THEEARL OFEPSOM TURNEDhis head and gazed across Piccadilly at his Golden cousin, but showed no particular emotion. Daniel had shrunk far down into the coach, where he hoped he’d be enshrouded in darkness. To him, John Comstock looked almost relieved. How bad could it be to live in Epsom and go hunting and fishing every day? That’s what Daniel told himself-but later the sadness and haggardness in the Earl’s face would appear in his mind’s eye at the oddest times.

“Do not become stupid now, just because you are seeing his face,” Roger said to him. “That man was a Cavalier. He led cavalry charges against the Parliamentarian foot-soldiers. Do you know what that means? Do you see that great bloody awful painting there of Comstock’s great-uncle and his friends galloping after that fox? Replace the fox with a starving yeoman, unarmed, alone, and you have a fair picture of how that man spent the Civil War.”

“I know all that,” Daniel said. “And yet, and yet, somehow I still prefer him and his family to the Duke of Gunfleet and his family.”

“John Comstock had to be cleared out of the way, and we had to lose a war, before anything could happen,” Roger said. “As to Anglesey and his spawn, I love them even less than you do. Do not fret about them. Enjoy your triumph and your mistress. Leave Anglesey to me.”

Then to Whitehall where they, and various Bolstroods and Waterhouses and many others, watched the King sign the Declaration. As penned by Wilkins, this document had given freedom of conscience to everyone. The version that the King signed today was not quite so generous: it outlawed certain extreme heretics, such as Arians who didn’t believe in the Trinity. Nevertheless, it was a good day’s work. Certainly enough to justify raising several pints, in several Drury Lane taverns, to the memory of John Wilkins. Daniel’s pretend mistress accompanied him on every stage of this epochal pub-crawling campaign, which led eventually to Roger Comstock’s playhouse, and, in particular, to a back-room of that playhouse, where there happened to be a bed.

“Who has been making sausages in here?” Daniel inquired. Which sent Tess into a fit of the giggles. She had just about got his new breeches off.

“I should say you have made a pretty one!” she finally managed to get out.

“I should say you are responsible for making it,” Daniel demurred, and then (now that it was in plain view) added: “and it is anything but pretty.”

“Wrong on both counts!” said Tess briskly. She stood up and grabbed it. Daniel gasped. She gave it a tug; Daniel yelped, and drew closer. “Ah, so it is attached to you. You shall have to accept responsibility for the making of it, then; can’t blame the lasses for everything. And as for pretty-” she relaxed her grip, and let it rest on the palm of her hand, and gave it a good look. “You’ve never seen a nasty one, have you?”

“I was raised to believe they were all quite nasty.”

“That may be true-it is all metaphysickal, isn’t it? Quite. But please know some are nastier than others. And that is why we have sausage-casings in a bedchamber.”

She proceeded to do something quite astonishing with ten inches of knotted sheepgut. Not that he needed ten inches; but she was generous with it, perhaps to show him a kind of respect.

“Does this mean it is not actually coitus?” Daniel asked hopefully. “Since I am not really touching you?” Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

“It is very common for men of your religion to say so,” Tess said. “Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say that we are not touching, and not having sex, if it makes you feel better,” Tess said. “Though, when all is finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep.”

“Please do not make me laugh!” Daniel said. “It hurts somehow.”

“What is funny? I simply speak the truth. What you are feeling is not hurting.”

He understood then that she was right. Hurting wasn’t the word for it.

When Daniel woke up in that bed, sometime in the middle of the following afternoon, Tess was gone. She’d left him a note (who’d have thought she was literate? But she had to read the scripts).

Daniel,

We shall make more sausages later. I am off to act. Yes, it may have slipped your mind that I am an actress.

Yesterday I worked, playing the role of mistress. It is a difficult role, because dull. But now it has become fact, not farce, and so I shall not have to act any more; much easier. As I am no longer professionally engaged, pretending to be your mistress, I shall no longer be receiving my stipend from your friend Roger. As I am now your mistress in fact, some small gift would be appropriate. Forgive my forwardness. Gentlemen know such things, Puritans must be instructed.

Tess

P.S. You want instruction in acting. I shall endeavour to help.

Daniel staggered about the room for some minutes collecting his clothes, and tried to put them on in the right order. It did not escape his notice that he was getting dressed, like an actor, in the backstage of a theatre. When he was done he found his way out among sets and properties and stumbled out onto the stage. The house was empty, save for a few actors dozing on benches. Tess was right. He had found his place now: he was just another actor, albeit he would never appear on a stage, and would have to make up his own lines ad libitum.

His role, as he could see plainly enough, was to be a leading Dissident who also happened to be a noted savant, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Until lately he would not have thought this a difficult role to play, since it was so close to the truth. But whatever illusions Daniel might once have harbored about being a man of God had died with Drake, and been cremated by Tess. He very much phant’sied being a Natural Philosopher, but that simply was not going to work if he had to compete against Isaac, Leibniz, and Hooke. And so the role that Roger Comstock had written for him was beginning to appear very challenging indeed. Perhaps, like Tess, he would come to prefer it that way.

That much had been evident to him on that morning in 1673. But the ramifications had been as far beyond his wits as Calculus would’ve been to Mayflower Ham. He could not have anticipated that his new-launched career as actor on the stage of London would stretch over the next twenty-five years. And even if he had foreseen that, he could never have phant’sied that, after forty, he would be called back for an encore.

BLACKBEARD IS AFTER HIM!Daniel spent the day terrified even before he knew this-now’s the time to be struck dead with fear. But he is calm instead. Partly it’s that the surgeon’s not sewing him together any more, and anything’s an improvement on that. Partly it’s that he lost some blood, and drank some rum, during the operation. But those are mechanistic explanations. Despite all that Daniel said to Wait Still concerning Free Will, et cetera, on the eve of his departure from Boston, he is not willing to believe, yet, that he is controlled by his balance of humours. No, Daniel is in a better mood (once he’s had an hour or two to rest up, anyway) because things are beginning to make sense now. Albeit scantly. Pain scares him, death doesn’t especially (he never expected to live so long!), but chaos, and the feeling that the world is not behaving according to rational laws, put him into the same state of animal terror as a dog who’s being dissected alive but cannot understand why. To him the rolling eyes of those bound and muzzled dogs have ever been the touchstone of fear.