“What is it?”

“This, sir. From Cottjens.”

Sir Grenville seized the letter. His secretary had already opened it, read it, and judged it necessary to bring it immediately to Westminster. Sir Grenville read it through once, twice, and then seemed to growl. The growl turned into audible words. “The bastard. The Jewish bastard. The filthy, Jewish bastard!”

Julius Cottjens was a merchant on the Amsterdam Exchange, a dealer in cloth and fine spices who also dealt with a select clientele for another commodity; information. Cottjens charged highly for his privately gathered news, and men met his prices, for he was accurate and trustworthy in a world subject to strange rumors. Julius Cottjens was a listener of genius, a man of unbounded curiosity and seeming discretion, and endowed with a prodigious memory, yet the news he had just dispatched to Sir Grenville Cony had required none of those qualities. Sir Grenville had long been a client of Cottjens’s, and there was a standing instruction that the Dutchman was to send to Sir Grenville any information, however trivial, concerning Mordecai Lopez. For two years there had been nothing, and now this. Lopez had returned to Amsterdam. The Jew had opened up his old, opulent house, while his ship, the Wanderer, was tied to an Amsterdam wharf. He had brought, Cottjens said, ten crates of belongings from Venice, and there was no evidence that he planned to move on for some while. The Wanderer had been stripped of her masts and was undergoing a thorough repair.

Sir Grenville Cony led his secretary toward a quiet space by the old Jewel Tower. “Why? Why? Why does that Jewish bastard come now?” Sir Grenville turned his back on a beggar who was hauling his crippled legs over the grass. The man claimed he had been wounded in Parliament’s service.

Dear God! Sir Grenville did not need this news now. First the girl disappears into a burning London night, Grimmett, faithful Grimmett, is killed, and now this! To add insult to injury, that fat fool Scammell had not even bedded the bitch before she fled. At least the wedding certificate, valid till proved otherwise, had survived in Scammell’s unburned, brick house. The only joy Sir Grenville had taken in the whole affair was to watch Scammell cringe as he was tongue-lashed.

Now this! Lopez had come north to Amsterdam. Sir Grenville kicked the beggar who had pulled at the lawyer’s coat, then kicked him again. “He knows, John! He knows!”

The secretary shrugged. “You think so, Sir Grenville?”

“Of course! Why the hell else does he come? The girl must have got a message to him. Christ and damnation! God! She has the seal, John. She has the seal!” He had been pacing up and down the patch of grass, but on these final words the small, fat, man whirled round and pointed a finger accusingly at his secretary, as though John Morse was responsible.

The secretary kept his voice mild. “We don’t know that, sir.”