Quicksilver Read online

  “Oh…in an earlier scene, there was a hilarious misadventure, having to do with a keg of gunpowder,” Daniel volunteered.

  “Er…was this comedy written recently?”

  “Since the…um…events?”

  “One can only assume,” Daniel said.

  Significant chin-stroking and hemming now among the various R.S. Fellows (save Newton), who glanced up towards the Earl of Epsom as they made their way to their seats.

  LYDIA: Is this walking, or swimming?

  VAN UND: Fine muck—fine hurricanoe—throw up a dike there, and a windmill yonder, and I’ll be able to join it to my estates in Flanders.

  LYDIA: But it isn’t yours.

  VAN UND: Easily remedied—what’s the name of the place?

  LYDIA: That pretty boatswain said we were just off a place called Suckmire.

  VAN UND: Don’t pine for him, Lydia—yonder Castle’s sure to house some Persons of Quality—why, I spy some now! Halloo!

  TOM RUNAGATE: You see, Miss Straddle, they’ve already marked us as Courtiers. A few stolen rags are as good as Title and Pedigree.

  MISS STRADDLE: Aye, Tom, true enough when we’re barely within bowshot—but what’s to come later?

  TOM (peering through spyglass): What is to come? I have spied one candidate—

  STRADDLE: That lass has breeding, my wayward Tom—she’ll scorn you as a Vagabond, when she hears your voice—

  TOM: I can do a fine accent well as any Lord.

  STRADDLE:—and observes your uncouth manners.

  TOM: Don’t you know that bad manners are high fashion now?

  STRADDLE: Stab me!

  TOM: ’Tis truth! These fine people insult one another all day long—’tis called wit! Then they poke at one another with swords, and call it honor.

  STRADDLE: Then ’tween Wit and Honor, the treasure on that wrack is as good as ours.

  VAN UND: Halloo, there, sir! Throw us a line, we are sinking into your garden!

  TOM: This one must be daft, he mistakes yonder mud-flat for a garden!

  STRADDLE: Daft, or Delft.

  TOM: You think he’s Dutch!? Then I might levy a rope-climbing toll…

  STRADDLE: What’ll his daughter think of you then?

  TOM: ’Tis well considered…

  Throws rope.

  LORD BRIMSTONE: Who’s that Frenchman on the sea-wall? Has England been conquered? Heaven help us!

  LADY B: He is no Frenchman, my lord, but a good English gentleman in modern attire—most likely it is Count Suckmire, and that lady is his latest courtesan.

  LORD B: You don’t say!

  To Miss Straddle. Good day, madam—I’m informed that you are a Cartesian—here stands another!

  STRADDLE: What’s he on about?

  TOM: Never mind—remember what I told you.

  LORD B: Cogito, ergo sum!

  STRADDLE: Air go some? Yes, the air goes some when you flap your jaw, sir—I thought it was a sea-breeze, until I smelled it.

  To Tom. Is that the sort of thing?

  TOM: Well played, my flower.

  LADY B: That whore is most uncivil.

  LORD B: NO need to be vulgar, my dear—it means she recognizes us as her equals.

  ENTER, from opposite, the Rev. Yahweh Pucker, with

  BIBLE and SHOVEL.

  PUCKER: Here’s proof the Lord works in mysterious ways—I came expecting to find a ship-wrack, and drownded bodies in need of burying—which service I am ever willing to perform, for a small contribution—group rates available—instead, it is a courtly scene. St. James’s Park on a sunny May morn ne’er was so.

  TOM: Between the Dutch mercer, and the English lord, there must be treasure aplenty on that wrack—if you can divert them in the Castle, I’ll get word to our merry friends—they can steal the longboat these rowed in on, and go fetch the goods.

  STRADDLE: Whilst you salvage the Dutch girl’s maidenhead?

  TOM: Lost at sea already, I fear.

  Now THERE WAS A CHANGE of scene to the interior of Castle Suck-mire. As things were being re-arranged upon the stage, Oldenburg leaned close and said, “Is that him, then?”

  “Yes, that’s Isaac Newton.”

  “Well done—more than one Anglesey will be pleased—how did you flush him into the open?”

  “I am not entirely sure.”

  “What of the tangents paper?”

  “One thing at a time, please, sir…”

  “I cannot understand his reticence!”

  “He’s only published one thing in his life—”

  “The colors paper!? That was two years ago!”

  “For you, two years of interminable waiting—for Isaac, two years of siege warfare—fending off Hooke on one front, Jesuits on the other.”

  “Perhaps if you would only relate to him how you have passed the last two months—”

  Daniel managed not to laugh in Oldenburg’s face.

  UP ON THE STAGE IN Neville’s Court, the plot was thickening, or, depending on how you liked your plots, expanding into a froth. Miss Straddle, played by Tess, was flirting with Eugene Stopcock, an infantry officer, who had rushed in from London to rescue his shipwrecked parents. Tom Runagate had already been to bed at least once with Lydia van Underdevater. The courtier Francis Bug-germy had showed up incognito and begun chasing the slave Nzinga around in hopes of verifying certain rumors about the size of African men.

  Isaac Newton was pinching the high bridge of his nose and looking mildly nauseated. Oldenburg was glaring at Daniel, and several important personages were glaring from On High at Oldenburg.

  The play was entering Act V. Soon it would come to an end, triggering a plan, laid by Oldenburg, in which Isaac was finally going to be introduced to the King, and to the Royal Society at large. If Isaac’s paper were not brought forth tonight, it never would be, and Isaac would be known only as an Alchemist who once invented a telescope. So Daniel excused himself and set out across Trinity’s courtyards one more time.

  The lurkers in the Great Court had thinned out, or perhaps he simply was not paying so much attention to them—he had decided what to do, and that gave him liberty, for the first time in months, to tilt his head back and look up at the stars.

  It had turned out that Hooke, with his telescope project, had had much more on his mind than countering the ravings of some pedantic Jesuit. Sitting in the dark hole of Gresham’s College, marking down the coordinates of various stars, he’d outlined the rudiments of a larger theory to Daniel: first that all cœlestial bodies attracted all others within their sphere of influence, by means of some gravitating power; second that all bodies put into motion moved forward in a straight line unless acted upon by some effectual power; third that the attractive power became more powerful as the body wrought upon came nearer to the center.

  Oldenburg did not yet know the magnitude of Isaac’s powers. Not that Oldenburg was stupid—he was anything but. But Isaac, unlike, say, Leibniz the indefatigable letter-writer or Hooke the Royal Society stalwart, did not communicate his results, and did not appear to socialize with anyone save daft Alchemists. And so in Oldenburg’s mind, Newton was a clever though odd chap who’d written a paper about colors and then got into a fracas over it with Hooke. If Newton would only mingle with the Fellows a bit, Oldenburg seemed to believe, he would soon learn that Hooke had quite put colors out of his mind and moved on to matters such as Universal Gravitation, which of course would not interest young Mr. Newton in the slightest.

  This entire plan was, in other words, an embryonic disaster. But it might not occur for another hundred years that most of the Royal Society, and a King with a passion for Natural Philosophy, would spend a night together in Cambridge, within shouting distance of the bed where Isaac slept and the table where he worked. Isaac had to be drawn out, and it had to happen tonight. If this would lead to open war with Hooke, so be it. Perhaps that was inevitable anyway, no matter what Daniel did in the next few minutes.

  DANIEL WAS BACK in the chambers. Rog
er Comstock, left behind, Cinderella-like, to tidy up and tend the furnaces, had apparently gotten bored and sneaked off to an alehouse, because the candles had all been snuffed, leaving the big room lit only by the furnaces’ rosy glow. Here Daniel would’ve been at a stand, if not for the fact that he lived there, and could find his way round in the dark. He groped a candle out of a drawer and lit it from a furnace. Then he went into the room where he’d conversed with Isaac earlier. Rummaging through papers, trying to find the one about tangents—the first practical fruits of Isaac’s old work about fluxions—he was reminded that the sight of something on this table had rattled Isaac, and persuaded him to expose himself to the awful torment of watching a comedy. Daniel kept a sharp eye out, but saw nothing except for tedious alchemical notes and recipes, many signed not “Isaac Newton” but “Jeova Sanctus Unus,” which was the pseudonym Isaac used for Alchemy work.

  In any case—without solving the eternal mystery of why Isaac did what he did—he spied the tangents paper on the far corner of the table, and stepped forward to reach for it.

  The place was suffused with odd sounds, mostly the seething and hissing of diverse fuels burning in the furnaces, and the endless popping and ticking of the wooden wall panels. Another sound, faint and furtive, had reached Daniel’s ears from time to time, but that surly porter who bestrides the gate of the conscious mind, spurning most of what is brought in by the senses and admitting only perceptions of Import or Quality, had construed this as a mouse sapping and mining the wall, and shouldered it aside. Now, though, it did come to Daniel’s notice, for it grew louder: more rat than mouse. Isaac’s tangents paper was in his hand, but he stood still for a few moments, trying to work out where this rat was busy, so that he could come back in daylight and investigate. The sound was resonating in a partition separating this room from the big laboratory with the furnaces, which was not of regular shape, but had several pop-outs and alcoves, built, by men who’d long since passed away, for heaven only knew what reasons: perhaps to encase a chimney here, or add a bit of pantry space there. Daniel had a good idea of what lay on the opposite side of that wall that was making the grinding noises: it was a little sideboard, set into an alcove in the corner of the laboratory, probably used once by servants when that room had been a dining-hall. Nowadays, Isaac used the cabinets below it to store Alchemical supplies. The counter was stocked with mortars, pestles, &c. For certain of the things Isaac worked with had a marked yearning to burst into flame, and so he was at pains to store them in that particular alcove, as far as possible from the furnaces.

  Daniel walked as quietly as he could back into the laboratory. He set the tangents paper down on a table and then picked up an iron bar that was lying next to a furnace door for use as a poker. There was more than one way to get rid of rats; but sometimes the best approach was the simplest, viz. ambush and bludgeon. He stalked down an aisle between furnaces, wiggling the poker in his hand. The alcove had been partitioned from the rest of the room by a free-standing screen such as ladies were wont to dress behind, consisting of fabric (now shabby) pleated and hung on a light wooden frame. This was to stop flying sparks, and to shield Isaac’s fragile scales and fine powders from gusts of wind coming through open windows or down chimneys.

  He faltered, for the gnawing had stopped, as if the rat sensed the approach of a predator. But then it started up again, very loud, and Daniel strode forward, stretched one toe out ahead of him, and kicked the screen out of the way. His poker-hand was drawn back behind his head, poised to ring down a death-blow, and the candle was thrust out before him to find and dazzle the rat, which he guessed would be out on the counter.

  Instead he found himself sharing a confined space with another man. Daniel was so astonished that he froze, and sprang several inches into the air, at the same instant, if such a combination were possible, and dropped the poker, and fumbled the candle. He had nearly shoved the flame right into the face of this other chap: Roger Comstock. Roger had been working in the dark with a mortar and pestle and so the sudden appearance of this flame in his face not only startled him half out of his wits, but blinded him as well. And on the heels of those emotions came terror. He dropped what he had been working on: a mortar, containing some dark gray powder, which he had been pouring into a cloth bag at the instant Daniel surprised him. Indeed drop did not do justice to Roger’s treatment of these two items; gravity was not nearly quick enough. He thrust them away, and at the same time flung himself backwards.

  Daniel watched the flame of his candle grow to the size of a bull’s head, enveloping his hand and arm as far as the elbow. He dropped it. The floor was carpeted with flame that leapt up in a great FOOM and disappeared, leaving the place perfectly dark. Not that all flames had gone, for Daniel could still hear them crackling; the darkness was because of dense smoke filling the whole room. Daniel inhaled some and wished he hadn’t. This was gunpowder that Roger had been playing with.

  Roger was out of the house in five heartbeats, notwithstanding that he did it on his hands and knees. Daniel crawled out after him and stood outside the door long enough to purge his lungs with several deep draughts of fresh air.

  Roger had already scuttled across the garden and banged out the gate. Daniel went over to pull it closed, looking out first into the way. Some yards down, a couple of porters, shadowed under the vault of the Great Gate, regarded him with only moderate curiosity. It was expected that strange lights and noises would emanate from the residence of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. For shadowy figures to flee the building with smoke coming out of their clothes was only a little remarkable. Failing to close the garden gate was an egregious lapse; but Daniel saw to it.

  Then, holding his breath, he ventured back in. He found the windows by grope and hauled them open. The flames had caught and spread in the fabric of the toppled screen, but gone no farther, owing to that Isaac suffered very little that was combustible to abide in the furnace-room. Daniel stomped out a few glowing edges.

  In a more genteel setting, the smoke would have been accounted as a kind of damage to all the contents of the room that had been darkened and made noisome by it; but in a place such as this, it was nothing.

  What had occurred was not an explosion—for the gunpowder, fortunately, had not been confined—but a very rapid burning. The screen was wrecked. The cabinetry in the alcove was blackened. A scale had been blown off the counter and was probably ruined. The mortar that Roger had dropped lay in fat shards at the epicenter of the black burst, making Daniel think of the cannon that had exploded at the “Siege of Maestricht,” and other such disasters he had heard about lately aboard ships of the Royal Navy. Surrounding it were burnt scraps of linen—the bag into which Roger had been decocting the gunpowder when Daniel had set fire to it. It was, in other words, the least possible amount of devastation that could possibly result from deflagration of a sack of gunpowder inside the house. That said, this corner of the laboratory was a shambles, and would have to be cleaned up—a task that would fall to Roger anyway. Unless, as seemed likely, Isaac fired him.

  One would think that being blown up would throw one’s evening’s schedule all awry. But all of this had passed very quickly, and there was no reason Daniel could not accomplish the errand that had brought him here. Indeed, the grave problems that had so burdened him on his walk over here were quite forgotten now, and would appear to be perfectly trivial seen against the stunning adventure of the last few minutes. His hand and, to a lesser degree, his face, were raw and red from flash-burns, and he suspected he might have to do without eyebrows for a few weeks. A quick change of robes and a wash were very much in order; no difficulty, as he lived upstairs.

  But having done those, Daniel picked up the tangents paper, shook off the black grit that re-punctuated it, and headed out the door. This was no more than a tenth of everything Isaac had accomplished with fluxions, but it was at least a shred of evidence—better than nothing—and sufficient to keep most Fellows of the Royal Society in bed with headach
es for weeks. The night overhead was clear, the view excellent, the mysteries of the Universe all spread out above Trinity College. But Daniel lowered his sights and plodded toward the cone of steamy light where everyone was waiting.

  London Bridge

  1673

  Once the characteristic numbers of most notions are determined, the human race will have a new kind of tool, a tool that will increase the power of the mind much more than optical lenses helped our eyes, a tool that will be as far superior to microscopes or telescopes as reason is to vision.

  —LEIBNIZ, Philosophical Essays, TRANS. BY ARLEW AND GARBER

  NEAR THE MIDPOINT of London Bridge, a bit closer to the City than to Southwark, was a firebreak—a short gap in the row of buildings, like a missing tooth in a crowded jawbone. If you were drifting down-river in a boat, so that you could see all nineteen of the squat piers that held the bridge up, and all twenty of the ragstone arches and wooden drawbridges that let the water through, you’d be able to see that this open space—“the square,” it was called—stood directly above an arch that was wider than any of the others—thirty-four feet, at its widest.

  As you drew closer to the bridge, and it became more and more obvious that your life was in extreme danger, and your mind, therefore, became focused on practical matters, you’d notice something even more important, namely that the sluice between the starlings—the snowshoe-like platforms of rubble that served as footings for the piers—was also wider, in this place, than anywhere else on the bridge. Consequently the passage through it looked less like a boiling cataract than a river rushing down from mountains during the spring thaw. If you still had the ability to steer for it, you would. And if you were a passenger on this hypothetical boat, and you valued your life, you’d insist that the waterman tie up for a moment at the tip of the starling and let you out, so that you could pick your way over that jammed horde of more or less ancient piles and the in-fill of mucky rubble; take a stair up to the level of the roadway; run across the Square, not forgetting to dodge the carts rushing both ways; descend another stair to the other end of the starling; and then hop, skid, and stagger across it until you reached the end, where your waterman would be waiting to pick you up again if indeed his boat, and he, still existed.