Daniel hadn’t moved or spoken in what seemed like ten minutes… he was (glancing at the telltale coffee cup here) paralyzed, in fact! Then he solved Sir Winston’s etiquette jam by blurting something like “I say!” and attempting to stand up, which came out as a palsied spasm of the entire body-he got into a shin-kicking match with his own table and produced a disturbance that sheared cups off their saucers. Everyone looked.

“Ever the diligent Natural Philosopher, Mr. Waterhouse pursues an experiment in Intoxication by Coffee!” Sir Winston announced roundly. Simply tremendous laughter and light applause.

Sir Winston was of Raleigh’s generation and had fought in the Civil War as a Cavalier-he was a serious man and so was dressed in a way that passed for dignified and understated here, in a black velvet coat, flaring out to just above the knee, with lace handkerchiefs trailing from various openings like wisps of steam, and a yellow waistcoat under that, and God only knew what else beneath the waistcoat-the sleeves of all these garments terminated near the elbows in huge wreaths of lace, ruffles, et cetera, and that was to show off his tan kid gloves. He had a broad-brimmed Cavalier-hat fringed with fluffy white stuff probably harvested from the buttocks of some bird that spent a lot of time sitting on ice floes, and a very thin mustache, and a wig of yellow hair, expensively disheveled and formed into bobbling ringlets. He had black stockings fashionably wrinkled up his calves, and high-heeled shoes with bows of a wingspan of eight inches. The stocking/breech interface was presumably somewhere around his knees and was some sort of fantastically complex spraying phenomenon of ribbons and gathers and skirtlets designed to peek out under the hems of his coat, waistcoat, and allied garments.

Mrs. Churchill, for her part, was up to something mordant involving a Hat. It had the general outlines of a Puritan-hat, a Pilgrimish number consisting of a truncated cone mounted on a broad flat brim, but enlivened with colorful bands, trailing ribbons, jeweled badges, curious feathers, and other merchandise-a parody, then, a tart assertion of non-pilgrimhood. Everything from the brim of this hat to the hem of her dress was too complex for Daniel’s eye to comprehend-he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible-but he did notice that the little boy carrying her train was dressed as a Leprechaun (Sir Winston did a lot of business for the King in Ireland).

It was a lot to put on, just to nip out for a cup of coffee, but the Churchills must have known that everyone was going to be fawning over them today because of their gallant son, and decided they ought to dress for it.

Mrs. Churchill was looking over Daniel’s shoulder, toward the street. This left Daniel free to stare at her face, to which she had glued several spots of black velvet-which, since the underlying skin had been whitened with some kind of powerful cosmetic, gave her a sort of Dalmatian appearance. “He’s here,” she said to whomever she was looking at. Then, confused: “Were you expecting your half-brother?”

Daniel turned around and recognized Sterling Waterhouse, now about forty, and his wife of three years, Beatrice, and a whole crowd of persons who’d apparently just staged some type of pillaging-raid on the New Exchange. Sterling and Beatrice were shocked to see him. But they had no choice but to come over, now that Mrs. Churchill had done what she’d done. So they did, cheerfully enough, and then there was a series of greetings and introductions and other formalities (including that all parties congratulated the Churchills on the dazzling qualities of their son John, and promised to say prayers for his safe return from the shores of Tripoli) extending to something like half an hour. Daniel wanted to slash his own throat. These people were doing what they did for a living. Daniel wasn’t.

But he did achieve one insight that would prove useful in later dealings with his own family. Because Raleigh was involved in the mysterious Conspiracy of which Daniel had, lately, become vaguely aware, it probably had something to do with land. Because Uncle Thomas (“Viscount Walbrook”) Ham was mixed up in it, it must have something to do with putting rich people’s money to clever uses. And because Sterling was involved, it probably had something to do with shops, because ever since Drake had ascended into the flames over London, Sterling had been moving away from Drake’s style of business (smuggling, and traveling around cutting private deals away from markets) and towards the newfangled procedure of putting all the merchandise in a fixed building and waiting for customers to transport themselves to it. The whole thing came together complete in Daniel’s head when he sat in that coffeehouse in Charing Cross and looked at the courtiers, macaronis, swells, and fops streaming in from the new town-houses going up on land that had been incinerated, or that had been open pastures, four years earlier. They were planning some sort of real estate development on the edge of the city-probably on that few acres of pasture out back of the Waterhouse residence. They would put up town-houses around the edges, make the center into a square, and along the square Sterling would put up shops. Rich people would move in, and the Waterhouses and their confederates would control a patch of land that would probably generate more rent than any thousand square miles of Ireland-basically, they would become farmers of rich people.

And what made it extraordinarily clever-as only Sterling could be-was that this project would not even be a struggle as such. They would not have to defeat any adversary or overcome any obstacle-merely ride along with certain inexorable trends. All they-all Sterling-had to do was notice these trends. He’d always had a talent for noticing-which was why his shops were so highly thought of-so all he needed was to be in the right place to do the necessary noticing, and the right place was obviously Mrs. Green’s coffee-house.

But it was the wrong place for Daniel, who only wanted to notice what Isaac was up to. A lively conversation was underway all round him, but it might as well’ve been in a foreign language-in fact, frequently it was. Daniel divided his time between looking at the telescope and wondering when he could snatch it off the table without attracting attention; staring at the mystery-shop and at the gentleman-rider; fraternal staredowns with Sterling (who was in his red silk suit with silver buttons today, and had numerous scraps of black glued to his face, though not as many as Beatrice); and watching Sir Winston Churchill, who looked equally bored, distracted, and miserable.

At one point he caught Sir Winston gazing fixedly at the telescope, his eyes making tiny movements and focusings as he figured out how it worked. Daniel waited until Sir Winston looked up at him, ready with a question-then Daniel winked and shook his head minutely. Sir Winston raised his eyebrows and looked thrilled that he and Daniel now had a small Intrigue of their own-it was like having a pretty seventeen-year-old girl unexpectedly sit on his lap. But this exchange was fully noticed by someone of Sterling’s crowd-one of Beatrice’s young lady friends-who demanded to know what the Tubular Object was.

“Thank you for reminding me,” Daniel said, “I’d best put it away.”

“What is it?” the lady demanded.

“A Naval Device,” Sir Winston said, “or a model of one-pity the Dutch Fleet when Mr. Waterhouse’s invention is realized at full scale!”

“How’s it work?”

“This is not the place,” said Sir Winston significantly, eyes rattling back and forth in a perfunctory scan for Dutch spies. This caused all of the other heads to turn, which led to an important Sighting: an entourage was migrating out of the Strand and into Charing Cross, and someone frightfully significant must be in the middle of it. While they were all trying to figure out who, Daniel put the telescope away and closed the box.