The City of London

1673

A fifth doctrine, that tendeth to the dissolution of a commonwealth, is, that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods; such, as excludeth the right of the sovereign.

—HOBBES, Leviathan

DANIEL HAD NEVER been an actor on a stage, of course, but when he went to plays at Roger Comstock’s theatre—especially when he saw them for the fifth or sixth time—he was struck by the sheer oddity of these men (and women!) standing about on a platform prating the words of a script for the hundredth time and trying to behave as if hundreds of persons weren’t a few yards away goggling at them. It was strangely mannered, hollow, and false, and all who took part in it secretly wanted to strike the show and move on to something new. Thus London during this the Third Dutch War, waiting for news of the Fall of Holland.

As they waited, they had to content themselves with such smaller bits of news as from time to time percolated in from the sea. All London passed these rumors around and put on a great pompous show of reacting to them, as actors observe a battle or storm said to be taking place off-stage.

Queerly—or perhaps not—the only solace for most Londoners was going to the theatre, where they could sit together in darkness and watch their own behavior reflected back to them. Once More into the Breeches had become very popular since its Trinity College debut. It had to be performed in Roger Comstock’s theatre after its first and second homes were set on fire owing to lapses in judgment on the part of the pyrotechnicians. Daniel’s job was to simulate lightning-flashes, thunderbolts, and the accidental detonation of Lord Brimstone without burning down Roger’s investment. He invented a new thunder-engine, consisting of a cannonball rolling down a Spiral of Archimedes in a wooden barrel, and he abused his privileges at the world’s leading alchemical research facility to formulate a new variant of gunpowder that made more flash and less bang. The pyrotechnics lasted for a few minutes, at the beginning of the play. The rest of the time he got to sit backstage and watch Tess, who always dazzled him like a fistful of flash-powder going off right in the face, and made his heart feel like a dented cannonball tumbling down an endless hollow Screw. King Charles came frequently to watch his Nellie sing her pretty songs, and so Daniel took some comfort—or amusement at least—in knowing that he and the King both endured this endless Wait in the same way: gazing at the cheeks of pretty girls.

The small bits of news that did come in, while they waited for the big one, took various forms at first, but as the war went on they seemed to consist mostly of death-notices. It was not quite like living in London during the Plague; but more than once, Daniel had to choose between two funerals going on at the same hour. Wilkins had been the first. Many more followed, as if the Bishop of Chester had launched a fad.

Richard Comstock, the eldest son of John, and the model for the stalwart if dim Eugene Stopcock in Breeches, was on a ship that was part of a fleet that fell under the guns of Admiral de Ruyter at Sole Bay. Along with thousands of other Englishmen, he went to David Jones’s Locker. Many of the survivors could now be seen hobbling round London on bloody stumps, or rattling cups on street-corners. Daniel was startled to receive an invitation to the funeral. Not from John, of course, but from Charles, who had been John’s fourth son and was now the only one left (the other two had died young of smallpox). After his stint as laboratory assistant during the Plague Year at Epsom, Charles had matriculated at Cambridge, where he’d been tutored by Daniel. He had been well on his way to being a competent Natural Philosopher. But now he was the scion of a great family, and never could be aught else, unless the family ceased to be great, or he ceased being a part of it.

John Comstock got up in front of the church and said, “The Hollander exceeds us in industry, and in all things else, but envy.”

King Charles shut down the Exchequer one day, which is to say that he admitted that the country was out of money, and that not only could the Crown not repay its debts, but it couldn’t even pay interest on them. Within a week, Daniel’s uncle, Thomas Ham, Viscount Walbrook, was dead—of a broken heart or suicide, no one save Aunt Mayflower knew—but it scarcely made a difference. This led to the most theatrickal of all the scenes Daniel witnessed in London that year (with the possible exception of the re-enactment of the Siege of Maestricht): the opening of the Crypt.

Thomas Ham’s reliable basement had been sealed up by court officials immediately upon the death of its proprietor, and musketeers had been posted all round to prevent Ham’s depositors (who had, in recent weeks, formed a small muttering knot that never went away, loitering outside; as others held up libels depicting the atrocities of King Looie’s army in Holland, so these held up Goldsmiths’s Notes addressed to Thomas Ham) from breaking in and claiming their various plates, candlesticks, and guineas. Legal maneuverings began, and continued round the clock, casting a queer shadow over Uncle Thomas’s funeral, and stretching beyond it to two days, then three. The cellar’s owner was already in the grave, his chief associates mysteriously unfindable, and rumored to be in Dunkirk trying to buy passage to Brazil with crumpled golden punch-bowls and gravy-boats. But those were rumors. The facts were in the famously safe and sturdy Ham Bros. Cellar on Threadneedle.

This was finally unsealed by a squadron of Lords and Justices, escorted by musketeers, and duly witnessed by Raleigh, Sterling, and Daniel Waterhouse; Sir Richard Apthorp; and various stately and important Others. It was three days exactly since King Charles had washed his hands of the royal debts and Thomas Ham had met his personal Calvary at the hands of the Exchequer. That statistic was noted by Sterling Waterhouse—as always, noticer of details par excellence. As the crowd of Great and Good Men shuffled up the steps of Ham House, he muttered to Daniel: “I wonder if we shall roll the stone aside and find an empty tomb?”

Daniel was appalled by this dual sacrilege—then reflected that as he was now practically living in a theatre and mooning over an actress every night, he could scarcely criticize Sterling for making a jest.

It turned out not to be a jest. The cellar was empty.

Well—not empty. It was full, now, of speechless men, standing flatfooted on the Roman mosaic.

RALEIGH: “I knew it would be bad. But—my God—there’s not even a potatoe.”

STERLING: “It is a sort of anti-miracle.”

LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF THE REALM: “Go up and tell the musketeers to go and get more musketeers.”

They all stood there for quite a while. Attempts to make conversation flared sporadically all round the cellar and fizzled like flashes in damp pans. Except—strangely—among Waterhouses. Disaster had made them convivial.

RALEIGH: “Our newest tenant informs me you’ve decided to turn architect, Daniel.”

STERLING: “We thought you were going to be a savant.”

DANIEL: “All the other savants are doing it. Just the other day, Hooke figured out how arches work.”

STERLING: “I should have thought that was known by now.”

RALEIGH: “Do you mean to say all existing arches have been built on guesswork?”

SIR RICHARD APTHORP: “Arches—and Financial Institutions.”

DANIEL: “Christopher Wren is going to re-design all the arches in St. Paul’s, now that Hooke has explained them.”

STERLING: “Good! Maybe the new one won’t become all bow-legged and down-at-heels, as the old one did.”

RALEIGH: “I say, brother Daniel—don’t you have some drawings to show us?”

DANIEL: “Drawings?”

RALEIGH: “In the w’drawing room, perhaps?”

Which was a bad pun and a cryptickal sign, from Raleigh the patriarch (fifty-five years comically aged, to Daniel’s eyes seeming like a young Raleigh dressed up in rich old man’s clothes and stage-makeup), that they were all supposed to Withdraw from the cellar. So they did, and Sir Richard Apthorp came with them. They wound up on the upper floor of Ham House, in a bedchamber—the very same one that Daniel had gazed into from his perch atop Gresham’s College. A rock had already come in through a window and was sitting anomalously in the middle of a rug, surrounded by polygons of glass. More were beginning to thud against the walls, so Daniel swung the windows open to preserve the glazing. Then they all retreated to the center of the room and perched up on the bed and watched the stones come in.

STERLING: “Speaking of Guineas, or lack thereof—shame about the Guinea Company, what?”

APTHORP: “Pfft! ’Twas like one of your brother’s theatrickal powder-squibs. Sold my shares of it long ago.”

STERLING: “What of you, Raleigh?”

RALEIGH: “They owe me money, is all.”

APTHORP: “You’ll get eight shillings on the pound.”

RALEIGH: “An outrage—but better than what Thomas Ham’s depositors will get.”

DANIEL: “Poor Mayflower!”

RALEIGH: “She and young William are moving in with me anon—and so you’ll have to seek other lodgings, Daniel.”

STERLING: “What fool is buying the Guinea Company’s debts?”

APTHORP: “James, Duke of York.”

STERLING: “As I said—what dauntless hero is, et cetera…”

DANIEL: “But that’s nonsense! They are his own debts!”

APTHORP: “They are the Guinea Company’s debts. But he is winding up the Guinea Company and creating a new Royal Africa Company. He’s to be the governor and chief shareholder.”

RALEIGH: “What, sinking our Navy and making us slaves to Popery is not sufficient—he’s got to enslave all the Neegers, too?”

STERLING: “Brother, you sound more like Drake every day.”

RALEIGH: “Being surrounded by an armed mob must be the cause of sounding that way.”

APTHORP: “The Duke of York has resigned the Admiralty…”

RALEIGH: “As there’s nothing left to be Admiral of…”

APTHORP: “And is going to marry that nice Catholic girl^* and compose his African affairs.”

STERLING: “Sir Richard, this must be one of those things that you know before anyone else does, or else there would be rioters in the streets.”

RALEIGH: “There are, you pea-wit, and unless I’m having a Drakish vision, they have set fire to this very house.”

STERLING: “I meant they’d be rioting ’gainst the Duke, not our late bro-in-law.”

DANIEL: “I personally witnessed a sort of riot ’gainst the Duke the other day—but it was about his religious, not his military, political, or commercial shortcomings.”

STERLING: “You left out ‘intellectual and moral.’”

DANIEL: “I was trying to be concise—as we are getting a bit short of that spiritous essence, found in fresh air, for which fire competes with living animals.”

RALEIGH: “The Duke of York! What bootlicking courtier was responsible for naming New York after him? ’Tis a perfectly acceptable city.”

DANIEL: “If I may change the subject…the reason I led us to this room was yonder ladder, which in addition to being an excellent Play Structure for William Ham, will also convey us to the roof—where it’s neither so hot nor so smoky.”

STERLING: “Daniel, never mind what people say about you—you always have your reasons.”

[Now a serio-comical musical interlude: the brothers Waterhouse break into a shouted, hoarse (because of smoke) rendition of a Puritan hymn about climbing Jacob’s Ladder.]

SCENE: The rooftops of Threadneedle Street. Shouts, shattering of glass, musket-shots heard from below. They gather round the mighty Ham-chimney, which is now venting smoke of burning walls and furniture below.

SIR RICHARD APTHORP: “How inspiring, Daniel, to gaze down the widened and straightened prospect of Cheapside and know that St. Paul’s will be rebuilt there anon—’pon mathematick principles—so that it’s likely to stay up for a bit.”

STERLING: “Sir Richard, you sound ominously like a preacher opening his sermon with a commonplace observation that is soon to become one leg of a tedious and strained analogy.”

APTHORP: “Or, if you please, one leg of an arch—the other to be planted, oh, about here.”

RALEIGH: “You want to build, what, some sort of triumphal arch, spanning that distance? May I remind you that first we want some sort of triumph!?”

APTHORP: “It is only a similitude. What Christopher Wren means to do yonder in the way of a Church, I mean to do here with a Banca. And as Wren will use Hooke’s principles to build that Church soundly, I’ll use modern means to devise a Banca that—without in any way impugning your late brother-in-law’s illustrious record—will not have armed mobs in front of it burning it down.”

RALEIGH: “Our late brother-in-law was ruined, because the King borrowed all of his deposits—presumably at gunpoint—and then declined to pay ’em back—what mathematick principle will you use to prevent that?”

APTHORP: “Why, the same one that you and your co-religionists have used in order to maintain your faith: tell the King to leave us alone.”

RALEIGH: “Kings do not love to be told that, or anything.”

APTHORP: “I saw the King yesterday, and I tell you that he loves being bankrupt even less. I was born in the very year that the King seized the gold and silver that Drake and the other merchants had deposited in the Tower of London for safekeeping. Do you recall it?”

RALEIGH: “Yes, ’twas a black year, and made rebels of many who only wanted to be merchants.”

APTHORP: “Your brother-in-law’s business, and the practice of goldsmith’s notes, arose as a result—no one trusted the Tower any more.”

STERLING: “And after today no one will trust goldsmiths, or their silly notes.”

APTHORP: “Just so. And just as the Empty Tomb on Easter led, in the fullness of time, to a Resurrection…”

DANIEL: “I am stopping up mine ears now—if the conversation turns Christian, wave your hands about.”

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT THE DUTCH had won the war percolated through London invisibly, like Plague. Suddenly everyone had it. Daniel woke up in Bedlam one morning knowing that William of Orange had opened the sluices and put a large part of his Republic under water to save Amsterdam. But he couldn’t recall whence that knowledge had come.

He and his brothers had worked their way up Threadneedle by assailing one rooftop after another. They’d parted company with Apthorp on the roof of his goldsmith’s shop, which was still solvent—yet there was an armed mob in front of it, too, and in front of the next goldsmith’s, and the next. Far from escaping a riot, they understood, somewhat too late, that they were working their way toward the center of a much larger one. The obvious solution was to turn round and go back the way they’d come—but now a platoon of Quakers was coming toward them over the rooftops gripping matchlocks, each Quaker trailing a long thread of smoke from the smoldering punk in his fingers. Looking north across Threadneedle they could see a roughly equivalent number of infantrymen headed over the rooftops of Broad Street, coming from the direction of Gresham’s College, and it seemed obvious enough that Quakers and Army men would soon be swapping musket-balls over the heads of the mob of Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Diggers, Jews, Huguenots, Presbyterians, and other sects down below.

So it was down to the street and into the stone-throwing fray. But when they got down there, Daniel saw that these were not the young shin-kickers and head-butters of Drake’s glory days. These were paunchy mercers who simply wanted to know where all of their money had got to. The answer was that it had gone to wherever it goes when markets crash. Daniel kept treading on wigs. Sometimes a hundred rioters would turn around and flee en bloc from sudden musket-fire and all of their wigs would fall off at once, as though this were a practiced military drill. Some of the wigs had dollops of brain in them, though, which ended up as pearly skeins on Daniel’s shoes.

They pushed their way up Broad Street, away from the ’Change, which seemed to be the center of all disturbance. Those mock-Polish grenadiers were formed up in front of the building that had been the Guinea, and was soon to be the Royal Africa, Company. So the Waterhouses squirted past on the far side of the street, looking back to see whether any of those fatal spheres were trajecting after them. They tried to get in at Gresham’s College. But many offices of the City of London had been moved into it after the fire, and so it was shut up and almost as well guarded as the Royal Africa Company.

So they had kept moving north and eventually reached Bedlam, and found an evening’s refuge there amid piles of dressed stone and splats of mortar. Sterling and Raleigh had departed the next morning, but Daniel had remained: encamped, becalmed, drained, and feeling no desire to go back into the city. From time to time he would hear a nearby church-bell tolling the years of someone who’d died in the rioting.

Daniel’s whereabouts became known, and messengers began to arrive, several times a day, bearing invitations to more funerals. He attended several of them, and was frequently asked to stand up and say a few words—not about the deceased (he scarcely knew most of them), but about more general issues of religious tolerance. In other words, he was asked to parrot what Wilkins would’ve said, and for Daniel that was easy—much easier than making up words of his own. Out of a balanced respect for his own father, he mentioned Drake, too. This felt like a slow and indirect form of suicide, but after his conversation with John Comstock he did not feel he had much of a life to throw away. He was strangely comforted by the sight of all those pews filled with men in white and black (though sometimes Roger Comstock would show up as a gem of color, accompanied by one or two courtiers who were sympathetic, or at least curious). More mourners would be visible through open doors and windows, filling the church-yard and street.

It reminded him of the time during his undergraduate days when the Puritan had been murdered by Upnor, and Daniel had traveled five miles outside of Cambridge to the funeral, and found his father and brothers, miraculously, there. Exasperating to his mind but comforting to his soul. His words swayed their emotions much more than he wanted, or expected—as two inert substances, mixed in an Alchemist’s mortar, can create a fulminating compound, so the invocation of Drake’s and Wilkins’s memories together.

But this was not what he wanted and so he began to avoid the funerals after that, and stayed in the quiet stone-garden of Bedlam.

Hooke was there, too, for Gresham’s College had become too crowded with scheming fops. Bedlam was years away from being done. The masons hadn’t even begun work on the wings. But the middle part was built, and on top of it was a round turret with windows on all sides, where Hooke liked to retreat and work, because it was lonely and the light was excellent. Daniel for his part stayed down below, and only went out into the city to meet with Leibniz.

DOCTOR GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ picked up the coffee-pot and tipped it into his cup for the third time, and for the third time nothing came out of it. It had been empty for half an hour. He made a little sigh of regret, and then reluctantly stood up. “I beg your pardon, but I begin a long journey tomorrow. First the Channel crossing—then, between Calais and Paris, we shall have to dodge French regiments, straggling home, abject, starving, and deranged.”

Daniel insisted on paying the bill, and then followed the Doctor out the door. They began strolling in the direction of the inn where Leibniz had been staying. They were not far from the ’Change. Paving-stones and charred firebrands still littered the unpaved streets.

“Not much divine harmony in evidence, here in London,” Daniel said. “I can only hang my head in shame, as an Englishman.”

“If you and France had conquered the Dutch Republic, you would have much more to be ashamed of,” Leibniz returned.

“When, God willing, you get back to Paris, you can say that your mission was a success: there is no war.”

“It was a failure,” Leibniz said, “we did not prevent the war.”

“When you came to London, Doctor, you said that your philosophick endeavours were nothing more than a cover for diplomacy. But I suspect that it was the other way round.”

“My philosophick endeavours were a failure, too,” Leibniz said.

“You have gained one adherent…”

“Yes. Oldenburg pesters me every day to complete the Arithmetickal Engine.”

“Make that two adherents, then, Doctor.”

Leibniz actually stopped in his tracks and turned to examine Daniel’s face, to see if he was jesting. “I am honored, sir,” he said, “but I would prefer to think of you not as an adherent but as a friend.”

“Then the honor is all mine.”

They linked arms and walked in silence for a while.

“Paris!” Leibniz said, as if it were the only thing that could get him through the next few days. “When I get back to the Bibliothèque du Roi, I will turn all of my efforts to mathematics.”

“You don’t want to complete the Arithmetickal Engine?”

It was the first time Daniel had ever seen the Doctor show annoyance. “I am a philosopher, not a watchmaker. The philosophickal problems associated with the Arithmetickal Engine have already been solved…I have found my way out of that labyrinth.”

“That reminds me of something you said on your first day in London, Doctor. You mentioned that the question of free will versus predestination is one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What, pray tell, is the other?”

“The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space? Euclid assures us that we can divide any distance in half, and then subdivide each of them into smaller halves, and so on, ad infinitum. Easy to say, but difficult to understand…”

“It is more difficult for metaphysicians than for mathematicians, I think,” Daniel said. “As in so many other fields, modern mathematics has given us tools to work with things that are infinitely small, or infinitely large.”

“Perhaps I am too much of a metaphysician, then,” Leibniz said. “I take it, sir, that you are referring to the techniques of infinite sequences and series?”

“Just so, Doctor. But as usual, you are overly modest. You have already demonstrated, before the Royal Society, that you know as much of those techniques as any man alive.”

“But to me, they do not resolve our confusion, so much as give us a way to think about how confused we are. For example—”

Leibniz gravitated toward a sputtering lamp dangling from the overhanging corner of a building. The City of London’s new program to light the streets at night had suffered from the fact that the country was out of money. But in this riotous part of town, where (in the view of Sir Roger L’Estrange, anyway) any shadow might hide a conspiracy of Dissidents, it had been judged worthwhile to spend a bit of whale-oil on street-lamps.

Leibniz fetched a stick from a pile of debris that had been a goldsmith’s shop a week earlier, and stepped into the circle of brown light cast on the dirt by the lamp, and scratched out the first few terms of a series:

“If you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to approach the value of pi—to reach toward it, but never to grasp it…much as the human mind can approach divine things, and gain an imperfect knowledge of them, but never look God in the face.”

“It is not necessarily true that infinite series must be some sort of concession to the unknowable, Doctor…they can clarify, too! My friend Isaac Newton has done wizardly things with them. He has learned to approximate any curve as an infinite series.”

Daniel took the stick from Leibniz, then swept out a curve in the dirt. “Far from detracting from his knowledge, this has extended his grasp, by giving him a way to calculate the tangent to a curve at any point.” He carved a straight line above the curve, grazing it at one point.

A black coach rattled up the street, its four horses driven onwards by the coachman’s whip, but veering nervously around piles of debris. Daniel and Leibniz backed into a doorway to let it pass; its wheels exploded a puddle and turned Leibniz’s glyphs and Daniel’s curves into a system of strange canals, and eventually washed them away.

“Would that some of our work last longer than that,” Daniel said ruefully. Leibniz laughed—for a moment—then walked silently for a hundred yards or so.

“I thought Newton only did Alchemy,” Leibniz said.

“From time to time, Oldenburg or Comstock or I cajole him into writing out some of his mathematical work.”

“Perhaps I need more cajoling,” Leibniz said.

“Huygens can cajole you, when you get back.”

Leibniz shrugged violently, as if Huygens were sitting astride his neck, and needed to be got rid of. “He has tutored me well, to this point. But if all he can do is give me problems that have already been solved by some Englishman, it must mean that he knows no more mathematics than I do.”

“And Oldenburg is cajoling you—but to do the wrong thing.”

“I shall endeavour to have an Arithmetickal Engine built in Paris, to satisfy Oldenburg,” Leibniz sighed. “It is a worthy project, but for now it is a project for a mechanic.”

They came into the light of another street-lamp. Daniel took advantage of it to look at his companion’s face, and gauge his mood. Leibniz looked a good deal more resolute than he had beneath the previous street-lamp. “It is childish of me to expect older men to tell me what to do,” the Doctor said. “No one told me to think about free will versus predestination. I plunged into the middle of the labyrinth, and became thoroughly lost, and then had no choice but to think my way out of it.”

“The second labyrinth awaits you,” Daniel reminded him.

“Yes…it is time for me to plunge into it. Henceforth, that is my only purpose. The next time you see me, Daniel, I will be a mathematician second to none.”

From any other Continental lawyer these words would have been laughably arrogant; but they had come from the mouth of the monster.

I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts.

—JOHN BUNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress

DANIEL WAS AWAKENED one morning by a stifled boom, and supposed it was a piece being tested in the Artillery Yard outside of town. Just as he was about to fall back to sleep he heard it again: thump, like the period at the end of a book.

Dawn-light had flooded the turret of Bedlam and was picking its way down through struts and lashings, plank-decks and scaffolds, dangling ropes and angling braces, to the ground floor where Daniel lay on a sack of straw. He could hear movements above: not blunderings of thieves or vermin, but the well-conceived, precisely executed maneuvers of birds, and of Robert Hooke.

Daniel rose and, leaving his wig behind, so that the cool air bathed his stubbled scalp, climbed up toward the light, ascending the masons’ ladders and ropes. Above his head, the gaps between planks were radiant, salmon-colored lines, tight and parallel as harpsichord-strings. He hoisted himself up through a hatch, rousting a couple of swallows, and found himself within the dome of the turret, sharing a hemispherical room with Robert Hooke. Dust made the air gently luminous. Hooke had spread out large drawings of wings and airscrews. Before the windows he had hung panes of glass, neatly scored with black Cartesian grids, plotted with foreshortened parabolae—the trajectories of actual cannonballs. Hooke liked to watch cannonballs fly from a stand-point next to the cannon, standing inside a contraption he had built, peering through these sheets of glass and tracing the balls’ courses on them with a grease-pencil.

“Weigh out five grains of powder for me,” Hooke said. He was paying attention to part of a rarefying engine: one of many such piston-and-cylinder devices he and Boyle used to study the expansion of gases.

Daniel went over to a tiny scale set up on a plank between two sawhorses. On the floor next to it was a keg branded with the coat of arms of the Silver Comstocks. Its bung was loose, and peppered with grains of coarse powder. Next to it rested a small cylindrical bag of linen, about the diameter of a fist, plump and round as a full sack of flour. This had once been sewn shut, but Hooke had snipped through the uneven stitches and teased it open. Looking in among the petals of frayed fabric, Daniel saw that it, too, was filled with black powder.

“Would you prefer I take it from the keg, or the little bag?” Daniel asked.

“As I value my eyes, and my Rarefying Engine, take it from the keg.”

“Why do you say so?” Daniel drew the loose bung out and found that the keg was nearly full. Taking up a copper spoon that Hooke had left near the scale (copper did not make sparks), he scooped up a small amount of powder from the bung-hole and began sprinkling it onto one of the scale’s frail golden pans. But his gaze strayed towards the linen bag. In part this was because Hooke, who feared so little, seemed to think it was a hazard. Too, there was something about this bag that was familiar to him, though he could not place it in his memory.

“Rub a pinch between your fingers,” Hooke suggested. “Come, there is no danger.”

Daniel probed into the linen bag and got a smudge of the stuff on his fingertips. The answer was obvious. “This is much finer than that in the keg.” And that was the clew that reminded him where he had seen such a bag before. The night that Roger Comstock had blown himself up in the laboratory, he had been grinding gunpowder very fine, and pouring it into a bag just like this one. “Where did this come from? A theatre?”

For once Hooke was flummoxed. “What a very odd question for you to ask. Why do you phant’sy such a thing should come from a theatre, of all places?”

“The nature of the powder,” Daniel said. “Ground so exceedingly fine.” He nodded at the bag, for his hands were busy. Having weighed out five grains of powder from the keg, he poured them from the scale-pan into a cupped scrap of paper and carried it over to Hooke. “Such powder burns much faster than this coarse stuff.” He shook the paper for emphasis and it made a sandy rasp. He handed it to Hooke, who poured it into the cylinder of the Rarefying Engine. Some of these engines were wrought of glass, but this was a heavy brass tube about the size of a tobacco-canister: a very small siege-mortar, in effect. Its piston fit into it like a cannonball.

“I am aware of it,” Hooke said. “That is why I do not wish to put five grains of it into the Rarefying Engine. Five grains of Comstock’s powder burns slow and steady, and drives the piston up in a way that is useful to me. The same weight of that fine stuff from yonder bag would burn in an instant, and explode my apparatus, and me.”

“That is why I supposed the bag might have come from a theatre,” Daniel said. “Such powder may be unsuitable for the Rarefying Engine, but on the stage it makes a pretty flash and bang.”

“That bag,” said Hooke, “came from the magazine of one of His Majesty’s Ships of War. The practice used to be, and still is on some ships, that powder is introduced into the bore of a cannon by scooping it up out of a keg and pouring it in. Similar to how a musketeer charges the barrel of his weapon. But in the heat of battle, our gunners are prone to mis-measure and to spill the powder on the deck. And to have open containers of powder near active cannon is to tempt disaster. A new practice is replacing the old. Before the battle, when it is possible to work calmly, the powder is carefully measured out and placed into bags, such as that one, which are sewn shut. The bags are stockpiled in the ship’s magazine. During battle, as they are needed, they are ferried one at a time to the guns.”

“I see,” Daniel said, “then the gunner need only slash the bag open and pour its contents into the bore.”

Hardly for the first time, Hooke was a bit irked by Daniel’s stupidity. “Why waste time opening it with a knife, when fire will open it for you?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Behold, the diameter of the bag is the same as the bore of the gun. Why open it then? No, the entire bag, sewn shut, is introduced into the barrel.”

“The gunners never even see what is inside of it!”

Hooke nodded. “The only powder that the gunners need concern themselves with is the priming-powder that is poured into the touch-hole and used to communicate fire to the bag.”

“Then those gunners are trusting the ones who sew up the bags—trusting them with their lives,” Daniel said. “If the wrong sort of powder were used—” and he faltered, and went over and dipped his fingers once more into the bag before him to feel the consistency of the powder inside. The difference between it and the Comstock powder was like that between flour and sand.

“Your discourse is strangely like that of John Comstock when he delivered that bag and that keg to me,” Hooke said.

“He brought them around in person?”

Hooke nodded. “He said he no longer trusted anyone to do it for him.”

Whereat Daniel must have looked shocked, for Hooke held up a hand as if to restrain him, and continued: “I understood his state of mind too well. Some of us, Daniel, are prone to a sort of melancholy, wherein we are tormented by phant’sies that other men are secretly plotting to do us injury. It is a pernicious state for a man to fall into. I have harbored such notions from time to time about Oldenburg and others. Your friend Newton shows signs of the same affliction. Of all men in the world, I supposed John Comstock least susceptible to this disorder; but when he came here with this bag, he was very far gone with it, which grieved me more than anything else that has happened of late.”

“My lord believes,” Daniel guessed, “that some enemy of his has been salting the magazines of Navy ships with bags filled with finely milled powder, such as this one. Such a bag, sewn shut, would look the same, to a gunner, as an ordinary one; but when loaded into the bore, and fired—”

“It would burst the barrel and kill everyone nearby,” Hooke said. “Which might be blamed on a faulty cannon, or on faulty powder; but as my lord manufactures both, the blame cannot but be laid on him in the end.”

“Where did this bag come from?” Daniel asked.

“My lord said it was sent to him by his son Richard, who found it in the magazine of his ship on the eve of their sailing for Sole Bay.”

“Where Richard was killed by a Dutch broadside,” Daniel said. “So my lord desired that you would inspect this bag and render an opinion that it had been tampered with by some malicious conspirator.”

“Just so.”

“And have you done so?”

“No one has asked my opinion yet.”

“Not even Comstock?”

“Nay, not even Comstock.”

“Why would he bring you such evidence in person, and then not ask?”

“I can only guess,” Hooke said, “that in the meantime he has come to understand that it does not really matter.”

“What an odd thing to think.”

“Not really,” Hooke said. “Suppose I testified that this bag contained powder that was too fine. What would it boot him? Anglesey—for make no mistake, that’s who’s behind this—would reply that Comstock had made up this bag in his own cellar, as false evidence to exonerate himself and his faulty cannons. Comstock’s son is the only man who could testify that it came from a ship’s magazine, and he’s dead. There might be other such bags in other magazines, but they are mostly on the bottom of the sea, thanks to Admiral de Ruyter. We have lost the war, and it must be blamed on someone. Someone other than the King and the Duke of York. Comstock has now come to understand that it is being blamed on him.”

The daylight had become much more intense in the minutes Daniel had been up here. He saw that Hooke had rigged an articulated rod to the back of the piston, and connected the rod to a system of cranks. Now, by means of a tiny touch-hole in the base of the cylinder, he introduced fire to the chamber. Thump. The piston snapped up to the top of the bore much faster than Daniel could flinch away from it. This caused an instant of violent motion in the gear-train, which had the effect of winding a spring that spiraled around in a whirling hoop the size of a dinner-plate. A ratchet stopped this from unwinding. Hooke then re-arranged the gears so that the giant watch-spring was connected, by a string wound around a tapered drum, to the drive-shaft of a peculiar helical object, very light-weight, made of parchment stretched on a frame of steam-bent cane. Like a Screw of Archimedes. The spring unwound slowly, spinning the screw swiftly and steadily. Standing at one end of it, Daniel felt a palpable breeze, which continued for more than a minute—Hooke timed it with his latest watch.

“Properly wrought, and fed with gunpowder at regular intervals, it might generate enough wind to blow itself off the ground,” Hooke said.

“Supplying the gunpowder would be difficult,” Daniel said.

“I only use it because I have some,” Hooke said. “Now that Anglesey has been elected President of the Royal Society, I look forward to experimenting with combustible vapors in its stead.”

“Even if I’ve moved to Massachusetts by then,” Daniel said, “I’ll come back to London to watch you fly through the air, Mr. Hooke.”

A church-bell began ringing not far away. Daniel remarked that it was a bit early for funerals. But a few minutes later another one started up, and another. They did not simply bong a few times and then stop—they kept pealing in some kind of celebration. But the Anglican churches did not seem to be sharing in the joy. Only the queer churches of Dutchmen and Jews and Dissenters.

LATER IN THE DAY, Roger Comstock appeared at the gates of Bedlam in a coach-and-four. The previous owner’s coat of arms had been scraped off and replaced with that of the Golden Comstocks. “Daniel, do me the honor of allowing me to escort you to Whitehall,” Roger said, “the King wants you there for the signing.”

“Signing of what?” Daniel could imagine several possibilities—Daniel’s death warrant for sedition, Roger’s for sabotage, or an instrument of surrender to the Dutch Republic, being three of the more plausible.

“Why, the Declaration! Haven’t you heard? Freedom of conscience for Dissenters of all stripes—almost—just as Wilkins wanted it.”

“That is very good news, if true—but why should His Majesty want me there?”

“Why, next to Bolstrood you are the leading Dissenter!”

“That is not true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Roger said cheerfully. “He thinks it’s true—and after today, it will be.”

“Why does he think it’s true?” Daniel asked, though he already suspected why.

“Because I have been telling everyone so,” Roger answered.

“I haven’t clothes fit to wear to a whorehouse—to say nothing of Whitehall Palace.”

“There is very little practical difference,” Roger said absent-mindedly.

“You don’t understand. My wig’s home to a family of swallows,” Daniel complained. But Roger Comstock snapped his fingers, and a valet sprang out of the coach laden with diverse packages and bundles. Through the open door, Daniel glimpsed women’s clothing, too—with women inside of it. Two different women. A thump from the turret, a muffled curse from Hooke. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing foppish,” Roger said. “For a leading Dissident, it is entirely proper.”

“Can the same be said of the ladies?” Daniel asked, following Roger and the valet into Bedlam.

“These aren’t ladies,” Roger said, and other than that weak jest did not even try to answer the question. “Do London a favor and take those damned clothes off. I shall have my manservant burn them.”

“The shirt is not so bad,” Daniel demurred. “Oh, I agree that it is no longer fit for wearing. But it might be made into a powder-bag for the Navy.”

“No longer in demand,” Roger said, “now that the war is over.”

“On the contrary, I say that a great many of them shall have to be made up now, as so many of the old ones are known to be defective.”

“Hmm, you are well-informed, for a political naif. Who has been filling your head with such ideas? Obviously a supporter of Comstock.”

“I suppose that supporters of Anglesey are saying that the powder-bags are all excellent, and it’s Comstock’s cannons that were made wrong.”

“It is universally known, among the Quality.”

“That may be. But it is known among you, and me, and a few other people, that bags were made up, containing powder that was ground fine.”

Coincidentally or not, Daniel had reached the point of complete nakedness as he was saying these words. He had a pair of drawers on; but Roger tossed him fresh ones, and averted his gaze. “Daniel! I cannot bear to see you in this state, nor can I listen to any more of your needling suspicious discourse. I will turn my back on you, and talk for a while. When I turn round again, I will behold a new man, as well informed as he is attired.”

“Very well, I suppose I’ve very little choice.”

“None whatsoever. Now, Daniel. You saw me grinding the powder fine, and putting it into the bag, and there is no point in denying it. No doubt you think the worst of me, as has been your wont since we first studied together at Trinity. Have you stopped to ask yourself, how a man in my position could possibly manage to introduce bags of powder into the magazines of a ship of the Royal Navy? Quite obviously it is impossible. Someone else must have done it. Someone with a great deal more power and reach than I can even dream of possessing.”

“The Duke of Gunfl—”

“Silence. Silence! And in silence ponder the similitudes between cannons and mouths. The simpleton beholds a cannon and phant’sies it an infallible destroyer of foes. But the veteran artilleryman knows that sometimes, when a cannon speaks, it bursts. Especially when it has been loaded in haste. When this occurs, Daniel, the foe is untouched. He may sense a distant gaseous exhalation, not puissant enough to ruffle his periwig. The eager gunner, and all his comrades, are blown to bits. Ponder it, Daniel. And for once in your life, show a trace of discretion. It does not really matter what the gentleman’s name was who was responsible for causing those cannons to burst. What matters is that I had no idea what I was doing. What do I, of all people, know about naval artillery? All I knew was this: I met certain gentlemen at the Royal Society. Presently they became aware that I worked in Newton’s laboratory as an assistant. One of them approached me and asked if I might do him a favor. Nothing difficult. He wanted me to grind up some gunpowder very fine and deliver it to him in wee bags. This I did, as you know. I made up half a dozen of those bags over the course of a year. One of them blew up on the spot, thanks to you. Of the other five, I now know that one was smuggled into the ‘Siege of Maestricht,’ where it caused a cannon to explode in full view of half of London. The other four went to the Royal Navy. One was detected by Richard Comstock, who sent it to his father. One exploded a cannon during a naval engagement against the Dutch. The other two have since found their way into David Jones’s Magazine. As to my culpability: I did not understand until recently why the gentleman in question had made such an odd request of me. I did not know, when I was filling those bags, that they would be used to do murder.”

Daniel, snaking his limbs through new clothes, believed every word of this. He had long ago lost count of Roger’s moral lapses. Roger, he suspected, had broken as many of the ten commandments and committed as many of the seven deadly sins as it was in his power to do, and was actively seeking ways to break and commit those he had not yet ticked off the list. This had nothing to do with Roger’s character. Someone was responsible for blowing up those poor gunners, as a ploy to dishonor the Earl of Epsom: as vile an act as Daniel could imagine. Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gun-fleet, or one of his sons must have been at the head of the conspiracy, for as Roger had pointed out, Roger couldn’t have done it all himself. The only question then was whether Roger had understood what was being done with those powder-bags. The Angleseys would never have told him, and so he’d have had to figure it out on his own. And Roger’s career at Trinity gave no grounds to expect dazzling flashes of insight.

Believing in Roger’s innocence lifted from Daniel’s shoulders an immense weight that he had not been sensible of until it was gone. This felt so good that it triggered a few moments of Puritanical self-examination. Anything that felt so good might be a trick of the devil. Was he only feigning trust in Roger, because it felt good?

“How can you go on associating with those people when you know the atrocious thing they have done?”

“I was going to ask you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have been associating with them since the Plague Year, Daniel, at every meeting of the Royal Society.”

“But I did not know they were doing murder!”

“On the contrary, Daniel, you have known it ever since that night at Trinity twelve years ago when you watched Louis Anglesey murder one of your brethren.” Had he been a rather different sort of chap, Roger might have mentioned this in a cruelly triumphant way. Had he been Drake, he’d have said it sadly, or angrily. But being Roger Comstock, he proffered it as a witticism. He did it so well that Daniel let out a wee snort of amusement before coming to his senses and stifling himself.

The terms of the transaction finally were clear. Why did Daniel refuse to hate Roger? Not out of blindness to Roger’s faults, for he saw Roger’s moral cowardice as clearly as Hooke peering through a lens at a newt. Not out of Christian forgiveness, either. He refused to hate Roger because Roger saw moral cowardice in Daniel, had done so for years, and yet did not hate Daniel. Fair’s fair. They were brothers.

As much as he had to ponder in the way of moral dilemmas vis-à-vis Roger, ’twas as nothing compared to half an hour later, when Daniel emerged, booted, bewigged, cravated, and jacketed, and equipped with a second-hand watch that Roger somehow begged off of Hooke, and climbed into the coach. For one of the women in there was Tess Charter. Thump.

When she and the other woman were finished laughing at the look on Daniel’s face, she leaned forward and got her fingers all entangled with his. She was shockingly and alarmingly alive—somewhat more alive, in fact, than he was. She looked him in the eyes and spoke in her French accent: “Twooly, Daniel, eet eez ze hrole of a lifetime—portraying ze mistress of a gentlemen who eez too pure—too spiritual—to sink zee thoughts of zee flesh.” Then a middling London accent. “But really I prefer the challenging parts. The ability to do them’s what separates me from Nell Gwyn.”

“I wonder what separates the King from Nell Gwyn?” said the other woman.

“Ten inches of sheepgut with a knot in one end—if the King knows what’s good for him!” Tess returned. Thump.

This led to more in a similar vein. Daniel turned to Roger, who was sitting next to him, and said, “Sir! What on earth makes you believe I wish to appear to have a mistress?”

“Who said anything about appearing to have one?” Roger answered, and when Daniel didn’t laugh, gathered himself up and said, “Poh! You could no more show up at Whitehall without a mistress, than at a duel without a sword! Come, Daniel! No one will take you seriously! They’ll think you’re hiding something!”

“And that he is—though none too effectively,” Tess said, eyeing a new convexity in Daniel’s breeches.

“I loved your work in The Dutch Strumpet,” Daniel tried, weakly.

Thus, down London Wall and westwards, ho!—Daniel’s every attempt to say anything serious pre-empted by a courtly witticism—more often than not, so bawdy he didn’t even understand it, any more than Tess would understand the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Every jest followed by exaltations of female laughter and then a radical, and completely irrational, change in subject.

Just when Daniel thought he had imposed a bit of order on the conversation, the coach rattled into the middle of St. Bartholomew’s Fair. Suddenly, outside the windows, bears were dancing jigs and hermaphrodites were tottering about on stilts. Devout men and well-bred ladies would avert their eyes from such sights, but Tess and the other woman (another Comedian, who gave every indication of being Roger’s authentic, not imaginary, mistress) had no intentions of averting their gazes from anything. They were still chattering about what they’d seen ten minutes later as the coach moved down Holborn. Daniel decided to take his cue from Roger, who rather than trying to talk to the ladies merely sat and watched them, face smeared with a village idiot’s grin.

They stopped by the corner of Waterhouse Square for ritual adoration of Roger’s new lot, and to make sniping comments about Raleigh’s house: that soon-to-be-o’ershadowed pile that Raleigh’s architect had (it was speculated) blown out of his arsehole during an attaque of the bloody phlux. The ladies made comments in a similar vein about the attire of the widow Mayflower Ham, who was descending from same, on her way to Whitehall, too.

Then down past any number of fields, churches, squares, et cetera, named after St. Giles, and a completely gratuitous detour along Piccadilly to Comstock House, where Roger had the coach stop so that he could spend several minutes savoring the spectacle of the Silver Comstocks moving out of the building that had served as their London seat since the Wars of the Roses. Colossal paintings, depicting scenes of hunting and of naval engagements, had been pulled out and leaned against the wrought-iron fence. Below them was a clutter of smaller canvases, mostly portraits, stripped of their gilded frames, which were going to auction. Making it appear that there was a whole crowd of Silver Comstocks, mostly in outmoded doublets or neck-ruffs, milling about down there and peering out grimly through the fence. “All behind bars where they should’ve been a hundred years ago!” Roger said, and then laughed at his own jest, loud enough to draw a look from John Comstock himself, who was standing in his forecourt watching some porters maneuver out the door a mainsail-sized painting of some Continental Siege. Daniel’s eye fixed on this. Partly it was because looking at the Earl of Epsom made him melancholy. But also it was because he had been spending so much time with Leibniz, who often spoke of paintings such as this one when talking about the mind of God. On one piece of canvas, seemingly from one fixed point of view, the artist had depicted skirmishes, sallies, cavalry charges, and the deaths of several of the principals, which had occurred in different places at different times. And this was not the only liberty he had taken with the notion of time and space, for certain events—the digging of a mine beneath a bastion, the detonation of the mine, and the ensuing battle—were shown all together at once. The images stood next to each other like pickled larvae in the Royal Society’s collection, sharing the same time for all time, and yet if you let your eye travel over them in the correct order you could make the story unfold within your mind, each event in its proper moment. This great painting did not, of course, stand alone, but was surrounded by all of the other paintings that had been carried out of the house before; its perceptions were ranged alongside others, this little Siege-world nested within a larger array of other things that the House of Comstock during its long history had perceived, and thought worthy to be set down on canvas. Now they were all being aired out and reshuffled, on a gloomy occasion. But to have this moment—the fall of the Silver Comstocks—embedded in so many old ones made it seem less terrible that it might have seemed if it had happened naked, as it were, and all alone in time and space.

THE EARL OF EPSOM TURNED his head and gazed across Piccadilly at his Golden cousin, but showed no particular emotion. Daniel had shrunk far down into the coach, where he hoped he’d be enshrouded in darkness. To him, John Comstock looked almost relieved. How bad could it be to live in Epsom and go hunting and fishing every day? That’s what Daniel told himself—but later the sadness and haggardness in the Earl’s face would appear in his mind’s eye at the oddest times.

“Do not become stupid now, just because you are seeing his face,” Roger said to him. “That man was a Cavalier. He led cavalry charges against the Parliamentarian foot-soldiers. Do you know what that means? Do you see that great bloody awful painting there of Comstock’s great-uncle and his friends galloping after that fox? Replace the fox with a starving yeoman, unarmed, alone, and you have a fair picture of how that man spent the Civil War.”

“I know all that,” Daniel said. “And yet, and yet, somehow I still prefer him and his family to the Duke of Gunfleet and his family.”

“John Comstock had to be cleared out of the way, and we had to lose a war, before anything could happen,” Roger said. “As to Anglesey and his spawn, I love them even less than you do. Do not fret about them. Enjoy your triumph and your mistress. Leave Anglesey to me.”

Then to Whitehall where they, and various Bolstroods and Waterhouses and many others, watched the King sign the Declaration. As penned by Wilkins, this document had given freedom of conscience to everyone. The version that the King signed today was not quite so generous: it outlawed certain extreme heretics, such as Arians who didn’t believe in the Trinity. Nevertheless, it was a good day’s work. Certainly enough to justify raising several pints, in several Drury Lane taverns, to the memory of John Wilkins. Daniel’s pretend mistress accompanied him on every stage of this epochal pub-crawling campaign, which led eventually to Roger Comstock’s playhouse, and, in particular, to a back-room of that playhouse, where there happened to be a bed.

“Who has been making sausages in here?” Daniel inquired. Which sent Tess into a fit of the giggles. She had just about got his new breeches off.

“I should say you have made a pretty one!” she finally managed to get out.

“I should say you are responsible for making it,” Daniel demurred, and then (now that it was in plain view) added: “and it is anything but pretty.”

“Wrong on both counts!” said Tess briskly. She stood up and grabbed it. Daniel gasped. She gave it a tug; Daniel yelped, and drew closer. “Ah, so it is attached to you. You shall have to accept responsibility for the making of it, then; can’t blame the lasses for everything. And as for pretty—” she relaxed her grip, and let it rest on the palm of her hand, and gave it a good look. “You’ve never seen a nasty one, have you?”

“I was raised to believe they were all quite nasty.”

“That may be true—it is all metaphysickal, isn’t it? Quite. But please know some are nastier than others. And that is why we have sausage-casings in a bedchamber.”

She proceeded to do something quite astonishing with ten inches of knotted sheepgut. Not that he needed ten inches; but she was generous with it, perhaps to show him a kind of respect.

“Does this mean it is not actually coitus?” Daniel asked hopefully. “Since I am not really touching you?” Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

“It is very common for men of your religion to say so,” Tess said. “Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say that we are not touching, and not having sex, if it makes you feel better,” Tess said. “Though, when all is finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep.”

“Please do not make me laugh!” Daniel said. “It hurts somehow.”

“What is funny? I simply speak the truth. What you are feeling is not hurting.”

He understood then that she was right. Hurting wasn’t the word for it.

When Daniel woke up in that bed, sometime in the middle of the following afternoon, Tess was gone. She’d left him a note (who’d have thought she was literate? But she had to read the scripts).

Daniel,

We shall make more sausages later. I am off to act. Yes, it may have slipped your mind that I am an actress.

Yesterday I worked, playing the role of mistress. It is a difficult role, because dull. But now it has become fact, not farce, and so I shall not have to act any more; much easier. As I am no longer professionally engaged, pretending to be your mistress, I shall no longer be receiving my stipend from your friend Roger. As I am now your mistress in fact, some small gift would be appropriate. Forgive my forwardness. Gentlemen know such things, Puritans must be instructed.

Tess

P.S. You want instruction in acting. I shall endeavour to help.

Daniel staggered about the room for some minutes collecting his clothes, and tried to put them on in the right order. It did not escape his notice that he was getting dressed, like an actor, in the backstage of a theatre. When he was done he found his way out among sets and properties and stumbled out onto the stage. The house was empty, save for a few actors dozing on benches. Tess was right. He had found his place now: he was just another actor, albeit he would never appear on a stage, and would have to make up his own lines ad libitum.

His role, as he could see plainly enough, was to be a leading Dissident who also happened to be a noted savant, a Fellow of the Royal Society. Until lately he would not have thought this a difficult role to play, since it was so close to the truth. But whatever illusions Daniel might once have harbored about being a man of God had died with Drake, and been cremated by Tess. He very much phant’sied being a Natural Philosopher, but that simply was not going to work if he had to compete against Isaac, Leibniz, and Hooke. And so the role that Roger Comstock had written for him was beginning to appear very challenging indeed. Perhaps, like Tess, he would come to prefer it that way.

That much had been evident to him on that morning in 1673. But the ramifications had been as far beyond his wits as Calculus would’ve been to Mayflower Ham. He could not have anticipated that his new-launched career as actor on the stage of London would stretch over the next twenty-five years. And even if he had foreseen that, he could never have phant’sied that, after forty, he would be called back for an encore.