And then Daniel stepped out onto a deal boardwalk that might've answered to the name of verandah or pier, depending on whence you looked at it. In theory boats of shallow draught might be poled up to it and made fast, in practice they'd been drawn up on the muck about a horseshoe-throw away from the crusty ankles of its pilings. The tracks of the boatmen were swollen wounds in the mudflat, and spatterings across the planks. Half a mile out, diverse ships were riding at anchor in the wide spot where the Medway exhausted into the Thames. It was low tide! James, the sea-hero, the Admiral who'd fought the Dutch, and occasionally beaten 'em, who'd made Isaac Newton's ears ring with the distant roar of his cannons, had galloped out from London at exactly the wrong moment. Like King Canute, he would have to wait for the tide. It was simply too awful. Exhausted from the ride, left with no choice but to kill a few hours, the King must've wandered into this tavern – and why not? Every place he'd ever entered into, people had served him on bended knee. But James, who did not drink and did not curse, who stuttered, who couldn't speak the English of fishermen, might as well have been in a Hindoo temple. He'd switched to a dark wig from the usual blond one, and it had been knocked from his head early in the scuffle, revealing a half-bald head, thin yellow-white hair in a Caesar cut, shellacked to his pocked pate by sweat and grease. Wigs enabled one to avert one's attention from the fact of the wearer's age. Daniel had seen an odd-looking chap, fifty-five years old, lost.