“Er, getting back to the actual topic of conversation, don’t you think your time were better spent making sure the Hanoverians actually do succeed to the throne? Longitude can wait.”
Roger waved his hand as if trying for the eleventh time to knock a particular horse-fly out of the air. “God damn it, Daniel do you really think we are so feckless, as not to have thought of that?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“We’re not letting the Pretender in! You were there at his so-called birth-you saw the sleight-of-
hand involving the warming-pan-surely a man of your discrimination was not so easily deceived!”
“To me it looked like a babe’s head coming out of the Queen’s vagina.”
“And you call yourself a man of science!”
“Roger, if you would set aside this quaint notion that countries must be ruled by kings who are the sons of other kings, then it would not matter whether the Pretender entered St. James’s Palace through a vagina, or a warming-pan; either way, to hell with him.”
“Are you suggesting I become a Republican?”
“I’m suggesting you already are one.”
“Hmmph…from there, ’tis only a short step to Puritanism.”
“Puritanism has its advantages…we are not so much under the thumb of ladies.”
“Only because you hang all of the interesting ones!”
“I am told you have a mistress of a distinguished family…”
“As do you-the chief difference being, I get to sleep with mine.”
“They say she is extraordinarily clever.”
“Yours, or mine?”
“Both of them, Roger, but I was referring to yours.”
Roger did an odd thing then, namely, raised up his glass and turned it this way and that, until it had caught the light from the window the right way. It had been scratched up with a diamond. Several lines of script ran across it, which he now read, in a ghastly chaunt that was either bad reading or bad singing.
At Barton’s feet the God of Love
His Arrows and his Quiver lays,
Forgets he has a Throne above,
And with this lovely Creature stays.
Not Venus’s Beauties are more bright,
But each appear so like the other,
The Cupid has mistook the Right,
And takes the Nymph to be his Mother.
By the time he had lurched and wheezed to the end, several nearby clubbers had picked up the melody-if it could be so called-and begun to sing along. At the end, they all rewarded themselves by Consumption of Alcohol.
“Roger! I never would have dreamed any woman could move you to write even bad poetry.”
“Its badness is proof of my sincerity,” Roger said modestly. “If I wrote her an excellent love-poem, it might be said of me, that I had done it only to flaunt my wit.”
“As matters stand, you are indeed safe from any such accusations.”
Roger now allowed a few silent moments to pass, and adjusted his posture and his wig, as if about to be recognized in Parliament. He proclaimed: “Now, when the attention of all Good and Forthright Men is fixed upon the controversies attending the Hanoverian Succession, now, I say, is the time to pass Expensive and Recondite Legislation!”
“Viz. Longitude?”
“We can offer a prize to the chap who devises a way of measuring it. A large prize. I have mentioned the idea to Sir Isaac, to Sir Christopher, and to Mr. Halley. They are all for it. The prize is to be quite large.”
“If you have their support, Roger, what can you possibly want of me?”
“It is high time the Massachusetts Bay Institute of Technologickal Arts-which I have supported so generously-did something useful!”
“Such as-?”
“Daniel, I want to win the Longitude Prize!”
London
LATE FEBRUARY 1714
DANIEL WAS LURKING LIKE A bat in the attic, supervising Henry Arlanc, who was packing Science Crapp into crates and casks. Sir Isaac Newton emerged from a room on the floor just below, talking to a pair of younger men as they strode down the corridor. Daniel craned his neck and peered down the stairway just in time to catch a glimpse of Isaac’s feet and ankles as they flicked out of view. One of the men was Scottish, and sanguine, and fully agreeable to whatever it was that Isaac thought he should do. “I shall remark on the Baron’s remarks, sir!”
Leibniz had published his latest salvo in Journal Literaire under the title “Remarks.”
“I’ll use him smartly, I will!”
“I shall supply you with my notes on his Tentamen. I found in it a clearly erroneous use of second-order differentials,” Isaac said, preceding the others down the stairs.
“I perceive your strategy sir!” boomed the Scotsman. “Before the Baron presumes to pick the lint from oot o’ yoor eye he ought to extricate the log from oot o’ his oon!” It was John Keilclass="underline" Queen Anne’s cryptographer.
The three men stormed down the stairs and out into the streets, or so it sounded to Daniel, in whose failing ears their footsteps and their conversation melted together into a fusillade of hoots and booms.
Daniel waited until their carriages had cleared the end of Crane Court, then went to the Kit-Cat Clubb.
ONE OF THE REGULARS THERE was John Vanbrugh, an architect who made a specialty of country houses. For example, he was building Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough. He couldn’t help but be busy on that front just now, since Harley had just flung ten thousand pounds at the Duke. Most of his tasks, just now, had nothing to do with the drawing up of plans or the supervision of workers. He was rather shunting money from place to place and attempting to hire people. Daniel knew this because Vanbrugh was using the Kit-Cat Clubb as his office, and Daniel couldn’t go there and read the paper and drink chocolate without hearing half of Vanbrugh’s business. Occasionally Daniel would glance up to discover Vanbrugh staring at him. Perhaps the architect knew he had corresponded with Marlborough. Perhaps it was something else.
At any rate, Vanbrugh was there when Daniel walked down from Crane Court, and within a few moments he had a great deal more reason to stare. For Daniel had scarcely sat down before a really excellent carriage pulled up in front of the club, and the head of Sir Christopher Wren appeared in its window, asking for Dr. Daniel Waterhouse. Daniel obliged by coming out and climbing right in. The magnificence of this vehicle, and the beauty of the four matched horses that drew it, were sufficient to stop traffic on the Strand, which greatly simplified the task of getting it turned around and aimed back the way Daniel had come, eastwards into the city.
“I sent a carter round to Crane Court, as you requested, to collect whatever it was you wanted collected. He shall meet us at St. Stephen Walbrook and then he is yours for the day.”
“I am in your debt.”
“Not at all. May I ask what it is?”
“Rubbish from the attic. A gift to our scientific brethren in St. Petersburg.”
“Then I am in your debt. Given the nature of my work, what a scandal it would raise, if Crane Court collapsed under the weight of beetles.”
“Let us consider all accounts settled between us, then.”
“Did you really go through all of it!?”
“What I am really after is the residue of Hooke.”
“Oh-er! You shan’t find it there. Sir Isaac.”
“Hooke and Newton are the two most difficult persons I have ever known-”
“Flamsteed belongs too in that Pantheon.”
“Hooke thought Newton stole his ideas.”
“Yes. He made me aware of it.”
“Newton considered himself aggrieved by any such accusations. Hooke’s legacy could only support Hooke, and never exonerate Newton-so away with all such rubbish! But Hooke, being no less obstreperous than Newton, must have anticipated this-he would therefore have placed his most valuable stuff out of Newton’s reach.”
Wren bore his eighty-one years as an arch supports tons of stone. He had been a sort of mathematical and mechanical prodigy. The quicksilver that had seemingly welled up out of the ground, round the time of Cromwell, had been especially concentrated in him. Later that tide had seemed to ebb, as many of the early Royal Society men had succumbed to a heaviness of the limbs, or of the spirit. Not so with Wren, who seemed to be changing from an elfin youth into an angel, with only a brief sojourn in Manhood. He wore a tall fluffy silver wig, and clothing of light color, with airy lace at the throat and wrists, and his face was in excellent condition. His age showed mostly in the dimples of his cheeks, which had lengthened to crevices, and in the fragile skin of his eyelids, which had become quite loose, pink, and swollen. But even this only seemed to lend him a placid and mildly amused look. Daniel saw now that Wisdom had been among the gifts that God had bestowed on the young Wren, and that it had led him into architecture: a field where the results spoke for themselves, and in which it was necessary to remain on speaking terms with large numbers of one’s fellow humans for years at a time. The other early Royal Society men had not recognized Wren’s wisdom, and so there had been whispers, fifty years ago, that the wonder boy was squandering his gifts by going into the building trade. Daniel had been as guilty of saying so as anyone else. But Wren’s decision had long since been vindicated, and Daniel-who’d made his own decisions, some wiser than others-felt no trace of envy, and no regret. Only a sort of awed bemusement, as their carriage emerged from Ludgate and circumnavigated St. Paul’s church-yard, and Wren parted a curtain with one finger to cast an eye over St. Paul’s, like a shepherd scanning his flock.