HE GETS THERE much too early because he overestimated the Hanging-Traffic. So many people want to see Jack Shaftoe drawn and quartered that everyone has gone early to line the route. Daniel need only walk out of Sir Isaac Newton’s town-house, turn his back on the dim roar that resounds against the vault of heaven to the north-a sort of Aurora Borealis of Crowd-clamour-and stroll for a few minutes on quiet streets, and there he is in the Broad Sanctuary: a sweep of open ground splayed out north and west of the Abbey.

He must be a very old and strange man indeed to be approaching a stained Pile such as this one on official business. So peculiar is his errand that he falters, knowing not which entrance to use, which presbyter to accost. But the place is all out of kilter anyway because laborers are still taking down the galleries and bleachers put up for the Coronation. Cockney and Irish demolition-men are strutting out the doors with great rough-sawn planks on their shoulders. There is nary a churchman in sight. Daniel elects to go in the west entrance, which seems a bit less congested than the north with bulky blokes and baulks of wood. Moments later he is struck to find himself walking over the stone where Tompion was planted eleven months ago. It being a great peculiarity of this ?ra that a horologist should be given a resting-place that one or two generations before would have been reserved for a knight or a general.

He puts Tompion’s bones behind him, ducks beneath a moving plank, and gets out in to the cloisters. This is a square courtyard framed in a quadrilateral of roofed stone galleries, but otherwise open to the elements. Those elements today consist of raw bright autumn sun and cold turbulent air. Daniel shoves hands in pockets, hunches, and stiff-legs it to the next corner, turns right, follows the East Cloister to its end. There on the left wall is an unmarked medieval fortress-door, massive planks hinged, strapped, gridded, and pierced with black iron. Diverse ancient hand-crafted padlocks depend from its hasp-system like medals on the breast of a troll-general. Daniel has a key to only one of them, and no one else is here. He is freezing. Men half your age and double your weight have been slain on these wastes by Extremity of Cold. The cloister blocks the eastern sun but does nothing to shelter him from the breeze, which is coming out of the northwest, striking down into the Cloisters and nearly pinning him to this door. So he back-tracks a few paces and passes through a doorway that does happen to be open. This gets him into a corridor that is out of the wind, but cold and dark. Light beckons at its other end, and he can sense warmth on his face, so he goes that way for several paces, and is rewarded, and astonished, to find himself all alone in the most beautiful room in Britain.

Any other Brit would have known in advance that this was the Chapter House. But because of his Revolutionary up-bringing, this was the least likely place on the Isle for Daniel ever to have set foot-until this day. It is a great octagon whose walls seem to consist entirely of stained glass-a structural impossibility given that the vault overhead consists of numberless tons of stone. It is all held up, he reasons, by pillars at the eight vertices, and a ninth one in the center of the room, so tall and slender it seems doomed to buckle. But it has stayed up for something like four hundred years, and only the most bitter and skeptickal Empiricist would inspect it with such a jaded eye. The place is not going to collapse on him. Those windows are harvesting the sunlight and warming the place. Daniel falls into an orbit around the central pillar. Some of his lessons are coming back to him, and he recalls that this was where the King’s Council, and later Parliament, convened until the monks got sick of their hollering and kicked them out and across the street to Westminster Palace. From the way one old man’s footfalls and breathing echo around the place, Daniel can’t imagine how raucous it must have been when it was filled with politicians.

The brilliant windows capture his attention during the first few orbits, but later his eyes are drawn to the wooden panels below them, at head level. These are painted with scenes that Daniel recognizes, almost without even having to look at them, as the Revelation of that scary lunatick St. John the Divine. The Four Horsemen on their color-coded steeds, the Great Beast spitting terrified Saints, misguided humans queueing up to receive the Mark of the Beast. The Whore drunk on the Blood of the butchered Saints, and later being burned for it. Christ leading the armies of Heaven on a white horse. Much of this is so faded that it can only be made out by one such as Daniel who had to memorize it when he was a boy, so that, like an actor standing backstage awaiting his scene, he’d be able to follow the script, and know his cue, when it happened for real. In the more dilapidated Mobb-scenes, only the eyes stand out among the faded and peeling pigmentation: some sleepy, some upraised, some darting about for Earthly advantage, others attending to the faraway deeds of Angels, still others lost in contemplation of what it all means. He can not help seeing this all as a final message from Drake. A reminder that, in spite of all Isaac’s lucubrations, Isaac still does not know the date and time of the Last Trumpet, and that in spite of all Drake’s methodical preparations, Daniel has yet to step out of the wings and play his assigned role.

Footsteps and jolly hallooing come his way: sounds more terrible to his ears than the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen, for they signify that he shall have to be civil to chaps he barely knows. He turns toward the entrance. In comes the First Lord of the Treasury his Clarke, Writer of the Tallies, and Auditor of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer (one man) in his finest clothes. On his arm is the almost-as-well

–turned-out Chamberlain’s Deputy of the Receipt of the King’s Exchequer. These men, of course, have names and lives, but Daniel has forgot the former, and has no interest in the latter. This is one of those occasions in England when names do not matter, only titles. “Good morning, Dr. Waterhouse!” exclaims the first, “have you your Key?”

It is an inane question, as there’d be no point in Daniel’s being here if he didn’t have the bloody key; but the man who asks it does so with a twinkle in his eye. It is nothing more than a rhetorical and facetious chat-starter, and perhaps a way of taking Daniel’s measure.

“Have you yours, sir?” Daniel returns, and the oppressively cheerful Writer of the Tallies ( amp;c.) whips it out of his pocket. Not to be outdone, the Chamberlain’s Deputy ( amp;c.) pats his breast; a key hangs on a ribbon there.

Daniel’s key is in his left coat-pocket and his hand is clenched around it. In the right pocket, his other hand cradles a small wooden box, like a jewelry-chest, that he nicked from a storage-closet at Isaac’s a couple of hours ago. He is struck by a little spell of dizziness for a moment, and spreads his feet wider, as a precaution against toppling and splitting his head on the old floor-tiles. The Key and the Chest, the rite of the Six Padlocks-why, it’s as if he’s been dropped in to some hidden, never-published Chapter of the Revelation-perhaps even a whole separate book, an apocryphal sequel to the Bible.

Other voices can be heard out in the cloisters, and Daniel reckons they must be nearing a quorum. Noting Daniel’s interest, the Writer of the Tallies steps aside and settles into an after-you posture-whether because of age, rank, or general obsequiousness, Daniel can’t tell. Daniel’s here as one of the Treasury delegation. He leads the Writer of the Tallies and the Chamberlain’s Deputy back out to the gusty Cloister. Men have gathered before the door of the Pyx Chamber, some sitting on the huge mottled stone benches, others standing on stones bearing the names of middling-famous dead people. But when they spy Daniel and the others approaching, all rise and turn-as if he’s in charge! Which-given what he’s got in his pockets-he has every right to be. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says, and waits for the answering murmur to die down. “Are we all present, then?” He sees a gaudy cleric, but not a bishop (no mitre), and pegs him as the Dean of Westminster. Two other gentlemen step up fondling great keys. Some very junior Church-men stand by with lanthorns at the ready, and there is a contingent of befuddled/suspicious Hanoverian nobles, escorted by a personable English Duke who’s been despatched to explain matters to them, and Johann von Hacklheber, serving as interpreter.