In years since he has rarely gone back to those old memories. As he does now, in the tavern near Harvard College, he’s startled to find that the muddy whirl has been swept away. The mental pan has been churning for fifty years, sorting the dirt and sand to the periphery and throwing it off. Most of the memories are simply gone. All that remain are a few wee nuggets. It’s not plain to Daniel why these impressions have stayed, while others, which seemed as or more important to him at the time they happened, have gone away. But if the gold-panning similitude is faithful, it means that these memories matter more than the ones that have flown. For gold stays in the pan’s center because of its density; it has more matter (whatever that means) in a given extent than anything else.
The crowd in Charing Cross, the sword falling silently on the neck of Charles I: this is his first nugget. Then there’s nothing until some months later when the Waterhouses and their old family friends the Bolstroods went on a sort of holiday in the country to demolish a cathedral.
Nugget: In silhouette against a cathedral’s rose window, a bent, black wraith lumbering, his two arms a pendulum, a severed marble saint’s head swinging in them. This was Drake Waterhouse, Daniel’s father, about sixty years old.
Nugget: The stone head in flight, turning to look back in surprise at Drake. The gorgeous fabric of the window drawn inwards, like the skin on a kettle of soup when you poke a spoon through it-the glass falling away, the transcendent vision of the window converted to a disk of plain old blue-green English hillside beneath a silver sky. This was the English Civil War.
Nugget: A short but stout man, having done with battering down the gilded fence that Archbishop Laud had built around the altar, dropping his sledgehammer and falling into an epileptic fit on the Lord’s Table. This was Gregory Bolstrood, about fifty years old at the time. He was a preacher. He called himself an Independent. His tendency to throw fits had led to rumors that he barked like a dog during his three-hour sermons, and so the sect he’d founded, and Drake had funded, had come to be known as the Barkers.
Nugget: A younger Barker smiting the cathedral’s organ with an iron rod-stately pipes being felled like trees, polished boxwood keys skittering across the marble floor. This was Knott Bolstrood, the son of Gregory, in his prime.
BUT THESE ARE ALL FROMhis early childhood, before he’d learned to read and think. After that his young life had been well-ordered and (he’s surprised to see in retrospect) interesting. Adventurous, even. Drake was a trader. After Cromwell had won and the Civil War ended, he and young Daniel traveled all over England during the 1650s buying the local produce low, then shipping it to Holland where it could be sold high. Despite much of the trade being illegal (for Drake held it as a religious conviction that the State had no business imposing on him with taxes and tariffs, and considered smuggling not just a good idea but a sacred observance), it was all orderly enough. Daniel’s memories of that time-to the extent he still has any-are as prim and simple as a morality play penned by Puritans. It was not until the Restoration, and his going off to Trinity, that all became confused again, and he entered into a kind of second toddlerhood.
Nugget: The night before Daniel rode up to Cambridge to begin his four-year Cram Session for the End of the World, he slept in his father’s house on the outskirts of London. The bed was a rectangle of stout beams, a piece of canvas stretched across the middle by a zigzag of hairy ropes, a sack of straw tossed on, and half a dozen Dissenting preachers snoring into one another’s feet. Royalty was back, England had a King, who was called Charles II, and that King had courtiers. One of them, John Comstock, had drawn up an Act of Uniformity, and the King had signed it-with one stroke of the quill making all Independent ministers into unemployed heretics. Of course they had all converged on Drake’s house. Sir Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, came every few days and raided the place, on the suspicion that all those idle Phanatiques must be grinding out handbills in the cellar.
Wilkins-who for a brief while had been Master of Trinity-had secured Daniel a place there. Daniel had phant’sied that he should be Wilkins’s student, his protege. But before Daniel could matriculate, the Restoration had forced Wilkins out. Wilkins had retired to London to serve as the minister of the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry and, in his spare time, to launch the Royal Society. It was a lesson for Daniel in just how enormously a plan could go awry. For Daniel had been living in London, and could have spent as much time as he pleased with Wilkins, and gone to all the meetings of the Royal Society, and learnt everything he might have cared to know of Natural Philosophy simply by walking across town. Instead he went up to Trinity a few months after Wilkins had left it behind forever.
Nugget: On the ride up to Cambridge he passed by roadside saints whose noses and ears had been hammered off years ago by enraged Puritans. Each one of them, therefore, bore a marked resemblance to Drake. It seemed to him that each one turned its head to watch him ride past.
Nugget: A wench with paint on her face, squealing as she fell backwards onto Daniel’s bed at Trinity College. Daniel getting an erection. This was the Restoration.
The woman’s weight on his legs suddenly doubled as a boy half her age, embedded in a flouncing spray of French lace, fell on top of her. This was Upnor.
Nugget: A jeweled duelling-sword clattering as its owner dropped to hands and knees and washed the floor with a bubbling fan of vomit. “Eehhr,” he groaned, rising up to a kneeling position and letting his head loll back on his lace collar. Candle-light shone in his face: a bad portrait of the King of England. This was the Duke of Monmouth.
Nugget: A sizar with a mop and a bucket, trying to clean up the room-Monmouth and Upnor and Jeffreys and all of the other fellow-commoners calling for beer, sending him scurrying down to the cellar. This was Roger Comstock. Related, distantly, to the John Comstock who’d written the Act of Uniformity. But from a branch of the family that was at odds with John’s. Hence his base status at Trinity.
Daniel had his own bed at Trinity, and yet he could not sleep. Sharing the great bed in Drake’s house with smelly Phanatiques, or sleeping in common beds of inns while traveling round England with his father, Daniel had enjoyed great unbroken slabs of black, dreamless sleep. But when he went off to University he suddenly found himself sharing his room, and even his bed, with young men who were too drunk to stand up and too dangerous to argue with. His nights were fractured into shards. Vivid, exhausting dreams came through the cracks in between, like vapors escaping from a crazed vessel.
His first coherent memory of the place begins on a night like that.
The Dissenters are destitute of all decorations that can please the outward Senses, what their Teachers can hope for from humane Assistance lies altogether in their own endeavours, and they have nothing to strengthen their Doctrine with (besides what they can say for it) but probity of Manners and exemplary Lives.
-The Mischiefs That Ought Justly
to Be Apprehended from a
Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS,
attributed to BERNARDMANDEVILLE, 1714
SOME SORT OF COMMOTIONin the courtyard below. Not the usual revels, or else he wouldn’t have bothered to hear it.
Daniel got out of bed and found himself alone in the chamber. The voices below sounded angry. He went to the window. The tail of Ursa Major was like the hand of a c?lestial clock, and Daniel had been studying how to read it. The time was probably around three in the morning.