Reaching Holborn, he turned his back to the fire and ran toward the sound of the explosions. Some part of his mind had been doing geometry through all of this, plotting the points of the explosions and extrapolating them, and he was more and more certain that the curve was destined to pass near Drake’s house.
There was another rubble-heap on Holborn, so fresh that it was still sledding toward its angle of repose. Daniel charged up it, almost afraid to look down lest he should discover Drake’s furniture beneath his feet. But from the top of the heap he obtained a perfect view of Drake’s house, still standing, but standing alone now, in a sag-shouldered posture, as the houses to either side of it had been blown up. The walls had begun to smoke, and fire-brands were raining down around it like meteors, and Drake Waterhouse was up on the roof holding a Bible above his head with both hands. He was bellowing something that could not be heard, and did not need to be.
The street below was crowded with an uncommon number of Gentlemen, and better, brandishing swords-their gay courtiers’ clothing burnt and blackened-and musketeers, too, looking somewhat unhappy to be standing in such a place with containers of gunpowder strapped to their midsections. Very wealthy and prominent men were looking up at Drake, shouting and pointing at the street, insisting he come down. But Drake had eyes only for the fire.
Daniel turned round to see what his father was seeing, and was nearly slapped to the ground by the heat and the spectacle of it-the Fire. Everything between East and South was flame, and everything below the stars. It fountained and throbbed, jetted and pulsed, and buildings went down beneath it as blades of grass beneath John Wilkins’s giant Wheel.
And it was approaching, so fast that it overtook some persons who were trying to run away from it-they were blurring into ghosts of smoke and bursting into flames, their sprinting forms dissolving into light: the Rapture. This had not escaped Drake’s notice-he was pointing at it-but the crowd of Court fops below were not interested. To Drake, these particular men had been demons from Hell even before London had caught fire, because they were the personal bootlicks of King Charles II, an arch-daemon of King Louis XIV himself. Now, here they were, perversely convened in front of his house.
Daniel had been waving his arms over his head trying to get Drake’s attention, but he understood now that he must be an indistinct black shape against a vast glare, the least interesting thing in Drake’s panorama.
All of the courtiers had turned inward, attent on the same man-even Drake was looking at him. Daniel caught sight of the Lord Mayor, and thought perhaps he was the center of attention-but the Lord Mayor had eyes only to look at another. Sidestepping to a new position on the heap, Daniel finally saw a tall dark man in impossibly glorious clothing and a vast wig, which was shaking from side to side in exasperation. This man suddenly moved forward, seized a torch from a toady, looked up one last time at Drake, then bent down and touched the fire to the street. A bright smoking star rolled across the pavement toward Drake’s front door, which had been smashed open.
The man with the torch turned around, and Daniel recognized him as England.
There was a kind of preliminary explosion of humanity away from the house. Courtiers and musketeers formed a crowd behind the King to shield his back from flying harpsichords. Up on the roof, Drake aimed a finger at His Majesty and raised his Bible on high to call down some fresh damnation. From the burning timbers that were now coming down from Heaven like flaming spears hurled by avenging angels, he might have thought, in these moments, that he’d played an important part in Judgment Day. But nothing hit the King.
The spark was climbing the front steps. Daniel plunged forward down the piled house-guts, because he was fairly certain that he could outrun the spark, reach the fuse, and jerk it loose before it touched whatever powder-kegs had been rolled into Drake’s parlor. His path was blocked by members of the King’s personal bodyguard who were running the other way. They looked at Daniel curiously while Daniel changed course to swing round them. In the corner of his eye he saw one of them understand what Daniel was doing-that slackening of the face, the opening of the features, that came over the faces of students when, suddenly, they knew. This man stepped clear from the group and raised a yawning tube to his shoulder. Daniel looked at his father’s house and saw the star snaking down the dark hallway. He was tense for the explosion, but it came from behind him-at the same moment he was bitten in a hundred places and slammed face-down into the street.
He rolled over on his back, trying to snuff the fires of pain burning all over him, and saw his father ascending into heaven, his black clothes changing into a robe of fire. His table, books, and grandfather clock were not far behind.
“Father?” he said.
Which was senseless, if the only kind of sense you heeded was that of Natural Philosophy. Even supposing Drake was alive at the moment Daniel spoke to him-a daring supposition indeed, and not the sort of thing that contributed to a young man’s reputation in the Royal Society-he was far away, and getting farther, washed in apocalyptic roar and tumult, beset by many distractions, and probably deaf from the blast. But Daniel had just seen his house exploded and been shot with a blunderbuss in the same instant, and all sense of the Natural-Philosophic kind had fled from him. All that remained to shape his actions was the sentimental logic of a five-year-old bewildered that his father seemed to be leaving him: which was hardly the natural and correct order of things. Moreover, Daniel had another twenty years’ important things to say to his father. He had sinned against Drake and would make confession and be absolved, and Drake had sinned against him and must needs be brought to account. Determined to put a stop to this heinous, unnatural leaving, he used the only means of self-preservation that God had granted to five-year-olds: the voice. Which by itself did naught but wiggle air. In a loving home, that could raise alarms and summon help. “Father?” he tried again. But his home was a storm of bricks and a spray of timbers, each tracing its own arc to the smoking and steaming earth, and his father was a glowing cloud. Like a theophany of the Old Testament. But whereas fiery clouds were for YHWH a manifestation, a means of revealing Himself to His children below, this one swallowed Drake up and did not spit him out but made him one with the Mysterium Tremendum. He was hidden from Daniel now forever.
HIS MIND HAS QUITE RUNahead of his quill; his pen has gone dry, but his face is damp. Alone in his cabin, Daniel indulges himself for a minute in another favorite pastime of five-year-olds. Some say that crying is childish. Daniel-who since the birth of Godfrey has had more opportunities than he should have liked to observe crying-takes a contrary view. Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer’s part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions.
There’s a rhythmical chant down on the gundeck that slowly builds and then explodes into a drumming of many feet on mahogany stair-steps, and suddenly Minerva ’s deck is crowded with sailors, running about and colliding with each other, like a living demonstration of Hooke’s ideas about heat. Daniel wonders if perhaps a fire has been noticed down in the powder-magazine, and the sailors have all come up to abandon ship. But this is a highly organized sort of panic.
Daniel pats his face dry, stoppers his ink-well, and goes out onto the quarter-deck, chucking his ink-caked quill overboard. Most of the sailors have already ascended into the rigging, and begun to drop vast white curtains as if to shield landlubber Daniel’s eyes from the fleet of sloops and whaleboats that seems now to be converging on them from every cove and inlet on Plymouth Bay. Rocks and trees ashore are moving, with respect to fixed objects on Minerva, in a way that they shouldn’t. “We’re moving-we are adrift!” he protests. Weighing anchor on a ship of Minerva ’s bulk is a ludicrously complicated and lengthy procedure-a small army of chanting sailors pursuing one another round the giant capstan on the upperdeck, boys scrubbing slime off, and sprinkling sand onto, the wet anchor cable to afford a better purchase for the messenger cable-an infinite loop, passed three times round the capstan, that nimble-fingered riggers are continually lashing alongside the anchor cable in one place and unlashing in another. None of this has even begun to happen in the hour since the sun rose.