“You are in no position to give orders. But it suits my purposes to let you know that you have been surrounded by the First Company of the First Regiment of Dragoons of the Whig Association Militia, once known, and soon to be known again, as the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards. We have been bivouacked not far away to defend Marlborough House should the need arise, and were drawn here by all of your disorderly conduct.”

“Then do you return to your post, Captain,” said de Gex.

“I am a lowly Sergeant, alas.”

“Then get thee to Marlborough House, Sergeant,” said de Gex, “for I daresay it shall require some defending, before the night is through. What goes on here is no concern of yours; you are away from your post without leave.”

“It is, if truth be told, of direct concern to me, sir,” said the Sergeant, “being a sort of family matter. For unless my eyes are telling me lies, my brother, who has ever been a disgrace to the family name, is down there attempting to redeem himself, and repent, and redress his sins, and so on and so forth, by the ancient and honorable trial of single combat-for the honour of a fair lady, no less! I have sworn, many times in the past, that I’d slay my brother myself if given a chance. And perhaps I will someday. But I’ll not abandon him to be slain when he is about to do something honourable for once in his life. So have at it; but if any of your Horse try to intervene, they’ll be as dead as Captain Shelby. We are Dragoons, and to make short work of foppish cavalry is our bread and butter.”

So spoke Bob Shaftoe. The mounted Jacobites below all heard him, and heeded him; but Father Edouard de Gex missed the last bit, for he had darted inside the Opera House. Jack had lit out after him. After only a moment’s pause, Eliza called out, “Thank you, Bob…”

“No time for it. You hesitate on the threshold,” Bob said, “one part of you saying go with Jack, another saying you’ve no need of such a Vagabond wretch in your life. My voice bids you go in, Eliza, if a Sergeant may command a Duchess. The rabble beyond the fires, there, does not have the discipline or the discretion of these Jacobite riders. In a moment we may have open war here. Get inside! Stay near an exit. If you smell smoke, drop to your hands and knees, crawl out of the building, and run in any direction as fast as you can.”

“WE POLITICIANS,” quoth Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, re-filling his goblet with port for the eleventh time, “are like men who live in frosty climes. It is the habit of such men that whenever they have nothing else to take up their time, they hie to the chopping-block, take up the axe, and set to work splitting and stacking cord-wood. They do it even in the heat of August, for they are ever driven by the memory of having been cold once. You and I have each had our days of bitter cold, Roger, and so whenever we are not otherwise busy, we go to work stacking up our political cord-wood. Each of us has a mountain of it. Other men, seeing the size of the woodpile, would call it enough, and leave off chopping. But you and I know ’tis meant to be burned, and shall burn quickly once lit. This whole Realm that we call the United Kingdom is one great pile of cord-wood now, or rather two piles, one called Whig and one called Tory. They are so near to each other that one cannot be lit without setting fire to the other. All that is wanted is tinder, and a spark. London is packed with tinder to-night, which is your doing, and mine: the militias, and the Mobb. They have been gathering round their bonfires in Hay Market, Holbourn, Smithfield, and Charing Cross, as we have stood here and watched them.”

As Bolingbroke said this he drew Roger’s attention to the districts named, sweeping his arm from one great intersection to another. He spoke truly, for once. Overhead, the stars had come out. One minute they weren’t visible, the next they were. But they did not flare out all of a sudden, but asserted themselves quietly, as shoals rose from the sea while the tide ebbed. London this evening had become a constellation of bonfires in like fashion; they had not been lit at any one instant, yet every time Roger turned around and looked, there were more of them. Entire districts were dark, but between and among them was laced a flickering and pulsing net-work of fire, strewn, stretched, and rent like an old cobweb. Roger knew that like an old cobweb it was rooted, sticky, tenacious, no easy thing to sweep away. Really it had been present all the time, but invisible, like the strands of spider-silk one walks into in the dark. Fire only lit it up, and made glorious its immensity.

He gazed far downriver, past the dome of St. Paul’s and the Monument to an old citadel by the side of the river, with a high, four-turreted keep in the middle: the Tower of London. It was dim and quiet tonight, for the Mint was idle. Tower Hill, the belt of open ground surrounding the moat, was speckled with bonfires. Roger lifted his gaze from that distraction and found the dark bulk of Legge Mount, thrust out toward the troublous City like a fist. Thence he indexed round the Tower walls anti-clockwise until he found Bloody Tower and Wakefield Tower, which were joined together side-by-side like misshapen conjoined twins, looking out over the Pool of London from the center of the southern wall. On the roof of each, a signal-fire had been kindled. Two fires, small sparks, easily resolved from this distance. One might have been just a fire. But two were a signal, sent by one who had an excellent view of goings-on in the Pool.

“I don’t much care for your firewood similitude, Henry,” Roger said, “for it is too obviously meant to affright me. And moreover, I know what you are about to say next: that your pile of firewood is greater than mine. You cannot deter me now with such loose hobgoblin-talk about civil war. For as bad as that would be, what you propose in its place is worse: you would take us all the way back to the days of Bloody Mary.”

“Not so, Roger, not so! His Royal Highness is a Catholic, true, but-”

“As to the other thing, I am not yet overawed by your forces and your powers. Princess Caroline, whatever you might phant’sy about her, is not in London.”

Bolingbroke laughed. “But, Roger, you told me, only an hour ago, that you had seen her through my telescope!”

“But, Henry, I was lying.” It was Roger’s turn to take up the de-canter and replenish his glass. As he did, he turned his gaze south toward Hay Market. A contagion of bonfires had lately been spreading up and down its length, threatening to link up with a larger nexus in Charing Cross. They were particularly hot around the Italian Opera, which troubled Roger, for he’d put a lot of money into it, and did not want it burned down by a Mobb. His old eyes could not resolve individual figures from here, but he could see patterns: round and among the fires, dark currents swelled, ebbed, swirled, and splashed: the Mobb, yet wanting any clear purpose. But currents of order and purpose moved through the chaos, like rivers in the sea: disciplined groups, probably militia. The sight of it, so near to his beloved Opera, threw him into a woozy fit, and reminded him how much easier it would be to surrender to Bolingbroke.

But then his eyes picked out a black corpuscle, moving up Hay Market with implacable purpose, gleaming like a bead of lacquer as it slalomed round bonfires. At the great cross with Piccadilly it made the turn that would angle it up Shug Lane toward Golden Square. He knew then that this was his phaethon, hurtling across London like a black panther through a forest fire. He could not know what message it conveyed; but something in its desperate speed gave him hope it might be good news.