Stymied, he’d spent much of the time since about 1670 doing-what, exactly? Mining Africa for gold, and, when that failed, Negroes. Trying to persuade English noblemen to convert to Catholicism. Sojourning in Brussels, and then in Edinburgh, where he had made himself useful by riding out to wild parts of Scotland to suppress feral Presbyterians in their rustic conventicles. Really he had been wasting his time, just waiting.

Just like Daniel.

A dozen years had flown by, dragging him along like a rider with one foot caught in the stirrup.

What did it mean? That he had best take matters in hand and get his life in order. Find something to do with his allotted years. He had been too much like Drake, waiting for some Apocalypse that would never come.

The prospect of James on the throne, working hand-in-glove with Louis XIV, was just sickening. This was an emergency, every bit as pressing as when London had burnt.

The realizations just kept coming-or rather they’d all appeared in his mind at once, like Athena jumping out of his skull in full armor, and he was merely trying to sort them out.

Emergencies called for stern, even desperate measures, such as blowing up houses with kegs of gunpowder (as King Charles II had personally done) or flooding half of Holland to keep the French out (as William of Orange had done). Or-dare he think it-overthrowing Kings and chopping their heads off as Drake had helped to. Men such as Charles and William and Drake seemed to take such measures without hesitation, while Daniel was either (a) a miserably pusillanimous wretch or (b) wisely biding his time.

Maybe this was why God and Drake had brought him into this world: to play some pivotal role in this, the final struggle between the Whore of Babylon, a.k.a. the Roman Catholic Church, and Free Trade, Freedom of Conscience, Limited Government, and diverse other good Anglo-Saxon virtues, which was going to commence in about ten minutes.

Romanists now swarming at Court with greater confidence than had ever been seen since the Reformation.

– John Evelyn’s Diary

ALL OF THESE THOUGHTSterrified him so profoundly as to nearly bring him to his knees before the entrance of St. James’s Palace. This wouldn’t have been as embarrassing as it sounded; the courtiers circulating in and out of the doors, and the Grenadier Guards washing their hands in the blue, wind-whipped flames of torchieres, probably would have pegged him as another mad Puritan taken in a Pentecostal fit. However, Daniel remained on his feet and slogged up stairs and into the Palace. He made muddy footprints on the polished stone: making a mess of things as he went and leaving abundant evidence, which seemed a poor beginning for a conspirator.

St. James’s was roomier than the suite in Whitehall where James had formerly dwelt, and (as Daniel only now apprehended) this had given him the space and privacy to gather his own personal Court, which could simply be marched across the Park and swapped for Charles’s at the drop of a crown. They’d seemed a queer swarm of religious cultists and second-raters. Daniel now cursed himself for not having paid closer attention to them. Some of them were players who’d end up performing the same roles and prattling the same dialogue as the ones they were about to replace, but (if Daniel’s ruminations on the Privy Stairs were not completely baseless) others had unique perceptions. It would be wise for Daniel to identify these.

As he worked his way into the Palace he began to see fewer Grenadier Guards and more shapely green ankles scissoring back and forth beneath flouncing skirts. James had five principal mistresses, including a Countess and a Duchess, and seven secondary mistresses, typically Merry Widows of Important Dead Men. Most of them were Maids of Honour, i.e., members of the ducal household, therefore entitled to loiter around St. James’s all they wanted. Daniel, who made a sporting effort to keep track of these things, and who could easily list the King’s mistresses from memory, had entirely lost track of the Duke’s. But it was known empirically that the Duke would pursue any young woman who wore green stockings, which made it much easier to sort things out around St. James’s, just by staring at ankles.

From the mistresses he could learn nothing, at least, until he learned their names and gave them further study. What of the courtiers? Some could be described exhaustively by saying “courtier” or “senseless fop,” but others had to be known and understood in the full variety of their perceptions. Daniel recoiled from the sight of a fellow who, if he had not been clad in the raiments of a French nobleman, might have been taken for a shake-rag. His head seemed to have been made in some ghastly Royal Society experiment by taking two different men’s heads and dividing them along the centerline and grafting the mismatched halves together. He jerked frequently to one side as if the head-halves were fighting a dispute over what they should be looking at. From time to time the argument would reach some impasse and he’d stand frozen and mute for a few seconds, mouth open and tongue exploring the room. Then he’d blink and resume speaking again, rambling in accented English to a younger officer-John Churchill.

The better half of this strange Frenchman’s head looked to be between forty and fifty years of age. He was Louis de Duras, a nephew of Marshal Turenne but a naturalized Englishman. He had, by marrying the right Englishwoman and raising a lot of revenue for Charles, acquired the titles Baron Throwley, Viscount Sondes, and the Earl of Feversham. Feversham (as he was generally called) was Lord of the Bedchamber to King Charles II, which meant that he really ought to have been over in Whitehall just now. His failure to be there might be seen as proof that he was grossly incompetent. But he was also a Commander of Horse Guards. This gave him an excuse for being here, since James, as a highly unpopular but healthy king-to-be, needed a lot more guarding than Charles, a generally popular king at death’s door.

Around a corner and into another hall, this one so chilly that steam was coming from people’s mouths as they talked. Daniel caught sight of Pepys and veered towards him. But then a wind-gust, leaking through an ill-fitting window-frame, blew a cloud of vapor away from the face of the man Pepys was talking to. It was Jeffreys. His beautiful eyes, now trapped in a bloated and ruddy face, fixed upon Daniel, who felt for a moment like a small mammal paralyzed by a serpent’s hypnotic glare. But Daniel had the good sense to look the other way and duck through an opportune doorway into a gallery that connected several of the Duke’s private chambers.

Mary Beatrice d’Este, a.k.a. Mary of Modena-James’s second wife-would be sequestered back in these depths somewhere, presumably half out of her mind with misery. Daniel tried not to think of what it would be like for her: an Italian princess raised midway between Florence, Venice, and Genoa, and now stuck here, forever, surrounded by the mistresses of her syphilitic husband, surrounded in turn by Protestants, surrounded in turn by cold water, her only purpose in life to generate a male child so that a Catholic could succeed to the throne, but her womb barren so far.

Looking quite a bit more cheerful than that was Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, who’d been rich to begin with and had now secured her pension by producing two of James’s innumerable bastard sons. She was not an attractive woman, she was not Catholic, and she hadn’t even bothered to pull on green stockings-yet she had some mysterious unspecified hold over James exceeding that of any of his other mistresses. She was strolling down the gallery tete-a-tete with a Jesuit: Father Petre, who among other duties was responsible for bringing up all of James’s bastards to be good Catholics. Daniel caught a moment of genuine amusement on Miss Sedley’s face and guessed that the Jesuit was relating some story about her boys’ antics. In this windowless gallery, lit feebly by some candles, Daniel could not have been more than a dim apparition to them-a pale face and a lot of dark clothing-a Puritan Will-o’-the-wisp, the sort of bad memory that forever haunted the jumpy Royals who’d survived the Civil War. The affectionate smiles were replaced by alert looks in his direction: was this an invited guest, or a Phanatique, a hashishin? Daniel was grotesquely out of place. But his years at Trinity had made him accustomed to it. He bowed to the Countess of Dorchester and exchanged some sort of acrid greeting with Father Petre. These people did not like him, did not want him here, would never be friendly to him in any sense that counted. And yet there was a symmetry here that unnerved him. He’d seen wary curiosity on their faces, then recognition, and now polite masks had fallen over their covert thoughts as they wondered why he was here, and tried to fit Daniel Waterhouse into some larger picture.