The Confusion (74 page)

Roger had noticed Daniel noticing all of these things, and had the good instincts not to look back. But his eyes flicked slightly upwards to a windowpane just above Daniel’s head, and he scanned the reflections interestedly for a moment. Which in no way prevented his talking at the same time. “Indeed, Daniel, any man plucked from this coffee-house—with one or two exceptions—would be preferable to
the fellows running our mint now, who are
tapeworms.
”

Daniel was staring fixedly into Roger’s eyes, but in the background he could see the Tory turning away. The Tory planted himself with his back toward Roger, set his coffee-cup down on a sideboard, rested a hand idly on the hilt of his small-sword, and seemed to survey the crowd of merry Whigs filling the house.

“It follows that any Fellow of the Royal Society would be excellent—but merely excellent is not quite good enough, Daniel. Normally it takes me
hours
to explain why this is true. You, thank God, have perceived it instantly. The fate of Britain and of Christendom hinge upon the power of the new good Pound Sterling to drive out the bad—to sweep all opposition from the field and bring gold and silver to our shores from every corner of the earth. The quality of money is only partly due to the purity of its metal—which any Natural Philosopher could see to. It is also a matter of
trust,
of prestige.”

Daniel had now realized what was coming, and slid down in his chair, and put his hands over his face. “You don’t want
me
to enlist him, Roger! I no longer have his ear. You want Fatio, Fatio, Fatio!”

“Everyone knows he is in-Fatio-ated—but passions are fleeting. You have known him longer than anyone, Daniel. You are the man for it. England needs you! Your Massachusetts sinecure awaits!”

Daniel had parted his fingers now and was peering out through slits in between. Unable to look Roger in the face, he was surveying the distant background. Andrew Ellis—a compact young man with a blond ponytail, an enjoyable, harmless young Parliamentarian—was coming over with a glass of claret in each hand, intent on breaking into the conversation and sharing his enjoyableness with Roger. If Daniel had hopes of weaseling out, he had to do it now. To Roger Comstock, silence implied not merely consent, but a blood oath.

“You cannot know what you are proposing, ensconcing such a man at the Tower, giving him control of our money. He has strange ideas, dark secrets—”

“I know all about the beastliness.”

“No, that’s not what I mean.”

“Alchemy is an even more common vice.”

“That’s not it, either. He is a heretic, Roger.”

“Look who’s talking!”

“I mean, he does not even believe in the Trinity!”

Roger got a glazed-over look, as he always did when abstract theological matters were dragged into the conversation. Unlike ordinary men, who required several minutes to become fully glazed over, Roger could do it in an instant, as if a window-sash had dropped in
front of him from a great height. Daniel parted his fingers more to observe this phenomenon. But instead his attention was drawn to something even odder: an expensive copper-colored wig hanging in midair behind Roger’s chair. Its owner had ducked and darted out from under it as fast as a striking cobra and simply left it behind. It fell to the floor, of course. By that time the owner—who had red hair in a close Caesar crop—was whispering something into Andrew Ellis’s ear. It must have been something extremely shocking, to judge from the look of astonishment—nay, horror—that had come over the normally beaming face of Mr. Ellis.

Daniel pushed himself up in his chair to get a better look and perceived that the red-headed gent was now drawing away from Ellis—but Ellis was moving with him, as if they were joined together. Ellis gave out a little whimper.

Daniel could not credit what he was seeing. “Roger, I could almost swear that Mr. Ellis is having his ear bitten.”

Roger now took notice for the first time. He stood up, turned around, and quickly verified it. This prolonged ear-biting had drawn very little notice thus far because Ellis had been too astonished to speak and the biter, of course, could not really talk, either—though he did seem to be mumbling something in a low, grinding voice: “So you want to have the ear of Roger Comstock? Then
I
shall have
yours.
”

Oddly, it was Roger’s standing up that drew everyone’s attention. Then awareness splashed across the room.

“In the name of God, sir!” Ellis cried, and slumped against the paneled wall. The red-head stayed with him, of course, maintaining his bite like a bulldog, working his jaw slowly to gnaw through the cartilage. He planted a hand on the wall to either side of Ellis’s head, bracketing him in position. Several of the Whigs in the main room finally moved forward to intervene—but the gentleman who had been talking to the biter earlier whirled to face them, and drew his sword half out of his scabbard. That drove them back like a firecracker.

Roger stepped toward the biter and the bitee, and raised his arm that was nearer the wall, causing his cape to spread open and block Daniel’s view of the whole proceedings. He seemed to slap the back of the biter’s hand where it was planted on the wall. “Mr. White,” he said, in an indulgent tone, “do wipe your chin when you are quite finished.” Then Roger skirted around the pair and walked out of the coffee-house. Andrew Ellis collapsed to the floor with a scream and pressed both of his hands to the side of his head. Mr. White came up
with a triumphant toss of his head, like a country boy who has just won at apple-bobbing. Something like a dried apricot was lodged in his smile. He plucked it out with one hand to admire it. Andrew Ellis was lying against Mr. White’s shins and knees, forcing them back, and so White had to keep his other hand braced against the paneling lest he topple forward. Anyway, he pocketed Ellis’s ear and flashed a bloody grin at Daniel.

“Welcome to politics, Mr. Waterhouse,” he announced. “This is the world you have made. Rejoice and be glad in it—for you shall not be allowed to leave.”

“I am freer to leave than
you
are, Mr. White,” Daniel said on his way out, nodding in the direction of the hand that Mr. White was bracing against the wall.

Mr. White now seemed to notice for the first time that a dagger had been shoved all the way through that hand, between the metacarpals and out through the palm, and lodged deep in the wooden wall. Worked into the dagger’s pommel, in silver letters, as a sort of calling-card, were the initials
R.C.

W
HEN
D
ANIEL MADE IT
out to the street he discovered that his hand had gone into his pocket and got ahold of the Pearl of Great Price and squeezed it so hard, for so long, that his fingers had got tired. The Stone had a sort of devil’s-head shape, with two stubby hornlets that had once been lodged in his ureters. He had a habit of gripping it so that those wee knobs stuck out between his knuckles—it fitted his hand almost as well as his bladder.

Riding north across Hertfordshire in a borrowed carriage the next day, he found his hand had gone to it once again, as he reviewed the ear-biting scene in the theatre of his memory. Daniel was meditating on Cowardice. He knew a lot of cowards and saw cowardice everywhere, but just as Mr. Flamsteed’s observations of the stars were frequently obnubilated by weather, so Daniel’s of Cowardice by Extenuating Circumstances. Viz. a man might explain cowardliness by saying that he had a family to support, or, failing that, with the simple argument that it just was not fair for a young man to give up life or limb. But Daniel had no wife or children of his own, and brother Sterling was doing a fine job of supporting the extended family. And not only was Daniel old (forty-seven), but he ought to’ve been dead by now, and owed his remaining years solely to Mr. Hooke’s pitiless blade-work. So in Daniel Waterhouse, an observer could see cowardliness in its pure form, and perhaps learn something of its nature.

A note from Roger Comstock was on the bench next to Daniel; it had been waiting for him in the carriage this morning.
Dear Daniel,
it read,

Roger was completely free of any taint of cowardice. Craven he might be, but a coward? Never.
A trifle
. Roger was sincere when he called it that.

It was impossible for Daniel to read in the dim, rocking vehicle, and he had no one to talk to, so sleeping and thinking were the only ways to pass the long drive through the rain up to Cambridge. As he contrasted his fear of Mr. White (which was very much akin to the fear he had previously had of Jeffreys) with how he had once felt about this rock that was now in his pocket, a new hypothesis of cowardice came into his head. The Stone had made him sad, reluctant to die, and anxious—but his fear of it had been as nothing compared to his fear of Jeffreys, and now of White. Yet those men had only spoken threatening words to him. Even when Hooke had reached up between his thighs with the scalpel, Daniel had been gripped by a sort of animal fear, but nothing like the dread of Mr. White, which had kept him awake all last night.

The only difference he could think of was that Hooke
liked
Daniel and White
hated
him. Could it be, then, that Daniel’s true cowardice lay in that he could not stand for people to think poorly of him?

That would be a strange shape for cowardice to take. But it tallied well with Daniel’s experiences to date. It was Daniel’s biography in a sentence. Further, perhaps it was the case that there were certain men, such as Jeffreys and White, who were adept at detecting this
particular type of fear, and who had learned to cultivate it and use it against their enemies. Mr. John Hammond, the driver, had a long coachman’s whip and used it frequently, but never actually struck the horses with it. Rather, he made it crack in the air around the heads of his team, and used their own fear to drive them.

When Daniel had sent Jeffreys to the Tower and to his scaffold-top meeting with Jack Ketch, he’d phant’sied that he had slain a dragon, and put an end to that part of his life. Yet now Mr. White had appeared out of nowhere. An alarming chap! But much more alarming was what this all implied, namely that the world had more than one dragon—that it was infested with them—and that a fellow who was afraid of dragons must perforce spend all his days worrying about one or another.

This was all very much of the essence, because when Daniel tracked Isaac down, wherever he was, he would not be able to do what needed to be done without first mastering this fear.

A
S IT TURNED OUT,
he had no occasion to master it in Cambridge. He arrived at Trinity College in time to have a wash and a cat-nap in one of the guest chambers. Then, when the bell rang, he threw on a robe and went to the dining hall and took a place at the high table. Rather close to the head of that table, as it turned out. For between apoplexy and smallpox, Daniel was becoming more senior with every passing month. He was shown respect and even affection. He understood now why men afflicted with his particular brand of cowardice would gravitate to stations like this one, even though the College had fallen on very hard times, and was dishing up thin gruel little different from what was served in the poor-house.

When he inquired after Newton and Fatio, heads turned toward a young man seated near the foot of the table—too far away for Daniel to converse with him—who was called Dominic Masham. This suggested much to Daniel, for he knew that the family Masham were close friends and patrons of John Locke. Locke had been living on their estate at Oates since he’d come back from exile in Holland round the time of the Glorious Revolution. Daniel presumed that Locke had established some sort of alchemical laboratory there, for Newton and Fatio had frequently gone there for lengthy stays, as had Robert Boyle until his death a year or two ago. The Mashams had many children and Daniel guessed that this Dominic was one of them, and that he was here as a protégé of Newton.

It was explained to him that Newton, Fatio, and Locke had all been staying in Newton’s (and formerly Waterhouse’s) chambers here until yesterday morning, when they’d all gone away, leaving
Masham behind to tie up some loose ends. Newton and Fatio had gone off together bound for Oates. Locke had gone off by himself down the Barton Road, which led generally southeastwards. But he had declined to state his destination.

“I went right by them,” Daniel remarked. For the Mashams’ estate lay just off the London-Cambridge road, some twenty miles north of the capital. “What were those fellows up to?” For they also collaborated on theological projects.

It made the men at High Table nervous that Daniel had even asked.

“That is to say, what sorts of stimulating conversations have I missed by being so long absent from this table? Surely, three such men did not sit here in silence.”

Everyone
sat in silence for a few moments. But then, fortuitously, dinner was over. They all stood up and chanted in Latin, and filed out. Daniel tracked Dominic Masham across the Great Court, and caught up with him beyond the main gate as he was unlocking the portal to Newton’s private courtyard. Masham had a distracted and hurried look about him, which suited Daniel’s purposes well enough. Daniel had a lanthorn, which he used to illuminate Masham’s face.