Owing to those modifications that had been made to his head at the behest of Archbishop Laud, Drake Waterhouse made curious percolating and whistling noises when he chewed and swallowed his potatoes and herring.
In 1629, Drake and some friends had been arrested for distributing freshly printed libels in the streets of London. These particular libels inveighed against Ship Money, a new tax imposed by Charles I. But the topic did not matter; if this had happened in 1628, the libels would have been about something else, and no less offensive to the King and the Archbishop.
An indiscreet remark made by one of Drake’s comrades after burning sticks had been rammed under his nails led to the discovery of the printing-press that Drake had used to print the libels-he kept it in a wagon hidden under a pile of hay. So as he had now been exposed as the master-mind of the conspiracy, Bishop Laud had him, and a few other supremely annoying Calvinists, pilloried, branded, and mutilated. These were essentially practical techniques more than punishments. The intent was not to reform the criminals, who were clearly un-reformable. The pillory fixed them in one position for a while so that all London could come by and get a good look at their faces and thereafter recognize them. The branding and mutilation marked them permanently so that the rest of the world would know them.
As all of this had happened years before Daniel had even been born, it didn’t matter to him-this was just how Dad had always looked-and of course it had never mattered to Drake. Within a few weeks, Drake had been back on the highways of England, buying cloth that he’d later smuggle to the Netherlands. In a country inn, on the way to St. Ives, he encountered a saturnine, beetle-browed chap name of Oliver Cromwell who had recently lost his faith, and seen his life ruined-or so he imagined, until he got a look at Drake, and found God. But that was another story.
The goal of all persons who had houses in those days was to possess the smallest number of pieces of furniture needed to sustain life, but to make them as large and heavy and dark as possible. Accordingly, Daniel and Drake ate their potatoes and herring on a table that had the size and weight of a medieval drawbridge. There was no other furniture in the room, although the eight-foot-high grandfather clock in the adjoining hall contributed a sort of immediate presence with the heaving to and fro of its cannonball-sized pendulum, which made the entire house lean from one side to the other like a drunk out for a brisk walk, and the palpable grinding of its gear-train, and the wild clamorous bonging that exploded from it at intervals that seemed suspiciously random, and that caused flocks of migrating waterfowl, thousands of feet overhead, to collide with each other in panic and veer into new courses. The fur of dust beginning to overhang its Gothick battlements; its internal supply of mouse-turds; the Roman numerals carven into the back by its maker; and its complete inability to tell time, all marked it as pre-Huygens technology. Its bonging would have tried Daniel’s patience even if it had occurred precisely on the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour, et cetera, for it never failed to make him jump out of his skin. That it conveyed no information whatever as to what the time actually was, drove Daniel into such transports of annoyance that he had begun to entertain a phant’sy of standing at the intersection of two corridors and handing Drake, every time he passed by, a libel denouncing the ancient Clock, and demanding its wayward pendulum be stilled, and that it be replaced with a new Huygens model. But Drake had already told him to shut up about the clock, and so there was nothing he could do.
Daniel was going for days without hearing any other sounds but these. All possible subjects of conversation could be divided into two categories: (1) ones that would cause Drake to unleash a rant, previously heard so many times that Daniel could recite it from memory, and (2) ones that might actually lead to original conversation. Daniel avoided Category 1 topics. All Category 2 topics had already been exhausted. For example, Daniel could not ask, “How is Praise-God doing in Boston?”*because he had asked this on the first day, and Drake had answered it, and since then few letters had arrived because the letter-carriers were dead or running away from London as fast as they could go. Sometimes private couriers would come with letters, mostly pertaining to Drake’s business matters but sometimes addressed to Daniel. This would provoke a flurry of conversation stretching out as long as half an hour (not counting rants), but mostly what Daniel heard, day after day, was corpse-collectors’ bells, and their creaking carts; the frightful Clock; cows; Drake reading the Books of Daniel and of Revelation aloud, or playing the virginal; and the gnawing of Daniel’s own quill across the pages of his notebook as he worked his way through Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Huygens. He actually learned an appalling amount. In fact, he was fairly certain he’d caught up with where Isaac had been several months previously-but Isaac was up at home in Woolsthorpe, a hundred miles away, and no doubt years ahead of him by this point.
He ate down to the bottom of his potatoes and herring with the determination of a prisoner clawing a hole through a wall, finally revealing the plate. The Waterhouse family china had been manufactured by sincere novices in Holland. After James I had outlawed the export of unfinished English cloth to the Netherlands, Drake had begun smuggling it there, which was easily done since the town of Leyden was crowded with English pilgrims. In this way Drake had made the first of several smuggling-related fortunes, and done so in a way pleasing in the sight of the Lord, viz. by boldly defying the King’s efforts to meddle in commerce. Not only that but he had met and in 1617 married a pilgrim lass in Leyden, and he had made many donations there to the faithful who were in the market for a ship. The grateful congregation, shortly before embarking on the Mayflower, bound for sunny Virginia, had presented Drake and his new wife, Hortense, with this set of Delft pottery. They had obviously made it themselves on the theory that when they sloshed up onto the shores of America, they’d better know how to make stuff out of clay. They were heavy crude plates glazed white, with an inscription in spidery blue letters:
Staring at this through a miasma of the bodily fluids of herring for the thirty-fifth consecutive day, Daniel suddenly announced, “I was thinking that I might go and, God willing, visit John Wilkins.”
Wilkins had been exchanging letters with Daniel ever since the debacle of five years ago, when Daniel had arrived at Trinity College a few moments after Wilkins had been kicked out of it forever.
The mention of Wilkins did not trigger a rant, which meant Daniel was as good as there. But there were certain formalities to be gone through: “To what end?” asked Drake, sounding like a pipe-organ with numerous jammed valves as the words emerged partly from his mouth and partly from his nose. He voiced all questions as if they were pat assertions: To what end being said in the same tones as You and I are but earth.
“My purpose is to learn, Father, but I seem to’ve learned all I can from the books that are here.”
“And what of the Bible.” An excellent riposte there from Drake.
“There are Bibles everywhere, praise God, but only one Reverend Wilkins.”
“He has been preaching at that Established church in the city, has he not.”