“Why would he suddenly show up here?” Daniel wondered.

“When we were at Clerkenwell Court,” Saturn said, “the Tsar sent out a message. It seems that when he visited London some years ago, Sir Isaac gave him a tour of the Mint, which made a lively impression on him. Today when he saw the equipment we have made for handling the gold, he remembered this, and took it into his head that he wished to renew his acquaintance with that curious chap who once showed him around the Mint.”

Peter stood up and turned around, which obliged everyone else to stand up, too. The exact moment of the meeting between Sir Isaac Newton and Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz went unobserved by Daniel, who had become so upset that the blood stopped flowing to his brain for a little while; he remained standing, though, and his eyes stayed open, but it was as if his consciousness had gone into a total eclipse for half a minute or so.

When he was next aware of his surroundings, Saturn was tugging gently at his sleeve. Daniel looked round to discover that he was the only one still on his feet. The Tsar had moved around to Daniel’s side of the table to make room for Isaac. Daniel wedged his skinny pelvis into the slot between the two Peters, Hoxton and The Great, the largest men in the room. Facing them across the table, Newton and Leibniz sat side-by-side in the most awkward arrangement imaginable. They were silhouettes against the window-light, and perhaps it was some small act of mercy that Daniel could see nothing of their facial expressions, only the shapes of their periwigs.

Through Kikin, Peter the Great said to Newton: “I thought of you today.”

“I am honored, your Tsarish Majesty. May I ask in what connexion?” Newton’s head-silhouette angled slightly toward Leibniz. He was guessing it had something to do with the calculus. And so imagine his surprise at Peter’s response:

“Gold! I have never forgotten the day you showed me the Mint, and explained how gold flows to the Tower of London from every corner of the world to be made into guineas there. Today I have taken part in that currency. I have brought ordinary gold from Russia to your Bank, and heavy gold from the ship Minerva to Dr. Waterhouse’s vault around the corner.”

Lengthy was the silence of Newton. Daniel sensed, though he could not see, Isaac’s gaze on him. His face was warm, as if feeling the heat of Isaac’s wrath, and he wondered if his skin was still capable of turning pink.

Damn it anyway. This matter of the Solomonic Gold (he reminded himself) was not Daniel’s affair. He could not care less about it. As a favor to Leibniz, whose name was being dragged through the mud every day by Newton, and as a way to further his own work on the Logick Mill, Daniel had brokered a one-for-one swop of normal for “Solomonic” gold that had finally and improbably been consummated within the last few hours. Minerva was at last free of her cursed burthen. Jack Shaftoe was well on his way to being free of the threat of prosecution and punishment for his past work in coining that gold. The stuff was sitting in the Templar-tomb now, legally under Ravenscar’s control, but effectively Daniel’s to do with as he pleased. Daniel had been working toward this moment for some months now, and ought to have been hoisting a glass or two in carefree celebration. There was this one complication, having to do with Isaac’s notions about Alchemy; but Daniel had gotten better, with age, at accepting and ignoring the quirks and difficult peculiarities of his friends, perhaps even unto the point of self-induced blindness, and so he had not considered this very much until now.

What had ruined it all was the appearance of Monsieur Kohan. Most likely he was a lunatick; but indisputably he knew about the so-called Solomonic Gold, and looked forward to the day when every last ounce of it would be delivered to his custody in St. Petersburg. Whether or not Alchemy was claptrap, some believed in it, and some of them happened to be important, even dangerous. It might have been foolish for Daniel to have swallowed the phantastickal conceit that the heavy gold was infused with divine quintessence. But it would have suggested safer actions, which, had they been taken, would have led to simpler ends.

“That is a very remarkable thing, your Tsarish Majesty,” said Isaac, “and explains much that until this moment has been obscured from me.”

The front door of the tavern was kicked open. A huge man was standing there.

All went black, which Daniel, given his age, and his level of anxiety, was inclined to put down as resulting from the sort of devastating neurological event that was normally followed in a few minutes or hours by massive swelling of the brain and death.

On second thought, he was perfectly fine. Saturn had gripped the edge of the table and flung it up in the air whilst rising to his feet. The table-twelve feet long, and a hundred pounds of thick fir deals-had flipped up to create a barrier between all those sitting on that side of it, and the tavern’s entrance. But only for an instant; then, as Newton might have predicted, gravity had its way, and the table fell edge-first to the floor. The number of toes broken on impact would be difficult to estimate, for it came down in between the two rows of men who had been sitting across from each other. Daniel looked down to see a quivering shaft, eight feet long if it was an inch, embedded in the tabletop. It had struck the table with such violence that its honed steel tip (for it seemed to be some sort of spear, or harpoon) had penetrated the entire thickness of the wood, and burst out the other side for an inch or two, creating a little wigwam of splinters lit from within by the gleam of the metal. Standing up (for everyone was getting to his feet) and bending forward a bit to see the other side, Daniel got a moment’s horrifying glimpse of a human head impaled and spiked to the table. Then he understood it was nothing more than Leibniz’s periwig. For the harpoon (it was clearly a harpoon) had passed through a narrow space between the two greatest brains in the world, albeit closer to Leibniz’s, so that it had snagged the outer bulwarks of his out-moded, double-wide wig, and stripped it clean off his pate. The missile would have hurtled over the table and straight into the Tsar’s chest if Saturn had not had the presence of mind to flip the table up.

So now there was a second awkward silence. The harpooneer was still standing in the doorway, in a deflated posture. His beard was almost as long as that of Solomon Kohan. One of his arms had been truncated near the elbow and enhanced with a prosthesis, which looked heavy.

“It is him,” cried Mr. Kikin, “Yevgeny the Raskolnik! Where is my bodyguard when finally I need him!?”

“You do not need him, sir,” said Saturn, stepping over the table, and reaching down to grip the shaft of the harpoon, “for as a long-time resident of Hockley-in-the-Hole, I take it as a personal affront that such incivility has been shown to our guest.” He jerked the harpoon-shaft free from its steel head, which was going to remain embedded in the table for a long time. “I do view it as a personal obligation to now stave in the head of this Yevgeny.” Saturn took a step towards the door, and Yevgeny took a step back, to get out in the clear and gain some melee-room; but Saturn’s attack was arrested when a hand even larger than his closed over the harpoon-staff, and took it from him. “Your willingness is duly noted by his Tsarish Majesty,” Kikin explained in a hurry, “but the conflict is strictly a Russians-versus-Russians sort of affair, most difficult to explain, and honor dictates that it be settled without em-broiling our gracious hosts. Pray be seated and talk amongst yourselves.” And he rushed out the door in pursuit of the Tsar.

Further developments were obscured by the crowd that gathered instantly around any conflict in this district, be it bulls vs. terriers or Tsars vs. Raskolniks. Out the window they could see only a lot of blokes’ backs. Owing to the exceptional height of the combatants, they were from time to time able to glimpse a whirling quarter-stave, a hurtling flail, or a spray of blood silhouetted against the sky. But for the most part the progress of the duel had to be guessed at from watching the spectators, who moved in curious sympathy with the combatants. In much the same way as a man playing at lawn-bowls will twist and lean his body this way and that, as if he could thereby influence the course of a ball that has already left his hand, so those fight-watchers, almost in unison, juked and jived their shoulders and pelvises this way and that as they saw an opportunity to strike a blow, or cringed, smarted, and groaned when one was struck.