Bob now recognized these two-Jimmy and Danny-as his nephews, whom he had not seen in about twenty years.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said.
It was an expression of disgust and chagrin-hardly of surprise. He had been running into too many Shaftoes lately to be surprised by anything. Hearing the oath, they turned to look his way, and knew him in turn. “Aagh! Shit!” exclaimed Danny.
“I knew ’twould come to this sooner or later, uncle,” said Jimmy, with a sad, wise shake of the head, “if you kept trafficking with the legitimate authorities.”
“You know this man!?” said the black fellow, his mop-like hairdo all a-swing.
“He’s our friggin’ uncle,” said Danny. “Hope you’re satisfied, Bob.”
Bob’s heart was thudding. His feet were, too; that because of the cavalry, who were charging across the pasture, having perceived, in all of this, an opportunity to lop some heads, or at least limbs-the sort of entertainment Horse-men lived for. This clear and present danger unfroze Bob’s tongue, and his legs. He stumbled out into the path of the cavalry, and held up a hand to stay them; their captain had the good sense to call off the attack. They dropped to a canter and came on in a line to seal off any possible escape.
“You boys have been Absent Without Leave from the King’s, and then the Queen’s, and then the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard for twenty years,” said Bob.
“Don’t be such a prick!” was Danny’s response; but Jimmy-dismounting-said: “You don’t be such a friggin’ idiot, brother of mine. Our Uncle Bob phant’sies he’s doing us a boon by bringing us under military justice, so’s we’ll be hanged fast instead of drawn and quartered at Tyburn Cross.”
Danny was impressed. “Good one, uncle! Sorry I called you a prick. But just as Jimmy and Tomba would not abandon me, so me and Jimmy won’t leave Tomba behind to be gutted by Jack Ketch all by his lonesome, will we, Jimmy? Jimmy? Jimmy? Seamus Shaftoe, I be talking to ye, shite-for-brains!”
“I suppose not,” said Jimmy at last, “but it does put a friggin’ strain on me like this, having to do the decent thing twice in, what, two friggin’ minutes.”
“You’ve had twenty years to do the wrong things,” said Bob. “These two minutes won’t kill you.”
“What about the two minutes at Tyburn?” was Danny’s answer-which left Bob so tongue-tied that Tomba laughed out loud at him.
DANIEL HAD NEVER HEARD ISAAC admit to feeling pain, until he and Leibniz each took one of his hands and pulled him to his feet. Then Isaac got an astonished look, as though he’d never hurt before in his life, and let out an “Ooh-oh! Ah! Ah!” He clenched his eyes shut, grimaced, and steepled his brow, then froze just long enough to convince Daniel that he was suffering a cardiac event that would terminate his life. But finally the pain appeared to leak away in slow increments, and his conscious mind assumed control over the nerves that led to the muscles of the face. He could now wear the expression he wished to: one of forced unconcern. “It is,” he said, and stopped to sip air, “nothing. The muscles…about the ribs…were not ready…for Baron von Leibniz’s…intervention.”
“Might you have broken a rib?” Daniel asked.
“I do not believe so,” said Newton in one long down-hill gout of breath. Then he regretted having said so much at a go, as this obliged him to breathe deeply once. The grimace came back.
“Let us fetch the carriage, so you do not have to walk,” suggested Leibniz. “Daniel, you might remain with Sir Isaac?”
Daniel stood by Newton while Leibniz-who because of gout moved in an awkward shrugging-and-rolling gait even on a good day-went off to find their carriage. Its team must have fled screaming when the top of the hill had gone off. The place had not precisely exploded-though embedded in the event had been many small explosions. It had, rather, caught fire and burned to cinders very rapidly, as if a fire that ought to have extended over some hours had been compressed into as many seconds. The place had been a kind of slum, growing and running without plan-senseless. But unlike a normal slum, which about itself created middens of bones, gristle, shit, and ash, this one had become filthy with chymical wastes and by-products, many of them highly inflammable. The fire kindled by the Mohawk’s pistol-shot had hopped and rushed across the phosphorus-pocked soil until it had struck a vein: a rivulet of waste trickling from one of the boilers. It had raced up this fuse and ignited, then exploded, one or more of the giant copper retorts, and this blast, like the firing of powder in a musket’s pan, had ignited the main conflagration: some large store of red phosphorus in what had been a barn. The barn had been erased. Not even wreckage remained. The boilers were strewn scraps of copper, some of which was still molten. The dog, horse, and rider were steaming, intertangled bone-piles; they’d been incinerated by the roasting heat of the burning barn-a sort of action at a distance whereby heat was transmitted across space like gravity. It traveled, like light, in straight lines. This explained why Leibniz, Newton, and Waterhouse still lived, for in tumbling over the hedgerow they had fallen into its shadow, and so intercepted none of the fire’s radiance. The side of the hedgerow facing the barn was now a sterile stone spine with a few stalagmites of charcoal reaching out of it. The opposite side, a few inches away, was unchanged.
These and other impressions fully occupied their Natural-Philosophick faculties for some minutes. Then Daniel’s attention began to wander about. He had never taken a proper look round the area. First fog, then flames had baffled careful observations. He had no idea where they were, save that it was in Surrey, on some elevated stretch of the North Downs. Casting an eye down the hill, he saw undulating country spread out for many miles, church-steeples poking up here and there. Turning about, he saw a sort of cottage a few hundred yards down the road. But before he could gather many impressions of that, his eye was drawn to a much larger building spreading its wings across the breadth of a rise in the distance, and embracing one end of a system of formal gardens. “By god, that is a Great House!” he exclaimed. A stupid remark, but one that had to be gotten out of the way. His eyes were now able to find the tree-lined carriageway from which they had turned off some minutes before. It led around to the opposite face of that house and came up, he supposed, to its front door. “Whose is it?”
Newton had not noticed it before. But when he did, he looked bemused rather than surprised. “If you were a Tory, you would know it by heart. That is a place that my lord Bolingbroke bought, some years ago, from my lord-” and Isaac mentioned the name of a Whig lord who had famously gone bankrupt during an especially festive run on the Bank of England.
“I did not know Bolingbroke had a house in these parts,” Daniel confessed.
“That is because he has not occupied it yet,” said Isaac, “only subjected it to an endless series of remodeling-projects.” Then he paused to sift his own words. “Remodeling means that diverse tradesmen are forever passing in and out of the place with wagon-loads of stuff. The local people grow accustomed to such traffic…”
“You are saying that a criminal enterprise, headquartered on some of the out-buildings of the manor, could conceal its presence and its activities by blending in with such traffic,” said Daniel. He did not want to oblige Isaac to speak any more than was necessary, as it was quite obviously painful. “It is remarkable. We have suspected some link between Bolingbroke and Jack. But who would have imagined that the Secretary of State would suffer such goings-on in his own property?”