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 TOLDthe 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 LITTLEnote 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.