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And now he was gone, and could neither hear nor see her.
She turned around to face the house. Musicians and Actors had withdrawn to the farthest corners, and were looking to her, as if for a cue.
“It is safe now,” she a
Golden Square
THE SAME TIME
“YOU TOLD HIM WHAT!?” said Daniel.
“You heard me,” said Roger; then, when he had grown weary of Daniel’s gape and stare, “Really.”
“Really? What does that mean?”
“You are so tediously parson-like sometimes. I think it must be the lingering influence of Drake.”
“I am being pragmatic. What if Bolingbroke demands proof that we have Jack? I haven’t the faintest idea where the man is.”
“Daniel, look about you.”
Daniel did. He and Roger were at a corner of Golden Square, down the way a bit from Bolingbroke’s house, in a sort of caravan-camp of pricey coaches and good horses: the field headquarters of Whigdom. Isaac had already gone home in the phaethon. Mohawks were galloping hither and cantering thither proclaiming news, and shaking encyphered writs. The house of Bolingbroke was desolate: the curtains and shutters had been drawn, most lights had been snuffed, and it was not really known whether Bolingbroke himself was still in the place. Rumor had it he’d gone to his club.
“Behold,” Roger said, “we have won.”
“How do you know that!?”
“I can just tell.”
“How?”
“I saw it in his face.”
Roger excused himself, not by word, or by gesture, but by somehow changing, for a moment, the way his eyes looked at Daniel. He strolled over to a little war party of Mohawks who were standing near their horses, and addressed them: “We have won. Let the word go forth; light the beacons.” He then turned round and began making his way toward some cluster of notables. The Mohawks behind him began hip-hip-hooraying, and pretty soon everyone in Golden Square was doing it.
Daniel was slow to take up the cheer. But when he did, he meant it. This was politics. It was ugly, it was irrational, but it was preferable to war. Roger was being cheered because he had won. What did it mean to win? It meant being cheered. So Daniel huzzahed, as lustily as his dry pipes and creaky ribs would permit, and was astounded to see the way people came a-ru
Billingsgate Dock
A BIT LATER
“IT IS A WONDER,” exclaimed Joha
“I smell fish!” one of them shouted. And there were a hundred other remarks, most of them a good deal more direct and to the point.
“Gentlemen!” Joha
“I say, who are these fishwives?” exclaimed someone, so intoxicated that his tongue was swishing around in his mouth like a mop in a bucket. “He makes them sound like very merry wenches indeed.” He snorted a great draught of that bracing fish-market atmosphere into his nostrils. “And I do fancy their perfume.”
Joha
“They know perfectly well who you are,” said Joha
The bow was returned many-fold, but Joha
“We truly are safe from exposure now,” Joha
The longboat was u
“I am glad you had the wit to come here directly,” Joha
“Not so directly, for I was made to be the object of several toasts in the Kit-Cat Clubb,” she said.
Indeed, the toasting was not over yet. Enough time had elapsed, since it had become evident that she was going to depart by water, for the following to have been improvised by one of the crowd of domesticated poets who went round with Kit-Cats.
Off the sea came Aphrodite,
To the Greeks whose lust was mighty.
Soft of wit and firm of P-,
Romans worshipped foam-borne Venus.
’Pon the River dark as wine,
Rides Britons’ love-queen, Caroline.
“That is lovely,” Joha
“As shall I,” Caroline said, “to my husband.”
From Billingsgate a lone wag was chanting
May her Womb
Be Popery’s Tomb
But pray the German
Keeps his sperm in.
He was immediately shouted down by indignant, even scandalized Kit-Cats. Really! Some chaps knew no bounds! Someone drew a sword halfway, and made a great show of having to be restrained, all the while glancing river-wards to be sure his gallantry was being noted by Caroline. But the longboat had been swallowed by shadow, from their point of view. The sword-fight fizzled. The Kit-Cat Caravan began to mount up: and so the last they saw of the Clubb were scintillations of cut-crystal stirrup-cups and of the silver trays on which they were brought around, faint as gleaming of fish-scales on the black waters that lapped at Billingsgate Stairs.
“I pray that we are vanishing from their ken as much as they from ours,” Joha