For all that, he made excellent headway, and his admirers in the garden of the coffee-house had only a few moments in which to memorize the details. Daniel secured the Reflecting Telescope and then looked across the square, wanting to regain sight of the strange gentleman who’d been following Isaac.
But that fellow was no longer sitting in the coffee-house opposite. Daniel feared that he’d lost the man’s trail-until he happened to glance back at the Earl of Upnor, and noticed that his entourage was parting to admit, and swallow up, none other than the same gentleman rider.
Daniel, unencumbered by sword, giant flaring boots, or clacking boot-protectors, very quickly rose and stepped out of Mrs. Green’s without bothering to excuse himself. He did not walk directly towards Upnor, but plotted a course to swing wide around his group, as if going to an errand on the other side of Charing Cross.
As he drew close, he observed the following: the gentleman dismounted and approached the Earl, smiling confidently. Proud of himself, showing big mossy teeth.
While the rider bowed, Upnor glanced, and nodded, at one of his hangers-on. This man stepped in from the side, bending low, and made a sweeping gesture aimed at one of Upnor’s boots. Something flew from his hand and struck the top of the boot. In the same moment, this fellow extended his index finger and pointed to it: a neat dollop of brown stuff the size of a guinea coin. Everyone except the Earl of Upnor and the gentleman rider gasped in horror. “What is it?” the Earl inquired.
“Your boot!” someone exclaimed.
“I cannot see it,” the Earl said, “the boot-tops obstruct my view.” Supporting himself with the walking-stick, he extended one leg out in front of himself and pointed the toe. Everyone in Charing Cross could see it now, including the Earl. “You have got shit on my boot!” he announced. “Shall I have to kill you?”
The rider was nonplussed; he hadn’t come close enough to get shit on anyone-but the only other people who could testify to that were the Earl’s friends. Looking around, all he could see were the rouged and black-patched faces of the Earl’s crowd glowering at him.
“Whyever would you say such a thing, my lord?”
“ Fight a duel with you,I should say-which would presumably mean killing you. Everyone I fight a duel with seems to die-why should you be any exception?”
“Why a… duel, my lord?”
“Because to extract an apology from you seems impossible. Even my dog is apologetic. But you! Why can you not show that you are ashamed of your actions?”
“My actions…”
“You have got shit on my boot!”
“My lord, I fear you have been misinformed.”
Veryugly noises now from the entourage.
“Meet me tomorrow morning at Tyburn. Bring a second-someone strong enough to carry you away when I’m finished.”
The rider finally understood that claiming innocence was getting him nowhere. “But I can show that I am ashamed, my lord.”
“Really? E’en like a dog?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“When my dog gets shit in the wrong place, I rub his nose in it,” said the Earl, extending his pointed toe again, so it was nearly in the rider’s face.
Daniel was now walking nearly behind the rider, no more than twelve feet distant, and could clearly see a stream of urine form in the crotch of his breeches and pizzle out onto the road. “Please, my lord. I did as you asked. I followed the white-haired man-I sent the message. Why are you doing this to me?”
But the Earl of Upnor fixed his stare on the rider, and raised his boot an inch. The rider bowed his head-lowered his nose toward it-but then the Earl slowly lowered his boot until it was on the ground, forcing the other to bend low, then clamber down onto his knees, and finally to put his elbows into the dirt, in order to put his nose exactly where the Earl wanted it.
Then it was over, and the gentleman rider was running out of Charing Cross with his face buried in his hands, presumably never to be seen in London again-which must have been exactly what the Earl wanted.
The Earl, for his part, shed his entourage at a tavern, and went alone into the same shop as Isaac Newton. Daniel, by that point, wasn’t even certain that Isaac was still in there. He walked by the front of it once and finally saw a tiny sign in the window: monsieur lefebure-chymist.
Daniel roamed around Charing Cross for the next half an hour, glancing into M. LeFebure’s windows from time to time, until he finally caught sight of silver-haired Isaac framed in a window, deep in conversation with Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, who only nodded, and nodded, and (for good measure) nodded again, rapt.
Much as the sun had burnt its face into Isaac’s retinas at Woolsthorpe, this image remained before Daniel long after he had turned his back upon Charing Cross and stalked away. He walked for a long time through the streets, shifting the burden of the telescope from one shoulder to the other from time to time. He was headed generally toward Bishopsgate, where there was a meeting to attend. He was pursued and harried the whole way by a feeling, difficult to identify, until at last he recognized it as a sort of jealousy. He did not know what Isaac was up to in the house/shop/laboratory/salon of M. LeFebure. He suspected Alchemy, Buggery, or some ripe warm concoction thereof: and if not, then a flirtation with same. Which was wholly Isaac’s business and not Daniel’s. Indeed, Daniel had no interest in either of those pastimes. To feel jealous was, therefore, foolish. And yet he did. Isaac had, somehow, found friends in whom he could confide things he hid from Daniel. There it was, simple and painful as a smack in the gob. But Daniel had friends of his own. He was going to see them now. Some were no less fraudulent, or foolish, than Alchemists. Perhaps Isaac was only giving him his just deserts for that.