The horseman did not go inside. He rode past the shop once, twice, thrice, looking at it sidelong-just as baffled as Daniel was. Then he seemed to be talking to a pedestrian. Daniel recalled, now, that this rider had been pursued by a couple of servants on foot. One of these pages, or whatever they were, now took off at a run, and weaved between hawkers and hay-wains all the way across Charing Cross and finally vanished into the Strand.

The horseman dismounted, handed the reins to another page, and made a vast ceremony of unbuttoning his sleeves so that the cassock devolved into a cloak. He peeled off spatterdashes to reveal breeches and stockings that were only out-moded by six months to a year, and then found a coffee-house of his own, just across Pall Mall from the mysterious shop, along (therefore) the southern limit of St. James’s Fields-one of those Fields that the Church of St. Martin had formerly been in the middle of. But now houses were being built all around it, enclosing a little rectangle of farmland rapidly being gardenized.

Daniel could do nothing but sit. As a way of paying rent on this chair, he kept having more coffee brought out. The first sip had been tooth-looseningly unpleasant, like one of those exotic poisons that certain Royal Society members liked to brew. But he was startled to notice after a while that the cup was empty.

This whole exercise had begun rather early in the day when no one of quality was awake, and when it was too cold and dewy to sit at the outdoor tables anyway. But as Daniel sat and pretended to read his newspaper, the sun swung up over York House and then Scotland Yard, the place became comfortable, and Personages began to occupy seats nearby, and to pretend to read their newspapers. He even sensed that in this very coffee-house were some members of the cast of characters he had heard about while listening to his siblings talk over the dinner table. Actually being here and mingling with them made him feel like a theatregoer relaxing after a performance with the actors-and in these racy times, actresses.

Daniel spent a while trying to spy into the upper windows of the mystery-shop with his telescope, because he thought he’d glimpsed silver hair in one of them, and so for a while he was only aware of other customers’ comings and goings by their bow-waves of perfume, the rustling of ladies’ crinolines, the ominous creaking of their whalebone corset-stays, the whacking of gentlemen’s swords against table-legs as they misjudged distances between furniture, the clacking of their slap-soled booties.

The perfumes smelled familiar, and he had heard all of the jokes before, while dining at Raleigh’s house. Raleigh, who at this point was fifty-two years old, knew a startling number of dull persons who evidently had nothing else to do but roam around to one another’s houses, like mobs of Vagabonds poaching on country estates, and share their dullness with each other. Daniel was always startled when he learned that these people were Knights or Barons or merchant-princes.

“Why, if it isn’t Daniel Waterhouse! God save the King!”

“God save the King!” Daniel murmured reflexively, looking up into a vast bursting confusion of clothing and bought hair, within which, after a brief search, he was able to identify the face of Sir Winston Churchill-Fellow of the Royal Society, and father of that John Churchill who was making such a name for himself in the fighting before Algiers.

There was a moment of exquisite discomfort. Churchill had remembered, a heartbeat too late, that the aforementioned King had personally blown up Daniel’s father. Churchill himself had many anti-Royalists in his family, and so he prided himself on being a little defter than that.

Now Drake’s pieces had never been found. Daniel’s vague recollection (vague because he’d just been shot with a blunderbuss, at the time) was that the explosion had flung him in the general direction of the Great Fire of London, so it was unlikely that anything was left of him except for a stubborn film of greasy ash deposited on the linens and windowsills of downwind neighbors. Discovery of shatteredyou and i are but earth crockery in remains of burnt houses confirmed it. John Wilkins (still distraught over the burning of his Universal Character books in the Fire) had been good enough to preside over the funeral, and only a bridge-builder of his charm and ingenuity could have prevented it from becoming a brawl complete with phalanxes of enraged Phanatiques marching on Whitehall Palace to commit regicide.

Since then-and since most of Drake’s fortune had passed to Raleigh-Daniel hadn’t seen very much of the family. He’d been working on optics with Newton and was always startled, somehow, to find that the other Waterhouses were doing things when he wasn’t watching. Praise-God, Raleigh’s eldest son, who had gone to Boston before the Plague, had finally gotten his Harvard degree and married someone, and so everyone (Waterhouses and their visitors alike) had been talking about him-but they always did so mischievously, like naughty children getting away with something, and with occasional furtive glances at Daniel. He had to conclude that he and Praise-God were now the last vestiges of Puritanism in the family and that Raleigh was discreetly admired, among the coffee-house set, for having stashed one of them away at Cambridge and the other at Harvard where they could not interfere in whatever it was that the other Waterhouses were up to.

In this vein: he had gotten the impression, from various tremendously significant looks exchanged across tables at odd times by his half-siblings, their extended families, and their overdressed visitors, that the Waterhouses and the Hams and perhaps a few others had joined together in some kind of vast conspiracy the exact nature of which wasn’t clear-but to them it was as huge and complicated as, say, toppling the Holy Roman Empire.

Thomas Ham was now called Viscount Walbrook. All of his gold had melted in the Fire, but none had leaked out of his newly refurbished cellar-when they came back days later they found a slab of congealed gold weighing tons, the World’s Largest Gold Bar. None of his depositors lost a penny. Others hastened to deposit their gold with the incredibly reliable Mr. Ham. He began lending it to the King to finance the rebuilding of London. Partly in recognition of that, and partly to apologize for having blown up his father-in-law, the King had bestowed an Earldom on him.

All of which was Context for Daniel as he sat there gazing upon the embarrassed face of Sir Winston Churchill. Now if Churchill had only asked, Daniel might have told him that blowing up Drake was probably the correct action for the King to have taken under the circumstances. But Churchill didn’t ask, he assumed. Which was why he’d never make a real Natural Philosopher. Though the Royal Society would tolerate him as long as he continued paying his dues.

Daniel for his part was aware, now, that he was surrounded by the Quality, and that they were all peering at him. He had gotten himself into a Complicated Situation, and he did not like those. The Reflecting Telescope was resting on the table right in front of him, as obvious as a severed head. Sir Winston was too embarrassed to’ve noticed it yet, but he would, and given that he’d been a member of the Royal Society since before the Plague, he would probably be able to guess what it was-and even if Daniel lied to him about it, the lie would be discovered this very evening when Daniel presented it, on Isaac’s behalf, to the Royal Society. He felt an urge to snatch it away and hide it, but this would only make it more conspicuous.

And Sir Winston was only one of the people Daniel recognized here. Daniel seemed to have inadvertently sat down along a major game trail: persons coming up from Whitehall Palace and Westminster to buy their stockings, gloves, hats, syphilis-cures, et cetera at the New Exchange, just a stone’s throw up the Strand, all passed by this coffee-house to get a last fix on what was or wasn’t in fashion.