Dappa had been greatly disquieted early in this little speech, but then had got a distracted, calculating look, as if reckoning how quickly Minerva could weigh anchor and get out of the Pool. “And you tell me this-why? To be good?”

“As you were good to me, Dappa, when Blackbeard called for me by name, and you refused to give me up.”

“Oh. We did not do that out of goodness, but stubbornness.”

“Then my warning to you is strictly an act of Christian charity,” Daniel said.

“God bless you, Doctor!” Dappa replied, but he was still wary.

“Until such time as we arrive at an understanding concerning the disposition of the gold,” Daniel added.

“There is something in this word disposition that makes me leery. How do you imagine we’ll dispose of it?”

“You have to get rid of it before it is found by the gentleman I spoke of,” Daniel pointed out. “But if you coin it, ’twill be as if you sailed Minerva under the guns of the Tower at noon, and ran those sheets of gold up the yard-arms.”

“But what good is it, if not coined?”

“Gold has other uses,” Daniel said. “Of which I shall tell you more some day. But not today. For we are approached by Peer, and must bring the oddness of our discourse down to a value of one or two on the scale I mentioned earlier.”

“Peer? Who or what is Peer?”

“For a man who, moments ago, was lecturing me ’pon the workings of Grub Street, you’ve not been attending to your newspapers at all, have you?”

“I know it exists, how it works, and that it’s important, but-”

“I read the papers every day. Let me tell you quickly then: there is a newspaper called Ye Lens which was started by Whigs, when their Juncto held power; several clever men write for it; Peer is not one of them.”

“You mean, he doesn’t write for the Ye Lens?”

“No, I mean he is not very clever.”

“How’d he get the job, then?”

“By being in the House of Lords, and always taking the Whig side.”

“Ah, so he is a peer!”

“A Peer of the Realm, with writerly ambitions. And as he writes for the Lens, and a lens is something you peer through, he has given himself the pen-name of Peer.”

“This is the longest prolog to an introduction I’ve ever heard,” Dappa remarked. “When is he actually going to show up?”

“I believe he-they-are waiting for you to notice them,” Daniel said, pointing with his eyeballs. “Brace yourself.”

Dappa narrowed his eyes, flared his nostrils, and then torqued himself round in his chair until he had-heeding Daniel’s sage advice-braced one elbow on the table.

Facing him from roughly twelve feet away were the Marquis of Ravenscar, planted stolidly on the booze-slickened Kit-Cat floor-boards, and an even better-dressed chap, who was dangling by both arms from one of the Clubb’s low-hanging beams, his impeccably shod feet swinging back and forth just a few inches above the floor.

When this man saw that Dappa was looking his direction, he let go and dropped to the floor with a loud, chesty “Hoo!” His knees bent deeply, creating alarming strains in the crotch of his breeches, and allowing his knuckles to dangle near the floor. After making certain he’d caught Dappa’s eye, he moved in a waddling gait to the Marquis of Ravenscar, who was standing still as a star, his face pinched up in a pickled smile.

Peer now pursed his lips, thrust them out as far as they would go, and, glancing back frequently to make sure he still had Dappa’s attention, began to make little “Hoo! Hoo!” noises while circling cautiously around Roger. After completing a full orbit of Roger, he shuffled in closer, leaned in so that he was almost nuzzling Roger’s shoulder, and began to make snuffling noises whilst cocking his head this way and that. Noting something apparently caught in the tresses of Roger’s splendid wig, he raised one hand off the floor, reached into the luxuriant mass of curls, pinched something tiny, pulled it out, examined it, gave it a good thorough sniffing, then popped it into his mouth and began to make exaggerated chewing noises. Then, in case Dappa had glanced away during this, he sidled around Roger and repeated the performance some half-dozen times, until even Roger became sick of it, raised one hand in the mildest of threats, and muttered, “Oh, will you stop it!”

Peer’s response was extreme: he jumped back out of cuffing-range, came to rest on his knuckles and the balls of his feet, made excited screeching noises (or as near as a member of the House of Lords could come to it), then sprang into the air while flinging his arms above his head. He grabbed the beam again, knocking loose a shower of dust that sifted down, stained his white wig gray, and caused him to sneeze-which was most unfortunate, as he’d been taking snuff. A bolo of reddish-brown mucus hurtled out of his nose and made itself fast to his chin.

The Kit-Cat Clubb had become quiet as a monastery. Perhaps three dozen men were in the place. By and large, they were of a mind to find nearly anything funny. Rarely did a minute tick away without all conversation in the Clubb being drowned out by a storm-burst of booming laughter from one table or another. But there was something in Peer’s performance so queer that it had shut them all up. Daniel, who had phant’sied that the crowding and the hubbub gave him and Dappa some sort of privacy, now felt even more exposed, and acutely spied upon, than ever.

The Marquis of Ravenscar swaggered toward Dappa. Behind him, Peer dropped from the rafters and got busy with a Belgian gros-point lace handkerchief. After Roger had moved along for a few paces, Peer followed him, cringing along in Roger’s wake.

“Dr. Waterhouse. Mr. Dappa,” said Roger with tremendous aplomb. “It is good to see you both again.”

“And you likewise, et cetera,” answered Daniel shortly, as Dappa had been temporarily robbed of the power of speech.

Conversations resumed, tentatively, around the Clubb.

“I pray you will not take it amiss if I refrain from picking lice out of your hair, as my lord Wragby has been so considerate as to do for me.”

“It’s not even my hair, Roger.”

“May I introduce to you, Dappa, and re-introduce to you, Daniel, my lord Walter Raleigh Waterhouse Weem, Viscount Wragby and Rector of Scanque, Member of Parliament, and Fellow of the Royal Society.”

“Hullo, Uncle Daniel!” said Peer, suddenly straightening up. “Very clever of someone to dress him up in a suit of clothing! Was that your conceit?”

Dappa was staring sidelong at Daniel. “I forgot to mention that Peer is my half-great-nephew once removed, or something like that,” Daniel explained to him, behind his hand.

“Who are you talking to, uncle?” Peer inquired, looking past Dappa’s head into a void. Then, with a shrug, he continued, “Do you phant’sy my demonstration worked? I did ever so much research, to get it right.”

“I’ve no idea, Wally,” Daniel returned, and then looked over at Dappa, who was still frozen in the sidelong-glare attitude. “Dappa, did you understand, from what you just observed, that my lord Wragby, here, is a member of my lord Ravenscar’s ape-tribe, and that he plays a submissive role, fully acknowledging my lord Ravenscar’s dominance?”

“Who are you talking to?” said Peer for the second time.

“To whom are you talking!” Dappa corrected him.

A few moments’ silence from Peer, greatly savoured by Roger and Daniel. Peer raised one hand, pointed his index finger at Dappa as if holding him at bay with a pistol, and turned to Daniel with his mouth a-jar.

“What you didn’t know, my nephew,” Daniel said, “is that Dappa was, at a very young age, taken aboard ship by pirates as a sort of pet. And these pirates, being a polyglot group, amused themselves by training Dappa to speak twenty-five different languages fluently.”

“Twenty-five different languages!” Peer exclaimed.

“Yes. Including better English than you, as you just saw.”