Daniel was going for days without hearing any other sounds but these. All possible subjects of conversation could be divided into two categories: (1) ones that would cause Drake to unleash a rant, previously heard so many times that Daniel could recite it from memory, and (2) ones that might actually lead to original conversation. Daniel avoided Category 1 topics. All Category 2 topics had already been exhausted. For example, Daniel could not ask, “How is Praise-God doing in Boston?”* because he had asked this on the first day, and Drake had answered it, and since then few letters had arrived because the letter-carriers were dead or running away from London as fast as they could go. Sometimes private couriers would come with letters, mostly pertaining to Drake’s business matters but sometimes addressed to Daniel. This would provoke a flurry of conversation stretching out as long as half an hour (not counting rants), but mostly what Daniel heard, day after day, was corpse-collectors’ bells, and their creaking carts; the frightful Clock; cows; Drake reading the Books of Daniel and of Revelation aloud, or playing the virginal; and the gnawing of Daniel’s own quill across the pages of his notebook as he worked his way through Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens. He actually learned an appalling amount. In fact, he was fairly certain he’d caught up with where Isaac had been several months previously—but Isaac was up at home in Woolsthorpe, a hundred miles away, and no doubt years ahead of him by this point.
He ate down to the bottom of his potatoes and herring with the determination of a prisoner clawing a hole through a wall, finally revealing the plate. The Waterhouse family china had been manufactured by sincere novices in Holland. After James I had outlawed the export of unfinished English cloth to the Netherlands, Drake had begun smuggling it there, which was easily done since the town of Leyden was crowded with English pilgrims. In this way Drake had made the first of several smuggling-related fortunes, and done so in a way pleasing in the sight of the Lord, viz. by boldly defying the King’s efforts to meddle in commerce. Not only that but he had met and in 1617 married a pilgrim lass in Leyden, and he had made many donations there to the faithful who were in the market for a ship. The grateful congregation, shortly before embarking on the Mayflower, bound for sunny Virginia, had presented Drake and his new wife, Hortense, with this set of Delft pottery. They had obviously made it themselves on the theory that when they sloshed up onto the shores of America, they’d better know how to make stuff out of clay. They were heavy crude plates glazed white, with an inscription in spidery blue letters:
YOU AND I ARE BUT EARTH.
Staring at this through a miasma of the bodily fluids of herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day, Daniel suddenly announced, “I was thinking that I might go and, God willing, visit John Wilkins.”
Wilkins had been exchanging letters with Daniel ever since the debacle of five years ago, when Daniel had arrived at Trinity College a few moments after Wilkins had been kicked out of it forever.
The mention of Wilkins did not trigger a rant, which meant Daniel was as good as there. But there were certain formalities to be gone through: “To what end?” asked Drake, sounding like a pipe-organ with numerous jammed valves as the words emerged partly from his mouth and partly from his nose. He voiced all questions as if they were pat assertions: To what end being said in the same tones as You and I are but earth.
“My purpose is to learn, Father, but I seem to’ve learned all I can from the books that are here.”
“And what of the Bible.” An excellent riposte there from Drake.
“There are Bibles everywhere, praise God, but only one Reverend Wilkins.”
“He has been preaching at that Established church in the city, has he not.”
“Indeed. St. Lawrence Jewry.”
“Then why should it be necessary for you to leave.” As the city was a quarter of an hour’s walk.
“The Plague, father—I don’t believe he has actually set foot in London these last several months.”
“And what of his flock.”
Daniel almost fired back, Oh, you mean the Royal Society? which in most other houses would have been a bon mot, but not here. “They’ve all run away, too, Father, the ones who aren’t dead.”
“High Church folk,” Drake said self-explanatorily. “Where is Wilkins now.”
“Epsom.”
“He is with Comstock. What can he possibly be thinking.”
“It’s no secret that you and Wilkins have come down on opposite sides of the fence, Father.”
“The golden fence that Laud threw up around the Lord’s Table! Yes.”
“Wilkins backs Tolerance as fervently as you. He hopes to reform the church from within.”
“Yes, and no man—short of an Archbishop—could be more within than John Comstock, the Earl of Epsom. But why should you embroil yourself in such matters.”
“Wilkins is not pursuing religious controversies at Epsom—he is pursuing natural philosophy.”
“Seems a strange place for it.”
“The Earl’s son, Charles, could not attend Cambridge because of the plague, and so Wilkins and some other members of the Royal Society are there to serve as his tutors.”
“Aha! It is all clear, then. It is all an accommodation.”
“Yes.”
“What is it that you hope to learn from the Reverend Wilkins.”
“Whatever it is that he wishes to teach me. Through the Royal Society he is in communication with all the foremost natural philosophers of the British Isles, and many on the Continent as well.”
Drake took some time considering that. “You are asserting that you require my financial assistance in order to become acquainted with a hypothetical body of knowledge which you assume has come into existence out of nowhere, quite recently.”
“Yes, Father.”
“A bit of an act of faith then, isn’t it.”
“Not so much as you might think. My friend Isaac—I’ve told you of him—has spoken of a ‘generative spirit’ that pervades all things, and that accounts for the possibility of new things being created from old—and if you don’t believe me, then just ask yourself, how can flowers grow up out of manure? Why does meat turn itself into maggots, and ships’ planking into worms? Why do images of sea-shells form in rocks far from any sea, and why do new stones grow in farmers’ fields after the previous year’s crop has been dug out? Clearly some organizing principle is at work, and it pervades all things invisibly, and accounts for the world’s ability to have newness—to do something other than only decay.”
“And yet it decays. Look out the window! Listen to the ringing of the bells. Ten years ago, Cromwell melted down the Crown Jewels and gave all men freedom of religion. Today, a crypto-Papist* and lackey of the Antichrist† rules England, and England’s gold goes to making giant punch-bowls for use at the royal orgies, and we of the Gathered Church must worship in secret as if we were early Christians in pagan Rome.”
“One of the things about the generative spirit that demands our careful study is that it can go awry,” Daniel returned. “In some sense the pneuma that causes buboes to grow from the living flesh of plague victims must be akin to the one that causes mushrooms to pop out of the ground after rain, but one has effects we call evil and the other has effects we call good.”
“You think Wilkins knows more of this.”
“I was actually using it to explain the very existence of men like Wilkins, and of this club of his, which he now calls the Royal Society, and of other such groups, such as Monsieur de Montmor’s salon in Paris—”
“I see. You suppose that this same spirit is at work in the minds of these natural philosophers.”
“Yes, Father, and in the very soil of the nations that have produced so many natural philosophers in such a short time—to the great discomfiture of the Papists.” Reckoning it could not hurt his chances to get in a dig at Popery. “And just as the farmer can rely on the steady increase of his crops, I can be sure that much new work has been accomplished by such people within
the last several months.”
“But with the End of Days drawing so near—”
“Only a few months ago, at one of the last meetings of the Royal Society, Mr. Daniel Coxe said that mercury had been found running like water in a chalk-pit at Line. And Lord Brereton said that at an Inn in St. Alban’s, quicksilver was found running in a saw-pit.”
“And you suppose this means—what.”
“Perhaps this flourishing of so many kinds—natural philosophy, plague, the power of King Louis, orgies at Whitehall, quicksilver welling up from the bowels of the earth—is a necessary preparation for the Apocalypse—the generative spirit rising up like a tide.”
“That much is obvious, Daniel. I wonder, though, whether there is any point in furthering your studies when we are so close.”
“Would you admire a farmer who let his fields be overrun with weeds, simply because the End was near?”
“No, of course not. Your point is well taken.”
“If we have a duty to be alert for the signs of the End Times, then let me go, Father. For if the signs are comets, then the first to know will be the astronomers. If the signs are plague, the first to know—”
“—will be physicians. Yes, I understand. But are you suggesting that those who study natural philosophy can acquire some kind of occult knowledge—special insight into God’s Creation, not available to the common Bible-reading man?”
“Er…I suppose that’s quite clearly what I’m suggesting.”
Drake nodded. “That is what I thought. Well, God gave us brains for a reason—not to use those brains would be a sin.” He got up and carried his plate to the kitchen, then went to a small desk of many drawers in the parlor and broke out all of the gear needed to write on paper with a quill. “Haven’t much coin just now,” he mumbled, moving the quill about in a sequence of furious scribbles separated by long flowing swoops, like a sword-duel. “There you are.”
Mr. Ham pray pay to the bearer one pound I say £1—of that money of myne which you have in your hands upon sight of this Bill
Drake Waterhouse London
“What is this instrument, Father?”
“Goldsmith’s Note. People started doing this about the time you left for Cambridge.”
“Why does it say ‘the bearer’? Why not ‘Daniel Waterhouse’?”
“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You could, if you chose, use this to pay a one-pound debt—you’d simply hand it to your creditor and he could then nip down to Ham’s and get a pound in coin of the realm. Or he could use it to pay one of his debts.”
“I see. But in this case it simply means that if I go into the City and present this to Uncle Thomas, or one of the other Hams…”
“They’ll do what the note orders them to do.”
It was, then, a normal example of Drake’s innate fiendishness. Daniel was perfectly welcome to flee to Epsom—the seat of John Comstock, the arch-Anglican—and study Natural Philosophy until, literally, the End of the World. But in order to obtain the means, he would have to demonstrate his faith by walking all the way across London at the height of the Plague. Trial by ordeal it was.
The next morning: on with a coat and a down-at-heels pair of riding-boots, even though it was a warm summer day. A scarf to breathe through.* A minimal supply of clean shirts and drawers (if he was feeling well when he reached Epsom, he’d send for more). A rather small number of books—tiny student octavo volumes of the usual Continental savants, their margins and interlinear spaces now caulked with his notes. A letter he’d received from Wilkins, with an enclosure from one Robert Hooke, during a rare spate of mail last week. All went into a bag, the bag on the end of a staff, and the staff over his shoulder—made him look somewhat Vagabondish, but many people in the city had turned to robbery, as normal sources of employment had been shut down, and there were sound reasons to look impoverished and carry a big stick.
Drake, upon Daniel’s departure: “Will you tell old Wilkins that I do not think the less of him for having become an Anglican, as I have the most serene confidence that he has done so in the interest of reforming that church, which as you know has been the steady goal of those of us who are scorned by others as Puritans.”
And for Daniel: “I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you—not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”
“It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially.”
“That is fine when you are talking about comets.”
“I’ll not discuss religion, then. Good-bye, Father.”
“God be with you, Daniel.”
HE OPENED THE DOOR, trying not to flinch when outside air touched his face, and descended the steps to the road called Hol-born, a river of pounded dust (it had not rained in a while). Drake’s house was a new (post-Cromwell) half-timbered building on the north side of the road, one of a line of mostly wooden houses that formed a sort of fence dividing Holborn from the open fields on its north, which stretched all the way to Scotland. The buildings across the way, on the south side of Holborn, were the same but two decades older (pre-Civil War). The ground was flat except for a sort of standing wave of packed dirt that angled across the fields, indeed across Holborn itself, not far away, off to his right—as if a comet had landed on London Bridge and sent up a ripple in the earth, which had spread outwards until it had gone just past Drake’s house and then frozen. These were the remains of the earth-works that London* had thrown up early in the Civil War, to defend against the King’s armies. There’d been a gate on Holborn and a star-shaped earthen fort nearby, but the gate had been torn down a long time ago and the fort blurred into a grassy hummock guarded by the younger and more adventurous cattle.
Daniel turned left, towards London. This was utter madness. But the letter from Wilkins, and the enclosure from Hooke—a Wilkins protégé from his Oxford days, and now Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society—contained certain requests. They were phrased politely. Perhaps not so politely in Hooke’s case. They had let Daniel know that he could be of great service to them by fetching certain items out of certain buildings in London.
Daniel could have burned the letter and claimed it had never arrived. He could have gone to Epsom without any of the items on the list, pleading the Bubonic Plague as his excuse. But he suspected that Wilkins and Hooke did not care for excuses any more than Drake did.
By going to Trinity at exactly the wrong moment, Daniel had missed out on the first five years of the Royal Society of London. Lately he had attended a few meetings, but always felt as if his nose were pressed up against the glass.
Today he would pay his dues by walking into London. It was hardly the most dangerous thing anyone had done in the study of Natural Philosophy.
He put one boot in front of the other, and found that he had not died yet. He did it again, then again. The place seemed eerily normal for a short while as long as you ignored the continuous ringing of death-knells from about a hundred different parish churches. On a closer look, many people had adorned the walls of their houses with nearly hysterical pleas for God’s mercy, perhaps thinking that like the blood of the lambs on Israel’s door-posts, these graffiti might keep the Angel of Death from knocking. Wagons came and went on Holborn only occasionally—empty ones going into town, stained and reeking, with vanguards and rearguards of swooping birds cutting swaths through the banks of flies that surrounded them—these were corpse-wains returning from their midnight runs to the burial-pits and churchyards outside the town. Wagons filled with people, escorted by pedestrians with hand-bells and red sticks, crept out of town. Just near the remains of those earth-works where Holborn terminated at its intersection with the road to Oxford, a pest-house had been established, and when it had filled up with dead people, another, farther away, to the
north of the Tyburn gallows, at Marylebone. Some of the people on the wagons appeared normal, others had reached the stage where the least movement caused them hellish buboe-pain, and so even without the bells and red sticks the approach of these wagons would have been obvious from the fusillade of screams and hot prayers touched off at every bump in the road. Daniel and the very few other pedestrians on Holborn backed into doorways and breathed through scarves when these wagons passed by.
Through Newgate and the stumps of the Roman wall, then, past the Prison, which was silent, but not empty. Towards the square-topped tower of Saint Paul’s, where an immense bell was being walloped by tired ringers, counting the years of the dead. That old tower leaned to one side, and had for a long time, so that everyone in London had stopped noticing that it did. In these circumstances, though, it seemed to lean more, and made Daniel suddenly nervous that it was about to fall over on him. Just a few weeks ago, Robert Hooke and Sir Robert Moray had been up in its belfry conducting experiments with two-hundred-foot-long pendulums. Now the cathedral was fortified within a rampart of freshly tamped earth, the graves piled up a full yard above ground level.
The old front of the church had become half eaten away by coal-smoke, and a newfangled Classical porch slapped onto it some three or four decades ago. But the new columns were already decaying, and they were marred from where shops had been built between them during Cromwell’s time. During those years, Round-head cavalry had pulled the furniture up from the western half of the church and chopped it up for firewood, then used the empty space as a vast stable for nearly a thousand horses, selling their dung as fuel, to freezing Londoners, for 4d a bushel. Meanwhile, in the eastern half Drake and Bolstrood and others had preached three-hour sermons to diminishing crowds. Now King Charles was supposedly fixing the place up, but Daniel could see no evidence that anything had been done.