“Ludicrous!”
“Have you seen the latest flying letters, speeding about Europe unsigned, undated, devoid of even a printer’s mark? The anonymous reviews, planted, like sapper’s mines, in the journals of the savants? Sudden unmaskings of hitherto unnamed ‘leading mathematicians’ forced to own, or deny, opinions they have long disseminated in private correspondence? Great minds who, in any other era, would be making discoveries of Copernican significance, reduced to acting as cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers for the two principals? New and deservedly obscure journals suddenly elevated to the first rank of learned discourse, simply because some lackey has caused his latest stiletto-thrust to be printed in its back pages? Challenge problems flying back and forth across the Channel, each one fiendishly devised to prove that Leibniz’s calculus is the original, and Newton’s but a shoddy counterfeit, or vice versa? Reputations tossed about on points of swords-”
“No,” Daniel says. “I moved here to get away from European intrigues.” His eyes drop to the Letter. Enoch can’t help looking at it, too.
“It is purely an anomaly of fate,” Enoch says, “that Gottfried, as a young man, lacking means, seeking a position-anything that would give him the simple freedom to work-landed in the court of an obscure German Duke. Who through intricate and tedious lacework of marryings, couplings, dyings, religious conversions, wars, revolutions, miscarriages, decapitations, congenital feeble-mindedness, excommunications, et cetera among Europe’s elite-most notably, the deaths of all seventeen of Queen Anne’s children-became first in line to the Throne of England and Scotland, or Great Britain as we’re supposed to call it now.”
“ Somewould call it fate. Others-”
“Let’s not get into that. ”
“Agreed.”
“Anne’s in miserable health, the House of Hanover is packing up its pointed helmets and illustrated beer-mugs, and taking English lessons. Sophie may get to be Queen of England yet, at least for a short while. But soon enough, George Louis will become Newton’s King and-as Sir Isaac is still at the Mint-his boss.”
“I take your point. It is most awkward.”
“George Louis is the embodiment of awkwardness-he doesn’t care, and scarcely knows, and would probably think it amusing if he did. But his daughter-in-law the Princess-author of this letter-in time likely to become Queen of England herself-is a friend of Leibniz. And yet an admirer of Newton. She wants a reconciliation.”
“She wants a dove to fly between the Pillars of Hercules. Which are still runny with the guts of the previous several peace-makers.”
“It’s supposed that you are different.”
“Herculean, perhaps?”
“Well…”
“Do you have any idea why I’m different, Mr. Root?”
“I do not, Dr. Waterhouse.”
“The tavern it is, then.”
BEN ANDGODFREY ARE SENTback to Boston on the ferry. Daniel scorns the nearest tavern-some sort of long-running dispute with the proprietor-so they find the highway and ride northwest for a couple of miles, drawing off to one side from time to time to let drovers bring their small herds of Boston-bound cattle through. They arrive at what used to be the capital of Massachusetts, before the city fathers of Boston out-maneuvered it. Several roads lunge out of the wilderness and collide with one another. Yeomen and drovers and backwoodsmen churn it up into a vortex of mud and manure. Next to it is a College. Newtowne is, in other words, paradise for tavern-keepers, and the square (as they style it) is lined with public houses.
Waterhouse enters a tavern but immediately backs out of it. Looking into the place over his companion’s shoulder, Enoch glimpses a white-wigged Judge on a massive chair at the head of the tap-room, a jury empaneled on plank benches, a grimy rogue being interrogated. “Not a good place for a pair of idlers,” Waterhouse mumbles.
“You hold judicial proceedings in drinking-houses!?”
“Poh! That judge is no more drunk than any magistrate of the Old Bailey.”
“It is perfectly logical when you put it that way.”
Daniel chooses another tavern. They walk through its brick-red door. A couple of leather fire-buckets dangle by the entrance, in accordance with safety regulations, and a bootjack hangs on the wall so that the innkeeper can take his guests’ footwear hostage at night. The proprietor is bastioned in a little wooden fort in the corner, bottles on shelves behind him, a preposterous firearm, at least six feet long, leaning in the angle of the walls. He’s busy sorting his customers’ mail. Enoch cannot believe the size of the planks that make up the floor. They creak and pop like ice on a frozen lake as people move around. Waterhouse leads him to a table. It consists of a single slab of wood sawn from the heart of a tree that must have been at least three feet in diameter.
“Trees such as these have not been seen in Europe for hundreds of years,” Enoch says. He measures it against the length of his arm. “Should have gone straight to Her Majesty’s Navy. I am shocked.”
“There is an exemption to that rule,” Waterhouse says, showing for the first time a bit of good humor. “If a tree is blown down by the wind, anyone may salvage it. In consequence of which, Gomer Bolstrood, and his fellow Barkers, have built their colonies in remote places, where the trees are very large-”
“And where freak hurricanoes often strike without warning?”
“And without being noticed by any of their neighbors. Yes.”
“Firebrands to furniture-makers in a single generation. I wonder what old Knott would think.”
“Firebrands and furniture-makers,” Waterhouse corrects him.
“Ah, well… If my name were Bolstrood, I’d be happy to live anywhere that was beyond the reach of Tories and Archbishops.”
Daniel Waterhouse rises and goes over to the fireplace, plucks a couple of loggerheads from their hooks, and thrusts them angrily into the coals. Then he goes to the corner and speaks with the tavern-keeper, who cracks two eggs into two mugs and then begins throwing in rum and bitters and molasses. It is sticky and complicated-as is the entire situation here that Enoch’s gotten himself into.
There’s a similar room on the other side of the wall, reserved for the ladies. Spinning wheels whirr, cards chafe against wool. Someone begins tuning up a bowed instrument. Not the old-fashioned viol, but (judging from its sound) a violin. Hard to believe, considering where he is. But then the musician begins to play-and instead of a Baroque minuet, it is a weird keening sort of melody-an Irish tune, unless he’s mistaken. It’s like using watered silk to make grain sacks-the Londoners would laugh until tears ran down their faces. Enoch goes and peers through the doorway to make sure he’s not imagining it. Indeed, a girl with carrot-colored hair is playing a violin, entertaining some other women who are spinning and sewing, and the women and the music are as Irish as the day is long.
Enoch goes back to the table, shaking his head. Daniel Waterhouse slides a hot loggerhead into each mug, warming and thickening the drinks. Enoch sits down, takes a sip of the stuff, and decides he likes it. Even the music is beginning to grow on him.
He cannot look in any direction without seeing eyeballs just in the act of glancing away from them. Some of the other patrons actually run down the road to other taverns to advertise their presence here, as if Root and Waterhouse were a public entertainment. Dons and students saunter in nonchalantly, as if it’s normal to stand up in mid-pint and move along to a different establishment.
“Where’d you get the idea you were escaping from intrigue?”
Daniel ignores this, too busy glaring at the other customers.
“My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone,” Daniel finally says. “To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666-Number of the Beast and all that. I was, therefore, produced in 1646-as always, Drake’s timing was carefully thought out. When I came of age, I would be a man of the cloth, with the full university education, well versed in many dead classical languages, so that I could stand on the Cliffs of Dover and personally welcome Jesus Christ back to England in fluent Aramaic. Sometimes I look about myself-” he waves his arm at the tavern “-and see the way it turned out, and wonder whether my father could possibly have been any more wrong.”