Philosophers came to Greenwich all the time, and some even lived here, for the Observatory was up on the hill. Kings and Queens came here rarely, even though the place belonged to them. Architects came here frequently, and almost always wished they hadn’t. For building-projects at Greenwich always had money trouble, and things seemed to decay faster than they could be erected. Inigo Jones had been adroit enough to scamper in and out of this Slough of Despond and actually get a thing built and roofed before it got bogged down: this was the Queen’s House, and the secret to its success was that it was small. The bloody thing seemed to be a mile from the river. Or so it felt to Daniel and the others in the queue, whose head was lodged somewhere in Mr. Jones’s Opus and whose tail wandered all the way to bankside. Some stone steps descended to the river there. A gaudy barge had been made fast. Beyond, anchored in a deeper part of the Thames, was the Navy ship that had fetched George, King, over from the Eurasian landmass. Daniel was only able to see these things because he and Roger had, at long last, reached the foot of, and (half an hour later) trudged to the top of, one of the curving stairways that led up to the terrace of the Queen’s House. From there a few minutes’ shuffling and doddering had got them as far as the front door. They were on the threshold. Daniel had his back to the entrance and was enjoying the view—such as it was—down to the river. Roger, with his stoat-like instinct for dark, seething, infested places, faced opposite. The open doors expired a miasma of rose-water and armpits, cut with the tang of new paint, a-throb with a sort of Beowulfian mélange of German and English. Daniel couldn’t bear to turn round and see whatever Roger found so interesting, and so he and Roger passed over the threshold in this Janus-like configuration. Daniel was convinced he had caught a glimpse of Sir Christopher Wren, about an hour behind them in the queue, and had been trying to work out some way of getting Wren’s attention, and of inducing him, by furtive gesticulations, to jump the line. But it was perfectly hopeless; this was the worst place in the world for it. Twenty-some years ago, Wren had been brought in to impose some order on this place, as only Wren could. It had been his place ever since. He was working for free—the idea was to build a hospital for Naval pensioners. Queen Mary had started flogging the plan after the battle at La Hougue in ’92, but she had expired in ’94. There was no telling when a driblet of cash might spill forth from the Royal coffers. Whenever this occurred, Wren would blow it immediately on great blocks of stone and slam them down at the corners, and later along the perimeters, of the things he proposed to build here. For he could see perfectly well that he’d be dead before it went up. Later, and lesser, architects might botch the details, but none would be able to place the actual buildings other than where Wren had flung these plinths into the earth. His deputy Nick Hawksmoor, perceiving the genius of this strategy, and very much getting into the spirit, had lately bought a great bloody block of sculpture-grade marble at some scandalously low price and arranged for it to be vomited up on to the riverbank; when they could get enough money to hire someone to beat on it with a chisel, they’d make it into a brilliant statue of whomever happened to be King or Queen then. And so the general picture that Daniel was seeing from the terrace—and that owned Wren’s attention—was one of colossal foundations, laid by giants: a tiered echelon of rectangles—a Pythagorean dream. In that it was all foundations and no actual buildings, it seemed to confirm all that the Princess of Wales had said, a month ago, about the System, and the importance of putting it on a sound philosophical base. But what Newton and Leibniz had come up with—or failed to—seemed rickety compared to the works of Wren: further evidence that Wren had chosen wisely by turning away from pure philosophy and applying his genius to architecture.