SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1688
Therefore it happeneth commonly, that such as value themselves by the greatness of their wealth, adventure on crimes, upon hope of escaping punishment, by corrupting public justice, or obtaining pardon by money, or other rewards.
—HOBBES, Leviathan
Now as England was a country of fixed ways, they imprisoned him in the same chamber where they had put Oldenburg twenty years before.
But some things changed even in England; James II was peevish and fitful where his older brother had been merry, and so Daniel was kept closer than Oldenburg had been, and allowed to leave the chamber to stroll upon the walls only rarely. He spent all his time in that round room, encircled by the eldritch glyphs that had been scratched into the stone by condemned alchemists and sorcerers of yore, and pathetic Latin plaints graven by Papists under Elizabeth.
Twenty years ago he and Oldenburg had made idle jests about carving new graffiti in the Universal Character of John Wilkins. The words he had exchanged with Oldenburg still seemed to echo around the room, as if the stone were a telescope mirror that forever recurved all information towards the center. The idea of the Universal Character now seemed queer and naïve to Daniel, and so it didn’t enter his mind to begin scratching at the stone for the first fortnight or so of his imprisonment. He reckoned that it would take a long time to make any lasting mark, and he assumed he would not live long enough. Jeffreys could only have put him in here to kill him, and when Jeffreys set his mind to killing someone there was no stopping him, he did it the way a farmer’s wife plucked a chicken. But no specific judicial proceedings were underway—a sign that this was not to be a judicial murder (meaning a stately and more or less predictable one), but the other kind.
It was marvelously quiet at the Tower of London, the Mint being shut down at the moment, and people never came to visit him, and this was good—rarely was a murder victim afforded such an opportunity to get his spiritual house in order. Puritans did not go to confession or have a special sacrament before dying, as Papists did, but even so, Daniel supposed there must be a bit of tidying-up he could do, in the dusty corners of his soul, before the men with the daggers came.
So he spent a while searching his soul, and found nothing there. It was as sparse and void as a sacked cathedral. He did not have a wife or children. He lusted after Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, but something about being locked up in this round room made him realize that she neither lusted after nor particularly liked him. He did not have a career to speak of, because he was a contemporary of Hooke, Newton, and Leibniz, and therefore predestined for rôles such as scribe, amanuensis, sounding-board, errand-boy. His thorough training for the Apocalypse had proved a waste, and he had gamely tried to redirect his skills and his energies towards the shaping of a secular Apocalypse, which he styled Revolution. But prospects for such a thing looked unfavorable at the moment. Scratching something on the wall might enable him to make a permanent mark on the world, but he would not have time.
All in all, his epitaph would be: DANIEL WATERHOUSE 1646-1688 SON OF DRAKE. It might have made an ordinary man just a bit melancholy, this, but something about its very bleakness appealed to the spirit of a Puritan and the mind of a Natural Philosopher. Suppose he’d had twelve children, written a hundred books, and taken towns and cities from the Turks, and had statues of himself all over, and then been clapped in the Tower to have his throat cut? Would matters then stand differently? Or would these be meaningless distractions, a clutter of vanity, empty glamour, false consolation?
Souls were created somehow, and placed in bodies, which lived for more or fewer years, and after that all was faith and speculation. Perhaps after death was nothing. But if there was something, then Daniel couldn’t believe it had anything to do with the earthly things that the body had done—the children it had spawned, the gold it had hoarded—except insofar as those things altered one’s soul, one’s state of consciousness.
Thus he convinced himself that having lived a bleak spare life had left his soul no worse off than anyone else’s. Having children, for example, might have changed him, but only by providing insights that would have made it easier, or more likely, to have accomplished some internal change, some transfiguration of the spirit. Whatever growth or change occurred in one’s soul had to be internal, like the metamorphoses that went on inside of cocoons, seeds, and eggs. External conditions might help or hinder those changes, but could not be strictly necessary. Otherwise it simply was not fair, did not make sense. Because in the end every soul, be it never so engaged in the world, was like Daniel Waterhouse, alone in a round room in a stone tower, and receiving impressions from the world through a few narrow embrasures.
Or so he told himself; either he would be murdered soon, and learn whether he was right or wrong, or be spared and left to wonder about it.
On the twentieth day of his imprisonment, which Daniel reckoned to be August 17th, 1688, the perceptions coming in through his embrasures were of furious argument and wholesale change. The soldiers he’d been glimpsing out in the yard were gone, replaced by others, in different uniforms. They looked like the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, but that couldn’t be, for they were a household regiment, stationed at Whitehall Palace, and Daniel couldn’t imagine why they would be uprooted from their quarters there and moved miles down-river to the Tower of London.
Unfamiliar men came to empty his chamber-pot and bring him food—better food than he’d become accustomed to. Daniel asked them questions. Speaking in Dorsetshire accents, they said that they were indeed the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and that the food they were bringing him had been piling up for quite some time in a porter’s lodge. Daniel’s friends had been bringing it. But the men who’d been running the Tower until yesterday—a distinctly inferior foot regiment—had not been delivering it.
Daniel then moved on to questions of a more challenging nature and the men stopped supplying answers, even after he shared a few oysters with them. When he became insistent, they allowed as how they would relay his questions to their sergeant, who (as they warned him) was very busy just now, taking an inventory of the prisoners and of the Tower’s defenses.
It was two days before the sergeant came to call on Daniel. They were trying days. For just when Daniel had convinced himself that his soul was a disembodied consciousness in a stone tower, perceiving the world through narrow slits, he had been given oysters. They were of the best: Roger Comstock had sent them. They made his body happy when he ate them, and affected his soul much more than seemed proper, for a disembodied consciousness. Either his theory was wrong, or the seductions of the world were more powerful than he’d remembered. When Tess had got the smallpox she’d got it bad, and the pustules had all joined together and her whole skin had fallen off, and her guts had shot out of her anus into a bloody pile on the bed. After that she had somehow remained alive for a full ten and a half hours. Considering the carnal pleasures she had brought him during the years she’d been his mistress, Daniel had taken this the same way Drake would’ve: as a cautionary parable about fleshly delights. Better to perceive the world as Tess had during those ten and a half hours than as Daniel had while he’d been fucking her. But the oysters were extraordinarily good, their flavor intense and vaguely dangerous, their consistency clearly sexual.
Daniel shared some with the sergeant, who agreed that they were extraordinary but had little else to say—most of Daniel’s questions caused him to go shifty-eyed, and some even made him cringe. Finally he agreed to take the matter up with his sergeant, giving Daniel a nightmare vision of some endless regression of sergeants, each more senior and harder to reach than the last.
Robert Hooke showed up with a firkin of ale. Daniel assaulted it in much the same way as the murderers would him. “I was apprehensive that you would spurn my gift, and pour it into the Thames,” Hooke said irritably, “but I see that the privations of the Tower have turned you into a veritable satyr.”
“I am developing a new theory of bodily perceptions, and their intercourse with the soul, and this is research,” said Daniel, quaffing vigorously. He huffed ale-foam out of his whiskers (he’d not shaved in weeks) and tried to adopt a searching look. “Being condemned to die is a mighty stimulus to philosophick ratiocination, all of which is however wasted at the instant the sentence is carried out—fortunately I’ve been spared—”
“So that you may pass on your insights to me,” Hooke finished dourly. Then, with ponderous tact: “My memory has become faulty, pray just write it all down.”
“They won’t allow me pen and paper.”
“Have you asked again recently? They would not allow me, or anyone, to visit you until today. But with the new regiment, a new regimen.”
“I’ve been scratching on yonder wall instead,” Daniel announced, waving at the beginnings of a geometric diagram.
Hooke’s gray eyes regarded it bleakly. “I spied it when I came in,” he confessed, “and supposed ‘twas something very ancient and time-worn. Very recent and in progress would never have crossed my mind.”
Daniel was flummoxed for a few moments—just long enough for his pulse to rouse, his face to flush, and his vocal cords to constrict. “It is difficult not to take that as a rebuke,” he said. “I am merely trying to see if I can reconstruct one of Newton’s proofs from memory.”
Hooke looked away. The sun had gone down a few minutes ago. A westerly embrasure reflected in his eyes as an identical pair of vertical red slits. “It is a perfectly defensible practice,” he admitted. “If I’d spent more of my youth learning geometers’ tricks and less of it looking at things, and learning how to see, perhaps I’d have written the Principia instead of him.”
This was an appalling thing to say. Envy was common as pipe-smoke at Royal Society meetings, but to voice it so baldly was rare. But then Hooke had never cared, or even noticed, what people thought of him.
It took a few moments for Daniel to collect himself, and to give Hooke’s utterance the ceremonial silence it demanded. Then he said, “Leibniz has much to say on the subject of perceptions which I have but little understood until recently. And you may love Leibniz or not. But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well—what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So, all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind. Now, consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert—by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men who’ve not perceived a thousandth part of what you have. Newton makes his discoveries in geometrickal realms where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you, Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London. Anyone can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things you see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ‘tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword-fights.”
Hooke was silent for a time. The room had gone darker, and he’d faded to a gray ghost, that vivid pair of red sparks still marking his eyes. After a while, he sighed, and the sparks winked out for a few moments.
“I shall have to fetch you quill and paper, if this is to be the nature of your discourse, sir,” he said finally.
“I am certain that in the fullness of time, the opinion I have just voiced will be wide spread among learned persons,” Daniel said. “This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. There is no reason why I should conceal my opinions. But I warn you that I may express them all I like without bringing you fame or fortune.”
“It is enough you’ve expressed them to me in the aweful privacy of this chamber, sir,” Hooke returned. “I declare that I am indebted to you, and will repay that debt one day, by giving you something of incalculable value when you least expect it. A pearl of great price.”
LOOKING AT THE MASTER SERGANT made Daniel feel old. From the way that lower ranks had alluded to this man, Daniel had expected some sort of graybearded multiple amputee. But under the scars and weathering was a man probably no more than thirty years of age. He entered Daniel’s chamber without knocking or introducing himself, and inspected it as if he owned the place, taking particular care to learn the field of fire commanded by each of its embrasures. Moving sideways past each of those slits, he seemed to envision a fan-shaped territory of dead enemies spread across the ground beyond.
“Are you expecting to fight a war, sergeant?” said Daniel, who’d been scratching at some paper with a quill and casting only furtive dart-like glances at the sergeant.
“Are you expecting to start one?” the sergeant answered a minute later, as if in no especial hurry to respond.
“Why do you ask me such an odd question?”
“I am trying to conjure up some understanding of how a Puritan gets himself clapped in Tower just now, at a time when the only friends the King has are Puritans.”
“You have forgotten the Catholics.”
“No, sir, the King has forgotten ‘em. Much has changed since you were locked up. First he locked up the Anglican bishops for refusing to preach toleration of Catholics and Dissenters.”
“I know that much—I was a free man at the time,” Daniel said.
“But the whole country was like to rise up in rebellion, Catholic churches were being put to the torch just for sport, and so he let ‘em go, just to quiet things down.”
“But that is very different from forgetting the Catholics, sergeant.”
“Ah but since—since you’ve been immured here—why, the King has begun to fall apart.”
“So far I’ve learned nothing remarkable, sergeant, other than that there is a sergeant in the King’s service who actually knows how to use the word ‘immured.’ ”
“You see, no one believes his son is really his son—that’s what has him resting so uneasy.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Why, the story’s gotten out that the Queen was never pregnant at all—just parading around with pillows stuffed under her dress—and that the so-called Prince is just a common babe snatched from an orphanage somewhere, and smuggled into the birth-chamber inside a warming-pan.”
Daniel contemplated this, dumbfounded. “I saw the baby emerge from the Queen’s vagina with my own eyes,” he said.
“Hold on to that memory, Professor, for it may keep you alive. No one in England thinks the child is anything but a base smuggled-in changeling. And so the King is retreating on every front now. Consequently the Anglicans no longer fear him, while the Papists cry that he has abandoned the only true faith.”
Daniel pondered. “The King wanted Cambridge to grant a degree to a Benedictine monk named Father Francis, who was viewed, around Cambridge, as a sort of stalking-horse for the Pope of Rome,” he said. “Any news of him?”
“The King tried to insinuate Jesuits and such-like everywhere,” said the sergeant, “but has withdrawn a good many of ‘em in the last fortnight. I’d wager Cambridge can stand down, for the King’s power is ebbing—ebbing halfway to France.”
Daniel now went silent for a while. Finally the sergeant resumed speaking, in a lower, more sociable tone: “I am not learned, but I’ve been to many plays, which is where I picked up words like ‘immured,’ and it oftimes happens—especially in your newer plays—that a player will forget his next line, and you’ll hear a spear-carrier or lutenist muttering ‘im a prompt. And in that spirit, I’ll now supply you with your next line, sir: something like ‘My word, these are disastrous tidings, my King, a true friend to all Nonconformists, is in trouble, what shall become of us, how can I be of service to his Majesty?’”
Daniel said nothing. The sergeant seemed to have become provoked, and could not now contain himself from prowling and pacing around the room, as if Daniel were a specimen about whom more could be learned by peering at it from diverse angles. “On the other hand, perhaps you are not a run-of-the-mill Nonconformist, for you are in the Tower, sir.”
“As are you, sergeant.”
“I have a key.”
“Poh! Do you have permission to leave?”
This shut him up for a while. “Our commander is John Churchill,” he said finally, trying a new tack. “The King no longer entirely trusts him.”
“I was wondering when the King would begin to doubt Churchill’s loyalty.”
“He needs us close, as we are his best men—yet not so close as the Horse Guards, hard by Whitehall Palace, within musket-shot of his apartments.”
“And so you have been moved to the Tower for safe-keeping.”
“You’ve got mail,” said the sergeant, and flung a letter onto the table in front of Daniel. It bore the address: GRUBENDOL LONDON.
It was from Leibniz.
“It is for you, isn’t it? Don’t bother denying it, I can see it from the look on your face,” the sergeant continued. “We had a devil of a time working out who it was supposed to be given to.”
“It is intended for whichever officer of the Royal Society is currently charged with handling foreign correspondence,” Daniel said indignantly, “and at the moment, that is my honor.”
“You’re the one, aren’t you? You’re the one who conveyed certain letters to William of Orange.”
“There is no incentive for me to supply an answer to that question,” said Daniel after a brief interval of being too appalled to speak.
“Answer this then: do you have friends named Bob Carver and Dick Gripp?”
“That’s funny, for we have come upon a page of written instructions, left with the warder, saying that you’re to be allowed no visitors at all, except for Bob Carver and Dick Gripp, who may show up at the oddest hours.”
“I do not know them,” Daniel insisted, “and I beg you not to let them into this chamber under any circumstances.”
“That’s begging a lot, Professor, for the instructions are written out in my lord Jeffreys’s own hand, and signed by the same.”
“Then you must know as well as I do that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp are just murderers.”
“What I know is that my lord Jeffreys is Lord Chancellor, and to disobey his command is an act of rebellion.”
“Then I ask you to rebel.”
“You first,” said the sergeant.
Hanover, August 1688
Dear Daniel,
I haven’t the faintest idea where you are, so I will send this to good old GRUBENDOL and pray that it finds you in good health.
Soon I depart on a long journey to Italy, where I expect to gather evidence that will sweep away any remaining cobwebs of doubt that may cling to Sophie’s family tree. You must think me a fool to devote so much effort to genealogy, but be patient and you’ll see there are good reasons for it. I’ll pass through Vienna along the way, and, God willing, obtain an audience with the Emperor and tell him of my plans for the Universal Library (the silver-mining project in the Harz has failed—not because there was anything wrong with my inventions, but because the miners feared that they would be thrown out of work, and resisted me in every imaginable way—and so if the Library is to be funded, it will not be from silver mines, but from the coffers of some great Prince).
There is danger in any journey and so I wanted to write down some things and send them to you before leaving Hanover. These are fresh ideas—green apples that would give a stomach-ache to any erudite person who consumed them. On my journey I shall have many hours to recast them in phrasings more pious (to placate the Jesuits), pompous (to impress the scholastics), or simple (to flatter the salons), but I trust you will forgive me for writing in a way that is informal and plain-spoken. If I should meet with some misfortune along the way, perhaps you or some future Fellow of the Royal Society may pick up the thread where I’ve dropped it.
Looking about us we can easily perceive diverse Truths, viz. that the sky is blue, the moon round, that humans walk on two legs and dogs on four, and so on. Some of those truths are brute and geometrickal in nature, there is no imaginable way to avoid them, for example that the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line. Until Descartes, everyone supposed that such truths were few in number, and that Euclid and the other ancients had found almost all of them. But when Descartes began his project, we all got into the habit of mapping things into a space that could be described by numbers. We now cross two of Descartes’ number-lines at right angles to define a coordinate plane, to which we have given the name Cartesian coordinates, and this conceit appears to be catching on, for one can hardly step into a lecture-room anywhere without seeing some professor drawing a great + on the slate. At any rate, when we all got into the habit of describing the size and position and speed of everything in the world using numbers, lines, curves, and other constructions that are familiar, to erudite men, from Euclid, I say, then it became a sort of vogue to try to explain all of the truths in the universe by geometry. I myself can remember the very moment that I was seduced by this way of thinking: I was fourteen years old, and was wandering around in the Rosenthal outside of Leipzig, ostensibly to smell the blooms but really to prosecute a sort of internal debate in my own mind, between the old ways of the Scholastics and the Mechanical Philosophy of Descartes. As you know I decided in favor of the latter! And I have not ceased to study mathematics since.
Descartes himself studied the way balls move and collide, how they gather speed as they go down ramps, et cetera, and tried to explain all of his data in terms of a theory that was purely geometrical in nature. The result of his lucubrations was classically French in that it did not square with reality but it was very beautiful, and logically coherent. Since then our friends Huygens and Wren have expended more toil towards the same end. But I need hardly tell you that it is Newton, far beyond all others, who has vastly expanded the realm of truths that are geometrickal in nature. I truly believe that if Euclid and Eratosthenes could be brought back to life they would prostrate themselves at his feet and (pagans that they were) worship him as a god. For their geometry treated mostly simple abstract shapes, lines in the sand, while Newton’s lays down the laws that govern the very planets.
I have read the copy of Principia Mathematica that you so kindly sent me, and I know better than to imagine I will find any faults in the author’s proofs, or extend his work into any realm he has not already conquered. It has the feel of something finished and complete. It is like a dome—if it were not whole, it would not stand, and because it is whole, and does stand, there’s no point trying to add things on to it.
And yet its very completeness signals that there is more work to be done. I believe that the great edifice of the Principia Mathematica encloses nearly all of the geometrickal truths that can possibly be written down about the world. But every dome, be it never so large, has an inside and an outside, and while Newton’s dome encloses all of the geometrickal truths, it excludes the other kind: truths that have their sources in fitness and in final causes. When Newton encounters such a truth—such as the inverse square law of gravity—he does not even consider trying to understand it, but instead says that the world simply is this way, because that is how God made it. To his way of thinking, any truths of this nature lie outside the realm of Natural Philosophy and belong instead to a realm he thinks is best approached through the study of alchemy.
Let me tell you why Newton is wrong.
I have been trying to salvage something of value from Descartes’ geometrickal theory of collisions and have found it utterly devoid of worth.
Descartes holds that when two bodies collide, they should have the same quantity of motion after the collision as they had before. Why does he believe this? Because of empirical observations? No, for apparently he did not make any. Or if he did, he saw only what he wanted to see. He believes it because he has made up his mind in advance that his theory must be geometrickal, and geometry is an austere discipline—there are only certain quantities a geometer is allowed to measure and to write down in his equations. Chief among these is extension, a pompous term for “anything that can be measured with a ruler.” Descartes and most others allow time, too, because you can measure time with a pendulum, and you can measure the pendulum with a ruler. The distance a body travels (which can be measured with a ruler) divided by the time it took covering it (which can be measured with a pendulum, which can be measured with a ruler) gives speed. Speed figures into Descartes’ calculation of Quantity of Motion—the more speed, the more motion.
Well enough so far, but then he got it all wrong by treating Quantity of Motion as if it were a scalar, a simple directionless number, when in fact is is a vector. But that is a minor lapse. There is plenty of room for vectors in a system with two orthogonal axes, we simply plot them as arrows on what I call the Cartesian plane, and lo, we have geometrickal constructs that obey geometrickal rules. We can add their components geometrickally, reckon their magnitudes with the Pythagorean Theorem, &c.
But there are two problems with this approach. One is relativity. Rulers move. There is no fixed frame of reference for measuring extension. A geometer on a moving canal-boat who tries to measure the speed of a flying bird will get a different number from a geometer on the shore; and a geometer riding on the bird’s back would measure no speed at all!
Secondly: the Cartesian Quantity of Motion, mass multiplied by velocity (mv), is not conserved by falling bodies. And yet by doing, or even imagining, a very simple experiment, you can demonstrate that mass multiplied by the square of velocity (mv2) is conserved by such bodies.
This quantity mv2 has certain properties of interest. For one, it measures the amount of work that a moving body is capable of doing. Work is something that has an absolute meaning, it is free from the problem of relativity that I mentioned a moment ago, a problem unavoidably shared by all theories that are founded upon the use of rulers. In the expression mv2 the velocity is squared, which means that it has lost its direction, and no longer has a geometrickal meaning. While mv may be plotted on the Cartesian plane and subjected to all the tricks and techniques of Euclid, mv2 may not be, because in being squared the velocity v has lost its directionality and, if I may wax metaphysical, transcended the geometrickal plane and gone into a new realm, the realm of Algebra. This quantity mv2 is scrupulously conserved by Nature, and its conservation may in fact be considered a law of the universe—but it is outside Geometry, and excluded from the dome that Newton has built, it is another contingent, non-geometrickal truth, one of many that have been discovered, or will be, by Natural Philosophers. Shall we then say, like Newton, that all such truths are made arbitrarily by God? Shall we seek such truths in the occult? For if God has laid these rules down arbitrarily, then they are occult by nature.
To me this notion is offensive; it seems to cast God in the rôle of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us. In some things, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, God may not have had any choice when He created the world. In others, such as the inverse square law of gravity, He may have had choices; but in such cases, I like to believe he would have chosen wisely and according to some coherent plan that our minds—insofar as they are in God’s image—are capable of understanding.
Unlike the Alchemists, who see angels, demons, miracles, and divine essences everywhere, I recognize nothing in the world but bodies and minds. And nothing in bodies but certain observable quantities such as magnitude, figure, situation, and changes in these. Everything else is merely said, not understood; it is sounds without meaning. Nor can anything in the world be understood clearly unless it is reduced to these. Unless physical things can be explained by mechanical laws, God cannot, even if He chooses, reveal and explain nature to us.
I am likely to spend the rest of my life explaining these ideas to those who will listen, and defending them from those who won’t, and anything you hear from me henceforth should probably be viewed in that light, Daniel. If the Royal Society seems inclined to burn me in effigy, please try to explain to them that I am trying to extend the work that Newton has done, not to tear it down.
Leibniz
P.S. I know the woman Eliza (de la Zeur, now) whom you mentioned in your most recent letter. She seems to be attracted to Natural Philosophers. It is a strange trait in a woman, but who are we to complain?
“DR. WATERHOUSE.”
“Sergeant Shaftoe.”
“Your visitors have arrived—Mr. Bob Carver and Mr. Dick Gripp.”
Daniel rose from his bed; he had never come awake so fast. “Please, I beg you, Sergeant, do not—” he began, but he stopped there, for it had occurred to him that perhaps Sergeant Shaftoe’s mind was already made up, the deed was all but done, and that Daniel was merely groveling. He got to his feet and shuffled over the wooden floor towards Bob Shaftoe’s face and his candle, which hung in darkness like a poorly resolved binary star: the face a dim reddish blob, the flame a burning white point. The blood dropped from Daniel’s head and he tottered, but did not hesitate. He’d be nothing more than a bleating voice in the darkness until he entered the globe of light balanced on that flame; if Bob Shaftoe had thoughts of letting the murderers into this room, let him look full on Daniel’s face first. The brilliance of the light was governed by an inverse square law, just like gravity.
Shaftoe’s face finally came into focus. He looked a little sea-sick. “I’m not such a black-hearted bastard as’d admit a pair of hired killers to spit a helpless professor. There is only one man alive whom I hate enough to wish such an end on him.”
“Thank you,” Daniel said, drawing close enough now that he could feel the candle’s faint warmth on his face.
Shaftoe noticed something, turned sideways to Daniel, and cleared his throat. This was not your delicate pretentious upper-class ’hem but an honest and legitimate bid to dislodge an actual phlegm-ball that had sprung into his gorge.
“You’ve noticed me pissing myself, haven’t you?” Daniel said. “You imagine that it’s your fault—that you put such a terror into me, just now, that I could not hold my urine. Well, you did have me going, it is true, but that’s not why piss is running down my leg. I have the stone, Sergeant, and cannot make water at times of my own choosing, but rather I leak and seep like a keg that wants caulking.”
Bob Shaftoe nodded and looked to have been somewhat relieved of his burden of guilt. “How long d’you have then?”
He asked the question so offhandedly that Daniel did not get it for a few moments. “Oh—you mean, to live?” The Sergeant nodded. “Pardon me, Sergeant Shaftoe, I forget that your profession has put you on such intimate terms with death that you speak of it as sea-captains speak of wind. How long have I? Perhaps a year.”
“You could have it cut out.”
“I have seen men cut for the stone, Sergeant, and I’ll take death, thank you very much. I’ll wager it is worse than anything you may have witnessed on a battlefield. No, I shall follow the example of my mentor, John Wilkins.”
“Men have been cut for the stone, and lived, have they not?”
“Mr. Pepys was cut nigh on thirty years ago, and lives still.”
“He walks? Talks? Makes water?”
“Indeed, Sergeant Shaftoe.”
“Then, by your leave, Dr. Waterhouse, being cut for the stone is not worse than anything I have seen on battlefields.”
“Do you know how the operation is performed, Sergeant? The incision is made through the perineum, which is that tender place between your scrotum and your anus—”
“If it comes down to swapping blood-curdling tales, Dr. Waterhouse, we shall be here until this candle has burnt down, and all to no purpose; and if you really intend to die of the stone, you oughtn’t to be wasting that much time.”
“There is nothing to do, here, but waste time.”
“That is where you are wrong, Dr. Waterhouse, for I have a lively sort of proposition to make you. We are going to help each other, you and I.”
“You want money in exchange for keeping Jeffreys’s murderers out of my chamber?”
“That’s what I should want, were I a base, craven toad,” Bob Shaftoe said. “And if you keep mistaking me for that sort, why, perhaps I shall let Bob and Dick in here.”
“Please forgive me, Sergeant. You are right in being angry with me. It is only that I cannot imagine what sort of transaction you and I could…”
“Did you see that fellow being whipped, just before sundown? He would’ve been visible to you out in the dry-moat, through yonder arrow-slit.”
Daniel remembered it well enough. Three soldiers had gone out, carrying their pikes, and lashed them together close to their points, and spread their butts apart to form a tripod. A man had been led out shirtless, his hands tied together in front of him, and the rope had then been thrown over the lashing where the pikes were joined, and drawn tight so that his arms were stretched out above his head. Finally his ankles had been spread apart and lashed fast to the pikes to either side of him, rendering him perfectly immobile, and then a large man had come out with a whip, and used it. All in all it was a common rite around military camps, and went a long way towards explaining why people of means tried to live as far away from barracks as possible.
“I did not observe it closely,” Daniel said, “I am familiar with the general procedure.”
“You might’ve watched more carefully had you known that the man being whipped calls himself Mr. Dick Gripp.”
Daniel was at a loss for words.
“They came for you last night,” said Bob Shaftoe. “I had them clapped into separate cells while I decided what to do with ’em. Talked to ’em separately, and all they gave me was a deal of hot talk. Now. Some men are entitled to talk that way, they have been ennobled, in a sense, by their deeds and the things they have lived through. I did not think that Bob Carver and Dick Gripp were men of that kind. Others may be suffered to talk that way simply because they entertain the rest of us. I once had a brother who was like that. But not Bob and Dick. Unfortunately I am not a magistrate and have no power to throw men in prison, compel them to answer questions, et cetera. On the other hand, I am a sergeant, and have the power to recruit men into the King’s service. As Bob and Dick were clearly idle fellows, I recruited them into the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards on the spot. In the next instant, I perceived that I’d made a mistake, for these two were discipline problems, and wanted chastisement. Using the oldest trick in the book, I had Dick—who struck me as the better man—whipped directly in front of Bob Carver’s cell window. Now Dick is a strong bloke, he is unbowed, and I may keep him in the regiment. But Bob feels about his chastisement—which is scheduled for dawn—the same way you feel about being cut for the stone. So an hour ago he woke up his guards, and they woke me, and I went and had a chat with Mr. Carver.”
“Sergeant, you are so industrious that I almost cannot follow everything you are about.”
“He told me that Jeffreys personally ordered him and Mr. Gripp to cut your throat. That they were to do it slow-like, and that they were to explain to you, while you lay dying, that it had been done by Jeffreys.”
“It is what I expected,” Daniel said, “and yet to hear it set out in plain words leaves me dizzy.”
“Then I shall wait for you to get your wits back. More to the point, I shall wait for you to become angry. Forgive me for presuming to instruct a fellow of your erudition, but at a moment like this, you are supposed to be angry.”
“It is a very odd thing about Jeffreys that he can treat people abominably and never make them angry. He influences his victims’ minds strangely, like a glass rod bending a stream of water, so that we feel we deserve it.”
“You have known him a long time.”
“I have.”
“Let’s kill him.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Slay, murder. Let us bring about his death, so he won’t plague you any more.”
Daniel was shocked. “It is an extremely fanciful idea—”
“Not in the least. And there is something in your tone of voice that tells me you like it.”
“Why do you say ‘we’? You have no part in my problems.”
“You are high up in the Royal Society.”
“Yes.”
“You know many Alchemists.”
“I wish I could deny it.”
“You know my lord Upnor.”
“I do. I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jeffreys.”
“Upnor owns my lady love.”
“I beg your pardon—did you say he owns her?”
“Yes—Jeffreys sold her to him during the Bloody Assizes.”
“Taunton—your love is one of the Taunton schoolgirls!”
“Just so.”
Daniel was fascinated. “You are proposing some sort of pact.”
“You and I’ll rid the world of Jeffreys and Upnor. I’ll have my Abigail and you’ll live your last year, or whatever time God affords you, in peace.”
“I do not mean to quail and fret, Sergeant—”
“Go ahead! My men do it all the time.”
“—but may I remind you that Jeffreys is the Lord Chancellor of the Realm?”
“Not for long,” Shaftoe answered.
“How do you know?”
“He’s as much as admitted it, by his actions! You were thrown in Tower why?”
“For acting as go-between to William of Orange.”
“Why, that is treason—you should’ve been half-hanged, drawn, and quartered for it! But you were kept alive why?”
“Because I am a witness to the birth of the Prince, and as such, may be useful in attesting to the legitimacy of the next King.”
“If Jeffreys has now decided to kill you, what does that signify then?”
“That he is giving up on the King—my God, on the entire dynasty—and getting ready to flee. Yes, I understand your reasoning now, thank you for being so patient with me.”
“Mind you, I’m not asking you to take up arms, or do anything else that ill suits you.”
“Some would take offense at that, Sergeant, but—”
“E’en though my chief grievance may lie with Upnor, the first cause of it was Jeffreys, and I would not hesitate to swing my spadroon, if he should chance to show me his neck.”
“Save it for Upnor,” Daniel said, after a brief pause to make up his mind. In truth, he’d long since made it up; but he wanted to put on a show of thinking about it, so that Bob Shaftoe would not view him as a man who took such things lightly.
“You’re with me, then.”
“Not so much that I am with you as that we are with most of England, and England with us. You speak of putting Jeffreys to death with the strength of your right arm. Yet I tell you that if we must rely on your arm, strong as it is, we would fail. But if, as I believe, England is with us, why, then we need do no more than find him and say in a clear voice, ‘This fellow here is my lord Jeffreys,’ and his death will follow as if by natural law, like a ball rolling down a ramp. This is what I mean when I speak of revolution.”
“Is that a French way of saying ‘rebellion’?”
“No, rebellion is what the Duke of Monmouth did, it is a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it.”
“Then I’d best go find a man of discrimination,” muttered Bob Shaftoe, “and stop wasting the night with a hapless wretch.”
“I simply have not understood, until now, how I might benefit from the revolution. I have done all for England, naught for myself, and I have lacked any organizing principle by which to shape my plans. Never would I have dared to imagine I might strike Jeffreys down!”
“As a mudlark, Vagabond soldier, I am always at your service, to be a bringer of base, murderous thoughts,” said Bob Shaftoe.
Daniel had receded to the outer fringes of the light and worried a candle out of a bottle on his writing-table. He hustled back and lit it from Bob’s candle.
Bob remarked, “I’ve seen lords die on battlefields—not as often as I’d prefer, mind you—but enough to know it’s not like in paintings.”
“Paintings?”
“You know, where Victory comes down on a sunbeam with her tits hanging out of her frock, waving a laurel for said dying lord’s brow, and the Virgin Mary slides down on another to—”
“Oh, yes. Those paintings. Yes, I believe what you say.” Daniel had been working his way along the curving wall of the Tower, holding the candle close to the stone, so that its glancing light would deepen the scratchings made there by prisoners over the centuries. He stopped before a new one, a half-finished complex of arcs and rays that cut through older graffiti.
“I do not think I shall finish this proof,” he announced, after gazing at it for a few moments.
“We’ll not leave tonight. You shall likely have a week—maybe more. So there’s no cause for breaking off work on whatever that is.”
“It is an ancient thing that used to make sense, but now it has been turned upside-down, and seems only a queer, jumbled bag of notions. Let it bide here with the other old things,” Daniel said.