“Does this sham have a purpose, other than to reminisce about College days?” Daniel inquired.
“Give him a revolution, ” Jeffreys said.
The fellow who had poured water into Daniel’s mouth earlier-some sort of armed bailiff-stepped up, grabbed one of the four grappling-hooks projecting from Daniel’s collar, and gave it a wrench. The whole apparatus spun round, using Daniel’s neck as an axle, until he could get his arms up to stop it. A simpler man would have guessed-from the sheer amount of pain involved-that his head had been half sawed away. But Daniel had dissected enough necks to know where all the important bits were. He ran a few quick experiments and concluded that, as he could swallow, breathe, and wiggle his toes, none of the main cables had been severed.
“You are charged with perverting the English language,” Jeffreys proclaimed. “To wit: that on numerous occasions during idle talk in coffee-houses, and in private correspondence, you have employed the word ‘revolution,’ heretofore a perfectly innocent and useful English word, in an altogether new sense, conceived and propagated by you, meaning radical and violent overthrow of a government.”
“Oh, I don’t think violence need have anything to do with it.”
“You admit you are guilty then!”
“I know how the genuine Star Chamber worked… I don’t imagine this sham one is any different… why should I dignify it by pretending to put up a defense?”
“The defendant is guilty as charged!” Jeffreys announced, as if, by superhuman effort, he’d just brought an exhausting trial to a close. “I shan’t pretend to be surprised by the outcome-while you were asleep, we interrogated several witnesses-all agreed you have been using ‘revolution’ in a sense that is not to be found in any treatise of Astronomy. We even asked your old chum from Trinity…”
“Monmouth? But didn’t you chop his head off?”
“No, no, the other one. The Natural Philosopher who has been so impertinent as to quarrel with the King in the matter of Father Francis…”
“Newton!?”
“Yes, that one! I asked him, ‘You have written all of these fat books on the subject of Revolutions, what does the word signify to you?’ He said it meant one body moving about another-he uttered not a word about politics.”
“I cannot believe you have brought Newton into this matter.”
Jeffreys abruptly stopped playing the role of Grand Inquisitor, and answered in the polite, distracted voice of the busy man-about-town: “Well, I had to grant him an audience anyway, on the Father Francis matter. He does not know you are here… just as you, evidently, did not know he was in London.”
In the same sort of tone, Daniel replied, “Can’t blame you for finding it all just a bit bewildering. Of course! You’d assume that Newton, on a visit to London, would renew his acquaintance with me, and other Fellows of the Royal Society.”
“I have it on good authority he has been spending time with that damned Swiss traitor instead.”
“Swiss traitor?”
“The one who warned William of Orange of the French dragoons.”
“Fatio?”
“Yes, Fatio de Duilliers.”
Jeffreys was absent-mindedly patting his wig, puzzling over this fragment re Newton. The sudden change in the Lord Chancellor’s affect had engendered, in Daniel, a giddiness that was probably dangerous. He had been trying to stifle it. But now Daniel’s stomach began to shake with suppressed laughter.
“Jeffreys! Fatio is a Swiss Protestant who warned the Dutch of a French plot, on Dutch soil… and for this you call him a traitor?”
“He betrayed Monsieur le comte de Fenil. And now this traitor has moved to London, for he knows that his life is forfeit anywhere on the Continent… anywhere Persons of Quality observe a decent respect for justice. But here! London, England! Oh, in other times his presence would not have been tolerated. But in these parlous times, when such a man comes and takes up residence in our city, no one bats an eye… and when he is seen buying alchemical supplies, and talking in coffee-houses with our foremost Natural Philosopher, no one thinks of it as scandalous.”
Daniel perceived that Jeffreys was beginning to work himself up into another frenzy. So before the Lord Chancellor completely lost his mind, Daniel reminded him: “The real Star Chamber was known for pronouncing stern sentences, and executing them quickly.”
“True! And if this assembly had such powers, your nose would be lying in the gutter, and the rest of you would be on a ship to the West Indies, where you would chop sugar cane on my plantation for the rest of your life. As it stands, I cannot punish you until I’ve convicted you of something in the common-law court. Shouldn’t be all that difficult, really.”
“How do you suppose?”
“Tilt the defendant back!”
The Star Chamber’s bailiffs, or executioners or whatever they were, converged on Daniel from behind, gripped the back of his chair, and yanked, raising its front legs up off the floor and leaving Daniel’s feet a-dangle. His weight shifted from his buttocks to his back, and the iron collar went into motion and tried to fall to the floor. But it was stopped by Daniel’s throat. He tried to raise his hands to take the weight of the iron off his wind-pipe, but Jeffreys’ henchmen had anticipated that: each of them had a spare hand that he used to pin one of Daniel’s hands down to the chair. Daniel could see nothing but stars now: stars painted on the ceiling when his eyes were open, and other stars that zoomed across his vision when his eyes were closed. The face of the Lord Chancellor now swam into the center of this firmament like the Man in the Moon.
Now Jeffreys had been an astonishingly beautiful young man, even by the standards of the generation of young Cavaliers that had included such Adonises as the Duke of Monmouth and John Churchill. His eyes, in particular, had been of remarkable beauty-perhaps this accounted for his ability to seize and hold the young Daniel Waterhouse with his gaze. Unlike Churchill, he had not aged well. Years in London, serving as solicitor general to the Duke of York, then as a prosecutor of supposed conspirators, then Lord Chief Justice, and now Lord Chancellor, had put leaves of lard on him, as on a kidney in a butcher-stall. His eyebrows had grown out into great gnarled wings, or horns. The eyes were beautiful as ever, but instead of gazing out from the fair unblemished face of a youth, they peered out through a sort of embrasure, between folds of chub below and snarled brows above. It had probably been fifteen years since Jeffreys could list, from memory, all the men he had murdered through the judicial system; if he hadn’t lost count while extirpating the Popish Plot, he certainly had during the Bloody Assizes.
At any rate Daniel could not now tear his eyes away from those of Jeffreys. In a sense Jeffreys had planned this spectacle poorly. The drug must have been slipped into Daniel’s drink at the coffeehouse and Jeffreys’s minions must have abducted him after he’d fallen asleep in a water-taxi. But the elixir had made him so groggy that he had failed to be afraid until this moment.
Now, Drake wouldn’t have been afraid, even fully awake; he’d sat in this room and defied Archbishop Laud to his face, knowing what they would do to him. Daniel had been brave, until now, only insofar as the drug had made him stupid. But now, looking up into the eyes of Jeffreys, he recalled all of the horror-stories that had emanated from the Tower as this man’s career had flourished: Dissidents who “committed suicide” by cutting their own throats to the vertebrae; great trees in Taunton decorated with hanged men, dying slowly; the Duke of Monmouth having his head gradually hacked off by Jack Ketch, five or six strokes of the axe, as Jeffreys looked on with those eyes.