Roger sighed. “You are as ever a fount of treasonous raillery. It is well that we meet on a water-taxi, where the only one who can overhear us, does not speak a word of English.” This a playful dig at the Cockney manning the oar. If Daniel had made the same jest, he’d have been pitched overboard, and the waterman would have been acquitted, at the Old Bailey, on grounds of All Too Understandable Righteous Fury. Somehow Roger said it with the wink that was as good as a one-pound tip.
“When we parley in a coffee-house,” Roger went on, “I flinch whenever you get that look on your face, and part your lips.”
“Soon I shall follow that other Seditious Libeller, Gomer Bolstrood, across the sea, and your flinching days shall be at an end.” Daniel, seated in the backward-facing seat, gazed wistfully toward Massachusetts.
“Yes, so you have been claiming, for the last ten years or so—”
“Closer seven. But to play fast and loose with quantities numerical is, of course, a perquisite—some would say, a necessity—of your office.” Daniel rotated his head a few degrees to the left and nodded in the direction of Westminster Palace, still and for the next few seconds visible around the elbow of Lambeth. This was a reference to the Exchequer, an avalanche of ill-considered additions to the river-ward side of the same Palace. It was there that Daniel had gone to meet Roger, and thence that they’d departed on this boat a few minutes ago.
Roger turned around, following Daniel’s gaze, but too late.
“I was looking at your Place of Business,” Daniel said. “It seems to have disappeared behind all of those immense stacks of rotting timbers that have accumulated there in recent years, along the Lambeth river-bend, in consequence of that no one can buy anything because there is no money.”
Roger blinked very slowly, once, which was a way of letting Daniel know that the jab had quite wounded him, but that the victim was in a forgiving mood.
“I should be ever so much obliged,” Roger said, “if you would attend to the very important news I am projecting in the general direction of your bloody ears. Forty men—gentlemen and titled nobility of England, for the most part—gathered yesterday on Turn-ham Green to fall upon the King of England, on his way back from hunting, and murder him.”
“Say, speaking of bloody ears—”
“Yes! He was among them.”
People hated listening to Daniel and Roger converse, for they’d known each other much longer than was decent, proper, or good for them, and so were able to communicate in a stunted zargon of private allusions. Bloody ears was here a reference to Charles White, the Jacobite Tory who had made a habit of biting Whigs’ ears off, and (or so ’twas rumored) later displaying them, in private, to like-minded friends, as trophies.
“In Calais, in Dunkirk,” Roger continued, “you’ll see ships crammed with French troops, waiting only for that signal-fire to blaze up before they set sail.”
“I see that you are furious. I understand why. If I am not, it is only because this is all so bloody repetitive that I can scarcely believe I am hearing it! Did we not go through this already?”
“What an odd reaction.”
“Is it? I could say the same about the bloody money. When are we to have money, Roger?”
“Some, Daniel, would say that the regrettable ph?nomena to which you allude were consistent, or persistent, or constant menaces to our liberties as Englishmen, and thus naturally to be confronted and subdued with manly vigor. For you to roll your eyes in this way, and deride them as merely repetitious—as if you were watching a play—is very strange.”
“That is why I am getting ready to excuse myself, and go out to the lobby for air.”
“The lobby is some labored metaphor, here, for Massachusetts Bay Colony?”
“Yes.”
“What makes you suppose Massachusetts will seem any less repetitious? The news that I get from there is just one bloody Indian-raid, and Mather-tirade, after another.”
“I shall be able to pursue work there, of an altogether novel character.”
“Yes—so you keep telling the Fellows of the Royal Society—all two dozen of us.”
“The correct figure is nearer eight dozen. But I take your meaning. We have dwindled. It is all because of Want of Novelty. I mean to fix that.”
“Here is novelty for you: When you come in sight of the French naval base at Dunkirk—”
“That is the second time you have spoken to me as if I were about to go on a voyage to France. What is troubling your mind, to inspire such phant’sies?”
“Troubled mind or no, I am, am I not, the sole benefactor and Chairman of the Court of Directors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”
“Sir, I am not aware that the said Institute has even been Instituted yet. But if it had, you’d be the Prime Suspect.”
“Is that a yes?”
“Yes.”
“It follows that I am entitled to some say in how the sole employee goes about his work—do you not agree?”
“Employees get paid. They get paid money. Of which there is none.”
“You are really the most exasperating chap. How have you spent the past fortnight?”
“You know perfectly well I’ve been up at Cambridge helping Isaac clean out his lodgings.”