Some mail had piled up here, despite the recent difficulties, much of it addressed simply “GRUBENDOL London.” Following Wilkins’s instructions, Daniel gathered it all up and added it to the pile. But the GRUBENDOL stuff he culled out, and tied up into a packet with string.
Now he was ready to leave London, and wanted only money, and some way to carry all of this stuff. Back down Bishopsgate he went (leaving everything behind at Gresham College, except for the frogs, who demanded close watching) and turned on Threadneedle, which he followed westwards as it converged on Cornhill. Close to their intersection stood a series of row-houses that fronted on both of these streets. As even the illiterate might guess from the men with muskets smoking pipes on the rooftops, all were goldsmiths. Daniel went to the one called HAM BROS. A few trinkets and a couple of gold plates were displayed in a window by the door, as if to suggest that the Hams were still literally in the business of fabricating things out of gold.
A face in a grate. “Daniel!” The grate slammed and latched, the door growled and clanged as might works of ironmongery were slid and shot on the inside. Finally it was open. “Welcome!”
“Good day, Uncle Thomas.”
“Half-brother-in-law actually,” said Thomas Ham, out of a stubborn belief that pedantry and repetitiveness could through some alchemy be forged into wit. Pedantry because he was technically correct (he’d married Daniel’s half-sister) and repetitive because he’d been making the same joke for as long as Daniel had been alive. Ham was more than sixty years old now, and he was one of those who is fat and skinny at the same time-a startling pot-belly suspended from a lanky armature, waggling jowls draped over a face like an edged weapon. He had been lucky to capture the fair Mayflower Waterhouse, or so he was encouraged to believe.
“I was affrighted when I came up the street-thought you were burying people,” Daniel said, gesturing at several mounds of earth around the house’s foundations.
Ham looked carefully up and down Threadneedle-as if what he was doing could possibly be a secret from anyone. “We are making a Crypt of a different sort,” he said. “Come, enter. Why is that basket croaking?”
“I have taken a job as a porter,” Daniel said. “Do you have a hand-cart or wheelbarrow I could borrow for a few days?”
“Yes, a very heavy and strong one-we use it to carry lock-boxes back and forth to the Mint. Hasn’t moved since the Plague started. By all means take it!”
The parlor held a few more pathetic vestiges of a retail jewelry business, but it was really just a large writing-desk and some books. Stairs led to the Ham residence on the upper floors-dark and silent. “Mayflower and the children are well in Buckinghamshire?” Daniel asked.
“God willing, yes, her last letter quite put me to sleep. Come downstairs!” Uncle Thomas led him through another fortress-door that had been left wedged open, and down a narrow stair into the earth-for the first time since leaving his father’s house, Daniel smelled nothing bad, only the calm scent of earth being disturbed.
He’d never been invited into the cellar, but he’d always known about it-from the solemn way it was talked about, or, to be precise, talked around, he’d always known it must be full of either ghosts or a large quantity of gold. Now he found it to be absurdly small and homely compared to its awesome reputation, in a way that was heartwarmingly English-but it was full of gold, and it was getting larger and less ditch-like by the minute. At the end nearest the base of the stairway, piled simply on the dirt floor, were platters, punch-bowls, pitchers, knives, forks, spoons, goblets, ladles, candlesticks, and gravy-boats of gold-also sacks of coins, boxed medallions stamped with visages of Continental nobles commemorating this or that battle, actual gold bars, and irregular sticks of gold called pigs. Each item was somehow tagged: 367-11/32 troy oz. depos. by my Lord Rochester on 29 Sept. 1662 and so on. The stuff was piled up like a drystone wall, which is to say that bits were packed into spaces between other bits in a way calculated to keep the whole formation from collapsing. All of it was spattered with dirt and brick-fragments and mortar-splats from the work proceeding at the other end of the cellar: a laborer with pick and shovel, and another with a back-basket to carry the dirt upstairs; a carpenter working with heavy timbers, doing something Daniel assumed was to keep the House of Ham from collapsing; and a bricklayer and his assistant, giving the new space a foundation and walls. It was a tidy cellar now; no rats in here.
“Your late mother’s candlesticks are, I’m afraid, not on view just now-rather far back in the, er, Arrangement-” said Thomas Ham.
“I’m not here to disturb the Arrangement,” Daniel said, producing the Note from his father.
“Oh! Easily done! Easily and cheerfully done!” announced Mr. Ham after donning spectacles and shaking his jowls at the Note for a while, a hound casting after a scent. “Pocket money for the young scholar-the young divine-is it?”
“Cambridge is very far from re-opening, they say-need to be applying myself elsewhere,” Daniel said, merely dribbling small talk behind him as he went to look at a small pile of dirty stuff that was not gold. “What are these?”
“Remains of the house of some Roman that once stood here,” Mr. Ham said. “Those who follow these things-and I’m sorry to say I don’t- assure me that something called Walbrook Stream flowed just through here, and spilled into the Thames at the Provincial Governor’s Palace, twelve hundred odd years ago-the Roman mercers had their houses along its banks, so that they could ferry goods up and down from the River.”
Daniel was using the sole of one boot to sweep loose dirt away from a hard surface he’d sensed underneath. Wee polygons-terra-cotta, indigo, bone-white, beige-appeared. He was looking at a snatch of a mosaic floor. He swept away more dirt and recognized it as a rendering of a naked leg, knee flexed and toe pointed as if its owner were on the run. A pair of wings sprouted from the ankle. “Yes, the Roman floor we’ll keep,” said Mr. Ham, “as we need a barrier-to discourage clever men with shovels. Jonas, where are the loose bits?”
The digger kicked a wooden box across the floor towards them. It was half-full of small bits of dirty junk: a couple of combs carved out of bone or ivory; a clay lantern; the skeleton of a brooch, jewels long since missing from their sockets; fragments of glazed pottery; and something long and slender: a hairpin, Daniel reckoned, rubbing the dirt away. It was probably silver, though badly tarnished. “Take it, my lad,” said Mr. Ham, referring not only to the hairpin but also to a rather nice silver one-pound coin that he had just quarried from his pocket. “Perhaps the future Mrs. Waterhouse will enjoy fixing her coif with a bauble that once adorned the head of some Roman trader’s wife.”
“Trinity College does not allow us to have wives,” Daniel reminded him, “but I’ll take it anyway-perhaps I’ll have a niece or something who has pretty hair, and who isn’t squeamish about a bit of paganism.” For it was clear now that the hairpin was fashioned in the shape of a caduceus.
“Paganism? Then we are all pagans! It is a symbol of Mercury-patron of commerce-who has been worshipped in this cellar-and in this city-for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adopts the shape of any container-and someday, Daniel, you’ll meet a young lady who is just as adaptable. Take it.” Putting the silver coin next to the caduceus in Daniel’s palm, he folded Daniel’s fingers over the top and then clasped the fist-chilled by the touch of the metal-between his two warm hands in benediction.