For to accuse, requires less eloquence, such is man’s nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution more resembles justice.
–Hobbes, Leviathan
“HOW DOES THE SAYING GO?‘All work and no play… a dull boy,” said a disembodied voice. It was the only perception that Daniel’s brain was receiving at the moment. Vision, taste, and the other senses were dormant, and memory did not exist. This made it possible for him to listen with more-than-normal acuteness to the voice, and to appreciate its fine qualities-of which there were many. It was a delicious voice, belonging to an upper-class man who was used to being listened to, and who liked it that way.
“This boy’s lucubrations have made him very dull indeed, he is a very sluggard!” the voice continued.
A few men chuckled, and shifted bodies sheathed in silk. The sounds echoed from a high and hard ceiling.
Daniel’s mind now recollected that it was attached to a body. But like a regiment that has lost contact with its colonel, the body had not received any orders in a long time. It had gone all loose and discomposed, and had stopped sending signals back to headquarters.
“Give him more water!” commanded the beautiful voice.
Daniel heard boots moving on a hard floor to his left, felt blunt pressure against numbed lips, heard the rim of a bottle crack against one of his front teeth. His lungs began to fill up with some sort of beverage. He tried to move his head back but it responded sluggishly, and something cold hit him on the back of the neck hard enough to stop him. The fluid was flooding down his chin now and trickling under his clothes. His whole thorax clenched up trying to cough the fluid out of his lungs, and he tried to move his head forward-but now something cold caught him across the throat. He coughed and vomited at the same moment and sprayed hot humours all over his lap.
“These Puritans cannot hold their drink-really one cannot take them anywhere.”
“Save, perhaps, to Barbados, my Lord!” offered up another voice.
Daniel’s eyes were bleary and crusted. He tried raising his hands to his face, but halfway there each one of them collided with a bar of iron that was projecting across space. Daniel groped at these, but dire things happened to his neck when he did, and so he ended up feeling around them to paw at his eyes and wipe grit and moisture away from his face. He could make out now that he was sitting on a chair in the middle of a large room; it was night, and the place was lit up by only a modest number of candles. The light gleamed from white lace cravats round the throats of several gentlemen who were arranged round Daniel in a horseshoe.
The light wasn’t bright enough, and his vision wasn’t clear enough, to make sense of this ironmongery that was about his neck, so he had to explore that with his hands. It seemed to be a band of iron bent into a neck-ring. From four locations equally spaced around its circumference rods of iron projected outwards like spokes from a wheel-hub, to a radius of perhaps half a yard, where each split into a pair of back-curved barbs, like the flukes of grappling-hooks.
“While you were sleeping off the effects of M. LeFebure’s draught, I took the liberty of having you fitted out with new neckwear,” said the voice, “but as you are a Puritan, and have no use for vanity, I called upon a blacksmith instead of a tailor. You’ll find that this is all the mode in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.”
The barbs sticking out behind had gotten lodged in the back of the chair when Daniel had unwisely tried to sit forward. Now he gripped the ones in front and pushed himself back hard, knocking the rear ones free. Momentum carried him and the collar back; his spine slammed into the chair and the collar kept moving and tried to shear his head off. He ended up with his head tilted back, gazing almost straight up at the ceiling. His first thought was that candles had somehow been planted up there, or burning arrows shot at random into the ceiling by bored soldiery, but then his eyes focused and he saw that the vault had been decorated with painted stars that gleamed in the candle-light from beneath. Then he knew where he was.
“The Court of Star Chamber is in session-Lord Chancellor Jeffreys presiding,” said another excellent voice, husky with some kind of precious emotion. And what sort of man got choked up over this?
Now just as Daniel’s senses had recovered one at a time, beginning with his ears, so his mind was awakening piece-meal. The part of it that warehoused ancient facts was, at the moment, getting along much better than the part that did clever things. “Nonsense… the Court of Star Chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641… five years before I was born, or you were, Jeffreys.”
“I do not recognize the self-serving decrees of that rebel Parliament,” Jeffreys said squeamishly. “The Court of Star Chamber was ancient-Henry VII convened it, but its procedures were rooted in Roman jurisprudence-consequently, ’twas a model of clarity, of effiency, unlike the time-encrusted monstrosity of Common Law, that staggering, cobwebbed Beast, that senile compendium of folklore and wives’ tales, a scabrous Colander seiving all the chunky bits out of the evanescent flux of Society and compacting ’em into legal head-cheese.”
“Hear, hear!” said one of the other Judges, who apparently felt that Jeffreys had now encompassed everything there was to be said about English Common Law. Daniel assumed they must all be judges, at any rate, and that they’d been hand-picked by Jeffreys. Or, more like it, they’d simply gravitated to him during his career, they were the men that he always saw, whenever he troubled to glance around him.
Another one of them said, “The late Archbishop Laud found this Chamber to be a convenient facility for the suppression of Low Church dissidents, such as your father, Drake Waterhouse.”
“But the entire point of my father’s story is that he was not suppressed- Star Chamber cut his nose and his ears off and it only made him more formidable.”
“Drake was a man of exceptional strength and resilience,” Jeffreys said. “Why, he haunted my very nightmares when I was a boy. My father told me tales of him as if he were a bogey-man. I know that you are no Drake. Why, you stood by and watched one of your own kind be murdered, under your window, at Trinity, by my lord Upnor, twenty-some years ago, and you did nothing- nothing! I remember it well, and I know that you do as well, Waterhouse.”
“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.”