“You could inspect this one as closely as you wanted,” Daniel said, “and find no evidence of criminal tampering-I got it from a blind innkeeper who had suffered frostbite in the fingertips-had no idea what he was giving me.”
“Didn’t he think to bite down on it? Like so?” said the Judaic individual, taking the shilling and crushing it between his rear molars.
“What would he have learned by doing that, sir?”
“That whatever counterfeit-artist stamped it out, had used reasonably good metal-not above fifty percent lead.”
“We’ll choose to interpret that as a wry jest,” Daniel said, “the likes of which you could never direct against this shilling, which my half-brother found lying on the ground at the Battle of Naseby, not far from fragments of a Royalist captain who’d been blown to pieces by a bursting cannon-the dead man was, you see, a captain who’d once stood guard at the Tower of London where new coins are minted.”
The Jew repeated the biting ceremony, then scratched at the coin in case it was a brass clinker japanned with silver paint. “Worthless. But I owe a shilling to a certain vile man in London, a hater of Jews, and I would drive a shilling’s worth of satisfaction from slipping this slug of pig-iron into his hand.”
“Very well, then-” said Isaac, reaching for the prisms.
“Avid collectors such as you two must also have pennies-?”
“My father hands out shiny new ones as Christmas presents,” Daniel began. “Three years ago-” but he suspended the anecdote when he noticed that the lens-grinder was paying attention, not to him, but to a commotion behind them.
Daniel turned around and saw that it was a man, reasonably well-heeled, having trouble walking even though a friend and a servant were supporting him. He had a powerful desire to lie down, it seemed, which was most awkward, as he happened to be wading through ankle-deep mud. The servant slipped a hand between the man’s upper arm and his ribs to bear him up, but the man shrieked like a cat who’s been mangled under a cart-wheel and convulsed backwards and landed full-length on his back, hurling up a coffin-shaped wave of mud that spattered things yards away.
“Take your prisms,” said the merchant, practically stuffing them into Isaac’s pocket. He began folding up his display-case. If he felt the way Daniel did, then it wasn’t the sight of a man feeling ill, or falling down, that made him pack up and leave, so much as the sound of that scream.
Isaac was walking toward the sick man with the cautious but direct gait of a tightrope-walker.
“Shall we back to Cambridge, then?” Daniel suggested.
“I have some knowledge of the arts of the apothecary.” Isaac said, “Perhaps I could help him.”
A circle of people had gathered to observe the sick man, but it was a very broad circle, empty except for Isaac and Daniel. The victim appeared, now, to be trying to get his breeches off. But his arms were rigid, so he was trying to do it by writhing free of his clothes. His servant and his friend were tugging at the cuffs, but the breeches seemed to’ve shrunk onto his legs. Finally the friend drew his dagger, slashed through the cuffs left and right, and then ripped the pant-legs open from bottom to top-or perhaps the force of the swelling thighs burst them. They came off, anyway. Friend and servant backed away, affording Isaac and Daniel a clear vantage point that would have enabled them to see all the way up to the man’s groin, if the view hadn’t been blocked by black globes of taut flesh stacked like cannonballs up his inner thighs.
The man had stopped writhing and screaming now because he was dead. Daniel had taken Isaac’s arm and was rather firmly pulling him back, but Isaac continued to approach the specimen. Daniel looked round and saw that suddenly there was no one within musket range-horses and tents had been abandoned, back-loads of goods spilled on the ground by porters now halfway to Ely.
“I can see the buboes expanding even though the body is dead,” Isaac said. “The generative spirit lives on-transmuting dead flesh into something else-just as maggots are generated out of meat, and silver grows beneath mountains-why does it bring death sometimes and life others?”
That they lived was evidence that Daniel eventually pulled Isaac away and got him pointed back up the river toward Cambridge. But Isaac’s mind was still on those Satanic miracles that had appeared in the dead man’s groin. “I admire Monsieur Descartes’ analysis, but there is something missing in his supposition that the world is just bits of matter jostling one another like coins shaken in a bag. How could that account for the ability of matter to organize itself into eyes and leaves and salamanders, to transmute itself into alternate forms? And yet it’s not simply that matter comes together in good ways-not some ongoing miraculous Creation-for the same process by which our bodies turn meat and milk into flesh and blood can also cause a man’s body to convert itself into a mass of buboes in a few hours’ time. It might seem aimless, but it cannot be. That one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message that philosophers seek to decode.”
“Unless the message was set down long ago and is there in the Bible for all men to read plainly,” Daniel said.
Fifty years later, he hates to remember that he ever talked this way, but he can’t stop himself.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The year 1665 is halfway over-you know what year comes next. I must to London, Isaac. Plague has come to England. What we have seen today is a harbinger of the Apocalypse.”
DANIEL IS ROUSEDby a rooster on the forecastledeck*that is growing certain it’s not just imagining that light in the eastern sky. Unfortunately, the eastern sky is off to port this morning. Yesterday it was to starboard. Minerva has been sailing up and down the New England coast for the better part of a fortnight, trying to catch a wind that will decisively take her out into the deep water, or “off soundings,” as they say. They are probably not more than fifty miles away from Boston.
He goes below to the gun deck, a dim slab of sharp-smelling air. When his eyes have adjusted he can see the cannons, all swung around on their low carriages so they are parallel to the hull planking, aimed forwards, lashed in place, and the heavy hatches closed over the gun ports. Now that he cannot see the horizon, he must use the soles of his feet to sense the ship’s rolling and pitching-if he waits for his balance-sense to tell him he’s falling, it’ll be too late. He makes his way aft in very short, carefully planned steps, trailing fingertips along the ceiling, jostling the long ramrods and brushes racked up there for tending the guns. This takes him to a door and thence into a cabin at the stern that’s as wide as the entire ship and fitted with a sweep of windows, gathering what light they can from the western sky and the setting moon.
Half a dozen men are in here working and talking, all of them relatively old and sophisticated compared to ordinary seamen-this is where great chests full of good tools are stored, and sheets of potent diagrams nested. A tiller the dimensions of a battering-ram runs straight down the middle of the ceiling and out through a hole in the stern to the rudder, which it controls; the forward end of the tiller is pulled to and fro by a couple of cables that pass up through openings in the decks to the wheel. The air smells of coffee, wood-shavings, and pipe-smoke. Grudging hellos are scattered about. Daniel goes back and sits by one of the windows-these are undershot so that he can look straight down and see Minerva ’s wake being born in a foamy collision down around the rudder. He opens a small hatch below a window and drops out a Fahrenheit thermometer on a string. It is the very latest in temperature measurement technology from Europe-Enoch presented it to him as a sort of party favor. He lets it bounce through the surf for a few minutes, then hauls it in and takes a reading.