Enoch then walked briskly to the school and arrived in time to watch the inevitable fight. The fair boy was red-eyed and had porridge-vomit on his chin-it was safe to assume he’d been punched in the stomach. Another schoolboy-there was one in every school-seemed to have appointed himself master of ceremonies, and was goading them to action, paying most attention to the smaller boy, the injured party and presumed loser-to-be of the fight. To the surprise and delight of the community of young scholars, the smaller boy stepped forward and raised his fists.
Enoch approved, so far. Some pugnacity in the lad would be useful. Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.
Then combat was joined. Not many punches were thrown. The small boy did something clever, down around the tall boy’s knees, that knocked him back on his arse. Almost immediately the little boy’s knee was in the other’s groin, then in the pit of his stomach, and then on his throat. And then, suddenly, the tall boy was struggling to get up-but only because the fair-haired boy was trying to rip both of his ears off. Like a farmer dragging an ox by his nose-ring, the smaller boy led the bigger one over to the nearest stone wall, which happened to be that of Grantham’s huge, ancient church, and then began to rub his prisoner’s face against it as though trying to erase it from the skull.
Until this point the other boys had been jubilant. Even Enoch had found the early stages of the victory stirring in a way. But as this torture went on, the boys’ faces went slack. Many of them turned and ran away. The fair-haired boy had flown into a state of something like ecstasy-groping and flailing like a man nearing erotic climax, his body an insufficient vehicle for his passions, a dead weight impeding the flowering of the spirit. Finally an adult man-Clarke’s brother?-banged out through a door and stormed across the yard between school and church in the tottering gait of a man unaccustomed to having to move quickly, carrying a cane but not touching the ground with it. He was so angry that he did not utter a word, or try to separate the boys, but simply began to cut air with the cane, like a blind man fending off a bear, as he got close. Soon enough he maneuvered within range of the fair boy and planted his feet and bent to his work, the cane producing memorable whorling noises cut off by pungent whacks. A few brown-nosers now considered it safe to approach. Two of them dragged the fair boy off of his victim, who contracted into a fetal position at the base of the church wall, hands open like the covers of a book to enfold his wrecked face. The schoolmaster adjusted his azimuth as the target moved, like a telescope tracking a comet, but none of his blows seemed to have been actually felt by the fair boy yet-he wore a look of steadfast, righteous triumph, much like Enoch supposed Cromwell must have shown as he beheld the butchering of the Irish at Drogheda.
The boy was dragged inside for higher punishments. Enoch rode back to Clarke’s apothecary shop, reining in a silly urge to gallop through the town like a Cavalier.
Clarke was sipping tay and gnawing biscuits, already several pages into a new alchemical treatise, moving crumb-spattered lips as he solved the Latin.
“Who is he?” Enoch demanded, coming in the door.
Clarke elected to play innocent. Enoch crossed the room and found the stairs. He didn’t really care about the name anyway. It would just be another English name.
The upstairs was all one odd-shaped room with low adze-marked rafters and rough plaster walls that had once been whitewashed. Enoch hadn’t visited many children’s rooms, but to him it seemed like a den of thieves hastily abandoned and stumbled upon by a plodding constable, filled with evidence of many peculiar, ingenious, frequently unwise plots and machinations suddenly cut short. He stopped in the doorway and steadied himself. Like a good empiric, he had to see all and alter nothing.
The walls were marked with what his eyes first took to be the grooves left behind by a careless plasterer’s trowel, but as his pupils dilated, he understood that Mr. and Mrs. Clarke’s boarders had been drawing on the walls, apparently with bits of charcoal fetched out of the grate. It was plain to see which pictures had been drawn by whom. Most were caricatures learned by rote from slightly older children. Others-generally closer to the floor-were maps of insight, manifestoes of intelligence, always precise, sometimes beautiful. Enoch had been right in supposing that the boy had excellent senses. Things that others did not see at all, or chose not to register out of some kind of mental obstinacy, this boy took in avidly.
There were four tiny beds. The litter of toys on the floor was generally boyish, but over by one bed there was a tendency toward ribbons and frills. Clarke had mentioned one of the boarders was a girl. There was a dollhouse and a clan of rag dolls in diverse phases of ontogeny. Here there’d been a meeting of interests. There was doll furniture ingeniously made by the same regular mind and clever hands that had woven the net round the stone. The boy had made stalks of grass into rattan tables, and willow twigs into rocking-chairs. The alchemist in him had been at work copying recipes from that old corrupter of curious youths, Bates’s The Mysteries of Nature amp; Art, extracting pigments from plants and formulating paints.
He had tried to draw sketches of the other boys while they were sleeping-the only time they could be relied on to hold still and not behave abominably. He did not yet have the skill to make a regular portrait, but from time to time the Muse would take hold of his hand, and in a fortunate sweep of the arm he’d capture something beautiful in the curve of a jawbone or an eyelash.
There were broken and dismantled parts of machines that Enoch did not understand. Later, though, perusing the notebook where the boy had been copying out recipes, Enoch found sketches of the hearts of rats and birds that the boy had apparently dissected. Then the little machines made sense. For what was the heart but the model for the perpetual motion machine? And what was the perpetual motion machine but Man’s attempt to make a thing that would do what the heart did? To harness the heart’s occult power and bend it to use.
The apothecary had joined him in the room. Clarke looked nervous. “You’re up to something clever, aren’t you?” Enoch said.
“By that, do you mean-”
“He came your way by chance?”
“Not precisely. His mother knows my wife. I had seen the boy.”
“And seen that he had promise-as how could you not.”
“He lacks a father. I made a recommendation to the mother. She is steady. Intermittently decent. Quasi-literate…”
“But too thick to know what she has begotten?”
“Oh my, yes.”
“So you took the boy under your wing-and if he’s shown some interest in the Art you have not discouraged it.”
“Of course not! He could be the one, Enoch.”
“He’s not the one,” Enoch said. “Not the one you are thinking of. Oh, he will be a great empiricist. He will, perhaps, be the one to accomplish some great thing we have never imagined.”
“Enoch, what can you possibly be talking about?”
It made his head ache. How was he to explain it without making Clarke out to be a fool, and himself a swindler? “Something is happening.”
Clarke pursed his lips and waited for something a little more specific.
“Galileo and Descartes were only harbingers. Something is happening now-the mercury is rising in the ground, like water climbing up the bore of a well.”
Enoch couldn’t get Oxford out of his mind-Hooke and Wren and Boyle, all exchanging thoughts so quickly that flames practically leaped between them. He decided to try another tack. “There’s a boy in Leipzig like this one. Father died recently, leaving him nothing except a vast library. The boy began reading those books. Only six years old.”