“And yet it decays. Look out the window! Listen to the ringing of the bells. Ten years ago, Cromwell melted down the Crown Jewels and gave all men freedom of religion. Today, a crypto-Papist*and lackey of the Antichrist*rules England, and England’s gold goes to making giant punch-bowls for use at the royal orgies, and we of the Gathered Church must worship in secret as if we were early Christians in pagan Rome.”
“One of the things about the generative spirit that demands our careful study is that it can go awry,” Daniel returned. “In some sense the pneuma that causes buboes to grow from the living flesh of plague victims must be akin to the one that causes mushrooms to pop out of the ground after rain, but one has effects we call evil and the other has effects we call good.”
“You think Wilkins knows more of this.”
“I was actually using it to explain the very existence of men like Wilkins, and of this club of his, which he now calls the Royal Society, and of other such groups, such as Monsieur de Montmor’s salon in Paris-”
“I see. You suppose that this same spirit is at work in the minds of these natural philosophers.”
“Yes, Father, and in the very soil of the nations that have produced so many natural philosophers in such a short time-to the great discomfiture of the Papists.” Reckoning it could not hurt his chances to get in a dig at Popery. “And just as the farmer can rely on the steady increase of his crops, I can be sure that much new work has been accomplished by such people within the last several months.”
“But with the End of Days drawing so near-”
“Only a few months ago, at one of the last meetings of the Royal Society, Mr. Daniel Coxe said that mercury had been found running like water in a chalk-pit at Line. And Lord Brereton said that at an Inn in St. Alban’s, quicksilver was found running in a saw-pit.”
“And you suppose this means-what.”
“Perhaps this flourishing of so many kinds-natural philosophy, plague, the power of King Louis, orgies at Whitehall, quicksilver welling up from the bowels of the earth-is a necessary preparation for the Apocalypse-the generative spirit rising up like a tide.”
“That much is obvious, Daniel. I wonder, though, whether there is any point in furthering your studies when we are so close.”
“Would you admire a farmer who let his fields be overrun with weeds, simply because the End was near?”
“No, of course not. Your point is well taken.”
“If we have a duty to be alert for the signs of the End Times, then let me go, Father. For if the signs are comets, then the first to know will be the astronomers. If the signs are plague, the first to know-”
“-will be physicians. Yes, I understand. But are you suggesting that those who study natural philosophy can acquire some kind of occult knowledge-special insight into God’s Creation, not available to the common Bible-reading man?”
“Er… I suppose that’s quite clearly what I’m suggesting.”
Drake nodded. “That is what I thought. Well, God gave us brains for a reason- notto use those brains would be a sin.” He got up and carried his plate to the kitchen, then went to a small desk of many drawers in the parlor and broke out all of the gear needed to write on paper with a quill. “Haven’t much coin just now,” he mumbled, moving the quill about in a sequence of furious scribbles separated by long flowing swoops, like a sword-duel. “There you are.”
Mr. Ham pray pay to the bearer one pound I say ?1-of that money of myne which you have in your hands upon sight of this Bill
Drake Waterhouse
London
“What is this instrument, Father?”
“Goldsmith’s Note. People started doing this about the time you left for Cambridge.”
“Why does it say ‘the bearer’? Why not ‘Daniel Waterhouse’?”
“Well, that’s the beauty of it. You could, if you chose, use this to pay a one-pound debt-you’d simply hand it to your creditor and he could then nip down to Ham’s and get a pound in coin of the realm. Or he could use it to pay one of his debts.”
“I see. But in this case it simply means that if I go into the City and present this to Uncle Thomas, or one of the other Hams…”
“They’ll do what the note orders them to do.”
It was, then, a normal example of Drake’s innate fiendishness. Daniel was perfectly welcome to flee to Epsom-the seat of John Comstock, the arch-Anglican-and study Natural Philosophy until, literally, the End of the World. But in order to obtain the means, he would have to demonstrate his faith by walking all the way across London at the height of the Plague. Trial by ordeal it was.
The next morning: on with a coat and a down-at-heels pair of riding-boots, even though it was a warm summer day. A scarf to breathe through.*A minimal supply of clean shirts and drawers (if he was feeling well when he reached Epsom, he’d send for more). A rather small number of books-tiny student octavo volumes of the usual Continental savants, their margins and interlinear spaces now caulked with his notes. A letter he’d received from Wilkins, with an enclosure from one Robert Hooke, during a rare spate of mail last week. All went into a bag, the bag on the end of a staff, and the staff over his shoulder-made him look somewhat Vagabondish, but many people in the city had turned to robbery, as normal sources of employment had been shut down, and there were sound reasons to look impoverished and carry a big stick.
Drake, upon Daniel’s departure: “Will you tell old Wilkins that I do not think the less of him for having become an Anglican, as I have the most serene confidence that he has done so in the interest of reforming that church, which as you know has been the steady goal of those of us who are scorned by others as Puritans.”
And for Danieclass="underline" “I want that you should take care that the plague should not infect you-not the Black Plague, but the plague of Skepticism so fashionable among Wilkins’s crowd. In some ways your soul might be safer in a brothel than among certain Fellows of the Royal Society.”
“It is not skepticism for its own sake, Father. Simply an awareness that we are prone to error, and that it is difficult to view anything impartially.”
“That is fine when you are talking about comets.”
“I’ll not discuss religion, then. Good-bye, Father.”
“God be with you, Daniel.”
HE OPENED THE DOOR, trying not to flinch when outside air touched his face, and descended the steps to the road called Holborn, a river of pounded dust (it had not rained in a while). Drake’s house was a new (post-Cromwell) half-timbered building on the north side of the road, one of a line of mostly wooden houses that formed a sort of fence dividing Holborn from the open fields on its north, which stretched all the way to Scotland. The buildings across the way, on the south side of Holborn, were the same but two decades older (pre-Civil War). The ground was flat except for a sort of standing wave of packed dirt that angled across the fields, indeed across Holborn itself, not far away, off to his right-as if a comet had landed on London Bridge and sent up a ripple in the earth, which had spread outwards until it had gone just past Drake’s house and then frozen. These were the remains of the earth-works that London*had thrown up early in the Civil War, to defend against the King’s armies. There’d been a gate on Holborn and a star-shaped earthen fort nearby, but the gate had been torn down a long time ago and the fort blurred into a grassy hummock guarded by the younger and more adventurous cattle.