“Bitte, mein herr…”
“English is perfectly sufficient,” Enoch says. “Preferable, in fact.”
At the fringes of the robed and hooded mob, certain nearsighted faculty members are frantic with indignation over not having been able to read the seal. Their colleagues are muttering to them words like “Hanover” and “Ansbach.”
A man removes his hat and bows to Enoch. Then another.
They have not even set foot in Charlestown before the dons have begun to make a commotion. Porters and would-be passengers stare quizzically at the approaching ferry as they are assailed with shouts of “Make way!” and broad waving motions. The ferry’s become a floating stage packed with bad actors. Enoch wonders whether any of these men really supposes that word of their diligence will actually make its way back to court in Hanover, and be heard by their future Queen. It is ghoulish-they are behaving as if Queen Anne were already dead and buried, and the Hanovers on the throne.
“Sir, if you’d only told me ’twas Daniel Waterhouse you sought, I’d have taken you to him without delay-and without all of this bother. ”
“I erred by not confiding in you, Ben,” Enoch says.
Indeed. In retrospect, it’s obvious that in such a small town, Daniel would have noticed a lad like Ben, or Ben would have been drawn to Daniel, or both. “Do you know the way?”
“Of course!”
“Mount up,” Enoch commands, and nods at the horse. Ben needn’t be asked twice. He’s up like a spider. Enoch follows as soon as dignity and inertia will allow. They share the saddle, Ben on Enoch’s lap with his legs thrust back and wedged between Enoch’s knees and the horse’s rib-cage. The horse has, overall, taken a dim view of the Ferry and the Faculty, and bangs across the plank as soon as it has been thrown down. They’re pursued through the streets of Charlestown by some of the more nimble Doctors. But Charlestown doesn’t have that many streets and so the chase is brief. Then they break out into the mephitic bog on its western flank. It puts Enoch strongly in mind of another swampy, dirty, miasma-ridden burg full of savants: Cambridge, England.
“INTO YONDER COPPICE, then ford the creek,” Ben suggests. “We shall lose the Professors, and perhaps find Godfrey. When we were on the ferry, I spied him going thither with a pail.”
“Is Godfrey the son of Dr. Waterhouse?”
“Indeed, sir. Two years younger than I.”
“Would his middle name, perchance, be William?”
“How’d you know that, Mr. Root?”
“He is very likely named after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
“A friend of yours and Sir Isaac’s?”
“Of mine, yes. Of Sir Isaac’s, no-and therein lies a tale too long to tell now.”
“Would it fill a book?”
“In truth, ‘twould fill several -and it is not even finished yet.”
“When shall it be finished?”
“At times, I fear never. But you and I shall hurry it to its final act to-day, Ben. How much farther to the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”
Ben shrugs. “It is halfway between Charlestown and Harvard. But close to the river. More than a mile. Perhaps less than two.”
The horse is disinclined to enter the coppice, so Ben tumbles off and goes in there afoot to flush out little Godfrey. Enoch finds a place to ford the creek that runs through it, and works his way round to the other side of the little wood to find Ben engaged in an apple-fight with a smaller, paler lad.
Enoch dismounts and brokers a peace, then hurries the boys on by offering them a ride on the horse. Enoch walks ahead, leading it; but soon enough the horse divines that they are bound for a timber building in the distance. For it is the only building, and a faint path leads to it. Thenceforth Enoch need only walk alongside, and feed him the odd apple.
“The sight of you two lads scuffling over apples in this bleak gusty place full of Puritans puts me in mind of something remarkable I saw a long time ago.”
“Where?” asks Godfrey.
“Grantham, Lincolnshire. Which is part of England.”
“How long ago, to be exact?” Ben demands, taking the empiricist bit in his teeth.
“That is a harder question than it sounds, for the way I remember such things is most disorderly.”
“Why were you journeying to that bleak place?” asks Godfrey.
“To stop being pestered. In Grantham lived an apothecary, name of Clarke, an indefatigable pesterer.”
“Then why’d you go to him?”
“He’d been pestering me with letters, wanting me to deliver certain necessaries of his trade. He’d been doing it for years-ever since sending letters had become possible again.”
“What made it possible?”
“In my neck of the woods-for I was living in a town in Saxony, called Leipzig-the peace of Westphalia did.”
“1648!” Ben says donnishly to the younger boy. “The end of the Thirty Years’ War.”
“At his end,” Enoch continues, “it was the removal of the King’s head from the rest of the King, which settled the Civil War and brought a kind of peace to England.”
“1649,” Godfrey murmurs before Ben can get it out. Enoch wonders whether Daniel has been so indiscreet as to regale his son with decapitation yarns.
“If Mr. Clarke had been pestering you for years, then you must have gone to Grantham in the middle of the 1650s,” Ben says.
“How can you be that old?” Godfrey asks.
“Ask your father,” Enoch returns. “I am still endeavouring to answer the question of when exactly. Ben is correct. I couldn’t have been so rash as to make the attempt before, let us say, 1652; for, regicide notwithstanding, the Civil War did not really wind up for another couple of years. Cromwell smashed the Royalists for the umpteenth and final time at Worcester. Charles the Second ran off to Paris with as many of his noble supporters as had not been slain yet. Come to think of it, I saw him, and them, at Paris.”
“Why Paris? That were a dreadful way to get from Leipzig to Lincolnshire!” says Ben.
“Your geography is stronger than your history. What do you phant’sy would be a good way to make that journey?”
“Through the Dutch Republic, of course.”
“And indeed I did stop there, to look in on a Mr. Huygens in the Hague. But I did not sail from any Dutch port.”
“Why not? The Dutch are ever so much better at sailing than the French!”
“But what was the first thing that Cromwell did after winning the Civil War?”
“Granted all men, even Jews, the right to worship wheresoever they pleased,” says Godfrey, as if reciting a catechism.
“Well, naturally-that was the whole point, wasn’t it? But other than that-?”
“Killed a great many Irishmen,” Ben tries.
“True, too true-but it’s not the answer I was looking for. The answer is: the Navigation Act. And a sea-war against the Dutch. So you see, Ben, journeying via Paris might have been roundabout, but it was infinitely safer. Besides, people in Paris had been pestering me, too, and they had more money than Mr. Clarke. So Mr. Clarke had to get in line, as they say in New York.”
“Why were so many pestering you?” asks Godfrey.
“Rich Tories, no less!” adds Ben.
“We did not begin calling such people Tories until a good bit later,” Enoch corrects him. “But your question is apt: what did I have in Leipzig that was wanted so badly, alike by an apothecary in Grantham and a lot of Cavalier courtiers sitting in Paris waiting for Cromwell to grow old and die of natural causes?”