The System of the World (11 page)

An odd notion had come in to Daniel’s mind: perhaps the intended victim of the Infernal Device had been, not Daniel or Mr. Threader, but Henry Arlanc.

Now in his years of toil for the Royal Society, Daniel had become a stern judge of odd notions. There were abundant reasons to discard this one straightaway. Its most obvious defect was simply that Daniel had not the faintest idea why anyone would want to blow up the Royal Society’s porter. Moreover, the fog that had descended over Daniel’s mind since the explosion had made him susceptible to hypotheses of an extremely dark and frightening cast, and this seemed like one of those.

But the Natural Philosopher in him had to admit that it was at least
theoretically
possible. And until it had been ruled out, Daniel liked to preserve, from Arlanc, some independence—he did not wish to get in the habit of relying on the Huguenot every time he stirred from Crane Court—and some privacy. ’Twas neither necessary nor desirable for Arlanc to know everything about his movements around London.

His knees were still recovering from too long spent in bed, but they had become unlimbered by the time he reached the end of Crane Court and flung himself on the mercy of Fleet Street. He turned to the right, therefore moving in the general direction of Charing Cross, and worked his way cautiously upstream, prudently facing on-coming traffic, and with his right hand dabbing at the fronts of houses and shops in case he should be forced to save himself by diving into a door-way. Soon he had left St. Dunstan-in-the-West
behind. The Inner and Middle Temple would be to his left, on the opposite side of Fleet, lurking behind a screen of newer buildings. These were largely occupied by pubs and coffee-houses that were continual targets of arch but confusing references, and cruel but murky satire, in newspapers.

Soon he had passed through Temple Bar. The way—now called the Strand—forked into a main channel on the left and an inferior one to the right, creating a long central island with a couple of churches in it. Daniel took the narrower way—really a series of disjoint street-fragments crudely plumbed together—and grew convinced that he was lost. The buildings were held apart by splints of air, too narrow to deserve the name “alley,” that jogged crazily to the right and left, and did not run in straight lines even when they could have. The fire had stopped short of this part of the city, probably because the Rolls and the Temple, with their generous lawns, had acted as fire-breaks. Hooke, in his capacity as City Surveyor, had not been empowered to bring it out of the Dark Ages. These ancient rights-of-way were as sacred, or at least as unassailable, as the precepts of the Common Law. Somewhere among them was an old, therefore low-ceilinged room that had been acquired by a printer, Mr. Christopher Cat, and made into a thing called the Kit-Cat Clubb.

I have spoken to Mr. Cat about you,
Roger had let Daniel know, in a note slipped under his door.
When you venture out, stop by our Clubb for refreshment.
There had been a sketchy map, which Daniel now withdrew from his pocket, and tried to interpret. It was useless. But presently he was able to find his way to the Kit-Cat Clubb simply by following the carriages of Whig M.P.s.

The building had clearly been thrown up in an epoch of English history short on food and building materials, because Daniel, who was of average height, could barely stand up without being bludgeoned by a joist. Accordingly, the paintings that Mr. Cat had commissioned to adorn the walls were all bizarrely wide and short. This ruled out portraits, unless they were portraits of very large groups as seen from tremendous distances. Of these, the largest and most prominently displayed was of the distinguished membership of the Kit-Cat Clubb. Roger was front and center in his best wig, which was captured as a horseshoe-shaped swipe of an overloaded paint-brush.

“L
ET’S DO SOMETHING
about Longitude!”

He was the same Roger in a much older body. Only his teeth looked young, because they were; they could not have been carved more than a few months ago. He had deteriorated in every way save the Mental and the Dental. He made up for it with clothing.

Daniel blew on his chocolate for a few moments, trying to get it to cool without forming a wrinkled hide on the top. He could not hear himself think for all the Whigs in wigs shouting at each other. “The Queen opened Parliament only two hours ago,” he reminded Roger, “or so I’ve been told, and she forgot,
entirely,
to mention the trifling detail of who would succeed her, after her demise. And you wish to have a chat about Longitude.”

The Marquis of Ravenscar rolled his eyes. “ ’Twas settled æons ago. Sophie or Caroline will succeed her—”

“You mean, Sophie or George Louis.”

“Don’t be a fool. Ladies run Europe. The War of the Spanish Succession was all women. In Versailles, Madame de Maintenon. In Madrid, her best friend, the Princesse des Ursins,
Camarera Mayor
of the Bourbon Court of Spain. She runs the place. Those two on the one side, fought it out against Queen Anne and Sophie on the other.”

“I thought Queen Anne and Sophie hated each other.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Touché, Roger.”

“Now if you insist on being pedantic, yes, George Louis is next in the queue after Sophie. Do you know what he did with his wife?”

“Something horrible, I heard.”

“Locked her up in a Schloß for the rest of her life, for bed-swerving.”

“So clearly
he
has the upper hand, at least—”

“ ’Tis the exception that proves the rule, Daniel. By taking such a measure, he confesses his helplessness to the world. She made him a cuckold. Cuckolds cannot be unmade.”

“Still,
she’s
locked in a Schloß, and he
isn’t.
”

“He is locked up in the Schloß of his own mind, which, by all accounts, has walls so thick, as to leave very little room within. The leading lady of England will be the Princess of Wales—raised personally by Sophie and by the late lamented, by all accounts dazzling, Queen of Prussia; and tutored by
your friend.
” This Roger stressed ominously.

“Er, getting back to the actual topic of conversation, don’t you think your time were better spent making sure the Hanoverians actually do succeed to the throne? Longitude can wait.”

Roger waved his hand as if trying for the eleventh time to knock a particular horse-fly out of the air. “God damn it, Daniel do you really think we are so feckless, as not to have thought of that?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“We’re not letting the Pretender in! You were there at his so-called
birth—you saw the sleight-of-
hand involving the warming-pan—surely a man of your discrimination was not so easily deceived!”

“To me it looked like a babe’s head coming out of the Queen’s vagina.”

“And you call yourself a man of science!”

“Roger, if you would set aside this quaint notion that countries must be ruled by kings who are the sons of
other
kings, then it would not matter whether the Pretender entered St. James’s Palace through a vagina, or a warming-pan; either way, to hell with him.”

“Are you suggesting I become a Republican?”

“I’m suggesting you already are one.”

“Hmmph…from there, ’tis only a short step to Puritanism.”

“Puritanism has its advantages…we are not so much under the thumb of ladies.”

“Only because you
hang
all of the interesting ones!”

“I am told you have a mistress of a distinguished family…”

“As do you—the chief difference being, I get to sleep with mine.”

“They say she is extraordinarily clever.”

“Yours, or mine?”

“Both of them, Roger, but I was referring to yours.”

Roger did an odd thing then, namely, raised up his glass and turned it this way and that, until it had caught the light from the window the right way. It had been scratched up with a diamond. Several lines of script ran across it, which he now read, in a ghastly chaunt that was either bad reading or bad singing.

By the time he had lurched and wheezed to the end, several nearby clubbers had picked up the melody—if it could be so called—and begun to sing along. At the end, they all rewarded themselves by Consumption of Alcohol.

“Roger! I never would have dreamed any woman could move you to write even bad poetry.”

“Its badness is proof of my sincerity,” Roger said modestly. “If I
wrote her an
excellent
love-poem, it might be said of me, that I had done it only to flaunt my wit.”

“As matters stand, you are indeed safe from any such accusations.”

Roger now allowed a few silent moments to pass, and adjusted his posture and his wig, as if about to be recognized in Parliament. He proclaimed: “Now, when the attention of all Good and Forthright Men is fixed upon the controversies attending the Hanoverian Succession, now, I say, is the time to pass Expensive and Recondite Legislation!”

“Viz. Longitude?”

“We can offer a prize to the chap who devises a way of measuring it. A large prize. I have mentioned the idea to Sir Isaac, to Sir Christopher, and to Mr. Halley. They are all for it. The prize is to be quite large.”

“If you have
their
support, Roger, what can you possibly want of
me
?”

“It is high time the Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts—which I have supported so generously—did something useful!”

“Such as—?”

“Daniel, I want to win the Longitude Prize!”

LATE FEBRUARY
1714

D
ANIEL WAS LURKING LIKE A
bat in the attic, supervising Henry Arlanc, who was packing Science Crapp into crates and casks. Sir Isaac Newton emerged from a room on the floor just below, talking to a pair of younger men as they strode down the corridor. Daniel craned his neck and peered down the stairway just in time to catch a glimpse of Isaac’s feet and ankles as they flicked out of view. One of the men was Scottish, and sanguine, and fully agreeable to whatever it was that Isaac thought he should do. “I shall
remark
on the Baron’s
remarks,
sir!”

Leibniz had published his latest salvo in
Journal Literaire
under the title “Remarks.”

“I’ll use him smartly, I will!”

“I shall supply you with my notes on his
Tentamen.
I found in it a
clearly erroneous use of second-order differentials,” Isaac said, preceding the others down the stairs.

“I perceive your strategy sir!” boomed the Scotsman. “Before the Baron presumes to pick the lint from oot o’ yoor eye he ought to extricate the log from oot o’ his oon!” It was John Keill: Queen Anne’s cryptographer.

The three men stormed down the stairs and out into the streets, or so it sounded to Daniel, in whose failing ears their footsteps and their conversation melted together into a fusillade of hoots and booms.

Daniel waited until their carriages had cleared the end of Crane Court, then went to the Kit-Cat Clubb.

O
NE OF THE REGULARS THERE
was John Vanbrugh, an architect who made a specialty of country houses. For example, he was building Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough. He couldn’t help but be busy on that front just now, since Harley had just flung ten thousand pounds at the Duke. Most of his tasks, just now, had nothing to do with the drawing up of plans or the supervision of workers. He was rather shunting money from place to place and attempting to hire people. Daniel knew this because Vanbrugh was using the Kit-Cat Clubb as his office, and Daniel couldn’t go there and read the paper and drink chocolate without hearing half of Vanbrugh’s business. Occasionally Daniel would glance up to discover Vanbrugh staring at him. Perhaps the architect knew he had corresponded with Marlborough. Perhaps it was something else.

At any rate, Vanbrugh was there when Daniel walked down from Crane Court, and within a few moments he had a great deal more reason to stare. For Daniel had scarcely sat down before a really excellent carriage pulled up in front of the club, and the head of Sir Christopher Wren appeared in its window, asking for Dr. Daniel Waterhouse. Daniel obliged by coming out and climbing right in. The magnificence of this vehicle, and the beauty of the four matched horses that drew it, were sufficient to stop traffic on the Strand, which greatly simplified the task of getting it turned around and aimed back the way Daniel had come, eastwards into the city.

“I sent a carter round to Crane Court, as you requested, to collect whatever it was you wanted collected. He shall meet us at St. Stephen Walbrook and then he is yours for the day.”

“I am in your debt.”

“Not at all. May I ask what it is?”

“Rubbish from the attic. A gift to our scientific brethren in St. Petersburg.”

“Then I am in
your
debt. Given the nature of my work, what a scandal it would raise, if Crane Court collapsed under the weight of beetles.”

“Let us consider all accounts settled between us, then.”

“Did you really go through
all
of it!?”

“What I am really after is the residue of Hooke.”

“Oh—er! You shan’t find it
there
. Sir Isaac.”

“Hooke and Newton are the two most difficult persons I have ever known—”

“Flamsteed belongs too in that Pantheon.”

“Hooke thought Newton stole his ideas.”

“Yes. He made me aware of it.”

“Newton considered himself aggrieved by any such accusations. Hooke’s legacy could only support Hooke, and never exonerate Newton—so away with all such rubbish! But Hooke, being no less obstreperous than Newton, must have anticipated this—he would therefore have placed his most valuable stuff out of Newton’s reach.”

Wren bore his eighty-one years as an arch supports tons of stone. He had been a sort of mathematical and mechanical prodigy. The quicksilver that had seemingly welled up out of the ground, round the time of Cromwell, had been especially concentrated in him. Later that tide had seemed to ebb, as many of the early Royal Society men had succumbed to a heaviness of the limbs, or of the spirit. Not so with Wren, who seemed to be changing from an elfin youth into an angel, with only a brief sojourn in Manhood. He wore a tall fluffy silver wig, and clothing of light color, with airy lace at the throat and wrists, and his face was in excellent condition. His age showed mostly in the dimples of his cheeks, which had lengthened to crevices, and in the fragile skin of his eyelids, which had become quite loose, pink, and swollen. But even this only seemed to lend him a placid and mildly amused look. Daniel saw now that Wisdom had been among the gifts that God had bestowed on the young Wren, and that it had led him into architecture: a field where the results spoke for themselves, and in which it was necessary to remain on speaking terms with large numbers of one’s fellow humans for years at a time. The other early Royal Society men had not recognized Wren’s wisdom, and so there had been whispers, fifty years ago, that the wonder boy was squandering his gifts by going into the building trade. Daniel had been as guilty of saying so as anyone else. But Wren’s decision had long since been vindicated, and Daniel—who’d made his own decisions, some wiser than others—felt no trace of envy, and no regret. Only a sort of awed bemusement, as their carriage emerged from Ludgate and circumnavigated St. Paul’s church-yard, and Wren
parted a curtain with one finger to cast an eye over St. Paul’s, like a shepherd scanning his flock.

What would it be like, to have built
that
? Daniel could only guess at it, by considering what
he
had built, and trying to appraise it in a similar spirit. But Daniel’s work was not finished yet. He was not that old—or so he felt, in present company. When Wren’s son had laid the last stone into its place in the lantern atop the dome of St. Paul’s, Sir Christopher had been ten years older than Daniel was
today
.

St. Paul’s had passed from view; they had turned onto Watling Street and come to a dead stop in the congestion; the tables had turned, and now Wren was looking at Daniel bemusedly. “I do not intend to make your business mine,” he said, “but it would help me to help you, if you would allow me to know what sort of Hooke-stuff you are looking for. Some of his artwork, to adorn your walls? Navigational instruments, for finding your way back to Boston? Architectural drawings? Astronomical observations? Schemes for flying machines? Samples of exotic plants and animals? Clock-work? Optical devices? Chymical Receipts? Cartographical innovations?”

“Forgive me, Sir Christopher, my affairs divide and multiply from one day to the next, I am compelled to pursue several errands at once, and so my answer is not as plain as it might be. Almost anything will serve the end I have already mentioned, viz. giving the Russian savants-in-training food for thought. As for my own purposes, I require anything to do with machines.”

“I have heard it mentioned that you are a member of the Court of Directors of the Proprietors—”

“No. It is not that. Mr. Newcomen’s Engine is a huge and beastly piece of ironmongery, and he needs no assistance from me to make it. I am thinking of small, precise, clever machines.”

“I suppose you mean, small, precise machines,
made cleverly.
”

“I meant what I said, Sir Christopher.”

“So it’s the Logic Mill again? I thought Leibniz gave up on it, what, forty years ago.”

“Leibniz only
set it aside
forty years ago, so that he could—” Here Daniel was struck dumb for a few moments out of sheer awe at the
faux pas
he had been about to commit; he was going to say,
invent the calculus.

Sir Christopher’s face, as he regarded this narrowly averted conversational disaster, looked like the death-mask of a man who had died in his sleep while having a pleasant dream.

Finally Wren said, brightly, “I recall Oldenburg was furious. Never forgave him for not finishing it.”

A short pause. Daniel was thinking something unforgivable: perhaps
Oldenburg had been right, Leibniz should have built the damned machine and never trespassed upon the holy ground that Isaac had discovered and walled round. He sighed.

Sir Christopher was regarding him with infinite patience. ’Twas like sharing a coach with a Corinthian column.

“I am serving two masters and one mistress,” Daniel began. “Just now, I don’t know what the mistress expects of me, and so let us leave her out of the discussion, and consider my masters. Both men of power. One, a prince of a faraway land, of an old style, but with new ideas. The other, a new sort of prince: a Parliamentary potentate. I can satisfy both, by achieving the same object: construction of a Logic Mill. I know how to build it, for I have been thinking about it, and making test-pieces, for twenty years. I shall soon have a place to build it
in
. There is even money. I want tools, and clever men who can work miracles with them.”

“Hooke devised machines for cutting tiny gears, and the like.”

“And he knew all of the watch-makers. Among his papers there might be names.”

Wren was amused. “Oh, you’ll have no difficulty getting watch-makers to talk to you, after my lord Ravenscar passes the Longitude Act.”

“That depends on whether they perceive me as a competitor.”

“
Are
you?”

“I believe that the way to find longitude is not to make better clocks, but to make certain astronomical observations—”

“The Method of Lunar Distances.”

“Indeed.”

“But there is so much
arithmetick
to be done, with that method.”

“And so let us equip every ship with an Arithmetickal Engine.”

Sir Christopher Wren pinkened—not because he was angry, or embarrassed, but because he was interested. His mind worked for a while. Daniel let it. Finally Wren said, “The most ingenious mechanics I have ever seen, have not been those who make clocks—though they are admittedly very clever—but the ones who make
organs.
”

“Pipe-organs, you mean?”

“Yes. For churches.”

Daniel felt something very strange happening to his face: he was smiling. “Sir Christopher, you must have employed more organ-makers than any man in history.”

Wren held up a steadying hand. “The furnishings are put in by the parish vestries—it is they who employ the organ-makers. But this much is true: I see them all the time.”

“London must be infested with them!”

“That was more true ten and twenty years ago than now. London’s churches are finished. Many of the organ-makers have gone back to the Continent, to rebuild instruments destroyed in the wars. But many are still here. I shall make inquiries, Daniel.”

They arrived at the church of St. Stephen on Walbrook. Walbrook had been a stream in Roman times, and was now assumed to be a sewer flowing somewhere beneath the street of the same name, though no one was volunteering to go down and verify this. It was a good omen for the day, because this was Daniel’s favorite church. (1) Wren had put it up early in his career—come to think of it, during the same years Leibniz had been toiling on the calculus. It was all domes and arches, as white and pure as an egg; and whatever uplifting thoughts its parishioners might think as they filed into it, Daniel knew it was Wren’s secret anthem to Mathematicks. (2) Thomas Ham, his goldsmith uncle, had lived and worked close enough to hear the hymns being sung in this church. His widow Mayflower—who late in life had converted to Anglicanism—had attended services there with her surviving son William. (3) When King Charles II had ennobled Thomas Ham by way of apology for absconding with all of his customers’ deposits, he had named him Viscount Walbrook, and so to Daniel the Church of St. Stephen Walbrook felt almost like a family chapel.

Wren had put up so many churches so quickly that he’d not had time to plant steeples on them. They all looked splendid on the inside. But steeples were essential to his vision of how London ought to look from the outside, and so now, in semi-retirement, he was going round to his old projects and banging out majestic yet tasteful steeples one after the other. From here Daniel could see another being finished at St. James Garlickhythe, a quarter-mile away, and yet another freshly completed one across the street from there at St. Michael Paternoster Royal. Apparently Sir Christopher’s steeple project was rolling through London a neighborhood at a time. Eminently practical, that. This one, at St. Stephen Walbrook, was just getting underway, using men and matériel being moved over from the other two.

They were taking over the near end of an anomalous open ground north of the church, which spanned a distance of a hundred yards or so between it and the riotous Poultry/Threadneedle/Cornhill/Lombard intersection. Formerly this had been the Stocks Market. It was impossible for so much uncovered dirt to exist in a city like London without becoming a breeding-ground for Crime or Commerce, and Daniel spied instances of both as soon as he got out of Wren’s carriage. At the nearer end, Wren’s workmen had set up, and were
guarding, supply-dumps for the masons and carpenters who would spend the next year or two working here, and were erecting a tiny encampment of shacks and tents. Their dogs were parading around, solemn as doctors, urinating on anything that did not move fast enough. Amid this mess, Daniel spied one cart laden with parcels he’d packed with his own hands in the attic of the Royal Society.

A lot of fellows were doffing their hats—not to Daniel, of course, but to his traveling-companion. Wren was clearly getting ready to part ways with him. “I have in my possession drawings of many of Hooke’s buildings.”