That said, he was a bit relieved when the porters turned away from the locked rooms and conveyed him towards Hooke’s office under the cupola. The howls and screams of the inmates faded to a sort of dim background babble, then were drowned out by more cheerful voices coming through a polished door. Pepys scurried round in front of the sedan chair and flung that door open to reveal everyone: not only Hooke, but Christiaan Huygens, Isaac Newton, Isaac’s little shadow Fatio, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Roger Comstock, Christopher Wren, and twenty others-mostly Royal Society regulars, but a few odd men out such as Edmund Palling and Sterling Waterhouse.
They took him out of his sedan chair like a rare specimen being unpacked from its shipping-crate and held him up to accept several waves of cheers and toasts. Roger Comstock (who, since England’s Adult Supervision had all run away to France, was becoming more terribly important every day) stood up on Hooke’s lens-grinding table (Hooke became irate, and had to be restrained by Wren) and commanded silence. Then he held up a beaker of some fluid that was more transparent than water.
“We all know of Mr. Daniel Waterhouse’s high regard and admiration for Alchemy,” Roger began. This was made twice as funny by the exaggerated pomposity of his voice and manner; he was using his speaking-to-Parliament voice. After the laughter and Parliamentary barking noises had died down, he continued, just as gravely: “Alchemy has created many a miracle in our time, and I am assured, by some of its foremost practitioners, that within a few years they will have accomplished what has, for millennia, been the paramount goal of every Alchemist: namely, to bring us immorality!”
Roger Comstock now affected a look of extreme astonishment as the room erupted into true Bedlam. Daniel could not help glancing over at Isaac, who was the last man in the world to find anything amusing in a joke about Alchemy or immorality. But Isaac smiled and exchanged a look with Fatio.
Roger cupped a hand to his ear and listened carefully, then appeared taken aback. “What!? You say, instead, immortality?” Now he waxed indignant, and pointed a finger at Boyle. “Sirrah, my solicitor will call upon you in the morning to see about getting my money back!”
The audience had now been rendered completely helpless, which was the way Roger liked his audiences. They could only wait for him to continue, which he was only too happy to do: “The Chymists have accomplished smaller miracles along their way. Among those who frequent drinking establishments-or so I am told-it is known, empirically, that spiritous liquors are frequently contaminated by unwanted and unwholesome by-products. Of these, the most offensive by far is water, which gorges the bladder and obliges the drinker to step outside, where he is subject to cold, rain, wind, and the disapproving glares of neighbors and passers-by until such time as the bladder has become empty-which in the case of our Guest of Honor may be as long as a fortnight!”
“I can only say in my defense that I have time to sober up during those fortnights,” Daniel returned, “and when I go back inside I find that you have left all the glasses empty, my lord.”
Roger Comstock answered, “It is true. I give the contents of those glasses to our Alchemical brethren, who use them in their lucubrations. They have learnt how to remove water from wine and produce the pure spirit. But this is beginning to sound like a theologickal discourse, and so let me turn to practical matters.” Roger hoisted the beaker up above his head. “Pray, gentlemen, extinguish all smoking materials! We do not wish to set fire to Mr. Hooke’s edifice. The inmates will be so terrified that they will be driven sane, to a man. I hold in my hand the pure spirit I spoke of, and it could burn the place down like Greek fire. It will remain a grave hazard until our Guest of Honor has been so prudent as to sequester it in his belly. Cheers to you, Daniel; and rest assured that this libation will surely go to your head, but not a drop of it will trouble your kidneys!”
Under the center of the cupola they had set up a very stout oaken chair on a platform like a throne, which Daniel thought extremely considerate, as it put his head at or above the level of everyone else’s. It was the first time in ages he’d been able to talk to anyone without feeling as if he were being peered down at. Once he was mounted in that chair, and wedged more or less upright by a few pillows, he did not have to move anything save his jaw and his drinking-arm. The others came round in ones and twos to pay court to him.
Wren spoke of the progress building the great Dome of St. Paul’s. Edmund Palling related details of the voyage to Massachusetts planned for April. Hooke, when not arguing with Huygens about clocks (and fending off bawdy puns on “horology” from Roger Comstock), discoursed of his work on artificial muscles. He did not say that they were for use in flying machines, but Daniel already knew it. Isaac Newton was living in London now, sharing lodgings with Fatio, and had become Member of Parliament for Cambridge. Roger was bursting with scandalous gossip. Sterling was devising some sort of plot with Sir Richard Apthorp, some colossal scheme for financing the eternal follies of Government. Spain might have mines in America and France might have an infinite supply of taxable peasants, but Sterling and Sir Richard seemed to think that England could overcome her lack of both with some metaphysical sleight-of-hand. Huygens came over and told him the melancholy news that the Countess de la Zeur had got pregnant out of wedlock, then lost her baby. In a way, though, Daniel was pleased to hear that she was getting on with her life. He had dreamed once of proposing marriage to her. Looking at his condition now, it was hard to imagine a worse idea.
But thinking about her put him into a sort of reverie from which he did not return. He did not lose consciousness at any one certain point; consciousness slowly leaked out of him, rather, over the course of the evening. Every friend who came to greet him raised his glass, and Daniel raised his beaker in return. The liquor did not trickle down his throat but raced like panic across his mucous membranes, burning his eye-sockets and his eustachian tubes, and seeping direct from there into his brain. His vision faded. The babble and roar of the party put him gently to sleep.
The quiet woke him up. The quiet, and the light. He phant’sied for a moment that they had carried him out to face the Sun. But there were several suns ranged about him in a constellation. He tried to raise first one arm, then the other, to shield his eyes from the glare, but neither limb would move. His legs, too, were frozen in place.
“Perhaps you imagine you are having a cerebral anomaly, a near-death, or even a post-death, experience,” said a voice quietly. It emanated from down low, between Daniel’s knees. “And that several arch-angels are arrayed before you, burning your eyes with their radiance. In that case I would be a shade, a poor gray ghost, and the screams and moans you hear from far off would be the complaints of other departed souls being taken off to Hell.”
Hooke was indeed too dim to see clearly, for the lights were behind him. He was sorting through some instruments and tools on a table that had been set in front of the chair.
Now that Daniel had stopped looking into the bright lights, his eyes had adjusted well enough to see what was restraining him: white linen cord, miles of it, spiraled around his arms and legs, and cunningly interwoven into a sort of custom-built web or net. This was clearly the work of the meticulous Hooke, for even Daniel’s fingers and thumbs had been individually laced down, knuckle by knuckle, to the arms of this chair, which were as massive as the timbers of a gun-carriage.