Nearer the river, in the flat country beyond the Tower, Naval works took over from Military ones: shipyards messy with blond timber from Scotland or Massachusetts, splattered planks drawing themselves up into the curved hulls of ships, dead firs resurrected as masts. Colossal plumes of black smoke spreading downwind, pointing to Comstock-forges where tons of iron were being melted down and poured into subterranean cannon-molds, and windmill-blades rolling on the horizon, turning the gear-trains of mighty Comstock-machines that bored holes down the centers of those cannons.
Which brought Daniel’s gaze back to the Tower, where he’d started: the central mystery, where treasure-ships from (as everyone in London now knew) France brought in the gold to be minted into the guineas that paid for all of those ships and cannons, and for the services of England in its new role as a sort of naval auxiliary to France.
ONE DAY, HEARING CHURCH-BELLS RINGtwo o’clock, Daniel descended the ladder through the telescope-shaft. Hooke had gone out to inspect some new pavement, leaving behind nothing but a faint metallic scent of vomit. Daniel walked directly across the street, dodging uncouth traffic of heavy carts. He climbed into Samuel Pepys’s carriage and made himself comfortable. Several minutes passed. Daniel looked at passers-by out the window. A hundred yards south, the streets would be a-bustle with brokers of East India stocks and goldsmiths’ notes, but this place, tucked up against London wall, was a queer eddy, or backwater, and Daniel observed a jumble of Navy men, Dissident preachers, Royal Society hangers-on, foreigners, and Vagabonds, stirring and shuffling about one another in no steady pattern. It was an inscrutable Gordian knot suddenly cleft by one Chase Scene: a scruffy barefoot boy came bolting up Broad Street, pursued by a bailiff with a cudgel. Glimpsing a side street that ran off to the left, between the Navy Treasury and the Dutch Church, the boy skidded round the corner-paused-considered matters-and freed himself of a burden by heaving a pale brick into the air. It sheared apart, the wind caught it, and it puffed into a cloud of fluttering rectangles, whirling mysteriously round their long axes. By the time Daniel or anyone else thought to look for him, the boy was gone. The bailiff shifted to a straddling gait, as if riding an invisible pony, and began trying to step on all of the libels at once, gathering them in his arms, stuffing them into his pockets. Several members of the Watch stormed up and exchanged monosyllabic gasping noises with the bailiff. They all turned and glared at the facade of the Dutch Church, then went back to rounding up handbills.
Samuel Pepys was preceded by his cologne and his wig, and pursued by a minion embracing a sheaf of giant rolled documents. “I thought it well played, on the boy’s part,” he said, climbing into the coach and handing Daniel one of the libels.
“An old trick of the trade,” Daniel said.
Pepys looked delighted. “Drake put you out on the streets?”
“Of course… ’twas the common rite of passage for all Waterhouse boys.”
The handbill was a cartoon depicting King Louis XIV of France with his breeches piled up round his ankles and hairy buttocks thrust out, shitting an immense turd into the mouth of an English sailor.
“Let’s take it to Wilkins! It’ll cheer him up enormously,” Pepys suggested, and pounded on the ceiling. The coachman drove the horses forward. Daniel made his body go limp so that he would not accrue lacerations from the continual battering onslaughts of the vehicle’s benches and bulkheads.
“Did you bring it?”
“I always have it with me,” Pepys said, producing an irregular nodule about the size of a tennis ball, “as you have all your parts.”
“To remind you of your own mortality?”
“Once a man’s been cut for the stone, ’Tis hardly necessary. ”
“Why, then?”
“It is my conversation-starter of last resort. It gets anyone talking: Germans, Puritans, Red Indians…” He handed the object to Daniel. It was heavy. Heavy as a stone.
“I cannot believe this came out of your bladder,” Daniel said.
“You see? Never fails!” Pepys answered.
But Daniel got no further response from Pepys, who’d already unrolled one of the large documents, creating a screen that divided the carriage in half. Daniel had assumed that they were all diagrams of men-of-war. But when they turned west on Cheapside the sun came in the carriage window and shone through the paper, revealing a grid of numbers. Pepys muttered things to his assistant, who jotted them down. Daniel was left to rotate the bladder-stone in his hand and gaze out at London, so different when seen at street-level. Passing through St. Paul’s Churchyard, they saw the whole contents of a printer’s shop turned out into the street-several bailiffs, and one of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s lieutenants, pawing through stacks of unbound sheets, and holding wood-blocks up to mirrors.
Within a few minutes, anyway, they were at Wilkins’s house. Pepys left his assistant and his papers below in the carriage and pounded up stairs holding the bladder-stone in his hand like a questing knight brandishing a fragment of the Cross.
He shook it in Wilkins’s face. Wilkins only laughed. But it was good that he did, because his room was otherwise a horror-his dark breeches couldn’t conceal that he had been pissing blood, sometimes sooner than he could get to the chamber-pot. He was both wizened and bloated at the same time, if that were possible, and the smell that came out of his flesh seemed to suggest his kidneys weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain.
While Pepys exhorted the Bishop of Chester to allow himself to be cut for the stone, Daniel looked about, and was dispirited but not surprised to see several empty bottles from the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure. He gave one a sniff. It was Elixir Proprietalis LeFebure -the same stuff Hooke swallowed when headaches had brought him to the brink of suicide-the fruits of LeFebure’s researches into certain remarkable properties of the poppy family. It was hugely popular at Court, even among those not afflicted with headaches or the Stone. But when Daniel saw Wilkins go into a bladder spasm-reducing the Lord Bishop of Chester, and Founder of the Royal Society, to a dumb animal for several minutes, convulsing and howling-he decided perhaps Monsieur LeFebure was not such a sinister fellow after all.
When it was over, and Wilkins was Wilkins again, Daniel showed him the handbill, and mentioned L’Estrange’s raid on the printing-shop.
“The same men doing the same things as ten years ago,” Wilkins pronounced.
From that- the same men-Daniel knew that the originator of the handbills, and ultimate target of L’Estrange’s raids, must be Knott Bolstrood.
“And that is why I cannot stop what I am doing to be cut for the Stone,” Wilkins said.