“My word! You practically have the thing memorized!” Daniel exclaimed.

“I have had to spend many hours of late waiting for his majesty to wax talkative. Dappa writes well.”

“You have command of your old regiment again, I gather?”

“Yes. The details are quite unfathomable. Others are toiling away at them. Colonel Barnes has been located, and put in charge of rounding up certain elements who were scattered during the amusements of the summer. I am glad I was not here. It all would have vexed me to no end. I understand congratulations are in order for you.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel. “I have no idea what are the duties of a member of the Treasury Commission-”

“Keep an eye on my lord Ravenscar. See to it that the Trial of the Pyx goes rather well.”

“That, my lord, hangs on what is in the Pyx.”

“Yes. I was meaning to ask you. Does anyone really know what’s in the bloody thing?”

“Perhaps he does,” said Daniel, and inclined his head toward a nearby window. A red-wigged gentleman was in there, mingling with Germans, but glancing frequently at them.

“Charles White,” said Marlborough, “is, it’s true, still in command of the King’s Messengers, who pretend to guard the Pyx. I am pleased to let you know that they are now surrounded, and carefully observed, by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. So Mr. White cannot make any more mischief with the Pyx. And Colonel Barnes has related to me that White was downriver with you and Sir Isaac Newton at the moment that the Pyx was molested in April.”

“Very well,” said Daniel, since, plainly enough, Marlborough had figured this all out on his own: “The only one who really knows what is in the Pyx is Jack Shaftoe.”

“Hmm. If that is the case, then I am astonished that there is not a queue before Newgate Prison quite as long as that yonder.”

“Perhaps there is,” Daniel said.

White came out on the terrace and bowed. “My lord,” he said to Marlborough. “Doctor Waterhouse.”

“Mr. White,” they both said. Then they all took turns saying, “God save the King.”

“I trust you’ll be even more busy than usual,” White said to Daniel, “now that you’ve two Mints to look after.”

“Two Mints? I do not understand, Mr. White. There is only one Mint that I know of.”

“Oh, perhaps I was misinformed,” said White, mock-confused. “People are saying there is another.”

“Do you mean Jack Shaftoe’s coining house in Surrey? The Tory Mint?” Daniel asked, and let the handbill snap in the breeze, hoping that White would notice it. He did.

“You really ought to have better sources of information. Don’t read that rubbish. Listen to what Persons of Quality are saying.”

Marlborough turned his back, which was a rude thing to do; but the way this was going, it would soon become a duelling matter unless the Duke pretended he wasn’t hearing it.

“And what are Persons of Quality saying, Mr. White?”

“That Ravenscar is coining, too.”

“People are accusing the Marquis of Ravenscar of committing High Treason? Seems audacious.”

“Everyone knows he raised a private army. ’Tis a small step from that, to a private Mint.”

“Bored toffs in drawing-rooms may believe any phant’sies they please! Such accusations require at least some evidence.”

“They say that evidence may be found in abundance,” said White, “at Clerkenwell Court, and at Bridewell, and in the cellars of the Bank of England. Good day.” And he left. Which was fortunate for Daniel. A few seconds ago he had been amused at the sheer idiocy of the notion that Roger had been coining. Now he had become too flustered to speak.

“What was that about?” Marlborough very much wanted to know.

“It is a philosophical project I have been undertaking with Leibniz,” said Daniel, “that, to make a long story-” and he gave a sketchy account of the thing to the Duke, explaining the movement of the gold from Clerkenwell to Bridewell to the Bank to Hanover. “Someone seems to have gathered rather a lot of information about it,” Daniel concluded, “and spreads now a twisted version according to which it is a coining operation.”

“We know who is spreading it-we have just been conversing with him,” said Marlborough. “It matters not where the rumor originated.” To this Daniel said nothing, for a sickening awareness had come over him that this might all have originated with Isaac.

“What does matter-very much-is that two members of the new Treasury Commission are mixed up in it,” said Marlborough.

“Mixed up in what? A science experiment?”

“In something that looks a bit dodgy.”

“I can’t help it if it looks dodgy to an ignoramus!”

“But you can help that you are mixed up in it.”

“What do you mean, my lord?”

“I mean that your experiment is at an end, sir. It must stop. And the moment it has stopped, responsible persons, trusted by the King and the City alike, must go to this Clerkenwell Court, and to Bridewell, and into the vaults of the Bank, and inspect them, and find nothing of what Mr. White has been talking of.”

“It could be stopped at any time,” Daniel said, “but to wind it up properly and cast away the residue is impossible in a day, or a week.”

“How long will it take then?”

“October twenty-ninth,” said Daniel, “is the date that has just been set for the Trial of the Pyx, the execution of Jack the Coiner, and the elimination of all doubt as to the soundness of his majesty’s coinage. No later than that date, my lord, you’ll be able to visit the places mentioned with as many inspectors as you might care to bring along with you-including even Sir Isaac himself-and you shall find nothing save Templar-tombs at Clerkenwell, hemp-pounders at Bridewell, and Coin of the Realm at the Bank.”

“Done,” said the Duke of Marlborough, and strode away, pausing to bow to a young lady crossing the terrace alone: the Princess of Wales.

“Dr. Waterhouse,” Caroline said, “I need something from you.”

3:30 A.M., FOUR DAYS LATER (22 SEPTEMBER 1714)

DANIEL HAD BARELY GOT in the front door when the most exquisite body in Britain was pressed up against him, hard. He wondered, not for the first time, how the world might have been different had said body been united in one person with her uncle’s mind. Not much was separating him from Catherine Barton; having been rousted by a most urgent message, he’d come over in his nightshirt. She was wearing something diaphanous that he only glimpsed in the fraction of a second before she impacted on him. She smelled good: not an easy thing to accomplish in 1714. Daniel began to get his first erection since-since-well, since the last time he’d seen Catherine Barton. It was most inappropriate, as she was distraught. She was most certainly the sort of girl who would notice-but not the sort who would take it the wrong way.

She took him by the hand and led him back through the courtyard, round the fountain, and into the Ballroom, which smelled of oil, and was eerily lit up by the white-green glow of kaltes feuer: Phosphorus. A new thing had been added to the place. Seen from the entrance it looked like the rounded prow of a ship that happened to be made of silver, wreathed and festooned with garlands smitten of gold. Some manner of bas-relief Classical frieze had been molded into it. A sort of ram projected up and out of the thing, explicitly Priapic; Daniel recoiled and edged round this, for its tip was like to have caught him in the face. Iron rings, straps, amp;c., dangled from it. Coming now round the side of the object he discovered that it sat between a pair of wheels, made of wood but covered in gold leaf. This solved the mystery of how so heavy an object could have been moved into the ballroom. It was nothing less than a chariot-a huge one, eight feet wide. It was, he realized, a Chariot of the Gods. Coming finally around the open back of it, which faced towards the Volcano only a few yards away, he saw that the whole floor of the vehicle was a tongue-shaped expanse of Bed: as wide as the Chariot and ten feet long, upholstered in crimson silk and bestrewn with furs, and silk- and velvet-covered pillows in diverse glandular shapes. Sprawled in the middle of it was Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar. A laurel wreath was awry on his bald head. Mercifully, his purple toga had not been altogether torn off, but the middle of it was poked up, producing a Turkish tent effect that echoed the shape of the nearby Volcano. But the Volcano, mechanism that it was, still pumped away faithfully, its hidden Screw sending spurt after spurt of Oil of Phosphorus down its slopes. Whereas Roger was, or had been, animated by what Newton would call a Vegetative Spirit, which had quite fled his body. The toga-lifter was rigor mortis. He’d have to be buried in a special coffin.