"Damn all Puritans and their base obsession with how much it costs!" Roger bellowed, shaking a tiny drumstick at Daniel's brow as if it were the club of Hercules. "What matters is that the sentimental value of Météore to the de Lavardac family is very great. And who should be in Dunkirk just now but Eliza de Lavardac." Roger lost focus for some moments. "I hope it is not all true, what people say about her and the pox."

Daniel had seen the only woman he'd ever loved chewed up and vomited out by smallpox, and urgently desired a change of subject. "I begin to understand. The Whigs are seen as the party of the Bank, and of War. The Bank is said to be foundering and the War has ground to a halt."

"Mind you," put in Roger with one more admonitory shake of the drumstick, "the Bank shall succeed immensely, and we shall prevail over the French, all in good time; but it would help us if we could avoid losing the next election to Harley and Bolingbroke and his lot." Meaning the Tories.

"And so you would make some peace-offering to the French. Eliza is seen as a sort of bridge between France and England. You would please her and her husband by returning Météore. And you would like me to go along—?"

"Somewhat as you went to the Hague in the days before the Revolution," said Roger, "as the least likely imaginable diplomat."

"The more often I am sent on such missions the more likely I must seem," said Daniel, "but I shall go and deliver this boat to Eliza if that is what you want. From there it is on to Hanover."

"It is extraordinary you should mention Hanover," said Roger. "I have a message, too sensitive to commit to paper, that I should like you to deliver to our next Queen."

"Are you referring to Sophie of Hanover? You confuse me, for our next Queen is named Anne, and lives in England."

"Syphilitic like her sister and her dad," Roger mumbled, as if Princess Anne were only the most fleeting of distractions, "unlikely to have viable children—whereas Sophie was an unstoppable baby-maker in her day. Mark my words, if we can only suffer through to the end of these poxy, Popish Stuarts, we'll see Hanovers on the throne—and Hanovers are natural Whigs."

"How does that follow?"

"Hanovers are natural Whigs," Roger re-iterated. "Keep saying it to yourself, Daniel, an hundred times a day, until you believe it; and then say it to Sophie of Hanover as if you mean it."

"Well, do not look up, Roger, but I phant'sy that some natural Tories are spying on us from the Tower." Daniel cocked his head at a side-window of the cabin, which offered a prospect over the Wharf and the fortifications above and beyond it.

"Really!?"

"Oh yes indeed."

"The curtain-wall or—"

"Farther in, I should say. Do keep in mind that the Tower's a bit crowded with Tories today."

"I suppose it would be," said Roger. "Well done, Daniel! Perhaps you do have some future, after all, as a scheming political hack."

"You forget I used to make my living as one. Excuse me, Roger, but the gastro-colic reflex is having its way with me, and I must to the head."

"In truth or—"

"No, for I am stopped up in the bowels these three days; it is a diversionary ruse. Is there a prospective-glass to be found in this place?"

"Indeed, a lovely one, in that drawer—no, to the left—now down—and down again. There you have it."

"To perfect the illusion, I'll need something in lieu of a turd."

"Spotted Dick!" said Roger instantly, eyeing a brown log on a platter.

"I was thinking bangers," Daniel said, "but in English cuisine there are so many items of about the right size, shape, color and composition that it is easy to be overwhelmed by choices."

"In France, you'll find, there is greater variety in foods."

"So they keep saying." And Daniel, armed with a telescope in a hip-pocket and a length of Spotted Dick palmed in one hand, repaired to the head. In most ships this would have meant going all the way to the other end, and exposing his bum to London; but this being a ship of ducal luxury, there was, attached to this stateroom, a wee compartment, tacked on to the exterior of the hull proper, with a bench, with a hole, and three fathoms of open air between that and the water. Above the bench was a Barock window to admit light and vent fumes. Daniel made himself comfortable, cracked the window, and rested the prospective-glass on its sill, poking it out under the hem of the curtain.

Salt Tower, which anchored the southeastern corner of the fortifications that Henry III had, four hundred and some years ago, put up around what was now called the Inner Ward, looked to have been troweled together out of shivers and bits of other towers that had fallen down or been blown up. It was squarish in some places, roundish in others. Chimneys poked out here and there. In other parts were crenels or parapets. Diverse windows had been let into it whenever a whim to do so had taken the stonemasons. Or so it looked, at the end of half a millennium's improvements. Probably there was some inerrant logic behind the placement of every brick. Several kings named Edward had later surrounded all the Inner Ward stuff with a lower curtain-wall sporting its own museum of towers and bastions. It was over the guns and through the crenellations of the latter that Daniel now aimed his prospective-glass, and drew a focus on the flat top of Salt Tower above and beyond them. Salt was one of several of the old Inner Ward towers that were used as cells for prisoners of noble rank. It seemed to Daniel sometimes that half the people he knew had, at some point in their lives, been locked up in one or the other of these Towers—including Daniel himself. And so what might have seemed an incomprehensible Masonick salvage-yard to a common Newgate sort of prisoner, was as familiar to Daniel as a kitchen to a cook. He rapidly picked out, and drew focus on, two periwigged figures. They were standing on the very spot where, almost thirty years ago, Daniel had stood with the imprisoned Olden-burg and watched shipments of French gold come up the river under cover of night to buy England's foreign policy. Now all was reversed: These two men were peering down at Météore, which was on its way to France as part of an altogether different sort of Transaction. One of the men wore a wig of flaming red; this had to be Charles White, whose natural hair was the same color. His companion had a dark wig, a three-cornered hat, and a moustache, and was more difficult to make out. Both of them, presumably, had been rounded up following the betrayal, exposure, and failure of the assassination plot; but that only narrowed it down to a population of several thousand Tories who wanted King William dead badly enough to go and kill him. Conspicuous to Daniel was the dark-wigged man's curiosity about all that met his eye. To stare and point was rated bad manners, and not done by nobility, however these two chaps did nothing but. Charles White wanted chiefly to stare at Météore, and Daniel gave him something to notice by dropping three lengths of Spotted Dick down the hole. But his companion had eyes for London, and would not leave off staring, pointing, and tugging at White's sleeve to ask questions about this or that. He seemed particularly interested in the new developments of wharves and warehouses that had grown up along the banks of the river, spreading downstream towards Rotherhithe, in the last decades. Charles White was obliged to hold forth at some length, and to point out a few specifics. But once the dark-haired man had sated his curiosity, and gotten used to these novelties, he turned his attention towards older parts of London, and began to talk more and listen less. Charles White began to ask him questions. He began to relate anecdotes, with evocative hand-gestures and (Daniel supposed) expert wench-mimicry, planting limp wrists on his hip-bones, or cradling chin in curled fingers to deliver excellent punch-lines that evoked gusty laughter from both men—laughter with recoil, as both leaned back at the pelvis and exposed gleaming sweeps of teeth—like a pair of vipers rearing back to strike at each other. The dark man's teeth were recognizable even at this distance as having been made of the finest African elephant-ivory. Daniel, a free man, was intimidated by these prisoners, and stared at them raptly, like a hunter in a blind.