Now Jeffreys had been an astonishingly beautiful young man, even by the standards of the generation of young Cavaliers that had included such Adonises as the Duke of Monmouth and John Churchill. His eyes, in particular, had been of remarkable beauty – perhaps this accounted for his ability to seize and hold the young Daniel Waterhouse with his gaze. Unlike Churchill, he had not aged well. Years in London, serving as solicitor general to the Duke of York, then as a prosecutor of supposed conspirators, then Lord Chief Justice, and now Lord Chancellor, had put leaves of lard on him, as on a kidney in a butcher-stall. His eyebrows had grown out into great gnarled wings, or horns. The eyes were beautiful as ever, but instead of gazing out from the fair unblemished face of a youth, they peered out through a sort of embrasure, between folds of chub below and snarled brows above. It had probably been fifteen years since Jeffreys could list, from memory, all the men he had murdered through the judicial system; if he hadn't lost count while extirpating the Popish Plot, he certainly had during the Bloody Assizes.