His Majesty was standing up to the treatment surprisingly well. Of course, he’d fought in battles on land and at sea; no one had ever accused him of being a ninehammer. And this altercation was really more of a cuffing and slapping about: not so much fight as improvised entertainment by and for men who got out to Punchinello shows only infrequently. This was a very old tavern, half sunk into the riverside muck, and the ceiling was so close to the floor that the fishermen scarcely had room to draw their fists back properly. There were flurries of jabs that failed to connect with any part of the King’s body. The blows that did land were open-handed, roundhouse slaps. Daniel sensed that if the King would only stop flinching, say something funny, and buy a round for the house, everything would change. But if he were that sort of King he wouldn’t have ended up here in the first place.
At any rate Daniel was immensely relieved that it was not a serious beating. Otherwise he would’ve been obliged to draw the sword hanging from his belt, which he had no idea how to use. King James II most certainly would know what to do with it, of course. As Daniel plunged his upper lip through the curtain of foam on his pint, he had a moment’s phant’sy of unbelting the weapon and tossing it across the room to the sovereign, who’d snatch it from the air, whip it out, and commence slaying subjects. Then Daniel could perhaps embroider ‘pon his deed by smashing a bit of crockery over someone’s head-better yet, sustain an honorable wound or two. This would guarantee him a free, all-expenses paid, but strictly one-way trip to France, where he’d probably be rewarded with an English earldom that he’d never be able to visit, and get to lounge around in James’s exile court all day.
This phant’sy did not last for very long. One of the King’s attackers had felt something in His Majesty’s coat-pocket and yanked it out: a crucifix. A moment of silence. Those here who were conscious enough to see the object, felt obliged to give it due reverence; either because it was an emblem of Our Lord’s passion, or because it was made predominantly out of gold. Through the tavern’s atmosphere, which had approximately the mass and consistency of aspic, the artifact gleamed attractively, and even cast off a halo. Descartes had abhorred the idea of a vacuum, and held that what we took to be empty space was really a plenum, a solidly packed ocean of particles, swirling and colliding, trading and trafficking in a fixed stock of movement that had been imparted to the universe at its creation by the Almighty. He must have come up with that idea in a tavern like this one; Daniel wasn’t sure a pistol-ball would be able to dig a tunnel through this air from one side of the room to the other.
“What’s this, then!?” the fellow holding up the crucifix wanted to know.
James II looked suddenly exasperated. “Why, it is a crucifix!”
Another blank moment passed. Daniel had completely let go of the idea of being an exiled earl at Versailles, and was now feeling uncomfortably rabble-like himself, and strongly tempted to go and take a poke at His Majesty-if only for the sake of Drake, who’d never have hesitated.
“Well, if you’re not a bleeding Jesuit spy, then why’re you bearing this bit o’ idolatry about!?” demanded the fellow with the quick hands, shaking the crucifix just out of the King’s reach. “Didjer loot it? Didjer steal this holy object from a burnin’ church, didjer?”
They had no idea who he was.At this the scene made sense for the first time. Until then Daniel had wondered just who was suffering from syphilitic hallucinations around here!
James had surprised all London by galloping away from Whitehall Palace after midnight. Someone had caught sight of him hurling the Great Seal of the Realm into the Thames, which was not a wholly usual thing for the Sovereign to do, and with that he’d pelted off into the night, east-bound, and no person of gentle or noble rank had seen him since, until the moment Daniel had blundered into this tavern in search of refreshment.
Mercifully, the urge to sprint over and take a swing at the royal gob had passed. A semi-comatose man, slumped on a bench against the wall, was eyeing Daniel in a way that was not entirely propitious. Daniel reflected that if it was considered meet and proper for a well-heeled stranger to be beaten up and robbed on the mere suspicion that he was a Jesuit, things might not go all that well for Daniel Waterhouse the Puritan.
He drained about half the pint and turned round in the middle of the tavern so that his cloak fell open, revealing the sword. The weapon’s existence was noted, with professional interest, by the tavernkeeper, who didn’t look directly at it; he was one of those blokes who used peripheral vision for everything. Give him a spyglass, he’d raise it to his ear, and see as much as Galileo. His nose had been broken at least twice and he’d endured a blowout fracture of the left eye-socket, which made it seem as if his face were a clay effigy squirting out between the fingers of a clenching fist. Daniel said to him, “Let your friends understand that if serious harm comes to that gentleman, there lives a witness who’ll tell a tale to make a judge’s wig uncurl.”
And then Daniel stepped out onto a deal boardwalk that might’ve answered to the name of verandah or pier, depending on whence you looked at it. In theory boats of shallow draught might be poled up to it and made fast, in practice they’d been drawn up on the muck about a horseshoe-throw away from the crusty ankles of its pilings. The tracks of the boatmen were swollen wounds in the mudflat, and spatterings across the planks. Half a mile out, diverse ships were riding at anchor in the wide spot where the Medway exhausted into the Thames. It was low tide! James, the sea-hero, the Admiral who’d fought the Dutch, and occasionally beaten ’em, who’d made Isaac Newton’s ears ring with the distant roar of his cannons, had galloped out from London at exactly the wrong moment. Like King Canute, he would have to wait for the tide. It was simply too awful. Exhausted from the ride, left with no choice but to kill a few hours, the King must’ve wandered into this tavern-and why not? Every place he’d ever entered into, people had served him on bended knee. But James, who did not drink and did not curse, who stuttered, who couldn’t speak the English of fishermen, might as well have been in a Hindoo temple. He’d switched to a dark wig from the usual blond one, and it had been knocked from his head early in the scuffle, revealing a half-bald head, thin yellow-white hair in a Caesar cut, shellacked to his pocked pate by sweat and grease. Wigs enabled one to avert one’s attention from the fact of the wearer’s age. Daniel had seen an odd-looking chap, fifty-five years old, lost.
Daniel was beginning to feel he had more in common with this syphilitic Papist despot than with the people of Sheerness. He did not like where his feelings were taking him. So he had his feet take him elsewhere-to what passed for the high street of Sheerness, to an inn, where an uncommon number of well-dressed gentlemen were milling about, wringing their hands and kicking at the chickens. These men, Daniel included, had come out from London post-haste, only a few hours behind their fleeing King, on the presumption that if the Sovereign had left London, then they must all be missing something important by tarrying in the city. Wrong!
HE WENT IN AND TOLDthe tale to Ailesbury, the Gentleman of the Bedchamber, then turned to leave; but practically ended up with spur-marks in his back, as every courtier wanted to be first on the spot. In the stable-yard a horse was brought out for Daniel. Climbing into the saddle, and ascending to the same plane as all the other equestrians, he noted diverse faces turned his way, none of them looking very patient. So without sharing in any of the sense of romantic drama that animated all of the others, he rode out into the street, and led them on a merry gallop back down to the river. To uninformed bystanders, it must have looked like a Cavalier hunting-party pursuing a Roundhead, which Daniel hoped was no prefiguring of events to follow.