1672
The Inquisitive Jesuit RICCIOLI has taken great pains by 77 Arguments to overthrow the Copernican Hypothesis…I believe this one Discovery will answer them, and 77 more, if so many can be thought of and produced against it.
—ROBERT HOOKE
DANIEL SPENT A GOOD PART of two months on the roof of Gresham’s College, working on a hole—making, not mending, one. Hooke could not do it because his vertigo had been acting up, and if it struck while he was on top of the College, he would plunge to the ground like a wormy apple from a tree, his Last Experiment a study into the mysterious power of Gravitation.
For a man who claimed to hate the appearance of sharp things when viewed under a microscope, Hooke spent a great deal of time honing jabs at Inquisitive Jesuits. While Daniel was up on the roof making the hole, and a rain-hatch to cover it, Hooke was safe at ground level, running up and down a gallery. Strapped into his groin was a narrow hard saddle, and projecting from the saddle a strut with a wheel on the end, geared to a clock-work dial: a pedometer of his own design, which enabled him to calculate how much distance he had covered going nowhere. The purpose—as he explained to Daniel and diverse other aghast Fellows of the R.S.—was not to get from point A to point B, but to sweat. In some way, sweating would purge his body of whatever caused his headaches, nausea, and vertigo. From time to time, he would stop and refresh himself by drinking a glass of elemental mercury. He had set up a table at one end of the gallery where he stockpiled that and several of Mons. LeFebure’s fashionable medicines. There were various sorts of quills, too. Some of them he used to tickle the back of his throat and induce vomiting, others he sharpened, dipped in ink, and used to note down data from his pedometer, or to vent his spleen at Jesuits who refused to admit that the Earth revolved around the Sun, or to sketch out plans for Bedlam, or to write diatribes against Oldenburg, or simply to transact the routine business of the City Surveyor.
The Inquisitive Jesuit Riccioli had pointed out that if the heavens were sown with stars, some near and some far, and if the Earth were looping round the Sun in a vast ellipse, then the positions of those stars with respect to one another should shift during the course of the year, as trees in a forest changed their relative positions in the eyes of a traveler moving past. But no such parallax had been observed, which proved (to Riccioli, anyway) that the Earth must be fixed in the center of the Universe. To Hooke it only proved that good enough telescopes hadn’t been built, nor precise enough measurements made. To obtain the level of magnification he needed, he had to construct a telescope 32 feet long. To annull the light-bending effects of the Earth’s atmosphere (which were obvious from the fact that the Sun became an oval when it rose or set), he had to aim it straight up—hence the demand for a vertical shaft to be bored through Gresham’s College. Gresham’s antique mansion was now like an ancient plaster wall that had been mended so many times it consisted entirely of interlocked patches. It was solid scar tissue. This made the work more interesting for Daniel, and taught him more than he’d ever cared to know about how buildings were put up, and what kept them from falling down.
The goal was to gaze straight up into Heaven, and count the miles to the nearest stars. But as Daniel did most of the work during the daytime, he spent most of his idle moments looking down into London—six years since the Fire now—but its reconstruction really just getting underway.
Formerly Gresham’s College had huddled among buildings of about the same height, but the Fire had burnt almost to its front door, and so now it loomed like a manor house over a devastated fiefdom. If Daniel stood on the ridge of the roof, facing south toward London Bridge half a mile away, everything in his field of view bore marks of heat and smoke. Suppose the city were a giant Hooke-watch, with Gresham’s College the central axle-tree, and London Bridge marking twelve o’clock. Then Bedlam was directly behind Daniel at six o’clock. The Tower of London was at about ten o’clock. The easterly wind, and its glacis, had preserved it from the flames. The wedge from the Tower to the Bridge was a tangle of old streets with charred spikes of old church-steeples jutting up here and there, like surveyor’s stakes—literally. This to the chagrin of Hooke, who’d presented the City with a plan to rationalize the streets, only to be frustrated by a few such impediments that had survived the flames; for those who opposed his plans used the carbonized steeples as landmarks to shew where streets had once been, and ought to be remade, be they never so narrow and tortuous. The negative space between construction-sites defined new streets now, only a little wider and straighter than the old. Right in the center of this wedge was the place where the Fire had started—an empty moon-crater cordoned off so that Hooke and Wren could build a monument there.
Directly before Daniel, in the wedge from about noon to one o’clock, was the old goldsmiths’ district of Threadneedle and Cornhill streets, which converged at the site of the Royal Exchange—all so close that Daniel could hear the eternal flame of buying and selling in the courtyard of the ‘Change, fueled by the latest data from abroad, and he could look into the windows of Thomas Ham’s house and see Mayflower (like a matron) plumping pillows and (like a schoolgirl) playing leapfrog with William Ham, her youngest child, her dear heart.
The west-bound street formed by the confluence of Threadneedle and Cornhill became Cheapside, which Hooke had insisted on making much wider than it had been before—eliciting screams of agony and near-apocalyptic rantings from many—attacks that Hooke, who cared less than anyone what people thought of him, was uniquely qualified to ignore. It ran straight as Hooke could make it to the once and future St. Paul’s, now a moraine of blackened stones, congealed roofing-lead, and plague-victims’ jumbled bones. Wren was still working on plans and models for the new one. The streets limning St. Paul’s Churchyard were lined with printers’ shops, including the ones that produced most Royal Society publications, so the trip up and down Cheapside had become familiar to Daniel, as he went there to fetch copies of Hooke’s Micrographia or inspect the proofs for Wilkins’s Universal Character.
Raising his sights a notch and gazing over the scab of St. Paul’s (which stood at about two o’clock), he could see Bridewell on the far side of it—a former Royal palace, now tumbledown, where whores, actresses, and Vagabond-wenches picked oakum, pounded hemp, and carried out diverse other character-building chores, until they had become reformed. That marked the place where the Fleet River—which was simply a ditch full of shit—intersected the Thames. Which explained why the Royals had moved out of Bridewell and ceded it to the poor. The fire had jumped the ditch easily, and kept eating through the city until a shortage of fuel, and the King’s and Lord Mayor’s heroic house-bombing campaign, had finally drawn a lasso around it. So whenever he did this Daniel inevitably had to trace the dividing-line between burnt and unburnt parts of the city from the River up across Fleet Street as far as Hol-born (three o’clock). Out back of the place where his father had been blown up six years ago, a quadrangle had been laid out, lined with houses and shops, and filled with gardens, fountains, and statues. Others just like it were going up all around, and starting to crowd in around the edges of those few great Houses along Piccadilly, such as Comstock House. But those developments, and the great successes they had brought to Sterling and Raleigh, were old news to Daniel, and didn’t command his attention as much as certain strange new undertakings around the edges of the city.
If he turned and looked north over the bones of the old Roman wall he could look right into Bedlam less than a quarter of a mile away. It had not been burnt, but the city had hired Hooke to tear it down and rebuild it anyway, as long as they were rebuilding everything else. The joke being that London and Bedlam seemed to have exchanged places: for Bedlam had been emptied out and torn down in preparation for its reconstruction, and was a serene rock-garden now, whereas all of London (save a few special plots such as the Monument site and St. Paul’s) was in the throes of building—stones and bricks and timbers moving through the city on streets so congested that watching them fill up in the morning was like watching sausage casings being stuffed with meat. Wrecked buildings being torn down, cellars being dug, mortar being mixed, paving-stones being flung off carts, bricks and stones being chiselled to fit, iron wheel-rims grinding over cobbles—all of it made noise that merged together into a mad grind, like a Titan chewing up a butte.
So: strange enough. But beyond Bedlam, to the north and northeast, and sweeping round beyond the Tower along the eastern skirts of the city, were several artillery-grounds and army camps. These had been busy of late, because of the Anglo-Dutch War. Not the same Anglo-Dutch war that Isaac had listened to from his orchard in Woolsthorpe six years ago, for that had concluded in 1667. This was a wholly new and different Anglo-Dutch War, the third in as many decades. This time around, though, the English had finally gotten it right: they were allied with the French. Ignoring all considerations of what was really in the best interests of England, and setting aside all questions of moral rightness (and the current King was rarely troubled and little hindered by either), this seemed like a much better plan than fighting against France. Plenty of French gold had entered the country to bring Parliament around to Louis XIV’s side, and to pay for a lot of ships to be built. France had an immense army and needed little help from England on land; what Louis had bought, and paid for several times over, was the Royal Navy, and its guns, and its gunpowder.
It was difficult, therefore, for Daniel to make any sense of the project underway northeast of London. Over several weeks Daniel watched a flat parade-ground develop pits and wrinkles, which slowly grew to ditches and mounds, and shaped and resolved themselves (as if he were adjusting the focus of a prospective glass) into sharp neat earthworks. Daniel had never seen such things because, until now, they had not been built in England, but from books and siege-paintings he knew them as ramparts, a bastion, ravelins, and a demilune work. But if this were a preparation for Dutch invasion, it was poorly thought out, because these works stood in isolation, protecting nothing save a pasture with a few dozen befuddled, but extremely well-defended, cows. Nevertheless, guns were mustered out from the Ordnance storehouses in the Tower, and hauled up onto the ramparts by teams of straining oxen—hernias with legs. The cracks of the teamsters’ whips and the snorts and bellows of the beasts were carried for miles on a sea breeze all the way across Houndsditch and over the Wall and up the pitched roof of Gresham’s College into Daniel’s ears. Daniel for his part only stared in amaze.
Nearer the river, in the flat country beyond the Tower, Naval works took over from Military ones: shipyards messy with blond timber from Scotland or Massachusetts, splattered planks drawing themselves up into the curved hulls of ships, dead firs resurrected as masts. Colossal plumes of black smoke spreading downwind, pointing to Comstock-forges where tons of iron were being melted down and poured into subterranean cannon-molds, and windmill-blades rolling on the horizon, turning the gear-trains of mighty Comstock-machines that bored holes down the centers of those cannons.
Which brought Daniel’s gaze back to the Tower, where he’d started: the central mystery,
where treasure-ships from (as everyone in London now knew) France brought in the gold
to be minted into the guineas that paid for all of those ships and cannons, and for
the services of England in its new role as a sort of naval auxiliary to France.
ONE DAY, HEARING CHURCH-BELLS RING two o’clock, Daniel descended the ladder through the telescope-shaft. Hooke had gone out to inspect some new pavement, leaving behind nothing but a faint metallic scent of vomit. Daniel walked directly across the street, dodging uncouth traffic of heavy carts. He climbed into Samuel Pepys’s carriage and made himself comfortable. Several minutes passed. Daniel looked at passers-by out the window. A hundred yards south, the streets would be a-bustle with brokers of East India stocks and goldsmiths’ notes, but this place, tucked up against London wall, was a queer eddy, or backwater, and Daniel observed a jumble of Navy men, Dissident preachers, Royal Society hangers-on, foreigners, and Vagabonds, stirring and shuffling about one another in no steady pattern. It was an inscrutable Gordian knot suddenly cleft by one Chase Scene: a scruffy barefoot boy came bolting up Broad Street, pursued by a bailiff with a cudgel. Glimpsing a side street that ran off to the left, between the Navy Treasury and the Dutch Church, the boy skidded round the corner—paused—considered matters—and freed himself of a burden by heaving a pale brick into the air. It sheared apart, the wind caught it, and it puffed into a cloud of fluttering rectangles, whirling mysteriously round their long axes. By the time Daniel or anyone else thought to look for him, the boy was gone. The bailiff shifted to a straddling gait, as if riding an invisible pony, and began trying to step on all of the libels at once, gathering them in his arms, stuffing them into his pockets. Several members of the Watch stormed up and exchanged monosyllabic gasping noises with the bailiff. They all turned and glared at the façade of the Dutch Church, then went back to rounding up handbills.
Samuel Pepys was preceded by his cologne and his wig, and pursued by a minion embracing a sheaf of giant rolled documents. “I thought it well played, on the boy’s part,” he said, climbing into the coach and handing Daniel one of the libels.
“An old trick of the trade,” Daniel said.
Pepys looked delighted. “Drake put you out on the streets?”
“Of course…‘twas the common rite of passage for all Waterhouse boys.”
The handbill was a cartoon depicting King Louis XIV of France with his breeches piled up round his ankles and hairy buttocks thrust out, shitting an immense turd into the mouth of an English sailor.
“Let’s take it to Wilkins! It’ll cheer him up enormously,” Pepys suggested, and pounded on the ceiling. The coachman drove the horses forward. Daniel made his body go limp so that he would not accrue lacerations from the continual battering onslaughts of the vehicle’s benches and bulkheads.
“Did you bring it?”
“I always have it with me,” Pepys said, producing an irregular nodule about the size of a tennis ball, “as you have all your parts.”
“To remind you of your own mortality?”
“Once a man’s been cut for the stone, ’tis hardly necessary.”
“Why, then?”
“It is my conversation-starter of last resort. It gets anyone talking: Germans, Puritans, Red Indians…” He handed the object to Daniel. It was heavy. Heavy as a stone.
“I cannot believe this came out of your bladder,” Daniel said.
“You see? Never fails!” Pepys answered.
But Daniel got no further response from Pepys, who’d already unrolled one of the large documents, creating a screen that divided the carriage in half. Daniel had assumed that they were all diagrams of men-of-war. But when they turned west on Cheapside the sun came in the carriage window and shone through the paper, revealing a grid of numbers. Pepys muttered things to his assistant, who jotted them down. Daniel was left to rotate the bladder-stone in his hand and gaze out at London, so different when seen at street-level. Passing through St. Paul’s Churchyard, they saw the whole contents of a printer’s shop turned out into the street—several bailiffs, and one of Sir Roger L’Estrange’s lieutenants, pawing through stacks of unbound sheets, and holding wood-blocks up to mirrors.
Within a few minutes, anyway, they were at Wilkins’s house. Pepys left his assistant and his papers below in the carriage and pounded up stairs holding the bladder-stone in his hand like a questing knight brandishing a fragment of the Cross.
He shook it in Wilkins’s face. Wilkins only laughed. But it was good that he did, because his room was otherwise a horror—his dark breeches couldn’t conceal that he had been pissing blood, sometimes sooner than he could get to the chamber-pot. He was both wizened and bloated at the same time, if that were possible, and the smell that came out of his flesh seemed to suggest his kidneys weren’t keeping up their end of the bargain.
While Pepys exhorted the Bishop of Chester to allow himself to be cut for the stone, Daniel looked about, and was dispirited but not surprised to see several empty bottles from the apothecary shop of Monsieur LeFebure. He gave one a sniff. It was Elixir Pro-prietalis LeFebure—the same stuff Hooke swallowed when headaches had brought him to the brink of suicide—the fruits of LeFebure’s researches into certain remarkable properties of the poppy family. It was hugely popular at Court, even among those not afflicted with headaches or the Stone. But when Daniel saw Wilkins go into a bladder spasm—reducing the Lord Bishop of Chester, and Founder of the Royal Society, to a dumb animal for several minutes, convulsing and howling—he decided perhaps Monsieur LeFebure was not such a sinister fellow after all.
When it was over, and Wilkins was Wilkins again, Daniel showed him the handbill, and mentioned L’Estrange’s raid on the printing-shop.
“The same men doing the same things as ten years ago,” Wilkins pronounced.
From that—the same men—Daniel knew that the originator of the handbills, and ultimate target of L’Estrange’s raids, must be Knott Bolstrood.
“And that is why I cannot stop what I am doing to be cut for the Stone,” Wilkins said.
DANIEL ERECTED A BLOCK AND TACKLE above the Gresham shaft, Hooke put the rebuilding of London on hold for a day, and they put the long telescope into place, Hooke cringing and screaming every time it was bumped, as if the instrument were an extension of his own eyeball.
Meanwhile Daniel could never keep his attention fixed on the heavens, for the warm mutterings and nudgings of London would not leave him alone—notes slipped under his door, raised eyebrows in coffee-shops, odd things witnessed in the street all captured his attention more than they should’ve. Outside the city, scaffolding rose up from the glacis of those mysterious fortifications, and long benches began to shingle it.
Then, one afternoon, Daniel and all London’s Persons of Quality and most of her pickpockets were there, sitting on those benches or milling about in the fields. The Duke of Monmouth rode out, in a Cavalier outfit whose magnificence was such as to refute and demolish every sermon ever preached by a Calvinist—because if those sermons were true, Monmouth ought to be struck dead on the spot by a jealous God. John Churchill—possibly the only man in England handsomer than Monmouth—therefore wore slightly less thrilling clothes. The King of France could not attend this event, as he was so busy conquering the Dutch Republic just now, but a strapping actor pranced out in his stead, dressed in royal ermine, and took up a throne on an artificial hillock, and occupied himself with suitable bits of stage-business, viz. peering at events through a glass; pointing things out to diverse jewelled mistresses draped all about his vicinity; holding out his Sceptre to order his troops forward; descending from his throne to speak a few kind words to wounded officers who were brought up to him on litters; standing up and striking a grave defiant pose during moments of crisis, whilst holding out a steady hand to calm his jittery femmes. Likewise an actor had been hired to play the role of D’Artagnan. Since everyone knew what was about to happen to him, he got the most applause when he was introduced—to the visible chagrin of the (real) Duke of Monmouth. In any event: cannons were discharged picturesquely from the ramparts of “Maestricht,” and “Dutchmen” struck defiant poses on the battlements, creating among the spectators a frisson of righteous anger (how dare those insolent Dutchmen defend themselves!?)—rapidly transmuted into patriotic fervor as, at a signal from “Louis XIV,” Monmouth and Churchill led a charge up the slope of the demilune work. After a bit of thrilling swordplay and much spattering-about of stage-blood, they planted French and English flags side by side on the parapet, shook hands with “D’Artagnan,” and exchanged all manner of fond and respectful gestures with the “King” on his hillock.
There was an ovation. Daniel could hear nothing else, but he saw some odd sort of pratfall directly in front of him: a young man in severe dark clothing, who’d been standing in front of Daniel and blocking his view with a sort of Pilgrim-hat, turned round and splayed his limbs out like a squashed bug, let his head loll back on his white collar, stuck his tongue out, and rolled his eyes back in their sockets. He was mocking the pose of several “Dutch” defenders who were now hors de combat up on the demilune. He did not make a very pretty picture. Something was grievously wrong with his face: a dermatological catastrophe about the cheeks.
Behind him, a scene-change was underway: the dead defenders were resurrecting themselves and scurrying round back of the ramparts to prepare for the next act. Likewise the man in front of Daniel now recovered his balance and turned out not to be a dead Dutchman at all, just a young English bloke with a sour look about him. His attire was not just any drab garb but the specific drab garb worn, nowadays, by Barkers. But (now that Daniel thought about it slightly harder) it was very like the clothing worn by the mock-Dutchmen pretending to defend Maestricht. Come to think of it, those “Dutchmen” had looked a great deal more like English religious Dissenters than they had like actual Dutchmen, who (if the grapevine was to be believed) had long ago ditched their old Pilgrimish togs (which had been inspired by Spanish fashions anyway) and now dressed like everyone else in Europe. So in addition to being a re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht, this show was also a parable about well-dressed rakes and blades overcoming dull severe Calvinists in the streets of London town!
The slowness with which Daniel realized all this was infuriating to the young Barker in front of him—who had the cannonball head and mighty jawbone of an authentic Bolstrood.
“Is that Gomer?” Daniel exclaimed, when the ovation had died away into a thrum of thirsty squires calling for beer. Daniel had known the son of Knott Bolstrood as a little boy, but hadn’t set eyes on him in at least a decade.
Gomer Bolstrood answered the question by staring Daniel full in the face. On the front of each of his cheeks, just to either side of his nose, was an old wound: a complex of red trenches and fleshy ramparts, curved round into the crude glyph “S.L.” These marks had been made by a branding iron in the open-air court before the Sessions House at the Old Bailey, a few moments after Gomer had been pronounced guilty of being a Seditious Libeller.
Gomer Bolstrood could not be more than twenty-five years old, but that munition-like head, combined with those brands, gave him the presence of a much older man. He aimed his chin significantly towards a location off behind the stands.
Gomer Bolstrood, son of His Majesty’s Secretary of State Knott, son of ur-Barker Gregory, led Daniel into a Vagabond-camp of tents and wagons set up to serve and support this gala re-enactment. Some of the tents were for the actors and actresses. Gomer led Daniel between a couple of those, which meant fighting their way against a flood tide of “French Mistresses” coming back from the “Sun King’s” throne. Even as the sensitive eyes of Isaac Newton had been semi-permanently branded with the image of the solar disk during his colors experiments, so Daniel’s retinas were now stamped with a dozen or more cleavages. All of those cleavages must have had heads up above them somewhere—but the only one he noticed was speaking to one of the other girls in a French accent. From which he reckoned (in retrospect, somewhat simple-mindedly) that she must be French. But before Daniel could drift off into a full reverie, Gomer Bolstrood had grabbed his upper arm and pulled him ’tween the flaps of an adjoining beer tent.
The beer was Dutch. So was the man sitting at the table. But the waffle that the man was eating was indisputably Belgian.
Daniel sat in the chair indicated, and watched the Dutch gentleman eat the waffle for a while. He aimed his eyes in that direction, anyway. The image that still persisted before his eyes was cleavages, and the face of that “French” lass. But after a while this, sadly, faded, and was replaced by a waffle that had been put in front of him on a Delft china plate. And none of your crude heavy Pilgrim-ware, but the good stuff, export-grade.
He sensed an implicit demand that he should Partake. So he dissected a corner from the waffle, put it in his mouth, and began to chew it. It was good. His eyes were adjusting to the dimness of the tent, and he was noticing stacks of handbills piled up in the corners, neatly wrapped up in old proof-sheets. The words on the proof-sheets were in every language save English—these bills had been printed in Amsterdam and brought over on a beer-ship or perhaps a waffle-barge. Every so often the tent-flaps would part, and Gomer, or one of the taciturn, pipe-smoking Dutchmen in the corners, would peer out and thrust a brick of hand-bills through the gap.
“Whaat doo Belgian waffles and the cleavages of those girls haave in common?” said the Dutch Ambassador; for it was none other. He dabbed butter from his lips with a napkin. He was blond, and pyramidal, as if he consumed a lot of beer and waffles. “I saaw you staaring at them,” he added, apologetically.
“I haven’t the merest idea—sir!”
“Negateev Spaace,” the Dutch Ambassador intoned, letting those double vowels resonate as only a heavyweight Dutchman could. “Have you heard of thees? It is an aart woord. Wee know about negateev spaace because we like peectures soo muuch.”
“Is it anything like negative numbers?”
“Eet ees the spaace between twoo theengs,” said the other, and put his hands on his chest and forced his pectorals together to create a poor impression of cleavage. Daniel watched with polite incredulity, and tried not to shudder. The Dutchman plucked a fresh waffle off a plate and held it up by one corner, like a rag soaked with something unpleasant. “Likewise—the waffle of Belgium is shaaped and defiined, not by its own essential naatuure, but by the hot plaates of haard iron that encloose it on toop and boottom.”
“Oh, I see—you’re making a point about the Spanish Netherlands!”
The Dutch Ambassador rolled his eyes and tossed the waffle back over his shoulder—before it struck the ground, a stout, disconcertingly monkey-like dog sprang into the air and snatched it, and began to masticate it—literally—for the sound it made was like a homunculus squatting on the floor muttering, “masticate masticate masticate.”
“Traaped between Fraance and the Dutch Republic, the Spanish Netherlands is raapidly consuumed by Louis the Quatorze Bourbon. Fine. But when Le Roi du Soleil reaches Maestricht he touches—what?”
“The political and military equivalent of a hot iron plate?”
The Dutch Ambassador probed negative space with a licked finger, seemed to touch something, and drew back sharply, making a sizzling noise through his teeth. Perhaps by Dutch luck, perhaps by some exquisite sense of timing, Daniel felt the atmosphere socking him in the gut. The tent clenched inwards, then inflated. Waffle-irons chattered and buzzed in the dimness, like skeletons’ teeth. The monkey-dog scurried under the table.
Gomer Bolstrood pulled back a tent-flap to provide a clear view to the top of the demilune-work, which had been ruptured by detonation of a vast internal store of gunpowder. It looked like a steaming loaf that had been ripped in half. Resurgent Dutchmen were prancing around on the top, trampling and burning those French and English flags. The spectators were on the brink of riot.
Gomer let the tent-flap fall shut again, and Daniel turned his attention back to the ambassador, who had never taken his gaze off of Daniel.
“Maybe Fraance taakes Maestricht—but not so easily—they lose the hero D’Artagnan. The war will be won by us, however.”
“I am pleased to know that you will have success in Holland—now will you consider changing your tactics in London?” Daniel said this loudly so that Gomer could share in it.
“In whaat waay?”
“You know what L’Estrange has been doing.”
“I know what L’Estrange has been failing to do!” the Dutch Ambassador chortled.
“Wilkins is trying to make London like Amsterdam—and I’m not speaking of wooden shoes.”
“Many churches—no established religion.”
“It is his life’s work. He has given up on Natural Philosophy, these last years, to direct all of his energies toward that goal. He wants it because it is best for England—but the High Anglicans and Crypto-Catholics at Court are against anything that smacks of Dissidents. So Wilkins’s task is difficult enough—but when those same Dissidents are linked, in the public mind, with the Dutch enemy, how can he hope for success?”
“In a year—when the dead are counted, and the true costs of the war are understood—Wilkins’s task will be too easy.”
“In a year Wilkins will be dead of the stone. Unless he has it cut out.”
“I can recommend a chirurgeon-barber, very speedy with the knife—”
“He does not feel that he can devote several months to recovery, when the pressure is so immediate and the stakes so high. He is just on the verge of success, Mr. Ambassador, and if you would let up—”
“We will let up when the French do,” the Ambassador said, and waved at Gomer, who pulled the flap open again to show the demilune being re-conquered by French and English troops, led by Monmouth. To one side, “D’Artagnan” lay wounded in a gap in the wall. John Churchill was supporting the old musketeer’s head in his lap, feeding him sips from a flask.
The tent-flap remained open for rather a long time, and Daniel eventually understood that he was being shown the door. As he walked out he caught Gomer’s elbow and drew him outside onto the dirt street. “Brother Gomer,” he said, “the Dutch are deranged. Understandably. But our situation is not so desperate.”
“On the contrary,” said Gomer, “I say that you are in desperate peril, Brother Daniel.”
Anyone else would have meant physical peril by that, but Daniel had spent enough of his life around Gomer’s—which was to say, Daniel’s—ilk to know that Gomer meant the spiritual kind.
“I don’t suppose that’s just because I was staring at a pretty girl’s bosom just now—?”
Gomer did not much fancy the jest. Indeed, Daniel sensed before those words were out of his mouth that they would only confirm Gomer’s opinion of him as Fallen, or at best, Falling fast. He tried something else: “Your own father is Secretary of State!”
“Then go and speak to my father.”
“The point I am making is that there is no harm—or peril, if that is what you want to call it—in employing tactics. Cromwell used tactics to win battles, did he not? It did not mean he lacked faith. On the contrary—not to use the brains God gave you, and making every struggle into a frontal charge, is sinful—thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God!”
“Wilkins has the stone,” Gomer said. “Whether ’twas placed in his bladder by God, or the Devil, is a question for Jesuits. Anyway, he has it, and shall likely die of it, unless you and your Fellows can gin up a way to transmute it into some watery form that can be pissed out. In dread of his death, you have wrought in your mind this phant’sy that if I, Gomer Bolstrood, leave off distributing handbills in the streets of London, it shall set in motion a lengthy chain of consequences that shall somehow end in Wilkins’s suffering some chirurgeon to cut him for the stone, him surviving the operation, and living happily ever after, as the kind father you never had. And you say that the Dutch are deranged?”
Daniel could not answer. The discourse of Gomer had struck him in the face with no less heat, force, and dumbfounding pain than the branding iron had Gomer’s.
“As you phant’sy yourself a master of tactics, consider this whor-ish spectacle we have been witnessing.” Gomer waved at the demilune-work. Up on the parapet, Monmouth was planting the French and English flags anew, to the cheers of the spectators, who broke into a lusty chorus of “Pikes on the Dikes” even as “D’Artagnan” breathed his last. John Churchill carried him down the slope of the earthwork in his arms and laid him on a litter where his body was bedecked with flowers.
“Behold the martyr!” Gomer brayed. “Who gave his life for the cause, and is fondly remembered by all the Quality! Now there is a tactic for you. I am sorry Wilkins is sick. I would not put him in harm’s way on any account, for he was a friend to us. But it is not in my power to keep Death from his door. And when Death does come, ’twill make of him a Martyr—not so romantick as D’Artagnan perhaps—but of more effect in a better cause. Beg your pardon, Brother Daniel.” Gomer stalked away, tearing open the wrapper on a sheaf of libels.
“D’Artagnan” was being carried along the front of the bleachers in a cortege of gorgeously mussed and tousled Cavaliers, and spectators were doing business with roving flower-girls and showering bouquets and blossoms on those heroes living and “dead.” But even as petals were fluttering down on the mock-Musketeer, Daniel Waterhouse found slips of paper coming down all around him, carried on a breeze from the bleachers. He slapped one out of the air and was greeted with a cartoon of several French cavaliers gang-raping a Dutch milkmaid. Another showed a cravated musketeer, silhouetted in the light of a burning Protestant church, about to catch a tossed baby on the point of his sword. All around Daniel, and up in the stands, spectators were passing these bills hand-to-hand, sometimes wadding them into sleeves or pockets.
So the matter was complicated. And it only become more so ten minutes later, when, during a bombardment of “Maestricht,” a cannon burst in full view of all spectators. Most people assumed it was just a stage-trick until bloody fragments of artillerymen began to shower down all among them, mingling with the continual flurry of handbills.
Daniel walked back to Gresham’s College and worked all night with Hooke. Hooke stayed below, gazing up at various stars, and Daniel remained on the roof, looking at a nova that was flaring in the west end of London: a Mobb of people with torches, milling around St. James’s Fields and discharging the occasional musket. Later, he learned that they had attacked Comstock House, supposedly because they were furious about the cannon that had burst.
John Comstock himself showed up at Gresham’s College the next morning. It took several moments for Daniel to recognize him, so altered was his countenance by shock, by outrage, and even by shame. He demanded that Hooke and the rest drop what they were doing and investigate the remnants of the burst cannon, which he insisted had been tampered with in some way “by mine enemies.”