Also they’d had Hooke and Wren, who’d built London up from cinders. If there was a cellar, closet, attic, or shed anywhere in London that was sitting vacant, Wren would know of it, and Hooke would have the temerity to use it for something.
What it all amounted to was this: up to about the turn of the century, the Royal Society had been able to store things by the acre. There had been no need to cull out, to throw away, or even to organize. But during the first decade of the century they’d lost Gresham’s and they’d lost Hooke. Their storage space had shrunk by a factor of ten, at the least. Which might have been a very favorable turn if the sorting out and throwing away had been done by someone who was qualified—who had been around from the beginning—and who had had the time to do a good job of it. To put it plainly, Newton, Wren, or Waterhouse. But Sir Isaac had been busy with the Mint, with prosecuting a war against Flamsteed, and with making the second edition of Principia Leibniz-proof. Sir Christopher Wren, during the same days, had been finishing St. Paul’s and building the Duke of Marlborough’s London house, just next door to St. James’s Palace: two significant jobs for an architect. Daniel had been in Massachusetts trying to build a Logic Mill.
Who then had performed the sorting-out? One of Newton’s acolytes. And he had probably done it in a hurry. If Daniel had been fully aware of this four years ago, when it had been happening, he’d have been in a panic. Now he could only look on the contents of this attic in the same spirit in which he had looked at the remains of Drake’s house on the morning after the Fire.
Most of the Science Crapp was still packed in the crates, barrels, bundles, and bales in which it had been carted hither. Each of these containers was an impediment to the casual investigator. Daniel spied a crate, not far below the rafters, with its lid slightly askew. The only thing atop it was a glass bell jar covering a dessicated owl. Daniel set the bird to one side, drew out the crate, and pulled off the lid. It was the old Archbishop of York’s beetle collection, lovingly packed in straw.
This, and the owl, told all. It was as he had feared. Birds and bugs, top to bottom, front to back. All salvaged, not because they had innate value, but because they’d been given to the Royal Society by important people. They’d been kept here just as a young couple keeps the ugly wedding present from the rich aunt.
He heard someone stifling a sneeze. Straightening up carefully, so as not to burst any of the juicy bits in his spinal column, he looked down the stairs and caught the eye of Henry Arlanc. Henry looked nervous, and studiously mournful, like a vicar at a wake, who did not know the deceased, but who is aware that the living have suffered a grievous loss and are likely to be in a foul mood. “I have endeavoured, Dr. Waterhouse, to preserve all that was brought here, in the condition it was brought.”
“No solicitor could have worded it more carefully,” Daniel muttered under his breath.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
Daniel stepped over to the top of the staircase, and steadied himself with a hand on the wall, for this was halfway between a ladder and a stair, and it made him dizzy.
“You have done well…you are absolved,” Daniel said. “The owl was free of dust.”
“Thank you, Dr. Waterhouse.”
Daniel sat down at the top of the stairs, resting his feet on the first step down. Between his knees he now enjoyed a clear and direct view of Henry’s face. Up here in the attic it was gloomy, but the walls and doors of the storey below were all painted white or close to it. The doors had been left open to release the light coming in the windows, and so Henry was bathed in pitiless and revealing illumination, like a specimen on a microscope stage. He was regarding Daniel uneasily.
“How long have you served here, Henry?”
“Since you moved in, sir.”
Daniel was a bit confused until he realized you meant The Royal Society.
“I like to say, that I came with the property,” Henry continued.
“When we moved here from Gresham’s College, there must have been a good deal of…rubbish. At Gresham’s, I mean.”
Henry looked inexpressibly relieved. “Oh yes, sir, more than you could ever imagine.”
“Cart-loads, then, was it?”
“Yes, sir, dozens of cart-loads hauled away,” Henry affirmed, in the pride of a job well done.
“Hauled away where, precisely?”
Henry faltered. “I—I would not know that, Dr. Waterhouse, there are salvage-men who pick through rubbish looking for objects of value, and sell them to tinkers…”
“I understand, Henry. What is more, I agree that neither you, nor any other man, can be asked to know whither rubbish has gone, after the rubbish-cart has disappeared from view. But I have a different question for you along the same lines, on which you must concentrate as intently as you can.”
“I shall strain to do so, Dr. Waterhouse.”
“At the time that Gresham’s was being cleared out, and the rubbish being carted away, and the treasures brought safely here—I say, at that time, was any rubbish taken away, or treasures produced, from other locations?”
“Other locations, Dr. Waterhouse?”
“Hooke. Mr. Robert Hooke. He might have squirrelled things away at Bedlam, or in the additions to the Marquis of Ravenscar’s house, or the College of Physicians—”
“Why those places, sir?”
“He built them. Or St. Paul’s, or the Fire Monument—he had a hand in those as well. He might have left things in those buildings; and just as the nuts, hidden in out-of-the-way places by a squirrel, are oft forgotten, and discovered later by others—”
“I do not recollect anything coming from Bedlam, or any other place besides Gresham’s College,” Henry said flatly.
Henry looked curiously red in the face. He had been simple enough to fall into the trap that Daniel had set by speaking of rubbish. But he was sharp enough to see it in hindsight. His response was to become angry rather than fearful. Daniel sensed immediately that to have this man angry at him was undesirable. He explained, in softer tones, “It is only that the Royal Society is so pre-eminent among the scientific academies of the world, that what is rubbish to us, would be esteemed treasure to some who are accounted savants in backward places; and as a gesture of friendship towards such countries, we could send them odds and ends for which we have no further use.”
“I take your meaning now, sir,” said Henry, the flush fading from his cheeks.
“Better for one of Mr. Hooke’s old clocks to be studied by a student in Muscovy, than for some Shadwell tinker to make the gears into jewelry.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“I have been asked by a colleague on the Continent to keep an eye out for any such items. It is probably too late for the dozens of cart-loads. Perhaps not for what might have been stowed by Hooke in other buildings to which he had keys.”
“Sir Christopher Wren was an old friend of Mr. Hooke’s.”
“That he was,” said Daniel, “though I wonder how you know it, since Hooke died seven years before you had any connection to the Royal Society.”
Again Henry’s face flushed. “ ’Tis common knowledge. Sir Christopher is here all the time—why, he stopped in just this morning—and often speaks of Hooke with a kind of affection.”
Henry got a wry distracted look which proved he was speaking truth. God and the angels might speak of Hooke with outright and unalloyed affection; but a kind of affection was the best that could be achieved by Wren, or any other mortal.
“I should simply refer my inquiries to Sir Christopher, then.”
“He has stated more than once that he would enjoy renewing your acquaintance, sir, whenever…”
Henry trailed off and made a furtive glance at the doorway to the garret, near the top of the stairs.
“Whenever I came to my senses. Consider me healed, Henry. And if you are seized by an urge to throw anything away, do make me aware of it, so that I can pluck out any items that would pass for wonders in Muscovy.”
D
aniel went out for a walk: a most imprudent act.
Henry Arlanc had let it be known that if Daniel ever summoned the will to leave, for an hour or a day, he, Henry Arlanc, could arrange a sedan chair or a carriage. This was nothing more than simple common sense. The streets of London were a good bit more dangerous now than when Daniel had last walked them, and Daniel much more vulnerable. But on a morning like this, with the streets so crowded with well-to-do persons on the move, murderers and footpads were less likely to be encountered than pickpockets. And these would reap only the meagrest of harvests from Daniel.
An odd notion had come in to Daniel’s mind: perhaps the intended victim of the Infernal Device had been, not Daniel or Mr. Threader, but Henry Arlanc.
Now in his years of toil for the Royal Society, Daniel had become a stern judge of odd notions. There were abundant reasons to discard this one straightaway. Its most obvious defect was simply that Daniel had not the faintest idea why anyone would want to blow up the Royal Society’s porter. Moreover, the fog that had descended over Daniel’s mind since the explosion had made him susceptible to hypotheses of an extremely dark and frightening cast, and this seemed like one of those.
But the Natural Philosopher in him had to admit that it was at least theoretically possible. And until it had been ruled out, Daniel liked to preserve, from Arlanc, some independence—he did not wish to get in the habit of relying on the Huguenot every time he stirred from Crane Court—and some privacy. ’Twas neither necessary nor desirable for Arlanc to know everything about his movements around London.
His knees were still recovering from too long spent in bed, but they had become unlimbered by the time he reached the end of Crane Court and flung himself on the mercy of Fleet Street. He turned to the right, therefore moving in the general direction of Charing Cross, and worked his way cautiously upstream, prudently facing on-coming traffic, and with his right hand dabbing at the fronts of houses and shops in case he should be forced to save himself by diving into a door-way. Soon he had left St. Dunstan-in-the-West behind. The Inner and Middle Temple would be to his left, on the opposite side of Fleet, lurking behind a screen of newer buildings. These were largely occupied by pubs and coffee-houses that were continual targets of arch but confusing references, and cruel but murky satire, in newspapers.
Soon he had passed through Temple Bar. The way—now called the Strand—forked into a main channel on the left and an inferior one to the right, creating a long central island with a couple of churches in it. Daniel took the narrower way—really a series of disjoint street-fragments crudely plumbed together—and grew convinced that he was lost. The buildings were held apart by splints of air, too narrow to deserve the name “alley,” that jogged crazily to the right and left, and did not run in straight lines even when they could have. The fire had stopped short of this part of the city, probably because the Rolls and the Temple, with their generous lawns, had acted as fire-breaks. Hooke, in his capacity as City Surveyor, had not been empowered to bring it out of the Dark Ages. These ancient rights-of-way were as sacred, or at least as unassailable, as the precepts of the Common Law. Somewhere among them was an old, therefore low-ceilinged room that had been acquired by a printer, Mr. Christopher Cat, and made into a thing called the Kit-Cat Clubb.
I have spoken to Mr. Cat about you, Roger had let Daniel know, in a note slipped under his door. When you venture out, stop by our Clubb for refreshment. There had been a sketchy map, which Daniel now withdrew from his pocket, and tried to interpret. It was useless. But presently he was able to find his way to the Kit-Cat Clubb simply by following the carriages of Whig M.P.s.
The building had clearly been thrown up in an epoch of English history short on food and building materials, because Daniel, who was of average height, could barely stand up without being bludgeoned by a joist. Accordingly, the paintings that Mr. Cat had commissioned to adorn the walls were all bizarrely wide and short. This ruled out portraits, unless they were portraits of very large groups as seen from tremendous distances. Of these, the largest and most prominently displayed was of the distinguished membership of the Kit-Cat Clubb. Roger was front and center in his best wig, which was captured as a horseshoe-shaped swipe of an overloaded paint-brush.
“LET’S DO SOMETHING about Longitude!”
He was the same Roger in a much older body. Only his teeth looked young, because they were; they could not have been carved more than a few months ago. He had deteriorated in every way save the Mental and the Dental. He made up for it with clothing.
Daniel blew on his chocolate for a few moments, trying to get it to cool without forming a wrinkled hide on the top. He could not hear himself think for all the Whigs in wigs shouting at each other. “The Queen opened Parliament only two hours ago,” he reminded Roger, “or so I’ve been told, and she forgot, entirely, to mention the trifling detail of who would succeed her, after her demise. And you wish to have a chat about Longitude.”
The Marquis of Ravenscar rolled his eyes. “ ’Twas settled æons ago. Sophie or Caroline will succeed her—”
“You mean, Sophie or George Louis.”
“Don’t be a fool. Ladies run Europe. The War of the Spanish Succession was all women. In Versailles, Madame de Maintenon. In Madrid, her best friend, the Princesse des Ursins, Camarera Mayor of the Bourbon Court of Spain. She runs the place. Those two on the one side, fought it out against Queen Anne and Sophie on the other.”
“I thought Queen Anne and Sophie hated each other.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Touché, Roger.”
“Now if you insist on being pedantic, yes, George Louis is next in the queue after Sophie. Do you know what he did with his wife?”
“Something horrible, I heard.”
“Locked her up in a Schloß for the rest of her life, for bed-swerving.”
“So clearly he has the upper hand, at least—”
“ ’Tis the exception that proves the rule, Daniel. By taking such a measure, he confesses his helplessness to the world. She made him a cuckold. Cuckolds cannot be unmade.”
“Still, she’s locked in a Schloß, and he isn’t.”
“He is locked up in the Schloß of his own mind, which, by all accounts, has walls so thick, as to leave very little room within. The leading lady of England will be the Princess of Wales—raised personally by Sophie and by the late lamented, by all accounts dazzling, Queen of Prussia; and tutored by your friend.” This Roger stressed ominously.
“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?”
The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver, the Confusion, and the System of the World Page 231