The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World (98 page)

A
SAMPLE CONSEQUENCE OF THIS
alchemical fusing of forces would be that a comet fleeing the Sun on the out-bound limb of a hyperbola, traveling an essentially straight line, would, if it happened to pass near a planet, be drawn towards it. The Sun was not an absolute monarch. It did not have any special God-given power. The comet did not have to respect its force more than the forces of mere planets—in fact, the comet could not even perceive these two influences as being separate, they’d already been converted to the universal currency of force, and fused into a single vector. Far from the Sun, close to the planet, the latter’s influence would predominate, and the comet would change course smartly.

And so did Daniel, after riding almost straight across the fenny country northeast of Cambridge for most of a day, and traversing the pounded, shit-permeated mud flat where Stourbridge Fair was held, suddenly swing round a bend of the Cam and drop into an orbit whose center was a certain suite of chambers just off to the side of the Great Gate of Trinity College.

Daniel still had a key to the old place, but he did not want to go there just yet. He stabled his horse out back of the college and came in through the rear entrance, which turned out to be a bad idea. He knew that Wren’s library had started building, because Trinity had dunned him, Roger, and everyone else for contributions. And from the witty or despairing status reports that Wren gave the R.S. at every meeting, he was aware that the project had stopped and started more than once. But he hadn’t thought about the practical consequences. The formerly smooth greens between the Cam and the back of the College were now a rowdy encampment of builders, their draft-animals, and their camp-followers (and not just whores but itinerant publicans, tool-sharpeners, and errand-boys, too). So there was a certain amount of wading through horse-manure, wandering into blind alleys that had once been bowling-greens, tripping over hens, and declining more or less attractive carnal propositions before Daniel could even get a clear view of the library.

Most of Cambridge had fallen into twilight while Daniel had been seeking a route through the builders’ camp. Not that it made much of a difference, since the skies had looked like hammered lead all day. But the upper story of the Wren Library was high
enough to look west into tomorrow’s weather, which would be fine and clear. The roof was mostly on, and where it wasn’t, its shape was lofted by rafters and ridge-beams of red oak that seemed to resonate in the warm light of the sunset, not merely blocking the rays but humming in sympathy with their radiance. Daniel stood and looked at it for a while because he knew that any moment of such beauty could never last, and he wanted to describe it to the long-suffering Wren when he got back to London.

The bell began to toll, calling the Fellows to the dining hall, and Daniel slogged forward through the Library’s vacant arches and across Neville’s Court just in time to throw on a robe and join his colleagues at the High Table.

The faces around that table were warmed by port and candlelight, and exhibiting a range of feelings. But on the whole they looked satisfied. The last Master who’d tried to enforce any discipline on the place had suffered a stroke while hollering at some rowdy students. There was no preventing students and faculty from drawing weighty conclusions from such an event. His replacement was a friend of Ravenscar, an Earl who’d showed up reliably for R.S. meetings since the early 1670s and reliably fallen asleep halfway through them. He came up to Cambridge only when someone more important than he was there. The Duke of Monmouth was no longer Chancellor; he’d been stripped of all such titles during one of his banishments, and replaced by the Duke of Tweed—a.k.a. General Lewis, the L in Charles II’s CABAL.

Not that he or any other Chancellor made any difference. The college was run by the Senior Fellows. Twenty-five years earlier, just at the moment Daniel and Isaac had entered Trinity, Charles II had kicked out the Puritan scholars who had nested there under Wilkins and replaced ’em with Cavaliers who could best be described as gentlemen-scholars—in that order. While Daniel and Isaac had been educating themselves, these men had turned the college into their own personal termite-mound. Now they were Senior Fellows. The High Table diet of suet, cheese, and port had had its natural effect, and it was a toss-up as to whether their bodies or their minds had become softer.

No one could recollect the last time Isaac had set foot in this Hall. His lack of interest was looked on as proving not that something was wrong with Trinity but that something was wrong with Isaac. And in a way, this was just; if a College’s duty was to propagate a certain way of being to the next generation, this one was working perfectly, and Isaac would only have disrupted the place by bothering to participate.

The Fellows seemed to know this (this was how Daniel thought of them: not as a roomful of individuals but as The Fellows, a sort of hive or flock, an aggregate. The question of aggregates had been vexing Leibniz to no end. A flock of sheep consisted of several individual sheep and was a flock only by convention—the quality of flockness was put on it by humans—it existed only in some human’s mind as a perception. Yet Hooke had found that the human body was made up of cells—therefore, just as much an aggregate as a flock of sheep. Did this mean that the body, too, was just a figment of perception? Or was there some unifying influence that made those cells into a coherent body? And what of High Table at Trinity College? Was it more like a flock of sheep or a body? To Daniel it seemed very much like a body at the moment. To carry out the assignment given him by Roger Comstock he’d have to interrupt that mysterious unifying principle somehow, disaggregate the College, then cut a few sheep from the flock). The aggregate called Trinity noticed that Isaac only came to church once a week, on Sunday, and his behavior in the chapel was raising Trinity’s eyebrows, though unlike Puritans these High Church gentles would never come out and say what they were thinking about religion. That was all right with Daniel, who knew perfectly well what Newton was doing and what these men were thinking about it.

But later, after Daniel and several of the Fellows had filed out of the Hall and gone upstairs to a smaller room, to sit around a smaller table and drink port, Daniel used this as a sort of lure, dragging it through the pond to see if anything would rise up out of the murk and snap at it: “Given the company Newton’s been known to keep, I can’t help but wonder if he has become attracted to Popery.”

Silence.

“Gentlemen!” Daniel continued, “there’s nothing
wrong
with it. Remember, our King is a Catholic.”

There were thirteen other men in the room. Eleven of them found his remark to be in unspeakably poor taste (which was true) and said nothing. Daniel did not care; they’d forgive him on grounds that he’d been drinking and was well-connected. One of them understood immediately what Daniel was up to: this was Vigani, the alchemist. If Vigani had been following Isaac as closely, and listening to him as intently, as he had followed and listened to Daniel this evening, he would know a lot. For now, the ends of his mustache curled up wickedly and he hid his amusement in a goblet.

But one man, the youngest and drunkest in the room—a man who’d made no secret of the fact that he desperately wanted to get into the Royal Society—rose to the bait.

“I’d sooner expect all of Mr. Newton’s nocturnal visitors to convert to
his
brand of religion than
he
to
theirs
!”

This produced a few stiff chuckles, which only encouraged him. “Though God help ’em if they tried to get back into France afterwards—considering what King Louis does to Huguenots, imagine what kind of welcome he’d give to a full-blown—”

“To say nothing of Spain with the Inquisition,” said Vigani drolly. Which was a heroic and well-executed bid to change the topic to something so banal as to be a complete waste of breath—after all, the Spanish Inquisition had few defenders locally.

But Daniel had not endured years among courtiers without developing skills of his own. “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for an English Inquisition to find out what our friend was just about to say!”

“
That
should be coming along any day now,” someone muttered.

They were beginning to break ranks! But Vigani had recovered: “Inquisition? Nonsense! Freedom of Conscience is the King’s byword—or so Dr. Waterhouse has been telling everyone.”

“I have been a mere conduit for what the King says.”

“But you have just come from releasing a lot of Dissenters from prison, have you not?”

“Your knowledge of my pastimes is uncanny, sir,” Daniel said. “You are correct. There are plenty of empty cells available just now.”

“Shame to waste ’em,” someone offered.

“The King will find some use for those vacancies,” predicted someone else.

“An easy prediction to make. Here’s a more difficult: what will that King’s name be?”

“England.”

“I meant his Christian name.”

“You’re assuming he’s going to be a Christian, then?”

“You’re assuming he’s one now?”

“Are we speaking of the King who lives in Whitehall, or the one who has been spotted in the Hague?”

“The one in Whitehall has been
spotted
ever since his years in France: spotted on his face, on his hands, on his—”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, this room is too warm and close for your wit, I beg you,” said the most senior of the Fellows present, who looked as if he might be on the verge of having a stroke of his own. “Dr. Waterhouse was merely enquiring about his old friend, our colleague, Newton—”

“Is this the version we’re all going to relate to the English Inquisition?”

“You are merry, too merry!” protested the Senior Fellow, now
red in the face, and not with embarrassment. “Dr. Newton might serve as an example to you, for he goes about his work with
gravity,
and it is
sound
work in geometry, mathematics, astronomy…”

“Eschatology, astrology, alchemy…”

“No! No! Ever since Mr. Halley came up to enquire on the subject of Comets, Newton has had many fewer visitors from outside, and Signore Vigani has had to seek companionship in the Hall.”

“I need only
enter
the Hall and companionship is
found,
” said Vigani smoothly, “there is never
seeking.
”

“Please excuse me,” Daniel said, “it sounds as if Newton might welcome a visitor.”

“He might welcome a crust of bread,” someone said, “lately he has been scratching in his garden like a peckish hen.”

P
ASSING THROUGH
the Great Gate, he borrowed a lantern from a porter and exited onto a walkway that led to the street, hemmed in by crenellated walls. The wall to his left had a narrow gate let into it. Using his old key, Daniel opened the lock on this gate and stepped through into a sizable garden. It was laid out as a grid of gravel walkways with squares of greenery between. Some of the squares were planted with small fruit trees, others with shrubs or grass. To his left a line of taller trees screened the windows of the row of chambers that filled the space between the Great Gate and the Chapel. The buds in their branches were just evolving to nascent leaves, and where light shone from Isaac’s windows they glowed like stopped explosions, phosphorus-green. But most of the windows were dark, and the stars above the muzzles of the chimneys were sharp and crystalline, not blurred by heat or dimmed by smoke. Isaac’s furnaces were cold, the stuff in their crucibles congealed. Their heat had all gone into his skull.

Daniel let his lantern-hand fall to his side so that the light shone across the gravel path from the altitude of his knee. This made Isaac’s chicken-scratchings stand out in high relief.

Every one had started the same way: with Isaac slashing the toe of his shoe, or the point of his stick, across the ground to make a
curve. Not a specific curve—not a circle or a parabola—but a representative curve. Everything in the universe was curved, and those curves were evanescent and fluxional, but with this gesture Isaac snatched a particular curve—it didn’t matter which—down from the humming cosmos, like a frog flicking its tongue out to filch a gnat from a swarm. Once trapped in the gravel, it was frozen and helpless. Isaac could stand and look at it for as long as he wanted, like Sir Robert Moray gazing at a stuffed eel in a glass box. After a while Isaac would begin to slash straight lines into the gravel, building up a scaffold of rays, perpendiculars, tangents, chords, and normals. At first this would seem to grow in a random way, but then lines would intersect with others to form a triangle, which would miraculously turn out to be an echo of another triangle in a different place, and this fact would open up a sort of sluice-gate that would free information to flood from one part of the diagram to another, or to leap across to some other, completely different diagram—but the results never came clear to Daniel’s mind because here the diagram would be aborted and a series of footsteps—lunar craters in the gravel—would plot Isaac’s hasty return to his chambers, where it could be set down in ink.

Daniel followed these footsteps into the chambers he had once shared. The ground floor was cluttered with alchemical droppings, but not as dangerous as usual, since everything was cold. Daniel shone his lantern around one quiet room and then another. Everything that gave light back was hard mineral stuff, the inert refractory elements to which nature always returned: crusty crucibles, sooty retorts, corroded tongs, black crystals of charcoal, globs of quicksilver trapped in floor-cracks, a box of golden guineas left open next to a window as if to prove to all passers-by that the man who lived here cared nothing for gold.