M. le comte d’Avaux has redoubled his surveillance of the Countess in the Hague. He has received assurances from the laundresses who work in the house of Huygens that she has not bled a single drop of menstrual blood in the nearly two months she’s been there. She is pregnant with a bastard of Arcachon. She is therefore now a part of the family of France, of which your majesty is the patriarch. As it is become a family matter, I will refrain from any further meddling unless your majesty instructs me otherwise.
I have the honour to be, your majesty’s
humble and obedient servant,
Bonaventure Rossignol
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,DANIELdid 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 additition 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.”