you guess, Saturn.”
“Why, impossible!”
“Have you heard of a pirate in America, called Edward Teach?”
“Blackbeard? Of course, sir, he is legendary.”
“I say that not so long ago, I heard Blackbeard standing on the poop of Queen Anne’s Revenge, calling for me by name.”
For the first time, Peter Hoxton was taken a-back.
“As you see, I am insane—best leave me alone,” Daniel said, and turned his back on Saturn yet again, looking for an opening in traffic on Gray’s Inn Lane.
“Concerning Mr. Teach, I shall make inquiries among the Black-guard,” said Peter Hoxton.
The next time Daniel dared to look over his shoulder, Saturn had vanished.
Bloomsbury
HALF AN HOUR LATER
“A ROMAN TEMPLE, on the edge of the city. Modest. Nothing gaudy,” had been Roger’s instructions to him, some twenty-five years earlier.
“I suppose that rules out having it be a Temple of Jupiter or Apollo,” Daniel had returned.
Roger had looked out the window of the coffee-house, feigning deafness, which was what he always did when he guessed Daniel was making fun of him.
Daniel had sipped his coffee and considered it. “Among your modest and humble Roman Gods would be…let me think…Vesta. Whose temples, like your house, stood outside the old boundaries of the city.”
“Well enough. Splendid god, Vesta,” Roger had said, a bit distantly.
“Goddess, actually.”
“All right, who the hell was she!?”
“Goddess of the hearth, chaste above all others…”
“Oh, Jesus!”
“Worshipped around the clock—or the sundial, I should say—by the Vestal virgins…”
“Wouldn’t mind having a few of those around, provided they were not pedantic about the virginity.”
“Not at all. Vesta herself was almost seduced by Priapus, the ithyphallic God…”
Roger shivered. “I can’t wait to find out what that means. Perhaps we should make my house a Temple of Priapus.”
“Every shack you walk into becomes a Temple of Priapus. No need to spend money on an architect.”
“Who said I was going to pay you?”
“I did, Roger.”
“Oh, all right.”
“I will not make you a Temple of Priapus. I do not think that the Queen of England would ever come to call on you, Roger, if you lived in such a place.”
“Give me another humble, unassuming God then!” Roger had demanded, snapping his fingers. “Come on, I’m not paying you to drink coffee!”
“There’s always Vulcan.”
“Lame!”
“Indeed, he was a bit gouty, like many a gentleman,” Daniel had said patiently, “but he got all the most beautiful goddesses—including Venus herself!”
“Haw! The rogue!”
“He was master of metals—though humble, and scorned, he fettered Titans and Gods with his ingenuity—”
“Metals—including—?”
“Gold and silver.”
“Capital!”
“And of course he was God of Fire, and Lord of Volcanoes.”
“Volcanoes! An ancient symbol of fertility—sending their gouts of molten stone spurting high into the air,” Roger had said meditatively, prompting Daniel to shove his chair away several inches. “Right! That’s it, then—make me a Temple of Vulcan—tasteful and inexpensive, mind you—just off Bloomsbury there. And put a volcano in it!”
This—put a volcano in it—had been Roger’s first and last instructions to Daniel concerning interior decoration. Daniel had fobbed that part of it off on a silversmith—not a money one, but an old-school silversmith who still literally smote silver for a living. This had left Daniel free to design the Temple of Vulcan itself, which had presented no difficulties at all. A lot of Greeks had figured out how to make buildings of that general type two thousand years ago, and then Romans had worked out tricks for banging them out in a hurry, tricks that were now second nature to every tradesman in London.
Not really believing that Roger would ever actually build it, Daniel had sat down in front of a large clean sheet of paper and proceeded to pile element on element: and quite a few Plinths, Pilasters, Architraves, Urns, Archivolts, and Finials later, he had ended up with something that probably would have caused Julius Caesar to clap his hands over his laureled and anointed head in dismay, and order the designer crucified. But after a brief sell job from Daniel in the back room of a coffee-house (“Note the Lesbian leaf pattern at the tops of the columns…. Ancient symbols of fertility are worked into the groins…. I have taken the liberty of depicting this Amazon with two breasts, rather than the historically attested one”), Roger was convinced that it looked exactly like a Temple of Vulcan ought to. And when he actually went and built the thing—telling everyone it was an exact reproduction of a real one on Mount Vesuvius—nine out of ten Londoners were content to believe it. Daniel’s only consolation was that because of the bald lie