“So that’s why kings live at Whitehall nowadays-to be upwind of the Mint?” Daniel said jestingly.
On Oldenburg’s face, perfunctory amusement stamped out by pedantic annoyance. “You don’t understand. The Mint’s operations are extremely sporadic-it has been cold and silent for months-the workers idle and drunk.”
“And now?”
“Now they are busy and drunk. A few days ago, as I stood in this very place, I saw a three-master, a man of war, heavily laden, drop anchor just around the river-bend, there. Small boats carrying heavy loads began to put in at the water-gate just there, in the middle of the south wall. On the same night, the Mint came suddenly to life, and has not slept since.”
“And gold began to arrive at the Navy Treasury,” Daniel said, “making much work for Mr. Pepys.”
“Now, let us get back to this conversation you were allowed to hear. How did the Bishop of Chester respond to Mr. Pepys’s rather ham-handed revelations?”
“He said something like, ‘So Minette keeps his Majesty well acquainted with the doings of her beau?’”
“Now whom do you suppose he meant by that?”
“Her husband-? I know, I know-my naivete is pathetic.”
“Philippe, duc d’Orleans, owns the largest and finest collection of women’s underwear in France-his sexual adventures are strictly limited to being fucked up the ass by strapping officers.”
“Poor Minette!”
“She knew perfectly well when she married him,” Oldenburg said, rolling his eyes. “She spent her honeymoon in bed with her new husband’s elder brother: King Louis XIV. That is what Bishop Wilkins meant when he referred to Minette’s beau.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Pray go on.”
“Pepys assured Wilkins that, considering the volume of correspondence, King Charles couldn’t help but be very close to the man in question-an analogy was made to hoops of gold…”
“Which you took to mean, matrimonial bliss?”
“Even I knew what Pepys meant by that, ” Daniel said hotly.
“So did Wilkins, I’m sure-how did he seem, then?”
“Ill at ease-he wanted reassurance that ‘the two arch-Dissenters’ were handling formal contacts.”
“It is a secret-but generally known among the sort who rattle around London in private coaches in the night-time-that a treaty with France is being negotiated by the Earl of Shaftesbury, and His Majesty’s old drinking and whoring comrade, the Duke of Buckingham. Chosen for the job not because they are skilled diplomats but because not even your late father would ever accuse them of Popish sympathies.”
A Yeoman Warder was approaching, making his rounds. “Good evening, Mr. Oldenburg. Mr. Waterhouse.”
“Evening, George. How’s the gout?”
“Better today, thank you, sir-the cataplasm seemed to work-where did you get the receipt from?” George then went into a rote exchange of code-words with another Beefeater on the roof of Salt Tower, then reversed direction, bade them good evening, and strolled away.
Daniel enjoyed the view until he was certain that the only creature that could overhear them was a spaniel-sized raven perched on a nearby battlement.
Half a mile upstream, the river was combed, and nearly dammed up, by a line of sloppy, boat-shaped, man-made islands, supporting a series of short and none too ambitious stone arches. The arches were joined, one to the next, by a roadway, made of wood in some places and of stone in others, and the roadway was mostly covered with buildings that sprayed in every direction, cantilevered far out over the water and kept from falling into it by makeshift diagonal braces. Far upstream, and far downstream, the river was placid and sluggish, but where it was forced between those starlings (as the man-made islands were called), it was all furious. The starlings themselves, and the banks of the Thames for miles downstream, were littered with wreckage of light boats that had failed in the attempt to shoot the rapids beneath London Bridge, and (once a week or so) with the corpses and personal effects of their passengers.
A few parts of the bridge had been kept free of buildings so that fires could not jump the river. In one of those gaps a burly woman stopped to fling a jar into the angry water below. Daniel could not see it from here, but he knew it would be painted with a childish rendering of a face: this a charm to ward off witch-spells. The water-wheels constructed in some of those arch-ways made gnashing and clanking noises that forced Waterhouse and Oldenburg, half a mile away, to raise their voices slightly, and put their heads closer together. Daniel supposed this was no accident-he suspected they were coming to a part of the conversation that Oldenburg would rather keep private from those sharp-eared Beefeaters.
Directly behind London Bridge, but much farther away round the river-bend, were the lights of Whitehall Palace, and Daniel almost convinced himself that there was a greenish glow about the place tonight, as Enoch the Red schooled the King, and his court, and the most senior Fellows of the Royal Society, in the new Element called Phosphorus.
“Then Pepys got too enigmatic even for Wilkins,” Daniel said. “He said, ‘I refer you to Chapter Ten of your 1641 work.’”
“The Cryptonomicon? ”
“So I assume. Chapter Ten is where Wilkins explains steganography, or how to embed a subliminal message in an innocuous-seeming letter-” but here Daniel stopped because Oldenburg had adopted a patently fake look of innocent curiosity. “I think you know this well enough. Now, Wilkins apologized for being thick-headed and asked whether Pepys was speaking, now, of you.”
“Ho, ho, ho!” Oldenburg bellowed, the laughter bouncing like cannon-fire off the hard walls of the Inmost Ward. The raven hopped closer to them and screeched, “Caa, caa, caa!” Both humans laughed, and Oldenburg fetched a bit of bread from his pocket and held it out to the bird. It hopped closer and reared back to peck it out of the fat pale hand-but Oldenburg snatched it back and said very distinctly, “Cryptonomicon.”
The raven cocked its head, opened its beak, and made a long gagging noise. Oldenburg sighed and opened his hand. “I have been trying to teach him words,” he explained, “but that one is too much of a mouthful, for a raven.” The bird’s beak struck the bread out of Oldenburg’s hand, and it hopped back out of reach, in case Oldenburg should change his mind.
“Wilkins’s confusion is understandable-but Pepys’s meaning is clear. There are some suspicious-minded persons upriver” (waving in the general direction of Whitehall) “who think I’m a spy, communicating with Continental powers by means of subliminal messages embedded in what purport to be philosophickal discourses-it being beyond their comprehension that anyone would care as much as I seem to about new species of eels, methods for squaring hyperbolae, et cetera. But Pepys was not referring to that- he was being ever so much more clever. He was telling Wilkins that the not-very-secret negotiations being carried on by Buckingham and Shaftesbury are like the innocuous-seeming message, being used to conceal the truly secret agreement that the two Kings are drawing up, using Minette as the conduit.”
“God in Heaven,” Daniel said, and felt obliged to lean back against a battlement so that his spinning head wouldn’t whirl him off into the moat.
“An agreement whose details we can only guess at-except for this: it causes gold to appear there in the middle of the night.” Oldenburg pointed to the Tower’s water-gate along the Thames. Discretion kept him from speaking its ancient name: Traitor’s Gate.
“Pepys mentioned in passing that Thomas More Anglesey was responsible for filling the Navy’s coffers… I didn’t understand what he meant.”