The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (210 page)

“Only, Amen!”

“Amen. Damn me, I am late for my next conspiracy! Godspeed, Daniel.”

Daniel’s first emotion, unexpectedly, was a pang of sympathy for young Dominic Masham. Daniel, too, would have been amazed by what John Locke, Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, and Isaac Newton were up to at Oates, if he had not been at Epsom during the Plague Year. As it was, the laboratory that those three lonely hereticks had set up on the Masham estate seemed a masque of what Wilkins and Hooke had done as guests of John Comstock.

He had to admit it was a good deal more civilized, though. No dogs were being disembowelled in Lady Masham’s out-buildings. Epsom (in retrospect) had grown up, as if by spontaneous generation, out of earth saturated with blood and manured with gunpowder; it had been dominated by elements of earth and water. Oates was like a potted lily brought over from France; it was made of fire and air. And it was all about the search for the fifth element, the quintessence, star-stuff, God’s presence on earth. When Dominic Masham took Daniel round the place, the sun was shining on the white-plastered Barock buildings, the roses of late summer were still a-bloom, windows flung open to let fresh air infiltrate the galleries and drawing-rooms, and Daniel could very easily comprehend why a young fellow who knew no better might convince himself that there
was
a quintessence, that it was everywhere, and especially here, and
that men as brilliant as these might reach out and take some of it.

They encountered Fatio posed in the middle of a windowed library, surrounded by Bibles in diverse languages and alphabets.
Protogaea
had been quarantined on a table in the corner. Fatio was putting on a great show of thinking very hard on something and of not noticing that Daniel had entered the room—in effect daring Daniel to interrupt him, so that he could put on a further show of not minding at all. Daniel had no stomach for the game and so with a silent gesture to Masham he ducked out of the room. For about Fatio was a queer aura of fragility; he seemed stiff and scared as a glass figurine perched too close to an edge.

Masham led him on to a study that was obviously Locke’s. He had published his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
four years before. To judge from the storm of letters on his desk, angry criticism was still rushing in, and Locke was at work on a sort of apologia for the next edition: “…searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure.”

Locke’s study had French doors that led out into a little rose-garden. The wind blew up now for a few moments and got under the edge of one of those doors, which was hanging ajar, and blew it open, letting cool air curl into the room and blow Locke’s papers around. It felt and smelt of autumn. Masham scurried around chasing the blown pages, which was amusing because they had been in utmost disorder to being with. Daniel stepped to the open door to get out of Masham’s way and to hide the smile on his face. The gust waned and Daniel heard Locke’s voice from the garden, saying things long-winded and soothing and reasonable, interrupted by sharp objections from Isaac Newton.

Daniel stepped out into the garden just in time to be wrapped up in another wind-gust. This weather was stripping browned and withered petals from thousands of shaggy rose-blossoms that dangled like bruised apples from bowers and trellises all around, and they were storming down to earth and scuttling round the place in whorls.

Isaac had not failed to notice him. He was seated in a garden-chaise with his feet up, and he was wrapped in blankets, which did not prevent him from shivering all the time, though the day was only beginning to turn cool. He looked near death: even gaunter than usual, and sunk in on himself, and so devoid of color that one might suppose the blood had been drawn out of his veins and replaced with quicksilver.

“Daniel, it is well that your friend and mine Mr. John Locke foretold
your coming, or I should take it the wrong way.”

“How so, Isaac?”

“I have got into an odd turn of mind of late. The world seemeth benign enough, as I sit here in a bright garden among friends. But when night falls, as it does earlier and earlier, darkness stretches over my mind, and I phant’sy long menacing shadows cast by everyone and everything I saw during the day-time, which shades are interconnected in plots and conspiracies.”

“Everyone, save mad-men in Bedlam, has a Plot. Everyone belongs to a conspiracy or two. What is the Royal Society, besides a conspiracy? I shall not claim I am innocent. But the conspiracy I represent wants only good things for you.”

“I shall be the judge of that! How could you possibly know what is good for me?”

“If you could see yourself as I see you, Isaac, you would confess in an instant that I know much more of it than you do. How long has it been since you have slept?”

“Five nights I have sat up by the fire, tending a work.”

“The Great Work?”

“You have known me almost as long as I have known myself, Daniel, why do you waste breath asking? For you know that I will not answer you straight out. And you already know the answer. So your question is idle twice over.”

“Five nights…then I have come haply on this day, as I may be a match for you, Isaac, if you have gone a week without sleep beforehand.”

“In what wise do you seek to be my match, Daniel?”

Behind him Masham started to say something and was quickly shushed. Daniel turned halfway round and discovered that Fatio had followed him as far as Locke’s study; having now been discovered, he emerged into the garden, moving in an odd diagonal gait like a startled dog, acknowledging Daniel with a little bow. But he would not look Daniel in the eye.

“In what wise? Not as Fatio would be—this was settled between you and me on Whitsunday of the year 1662, unless I read the signs wrong.” A slow assenting blink of Newton’s bloodshot eyes told him he hadn’t. “And certainly not as Leibniz seeks to be.”

Fatio scoffed. “We have read Mr. Leibniz’s letter—which is nothing more than a butcherous attack on my theory of gravitation!”

“If Leibniz cuts down your theory of gravitation, Monsieur Fatio, it only means he has the courage and forthrightness to set down in ink what Huygens and Halley and Hooke and Wren have all said amongst themselves ever since you presented it to the Royal Society.
And I mean to emulate Leibniz now. Stay, Fatio, no show of indignation, please, I cannot abide it. I see three faces in this garden: Fatio, who has just been attacked, and is ready to respond very hotly; Newton, who is strangely ambivalent, as if he agrees with me in secret; Locke, who perhaps wishes I had never come to disturb your colloquium. But disturb it I have, and now I shall disturb it some more. For as I reflect on my career I believe I could have accomplished more if I had not cared so much what people thought of me. Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors. I have been a mediocre Natural Philosopher not because I was stupid but because I was, after a fashion, cowardly. Today I shall try boldness for once, and be a better Natural Philosopher for it, and probably get you all hating me by the time I am done. Then it’s off to Boston on the next boat. Therefore, Fatio, do not defend your theory or attack that of Leibniz with some tedious outburst, but, prithee, shut up and hate me instead. Isaac, this is what I mean when I say that I shall try to be a match for you today. If you hate me when I leave, then let that be a measure of my success.”

“This is a harsh method,” Isaac reflected, shivering even more violently now. “But I cannot deny that in my career scientific disputes have always been coupled with the most intense personal enmity. And I am not of a mood to be tender and conciliatory just now. So, have at it. I may understand you better as an enemy than as a friend.”

“When I saw you here in this rain of dead petals I was put in mind of the spring of 1666 when I came up to Woolsthorpe and saw you in a flurry of apple-blossoms. Do you recollect that day?”

“Of course.”

“I had just ridden up from Epsom where Hooke and Wilkins and I had been holding a colloquium much like this one. The overriding subject of it could be called ‘Life: what it is, and is not.’ Now I come here and find you studying what I will summarize as ‘God: what god-head is and is not.’ Have I said it well?”

“This way of saying it is very easily misunderstood,” Locke demurred.

“Stay, John,” Newton commanded, “Daniel misunderstands nothing.”

“Thank you, Isaac,” Daniel said. “If what you say is true, ’tis so only in that I have strived for so many years to follow your tortuous windings through these matters. It has been no easy task. Bible-stuff has always been intermingled with your philosophical work, and I
could never understand why, in our chambers, star-catalogs were so promiscuously thrown together with Hebraic scriptures, occult treatises on the philosophic mercury interleaved with diagrams of new telescopes,
et cetera.
But at last I came to understand that I was making it too complicated. For you, this is no mingling at all; for you the Book of Revelation, the ramblings of Hermes Trismegistus, and
Principia Mathematica
are all signatures torn from the same immense Book.”

“Why is it, Daniel, that you understand all of these matters with such clarity, and yet will not join with us? It seems to me as if some friend of Galileo had looked through his telescope and seen the moons of Jupiter making their circuits and yet refused to believe his own eyes, and taken the dead view of the Papists instead.”

“Isaac, I have done nothing but ask myself that for sixteen years.”

“You refer to what happened in 1677.”

“What
did
happen in 1677, anyway?” Fatio inquired. “Everyone wants to know.”

“Leibniz made his second visit to England. He went incognito to Cambridge, for no purpose other than to have a conversation with Isaac. Which did occur. But as they punted down the Cam, discoursing, I came upon papers in our chambers proving that Isaac had fallen into Arianism, which I saw as an unspeakable heresy. I burned those papers, and with them many of Isaac’s alchemical notes and books—for to me they were all of a piece. To which crime I now confess freely, and offer my repentance, and ask for forgiveness.”

“You speak as if you never expect to see me again!” Newton exclaimed, with tears in his eyes. “I perceived your shame, and knew your heart, and forgave you long ago, Daniel.”

“I know it.”

“Most of what you burned anyway was twaddle. You’ll see none of it
here
. Yet
here
I am infinitely closer to the Grand Magisterium.”

“I know you have torn Alchemy down to its foundations, and built it back up, and are recording it in a book called
Praxis,
which will be to Alchemy what
Principia Mathematica
was to physics. And perhaps ’tis hoped that in combination with some new reading of scriptures from Fatio, here, and new philosophy from Locke, there, and a reworking of Christianity on Arian principles from your disciples scattered round England, it shall all come together in some grand unifying discourse, a kind of scientific apocalypse in which the whole universe, and all history, shall be made clear as distilled water.”

“You mock us, by making it simple.”

“It is not simple, then? ’Twill not all happen at once, in a flash?”

“It is not for us to say in advance the manner of how it might happen.”

“Yet you have been awake five nights tending some work that you’ll not entrust to any assistant. You suffer obvious ill effects of quicksilver poisoning. You will not admit it is the Great Work, but what else could it be? And I cannot read your mind, Isaac, or ask you to divulge secrets, but I can see plainly enough that it
failed.
And if it was meant to combine with Fatio’s theory of gravity, then that has failed as well.”

“Before you mock our work, sir, prithee tell us in what way Leibniz’s has
succeeded,
” Fatio demanded.

“His differs from yours in that it does not need to succeed—only not to fail. And I take that to be a more sound way of doing science than your approach, which is all-or-nothing. For as I grow older and see new men coming into the Royal Society I perceive that though Natural Philosophy may have begun with our generation, it need not end with us. Nor am I alone in thinking so.” Daniel now lifted up a sheet he had taken from Locke’s study, and read: “It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him.”

“What sniveling fool penned that nonsense?” Fatio demanded.

“Mr. John Locke. And the ink is still damp on it,” Daniel replied.

“I am quite sure he did not mean it to apply to Isaac Newton!” Fatio returned, jarred, but recovering quickly.

“I believe what you really mean to say is, ‘Newton and Fatio,’ ” Daniel said.

Newton and Fatio looked at each other, and Daniel looked at them. Fatio had a kind of tender, insinuating look on his face, and Daniel got the idea it was very far from the first time he had shown that sort of face to Newton, and that Fatio was used to seeing a tender and loving face looking back his way. But not today. Newton was staring at Fatio not with love, but with avid curiosity, as if suddenly perceiving what had escaped his notice before. Daniel had no love for Fatio, but this made him so uneasy that he lost the courage he’d maintained up until now.

“I wish to tell you a story about Robert Hooke,” he announced.

This was one of the few things that could get Isaac’s attention away from his minute, penetrating study of Nicolas Fatio de Duillier. He turned his eyes toward Daniel, who went on: “Before I came up to Woolsthorpe, Isaac, I did an experiment with him. We set up a scale above a well, and weighed the same object at the level of the ground, and again three hundred feet below it, to see if there was a difference.
For you see, Hooke had an inkling of the inverse-square law.”