The System of the World

A Subterranean Vault in Clerkenwell
EARLY APRIL 1714

“THE RIVER FLEET is a parable-I would venture to say, a very mockery-of humane degradation!” announced Mr. Orney, by way of a greeting, as he stomped down stairs into the crypt.

Here, if he had evinced dismay, turned on his heel, and run back up the steps, no man would have thought less of him.

Mr. Threader-who’d arrived a quarter of an hour previously-had been quite aghast. “It is consecrated ground, sir,” Daniel had told Mr. Threader, “not some pagan Barrow. These souls are Members in Good Standing of the Community of the Dead.” And he had shoved his hand into a tangle of pallid roots and ripped them out of the way to reveal an ancient brass plate, bejeweled with condensed moisture, and gouged with a dog’s breakfast of rude letters, no two the same size, evidently copied out by some medieval artisan who knew not what they signified.

Re-forming them into Latin words and sentences was a job for patient clerks, or clerics. But this was Clerkenwell, where such had been coming to draw water for at least five hundred years. Decyphered, the letters said that behind this plate lay the earthly remains of one Theobald, a Knight Templar who had gone to Jerusalem whole, and come back in pieces. Next to it was another plate telling a similar tale about a different bloke.

Unlike Mr. Threader, Mr. Orney seemed not in the least put out by the surroundings. Daniel had been at pains to set up candles and lanthorns wherever he could, which generally meant the lids of the half-dozen blocky sarcophagi that claimed most of the floor. By the light of these, it was possible to make out a vaulted roof. This was not a soaring, lost-in-dimness type of vaulted roof. It was barely high enough for a bishop to walk up the middle without getting slime on his mitre. But the stones had been well joined, and the room had survived, a pocket of air in the dirt, oblivious to what might be happening above.

Mr. Orney paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs to let his eyes adjust, which was very prudent, then advanced on Daniel and Mr. Threader, dodging round nearly invisible puddles with sailorly grace as he made his way between the sarcophagi. He was showing a lack of curiosity, and a refusal to be awed, that in another man would have been infallible proof of stupidity. Since Daniel knew him not to be stupid, he reckoned that it was a sort of religious assertion; to a Quaker, these Papist crusader-knights were as primitive, and as beside the point, as a clan of Pictish barrow-diggers.

“Why, Brother Norman? Because the Fleet, like life, is brief and stinky?” inquired Daniel politely.

“The stench at its end is only remarkable because the Fleet runs so pure and fresh at the beginning; issuing as it does from diverse wells, holes, rills, and spaws hereabouts. Thus does a babe, fresh from the womb, soon fall prey to all manner of gross worldly-”

“We get the point,” Mr. Threader said.

“And yet the interval between the two is so brief,” Mr. Orney continued, “that a robust man” (meaning himself) “may walk it in half an hour.” He pretended to check his watch, as proof that this was no exaggeration. But it was too gloomy in here to make out the dial.

“Do not let our host see your time-piece, sir, he’ll have it apart before you can say, ’avast, that is expensive!” ’ said Mr. Threader, sounding as if he knew whereof he spoke.

“Never mind,” said Daniel, “I recognize it as the work of Mr. Kirby, probably undertaken when he was journeyman to Mr. Tompion, nine years ago.”

This produced a brief but profound-one might say, sepulchral-silence. “Well discerned, Brother Daniel,” Mr. Orney finally said.

“After the mysterious explosion,” remarked Mr. Threader, “Dr. Waterhouse secreted himself in an attic no less gloomy than this tomb, and would not return my letters for many weeks. I feared he had no stomach for Prosecution. But when he returned to polite society, behold! He knew more of clocks, and the men who make ’em, than any man alive-”

“That is rank flattery, sir,” Daniel protested. “But I will grant you this much, that if our Clubb is to achieve its Goal, we must learn all we can of the Infernal Devices in question. They were driven by clock-work, you may be sure on’t. Now, thirty years ago, I knew Huygens and Hooke, the most illustrious horologists of the ?ra. But when I returned to London I found that I was no longer privy to the secrets, nor acquainted with the practitioners, of that Technology. In my eagerness to redress this, I did from time to time forget my manners, prising open clocks and watches to examine their workings and decypher their makers’ marks, as Mr. Threader has waspishly reminded me. The result: we are met here in Clerkenwell!”

“Vy the khell are ve meetink khere?” demanded a new voice.

“God save you, Mr. Kikin!” answered Mr. Orney, not very informatively.

“If you had arrived on time,” said the irritable Mr. Threader, “you’d have had an answer just now from Dr. Waterhouse.”

“My carriage is axle-deep in a bog,” was the answer of Mr. Kikin.

“That bog is a valuable discovery,” said Mr. Orney, who waxed jovial when Mr. Threader was in a bad mood. “Put a fence round it, call it a Spaw, charge a shilling for admission, and you’ll soon be able to buy a phaethon.”

The Russian was ill-advisedly descending a slimy twelfth-century staircase into his own shadow. A flickering orange trapezoid was projected onto the floor from above, skating back and forth like a leaf coming down from a tree. It could be inferred that Mr. Kikin’s associate, who was too tall to enter the crypt, was standing in the antechamber at the top of the stairs waving a torch around, trying to get the light around his master’s shoulders.

“This damp will kill us,” Mr. Kikin predicted in a stolid way, as if he got killed every morning before breakfast.

“As long as the candles don’t go out, we have nothing to fear from this atmosphere,” said Daniel, who was deeply sick and tired of hearing semi-learned people ascribe all their problems to damps. “Yes, water seeps in here from the moist earth. But Mr. Orney was only just now remarking upon the marvellous purity of these waters. Why do you think the Knights Templar built their Temple here? It is because the nuns of St. Mary and the Knights Hospitallers both drew their water from the same well here, and didn’t die of it. Why, just up the road, wealthy gentle-folk pay money to soak in these same moistures.”

“Why not meet there?” Mr. Kikin suggested.

“I second the motion!” exclaimed Mr. Threader.

“Because-” Daniel began. But then he heard a snatch of conversation from the top of the stairs. The torch-light trapezoid grew wider and moved sideways. A new shadow appeared in its center. The fifth and last member of the Clubb was making his way down stairs. Daniel gave him a few moments to get within earshot, then continued, loudly: “because we do not wish to draw attention to ourselves! If our Nemesis has employed a clock-maker, or indeed a maker of any sort of fine instrument, why, the knave’s workshop is likely within a musket shot of this Temple.”

“Some would call it a temple, some a mound of rubble in the middle of a swine-yard,” said Mr. Kikin, catching the eye of Mr. Threader and getting a warm look in return.

“Mound is too grand a word, sir. In English we say ‘bulge.’ ”

“Those who did, would thereby show a grievous want of Real Estate Acumen!” Daniel returned, “for of the Three Desiderata: location, location, and location, this ruin has all! The tide of London’s expansion is lapping at its foundations!”

“Are you the land-lord, Dr. Waterhouse?” inquired Mr. Threader, suddenly interested.

“I am looking after the property on behalf of a High Net Worth Individual,” returned Daniel, “who is keen to make this vale into a world-renowned center of Technologickal Arts.”

“How did this individual become aware of the ruin’s existence?”

“I told him, sir,” Daniel said, “and to anticipate your next question, I learnt of it from a fellow of my acquaintance, a very, very old chap, who had knowledge from a Knight Templar.”

“Then he must indeed be very old, as the Templars were wiped out four hundred years ago,” said Mr. Threader, sounding a bit irritated.

“A new building is contemplated?” asked Mr. Orney, as one man of commerce to another.

“Is already underway,” Daniel confided, “to include an arcade of shops and ateliers for makers of watches, and of instruments-not only musickal, but philosophickal.”

He was getting expectant stares, as if he had broken off in mid-sentence.

“Planispheres, heliostats, theodolites, and circumferentors, e.g.,” he tried. Nothing.

“If Longitude is found, I daresay, ’twill be found on this property!” he concluded.

All of this had been taken in by Henry Arlanc, the last to arrive. He was standing silently, and somewhat apart from the others.

“Right!” said Mr. Threader. “The second meeting of the Clubb for the Taking and Prosecution of the Party or Parties responsible for the Manufacture and Placement of the Infernal Engines lately Exploded at Crane Court, Orney’s Ship-yard, amp;c., is called to order.”

TO DANIEL, IN HIS YOUTH, a club had always been a stick for hitting things with.

In 1664, a Mr. Power, discoursing of barometers, had written, “The Difference of the Mercurial Cylinder may arise from the club and combination of all these causes joined together.”

This extended meaning of “club” had been taken clearly by Daniel and everyone else at the Royal Society, because many of them had lately been at universities where starvelings pooled pennies to buy food or, more often, drink. The slang for this was “to make a club.” Around this time, one often heard Mr. Pepys proposing to John Wilkins and others that they make a club for dinner, meaning exactly the same procedure, save with more money and better results.

During Daniel’s absence from London, Pepys’s merry improvisations had spread out across Time to become perpetual, while losing their freedom in Space by confining themselves to fixed quarters. The notion had struck Daniel as questionable, until Roger had finally lured him to the Kit-Cat Clubb. On entering that place Daniel had said, “Oh, why didn’t you say so!” for he had understood it immediately as a Routine Upgrade of the coffee-houses where everyone had used to pass the time of day twenty years ago-the chief difference being that only certain people were let in. This all but ruled out ear-biting, stab-wounds, and duels.

This Clubb was nothing at all like the Kit-Cat. Its purpose was altogether different, its members (except for Daniel) very unlike Roger’s crowd, its meeting-place even darker and more low-ceilinged.

But certain things about Clubbs were universal. “First order of business: the collection of Dues!” Mr. Threader proclaimed. He had a coin pre-positioned in a tiny pocket of his waistcoat, and now flipped it casually onto the stone lid of a twenty-ton coffin. Everyone did a double-take: it was a pound sterling, which was to say a silver coin, and very crisp-looking, too. Using it to pay Clubb dues was a bit like nonchalantly riding around Hyde Park on the back of a Unicorn.

Daniel threw in a Piece of Eight. Mr. Kikin paid with Dutch silver money. Mr. Orney tossed out a golden guinea. Henry Arlanc upended a purse and poured out half a pint of copper tokens. Nearly all of these had been given him beforehand by Daniel. The other members of the Clubb probably suspected as much.

Daniel had insisted that the Huguenot porter be admitted, because it was theoretically possible that he was an intended victim of the first Infernal Device. Mr. Threader had proposed that the dues be set high, as a way of keeping rabble such as Arlanc out. Orney had agreed for reasons strictly practical: it was expensive to hunt down and prosecute criminals. Kikin had gone along with any and all expenditures because it might help keep his head attached to his neck if he could show the Tsar he was sparing no expense to catch the men who’d burned his ship. So Daniel had ended up paying high dues, not only for himself but for Arlanc.

Mr. Threader opened a small wooden case lined with red velvet, took out a hand-scale, and began to weigh the Spanish and Dutch money against a calibrated brass weight, which, according to tiny but furious assertions graved on its face, was the Platonic ideal of what a pound sterling ought to weigh, as laid down some 150 years ago by Gresham. Mr. Orney took this as a signal to begin reading the minutes of the previous meeting, which had been held at Mr. Kikin’s town-house in Black Boy Alley a fortnight ago.

“With the Membership’s indulgence, I shall elide all that was to no purpose, and summarize all that was merely pedantic…” Orney began.

“Hear, hear!” said Daniel before Mr. Threader could object. He needn’t have worried. Mr. Threader had stuck his tongue out, and his eyes were nearly projecting from his head on stalks as he gauged the weight of Daniel’s Spanish silver.

“This leaves only two items worth mentioning: the interview with the unfortunate Watchman, and Dr. Waterhouse’s discourse on the mechanism. Taking these in order, we interrogated Mr. Pinewood, a Watchman who witnessed the explosion in Crane Court, and was hired, or in some way induced, by verbal representations from Mr. Threader, of a highly ambiguous and still hotly disputed nature…”

“Is all of that really in the minutes!?” said Mr. Threader, glancing up from his scale with a look of mock amazement.

“Believing that he would be compensated, Mr. Pinewood lit out after a sedan chair that had been seen following Mr. Threader and Dr. Waterhouse immediately prior to the explosion,” said Mr. Orney, looking satisfied that he had been able to get a rise out of Mr. Threader. “Mr. Pinewood informed us that he followed the chair eastwards on Fleet Street as far as the Fleet Bridge, where the two men bearing it stopped, set it down, turned on Mr. Pinewood, picked him up…”

“Avast, we know the story,” muttered Mr. Threader.

“…and flung him bodily into Fleet Ditch.”

Everyone swallowed.

“A collection was taken up for Mr. Pinewood’s boils, and prayers said for his other symptoms, some of which medical science has not even devised names for yet. Some contributed more, and prayed more reverently, than others.

“The subsequent movements of the sedan chair may only be guessed at. Dr. Waterhouse lost no time guessing that it had returned to the side-alley whence he himself had seen it issue only a few minutes earlier. ‘I am convinced,’ Dr. Waterhouse informed us, ‘that they had some foreknowledge of our arrival in London, and were positioned to follow Mr. Threader’s carriage through Newgate to the City, and that we foxed them by diverting down the bank of Fleet Ditch to Crane Court.’ There followed some discussion as to whether the occupant of the sedan chair had any connection whatever to the Infernal Device; I opined that ’twere imprudent to follow so closely a vehicle known to be moments away from exploding, and that the sedan chair probably contained nothing more than a venturesome Courtesan. Mr. Threader was quick to take offense at any suggestion that a Whore (to use his term) would look on the arrival of his entourage in London as an Opportunity; the faces of the other members of the Clubb recorded amusement at his pious…”

“I move we choose a new secretary to take the Minutes,” Mr. Threader said. “Monsieur Arlanc, never mind what I’ve said about him in the past, is quiet, dutiful, and literate; I’ll pay his dues if he takes the job.”

The end of Mr. Threader’s sentence was garbled, because while talking he had reached up and inserted a large gold coin between his own molars.

“Mr. Threader,” said Mr. Orney, “if you are feeling peckish, there are Inns up the road at Black Mary’s Hole, and taverns down at Hockley-in-the-Hole, to which we might adjourn; but you’ll get no satisfaction by eating my guinea.”

“It is not yours any longer, but the Clubb’s,” said Mr. Threader, now examining the coin for bite-marks, “and it is not a guinea until I say it is.”

“You’ve already weighed it, so what’s the use of biting it?” asked Mr. Orney, sounding at least as curious as he was peeved.

“ ’Tis a proper guinea,” Mr. Threader admitted. “Pray continue your whimsical Narration, Mr. Orney.”

“In short, I put forth the hypothesis that the sedan chair was a red herring,” said Mr. Orney. “This led to a murky disquisition on clock-work, or so it appears in my notes…”

“For once your notes are accurate,” said Mr. Threader.

“Not in the least!” said Daniel. “All I meant was this. Mr. Orney avers that to place an Infernal Device in a carriage, made to explode at a certain time, and then to follow the same carriage closely down the street, only moments in advance of the explosion, were madness. To which I answer, this depends on how knowledgeable, and how confident, one is of the correct running of the clock-work. A competent horologist would set the Device up properly, and moreover would have some idea how fast or slow ’twould run in a rocking and jouncing carriage on a cold day.”

“So the person in the sedan chair was no horologist!” said Mr. Kikin.

Mr. Threader chuckled, believing that it was a witticism, but Daniel could see that the Russian had taken Daniel’s point, and was wholly serious.

“Indeed, sir. I submit that the Infernal Devices might have been planted by people who had but a very imperfect understanding of how they worked. If that is true, the Device might have been expected to explode hours or even days later than it did-the person in the sedan chair might have been nearly as astonished as were Mr. Threader and I, when it went off in Crane Court.”

“No one doubts that it exploded at the wrong moment,” said Mr. Threader, “so your hypothesis has at least a patina of credibility.”

“It is all neither here nor there,” Mr. Orney said flatly, “as Mr. Pinewood ended up thrashing about in shite, and we know nothing more concerning the sedan chair.”

“I disagree. It suggests a line of attack, by thinking about clock-work. The device that burned your ship went off at the right time: the dead of night. The one in Mr. Threader’s carriage went off too early. I conclude that the device that was used ran too quickly in a moving carriage on a cold day, but ran at the correct rate sitting still in the belly of a ship’s hull. From that I can guess as to what sort of clock-work was used, which might help lead us to him who made the Infernal Devices.”

“Hence…Clerkenwell,” Mr. Kikin said.

“What results can you report to us, from this line of inquiry?” demanded Mr. Orney.

“That is like asking a farmer in April what he has harvested from the seeds he planted a week ago,” Daniel protested. “I had hoped to find some of Mr. Robert Hooke’s notes and test-pieces at Crane Court. He was one of the first to have a go at finding the Longitude with clocks, and knew better than anyone how their rate was influenced by rocking and by changes in temperature. Alas, Hooke’s residue was all rubbished. I have made inquiries with the Royal College of Physicians, and with my lord Ravenscar.”

“Why them, pray tell?” Mr. Threader asked.

“Hooke built the Physicians in Warwick Lane, as well as certain additions to my lord Ravenscar’s house. It is possible that he stored some of his things in those places. My queries have gone unanswered. I shall redouble my efforts.”

“Since we appear to have moved on to New Business,” said Mr. Threader, “pray tell us, Mr. Orney, of all that you have learnt on the piss-boiling front.”

“Dr. Waterhouse assures us that piss-boiling on a very large scale is needed to make phosphorus for these Infernal Devices,” Mr. Orney reminded them.

“His account left little to the imagination,” Mr. Threader said.

“To do it in London would be difficult-”

“Why? London could not smell any more like piss than it does to begin with,” Mr. Kikin observed shrewdly.

“It would draw attention, not because it smelt bad, but because it was a queer practice. So the piss-boiling probably happens in the countryside. But this would require transportation of piss, in large amounts, from a place where there was a lot to be had-viz. a city, e.g., London-to said countryside; a thing not to be accomplished in perfect secrecy.”

“You should make inquiries among the Vault men!”

“An excellent idea, Mr. Kikin, and one I had a long time ago,” Mr. Orney said. “But my habitation is remote from the banks of the lower Fleet where the Vault men cluster, thick as flies, every night to discharge their loads. As Monsieur Arlanc dwells at Crane Court, five minutes’ walk from the said Ditch, I charged him with it. Monsieur Arlanc?”

“I have been very, very busy…” began Henry Arlanc, and was then drowned out by indignant vocalizations from the rest of the Clubb. The Huguenot made a brave show of Gallic dignity until this Parliamentary baying had died down. “But the Justice of the Peace for Southwark has succeeded where I failed. Voila!”

Arlanc whipped out a pamphlet, and tossed it onto a slate coffin-lid; it skidded to a stop in the pool of light cast by a candle. The cover was printed in great rude lurid type, big enough for Daniel to read without fishing out his spectacles: “THE PROCEEDINGS of the As-sizes of the Peace, Oyer and Terminer and General Gaol-Delivery for the COUNTY OF SURREY.”

Below that the letters got small; but Mr. Kikin bent over and read the subtitle aloud: “Being a FULL and TRUE accompt of ye most surprizing, execrable and Horrid CRIMES committed by the Enemies, and just, swift and severe PUNISHMENTS meted out by the Defenders, of the Peace of that County from Friday January 1, to Saturday February 27, Anno Domini 1713/14…”

Mr. Kikin shared an amused look over the candle with Henry Arlanc. It was possible to buy these pamphlets everywhere, which implied that some people-a lot of people, actually-were buying them. But no man who was literate enough to read them would admit to it. This sort of literature was supposed to be ignored. For Mr. Arlanc to notice it was uncouth, and for Mr. Kikin to derive amusement from it was rude. Foreigners and their ways!

“Forgive me, Monsieur Arlanc, but I have not had the…er…pleasure of reading that document,” said Mr. Threader. “What does it say?”

“It relates the case of a Mr. Marsh, who was driving his wagon down Lambeth Road one night in December, when he met three young gentlemen who had just emerged from a house of ill repute in St. George’s Fields. As they passed each other in the lane, these three young men became so incensed by the odour emanating from Mr. Marsh’s wagon that they drew out their swords and plunged them into the body of Mr. Marsh’s horse, which died instantly, collapsing in its traces. Mr. Marsh set up a hue and cry, which drew the attention of the occupants of a nearby tavern, who rushed out and seized the perpetrators.”

“Courageous, that, for a Mobb of Drunks.”

“The roads down there are infested with highwaymen,” Mr. Threader said keenly. “They probably reckoned ’twas safer to go out and face them as a company, be it ne’er so ragged, than be picked off one by one as they straggled home.”

“Imagine their surprise when they found they’d apprehended not highwaymen, but gentlemen!” Mr. Kikin remarked, very amused.

“They had apprehended both,” said Henry Arlanc.

“What!?”

“Many highwaymen are gentlemen,” said Mr. Threader learnedly. “As ’tis beneath the dignity of a Person of Quality to work for a living, why, when he’s gambled and whored away all his money, he must resort to a life of armed robbery. To do otherwise were dishonorable.”

“How come you to know so much of it? I daresay you are a regular subscriber of these pamphlets, sir!” said the delighted Mr. Orney.

“I am on the road several months out of the year, sir, and know more of highwaymen than do you of the very latest advances in Caulking.”

“What came of it, Monsieur Arlanc?” Daniel inquired.

“On the persons of these three, valuables were found that had been stolen, earlier in the evening, from a coach bound for Dover. The occupants of that coach prosecuted them. As all three were of course literate, they got benefit of clergy. Mr. Marsh does not appear again in the Narration, save as a witness.”

“So all that we know of Mr. Marsh is that in the middle of the night he was transporting something down Lambeth Road so foul-smelling that three highwaymen risked the gallows to revenge themselves on his horse!” said Mr. Orney.

“I know a bit more than that, sir,” Arlanc said. “I’ve made inquiries along the banks of the Fleet, after dark. Mr. Marsh was indeed a London Vault-man. ’Tis considered most strange, by his brethren, that he crossed the River with a full load in the middle of the night.”

“You say he was a Vault-man,” Daniel remarked. “What is he now? Dead?”

“Out of business, owing to the loss of his horse. Moved back to Plymouth to live with his sister.”

“Perhaps we should send one of our number to Plymouth to interview him,” suggested Daniel, half in jest.

“Inconceivable! The state of the Clubb’s finances is desperate!” Mr. Threader proclaimed.

Silence then, save for the sound of tongues being bitten. A face or two turned towards Daniel. He had known Mr. Threader longer than the others; so a decent respect for precedence dictated that he be given the first chance to bite Mr. Threader’s head off.

“We have just doubled the size of our accompt, sir. How can you make such a claim?”

“Not quite doubled, sir, your Piece of Eight came up a ha’p’ny light of a pound.”

“And my guinea is several pence heavy, as all the world knows,” said Mr. Orney, “so you may supply Brother Daniel’s deficit from my surplus, and keep the change while you are at it.”

“Your generosity sets an example to us unredeemed Anglican sinners,” said Mr. Threader with a weak smile. “But it does not materially change the Clubb’s finances. Yes, we have twice the assets today as we had yesterday; but we must consider liabilities as well.”

“I did not know we had any,” said the perpetually amused Mr. Kikin, “unless you have been taking our dues to Change Alley, and investing them in some eldritch Derivatives.”

“I look to the future, Mr. Kikin. One gets what one pays for! That is the infallible rule in fish-markets, whorehouses, and Parliament. And it applies with as much force in the world of the thief-taker.”

Mr. Threader reveled in the silence that followed. Finally Mr. Orney, who could not stand to see anyone-especially Mr. Threader-enjoy anything, said, “If you mean to hire a thief-taker, sir, with our money, you would do well to propose it first, that we may dispute it.”

“Even before disputing thief-takers, if someone would be so kind as to define the term for me?” said Mr. Kikin.

“Apprehending criminals is oft strenuous, and sometimes mortally dangerous,” said Mr. Threader. “So, instead of doing it oneself, one hires a thief-taker to go and do it for one.”

“To go out and…hunt down, and physically abduct, someone?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Threader mildly. “How else do you suppose justice can ever be served?”

“Police…constables…militia…or something!” sputtered Mr. Kikin. “But…in an orderly country…you can’t simply have people running around arresting each other!”

“Thank you, sirrah, for your advice upon how to run an orderly country!” Mr. Threader brayed. “Ah, yes, if only England could be more like Muscovy!”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen…” Daniel began. But Mr. Kikin’s fascination prevailed, and he let the argument drop, asking, “How does it work?”

“Generally one posts a reward, and leaves the rest to the natural workings of the market,” said Mr. Threader.

“How large a reward?”

“You have penetrated to the heart of the matter, sir,” said Mr. Threader. “Since the days of William and Mary, the reward for a common robber or burglar has been ten pounds.”

“By convention, or…”

“By royal proclamation, sir!”

Mr. Kikin’s face clouded over. “Hmm, so we are in competition with Her Majesty’s government, then…”

“It gets worse. Forty pounds for highway robbers, twenty to twenty-five for horse thieves, even more for murderers. The Clubb, I remind you, has ten pounds, plus or minus a few bits and farthings.”

“Stiff competition indeed,” said Mr. Orney, “and a sign, to those wise enough to heed it, that ’tis a waste of time to rely ’pon thief-takers.”

Before Mr. Threader could say what he thought of Mr. Orney’s brand of wisdom, Mr. Kikin said: “You should have told me before. If the Clubb’s dues are to be pissed away on inane things, I must be thrifty. But if it is a matter of posting a reward…to catch an enemy of the Tsar…we could have every thief-taker in London working for us by tomorrow evening!”

Mr. Threader looked perfectly satisfied.

“Do we really want that?” Daniel asked. “Thief-takers have a more vile reputation even than thieves.”

“That is of no account. We are not proposing to hire one as a nanny. The viler the better, I say!”

Daniel could see one or two flaws in that line of reasoning. But a glance at the faces of Mr. Orney and Monsieur Arlanc told him he was out-voted. They appeared to think it was splendid if Mr. Kikin wanted to spend the Tsar’s money in this way.

“If there is no further business here,” Daniel said, “I thought a tour of the watch-makers’ shops of Clerkenwell might be in order.”

“To find criminals, Dr. Waterhouse, let us search among criminals, not horologists; and let us not do it ourselves, but have thief-takers-paid for by the Tsar of Muscovy!-do it for us,” said Mr. Threader; and for once, he seemed to speak for the whole Clubb, except for Daniel. “The meeting is adjourned.”

AS A WAVE PASSES THROUGH a rug that is being shaken, driving before it a front of grit, fleas, apple seeds, tobacco-ashes, pubic hairs, scab-heads, amp;c., so the expansion of London across the defenseless green countryside pushed before it all who had been jarred loose by Change, or who simply hadn’t been firmly tied down to begin with. A farmer living out in the green pastures north of the city might notice the buildings creeping his way, year by year, but not know that his pasture was soon to become part of London until drunks, footpads, whores, and molly-boys began to congregate under his windows.

As a boy Daniel had been able to open an upper-storey window in back of Drake’s house on Holborn, and gaze across one mile of downs and swales to an irregular patch of turf called Clerkenwell Green: a bit of common ground separating St. James’s and St. John’s. Each of these was an ancient religious order, therefore, a jumbled compound of graveyards, houses, ancient Popish cloisters, and out-buildings. Like all other Roman churches in the realm, these had become Anglican, and perhaps been sacked a little bit, during Henry VIII’s time. And when Cromwell had come along to replace Anglicanism with a more radical creed, they had been sacked more thoroughly. Now what remained of them had been engulfed by London.

Yet it was better to be engulfed than to be on the edge, for the city had a kind of order that the frontier wanted. Whatever crimes, disruptions, and atrocities had occurred around Clerkenwell Green while it was being ringed with new buildings, had now migrated slightly northwards, to be replaced by outrages of a more settled and organized nature.

Half a mile northwest of Clerkenwell Green was a place where the fledgling Fleet ran, for a short distance, parallel to the road to Hampstead. Between road and river the ground was low, and shiny with shifting sheets of water. But on the opposite bank, nearer to Clerkenwell, the ground was firm enough that shrubs and vegetables could be planted in it without drowning, and buildings set on it without sinking into the muck. A hamlet had gradually formed there, called Black Mary’s Hole.

A bloke wanting to leave the urban confines of Clerkenwell Green and venture out across the fields toward Black Mary’s Hole would have to contend with a few obstacles. For directly in his path stood the ancient compound of St. James’s, and on the far side of that was a new-built prison, and just beyond that, a bridewell run by Quakers. And the sort of bloke who passed the time of day going up to Black Mary’s Hole would instinctively avoid such establishments. So he would begin his journey by dodging westwards and exiting Clerkenwell Green through a sort of sphincter that led into Turnmill Street. To the left, or London-wards, Turnmill led into the livestock markets of Smithfield, and was lined with shambles, tallow-chandleries, and knackers’ yards: hardly a tempting place for a stroll. To the right, or leading out to open country, it forked into two ways: on the right, Rag Street, and on the left, Hockley-in-the-Hole, which presumably got its name from the fact that it had come into being along a bend of the Fleet, which there had been bridged in so many places that it was vanishing from human ken.

Hockley-in-the-Hole was a sort of recreational annex to the meat markets. If animals were done to death for profit in the butcher-stalls of Smithfield, they were baited, fought, and torn asunder for pleasure in the cock-pits and bear-rings of Hockley-in-

the-Hole.

Rag Street was not a great deal more pleasant, but it did get one directly out of the city. A hundred paces along, the buildings fell away, and were replaced by gardens, on the right. On the left the buildings went on for a bit, but they were not so unsavoury: several bakeries, and then a bath where the Quality came to take the waters. In a few hundred paces the buildings ceased on that side as well. From that point it was possible to see across a quarter-mile of open ground to Black Mary’s Hole. This was, in other words, the first place where a Londoner, crazed by crowding and choked from coal-smoke, could break out into the open. The impulse was common enough. And so the entire stretch of territory from the Islington Road on the east to Tottenham Court Road on the west had become a sort of deranged park, with Black Mary’s Hole in the center of it. It was where people resorted to have every form of sexual congress not sanctioned by the Book of Common Prayer, and where footpads went to prey upon them, and thief-takers to spy on the doings of the footpads and set one against another for the reward money.

Baths and tea-gardens provided another reason to go there-or, barring that, a convenient pretext for gentlefolk whose real motives had nothing to do with bathing or tea. And-complicating matters terribly-any number of people went there for childishly simple and innocent purposes. Picknickers were as likely to come here as murderers. On his first visit to this district, Daniel had heard someone creeping along behind him, and been certain it was a footpad, raising his cudgel to dash Daniel’s brain’s out; turning around, he had discovered a Fellow of the Royal Society brandishing a long-handled butterfly net.

Just at this place where London stopped, on the road to Black Mary’s Hole, was a bit of land accurately described, by members of Daniel’s Clubb, as a swine-yard with a mound of rubble in it. As a boy looking out the window of Drake’s house, Daniel had probably flicked his gaze over it a hundred times and made naught of it. But recently he had got a bundle of letters from Massachusetts. One of them had been from Enoch Root, who’d got wind of Daniel’s plan to build a sort of annex to the Institute of Technologickal Arts somewhere around London.

For a long time I have phant’sied that one day I should find the landlord of the ruined Temple in Clerkenwell, and make something of that property.

Daniel had rolled his eyes upon reading these words. If Enoch Root was a real estate developer, then Daniel was a Turkish harem-girl! It was typical Enochian meddling: he knew there was a Templar crypt under this swine-lot that was about to be gobbled by London, and didn’t want it to be filled in, or used as a keg-room for a gin-house, and he hoped Daniel or someone would do something about it. Daniel bridled at this trans-Atlantic nagging. But Root had a knack for finding, or creating, alignments between his interests and those of the people whose lives he meddled with. Daniel needed a place to build things. Clerkenwell, though it was obviously unstable, muddy, smelling of the knacker, and loud with the screams and roars of fighting beasts, Regarded as Unsafe by Persons of Quality, was a suitable place for Daniel. He could get to Town or Country-or escape from either-with but a few steps, and none of the neighbors were apt to complain of queer doings, or pay any note to nocturnal visitors.

The parcel was an irregular pentagon about a hundred paces wide. Within it, the sunken ruin was situated off-center, away from the road to Black Mary’s Hole, near a vertex that pointed back towards Clerkenwell. The gardens of a neighboring Spaw came up close to it on one side, making the parcel seem larger than it was. It was one of countless crumbs of territory that had been worried off the edges of the Church’s stupendous holdings in Tudor days. Tracing the changes in its ownership since then had been a good job for an unemployed boffin who knew a lot of Latin-Daniel had made two trips to Oxford to research it. He had discovered that ownership of the land had passed into the hands of a Cavalier family that had gone to France during Cromwell days and, owing to an ensuing pattern of marriages, bastardy, suspicious deaths, and opportunistic religious conversions, essentially become French people and were unlikely ever to come back. Twenty-five years of almost continual war between Britain and France had left them profoundly ignorant of suburban London real estate trends. Daniel had passed all of this on to Roger at the Kit-Cat Clubb. Letters had been despatched to France, and a few weeks later Roger had informed him that he could build anything he wanted there, provided it might later be resold at a profit. Daniel had found a mediocre architect and told him to design houses with shops in the ground floor, wrapping around three sides of the property, embracing a court with the ruin in the middle of it.

As he emerged from the half-collapsed anteroom of the crypt-the last member of the Clubb to depart-white blindness came over him because of the brilliance of the cloudy sky. He shaded his eyes and looked down at the luminous grass. A small round wrinkled thing was next to his shoe, looking like a f?ry’s coin-purse. He kicked it over and realized it was a knotted sheep-gut condom.

His eyes had adjusted sufficiently now that he could look at the nearby hog-wallow without suffering too much. It was all dried up, as the tenant had been encouraged to take his swine elsewhere. Finally he could remove his hand from his brow and trace the lines of surveyors’ stakes marking the foundations of the new buildings. When walls began to rise up upon those foundations, they’d screen this yard from the road, and then the only people who’d be able to see into it would be a few of those Spaw-goers, and perhaps-if they had sharp eyes, or owned perspective glasses-inmates of the new prison on Clerkenwell Close, a quarter-mile distant. But for what it was worth, they’d be the better class of prisoners who could afford to pay the gaolers for upper-storey rooms.

ACCUSTOMED TO THE TEMPO of Trinity College and of the Royal Society, he’d thought that the Clubb’s meeting would go much longer. But Threader, Orney, and Kikin had nothing in common but decisiveness, and a will to get on with it. His watch told him he was very early for his appointment with Sir Isaac Newton. This would have been a blessing to most, for who’d want to be the insolent wretch who kept Sir Isaac waiting? To Daniel, who was looking forward to the meeting about as much as another bladder operation, it was a damned nuisance. He desired some pointless distraction; and so he decided to go call on the Marquis of Ravenscar.

There was no way to get from here to Roger’s house that was not dangerous, offensive, or both. Daniel opted for offensive, i.e., he attempted to walk through the middle of Hockley-in-the-Hole. It lay within earshot, just on the other side of some buildings. What made it offensive was the sort of people gathered there on this Saturday morning: Cockneys come up to watch fights between beasts, and to participate in others. But they also made it safe, after a fashion. Pick-pockets were all over the place, but footpads-whose modus operandi was to beat victims senseless-couldn’t work in a crowd.

At the place where Saffron Hill Road disgorged its push of Londoners into the Hole, two men, stripped to the waist, were circling around each other with their fists up. One of them already had a red knuckle-print on his cheek, and a huge smear of dirt on one shoulder where he’d tumbled into the street. They were bulky coves, probably meat-cutters from Smithfield, and at least a hundred men had already formed a ring around them, and begun to lay wagers. All foot-traffic had to squeeze through a strait no more than a fathom wide between this storm of elbows and the building-fronts along the north side of the Hole: a line-up of taverns and of smudgy enterprises that looked as if they didn’t want to be noticed.

A man was lying full-length on the ground at the foot of one building, dead or asleep, creating further eddies and surges in the crowd as people dodged around him. He looked like an apparition, a prophecy of what would become of Daniel if he were to lose his footing there. So Daniel made no pretense of dignity. He sidestepped as far as he could to the right, so that he was almost cowering against the sheer brown-brick face of a building, and shifted his walking-stick to his right hand so it wouldn’t get kicked out from under him, and put his hand through the wrist-loop in case it did. He let the traffic carry him into the flume.

He had got about halfway through, and begun to sense daylight ahead, when he sensed unease propagating like a wave through the crowd ahead of him, and looked up to see a great brute of a horse, in black leather tack with silver ornament, drawing a small carriage. Its design was outlandish: all stretched out and bent around, recalling the shape of a pouncing cheetah. In the moment before he realized that he was in trouble, his mind identified it as one of the new rigs called phaethons. It was going to squeeze through this bottleneck. Or rather, it would trot through without breaking stride, and let the pedestrians do all the squeezing.

The crowd couldn’t believe it-’twas an impossibility! Yet the vehicle, twenty feet long and eight high, drawn by a ton of prancing, iron-shod flesh, was not slowing down. The ends of the carriage-poles protruded like jousting-lances. One of those could go through your head like a pike through a pumpkin, and if you dodged that, you might still have your foot crushed under a wheel and face the always-tricky dilemma of amputation vs. gangrene. A hundred men did the rational thing. The sum of those rational choices was called panic. Daniel’s contribution to the panic was as follows: perhaps eight feet ahead of him he saw a recessed shop-doorway, and made up his mind that while everyone else was gaping at the phaethon, he could squirt forward between the crowd on his left, and the shop-window on his right, and dodge into it. He ducked under the shoulder of a bigger man and scurried forward.

Halfway there, his left peripheral vision went dark as a large number of onrushing bodies blotted out the white sky.

Daniel saw very clearly that he was going to die now, in the following manner: smashed against the front of this shop by tons of meat and bone. The shop-window would not give way; it was made of small square panes in a grid of wooden mullions as thick as his wrist. Eventually it might buckle under the pressure of the crowd, but all of his ribs would give way sooner. He tried to lunge forward another step, but it only got worse; and his foot came down too soon, on unsteady ground. He had stepped on the torso of the unconscious man he’d noticed moments earlier. He lost his balance, but gained six inches’ altitude, and this triggered some sort of climbing instinct. If the mullions of the window were stout enough to crush his ribcage, then they could at least support his weight while they were doing it. He flung both arms in the air like a Baptist in ecstasy, clutched at a horizontal bar, and pulled himself up while pushing with both feet against that sleeping or dead man, all at the same moment as he was being picked up by the mob, like a reed that has fallen into the surf, and slammed against the building. His feet were no longer touching anything. The force of gravity was countered by several different blokes’ knees, shoulders, hips, and heads, which had all struck him over the course of a brief, bony barrage. If they’d driven him under he’d be a sorry case, but they’d pushed him up. One of his cheeks had slammed up against a windowpane so hard that the glass had popped half out of its frame and was making ominous ticking noises very close to his eyeball.

He no longer needed to support his own weight, so he allowed his left hand to release its grip on the mullion above, brought it down right past his nose, insinuated his fingers between jawbone and window, and crooked his fingers over the edge of the frame, taking advantage of the loose pane by getting a bit of a handhold on its mullion, so that when the crowd collapsed he would not simply fall backwards and crack his head on the ground.

The air inside the shop felt cooler on his fingertips and smelt of pipe-smoke. He had no choice but to stare through the glass for about five seconds. In the architect’s mind’s eye, this had probably been a lovely shop-window where ladies would coo over pretty displays. And maybe it would be that some day, if Hockley-in-the-Hole ever became fashionable. But for now a board had been put up inside of it, a bit more than arm’s length inside the glass. Daniel couldn’t tell whether it was a backdrop for display, or a barrier against intruders. It had been covered with green fabric a long time ago, and the fabric had been bleached by the sun, as this was a south-facing window. It had gone nearly white everywhere except where the sun’s light had been blocked by wares, hung on that board for display. No wares remained on it now. But their caught shadows were clearly visible. Daniel’s first thought was pendulums, because the shapes were circular, depending from slim cords. But no one bought pendulums save Natural Philosophers and mesmerists. It had to have been watches, hanging on chains.

The phaethon clattered past and the crowd relaxed, presenting a whole new universe of hazards to Daniel. A lot of chaps who had been leaning against other chaps who had, in the end, been leaning against Daniel, now decided to right themselves by pushing off hard. So waves of pressure thrust Daniel against the grid, again and again, so hard that he felt it popping underneath him. One of the brass buttons on his coat shattered a pane, spraying the watch-shadows with skewed triangles of glass. Then his support went out from under him and he fell, braking himself-as planned-with the one hand he’d crooked over the windowframe. His hip swung into the store-front and cracked another pane.

Now that the loosened pane was no longer being forced inwards by his cheek, it had sprung back and trapped his knuckles under its sharp edge. He was caught on tiptoe, like a prisoner strung up in a dungeon. But his right hand was free, the walking-stick still dangling by its wrist-thong, so with some ridiculous tossing and squirming motions he got a grip on its middle, raised its knotty head, and bashed out the loose pane to get himself free. The man who’d been lying on the ground rolled over onto his back, sat up convulsively, and blew a cloud of blood from his nostrils. Daniel hurried on; and just as he walked past the front door of the building he felt it opening. Three paces farther along he heard an “Oy, you!” but Hockley-in-the-Hole had become more riotous than ever and he could plausibly ignore this. He simply could not begin a conversation with the sort of person who would lurk in the back of such a building.

He walked faster, following the leftward curve of Hockley-in-the-Hole. A miasma of watery smells, issuing from gutters and crevices in the pavement, told him he’d crossed over the entombed Fleet. He dodged right into Windmill Hill, though it was a long time since there’d been a discernible hill, or a windmill, there. He then forced himself to walk straight west, without looking back, for a hundred paces. That brought him clear of Hockley, and into the center of the largest open place in this part of town, where Leather Lane, Liquor-pond Street, and several other ways came together in a crazed, nameless interchange half the size of Charing Cross. There, finally, he turned around.

“Your watch, sir,” said a bloke, “or so I surmise.”

All the air drained out of Daniel’s lungs. For ten minutes he had felt clever and spry. Now he looked down at himself and saw wreckage. To inventory all that had gone wrong with his clothes and his toilette would take more time than he could spare; but his watch was unquestionably missing. He took a step toward the bloke, then a smaller step. But the other fellow seemed to’ve made up his mind that he’d not pursue Daniel any farther today. He stood and waited, and the longer he waited, the more he seemed to glower. He was a great big cove, built to chop wood all day long. He had the most profound whiskerage Daniel had seen in many a year, and looked as if he could grow a jet-black beaver-pelt out of his face in about a week’s time. He might have shaved forty-eight hours ago. But he’d had little incentive to do it any more frequently than that, since his cheeks and chin had suffered badly from smallpox, leaving scars atop other scars. In sum, the man’s head looked like a Dutch oven forged over a dying fire with a ball-peen hammer. His hair hung round his face in a way that reminded Daniel of the young Robert Hooke; but where Hooke had been sickly and bent, this man was made like a meat-wagon. Yet he was holding Daniel’s watch in the most curious delicate way, the time-piece resting on a half-acre of pink palm, the chain drawn back and draped over the black-creviced fingers of the other hand. He was displaying it.

Daniel took another step forward. He had the ridiculous phant’sy that the man would dart away if Daniel reached out: a reflex Daniel had learned in childhood games of keep-away, and never quite got rid of.

Something did not make sense. He looked up into the man’s gray eyes and noticed crows’ feet. He was older than he looked, probably in his forties. The beginnings of an explanation there.

“You have judged me aright,” the man said, in an encouraging tone. “I am a horologist gone bad.”

“You deal in stolen time-”

“Don’t we all, sir? Each striking his own bargain, as ’twere.”

“I was going to say, ‘time-pieces,’ but you interrupted me.”

“ ’Tis a common error of those who buy time dear, and sell it cheap, Dr. Waterhouse.”

“You know my name? What is yours?”

“My surname is Hoxton. My father christened me Peter. Hereabouts, I am called Saturn.”

“The Roman god of time.”

“And of surly dispositions, Doctor.”

“I have inspected your shop, Mr. Hoxton, quite a bit more closely than I should have liked.”

“Yes, I was just inside the window, smoking my pipe, and observing you in return.”

“You have told me in your own words that you have gone bad. You operate under an alias that is a byword for foul temper. I think I know the nature of your business. Yet you ask me to believe that you are returning me my watch, without any…complications…and you expect me to approach within your reach…” Daniel here trailed off, keeping an eye on the watch, trying not to seem as interested in getting it back as he really was.

“You’re one of those coves f’r whom everything has to make sense? Then you and I are fellow-sufferers.”

“You say that because you are a horologist?”

“Mechanic since I was a lad, clock-maker since I came to my senses,” said Saturn. “The piece of information you are wanting, Doctor, is this: this here is an old Hooke balance-spring watch, this is. When the Master made it, why, it might’ve been the best time-piece ever fashioned by human hands. But now there’s a score of proper horologists round Clerkenwell who can make ones that’ll keep better time. Technology ages, dunnit?”

Daniel pursed his lips to keep from laughing at the spectacle of this new, five-guinea word, Technology, emerging from that head.

“It ages faster’n we do. It can be difficult for a bloke to keep up.”

“Is that your story, Saturn? You could not keep up, and so you went bad?”

“I grew weary of keeping up, Doctor. That is my story, if you must know. I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more ?ternal nature.”

“Do you claim to have found it?”

“No.”

“Good. I was afraid this was going to turn into a homily.”

Daniel now felt safe in advancing two more steps. Then a question occurred to him, and he stopped. “How did you know my name?”

“It’s inscribed on the back of the watch.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Very clever,” said Saturn. Daniel could not tell which of them was the target of the sarcasm. Saturn continued, “Very well, sir. A certain flash cull of my acquaintance, a file-cly with a specialization in tatlers, who had run afoul of a Harmon in Fleet Street, and been condemned to shove the tumbler from Newgate to Leadenhall, came by my ken of an afternoon, desiring employment of a sedentary nature while his stripes healed. And after taking sensible precautions, which is to say, making sure that he was not running a type of service-lay to slum my ken, I said to this buz, my business here has fallen on hard times because I cannot run it without transitory knowledge. And yet my brain has had its fill of the same, and all I wish to do is to sit in my shop reading books, to acquire knowledge ?ternal, which benefits me in ways intangible, but in no way helps me to receive and sell stolen property of a horologickal nature, which is the raison d’etre of the shop. Therefore, go ye out into the Rumbo, the Spinning-Ken, to Old Nass, go to the Boozing-kens of Hockley-in-the-Hole and the Cases at the low end of the Mount, go to the Goat in Long-lane, the Dogg in Fleet Street, and the Black-boy in Newtenhouse-

Lane, and drink-but not too much-and buy drinks-but never too many-for any flash culls you spy there, and acquire transitory knowledge, and return to my ken and relate to me what you have learnt. And back he comes, a week later, and informs me that a certain old Gager has lately been making the rounds, trying to recover some lost property. ‘What has he lost?’ I inquired. ‘Not a thing,’ came the answer, ‘he is after another cull’s lost property-some gager who was Phinneyed ten years since.’ ‘Go and learn that dead cove’s name,’ says I, ‘and the quick one’s, too.’ Come the answers: Robert Hooke, and Daniel Waterhouse, respectively. Why, he even pointed you out to me once, when you walked past my shop on your way to visit your swine-yard. That’s how I knew you.”

Peter Hoxton now extended his arms. His left hand held the chain of the Hooke-watch, swinging it like a pendulum, and his right offered a handshake. Daniel accepted the watch greedily, and the handshake with reluctance.

“I have a question for you, Doctor,” said Saturn, as he was shaking Daniel’s hand.

“Yes?”

“I’ve made a study of you, and know you are a bit of a Natural Philosopher. Been meaning to invite you into my ken.”

“Did you-sir, did you cause my watch to be stolen!?” Daniel demanded, trying to draw back; but Saturn’s hand had engulfed his, like a python swallowing a gerbil.

“Did you-Doctor, did you fling yourself against my shop-window on purpose!?” Saturn answered, perfectly mocking Daniel’s tone.

Daniel was too indignant to speak, which the other took as permission to go on: “Now philosophy is the study of wisdom-truths ?ternal. Yet, long ago you went over the sea, didn’t you, to set up an Institute of Technologickal Arts. And here you are back in London, aren’t you, on some similar errand. Why, Doctor? You had the life I dream of: to sit on your arse and read of truths ?ternal. And yet I cannot make my way through a chapter of Plato without glancing up to see you sprawled against my shop-window like an enormous spate of bird-shite. Why turn away from the study of truths ?ternal, to traffick in transitory knowledge?”

Somewhat to his own surprise, Daniel had a ready answer, which came out of his mouth before he had had time to consider it. “Why does the minister tell mundane stories during his homily? Why not simply quote direct from sublime works of theology?”

“Anecdotes serve to illustrate the ideas he’s getting at,” Saturn surmised, “and anyway, if those ideas have no relation to mundane things, why, they’re probably rubbish.”

“Then if Newton and Leibniz are sublime theologians, sir, I am an humble vicar. Technology is a sort of religious practice to me, a way of getting at the ?ternal by way of the mundane. Does that answer your question, and may I have my hand back?”

“Yes,” said Saturn. “You have your watch, sir; you have your hand; and you have a parishioner.”

“But I do not want a parishioner,” said Daniel, turning on his heel and walking west into Liquor-pond Street.

“Then you ought to give up preaching, and those religious observances you just spoke of,” said Peter Hoxton, falling into step beside Daniel. “You are a Cambridge man?”

“I am.”

“And is not the ancient purpose of Cambridge to turn out clerics, and send them out into England to minister to the unwashed?”

“You know that perfectly well! But I’ll not minister to you or any other man, Peter Hoxton, for if ever I was a vicar, I am a fallen one now, and not fit to minister to a dog. I went astray early, and have strayed far. The only way I can think of to find my way closer to God is through the strange ministry I spoke of earlier, whereof Hooke and Spinoza were prophets. It is not a way I recommend to any man, for I am as ’stranged from the main line of religion as a stylite monk, sitting on a pillar in a waste.”

“I have strayed further and grown more ’stranged than you, Doc. I have been wandering in that same waste without any pillar to sit upon-therefore, you, perched on your post, are like a Pharos to me.”

“I say to you one more time-”

“There’s that word again! Time. Let me speak of time, Doc, and say to you this: if you continue to walk through Hockley-in-the-Hole unaccompanied, and to wander about the city as you’ve been doing, your time may be measured in days, or hours. You are not leery enough. This fact has been made note of by certain coves who make unleery gagers their prey. Every foot-scamperer and bridle-cull on the upper Fleet pricks up his ears when you trudge out to your swine-yard and disappear into your hole in the ground. Your time will be up very soon, and you will wind up as a scragg’d, naked corpse, floating down Fleet Ditch to Bridewell, if you do not make some large friends soon.”

“Are you nominating yourself my bodyguard, Saturn?”

“I am nominating myself your parishioner, Doc. As you lack a church, we shall have to worship peripatetically, ambling about the streets, as now, and making Hockley-in-the-Hole our Agora. As I am half as old, and twice as big, as you, why, many an idle cove, who does not wot the true nature of our relationship, may ignorantly assume that I am your bodyguard, and, on account of that foolish misapprehension, refrain from stabbing you or bludgeoning you to death.”

They had reached Gray’s Inn Lane. The lawyer-infested gardens and walks behind Gray’s Inn lay to either side of the road here, and beyond them were the settled confines of various Squares: Red Lyon, Waterhouse, Bloomsbury. Roger’s estate was on the far corner of Bloomsbury, where London gave way again to open countryside. Daniel did not want to lead Saturn directly to it. He stopped.

“I am dafter e’en than you guess, Saturn.”

“Why, impossible!”

“Have you heard of a pirate in America, called Edward Teach?”

“Blackbeard? Of course, sir, he is legendary.”

“I say that not so long ago, I heard Blackbeard standing on the poop of Queen Anne’s Revenge, calling for me by name.”

For the first time, Peter Hoxton was taken a-back.

“As you see, I am insane-best leave me alone,” Daniel said, and turned his back on Saturn yet again, looking for an opening in traffic on Gray’s Inn Lane.

“Concerning Mr. Teach, I shall make inquiries among the Black-guard,” said Peter Hoxton.

The next time Daniel dared to look over his shoulder, Saturn had vanished.