11 DECEMBER 1688
Then the Kings countenance was changed, and his thoghts troubled him, so that the joyntes of his loines were loosed, and his knees smote one against the other.
—DANIEL 5:6
ON ANY OTHER DAY, DANIEL did not have a thing in common with anyone else at the Court of St. James. Indeed, that was the very reason he was allowed to bide there. Today, though, he had two things in common with them. One, that he had spent most of the preceding night, and most of this day, traipsing all over Kent trying to figure out where the King had got to. And two, that he stood in utmost need of a pint.
Finding himself alone on a boat-flecked mudflat, and happening on a tavern, he entered it. The only thing he sought in that place was that pint and maybe a banger. In addition to which, he found James (by the Grace of God King of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the occasional odd bit of France) Stuart being beaten up by a couple of drunken English fishermen. It was just the sort of grave indignity absolute monarchs tried at all costs to avoid. In normal times, procedures and safeguards were in place to prevent it. One could imagine one of the ancient Kings of England, say, your Sven Forkbeard, or your Ealhmund the Under-King of Kent, wandering into an inn somewhere and throwing a few punches. But barroom brawling had been pushed off the bottom of the list of Things Princes Should Know How to Do during the great Chivalry vogue of five centuries back. And it showed: King James II had a bloody nose. To be fair, though, he’d been having an epic one for weeks. As past generations sang of Richard Lionheart’s duels against Saladin before Jerusalem, future ones would sing of James Stuart’s nosebleed.
It was, in sum, not a scenario that had ever been contemplated by the authors of the etiquette-books that Daniel had perused when he’d gone into the Courtier line of work. He’d have known just how to address the King during a masque at the Banqueting House or a hunt in a royal game-park. But when it came to breaking up a royal bar-fight in a waterfront dive at the mouth of the Medway, he was at a loss, and could only order himself that pint, and consider his next move.
His Majesty was standing up to the treatment surprisingly well. Of course, he’d fought in battles on land and at sea; no one had ever accused him of being a ninehammer. And this altercation was really more of a cuffing and slapping about: not so much fight as improvised entertainment by and for men who got out to Punchinello shows only infrequently. This was a very old tavern, half sunk into the riverside muck, and the ceiling was so close to the floor that the fishermen scarcely had room to draw their fists back properly. There were flurries of jabs that failed to connect with any part of the King’s body. The blows that did land were open-handed, roundhouse slaps. Daniel sensed that if the King would only stop flinching, say something funny, and buy a round for the house, everything would change. But if he were that sort of King he wouldn’t have ended up here in the first place.
At any rate Daniel was immensely relieved that it was not a serious beating. Otherwise he would’ve been obliged to draw the sword hanging from his belt, which he had no idea how to use. King James II most certainly would know what to do with it, of course. As Daniel plunged his upper lip through the curtain of foam on his pint, he had a moment’s phant’sy of unbelting the weapon and tossing it across the room to the sovereign, who’d snatch it from the air, whip it out, and commence slaying subjects. Then Daniel could perhaps embroider ’pon his deed by smashing a bit of crockery over someone’s head—better yet, sustain an honorable wound or two. This would guarantee him a free, all-expenses paid, but strictly one-way trip to France, where he’d probably be rewarded with an English earldom that he’d never be able to visit, and get to lounge around in James’s exile court all day.
This phant’sy did not last for very long. One of the King’s attackers had felt something in His Majesty’s coat-pocket and yanked it out: a crucifix. A moment of silence. Those here who were conscious enough to see the object, felt obliged to give it due reverence; either because it was an emblem of Our Lord’s passion, or because it was made predominantly out of gold. Through the tavern’s atmosphere, which had approximately the mass and consistency of aspic, the artifact gleamed attractively, and even cast off a halo. Descartes had abhorred the idea of a vacuum, and held that what we took to be empty space was really a plenum, a solidly packed ocean of particles, swirling and colliding, trading and trafficking in a fixed stock of movement that had been imparted to the universe at its creation by the Almighty. He must have come up with that idea in a tavern like this one; Daniel wasn’t sure a pistol-ball would be able to dig a tunnel through this air from one side of the room to the other.
“What’s this, then!?” the fellow holding up the crucifix wanted to know.
James II looked suddenly exasperated. “Why, it is a crucifix!”
Another blank moment passed. Daniel had completely let go of the idea of being an exiled earl at Versailles, and was now feeling uncomfortably rabble-like himself, and strongly tempted to go and take a poke at His Majesty—if only for the sake of Drake, who’d never have hesitated.
“Well, if you’re not a bleeding Jesuit spy, then why’re you bearing this bit o’ idolatry about!?” demanded the fellow with the quick hands, shaking the crucifix just out of the King’s reach. “Didjer loot it? Didjer steal this holy object from a burnin’ church, didjer?”
They had no idea who he was. At this the scene made sense for the first time. Until then Daniel had wondered just who was suffering from syphilitic hallucinations around here!
James had surprised all London by galloping away from Whitehall Palace after midnight. Someone had caught sight of him hurling the Great Seal of the Realm into the Thames, which was not a wholly usual thing for the Sovereign to do, and with that he’d pelted off into the night, east-bound, and no person of gentle or noble rank had seen him since, until the moment Daniel had blundered into this tavern in search of refreshment.
Mercifully, the urge to sprint over and take a swing at the royal gob had passed. A semi-comatose man, slumped on a bench against the wall, was eyeing Daniel in a way that was not entirely propitious. Daniel reflected that if it was considered meet and proper for a well-heeled stranger to be beaten up and robbed on the mere suspicion that he was a Jesuit, things might not go all that well for Daniel Waterhouse the Puritan.
He drained about half the pint and turned round in the middle of the tavern so that his cloak fell open, revealing the sword. The weapon’s existence was noted, with professional interest, by the tavernkeeper, who didn’t look directly at it; he was one of those blokes who used peripheral vision for everything. Give him a spyglass, he’d raise it to his ear, and see as much as Galileo. His nose had been broken at least twice and he’d endured a blowout fracture of the left eye-socket, which made it seem as if his face were a clay effigy squirting out between the fingers of a clenching fist. Daniel said to him, “Let your friends understand that if serious harm comes to that gentleman, there lives a witness who’ll tell a tale to make a judge’s wig uncurl.”
And then Daniel stepped out onto a deal boardwalk that might’ve answered to the name of verandah or pier, depending on whence you looked at it. In theory boats of shallow draught might be poled up to it and made fast, in practice they’d been drawn up on the muck about a horseshoe-throw away from the crusty ankles of its pilings. The tracks of the boatmen were swollen wounds in the mudflat, and spatterings across the planks. Half a mile out, diverse ships were riding at anchor in the wide spot where the Medway exhausted into the Thames. It was low tide! James, the sea-hero, the Admiral who’d fought the Dutch, and occasionally beaten ’em, who’d made Isaac Newton’s ears ring with the distant roar of his cannons, had galloped out from London at exactly the wrong moment. Like King Canute, he would have to wait for the tide. It was simply too awful. Exhausted from the ride, left with no choice but to kill a few hours, the King must’ve wandered into this tavern—and why not? Every place he’d ever entered into, people had served him on bended knee. But James, who did not drink and did not curse, who stuttered, who couldn’t speak the English of fishermen, might as well have been in a Hindoo temple. He’d switched to a dark wig from the usual blond one, and it had been knocked from his head early in the scuffle, revealing a half-bald head, thin yellow-white hair in a Caesar cut, shellacked to his pocked pate by sweat and grease. Wigs enabled one to avert one’s attention from the fact of the wearer’s age. Daniel had seen an odd-looking chap, fifty-five years old, lost.
Daniel was beginning to feel he had more in common with this syphilitic Papist despot
than with the people of Sheerness. He did not like where his feelings were taking
him. So he had his feet take him elsewhere—to what passed for the high street of Sheerness,
to an inn, where an uncommon number of well-dressed gentlemen were milling about,
wringing their hands and kicking at the chickens. These men, Daniel included, had
come out from London post-haste, only a few hours behind their fleeing King, on the
presumption that if the Sovereign had left London, then they must all be missing something
important by tarrying in the city. Wrong!
HE WENT IN AND TOLD the tale to Ailesbury, the Gentleman of the Bedchamber, then turned to leave; but practically ended up with spur-marks in his back, as every courtier wanted to be first on the spot. In the stable-yard a horse was brought out for Daniel. Climbing into the saddle, and ascending to the same plane as all the other equestrians, he noted diverse faces turned his way, none of them looking very patient. So without sharing in any of the sense of romantic drama that animated all of the others, he rode out into the street, and led them on a merry gallop back down to the river. To uninformed bystanders, it must have looked like a Cavalier hunting-party pursuing a Roundhead, which Daniel hoped was no prefiguring of events to follow.
When they reached the tavern, an astounding number of Persons of Quality packed themselves inside, and commenced making stentorian announcements. One might’ve expected drunks and ne’er-do-wells to flood out through windows and trap-doors, like mice fleeing when the lantern is lit, but not a soul left the building, even after it was made known that they were all in the Presence. There seemed, in other words, to be a general failure, among the waterfront lowlives of Sheerness, to really take the notion of monarchy seriously.
Daniel lingered outside for a minute or two. The sun was setting behind a gapped cloud-front and shoving fat rays of gaudy light across the estuary of the Medway: a big brackish sump a few miles across, with a coastline as involuted as a brain, congested with merchant and naval traffic. Most of the latter huddled sheepishly down at the far end, behind the chain that was stretched across the river, below the sheltering guns of Upnor Castle. James had for some reason expected William of Orange’s fleet to attack there, in the worst possible place. Instead the Protestant Wind had driven the Dutchman all the way to Tor Bay, hundreds of miles to the west—almost Cornwall. Since then the Prince had been marching steadily eastwards. English regiments marched forth to stand in his path, only to defect and about-face. If William was not in London yet, he would be soon.
The waterfront people were already reverting to a highly exaggerated Englishness: womenfolk were scurrying toward the tavern, hitching up their skirts to keep ’em out of the muck, so that they glissaded across the tidelands like bales on rails. They were bringing victuals to the King! They hated him and wanted him gone. But that was no reason to be inhospitable. Daniel had reasons to tarry—he felt he should go in and say good-bye to the King. And, to be pragmatic, he was fairly certain he could be charged with horse-thievery if he turned this mount towards London.
On the other hand, he had another hour of twilight, and the low tide could cut a few hours off the time it would take him to work his way round the estuary, cross the river, and find the high road to London. He had the strongest feeling that important things were happening there; and as for the King, and his improvised Court here at Sheerness: if the local pub scum couldn’t bring themselves to take him seriously, why should the Secretary of the Royal Society? Daniel aimed his horse’s backside at the King of England and then spurred the animal forward into the light.
Since the time of the Babylonian astronomers, solar eclipses had from time to time
caused ominous shadows to fall upon the land. But England in winter sometimes afforded
its long-suffering populace a contrary phenomenon, which was that after weeks of dim
colorless skies, suddenly the sun would scythe in under the clouds after it had seemed
to set, and wash the landscape with pink, orange, and green illumination, clear and
pure as gems. Empiricist though he was, Daniel felt free to ascribe meaning to this
when it went his way. Ahead all was clear light, as if he were riding into stained
glass. Behind (and he only bothered to look back once) the sky was a bruise-colored
void, the land a long scrape of mud. The tavern rose up from the middle of the waste
on a sheave of pilings that leaned into each other like a crowd of drunks. Its plank
walls pawed a bit of light out of the sky, its one window glowed like a carbuncle.
It was the sort of grotesque sky-scape that Dutchmen would come over to paint. But
come to think of it, a Dutchman had come over and painted it.
MOST TRAVELERS WOULD TAKE LITTLE note of Castle Upnor. It was but a stone fort, built by Elizabeth a hundred years ago, but looking much older—its vertical stone walls obsolete already. But since the Restoration it had been the nominal seat of Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, and owner of the fair Abigail Frome (or at least Daniel presumed she was fair). As such it gave Daniel the shudders; he felt like a little boy riding past a haunted house. He’d have gone wide of it if he could, but the ferry next to it was by far the most expeditious way of crossing the Medway, and this was no time to let superstition take him out of his way. The alternative would’ve been to ride a few miles up the east bank to the huge naval shipyard of Chatham, where there were several ways of getting across. But passing through a naval base did not seem the most efficient way of getting around, during a foreign invasion.
He pretended to give his horse a few minutes’ rest at the ferry landing, and did what half-hearted spying he could. The sun was positively down now and everything was dark blue on a backdrop of even darker blue. The Castle fronted on the west bank of the river and was buried in its own shadow. However, lights were burning in some of the windows, and particularly in the outbuildings. A sharp two-masted vessel was anchored in the dredged channel nearby.
When the Dutch had sailed up here in ’67 and, over the course of a leisurely three-day rampage, stolen some of Charles II’s warships and burned diverse others, Castle Upnor had acquitted itself reasonably well, declining to surrender and taking pot-shots at any Dutchmen who’d come anywhere near close enough. The Earl of Upnor, whose travails with gambling debts and Popish Plot hysteria still lay in the future, had picked up some reflected luster. But to have one’s chief Navy Yard infested with Dutchmen was embarrassing even to a foreign-policy slut like Charles II. So modern defenses with proper earthworks had since been put up in the neighborhood, and Upnor had been demoted to the status of a giant powder-magazine, sort of an outlying gunpowder depot for the Tower of London—the unspoken message being that no one cared if it blew up. Powder-barges came hither frequently from the Tower and moored in the place claimed, tonight, by that two-master. Daniel knew only a little of ships, but even a farmer could see that this one had several cabins astern, well-appointed with windows, and lights burning behind their drawn curtains and closed shutters. Louis Anglesey hardly ever came to this place, as why should any Earl in his right mind go to a dank stone pit to sit upon powder-kegs? And yet in times of trouble there were worse places to bolt. Those stone walls might not stop Dutch cannonballs, but they would keep Protestant mobs at bay for weeks, and the river was only a few steps away; once he stepped off the quay and boarded his boat, Upnor was as good as in France.
There were a few watchmen posted about the place, hugging their pikes to their chests so they could keep their hands stuffed into their armpits, shooting the breeze, mostly gazing outwards towards the Roman road, occasionally turning round to enjoy some snatch of domestic comedy playing itself out within the walls. Potato peels and chicken feathers were bobbing in the river’s backwaters, and he caught whiffs of yeast on the breeze. There was, in other words, a functioning household there. Daniel decided that Upnor was not here at the moment, but that he was expected. Perhaps not tonight, but soon.
He left Castle Upnor behind him and went back to riding around England by himself in the dark, which seemed to be how he had spent half of his life. Now that he’d crossed over the Medway there were no real barriers between him and London, which was something like twenty-five miles away. Even if there hadn’t been a Roman road to follow, he probably would have been able to find the route by riding from one fire to the next. The only hazard was that some mob might take him for an Irishman. That Daniel bore no resemblance to an Irishman was of no account—rumors had spread that James had shipped in a whole legion of Celtic avengers. No doubt many an Englishman would agree, tonight, that strange riders should be burnt first and identified on the basis of their dental peculiarities after the ashes had cooled.
So it was boredom and terror, boredom and terror, all the way. The boring bits gave Daniel some leisure to ponder the quite peculiar family curse he seemed to be living under, namely, this marked tendency to be present at the demise of English Kings. He’d literally seen Charles I’s head roll, and he’d watched Charles II being done in by his physicians, and now this. If the next Sovereign knew what was good for him, he’d make sure Daniel was assigned, by the Royal Society, to spend the rest of his life taking daily measurements of the baroscopic pressure in Barbados.
The last bit of his route ran within view of the river, which was a pleasant sight, a snaking constellation of ships’ lanterns. By contrast the flat countryside was studded with pylons of streaming fire that warmed Daniel’s face from half a mile away, like the first uncontrollable flush of shame. Mostly these were simply bonfires, which were the only way Englishmen had of showing emotion. But in one town that he rode through, the Catholic church was being not merely burnt but pulled down, its very bricks prised apart by men with sharpened bars—men made orange by the fire-light, not people he recognized, any more, as countrymen.
The river attracted him. At first he told himself that it did so because it was cool and serene. When he got finally to Greenwich he turned aside from the road and rode onto the lumpy pasture of the Park. He couldn’t see a damned thing, which was funny because the place was supposed to be an Observatory. But he kept to a policy of insisting that his horse go the way it didn’t want to—which meant uphill. This had more than a little in common with trying to get a large and basically prosperous country to revolt.
A saltbox of a building perched on the edge of a precipice in the midst of this little range of hills out in the middle of nowhere: a house, queer-looking and haunted. Haunted by philosophers. Its pedestal—a brick of living-space—was surrounded by trees in a way that obscured the view out its windows. Any other tenant would have chopped them down. But Flamsteed had let them grow; they made no difference to him, as he slept all day, and his nights were devoted to looking not out but up.
Daniel reached a place where he could see the light of London shining through gaps among trees. The lambent sky was dissected by the spidery black X of the sixty-foot refracting telescope, supported by a mast scavenged from a tall ship. As he neared the crest he diverted to the right, instinctively avoiding Flamsteed, who exerted a mysterious repulsive force all his own. He was likely to be awake, but unable to make observations because of the light in the sky, therefore more irritable than usual, perhaps scared. His apartment’s windows had solid wooden shutters that he had clapped shut for safety. He was holed up in one of the tiny rooms, probably unable to hear anything save the ticking of diverse clocks. Upstairs, in the octagonal saltbox, were two Hooke-designed, Tompion-built clocks with thirteen-foot pendulums that ticked, or rather clunked, every two seconds, slower than the human heartbeat, a hypnotic rhythm that could be felt everywhere in the building.
Daniel led his horse on a slow traverse round the top of the hill. Below, along the riverbank, the brick ruins of Placentia, the Tudor palace, swung gradually into view. Then the new stone buildings that Charles II had begun to put up there. Then the Thames: first the Greenwich bend, then a view straight upriver all the way into the east end. Then all of London was suddenly unrolled before him. Its light shone from the wizened surface of the river, interrupted only by the silhouettes of the anchored ships. If he had not long ago seen the Fire of London with his own eyes, he might have supposed that the whole city was ablaze.
He had entered into the upper reaches of a little wood of oak and apple trees that gripped the steepest part of the hill. Flamsteed’s apartments were only a few yards above and behind him along the Prime Meridian. The fragrance of fermenting apples was heady, for Flamsteed had not bothered to collect them as they dropped from the trees during the autumn. Daniel did not bother to tie his horse, but let it forage there, getting fed and drunk on the apples. Daniel moved to a place where he could see London between trees, dropped his breeches, squatted down on his haunches, and began experimenting with various pelvic settings in hopes of allowing some urine to part with his body. He could feel the boulder in his bladder, shifting from side to side like a cannonball in a poke.
London had never been so bright since it had burned to the ground twenty-two years ago. And it had never sounded thus in all its ages. As Daniel’s ears adjusted themselves to this quiet hill-top he could hear a clamor rising up from the city, not of guns or of cart-wheels but of human voices. Sometimes they were just babbling, each to his own, but many times they came together in dim choruses that swelled, clashed, merged, and collapsed, like waves of a tide probing and seeking its way through the mazy back-waters of an estuary. They were singing a song, Lilliburlero, that had become universal in the last few weeks. It was a sort of nonsense-song but its meaning was understood by all: down with the King, down with Popery, out with the Irish.
If the scene in the tavern hadn’t made it clear enough, the very appearance of the city tonight told him that the thing had happened—the thing that Daniel had been calling the Revolution. The Revolution was done, it had been Glorious, and what made it glorious was that it had been an anticlimax. There’d been no Civil War this time, no massacres, no trees bent under the weight of hanged men, no slave-ships. Was Daniel flattering himself to suppose that this could be put down to his good work?
All his upbringing had taught him to expect a single dramatic moment of apocalypse. Instead this had been slow evolution spread all round and working silently, like manure on a field. If anything important had happened, it had done so in places where Daniel wasn’t. Buried in it somewhere was an inflection point that later they’d point to as the Moment It All Happened.
He was not such an old tired Puritan that he didn’t get joy out of it. But its very anticlimactitude, if that was a word, its diffuseness, was a sort of omen to him. It was like being an astronomer, up in that tower behind him, at the moment that the letter arrived from the Continent in which Kepler mentioned that the earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. Like that astronomer, Daniel had much knowledge, and only some of it was wrong—but all of it had to be gone over now, and re-understood. This realization settled him down a bit. As when a queer wind-gust comes down chimney and fills a room of merry-makers with smoke, and covers the pudding with a black taste. He was not quite ready for life in this England.
Now he understood why he’d felt so attracted to the river earlier: not because it was serene, but because it had the power to take him somewhere else.
He left the horse there, with an explanatory note for Flamsteed, who’d be apoplectic. He walked down to the Thames and woke up a waterman he knew there, a Mr. Bhnh, the patriarch of a tiny Qwghlmian settlement lodged in the south bank. Mr. Bhnh had grown so accustomed to the nocturnal crossings of Natural Philosophers that someone had nominated him, in jest, as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He agreed to convey Daniel across to the Isle of Dogs on the north bank.
Of late, reductions in the cost of window-glass, and improvements in the science of architecture, had made it possible to build whole blocks of shops with large windows facing the street, so that fine goods could be set out in view of passers-by. Shrewd builders such as Sterling (the Earl of Willesden) Waterhouse and Roger (the Marquis of Ravenscar) Comstock had built neighborhoods where courtiers went to do just that. The noun “shop” had been verbed; people went “shopping” now. Daniel of course never lowered himself to this newfangled vice—except that as he crossed the river he seemed to be doing it with ships. And he was a discriminating shopper. The watermen’s boats, the smacks and barges of the estuary were beneath his notice altogether, and the coasting vessels—anything with a fore-and-aft rig—were scarcely more than impediments. He raised his eyes up out of the clutter to scan for the great ships thrusting their yards up, like High Church priests exalting the sacraments above the rabble, into the sky where the wind blew straight and brave. The sails hung from those yards like vestments. There were not many such ships in the Pool tonight, but Daniel sought them all out and appraised each one shrewdly. He was shopping for something to take him away; he wanted to voyage out of sight of land for once in his life, to die and be buried on another continent.
One in particular caught his eye: trim, clean-lined, and sharply managed. She was taking advantage of the in-coming tide to make her way up-stream, ushered forward by a faint southerly breeze. The movement of the air was too faint for Daniel to feel it, but the crew of this ship, Hare, had seen flickers of life in the streamers dangling from her mastheads, and spread out her topsails. These stopped a bit of air. They stopped some of the fire-light from the city, too, projecting long prismatic shadows off into the void. The sails of Hare hovered above the black river, glowing like curtained windows. Mr. Bhnh tracked them for half a mile or so, taking advantage of the lead that the great ship forced among the smaller vessels. “She’s fitted out for a long voyage,” he mused, “probably sailing for America on the next tide.”
“Would I had a grapnel,” Daniel said, “I’d climb aboard like a pirate, and stow away on her.”
This startled Mr. Bhnh, who was not used to hearing such flights of fancy from his clientele. “Are you going to America, Mr. Waterhouse?”
“Someday,” Daniel allowed, “there is tidying-up to do in this country yet.”
Mr. Bhnh was loath to discharge Daniel in the fiery wilds of East London, which tonight was thronged with drunken mudlarks lighting out in torrid pursuit of real or imaginary Jesuits. Daniel gave no heed to this good man’s worries. He had made it all the way from Sheerness without any trouble. Even in the tavern there, he had been left alone. Those who took any notice of him at all, soon lost their interest, or (strange to relate) lost their nerve and looked away. For Daniel carried now the unstudied nonchalance of a man who knew he’d be dead in a year no matter what; people seemed to smell the grave about him, and were happy to leave him alone.
On the other hand, a man with little time to live, and no heirs, need not be so miserly. “I shall give you a pound if you take me direct to the Tower,” Daniel said. Then, observing a wary look on Mr. Bhnh’s face, he teased his purse open and tossed a handful of coins beside the boat’s lantern until he found one that shone a little, and was nearly round. In the center was a battered and scratched plop of silver that with careful tilting and squinting and use of the imagination could be construed as a portrait of the first King James, who had died sixty-some odd years ago, but who was held to have managed the Mint competently. The waterman’s hand closed over this artifact and almost as quickly Daniel’s eyelids came to with an almost palpable slamming noise. He was remotely aware of massive wool blankets being thrown over his body by the solicitous Mr. Bhnh, and then he was aware of nothing.
For the King of the North shal returne, and shal set forthe a greater multitude then afore, and shal come forthe (after certeine yeres) with a mightie armie, & great riches.
And at the same time there shal manie stand up against the King of the South: also the rebellious children of thy people shal exalte them selves to establish the vision, but they shal fall.
So the King of the North shal come, and cast up a mounte, & take the strong citie: and the armes of the South shal not resist, neither his chosen people, neither shal there be anie strength to withstand.
—DANIEL 11:13–15
HAVING GONE TO SLEEP in that boat on that night he should on no account have been surprised to wake up in the same boat on the same night; but when it happened he was perfectly amazed, and had to see and understand everything afresh. His body was hot on the top and cold on the bottom, and on the whole, not happy with its management. He tried closing and opening his eyes a few times to see if he could conjure up a warm bed, but a mightier conjuration had been wrought on him, and condemned him to this place and time. To call it nightmarish was too easy, for it had all the detail, the lively perversity that nightmares wanted. London—burning, smoking, singing—was still all around. However, he was confronted by a sheer wall of stone that rose up out of the Thames, and was thickly jacketed in all of the unspeakables that flowed in it. Atop that wall was a congeries of small buildings, hoists, large guns, a few relatively small and disciplined bonfires, armed men, but snarls of running boys, too. There was the smell of coal, iron, and sulfur, reminding Daniel of Isaac’s laboratory. And because the sense of smell is plumbed into the mind down in the cellar, where dark half-formed notions lurk and breed, Daniel entertained a momentary phant’sy that Isaac had come to London and set his mind to the acquisition of temporal power, and constructed a laboratory the size of Jerusalem.
Then he perceived stone walls and towers rising up behind this wharf, and taller ones rising up behind them, and an even higher fort of pale stone above and behind those, and he understood that he lay before the Tower of London. The roar of the artificial cataracts between the starlings of London Bridge, off to his left, confirmed it.
The wharf-wall was pierced by an arch whose floor was a noisome back-water of the Thames. The boat of Mr. Bhnh was more or less keeping station before that arch, though the current was flowing one way and the tide striving against it, so they were being ill-used by marauding vortices and pounced upon by rogue waves. The waterman, in other words, was using every drowning-avoidance skill he’d practised in the rocky flows off Qwghlm, and more than earning his pound. For in addition to duelling those currents he had been prosecuting a negotiation with a figure who stood on the top of the wharf, just above the arch. That man in turn was exchanging shouts through a speaking trumpet with a periwigged gentleman up on the parapet of the wall behind: a crenellated medieval sort of affair with a modern cannon poking out through each slot, and each cannon conspicuously manned.
Some of the men on the wharf were standing near enough to bonfires that Daniel could make out the colors of their garments. These were the Black Torrent Guards.
Daniel rose up against the gravity of many stout damp blankets, his body reminding
him of every injustice he had dealt it since he had been awakened, twenty-four hours
ago, with news that the King had gone on the lam. “Sergeant!” he hollered to the man
on the wharf, “please inform yonder officer that the escaped prisoner has returned.”
THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had gone into the west country with King James just long enough for their commander, John Churchill, to sneak away from camp and ride to join up with William of Orange. This might have surprised some of the Guards, but it had not surprised Daniel, for almost a year ago he had personally conveyed letters from John Churchill, among others, to the Prince of Orange in the Hague; and though he hadn’t read those letters, he could guess what they had said.
Within a few days, Churchill and his regiment had been back in London. But if they’d hoped to be stationed back at their old haunt of Whitehall, they’d been disappointed. William, still trying to sort out his newly acquired Kingdom, was posting his own Dutch Blue Guards at the royal palaces of Whitehall and St. James, and was happy to keep Churchill and the Black Torrent Guards at arm’s length in the Tower—which needed defending in any case, as it housed the Royal Mint, and controlled the river with its guns, and was the chief arsenal of the Realm.
Now Daniel was known, to the men of that regiment, as a wretch who’d been imprisoned there by King James II; one cheer for Daniel! Jeffreys had sent murderers to slay him—two cheers! And he had arrived at some untalked-about agreement with Sergeant Bob: three cheers! So in the last weeks before his “escape” Daniel had become a sort of regimental mascot—as Irish regiments kept giant wolf-hounds, this one had a Puritan.
And so the long and the short of it was that Mr. Bhnh was suffered to bring his boat through that tunnel under the wharf. After they passed under the arch, the sky appeared again briefly, but a good half of it was occulted by that out-thrust bulwark: St. Thomas’s Tower, a fortress unto itself, grafted to the outer wall of the Tower complex, straddling another stone arch-way paved with fœtid moat-water. Their progress was barred by a water-gate filling that arch. But as they approached, the gates were drawn open, each vertical bar leaving an arc of oily vortices in its wake. Mr. Bhnh hesitated, as any sane man would, and tilted his head back for a moment, in case he never got a chance to see the sky again. Then he probed for the bottom with his pole.
“This is my family coat of arms, such as it is,” Daniel remarked, “a stone castle bestriding a river.”
“Don’t say that!” Mr. Bhnh hissed.
“Why ever not?”
“We are entering into Traitor’s Gate!”
PAST THE NARROW APERTURE OF THE Gate lay a pool vaulted over with a vast, fair stone arch. Some engineer had lately constructed a tide-driven engine there for raising water to a cistern in some higher building back in the penetralia of the citadel, and its fearsome grinding—like a troll gnashing its teeth in a cave—appalled Mr. Bhnh more than anything he’d seen all night. He took his leave gladly. Daniel had disembarked onto some ancient slime-covered stairs. He ascended, carefully, to the level of the Water Lane, which ran between the inner and outer fortifications. This had become the scene of a makeshift camp: several hundred Irish people at least were here, taking their ease on blankets or thin scatterings of straw, smoking pipes if they were lucky, playing hair-raising plaints on penny-whistles. No celebratory bonfires here: just a few brooding cook-fires setting kettle-bottoms aglow, and begrudging faint red warmth on the hands and faces of the squatters. There had to be a rational explanation for their being here, but Daniel could not conjure one up. But that was what made city life interesting.
Bob Shaftoe approached, harried by a couple of boys who were running around barefoot even though this was December. He ordered them away gruffly, even a bit cruelly, and as they turned to run off, Daniel got a look at one of their faces. He thought he saw a familial resemblance to Bob.
Sergeant Shaftoe was headed down the lane in the direction of the Byward Tower, which was the way out to London. Daniel fell into step beside him and in a few paces they’d left the water-engine far enough behind that they could talk without shouting.
“I was ready to set off without you,” Bob said somewhat bitterly.
“For where?”
“I don’t know. Castle Upnor.”
“He’s not there yet. I’d wager he’s still in London.”
“Let’s to Charing Cross, then,” Bob said, “as I think he has a house near there.”
“You mean, is the Lieutenant of the Tower going to supply you, an escaped prisoner, with a free horse—?”
“Never mind, there are other ways of getting down the Strand. Any news concerning Jeffreys?”
“I have impressed ’pon Bob Carver the grave importance of his providing useful information to us concerning that man’s whereabouts,” Bob said. “I do not think his fear was affected; on the other hand, he has a short memory, and London contains many diversions to-night, most appealing to a man of his character.”
Passing through the Byward Tower they came out into the open and began to traverse the causeway over the moat: first a plank bridge that could be moved out of the way, then a stone ramp onto the permanent causeway. Here they encountered John Churchill, smoking a pipe in the company of two armed gentlemen whom Daniel recognized well enough that he could have recalled their names, had it been worth the effort. Churchill broke away from them when his eyes fell on Daniel, and pursued for a few steps, glaring at Bob Shaftoe in a way that meant “keep walking.” So Daniel ended up isolated in mid-causeway, face to face with Churchill.
“In truth I have no idea whether you’re about to embrace and thank me, or stab me and shove me into the moat,” Daniel blurted, because he was nervous, and too exhausted to govern his tongue.
Churchill appeared to take Daniel’s words with utmost gravity—Daniel reckoned he must’ve said something terribly meaningful, out of blind luck. Daniel had encountered Churchill many times at Whitehall, where he had always been surrounded by a sort of aura or nimbus of Import, of which his wig was only the innermost core. You could feel the man coming. He had never been more important than he was tonight—yet here on this causeway all that remained of his aura was his wig, which stood sore in need of maintenance. It was easy to see him as Sir Winston’s lad, a Royal Society whelp who had gone to sojourn in the world of affairs.
“So it’ll be for everyone, from now on,” Churchill said. “The old schemes by which we reckoned a man’s virtue have now been o’erthrown along with Absolute Monarchy. Your Revolution is pervasive. It is tricky, too. I don’t know whether you will run afoul of its tricks in the end. But if you do, it shall not be by my hand…”
“Your face seems to say, ‘provided…’”
“Provided you continue to be the enemy of my enemies—”
“Alas, I’ve little choice.”
“So you say. But when you walk through yonder gate,” Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, “you’ll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. ’Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You’re a Bishop, and I’m a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light ’tis difficult to make out your true shade.”
“I have been awake for twenty-four hours and cannot follow your meaning when you speak in figures.”
“It is not that you are tired, but that you are a Puritan and a Natural Philosopher; neither group is admired for its grasp of the subtle and the ambiguous.”
“I am defenseless against your japes. But as we are not within earshot of anyone, please avail yourself of this opportunity to speak plainly.”
“Very well. I know many things, Mr. Waterhouse, because I make it my business to converse with fellows like those—we trade news as fervidly as traders swapping stocks on the ’Change. And one thing I know is that Isaac Newton is in London to-night.”
It struck Daniel as bizarre that John Churchill should even know who Isaac was. Until Churchill continued, “Another thing I know is that Enoch turned up in our city a few days ago.”
“Enoch the Red?”
“Don’t act like an imbecile. It makes me distrustful, as I know you are not one.”
“I take such a dim view of the Art that my heart denies what my mind knows.”
“That is just the sort of thing you would say if you were one of them, and wished to hide it.”
“Ah. Now I perceive what you meant with your talk of chess-pieces and colors—you think I am hiding the red robes of an Alchemist beneath these weeds?! What a thought!”
“You’d have me just know that the notion is absurd? Pray tell, sir, how should I know it? I’m not learned as you are, I’ll admit it; but no one has yet accused me of being stupid. And I say to you that I do not know whether you are mixed up in Alchemy or no.”
“It is vexing to you,” Daniel thought aloud, “not to follow it.”
“More than that, it is alarming. In a given circumstance, I know what a soldier will do, what a Puritan will do, what a French cardinal or a Vagabond will do—certain ones excepted—but the motives of the esoteric brotherhood are occult to me, and I do not love that. And as I look forward to being a man of moment in the new order—”
“Yes, I know, I know.” Daniel sighed and tried to gather himself. “Really, I think you make too much of them. For never have you seen such a gaggle of frauds, fops, ninehammers, and mountebanks.”
“Which of these is Isaac Newton?”
The question was like a bung hammered into Daniel’s gob.
“What of King Charles II? Which was His Majesty, ninehammer or mountebank?”
“I have to go and talk to them anyway,” Daniel finally said.
“If you can penetrate that cloud, Mr. Waterhouse, I shall consider myself obliged to you.”
“How obliged?”
“What is on your mind?”
“If an earl dies on a night such as this, might it be overlooked?”
“Depends on the earl,” Churchill said evenly. “There will be someone, somewhere, who’ll not be of a mind to overlook it. You must never forget that.”
“I entered from the river tonight,” Daniel said.
“This is an oblique way of saying, you came in through the Traitor’s Gate—?”
Daniel nodded.
“I arrived from the land, as you can see, but there shall be many who shall say that I passed through the same portal as you.”
“Which puts us in the same boat,” Daniel proclaimed. “Now they say that there’s no honor among thieves—I wouldn’t know—but perhaps there may be a kind of honor among traitors. If I’m a traitor, I’m an honorable one; my conscience is clear, if not my reputation. So now I am holding my hand out to you, John Churchill, and you may stand there eyeing it all night long if you please. But if you would care to stand behind me and shore me up as I look into this question of Alchemy, I should like it very much if you took that hand in yours and shook it, as a gentleman; for as you have noticed the esoteric brotherhood is powerful, and I cannot work against it without a brotherhood of sorts to stand with me.”
“You have entered into contracts before, Mr. Waterhouse?” asked Churchill, still appraising Daniel’s out-stretched hand. Daniel could sense Bob Shaftoe looking at them from one end of the causeway.
“Yes, as when working as an architect, et cetera.”
“Then you know every contract involves obligations reciprocal. I might agree to ‘shore you up’ when you are undermined—but in return I may call upon you from time to time.”
Daniel’s hand did not move.
“Very well, then,” said Churchill, reaching out across smoke, damp, and dark.
CHARING CROSS was strewn with bonfires. But it was the green one that caught Daniel’s eye.
“M’Lord Upnor’s town-house lies this way,” shouted Bob Shaftoe, pointing insistently in the direction of Piccadilly.
“Work with me, Sergeant,” Daniel said, “as if I were a guide taking you on a hunt for strange game of which you know nothing.” They began to push their way across the vast cosmos of the square, which was crowded with dark matter: huge mobs pressing in round bonfires, singing Lilliburlero, and diverse knaves who’d come up out of Hogs-den to prey upon ’em, and patchwork mutts fighting over anything that escaped the attention of the knaves. Daniel lost sight of the green flames for a while and was about to give up when he saw red flames shooting up in the same place—not the usual orange-red but an unnatural scarlet. “If we should become separated, I shall meet you at the northern end of the Tilt Yard where King Street loses itself in the Cross.”
“Right you are, Guv.”
“Who was that boy I saw you talking to before the Bulwark, as we were leaving the Tower?”
“A messenger from Bob Carver.”
“Ah, what news from him?”
“The house of Jeffreys is boarded up, and dark.”
“If he went to the trouble of having it boarded up, then he’s done a proper job.”
“It’s as we reckoned it, these many weeks ago, Guv,” Bob answered, “Jeffreys planned his departure well.”
“Well for us. If he fled in a panic, how would we find him? Has Mr. Carver any other news?”
“The intent was not to supply us with news, so much as to impress on us what a hard-working and diligent bloke he is.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Daniel said, distracted by a rage of blue flame up ahead.
“Fireworks?” Bob guessed.
“Some plan their departures better than others,” Daniel answered.
Finally they reached the southwestern margin of the square, where King Street bent round into Pall Mall, and the view of the park and the Spring Garden was screened by an arc of town-houses that seemed to bulge out into Charing Cross, like a dam holding back pressure behind. The bonfire that kept changing its color was planted before those houses, a bow-shot away. This one was not surrounded by any crowd. This might’ve been because the true center of drinking, singing, and sociability lay elsewhere, up towards Hay-market, or perhaps it could be laid to the fact that this fire sputtered evilly and let off vile smells. Daniel fell into orbit round it, and saw books, maps, and wooden boxes being dismantled and dissolved in the flames. A chest was being devoured, and small glass phials spilled out of it a few at a time, bursting in the heat to release jets of vapor that sometimes exploded in brilliant-colored flames.
Bob Shaftoe nudged him and pointed toward one of the town-houses. The front door was being held open by a servant. Two younger servants were lugging a portmanteau out and down the front steps. The lid was half open and papers and books were spilling out. The servant who had held the door open let it fall to and then scurried after the others, picking up what they’d let drop, and stuffing it all together in a great wad, a double armload, which rested comfortably on his belly as he waddled across the dirt towards the fire. It looked as if he were planning to fling himself headlong into the particolored inferno, but he stopped just short and with a final grand belly-thrust projected the load of goods into the flames. A moment later the other two caught up with him and heaved the portmanteau right into perdition. The fire dimmed for a minute, seeming taken aback, but then the flames began to get their teeth into the new load of fuel, and to whiten as they built heat.
Still circling round, Daniel stopped to stare at a map, drawn with inks of many colors upon excellent vellum. The hottest part of the fire was behind it, so the light shone through the empty places on the map—which were many, as it was a map of some mostly uncharted sea, the voids decorated with leviathans and dread-locked cannibals. There was a scattering of islands literally gilded onto the page with some sort of golden ink, labelled “Ye Islands of King Solomon.” As Daniel gazed at them, the ink finally burst into flames and burnt like trails of gunpowder; the words vanished from the world but were committed to his memory in letters of fire.
“It is the house of M. LeFebure,” Daniel explained, walking towards it with Bob in tow. “Mark those three great windows above the entrance, glowering blood-red as the light shines through their curtains. Once I spied on Isaac Newton through those windows, using his own telescope.”
“Making the acquaintance of the Earl of Upnor—who wanted to meet him so badly that he’d made arrangements for him to be followed.”
“What is that house, then? A den of sodomites?”
“No. It has been the chief nest of Alchemists in the city ever since the Restoration. I’ve never set foot in it, but I go there now; if I fail to come out, go to the Tower and tell your master the time has come to make good on his end of our contract.”
The big-bellied servant had seen Daniel approaching and was standing warily at the door. “I am here to join them,” Daniel snapped, brushing past into the entrance hall.
The place had been decorated in the Versailles way, all magnificent, as expensive as possible, and calculated to overawe the Persons of Quality who came here to buy powders and philtres from M. LeFebure. He was not here, having fled the country already. This went a long way toward explaining the fact that the house, tonight, was about as elegant as a fish-market. Servants, and two gentlemen, were bringing goods down from the upper floors, and up from the cellar, dumping them out on tables or floors, and messing through them. After a few moments Daniel realized that one of the gentleman was Robert Boyle and the other Sir Elias Ash-mole. Nine things out of ten were tossed in the general direction of the entrance to be hauled out to the fire. The rest were packed in bags and boxes for transport. Transport where, was the question. In the kitchen, a cooper was at work, sealing ancient books up inside of barrels, which suggested a sea-voyage was contemplated by someone.
Daniel ascended the stairs, moving purposefully, as if he actually knew his way around the place. In fact, all he had to go on was vague memories of what he’d spied through the telescope twenty years ago. If they served, the room where Upnor and Newton had met was dark-paneled, with many books. Daniel had been having odd dreams about that room for two decades. Now he was finally about to enter it. But he was dead on his feet, so exhausted that everything was little different from a dream anyway.
At least a gross of candles were burning in the stairs and the upstairs hall: little point in conserving them now. Cobwebby candelabras had been dragged out of storage, and burdened with mismatched candles, and beeswax tapers had been thrust into frozen wax-splats on expensive polished banisters. A painting of Hermes Trismegistus had been pulled down from its hook and used to prop open the door of a little chamber, a sort of butler’s pantry at the top of the stairs, which was mostly dark; but enough light spilled in from the hall that Daniel could see a gaunt man with a prominent nose, and large dark eyes that gave him a sad preoccupied look. He was conversing with someone farther back in the room, whom Daniel could not see. He had crossed his arms, hugging an old book to himself with an index finger thrust into it to save his place. The big eyes turned Daniel’s way and regarded him without surprise.
“Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse.”
“Good morning, Mr. Locke. And welcome back from Dutch exile.”
“What news?”
“The King is run to ground at Sheerness. And what of you, Mr. Locke, shouldn’t you be writing us a new Constitution or something?”
“I await the pleasure of the Prince of Orange,” said John Locke patiently. “In the meantime, this house is no worse a place to wait than any other.”
“It is certainly better than where I have been living.”
“We are all in your debt, Dr. Waterhouse.”
Daniel turned round and walked five paces down the hall, moving now towards the front of the house, and paused before the large door at the end.
He could hear Isaac Newton saying, “What do we know, truly, of this Viceroy? Supposing he does succeed in conveying it to Spain—will he understand its true value?”
Daniel was tempted to stand there for a while listening, but he knew that Locke’s eyes were on his back and so he opened the door.
Opposite were the three large windows that looked over Charing Cross, covered with scarlet curtains as big as mainsails, lit up by many tapers in sconces and candelabras curiously wrought, like vine-strangled tree-branches turned to solid silver. Daniel had a dizzy sensation of falling into a sea of red light, but his eyes adjusted, and with a slow blink his balance recovered.
In the center of the room was a table with a top of black marble shot through with red veins. Two men were seated there, looking up at him: on Daniel’s left, the Earl of Upnor, and on his right, Isaac Newton. Posed nonchalantly in the corner of the room, pretending to read a book, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.
Daniel immediately, for some reason, saw this through the suspicious eyes of a John Churchill. Here sat a Catholic nobleman who was more at home in Versailles than in London; an Englishman of Puritan upbringing and habits, lately fallen into heresy, the smartest man in the world; and a Swiss Protestant famous for having saved William of Orange from a French plot. Just now they’d been interrupted by a Nonconformist traitor. These differences, which elsewhere sparked duels and wars, counted for naught here; their Brotherhood was somehow above such petty squabbles as the Protestant Reformation and the coming war with France. No wonder Churchill found them insidious.
Isaac was a fortnight shy of his forty-sixth birthday. Since his hair had gone white, his appearance had changed very little; he never stopped working to eat or drink and so he was as slender as he had always been, and the only symptom of age was a deepening translucency of his skin, which brought into view tangles of azure veins strewn around his eyes. Like many College dwellers he found it a great convenience to hide his clothing—which was always in a parlous state, being not only worn and shabby but stained and burnt with diverse spirits—underneath an academic robe; but his robe was scarlet, which made him stand out vividly at the College, and here in London all the more so. He did not wear it in the street, but he was wearing it now. He had not affected a wig, so his white hair fell loose over his shoulders. Someone had been brushing that hair. Probably not Isaac. Daniel guessed Fatio.
For the Earl of Upnor it had been a challenging couple of decades. He’d been banished once or twice for slaying men in duels, which he did as casually as a stevedore picked his nose. He had gambled away the family’s great house in London and been chased off to the Continent for a few years during the most operatic excesses of the so-called Popish Plot. He had, accordingly, muted his dress somewhat. To go with his tall black wig and his thin black moustache he was wearing an outfit that was, fundamentally, black: the de rigueur three-piece suit of waistcoat, coat, and breeches, all in the same fabric—probably a very fine wool. But the whole outfit was crusted over with embroidery done in silver thread, and thin strips of parchment or something had been involved with the needle-work to lift it off the black wool underneath and give it a three-dimensional quality. The effect was as if an extremely fine network of argent vines had grown round his body and now surrounded him and moved with him. He was wearing riding-boots with silver spurs, and was armed with a Spanish rapier whose guard was a tornadic swirl of gracefully curved steel rods with bulbous ends, like a storm of comets spiraling outwards from the grip.
Fatio’s attire was relatively demure: a many-buttoned sort of cassock, a middling brown wig, a linen shirt, a lace cravat.
They were only a little surprised to see him, and no more than normally indignant that he’d burst in without knocking. Upnor showed no sign of wanting to run him through with that rapier. Newton did not seem to think that Daniel’s appearing here, now, was any more bizarre than any of the other perceptions that presented themselves to Isaac in a normal day (which was probably true), and Fatio, as always, just observed everything.
“Frightfully sorry to burst in,” Daniel said, “but I thought you’d like to know that the King’s turned up in Sheerness—not above ten miles from Castle Upnor.”
The Earl of Upnor now made a visible effort to prevent some strong emotion from assuming control of his face. Daniel couldn’t be certain, but he thought it was a sort of incredulous sneer. While Upnor was thus busy, Daniel pressed his advantage: “The Gentleman of the Bedchamber is in the Presence as we speak, and I suppose that other elements of Court will travel down-river tomorrow, but for now he has nothing—food, drink, a bed are being improvised. As I rode past Castle Upnor yesterday evening, it occurred to me that you might have the means, there, to supply some of His Majesty’s wants—”
“Oh yes,” Upnor said, “I have all.”
“Shall I make arrangements for a messenger to be sent out then?”
“I can do it myself,” said the Earl.
“Of course I am aware, my lord, that you have the power to dispatch messages. But out of a desire to make myself useful I—”
“No. I mean, I can deliver the orders myself, for I am on my way to Upnor at daybreak.”
“I beg your pardon, my lord.”
“Is there anything else, Mr. Waterhouse?”
“Not unless I may be of assistance in this house.”
Upnor looked at Newton. Newton—who’d been gazing at Daniel—seemed to detect this in the corner of his eye, and spoke: “In this house, Daniel, a vast repository of alchemical lore has accumulated. Nearly all of it is garbled nonsense. Some of it is true wisdom—secrets that ought rightly to be kept secret from them in whose hands they would be dangerous. Our task is to sort out one from the other, and burn what is useless, and see to it that what is good and true is distributed to the libraries and laboratories of the adept. It is difficult for me to see how you could be of any use in this, since you believe that all of it is nonsense, and have a well-established history of incendiary behavior in the presence of such writings.”
“You continue to view my 1677 actions in the worst possible light.”
“Not so, Daniel. I am aware that you thought you were showering favors on me. Nonetheless, I say that what happened in 1677 must be looked on as permanently disqualifying you from being allowed to handle alchemical literature around open flames.”
“Very well,” said Daniel. “Good night, Isaac. M’Lord. Monsieur.” Upnor and Fatio were both looking a bit startled by Isaac’s cryptic discourse, so Daniel bowed perfunctorily and backed out of the room.
They resumed their previous conversation as if Daniel were naught more than a servant who’d nipped in to serve tea. Upnor said, “Who can guess what notions have got into his head, living for so many years in that land, over-run with the cabals of crypto-Jews, and Indians sacrificing each other atop Pyramids?”
“You could just write him a letter and ask him,” suggested Fatio, in a voice so bright and reasonable that it annoyed even Daniel, who was rapidly backing out of earshot. He could tell, just from this, that Fatio was no alchemist; or if he was, he was new to it, and not yet inculcated to make everything much more obscure and mysterious than it needed to be.
He turned around finally, and nearly bumped into a fellow whom he identified, out of the corner of his eye, as a merry monk who had somehow got grievously lost: it was a robed figure gripping a large stoneware tankard that he had evidently taken out on loan from one of the local drinking establishments. “Have a care, Mr. Waterhouse, you look too little, for listening so well,” said Enoch Root affably.
Daniel started away from him. Locke was still standing there embracing his book; Root was the chap he’d been talking to earlier. Daniel was caught off guard for a few moments; Root took advantage of the lull to down a mouthful of ale.
“You are very rude,” Daniel said.
“What did you say? Root?”
“Rude, to drink alone, when others are present.”
“Each man finds his own sort of rudeness. Some burst into houses, and conversations, uninvited.”
“I was bearing important news.”
“And I am celebrating it.”
“Aren’t you afraid that drink will shorten your longevity?”
“Is longevity much on your mind, Mr. Waterhouse?”
“It is on the mind of every man. And I am a man. Who or what are you?”
Locke’s eyes had been going back and forth, as at a tennis match. Now they fixed on Enoch for a while. Enoch had got a look as if he were trying to be patient—which was not the same as being patient.
“There’s a certain unexamined arrogance to your question, Daniel. Just as Newton presumes that there is some absolute space by which all things—comets even!—are measured and governed, you presume it is all perfectly natural and pre-ordained that the earth should be populated by men, whose superstitions ought to be the ruler by which all things are judged; but why might I not ask of you, ‘Daniel Waterhouse, who or what are you? And why does Creation teem with others like you, and what is your purpose?’ ”
“I’ll remind you, sirrah, that All Hallows’ Eve was more than a month since, and I am not of a humour to be baited with hobgoblin-stories.”
“Nor am I of a humour to be rated a hobgoblin or any other figment of the humane imagination; for ’twas God who imagined me, just as He did you, and thereby brought us into being.”
“Your tankard brims over with scorn for our superstitions and imaginings; yet here you are, as always, in the company of Alchemists.”
“You might have said, ‘Here you are in the center of the Glorious Revolution conversing with a noted political philosopher,’” Root returned, glancing at Locke, who flicked his eyes downward in the merest hint of a bow. “But I am never credited thus by you, Daniel.”
“I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. Do you deny it?”
“Daniel, I have only seen you in the company of alchemists. But I am aware that you do other things. I know you have oft been at Bedlam with Hooke. Perhaps you have seen priests there who go to converse with madmen. Do you suppose those priests to be mad?”
“I’m not sure if I approve of the similitude—” Locke began.
“Stay, ’tis just a figure!” Root laughed rather winningly, reaching out to touch Locke’s shoulder.
“A faulty one,” Daniel said, “for you are an alchemist.”
“I am called an Alchemist. Within living memory, Daniel, everyone who studied what I—and you—study was called by that name. And most persons even today observe no distinction between Alchemy and the younger and more vigorous order of knowledge that is associated with your club.”
“I am too exhausted to harry you through all of your evasions. Out of respect for your friends Mr. Locke, and for Leibniz, I shall give you the benefit of the doubt, and wish you well,” Daniel said.
“God save you, Mr. Waterhouse.”
“And you, Mr. Root. But I say this to you—and you as well, Mr. Locke. As I came in here I saw a map, lately taken from this house, burning in the fire. The map was empty, for it depicted the ocean—most likely, a part of it where no man has ever been. A few lines of latitude were ruled across that vellum void, and some legendary isles drawn in, with great authority, and where the map-maker could not restrain himself he drew phantastickal monsters. That map, to me, is Alchemy. It is good that it burnt, and fitting that it burnt tonight, the eve of a Revolution that I will be so bold as to call my life’s work. In a few years Mr. Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr. Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid—what we call a Cartesian grid, though ’twas not his idea—and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters—and that will be the end of Alchemy.”
“ ’Tis a noble pursuit and I wish you Godspeed,” Root said, “but remember the poles.”
“The poles?”
“The north and south poles, where your meridians will come together—no longer parallel and separate, but converging, and all one.”
“That is nothing but a figment of geometry.”
“But when you build all your science upon geometry, Mr. Waterhouse, figments become real.”
Daniel sighed. “Very well, perhaps we’ll get back to Alchemy in the end—but for now, no one can get near the poles—unless you can fly there on a broom, Mr. Root—and I’ll put my trust in geometry and not in the books of fables that Mr. Boyle and Sir Elias are sorting through below. ’Twill work for me, for the short time I have remaining. I have not time to-night.”
“Further errands await you?”
“I would fain bid a proper farewell to my dear old friend Jeffreys.”
“He is an old friend of the Earl of Upnor as well,” Enoch Root said, a bit distractedly.
“This I know, for they cover up each other’s murders.”
“Upnor sent Jeffreys a box a few hours ago.”
“Not to his house, I’ll wager.”
“He sent it in care of the master of a ship in the Pool.”
“The name of the ship?”
“I do not know it.”
“The name of the messenger, then?”
Enoch Root leaned over the baluster and peered down the middle of the stairwell. “I
do not know that, either,” he said, then shifted his tankard to the other hand so
that he could reach out. He pointed at a young porter who was just on his way out
the door, bearing another pile of books to the bonfire. “But it was him.”
HARE RODE AT ANCHOR, LANTERNS a-blaze, before Wapping: a suburb crooked in an elbow of the Thames just downstream of the Tower. If Jeffreys had already boarded her, there was nothing they could do, short of hiring a pirate-ship to overhaul her when she reached blue water. But a few minutes’ conversation with the watermen loitering round the Wapping riverfront told them that no passengers had been conveyed to that ship yet. Jeffreys must be waiting for something; but he would wait close by, within view of Hare, so that he could bolt if he had to. And he would choose a place where he could get strong drink, because he was a drunkard. That narrowed it down to some half a dozen taverns, unevenly spaced along the riverbank from the Tower of London down to Shadwell, mostly clustered around the stairs and docks that served as gate-ways ’tween the Wet and the Dry worlds. Dawn was approaching, and any normal business ought to’ve been closed half a dozen hours ago. But these dockside taverns served an irregular clientele at irregular hours; they told time by the rise and fall of the tides, not by the comings and goings of the sun. And the night before had been as wild as any in England’s history. No sane tavernkeeper would have his doors closed now.
“Let’s be about it smartly then, guv’nor,” said Bob Shaftoe, striding off the boat they’d hired near Charing Cross and lighting on King Henry’s Stairs. “This may be nigh on the longest night of the year, but it can’t possibly be much longer; and I believe that my Abigail awaits me at Upnor.”
This was a gruff way of speaking to a tired sick old Natural Philosopher, yet an improvement on the early days in the Tower, when Bob had been suspicious and chilly, or recent times when he’d been patronizing. When Bob had witnessed John Churchill shaking Daniel’s hand on the Tower causeway a few hours earlier, he’d immediately begun addressing him as “guv’nor.” But he’d persisted in his annoying habit of asking Daniel whether he was tired or sick until just a quarter of an hour ago, when Daniel had insisted that they shoot one of the flumes under London Bridge rather than take the time to walk around.
It was the first time in Daniel’s life that he’d run this risk, the second time for Bob, and the fourth time for the waterman. A hill of water had piled up on the upstream side of the bridge and was finding its way through the arches like a panicked crowd trying to bolt from a burning theatre. The boat’s mass was but a millionth part of it, and was of no account whatever; it spun around like a weathercock at the brink of the cataract, bashed against the pilings below Chapel Pier hard enough to stave in the gunwale, spun round the opposite way from the recoil, and accelerated through the flume sideways, rolling toward the downstream side so that it scooped up a ton or so of water. Daniel had imagined doing this since he’d been a boy, and had always wondered what it would be like to look up and see the Bridge from underneath; but by the time he thought to raise his gaze outside the narrow and dire straits of the boat, they’d been thrust half a mile downstream and were passing right by the Traitor’s Gate once more.
This act had at last convinced Bob that Daniel was a man determined to kill himself this very night, and so he now dispensed with all of the solicitous offers; he let Daniel jump off the boat under his own power, and did not volunteer to bear him piggy-back up King Henry’s Stairs. Up they trudged into Wapping, river-water draining in gallons from their clothes, and the waterman—who’d been well paid—was left to bail his boat.
They tried four taverns before they came to the Red Cow. It was half wrecked from the past night’s celebrations, but efforts were underway to shovel it out. This part of the riverfront was built up only thinly, with one or two strata of inns and warehouses right along the river, crowding in against a main street running direct to the Tower a mile away. Beyond that ’twas green fields. So the Red Cow offered Daniel juxtapositions nearly as strange as what he’d witnessed in Sheerness: viz. one milkmaid, looking fresh and pure as if angels had just borne her in from a dewy Devonshire pasture-ground, carrying a pail of milk in the back door, stepping primly over a peg-legged Portuguese seaman who’d passed out on a heap of straw embracing a drained gin-bottle. This and other particulars, such as the Malay-looking gent smoking bhang by the front door, gave Daniel the feeling that the Red Cow merited a thoroughgoing search.
As on a ship when exhausted sailors climb down from the yards and go to hammocks still warm from the men who replace them, so the late-night drinkers were straggling out, and their seats being taken by men of various watery occupations who were nipping in for a drink and a nibble.
But there was one bloke in the back corner who did not move. He was dark, saturnine, a lump of lead on a plank, his face hidden in shadow—either completely unconscious or extremely alert. His hand was curled round a glass on the table in front of him, the pose of one who needs to sit for many hours, and who justifies it by pretending he still nurses his drink. Light fell onto his hand from a candle. His thumb was a-tremble.
Daniel went to the bar at the opposite corner of the room, which was little bigger than a crow’s nest. He ordered one dram, and paid for ten. “Yonder bloke,” he said, pointing with his eyes, “I’ll lay you a quid he is a common man—common as the air.”
The tavernkeeper was a fellow of about three score, as pure-English as the milkmaid, white-haired and red-faced. “It’d be thievery for me to take that wager, for you’ve only seen his clothes—which are common—while I’ve heard his voice—which is anything but.”
“Then, a quid says he has a disposition sweet as clotted cream.”
The tavernkeeper looked pained. “It slays me to turn your foolish bets away, but again, I have such knowledge to the contrary as would make it an unfair practice.”
“I’ll bet you a quid he has the most magnificent set of eyebrows you’ve ever seen—eyebrows that would serve for pot-scrubbers.”
“When he came in he kept his hat pulled down low, and his head bowed—I didn’t see his eyebrows—I’d say you’ve got yourself a wager, sir.”
“Do you mind?”
“Be at your ease, sir, I’ll send my boy round to be the judge of it—if you doubt, you may send a second.”
The tavernkeeper turned and caught a lad of ten years or so by the arm, bent down, and spoke to him for a few moments. The boy went directly to the man in the corner and spoke a few words to him, gesturing toward the glass; the man did not even deign to answer, but merely raised one hand as if to cuff the boy. A heavy gold ring caught the light for an instant. The boy came back and said something in slang so thick Daniel couldn’t follow.
“Tommy says you owe me a pound then,” the tavernkeeper said.
Daniel sagged. “His eyebrows were not bushy?”
“That wasn’t the wager. His eyebrows are not bushy, that was the wager. Were not bushy, that’s neither here nor there!”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’ve a blackthorn shillelagh behind this counter that was witness to our wager, and it says you owe me that quid, never mind your weasel-words!”
“You may let your shillelagh doze where it is, sir,” Daniel said, “I’ll let you have that quid. I only ask that you explain yourself.”
“Bushy eyebrows he might have had yesterday, for all I know,” the tavernkeeper said, calming down a little, “but as we speak, he has no eyebrows at all. Only stubble.”
“He cut them off!”
“It is not my place to speculate, sir.”
“Here’s your pound.”
“Thank you, sir, but I would prefer one of full weight, made of silver, not this counterfeiter’s amalgam…”
“Stay. I can give you better.”
“A better coin? Let’s have it then.”
“No, a better circumstance. How would you like this place to be famous, for a hundred years or more, as the place where an infamous murderer was brought to justice?”
Now it was the tavernkeeper’s turn to deflate. It was clear from his face that he’d much rather not have any infamous murderers at all in the house. But Daniel spoke encouraging words to him, and got him to send the boy running up the street toward the Tower, and to stand at the back exit with the shillelagh. A look sufficed to get Bob Shaftoe on his feet, near the front door. Then Daniel took a fire-brand out of the hearth and carried it across the room, and finally waved it back and forth so that it flared up and filled the dark corner with light.
“Damned be to Hell, you shit, Daniel Waterhouse! Traitorous, bastard whore, pantaloon-pissing coward! How dare you impose on a nobleman thus! By what authority! I’m a baron, as you are a sniveling turncoat, and William of Orange is no Cromwell, no Republican, but a prince, a nobleman like me! He’ll show me the respect I merit, and you the contempt you deserve, and ’tis you who’ll feel Jack Ketch’s blade on his neck, and die like a whipped bitch in the Tower as you should’ve done!”
Daniel turned to address the other guests in the tavern—not so much the comatose dregs of last night as the breakfasting sailors and watermen. “I apologize for the disruption,” he announced. “You have heard of Jeffreys, the Hanging Judge, the one who decorated trees in Dorset with bodies of ordinary Englishmen, who sold English schoolgirls into chattel slavery?”
Jeffreys got to his feet, knocking his table over, and made for the closest exit, which was at the rear; but the tavernkeeper raised the shillelagh in both hands and wound up like a woodman preparing to swing his axe at a tree. Jeffreys shambled to a stop and reversed direction, heading for the front of the room. Bob Shaftoe let him build to full speed, and let him enjoy a few seconds’ hope, before side-stepping in front of the doorway and whipping a dagger out of his boot. It was all Jeffreys could do to stop before impaling himself on it; and the casual look on Bob’s face made it clear he would not have turned the point aside.
The men in the tavern had all got to their feet now and begun reaching into their clothes, betraying locations of various daggers, coshes, and other necessaries. But they did this because they were confused, not because they’d formed any clear intentions. For that, they were still looking to Daniel.
“The man I speak of, whose name you have all heard, the man who is responsible for the Bloody Assizes and many other crimes besides—judicial murders, for which he has never dreamed he would be made to pay, until this moment—George Jeffreys, Baron of Wem, is he.” And Daniel pointed his finger like a pistol into the face of Jeffreys, whose eyebrows would have shot up in horror, if he still had any. As it was, his face was strangely devoid of expression, of its old power to stir Daniel’s emotions. Nothing he could do with that face could now make Daniel fear him, or pity him, or be charmed by him. This was attributing more power to a set of eyebrows than was really sensible, and so it had to be something else instead; some change in Jeffreys, or in Daniel.
The daggers and coshes had begun to come out—not to be used, but to keep Jeffreys hemmed in. Jeffreys was speechless for the first time since Daniel had known him. He could not even curse.
Daniel met Bob’s eyes, and nodded. “Godspeed, Sergeant Shaftoe, I hope you rescue your princess.”
“So do I,” Bob said, “but whether I live or die in the attempt, do not forget that I have helped you; but you have not helped me yet.”
“I have not forgotten it, nor will I ever. Chasing armed men cross-country is not something I am very good at, or I would come with you now. I await a chance to return the favor.”
“It is not a favor, but one side of a contract,” Bob reminded him, “and all that remains is for us to choose the coin in which I shall be repaid.” He turned and bolted into the street.
Jeffreys looked around, taking a quick census of the men and weapons closing in around him, and finally turned his gaze on Daniel: not fierce any more, but offended, and bewildered—as if asking why? Why go to the trouble? I was running away! What is the point of this?
Daniel looked him in the eye and said the first thing that entered his mind:
Then he walked out into the city. The sun was coming up now, and soldiers were running down the street from the Tower, led by a boy.