the memory. “After you, uncle,” said William, sounding rather more serene than he had some minutes earlier.

“No, William, after you! You have precedence. This is your deed. A small one, but a great one. People around the City shall hear of it, and the stock of the Bank shall rise, because of the stand you have made. But more important: your father, if he can see this, is saying to the other departed spirits, this is my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

“Good of you to say so—since I know you don’t believe in any of that!” said William, a bit huskily. Daniel had averted his gaze from the sight of tears filling the pouches under his nephew’s eyes, and so was startled, and almost dropped the lanthorn, when William socked him on the shoulder. “But I do believe in such things, and I say that if my dad’s looking on, why, yours is right there next to him, and couldn’t be happier to see you poking your brand-new King in the eye with a sharp stick!”

A MINUTE LATER DANIEL was alone in the Temple of Mithras, and William Ham was on the other side of the Vault door, locking him in there.

In William’s hip-pocket was a document, freshly signed, in which Daniel took possession of his deposits, and relieved the Bank of all responsibility for them. If nothing else, it would slow the King’s men down for as long as it took them to read it.

Those deposits, of course, were all here and accounted for, stacked on the floor in front of Daniel. The golden cards of the Logick Mill had been sent over from Bridewell in frequent small shipments. After Daniel had visited this place with Solomon Kohan, and become aware of the well-shaft in its floor, he had instituted changes in how the cards were packaged for shipment. He had struck a deal with a cooper near the Vintner’s Yard, and this cooper, Mr. Anderton, had fabricated a run of purpose-built boxes of peculiar design. Most anyone who looked on one of these would guess it was either a snare-drum or a hat-box, about a foot in diameter and half that in height. They were lightweight and not especially rugged, made from splits of soft wood no more than an eighth of an inch thick, steam-bent into hoops, sewed together with rawhide, and sealed with pitch. Each arrived at Bridewell with wood-shavings (a resource produced in superabundance by Mr. Anderton’s arsenal of block-planes and draw-knives). Each had a close-fitting lid. These had been stockpiled at one end of the card-punching shop, handy to the desk where Mr. Ham weighed and accounted for all of the gold. Whenever a batch of cards was complete, and the paperwork all made out, one of these hat-boxes would be pulled off the stack and the lid set aside. Into the bed of wood-shavings would be pressed the stack of cards, all wrapped in paper, and next to it would go a wee purse containing the holes that had been punched out of them. The papers for this batch would be set atop, and finally the lid would be put on, laced down with more rawhide, and sealed all around its rim with tar. Then it was ready for dispatch to the Bank of England.

These containers were nothing like true barrels for strength, water-tightness, or cost. But they would fit down the well-shaft, and they would float, at least for a little while. Which was all that Daniel wanted. As soon as William Ham locked him in to the Vault, Daniel went over and pulled up the plank disk that covered the well-shaft. He was dizzy with a kind of terror that something would have gone wrong, and no one would be there. For a minute his fears were borne out. But then he began to hear voices, and a minute later he observed shreds of light skating and veering around, and finally a candle-flame, directly below. “Ready,” came a voice.

Daniel dropped a hat-box down the shaft. No crashing or splintering noises were returned: only a firm splunk as it was caught by two out-stretched hands, followed by some conversation, and a brief surge of laughter. Then: “Ready!” and Daniel dropped another. It was uneven the first dozen times, with too much conversation and apologizing. Then it seemed as though the men down below had got a bucket-brigade organized, and Daniel ended up being the bottleneck, as he could not seem to ferry the boxes to the hole rapidly enough. In the end Peter Hoxton had to climb up into the vault and assist him. After that, the place emptied out in a very short time.

But by the time the last of the Solomonic Gold went down the hole, voices—angry ones—could already be heard on the other side of the door, and hasty men were rattling the locks and picking curiously at the hasps and the hinges. William had promised to delay as long as he could by being indolent, then argumentative, and finally by pretending he couldn’t find the key; but clearly enough these pretenses were all wearing thin. Worse, Daniel was growingly certain that Isaac was on the other side of that door, and Isaac could pick any lock ever made. After a last look round to make sure no box had been forgotten, Daniel inserted himself into the shaft, and began to seek the ladder’s rungs with his toes. Saturn was not far behind, but he paused at the top of the ladder to fiddle with a bit of rope, and then to set the plank-disk lid into place above his head—closing the door behind him, as it were. That rope still dangled through a small hole bit from the rim of the lid. It led, as Daniel knew, to the underside of a large, ancient-looking crate that rested on the floor of the Vault next to the well-shaft. When Saturn was sure that Daniel had reached the base of the ladder and gotten well out of harm’s way by retreating into the side-shaft, he wrapped that rope around his hands and trusted his whole weight to it. He plunged straight down for about an arm’s length, then was caught short, and had to kick for a rung. The crate had shifted over and, or so they hoped, covered the lid. This might or might not buy them a few minutes of extra time, depending on how closely the Vault was searched.

Saturn pulled the ladder down and carried it with him as he followed Daniel to the bank of Walbrook. The stream’s course was now marked out, spottily, by a series of candles. One or two men could be heard sloshing downriver. Saturn here discarded the ladder and then followed Daniel down the current, snuffing out candles as he went, and both of them keeping an eye peeled for hat-boxes that had gone astray.

A few minutes’ wading brought them to the orifice that served as cellar-drain for St. Stephen Walbrook. Daniel went through first, crawling up it on his belly until rough hands grasped his, and drew him out in one long heave. He could not see very well for a minute, because there was suddenly too much light coming into his eyes. But he could smell the mineral tang of fresh mortar, and he knew from the calluses on those hands that they must have belonged to masons. There was a minute of bother trying to get Saturn up through the drain, which turned to hilarity when he popped loose; then he jumped to his feet and shushed them all furiously, saying that he had heard voices echoing down Walbrook from the Bank, and he thought one of them might be an angry Sir Isaac.

Daniel could see now. There was quite a crowd there in the crypt under the church: a mason and two younger assistants, two coopers from Mr. Anderton’s company, Daniel, Saturn, and a pair of mudlarks who had been part of the bucket brigade. As well as a very old and bent-over chap, in good clothes and good humor, seemingly fascinated by the hole in the floor whence so many novelties had just emerged.

“I had quite forgotten about it!” exclaimed Sir Christopher Wren. “I am indebted to you, Daniel. It is in the nature of building-projects, you know, that one gets a thing ninety-nine percent finished, then drifts away. Quite right of you to call this to my attention.”

By the time he had reached the end of this sentence, the drain had ceased to exist. The masons had brought with them a length of wrist-thick lead pipe, which they thrust down the tunnel, then buried in a wheelbarrow-avalanche of mixed mortar and rubble. The head of the pipe was stomped down until it was flush with the floor, and then the eldest of the masons set about finish-work, arranging a few small flat paving-stones around the orifice to cover up the rubble fill beneath.

At the other end of the room, Anderton’s men were stacking the hat-boxes into barrels. These were unfinished; the staves at the top were splayed apart, restrained by temporary hoops. A groove had been carved around their inner surfaces, near the ends, to accept the end-pieces. Each barrel was tall enough to accommodate a stack of half a dozen hat-boxes; more wood-shavings were dumped in around these, so they would not rattle around, and then the end-pieces were set in loose. In this state the barrels were dragged up stairs and out into the court behind the church, which communicated with a bigger court out back of Salters’ Hall: a place where no sight was more unremarkable than a huddle of barrels ready to be finished.

By day’s end, all of the barrels had been conveyed to the workshop of Mr. Anderton, and his coopers had bent the staves inward to imprison the end-pieces, and put on the permanent hoops.

Daniel was tired, and wanted to call it a day, but he could not bring himself to leave the cooperage until the last of the hat-boxes had been sealed up within the last of the barrels. He made himself at home in a corner of Anderton’s shop, stimulating himself as needed with coffee or tobacco, until the job was done. The barrels were then rolled down to Three Cranes and entrusted to a shipping-company; the destination marked on each one of them was LEIBNIZ-HAUS HANOVER. After all the care and bother that the Solomonic Gold had occasioned during its eventful passage from the Solomon Islands to the Palace of the Viceroy in Mexico, to its theft before Bonanza, to Cairo and Malabar and its many travels on or in the hull of Minerva, it felt very strange to turn one’s back on it and walk away, leaving it stacked out in the open on a wharf. But now, disguised as salt cod and placed in the care of a reputable shipping-agent, it was probably safer than it had ever been.

Poop Deck of Minerva, the Pool of London

MIDDAY, TUESDAY, 26 OCTOBER 1714

DANIEL HAD FEARED going back to Crane Court yesterday evening for the reason that Isaac would probably find him there and belabor him, and lambaste him, and browbeat him, and altogether make him feel bad. So he had fetched on the notion of requesting permission to come aboard Minerva, which was more convenient to the Three Cranes, and more hospitable. For weeks the management of that fair ship had been urging him to pay them a call, and for weeks he had been finding excuses not to. They were delighted when Daniel’s water-taxi hove up alongside shortly before midnight, and gave him too much to drink and then bedded him down in his old cabin.

When he woke up, he knew in his bones that he had slept for a very, very long time—probably owing to his inexpressible relief at having rid himself of the Solomonic Gold.

But he also knew that he could have slept much longer if not for all of the crashing and cursing.

He pulled on—with some reluctance—the crusty duds he had worn the day before. It felt like they were wearing him now. A strange man flung his cabin-door open without thinking to knock. Daniel was just in the act of buckling his shoe. He and the intruder studied each other, mutually shocked. The other was young, well-dressed, and properly brought up—mortified, therefore, that he had disturbed an old man at his levée. Why, then, was he here? The answer was suggested by the silver-greyhound badge.

“Sir! I do beg your pardon. But, er…”

“By the King’s command, you must search this cabin?” Daniel guessed.

“Yes, sir. That’s right.”

“For…what, if I may ask? Sleepy old men? Here’s one.”

“No, sir, beg pardon…”

“If you will only tell me what you have been ordered to search for, then perhaps I can assist you.”

“It’s gold, sir. Contraband gold.”

“Ah,” Daniel said, “I’m afraid the only gold in this chamber is this ring on my finger.” Daniel slipped it off and held it up. “Will you be confiscating it, then?”

Now the King’s Messenger was downright embarrassed. “Oh, no, sir, of course not, that is not the sort of thing we are looking for at all. And I really am terribly sorry to be disturbing you. But if you could only…well…”

“Get out of the way, so that you could give this cabin a thorough search? My good man, I was just on my way out!” Daniel said, and after slipping the ring back on to his finger he raised his eyebrows at the Messenger, pushed himself to his feet, and got out.

He found Dappa above, on the poop deck, sighting through a prospective-glass toward the Tower of London. Last night Daniel had reached Minerva without getting a clear notion of where she was situated in the Pool. Now that the sun was up, he was struck by how near she was to the Tower: practically within shouting-distance.

He knew better than to startle Dappa by speaking: this was bad etiquette, when the other chap’s attention was fixed on something far away. And he did not bother inquiring after van Hoek. The Captain’s whereabouts were obvious, for he never let off cursing in Dutch, Sabir, and all other tongues at his command, as he followed the King’s Messengers about his ship.

“It could have been worse,” Dappa said, after an especially bracing out-burst of van Hoekian execration burgeoned from an open hatch. “We are light-laden just now, and there is little difficulty in making a thorough search. A fortnight from now we’d have been laden to the scuppers and it would have been awkward.” He withdrew the glass from his eye and squinted at Daniel. “They are scratching our guns.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Someone important has fallen under the spell of a phant’sy that this magic gold might have been cast into the form of a gun, and painted black, as a way of smuggling it out, and so they have scratched each and every one of our guns with an awl, to be sure they are made of brass.”

“Incredible.”

“There are those among our crew who look on you, now, as bad luck.”

“Ah. I see. Because the first time I came aboard, it led to being assaulted by Blackbeard. And now this.”

“Yes, Doc.”

“Since they are so superstitious,” Daniel said, “perhaps they have heard the saying, ‘Third time’s a charm.’ ”

“What do you have in mind?” Dappa asked, and then could not help smiling.

“I gather from what you said that a voyage is in the offing?”

“We’ll take on some cargo here. Then to Plymouth.”

“Really!”

“When we set you ashore there, ten months ago, we chanced to embark on a little venture that is still playing out. At any rate, we must needs put in there. Then south to Oporto. Then a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean is contemplated, in balmier latitudes than these.”

“And then back to London in the spring-time?”

“We have had quite enough of London, thank you! No,” Dappa said, and laughed. “We go the other way round. Enoch Root has been pestering us to take him to the Islands of Solomon…”

“But those are halfway around the world from Boston!”

“We know where they are,” said Dappa. “They are on our way, though.”

“On your way to where?!”

“Queena-Kootah, where we’d visit old friends, or their grave-sites as the case might be, and then Malabar, where we have an Investrix who, it is safe to say, is now waxing a bit obstreperous. She’ll not accept her Dividend in the form of a Bill of Exchange. We must sail there and stack bullion on the shore.”

“Awkward.”

“When we make profits in London, yes, I should say it is awkward. We’ll go there and stack gold on her beach and I shall make love to her and in time she’ll forgive us.”

“Then?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Your Solomon Islands passenger has been working as my proxy in Boston,” Daniel said, “winding up the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, liquidating the assets, assuaging the creditors, and paying the bar tabs. Before he absconds to the Antipodes I really ought to sit down with him and settle accounts.”

“Then you’ll need to go there, and do it soon, for I can assure you he is not coming this way.”

“You said you were going first to Plymouth—?”

“That I did.”

“I, too, have business in the west country,” said Daniel. “Perhaps I could make rendezvous with you there, and obtain passage back home?”

“Perhaps,” Dappa said. Then, startled by his own rudeness, he made haste to add, “Oh, ’tis all good where I am concerned. But after this van Hoek’ll have questions. He’ll want to know just where is this troublous gold. I shall give you a Hint: a satisfactory answer would be far, far away.”

“I’ve an even better answer,” said Daniel, “which is: I don’t know.” He held up his hands as if to indicate all thousand ships in the Pool, and it turned into a shrug.

“It is in transit,” Dappa understood. “You have shipped it.”

“It has been solved,” Daniel said, “con-fused in the currency of the Thames, and it will make its way to Hanover, mysteriously but reliably, even as Pieces of Eight converge, as if they had minds of their own, on Shahjahanabad.”

The more poetic Daniel waxed, the more Dappa’s interest waned, and by the end of this sentence he had plugged the glass back into his eye-socket and trained it again on the Tower.

“What is it you are looking at up there?” Daniel asked. The wind was strong, and cold, and out of the north, and Daniel had no wig or hat. As he had ascended to the poop deck a minute ago, he had looked once toward the Tower, to get his bearings, but since then he had stood with his back to it and the collar of his coat turned up to shield his neck and the base of his skull. Dappa faced resolutely into the breeze, fighting it off with a fixed grimace. He said, “It is easier for you to turn around and see for yourself than for me to explain all.”

“But you have a prospective-glass, and I don’t.”

“It is hardly needed at this range!”

“Why are you you using it, then?”

“Trying to resolve certain details. I am watching a group of men on the top of Lanthorn Tower,” Dappa said, “who are obviously enough responsible for this outrage.”

“Meaning, the ransack of your ship?”

“Yes. These Messengers, you may’ve noticed, keep looking to them for instructions. They have been communicating with semaphores. I think that one of them is Sir Isaac Newton.”

This was altogether predictable, and yet it was enough to make Daniel turn around and brave the wind. In a few moments he had picked out the group that Dappa had described. “Where is he?” Daniel asked.

“In the middle, peering right back at us with a spyglass.”

“Oh, bloody hell, he’ll probably recognize me!” Daniel burst out. He ought to have whirled right back around. But like a field-mouse caught in a raptor’s gaze, he found himself curiously unable to move.

“It’s all right, he is lowering the glass—no, I’m wrong, he dropped the bloody thing!”

“Isaac dropped it!?” Daniel could not conceive of Isaac Newton dropping a telescope.

“He’s a-gawp. Looking our way. Can’t make out his face really…his posture calls to mind such undignified words as gobsmacked, stamagast. Stricken. Oh! Oh! Oh, my god!”

“What! What is it?” Daniel demanded, and mastered the urge to snatch the glass. For all he could see with his naked eye was that the crowd on the top of the tower was puckering inwards toward the center, where Isaac stood—or had stood a moment earlier.

“He’s gone down! Straight down. Lucky that bloke on his right caught him.”

“Caught him!?”

“He just toppled over,” said Dappa, “dropped the glass and like to have landed right on top of it. Look, someone is running for help…they are calling to the soldiers down below them, waving their hats…Jesus Christ, they’re all in a bloody panic!” Dappa finally took the glass from his eye, and looked at Daniel. His brow furrowed above the bridge of his nose, as finally he made sense of what he had just seen. Then it hit Daniel, too, and he had to reach out one hand and steady himself on a railing.

“He’s not dead, or they would not be in such a hurry,” Dappa reasoned. “Sir Isaac Newton has had a stroke. That’s what I’d say.”

“Perhaps he only fainted. He has been ailing of late.”

“A stroke fits better with what I saw. It hit him on his right side—that’s why he dropped the glass, that’s why his right leg gave way. Whether it was a swoon, or a stroke, I do believe it was occasioned—” But here he bit his tongue, and winced.

“By his recognizing my face, when I turned around,” Daniel said, “thereby proving all his darkest and strangest fears. Which fears have been tormenting him ever since I returned to London and got entangled in the weird saga of the Solomonic Gold. Shit! I killed my friend.”

“He is neither dead, nor your friend,” Dappa corrected him.

“If you would be so good as to summon me a water-taxi,” said Daniel, “I must make haste to his niece’s house—which is probably where they’ll take him—and defend him from the physicians.”

The Temple of Vulcan

WEDNESDAY, 27 OCTOBER 1714

THE OPTIMISTIC SIDE OF DANIEL’S nature put in a rare appearance on the evening of Tuesday and convinced Daniel that Isaac’s collapse had been neither swoon nor stroke, but only another of those mad panics that would come over him from time to time and later subside. Daniel was so sure of this that he paid a call on Isaac’s house in St. Martin’s that evening, expecting that Isaac would be there. But he was not. He was in the care of Catherine Barton at the house of the late Roger Comstock.

Daniel went there on Wednesday, then, and found Miss Barton distraught. In retrospect he now saw it as a marvel that Isaac hadn’t died a long time ago. His troubles had begun in August when Leibniz had knocked him and Daniel over a wall. This had saved them from being roasted by phosphorus-fire, but had done damage to Isaac’s ribs, with the result that he’d breathed but shallowly for weeks afterwards. He’d picked up a catarrh that ought to have been minor, but had been unable to cough effectively because of the pain in his ribs, and so had not been clearing his lungs. This catarrh had entrenched itself and become a pneumonia.

The event yesterday probably had been a stroke, but not as grave as it might have been; according to Catherine, Isaac had suffered weakness on his right side for a time, but seemed to have regained some of his strength since then. That did not concern her so much as his rapidly mounting fever.

“Fever!?” Daniel exclaimed, and insisted on going in to see the patient. Isaac had left strict orders to keep all physicians out of his room, and Catherine had obeyed them; but Daniel Waterhouse was no physician.

Isaac was spread-eagled on a four-poster bed, dressed in a flimsy nightshirt. He had kicked the bedclothes off onto the floor and he or someone else had opened a window to let in cold air. Daniel had to stuff his hands into his pockets to keep them from freezing. “Isaac?” he said.

The patient’s head stirred, triggering a shift of his flowing white hair, and beneath half-closed lids his eyes focused. But the eyes were not looking Daniel’s way. Daniel came over to the bedside. Isaac was breathing rapidly and shallowly. Daniel bent down and pressed an ear to Isaac’s ribcage, wincing at the heat that came out of his body—like a loaf fresh out of the oven. In the bases of Isaac’s lungs, it sounded as though bacon was being fried. His heart was beating weakly but quickly, albeit with alarming skips and pauses.

During this examination, Daniel could not help but notice a rash on those parts of Isaac’s chest not covered by the nightshirt. He sat on the edge of the bed and unbuttoned the garment. Isaac’s eyes, then his head moved slightly as Daniel did so; the movement had caught his eye. He watched Daniel’s hands work their way down his heaving sternum, one button at a time, and when Daniel spread the nightshirt apart, Isaac’s eyes tracked his right hand. Daniel recognized it: Natural-Philosophic curiosity.

Isaac’s torso was covered with the rash. It was most obvious around the left armpit.

“When was the last time you were in Newgate Prison?” Daniel asked. For he had the sense that Isaac was entering in to a lucid phase.

“Ah!” Isaac said, and then had to cough for a minute, in a frothy way, to clear the pipes for action. “You and I agree on the diagnosis of gaol-fever, then. That is a comfort. We agree on so little else.” Long pauses held these phrases apart.

“When was the last time…” Daniel reiterated patiently.

Isaac cut him off with the answer: “A week ago. I went and spoke to Jack in the Condemned Hold.”

“Normally the incubation period for gaol-fever would be—”

“Longer, a bit. Yes. I know. But I am old. And weakened by other maladies. You are being tedious. I have little time. I stipulate that I have gaol-fever. It will get worse before it gets better. If it gets better at all. Now I am getting chilly. Will you please button me back up. My right hand has lost some of its dexterity.”

Daniel could hardly deny such a request, and so he began to re-button the shirt—even though he was sure that this was a ploy by Isaac to bring Daniel’s hands into view again so that he could observe the ring. Daniel ignored this, and worked the buttons as fast as he could, and cursed his own stupidity for not having simply pocketed the thing before entering the room.

“It looks heavy,” Isaac remarked. “You know of what I speak. Does it weigh heavy on your finger?”

“Sometimes.”

“Who gave it you? Not a woman, surely.”

Daniel finished with the buttons, and thrust his hands back in his pockets.

“I should like to give you something as well,” Isaac remarked. His gaze had tracked the bauble all the way to Daniel’s pocket and now flicked up to settle on Daniel’s eyes.

“And what might that be, Isaac?”

“Not so much give it you, as draw it to your notice,” Isaac corrected himself. “That stuff of Hooke’s. Found at Bedlam. Reposited here. For me it was neither the most…nor the least…convenient place to look at it. Since the death…of Roger…I have come here more often. For I could not attend to my work…when he was hovering…you know…and asking all manner of questions. I have made a study of that document. The one that figured in the Stake-out…of last summer. You know the one I mean. Hooke’s account of a patient…who died after a lithotomy…and was resurrected…there is no other word for it…by a certain receipt. A remarkable document.”

“You forged a fake version of it as bait for de Gex,” Daniel said, “but—”

“But I have returned to it. In recent weeks. As my health was failing. And I took many notes. And interpreted what was cryptic. And set down clearly what Hooke—who was no Alchemist—did not understand. I know you think it is all rubbish. But if you would look after it…and see that it finds its way into the right…hands…it would be a comfort to me.”

“Of course. Where is it?”

“Roger’s library. Table before the window. Top drawer on the right.”

“I’ll fetch it now,” Daniel said, “and take it to your house straightaway.”

“That is good,” Isaac said. “Take it to my laboratory. Put it with the rest.”

“The rest of what?” Daniel asked. But he could see plainly he’d not be getting an answer. Isaac drew in his limbs, curled up on his side, and began to shiver like a dog fresh out of the water that cannot fight the urge to shake. Daniel called for Catherine, and together they sorted out the bedclothes and drew them over Isaac’s body.

“He has asked me to tend to some things,” Daniel announced to justify leaving. “I shall send word to the Council that Isaac is unwell, and cannot attend the Trial of the Pyx, day after tomorrow.”

“No! You must do no such thing!” Miss Barton said, and laid a hand on Daniel’s wrist. For she knew well enough that her words would penetrate a man’s brain as effectively as a musket-ball, if she touched him while she spoke.

“Miss Barton,” Daniel said, “look at the poor man! He can’t possibly—”

“Uncle Isaac told me that he must be present at the Trial of the Pyx no matter what. Even if he’s dead.”

“Pardon me, but did you really mean that?”

“ ‘Even if I am dead,’ he told me, ‘you stuff my corpse in a sedan chair and carry me to Star Chamber on Friday morning.’ And that, Doctor Waterhouse, is just what I mean to do.”

“Well, God willing, he’ll still be alive,” Daniel said, and gently disengaged himself from Miss Barton’s smooth grasp, and headed for Roger’s library.

Newgate Prison

28 OCTOBER 1714

…the Bell-man, who is the Prelude to the Hangman, like a Flourish before a damn’d Melancholy Tune, comes next to Torture them with his Inhumane Stanza’s, as if Men in their Condition cou’d have any Stomach to Unseasonable Poetry; for the Night before Execution, placing himself under their Window, he harangues them with the following Serenade, set to the Tune of the Bar Bell at the Black Dog.

—Memoirs of the Right Villanous John Hall, 1708

SINCE SENTENCE OF DEATH had been pronounced upon him, the gaol-keepers had kept Jack’s apartment-door locked, and posted armed men outside to ensure it stayed that way. They’d never once let him go down to the good old Dogg. Jack’s only way of communing with the Dogg’s merry company had been to hear the ringing of its bell every night, at curfew. At that moment it had been his custom to lift a glass of Oporto, chosen from the rather large collection of bottles that had been sent up to his room, during the last week, by admirers.

This evening, however, his libation was rudely interrupted by the clanging of a hand-bell down below, in the vaulted passage-way that tunneled below his Castle and passed by the grated vent-hole of the Condemned Hold. Jack was not the only man slated to die at Tyburn tomorrow. Six more were going there with him, all Common-Side Malefactors who lacked means, or mysterious friends, to buy their way out of the said Hold. This nocturnal Bell-Man was plying his trade to a captive audience down there, spewing noxious poetry through the grating:

All you that in the Condemn’d Hold do lye,

Prepare you, for to Morrow you must die.

Think well upon your Sins, in Time repent,

Lest you are Headlong into Satan sent.

Watch then, and Pray, that so you may be fit

T’Appear so soon before the Judgment-Seat:

And when St. Pulcher’s Bell to Morrow Tolls,

The Lord above have Mercy on your Souls.

Having discharged his obligations there, the Bell-Man removed himself from the stink of the vault. He retreated through the portcullis and out into the middle of Holborn. He planted himself in the middle of the road directly beneath Jack Shaftoe’s triple window, like a swain getting ready to serenade his lady love. Which maneuvers would normally be both dark (as the sun had set quite some time ago) and dangerous (as men who stood in the middle of a highway leading into a gate of the City of London normally did not long survive). But the Bell-Man’s progress was well-lighted by a crowd of Londoners with torches, who had thronged the highway from one side to the other, throwing up a barrier of flame that would dazzle and terrify any horses whose drivers were foolish enough to bring them this way. Newgate was closed for the evening. The Bell-Man stood in a fiery semicircle, blinking in surprise, as normally he must carry out his duties alone and unheralded.

Jack had been playing the recluse since he had been condemned. In the first days, crowds had gathered in Holborn from time to time, apparently drawn by rumors that Jack Shaftoe was going to get out of bed and stand in his window to be viewed, like a King taking the air in St. James’s. All of them had been driven away, disappointed, by constables. But tonight was a special occasion, for how many times in his life would Jack be half-hanged, drawn, and quartered? Jack busied himself for a minute or two, lighting tapers. For sources of illumination were another luxury that was famously in short supply at Newgate, and those sycophants who lacked the Yellow Boys (that is to say, Guineas) to buy Jack bottles of Oporto might at least scratch together thrums (that is to say, three pence) to buy him a taper, so that he might take good aim at his chamber-pot later. He had not been burning many of these, but at this point there was little reason to hoard them, and so he went round and set every one of them alight. The room immediately filled with lambent smoke, and the fragrance of rancid tallow, which took him right back to his boyhood on the Isle of Dogs. There was a small ironbound hatch in one of his windows, which might be opened to admit air. He did so now, to spill out the smoke, and was spotted by the crowd down in Holborn, who phant’sied that Jack Shaftoe had nothing better to do on this, his last night, than to banter with them. That damned bell started up, quieting a surge of excitement from the crowd, and the Bell-Man roared out his stanza.

Jack was ready for him. He put his face to the open grate and shouted back,

O tedious Man, who with thy Bell

Dost ring me down the road to Hell,

Tomorrow eve, at half past seven,

I’ll hock a spit on you from Heaven.

For if, as preachers say, the afterlife

Smells sweet, sounds pleasant, is free of strife,

And is, in sum, a Kingdom of Felicity,

It must be any place that does not harbor Thee.

The performance was extremely well-received by all hearers save the Bell-Man himself, who slinked away in the direction of St. Sepulchre, stepping a bit lively as turds and expired vegetables began to pelt him in the back.

Now that he’d been sent away in disgrace, the only people remaining were members in good standing of the Mobility, a.k.a. the Mobb, a class of people divided by their tendency to rape, murder, and steal from one another, but united in their admiration for Jack. They were expecting something from him, without a doubt. A few groups were trying to sing songs to him, in different keys and meters, but no one tune had taken hold yet. Jack—who must be nothing more, to them, than a silhouette against a smoky candle-lit chamber, half-obscured by the reticule of massive iron bars—waved his arms a bit to quiet them down, then put his face to the grate again, and shouted:

“The curfew-bell has sounded, and the gentleman from St. Sepulchre has given me his stanzas, and I am retiring! As should you all! For we have a long and busy day ahead of us tomorrow! I have an appointment at Tyburn in the morning, to which you are all invited! And then another at the College of Physicians in the afternoon. For even though my body is to be quartered, my head is expected to come through the ceremony more or less intact, and those Natural Philosophers around the corner there—straight up Newgate Street, take a right on Warwick Lane just across from Grey Fryars, there, then down to the first entry on your right, the large building with the golden pill on the top—they’re going to cut open my skull tomorrow and peer inside, to see if they can ascertain why I am such a bad fellow.”

He was answered by a general scream of rage, so disturbing to the peace and quiet of his gentlemanly abode, that he shut the hatch immediately. And a good thing, too, for moments later, a hailstorm struck. The noise of small objects assaulting the windowpanes grew until it was louder than the screaming was. Jack approached the window again, out of curiosity, and saw that farthings and pennies, and even a few shillings, were piling up on the stone windowsill outside, so thick that they were forming up into drifts. The people were throwing money at him, money to pay for a Christian burial, to keep him out of the hands of the College of Physicians. And the ones who couldn’t afford to fling coins, were charging up Newgate Street in a torchlight stampede, looking for that first right turn that Jack just told them about. It promised to be a long and eventful night at the College of Physicians; but at least Jack Shaftoe would get some privacy, and some sleep.

Sir Isaac Newton’s House in St. Martin’s

EVENING, THURSDAY, 28 OCTOBER 1714

“MR. THREADER,” the butler announced.

Daniel looked up, and turned around.

Mr. Threader stood in the laboratory doorway, hat in hand, decidedly cringing, looking about the room as if expecting Sir Isaac Newton to spring out from behind a glowing furnace and turn him into a newt.

“He is not here,” Daniel said gently. “He is at his niece’s house.”

“Recuperating—or so ’tis rumored—from an attaque of some sort—?” Mr. Threader, emboldened, stepped over the threshold. The butler closed the door behind him and walked away.

“We shall help him recuperate, you and I. Please, please, come in!” Daniel beckoned with one, then both hands. Mr. Threader obeyed with extreme reluctance. He was not accustomed to Alchemical laboratories. The glowing furnaces, the smells, the open flames, the jars and retorts with their cryptic labels, were all vaguely threatening to him. Seeing as much, Daniel felt, for a moment, what a second-rate Alchemist must feel when a gullible person ventures into his shop: a smug self-satisfaction in the bamboozlement and bewilderment of one’s fellow-man, and a perverse urge to milk the wretch for all he is worth.

But alas, he had other errands, and must needs put Mr. Threader at ease.

“It must all seem quite foreign to you. I was fortunate: I was chumming with Isaac during the years that he turned our domicile into one great smoking Lab. So, all the stuff you see around you here was moved in to our house one bit at a time, and I could ask Isaac what it was, and how to use it.” Daniel laughed. “I am more at home here than I should care to admit!”

Mr. Threader permitted himself a dry chuckle. “I must say that you look quite at home here, which is quite amusing after all of the unkind remarks you have made about Alchemy.”

Daniel wondered what Mr. Threader would make of it if Daniel were to let him know that tomorrow he, Daniel, might be the most eminent Alchemist since King Solomon went in to the East. But he shook it off as being too uncanny to speak of just now.

“Is Sir Isaac expected to be in any condition to attend the Trial?”

“He would not miss it for anything.”

“It is good to know his condition improves.”

Daniel said nothing. Isaac’s condition was not improving; he suspected that the gaol-fever was creating a lesion on Isaac’s heart. As a boy Isaac had tried to make perpetual motion machines, seeing in them a model of the heart. But Isaac’s heart, Daniel suspected, was about to give out. Men had not been able to fashion perpetual motion machines because men were mechanics who only knew how to work with inert matter. Hearts pumped longer than any machine could, because the matter of which they were made—or so Alchemists supposed—was suffused with the vegetative spirit.

“Let’s make some money!” Daniel said. “Did you bring the molds?”

What Daniel had mentioned was so perilous that Mr. Threader, by way of an answer, could only flinch. “Do you have a bit of gold?” he returned.

Daniel flourished his right hand, then pulled off the gold ring and tossed it without ceremony into a small crucible. Picking this up with a pair of tongs, he made to thrust it into a small, keening, and radiating furnace. “Is it fine gold?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.

“It is finer than fine,” Daniel said, and maneuvered the crucible into the glowing heart of the furnace. “It is heavier than pure gold.”

Mr. Threader blinked. “I’m afraid that is quite impossible.”

“You may verify it in a minute or two.”

“How can such a thing be?”

“A divine quintessence fills its pores, which, in ordinary gold, are vacant cavities.”

Mr. Threader stared at him, to see if Daniel was having him on; but Daniel himself was not certain. In the end Mr. Threader believed it, not because of weighing the gold or because he found Alchemy convincing, but because of the political, the human logic of the thing. “I say! I say! You want me to—to—you are up to something! Aren’t you!”

“We are all up to something,” Daniel said, and gave Mr. Threader what was meant to be a chilly look. He was afraid that the other was about to launch into some self-righteous peroration. But Mr. Threader had the decency to stifle himself.

“You have been chosen by the Jury of the Citizens to serve in the rôle of Pesour tomorrow, have you not?”

“Dr. Waterhouse, you are strangely well-informed about what is supposed to have been a secret, and so I shall not make a fool of myself denying it.”

“You are, therefore, the adversary—the challenger—of the Master of the Mint.”

“That is how the avarice of the Mint-men has been kept in check since ancient days,” Mr. Threader said agreeably. “It is the goldsmiths’ duty and their honour.”

“It poses a curious conflict of interests,” Daniel remarked, “when one considers that Sir Isaac had it in his power, a few weeks ago, to send you to Tyburn along with Jack Shaftoe, but elected not to.”

Mr. Threader only made a seething noise at that, which was nearly lost in like noises emitted by the furnace. In August he had been pitiable, abject, almost a little disgusting. But now he’d got used to the whole affair’s having been swept under the rug, and considered it very bad manners indeed for Daniel to have revisited it. Daniel was distracted now, for a moment, by the curious sight of the ring beginning to melt: most of it was yet unchanged, but where it touched the walls of the crucible it was sagging and ponding.

“The only ones who can testify against me are Jack and his boys,” Mr. Threader reminded him. “Jack has not implicated me, and will be dead in a few hours. The boys have escaped—”

“I know,” Daniel said, “I broke them out of prison. I know where they are. Got affidavits from them, before they left the country. Witnessed and sealed affidavits stating that you took part in coining. Speaking of which, I do believe we are just about ready for that mold.”

Mr. Threader reached into his coat-pocket. “To own this thing is a death-warrant,” he said, “but you already have mine in your hip pocket, it seems, and so this is redundant.” And he took out a cylinder of clay, a bit larger in diameter than a guinea coin, and as long as a finger. In the middle it had been broken or chopped into two halves that had been rejoined with slip and fired to make the thing whole. He lay this on its side on the workbench and then rolled it until a tapered hole, like a tiny funnel, came round to the top. Then he chocked it between a pair of fire-bricks. “Be my guest,” he offered, “but this is hardly the way to forge a proper guinea!”

“It need not be all that convincing,” Daniel said, “as we are going to chop it up anyway.”

Mr. Threader was startled, then baffled by this remark; then he understood, and nodded. Meanwhile Daniel had taken up the tongs again, and reached in to the furnace. The crucible came out a-glow. Daniel swung it round over the bench-top and let the tongs rest on one of the fire-bricks, to steady himself. Then he twisted his wrists. Liquid fire spilled out of the crucible. A bead or two went astray, but most of it went down the hole in the clay cylinder.

“There,” said Mr. Threader, “we are in the same boat now—you have just committed High Treason!”

“It is an old failing of my family,” Daniel admitted. He tapped the last drips of gold from the crucible; they beaded on the table and instantly congealed. He set the tongs and crucible aside, and closed the furnace door. With a pair of tweezers he picked up every bead of gold that had gone astray and dropped them into a little cup. Then he took up the clay mold, which was warm, and snapped it in half. A guinea fell out of it and spun on the table. As Mr. Threader had warned him, it was not a very good guinea: the gold had not evenly filled the mold, so parts of it were indistinct. The edging was no good at all, and it had a bubble trapped in it. A prong stuck out of its rim where the filling-hole had been. Daniel flicked it into a bowl of water to cool it down, then plucked it out with his bare fingers and attacked it with a pair of heavy shears. His hands almost were not equal to this task, and he thought for a moment that he might have to send for Saturn. But Mr. Threader, warming to the task, wrapped his hands around Daniel’s and they squeezed together, grunting like swine, and finally there was a snap and two halves of the guinea went flying opposite directions. Daniel had so arranged things that one of these halves included the prong and most of the other gross imperfections. This he placed in the bowl with the other surplus. But the other half was more presentable. Daniel fetched this off the floor and brought it back, and they halved it again, and again—a little bit like cutting a Piece of Eight into reales, except they made the bits smaller and quite irregular—reducing the false half-guinea into a rubble of mangled shards. When Mr. Threader deemed that they had a suitable range of shapes and sizes, they raked it all into a scale-pan and weighed it—both men jotting down the number.

And then both agreed, without having to say it, that they were finished. Daniel saw the visitor out; Mr. Threader had taken a sedan chair so that no one might see the Pesour paying a call on the Master of the Mint, something that would have seemed very fishy indeed.

“Did you—somehow—influence the Jury to choose me?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.

“I used what influence I could muster.”

“Because of my guilty conscience.”

“No, in truth, any member of the Jury probably could have been swayed, one way or another,” Daniel said. “I thought of you because of your skill at prestidigitation. And I hope you can do tricks with coin-snips as well as with whole guineas.”

“Most of it is a matter of misdirecting the audience’s attention—less dexterity is involved than is commonly supposed. But I shall practice with these tonight.”

“Then I shall practice making a distracting spectacle of myself,” Daniel promised him.

“Then you shall be up all night long, for it does not come naturally to you.”

“I’ll be up all night anyway,” Daniel said, “doing all kinds of unnatural things.”

Friday

29 October 1714

Westminster Abbey

MORNING

HE GETS THERE much too early because he overestimated the Hanging-Traffic. So many people want to see Jack Shaftoe drawn and quartered that everyone has gone early to line the route. Daniel need only walk out of Sir Isaac Newton’s town-house, turn his back on the dim roar that resounds against the vault of heaven to the north—a sort of Aurora Borealis of Crowd-clamour—and stroll for a few minutes on quiet streets, and there he is in the Broad Sanctuary: a sweep of open ground splayed out north and west of the Abbey.

He must be a very old and strange man indeed to be approaching a stained Pile such as this one on official business. So peculiar is his errand that he falters, knowing not which entrance to use, which presbyter to accost. But the place is all out of kilter anyway because laborers are still taking down the galleries and bleachers put up for the Coronation. Cockney and Irish demolition-men are strutting out the doors with great rough-sawn planks on their shoulders. There is nary a churchman in sight. Daniel elects to go in the west entrance, which seems a bit less congested than the north with bulky blokes and baulks of wood. Moments later he is struck to find himself walking over the stone where Tompion was planted eleven months ago. It being a great peculiarity of this æra that a horologist should be given a resting-place that one or two generations before would have been reserved for a knight or a general.

He puts Tompion’s bones behind him, ducks beneath a moving plank, and gets out in to the cloisters. This is a square courtyard framed in a quadrilateral of roofed stone galleries, but otherwise open to the elements. Those elements today consist of raw bright autumn sun and cold turbulent air. Daniel shoves hands in pockets, hunches, and stiff-legs it to the next corner, turns right, follows the East Cloister to its end. There on the left wall is an unmarked medieval fortress-door, massive planks hinged, strapped, gridded, and pierced with black iron. Diverse ancient hand-crafted padlocks depend from its hasp-system like medals on the breast of a troll-general. Daniel has a key to only one of them, and no one else is here. He is freezing. Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold. The cloister blocks the eastern sun but does nothing to shelter him from the breeze, which is coming out of the northwest, striking down into the Cloisters and nearly pinning him to this door. So he back-tracks a few paces and passes through a doorway that does happen to be open. This gets him into a corridor that is out of the wind, but cold and dark. Light beckons at its other end, and he can sense warmth on his face, so he goes that way for several paces, and is rewarded, and astonished, to find himself all alone in the most beautiful room in Britain.

Any other Brit would have known in advance that this was the Chapter House. But because of his Revolutionary up-bringing, this was the least likely place on the Isle for Daniel ever to have set foot—until this day. It is a great octagon whose walls seem to consist entirely of stained glass—a structural impossibility given that the vault overhead consists of numberless tons of stone. It is all held up, he reasons, by pillars at the eight vertices, and a ninth one in the center of the room, so tall and slender it seems doomed to buckle. But it has stayed up for something like four hundred years, and only the most bitter and skeptickal Empiricist would inspect it with such a jaded eye. The place is not going to collapse on him. Those windows are harvesting the sunlight and warming the place. Daniel falls into an orbit around the central pillar. Some of his lessons are coming back to him, and he recalls that this was where the King’s Council, and later Parliament, convened until the monks got sick of their hollering and kicked them out and across the street to Westminster Palace. From the way one old man’s footfalls and breathing echo around the place, Daniel can’t imagine how raucous it must have been when it was filled with politicians.

The brilliant windows capture his attention during the first few orbits, but later his eyes are drawn to the wooden panels below them, at head level. These are painted with scenes that Daniel recognizes, almost without even having to look at them, as the Revelation of that scary lunatick St. John the Divine. The Four Horsemen on their color-coded steeds, the Great Beast spitting terrified Saints, misguided humans queueing up to receive the Mark of the Beast. The Whore drunk on the Blood of the butchered Saints, and later being burned for it. Christ leading the armies of Heaven on a white horse. Much of this is so faded that it can only be made out by one such as Daniel who had to memorize it when he was a boy, so that, like an actor standing backstage awaiting his scene, he’d be able to follow the script, and know his cue, when it happened for real. In the more dilapidated Mobb-scenes, only the eyes stand out among the faded and peeling pigmentation: some sleepy, some upraised, some darting about for Earthly advantage, others attending to the faraway deeds of Angels, still others lost in contemplation of what it all means. He can not help seeing this all as a final message from Drake. A reminder that, in spite of all Isaac’s lucubrations, Isaac still does not know the date and time of the Last Trumpet, and that in spite of all Drake’s methodical preparations, Daniel has yet to step out of the wings and play his assigned role.

Footsteps and jolly hallooing come his way: sounds more terrible to his ears than the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen, for they signify that he shall have to be civil to chaps he barely knows. He turns toward the entrance. In comes the First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke, Writer of the Tallies, and Auditor of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer (one man) in his finest clothes. On his arm is the almost-as-well
-turned-out Chamberlain’s Deputy of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer. These men, of course, have names and lives, but Daniel has forgot the former, and has no interest in the latter. This is one of those occasions in England when names do not matter, only titles. “Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse!” exclaims the first, “have you your Key?”

It is an inane question, as there’d be no point in Daniel’s being here if he didn’t have the bloody key; but the man who asks it does so with a twinkle in his eye. It is nothing more than a rhetorical and facetious chat-starter, and perhaps a way of taking Daniel’s measure.

“Have you yours, sir?” Daniel returns, and the oppressively cheerful Writer of the Tallies (&c.) whips it out of his pocket. Not to be outdone, the Chamberlain’s Deputy (&c.) pats his breast; a key hangs on a ribbon there.

Daniel’s key is in his left coat-pocket and his hand is clenched around it. In the right pocket, his other hand cradles a small wooden box, like a jewelry-chest, that he nicked from a storage-closet at Isaac’s a couple of hours ago. He is struck by a little spell of dizziness for a moment, and spreads his feet wider, as a precaution against toppling and splitting his head on the old floor-tiles. The Key and the Chest, the rite of the Six Padlocks—why, it’s as if he’s been dropped in to some hidden, never-published Chapter of the Revelation—perhaps even a whole separate book, an apocryphal sequel to the Bible.

Other voices can be heard out in the cloisters, and Daniel reckons they must be nearing a quorum. Noting Daniel’s interest, the Writer of the Tallies steps aside and settles into an after-you posture—whether because of age, rank, or general obsequiousness, Daniel can’t tell. Daniel’s here as one of the Treasury delegation. He leads the Writer of the Tallies and the Chamberlain’s Deputy back out to the gusty Cloister. Men have gathered before the door of the Pyx Chamber, some sitting on the huge mottled stone benches, others standing on stones bearing the names of middling-famous dead people. But when they spy Daniel and the others approaching, all rise and turn—as if he’s in charge! Which—given what he’s got in his pockets—he has every right to be. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says, and waits for the answering murmur to die down. “Are we all present, then?” He sees a gaudy cleric, but not a bishop (no mitre), and pegs him as the Dean of Westminster. Two other gentlemen step up fondling great keys. Some very junior Church-men stand by with lanthorns at the ready, and there is a contingent of befuddled/suspicious Hanoverian nobles, escorted by a personable English Duke who’s been despatched to explain matters to them, and Johann von Hacklheber, serving as interpreter.

“His Majesty’s Privy Council have demanded a Trial of the Pyx,” Daniel reminds them, “and so provided there are no objections I say that we should give them satisfaction by fetching the necessary bits and conveying them to Star Chamber with no further ado.”

There are no objections and so Daniel turns significantly toward the locked door. The First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke, Writer of the Tallies, and Auditor of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer moves into position on one side of him, and another Key-holder on the other. They make a second echelon behind another group of three Key-holders who form up directly in front of the door: the Dean of Westminster, the Chamberlain’s Deputy of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer, and a representative of the Company of Goldsmiths. The Dean steps up, pulling off a key that has been dangling on his breast-bone on a golden rope, and sets to work on one of the three padlocks visible on this, the outer door. When he is finished, the other two Key-holders play their parts. The padlocks are carried away in pomp and laid out on the stone bench where important men make it their business to keep an eye on them. The great hasp is dismantled by a brawny Acolyte and the door is pulled open.

Two steps lead down into a small anteroom. The way is barred by a second door, no less formidable than the first. Daniel steps forward and down in to this space, takes out his key, and after a few moments’ trial and error, works out which lock it is meant to open. That achieved, he ascends back to cloister level, for there is only room there for one Key-holder and one lanthorn-man. Presently all three inner-door locks have been removed, and brought out into the light, and the hasp is undone. Eyes turn to Daniel again. He goes down in there and puts his shoulder to the door and shoves. It swings halfway open and stops resolutely, as he knew it would. The vault beyond is twice as ancient as the Chapter House. It was rifled during some 13th-Century disturbance—for this is where the Abbey stores its plate and other treasures—and so they installed a stone kerb on the floor so that the door could not be swung fully a-gape, and any future looters would have to ferry the goods out one bauble at a time, as opposed to by the chest-load.

It is Daniel’s privilege now to go in, so he takes possession of a lanthorn and side-steps into the Pyx chamber—then quells a misanthropic urge to slam it behind him and bar it, and live here for a thousand years on the Philosopher’s Stone. The place is bigger than he’d expected: thirty feet square, with a single squat pillar in the center holding up the four low-slung vaults that converge there and give the place such a hunched, dwarvish feel. After all of this fuss, Daniel’s bemused to find that it is just a dusty old storage-cellar with black lock-boxes strewn about according to no especial plan.

Others follow him in. Some seem to know their way around the place. They converge on certain of the treasure-chests, and there is much more finagling with keys. The last group to sack the place were Cromwell’s men, who shot the locks off the chests and helped themselves to the Coronation regalia. But Cromwell had needed a sound coinage as badly as any King of old, and so he’d had to mend the chests and replace the locks. Daniel is tempted to point this out as he watches hereditary nobles fumbling with the Puritan hard-ware, but he stifles himself.

Three important objects come out from their respective lock-boxes:

(item) A leather case containing Terrible Documents: the counterpanes of the indentures signed by Isaac and other Mint officials. The First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke takes possession of these.

(item) A boxy wooden chest containing standard weights.

(item) A broader and flatter chest containing standard plates: sheets of precious metal of known fineness, produced in the furnaces of the Company of Goldsmiths. It is against these that Isaac’s coins are to be compared.

These three treasures are borne up into the Cloister as if they were royal triplets being trotted out for some fresh air. Long and loud is the clicking of keys and clanging of hasps in their wake. This rite must have been a lot more efficient, Daniel reflects, back in the days when Parliament and the Council both held their deliberations a few paces away in the Chapter House. When the monks booted them out, there must have been some discussion along the lines of “Oh yes, and one of these days we must fetch the Pyx stuff out of the Abbey and store it where it is actually used.” But that was one of those errands that, if not achieved in the first twelve hours, would remain undone centuries later. And, as all of this was shewing, the fetching-out of these three items had long since ossified into a ceremony.

A procession forms up and marches back along the Cloister, into the Transept of the Abbey, and across the Quire. The demolition-crews taking down the galleries in the North Transept seem to sense that something very grave is underway, and shush one another, and clear a path for them; some take their hats off, others stand at attention, holding their crowbars at parade rest. As soon as the last of the parade has gone out the north door, they descend back into joyous mayhem.

The procession right-faces as it clears the door, entering in to a pass between the Abbey and St. Margaret’s Church. Their path toward the River is squarely barred by the gloomy, encrusted hulk of Westminster Hall. To the left or north end of it lie those encrustations belonging to the Exchequer, including the Star Chamber. This is where Sir Isaac Newton’s travail began, back in June. It is where the final settling of accounts is going to take place now, or as soon as Daniel and the others cross the street.

Chapel of Newgate Prison

IT IS A WHOLE new look for the chapel: the black window treatments have been pulled down, and sentenced to a period of confinement, not to exceed one-eighth of a year, in a wooden box where moths will feed upon them. Light is cautiously admitted through the window-grates. The tourists in the back pews are absent. On the altar before the Condemned pew, the coffin has been replaced with a platter of bread and wine. The wine looks as if it’s to be metered out in thimbles, which is an offense to Jack. For if the Church believes, as it plainly does, that a little bit of communion wine is a good thing, then why should not a bucket of it be excellent?

But there’ll be plenty of opportunities to get drunk on the way to Tyburn, and so this is a mere passing flicker of annoyance. He is here to be Churchified. It is the next in the steadily building rite of mortifications and tortures that began with the Bell-Man last night and will culminate, in a few hours, with quartering.

Jack Shaftoe is brought in separately, after the wretches who spent the night in the Condemned Hold have already been frogmarched up the aisle and chained to the awful Pew. He feels like a bride, the last one into the church, the one all heads turn to look at. As well they might! For Jack got up two hours ago, not wanting to waste a single minute of this most special of all days, and has spent the intervening time getting dressed up in his Hanging-Suit.

He does not know whence the Hanging-Suit came. It arrived at dawn, delivered, the turnkey insisted, by a blond man who roared up in an immense black carriage, and did not speak a word.

Several boxes were needed to contain the entire Hanging-Suit. By the time Jack first saw it, they’d all been gone through by the gaolers, to make sure that no shivs, pistols, saws, or Infernal Devices were wrapped up in the finery. So all was in disarray, all blotched with grimy hand-prints. And yet the inherent majesty of the Hanging-Suit was in no way diminished.

The innermost of the Hanging-Suit’s three layers—the part that touches Jack—comprises white drawers of Egyptian cotton, white hose of Turkish silk, and a shirt made from enough fine white Irish linen to keep a company of Foot in tourniquets and bandages through a brief foreign war. And it must be understood that the adjective “white” here means a true, blinding salt-white, and not the dirty beige that passes for white in poorly illuminated textile markets.

The next layer comprises a pair of breeches, a long-skirted waistcoat, and a coat. All of these are in metallic hues. As a matter of fact, Jack’s pretty sure that they are literally made out of metal. The waistcoat seems to be cloth-of-gold. The breeches and coat are silver. All of the buttons are golden, which Jack takes to mean that, like counterfeit guineas, they are lumps of solder, cleverly jacketed in whispers of gold. But when he bites one, it bites back. Only faint impressions are left by his [false] teeth, and he can see no trace of gray in them—no evidence of base metal underlying the gold. These buttons were made by pouring molten metal into a mold, so each one bears the same imprint: a figure too tiny and involved for Jack’s eyes to make it out in the dimness of his Castle apartment.

The third layer—what comes into contact with the dirt of the world—consists of black leather shoes with silver buckles; a cape, purple on the outside, lined with fur, and hemmed and piped and bebuttoned with additional silver and gold; and a white periwig.

The Hanging-Suit is replete with pockets, several of which came pre-loaded with coins, placing Jack in a position to dispense Civility Money to the sundry turnkeys, gaolers, blacksmiths, drivers, and executioners who’ll be handling him during the course of the day. It is extraordinary that those coins were not pilfered and the buttons not ripped off by the gaolers when they inspected the Hanging-Suit; Jack concludes that the Mysterious Personage who brought it to him must have employed not only bribery, but threats of Prosecution and of Physical Violence as well.

On his way up stairs to the chapel here, he has advanced the turnkey a shilling for the following favor:

Upon entering the Chapel, every denizen of Newgate stops in his tracks for a few moments because staggered by a blast of light, a sort of optical fanfare. To be honest, the chapel is just sufficiently illuminated for the Ordinary to read from his hundred-pound Bible. But compared to the rest of Newgate, it’s brilliant.

The Lord’s House gets the best part of the prison, viz. the southeastern corner of the top floor. This means a few windows face the morning sun, and several more take the sun during the day—assuming there is any sun. Today the sky is cloudless. The favor that Jack has requested of the turnkey is simply that he would like to have a few moments to bask in the sun that streams into one of those east-facing windows, at the back of the chapel, before he is led up to the doleful Pew.

The transaction comes off as agreed. Into the southeast corner Jack goes, and stands in a prism of sunlight for a few moments. His eyes are seared by the radiance of his own clothing. He is forced to gaze out the window for a few moments, to give his stiff creaky old pupils time to shrink down to the size of fleas. He is therefore gazing roughly eastwards, down the length of Phoenix Court. Just below him, Phoenix Court makes a sort of intersection with the Straight and Narrow Way that connects Newgate with the Court of Sessions in the Old Bailey. Moving away from the prison, then, it forms the northern boundary of the garden that spreads behind the College of Physicians.

Gazing over the wall from this privileged vantage-point, Jack is just a bit let down to see that the College of Physicians is still standing. Oh, there are columns of smoke rising from its property. But this is not because the Mobb burned it down last night. The smoke issues rather from cook-fires. The garden in the back has been turned into a bivouac for (counting the tents) a company of soldiers. No, strike that, they are (examining the colours) grenadiers. Of soldiers, these are the biggest (in that they are obliged to march around with large numbers of iron bombs strapped to their bodies), stupidest (obviously), and the most dangerous to the Mobility (considering the effect of a grenade lobbed into a crowd). Just the lot you’d want to have camped out in your garden if you were Noble, and expecting a nocturnal visit from the Mobile.

As long as he’s here, Jack takes a moment to fondle one of his golden buttons, and to twist it round for a good look. He notes, first of all, that it’s not attached very firmly: just a few threads hold it in place. But he already knew that from fumbling with it in the dark, back in his apartment. What he really wants is to examine the emblem that is molded into every one of those buttons. Now that he has light, he recognizes it instantly: this is the symbol written by Alchemists to denote quicksilver.

These preliminaries, small as they might seem, put all into a new light—and not just literally—for Jack. He allows himself to be escorted up the aisle, very much like a radiant bride, and very much to the dazzlement of his pew-mates and the dismay of the Ordinary.

The only thing lacking is the bridegroom, one Jack Ketch, who is down in his kitchen putting on his black formal attire and getting ready for the big day. But that part of the ceremony will be conducted later, al fresco, before, give or take a multitude, the entire population of Southeastern England.

The service follows the usual pattern, complete with Old and New Testament readings chosen to fit the occasion. The Ordinary has pre-positioned bookmarks. The Old Testament one is a length of black grosgrain ribbon that takes him into the type of passage whose sole purpose, in a Christian service, is to demonstrate just how much trouble we would all be in, if we were still Jews. Finishing this, the Ordinary grips three inches’ and fifty pounds’ worth of pages and heaves them over, bypassing a lot of zany Prophets and tedious Psalms, and dropping smack dab into the New Testament. A small adjustment then takes him to a page that has been marked with the gaudiest, most whorish bookmark Jack’s ever seen, a fat swath of yellow silk with a gold medallion dangling from the end. The Ordinary pulls this exhibit all the way out of the Book, gripping the golden disk in his hand, and letting the yellow silk dangle before them, and rather deliberately folds it up and slips it into his pocket, all the while keeping a curious eye on Jack.

It occurs to Jack that he is being Sent a Message.

The Ordinary reads. It is not a single continuous selection but a whole series of snippets, for worshippers with short attention spans, and short life expectancies.

“Now about eight days after these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And as he was praying, the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white. Luke 9:28–29.

“As they were going along the road, a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Luke 9:57–58.

“A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. Luke 10:30–34.

“There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom. Luke 16:19–23.”

“I’ll be damned, that Luke was a hell of a scribbler,” says Jack.

The Ordinary pauses and stares at Jack over his half-glasses.

Bribing the Ordinary is nothing new, of course, it is nearly as ancient and hallowed a ritual as celebrating the Eucharist. But the yellow silk, the gold—this is a kind of signature, a way of letting Jack know just who did the bribing.

“Your Reverence, could I trouble you to read the Old Testament passage one more time?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Read it again. Consider it, sir, to be part of those Duties for which you have been already Compensated.”

With great rakings and shovelings of pages, the Ordinary returns to the very beginning of the Tome. The other condemned prisoners shift and mutter; some even rattle their chains. To be hanged by the neck until dead is one thing; but to be forced to listen to a reading from the Old Testament twice, why, that is not only Unusual but Cruel.

“Cain knew his wife,” the Ordinary intones, “and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a City, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch…” There now follows a quarter of an hour of men knowing their wives, and becoming the fathers of other men and living for hundreds and hundreds of years. This was the bit where Jack lost his concentration on the first read-through. And to be perfectly honest he loses it again now, somewhere around the time when Kenan becomes the father of Mahalalel. But he snaps to attention later when the name of Enoch comes up again. “When Enoch had lived sixty-five years, he became the father of Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after the birth of Methuselah three hundred years, and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him. The Book of Genesis, Chapter 5.” And the Ordinary heaves an immense sigh, for he has been reading for a long time, and lo, he thirsteth mightily for the wine on the Lord’s Table, for his throat is as dry as a place in the wilderness without water, amen.

“What the hell does that mean? ‘Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’?”

“Enoch was translated,” the Ordinary says.

“Even an unlettered mudlark like me knows that the Bible was translated from another tongue, your Reverence, but—”

“No, no, no, I don’t mean translated that way. It is a term of theology,” the Ordinary says, “it means that Enoch did not die.”

“Pardon?”

“At the point of death, he was taken away bodily into the afterlife.”

“Bodily?”

“His body, rather than dying, was translated away,” says the Ordinary. “Is it all right with you if we continue now with the service as planned?”

“Carry on, sir,” Jack says. “Carry on.”

New Palace Yard, Westminster

EVEN AS DANIEL’S PROCESSION has been assembling in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey, in other buildings, palaces, and compounds around London other groups have been coalescing in more or less ancient and awesome buildings and converged on Westminster by boat, foot, or gilded carriage, and are now stacked outside of Star Chamber like so many battalions waiting to be summoned onto the Fields of Mars. It is no mean similitude. The Trial of the Pyx is so pompous precisely because it is such a dire and vicious clash. In its rudiments, this is a four-way knife-fight among the Sovereign (here represented by the Lords of the Council and the King’s Remembrancer), the Exchequer (which is playing host to the Trial), the Mint (today, synonymous with Sir Isaac Newton), and a medieval guild called the Company of Goldsmiths. In effect, what they are all here to do is to construct an airtight legal case against Sir Isaac, and find him guilty beyond doubt of Treason, in the form of embezzling from the Royal Mint, so that he may be punished straightaway and with no thought of any appeal. The penalties might range from æternal shame and obloquy on up to loss of the right hand (the traditional fate of fraudulent coiners) or even to the same treatment that Jack Shaftoe is about to receive at Tyburn. The challengers are the Goldsmiths, here represented by a jury of chaps in suitably medieval-looking garb, flashy with cloth-of-gold. They are Prosecutors, Mercenaries, and Inquisitors all rolled in to one. The choice is cunningly made, for the Goldsmiths have a natural and long-standing suspicion of the Mint and its produce, which from time to time flares up to out-and-out hostility. Hostility has been the rule during Sir Isaac’s tenure. Isaac has found ways to reduce the profit that the Goldsmiths reap when they deliver bullion to the Mint to be coined, and they have retaliated by crafting new trial plates of such fineness that Isaac has been hard pressed to mint guineas pure enough. For the Goldsmiths, as well as others in the money trade, such as Mr. Threader, the rewards of bringing down Isaac shall be immense.

The Serjeant at Arms Attending the Great Seal comes out in to the yard and summons Daniel’s contingent. They troop into the Palace and enter presently into Star Chamber. Last time Daniel was in this place, he was tied to a chair and being tortured for sport by Jeffreys. Today the scene’s a bit different. The furniture has been removed or pushed to the walls. In the middle of the chamber, planks have been laid down to protect the floor, and bricks piled atop them to make a platform at about the height of a man’s midsection. Resting atop this is a small furnace, similar to the one in which Daniel melted his ring last night. Someone must have been up tending it since the wee hours, for it’s already heated through, cherry red, and ready to go.

They pass out into a side chamber. Marlborough’s here, seated at the high end of a table along with the Lord Chancellor, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the new First Lord of the Treasury—Roger’s replacement—and other Lords of the Council. Seated in the middle of the table, facing the door, and flanked by clerks and aides, is a chap in a white judicial wig, a three-cornered baron’s hat, and black robes. This, Daniel reckons, would be the King’s Remembrancer: one of the most ancient positions in the Realm. He is the keeper of the Seal that is the sine qua non of the power of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in the King’s name he rides herd on the Exchequer in diverse ways—including presiding over Trials of the Pyx.

Such a Trial cannot even get underway without the necessaries that it has been Daniel’s honor to fetch from the Abbey vault. And so what occurs next, encrusted as it might be with protocol and ceremony, is ever so straightforward: Daniel and the other five Key-holders are summoned to the table. The King’s Remembrancer asks for the Indentures, the Weights, and the Plates. These are handed over, but not before Daniel and the others have sworn on stacks of Bibles that they are the genuine articles. One of the King’s Remembrancer’s Clarkes opens up the chest containing the trial plates. There are two of these, one of silver and one of gold: slabs of metal inscribed with great hairballs of cursive asserting just how fine and just how authentic they are, and pocked here and there with goldsmiths’ seals. The Clarke reads these aloud. Another contingent of blokes is summoned and sworn: these have come from his majesty the King’s Treasury at Westminster, whence they’ve fetched out a little chest, sealed shut with a lump of wax. The seal is that of the Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayor himself is hauled in, at the head of a jury of twelve Citizens, Mr. Threader among them. The Lord Mayor verifies the seal on the chest. It is opened and a die is removed from a velvet bed. The die is compared, by the Mayor and the Citizens, to the stamps on the trial plates, and all agree that the match is perfect. These are indeed the true plates made by the Goldsmiths as a challenge to Sir Isaac Newton; the Trial may proceed.

Similar rites attend the box of weights. This is lined in green velvet, with neat depressions to contain the individual weights: the largest, a full pint or so of brass, marked 500 shillings and much smaller ones for 1 shilling and 4 pence and one pence, &c., &c., and finally a set of ivory-handled tweezers for manipulating the tiniest of them.

“Summon the Goldsmiths,” intones the King’s Remembrancer. To Daniel and his coterie, he says, “You may stand over there,” and waves at an open space in the corner. Daniel leads the group over, and turns around to find the eyes of the Duke of Marlborough on him: a reminder—as if Daniel needed any—that this is it. The new System is facing its first test, and it’s doing so under the most adverse possible circumstances: a sick and possibly demented Alchemist is in charge of the Mint and a Vagabond has tampered with the Pyx and is now going to meet his Maker without having coughed up the evidence they want. And Roger’s no longer around to make it all better.

The Stone Anvil, the High Hall,
Newgate Prison

“I HAVE FOUND GOD!” Jack Shaftoe announces.

“What, here!?” says his interlocutor, a heavy-set chap in a black leather hood.

They are standing in a queue in the High Hall. Or rather Jack Shaftoe is, and the hooded man has come up to him, the better to inspect Jack’s Hanging-Suit.

The High Hall might be a bit of a grand name for it. It is simply the biggest room in the gaol, outside of the Chapel, and so it is where fitness-conscious felons come to toddle around, in an endless ragged procession. The center of their orbit is a block of stone set in the middle of the floor, and equipped with a few basic smithy-tools. Normally they are a wordy bunch, the Hall a hurricanoe of profanity, a Vortex of Execration. Today they are gagged by their own amazement. All stare inwards toward the two most famous Jacks in London: Shaftoe and Ketch, exchanging civilities like Addison and Steele. There is no sound except for the scraping of their chains on the floor, and the organized chants of the Mobb outside.

Then an ear-splitting clang sounds from the stone anvil. Another prisoner has just had his ankle-fetters struck off. The only restraint upon him now is a length of cord with which Ketch has lately bound his elbows together behind his back.

“The communion-bread, you know, is in the shape of coins,” Shaftoe remarks.

Then he thinks better of it, for Ketch thinks it’s funny, and forgets himself, and exposes his empty tooth-sockets, as well as a few that are soon to be empty. For the hood unfortunately stops at the level of his nose. Somewhere, Ketch must have a whole foot-locker filled with false teeth, as no man in London is in a better position to collect them; but he has not worn any today.

“But how richer a treasure are those coins of bread, than ones of gold!” Shaftoe exclaims. “For gold and silver may buy admission to a Clubb, or other place of debauchery. But coins of bread have bought me admission to the Kingdom of Heaven. Assuming I can manage a few things in the next couple of hours.”

Ketch has utterly lost interest. How many times has he heard this identical speech from a client? He excuses himself very civilly, jumps to the head of the queue, and devotes a few moments to pinioning the next prisoner’s elbows with another length of cord.

When Ketch comes back, it is evident he has been thinking about Jack’s Hanging-Suit. “After this,” he remarks, “it will not be possible for you to change clothes.”

“Oh, you are a subtile one, Jack Ketch!” Shaftoe remarks.

“It is just that—according to some who style themselves in the know—you are destitute.”

“You think I borrowed this suit!? Fie on all such gossip-mongers, Mr. Ketch, you know better than to pay heed to them. This suit is every bit as much my own property, as that handsome hood is yours.”

Another clang. Ketch excuses himself again and binds up the bloke who’s directly in front of Jack. While he is doing so, he sniffles once or twice, juicily, as if the air in the High Hall does not agree with him. But of all men in London, Ketch must be the least sensitive to miasmas, damps, and vapours.

When Ketch turns back round, Shaftoe’s startled, and even a bit alarmed, to see, below the fringe of the hood, a teardrop trickling down his cheek. Ketch steps close to Shaftoe, close enough that Shaftoe, craning his neck (for Ketch is a head taller) can resolve individual cavities in Ketch’s last remaining incisor. “You can’t imagine what this means to me, Mr. Shaftoe.”

“No, I cannot, Mr. Ketch. What does it mean to you?”

“I’m in debt, Mr. Shaftoe, deep in debt.”

“You don’t say!”

“My Betty—the missus—can’t stop having little ones. Every year for the last eight.”

“You have eight little Ketches? How remarkable, that a man in your line of work should be such a fount of new life.”

“After the last hanging, one of my creditors tried to arrest me in the street! I’ve never been so ashamed.”

“Indeed! For a man in such a respectable profession, to be accosted in a public place, and accused of indebtedness, that is a grave humiliation!”

“What would my boys think of me if I wound up here, in Newgate?”

“You have wound up here in Newgate, Mr. Ketch. But never mind, I take your meaning.”

“They’d have to come and live with me. Here.”

“It is not the best environment for raising small children,” Shaftoe allowed.

“That’s why—excuse me—” Ketch steps behind Shaftoe, draws out another length of cord, and strings it between the latter’s elbows. Ketch makes a sliding knot, and begins to draw it tighter, bringing Shaftoe’s elbows closer together—but only a bit.

“It would be a shame to wrinkle the Hanging-Suit,” Shaftoe remarks.

“A great shame, Mr. Shaftoe, but more important to me is your comfort.”

Shaftoe smiles in spite of himself at this polite evasion. And with that smile on his face, he steps forward, raises a knee, and places one immaculate polished shoe on the stone anvil. “Do have a care with that hammer, my good man,” he says to the smith—a pox-ravaged prisoner who looks like he has been in Newgate since the Fire. “These clothes mean nothing to me, but they will soon be inherited by my good friend Mr. Ketch here. For he is not only my friend, and my sole heir, but the executor of my will. By the immemorial traditions of this Realm, all that I wear upon my person, and the contents of its pockets, are his at the moment of my expiration. In those pockets reside several coins of diverse denominations. If you go about your work soberly, and leave my shoes unmarked, Mr. Ketch may choose to reach into one of my pockets and fish out a rather large coin for your Civility Money; but if you ruin them, Mr. Ketch may have to recoup his losses by giving you nothing.”

In consequence of this, the smith spends more time getting Jack’s chains off than all the other condemnees put together. But get them off he does, and for his pains receives a handsome shilling from Shaftoe’s pocket and Ketch’s hand.

The Trial of the Pyx

NO TWO TRIALS of the Pyx are the same. Details vary depending on whose ox is being gored at the time, and who’s goring it. Anciently the Mayor and Citizens of London would stand by and witness the whole rite, which was the most reasonable thing in the world given that the City men had a greater stake in the soundness of the coinage than anyone else. It made for some crowded and riotous Trials, and so at some point a jury of twelve respected City men came to stand in for the whole Citizenry. They would take a hand in those parts of the Trial that did not require any special Guild expertise, and observe the Jury of Goldsmiths carrying out those that did, and when the assayers had rendered their verdict, they would go out into London and relate the good or bad news to their fellow-Citizens.

In recent centuries the presence of the City men has slowly dwindled, to the point where Sir Isaac Newton has felt moved to complain that Trials of the Pyx have become a shadowy rite conducted by a cabal or conspiracy of Goldsmiths, unobserved and unaccountable. It is safe to say the Goldsmiths are no more pleased by these remarks than by anything else Isaac has done during his tenure at the Mint. Still and all, the entire point of the exercise is to prove Isaac a traitorous fraud, and, if at all possible, to see his hand chopped off in New Palace Yard. All of which is less likely to come to pass if Isaac can make a credible case that the Trial is rigged by a shadowy Guild. So for today’s Trial the pendulum has swung back as far as it can without inviting the whole City. It is a full-dress, dual-Jury affair. The City’s represented not only by the Lord Mayor but also by a full jury of twelve Citizens, separate from and independent of the jury of Goldsmiths. And they’ll not just watch but—mostly through their chosen delegate, Mr. Threader—participate. Only after these dozen Citizens have been recognized and sworn and shunted off to their own corner is it time for the Principals to be brought in and the Trial to begin in earnest.

The King’s Remembrancer asks for the Pyx. Out goes the Serjeant at Arms. A minute later he’s back with the Earl of Lostwithiel in tow, and behind Lostwithiel are four more King’s Messengers carrying a palanquin on which rests the Pyx. This is set down before the table, and Lostwithiel avers that it really is the Pyx and that he fetched it in good order straight from the Tower, and no monkey business along the way.

The King’s Remembrancer then asks the Serjeant to summon the second Jury: that of the Goldsmiths. A minute later, the Twelve troop in, all a-gleam, and line up before him. They cannot take their eyes off the Pyx, at least not until the King’s Remembrancer speaks, as follows: “Do you swear that you shall well and truly, after your knowledge and discretion, make the assays of the monies of gold and silver that have been reposited in the Pyx, and truly report if the said monies be in weight and fineness according to the King’s standards of his Treasury, and also if the same monies be sufficient in allay, et cetera, according to the Covenant comprised in the Indenture thereof made between the King’s grace and the Master of his Mint, so help you God?”

“We do,” say the Jury of Goldsmiths.

Satisfied of that, the King’s Remembrancer asks for the Master of the Mint: the man, and the moment, everyone has been waiting for. All bodies and heads and eyes turn to follow the Serjeant out of the room, then remain motionless as his boot-steps recede through Star Chamber and the gallery beyond.

They wait, and wait, and wait, until every man jack in the room is quite certain that it really is taking longer than it ought to—much longer—something must be out of joint. A member of the City jury can be heard mumbling some kind of witticism. One of the goldsmiths says clearly, “Perhaps he’s at the hanging!” and another responds, “Perhaps he’s run off to France!” whereupon he is furiously shushed by no less than the Duke of Marlborough.

When all of that noise and bother die down, it is finally possible to hear people approaching Star Chamber—rather more people than the King’s Remembrancer asked for. The entourage, if that’s what it is, bates outside. The Serjeant comes in. On his arm is a young woman. They cross the floor of Star Chamber; her head turns to gaze curiously at the assayer’s furnace, whose red light shines on her, so that Daniel recognizes her as Catherine Barton.

She comes in to the chamber and is heralded by the Serjeant. Great is her fame, of course, and so the amount of ogling that now takes place is beyond all boundaries of dignity. It almost would have been better if she had showed up stark naked. “My lords,” she says, for with so many dignitaries in the room she daren’t speculate as to who is in charge, “Sir Isaac Newton is ill. I have sat by his bed this last week and I beseeched him not to answer your summons. He would not heed me, but gave orders that he was to be brought here this morning no matter what. He is very weak, and so, if it please my lords, I have arranged to bring him here in his sedan chair. With your permission, I’ll have him brought in thusly.”

“As his nurse, Miss Barton, is it your opinion that he is fit to understand what is going on around him, and to be tried?” asks the King’s Remembrancer.

“Oh, yes. He knows,” Miss Barton insists, “however, because he is so very weak, he requests that Dr. Daniel Waterhouse act as his spokesman.” And, having now fixed on the King’s Remembrancer as the boss, she steps forward and hands him a letter, presumably written in Isaac’s hand, saying as much.

Generally not one to seize the moment, Daniel acts all out of character now by striding in to the middle of the room while most eyes are still trying to pick him out in the crowd. “If Sir Isaac’s proposal is acceptable to my lords, then I shall be honoured to serve as his hand and voice.”

There is a certain amount of looking back and forth now, but this does not alter what is inside the Pyx, or what is written on the indenture, and so in the end it does not really matter. Suddenly, important heads are nodding all around the room. “It is so ordered,” says the King’s Remembrancer, not before reading the letter through twice. “You have the gratitude of the Council, Dr. Waterhouse. Er, shall we have Sir Isaac’s chair brought in, then?”

“There is no precedent for this, and so pray allow me to suggest one,” Daniel says. “We are soon to move in to the Star Chamber for the Assay, are we not? Then rather than move Sir Isaac twice, I suggest we make him comfortable straightaway in Star Chamber. He can hear the indenture being read from there.”

“So ordered!”

Miss Barton curtseys her way out and flits across Star Chamber, calling to Daniel with her eyes. Daniel excuses himself and backs out. Heads lean in and faces turn to line the doorway. Daniel is confronted by the black obelisk of Isaac’s sedan chair, suspended between two astonished-looking porters. Miss Barton is hissing directions: “In the corner! The corner! No, that one!” There is some almost comical turning about, but finally they understand what she wants: for the sedan’s door to face toward a corner of Star Chamber so that when the door is open Isaac, in his pitiful state, won’t be visible to the entire Chamber. Finally they get it set down the way she wants it. Daniel side-steps through a narrow gap between pole and wall, and backs in to the corner. He glances up one time to see all of those faces in the next room peering through the doorway at him. Then he undoes the latch on the sedan chair’s door and opens it. The first thing he sees is a hand, pale and still, gripping an ornate key. He opens the door farther, letting light shine in so that he can see Isaac sprawled against the wall of his black box, eyes open and mouth a-gape, perfectly still. Daniel need not check his pulse to be certain that what he is looking at, here, is the recently deceased corpse of Sir Isaac Newton, dead at age seventy-one of Newgate gaol-fever.

The Press-Yard, Newgate Prison

TEN MINUTES LATER they are down in the Press-Yard, just off Phoenix Court. It is called a Yard but is really nothing more than a fortified alley. A short caravan is drawn up there, waiting to convey them all to Tyburn: a wagon containing various tools of Mr. Ketch’s trade; a spacious open cart, already loaded with empty coffins; and, drawing up the rear, a sledge. The cart is for most of the condemnees, for Ketch, and for the Ordinary. The sledge is reserved for Shaftoe, it being the tradition that a traitor be dragged to his death facing backwards. Mere hanging is too good for such a vile person, wheels are too nice.

As the condemnees progress from each stage to the next, their entourage grows. Here in the Press-Yard there must be two score men, mostly gaolers with cudgels, but a few constables as well. Jack’s beginning to see blunderbusses. A sort of corridor is formed, tending to funnel them straight to the big cart. The other prisoners clamber up and sit down, using coffin-lids as benches. Jack is directed to his wheelless land-barge, which has a plank to sit on, but no coffin; by the end of the day, a coffin, or indeed any other container, will be quite wasted on him.

Mr. Ketch, who is nothing if not organized, opens one of the several lockers on his supply-wagon, and pulls out several lengths of rope. Each of them has a hangman’s noose in one end. He tosses all but one of them into the big cart, then circles around to the rear where he addresses Jack.

“It’s a fine one, eh?” he exclaims, holding up the noose.

“If you were not wearing a black hood you’d be glowing with pride, Mr. Ketch. But I do not know why.”

“This rope I got from a pirate-captain I hanged last year.”

“He supplied his own rope?”

“Indeed. A hawser, he called it. Look at the thickness of it.”

“He wanted to be sure the rope would not break? That seems very odd to me.”

“No, no, I’ll show you!” And Ketch steps round to Shaftoe’s left side and fits the noose over the latter’s head. The rope is so thick and stiff, the noose so tight, that it can barely close around Shaftoe’s throat. But the knot lodges under his left ear like a great bony fist. “Feel that leverage—now you’ll take my meaning, sir!” Ketch says, pulling up once or twice on the loose end of the rope. Each time he does, the knot, bearing on the heel of Shaftoe’s skull, crowbars his entire head forward and to one side. “And look at the length of it!” Shaftoe turns to see that Ketch has retreated to a distance of some two fathoms, but still has not run out of rope. “With this I can give you a drop such as few men are afforded, Mr. Shaftoe, very few. By the time you get to the end of this rope you’ll be moving as fast as a cannonball. You’ll be smoking a pipe in Heaven long before I chop off your testicles and shovel your guts out; and the quartering will mean as little to you, as coffin-worms to a dead bishop.”

“You are a princely fellow, Mr. Ketch, and Betty is fortunate to have you.”

“Mr. Shaftoe,” says Jack Ketch in a lower voice, stepping up very close to him now, and absent-mindedly wrapping the loose rope into a neat coil, “I shan’t have leisure to exchange words with you again, until we are standing beneath the Tree. For I’ve other prisoners to tend to, as you can see, and the journey to Tyburn promises to be, er…”

“Festive?”

“I was going to say ‘eventful,’ not wanting to show disrespect. I’ll be in the cart. We shall not be able to hear each other. Since you’re facing backwards, we shall not be able to see each other. Even when we are face to face beneath the Tree, the noise will be such that we’ll not be able to exchange a word, though we scream in each other’s ears. So I say to you now, sir, thank you! Thank you! And know that you shall feel less pain today than a man who bangs his head on a door-frame in a dark room.”

“In the way of pain, I ask for nothing more nor less than what I deserve,” says Shaftoe, “and I shall entrust you, Mr. Ketch, with that determination.”

“And I shall prove worthy of that trust sir! Farewell!” says Jack Ketch. He turns his back on Shaftoe as if he’s afraid he might cry again. He straightens his back, works on his composure, smooths down his hood, and steps up into the cart, where he has other clients waiting.

Star Chamber

THE NEXT TIME Daniel has his wits about him, the King’s Remembrancer is reading some document aloud, declaiming in the hoarse lope of one who has been reading for quite a long while. Daniel looks through the doorway to see the King’s Remembrancer peering through half-glasses at a generously sized parchment with a zigzag edge: one of the counterpanes of an indenture. This would be the contract that Isaac signed when he became Master of the Mint. It is one of the treasures that Daniel fetched out of the Abbey vault. What it says is that Isaac accepts sole personal responsibility for whatever is about to be found in the Pyx. It probably seemed like a lot of dry legal gibberish when Isaac signed it, but as the words resound through Star Chamber in the hearing of all the most important men in the Realm, it strikes him as so very grave and formidable as to make Isaac almost lucky to be dead. Daniel notes that he is the object of curious scrutiny by several of those men, and so he fixes his gaze on Isaac’s dead face, smiles, nods, and makes a sotto voce remark as if chatting with the sick man.

The Indenture draws to a thunderous end with invocations of God and of the Sovereign, and then the King’s Remembrancer looks up and demands the three keys of the Pyx.

In taking Isaac’s key out of his hand, Daniel notes that rigor mortis has not set in yet. He can’t have been dead for long.

The other Key-holders of the Pyx have already undone their respective locks by the time Daniel gets in there. Only one lock remains: a beauty, made to look like the front of the Temple of Solomon. Daniel gets it open and flips the hasp out of the way. Two members of the City jury step up and raise the lid of the Pyx. The cervical vertebrae of the Great and the Good pop and creak all round as they vie to see what’s in it: a pile of wee leather packets, called Sinthias, each labeled with a month and a year.

“Very well,” says the King’s Remembrancer, “the Jurors may withdraw to Star Chamber to conduct the Assay.”

While the Jurors are still mumbling and shuffling, Daniel strides out, key in hand, and makes for the sedan chair. Miss Barton has taken up a position in front of it, facing into the room, as if to block any well-wishers—or ill-wishers, for that matter—from trying to get close to her uncle. She’s a bit red around the eyes, but when Daniel comes up to place a steadying hand on her shoulder, she feels solid and strong beneath the sleeve of her frock, and after a moment she shrugs him off and directs him toward the corner with a flick of her eyes. Many a London man-about-town has dreamed of receiving a come-hither look from those lovely Orbs, but Daniel will have to settle for what he’s just been given: a go-thither look. “He said,” she says, “that you would know what to do.”

So he goes into the corner, opens the door again, and verifies that Isaac’s still dead (which might seem a safe enough thing to assume; but with Isaac, you never know). He leans his head and shoulders into the box now, and checks under Isaac’s armpit: still tepid. Looking up, he has a full view of the back of Catherine Barton’s bodice and all of Star Chamber beyond. The black screen darkens everything somewhat, but his eyes soon enough adjust. No one, of course, can see him or Isaac.

On a large table next to the furnace, the City jurors dump out the contents of the Pyx. Sinthias gush out and mound up. A few roll to the floor and are chased down and snatched back. The Pyx is set upright, open, and empty, on the floor. The twenty-four Jurors—Goldsmiths and Citizens working all together, for the nonce—go through the heap, reading the label on each Sinthia, and divide them into two piles: one containing silver coins—shillings, sixpence, and various other penny denominations—and the other gold: guineas, and the odd five-guinea piece. Daniel notes that Mr. Theader has established a commanding position at the end of the table where the gold coins are being piled. Before him is a great two-pan scale. He is wielding a jack-knife, making quick work of the Sinthias, cutting the Yellow Boys out of their leathern straitjackets and stacking them on the table. From time to time he will cup one in his hand and toss it: as always, Daniel cannot make out whether this is a mere nervous tic, or a studied effort to judge its weight.

As the Trial of the Pyx seems well in hand, Daniel turns his attention to matters inside the sedan chair.

He said you would know what to do. Well, yes and no.

Daniel has studied a document, written in Hooke’s hand, asserting that a patient (who happened to be one Daniel Waterhouse, but that is neither here nor there) died, and was brought back to life by a coction brewed up by an Alchemist. Hooke set down the receipt as best as he could from memory. Later Isaac went through and studied this, as only Isaac could study a thing, and made any number of annotations to it, all in the mythology-ridden argot and the queer symbology of the Esoteric Brotherhood. Daniel knows more than he’d like to of such things, from having spent so much of his young life around such people, and he’s had a few days to go over Hooke’s receipt and Newton’s commentary and puzzle out what they mean. Isaac has made several attempts in recent weeks to carry out all of the steps in the procedure save the last, and so all of the necessary crucibles, retorts, &c. were lying out in plain sight on his laboratory-table when Daniel began work a couple of days ago, and all of the ingredients were there, too. All, that is, except for the last and most crucial.

Out of his pocket Daniel now takes the small wooden chest. He sets it on Isaac’s lap and opens it. The contents are a stoppered glass flask containing a red liquid, and a paper packet, like a wee Sinthia no bigger than Daniel’s fingernail. Daniel unfolds this with great care to expose a small quantity of gold dust. This is what remains of the ring that Solomon Kohan gave him, which Daniel melted last night to make a counterfeit guinea. Half of that guinea was snipped up into tiny shards that ought to be up Mr. Threader’s sleeve just now. The rest of it Daniel tediously rubbed against a file until it was all gone, and collected the dust of it into this paper packet. The particles are so fine that one needs a microscope to view them; this ought to mean that their superficies are enormous, and easily penetrable by any surrounding menstruum. Right now that happens to be air, and not much seems to be happening. But it is time to carry out the last step, which is to place them in a very different menstruum, altogether more reactive. Daniel picks up the phial of scarlet fluid and thumbs the cork out of it, then, practically in the same motion, pours the dust of the Solomonic Gold into the fluid. He replaces the cork and, holding the flask between his palms, clamps the stopper in place with both thumbs and gives it a shake.

A red-orange glow suffuses the interior of the sedan chair. Daniel perceives that it is light shining through the flesh of his hands. But there is no warmth: this is like kaltes feuer, the cold fire of Phosphorus.

He stuffs the phial under the flap of Isaac’s coat so that the unearthly light won’t shine through the window of the sedan chair, then risks taking the cork off. It is like staring into the swirling and lambent clouds of a thunderstorm. A scent reaches his nostrils, which he cannot identify, but he knows he’s smelled it before, and it brings a powerful urge to lift this draught to his lips and drink it down. He masters this, and considers how to get it into Isaac. It is to be administered orally, he knows that. But how does one get a dead man to drink? Hooke’s notes said something about a spatula. Tilting the vial, Daniel observes that the magma is thick, like porridge—it is congealing. If he waits much longer, he fears, it will be solid and unusable. Daniel grabs the only spatulate object near to hand: the key to Isaac’s padlock. Using this as a spoon, he digs out a gob of the bright stuff as big as the last joint of his little finger, and introduces it to Isaac’s mouth, flips it upside-down, and wipes it off on Isaac’s tongue.

He looks out the window, fearful that someone will have noticed the light. But all eyes are on a grave rite being conducted by Mr. Threader: a pile of guineas has been placed on one pan of his great Barock scale, and on the opposite pan, one of the standard weights from the Abbey vault.

He spoons out another gob. Half of the stuff is now gone from the phial. It continues to congeal, but it is still manageable. It has the useful property of adhering to itself more than to anything else, somewhat like mercury; it leaves no wetness, no residue on the inside of the phial or on the key. The final spoonful seems to take with it every last trace of the stuff, and the key emerges from Isaac’s mouth clean. Daniel notes that the glow has vanished, and now for the first time risks bringing his trembling hand to Isaac’s mouth and pulling his jaw down so that he can inspect the inside of the mouth. He is shocked to find that all of the stuff is gone, as if it had never existed. It has diffused into Isaac’s flesh: the vegetative spirit, if that’s what it really is, pervading the inert matter of the corpse.

“I find that these coins are satisfactory for weight,” Mr. Threader announces, “and so I propose that we now prevail upon our good friends, the Company of Goldsmiths, to assay the metal for fineness.” As Mr. Threader says this, he glances toward Daniel.

“The Company of Goldsmiths stands ready to conduct the assay,” announces the eldest of that jury. “We have nominated Mr. William Ham as Fusour.”

William steps forward and addresses Mr. Threader. “I shall require a fair sample of the metal having an aggregate weight of twelve grains, if you please, sir.”

“It is my honour to have been nominated Pesour by the Jury of Citizens,” says Mr. Threader agreeably. “I propose to give you your twelve grains by cutting small amounts from several coins, as is the established practice.”

“The Company of Goldsmiths assents,” says the Fusour.

“Then let the guineas from the Sinthias be mixed that a fair sample may be drawn,” says the Pesour.

With that, all the stacks of guineas piled on the table are swept off, in a clashing golden avalanche, into the Pyx. Watched intently by twenty-three other jurors—and now by Daniel, who has withdrawn from the sedan chair, and come over to observe—one of the Citizens stirs through the guineas with his hand, mixing them thoroughly. When that has gone on for long enough, he averts his gaze, displays an empty hand to the room, thrusts it into the middle of the Pyx, and pulls out a single guinea, which he places on the table before the Pesour.

Each of the other eleven City men does the same. A dozen guineas, chosen at random, are now lined up on the table before Mr. Threader.

Church of St. Sepulchre

All good people, pray heartily unto God for these poor Sinners, who are now going to their Death, for whom this great Bell doth toll. You that are condemned to die, repent with lamentable Tears; ask Mercy of the Lord for the Salvation of your souls through the Merits, Death, and Passion of Jesus Christ, who now sits on the right Hand of God, to make intercession for as many of you as penitently return unto Him. Lord have Mercy upon you! Christ have Mercy upon you!

—THE BELL-MAN OF ST. SEPULCHRE’S

WHEN THEY DRAG HIM OUT of the Press-Yard he’s startled to see that they’ve actually dropped the portcullis, severing Newgate Street intra muros from Holborn extra. He can hear a seething Mobb on the other side of it, but not see them, as a squadron of mounted soldiers is drawn up on the near side of the mighty Grate, forming up as if to mount a sally.

Presently, his private ceremonial sledge slews itself round in the street so that he is facing abaft, which means gazing down Newgate toward the heart of old London Town. This ought to provide him a more or less straight view down Newgate and Cheapside all the way to the ’Change, miles away; but instead all he sees is more soldiers. Squadrons are issuing from Phoenix Court on the right, and the grounds of Christ’s Hospital on the left, and forming up in the wide part of the street behind him. This is unusual.

The air feels heavy, pushing in queerly on his skull. Because of the crowd-noise it is difficult to discern why, at first; then he recollects that every bell in London is ringing, muffled, to announce the Hanging-March.

The first leg of the three-mile journey encompasses somewhat less than a hundred yards, that being the distance from the portcullis of Newgate to the Church-Yard of St. Sepulchre’s. It only takes them about twenty minutes, which makes Jack phant’sy this isn’t going to be so very difficult as popular legend would have one believe. He remembers these things as being a good deal bigger and rowdier. But then he hasn’t attended one since before the Plague, and everything seemed larger through a child’s eyes.

Still and all, he has plenty of time to rid himself of the cord that Jack Ketch used to link his elbows. Being loose to begin with, it scrapes off easily on the rough planks of the sledge. He’s about to toss it away into the crowd when he gets to looking at it, and thinks it might have other uses. Jack—who’s lived on ships, and knows his knotwork—has a bowline in the end of it before the Mobb can chant “Jack Shaftoe!” and slips this over the toe of his shoe. It catches on the heel, and makes a kind of stirrup. With a few undignified gestures he is able to thread it up his leg, beneath his breeches. Then, reaching down his front, he pulls it up under his shirt so that it emerges from his collar, just at the base of his throat. And now his seamanship once again comes into play as he whips that cord round the noose a few times, and makes it fast.

Though he can’t see forward, he knows they are before St. Sepulchre’s, because its muffled bell has become very loud, and is now reinforced by a familiar but unwelcome clang. The Bell-Man once again has added his monotonous note. He is reinforced by the Vicar of that church and diverse acolytes and hangers-on. Most of these, Jack peevishly suspects, only agreed to this duty so that they could get excellent front-row seats to the Hanging-March.

Some sort of ritual—completely inaudible to Jack, who is half-deaf in the best of circumstances—plays out on the steps of the church. It is for his benefit, he knows. He is ready to give the Bell-Man another round of abuse. But he bates. Tiresome though these people are, they have his best interests at heart, and some of the lesser criminals up on the cart might derive comfort from this.

The general idea, here, is that back in the old days, when St. Sepulchre’s sat outside the City Gate on the Edge of Nowhere, this was the last church that any Tyburn-bound prisoner would ever see, and hence marked his absolutely final opportunity to repent. This being the London of today, they’ll pass any number of Wren-churches between here and the Fatal Tree. But tradition is tradition. And so the Church of England gets a few points for sheer persistence.

The rite, whatever it is, doesn’t last long, and then the church-folk come out with little nosegays for the prisoners, and cups of wine. Jack accepts both with good grace, reaching deep into his pockets for Civility Money. This gesture is noted by the crowd and garners a roar of approval, which comes to Jack’s ears as a great sea tearing into a pebbly beach a mile away. And so Jack beckons the Bell-Man over and gives him a whole guinea for his pains—though not before biting down on it. This jest elicits laughs even from the soldiers. Finally, since this is going over so well, he gets the Vicar to descend the steps, and hands over another guinea—his last—for the poor-box, and shakes his hand. And nearly jerks the poor fellow’s arm out of its socket, as the sledge has started up again. This thanks to Ketch, who has not failed to notice Shaftoe’s guineas—which is to say, Ketch’s guineas—disappearing into the undeserving hands of Church-men! Ketch gets the caravan moving double-time, as if they were being menaced from the rear by a Horde of Mongols. Not until they are well clear of the danger, and moving along at a good steady clip, does Ketch turn his attention back to Shaftoe. His mouth is half-open. His rotting jaw is slack. What on earth were you thinking!? he seems to say, I could have fed my family for a year on what you just gave away!

Thus is Jack jerked away from St. Sepulchre’s behind without even having had time to think about repentance—which was supposed to have been the entire point of stopping there. Either he has already repented, back in Newgate Chapel this morning, or else he never will.

But, in all seriousness, he thinks he might have repented. Something happened there, in truth. A sort of portcullis clanged down, severing the long, bad part of his life from a shorter and better part of it. It is all bound up, somehow, with that procedure of eating the coin of bread. But there is a powerful point to that rite, and he reckons it has something to do with a joining together, a sharing with everyone else who’s ever accepted payment in that coinage, God’s Legal Tender. In sum, Jack feels strangely one with all of Christendom this morning—which is not by any means a familiar way for him to feel—and Christendom seems to reciprocate those tender feelings, for all of it has turned out to see him off.

Now at last he begins to comprehend the immensity and power of the Mobb. Until this point he has seen it at a remove, like a man watching a play. Now there is a reversal. Jack is the poor player having his hour on the stage, and the audience is all of London. Or since so many appear to have come in from out of town, let’s just call it all of the Universe. They react to his merest gesture. They even react to things he hasn’t actually done. Seams of laughter rip through the crowd in response to jests he is rumored to have uttered. Not one person in an hundred even knows of his own knowledge that Jack is here, because most of them (as Jack recollects from having been a part of such Mobbs) can only see others’ backs. They have been drawn here by the legend that Jack Shaftoe will be drawn to Tyburn on a sledge, and having come, and being unable to see him, they get by on the suspicion that he is out there somewhere. Jack Ketch—still stung and dismayed by the loss of those two guineas—is without a doubt the foremost member of the audience, viewing Jack’s performance from, as it were, his own private box-on-wheels.

Jack guesses that every constable, beadle, bailiff, watchman, and gaoler in London is included in the entourage. Even for a normal Hanging-Day this does not suffice to hold back the crowd, and so there are always soldiers with half-pikes. But today there are these mounted squadrons as well. Jack had supposed at first that they were cavalry, but quickly knew from their colors that they were actually the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards—no less than the terrible Dragoons who keep the Tower. Awfully nice of them to come out for his execution considering all of the trouble he has put them to in recent months. ’Tis a splendid gesture, and probably a calculated one. Of all His Majesty’s regiments, none would be more avid to witness his death, none less likely to allow him to slip away. And so all that Jack sees of the Mobb, he sees by peering, through his low, sledge-back vantage-point, between the scissoring legs of the Dragoons’ mounts. But he sees plenty.

The King’s Own Black Torrent Guards have blundered into a sort of pincer now, and allowed themselves to be enveloped. For to the north of St. Sepulchre’s is Smithfield, a largish open space, site of the cattle market, and used for occasional burnings at the stake.* The two great streets that curve down from Smithfield are Gilt-Spur, which they’ve already passed, and Cow-Lane, which is ahead. Smithfield, it is now obvious, has served as an immense gathering-place and holding-pen for hanging-watchers; for at least the past day, and probably longer, revelers have congregated there to hurl spent gin-bottles into howling bonfires. The ringing of the church-bells has served as their signal, and now they are flooding down Gilt-Spur Street and Cow-Lane. This puts a million of them in front of the procession and a million behind.

Cow-Lane joins Holborn near the eastern end of the bridge that Hooke threw over Fleet Ditch some years ago. This is therefore a strategic intersection. If the procession were somehow blocked there by the Mobb, it would have no way of getting across the streaming shit-flume of the Fleet, it would be bottled up, unable to reach the killing-ground. Jack can’t see it, but he knows they’re headed that way, because the earth is tilting beneath the sledge, causing him to recline ever so gently. They are descending Snow Hill. The whole parade should grind to a halt at any moment. But to his surprise they make the turn at the base of the hill without delay, and cross onto the pavers of the bridge. They are halfway across the Fleet Ditch before Jack perceives why: a company of artillery has established a bridgehead there, and set up several cannons, presumably loaded with grapeshot and chains, pointed up Cow-Lane towards Smithfield. A few yards farther along is another battery aimed south along the stony brink of the Ditch, holding back a hundred thousand or so who have formed up there. The Mobb is thus obliged to watch his passage from a remove. Jack stands up in his sledge and waves an arm. Ten thousand people surge to glimpse the great event. It is difficult to guess how many are crushed; but at least a hundred of them are projected over the kerb into the Ditch. Jack sits down, not wishing to be responsible for any more such mayhem. Another score of spectators tumble into the Fleet.

Star Chamber

TWELVE GRAINS IS A FORTIETH of an ounce; and gold being the densest thing in the world, a fortieth of an ounce is smaller than a pea. Yet such is the precision of the Goldsmiths’ techniques that they can conduct a reliable assay with so tiny a sample. To take the twelve grains from a single coin would defeat the purpose of the whole undertaking, for such a test might be queered by a freak of chance: a meaningless surplus or deficit of gold in one particular coin. Hence the mixing and sampling that has led to Mr. Threader’s having a dozen guineas set out on the cloth before him. He has come armed with a pair of mighty long-handled snips. He stands up for better leverage, and in short order has cut each of the dozen guineas into halves. He then works his way down the row of twenty-four half-guineas, snipping off their sharp corners. There ought to be forty-eight of these. They are so tiny that they appear to Daniel as points of fire on Threader’s black velvet cloth, echoing the stars painted on the ceiling of this chamber. Like a mad demiurge, Mr. Threader creates a little cosmos crowded with half-moons and strewn stars. He then begins to impose Order on his own Chaos, picking up the halved guineas and setting them to one side, while herding the stars into a globular cluster in the middle. It seems that his old fingers have difficulty picking up the wee bits, for he raises his hand to his mouth once or twice and licks his fingertips, like a scholar who is having difficulty getting traction on a page. Everyone is watching this closely, though Daniel’s mind is a bit distracted still because of that business with Isaac. He turns his head thataway, and notes that the Lord Privy Seal has ventured out of the side chamber where he and all of the great big-wigs are supposed to be awaiting the verdict of the Jury. His lordship has got it into his head that he is going to say hello to Sir Isaac, and turns that way purposefully. But Catherine has read his mind, has tracked his doddering progress, giving him the evil eye the whole way. He’s too blind or careless to notice. She steps into his path. Daniel averts his gaze, not wishing to see the Catastrophe of Manners that’s in the offing.

“Pray, my lord, do not, I beg you,” cries Catherine Barton from the corner of the room. All heads turn that way except for that of Daniel, who is just turning round the other way.

Mr. Threader glances up over his half-glasses, reaches down, and puts the tip of his long finger on a star. When he withdraws his hand, it’s gone—the star has been snuffed out. But another one tumbles to the cloth in its place. This he seizes between thumb and index finger, picks up, and drops upon the little mound that he’s making in the middle. He brings his fingertips to his mouth again to lick them, and Daniel sees a fleck of gold come away on the tip of his tongue and disappear, he supposes, right down Mr. Threader’s epiglottis. Then Mr. Threader rubs his hands together as if they’re chilly—which they probably are. He favors Daniel with a wink.

The crisis in the corner has been sorted out somehow; heads are turning back toward the Pesour. He stands there motionless, hands at his sides, as if he has not moved a muscle during this little contretemps. “Sir Isaac is grown so reclusive of late, one can’t but wonder what it is he’s trying to hide from us!” Mr. Threader remarks, in a clearly audible aside to one of the Goldsmiths. “I daresay all his secrets shall be discovered in a few minutes’ time; he can hide from Lord Privy Seal but not from this.” Nodding at the furnace.

Daniel is by and large a great stifler of urges and hider of feelings; but he knows that this is a cue. “You dog!” he exclaims, and takes half a step forward, reaching around himself, groping for the ridiculous sword he’s hung on himself for the occasion, and half yanking it from its scabbard. In that moment every face in the room turns toward him. Mr. Threader snuffs out another star, lets another one fall from between his fingers, and reloads.

“Dr. Waterhouse,” he says, mumbling a bit, probably because he is in the act of swallowing a bit of a guinea, “my old friend! Are you feeling quite all right?”

“I am no friend of yours, sir!” Daniel cries, and makes to draw the sword all the way out; but then younger and stronger hands are on his arm, and someone has moved to block his path to Mr. Threader. “I am a true friend of Sir Isaac Newton—a man so dedicated, so loyal to his King and to his craft that he has come here to-day in spite of being laid low with illness!” Daniel shoves the sword back in to its sheath, spins, and takes a few paces back into the open space between the Jurors and Miss Barton. All eyes track him except for those of Mr. Threader, who is up to more conjuring. “You would do well to remember, sir, that it is your solemn duty to conduct this assay justly and truly, and in spite of the enmity that your profession bears toward Sir Isaac. The Lords of the Council—” and here Daniel turns to gesture with one hand toward the door of the side chamber. The unfamiliar scabbard swings around and whacks him on the ankle, which gives him an idea—he hooks a toe over it, flails his arms, and tumbles to the floor.

It’s all the Jurors can do not to laugh out loud. But soon enough they are struck dumb by two very different, yet equally mesmerizing sights: first of all Catherine Barton rushing forward and bending down to assist Daniel, so that everyone’s able to stare down her bodice. Second, the Duke of Marlborough striding in from the next room in high dudgeon.

“What in the name of—” he begins, then stops, lost in contemplation of Miss Barton’s cleavage.

“ ’Tis nothing, my lord, if you please, a momentary flaring of warm feelings, as when a log bursts on a hearth, and sparks fly,” says Mr. Threader. “The only sparks that matter to us are these.” He gestures with both hands at the pile of golden bits he has made on the cloth. “If, as I hope, Dr. Waterhouse’s exertions have left him quite uninjured, then I shall weigh out twelve grains of these.”

“I am…fine,” Daniel announces. “Thank you, Miss Barton,” he says, for she’s just hauled him to his feet, and is spanking the dust from him. “I am sorry,” he concludes. “Pray continue, Mr. Threader.”

Working now with a pair of tweezers, Mr. Threader moves granules of gold one by one from the pile of snips to one of the pans of his great Scale. On the opposite pan he places a twelve-grain weight from the set that was stored in the Abbey. After a minute the scale-pans begin to move. The Pesour goes into a protracted and tedious work of swapping larger bits for smaller ones, or sometimes snipping a bit in half to make change, as it were.

Finally Mr. Threader steps back from the table, hands upraised like a priest’s. “I say,” he intones, “that on the pan of yonder scale is a sample of metal fairly chosen from the coins in the Pyx, weighing twelve grains exactly; and I invite the Fusour to assay it.”

William Ham steps up.

William has not worked as a goldsmith since he was a boy. But like his father before him he’s a member in good standing of the Company. Daniel reckons that they tapped him as Fusour for a reason: he defied Sir Isaac and the King’s Messengers in the Bank of England a few days ago, asserting that they had no right to enter the vault and seize a deposit. They honor him for it now. This steadfast Goldsmith protected the sanctity of England’s commerce by his actions in the bank, and now he’ll perform a like service by challenging the produce of the Mint.

He has been at work preparing some necessaries over by the furnace. He approaches the Scale now carrying a wooden tray between his hands. On the tray are a sheet of lead, hammered out to a thin irregular disk, like a miniature pie-crust; a bullet-mold; pliers; and a cube of gray-white material rather less than an inch on a side, with a round depression in its upper surface. William Ham sets this down before the scale and tilts the scale-pan so that the twelve grains of gold-bits slide off and shower down into the center of the leaden sheet. He then folds the sheet together to imprison the gold, and wraps it up into a lumpy wad about the size of a hazelnut. He places this into one half of the bullet-mold, settles the other half over it, and squeezes the mold together with the pliers. When the packet comes out it has been rendered almost perfectly spherical: a wee globe, less like the Earth than the pitted gray Moon. He sets this into the depression in the top of the cupel—for that is the name of the cube of burnt bone ash. The sample fits into this neatly, recalling diagrams Daniel once studied in Geometry of spheres inscribed within cubes. William carries the tray over and sets it beside the furnace. A pair of tongs awaits. He uses these to pick up the cupel and thrust it into the heart of the furnace. It is dark and gray at first, but in a few moments it begins to absorb and then to give back some of the radiance in which it’s immersed. The lead softens and sags. William Ham consults his watch. A dome of surface tension forms in the cupel as its contents become liquid. The gray ash darkens as the molten metals saturate it.

Written right on the gold trial plate is the following: This standard composed of 22 carracts of fine gold, 2 carracts of alloy in the pound troy of Great Britain made the 13th day of April 1709. The late Sir Isaac Newton begged to differ—he suspected that the true numbers were more like 23 and 1, and that the goldsmiths had fixed the plate to make it more likely he’d fail the Trial—but in any case, the point is that Sir Isaac’s guineas are supposed to be made almost entirely of gold, with small amounts of base metals permitted. That is to say that out of the twelve grains of guinea-shards that made up the sample, eleven grains (if the inscription on the trial plate is taken at face value) or more (if the Goldsmiths fudged it) must be pure gold. The way to verify this is chymically to separate the gold from the not-gold, then weigh the former. The Company of Goldsmiths learned, ages ago, that when an assay is made in a cupel according to this receipt, the base metals in the sample will dissolve into the lead and be drawn, along with it, into the bone ash, like water into a sponge. But the pure gold will remain aloof, and form an ingot in the depression in the cupel’s top. And that is what happens now, before the eyes of Daniel and all the Jurors. Though it is an everyday procedure, it seems nearly as magical, to Daniel, as what occurred a few moments ago in the sedan chair. The release of the body of pure radiant gold from the dissolving globe of lead reminds him of the dream-vision of which Princess Caroline spoke.

If the assay is left in the furnace for too long, the gold will evaporate and lose weight, which is not fair to the Master of the Mint. If it is not left in long enough, some base metal will remain allayed with the ingot of gold, which is not fair to the King. Knowing how long to leave it in there is a black art of the Goldsmiths, and Daniel gets the sense that William is silently polling the other eleven members of his Jury for their opinions. When a consensus seems to have been reached, he picks up the tongs again and withdraws the cupel and sets it on a brick to cool down. The lead jacket has vanished and the cupel has turned charcoal-gray. Remaining in the top of the cupel is the ingot: a tiny round lake of gold. The stars and moons that decorated Mr. Threader’s black firmament have been changed by alchemy into this little sun. They need only wait for its heat to subside before they take the weight of it.

Holbourn

HOLBOURN OUGHT TO BE the Valley of the Shadow of Death for Jack. Perhaps he’d see it that way if he were facing forwards, watching Tyburn creep toward him. But they’ve faced him the other way, towards the London he’s leaving. There is intended to be a message in this: he is supposed to be looking back ruefully on his traitorous doings. But it is not working out thus. Jack is a spark dragged through a trench full of gunpowder. Far from being the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it is a roaring flume of vibrant riotous life, perfectly arrayed for viewing by Jack, and as such, a great distraction for one who really ought to be attending to his sins.

He does not recognize any one person in particular, but London, as an entire thing, is as familiar to him as the faces in a parish church, on Sunday morn, would be to an aged vicar. Groups are recognizable too. There’s a battalion of fishwives, of approximately regimental size, who have outflanked the artillery batteries at the Bridge and, by a covert march along Chick Lane, worked their way round to the west bank of the Fleet. There they seem to have divided into companies and squads, and mustered themselves within striking-distance in such places as Saffron Hill, the Dyers’ Court, the Plough-Yard, and Bleeding Heart Court. These are tributaries that empty into Holbourn along the hill that climbs up from the Fleet crossing, where the Hanging-March is doomed to move slowly. Triggered by the westward-propagating Mobb-roar, the fishwives mount vicious sallies from their nests and burst into the road, shouldering between the pikemen and the dragoons, pulling fistfuls of black coins from their aprons and flinging them at Jack’s head. They pock the sledge like grapeshot, they ricochet and ring in the air like færy-bells. Jack rips a button from his coat and underhands it to a fishwife who has actually penetrated to within a few yards of the sledge. She’s too astonished to do anything but clap it out of the air. A knot of fish-guts strikes him square on the bridge of the nose. He returns fire with another golden button.

Having beaten back the assault of the Fishwives’ Regiment with only light casualties, they crest the hill and enter into the widest part of Holbourn, which runs for a mile to St. Giles’s, passing between diverse expensive squares, all converted from cow-pastures during Jack’s lifetime. A Puritan in a black frock stands up on the street-island at Holbourn Bar, holding a Bible over his head, open to some passage he guesses Jack should know about. Another breaks through the cordon and climbs into the sledge with Jack and gets ready to baptize him with a bucket of water he’s brought along; but the Ordinary of Newgate, who’s been riding in the cart, isn’t having any of that. He’s down on the pavement in a trice, hustling along beside the sledge, and makes a grab for the handle of the Baptismal pail. This leads to a tug-of-war, and creates enough of a diversion that a short procession of Catholics—or so he assumes, from the monks’ robes they’re all wearing—is able to slip in, and make itself part of the parade. One is a priest, the others are burly monks, which makes perfect sense as a lone Papist wouldn’t survive for ten seconds in this crowd. The priest strides along behind the sledge, looks Jack in the eye, and begins to declaim rapidly in what Jack assumes is Latin. Jack is being given last rites! A very considerate gesture on someone’s part. This tiny and intrepid Popish strike force was probably despatched by Louis XIV from a secret chapel-headquarters in a vault beneath Versailles.

The procession bumps to a stop for some reason Jack can’t see. Getting into the Christian spirit, he takes this opportunity to whip off his purple cape and toss it to the priest. He then indicates that the priest is to give it to a poor old woman, over yonder, who has somehow fought her way to the front of the crowd.

The rich people are having their say now. The procession has passed Chancery Lane and travels now among the homes of the high and the mighty: Red Lyon Square, Waterhouse Square, Bloomsbury. All to the north side. To the south, Drury Lane plugs in, running up from Covent Garden and Long Acre. Which is to say that Dukes and Merchant Princes control one side of the parade route, whores and actresses the other. Captains of Commerce, worth millions of pounds sterling, practically topple from balconies and rooftops in their eagerness to shake their fists at him. The ladies on the other side are much more forgiving. Jack, on an impulse, stands up, shrugs off his coat, and throws it into a phalanx of prostitutes. It’s shredded in a heartbeat. He’s down to his cloth-of-gold vest now, already missing a few buttons. He turns around to make sure that Jack Ketch is getting a load of this. And indeed he is. The executioner was dismayed by Jack’s alms-giving at St. Sepulchre, but after a while he seemed to put it out of his mind, reckoning it was an aberration, a moment of weakness, on Shaftoe’s part. Which must have made it all the more painful for him when Shaftoe began to disrobe and hurl his priceless raiments into the Mobb.

At St. Giles’s, there’s another ritual: the procession stops so that bowls of ale may be brought out and given to the prisoners. Jack drinks several, paying for each with a golden button. By the time they start moving again, and round the Tottenham Court bend into Oxford Road, his vest is hanging loose on his shoulders, not a single button remaining.

A carriage is stopped in the intersection, like a boat run aground in the middle of a torrent. Standing atop it is a fat Duke who has positioned himself so that Jack will get a good long look at him as he is dragged away to the west. He screams something that must be very unpleasant, and, realizing that Jack cannot quite make out what he’s saying over the general noise, turns red in the face and begins to bellow and gesticulate with such fury that his wig shudders askew. But the meaner sort of people, leaving aside the occasional angry fishwife, are much more forgiving. At the crossing of Marybone Lane, where the countryside finally opens up to the north side of the road, a common-looking fellow comes trotting alongside with a pint of wine for Jack, and Jack pays him by handing him the golden vest.

They have reached Tyburn Cross. It is a desert the size of the Pacific Ocean, paved with human faces. A few tall objects protrude above the flood, here and there: a stranded carriage, a tree that’s about to collapse from the weight of the people who’ve climbed it, occasional men on horseback, and the Triple Tree itself. Which Jack does not see until he’s underneath it. It is an alienated frame-work of six mighty timbers—three vertical pilings and three cross-bars forming a triangle high above—beautiful in a strange way. The feeling is of entering a house without a roof, a home whose ceiling is Heaven.

A space about a stone’s throw in width has been cleared round the base of the Deadly Nevergreen. The crowd’s held at bay by pikemen, now reinforced by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. Some bestride their war-horses facing outwards with sabers drawn and pistols cocked; others have dismounted and fixed bayonets.

The preliminary hangings seem to take forever. Jack enlivens the proceedings by stripping off his breeches, whipping them around his head a few times, showering coins in all directions, and flinging them off into the crowd. Somewhere along the line he’s lost his periwig, too. So now he’s stripped down to white undergarments, shoes, and a noose. Going to his destiny a pauper, like that Lazarus the Ordinary read about in chapel this morning.

The others are all dead, decorating two of the Three-Legged Mare’s cross-bars. The third is reserved exclusively for Jack. He climbs up onto the cart, and the driver maneuvers it beneath the clear space. Jack’s eyes are tired from seeing so much, and so he tilts his head back for a moment so that all he can see is the sky, divided in half by the rope-worn timber above.

Gunfire sounds from nearby. He swings his chin down again. This is the first time he’s seen the crowd from a high vantage-point. Yet still he cannot find the edge of it. Gunpowder-smoke is drifting up from a black phalanx of Quakers or Barkers or some such. No one knows why.

Below, preparations are being made.

Flies explode from Jack Ketch’s man-rated butcher block as Ketch heaves a rolled bundle onto it. He loosens a couple of ties and shakes out the contents: a complete suite of disembowelling-tools. The table is a scab the size of a bed. Ketch distributes his tools around it, occasionally testing an edge with a thumb. He takes particular care with some rusty shackles. This is a way of letting Shaftoe know that he can expect to be alive and conscious during the later phases of the operation.

When they pulled out of the Press-Yard some hours ago, Ketch had every expectation of being a rich man at the end of the day. All of those golden buttons, all of those rich clothes, the coins in the pockets, all were for him. He was going to get out of debt and buy shoes for his children.

Now Ketch is going to get nothing. Shaftoe has avoided meeting Ketch’s eye until now, not knowing, and not caring, whether Ketch was responding to the relentless destruction of his fortune with curses, tears, or shocked disbelief. But they do look at each other now, Shaftoe up on his cart, and Ketch down at his abattoir, and Shaftoe sees that Ketch is perfectly calm. There’s no trace of the warm emotion he showed earlier, in the Press-Yard. It’s as if that never occurred. Even if Ketch removed his hood, the face beneath would be no more expressive than is the black leather mask. He has gone into a cool professional mode. In a way, revenge is easy for Ketch, because he need only carry out the Court’s sentence to the letter, and put him to death in terrorem.

Jack now wonders whether this strategy was a good idea. A younger man would be scared. But it’s normal to have second thoughts at this stage. It’s the sign of a good plan.

He is expected to say a few words now.

“I, Jack Shaftoe, also known as L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, Ali Zaybak, Quicksilver, Lord of Divine Fire, Jack the Coiner, do hereby repent of all my sins and commend my soul to God,” he says, “and ask only that I receive a decent Christian burial, with all of my quarters, if they can be rounded up, to be put together in the same box. And my head, too. For it is well known that the College of Physicians is gathered, as I speak, round their dissection-table on Warwick Lane, sharpening their scalpels, and getting ready to cut my head open so that they may rummage through my brains looking for the house where the Imp of the Perverse has dwelt lo these many years. I would prefer that this not happen. Having said that, Mr. Ketch, I turn myself over to your care. And I ask only that you check your knotwork twice over, for last night when Betty came to service me and these other fellows in the Condemned Hold, she was saying that you had quite lost your enthusiasm for the job, and were looking for a position as a maid-of-all-work. Step to it, man, the Physicians are waiting—”

And that is all he can get out, for during this last bit, Ketch has slung the loose end of the rope over the timber above, and pulled it taut. Very taut. Earlier, he’d promised to put a lot of slack in it and give Shaftoe a nice long drop, so that it would be over quickly; but that was before Shaftoe breached a certain implied contract. Ketch pulls the rope so taut that Jack is only appearing to stand on the cart; in truth, the tips of his toes are barely grazing the floor-boards now. “I shall tend to you in a few minutes’ time, Jack,” he mumbles into Shaftoe’s ear.

Jack’s head is forced down by the knot behind his ear; he can’t help but notice that the cart is no longer beneath him. He remembers the cord that he earlier strung from his shoe to the noose beneath his drawers, and pushes off against it with one leg. This relieves some of the pressure. Behind him on the cart, the Ordinary and the Catholic priest are striving to out-pray each other.

Four teams of horses stand at the ready in the clear space below, facing different ways like the cardinal points on a compass-card, ready for the final and most spectacular part of the operation. A few people, presumably connected in one way or another with aspects of the drawing-and-quartering, are standing around down there, watching him.

One of these is a solitary man, dressed in a monk’s robe. Come to think of it, he’s one of the monks who was escorting the Catholic priest up Holbourn. He takes up a position in the open, next to the giant butcher block. The man’s hood is drawn nearly closed, so that he looks out at the world down a tunnel of black homespun. He turns to face Jack, cleverly arranging it so that a tube of sunlight will shine onto his face. Jack’s expecting Enoch Root or, barring that, some wild holy man.

Instead he recognizes the face of his brother Bob.

And that explains how a lone monk is able to be here at all, because Bob, of course, knows his way around the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard.

For one glorious moment of stupidity, Jack supposes that some kind of rescue is about to happen.

Then there’s a moment of terror as he wonders if Bob is going to run up and hang from his legs to kill him fast. Or barring that, perhaps he’ll pull a pistol and put Jack out of his misery directly.

The cord snaps! Jack drops a couple of inches, the noose clubs him in the back of the head, the rope draws tighter.

Jack keeps watching his brother. Now, as in the early years of his life, there is no one else in the world.

Bob until now has kept his hands together in front of him, tucked into the capacious sleeves of his garment. Now, seeing Jack’s distress, he draws them apart, and holds them up in the air like a saint. The sleeves churn. Two larks fly out of the right one, and a blackbird from the left. They flutter aimlessly about the gallows for a few moments, then identify it as Not a Real Tree, and ascend into the light.

Jack feels the pressure of the world being relieved.

He has no trouble taking the birds’ meaning: they have escaped. All three of them. They are headed for America.

There is a roaring. He cannot know if it is the blood in his ears, or the Mobb, or, perhaps, a legion of demons and a choir of angels fighting for possession of his soul. Jack rolls his eyes high up in their sockets, trying to keep those birds in view. The sky, which was blue a moment ago, has turned uniformly gray, and its compass is narrowing. It shrinks to a lead coin with two white birds and a black one minted on its face.

Star Chamber

IN DUE TIME MR. THREADER seizes the cupel with tongs and upends it over the freshly polished scale-pan of the balance. The ingot—an oblate bead—falls out, and spins and buzzes on the pan. Some flecks of burnt bone fall around it; Mr. Threader blows these away and then gives the ingot an exploratory nudge or two with his tweezers, to satisfy himself that no other impurities have stuck to it. When he is certain that there’s nothing on that pan except for pure gold, he places a ten-grain standard weight on the opposite pan. This is not nearly enough to balance the ingot—which is good, as far as it goes—and so, now wielding the ivory-handled tweezers, he adds a one-grain weight. Then a half-grain. The scale has gone into motion but still inclines toward the ingot of gold. Mr. Threader is working now with standard weights so small that Daniel can hardly see them: they are evanescent squares of gold foil stamped with fractions. He makes a messy pile of them and then stops, stumped. He removes a lot of small ones and replaces them with a larger one, and hems and haws. Finally he removes every single one of the standard weights, sets them back in their niches in the case, and puts on the single twelve-grain weight that he used earlier to weigh the sample of guinea fragments.

The pans oscillate for a long time, the needle making equal excursions to either side of dead center. After a while, friction prevails, and it stops. It is so close to being perfectly centered that in order to read it Mr. Threader must place his hand over his nose and mouth, so that his breathing won’t startle it, and practically polish the thing with his eyelashes.

Then he draws back: the only man in the room who is moving so much as a muscle. For everyone has marked the delay, and noticed the twelve-grain weight on the other pan: very odd.

“The ingot weighs twelve grains,” Mr. Threader proclaims.

“There must be some error,” says a flummoxed senior Goldsmith. “Such a thing is impossible unless all the guineas contain no base metals whatsoever!”

“Or,” says Mr. Threader under his breath to Daniel, “the base metals were converted to gold in the cupel!”

“There must have been some error in the assay,” the senior Goldsmith continues, beginning now to look to his Guild-fellows, to erect a consensus.

But William Ham is having none of it. “That is a difficult accusation to sustain, without evidence,” he points out.

“The evidence is right there before our eyes!” complains the elder, gesturing at the balance.

“That is evidence only that Sir Isaac makes good guineas, and that the British coin is the soundest currency of the whole world,” William says doggedly. “Every member of this Jury watched—nay, participated in—the Assay. Did we not? None of us saw anything amiss. By our silence we have already consented to it, and vouchsafed its result. To reverse ourselves now, and say ’twas all done wrong, is to go before that man and say, ‘My lord, we do not know how to do an assay!’ ” William gestures toward the end of Star Chamber, where the Duke of Marlborough’s absorbed in conversation with some other dignitary.

William’s a banker, not a practicing Goldsmith. In the councils of that Company he is of low rank and little account. But outside their Clubb-house, in the City of London, he has earned a gravitas that makes heads turn his way when he speaks. This is why they nominated him as Fusour. Perhaps it is why the senior Goldsmith is calling the Assay into question; he’s spooked by William’s influence. Such political currents are too subtle for Daniel to follow; all he needs to know is that the Goldsmiths and the City men alike are swayed by William’s words. If they trouble to look at the senior Goldsmith at all, it is in glances over their shoulders, as if looking back curiously at one who has fallen behind.

To his credit, the elder sees clearly enough the way it’s going. He cringes once at what he’s being forced to do, then his face slackens. “Very well,” he says, “let us give Sir Isaac his due, then. He has exasperated us more than any other Master of the Mint; but no one has ever claimed he did not know his way around a furnace.” He turns toward Marlborough, as do the other Goldsmiths, and they all bow. Marlborough notes it and nods to the chap he’s been talking to, who turns around to see it. Daniel recognizes the fellow as Isaac Newton, and feels a kind of pride that his friend is being honored in this way, and that he seems at last to have earned the trust of Marlborough. A moment passes before Daniel remembers that Isaac is dead.

This courtly scene is disturbed by trouble in the gallery leading in from New Palace Yard: some uncivil person is trying to crash the party, and the Serjeant is dutifully trying to stop him. Their dispute and their footsteps draw nearer.

“What business—”

“The King’s business, sir!”

“Whom would you—”

“My captain, sir! The Duke of Marlborough! Perhaps you will have heard of him!” The speaker stomps right into Star Chamber, moving in an uneven gait: a uniformed Colonel with a peg-leg of carven ebony. Then he stops, realizing he’s just burst in upon a solemn moment, and doesn’t know what to say. It promptly gets worse: recent evolutions have given the Lords waiting in the side chamber the idea that they have been missing out on something. Most of them choose this moment to debouche into the Star Chamber wearing expressions that say, “Explain, or be hanged!”

Daniel by now has recognized the peg-legged colonel: this is Barnes of the Black Torrent Guard. Barnes was already of a mind to dig his own grave and jump into it even before the King’s Remembrancer, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Privy Seal, and Lord Chancellor filed into the room, followed by enough Hanoverian Dukes and Princes to conquer Saxony. Barnes is now not only peg-legged but peg-tongued and peg-brained. The only man who dares make a sound is Marlborough.

“My lords,” he says, when the side-chamber has emptied out, “we have news from the Jurors. And unless I have mistaken the signs, we have got news from Tyburn Cross as well.”

Daniel glances at Barnes, who is going through a chrestomathy of head-shaking, throat-slitting, eye-bulging, and hand-waving. But Marlborough is oblivious; he’s got eyes only for the Lords of the Council, and the Hanoverians. He goes on, “Would the Juries care to make a preliminary report?”

The Pesour and the Fusour make after-you gestures at each other. Finally William Ham steps forward, and bows. “We shall of course draw up the document presently, and give it to the King’s Remembrancer,” he says, “but it is my great pleasure to inform my lords that the assay has been performed, and it has proved beyond doubt that His Majesty’s currency is sounder than it has ever been in all the history of this Realm, and that the highest accolades are owed to the Master of his majesty’s Mint, Sir Isaac Newton!”

Isaac is diffident, but the Fusour’s announcement starts up a round of hip-hip-huzzahs that only bates when he steps forward and bows to the room. Which he does gracefully and with perfect balance; he has not looked so spry in years. Daniel searches the room for Miss Barton, and only finds her when she appears at his side, seizes him by the right arm, and plants a kiss on his cheek.

“It is my very great honor,” says Isaac, “to do what I can for my country. Some distinguish themselves in battle” (a nod at Marlborough), “others in sage advice” (a nod—astonishingly—at Daniel), “still others in grace and beauty” (Miss Barton). “I make coins, and strive to make them sound, as a foundation on which the Commerce of this Realm may be builded by her thrifty and industrious Citizens.” A nod to the Jurors.

“There is another thing that you do very well, besides making coins, is there not, Sir Isaac?”

This Marlborough enunciates very clearly, for the benefit of the Hanoverians, and he waits for Johann von Hacklheber to effect a translation before he goes on: “I refer, of course, to your duty of prosecuting those who make bad coins.”

“That, too, is the charge of the Master of the Mint,” Isaac admits.

Barnes has gone back into frantic pantomiming, but he can’t seem to get the eye of Marlborough, who is rapt on the Germans. Marlborough goes on, “Sir Isaac’s triumph here, in the Trial of the Pyx, has, as I understand it, been matched—some would even say, surpassed—by a simultaneous triumph at Tyburn! Colonel Barnes?” And all eyes turn to Barnes. But he has dropped the gesticulations and now stands there the very picture of martial dignity.

“Indeed, my lord,” he announces. “Jack Shaftoe, L’Emmerdeur, the King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Jack the Coiner, has been hanged.”

“Hanged, drawn, and quartered, according to the sentence pronounced against him?” Marlborough says, so fiercely that it is more assertion than query.

“Hanged, my lord,” Barnes says. It dangles there for a terrible long time, like a kicking wretch on a gallows, and he feels a need to make improvements: “Hanged by the neck until dead.”

“Half dead, I should say, and then cut down, drawn, and quartered?”

“Mr. Ketch was balked from carrying out the, er, supplemental eviscerations and dismemberments and whatnot, upon the hanged and dead, corpse of the late villain Shaftoe.”

“Prevented by what, pray tell? Squeamishness? Did Mr. Ketch forget to bring his cutlery?”

“Prevented by the Mobb. By the violence and the menace of the greatest and surliest Mobb that has ever assembled upon this Island.”

A murky side-conversation now starts up in the Hanover contingent, as Johann von Hacklheber tries to translate “Mobb” into High German.

“I ordered the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard to defend the gallows, precisely because I expected a larger than usual Mobb,” says Marlborough distractedly, in a sort of quiet prodrome to raging anger. Recognizing it as such, Barnes says: “And that is precisely what we accomplished, my lord, and the hangings were all carried out in good order, and Jack Ketch and the bailiffs and gaolers conveyed out of there safe and sound. The gallows will, alas, have to be rebuilt, but that’s a job for carpenters, not soldiers.”

“I see. But you deemed it prudent to retreat before the drawing and quartering could be performed.”

“Yes my lord, ’twas at that moment when the Mobb became most frenzickal, and rushed the Gallows to cut him down—”

“Him, or his corpse?” Isaac Newton asks.

“Colonel Barnes,” says Marlborough, “did they cut him down, or did they merely rush the gallows to cut him down? There is a difference, you see.”

“If you want to know whose hand wielded the knife that severed the rope, I cannot give you his name,” Barnes says. “Just then, I was preoccupied with the larger task of leading my troops.”

“How did you lead them? What orders did you give?”

“To form a cordon with fixed bayonets around Jack Ketch and those other participants who were still alive.”

“Did you give an order to fire?”

“No,” says Barnes, “as I judged it would be suicidal; and though I am ever ready to die in the line of duty, I was of the view that for us to commit suicide would have impeded us in the conduct of our mission.”

“I have often thought that the Vicar and the Warrior in you were struggling to achieve dominance, Colonel Barnes. Now I see that the Warrior has at last prevailed. For the Vicar would have opened fire and trusted to God. It is only the Warrior who would have chosen the difficult path of an orderly retreat.”

Barnes—who has been expecting anything but praise—salutes, and goes red in the face.

“They wish to know why the soldiers did not fire on the Mobb to restore order!” says Johann von Hacklheber, speaking on behalf of a formation of very disgruntled-looking Hanoverians.

“Because this is England and we don’t massacre people in England!” Marlborough announces. “Or rather, we do but we are striving to turn over a new leaf. Pray translate that into more diplomatic language, Freiherr von Hacklheber, and see to it that the new King quite gets the message, so that we don’t have to send the Barkers after him.” Marlborough winks at Daniel.

Isaac has paid little heed to these last few exchanges. “In truth it is just as well for my purposes that Jack Shaftoe’s corpse was left intact, for I have been looking forward to conducting an autopsy on the wretch at the College of Physicians, to find out what on earth made him the way he was.”

“I know,” says Barnes. “All London knows, for Jack announced as much—somewhat more colorfully—from the gallows. It was this very thing that so infuriated the Mobb.”

“So be it,” says Isaac, with a shrug. “Have your men take the corpse to the College of Physicians.”

“We don’t know where it is,” says Colonel Barnes.

“On Warwick Lane, off Newgate.”

“No. I meant, we don’t know where the corpse is.”

“I beg your pardon?” says Isaac, and looks to Marlborough. But the Duke is in a frank Cultural Exchange with his Hanoverian counterparts and has no time for Isaac. It has taken the Germans some time to fully comprehend the impertinence of Marlborough’s quip about the Barkers, and to believe that the Duke actually said something that rude; now they are waxing wroth, getting a bit foamy even. Johann von Hacklheber, seeing he’s caught in a perilous crossfire, is edging away, trying to make himself party to the safer and more interesting conversation re: Jack Shaftoe’s carcass.

“After the dead body was cut down,” Barnes continues, “some of the Mobb raised it up. I sent soldiers to wrest it from them. The Mobb scampered away and gave it a right good heave.”

“On to the ground?”

“No, it was caught and raised up on high again by others of the Mobb; and when they spied my soldiers coming for them, they gave it another heave, so that others, farther from the gallows, took up the burthen. And from there it developed into a sort of, well, orderly procedure, and I had to climb up on to the scaffold to see where it went. He sort of glided. Like a leaf, floating on a turbulent and swirling stream, dodging and spinning in unseen Mobb-currents, but ever moving in the same general direction: away from me.”

Isaac sighs, and begins to look his age again. “Spare me any further poetick description and just say forthrightly, please, where did you last see the body of Jack Shaftoe?”

“Sort of dissolving into the western horizon.”

Isaac stares at him.

“The Mobb was of tremendous size,” Barnes explains.

“You are quite certain he was dead at the time he was cut down?”

“If I may, sir, that’s easily answered!” says Johann von Hacklheber. “Anyone who was at Newgate this morning can tell you he was wearing a king’s ransom in cloth-of-gold, and that his pockets bulged with coins. All of which, of course, was payment for Jack Ketch—”

“To hang him fast—break his neck in an instant,” Isaac says. “Very well! Let the Mobb have him then. Let him end up in a potter’s field somewhere.”

“Yes,” says Daniel Waterhouse, “it is a most fitting end for such a villainous man. And this—the new King, the strong Bank, the sound coinage, and all the works of Natural Philosophers and ingénieurs—are a fine beginning for a new System of the World.”

At this, Johann von Hacklheber looks askance at Marlborough, who is close to getting into a sword-fight with some Duke of Germany.

“Never you mind that,” Daniel reassures him, “for it is all part of the System.”

Epilogs

For Time, though in Eternitie, appli’d

To motion, measures all things durable

By present, past, and future

—MILTON, Paradise Lost

Leibniz-Haus, Hanover

NOVEMBER 1714

MOST MEN, standing knee-deep in gold, would talk about that. But not these two eccentric Barons.

“Then he stepped out of his sedan chair and looked perfectly all right,” says Johann von Hacklheber.

He sits down upon an empty barrel. Leibniz, cringing and mincing from the gout, has been seated for some while. They are beneath Leibniz’s great house, in a cellar made to store victuals. But the bottles of wine, the kegs of beer, the turnips, potatoes, and belching buckets of sauerkraut have been hauled out and given to the poor. The place has been filled up with barrels of a different sort. Leibniz, unwilling now to trust anyone in Hanover, left them sealed until Johann arrived. Johann’s been dismantling them, removing the gold plates, and placing them in orderly stacks.

“It sounds as though he was re-animated by the Elixir Vitae,” Leibniz admits.

“I thought you didn’t believe in such things,” says Johann, and gestures at the gold plates all around.

“I don’t think about such matters the way he does,” says Leibniz, “but I can’t rule out the possibility that monads, ordered in the right way, might do things that would seem like miracles to us.”

“Well, you have got all the magic gold you could ever desire, if you want to cure that gout, or—”

“Live forever?”

Johann looks abashed, and instead of answering, picks up his pry-bar, and goes to work on another barrel.

“I suspect that there are some of us who have been living forever,” Leibniz says, “such as your supposed great-uncle, and my benefactor, Egon von Hacklheber. Or Enoch Root, as others know him. Let us suppose that Enoch knows how to manipulate the Subtile Spirit in such a way as to heal diseases and extend life. What of it, then? What has he accomplished? How has it changed anything?”

“Hardly at all,” says Johann.

“Hardly at all,” agrees Leibniz, “save that from time to time he may grant a few years’ undeserved life to someone who would otherwise have perished. Enoch must have been asking himself, these last couple of millennia, what is the point of it all. It is obvious that he took a lively interest in Natural Philosophy, and did what he could to foster it. Why?”

“Because Alchemy was not bringing him satisfaction.”

“Evidently not. Now, Johann, it would seem that Sir Isaac has been granted a few more years by Alchemy, and yet clearly it has not brought him any happiness or enlightenment that he did not possess before. Which gives us another hint as to why it does not satisfy Enoch. You point out that I, likewise, could use the Solomonic Gold in this cellar to extend my life. Let us suppose that it’s true. But obviously this is not the goal toward which I have been directed by Enoch, or by Solomon Kohan. On the contrary! Those two have sought to sequester the gold and keep it out of the hands of the one man who knows how to wield it: Isaac Newton. For me to take up Alchemy at my age, and melt those plates down to make an elixir—why, it’d be Doctor Faustus all over again! And with the same dismal result in the last act.”

“I can’t bear to see Newton triumph, while you sicken and dwindle here in Hanover.”

“I’ve got all of the Solomonic Gold. He doesn’t. That is a triumph. It does not make me glad. No, triumph will not be mine if I only ape what he did. That is surrender. If I am to outlive Newton, it will not be by extending the span of my life with unnatural coctions. We must do all in our power to see that the Logic Mill is built.”

“In St. Petersburg?”

“Or wherever, and whenever, some great prince sees fit to build it.”

“I’ll make arrangements to have some stout crates built,” says Johann, “and delivered here. I’ll take them into this cellar myself and pack the golden cards into them with my own two hands, and nail them shut so that no one will have cause to think that they contain anything more valuable than musty old letters. Once that is done, you may ship them to St. Petersburg, if that is the right place for them, with a stroke of a quill. But if what I hear from Russia has any color of truth, the Tsar is distracted, and may not see the thing through.”

Leibniz smiles. “That’s why I was careful to say whenever some great prince sees fit to build it. If not the Tsar, then someone else who will come along after my death.”

“Or after mine, or my son’s or my grandson’s,” Johann says. “Human nature being what it is, I fear that this will only happen when the things that the Logic Mill is good at become important to a war. And that is a difficult thing to imagine.”

“Then pray bring up your son and your grandson, if you have any, to be imaginative. Then impress on them the importance of looking after those dusty old crates in the Leibniz-Archiv. Speaking of which—”

“The Princess of Wales,” says Johann, holding up a hand, “has become most imperious since she got her new lands and titles, and has ordered me to find a woman I have some actual prospect of marrying. My dear mother has weighed in, too. I beg you not to start.”

“Very well,” says Leibniz, and lets a respectful silence fall. “That must have been a difficult conversation. I am sorry.”

“It was a difficult conversation that I had been expecting,” says Johann, “and I find it’s easier to have it behind me than in front of me. I am here now. I’ll go to London from time to time, and dance with her at a ball, and take tea with my mother, and remember. Then I shall return to Hanover and live my life.”

“What about them? What do you hear from those two great ladies?”

“They are on this Continent,” says Johann, “mending fences with their cousins, now that the war is finally over.”

Gardens of Trianon,
Royal Château of Versailles

A CRACK SOUNDS across still water. Wild geese squawk and take to the air on tired wings. A second crack, and a single bird drops to the bank. A water-dog swims after it, marring the pond’s surface with a vee-shaped wake that could almost be a reflection of the goose-formations high above. A window shatters, a lady whoops in surprise. The laughter of two men can be heard.

A panel of chopped and lashed-down foliage moves suddenly aside, like a door, to reveal a small barge: a floating blind. It is just large enough for two hunters, but rich enough for two kings. For once the panel of sticks and dead leaves is out of the way, it is all gold leaf and bas-reliefs of Diana and Orion. Two men sit in gilded campaign-chairs. Each cradles a fowling-piece of ridiculous length. They are helpless with mirth, for a while, at the breaking of the window.

One of them is very old, pink, bloated, half buried in furs and blankets that settle toward the deck as he jiggles them with his laughter. He slaps an ermine pelt to keep it from sliding into the pond. “Mon cousin,” he says, “you have bagged two birds with one shot: a goose, and a chambermaid!”

The other is in his middle fifties, active, but not spry, for it seems that a life of adventures has left him carrying a vast inventory of aches, pains, cramps, cricks, clicks, pops, and charley-horses. He shuffles across the deck of the barge and heaves open another camouflage-panel to let in the morning sun and release stale air. This gives him time to compose a sentence in bad French: “If she was hurt bad we’d hear more screaming. She was only scared.”

“I believe you scored a hit on the Trianon-sous-
Bois: the residence of my sister-in-law, Liselotte.”

“She sounds ever so high and mighty,” says the younger man. “I dare not talk to one such. Maybe you could let her know how sorry I am.”

“Oh? How sorry are you?” asks the older.

“Ah, you are a sly one there, Leroy. Tell me, does this Liselotte know the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm?”

“But yes, they are old partners in mischief, those two! Probably having breakfast together as we speak.”

“Then maybe Eliza can be my apologist. She speaks better French than you anyway.”

“Ho-ho-ho!” chortles the King. “You only think so because you are so besotted with her. I can see it.”

There’s sudden thrashing in the brush beside the water. “Merde!” says the King, “we are found out! Close the blind! Hurry!”

The other turns and reaches for the panel, then stops short, grimaces, and cocks his head. “Bloody hell.”

“The neck again?”

“Worst bleeding crick in the neck I’ve ever had.” He reaches up to rub a raw place, then flinches, and settles for re-composing his silk neckerchief.

“You should try to avoid being hanged.”

“I did try to avoid it, but the thing was complicated.”

She appears on the bank, holding up one hand with thumb and index finger pressed together.

“Morning, Jack.”

“Bonjour, Madame la Duchesse.” The one named Jack executes a courtly bow, so exaggerated as to border on open mockery. Each and every one of his vertebrae has something to say about it.

“I’ve something here that you lost!” she announces.

“My heart?”

She hurls the bird-pellet at him. The men on the barge avert their eyes as it impacts on a chair-arm and ricochets around. “La Palatine wants you two to know that she is too old to be the target of musket-fire.”

“Fortunately Pepe is bringing you a peace-offering,” says the King, and indicates the curly-haired dog, who’s up on the bank now, wagging his tail at Eliza. He trots up and drops the dead bird at her feet.

“I’ve little taste for such things,” she says, “but Liselotte was a great huntress in her day and so it might placate her.” She bends down, pinches the bird’s neck, and walks away from them holding it out at arm’s length. The men watch in awe. Leroy gives Jack a dig in the ribs.

“Magnifique, eh?”

“Old goat.”

“Ah, she is a great woman,” says the King, “and you, mon cousin, are a fortunate man.”

“To meet her in the first place was fortunate, I’ll give you that. To lose her was stupid. Now, I don’t know the word to describe what I am, besides tired.”

“You will have ample time to rest from your travails, and lovely places in which to do it,” says Leroy.

Jack, suddenly alert, pulls one of the blind doors to, and crouches behind it. A trio of French courtiers, drawn by the sound of the fowling-pieces, are approaching. “Lovely places indeed,” says Jack, “as long as I stay out of sight, and out of gossip.”

“Ah, but in such places as La Zeur and St.-Malo, this is not so terribly difficult, eh?”

“That is where I shall live out my retirement,” Jack allows, “as long as she’ll have me.”

The King looks mock-astonished. “And if she throws you out?”

“Back to England, and back to work,” says Jack.

“As a coiner?”

“As a gardener.”

“I do not believe such a thing!”

“Believe it, Leroy, for ’tis a notorious weakness of Englishmen who are too old to do anything useful. My brother has found a position on a rich man’s estate. If Eliza ever grows weary of supporting a broken-down old Vagabond, I may go thither and live out my days killing the Duke’s weeds and poaching his game.”

Blenheim Palace

“FINE! SO BE IT, then! I’ll get along unshod!” bellows a man of similar age and proportions to Jack. He seizes one of his knees with both hands and yanks up. A bare foot emerges from a boot, which is sunk almost to its top in the mud. He plants the foot, grabs the other knee, and repeats. Bob Shaftoe now stands, a free man, in mud almost up to his knees. His boots are stranded nearby, rapidly filling with rain. He salutes them. “Good riddance!”

“Hear, hear!” calls a voice from a tent, pitched nearby on slightly higher and firmer ground. A man rises from a table and turns toward him. The table is lit by several candles even though it is two o’clock in the afternoon.

Bob’s wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat, which supports approximately a gallon of rainwater, distributed among several discrete pools. He cocks his head in a most deliberate and calculating manner, and the pools slide, merge, slalom round the hat’s contours, and spring off its back brim, splatting into the mud behind him. This enables him to get a clear sight-line into the tent.

The man who has just spoken stands in its entrance, gazing down on him; at the table, a peg-legged fellow sits on a folding chair and graciously accepts a cup of chocolate from a woman who has been at work over a little cook-fire in the rear. “Bob,” calls the standing gentleman, “you are now barefoot in the rain, which calls to mind how I first saw you nigh on fifty years ago, and I say it becomes you, and may you leave those boots there to rot, and never again wear such odious contraptions. Now, do come back to us before you catch your death. Abigail has made chocolate.”

Bob wrenches a foot clear of the mud, plants it on a rock, and uses this as a foundation on which to pull the opposite one free. He risks a glance back at the abandoned boots. “Do the bloody plans call for a pair o’boots there?”

“They call for a shrubbery!” announces the peg-leg, peering at Bob through a transit, and consulting a garden-plan spread out on the table. “But never you mind, those boots will be eaten by vermin long before planting-season.”

“What would the Vicar of Blenheim know about planting-season?”

“As much as I know about being a vicar.”

“And that is as much as I know about being a country gentleman,” says the Duke of Marlborough, gazing fretfully across a half-mile of mud and stumps at the still-building pile of Blenheim. “But we must all adapt—we must all learn. Except for Abigail, who is already perfect.” Abigail gives him a skeptical look and a cup of chocolate. Bob squelches another step closer. The gaze of (formerly) Colonel, (and now) the Reverend Barnes strays back to the great map, which looks ever so fanciful when contrasted against the gloomy reality outside. His eye wanders across the orderly geometry of the plan until it fixes upon a wee Chapel and a nearby Vicarage.

Marlborough says, “We shall mount a last Campaign from this tent, and pick off the vermin who are drawn hither by the intoxicating fragrance of Bob’s boots. Bob shall study how to look after plants, Barnes shall learn how to look after souls, I shall learn how to be idle, and Abigail shall look after all of us.”

“It sounds as if it ought to work,” says Bob, “so long as my brother does not show up.”

“He is dead,” Marlborough avers. “But if he shows up, we’ll shoot him. And if he recovers, we’ll pack him off to Carolina, where he may work alongside his offspring. For I am told that you are not the only Shaftoe, Bob, to have turned over a new leaf, and become a tiller of the soil.”

Bob has finally reached the tent’s threshold. “It is a strange fate indeed,” he mutters, “but only fitting.”

“Why fitting?”

“Jack, Jimmy, and Danny ought by rights to become tillers of the soil,” says Bob, “because they have made so much trouble in the past, as soilers of the till.”

“If you are going to make such jests,” says Barnes, “you are welcome to stay out in the rain.”

Carolina

“I SPIED ’EM AGAIN this morning, Tomba! The weather cleared, just after sunup, and I looked to the West and saw ’em, all lit up by the red sun shining in off the sea. A line of hills, or mountains if you please. Laid out, waiting for us, like baked apples in a pan.”

Tomba is lying face down on the sack of desiccated pine-branches that answers to the name of bed here, in the indentured servants’ quarters of Mr. Ickham’s Plantation. Not for the first time in his life, his back is striped with long whip-cuts. Jimmy Shaftoe hauls a sopping mass of rags out of a bucket, wrings it out, and lays it on Tomba’s raw flesh. Tomba opens his mouth to scream, but makes no sound. Danny keeps talking, trying to get Tomba to think about something else. “A week’s hard traveling,” he says, “less than that if we steal some horses. We can manage without food for that long. When we make it to those hills, there’ll be game a-plenty.”

“Game,” says Tomba, “and Indians.”

“Tomba, look at the state you’re in, and tell me Indians are worse than the Overseer.”

“Nothing’s worse than him,” Tomba admits. “But I’m in no condition to run cross-country for seven days.”

“Then we wait until those stripes are healed. Then we do it—”

“Boys, you do not understand. There will always be something. The Overseer knows how to keep men downtrodden. Especially black men. I didn’t understand that, when I came here. It’s different, the way he treats me. Look at my back, and tell me it isn’t so.”

Lines of fire run in parallel courses across the walls of the shack where the sun glares between unchinked wall-planks. A pig roots outside, undermining the corner of their dwelling, but they can’t shoo it away or eat it because it is the Overseer’s pride and joy. They can hear him now, bellowing in the distance. “Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Where the hell have you got to?”

“Lookin’ after our mate you just beat half to death, you bastard,” mutters Jimmy.

“I want to see red necks on the lot of you,” says Tomba, repeating the Overseer’s favorite aphorism. “Tomorrow, red necks all around, save for this Blackamoor—there’s only one way to give him a red neck and that’s with the lash.” Tomba gets his hands underneath him, and pushes himself up on to all fours, then hangs his head low and lets his dreadlocks sweep the floor, he’s so woozy.

“Jimmy? Danny! Jimmy? Danny! Are you feedin’ your pet Blackamoor?” By process of elimination, the Overseer has figured out where they are, and is drawing nigh.

“You’re right,” says Tomba, “he means to kill me today. It is time to unpack.”

“Then unpack we shall,” says Danny.

He bends down and seizes the hay-bag that served him for a bed, and rips it open from one end to the other. Out tumbles an elongated bundle. Jimmy snatches it and tears away several rope ties. The two Shaftoes work together to unroll the bundle, Danny holding his arms out like a pair of shelf-brackets while Jimmy unwinds the bolt of canvas. Tomba paws one hand up the shack’s wall until he finds a hand-hold on one of the hewn logs that make up its frame, and pulls himself to his feet. “They’re not in here, Master!” he calls, “no one in here but poor Tomba!”

“You’re a damned liar!” bellows the Overseer, and hammers the door open with the butt of his whip-handle. He stops, framed in the entrance, unable to see into the darkness of the shed. He can hear, though, the unexpected sounds of two gently curved blades—a longer one and a shorter one—being whisked from their scabbards. Perhaps he even glimpses the unaccustomed sight of Carolina sunlight gleaming from watered steel.

“Don’t tell us,” says Danny, “you want to see some red necks around this place. Is that what you were about to say?”

“What—get back to work, you lazy bastards! Or I’ll give you more of what Tomba got!” The Overseer steps into the shed, and raises his whip; but before he can bring it down, steel skirls past his ear, and the amputated lash drops to the dirt floor at his feet. Tomba staggers outside and closes the shed door behind himself. He squints about at several acres of mud, which he knows to be red in color, though it looks gray to him because his vision has gone black and white. A big white house stands at one end. Indentured servants toil with mattocks and shovels. Behind him, the Overseer has become uncharacteristically silent. Perhaps his eyes have adjusted to the point where he can see he’s locked in a confined space with a pair of enraged Samurai.

“There’s more’n one way to make a red neck,” Danny points out, “and here’s how they do it in Nagasaki!” There follows a rapid sequence of noises that Tomba has not heard in quite a while, though he recognizes them well enough. Blood rushes out from under the shed wall and puddles in the wallow rooted out by the Overseer’s pig. Drawn by its fragrance, the pig waddles over, snuffles, then begins to lap it up.

Jimmy and Danny burst out of the shed. Danny wipes his blade on his pant-leg and re-sheathes it. Jimmy hollers to the other indentured servants: “You all can take the rest of the day off! And when Mr. Ickham comes back from Charleston, and wants to know what happened, why, you just tell him that it was done by the Red-Neck Ronin, and that we went that-away!” And he thrusts his wakizashi into the un-tamed West. Then he sheathes it and turns to his companions.

“Let’s head for the hills, boys.”

Cornwall

WILL COMSTOCK, the Earl of Lostwithiel, has been worrying that they’ll become trapped in one of the sudden mists that wander about the moors like ghosts through a haunted house, and lose their way. And indeed such mists wash up round them on two occasions. He insists, then, that they stop right where they are, and bide their time until the air clears. Daniel frets that Minerva shall lose patience, and sail without him. But around midday the mists blow off on a stiff north wind that presses and pursues them down-valley toward the sea, now visible far off, pea-green, and pied with cloud-shadows and sun-shafts.

The land is chopped by stone walls into parcels so irregular it’s almost as if this country had to be pieced together from shreds of other worlds. In the high open country that tumbles down from the moors, the walls are lacy and irregular. Later, as the company of travelers traverse down into the valley, they pass through forests of stunted oaks, no taller than Daniel’s head, that cling to the slopes like wool to a sheep’s back and refuse to give up their leaves even at this time of year. There the walls run straight and solid, drenched with moss and saturated with life.

From such a wood, the company emerges into a smoky bottom-land, where shaggy anthracite-colored cattle engage in desultory shoving-matches. They fall in along the course of a rushing river that has vaulted down off the moor. Not far below them, it slows, flattens, and broadens to an estuary. There is the longboat waiting to take Daniel out to Minerva, which is anchored somewhere hereabouts, making ready for the run to Oporto and thence, eventually, to Boston.

But the travelers from London have not followed the Earl of Lostwithiel and Thomas Newcomen all this way to look at cows or boats. As they come out from under the dripping eaves of the last little oak-coppice, Daniel Waterhouse, Norman Orney, and Peter Hoxton begin to note certain oddments and novelties round the foot of the valley. Above the high tide mark, the ground runs gently up-hill for no more than a bow-shot before leaping up to make a rocky bluff that looms over the estuary. It’s obvious enough, even to visitors who are not aficionadoes of the Technologickal Arts, that men have been digging coal out of the roots of that bluff for many generations. The flat ground along the shore is strewn with dunnage and gouged with marks where they have trundled and dragged the coal down to meet the boats. To that point, it is typical of a certain type of small mine that might prosper until the miners delved to the waterline, and then be abandoned.

There is a flattish out-cropping not far above the foot of the bluff. On it stands a thing that might have been cobbled together from pieces of drawbridges and siege engines. Two free-standing stone walls are held apart by an unroofed void perhaps four yards in breadth. That void has been congested with a dark web of timbers that reminds Daniel of a gallows. This supports some arrangement of platforms, stairs, ladders, and Machinery that is quite difficult to sort out, even as they draw closer to it. From its complexities emerges a sucking and hissing and booming, like the beating of a giant’s heart, one might think, in the last moments before it dies. This does not die, however, but keeps going in a steady cadence. With each beat comes a sudden rushing noise, which their ears can follow as it meanders down a crooked wooden aqueduct and finally leaps out and spatters on the tidal flat below, where it has carved a little water-course—a man-made streambed—down into the surf.

“Ground-water, pumped from the depths of the mine, by Mr. Newcomen’s Engine,” announces Lostwithiel. This is unnecessary, since the three visitors have come all the way out from London expressly to see it. And yet it’s important for Lostwithiel to come out and say it, as when the pastor at a wedding intones, I now pronounce you man and wife.

Orney and Saturn are keen to clamber down into the bowels of the Engine and know the particulars. Daniel goes with them as far as a plank platform from which he can get a good prospect of the valley. There he stops for a look round. It is the closest thing to solitude he’ll have until he reaches Massachusetts. He can now see Minerva anchored beyond the bar, some miles down where the estuary joins the sea. The crew of the longboat have already marked him through their prospective-glasses and are rowing directly for him, building speed to ground their keel in the soft sand where the Engine spits out the mine-water.

Slowly shaking its fist above Daniel’s head is an arm made of giant, knot-ridden timbers joined by iron hasps that must have been sledge-hammered out in a forge somewhere nearby. Depending from its end is a gargantuan chain, its links about the size of a grown man’s femur, joined together by hand-forged cotter pins as big as bears’ claws. In Newcomen’s mind, Daniel knows, these links are meant to be of uniform size. In practice each is a little different, the differences averaging out as the chain disappears over the horizon of the curving arch-head that terminates the great arm. From it depends the piston, which fills a vertical cylinder the size of a mine-shaft. Packed round the piston’s edge to form a seal is a matted O of old rope yarn, called junk, clamped down by a junk ring, secured with rustic nuts. Plenty of steam leaks out around it, but most stays where it belongs. The opposite end of the arm is linked to a pump rod consisting of several tree-trunks squared off and bound together with iron bands, plunging into the earth and pulling on giant sucking and splurging equipment too deep down for Daniel to see. Compared to all of this, the brains of the thing are tiny, and easy to miss: a man, on a platform a storey or two below where Daniel is standing, surrounded by pushrods, bell-cranks, and levers and supplying information to the machine when needed, which is not very frequently. At the moment, he is supplying information to Orney and Saturn, who have joined him down there.

This platform is dripping wet, and yet it’s warm, for the used steam exhaled by the Engine drifts round it and condenses on the planks. Daniel lets the Engine breathe down his neck while he surveys the other works of the Proprietors of the Engine for Raising Water by Fire. He means to dash off a note to Eliza, letting her know just what has been done here with the capital that she and the other investors have entrusted to Lostwithiel and Newcomen. Mr. Orney will then take the letter back to London and see that she receives it. Orney will have a lot more to say, of course. Being a man of commerce, he’ll mark things to which Daniel would be blind, and he’ll know, without having to think about it, just which details Eliza shall and shan’t find interesting. For Orney himself has put a bit of money in this thing now, and if he likes what he sees here, he’ll go back to London and talk it up among his brethren.

So there’s no need for Daniel to make some foolish pretense of seeing this venture through the shrewd eyes of a businessman. He tries, rather, to see it as what he is: a Natural Philosopher. As such it is the experimental aspects of it—its failures—that draw his notice. The level ground below the Engine is pocked, all around, with wreckage of Newcomen’s boilers. The natural and correct form for such a thing is a sphere. Knowing as much, Newcomen has been learning how to fabricate large spherical shells out of iron. And just as a schoolboy’s waste-book is littered, page after page, with smeared and scratched-out failures, so the deep soil of the river-bottom is strewn with ineradicable records of every idea that Newcomen has ever had on the subject, and striking visual proof of why and how certain of those ideas were bad. He can’t possibly beat out a single billet of iron into a vast seamless bubble and so he has to piece the things together of many smaller curved plates, lapped and riveted.

Fifty years ago Hooke had caught sparks struck off of a steel, and put them under the microscope, and shown Daniel what they really were: pocked spheres of shiny metal, like iron planets. Daniel had supposed they were solid, until he saw some that had been blown open by internal pressure. For the sparks weren’t globules, but hollow bubbles, of molten steel that flailed, then froze, when they burst, leaving wild out-flung extremities that looked a little bit like clawing hands and a little bit like ancient tree-roots cast up on a beach. Some of Mr. Newcomen’s failed boilers look like those exploded sparks. Others have failed in ways not so obvious, and lie half-embedded in the earth, like meteors fallen out of the sky.

Some miners come up out of the ground talking in a language he’s never heard before: half a dozen Cornish men in black, sodden clothes. Daniel can see just from their stumbling gait that their feet are half frozen, and from the way they carry themselves that they’ve been working hard for a long time. They fetch hampers and gather round the one boiler in the vale that actually works: the one below Daniel, which is driving the Engine. This rests in a massive collar of masonry with holes in the bottom to admit air and coal. The miners pull off their boots and their dripping socks and stretch their feet out in the fire-glow and take great loaf-sized pasties out of the hamper and begin to tear out mouthfuls. Their faces are all black from coal, much blacker than Dappa’s. Their eyes are white as stars. A pair of eyes leaps up and marks Daniel on the platform, and then all the others follow suit. There’s a moment, then, when Daniel’s looking down at them and they are all looking up trying to decide what to make of this strange visitor. How must he seem to them? He’s in a long woolen coat and his head is swaddled in a knit sailor’s cap. He’s growing a beard. He looms above them wreathed in whorls of exhausted steam. He wonders if these Cornish men have the faintest idea that they are sitting around an explosive device. He concludes that they are probably as intelligent as anyone else, and know it perfectly well, but have made peace with the idea, and have decided that they can accommodate it in their day-to-day lives in exchange for what passes, around here, for prosperity. It’s no different from what a sailor does when he takes ship knowing that he might drown. Daniel supposes that the wizards of the Technologickal Arts will be proffering many more such choices to people in years to come.

This journey began with a wizard walking into his door. Now it ends with a new kind of wizard standing on an Engine. Gazing down on this boiler from above, the wizard has the sense of being an angel or demon regarding Earth from Polaris. For, chastened by his failures, Mr. Newcomen has become most regular in his practices, and in this, his master-work, the seams and rivet-lines joining one curved plate to the next radiate from top center just like meridians of Longitude spreading from the North Pole. Below is a raging fire, and within is steam at a pressure that would blow Daniel to Kingdom Come ( just like Drake) if a rivet were to give way. But that does not come to pass. The steam is piped off to raise water, and the wasted heat of the fire affords a measure of comfort to the miners, and for the time being it all works as it is supposed to. At some point the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it in spite of the best efforts of Caroline and Daniel. Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But—and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away—he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.

He has done his job.

“I’m going home now,” he says.

HERE ENDS The BAROQUE CYCLE

This I have now published; not for the public good (which I do not think my poor abilities can promote), but to gratify my brother the Stationer. The benefits of that trade do chiefly consist in the printing of copies; and the vanity of this age is more taken with matters of curiosity, than those of solid benefit. Such a pamphlet as this, may be salable, when a more substantial and useful discourse is neglected.

—John Wilkins

Acknowledgments

THE BAROQUE CYCLE would have been unthinkable—in the most literal sense of that word—had it not been for the efforts of scholars, scientists, explorers, poets, preachers, pamphleteers, raconteurs, artists, translators, and cartographers dating back to the era of Wilkins and Comenius, and extending into the present day. A few of them are listed below. Some lived three hundred years ago, but others are still alive. I am a little hesitant to publish the names of the latter because it is much easier than it used to be to look people up, and so I am afraid that it will lead to these people being pestered. Nearly all of the people who bother to read three-thousand-page novels and their acknowledgments pages wouldn’t dream of disturbing the privacy of the acknowledged, but there are always a few exceptions; if you are one of those, please leave these people alone!

The project would not have happened at all had it not been for serendipitous conversations seven years ago with George Dyson and Steven Horst. A crucial midcourse correction, equally unlooked-for, was supplied by Piers Bursill-Hall after he sat through an infamously long lecture delivered by yours truly in Cambridge in 2002.

The following scholars (in alphabetical order) have done work that was essential to the completion of this project. While eager to give them due credit, I am aware that those who are still among us, and who actually bother to read my work, may be chagrined by my tendency to whip out my artistic license and make stuff up whenever it’s convenient: Frank Dawson Adams, E. J. Aiton, Maurice Ashley, Julian Barbour, J. M. Beattie, Olivier Bernier, Peter L. Bernstein, Bryan Bevan, Roger Lee Brown, Florian Cajori, Gale E. Christianson, Sir Archibald Geikie, David M. Gitlitz, A. Rupert Hall, John E. N. Hearsey, David Kahn, Henry Kamen, John Maynard Keynes, Mark Kishlansky, Meir Kohn, Maria Kroll, Andrew Lossky, Robert K. Massie, Nicholas Mayhew, John Read, H. Stanley Redgrove, Bertrand Russell, Hans Georg Schulte-Albert, Barbara J. Shapiro, J. G. Simms, Lee Smolin, William Spencer, Hugh Thomas, David Underdown, Henri and Barbara van der Zee, Maureen Waller, Richard Westfall, D. T. Whiteside. Though her biography of Hooke came out too late to influence this project, Lisa Jardine should also be mentioned, simply out of the hope that readers who would like to learn more about this period will read her work. Likewise Carl Zimmer and his recent biography of Thomas Willis, and Vladimir I. Arnol’d for Huygens and Barrow, Newton and Hooke.

In general there is not room to mention specific titles here, but I’ll make exceptions for Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism series; Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough; Giovanni Franceso Gemelli Careri’s incredible Voyage Round the World; and every ribald, scabrous, mordant, teeming libel Ned Ward ever wrote. I am thankful Ned was around to describe Baroque England, and even more thankful that he died before he could get around to describing me.

Period writers were indispensable: John Bunyan, Richard F. Burton (who was not really of this period but who wrote much that was useful), Daniel Defoe, John Evelyn, George Farquhar, Henry Fielding, (the Right Villainous) John Hall, Liselotte, John Milton, Samuel Pepys, the Duc de Saint-Simon, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Jean de Thevenot, Joseph de la Vega, John Wilkins, Lt.-Gen. Adam Williamson of the Tower of London, and the translators of the Geneva Bible. And of course, Hooke, Newton, and Leibniz. But an author of my limitations would be unable to make heads or tails of Leibniz’s body of work without the help of scholars, translators, and editors such as Robert Merrihew Adams, H. G. Alexander, Roger Ariew, Richard Francks, Daniel Garber, and R. S. Woolhouse. Likewise Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar for his Newton’s Principia for the Common Reader.

A certain kind of debt, which might make sense only to novelists, ought to be acknowledged to the late Dorothy Dunnett and to Alexandre Dumas.

People who fund and staff museums—especially wee, peculiar museums—ought to be acknowledged. I don’t have any of those people’s names, but here are some interesting museums: Newton’s Room at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts; Newton’s house at Woolsthorpe; Musée Carnavalet in Paris; the Bank of England Museum; the Hague Historical Museum; the Upper Harz Mining Museum and the Bergapothek in Clausthal-Zellerfeld; and the Berg-baumuseum Röhrigschacht in Wettelrode.

Thanks to Béla and Gabriella Bollobás; Doug Carlston and Tomi Pierce; and Barry Kemp of Connell Cars for providing me with access to places I could not have seen (Bollobás), worked in (Carlston/ Pierce), or found (Kemp) otherwise. George Jewsbury and Catherine and Hugo Durandin provided timely assistance. Charles McAleese had a thing or two to say about Irish history. Likewise the balance of the HBC on all other topics under the sun. Greg Bear lent me two books and did not object when the loan stretched out to a length that a lesser man might have denominated theft (the books have now been returned in front of many witnesses).

Many others have, knowingly or not, contributed to a milieu in which it was possible for me to consider writing something like this without seeming completely mad. And here I am tempted to list the names of a lot of mathematicians and physicists. But out of a concern for their privacy and a desire not to seem like I’m clinging to their ankles, I’ll draw a veil over those conversations. Suffice it to say that the Royal Society crowd written about in these books has many descendants and heirs today, who are capable of talking learnedly about monads, cellular automata, the calculus dispute, absolute time and space, &c. at the drop of a hat, and that it’s been my privilege to know a few of them. They seem pleasantly surprised to learn that someone actually wants to write a novel about such topics, and I in turn have been pleasantly surprised to find that they are actually willing to spend time talking to me, and out of this, quite a few good conversations have arisen over the years.

Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience over its seven-year span, were Jennifer Hershey, Liz Darhansoff, Jennifer Brehl, and Ravi Mirchandani.

Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate drafts and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees.

The dialect spoken by Lord Gy in the third volume is a good faith effort by the author to approach eighteenth-century Scottish with all due respect and to get it as right as possible. If I’ve botched it; and if you know enough Scottish to know that I have; and if you’re thinking of giving me a piece of your mind, know that I am one-quarter MacPhail. The uncanny vibrations you have been feeling in the soles of your feet the last couple of years are seismic disturbances created by my ancestors turning over in their graves at Preston Pans and other locations. Worse, the clan’s last chieftain—no admirer of the Hanovers, apparently—was transported to Virginia in 1715 but died en route. He probably haunts the sea-lanes even now, and, for all I know, may have a bone to pick with me. Which is a roundabout way of saying that even before the ink has dried on the manuscript page, novelists’ families—nuclear and extended—have had to put up with a lot from us. The greatest share of my gratitude, always, goes to them.

Neal Stephenson

May 2004

Credits

Cover design by Richard L. Aquan
Cover illustration of world map by Frederick de Wit from De Zee Atlas Amsterdam, 1662, Birmingham Library, UK

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2004 ISBN: 9780061793400

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About the Author

NEAL STEPHENSON issueth from a Clan of yeomen, itinerant Parsons, Ingenieurs, and Natural Philosophers that hath long dwelt in bucolick marches and rural Shires of his native Land, and trod the Corridors of her Varsities. At a young age, finding himself in a pretty Humour for the writing of Romances, and the discourse of Natural Philosophy and Technologick Arts, he took up the Pen, and hath not since laid it down.

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*Son of Praise-God W., son of Raleigh W., son of Drake—hence, some sort of nephew to Daniel.

*In England, the Civil War that brought Cromwell to power, and on the Continent, the Thirty Years’ War.

*Counterfeits made of base metals such as copper and lead.

*The forecastledeck is the short deck that, towards the ship’s bow, is built above the upperdeck.

*Praise-God W. being the eldest son of Raleigh W., and hence Drake W.’s first grandchild; he had recently sailed to Boston at the age of sixteen to study at Harvard, become part of that City on the Hill that was America, and, if possible, return in glory at some future time to drive Archbishop Laud’s spawn from England and reform the Anglican Church once and for all.

*King Charles II of England.

†Usually the Pope, but in this context, King Louis XIV of France.

*The consensus of the best physicians in the Royal Society was that plague was not caused by bad air, but had something to do with being crowded together with many other people, especially foreigners (the first victims of the London plague had been Frenchmen fresh off the boat, who’d died in an inn about five hundred yards from Drake’s house), however, everyone breathed through scarves anyway.

*Which had been pro-Cromwell.

*Which had nothing to do with Jews; it was named partly after its location in a part of the city where Jews had lived before they had been kicked out of England in 1290 by Edward I. For Jews to exist in a Catholic or Anglican country was theoretically impossible because the entire country was divided into parishes, and every person who lived in a given parish, by definition, was a member of the parish church, which collected tithes, recorded births and deaths, and enforced regular attendance at services. This general sort of arrangement was called the Established Church and was why dissidents like Drake had no logical choice but to espouse the concept of the Gathered Church, which drew like-minded persons from an arbitrary geographical territory. In making it legally possible for Gathered Churches to exist, Cromwell had, in effect, re-admitted Jews to England.

*A conical glass, wide at the top and pointed on the bottom, which when filled with cold water or (preferably) snow and left outside overnight, would condense dew on its outside; the dew would run down and drip into a receptacle underneath.

*Forerunner of the Royal Society.

*He was not the first person to observe it.

*I.e., it was already 1665 everywhere except England, where the new year was held to begin on March 25th.

†Though the fields were becoming city streets, so at this point it was more like St. Martin-at-the-edge-of-a-field, and soon to be St. Martin-within-visual-range-of-a-very-expensive-field-or-two.

*I.e., he had a sword.

†The five men King Charles II had chosen to run England: John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom, Lord Chancellor; Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Knott Bolstrood, who’d been coaxed back from Dutch self-exile to serve as His Majesty’s Secretary of State; Sir Richard Apthorp, a banker, and a founder of the East India Company; and General Hugh Lewis, the Duke of Tweed.

*Knott Bolstrood, a Barker and an old friend of Drake’s, was rabidly Protestant and anti-French—the King had made him Secretary of State because no one in his right mind could possibly accuse him of being a crypto-Catholic.

†Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company.

*None other than Knott Bolstrood, who’d been ennobled, for protocol reasons, when the King had named him Secretary of State—the King had chosen to make him Count Penistone because that way, Bolstrood the ultra-Puritan could not sign his name without writing the word “penis.”

*Pansophism was a movement among Continental savants, in which the said Comenius had been an important figure; it had influenced Wilkins, Oldenburg, and others to found the Experimental Philosophical Club and later the Royal Society.

*Philippe, duc d’Orléans, was the younger brother of King Louis XIV of France.

*Thomas Ham had been made Viscount Walbrook by the King.

*A vast, turgid, incoherent compendium of alchemical lore.

*Here, a moiety of the audience—mostly Cambridge undergraduates—stood up (if they weren’t standing to begin with) and applauded. Admittedly they would’ve come erect and shown their appreciation for almost any human female recognizable as such who appeared on the grounds of their College, but more so in this case since the role of Lydia was being played by Eleanor (Nell) Gwyn—the King’s Mistress.

*A grassy quadrangle surrounded by buildings of Trinity College.

*Pepys being a good example—but he wasn’t there.

*As King Louis XIV had guards dressed as Croats, so Charles might have Poles; any nation whose survival depended on crossing swords with Turks had a fearsome reputation nowadays.

*Which, remember, is one “storey” below the quarterdeck, where Daniel is pretty much giving up on getting any relaxation.

*That is, ahead of them and off to the side from which the wind is blowing—at about ten o’clock.

*At about five o’clock if he were facing toward the bow.

*Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena; for Anne Hyde had been winched into a double-wide grave two years previously.

*There are thirty-two points on the compass rose.

*Jack could not read but could infer as much from the types of letters used.

*The reason the pikemen didn’t protectively surround the musketeers, instead of being surrounded by them, was that even if the musketeers aimed between them, or over their heads, they would get mowed down by errant balls; because if, as frequently happened, a musket ball was a bit too small for its barrel, it would take to bouncing from one side of the barrel to the other as it was propelled out, and might emerge at a sharp, startling sideways angle.

*Not that Bob was a Puritan—far from it—but he was known to talk that way, to demonstrate his superiority over Jack.

*It turned out that if you did the mathematicks on a typical war, the cost of powder was more important than just about anything else—Herr Geidel insisted that the gunpowder in the arsenal of Venice, for example, was worth more than the annual revenue of the entire city. This explained a lot of oddness Jack had witnessed in various campaigns and forced him to reconsider (briefly) his opinion that all officers were mad.

*Which Jack could tell by interpreting the coats of arms carved on the gateposts and embroidered on the flags.

*As the trading-houses were called, because important men called factors inhabited and ran them.

*E.g., “Hey, Doc, how many goats were shaved to make that wig?”

*Just guessing, here.

*Which they knew because it bore the trademark of none other than Herr Geidel.

*Faulbaum, the Germans said, meaning “lazy and rotten tree.” They were alders.

*The Doctor: “Actually, it is a helix, not a spiral.”

*Various pieces of evidence suggested to Jack that he’d been sleeping.

*It being one of the many peculiar features of Jack’s upbringing that (1) he had a perpetual sparring partner (Bob)—perpetual in the sense that they slept in the same bed at night and, as brothers do, fought all day—against whom he was evenly matched, and (2) at the age when every boy engages in mock sword-fight, he and Bob happened to suddenly find themselves living in a military barracks, where their duels served as free entertainment for large numbers of men who actually did know a few things about fighting with swords, and who found the entertainment lacking if it was not well played, both in a technical sense (blows had to be delivered and parried in some way that was realistic to their discerning eyes) and in a dramatic sense (extra points scored, and extra food thrown in their direction, for enhancements such as hanging by the knees from joists and fighting upside-down, swinging like apes from ropes, etc.). The result being that from a young age the Shaftoe boys had sword-fighting abilities considerably above their station in life (most people like them never came into contact with a sword at all, unless it was with the edge of the blade in the last instant of their life), but limited to the type of sword called the spadroon—a cut-and-thrust weapon—which, they’d been warned, might not be very effective against Gentlemen armed with long slender poky rapiers and trained to insert them deftly through narrow gaps in one’s defenses. The Janissary-blade was a rough Mahometan equivalent of a spadroon, therefore, ideally matched to Jack’s style, or Bob’s for that matter. He waved it around dramatically.

*And of her husband, Duke Ernst August.

*Louis XIV of France.

*William of Orange.

*William of Orange.

*King Louis XIV of France—not really Monmouth’s uncle, but the brother of the widower of the sister of his illegitimate father, as well as the son of the brother of his grandmother, and many other connexions besides.

*A quartering of elements old (fleurs-de-lis, denoting their ancient connections to the royal family) and new (Negro-heads in iron neck-collars).

*It dropped from 572 to 250 when word of Monmouth’s rebellion spread.

*E.g., Nassau, Katsenellenbogen, Dietz, Vianden, Meurs.

*The flying jib downhaul.

*The Duke of Northumbria was the bastard son of Charles II by his mistress Barbara Palmer, nee Villiers, Duchess of Castlemaine.

†The Duke of Richmond was the bastard son of Charles II by his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth.

‡The Duke of St. Alban’s was the bastard son of Charles II by his mistress Nell Gwyn, the nubile comedienne and apple-woman.

*The name of Hexagram 3 of the I Ching, or 010001, that being the encryption key for the subliminal message embedded in the script of this letter.

*Darkening of the Light: Hexagram 36 of the I Ching, or 000101.

*Increase: Hexagram 42 of the I Ching, or 110001.

*Family: Hexagram 37 of the I Ching, or 110101.

*Break-through: Hexagram 43 of the I Ching, or 0 1 1 1 1 1.

*But sometimes they formally held these positions and sometimes they didn’t.

*“What are the odds of that?” had been Jack’s response, when he’d been made aware, for he’d had dealings with the Esphahnians before; but the others had rolled their eyes and, it seemed, bit their tongues—giving Jack a clew that there were no accidents, at least where Armenians were concerned, and that the presence of a Esphahnian on his oar was anything but fortuitous.

*Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or Dutch East India Company

*Princess Eleanor of Saxe-Eisenach, impoverished widow and mother, who along with her six-year-old daughter, Princess Wilhelmina Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, had befriended Eliza in the Hague

*For the Marquis believed that his half-brother Étienne was the father, which, if it had been true, would have meant that Jean-Jacques was a de Lavardac bastard just like him.

*In the part of France she was talking about, the Saône and the Loire ran in parallel courses about fifty miles apart, but in opposite directions. The Saône flowed south to its confluence with the Rhône and thence to Marseille. The Loire ran north to Orléans, where it bent westward and continued down to the Atlantic. Several miles north of Lyon was the portage that linked these two rivers: a road, or rather a bundle of roads and tracks, that cut westward over a line of hills to the town of Roanne, about fifty miles away, which lay on the upper Loire.

*For the French did not recognize William’s title as King of England

*The East London mudlark who had succeeded in stealing an anchor only after sacrificing Dick Shaftoe to the Thames, and then passed out drinking so that he was apprehended the next day.

†Who was not especially pleasant to pass the time with, but who had a knack for getting things done.

*“Ship” in this context meaning anything with three masts, square-rigged.

*It was the rule, on Corsair-galleys, that the raïs was in command of the ship and its crew, while the Agha of the Janissaries was in command of the fighters.

*This galleot was the Argo, the Cabal were Argonauts on their way to the Orient in search of the Golden Fleece, and the treacherous slaves were like Ares, fallen into the hands of the Aloadae to be chained up in a bronze vessel for thirteen months

*In this context meaning a cavalry stable, a large structure situated near a palace, and serving as home and headquarters for a military organization, as opposed to a barn for keeping beasts out of the rain.

*Wheel of Books.

*Egypt

*Meaning that seen in cross-section, her hull had a V shape instead of being flat-bottomed.

*Maybe it was a translation problem; the German word for infinite is unendlich, or, roughly, unendly, without an end, and perhaps it came through to the Tsar as “a certain amount every year.”

*The future King of England.

†The future King of Prussia

*Salamón went by the name Sanchez.

*Sterling Waterhouse (1630–1703), Daniel’s older half-brother, a real estate developer ennobled later in life as the Earl of Willesden.

*George Augustus of Hanover, later George II.

*A.k.a. James Stuart, “The Pretender,” son of the late former King James II, and would-be James III.

*One of the English titles of that same George Augustus of Hanover.

*Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar.

†The Kit-Cat Clubb.

‡An allusion to the lightning-bolts forged by Vulcan; alternately, perhaps, golden guineas turned out by the Mint, which was no longer under Roger’s direction since Oxford and Bolingbroke had overthrown the Whig Juncto, but still run by men associated with Roger, such as Newton.

§Jupiter, to whom Vulcan supplied lightning-bolts; but possibly a cheeky allusion to George Louis of Hanover, for whom, it was hoped, the Mint would soon be turning out guineas.

**Bolingbroke.

††Queen Anne.

‡‡An allusion to a myth in which an angry Vulcan fashioned a trick throne containing hidden restraints, and gave it to his mother, Juno; when she sat on it, she was trapped, and only Vulcan could release her.

*Partry.

*In honor of Lady Anne Sunderland, the daughter of the Duke of Marlborough.

*As everyone in the room knew, Leibniz was using the word animal in an ancient and somewhat technical sense of something animated, i.e., possessing, or possessed by, an anima, or spirit.

*Females who are found guilty of High Treason are punished thus, rather than being subjected to the indecency of what is about to happen to Jack.