The Duke and his Duchess had reached Dover late on the 2nd. Yesterday had been devoted to an all-but-Royal progress through Rochester and other burgs lining the road to Londinium. So many of the Whig Quality had turned out to ride in the procession, and so many commoners had lined Watling Street, as to rouse suspicions in Daniel’s mind that the rumors spread for so long by the Tories were true: Marlborough was the second coming of Cromwell. Now, to his very first levee, he had invited Daniel, who could still remember sitting on Cromwell’s knee when he was a little boy.
Next to St. James’s Palace, which was getting to look like a heap of architectural elements flung into a bin, Marlborough House shaped up as a proper building. The fence around its forecourt was a giant iron strainer, stopping everyone except for Daniel. The excluded had formed drifts of flesh on the other side, and watched eagerly, faces wedged between bars. As Daniel was helped down out of the carriage, and walked to the front door, he wondered how many of the crowd knew who he was, and of his ancient connexion to the terrible Puritan warlord. Some of them had to be Tory spies, who would mark Daniel, and note the connexion instantly. Daniel guessed that he had been summoned here to send a message of a vaguely threatening nature to all Torydom.
Vanbrugh had been remodeling the place in the expectation that the Duke would settle in for a long stay. Much of this work was still in its most brute stages and so Daniel had to be conducted under scaffolding and between piles of bricks and of timbers by a member of Marlborough’s household. But as they got deeper into the building, it became more finished. The Duke’s bedchamber had been done first, and the renovations propagated outwards from there. Before the Grinling Gibbons custom-carved double doors, a maid handed Daniel a large silver bowl full of steaming water, swathed in towels so it would not burn his hands. “Set it down beside my lord,” he was instructed, and the doors were pulled open.
Like a beetle on a glacier the Duke of Marlborough sat in a chair in the white immensity of his bedchamber. Next to him was a table. The stubble on his scalp was dense: obviously it was Shaving-Day, and high time for it; as everyone had now heard, the Duke and Duchess had been held back in Ostend by contrary winds for a whole fortnight. Daniel, knowing no more of levees than any other Englishman, feared for a moment that he was about to be asked to lather the Duke’s skull and scrape off two weeks’ growth. But then he noted a valet standing by, stropping a razor, and understood, with immeasurable relief, that the blade-work would be left to a trained artisan.
Of the half-dozen who had been summoned to the levee, Daniel was the last to arrive-this much he could see even though his eyes were dazzled by August sunshine glancing off many tons of new plasterwork. So lofty was the ceiling that a Natural Philosopher could be forgiven for thinking that the festoons and friezes up along the ceiling had been carved from natural accumulations of snow and ice.
The Duke was in a dressing-gown of something that gleamed and whispered, and his neck had been swaddled in miles of linen in preparation for the shaving. It was as far from Puritan severity as one could possibly imagine. If there were any Tories without, on Pall Mall, who phant’sied that Daniel had come to pass the torch to the next Cromwell, a moment’s glimpse into this room would have extinguished their fears. If Marlborough had come back in triumph to take over the country, he’d do so not as a military dictator but as a Sun King.
Marlborough half rose from his chair and bowed to Daniel-who nearly dropped the bowl. The other five participants in the levee-candle-holders, shirt-bearers, wig-powderers, mostly Earls or better-bowed even deeper. Daniel could still see little, but he could hear snickers as he staggered the last few yards.
“Dr. Waterhouse does not yet know about what was found in Baron von Bothmar’s lock-box to-day,” the Duke hazarded.
“I confess utter ignorance, my lord,” Daniel said.
“The Hanoverian ambassador, Bothmar, brought with him a lock-box that was to be opened upon the death of Queen Anne. It contained orders from his majesty as to how the Realm was to be administered until such time as his majesty could come here to receive the crown, orb, and sceptre,” explained the Duke. “This morning it was opened in the presence of the Council, and read out. The King has named twenty-five Regents to act in his stead until he arrives. You, Dr. Waterhouse, are one of the twenty-five.”
“Bollocks!”
“Oh, it is quite true. And so when we bow to you, my lord, it is to acknowledge your authority as a Regent. You, and your two dozen colleagues, are the closest we have, just now, to a Sovereign.”
Daniel had never been addressed before as “my lord,” and certainly had never guessed that the first person ever to do so would be the Duke of Marlborough. It required some presence of mind not to spill the bowl. But he brought it home, with the help of a guiding hand from the valet, and stepped back, his formal duties completed. The valet rolled a sponge into the bowl, wrung it out, and placed it on the Duke’s head like a soppy crown. The Duke blinked a rivulet out of his eye, elevated his chin, and commenced going through some papers that were on his lap-for apparently one of the attractions of the levee was watching the great man read his mail.
“Grub Street must be ten miles long now,” the Duke remarked, tossing aside one newspaper after another.
“You may soon wish it were a good deal shorter.”
“As may you, Dr. Waterhouse-your new prominence shall make you a Butt for innumerable Shafts.” Marlborough had now cocked his head back so that soap would not run into his eyes, which placed him in the odd position of not being able to see into his own lap. He was groping through the papers there, golden cuff-tassels flailing, occasionally holding something up at arm’s length. “Ah,” he announced, finding today’s Lens, “I give you this, Dr. Waterhouse. Just now, I was reading it aloud to these gentlemen, as we waited for the late arrival-you may read it yourself.”
“Thank you, my lord, I am sure ’twas vastly more amusing than having me here on time.”
“On the contrary, my lord, it is we who ought to amuse you,” said the Duke, and jerked in his chair as the razor planed off a ridge of scar-tissue. His noggin had acquired more than its share of high and low relief as he had overseen the deaths of several hundred thousand English, French, and other soldiers in the wars against Louis XIV. They now lurked below a fortnight’s stubble like shoals under a murky tide, unseen Hazards to the blade’s Navigation.
“What is it I am to read, my lord?” Daniel inquired, reaching out to accept the proffered newspaper.
Marlborough’s eyes-which were uncommonly large and expressive-strayed for a moment to Daniel’s hand. People did not, as a rule, bother to look at Daniel’s hands-nay, neither the left nor the right. They had the full complement of fingers, they had not been branded in the Old Bailey, and they were unadorned-as a rule. But today Daniel wore, on his right hand, a simple ring of gold. Never having worn jewelry before, he was astonished at how this object caught people’s attention.
“A Meditation upon Power,” Marlborough answered, “second page.”
“It sounds meet, if I am as powerful as you say. Pray, who wrote it?”
“That’s the thing,” said Marlborough, “the extraordinary thing. There is a chap who goes by the nom de plume of Peer-”
“He wrote it!?”
“No, but he has discovered in the Clink a Blackamoor, a most remarkable specimen. He is not, of course, a sentient being-but he possesses the singular gift of being able to write and speak exactly as if he were one.”
“I have met him,” Daniel said. His eyes had finally adjusted to where he could make out the byline DAPPA. He glanced up at the Duke, then glanced away, as a thick bead of blood was coming out in front of his right ear and coursing along his jaw-line to stain the linen beneath his chin. The Duke jerked again. “Have a care, sirrah, I did not come hither to perish of lockjaw.”