was generally perceived to have been planned by Catholics as a prelude to a massacre of London’s Protestants. And during the Revolution, did not Londoners expect to be massacred by King James’s Irish troops with whom he hoped to keep his kingdom?
“No, Ellis. Londoners are like the people of any great city: most credulous and mad. I would as soon trust a dog with a foaming mouth as depend on the varied and inconstant opinion of a London mob. I wonder that any man who has been to an execution at Tyburn could hold such a good opinion of the populace as you seem to.”
“I agree, sir, if the mob is provoked, then it is most ungovernable. But I do not see Englishmen being led by French Huguenots. How is the mob to be provoked?”
“It would not be difficult,” said Newton. “But we must find out more, and quickly, too, for we have lost much time while I have been solving this cipher.”
“I still find this hard to accept,” said I.
“Then read the message that we found on Major Mornay’s body.”
“Does that not put it beyond any doubt?” asked Newton.
“Yes,” I heard myself say. “And to think that I felt sorry for him.”
Newton nodded silently.
“But were there not four messages, master? What about the message we recovered from poor Mister Twistleton? Did you not decipher that one?”
Silently, Newton handed over the decipherment and let me read the plain text for myself. It made alarming reading:
“I must confess that this one gave me a little trouble,” explained Newton. “’Jonathan Ambrose, the goldsmith, who is know greatly to resent Newton’? That’s bad grammar. Such a thing makes a decipherer’s life most vexatious.”
“But, sir, you understate the matter most egregiously. For, according to this letter, you are in mortal danger.”
“I think that we are probably both in some danger,” said Newton.
“But in my own case, I should only be killed with the rest. You, however, are to be killed first of all. Which might be at any time.”
“Not until the King has returned from the war,” said Newton. “That is what the message says, Ellis.”
“It would explain why Sergeant Rohan was so curious about you,” I said, unhappily.
“You spoke to him?”
“Once, when I had followed him to Westminster,” I confessed. “I lost him for a while and then bumped into him. He was most affable. We had a drink together. At the time I thought that I might acquire some information about him.”
“And now you discover that he may have gained some information about me, is that it?”
I nodded miserably, ashamed to confess that I had the suspicion that I might even have let slip Newton’s address.
“No matter,” said Newton. “Information about me is not so difficult to obtain. He would have found some other means, had you not told him what you did. Therefore, calm yourself. We are prepared for them and know them for what they are: ruthless men. Doubtless Macey was tortured and killed when he tried to understand their messages. Even Major Mornay, who was one of them, was not safe when the scandal of a duel threatened to compromise their plans. We must move very carefully.”
“I wonder why they left Mister Twistleton alive,” said I.
“Who listens to a madman?” said Newton. “You said as much yourself. It is a measure of their confidence in this stratagem and their cipher that they left him alive and in possession of a coded letter. It also explains why Mister Twistleton wished to attack me. But I wish I had possessed the wit to copy down what he said to us. For I’ve an idea that he actually told us the keyword to the code himself, when we visited him in Bedlam. Do you not remember what he said when I asked him the meaning of the letters?”
“Blood,” I said. “‘Blood is behind everything,’ he said.”
“He meant it literally and cryptically,” said Newton. “For
“But one thing I still do not understand,” said I. “Why should this be happening here, in the Tower?”
“I have given this matter some thought,” admitted Newton. “And I have concluded that if a mob must be armed, where better to do it than from the Royal Armouries?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “There are enough swords and guns here to equip a whole army. But what are we going to do?”
“We must insinuate ourselves into this secret correspondence,” he explained. “Only then will we find the evidence to take to milord Halifax. To do that, we must know more about our plotters. Not least when they plan to commit their treason. I would know more about this Doctor Davies. Did not one of our spies follow Sergeant Rohan to the courts at Westminster Hall? Perhaps he was the man the Sergeant met there. Once we have discovered that, we shall play one against the other.”
Our spy, Humphrey Hall, was a most diligent fellow, as I have said; and the next day I went to Westminster Hall with him to see if he could identify the man whom he had seen meeting with Sergeant Rohan. But the man was not there; nor the day after that. And it was Friday, September the third, before Mister Hall spied the man he had seen meeting with the Sergeant.
I had a good look at the fellow when we followed him to The Swan with Two Necks in nearby Tuttle Street. About fifty years of age, he was a tall man but bowlegged, with a bull neck, although not powerful, so that his head scarcely protruded from his body, and his abnormally large chin, which was equal in size to the rest of his peculiar face, seemed permanently bowed toward his chest. His eyes were small and quite feral, and his brow as low as his great hat, which darkened an already purplish complexion that was clearly the result of an overfondness of wine. Above one eyebrow was a large wart. His mode of dress was not only clerical but Episcopal, for he wore a cassock and, but for a long rose-coloured scarf and a way of speaking that better suited a costermonger or a Southwark porter—for we heard him speak to the tavern’s landlord in a strident sing-song voice, so that he seemed permanently to complain rather than to speak—we might have taken him for a man of some learning, or even a lawyer, whose presence in the courts of Chancery was upon the instruction of his client, for there were many who attended that were never heard.
We followed the strange Doctor Davies to his place of lodging on the north side of Axe Yard, and collected some facts upon him from Mister Beale, who was the most talkative landlord at The Axe Tavern, farther along the street, and whose family had been in Axe Yard since before the Great Fire. He told us that Doctor Davies was a Cambridge man and the son of an Anabaptist chaplain in Cromwell’s New Model Army; he had been a chaplain in the navy; he had written a book; he had been recently married to a wealthy widow who was away visiting her relations; he enjoyed a government pension; and he was a Baptist minister in Wapping.
Having thanked Mister Beale with five shillings for his information and his silence, it was to Wapping we now went to find out more.
I have never much like Ranters, and Baptists least of all, for what kind of sect is it that follows the precepts
