Shaftoe’s face finally came into focus. He looked a little sea-sick. “I’m not such a black-hearted bastard as’d admit a pair of hired killers to spit a helpless professor. There is only one man alive whom I hate enough to wish such an end on him.”

“Thank you,” Daniel said, drawing close enough now that he could feel the candle’s faint warmth on his face.

Shaftoe noticed something, turned sideways to Daniel, and cleared his throat. This was not your delicate pretentious upper-class ‘hem but an honest and legitimate bid to dislodge an actual phlegm-ball that had sprung into his gorge.

“You’ve noticed me pissing myself, haven’t you?” Daniel said. “You imagine that it’s your fault-that you put such a terror into me, just now, that I could not hold my urine. Well, you did have me going, it is true, but that’s not why piss is running down my leg. I have the stone, Sergeant, and cannot make water at times of my own choosing, but rather I leak and seep like a keg that wants caulking.”

Bob Shaftoe nodded and looked to have been somewhat relieved of his burden of guilt. “How long d’you have then?”

He asked the question so offhandedly that Daniel did not get it for a few moments. “Oh-you mean, to live?” The Sergeant nodded. “Pardon me, Sergeant Shaftoe, I forget that your profession has put you on such intimate terms with death that you speak of it as sea-captains speak of wind. How long have I? Perhaps a year.”

“You could have it cut out.”

“I have seen men cut for the stone, Sergeant, and I’ll take death, thank you very much. I’ll wager it is worse than anything you may have witnessed on a battlefield. No, I shall follow the example of my mentor, John Wilkins.”

“Men have been cut for the stone, and lived, have they not?”

“Mr. Pepys was cut nigh on thirty years ago, and lives still.”

“He walks? Talks? Makes water?”

“Indeed, Sergeant Shaftoe.”

“Then, by your leave, Dr. Waterhouse, being cut for the stone is not worse than anything I have seen on battlefields.”

“Do you know how the operation is performed, Sergeant? The incision is made through the perineum, which is that tender place between your scrotum and your anus-”

“If it comes down to swapping blood-curdling tales, Dr. Waterhouse, we shall be here until this candle has burnt down, and all to no purpose; and if you really intend to die of the stone, you oughtn’t to be wasting that much time.”

“There is nothing to do, here, but waste time.”

“That is where you are wrong, Dr. Waterhouse, for I have a lively sort of proposition to make you. We are going to help each other, you and I.”

“You want money in exchange for keeping Jeffreys’s murderers out of my chamber?”

“That’s what I should want, were I a base, craven toad,” Bob Shaftoe said. “And if you keep mistaking me for that sort, why, perhaps I shall let Bob and Dick in here.”

“Please forgive me, Sergeant. You are right in being angry with me. It is only that I cannot imagine what sort of transaction you and I could…”

“Did you see that fellow being whipped, just before sundown? He would’ve been visible to you out in the dry-moat, through yonder arrow-slit.”

Daniel remembered it well enough. Three soldiers had gone out, carrying their pikes, and lashed them together close to their points, and spread their butts apart to form a tripod. A man had been led out shirtless, his hands tied together in front of him, and the rope had then been thrown over the lashing where the pikes were joined, and drawn tight so that his arms were stretched out above his head. Finally his ankles had been spread apart and lashed fast to the pikes to either side of him, rendering him perfectly immobile, and then a large man had come out with a whip, and used it. All in all it was a common rite around military camps, and went a long way towards explaining why people of means tried to live as far away from barracks as possible.

“I did not observe it closely,” Daniel said, “I am familiar with the general procedure.”

“You might’ve watched more carefully had you known that the man being whipped calls himself Mr. Dick Gripp.”

Daniel was at a loss for words.

“They came for you last night,” said Bob Shaftoe. “I had them clapped into separate cells while I decided what to do with ’em. Talked to ’em separately, and all they gave me was a deal of hot talk. Now. Some men are entitled to talk that way, they have been ennobled, in a sense, by their deeds and the things they have lived through. I did not think that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp were men of that kind. Others may be suffered to talk that way simply because they entertain the rest of us. I once had a brother who was like that. But not Bob and Dick. Unfortunately I am not a magistrate and have no power to throw men in prison, compel them to answer questions, et cetera. On the other hand, I am a sergeant, and have the power to recruit men into the King’s service. As Bob and Dick were clearly idle fellows, I recruited them into the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards on the spot. In the next instant, I perceived that I’d made a mistake, for these two were discipline problems, and wanted chastisement. Using the oldest trick in the book, I had Dick-who struck me as the better man-whipped directly in front of Bob Carver’s cell window. Now Dick is a strong bloke, he is unbowed, and I may keep him in the regiment. But Bob feels about his chastisement-which is scheduled for dawn-the same way you feel about being cut for the stone. So an hour ago he woke up his guards, and they woke me, and I went and had a chat with Mr. Carver.”

“Sergeant, you are so industrious that I almost cannot follow everything you are about.”

“He told me that Jeffreys personally ordered him and Mr. Gripp to cut your throat. That they were to do it slow-like, and that they were to explain to you, while you lay dying, that it had been done by Jeffreys.”

“It is what I expected,” Daniel said, “and yet to hear it set out in plain words leaves me dizzy.”

“Then I shall wait for you to get your wits back. More to the point, I shall wait for you to become angry. Forgive me for presuming to instruct a fellow of your erudition, but at a moment like this, you are supposed to be angry.”

“It is a very odd thing about Jeffreys that he can treat people abominably and never make them angry. He influences his victims’ minds strangely, like a glass rod bending a stream of water, so that we feel we deserve it.”

“You have known him a long time.”

“I have.”

“Let’s kill him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Slay, murder. Let us bring about his death, so he won’t plague you any more.”

Daniel was shocked. “It is an extremely fanciful idea-”

“Not in the least. And there is something in your tone of voice that tells me you like it.”

“Why do you say ‘we’? You have no part in my problems.”

“You are high up in the Royal Society.”

“Yes.”

“You know many Alchemists.”

“I wish I could deny it.”

“You know my lord Upnor.”

“I do. I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jeffreys.”

“Upnor owns my lady love.”

“I beg your pardon-did you say he owns her?”

“Yes-Jeffreys sold her to him during the Bloody Assizes.”

“Taunton-your love is one of the Taunton schoolgirls!”

“Just so.”

Daniel was fascinated. “You are proposing some sort of pact.”

“You and I’ll rid the world of Jeffreys and Upnor. I’ll have my Abigail and you’ll live your last year, or whatever time God affords you, in peace.”

“I do not mean to quail and fret, Sergeant-”

“Go ahead! My men do it all the time.”

“-but may I remind you that Jeffreys is the Lord Chancellor of the Realm?”

“Not for long,” Shaftoe answered.

“How do you know?”

“He’s as much as admitted it, by his actions! You were thrown in Tower why?”