“I am all that stands between him and the Solomonic Gold, or so he imagines.”

“Is it true?”

“The Tsar, and various of his minions, such as Monsieurs Kohan and Kikin, would have something to say about it, if Isaac confiscated the stuff,” Daniel allowed, “but they are far away, and not really part of Newton’s world. He will not take such persons into consideration. Me he will hate for having done the wrong thing.”

“What are the practical consequences of being so hated?” Saturn wondered.

Daniel thought of Hooke, and how Hooke’s legacy had disappeared. But if that happened after one was dead, did it really matter?

Saturn went on, “He is civil to you when the Clubb is together-”

“And I had wondered why, until today,” Daniel said. “Isaac no longer has the King’s Messengers and the Black Torrent Guard at his disposal. Bolingbroke has stripped him of the temporal power he had, or phant’sied he had, a few months ago. To act against Jack the Coiner, Isaac requires that sort of power-and I have got such power, at least indirectly, through Roger.”

“But why on earth,” asked Saturn, “should you consent to any such thing, if you hold it to be the case that Sir Isaac counts you as a foe, and would sweep you out of his way?”

“A perfectly sensible question,” said Daniel. “I think it is simple for him, complicated for me, snared as I am in a mare’s nest of compromises and accommodations, which to him would seem like one of those hair-balls we used to pull from cows’ bellies-a nasty mess that ought to be swept away. He’ll not be satisfied with anything less than the destruction of Bolingbroke, Charles White, Jack Shaftoe, Leibniz, and-if I’ve been so foolish as to get tangled up with ’em-me. Peter, I cannot summon anything like the fury of Newton, hot as a refiner’s fire. Perhaps I and the others really are nothing more than schlock to be raked off the top of his crucible and dumped on the ground to harden and blacken.”

And armes shal stand on his parte, and thei shal pollute the Sanctuarie of strength, amp; shal take away the dailie sacrifice, amp; they shal set up the abominable desolation.

-DANIEL 11:31

When ye therefore shal se the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, standing in the holie place (let him that readeth consider it). Then let them which be in Iudea, flee into the mountaines. Let him who is on the house top, not come downe to fetch anie thing out of his house. And he that is in the field, let not him returne back to fetch his clothes.

-MATTHEW 24:15-18

HE HATED TO BE LEADING troops across English soil. Ireland, Belgium, Holland, and France were the natural champs de Mars; armies roamed across and fed off them like sheep on English downs. But to lead a company of armed troopers across an English field made him reconsider his choice of profession.

That was, as he knew, confused and stupid thinking, for armies were no more natural and no more welcome in Belgium than they were here; but anyway it was how he felt. As always, he would be keeping those feelings to himself.

They had crossed over to Lambeth on the horse ferry two hours after midnight and marched, or rather walked, south on the Clapham road. The beating tromp of a proper march would be heard for miles across this drowsy landscape, and they did not want alarms to race across the countryside. So they had broken stride, separated into platoons, and made their way southwards, dividing and merging around the odd settlement. Watchmen, insomniacs, and busybodies who came out on to the road to pose troublesome questions, were told to mind their own business, and then asked for directions to Epsom. The strategy was to march faster than Rumor, but if some eager messenger were to get out ahead of them on horseback, they hoped he would spread the lie that they were going generally southwest. Which was just what they did, for some hours; but then, having gathered together in a dell off to the side of the way to eat their rations of biscuit, they executed a sharp change in direction, double-timed four miles eastwards along a road, then took to the fields. Scouts led them up and down gentle slopes that they could feel but not yet see. He thought there was rather more of up, than of down, but then it always felt thus to a tired infantryman. His ears were bad, and so he could not hear the rustling of leaves, but he sensed the presence of trees by their auras of stillness and of scent. These developed into copses that had to be circumvented, lest in walking through them the soldiers disperse, rustle leaves, and pop branches.

The light sifted down out of the sky like motes and flakes of ash from a burning city. At some point there was suddenly enough of it that he could make sense of the blobs and vestiges that, for the last hour or so, had marred the darkness. He stopped to look round. He had imagined, until now, that they had been marching across open ground, diverting around the occasional wood. But it was not like that. Trees grew more or less densely everywhere, and made it impossible to see more than a stone’s throw in any direction, except where a hill rolled up in the distance. Through the mottled shadow of the wood meandered a pale river: a way paved with grass that was becoming prickly and tinder-like in the summer heat. This chalky soil was as powerless to retain moisture as the fingers of a skeleton to hold money. It set off a hue and cry in his mind: he had marched a company into a high place where ponds and streams would not exist! In a few hours they would be out of water! He silenced these alarms by means of elaborate thinking and exhausting mental effort; ten paces later they started back up again, and reigned over his mind for an age. The thoughts became dry and worn-out, like straw that has been slept on too many times, and finally disintegrated in the first clear light of the morning.

Like boys who have waded along a creek-bed to the place where it loses itself in river, the troops had come to a broad swale that rolled up from undulating farm-country below-generally to their left-and, to their right, fetched up against the limey buttresses of a chalk hill-a down, as they named it in this part of the country. There this convenient highway of dry fescue and sporadic trees was barred by a furry tonsure of beeches that gripped the rougher parts of the down, indeed seemed to cover it all the way to the top-until he peered through spare places in the wood and saw pale, sere meadows on the high side.

The order of battle would have been clear to him at that point, even if he’d been a private soldier with no hand in its planning: there was an estate on the top of this down, hedged on this approach by the beech-belt. Proper visitors would approach it by (he guessed) some sort of carriageway that would come up the gentler slope on its yonder side; he and his company, however, were going to assault it from its (he hoped) unguarded and unwatched rear by toiling up the wooded chalk-bluff until they could break out of the trees and into the open ground above and beyond.

As he was collecting all of this together in his head, the wee hairs on the back of his neck stirred. He turned and drew this new breeze into his nostrils. It was damp and smelled of the river. It was going to precede them up through the trees.

He spoke now for the first time in hours, and gave the word to begin at once, each platoon holding hands, to use a figure of speech, with those to either side of it, so that they’d not lose one another in the fog, and fragment the line. “What fog, Sergeant?” someone asked, for the air was as clear as snow-melt. But Sergeant Bob only turned his back on this fellow and began stalking up-hill. One measure of soldierly experience, he had found, was how long it took for a man to wot that an engagement had commenced. For Bob Shaftoe, it had commenced the moment this moist breeze had begun its journey up from the Thames, and the battle was now more than half over. For this chap who had just asked him “What fog?” the onset of the battle still lay at some indefinite point in the future. Taken to its extreme, this particular form of military incompetence led to men being surrounded and slaughtered while sleeping, or eating. In less extreme forms it caused excessive casualties. Bob knew of no remedy for it other than to act, which would shock and embarrass laggardly sergeants and corporals to follow him. By the time he reached the verge of the beech-wood, he could feel the moisture clammy on his arms. By the time he led his company out on to the high pasture-land on the lid of the down, it was hushed under a new fog. He had not gone ten paces into this hilltop estate when a dog began to bark. The company had been moving with admirable quiet; but the breeze was at their backs, their scent had preceded them, indeed was now a mile in their van, and the dog knew they were coming.