“There,” said Mr. Threader, “we are in the same boat now-you have just committed High Treason!”
“It is an old failing of my family,” Daniel admitted. He tapped the last drips of gold from the crucible; they beaded on the table and instantly congealed. He set the tongs and crucible aside, and closed the furnace door. With a pair of tweezers he picked up every bead of gold that had gone astray and dropped them into a little cup. Then he took up the clay mold, which was warm, and snapped it in half. A guinea fell out of it and spun on the table. As Mr. Threader had warned him, it was not a very good guinea: the gold had not evenly filled the mold, so parts of it were indistinct. The edging was no good at all, and it had a bubble trapped in it. A prong stuck out of its rim where the filling-hole had been. Daniel flicked it into a bowl of water to cool it down, then plucked it out with his bare fingers and attacked it with a pair of heavy shears. His hands almost were not equal to this task, and he thought for a moment that he might have to send for Saturn. But Mr. Threader, warming to the task, wrapped his hands around Daniel’s and they squeezed together, grunting like swine, and finally there was a snap and two halves of the guinea went flying opposite directions. Daniel had so arranged things that one of these halves included the prong and most of the other gross imperfections. This he placed in the bowl with the other surplus. But the other half was more presentable. Daniel fetched this off the floor and brought it back, and they halved it again, and again-a little bit like cutting a Piece of Eight into reales, except they made the bits smaller and quite irregular-reducing the false half-guinea into a rubble of mangled shards. When Mr. Threader deemed that they had a suitable range of shapes and sizes, they raked it all into a scale-pan and weighed it-both men jotting down the number.
And then both agreed, without having to say it, that they were finished. Daniel saw the visitor out; Mr. Threader had taken a sedan chair so that no one might see the Pesour paying a call on the Master of the Mint, something that would have seemed very fishy indeed.
“Did you-somehow-influence the Jury to choose me?” Mr. Threader wanted to know.
“I used what influence I could muster.”
“Because of my guilty conscience.”
“No, in truth, any member of the Jury probably could have been swayed, one way or another,” Daniel said. “I thought of you because of your skill at prestidigitation. And I hope you can do tricks with coin-snips as well as with whole guineas.”
“Most of it is a matter of misdirecting the audience’s attention-less dexterity is involved than is commonly supposed. But I shall practice with these tonight.”
“Then I shall practice making a distracting spectacle of myself,” Daniel promised him.
“Then you shall be up all night long, for it does not come naturally to you.”
“I’ll be up all night anyway,” Daniel said, “doing all kinds of unnatural things.”
Friday
29 October 1714
Westminster Abbey
MORNING
HE GETS THERE much too early because he overestimated the Hanging-Traffic. So many people want to see Jack Shaftoe drawn and quartered that everyone has gone early to line the route. Daniel need only walk out of Sir Isaac Newton’s town-house, turn his back on the dim roar that resounds against the vault of heaven to the north-a sort of Aurora Borealis of Crowd-clamour-and stroll for a few minutes on quiet streets, and there he is in the Broad Sanctuary: a sweep of open ground splayed out north and west of the Abbey.
He must be a very old and strange man indeed to be approaching a stained Pile such as this one on official business. So peculiar is his errand that he falters, knowing not which entrance to use, which presbyter to accost. But the place is all out of kilter anyway because laborers are still taking down the galleries and bleachers put up for the Coronation. Cockney and Irish demolition-men are strutting out the doors with great rough-sawn planks on their shoulders. There is nary a churchman in sight. Daniel elects to go in the west entrance, which seems a bit less congested than the north with bulky blokes and baulks of wood. Moments later he is struck to find himself walking over the stone where Tompion was planted eleven months ago. It being a great peculiarity of this ?ra that a horologist should be given a resting-place that one or two generations before would have been reserved for a knight or a general.
He puts Tompion’s bones behind him, ducks beneath a moving plank, and gets out in to the cloisters. This is a square courtyard framed in a quadrilateral of roofed stone galleries, but otherwise open to the elements. Those elements today consist of raw bright autumn sun and cold turbulent air. Daniel shoves hands in pockets, hunches, and stiff-legs it to the next corner, turns right, follows the East Cloister to its end. There on the left wall is an unmarked medieval fortress-door, massive planks hinged, strapped, gridded, and pierced with black iron. Diverse ancient hand-crafted padlocks depend from its hasp-system like medals on the breast of a troll-general. Daniel has a key to only one of them, and no one else is here. He is freezing. Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold. The cloister blocks the eastern sun but does nothing to shelter him from the breeze, which is coming out of the northwest, striking down into the Cloisters and nearly pinning him to this door. So he back-tracks a few paces and passes through a doorway that does happen to be open. This gets him into a corridor that is out of the wind, but cold and dark. Light beckons at its other end, and he can sense warmth on his face, so he goes that way for several paces, and is rewarded, and astonished, to find himself all alone in the most beautiful room in Britain.
Any other Brit would have known in advance that this was the Chapter House. But because of his Revolutionary up-bringing, this was the least likely place on the Isle for Daniel ever to have set foot-until this day. It is a great octagon whose walls seem to consist entirely of stained glass-a structural impossibility given that the vault overhead consists of numberless tons of stone. It is all held up, he reasons, by pillars at the eight vertices, and a ninth one in the center of the room, so tall and slender it seems doomed to buckle. But it has stayed up for something like four hundred years, and only the most bitter and skeptickal Empiricist would inspect it with such a jaded eye. The place is not going to collapse on him. Those windows are harvesting the sunlight and warming the place. Daniel falls into an orbit around the central pillar. Some of his lessons are coming back to him, and he recalls that this was where the King’s Council, and later Parliament, convened until the monks got sick of their hollering and kicked them out and across the street to Westminster Palace. From the way one old man’s footfalls and breathing echo around the place, Daniel can’t imagine how raucous it must have been when it was filled with politicians.
The brilliant windows capture his attention during the first few orbits, but later his eyes are drawn to the wooden panels below them, at head level. These are painted with scenes that Daniel recognizes, almost without even having to look at them, as the Revelation of that scary lunatick St. John the Divine. The Four Horsemen on their color-coded steeds, the Great Beast spitting terrified Saints, misguided humans queueing up to receive the Mark of the Beast. The Whore drunk on the Blood of the butchered Saints, and later being burned for it. Christ leading the armies of Heaven on a white horse. Much of this is so faded that it can only be made out by one such as Daniel who had to memorize it when he was a boy, so that, like an actor standing backstage awaiting his scene, he’d be able to follow the script, and know his cue, when it happened for real. In the more dilapidated Mobb-scenes, only the eyes stand out among the faded and peeling pigmentation: some sleepy, some upraised, some darting about for Earthly advantage, others attending to the faraway deeds of Angels, still others lost in contemplation of what it all means. He can not help seeing this all as a final message from Drake. A reminder that, in spite of all Isaac’s lucubrations, Isaac still does not know the date and time of the Last Trumpet, and that in spite of all Drake’s methodical preparations, Daniel has yet to step out of the wings and play his assigned role.