College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, Cambridge

1661

        The Dissenters are destitute of all decorations that can please the outward Senses, what their Teachers can hope for from humane Assistance lies altogether in their own endeavours, and they have nothing to strengthen their Doctrine with (besides what they can say for it) but probity of Manners and exemplary Lives.

—The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS, ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

SOME SORT OF COMMOTION in the courtyard below. Not the usual revels, or else he wouldn’t have bothered to hear it.

Daniel got out of bed and found himself alone in the chamber. The voices below sounded angry. He went to the window. The tail of Ursa Major was like the hand of a cœlestial clock, and Daniel had been studying how to read it. The time was probably around three in the morning.

Beneath him several figures swam in murky pools of lanthorn-light. One of them was dressed as men always had been, in Daniel’s experience, until very recently: a black coat and black breeches with no decorations. But the others were flounced and feathered like rare birds.

The one in black seemed to be defending the door from the others. Until recently, everyone at Cambridge had looked like him, and the University had been allowed to exist only because a godly nation required divines who were fluent in Greek and Latin and Hebrew. He was barring the door because the men in lace and velvet and silk were trying to bring a wench in with them. And hardly for the first time! But this man, apparently, had seen one wench too many, and resolved to make a stand.

A scarlet boy flourished in the midst of the lanthorn-light—a writhing bouquet of tassles and flounces. His arms were crossed over his body. He drew them apart with a sharp ringing noise. A rod of silver light had appeared in each of his hands—a long one in his right, a short one in his left. He drew into a crouch. His companions were all shouting; Daniel could not make out the words, but the feelings expressed were a welter of fear and joy. The black-clad fellow drew out a sword of his own, something dull and clanging, a heavier spadroon, and the scarlet boy came at him like a boiling cloud, with lightning darting out of the center. He fought as animals fight, with movements too quick for the eye to follow, and the man in black fought as men fight, with hesitations and second thoughts. He had a great many holes in him very soon, and was reduced to a heap of somber, bloody clothing on the green grass of the courtyard, shifting and rocking, trying to find a position that was not excruciatingly painful.

All of the Cavaliers ran away. The Duke of Monmouth picked the wench up over his shoulder like a sack of grain and carried her off at a dead run. The scarlet boy tarried long enough to plant a boot on the dying man’s shoulder, turn him over onto his back, and spit something into his face.

All round the courtyard, shutters began to slam closed.

Daniel threw a coat over himself, pulled on a pair of boots, got a lanthorn of his own lit, and hurried downstairs. But it was too late for hurrying—the body was already gone. The blood looked like tar on the grass. Daniel followed one dribble to the next, across the green, out the back of the college, and onto the Backs—the boggy floodplain of the river Cam, which wandered around in back of the University. The wind had come up a bit, making noise in the trees that nearly obscured the splash. A less eager witness than Daniel could have claimed he’d heard nothing, and it would have been no lie.

He stopped then, because his mind had finally come awake, and he was afraid. He was out in the middle of an empty fen, following a dead man toward a dark river, and the wind was trying to blow out his lanthorn.

A pair of naked men appeared in the light, and Daniel screamed.

One of the men was tall, and had the most beautiful eyes Daniel had ever seen in a man’s face; they were like the eyes of a painting of the Pieta that Drake had once flung onto a bonfire. He looked towards Daniel as if to say, Who dares scream?

The other man was shorter, and he reacted by cringing. Daniel finally recognized him as Roger Comstock, the sizar. “Who’s that?” this one asked. “My lord?” he guessed.

“No man’s lord,” Daniel said. “It is I. Daniel Waterhouse.”

“It’s Comstock and Jeffreys. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?” Both of the men were naked and soaked, their long hair draggling and seeping on their shoulders. Yet even Comstock seemed at ease compared to Daniel, who was dry, clothed, and equipped with a lanthorn.

“I might ask the same of you. Where are your clothes?”

Jeffreys now stepped forward. Comstock knew to shut up.

“We doffed our clothing when we swam the river,” Jeffreys said, as if this should be perfectly obvious.

Comstock saw the hole in that story as quickly as Daniel did, and hastily plugged it: “When we emerged, we found that we had drifted for some distance downstream, and were unable to find them again in the darkness.”

“Why did you swim the river?”

“We were in hot pursuit of that ruffian.”

“Ruffian!?”

The outburst caused a narrowing of the beautiful eyes. A look of mild disgust appeared on Jeffreys’s face. But Roger Comstock was not above continuing with the conversation: “Yes! Some Phanatique—a Puritan, or possibly a Barker—he challenged my Lord Upnor in the courtyard just now! You must not have seen it.”

“I did see it.”

“Ah.” Jeffreys turned sideways, caught his dripping penis between two fingers, and urinated tremendously onto the ground. He was staring toward the College. “The window of your and My Lord Monmouth’s chamber is awkwardly located—you must have leaned out of it?”

“Perhaps I leaned out a bit.”

“Otherwise, how could you have seen the men duelling?”

“Would you call it duelling, or murdering?”

Once again, Jeffreys appeared to be overcome with queasiness at the fact that he was having a conversation of any sort with the likes of Daniel. Comstock put on a convincing display of mock astonishment. “Are you claiming to have witnessed a murder?”

Daniel was too taken aback to answer. Jeffreys continued to jet urine onto the ground; he had produced a great steaming patch of it already, as if he intended to cover his nakedness with a cloud. He furrowed his brow and asked, “Murder, you say. So a man has died?”

“I…I should suppose so,” Daniel stammered.

“Hmmm…supposing is a dangerous practice, when you are supposing that an Earl has committed a capital crime. Perhaps you’d better show the dead body to the Justice of the Peace, and allow the coroner to establish a cause of death.”

“The body is gone.”

“You say body. Wouldn’t it be correct to say, wounded man?”

“Well…I did not personally verify that the heart had stopped, if that is what you mean.”

“Wounded man would be the correct term, then. To me, he seemed very much a wounded man, and not a dead one, when Com-stock and I were pursuing him across the Backs.”

“Unquestionably not dead,” Comstock agreed.

“But I saw him lying there—”

“From your window?” Jeffreys asked, finally done pissing.

“Yes.”

“But you are not looking out your window now, are you, Waterhouse?”

“Obviously not.”

“Thank you for telling me what is obvious. Did you leap out of your window, or did you walk down stairs?”

“Down stairs, of course!”

“Can you see the courtyard from the staircase?”

“No.”

“So as you descended the stairs, you lost sight of the wounded man.”

“Naturally.”

“You really haven’t the faintest idea, do you, Waterhouse, of what happened in the courtyard during the interval when you were coming down stairs?”

“No, but—”

“And despite this ignorance—ignorance utter, black, and entire—you presume to accuse an Earl, and personal friend of the King, of having committed—what was it again?”

“I believe he said murder, sir,” Comstock put in helpfully.

“Very well. Let us go and wake up the Justice of the Peace,” Jeffreys said. On his way past Waterhouse he snatched the lanthorn, and then began marching back towards the College. Comstock followed him, giggling.

First Jeffreys had to get himself dried off, and to summon his own sizar to dress his hair and get his clothes on—a gentleman could not go and visit the Justice of the Peace in a disheveled state. Meanwhile Daniel had to sit in his chamber with Comstock, who bustled about and cleaned the place with more diligence than he had ever shown before. Since Daniel was not in a talkative mood, Roger Comstock filled in the silences. “Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor—pushes a sword like a demon, doesn’t he? You’d never guess he’s only fourteen! It’s because he and Monmouth and all that lot spent the Interregnum in Paris, taking their pushing-lessons at the Academy of Monsieur du Plessis, near the Palais Cardinal. They learned a very French conception of honor there, and haven’t quite adjusted to England yet—they’ll challenge a man to a duel at the slightest offence—real or phant’sied. Oh, now, don’t look so stricken, Mr. Waterhouse—remember that if that fellow he was duelling with is found, and is found to be dead, and his injuries found to be the cause of his death, and those injuries are found to’ve been inflicted by My Lord Upnor, and not in a duel per se but in an unprovoked assault, and if a jury can be persuaded to overlook the faults in your account—in a word, if he is successfully prosecuted for this hypothetical murder—then you won’t have to worry about it! After all, if he’s guilty, then he can’t very well claim you’ve dishonored him with the accusation, can he? Nice and tidy, Mr. Waterhouse. Some of his friends might be quite angry with you, I’ll admit—oh, no, Mr. Waterhouse, I didn’t mean it in the way you think. I am not your enemy—remember, I am of the Golden, not the Silver, Comstocks.”

It was not the first time he’d said something like this. Daniel knew that the Comstocks were a grotesquely large and complicated family, who had begun popping up in minor roles as far back as the reign of King Richard Lionheart, and he gathered that this Silver/Golden dichotomy was some kind of feud between different branches of the clan. Roger Comstock wanted to impress on Daniel that he had nothing in common, other than a name, with John Comstock: the aging gunpowder magnate and arch-Royalist, and now Lord Chancellor, who had been the author of the recent Declaration of Uniformity—the act that had filled Drake’s house with jobless Ranters, Barkers, Quakers, et cetera. “Your people,” Daniel said, “the Golden Comstocks, as you dub them—pray, what are they?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“High Church?” Meaning Anglicans of the Archbishop Laud school, who according to Drake and his ilk were really no different from Papists—and Drake believed that the Pope was literally the Antichrist. “Low Church?” Meaning Anglicans of a more Calvinist bent, nationalistic, suspicious of priests in fancy clothes. “Independents?” Meaning ones who’d severed all ties with the Established Church, and made up their own churches as it suited them. Daniel did not venture any further down the continuum, for he had already shot well beyond Roger Comstock’s limits as a theologian.

Roger threw up his hands and said merely, “Because of the unpleasantness with the Silver branch, recent generations of the Golden Comstocks have spent rather a lot of time in the Dutch Republic.”

To Daniel, the Dutch Republic meant God-fearing places like Leiden, where the pilgrims had sojourned before going to Massachusetts. But it presently came clear that Roger was talking about Amsterdam. “There are all sorts of churches in Amsterdam. Cheek by jowl. Strange as it must sound, this habit has quite worn off on us over the years.”

“Meaning what? That you’ve become used to preserving your faith despite being surrounded by heretics?”

“No. Rather, it’s as if I’ve got an Amsterdam inside of my head.”

“A what !?”

“Many different sects and faiths that are always arguing with one another. A Babel of religious disputation that never dies down. I have got used to it.”

“You believe nothing !?”

Further debate—if listening to Roger’s ramblings could be considered such—was cut off by the arrival of Monmouth, who strolled in looking offensively relaxed. Roger Comstock had to make a fuss over him for a while—jacking his boots off, letting his hair down, getting him undressed. Comstock supplied entertainment by telling the tale of chasing the killer Puritan across the Backs and into the River Cam. The more the Duke heard of this story, the more he liked it, and the more he loved Roger Comstock. And yet Com-stock made so many ingratiating references to Waterhouse that Daniel began to feel that he was still part of the same merry crew; and Monmouth even directed one or two kindly winks at him.

Finally Jeffreys arrived in a freshly blocked wig, fur-lined cape, purple silk doublet, and fringed breeches, a ruby-handled rapier dangling alongside one leg, and fantastical boots turned down at the tops so far that they nearly brushed the ground. Looking, therefore, twice as old and ten times as rich as Daniel, even though he was a year younger and probably broke. He led the faltering Daniel and the implacably cheerful Comstock down the staircase—pausing there for a while to reflect upon the total impossibility of anyone’s seeing the courtyard from it—and across Trinity’s great lawn and out the gate into the streets of Cambridge, where water-filled wheel-ruts, reflecting the light of dawn, looked like torpid, fluorescent snakes. In a few minutes they reached the house of the Justice of the Peace, and were informed that he was at church. Jeffreys therefore led them to an alehouse, where he was soon engulfed in wenches. He caused drink and food to be brought out. Daniel sat and watched him tear into a great bloody haunch of beef whilst downing two pints of ale and four small glasses of the Irish drink known as Usquebaugh. None of it had any effect on Jeffreys; he was one of those who could become staggeringly drunk and yet only wax quieter and calmer.

The wenches kept Jeffreys occupied. Daniel sat and knew fear—not the abstract fear that he dutifully claimed to feel when preachers spoke of hellfire, but a genuine physical sensation, a taste in his mouth, a sense that at any moment, from any direction, a blade of French steel might invade his vitals and inaugurate a slow process of bleeding or festering to death. Why else would Jeffreys have led him to this den? It was a perfect place to get murdered.

The only way to get his mind off it was to talk to Roger Com-stock, who continued with strenuous but completely pointless efforts to ingratiate himself. He circled round one more time to the topic of John Comstock, with whom—it could not be said too many times—he had nothing in common. That he had it on good authority that the gunpowder turned out by Comstock’s mills was full of sand, and that it either failed entirely to explode, or else caused cannons to burst. Why everyone, save a few self-deluding Puritans, now understood that the defeat of the first King Charles had occurred not because Cromwell was such a great general, but because of the faulty powder that Comstock had supplied to the Cavaliers. Daniel—scared to death—was in no position to understand the genealogical distinctions between the so-called Silver and Golden Comstocks. The upshot was that Roger Comstock seemed, in some way, to want to be his friend, and was trying desperately hard to be just that, and indeed was the finest fellow that a fellow could possibly be, while still having spent the night dumping the corpse of a murder victim into a river.

The ringing of church-bells told them that the Justice of the Peace was probably finished with his breakfast of bread and wine. But Jeffreys, having made himself comfortable here, was in no hurry to leave. From time to time he would catch Daniel’s eye and stare at him, daring Daniel to stand up and head for the door. But Daniel was in no hurry, either. His mind was seeking an excuse for doing nothing.

The one that he settled on went something like this: Upnor would be Judged—for good—five years from now when Jesus came back. What was the point of having the secular authorities sit in judgment on him now? If England were still a holy nation, as it had been until recently, then prosecuting Louis Anglesey, Earl of Upnor, would have been a fitting exercise of her authority. But the King was back, England was Babylon, Daniel Waterhouse and the hapless Puritan who’d died last night were strangers in a strange land, like early Christians in pagan Rome, and Daniel would only dirty his hands by getting into some endless legal broil. Best to rise above the fray and keep his eye on the year sixteen hundred and sixty-six.

So it was back to the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity without saying a word to the Justice of the Peace. It had begun to rain. When Daniel reached the college, the grass had been washed clean.

THE DEAD MAN’S BODY was found two days later, tangled in some rushes half a mile down the Cam. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, a scholar of Hebrew and Aramaic who had been slightly acquainted with Drake. His friends went round making inquiries, but no one had seen a thing.

There was a rowdy funeral service in a primitive church that had been established in a barn five miles from Cambridge. Exactly five miles. For the Act of Uniformity stated, among other things, that Independents could not gather churches within five miles of any Established (i.e., Anglican) parish church, and so a lot of Puritans had been busy with compasses and maps lately, and a lot of bleak real estate had changed hands. Drake came up, and brought with him Daniel’s older half-brothers, Raleigh and Sterling. Hymns were sung and homilies delivered, affirming that the victim had gone on to his eternal reward. Daniel prayed, rather loudly, to be delivered from the seething den of reptiles that was Trinity College.

Then, of course, he had to suffer advice from his elders. First, Drake took him aside.

Drake had long ago adjusted to the loss of his nose and ears, but all he had to do was turn his face in Daniel’s direction to remind him that what he was going through at Trinity wasn’t so bad. So Daniel hardly took in a single word of what Drake said to him. But he gathered that it was something along the lines of that coming into one’s chambers every night to find a different whore, services already paid for, slumbering in one’s bed, constituted a severe temptation for a young man, and that Drake was all in favor of it—seeing it as a way to hold said young man’s feet to the eternal fire and find out what he was made of.

Implicit in all of this was that Daniel would pass the test. He could not bring himself to tell his father that he’d already failed it.

Second, Raleigh and Sterling took Daniel to an extremely rural alehouse on the way back into town and told him that he must be some kind of half-wit, not to mention an ingrate, if he was not in a state of bliss. Drake and his first clutch of sons had made a very large amount of money despite (come to think of it, because of ) religious persecution. Among that ilk, the entire point of going to Cambridge was to rub elbows with the fine and the mighty. The family had sent Daniel there, at great expense (as they never tired of reminding him), and if Daniel occasionally woke up to find the Duke of Monmouth passed out on top of him, it only meant that all of their dreams had come true.

Implicit was that Raleigh and Sterling did not believe that the world was coming to an end in 1666. If true, this meant that Daniel’s excuse for not ratting on Upnor was void.

The whole incident was then apparently forgotten by everyone at Trinity except Waterhouse and Jeffreys. Jeffreys ignored Daniel for the most part, but from time to time he would, for example, sit across from him and stare at him all through dinner, then pursue him across the lawn afterwards: “I can’t stop looking at you. You are fascinating, Mr. Waterhouse, a living and walking incarnation of cravenness. You saw a man murdered, and you did nothing about it. Your face glows like a hot branding-iron. I want to brand it into my memory so that as I grow old, I may look back upon it as a sort of Platonic ideal of cowardice.

“I’m going into law, you know. Were you aware that the emblem of justice is a scale? From a beam depend two pans. On one, what is being weighed—the accused party. On the other, a standard weight, a polished gold cylinder stamped with the assayer’s mark. You, Mr. Waterhouse, shall be the standard against which I will weigh all guilty cowards.

“What sort of Puritanical sophistry did you gin up, Mr. Waterhouse, to justify your inaction? Others like you got on a ship and sailed to Massachusetts so that they could be apart from us sinners, and live a pure life. I ween you are of the same mind, Mr. Waterhouse, but sailing on a ship across the North Atlantic is not for cowards, and so you are here. I think that you have withdrawn into a sort of Massachusetts of the mind! Your body’s here at Trinity, but your spirit has flown off to some sort of notional Plymouth Rock—when we sit at High Table, you phant’sy yourself in a wigwam ripping drumsticks from a turkey and chewing on Indian corn and making eyes at some redskinned Indian lass.”

THIS SORT OF THING LED to Daniel’s spending much time going for walks in Cambridge’s gardens and greens, where, if he chose his route carefully, he could stroll for a quarter of an hour without having to step over the body of an unconscious young scholar, or (in warmer weather) make apologies for having stumbled upon Mon-mouth, or one of his courtiers, copulating with a prostitute al fresco. More than once, he noticed another solitary young man strolling around the Backs. Daniel knew nothing of him—he had made no impression upon the College whatsoever. But once Daniel got in the habit of looking for him, he began to notice him here and there, skulking around the edges of University life. The boy was a sizar—a nobody from the provinces trying to escape from the lower class by taking holy orders and angling for a deaconage in some gale-chafed parish. He and the other sizars (such as Roger Comstock) could be seen descending on the dining-hall after the upper classes—pensioners (e.g., Daniel) and fellow-commoners (e.g., Monmouth and Upnor)—had departed, to forage among their scraps and clean up their mess.

Like a pair of comets drawn together, across a desolate void, by some mysterious action at a distance, they attracted each other across the greens and fells of Cambridge. Both were shy, and so early they would simply fall into parallel trajectories during their long strolls. But in time the lines converged. Isaac was pale as starlight, and so frail-looking that no one would’ve guessed he’d live as long as he had. His hair was exceptionally fair and already streaked with silver. He already had protruding pale eyes and a sharp nose. There was the sense of much going on inside his head, which he had not the slightest inclination to share with anyone else. But like Daniel, he was an alienated Puritan with a secret interest in natural philosophy, so naturally they fell in together.

They arranged a room swap. Another merchant’s son eagerly took Daniel’s place, viewing it as a move up the world’s ladder. The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity did not segregate the classes as rigidly as other colleges, so it was permitted for Isaac and Daniel to chum together. They shared a tiny room with a window looking out over the town—for Daniel, a great improvement over the courtyard view, so fraught with bloody memories. Musket-balls had been fired in through their window during the Civil War, and the bullet-holes were still in the ceiling.

Daniel learned that Isaac came from a family prosperous by Lincolnshire standards. His father had died before Newton was even born, leaving behind a middling yeoman’s legacy. His mother had soon married a more or less affluent cleric. She did not sound, from Isaac’s description, like a doting mum. She’d packed him off to school in a town called Grantham. Between her inheritance from the first marriage and what she’d acquired from the second, she easily could have sent him to Cambridge as a pensioner. But out of miserliness, or spite, or some hostility toward education in general, she’d sent him as a sizar instead—meaning that Isaac was obliged to serve as some other student’s boot-polisher and table-waiter. Isaac’s dear mother, unable to humiliate her son from a distance, had arranged it so that some other student—it didn’t matter which—would do it in her stead. In combination with that Newton was obviously far more brilliant than Daniel was, Daniel was uneasy with the arrangement. Daniel proposed that they make common cause, and pool what they had, and live together as equals.

To Daniel’s surprise, Isaac did not accept. He continued to perform sizar’s work, without complaint. By any measure, his life was much better now. They’d spend hours, days, in that chamber together, spending candles by the pound and ink by the quart, working their separate ways through Aristotle. It was the life that both of them had longed for. Even so, Daniel thought it strange that Isaac would help him in the mornings with his clothing, and devote a quarter of an hour, or more, to dressing his hair. Half a century later, Daniel could remember, without vanity, that he had been a handsome enough young man. His hair was thick and long, and Isaac learned that if he combed it in a particular way he could bring out a certain natural wave, up above Daniel’s forehead. He would not rest, every morning, until he had accomplished this. Daniel went along with it uneasily. Even then, Isaac had the air of a man who could be dangerous when offended, and Daniel sensed that if he declined, Isaac would not take it well.

So it went until one Whitsunday, when Daniel awoke to find Isaac gone. Daniel had gone to sleep well after midnight, Isaac as usual had stayed up later. The candles were all burned down to stubs. Daniel guessed Isaac was out emptying the chamber-pot, but he didn’t come back. Daniel went over to their little work-table to look for evidence, and found a sheet of paper on which Isaac had drawn a remarkably fine portrait of a sleeping youth. An angelic beauty. Daniel could not tell whether it was meant to be a boy or a girl. But carrying it to the window and looking at it in day-light, he noticed, above the youth’s brow, a detail in the hair. It served as the cryptological key that unlocked the message. Suddenly he recognized himself in that page. Not as he really was, but purified, beautified, perfected, as though by some alchemical refinement—the slag and dross raked away, the radiant spirit allowed to shine forth, like the Philosophick Mercury. It was a drawing of Daniel Waterhouse as he might have looked if he had gone to the Justice of the Peace and accused Upnor and been persecuted and suffered a Christlike death.

Daniel went down and eventually found Isaac bent and kneeling in the chapel, wracked with agony, praying desperately for the salvation of his immortal soul. Daniel could not but sympathize, though he knew too little of sin and too little of Isaac to guess what his friend might be repenting for. Daniel sat nearby and did a little praying of his own. In time, the pain and fear seemed to ebb away. The chapel filled up. A service was begun. They took out the Books of Common Prayer and turned to the page for Whitsunday. The priest intoned: “What is required of them who come to the Lord’s Supper?” They answered, “To examine themselves whether they repent of their former sins, steadfastly purporting to lead a new life.” Daniel watched Isaac’s face as he spoke this catechism and saw in it the same fervor that always lit up Drake’s mangled countenance when he really thought he was on to something. Both of them took communion. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Daniel watched Isaac change from a tortured wretch, literally writhing in spiritual pain, into a holy and purified saint. Having repented of their former sins—steadfastly purporting to lead new lives—they went back up to their chamber. Isaac pitched that drawing into the fire, opened up his note-book, and began to write. At the head of a blank page he wrote Sins committed before Whitsunday 1662 and then began writing out a list of every bad thing he’d ever done that he could remember, all the way back to his childhood: wishing that his stepfather was dead, beating up some boy at school, and so forth. He wrote all day and into the night. When he had exhausted himself he started up a new page entitled Since Whitsunday 1662 and left it, for the time being, blank.

Meanwhile, Daniel turned back to his Euclid. Jeffreys kept reminding him that he had failed at being a holy man. Jeffreys did this because he supposed it was a way of torturing Daniel the Puritan. In fact, Daniel had never wanted to be a preacher anyway, save insofar as he wanted to please his father. Ever since his meeting with Wilkins, he had wanted only to be a Natural Philosopher. Failing the moral test had freed him to be that, at a heavy price in self-loathing. If Natural Philosophy led him to eternal damnation, there was nothing he could do about it anyway, as Drake the predestinationist would be the first to affirm. An interval of years or even decades might separate Whitsunday 1662 and Daniel’s arrival at the gates of Hell. He reckoned he might as well fill that time with something he at least found interesting.

A month later, when Isaac was out of the room, Daniel opened up the note-book and turned to the page headed Since Whitsunday 1662. It was still blank.

He checked it again two months later. Nothing.

At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin.

This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments.