SUMMER 1665
Th’earths face is but thy Table; there are set Plants, cattell, men, dishes for Death to eate. In a rude hunger now hee millions drawes Into his bloody, or plaguy, or sterv’d jawes.
—JOHN DONNE, “Elegie on M Boulstred”
DANIEL WAS EATING POTATOES and herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day. As he was doing it in his father’s house, he was expected loudly to thank God for the privilege before and after the meal. His prayers of gratitude were becoming less sincere by the day.
To one side of the house, cattle voiced their eternal confusion—to the other, men trudged down the street ringing hand-bells (for those who could hear) and carrying long red sticks (for those who could see), peering into court-yards and doorways, and poking their snouts over garden-walls, scanning for bubonic corpses. Everyone else who had enough money to leave London was absent. That included Daniel’s half brothers Raleigh and Sterling and their families, as well as his half-sister Mayflower, who along with her children had gone to ground in Buckinghamshire. Only Mayflower’s husband, Thomas Ham, and Drake Waterhouse, Patriarch, had refused to leave. Mr. Ham wanted to leave, but he had a cellar in the City to look after.
The idea of leaving, just because of a spot of the old Black Death, hadn’t even occurred to Drake yet. Both of his wives had died quite a while ago, his elder children had fled, there was no one left to talk sense into him except Daniel. Cambridge had been shut down for the duration of the Plague. Daniel had ventured down here for what he had envisioned as a quick, daring raid on an empty house, and had found Drake seated before a virginal playing old hymns from the Civil War. Having spent most of his good coins, first of all helping Newton buy prisms, and secondly bribing a reluctant coachman to bring him down within walking distance of this pest-hole, Daniel was stuck until he could get money out of Dad—a subject he was afraid to even broach. Since God had predestined all events anyway, there was no way for them to avoid the Plague, if that was their doom—and if it wasn’t, why, no harm in staying there on the edge of the city and setting an example for the fleeing and/or dying populace.
Owing to those modifications that had been made to his head at the behest of Archbishop Laud, Drake Waterhouse made curious percolating and whistling noises when he chewed and swallowed his potatoes and herring.
In 1629, Drake and some friends had been arrested for distributing freshly printed libels in the streets of London. These particular libels inveighed against Ship Money, a new tax imposed by Charles I. But the topic did not matter; if this had happened in 1628, the libels would have been about something else, and no less offensive to the King and the Archbishop.
An indiscreet remark made by one of Drake’s comrades after burning sticks had been rammed under his nails led to the discovery of the printing-press that Drake had used to print the libels—he kept it in a wagon hidden under a pile of hay. So as he had now been exposed as the master-mind of the conspiracy, Bishop Laud had him, and a few other supremely annoying Calvinists, pilloried, branded, and mutilated. These were essentially practical techniques more than punishments. The intent was not to reform the criminals, who were clearly un-reformable. The pillory fixed them in one position for a while so that all London could come by and get a good look at their faces and thereafter recognize them. The branding and mutilation marked them permanently so that the rest of the world would know them.
As all of this had happened years before Daniel had even been born, it didn’t matter to him—this was just how Dad had always looked—and of course it had never mattered to Drake. Within a few weeks, Drake had been back on the highways of England, buying cloth that he’d later smuggle to the Netherlands. In a country inn, on the way to St. Ives, he encountered a saturnine, beetle-browed chap name of Oliver Cromwell who had recently lost his faith, and seen his life ruined—or so he imagined, until he got a look at Drake, and found God. But that was another story.
The goal of all persons who had houses in those days was to possess the smallest number of pieces of furniture needed to sustain life, but to make them as large and heavy and dark as possible. Accordingly, Daniel and Drake ate their potatoes and herring on a table that had the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge. There was no other furniture in the room, although the eight-foot-high grandfather clock in the adjoining hall contributed a sort of immediate presence with the heaving to and fro of its cannonball-sized pendulum, which made the entire house lean from one side to the other like a drunk out for a brisk walk, and the palpable grinding of its gear-train, and the wild clamorous bonging that exploded from it at intervals that seemed suspiciously random, and that caused flocks of migrating waterfowl, thousands of feet overhead, to collide with each other in panic and veer into new courses. The fur of dust beginning to overhang its Gothick battlements; its internal supply of mouse-turds; the Roman numerals carven into the back by its maker; and its complete inability to tell time, all marked it as pre-Huygens technology. Its bonging would have tried Daniel’s patience even if it had occurred precisely on the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, et cetera, for it never failed to make him jump out of his skin. That it conveyed no information whatever as to what the time actually was, drove Daniel into such transports of annoyance that he had begun to entertain a phant’sy of standing at the intersection of two corridors and handing Drake, every time he passed by, a libel denouncing the ancient Clock, and demanding its wayward pendulum be stilled, and that it be replaced with a new Huygens model. But Drake had already told him to shut up about the clock, and so there was nothing he could do.
Daniel was going for days without hearing any other sounds but these. All possible subjects of conversation could be divided into two categories: (1) ones that would cause Drake to unleash a rant, previously heard so many times that Daniel could recite it from memory, and (2) ones that might actually lead to original conversation. Daniel avoided Category 1 topics. All Category 2 topics had already been exhausted. For example, Daniel could not ask, “How is Praise-God doing in Boston?”* because he had asked this on the first day, and Drake had answered it, and since then few letters had arrived because the letter-carriers were dead or running away from London as fast as they could go. Sometimes private couriers would come with letters, mostly pertaining to Drake’s business matters but sometimes addressed to Daniel. This would provoke a flurry of conversation stretching out as long as half an hour (not counting rants), but mostly what Daniel heard, day after day, was corpse-collectors’ bells, and their creaking carts; the frightful Clock; cows; Drake reading the Books of Daniel and of Revelation aloud, or playing the virginal; and the gnawing of Daniel’s own quill across the pages of his notebook as he worked his way through Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens. He actually learned an appalling amount. In fact, he was fairly certain he’d caught up with where Isaac had been several months previously—but Isaac was up at home in Woolsthorpe, a hundred miles away, and no doubt years ahead of him by this point.
He ate down to the bottom of his potatoes and herring with the determination of a prisoner clawing a hole through a wall, finally revealing the plate. The Waterhouse family china had been manufactured by sincere novices in Holland. After James I had outlawed the export of unfinished English cloth to the Netherlands, Drake had begun smuggling it there, which was easily done since the town of Leyden was crowded with English pilgrims. In this way Drake had made the first of several smuggling-related fortunes, and done so in a way pleasing in the sight of the Lord, viz. by boldly defying the King’s efforts to meddle in commerce. Not only that but he had met and in 1617 married a pilgrim lass in Leyden, and he had made many donations there to the faithful who were in the market for a ship. The grateful congregation, shortly before embarking on the Mayflower, bound for sunny Virginia, had presented Drake and his new wife, Hortense, with this set of Delft pottery. They had obviously made it themselves on the theory that when they sloshed up onto the shores of America, they’d better know how to make stuff out of clay. They were heavy crude plates glazed white, with an inscription in spidery blue letters:
YOU AND I ARE BUT EARTH.
Staring at this through a miasma of the bodily fluids of herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day, Daniel suddenly announced, “I was thinking that I might go and, God willing, visit John Wilkins.”
Wilkins had been exchanging letters with Daniel ever since the debacle of five years ago, when Daniel had arrived at Trinity College a few moments after Wilkins had been kicked out of it forever.
The mention of Wilkins did not trigger a rant, which meant Daniel was as good as there. But there were certain formalities to be gone through: “To what end?” asked Drake, sounding like a pipe-organ with numerous jammed valves as the words emerged partly from his mouth and partly from his nose. He voiced all questions as if they were pat assertions: To what end being said in the same tones as You and I are but earth.
“My purpose is to learn, Father, but I seem to’ve learned all I can from the books that are here.”
“And what of the Bible.” An excellent riposte there from Drake.
“There are Bibles everywhere, praise God, but only one Reverend Wilkins.”
“He has been preaching at that Established church in the city, has he not.”
“Indeed. St. Lawrence Jewry.”
“Then why should it be necessary for you to leave.” As the city was a quarter of an hour’s walk.
“The Plague, father—I don’t believe he has actually set foot in London these last several months.”
“And what of his flock.”
Daniel almost fired back, Oh, you mean the Royal Society? which in most other houses would have been a bon mot, but not here. “They’ve all run away, too, Father, the ones who aren’t dead.”
“High Church folk,” Drake said self-explanatorily. “Where is Wilkins now.”
“Epsom.”
“He is with Comstock. What can he possibly be thinking.”
“It’s no secret that you and Wilkins have come down on opposite sides of the fence, Father.”
“The golden fence that Laud threw up around the Lord’s Table! Yes.”
“Wilkins backs Tolerance as fervently as you. He hopes to reform the church from within.”
“Yes, and no man—short of an Archbishop—could be more within than John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom. But why should you embroil yourself in such matters.”
“Wilkins is not pursuing religious controversies at Epsom—he is pursuing natural philosophy.”
“Seems a strange place for it.”
“The Earl’s son, Charles, could not attend Cambridge because of the plague, and so Wilkins and some other members of the Royal Society are there to serve as his tutors.”
“Aha! It is all clear, then. It is all an accommodation.”
“Yes.”
“What is it that you hope to learn from the Reverend Wilkins.”
“Whatever it is that he wishes to teach me. Through the Royal Society he is in communication with all the foremost natural philosophers of the British Isles, and many on the Continent as well.”
Drake took some time considering that. “You are asserting that you require my financial assistance in order to become acquainted with a hypothetical body of knowledge which you assume has come into existence out of nowhere, quite recently.”
“Yes, Father.”
“A bit of an act of faith then, isn’t it.”
“Not so much as you might think. My friend Isaac—I’ve told you of him—has spoken of a ‘generative spirit’ that pervades all things, and that accounts for the possibility of new things being created from old—and if you don’t believe me, then just ask yourself, how can flowers grow up out of manure? Why does meat turn itself into maggots, and ships’ planking into worms? Why do images of sea-shells form in rocks far from any sea, and why do new stones grow in farmers’ fields after the previous year’s crop has been dug out? Clearly some organizing principle is at work, and it pervades all things invisibly, and accounts for the world’s ability to have newness—to do something other than only decay.”
“And yet it decays. Look out the window! Listen to the ringing of the bells. Ten years ago, Cromwell melted down the Crown Jewels and gave all men freedom of religion. Today, a crypto-Papist* and lackey of the Antichrist† rules England, and England’s gold goes to making giant punch-bowls for use at the royal orgies, and we of the Gathered Church must worship in secret as if we were early Christians in pagan Rome.”
“One of the things about the generative spirit that demands our careful study is that it can go awry,” Daniel returned. “In some sense the pneuma that causes buboes to grow from the living flesh of plague victims must be akin to the one that causes mushrooms to pop out of the ground after rain, but one has effects we call evil and the other has effects we call good.”
“You think Wilkins knows more of this.”
“I was actually using it to explain the very existence of men like Wilkins, and of this club of his, which he now calls the Royal Society, and of other such groups, such as Monsieur de Montmor’s salon in Paris—”
“I see. You suppose that this same spirit is at work in the minds of these natural philosophers.”
“Yes, Father, and in the very soil of the nations that have produced so many natural philosophers in such a short time—to the great discomfiture of the Papists.” Reckoning it could not hurt his chances to get in a dig at Popery. “And just as the farmer can rely on the steady increase of his crops, I can be sure that much new work has been accomplished by such people within the last several months.”
“But with the End of Days drawing so near—”
“Only a few months ago, at one of the last meetings of the Royal Society, Mr. Daniel Coxe said that mercury had been found running like water in a chalk-pit at Line. And Lord Brereton said that at an Inn in St. Alban’s, quicksilver was found running in a saw-pit.”
“And you suppose this means—what.”
“Perhaps this flourishing of so many kinds—natural philosophy, plague, the power of King Louis, orgies at Whitehall, quicksilver welling up from the bowels of the earth—is a necessary preparation for the Apocalypse—the generative spirit rising up like a tide.”
“That much is obvious, Daniel. I wonder, though, whether there is any point in furthering your studies when we are so close.”
“Would you admire a farmer who let his fields be overrun with weeds, simply because the End was near?”
“No, of course not. Your point is well taken.”
“If we have a duty to be alert for the signs of the End Times, then let me go, Father. For if the signs are comets, then the first to know will be the astronomers. If the signs are plague, the first to know—”
“—will be physicians. Yes, I understand. But are you suggesting that those who study natural philosophy can acquire some kind of occult knowledge—special insight into God’s Creation, not available to the common Bible-reading man?”
“Er…I suppose that’s quite clearly what I’m suggesting.”
Drake nodded. “That is what I thought. Well, God gave us brains for a reason—not to use those brains would be a sin.” He got up and carried his plate to the kitchen, then went to a small desk of many drawers in the parlor and broke out all of the gear needed to write on paper with a quill. “Haven’t much coin just now,” he mumbled, moving the quill about in a sequence of furious scribbles separated by long flowing swoops, like a sword-duel. “There you are.”
Mr. Ham pray pay to the bearer one pound I say £1—of that money of myne which you have in your hands upon sight of this Bill
Drake Waterhouse London
“What is this instrument, Father?”
“Goldsmith’s Note. People started doing this about the time you left for Cambridge.”
“Why does it say ‘the bearer’? Why not ‘Daniel Waterhouse’?”
“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You could, if you chose, use this to pay a one-pound debt—you’d simply hand it to your creditor and he could then nip down to Ham’s and get a pound in coin of the realm. Or he could use it to pay one of his debts.”
“I see. But in this case it simply means that if I go into the City and present this to Uncle Thomas, or one of the other Hams…”
“They’ll do what the note orders them to do.”
It was, then, a normal example of Drake’s innate fiendishness. Daniel was perfectly welcome to flee to Epsom—the seat of John Comstock, the arch-Anglican—and study Natural Philosophy until, literally, the End of the World. But in order to obtain the means, he would have to demonstrate his faith by walking all the way across London at the height of the Plague. Trial by ordeal it was.
The next morning: on with a coat and a down-at-heels pair of riding-boots, even though it was a warm summer day. A scarf to breathe through.* A minimal supply of clean shirts and drawers (if he was feeling well when he reached Epsom, he’d send for more). A rather small number of books—tiny student octavo volumes of the usual Continental savants, their margins and interlinear spaces now caulked with his notes. A letter he’d received from Wilkins, with an enclosure from one Robert Hooke, during a rare spate of mail last week. All went into a bag, the bag on the end of a staff, and the staff over his shoulder—made him look somewhat Vagabondish, but many people in the city had turned to robbery, as normal sources of employment had been shut down, and there were sound reasons to look impoverished and carry a big stick.
Drake, upon Daniel’s departure: “Will you tell old Wilkins that I do not think the less of him for having become an Anglican, as I have the most serene confidence that he has done so in the interest of reforming that church, which as you know has been the steady goal of those of us who are scorned by others as Puritans.”
And for Daniel: “I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you—not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”
“It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially.”
“That is fine when you are talking about comets.”
“I’ll not discuss religion, then. Good-bye, Father.”
“God be with you, Daniel.”
HE OPENED THE DOOR, trying not to flinch when outside air touched his face, and descended the steps to the road called Hol-born, a river of pounded dust (it had not rained in a while). Drake’s house was a new (post-Cromwell) half-timbered building on the north side of the road, one of a line of mostly wooden houses that formed a sort of fence dividing Holborn from the open fields on its north, which stretched all the way to Scotland. The buildings across the way, on the south side of Holborn, were the same but two decades older (pre-Civil War). The ground was flat except for a sort of standing wave of packed dirt that angled across the fields, indeed across Holborn itself, not far away, off to his right—as if a comet had landed on London Bridge and sent up a ripple in the earth, which had spread outwards until it had gone just past Drake’s house and then frozen. These were the remains of the earth-works that London* had thrown up early in the Civil War, to defend against the King’s armies. There’d been a gate on Holborn and a star-shaped earthen fort nearby, but the gate had been torn down a long time ago and the fort blurred into a grassy hummock guarded by the younger and more adventurous cattle.
Daniel turned left, towards London. This was utter madness. But the letter from Wilkins, and the enclosure from Hooke—a Wilkins protégé from his Oxford days, and now Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society—contained certain requests. They were phrased politely. Perhaps not so politely in Hooke’s case. They had let Daniel know that he could be of great service to them by fetching certain items out of certain buildings in London.
Daniel could have burned the letter and claimed it had never arrived. He could have gone to Epsom without any of the items on the list, pleading the Bubonic Plague as his excuse. But he suspected that Wilkins and Hooke did not care for excuses any more than Drake did.
By going to Trinity at exactly the wrong moment, Daniel had missed out on the first five years of the Royal Society of London. Lately he had attended a few meetings, but always felt as if his nose were pressed up against the glass.
Today he would pay his dues by walking into London. It was hardly the most dangerous thing anyone had done in the study of Natural Philosophy.
He put one boot in front of the other, and found that he had not died yet. He did it again, then again. The place seemed eerily normal for a short while as long as you ignored the continuous ringing of death-knells from about a hundred different parish churches. On a closer look, many people had adorned the walls of their houses with nearly hysterical pleas for God’s mercy, perhaps thinking that like the blood of the lambs on Israel’s door-posts, these graffiti might keep the Angel of Death from knocking. Wagons came and went on Holborn only occasionally—empty ones going into town, stained and reeking, with vanguards and rearguards of swooping birds cutting swaths through the banks of flies that surrounded them—these were corpse-wains returning from their midnight runs to the burial-pits and churchyards outside the town. Wagons filled with people, escorted by pedestrians with hand-bells and red sticks, crept out of town. Just near the remains of those earth-works where Holborn terminated at its intersection with the road to Oxford, a pest-house had been established, and when it had filled up with dead people, another, farther away, to the north of the Tyburn gallows, at Marylebone. Some of the people on the wagons appeared normal, others had reached the stage where the least movement caused them hellish buboe-pain, and so even without the bells and red sticks the approach of these wagons would have been obvious from the fusillade of screams and hot prayers touched off at every bump in the road. Daniel and the very few other pedestrians on Holborn backed into doorways and breathed through scarves when these wagons passed by.
Through Newgate and the stumps of the Roman wall, then, past the Prison, which was silent, but not empty. Towards the square-topped tower of Saint Paul’s, where an immense bell was being walloped by tired ringers, counting the years of the dead. That old tower leaned to one side, and had for a long time, so that everyone in London had stopped noticing that it did. In these circumstances, though, it seemed to lean more, and made Daniel suddenly nervous that it was about to fall over on him. Just a few weeks ago, Robert Hooke and Sir Robert Moray had been up in its belfry conducting experiments with two-hundred-foot-long pendulums. Now the cathedral was fortified within a rampart of freshly tamped earth, the graves piled up a full yard above ground level.
The old front of the church had become half eaten away by coal-smoke, and a newfangled Classical porch slapped onto it some three or four decades ago. But the new columns were already decaying, and they were marred from where shops had been built between them during Cromwell’s time. During those years, Round-head cavalry had pulled the furniture up from the western half of the church and chopped it up for firewood, then used the empty space as a vast stable for nearly a thousand horses, selling their dung as fuel, to freezing Londoners, for 4d a bushel. Meanwhile, in the eastern half Drake and Bolstrood and others had preached three-hour sermons to diminishing crowds. Now King Charles was supposedly fixing the place up, but Daniel could see no evidence that anything had been done.
Daniel went round the south side of the church even though it was not the most direct way, because he wanted to have a look at the south transept, which had collapsed some years ago. Rumor had it that the bigger and better stones were being carted away and used to build a new wing of John Comstock’s house on Piccadilly. Indeed, many of the stones had been removed to somewhere, but of course no one was working there now except for gravediggers.
Into Cheapside, where men on ladders were clambering into upper-story windows of a boarded-up house to remove limp, exhausted children who’d somehow outlived their families. Down in the direction of the river, the only gathering of people Daniel had seen: a long queue before the house of Dr. Nathaniel Hodges, one of the only physicians who hadn’t fled. Not far beyond that, on Cheapside, the house of John Wilkins himself. Wilkins had sent Daniel a key, which turned out not to be necessary, as his house had already been broken into. Floorboards pried up, mattresses gutted so that the place looked like a barn for all the loose straw and lumber on the floor. Whole ranks of books pawed from the shelves to see if anything was hidden behind. Daniel went round and re-shelved the books, holding back two or three newish ones that Wilkins had asked him to fetch.
Then to the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry.* “Follow the Drainpipes, find the Amphib’ns,” Wilkins had written. Daniel walked round the churchyard, which was studded with graves, but had not reached the graves-on-top-of-graves stage—Wilkins’s parishioners were mostly prosperous mercers who’d fled to their country houses. At one corner of the roof, a red copper vein descended from the downhill end of a rain-gutter, then ducked into a holed window beneath. Daniel entered the church and traced it down into a cellar where dormant God-gear was cached to expect the steady wheeling of the liturgical calendar (Easter and Christmas stuff, e.g.) or sudden reversals in the prevailing theology (High Church people like the late Bishop Laud wanted a fence round the altar so parish dogs couldn’t lift their legs on the Lord’s Table, Low Church primitives like Drake didn’t; the Rev. Wilkins, more in the Drake mold, had stashed the fence and rail down here). This room hummed, almost shuddered, as if a choir of monks were lurking in the corners intoning one of their chants, but it was actually the buzzing of a whole civilization of flies, so large that many of them seemed to be singing bass—these had grown from the corpses of rats, which carpeted the cellar floor like autumn leaves. It smelled that way, too.
The drain-pipe came into the cellar from a hole in the floor above, and emptied into a stone baptismal Font—a jumbo, total-baby-immersion style of Font—that had been shoved into a corner, probably around the time that King Henry VIII had kicked out the Papists. Daniel guessed as much from the carvings, which were so thick with symbols of Rome that to remove them all would have destroyed it structurally. When this vessel filled with rain-water from the drain-pipe it would spill excess onto the floor, and it would meander off into a corner and seep into the earth—perhaps this source of drinking-water had attracted the sick rats.
In any case the top of the font was covered with a grille held down by a couple of bricks—from underneath came contented croaking sounds. A gout of pink shot through an interstice and speared a fly out of midair, paused humming-taut for an instant, then snapped back. Daniel removed the bricks and pulled up the grille and looked at, and was looked at by, half a dozen of the healthiest frogs he’d ever seen, frogs the size of terriers, frogs that could tongue sparrows out of the air. Standing there in the City of Death, Daniel laughed. The generative spirit ran amok in the bodies of rats, whose corpses were transmuted into flies, which gave up their spirit to produce happy blinking green frogs.
Faint ticks, by the thousands, merged into a sound like wind-driven sleet against a windowpane. Daniel looked down to see it was just hordes of fleas who had abandoned the rat corpses and converged on him from all across the cellar, and were now ricocheting off his leather boots. He rummaged until he found a bread-basket, packed the frogs into it, imprisoned them loosely under a cloth, and walked out of there.
Though he could not see the river from here, he could infer that the tide was receding from the trickle of Thames-water that was beginning to probe its way down the gutter in the middle of Poultry Lane, running downhill from Leadenhall. Normally this would be a slurry of paper-scraps discarded by traders at the ’Change, but today it was lumpy with corpses of rats and cats.
He gave that gutter as wide a berth as he could, but proceeded up against the direction of its flow to the edge of the goldsmiths’ district, whence Threadneedle and Poultry and Lombard and Cornhill sprayed confusingly. He continued up Cornhill to the highest point in the City of London, where Cornhill came together with Leadenhall (which carried on eastwards, but downhill from here) and Fish Street (downhill straight to London Bridge) and Bishops-gate (downhill towards the city wall, and Bedlam, and the plague-pit they’d dug next to it). In the middle of this intersection a stand-pipe sprouted, with one nozzle for each of those streets, and Thames-water rushed from each nozzle to flush the gutters. It was connected to a buried pipe that ran underneath Fish Street to the northern terminus of London Bridge. During Elizabeth’s time some clever Dutchmen had built water-wheels there. Even when the men who tended them were dead or run away to the country, these spun powerfully whenever the tide went out and high water accumulated on the upstream side of the bridge. They were connected to pumps that pressurized the Fish Street pipe and (if you lived on this hill) carried away the accumulated waste, or (if you lived elsewhere) brought a twice-daily onslaught of litter, turds, and dead animals.
He followed said onslaught down Bishopsgate, watching the water get dirtier as he went, but didn’t go as far as the wall—he stopped at the great house, or rather compound, that Sir Thomas (“Bad money drives out good”) Gresham had built, a hundred years ago, with money he’d made lending to the Crown and reforming the coinage. Like all old half-timbered fabricks it was slowly warping and bending out of true, but Daniel loved it because it was now Gresham’s College, home of the Royal Society.
And of Robert Hooke, the R.S.’s Curator of Experiments, who’d moved into it nine months ago—enabling him to do experiments all the time. Hooke had sent Daniel a list of odds and ends that he needed for his work at Epsom. Daniel deposited his frog-basket and other goods on the high table in the room where the Royal Society had its meetings and, using that as a sort of base-camp, made excursions into Hooke’s apartment and all of the rooms and attics and cellars that the Royal Society had taken over for storage.
He saw, and rummaged through, and clambered over, slices of numerous tree-trunks that someone had gathered in a bid to demonstrate that the thin parts of the rings tended to point towards true north. A Brazilian compass-fish that Boyle had suspended from a thread to see if (as legend had it) it would do the same (when Daniel came in, it was pointing south by southeast). Jars containing: powder of the lungs and livers of vipers (someone thought you could produce young vipers from it), something called Sympathetic Powder that supposedly healed wounds through a voodoo-like process. Samples of a mysterious red fluid taken from the Bloody Pond at Newington. Betel-nut, camphire-wood, nux vomica, rhino-horn. A ball of hair that Sir William Curtius had found in a cow’s belly. Some experiments in progress: a number of pebbles contained in glass jars full of water, the necks of the jars just barely large enough to let the pebbles in; later they would see if the pebbles could be removed, and if not, it would prove that they had grown in the water. Very large amounts of splintered lumber of all types, domestic and foreign—the residue of the Royal Society’s endless experiments on the breaking-strength of wooden beams. The Earl of Balcarres’s heart, which he had thoughtfully donated to them, but not until he had died of natural causes. A box of stones that various people had coughed up out of their lungs, which the R.S. was saving up to send as a present to the King. Hundreds of wasps’ and birds’ nests, methodically labeled with the names of the proud patrons who had brought them in. A box of baby vertebrae which had been removed from a large abscess in the side of a woman who’d had a failed pregnancy twelve years earlier. Stored in jars in spirits of wine: various human foetuses, the head of a colt with a double eye in the center of its forehead, an eel from Japan. Tacked to the wall: the skin of a seven-legged, two-bodied, single-headed lamb. Decomposing in glass boxes: the Royal Society’s viper collection, all dead of starvation; some had their heads tied to their tails as part of some sort of Uroburos experiment. More hairballs. The heart of an executed person, superficially no different from that of the Earl of Balcarres. A vial containing seeds that had supposedly been voided in the urine of a maid in Holland. A jar of blue pigment made from tincture of galls, a jar of green made from Hungarian vitriol. A sketch of one of the Dwarves who supposedly inhabited the Canary Islands. Hundreds of lodestones of various sizes and shapes. A model of a giant crossbow that Hooke had designed for flinging harpoons at whales. A U-shaped glass tube that Boyle had filled with quicksilver to prove that its undulations were akin to those of a pendulum.
Hooke wanted Daniel to bring various parts and tools and materials used in the making of watches and other fine mechanisms; some of the stones that had been found in the Earl’s heart; a cylinder of quicksilver; a hygroscope made from the beard of a wild oat; a burning-glass in a wooden frame; a pair of deep convex spectacles for seeing underwater; his dew-collecting glass,* and selections from his large collection of preserved bladders: carp, pig, cow, and so on. He also wanted enormous, completely impractical numbers of different-sized spheres of different materials such as lead, amber, wood, silver, and so forth, which were useful in all manner of rolling and dropping experiments. Also, various spare parts for his air-compressing engine, and his Artificial Eye. Finally, Hooke asked him to collect “any puppies, kittens, chicks, or mice you might come across, as the supply hereabouts is considerably diminished.”
Some mail had piled up here, despite the recent difficulties, much of it addressed simply “GRUBENDOL London.” Following Wilkins’s instructions, Daniel gathered it all up and added it to the pile. But the GRUBENDOL stuff he culled out, and tied up into a packet with string.
Now he was ready to leave London, and wanted only money, and some way to carry all of this stuff. Back down Bishopsgate he went (leaving everything behind at Gresham College, except for the frogs, who demanded close watching) and turned on Thread-needle, which he followed westwards as it converged on Cornhill. Close to their intersection stood a series of row-houses that fronted on both of these streets. As even the illiterate might guess from the men with muskets smoking pipes on the rooftops, all were goldsmiths. Daniel went to the one called HAM BROS. A few trinkets and a couple of gold plates were displayed in a window by the door, as if to suggest that the Hams were still literally in the business of fabricating things out of gold.
A face in a grate. “Daniel!” The grate slammed and latched, the door growled and clanged as might works of ironmongery were slid and shot on the inside. Finally it was open. “Welcome!”
“Good day, Uncle Thomas.”
“Half-brother-in-law actually,” said Thomas Ham, out of a stubborn belief that pedantry and repetitiveness could through some alchemy be forged into wit. Pedantry because he was technically correct (he’d married Daniel’s half-sister) and repetitive because he’d been making the same joke for as long as Daniel had been alive. Ham was more than sixty years old now, and he was one of those who is fat and skinny at the same time—a startling pot-belly suspended from a lanky armature, waggling jowls draped over a face like an edged weapon. He had been lucky to capture the fair Mayflower Waterhouse, or so he was encouraged to believe.
“I was affrighted when I came up the street—thought you were burying people,” Daniel said, gesturing at several mounds of earth around the house’s foundations.
Ham looked carefully up and down Threadneedle—as if what he was doing could possibly be a secret from anyone. “We are making a Crypt of a different sort,” he said. “Come, enter. Why is that basket croaking?”
“I have taken a job as a porter,” Daniel said. “Do you have a hand-cart or wheelbarrow I could borrow for a few days?”
“Yes, a very heavy and strong one—we use it to carry lock-boxes back and forth to the Mint. Hasn’t moved since the Plague started. By all means take it!”
The parlor held a few more pathetic vestiges of a retail jewelry business, but it was really just a large writing-desk and some books. Stairs led to the Ham residence on the upper floors—dark and silent. “Mayflower and the children are well in Buckinghamshire?” Daniel asked.
“God willing, yes, her last letter quite put me to sleep. Come downstairs!” Uncle Thomas led him through another fortress-door that had been left wedged open, and down a narrow stair into the earth—for the first time since leaving his father’s house, Daniel smelled nothing bad, only the calm scent of earth being disturbed.
He’d never been invited into the cellar, but he’d always known about it—from the solemn way it was talked about, or, to be precise, talked around, he’d always known it must be full of either ghosts or a large quantity of gold. Now he found it to be absurdly small and homely compared to its awesome reputation, in a way that was heart-warmingly English—but it was full of gold, and it was getting larger and less ditch-like by the minute. At the end nearest the base of the stairway, piled simply on the dirt floor, were platters, punch-bowls, pitchers, knives, forks, spoons, goblets, ladles, candlesticks, and gravy-boats of gold—also sacks of coins, boxed medallions stamped with visages of Continental nobles commemorating this or that battle, actual gold bars, and irregular sticks of gold called pigs. Each item was somehow tagged: 367-11/32 troy oz. depos. by my Lord Rochester on 29 Sept. 1662 and so on. The stuff was piled up like a dry-stone wall, which is to say that bits were packed into spaces between other bits in a way calculated to keep the whole formation from collapsing. All of it was spattered with dirt and brick-fragments and mortar-splats from the work proceeding at the other end of the cellar: a laborer with pick and shovel, and another with a back-basket to carry the dirt upstairs; a carpenter working with heavy timbers, doing something Daniel assumed was to keep the House of Ham from collapsing; and a bricklayer and his assistant, giving the new space a foundation and walls. It was a tidy cellar now; no rats in here.
“Your late mother’s candlesticks are, I’m afraid, not on view just now—rather far back in the, er, Arrangement—” said Thomas Ham.
“I’m not here to disturb the Arrangement,” Daniel said, producing the Note from his father.
“Oh! Easily done! Easily and cheerfully done!” announced Mr. Ham after donning spectacles and shaking his jowls at the Note for a while, a hound casting after a scent. “Pocket money for the young scholar—the young divine—is it?”
“Cambridge is very far from re-opening, they say—need to be applying myself elsewhere,” Daniel said, merely dribbling small talk behind him as he went to look at a small pile of dirty stuff that was not gold. “What are these?”
“Remains of the house of some Roman that once stood here,” Mr. Ham said. “Those who follow these things—and I’m sorry to say I don’t—assure me that something called Walbrook Stream flowed just through here, and spilled into the Thames at the Provincial Governor’s Palace, twelve hundred odd years ago—the Roman mercers had their houses along its banks, so that they could ferry goods up and down from the River.”
Daniel was using the sole of one boot to sweep loose dirt away from a hard surface he’d sensed underneath. Wee polygons—terra-cotta, indigo, bone-white, beige—appeared. He was looking at a snatch of a mosaic floor. He swept away more dirt and recognized it as a rendering of a naked leg, knee flexed and toe pointed as if its owner were on the run. A pair of wings sprouted from the ankle. “Yes, the Roman floor we’ll keep,” said Mr. Ham, “as we need a barrier—to discourage clever men with shovels. Jonas, where are the loose bits?”
The digger kicked a wooden box across the floor towards them. It was half-full of small bits of dirty junk: a couple of combs carved out of bone or ivory; a clay lantern; the skeleton of a brooch, jewels long since missing from their sockets; fragments of glazed pottery; and something long and slender: a hairpin, Daniel reckoned, rubbing the dirt away. It was probably silver, though badly tarnished. “Take it, my lad,” said Mr. Ham, referring not only to the hairpin but also to a rather nice silver one-pound coin that he had just quarried from his pocket. “Perhaps the future Mrs. Waterhouse will enjoy fixing her coif with a bauble that once adorned the head of some Roman trader’s wife.”
“Trinity College does not allow us to have wives,” Daniel reminded him, “but I’ll take it anyway—perhaps I’ll have a niece or something who has pretty hair, and who isn’t squeamish about a bit of paganism.” For it was clear now that the hairpin was fashioned in the shape of a caduceus.
“Paganism? Then we are all pagans! It is a symbol of Mercury—patron of commerce—who has been worshipped in this cellar—and in this city—for a thousand years, by Bishops as well as business-men. It is a cult that adapts itself to any religion, just as easily as quicksilver adopts the shape of any container—and someday, Daniel, you’ll meet a young lady who is just as adaptable. Take it.” Putting the silver coin next to the caduceus in Daniel’s palm, he folded Daniel’s fingers over the top and then clasped the fist—chilled by the touch of the metal—between his two warm hands in benediction.
DANIEL PUSHED HIS HAND-CART westwards down Cheapside. He held his breath as he hurried around the reeking tumulus that surrounded St. Paul’s, and did not breathe easy again until he’d passed out of Ludgate. The passage over Fleet Ditch was even worse, because it was strewn with bodies of rats, cats, and dogs, as well as quite a few plague-corpses that had simply been rolled out of wagons, and not even dignified with a bit of dirt. He kept a rag clamped over his face, and did not take it off until he had passed out through Temple Bar and gone by the little Watch-house that stood in the middle of the Strand in front of Somerset House. From there he could glimpse green fields and open country between certain of the buildings, and smell whiffs of manure on the breeze, which smelled delightful compared to London.
He had worried that the wheels of his cart would bog down in Charing Cross, which was a perpetual morass, but summer heat, and want of traffic, had quite dried the place up. A pack of five stray dogs watched him make his way across the expanse of rutted and baked dirt. He was worried that they would come after him until he noticed that they were uncommonly fat, for stray dogs.
Oldenburg lived in a town-house on Pall Mall. Except for a heroic physician or two, he was the only member of the R.S. who’d stayed in town during the Plague. Daniel took out the GRUBEN-DOL packet and put it on the doorstep—letters from Vienna, Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Moscow.
He knocked thrice on the door, and backed away to see a round face peering down at him through obscuring layers of green window-glass, like a curtain of tears. Oldenburg’s wife had lately died—not of Plague—and some supposed that he stayed in London hoping that the Black Death would carry him off to wherever she was.
On his long walk out of town, Daniel had plenty of time to work out that GRUBENDOL was an anagram for Oldenburg.