1672
There are few things, that are incapable of being represented by a fiction.
—HOBBES, Leviathan
A COMEDY
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
MEN: MR. VAN UNDERDEVATER, a Dutchman, founder of a great commercial empire in sow’s-ears and potatoes’-eyes NZINGA, a cannibal Neeger, formerly King of the Congo, now house-slave to Mr. van Underdevater JEHOSHAPHAT STOPCOCK, the Earl of BRIMSTONE, an enthusiast
TOM RUNAGATE, a discharged soldier turned Vagabond THE REV. YAHWEH PUCKER, a Dissident divine EUGENE STOPCOCK, son of Lord Brimstone, a Captain of Foot FRANCIS BUGGERMY, Earl of Suckmire, a foppish courtier DODGE AND BOLT, two of Tom Runagate’s accomplices
WOMEN: MISS LYDIA VAN UNDERDEVATER, the daughter and sole heiress of Mr. van Underdevater, recently returned from a Venetian finishing-school LADY BRIMSTONE, wife to Jehoshaphat Stopcock Miss STRADDLE, Tom Runagate’s companion
SCENE: SUCKMIRE, a rural estate in Kent
ACT I. SCENE I.
SCENE: a Cabin in a Ship at Sea. Thunder heard, flashes of Lightning seen.
Enter Mr. van Underdevater in dressing-gown, with a lanthorn.
VAN UND: Boatswain!
Enter Nzinga wet, with a Sack.
NZINGA: Here, master, what—
VAN UND: Odd’s bodkins! Have you fallen into the tar-pot, boatswain?
NZINGA: It is I, Master—your slave, My Royal Majesty, by the Grace of the tree-god, the rock-god, river-god, and diverse other gods who have slipped my mem’ry, of the Congo, King.
VAN UND: SO it is. What have you in the bag?
NZINGA: Balls.
VAN UND: Balls! Sink me! You have quite forgot your Civilizing Lessons!
NZINGA: Of ice.
VAN UND: Thank heavens.
NZINGA: I gathered ’em from the deck—where they are falling like grape-shot—and for this you thank heaven?
VAN UND: Aye, for it means the boatswain is still in possession of all his Parts. Boatswain!
Enter LYDIA in dressing-gown, dishevelled.
LYDIA: Dear father, why do you shout for the boatswain so?
VAN UND: My dear Lydia, I would fain pay him to bring this infernal storm to an end.
LYDIA: But father, the boatswain can’t stop a tempest!
VAN UND: Perhaps he knows someone who can.
NZINGA: I know a weather-god in Guinea who can—and at rates very reasonable, as he will accept payment in rum.
VAN UND: Rum! You take me for a half-wit? If this is what the weather-god does when he is sober—
NZINGA: Cowrie-shells would do in a pinch. If master would care to despatch My Majesty on the next southbound boat, My Majesty would be pleased to broker the transaction—
VAN UND:You prove yourself a shrewd man of commerce. I am reminded of when I traded the holes in a million cannibals’ ears, for the eyes of a million potatoes, and beat the market at both ends of the deal—
More thunder.
VAN UND: TOO, slow, too slow! Boatswain!
Enter Lord Brimstone.
LORD BRIMSTONE: Here, here, what is this bawling?
LYDIA: Lord Brimstone—your servant.
VAN UND: The price of ending this tempest is too high, the market in Pagan Deities too remote—
LORD B: Then why, sir, do you call for the boatswain?
VAN UND: Why, sir, to tell him to be of good courage and to remain firm in the face of danger.
LYDIA: Oh, too late, father!
VAN UND: What mean you, child?
LYDIA: When the boatswain heard you, he lost what firmness he had, and fled in a panic.
VAN UND: How do you know it? LYDIA: Why, he upset the hammock altogether, and tumbled me onto the deck!
VAN UND: Lydia, Lydia, I have spent a fortune sending you to that school in Venice, where you have been studying to become a virtuous maiden—
LYDIA: And I have studied hard, Father, but it is ever so difficult!
VAN UND: Has all that money been wasted?
LYDIA: Oh, no, Father, I learned some lovely songs from our dancing-master, Signore Fellatio.
Sings.*
VAN UND: I’ve heard enough—Boatswain!
Enter Lady Brimstone.
LADY BRIMSTONE: My lord, have you found who is making that dreadful noise yet?
LORD B: M’lady, it’s that Dutchman.
LADY B: SO much for idle investigations—what have you done about it, my lord?
LORD B: Nothing, my lady, for they say that the only way to quiet one of these obstreperous Dutchmen is to drown him.
LADY B: Drown—why, my lord—you’re not thinking of throwing him overboard—?
LORD B: Every soul aboard is thinking of it, M’lady. But with a Dutchman it isn’t necessary, as they live below sea-level to begin with. ’Tis merely a question of getting the sea to go back where the Good Lord put it in the first place—
LADY B: And how d’you propose to effect that, my lord?
LORD B: I have been conducting experiments on a novel engine to make windmills turn backwards, and pump water down-hill—
LADY B: Experiments! Engines! I say the way to put Dutchmen under water’s with French
gunpowder and English courage!
Whatever the actor playing Lord Brimstone said was like expectorating into the River Amazon. For the true SCENE of these events was Neville’s Court* on a spring evening, and the true Dramatis Personae a roll that would’ve consumed many yards of paper and drams of ink to set it out fully. The script was an unpublished masterwork of courtly and collegiate intrigue, comprising hundreds of more or less clever lines being delivered—mostly sotto voce—at the same instant, producing a contrapuntal effect quite intricate but entirely too much for young Daniel Waterhouse to grasp. He had been wondering why persons such as these bothered to go to plays at all, when every day at Whitehall provided more spectacle—now he sensed that they did so because the stories in the theatre were simple, and arrived at fixed conclusions after an hour or two.
Heading up the cast of tonight’s performance was King Charles II of England, situated on the upper floor of Trinity’s miserable wreck of a library, where several consecutive windows had been opened up and converted into temporary opera-boxes. The Queen, one Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess with a famously inoperative womb, was seated to one side of His Majesty, pretending to understand English as usual. The guest of honor, the Duke of Monmouth (King Charles’s son by his mistress Lucy Walter), was on the other side. The windows flanking the King’s contained various elements of his court: one was anchored by Louise de Kéroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth and the King’s mistress. Another by Barbara Villiers, a.k.a. Lady Castlemaine, a.k.a. the Duchess of Cleveland, former lover of John Churchill, and the King’s mistress.
Moving outwards from the three central windows, there was one all filled up with Angleseys: Thomas More Anglesey and his nearly indistinguishable sons, Philip, now something like twenty-seven years old, and Louis, who was twenty-four, but looking younger. For protocol dictated that, as the Earl of Upnor was visiting his alma mater, he had to wear academic robes. Though he’d mobilized a squadron of French tailors to liven them up, they were still academic robes, and the object infesting his wig was unmistakably a mortarboard.
Balancing this Anglesey-window was a window all crowded with Comstocks, specifically the so-called Silver branch of that race: John and his sons Richard and Charles foremost, all dressed likewise in robes and mortarboards. Unlike the Earl of Upnor they seemed comfortable dressed that way. Or at least had until the play had begun, and the character of Jehoshaphat Stopcock, Lord Brimstone, had come tottering out dressed precisely as they were.
The King’s Comedians, performing on a temporary stage that had been erected in Neville’s Court, had decided to plow onwards in spite of the fact that no one could hear a word they were saying. “Lord Brimstone” seemed to be upbraiding his wife about something—presumably, her reference to “French gunpowder,” as opposed to “English,” which, on some other planet, might have been a rhetorical figure, but here seemed very much like a stab at John Comstock. Meanwhile, most of the audience—who, if they had the good fortune to be seated, were seated on chairs and benches arranged in the corner of Neville’s Court, beneath the windows of King and Court—were trying to break out into the opening stanza of “Pikes on the Dikes,” the most widely plagiarized song in England: a rousing ditty about why it was an excellent idea to invade Holland. But the King held out one hand to silence them. Not that he was lacking in belligerence—but down on the stage, “Lydia van Underdevater” was delivering a line that looked like it was meant to be funny. And the King didn’t like it when the buzz of Intrigue drowned out his Mistress.
All of the Comedians suddenly fell down, albeit in dramatickal and actorly ways—and that went double for Nell Gwyn, who wound up draped over a bench with one arm stretched out gracefully, displaying about a square yard of flawless pale armpits and bosoms. The audience were poleaxed. The long-called-for boatswain finally ran in and announced that the ship had run aground in sands just off Castle Suckmire. “Lord Brimstone” sent Nzinga out to fetch his trunk, which arrived with the immediacy that can only happen in stage-plays. The owner pawed through its contents, spilling out a strange mixture of drab outmoded clothing and peculiar equipment, viz. retorts, crucibles, skulls, and microscopes. Meanwhile Lydia was picking up certain of his garments, such as farmers’ breeches and cowherds’ boots, holding them at arm’s length and mugging. Finally, Lord Brimstone stood up, tucking a powder-keg under one arm, and slapping a frayed and bent mortarboard onto his head.
LORD B: What’s wanted to move this ship is Gunpowder!
Among the groundlings in their chairs and on the grass, much uneasy shifting and muttering, and tassels flopping this way and that, as mortarboard-wearing scholars turned to each other to enquire as to just who was being made fun of here, or shook their heads, or bowed them low to pray for the souls of the King’s Comedians, and of whomever had written this play, and of the King who’d insisted he couldn’t make it through a one-night stand at Cambridge without being entertained.
Very different reactions, though, from the windows-cum-opera-boxes: the Duchess of Portsmouth was undone. Her bosom was heaving like a spritsail gone all a-luff, her head was thrown back to expose a whole lot of jewelled throat. These spectacles had already caused diverse groundling scholars to fall out of their chairs. She was being supported by a pair of young blades in huge curled and beribboned wigs, who were wiping tears of mirth away from their eyes with the fingertips of their kid gloves—having already donated their lace hankies to the Duchess.
Meanwhile, mortarboard-wearing gunpowder magnate John Comstock—who’d long opposed the Duchess of Portsmouth’s efforts to introduce French fashions to the English court—was managing a thin, oddly distracted smile. The King—who, until tonight anyway, had generally sided with Comstock—was smiling, and the Angleseys were all having the times of their lives.
An elbow to the kidney forced Daniel to stop gaping at the Duchess’s efforts to rupture her bodice, and to pay some attention to the rather homelier sight of Oldenburg, who was seated next to him. The hefty German had been released from the Tower as suddenly and as inexplicably as he’d been clapped into it. He glanced down toward the far end of Neville’s Court, then frowned at Daniel and said, “Where is he? Or at least it!” meaning Isaac Newton and his paper on tangents, respectively. Then Oldenburg turned the other way and peeked up round the edge of his mortarboard toward the Angleseys’ box, where Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor, had somehow gotten his merriment under control and was giving Oldenburg a Significant Glare.
Daniel was glad to have a pretext for leaving. All through the play he had been trying and trying to suspend his disbelief, but the damned thing just wouldn’t suspend. He rose to his feet, bunched his robes up, and sidestepped down a row of chairs, treading on diverse Royal Society feet. Sir Winston Churchill: Cheers on your boy’s Maestricht work, old chap. Christopher Wren: Let’s get that cathedral up, what, no dilly-dallying! Sir Robert Moray: Let’s have lunch and talk about eels. Thank God Hooke had had the temerity to not show up—too busy rebuilding London—so Daniel didn’t have to step on any of his parts. Finally, Daniel was out on open grass. This was really a job for John Wilkins—but the Bishop of Chester was lying on his bed down in London, ill of the stone.
Working his way round back of the stage, Daniel found himself among several wagons that had been used to haul dramaturgickal mysteries up from London. Awnings had been rigged to them and tents pitched in between, so tent-ropes were stretched across the darkness, thick as ship’s rigging, and hitched round splintery wooden stakes piercing the (until the actors had shown up, anyway) flawless lawn. Various items of what he could only assume were ladies’ undergarments (they were definitely garments, but he had never seen their like—Q.E.D.) dangled from the ropes and occasionally surprised the hell out of him by pawing clammily at his face. Daniel had to plot a devious course, then pursue it slowly, to escape the tangle. So it was really—really—just an accident that he found the two actresses, doing whatever the hell it was that females do when they excuse themselves and exchange warm knowing looks and go off in pairs. He caught the very end of it: “What should I do w’th’old one?” said a young lady with a lovely voice, and an accent from some part of England with too many sheep.
“Fling it into the crowd—start a riot,” suggested the other—an Irish girl.
This touched off fiendish whooping. Clearly no one had taught these girls how to titter.
“But they wouldn’t even know what it was,” said the girl with the lovely voice, “we are the first women to set foot in this place.”
“Then neither will they know if you leave it where it lies,” the Irish girl answered.
The other now dropped her rural accent and began talking exactly like a Cambridge scholar from a good family. “I say, what’s this in the middle of my bowling-green? It would appear to be…fox-bait!”
More whooping—cut short by a man’s voice out of a backstage caravan: “Tess—save some of that for the King—you’re wanted on the stage.”
The lasses picked up their skirts and exeunted. Daniel glimpsed them as they transited across a gap between tents, and recognized the one called Tess from the “Siege of Maestricht.” She was the one he had taken for a Frenchwoman, simply because he’d heard her talking that way. He now understood that she was really an Englishwoman who could talk any way she pleased. This might have been obvious, since she was a professional actress; but it was new to him, and it made her interesting.
Daniel emerged from behind the tent where he’d been (it is fair to say) lurking, and—purely in a spirit of philosophical inquiry—approached the spot where Tess of the beautiful voice and many accents had been (fair to say) squatting.
In a sort of hod projecting above the stage, more gunpowder was lit off in an attempt to simulate lightning, and it made a pool of yellow light in front of Daniel for just a moment. Neatly centered in a patch of grass—grass that was almost phosphorus-green, this being Spring—was a wadded-up rag, steaming from the warmth of Tess, bright with blood.
Of sooty coal the Empiric Alchimist Can turn, or holds it possible to turn Metals of drossiest Ore to perfet Gold As from the Mine.
—MILTON, Paradise Lost
IT HAD BEEN A FULL DAY for the King. Or perhaps Daniel was being naïve to think so—more likely, it was a typical day for the King, and the only persons feeling exhausted were the Cantabrigians who had been trying to maintain the pretense that they could keep up with him. The entourage had appeared on the southern horizon in mid-morning, looking (Daniel supposed) quite a bit like the invasion that Louis XIV had recently flung into the Dutch Republic: meaning that it thundered and threw up dust-clouds and consumed oats and generated ramparts of manure like any Regiment, but its wagons were all gilded, its warriors were armed with jewelled Italian rapiers, its field-marshalls wore skirts and commanded men, or condemned them, with looks—this fell upon Cambridge, anyway, with more effect than King Louis had achieved, so far, in the Netherlands. The town was undone, dissolved. Bosoms everywhere, bare-assed courtiers spilling out of windows, the good Cambridge smell of fens and grass overcome by perfumes, not just of Paris but of Araby and Rajasthan. The King had abandoned his coach and marched through the streets of the town accepting the cheers of the scholars of Cambridge, who had formed up in front of their several Colleges, robed and arranged by ranks and degrees, like soldiers drawn up for review. He’d been officially greeted by the outgoing Chancellor, who had presented him with a colossal Bible—they said it was possible to see the royal nose wrinkling, and the eyes rolling, from half a mile away. Later the King (and his pack of demented spaniels) had dined at High Table in the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, under the big Holbein portrait of the college’s Founder, King Henry VIII. As Fellows, Daniel and Isaac were accustomed to sitting at High Table, but the town was now stuffed with persons who ranked them, and so they’d been demoted halfway across the room: Isaac in his scarlet robes talking to Boyle and Locke about something, and Daniel shoved off in a corner with several vicars who—in violation of certain Biblical guidelines—plainly did not love one another. Daniel tried to stanch their disputatious drone and to pick up a few snatches of conversation from the High Table. The King had a lot to say about Henry VIII, all of it apparently rather droll.
At first, it was Old Hank’s approach to polygamy: so ham-handed it was funny. All of it was veiled in royal wit, of course—he didn’t come right out and say anything really, but the point seemed to be: why do people call me a libertine? At least I don’t chop their heads off. If Daniel (or any other scholar in this place) had wanted to die instantly, he could have stood up at this point and hollered, “Well, at least he eventually got round to producing a legitimate male heir!” but this did not occur.
Several goblets later, the King moved on to some reflections on what a fine and magnificent and (not to put too fine a point on it) rich place Trinity College was, and how remarkable it was that such results could have been achieved by Henry VIII merely by defying the Pope, and sacking a few monasteries. So perhaps the coffers of Puritans, Quakers, Barkers, and Presbyterians might go, one day, towards building an even finer College! This was said as a jest, of course—he went on to say that of course he was speaking of voluntary contributions. Even so, it made the Dissenters in the room very angry—but (as Daniel later reflected) no more angry, really, than they’d been before. And it was a masterly bit of Catholic-bashing. In other words, all nicely calculated to warm the hearts and ease the fears of all the High Anglicans (such as John Comstock) in the hall. The King had to do a lot of that, because many assumed he was soft on Catholics, and some even thought he was one.
In other words, maybe he had just seen a little slice of Court politics as usual, and nothing of consequence had happened. But since John Wilkins had lost the ability to urinate, Daniel’s job was to pay attention and report all of this to him later.
Then it was off to the chapel where the Duke of Monmouth, now a war hero as well as a renowned scholar and bastard, was installed as Chancellor of the University. After that, finally, the Comedy in Neville’s Court.
DANIEL PAUSED IN THE CENTER of a Gothic arch and looked out over a spread of stone steps that led down into the Great Court of Trinity College: an area about four times the size of Neville’s Court. In a strange way it reminded him of the ’Change in London, except that where the ’Change was a daytime place, all a-sparkle with Thomas Gresham’s golden grasshoppers and vaulting Mercurys, and crowded with lusty shouting traders, this place was Gothickal in the extreme, faintly dusted with the blue light of a half-moon, sparsely populated by robed and/or big-wigged men skulking about the paths and huddling in doorways in groups of two or three. And whereas the ’Change-men made common cause to buy shares in sailing-ships or joint stock companies, and traded Jamaica sugar for Spanish silver, these men were transacting diverse small conspiracies or trading snatches of courtly data. The coming of Court to Cambridge was like Stourbridge Fair—an occasional opportunity for certain types of business, most of which was in some sense occult. He couldn’t get in any trouble simply walking direct across the Great Court to the Gate. As a Fellow, he was allowed to tread on the grass. Most of these lurkers and strollers weren’t. Not that they cared about the College’s pedantic rules, but they preferred shadowy edges, having the courtier’s natural affinity for joints and crevices. Across broad open space Daniel strode, so that no one could accuse him of eavesdropping. A line stretched from where he’d come in, to the Gate, would pass direct through a sort of gazebo in the center of the Great Court: an octagonal structure surmounting a little pile of steps, with a goblet-shaped fountain in the middle. Moonlight slanted in among the pillars and gave it a ghastly look—the stone pale as a dead man’s flesh, streaked with rivulets of blood, pulsing from arterial punctures. Daniel reckoned it had to be some sort of Papist-style Vision, and was just about to lift up his hands to inspect them for Stigmata when he caught a whiff, and recollected that the fountain had been drained of water and filled with claret wine in honor of the King and of the new Chancellor: a decision that begged to be argued with. But no accounting for taste…
“The Africans cannot propagate,” said a familiar voice, startlingly close.
“What do you mean? They can do so as well as anyone,” said a different familiar voice. “Perhaps better!”
“Not without Neeger women.”
“You don’t say!”
“You must remember that the planters are short-sighted. They’re all desperate to get out of Jamaica—they wake up every day expecting to find themselves, or their children, in the grip of some tropical fever. To import female Neegers would cost nearly as much as to import males, but the females cannot produce as much sugar—particularly when they are breeding.” Daniel had finally recognized this voice as belonging to Sir Richard Apthorp—the second A in the CABAL.
“So they don’t import females at all?”
“That is correct, sir. And a newly arrived male is only usable for a few years,” Apthorp said.
“That explains much of the caterwauling that has been emanating lately from the ’Change.”
The two men had been sitting together on the steps of the fountain, facing toward the Gate, and Daniel hadn’t seen them until he’d drawn close enough to hear them. He was just getting ready to shift direction, and swing wide around the fountain, when the man who wasn’t Sir Richard Apthorp stood up, turned around, and dipped a goblet into the fountain—and caught sight of Daniel standing there flat-footed. Now Daniel recognized him—he was only too easy to recognize in a dark Trinity courtyard with blood on his hands. “I say!” Jeffreys exclaimed, “is that a new statue over there? A Puritan saint? Oh, I’m wrong, it is moving now—what appeared to be a Pillar of Virtue, is revealed as Daniel Waterhouse—ever the keen observer—now making an empiric study of us. Don’t worry, Sir Richard, Mr. Waterhouse sees all and does nothing—a model Royal Society man.”
“Good evening, Mr. Waterhouse,” Apthorp said, managing to convey, by the tone of his voice, that he found Jeffreys embarrassing and tedious.
“Mr. Jeffreys. Sir Richard. God save the King.”
“The King!” Jeffreys repeated, raising his dripping goblet and then taking a swallow. “Stand and deliver like a good little scholar, Mr. Waterhouse. Why are Sir Richard’s friends in the ’Change making such a fuss?”
“Admiral de Ruyter sailed down to Guinea and took away all of the Duke of York’s slave-ports,” Daniel said.
Jeffreys—one hand half-covering his mouth, and speaking in a stage-whisper: “Which the Duke of York had stolen from the Dutch, a few years before—but in Africa, who splits hairs?”
“During the years that the Duke’s company controlled Guinea, many slaves were shipped to Jamaica—there they made sugar—fortunes were built, and will endure, as long as the attrition of slaves is replaced by new shipments. But the Dutch have now choked off the supply—so I’d guess that Sir Richard’s clients at the ’Change can read the implications clearly enough—there must be some turmoil in the commodities markets.”
Like a victim of unprovoked Battery looking for witnesses, Jeffreys turned toward Apthorp, who raised his eyebrows and nodded. Now Jeffreys had been a London barrister for some years. Daniel suspected that he knew of these events only as a mysterious influence that caused his clients to go bankrupt. “Some turmoil,” Jeffreys said, in a dramatic whisper. “Rather dry language, isn’t it? Imagine some planter’s family in Jamaica, watching the work-force, and the harvest, dwindle—trying to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy, yellow fever, and slave rebellion—scanning the horizon for sails, praying for the ships that will be their salvation—some turmoil, you call it?”
Daniel could have said, Imagine a barrister watching his moneybags dwindle as he drinks them away, scanning the Strand for a client who’s got the wherewithal to pay his legal bills…but Jeffreys was wearing a sword and was drunk. So he said: “If those planters are in church, and praying, then they’ve already found salvation. Good evening, gentlemen.”
He headed for the Gate, swinging wide round the fountain so that Jeffreys wouldn’t be tempted to run him through. Sir Richard Apthorp was applauding him politely. Jeffreys was mumbling and growling, but after a few moments he was able to get words out: “You are the same man as you were—or weren’t—ten years ago, Daniel Waterhouse! You were ruled by fear then—and you’d have England ruled by it now! Thank God you are sequestered within these walls, and unable to infect London with your disgusting pusillanimity!”
And more in that vein, until Daniel ducked into the vault of the Great Gate of Trinity College. The gate was a hefty structure with crenellated towers at its four corners: a sort of mock-fortress, just the thing for retreating into when under attack by a Jeffreys. Between it and the side-wall of Trinity’s shotgun chapel was a gap in the College’s perimeter defenses about a stone’s throw wide, patched with a suite of chambers that had a little walled garden in front of it, on the side facing towards the town. These chambers had been used to shield various Fellows from the elements over the years, but lately Daniel Waterhouse and Isaac Newton had been living there. Once those two bachelors had moved in their miserable stock of furniture, there had been plenty of unused space remaining, and so it had become the world’s leading alchemical research facility. Daniel knew this, because he had helped build it—was helping build it, rather, for it was perpetually under construction.
Entering his home, Daniel pulled his robes close to his body so that they would not catch fire brushing against the glowing dome of the Reverberatory Furnace, wherein flames curled against the ceiling to strike downwards against the target. Then he pulled his skirts up so they wouldn’t drag against the heap of coal that (though the room was dark) he knew would be piled on the floor to his right. Or, for that matter, the mound of horse dung on the left (when burnt, it made a gentle moist heat). He maneuvered down a narrow lead among stacks of wooden crates, an egglike flask of quicksilver packed into each one, and came round a corner into another room.
This chamber looked like a miniature city, built by outlandish stone-masons, and just in the act of burning down—for each “building” had a peculiar shape, to draw in the air, channel flame, and carry away fumes in a particular way, and each one was filled with flames. Some of them smoked; some steamed; most gave off queer-smelling vapors. Rather than explaining what the place smelled like, ’twere easier to list what few things could not be smelled here. Lumps of gold lay out on tabletops, like butter in a pastry-shop—it being de rigueur among the higher sort of Alchemists to show a fashionable contempt for gold, as a way of countering the accusation that they were only in it for the money. Not all operations demanded a furnace, and so there were tables, too, sheathed in peened copper, supporting oil-lamps that painted the round bottoms of flasks and retorts with yellow flame.
Smudged faces turned towards Daniel, sequins of perspiration tumbled from drooping eyebrows. He immediately recognized Robert Boyle and John Locke, Fellows of the Royal Society, but, too, there were certain gentlemen who tended to show up at their garden-gate at perverse hours, robed and hooded—as if they really needed to conceal their identities when the King himself was practicing the Art at Whitehall. Viewing their petulant faces by firelight, Daniel wished they’d kept the hoods on. For, alas, they weren’t Babylonian sorcerers or Jesuit warrior-priests or Druidic warlocks after all, but an unmatched set of small-town apothecaries, bored noblemen, and crack-pated geezers, with faces that were either too slack or too spasmodical. One of them was markedly young—Daniel recognized him as Roger Comstock, he of the so-called Golden Comstocks, who’d been a scholar along with Daniel, Isaac, Upnor, Monmouth, and Jeffreys. Isaac had put Roger Comstock to work pumping a bellows, and the strain was showing on his face, but he was not about to complain. Too, there was a small and very trim raptor-faced man with white hair. Daniel recognized him as Monsieur LeFebure, the King’s Chymist, who’d introduced John Comstock and Thomas More Anglesey and others—including the King himself—to the Art, when they’d been exiled in St.-Germain during the Cromwell years.
But all of these were satellites, or (like Jupiter’s moons) satellites of satellites. The Sun stood at a writing-desk in the center of the room, quill in hand, calmly making notations in a large, stained, yellowed Book. He was dressed in a long splotched smock with several holes burnt through it, though the hem of a scarlet robe could be seen hanging beneath. His head was encased in a sort of leather sack with a windowpane let into it so that he could see out. Where Daniel stood, that rectangle of glass happened to be reflecting an open furnace-door, so instead of the bulging eyes, he saw a brilliant sheet of streaming flame. A breathing-tube, comprising segments of hollow cane plumbed together by the small intestine of some beast, was sewn through the bag. Isaac had tossed it back over his shoulder. It dangled down his back and ran across the floor to Roger Comstock, who pumped fresh air into it with a bellows. So they must be doing something with mercury this evening. Isaac had observed that quicksilver, absorbed into his body, produced effects like those of coffee or tobacco, only more so, and so he used the breathing apparatus whenever he had begun to feel especially twitchy.
The results of some experiment appeared to be cooling down on one of the tables—a crucible hanging in darkness giving off a sullen glow, like Mars—and Daniel reckoned it was as good a time as any to interrupt. He stepped into the middle of the room and held up the bloody rag. “The menstruum of a human female,” he announced, “only a few minutes old!”
A bit melodramatic. But these men thrived on it. Why else would they conceal their persons in wizard-cloaks, and their knowledge in occult signs? Some of them, anyway, were deeply impressed. Newton turned round and glared significantly at Roger Comstock, who cringed and gave the bellows several brisk strokes. The sack around Isaac’s head bulged and whistled. Isaac glared some more. One of the minions rushed up with a beaker. Daniel dropped the moist rag into it. Monsieur LeFebure approached and began to make calm observations in a fifty-fifty French-Latin mix. Boyle and Locke listened politely, the lesser Alchemists formed up in an outer circle, faces strained with the effort of decrypting whatever the King’s Chymist was saying.
Daniel turned the other way to see Isaac peeling the wet sack off his head, then gathering his silver hair and holding it atop his skull to let the back of his neck cool down. He was gazing back at Daniel with no particular emotion. Of course he knew that the rag was just a diversionary tactic, but this did not affect him one way or the other.
“There’s still time to see the second act of the play,” Daniel said. “We’re holding an empty seat for you—practically had to use muskets and pikes to keep scheming Londoners from it.”
“You are taking the position, then, that God placed me on the earth, and in His wisdom supplied me with the resources that He has, so that I could interrupt my work, and spend my hours, watching a wicked atheistical play?”
“Of course not, Isaac, please don’t impute such things to me, not even in private.”
They were withdrawing to another room—which, therefore, in a more dignified sort of house would be called the w’drawing room—but here it was a workshop, the floor slick with wood-dust and shavings from a lathe, and a-crackle with failures from the glass-blowing bench, and cluttered with various hand-tools that they’d used to construct everything else. Isaac said nothing, only gazed at Daniel, all patient expectation. “From time to time—perhaps once a day—I prevail upon you to eat something,” Daniel pointed out. “Does this mean I believe God put you here to stuff food into your mouth? Of course not. But in order for you to accomplish the work that you, and I, believe God shaped you for, you must put food into your body.”
“Is it really your belief that watching Once More into the Breeches is comparable to eating?”
“To work, you require certain resources—nutrition is only one. A stipend, a workshop, tools, equipment—how do you get them?”
“Behold!” Isaac said, sweeping one arm over his empire of tools and furnaces. This caused the cuff of his robe to fly out from under his smock—catching sight of it, he grasped the smock’s sleeve with the other hand and yanked it back to reveal the scarlet raiment of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Coming from any other man this would have seemed dramatic and insufferably pompous, but from Isaac it was the simplest and most concise answer to Daniel’s question.
“The Fellowship—the chambers—the laboratory—and the Lucasian Chair—all the best that you could hope for. You have all you need—for now. But how did you get those things, Isaac?”
“Providence.”
“By which you mean Divine Providence. But how—”
“You wish to examine the workings of God’s will in the world? I am pleased to hear it. For that is my sole endeavour. You are keeping me from it—let us go back into the other room and pursue an answer to your question together.”
“By diverting your attention from those crucibles—for a few hours—you could gain a clearer understanding of, and a more profound gratitude for, what Providence has given you.” Devising that sentence had required intense concentration on Daniel’s part—he was gratified when it seemed to at least confuse Isaac.
“If there are some data I have overlooked, by all means edify me,” Isaac said.
“Recall the Fellowship competition of several years ago. You’d been busy doing the work God put you here to do—instead of the work that Trinity College expected of you—consequently, your prospects seemed bleak—wouldn’t you agree?”
“I have always placed my faith in—”
“In God, of course. But don’t tell me you weren’t worried you’d be sent packing, and live out your days as a gentleman farmer in Woolsthorpe. There were other candidates. Men who’d curried favor in the right places, and memorized all of the medieval claptrap we were expected to know. Do you remember, Isaac, what became of your competitors?”
“One went insane,” Isaac recited like a bored scholar. “One passed out in a field from too much drink, caught a fever, and died. One fell down stairs drunk and had to withdraw because of injuries suffered. The fourth—” Here Isaac faltered, which was a rare event for him. Daniel seized the moment by stepping closer and adopting a curious and innocent look.
Isaac looked away and said, “The fourth one also fell down stairs drunk and had to withdraw! Now, Daniel, if you’re trying to say that this was incredibly improbable, and fortunate for me, I have already given you my answer: Providence.”
“But in what form did Providence exert itself? Some mysterious action at a distance? Or the earthly mechanics of colliding bodies?”
“Now you have quite lost me.”
“Do you believe that God stretched out a finger from Heaven, and knocked those two down the staircase? Or did he put someone on Earth who arranged for these things to happen?”
“Daniel—surely you didn’t—”
Daniel laughed. “Push them down stairs? No. But I think I know who did. You have the wherewithal to work, Isaac, because of certain Powers that Be—which is not to say that Providence isn’t working through them. But what it all means is that you must, from time to time, pause in your labors, and spend a few hours maintaining friendly relations with those Powers.”
Isaac had been pacing around the chamber during this lecture, and looking generally skeptical. More than one time he opened his mouth to make some objection. But at about the time Daniel finished, Isaac seemed to notice something. Daniel thought it was one of many papers and note-books scattered upon a certain table. Whatever it might have been, the sight of it caused Isaac to reconsider. Isaac’s face slackened, as if the internal flame were being banked. He began stripping off his smock. “Very well,” he said, “please inform the others.”
The others had already squeezed the rag out into a glass retort and were trying to
distill from it whatever generative spirit they supposed must be exuded from a woman’s
womb. Roger Comstock and the other minions looked crestfallen to learn that Professor
Newton would be leaving them, but Locke and Boyle and LeFebure took it in stride.
Newton made himself presentable very quickly—this being why academics loved robes,
and fops loathed them. A contingent of five Royal Society members—Boyle, Locke, LeFebure,
Waterhouse, and Newton—set out across the Great Court of Trinity College. All were
in long black robes and mortarboards save Newton, who led the way, a cardinal pursued
by a flock of crows, a vivid red mark on the Trinity green.
“I HAVEN’T SEEN THIS PLAY,” Locke said, “but I have seen one or two from which the story and characters of this one were…uh…”
Newton: “Stolen.”
Boyle: “Inspired.”
LeFebure: “Appropriated.”
Locke: “Adapted, and so I can inform you that a ship has run aground in a storm, near a castle, the seat of a foppish courtier probably named something like Percival Kidney or Reginald Mumblesleeve—”
“Francis Buggermy, according to the Playbill,” Daniel put in. Isaac turned around and glared at him.
“So much the better,” Locke said. “But of course the fop’s in London, never comes to the country—so a Vagabond named Roger Thrust or Judd Vault or—”
“Tom Runagate.”
“And his mistress, Madeline Cherry or—”
“Miss Straddle, in this case.”
“Are squatting there. Now, seeing a group of castaways from the ship coming ashore, these two Vagabonds dress up in the fop’s clothing and impersonate Francis Buggermy and his mistress-of-the-moment—much to the surprise of a withered Puritan Bible-pounder who comes upon the scene—”
“The Reverend Yahweh Pucker,” Daniel said.
“The rest we can see for ourselves—”
“Why’s that old fellow all charred black?” Boyle demanded, catching sight of a performer up on the stage.
“He’s a Neeger slave,” Daniel said.
“Which reminds me,” Locke put in, “I need to send a message to my broker—time to sell my stock in the Guinea Company, I fear—”
“No, no!” Boyle said, “I mean black as in charred, burnt, with smoke coming out of his hair!”
“No such thing was in the version I saw,” Locke said.
“Oh…in an earlier scene, there was a hilarious misadventure, having to do with a keg of gunpowder,” Daniel volunteered.
“Er…was this comedy written recently?”
“Since the…um…events?”
“One can only assume,” Daniel said.
Significant chin-stroking and hemming now among the various R.S. Fellows (save Newton),
who glanced up towards the Earl of Epsom as they made their way to their seats.
LYDIA: Is this walking, or swimming?
VAN UND: Fine muck—fine hurricanoe—throw up a dike there, and a windmill yonder, and I’ll be able to join it to my estates in Flanders.
LYDIA: But it isn’t yours.
VAN UND: Easily remedied—what’s the name of the place?
LYDIA: That pretty boatswain said we were just off a place called Suckmire.
VAN UND: Don’t pine for him, Lydia—yonder Castle’s sure to house some Persons of Quality—why, I spy some now! Halloo!
TOM RUNAGATE: You see, Miss Straddle, they’ve already marked us as Courtiers. A few stolen rags are as good as Title and Pedigree.
MISS STRADDLE: Aye, Tom, true enough when we’re barely within bowshot—but what’s to come later?
TOM (peering through spyglass): What is to come? I have spied one candidate—
STRADDLE: That lass has breeding, my wayward Tom—she’ll scorn you as a Vagabond, when she hears your voice—
TOM: I can do a fine accent well as any Lord.
STRADDLE:—and observes your uncouth manners.
TOM: Don’t you know that bad manners are high fashion now?
STRADDLE: Stab me!
TOM: ’Tis truth! These fine people insult one another all day long—’tis called wit! Then they poke at one another with swords, and call it honor.
STRADDLE: Then ’tween Wit and Honor, the treasure on that wrack is as good as ours.
VAN UND: Halloo, there, sir! Throw us a line, we are sinking into your garden!
TOM: This one must be daft, he mistakes yonder mud-flat for a garden!
STRADDLE: Daft, or Delft.
TOM: You think he’s Dutch!? Then I might levy a rope-climbing toll…
STRADDLE: What’ll his daughter think of you then?
TOM: ’Tis well considered…
Throws rope.
LORD BRIMSTONE: Who’s that Frenchman on the sea-wall? Has England been conquered? Heaven help us!
LADY B: He is no Frenchman, my lord, but a good English gentleman in modern attire—most likely it is Count Suckmire, and that lady is his latest courtesan.
LORD B: You don’t say!
To Miss Straddle. Good day, madam—I’m informed that you are a Cartesian—here stands another!
STRADDLE: What’s he on about?
TOM: Never mind—remember what I told you.
LORD B: Cogito, ergo sum!
STRADDLE: Air go some? Yes, the air goes some when you flap your jaw, sir—I thought it was a sea-breeze, until I smelled it.
To Tom. Is that the sort of thing?
TOM: Well played, my flower.
LADY B: That whore is most uncivil.
LORD B: NO need to be vulgar, my dear—it means she recognizes us as her equals.
ENTER, from opposite, the Rev. Yahweh Pucker, with
BIBLE and SHOVEL.
PUCKER: Here’s proof the Lord works in mysterious ways—I came expecting to find a ship-wrack, and drownded bodies in need of burying—which service I am ever willing to perform, for a small contribution—group rates available—instead, it is a courtly scene. St. James’s Park on a sunny May morn ne’er was so.
TOM: Between the Dutch mercer, and the English lord, there must be treasure aplenty on that wrack—if you can divert them in the Castle, I’ll get word to our merry friends—they can steal the longboat these rowed in on, and go fetch the goods.
STRADDLE: Whilst you salvage the Dutch girl’s maidenhead?
TOM: Lost at sea already, I fear.
Now THERE WAS A CHANGE of scene to the interior of Castle Suck-mire. As things were being re-arranged upon the stage, Oldenburg leaned close and said, “Is that him, then?”
“Yes, that’s Isaac Newton.”
“Well done—more than one Anglesey will be pleased—how did you flush him into the open?”
“I am not entirely sure.”
“What of the tangents paper?”
“One thing at a time, please, sir…”
“I cannot understand his reticence!”
“He’s only published one thing in his life—”
“The colors paper!? That was two years ago!”
“For you, two years of interminable waiting—for Isaac, two years of siege warfare—fending off Hooke on one front, Jesuits on the other.”
“Perhaps if you would only relate to him how you have passed the last two months—”
Daniel managed not to laugh in Oldenburg’s face.
UP ON THE STAGE IN Neville’s Court, the plot was thickening, or, depending on how you liked your plots, expanding into a froth. Miss Straddle, played by Tess, was flirting with Eugene Stopcock, an infantry officer, who had rushed in from London to rescue his shipwrecked parents. Tom Runagate had already been to bed at least once with Lydia van Underdevater. The courtier Francis Bug-germy had showed up incognito and begun chasing the slave Nzinga around in hopes of verifying certain rumors about the size of African men.
Isaac Newton was pinching the high bridge of his nose and looking mildly nauseated. Oldenburg was glaring at Daniel, and several important personages were glaring from On High at Oldenburg.
The play was entering Act V. Soon it would come to an end, triggering a plan, laid by Oldenburg, in which Isaac was finally going to be introduced to the King, and to the Royal Society at large. If Isaac’s paper were not brought forth tonight, it never would be, and Isaac would be known only as an Alchemist who once invented a telescope. So Daniel excused himself and set out across Trinity’s courtyards one more time.
The lurkers in the Great Court had thinned out, or perhaps he simply was not paying so much attention to them—he had decided what to do, and that gave him liberty, for the first time in months, to tilt his head back and look up at the stars.
It had turned out that Hooke, with his telescope project, had had much more on his mind than countering the ravings of some pedantic Jesuit. Sitting in the dark hole of Gresham’s College, marking down the coordinates of various stars, he’d outlined the rudiments of a larger theory to Daniel: first that all cœlestial bodies attracted all others within their sphere of influence, by means of some gravitating power; second that all bodies put into motion moved forward in a straight line unless acted upon by some effectual power; third that the attractive power became more powerful as the body wrought upon came nearer to the center.
Oldenburg did not yet know the magnitude of Isaac’s powers. Not that Oldenburg was stupid—he was anything but. But Isaac, unlike, say, Leibniz the indefatigable letter-writer or Hooke the Royal Society stalwart, did not communicate his results, and did not appear to socialize with anyone save daft Alchemists. And so in Oldenburg’s mind, Newton was a clever though odd chap who’d written a paper about colors and then got into a fracas over it with Hooke. If Newton would only mingle with the Fellows a bit, Oldenburg seemed to believe, he would soon learn that Hooke had quite put colors out of his mind and moved on to matters such as Universal Gravitation, which of course would not interest young Mr. Newton in the slightest.
This entire plan was, in other words, an embryonic disaster. But it might not occur
for another hundred years that most of the Royal Society, and a King with a passion
for Natural Philosophy, would spend a night together in Cambridge, within shouting
distance of the bed where Isaac slept and the table where he worked. Isaac had to
be drawn out, and it had to happen tonight. If this would lead to open war with Hooke,
so be it. Perhaps that was inevitable anyway, no matter what Daniel did in the next
few minutes.
DANIEL WAS BACK in the chambers. Roger Comstock, left behind, Cinderella-like, to tidy up and tend the furnaces, had apparently gotten bored and sneaked off to an alehouse, because the candles had all been snuffed, leaving the big room lit only by the furnaces’ rosy glow. Here Daniel would’ve been at a stand, if not for the fact that he lived there, and could find his way round in the dark. He groped a candle out of a drawer and lit it from a furnace. Then he went into the room where he’d conversed with Isaac earlier. Rummaging through papers, trying to find the one about tangents—the first practical fruits of Isaac’s old work about fluxions—he was reminded that the sight of something on this table had rattled Isaac, and persuaded him to expose himself to the awful torment of watching a comedy. Daniel kept a sharp eye out, but saw nothing except for tedious alchemical notes and recipes, many signed not “Isaac Newton” but “Jeova Sanctus Unus,” which was the pseudonym Isaac used for Alchemy work.
In any case—without solving the eternal mystery of why Isaac did what he did—he spied the tangents paper on the far corner of the table, and stepped forward to reach for it.
The place was suffused with odd sounds, mostly the seething and hissing of diverse fuels burning in the furnaces, and the endless popping and ticking of the wooden wall panels. Another sound, faint and furtive, had reached Daniel’s ears from time to time, but that surly porter who bestrides the gate of the conscious mind, spurning most of what is brought in by the senses and admitting only perceptions of Import or Quality, had construed this as a mouse sapping and mining the wall, and shouldered it aside. Now, though, it did come to Daniel’s notice, for it grew louder: more rat than mouse. Isaac’s tangents paper was in his hand, but he stood still for a few moments, trying to work out where this rat was busy, so that he could come back in daylight and investigate. The sound was resonating in a partition separating this room from the big laboratory with the furnaces, which was not of regular shape, but had several pop-outs and alcoves, built, by men who’d long since passed away, for heaven only knew what reasons: perhaps to encase a chimney here, or add a bit of pantry space there. Daniel had a good idea of what lay on the opposite side of that wall that was making the grinding noises: it was a little sideboard, set into an alcove in the corner of the laboratory, probably used once by servants when that room had been a dining-hall. Nowadays, Isaac used the cabinets below it to store Alchemical supplies. The counter was stocked with mortars, pestles, &c. For certain of the things Isaac worked with had a marked yearning to burst into flame, and so he was at pains to store them in that particular alcove, as far as possible from the furnaces.
Daniel walked as quietly as he could back into the laboratory. He set the tangents paper down on a table and then picked up an iron bar that was lying next to a furnace door for use as a poker. There was more than one way to get rid of rats; but sometimes the best approach was the simplest, viz. ambush and bludgeon. He stalked down an aisle between furnaces, wiggling the poker in his hand. The alcove had been partitioned from the rest of the room by a free-standing screen such as ladies were wont to dress behind, consisting of fabric (now shabby) pleated and hung on a light wooden frame. This was to stop flying sparks, and to shield Isaac’s fragile scales and fine powders from gusts of wind coming through open windows or down chimneys.
He faltered, for the gnawing had stopped, as if the rat sensed the approach of a predator. But then it started up again, very loud, and Daniel strode forward, stretched one toe out ahead of him, and kicked the screen out of the way. His poker-hand was drawn back behind his head, poised to ring down a death-blow, and the candle was thrust out before him to find and dazzle the rat, which he guessed would be out on the counter.
Instead he found himself sharing a confined space with another man. Daniel was so astonished that he froze, and sprang several inches into the air, at the same instant, if such a combination were possible, and dropped the poker, and fumbled the candle. He had nearly shoved the flame right into the face of this other chap: Roger Comstock. Roger had been working in the dark with a mortar and pestle and so the sudden appearance of this flame in his face not only startled him half out of his wits, but blinded him as well. And on the heels of those emotions came terror. He dropped what he had been working on: a mortar, containing some dark gray powder, which he had been pouring into a cloth bag at the instant Daniel surprised him. Indeed drop did not do justice to Roger’s treatment of these two items; gravity was not nearly quick enough. He thrust them away, and at the same time flung himself backwards.
Daniel watched the flame of his candle grow to the size of a bull’s head, enveloping his hand and arm as far as the elbow. He dropped it. The floor was carpeted with flame that leapt up in a great FOOM and disappeared, leaving the place perfectly dark. Not that all flames had gone, for Daniel could still hear them crackling; the darkness was because of dense smoke filling the whole room. Daniel inhaled some and wished he hadn’t. This was gunpowder that Roger had been playing with.
Roger was out of the house in five heartbeats, notwithstanding that he did it on his hands and knees. Daniel crawled out after him and stood outside the door long enough to purge his lungs with several deep draughts of fresh air.
Roger had already scuttled across the garden and banged out the gate. Daniel went over to pull it closed, looking out first into the way. Some yards down, a couple of porters, shadowed under the vault of the Great Gate, regarded him with only moderate curiosity. It was expected that strange lights and noises would emanate from the residence of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. For shadowy figures to flee the building with smoke coming out of their clothes was only a little remarkable. Failing to close the garden gate was an egregious lapse; but Daniel saw to it.
Then, holding his breath, he ventured back in. He found the windows by grope and hauled them open. The flames had caught and spread in the fabric of the toppled screen, but gone no farther, owing to that Isaac suffered very little that was combustible to abide in the furnace-room. Daniel stomped out a few glowing edges.
In a more genteel setting, the smoke would have been accounted as a kind of damage to all the contents of the room that had been darkened and made noisome by it; but in a place such as this, it was nothing.
What had occurred was not an explosion—for the gunpowder, fortunately, had not been confined—but a very rapid burning. The screen was wrecked. The cabinetry in the alcove was blackened. A scale had been blown off the counter and was probably ruined. The mortar that Roger had dropped lay in fat shards at the epicenter of the black burst, making Daniel think of the cannon that had exploded at the “Siege of Maestricht,” and other such disasters he had heard about lately aboard ships of the Royal Navy. Surrounding it were burnt scraps of linen—the bag into which Roger had been decocting the gunpowder when Daniel had set fire to it. It was, in other words, the least possible amount of devastation that could possibly result from deflagration of a sack of gunpowder inside the house. That said, this corner of the laboratory was a shambles, and would have to be cleaned up—a task that would fall to Roger anyway. Unless, as seemed likely, Isaac fired him.
One would think that being blown up would throw one’s evening’s schedule all awry. But all of this had passed very quickly, and there was no reason Daniel could not accomplish the errand that had brought him here. Indeed, the grave problems that had so burdened him on his walk over here were quite forgotten now, and would appear to be perfectly trivial seen against the stunning adventure of the last few minutes. His hand and, to a lesser degree, his face, were raw and red from flash-burns, and he suspected he might have to do without eyebrows for a few weeks. A quick change of robes and a wash were very much in order; no difficulty, as he lived upstairs.
But having done those, Daniel picked up the tangents paper, shook off the black grit that re-punctuated it, and headed out the door. This was no more than a tenth of everything Isaac had accomplished with fluxions, but it was at least a shred of evidence—better than nothing—and sufficient to keep most Fellows of the Royal Society in bed with headaches for weeks. The night overhead was clear, the view excellent, the mysteries of the Universe all spread out above Trinity College. But Daniel lowered his sights and plodded toward the cone of steamy light where everyone was waiting.