Nugget: The night before Daniel rode up to Cambridge to begin his four-year Cram Session for the End of the World, he slept in his father’s house on the outskirts of London. The bed was a rectangle of stout beams, a piece of canvas stretched across the middle by a zigzag of hairy ropes, a sack of straw tossed on, and half a dozen Dissenting preachers snoring into one another’s feet. Royalty was back, England had a King, who was called Charles II, and that King had courtiers. One of them, John Comstock, had drawn up an Act of Uniformity, and the King had signed it-with one stroke of the quill making all Independent ministers into unemployed heretics. Of course they had all converged on Drake’s house. Sir Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, came every few days and raided the place, on the suspicion that all those idle Phanatiques must be grinding out handbills in the cellar.
Wilkins-who for a brief while had been Master of Trinity-had secured Daniel a place there. Daniel had phant’sied that he should be Wilkins’s student, his protege. But before Daniel could matriculate, the Restoration had forced Wilkins out. Wilkins had retired to London to serve as the minister of the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry and, in his spare time, to launch the Royal Society. It was a lesson for Daniel in just how enormously a plan could go awry. For Daniel had been living in London, and could have spent as much time as he pleased with Wilkins, and gone to all the meetings of the Royal Society, and learnt everything he might have cared to know of Natural Philosophy simply by walking across town. Instead he went up to Trinity a few months after Wilkins had left it behind forever.
Nugget: On the ride up to Cambridge he passed by roadside saints whose noses and ears had been hammered off years ago by enraged Puritans. Each one of them, therefore, bore a marked resemblance to Drake. It seemed to him that each one turned its head to watch him ride past.
Nugget: A wench with paint on her face, squealing as she fell backwards onto Daniel’s bed at Trinity College. Daniel getting an erection. This was the Restoration.
The woman’s weight on his legs suddenly doubled as a boy half her age, embedded in a flouncing spray of French lace, fell on top of her. This was Upnor.
Nugget: A jeweled duelling-sword clattering as its owner dropped to hands and knees and washed the floor with a bubbling fan of vomit. “Eehhr,” he groaned, rising up to a kneeling position and letting his head loll back on his lace collar. Candle-light shone in his face: a bad portrait of the King of England. This was the Duke of Monmouth.
Nugget: A sizar with a mop and a bucket, trying to clean up the room-Monmouth and Upnor and Jeffreys and all of the other fellow-commoners calling for beer, sending him scurrying down to the cellar. This was Roger Comstock. Related, distantly, to the John Comstock who’d written the Act of Uniformity. But from a branch of the family that was at odds with John’s. Hence his base status at Trinity.
Daniel had his own bed at Trinity, and yet he could not sleep. Sharing the great bed in Drake’s house with smelly Phanatiques, or sleeping in common beds of inns while traveling round England with his father, Daniel had enjoyed great unbroken slabs of black, dreamless sleep. But when he went off to University he suddenly found himself sharing his room, and even his bed, with young men who were too drunk to stand up and too dangerous to argue with. His nights were fractured into shards. Vivid, exhausting dreams came through the cracks in between, like vapors escaping from a crazed vessel.
His first coherent memory of the place begins on a night like that.
The Dissenters are destitute of all decorations that can please the outward Senses, what their Teachers can hope for from humane Assistance lies altogether in their own endeavours, and they have nothing to strengthen their Doctrine with (besides what they can say for it) but probity of Manners and exemplary Lives.
-The Mischiefs That Ought Justly
to Be Apprehended from a
Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS,
attributed to BERNARDMANDEVILLE, 1714
SOME SORT OF COMMOTIONin the courtyard below. Not the usual revels, or else he wouldn’t have bothered to hear it.
Daniel got out of bed and found himself alone in the chamber. The voices below sounded angry. He went to the window. The tail of Ursa Major was like the hand of a c?lestial clock, and Daniel had been studying how to read it. The time was probably around three in the morning.
Beneath him several figures swam in murky pools of lanthorn-light. One of them was dressed as men always had been, in Daniel’s experience, until very recently: a black coat and black breeches with no decorations. But the others were flounced and feathered like rare birds.
The one in black seemed to be defending the door from the others. Until recently, everyone at Cambridge had looked like him, and the University had been allowed to exist only because a godly nation required divines who were fluent in Greek and Latin and Hebrew. He was barring the door because the men in lace and velvet and silk were trying to bring a wench in with them. And hardly for the first time! But this man, apparently, had seen one wench too many, and resolved to make a stand.
A scarlet boy flourished in the midst of the lanthorn-light-a writhing bouquet of tassles and flounces. His arms were crossed over his body. He drew them apart with a sharp ringing noise. A rod of silver light had appeared in each of his hands-a long one in his right, a short one in his left. He drew into a crouch. His companions were all shouting; Daniel could not make out the words, but the feelings expressed were a welter of fear and joy. The black-clad fellow drew out a sword of his own, something dull and clanging, a heavier spadroon, and the scarlet boy came at him like a boiling cloud, with lightning darting out of the center. He fought as animals fight, with movements too quick for the eye to follow, and the man in black fought as men fight, with hesitations and second thoughts. He had a great many holes in him very soon, and was reduced to a heap of somber, bloody clothing on the green grass of the courtyard, shifting and rocking, trying to find a position that was not excruciatingly painful.
All of the Cavaliers ran away. The Duke of Monmouth picked the wench up over his shoulder like a sack of grain and carried her off at a dead run. The scarlet boy tarried long enough to plant a boot on the dying man’s shoulder, turn him over onto his back, and spit something into his face.
All round the courtyard, shutters began to slam closed.
Daniel threw a coat over himself, pulled on a pair of boots, got a lanthorn of his own lit, and hurried downstairs. But it was too late for hurrying-the body was already gone. The blood looked like tar on the grass. Daniel followed one dribble to the next, across the green, out the back of the college, and onto the Backs-the boggy floodplain of the river Cam, which wandered around in back of the University. The wind had come up a bit, making noise in the trees that nearly obscured the splash. A less eager witness than Daniel could have claimed he’d heard nothing, and it would have been no lie.
He stopped then, because his mind had finally come awake, and he was afraid. He was out in the middle of an empty fen, following a dead man toward a dark river, and the wind was trying to blow out his lanthorn.
A pair of naked men appeared in the light, and Daniel screamed.
One of the men was tall, and had the most beautiful eyes Daniel had ever seen in a man’s face; they were like the eyes of a painting of the Pieta that Drake had once flung onto a bonfire. He looked towards Daniel as if to say, Who dares scream?