Quicksilver (114 page)

SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1688

Therefore it happeneth commonly, that such as value themselves by the greatness of their wealth, adventure on crimes, upon hope of escaping punishment, by corrupting public justice, or obtaining pardon by money, or other rewards.

—HOBBES,
Leviathan

Now as
E
ngland was a country of fixed ways, they imprisoned him in the same chamber where they had put Oldenburg twenty years before.

But some things changed even in England; James II was peevish and fitful where his older brother had been merry, and so Daniel was kept closer than Oldenburg had been, and allowed to leave the chamber to stroll upon the walls only rarely. He spent all his time in that round room, encircled by the eldritch glyphs that had been scratched into the stone by condemned alchemists and sorcerers of yore, and pathetic Latin plaints graven by Papists under Elizabeth.

Twenty years ago he and Oldenburg had made idle jests about carving new graffiti in the Universal Character of John Wilkins. The words he had exchanged with Oldenburg still seemed to echo
around the room, as if the stone were a telescope mirror that forever recurved all information towards the center. The idea of the Universal Character now seemed queer and naïve to Daniel, and so it didn’t enter his mind to begin scratching at the stone for the first fortnight or so of his imprisonment. He reckoned that it would take a long time to make any lasting mark, and he assumed he would not live long enough. Jeffreys could only have put him in here to kill him, and when Jeffreys set his mind to killing someone there was no stopping him, he did it the way a farmer’s wife plucked a chicken. But no specific judicial proceedings were underway—a sign that this was not to be a
judicial
murder (meaning a stately and more or less predictable one), but the
other
kind.

It was marvelously
quiet
at the Tower of London, the Mint being shut down at the moment, and people never came to visit him, and this was good—rarely was a murder victim afforded such an opportunity to get his spiritual house in order. Puritans did not go to confession or have a special sacrament before dying, as Papists did, but even so, Daniel supposed there must be a bit of tidying-up he could do, in the dusty corners of his soul, before the men with the daggers came.

So he spent a while searching his soul, and found nothing there. It was as sparse and void as a sacked cathedral. He did not have a wife or children. He lusted after Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, but something about being locked up in this round room made him realize that she neither lusted after nor particularly liked him. He did not have a career to speak of, because he was a contemporary of Hooke, Newton, and Leibniz, and therefore predestined for rôles such as scribe, amanuensis, sounding-board, errand-boy. His thorough training for the Apocalypse had proved a waste, and he had gamely tried to redirect his skills and his energies towards the shaping of a secular Apocalypse, which he styled Revolution. But prospects for such a thing looked unfavorable at the moment. Scratching something on the wall might enable him to make a permanent mark on the world, but he would not have time.

All in all, his epitaph would be:
DANIEL WATERHOUSE
1646-1688
SON OF DRAKE.
It might have made an ordinary man just a bit melancholy, this, but something about its very bleakness appealed to the spirit of a Puritan and the mind of a Natural Philosopher. Suppose he’d had twelve children, written a hundred books, and taken towns and cities from the Turks, and had statues of himself all over, and
then
been clapped in the Tower to have his throat cut? Would matters then stand differently? Or would these be meaningless distractions, a clutter of vanity, empty glamour, false consolation?

Souls were created somehow, and placed in bodies, which lived for more or fewer years, and after that all was faith and speculation. Perhaps after death was nothing. But if there was
something,
then Daniel couldn’t believe it had anything to do with the earthly things that the body had done—the children it had spawned, the gold it had hoarded—except insofar as those things altered one’s soul, one’s state of consciousness.

Thus he convinced himself that having lived a bleak spare life had left his soul no worse off than anyone else’s. Having children, for example, might have changed him, but only by providing insights that would have made it easier, or more likely, to have accomplished some
internal
change, some transfiguration of the spirit. Whatever growth or change occurred in one’s soul
had
to be internal, like the metamorphoses that went on inside of cocoons, seeds, and eggs. External conditions might help or hinder those changes, but could not be strictly
necessary.
Otherwise it simply was not
fair,
did not make
sense.
Because in the end every soul, be it never so engaged in the world, was like Daniel Waterhouse, alone in a round room in a stone tower, and receiving impressions from the world through a few narrow embrasures.

Or so he told himself; either he would be murdered soon, and learn whether he was right or wrong, or be spared and left to wonder about it.

On the twentieth day of his imprisonment, which Daniel reckoned to be August 17th, 1688, the perceptions coming in through his embrasures were of furious argument and wholesale change. The soldiers he’d been glimpsing out in the yard were gone, replaced by others, in different uniforms. They looked like the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, but that couldn’t be, for they were a household regiment, stationed at Whitehall Palace, and Daniel couldn’t imagine why they would be uprooted from their quarters there and moved miles down-river to the Tower of London.

Unfamiliar men came to empty his chamber-pot and bring him food—better food than he’d become accustomed to. Daniel asked them questions. Speaking in Dorsetshire accents, they said that they were indeed the King’s Own Black Torrent Guards, and that the food they were bringing him had been piling up for quite some time in a porter’s lodge. Daniel’s friends had been bringing it. But the men who’d been running the Tower until yesterday—a distinctly inferior foot regiment—had not been delivering it.

Daniel then moved on to questions of a more challenging nature and the men stopped supplying answers, even after he
shared a few oysters with them. When he became insistent, they allowed as how they would relay his questions to their sergeant, who (as they warned him) was very busy just now, taking an inventory of the prisoners and of the Tower’s defenses.

It was two days before the sergeant came to call on Daniel. They were trying days. For just when Daniel had convinced himself that his soul was a disembodied consciousness in a stone tower, perceiving the world through narrow slits, he had been given oysters. They were of the best: Roger Comstock had sent them. They made his body happy when he ate them, and affected his soul much more than seemed proper, for a disembodied consciousness. Either his theory was wrong, or the seductions of the world were more powerful than he’d remembered. When Tess had got the smallpox she’d got it bad, and the pustules had all joined together and her whole skin had fallen off, and her guts had shot out of her anus into a bloody pile on the bed. After that she had somehow remained alive for a full ten and a half hours. Considering the carnal pleasures she had brought him during the years she’d been his mistress, Daniel had taken this the same way Drake would’ve: as a cautionary parable about fleshly delights. Better to perceive the world as Tess had during those ten and a half hours than as Daniel had while he’d been fucking her. But the oysters were extraordinarily good, their flavor intense and vaguely dangerous, their consistency clearly sexual.

Daniel shared some with the sergeant, who agreed that they were extraordinary but had little else to say—most of Daniel’s questions caused him to go shifty-eyed, and some even made him cringe. Finally he agreed to take the matter up with
his
sergeant, giving Daniel a nightmare vision of some endless regression of sergeants, each more senior and harder to reach than the last.

Robert Hooke showed up with a firkin of ale. Daniel assaulted it in much the same way as the murderers would him. “I was apprehensive that you would spurn my gift, and pour it into the Thames,” Hooke said irritably, “but I see that the privations of the Tower have turned you into a veritable
satyr.
”

“I am developing a new theory of bodily perceptions, and their intercourse with the soul, and this is
research,
” said Daniel, quaffing vigorously. He huffed ale-foam out of his whiskers (he’d not shaved in weeks) and tried to adopt a searching look. “Being condemned to die is a mighty stimulus to philosophick ratiocination, all of which is however wasted at the instant the sentence is carried out—fortunately I’ve been spared—”

“So that you may pass on your insights to
me,
” Hooke finished
dourly. Then, with ponderous tact: “My memory has become faulty, pray just write it all down.”

“They won’t allow me pen and paper.”

“Have you asked again recently? They would not allow me, or anyone, to visit you until today. But with the new regiment, a new regimen.”

“I’ve been scratching on yonder wall instead,” Daniel announced, waving at the beginnings of a geometric diagram.

Hooke’s gray eyes regarded it bleakly. “I spied it when I came in,” he confessed, “and supposed ‘twas something very
ancient
and
time-worn.
Very
recent
and
in progress
would never have crossed my mind.”

Daniel was flummoxed for a few moments—just long enough for his pulse to rouse, his face to flush, and his vocal cords to constrict. “It is difficult not to take that as a
rebuke,
” he said. “I am merely trying to see if I can reconstruct one of Newton’s proofs from memory.”

Hooke looked away. The sun had gone down a few minutes ago. A westerly embrasure reflected in his eyes as an identical pair of vertical red slits. “It is a perfectly defensible practice,” he admitted. “If I’d spent more of my youth learning geometers’ tricks and less of it looking at things, and learning how to see, perhaps I’d have written the
Principia
instead of him.”

This was an appalling thing to say. Envy was common as pipe-smoke at Royal Society meetings, but to voice it so baldly was rare. But then Hooke had never cared, or even noticed, what people thought of him.

It took a few moments for Daniel to collect himself, and to give Hooke’s utterance the ceremonial silence it demanded. Then he said, “Leibniz has much to say on the subject of
perceptions
which I have but little understood until recently. And you may love Leibniz or not. But consider: Newton has thought things that no man before has ever thought. A great accomplishment, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest achievement any human mind has ever made. Very well—what does that say of Newton, and of us? Why, that his mind is framed in such a way that it can out-think anyone else’s. So, all hail Isaac Newton! Let us give him his due, and glorify and worship whatever generative force can frame such a mind. Now, consider Hooke. Hooke has perceived things that no man before has ever perceived. What does that say of Hooke, and of us? That Hooke was framed in some special way? No, for just look at you, Robert—by your leave, you are stooped, asthmatic, fitful, beset by aches and ills, your eyes and ears are no better than those of men
who’ve not perceived a thousandth part of what you have. Newton makes his discoveries in geometrickal realms where our minds cannot go, he strolls in a walled garden filled with wonders, to which he has the only key. But you, Hooke, are cheek-by-jowl with all of humanity in the streets of London.
Anyone
can look at the things you have looked at. But in those things
you
see what no one else has. You are the millionth human to look at a spark, a flea, a raindrop, the moon, and the first to see it. For anyone to say that this is less remarkable than what Newton has done, is to understand things in but a hollow and jejune way, ‘tis like going to a Shakespeare play and remembering only the sword-fights.”

Hooke was silent for a time. The room had gone darker, and he’d faded to a gray ghost, that vivid pair of red sparks still marking his eyes. After a while, he sighed, and the sparks winked out for a few moments.

“I shall
have
to fetch you quill and paper, if this is to be the nature of your discourse, sir,” he said finally.

“I am certain that in the fullness of time, the opinion I have just voiced will be wide spread among learned persons,” Daniel said. “This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame’s a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. There is no reason why I should conceal my opinions. But I warn you that I may express them all I like without bringing you fame or fortune.”

“It is enough you’ve expressed them to
me
in the aweful privacy of this chamber, sir,” Hooke returned. “I declare that I am indebted to you, and will repay that debt one day, by giving you something of incalculable value when you least expect it. A pearl of great price.”

LOOKING AT THE MASTER SERGANT
made Daniel feel old. From the way that lower ranks had alluded to this man, Daniel had expected some sort of graybearded multiple amputee. But under the scars and weathering was a man probably no more than thirty years of age. He entered Daniel’s chamber without knocking or introducing himself, and inspected it as if he owned the place, taking particular care to learn the field of fire commanded by each of its embrasures. Moving sideways past each of those slits, he seemed to envision a fan-shaped territory of dead enemies spread across the ground beyond.

“Are you expecting to fight a war, sergeant?” said Daniel, who’d been scratching at some paper with a quill and casting only furtive dart-like glances at the sergeant.