Quicksilver

Two of them are all three-what could that possibly mean? Who was royal, female, and of tender years? King Charles II didn’t have any daughters, at least legitimate ones. Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, had littered Europe with princes and princesses until she’d passed away a couple of years ago-but it seemed unlikely that any Continental royalty would be visiting England during the Plague.

Comstock continued: “These persons have come here seeking refuge, as they are terrified to begin with, of the Plague and other horrors-including, but hardly limited to, a possible Dutch invasion. The violent compression of the air, which you and I might think of as a possible cure for deafness, is construed, by such people, entirely differently…”

Wilkins said something fiendishly clever and appropriate and then devoted the next couple of days to abjectly humbling himself and apologizing to every noble person within ear- and nose-shot of the late Experiments. Hooke was put to work making little wind-up toys for the two little royal girls. Meanwhile Daniel and Charles had to dismantle all of the bad-smelling experiments, and oversee their decent burials, and generally tidy things up.

It took days’ peering at Fops through hedges, deconstructing carriage-door scutcheons, and shi

Daniel did not reck who that fellow was, and was too abashed to discover his ignorance by asking, until one day a carriage arrived from London and several men in admirals’ hats climbed out of it and went to talk to the same man in the garden. Though first they all doffed those hats and bowed low.

“That blond man who walks in the garden, betimes, on the arm of the Big Dipper-would that be the Duke of York?”

“Yes,” said Wilkins-not wishing to say more, as he was breathing shallowly, his eye peeled wide open and bathed in a greenish light from the eyepiece of his prospective-glass.

“And Lord High Admiral,” Daniel continued.

“He has many titles,” Wilkins observed in a level and patient tone.

“So those chaps in the hats would be-obviously-”

“The Admiralty,” Wilkins said curtly, “or some moiety or faction thereof.” He recoiled from the scope. Daniel phant’sied he was being proffered a look-see, but only for a moment-Wilkins lifted the instrument out of the tree-crook and collapsed it. Daniel collected that he had seen something Wilkins wished he hadn’t.

The Dutch and the English were at war. Because of the Plague, this had been a desultory struggle thus far, and Daniel had forgotten about it. It was midwinter. Cold had brought the Plague to a stand. Months would pass before the weather permitted resumption of the sea-campaign. But the time to lay plans for such campaigns was now. It ought to surprise no one if the Admiralty met with the Lord High Admiral now. It would be surprising if they didn’t. What struck Daniel was that Wilkins cared that he, Daniel, had seen something. The Restoration, and Daniel’s Babylonian exile and subjugation at Cambridge, had led him to think of himself as a perfect nobody, except perhaps when it came to Natural Philosophy-and it was more obvious every day that even within the Royal Society he was nothing compared to Wren and Hooke. So why should John Wilkins give a fig whether Daniel spied a flotilla of admirals and collected, from that, that John Comstock was hosting James, Duke of York, brother of Charles II and next in line to the throne?

It must be (as Daniel realized, walking back through a defoliated orchard alongside the brooding Wilkins) because he was the son of Drake. And though Drake was a retired agitator of a defeated and downcast sect, at bay in his house on Holborn, someone was still afraid of him.

Or if not of him, then of his sect.

But the sect was shattered into a thousand claques and cabals. Cromwell was gone, Drake was too old, Gregory Bolstrood had been executed, and his son Knott was in exile-

That was it. They were afraid of Daniel.

“What is fu

“People,” Daniel said, “and what goes on in their minds sometimes.”

“I say, you’re not referring to me by that-?-!”

“Oh, perish the thought. I would not mock my betters.”

“Pray, who on this estate is not your better?”

A hard question that. Daniel’s answer was silence. Wilkins seemed to find even that alarming.

“I forget you are a Phanatique born and bred.” Which was the same as saying, You recognize no man as your better, do you?

“On the contrary, I see now that you have never forgotten it.”

But something seemed to have changed in Wilkins’s mind. Like an Admiral working his ship to windward, he had suddenly come about and, after a few moments’ luffing and disarray, was now on an altogether novel tack: “The lady used to be called A