It was a lot to put on, just to nip out for a cup of coffee, but the Churchills must have known that everyone was going to be fawning over them today because of their gallant son, and decided they ought to dress for it.
Mrs. Churchill was looking over Daniel’s shoulder, toward the street. This left Daniel free to stare at her face, to which she had glued several spots of black velvet-which, since the underlying skin had been whitened with some kind of powerful cosmetic, gave her a sort of Dalmatian appearance. “He’s here,” she said to whomever she was looking at. Then, confused: “Were you expecting your half-brother?”
Daniel turned around and recognized Sterling Waterhouse, now about forty, and his wife of three years, Beatrice, and a whole crowd of persons who’d apparently just staged some type of pillaging-raid on the New Exchange. Sterling and Beatrice were shocked to see him. But they had no choice but to come over, now that Mrs. Churchill had done what she’d done. So they did, cheerfully enough, and then there was a series of greetings and introductions and other formalities (including that all parties congratulated the Churchills on the dazzling qualities of their son John, and promised to say prayers for his safe return from the shores of Tripoli) extending to something like half an hour. Daniel wanted to slash his own throat. These people were doing what they did for a living. Daniel wasn’t.
But he did achieve one insight that would prove useful in later dealings with his own family. Because Raleigh was involved in the mysterious Conspiracy of which Daniel had, lately, become vaguely aware, it probably had something to do with land. Because Uncle Thomas (“Viscount Walbrook”) Ham was mixed up in it, it must have something to do with putting rich people’s money to clever uses. And because Sterling was involved, it probably had something to do with shops, because ever since Drake had ascended into the flames over London, Sterling had been moving away from Drake’s style of business (smuggling, and traveling around cutting private deals away from markets) and towards the newfangled procedure of putting all the merchandise in a fixed building and waiting for customers to transport themselves to it. The whole thing came together complete in Daniel’s head when he sat in that coffeehouse in Charing Cross and looked at the courtiers, macaronis, swells, and fops streaming in from the new town-houses going up on land that had been incinerated, or that had been open pastures, four years earlier. They were planning some sort of real estate development on the edge of the city-probably on that few acres of pasture out back of the Waterhouse residence. They would put up town-houses around the edges, make the center into a square, and along the square Sterling would put up shops. Rich people would move in, and the Waterhouses and their confederates would control a patch of land that would probably generate more rent than any thousand square miles of Ireland-basically, they would become farmers of rich people.
And what made it extraordinarily clever-as only Sterling could be-was that this project would not even be a struggle as such. They would not have to defeat any adversary or overcome any obstacle-merely ride along with certain inexorable trends. All they-all Sterling-had to do was notice these trends. He’d always had a talent for noticing-which was why his shops were so highly thought of-so all he needed was to be in the right place to do the necessary noticing, and the right place was obviously Mrs. Green’s coffee-house.
But it was the wrong place for Daniel, who only wanted to notice what Isaac was up to. A lively conversation was underway all round him, but it might as well’ve been in a foreign language-in fact, frequently it was. Daniel divided his time between looking at the telescope and wondering when he could snatch it off the table without attracting attention; staring at the mystery-shop and at the gentleman-rider; fraternal staredowns with Sterling (who was in his red silk suit with silver buttons today, and had numerous scraps of black glued to his face, though not as many as Beatrice); and watching Sir Winston Churchill, who looked equally bored, distracted, and miserable.
At one point he caught Sir Winston gazing fixedly at the telescope, his eyes making tiny movements and focusings as he figured out how it worked. Daniel waited until Sir Winston looked up at him, ready with a question-then Daniel winked and shook his head minutely. Sir Winston raised his eyebrows and looked thrilled that he and Daniel now had a small Intrigue of their own-it was like having a pretty seventeen-year-old girl unexpectedly sit on his lap. But this exchange was fully noticed by someone of Sterling’s crowd-one of Beatrice’s young lady friends-who demanded to know what the Tubular Object was.
“Thank you for reminding me,” Daniel said, “I’d best put it away.”
“What is it?” the lady demanded.
“A Naval Device,” Sir Winston said, “or a model of one-pity the Dutch Fleet when Mr. Waterhouse’s invention is realized at full scale!”
“How’s it work?”
“This is not the place,” said Sir Winston significantly, eyes rattling back and forth in a perfunctory scan for Dutch spies. This caused all of the other heads to turn, which led to an important Sighting: an entourage was migrating out of the Strand and into Charing Cross, and someone frightfully significant must be in the middle of it. While they were all trying to figure out who, Daniel put the telescope away and closed the box.
“It’s the Earl of Upnor,” someone whispered, and then Daniel had to look, and see what had become of his former roommate.
The answer: now that Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, was in London, freed from the monastic constraints of Cambridge, and a full twenty-two years of age, he was able to live, and dress, as he pleased. Today, walking across Charing Cross, he was wearing a suit that appeared to’ve been constructed by (1) dressing him in a blouse with twenty-foot-long sleeves of the most expensive linen; (2) bunching the sleeves up in numerous overlapping gathers on his arms; (3) painting most of him in glue; (4) shaking and rolling him in a bin containing thousands of black silk doilies; and (5) (because King Charles II, who’d mandated, a few years earlier, that all courtiers wear black and white, was getting bored with it, but had not formally rescinded the order) adding dashes of color here and there, primarily in the form of clusters of elaborately gathered and knotted ribbons-enough ribbon, all told, to stretch all the way to whatever shop in Paris where the Earl had bought all of this stuff. The Earl also had a white silk scarf tied round his throat in such a way as to show off its lacy ends. Louis XIV’s Croatian mercenaries, les Cravates, had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel, and this had become a fashion in Paris, and the Earl of Upnor, always pushing the envelope, was now doing the cravate thing with a scarf instead of an (as of ten minutes ago) outmoded collar. He had a wig that was actually wider than his shoulders, and a pair of boots that contained enough really good snow-white leather that, if pulled on straight, they would have reached all the way to his groin, at which point each one of them would have been larger in circumference than his waist; but he had of course folded the tops down and then (since they were so long) folded them back up again to keep them from dragging on the ground, so that around each knee was a complex of white leather folds about as wide as a bushel-basket, filled with a froth of lace. Gold spurs, beset with jewels, curved back from each heel to a distance of perhaps eight inches. The heels themselves were cherry-red, four inches high, and protected from the muck of Charing Cross by loose slippers whose flat soles dragged on the ground and made clacking noises with each step. Because of the width of his boot-tops, the Earl had to swing his legs around each other with each step, toes pointed, rolling so violently from side to side that he could only maintain balance with a long, encrusted, beribboned walking-stick.