By that time his supposed father, the Duke of Gunfleet, had long since died. The Duke’s final years had not been good ones. Having ruined the Silver Comstocks—driven John into rustic retirement, and the rest of them all the way to Connecticut—and having taken over their house in St. James’s, he had seen his own fortunes destroyed, by bad investments, by his sons’ gambling debts (which must have hurt him all the more, as they weren’t really his sons), and above all by the Popish Plot, which was a sort of politico-religious rabies that had taken over London round 1678. He had packed the entire family off to France and sold the London palace to Roger Comstock, who had promptly leveled it with the ground and turned it into a real estate development. In France the Duke had died—Daniel had no idea when, but it would have been a long time ago—leaving only Phillip, Count Sheerness: the older of the two bastards.