“Queena-Kootah, where we’d visit old friends, or their grave-sites as the case might be, and then Malabar, where we have an Investrix who, it is safe to say, is now waxing a bit obstreperous. She’ll not accept her Dividend in the form of a Bill of Exchange. We must sail there and stack bullion on the shore.”

“Awkward.”

“When we make profits in London, yes, I should say it is awkward. We’ll go there and stack gold on her beach and I shall make love to her and in time she’ll forgive us.”

“Then?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Your Solomon Islands passenger has been working as my proxy in Boston,” Daniel said, “winding up the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, liquidating the assets, assuaging the creditors, and paying the bar tabs. Before he absconds to the Antipodes I really ought to sit down with him and settle accounts.”

“Then you’ll need to go there, and do it soon, for I can assure you he is not coming this way.”

“You said you were going first to Plymouth-?”

“That I did.”

“I, too, have business in the west country,” said Daniel. “Perhaps I could make rendezvous with you there, and obtain passage back home?”

“Perhaps,” Dappa said. Then, startled by his own rudeness, he made haste to add, “Oh, ’tis all good where I am concerned. But after this van Hoek’ll have questions. He’ll want to know just where is this troublous gold. I shall give you a Hint: a satisfactory answer would be far, far away.”

“I’ve an even better answer,” said Daniel, “which is: I don’t know.” He held up his hands as if to indicate all thousand ships in the Pool, and it turned into a shrug.

“It is in transit,” Dappa understood. “You have shipped it.”

“It has been solved,” Daniel said, “con-fused in the currency of the Thames, and it will make its way to Hanover, mysteriously but reliably, even as Pieces of Eight converge, as if they had minds of their own, on Shahjahanabad.”

The more poetic Daniel waxed, the more Dappa’s interest waned, and by the end of this sentence he had plugged the glass back into his eye-socket and trained it again on the Tower.

“What is it you are looking at up there?” Daniel asked. The wind was strong, and cold, and out of the north, and Daniel had no wig or hat. As he had ascended to the poop deck a minute ago, he had looked once toward the Tower, to get his bearings, but since then he had stood with his back to it and the collar of his coat turned up to shield his neck and the base of his skull. Dappa faced resolutely into the breeze, fighting it off with a fixed grimace. He said, “It is easier for you to turn around and see for yourself than for me to explain all.”

“But you have a prospective-glass, and I don’t.”

“It is hardly needed at this range!”

“Why are you you using it, then?”

“Trying to resolve certain details. I am watching a group of men on the top of Lanthorn Tower,” Dappa said, “who are obviously enough responsible for this outrage.”

“Meaning, the ransack of your ship?”

“Yes. These Messengers, you may’ve noticed, keep looking to them for instructions. They have been communicating with semaphores. I think that one of them is Sir Isaac Newton.”

This was altogether predictable, and yet it was enough to make Daniel turn around and brave the wind. In a few moments he had picked out the group that Dappa had described. “Where is he?” Daniel asked.

“In the middle, peering right back at us with a spyglass.”

“Oh, bloody hell, he’ll probably recognize me!” Daniel burst out. He ought to have whirled right back around. But like a field-mouse caught in a raptor’s gaze, he found himself curiously unable to move.

“It’s all right, he is lowering the glass-no, I’m wrong, he dropped the bloody thing!”

“Isaac dropped it!?” Daniel could not conceive of Isaac Newton dropping a telescope.

“He’s a-gawp. Looking our way. Can’t make out his face really…his posture calls to mind such undignified words as gobsmacked, stamagast. Stricken. Oh! Oh! Oh, my god!”

“What! What is it?” Daniel demanded, and mastered the urge to snatch the glass. For all he could see with his naked eye was that the crowd on the top of the tower was puckering inwards toward the center, where Isaac stood-or had stood a moment earlier.

“He’s gone down! Straight down. Lucky that bloke on his right caught him.”

“Caught him!?”

“He just toppled over,” said Dappa, “dropped the glass and like to have landed right on top of it. Look, someone is running for help…they are calling to the soldiers down below them, waving their hats…Jesus Christ, they’re all in a bloody panic!” Dappa finally took the glass from his eye, and looked at Daniel. His brow furrowed above the bridge of his nose, as finally he made sense of what he had just seen. Then it hit Daniel, too, and he had to reach out one hand and steady himself on a railing.

“He’s not dead, or they would not be in such a hurry,” Dappa reasoned. “Sir Isaac Newton has had a stroke. That’s what I’d say.”

“Perhaps he only fainted. He has been ailing of late.”

“A stroke fits better with what I saw. It hit him on his right side-that’s why he dropped the glass, that’s why his right leg gave way. Whether it was a swoon, or a stroke, I do believe it was occasioned-” But here he bit his tongue, and winced.

“By his recognizing my face, when I turned around,” Daniel said, “thereby proving all his darkest and strangest fears. Which fears have been tormenting him ever since I returned to London and got entangled in the weird saga of the Solomonic Gold. Shit! I killed my friend.”

“He is neither dead, nor your friend,” Dappa corrected him.

“If you would be so good as to summon me a water-taxi,” said Daniel, “I must make haste to his niece’s house-which is probably where they’ll take him-and defend him from the physicians.”

THE OPTIMISTIC SIDE OF DANIEL’S nature put in a rare appearance on the evening of Tuesday and convinced Daniel that Isaac’s collapse had been neither swoon nor stroke, but only another of those mad panics that would come over him from time to time and later subside. Daniel was so sure of this that he paid a call on Isaac’s house in St. Martin’s that evening, expecting that Isaac would be there. But he was not. He was in the care of Catherine Barton at the house of the late Roger Comstock.

Daniel went there on Wednesday, then, and found Miss Barton distraught. In retrospect he now saw it as a marvel that Isaac hadn’t died a long time ago. His troubles had begun in August when Leibniz had knocked him and Daniel over a wall. This had saved them from being roasted by phosphorus-fire, but had done damage to Isaac’s ribs, with the result that he’d breathed but shallowly for weeks afterwards. He’d picked up a catarrh that ought to have been minor, but had been unable to cough effectively because of the pain in his ribs, and so had not been clearing his lungs. This catarrh had entrenched itself and become a pneumonia.

The event yesterday probably had been a stroke, but not as grave as it might have been; according to Catherine, Isaac had suffered weakness on his right side for a time, but seemed to have regained some of his strength since then. That did not concern her so much as his rapidly mounting fever.

“Fever!?” Daniel exclaimed, and insisted on going in to see the patient. Isaac had left strict orders to keep all physicians out of his room, and Catherine had obeyed them; but Daniel Waterhouse was no physician.

Isaac was spread-eagled on a four-poster bed, dressed in a flimsy nightshirt. He had kicked the bedclothes off onto the floor and he or someone else had opened a window to let in cold air. Daniel had to stuff his hands into his pockets to keep them from freezing. “Isaac?” he said.