Now Jeffreys had been an astonishingly beautiful young man, even by the standards of the generation of young Cavaliers that had included such Adonises as the Duke of Monmouth and John Churchill. His eyes, in particular, had been of remarkable beauty-perhaps this accounted for his ability to seize and hold the young Daniel Waterhouse with his gaze. Unlike Churchill, he had not aged well. Years in London, serving as solicitor general to the Duke of York, then as a prosecutor of supposed conspirators, then Lord Chief Justice, and now Lord Chancellor, had put leaves of lard on him, as on a kidney in a butcher-stall. His eyebrows had grown out into great gnarled wings, or horns. The eyes were beautiful as ever, but instead of gazing out from the fair unblemished face of a youth, they peered out through a sort of embrasure, between folds of chub below and snarled brows above. It had probably been fifteen years since Jeffreys could list, from memory, all the men he had murdered through the judicial system; if he hadn’t lost count while extirpating the Popish Plot, he certainly had during the Bloody Assizes.

At any rate Daniel could not now tear his eyes away from those of Jeffreys. In a sense Jeffreys had planned this spectacle poorly. The drug must have been slipped into Daniel’s drink at the coffeehouse and Jeffreys’s minions must have abducted him after he’d fallen asleep in a water-taxi. But the elixir had made him so groggy that he had failed to be afraid until this moment.

Now, Drake wouldn’t have been afraid, even fully awake; he’d sat in this room and defied Archbishop Laud to his face, knowing what they would do to him. Daniel had been brave, until now, only insofar as the drug had made him stupid. But now, looking up into the eyes of Jeffreys, he recalled all of the horror-stories that had emanated from the Tower as this man’s career had flourished: Dissidents who “committed suicide” by cutting their own throats to the vertebrae; great trees in Taunton decorated with hanged men, dying slowly; the Duke of Monmouth having his head gradually hacked off by Jack Ketch, five or six strokes of the axe, as Jeffreys looked on with those eyes.

The colors were draining out of the world. Something white and fluffy came into view near Jeffreys’s face: a hand surrounded by a lace cuff. Jeffreys had grasped one of the hooks projecting up from Daniel’s collar. “You say that your revolution does not have to involve any violence,” he said. “I say you must think harder about the nature of revolution. For as you can see, this hook is on top now. A different one is on the bottom. True, we can raise the low one up by a simple revolution- ” Jeffreys wrenched the collar around, its entire weight bearing on Daniel’s adam’s apple-giving Daniel every reason to scream. But he made no sound other than a pitiable attempt to suck in some air. “Ah, but observe! The one that was high is now low! Let us raise it up then, for it does not love to be low.” Jeffreys wrenched it back up. “Alas, we are back to where we started; the high is high, the low is low, and what’s the point of having a revolution at all?” Jeffreys now repeated the demonstration, laughing at Daniel’s struggle for air. “Who could ask for a better career!” he exclaimed. “Slowly decapitating the men I went to college with! We made Monmouth last as long as ’twas possible, but the axe is imprecise, Jack Ketch is a butcher, and it ended all too soon. But this collar is an excellent device for a gradual sawing-off, I could make him last for days!” Jeffreys sighed with delight. Daniel could not see any more, other than a few pale violet blotches swimming in turbulent gray. But Jeffreys must have signalled the bailiffs to right the chair, for suddenly the weight of the collar was on his collarbones and his efforts to breathe were working. “I trust I have disabused you of any ludicrous ideas concerning the true nature of revolutions. If the low are to be made high, Daniel, then the high must be made low-but the high like to be high-and they have an army and a navy. ‘Twill never occur without violence. And ‘twill fail given enough time, as your father’s failed. Have you quite learnt the lesson? Or shall I repeat the demonstration?”

Daniel tried to say something: namely to beg that the demonstration not be repeated. He had to because it hurt too much and might kill him. To beg for mercy was utterly reasonable-and the act of a coward. The only thing that prevented him from doing it was that his voice-box was not working.

“It is customary for a judge to give a bit of a scolding to a guilty man, to help him mend his ways,” Jeffreys reflected. “That part of the proceedings is now finished-we move on to Sentencing. Concerning this, I have Bad News, and Good News. ’Tis an ancient custom to give the recipient of Bad and Good News, the choice of which to hear first. But as Good News for me is Bad for you, and vice versa, allowing you to make the choice will only lead to confusion. So: the Bad News, for me, is that you are correct, the Star Chamber has not been formally re-constituted. ’Tis just a pastime for a few of us Senior Jurists and has no legal authority to carry out sentences. The Good News, for me, is that I can pronounce a most severe sentence upon you even without legal authority: I sentence you, Daniel Waterhouse, to be Daniel Waterhouse for the remainder of your days, and to live, for that time, every day with the knowledge of your own disgusting cravenness. Go! You disgrace this Chamber! Your father was a vile man who deserved what he got here. But you are a disfigurement of his memory! Yes, that’s right, on your feet, about face, march! Get out! Just because you must live with yourself does not mean we must be subjected to the same degradation! Out, out! Bailiffs, throw this quivering mound of shite out into the gutter, and pray that the piss running down his legs will wash him down into the Thames!”

THEY DUMPED HIMlike a corpse in the open fields upriver from Westminster, between the Abbey and the town of Chelsea. When they rolled him out the back of the cart, he came very close to losing his head, as one of the collar-hooks caught in a slat on the wagon’s edge and gave him a jerk at the neck so mighty it was like to rip his soul out of his living body. But the wood gave way before his bones did, and he fell down into the dirt, or at least that was what he inferred from evidence near to hand when he came to his senses.

His desire at this point was to lie full-length on the ground and weep until he died of dehydration. But the collar did not permit lying down. Having it round his neck was a bit like having Drake stand over him and berate him for not getting up. So up he got, and stumbled round and wept for a while. He reckoned he must be in Hogs-den, or Pimlico as men in the real estate trade liked to name it: not the country and not the city, but a blend of the most vile features of both. Stray dogs chased feral chickens across a landscape that had been churned up by rooting swine and scraped bald by scavenging goats. Nocturnal fires of bakeries and breweries shot rays of ghastly red light through gaps in their jumble-built walls, spearing whores and drunks in their gleam.

It could have been worse: they could have dumped him in a place with vegetation. The collar was designed to prevent slaves from running away by turning every twig, reed, vine, and stalk into a constable that would grab the escapee by the nape as he ran by. As Daniel roamed about, he explored the hasp with his fingers and found it had been wedged shut with a carven peg of soft wood which had been hammered through the loops. By worrying this back and forth he was able to draw it out. Then the collar came loose on his neck and he got it off easily. He had a dramatical impulse to carry it over to the river-bank and fling it into the Thames, but then coming to his senses he recollected that there was a mile of dodgy ground to be traversed before he reached the edge of Westminster, and any number of dogs and Vagabonds who might need to be beaten back in that interval. So he kept a grip on it, swinging it back and forth in the darkness occasionally, to make himself feel better. But no assailant came for him. His foes were not of the sort that could be struck down with a rod of iron.