“Which riddle was that?”
“This box! I said it contained something infinitely more valuable than gold, and yet it could not be stolen. Which way do we turn here?”
For they’d come out into the hurricane where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Poultry, and Lombard all collided. Message-boys were flying across that intersection like quarrels from crossbows-or (Daniel suspected) like broad Hints that he was failing to Get.
LONDON CONTAINED A HUNDRED LORDS, bishops, preachers, scholars, and gentlemen-philosophers who would gladly have provided Wilkins with a comfortable sick-bed, but he had ended up in his stepdaughter’s home in Chancery Lane, actually rather close to where the Waterhouses lived. The entrance to the place, and the street in front, were choked with sweating courtiers-not the sleek top-level ones but the dented, scarred, slightly too old and slightly too ugly ones who actually got everything done.*They were milling in the street around a black coach blazoned with the arms of Count Penistone. The house was an old one (the Fire had stopped a few yards short of it). It was one of those slump-shouldered, thatch-roofed, half-timbered Canterbury Tales productions, completely out-moded by the gleaming coach and the whip-thin rapiers.
“You see-despite the purity of your motives, you’re immersed in politics already,” Daniel said. “The lady of the house is Cromwell’s niece.”
“What!? The Cromwell?”
“The same whose skull gazes down on Westminster from the end of a stick. Now, the owner of that excellent coach is Knott Bolstrood, Count Penistone-his father founded a sect called the Barkers, normally lumped in with many others under the pejorative term of Puritans. The Barkers are gratuitously radical, however-for example, they believe that Government and Church should have naught to do with each other, and that all slaves in the world should be set free.”
“But the gentlemen in front are dressed like courtiers! Are they getting ready to siege the Puritan-house?”
“They are Bolstrood’s hangers-on. You see, Count Penistone is His Majesty’s Secretary of State.”
“I had heard that King Charles the Second made a Phanatique his Secretary of State, but could not believe it.”
“Consider it-could Barkers exist in any other country? Save Amsterdam, that is.”
“Naturally not!” Leibniz said, lightly offended by the very idea. “They would be extinguished.”
“Therefore, whether or not he feels any loyalty toward the King, Knott Bolstrood has no choice but to stand for a free and independent England-and so, when Dissenters accuse the King of being too close to France, His Majesty need only point to Bolstrood as the living credential of his independent foreign policy.”
“But it’s all a farce!” Leibniz muttered. “All Paris knows England’s in France’s pocket.”
“All London knows it, too-the difference is that we have three dozen theatres here-Paris has only one of them-”
Leibniz’s turn, finally, to be baffled. “I don’t understand.”
“All I am saying is that we happen to enjoy farces.”
“Why is Bolstrood visiting the niece of Cromwell?”
“He’s probably visiting Wilkins.”
Leibniz stopped and considered matters. “Tempting. But the protocol is impossible. I cannot enter the house!”
“Of course you can-with me,” Daniel said. “Just follow.”
“But I must go back and fetch my companions-for I do not have the standing to disturb the Secretary of State-”
“I do,” Daniel said. “One of my earliest memories is of watching him destroy a pipe organ with a sledgehammer. Seeing me will give him a warm feeling.”
Leibniz stopped and looked aghast; Daniel could almost see, reflected in his eyes, the stained-glass windows and organ-pipes of some fine Lutheran church in Leipzig. “Why would he commit such an outrage!?”
“Because it was in an Anglican cathedral. He would have been about twenty-a high-spirited age.”
“Your family were followers of Cromwell?”
“It is more correct to say that Cromwell was a follower of my father-may God rest both of their souls.” But now they were in the midst of the courtier-mob, and it was too late for Leibniz to obey his instincts, and run away.
They spent several minutes pushing among progressively higher-ranking and better-dressed men, into the house and up the stairs, and finally entered a tiny low-ceilinged bedchamber. It smelled as if Wilkins had already died, but most of him still lived-he was propped up on pillows, with a board on his lap, and a fine-looking document on the board. Knott Bolstrood-forty-two years old-knelt next to the bed. He turned round to look as Daniel entered. During the ten years Knott had survived on the Common-Side of Newgate Prison, living in a dark place among murderers and lunaticks, he had developed a strong instinct for watching his back. It was as useful for a Secretary of State as it had been for a marauding Phanatique.
“Brother Daniel!”
“My lord.”
“You’ll do as well as anyone-better than most.”
“Do for what, sir?”
“Witnessing the Bishop’s signature.”
Bolstrood got a quill charged with ink. Daniel wrapped Wilkins’s puffy fingers around it. After a bit of heavy breathing on the part of its owner, the hand began to move, and a tangle of lines and curves began to take shape on the page, bearing the same relationship to Wilkins’s signature as a ghost to a man. It was a good thing, in other words, that several persons were on hand to verify it. Daniel had no idea what this document was. But from the way it was engrossed he could guess that it was meant for the eyes of the King.
Count Penistone was a man in a hurry, after that. But before he left he said to Danieclass="underline" “If you have any stock in the Duke of York’s Guinea Company, sell it-for that Popish slave-monger is going to reap the whirlwind.” Then, for maybe the second or third time in his life, Knott Bolstrood smiled.
“Show it to me, Dr. Leibniz,” Wilkins said, skipping over all of the formalities; he had not urinated in three days and so there was a certain urgency about everything.
Leibniz sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, and opened the box.
Daniel saw gears, cranks, shafts. He thought it might be a new sort of timepiece, but it had no dial and no hands-only a few wheels with numbers stamped on them.
“It owes much to Monsieur Pascal’s machine, of course,” Leibniz said, “but this one can multiply numbers as well as add and subtract them.”
“Make it work for me, Doctor.”
“I must confess to you that it is not finished yet.” Leibniz frowned, tilted the box toward the light, and blew into it sharply. A cockroach flew out and traced a flailing parabola to the floor and scurried under the bed. “This is just a demo’. But when it is finished, it will be magnifique. ”
“Never mind,” Wilkins said. “It uses denary numbers?”
“Yes, like Pascal’s-but binary would work better-”
“You needn’t tell me, ” Wilkins said, and then rambled for at least a quarter of an hour, quoting whole pages from relevant sections of the Cryptonomicon.
Leibniz finally cleared his throat and said, “There are mechanical reasons, too-with denary numbers, too many meshings of gears are necessary-friction and backlash play havoc.”
“Hooke! Hooke could build it,” Wilkins said. “But enough of machines. Let us speak of Pansophism. Tell me, now-have you met with success in Vienna?”
“I have written to the Emperor several times, describing the French king’s Bibliotheque du Roi-”