All round the courtyard, shutters began to slam closed.

Daniel threw a coat over himself, pulled on a pair of boots, got a lanthorn of his own lit, and hurried downstairs. But it was too late for hurrying-the body was already gone. The blood looked like tar on the grass. Daniel followed one dribble to the next, across the green, out the back of the college, and onto the Backs-the boggy floodplain of the river Cam, which wandered around in back of the University. The wind had come up a bit, making noise in the trees that nearly obscured the splash. A less eager witness than Daniel could have claimed he’d heard nothing, and it would have been no lie.

He stopped then, because his mind had finally come awake, and he was afraid. He was out in the middle of an empty fen, following a dead man toward a dark river, and the wind was trying to blow out his lanthorn.

A pair of naked men appeared in the light, and Daniel screamed.

One of the men was tall, and had the most beautiful eyes Daniel had ever seen in a man’s face; they were like the eyes of a painting of the Pieta that Drake had once flung onto a bonfire. He looked towards Daniel as if to say, Who dares scream?

The other man was shorter, and he reacted by cringing. Daniel finally recognized him as Roger Comstock, the sizar. “Who’s that?” this one asked. “My lord?” he guessed.

“No man’s lord,” Daniel said. “It is I. Daniel Waterhouse.”

“It’s Comstock and Jeffreys. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” Both of the men were naked and soaked, their long hair draggling and seeping on their shoulders. Yet even Comstock seemed at ease compared to Daniel, who was dry, clothed, and equipped with a lanthorn.

“I might ask the same of you. Where are your clothes?”

Jeffreys now stepped forward. Comstock knew to shut up.

“We doffed our clothing when we swam the river,” Jeffreys said, as if this should be perfectly obvious.

Comstock saw the hole in that story as quickly as Daniel did, and hastily plugged it: “When we emerged, we found that we had drifted for some distance downstream, and were unable to find them again in the darkness.”

“Why did you swim the river?”

“We were in hot pursuit of that ruffian.”

“Ruffian!?”

The outburst caused a narrowing of the beautiful eyes. A look of mild disgust appeared on Jeffreys’s face. But Roger Comstock was not above continuing with the conversation: “Yes! Some Phanatique-a Puritan, or possibly a Barker-he challenged my Lord Upnor in the courtyard just now! You must not have seen it.”

“I did see it.”

“Ah.” Jeffreys turned sideways, caught his dripping penis between two fingers, and urinated tremendously onto the ground. He was staring toward the College. “The window of your and My Lord Monmouth’s chamber is awkwardly located-you must have leaned out of it?”

“Perhaps I leaned out a bit.”

“Otherwise, how could you have seen the men duelling?”

“Would you call it duelling, or murdering?”

Once again, Jeffreys appeared to be overcome with queasiness at the fact that he was having a conversation of any sort with the likes of Daniel. Comstock put on a convincing display of mock astonishment. “Are you claiming to have witnessed a murder?”

Daniel was too taken aback to answer. Jeffreys continued to jet urine onto the ground; he had produced a great steaming patch of it already, as if he intended to cover his nakedness with a cloud. He furrowed his brow and asked, “Murder, you say. So a man has died?”

“I… I should suppose so,” Daniel stammered.

“Hmmm… supposing is a dangerous practice, when you are supposing that an Earl has committed a capital crime. Perhaps you’d better show the dead body to the Justice of the Peace, and allow the coroner to establish a cause of death.”

“The body is gone.”

“You say body. Wouldn’t it be correct to say, wounded man?”

“Well… I did not personally verify that the heart had stopped, if that is what you mean.”

“Wounded man would be the correct term, then. To me, he seemed very much a wounded man, and not a dead one, when Comstock and I were pursuing him across the Backs.”

“Unquestionably not dead,” Comstock agreed.

“But I saw him lying there-”

“From your window?” Jeffreys asked, finally done pissing.

“Yes.”

“But you are not looking out your window now, are you, Waterhouse?”

“Obviously not.”

“Thank you for telling me what is obvious. Did you leap out of your window, or did you walk down stairs?”

“Down stairs, of course!”

“Can you see the courtyard from the staircase?”

“No.”

“So as you descended the stairs, you lost sight of the wounded man.”

“Naturally.”

“You really haven’t the faintest idea, do you, Waterhouse, of what happened in the courtyard during the interval when you were coming down stairs?”

“No, but-”

“And despite this ignorance-ignorance utter, black, and entire-you presume to accuse an Earl, and personal friend of the King, of having committed-what was it again?”

“I believe he said murder, sir,” Comstock put in helpfully.

“Very well. Let us go and wake up the Justice of the Peace,” Jeffreys said. On his way past Waterhouse he snatched the lanthorn, and then began marching back towards the College. Comstock followed him, giggling.

First Jeffreys had to get himself dried off, and to summon his own sizar to dress his hair and get his clothes on-a gentleman could not go and visit the Justice of the Peace in a disheveled state. Meanwhile Daniel had to sit in his chamber with Comstock, who bustled about and cleaned the place with more diligence than he had ever shown before. Since Daniel was not in a talkative mood, Roger Comstock filled in the silences. “Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor-pushes a sword like a demon, doesn’t he? You’d never guess he’s only fourteen! It’s because he and Monmouth and all that lot spent the Interregnum in Paris, taking their pushing-lessons at the Academy of Monsieur du Plessis, near the Palais Cardinal. They learned a very French conception of honor there, and haven’t quite adjusted to England yet-they’ll challenge a man to a duel at the slightest offence-real or phant’sied. Oh, now, don’t look so stricken, Mr. Waterhouse-remember that if that fellow he was duelling with is found, and is found to be dead, and his injuries found to be the cause of his death, and those injuries are found to’ve been inflicted by My Lord Upnor, and not in a duel per se but in an unprovoked assault, and if a jury can be persuaded to overlook the faults in your account-in a word, if he is successfully prosecuted for this hypothetical murder-then you won’t have to worry about it! After all, if he’s guilty, then he can’t very well claim you’ve dishonored him with the accusation, can he? Nice and tidy, Mr. Waterhouse. Some of his friends might be quite angry with you, I’ll admit-oh, no, Mr. Waterhouse, I didn’t mean it in the way you think. I am not your enemy-remember, I am of the Golden, not the Silver, Comstocks.”

It was not the first time he’d said something like this. Daniel knew that the Comstocks were a grotesquely large and complicated family, who had begun popping up in minor roles as far back as the reign of King Richard Lionheart, and he gathered that this Silver/Golden dichotomy was some kind of feud between different branches of the clan. Roger Comstock wanted to impress on Daniel that he had nothing in common, other than a name, with John Comstock: the aging gunpowder magnate and arch-Royalist, and now Lord Chancellor, who had been the author of the recent Declaration of Uniformity-the act that had filled Drake’s house with jobless Ranters, Barkers, Quakers, et cetera. “Your people,” Daniel said, “the Golden Comstocks, as you dub them-pray, what are they?”