STERLING:“I meant they’d be rioting ‘gainst the Duke, not our late bro-in-law.”

DANIEL:“I personally witnessed a sort of riot ‘gainst the Duke the other day-but it was about his religious, not his military, political, or commercial shortcomings.”

STERLING:“You left out ‘intellectual and moral.’”

DANIEL:“I was trying to be concise-as we are getting a bit short of that spiritous essence, found in fresh air, for which fire competes with living animals.”

RALEIGH:“The Duke of York! What bootlicking courtier was responsible for naming New York after him? ’Tis a perfectly acceptable city. ”

DANIEL:“If I may change the subject… the reason I led us to this room was yonder ladder, which in addition to being an excellent Play Structure for William Ham, will also convey us to the roof-where it’s neither so hot nor so smoky.”

STERLING:“Daniel, never mind what people say about you-you always have your reasons. ”

[Now a serio-comical musical interlude: the brothers Waterhouse break into a shouted, hoarse (because of smoke) rendition of a Puritan hymn about climbing Jacob’s Ladder.]

scene:The rooftops of Threadneedle Street. Shouts, shattering of glass, musket-shots heard from below. They gather round the mighty Ham-chimney, which is now venting smoke of burning walls and furniture below.

SIRRICHARDAPTHORP:“How inspiring, Daniel, to gaze down the widened and straightened prospect of Cheapside and know that St. Paul’s will be rebuilt there anon-‘pon mathematick principles-so that it’s likely to stay up for a bit.”

STERLING:“Sir Richard, you sound ominously like a preacher opening his sermon with a commonplace observation that is soon to become one leg of a tedious and strained analogy. ”

APTHORP:“Or, if you please, one leg of an arch-the other to be planted, oh, about here. ”

RALEIGH:“You want to build, what, some sort of triumphal arch, spanning that distance? May I remind you that first we want some sort of triumph!?”

APTHORP:“It is only a similitude. What Christopher Wren means to do yonder in the way of a Church, I mean to do here with a Banca. And as Wren will use Hooke’s principles to build that Church soundly, I’ll use modern means to devise a Banca that-without in any way impugning your late brother-in-law’s illustrious record-will not have armed mobs in front of it burning it down.”

RALEIGH:“Our late brother-in-law was ruined, because the King borrowed all of his deposits-presumably at gunpoint-and then declined to pay ’em back-what mathematick principle will you use to prevent that?”

APTHORP:“Why, the same one that you and your co-religionists have used in order to maintain your faith: tell the King to leave us alone.”

RALEIGH:“Kings do not love to be told that, or anything. ”

APTHORP:“I saw the King yesterday, and I tell you that he loves being bankrupt even less. I was born in the very year that the King seized the gold and silver that Drake and the other merchants had deposited in the Tower of London for safekeeping. Do you recall it?”

RALEIGH:“Yes, ’twas a black year, and made rebels of many who only wanted to be merchants.”

APTHORP:“Your brother-in-law’s business, and the practice of goldsmith’s notes, arose as a result-no one trusted the Tower any more.”

STERLING:“And after today no one will trust goldsmiths, or their silly notes.”

APTHORP:“Just so. And just as the Empty Tomb on Easter led, in the fullness of time, to a Resurrection…”

DANIEL:“I am stopping up mine ears now-if the conversation turns Christian, wave your hands about.”

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THEDUTCHhad won the war percolated through London invisibly, like Plague. Suddenly everyone had it. Daniel woke up in Bedlam one morning knowing that William of Orange had opened the sluices and put a large part of his Republic under water to save Amsterdam. But he couldn’t recall whence that knowledge had come.

He and his brothers had worked their way up Threadneedle by assailing one rooftop after another. They’d parted company with Apthorp on the roof of his goldsmith’s shop, which was still solvent-yet there was an armed mob in front of it, too, and in front of the next goldsmith’s, and the next. Far from escaping a riot, they understood, somewhat too late, that they were working their way toward the center of a much larger one. The obvious solution was to turn round and go back the way they’d come-but now a platoon of Quakers was coming toward them over the rooftops gripping matchlocks, each Quaker trailing a long thread of smoke from the smoldering punk in his fingers. Looking north across Threadneedle they could see a roughly equivalent number of infantrymen headed over the rooftops of Broad Street, coming from the direction of Gresham’s College, and it seemed obvious enough that Quakers and Army men would soon be swapping musket-balls over the heads of the mob of Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Diggers, Jews, Huguenots, Presbyterians, and other sects down below.

So it was down to the street and into the stone-throwing fray. But when they got down there, Daniel saw that these were not the young shin-kickers and head-butters of Drake’s glory days. These were paunchy mercers who simply wanted to know where all of their money had got to. The answer was that it had gone to wherever it goes when markets crash. Daniel kept treading on wigs. Sometimes a hundred rioters would turn around and flee en bloc from sudden musket-fire and all of their wigs would fall off at once, as though this were a practiced military drill. Some of the wigs had dollops of brain in them, though, which ended up as pearly skeins on Daniel’s shoes.

They pushed their way up Broad Street, away from the ‘Change, which seemed to be the center of all disturbance. Those mock-Polish grenadiers were formed up in front of the building that had been the Guinea, and was soon to be the Royal Africa, Company. So the Waterhouses squirted past on the far side of the street, looking back to see whether any of those fatal spheres were trajecting after them. They tried to get in at Gresham’s College. But many offices of the City of London had been moved into it after the fire, and so it was shut up and almost as well guarded as the Royal Africa Company.

So they had kept moving north and eventually reached Bedlam, and found an evening’s refuge there amid piles of dressed stone and splats of mortar. Sterling and Raleigh had departed the next morning, but Daniel had remained: encamped, becalmed, drained, and feeling no desire to go back into the city. From time to time he would hear a nearby church-bell tolling the years of someone who’d died in the rioting.

Daniel’s whereabouts became known, and messengers began to arrive, several times a day, bearing invitations to more funerals. He attended several of them, and was frequently asked to stand up and say a few words-not about the deceased (he scarcely knew most of them), but about more general issues of religious tolerance. In other words, he was asked to parrot what Wilkins would’ve said, and for Daniel that was easy-much easier than making up words of his own. Out of a balanced respect for his own father, he mentioned Drake, too. This felt like a slow and indirect form of suicide, but after his conversation with John Comstock he did not feel he had much of a life to throw away. He was strangely comforted by the sight of all those pews filled with men in white and black (though sometimes Roger Comstock would show up as a gem of color, accompanied by one or two courtiers who were sympathetic, or at least curious). More mourners would be visible through open doors and windows, filling the church-yard and street.

It reminded him of the time during his undergraduate days when the Puritan had been murdered by Upnor, and Daniel had traveled five miles outside of Cambridge to the funeral, and found his father and brothers, miraculously, there. Exasperating to his mind but comforting to his soul. His words swayed their emotions much more than he wanted, or expected-as two inert substances, mixed in an Alchemist’s mortar, can create a fulminating compound, so the invocation of Drake’s and Wilkins’s memories together.