“I ween we shall now hear a long disquisition from Mr. Kikin,” said Mr. Threader. “Once, that is, he has remembered his manners. Let us hear first, and briefly, the report of Mr. Marsh.”
“Oh, from that I am here, and alive, you must know that it came off as planned, sirs,” said Mr. Marsh.
“You met the mysterious personage in the night-time? You were blindfolded and conveyed to the place where the urine is collected? You emptied your load, and were returned to the lonely crossroads, and were paid, and were sent on your way?” Threader inquired. Marsh answered with a stately procession of nods.
“Very well, then,” said Daniel Waterhouse, “as we agreed, the horse is yours, and you are free to go forth and ply your trade. We ask only that you speak of this to no one.”
“Right, guv’nor,” answered Marsh, with a slight roll of the eyes: his way of pointing out that it would be suicidal for him to relate the story anywhere in Christendom. Then, exhausted though he was, he drove out of Orney’s Ship-yard and began putting distance between him and the mad Clubb as fast as his new cart-horse could manage.
Mr. Orney had spread out a large-scale map of Surrey on an open-air table normally used for unfurling ship-plans. Kikin, moving in a stiff tottering gait, brought his paper-scraps and began to arrange them according to some inscrutable scheme while quaffing beer from a sort of earthenware tureen. Breezes discomposed the scraps; rocks were procured. Kikin placed his pocket-compass on the map. The three Natural Philosophers all noted that Orney-as always, a master of detail-had so oriented the map that its north-arrow was aligned with the compass’s needle.
When Mr. Kikin felt himself capable of human speech, he announced, with no greetings, complaints, or other preliminaries: “We commenced from here.” And he deposited a pebble on a Surrey crossroads not far off the high road from London Bridge. “To the southeast we proceeded, on a good road-”
“You were able to perceive the compass in the dark, then?” Orney asked.
“The phosphorus paint compounded by Freiherr von Leibniz, and daubed upon its card by Mr. Hoxton, performed as expected. It was right in my face, as bright as a full moon. I say we were going southeast on a good road-almost certainly this one,” insisted Kikin, streaking his finger across the map. “I counted, er…” and here he consulted his notes. “Seventy-eight revolutions of the wheel.” For Newton had proposed, and Saturn had constructed, a little device that produced a click every time the wheel went round.
“One thousand and thirty feet, then,” said Newton, having worked out the product in his head. For all of them knew by heart the circumference of the wheel in question.
But here Orney had anticipated, and prepared: he produced a ribbon of paper, marked with regularly spaced pen-lines, each neatly indexed with a number: 50, 100, 200, and so on. It was a scale that he had drawn up, demarcated not in feet, furlongs, or miles, but in revolutions of the wheel of Mr. Marsh’s vault-wagon. By snaking it down the road drawn on the map (for the road was not perfectly straight) he was able to show that, at a place near the eighty mark, there was an intersection with a smaller road. “That must be it,” Kikin said, and reviewed a spate of Cyrillic notations. “Yes, west-southwest for fifty ticks-then an elbow in the road, bringing us round to almost due south-three hundred and thirty ticks later we went up and over a stone bridge.”
This led to some back-tracking and head-scratching, for it was not clear which of several possible roads the wagon might have taken; but presently Leibniz noticed a bridge whose position was found to be consistent with all of Kikin’s data, and so they went on reckoning from there.
All in all, Kikin had marked down a couple of dozen changes in direction, three bridges, diverse segments of noticeably good or bad road, and the odd hill, village, obstreperous canine, or swampy bit. It became obvious, as they plotted his trajectory as a line of pebbles on the map, that the route was circuitous by design. But eventually it had come to an end in some place described by Kikin as reeking of sal ammoniac. There the wagon had been emptied. A different winding and looping course had then been traced to bring Mr. Marsh (and his hidden stowaway) back to the starting-place. Getting the outbound and the inbound data to agree with each other, so that they started and ended in the same places, while not blatantly contradicting the map’s assertions as to the locations of bridges, hills, amp;c., took twice as long as had been required for the wagon to actually cover the ground, and devolved into a lengthy progress of disputes about applied Euclidean geometry and the nature of absolute space: arguments that Newton and Leibniz were perhaps a bit too eager to engage in, so that Daniel had to intervene from time to time and ban Metaphysics. The accuracy of Mr. Kikin’s observations was called into question; he defended himself with less and less vehemence as the morning wore on, and in early afternoon could be seen dozing on a piled cargo-net. Factions developed, fissures opened within factions, alliances were forged and betrayed, outrage was manifested against the turncoats, who professed dedication only to higher principles of Truth.
But at some point it all fell into place and they came up with an answer-Daniel’s gold ring, set down at a particular location on the map-that was obviously right, and made them wonder why they had not seen it right away. Mr. Kikin, who only minutes earlier had been characterized as an innumerate poltroon, under suspicion of having fallen asleep between observations, was now hailed as the best chap ever; toasted; and likened to Vasco da Gama.
It was Daniel who ruined the celebratory mood by asking the question: “Now what?”
“If the map is to be trusted,” said Newton, “Jack’s urine-boiling operation is situated on a large estate, high in the North Downs.”
“As it would have to be,” Orney put in, “or the neighbors would complain of the stink.”
“Taking into consideration the size of the estate, the openness of the countryside, and the notorious and vicious character of Jack’s gang, I say ’twere foolhardy to approach the place without a company or more of armed men.”
“Then it is fortunate that you are a member of the Clubb, Sir Isaac,” Saturn said, “for I have seen you summon up just such a force when you were in need.” He was referring to the raid on the boozing-ken in St. Bride’s.
“The men you saw-and escaped from-on that occasion were Queen’s Messengers,” Newton said, “though of course they are called King’s Messengers as of two weeks ago. They are under the command of Mr. Charles White, who is a loyal minion of Bolingbroke. He aided me then, only as part of leading me into a trap. I do not phant’sy Mr. White will be disposed to aid us now.”
“But the power of Bolingbroke is destroyed,” said Kikin, “or so people are saying.”
“Not destroyed, sir,” Newton corrected him, “as long as his man guards the Mint, and the Pyx.”