“Not at all!”
“I thought my work would be appreciated here. I was going to establish what, to Harvard, would’ve been what Gresham’s College was to Oxford. Imagined I’d find a student body, or at least a protege. Someone who could help me build the Logic Mill. Hasn’t worked out that way. All of the mechanically talented sorts are dreaming of steam-engines. Ludicrous! What’s wrong with water-wheels? Plenty of rivers here. Look, there’s a little one right between your feet!”
“Engines are naturally more interesting to the young.”
“You needn’t tell me. When I was a student, a prism was a wonder. Went to Sturbridge Fair with Isaac to buy them-little miracles wrapped in velvet. Played with ’em for months.”
“This fact is now widely known.”
“Now the lads are torn every direction at once, like a prisoner being quartered. Or eighthed, or sixteenthed. I can already see it happening to young Ben out there, and soon it’ll happen to my own boy. ‘Should I study mathematics? Euclidean or Cartesian? Newtonian or Leibnizian calculus? Or should I go the empirical route? Will it be dissecting animals then, or classifying weeds, or making strange matters in crucibles? Rolling balls down inclined planes? Sporting with electricity and magnets?’ Against that, what’s in my shack here to interest them?”
“Could this lack of interest have something to do with that everyone knows the project was conceived by Leibniz?”
“I’m not doing it his way. His plan was to use balls running down troughs to represent the binary digits, and pass them through mechanical gates to perform the logical operations. Ingenious, but not very practical. I’m using pushrods.”
“Superficial. I ask again: could your lack of popularity here be related to that all Englishmen believe that Leibniz is a villain-a plagiarist?”
“This is an unnatural turn in the conversation, Mr. Root. Are you being devious?”
“Only a little.”
“You and your Continental ways.”
“It’s just that the priority dispute has lately turned vicious.”
“Knew it would happen.”
“I don’t think you appreciate just how unpleasant it is.”
“You don’t appreciate how well I know Sir Isaac.”
“I’m saying that its repercussions may extend to here, to this very room, and might account for your (forgive me for mentioning this) solitude, and slow progress.”
“Ludicrous!”
“Have you seen the latest flying letters, speeding about Europe unsigned, undated, devoid of even a printer’s mark? The anonymous reviews, planted, like sapper’s mines, in the journals of the savants? Sudden unmaskings of hitherto unnamed ‘leading mathematicians’ forced to own, or deny, opinions they have long disseminated in private correspondence? Great minds who, in any other era, would be making discoveries of Copernican significance, reduced to acting as cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers for the two principals? New and deservedly obscure journals suddenly elevated to the first rank of learned discourse, simply because some lackey has caused his latest stiletto-thrust to be printed in its back pages? Challenge problems flying back and forth across the Channel, each one fiendishly devised to prove that Leibniz’s calculus is the original, and Newton’s but a shoddy counterfeit, or vice versa? Reputations tossed about on points of swords-”
“No,” Daniel says. “I moved here to get away from European intrigues.” His eyes drop to the Letter. Enoch can’t help looking at it, too.
“It is purely an anomaly of fate,” Enoch says, “that Gottfried, as a young man, lacking means, seeking a position-anything that would give him the simple freedom to work-landed in the court of an obscure German Duke. Who through intricate and tedious lacework of marryings, couplings, dyings, religious conversions, wars, revolutions, miscarriages, decapitations, congenital feeble-mindedness, excommunications, et cetera among Europe’s elite-most notably, the deaths of all seventeen of Queen Anne’s children-became first in line to the Throne of England and Scotland, or Great Britain as we’re supposed to call it now.”
“ Somewould call it fate. Others-”
“Let’s not get into that. ”
“Agreed.”
“Anne’s in miserable health, the House of Hanover is packing up its pointed helmets and illustrated beer-mugs, and taking English lessons. Sophie may get to be Queen of England yet, at least for a short while. But soon enough, George Louis will become Newton’s King and-as Sir Isaac is still at the Mint-his boss.”
“I take your point. It is most awkward.”
“George Louis is the embodiment of awkwardness-he doesn’t care, and scarcely knows, and would probably think it amusing if he did. But his daughter-in-law the Princess-author of this letter-in time likely to become Queen of England herself-is a friend of Leibniz. And yet an admirer of Newton. She wants a reconciliation.”
“She wants a dove to fly between the Pillars of Hercules. Which are still runny with the guts of the previous several peace-makers.”
“It’s supposed that you are different.”
“Herculean, perhaps?”
“Well…”
“Do you have any idea why I’m different, Mr. Root?”
“I do not, Dr. Waterhouse.”
“The tavern it is, then.”
BEN ANDGODFREY ARE SENTback to Boston on the ferry. Daniel scorns the nearest tavern-some sort of long-running dispute with the proprietor-so they find the highway and ride northwest for a couple of miles, drawing off to one side from time to time to let drovers bring their small herds of Boston-bound cattle through. They arrive at what used to be the capital of Massachusetts, before the city fathers of Boston out-maneuvered it. Several roads lunge out of the wilderness and collide with one another. Yeomen and drovers and backwoodsmen churn it up into a vortex of mud and manure. Next to it is a College. Newtowne is, in other words, paradise for tavern-keepers, and the square (as they style it) is lined with public houses.
Waterhouse enters a tavern but immediately backs out of it. Looking into the place over his companion’s shoulder, Enoch glimpses a white-wigged Judge on a massive chair at the head of the tap-room, a jury empaneled on plank benches, a grimy rogue being interrogated. “Not a good place for a pair of idlers,” Waterhouse mumbles.
“You hold judicial proceedings in drinking-houses!?”
“Poh! That judge is no more drunk than any magistrate of the Old Bailey.”
“It is perfectly logical when you put it that way.”
Daniel chooses another tavern. They walk through its brick-red door. A couple of leather fire-buckets dangle by the entrance, in accordance with safety regulations, and a bootjack hangs on the wall so that the innkeeper can take his guests’ footwear hostage at night. The proprietor is bastioned in a little wooden fort in the corner, bottles on shelves behind him, a preposterous firearm, at least six feet long, leaning in the angle of the walls. He’s busy sorting his customers’ mail. Enoch cannot believe the size of the planks that make up the floor. They creak and pop like ice on a frozen lake as people move around. Waterhouse leads him to a table. It consists of a single slab of wood sawn from the heart of a tree that must have been at least three feet in diameter.
“Trees such as these have not been seen in Europe for hundreds of years,” Enoch says. He measures it against the length of his arm. “Should have gone straight to Her Majesty’s Navy. I am shocked.”
“There is an exemption to that rule,” Waterhouse says, showing for the first time a bit of good humor. “If a tree is blown down by the wind, anyone may salvage it. In consequence of which, Gomer Bolstrood, and his fellow Barkers, have built their colonies in remote places, where the trees are very large-”
“And where freak hurricanoes often strike without warning?”
“And without being noticed by any of their neighbors. Yes.”
“Firebrands to furniture-makers in a single generation. I wonder what old Knott would think.”