“AND SO, TO SUM UP, I must confess that I too was absent during the onslaught of these Black-guards-

a shame that I shall never out-live,” said Charles White, who had just related, to an astonished Chamber, an improbable yarn about a wild goose chase down the River Thames: a venture that had been undertaken on the strength of assurances from Colonel Barnes and Sir Isaac Newton that it would culminate in the capture of Jack the Coiner, but that in fact had ended with a fire in a broken-down, abandoned coastal watch-tower, and a lot of confused and misled dragoons storming around in benighted mud-flats. A boat or two had been sighted, and pursued, until darkness had fallen. Sir Isaac had been rescued from a drifting wreck where he and another aged Whig Natural Philosopher had been found down in the bilge playing with a jack-in-the-box.

“Your sense of duty is an example to us all, Mr. White,” Bolingbroke protested, in a voice soaked with amusement over the concluding detail of the jack-in-the-box. “If you were misled, ’twas only because the Byzantine intrigues that were afoot on that day, are so alien to the mentality of an honest Englishman. Tell me, when you returned to the Tower, and found that indescribable scene, were you concerned as to the Crown Jewels?”

“Naturally, my lord, and hied thither straightaway.”

“Does anyone really hie nowadays?” asked Roger.

Perfect was the silence at his levity.

Charles White cleared his throat and continued. “Finding several of the jewels missing, I supposed, at first, that this explained all.”

“In what way, Mr White?” Bolingbroke inquired, now in a sort of friendly cross-examination mode.

“Good my lord, I reasoned that the Black-guards had been after the Crown Jewels, and that all of the day’s happenings in the Tower had been parts of their plan to steal them.”

“But you are using the past tense, Mr. White. Your opinions on the matter have undergone some change?”

“It was not until some weeks after, when some of the Black-guards were caught, and made to tell what they knew, that I began to perceive faults in that hypothesis.” He pronounced it wrong.

“But it seemed a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, didn’t it? No one would have found fault with it, had the prisoners not given us the information that Jack the Coiner evinced no desire to see the Crown Jewels.”

“It did indeed seem reasonable, my lord, or so I tried to tell myself for quite some little while; but viewed with a more critical eye, it does not hold up.”

“Why does it not, Mr. White?”

“The journey downriver, which I have just related, was, as my lord will have plainly seen, a diversion, meant to remove me and the first company of Guards from the Tower.”

“So it would seem.”

“It must therefore have been arranged, with some cunning and forethought, by some who were secretly confederated with Jack, and who would profit by the success of Jack’s undertaking.”

“A reasonable enough supposition,” Bolingroke allowed. Then he reminded White, “We look forward to a confession to that effect from Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Consider it done my lord-but Robert Shaftoe is just a sergeant. A very senior one, true, but-”

“I do take your point, Mr. White. Perhaps Colonel Barnes ought to be questioned. He would have the authority-”

“Would have, my lord, but-and I have turned this over in my mind a thousand times-Colonel Barnes did never exercise any such authority on that day. I requested that he send a company on the expedition to Shive Tor, because, to hear Sir Isaac tell it, we would need a whole company, or more, to subdue the small army of Black-guards we would find there.”

“Mr. White. Certainly you are not accusing yourself of complicity!”

“Even if I did, my lord, ’twould never stand; for the record now shows that the true butt at which Jack the Coiner aimed his shaft was not the Jewels but the Mint-to be specific, the Pyx. And how would I benefit from some compromise of the Pyx?”

“How could anyone conceivably benefit from it?” Bolingbroke wanted to know.

“It is of no account,” Isaac Newton broke in, “as the Pyx was never compromised!”

“Sir Isaac Newton! We’ve not heard from you yet. For the benefit of those here who have never seen the Pyx, would you be so good as to explain its workings?”

“It would be my pleasure, my lord,” said Newton, stepping forward, eluding the hand of the Marquis of Ravenscar who had groped forward, out of some instinct, trying to yank him back from the abyss. “It is closed by three locks-all three must be removed for the lid to be opened. The top, as you can see, is fashioned with a hatch, devised in such a way that a small object may be deposited into the Pyx without opening the locks. But it is impossible for a hand to reach in and remove any object.” Newton operated the mechanism, letting everyone get a look at a pair of swinging doors rigged just as he had claimed.

“How is the Pyx employed at the Mint?” Bolingbroke inquired, accurately feigning the sort of elevated curiosity that was good form at Royal Society meetings.

Newton responded in kind. “Of every lot of coins that is minted, some are plucked out, and deposited. I shall demonstrate, behold!” Newton opened his own coin-purse and spilled a guinea and some pennies-freshly minted, of course-onto his hand. He borrowed a sheet of foolscap from a clerk, laid it on the Pyx, arranged the coins in the center of the page, and then rolled and folded the paper around the money to make a neat little packet. “Here I have done it with paper-at the Mint we use leather. The Sinthia, as we call this little packet, is sewn shut. The worker writes on its outside a notation as to when the sample was taken, and stamps it with a seal, kept for that purpose alone. Then-” Sir Isaac slipped the Sinthia into the Pyx’s hatch, and tripped the mechanism. It vanished and dropped within.

“And from time to time, as is well known to that scholar of all matters monetary, my lord Ravenscar, the Pyx is brought hither to the Star Chamber by order of the Privy Council,” Bolingbroke said, “and opened, and its contents assayed by a jury of goldsmiths drawn from the most respectable citizens of the City of London.”

“Indeed, my lord. Anciently it was done four times a year. Of late, less frequently.”

“When was the last Trial of the Pyx, Sir Isaac?”

“Last year, my lord.”

“You say, ’twas around the time that the hostilities on the Continent ceased, and the Queen’s Own Black Torrent Guard returned to garrison the Tower.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And so the Pyx, as of April 22nd, contained samples of all lots of coins minted during the months that the Black Torrent Guard controlled the Tower.”

“Er, indeed, my lord,” said Newton, wondering what that had to do with anything.

Bolingbroke was only too happy to lead him out of his confusion. “Mr. Charles White is of the view that those who were responsible for the assault on the Tower, phant’sied that they could somehow benefit more from compromising the Pyx, than from stealing the Crown Jewels! How could such a thing possibly be, Sir Isaac?”

“I do not know, my lord, and I hold it to be idle, for the Pyx was never compromised.”

“How do you know that, Sir Isaac? Jack the Coiner might have spent as much as an hour with it.”

“As you can see, it is sealed with three padlocks, my lord. I cannot attest to the other two, for one is the property of the Warden of the Mint and the other belongs to the Lord Treasurer; but the third is mine. There is only one key to that lock, and I am never without it.”

“I have heard that there are men who can open a lock, without a key-there is a word for it, they say.”

“Lock-picking, my lord,” someone said helpfully.

“Trust a Whig to know such a thing! Could Jack have ‘picked’ the locks?”

“Locks such as these, perhaps,” answered Newton, passing his hand over two of them. Then he turned his attention to a third, much larger and heavier. He hefted it like Roger Comstock cupping one of his mistress’s breasts. “To pick this one is almost certainly impossible. To pick it and two others in an hour is absolutely impossible.”