The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  Here was where time began. Here was the anchor of place, without which every mariner would be lost. Since before history sailors had been able to fix positions up and down on their maps, fixing the north-south movements of their ships. But it had taken the ingenious men in this temple of knowledge to reconcile the movements of time and stars so that east-west positions could be fixed. Here was the shrine of navigation. Here was zero degrees longitude.

  Duncan had learned from Franklin and Hewson that the celebrated strides of the astronomers of Greenwich meant that the site had also become the center of the government’s efforts to advance natural philosophy. The Astronomer Royal had thus become the king’s natural philosopher and the general of the small army of dedicated mathematicians, astronomers, and surveyors housed in the hilltop complex.

  Captain Rhys had insisted on joining Duncan and now, realizing that Duncan had not kept pace with him, waited at the end of the busy dock. He seemed to recognize the expression on Duncan’s face. His weather-beaten countenance widened in a grin. “I felt the same way on my first visit, son,” he said. “I was a young lieutenant with the sailing master from our ship. Here, says the master, is the place where distance begins. I remember him saying that ye can’t really know something unless ye can measure it. So ye might say that it was the sages who labored on that hill who truly introduced us to our planet.”

  The Welshman led Duncan up the path to the observatory complex. As they climbed, the din of the waterfront receded. A door in Duncan’s memory opened unexpectedly. He recalled being with his mother as a young boy on a pilgrimage to the cathedral in Edinburgh, when his usual clamor of questions had died away as he was struck dumb by the immense, uplifting architecture. He sensed Wren’s building too was a cathedral of sorts, and felt a humble reverence as he walked through the high double doors into a gallery lined with shelves of chronological devices and portraits of famous mariners and astronomers.

  The captain, in a dark blue waistcoat and britches adorned with brass buttons down the legs, struck an authoritative pose with the functionaries they encountered. No one challenged them as they walked up the central stairway to what appeared to be the primary working offices of the observatory, where earnest, mostly bespectacled men bent over charts. Halfway down the corridor the captain stopped a young clerk with several rolled charts under one arm and more balanced in the crook of the other.

  “I thought Mr. Mason’s office was here,” the captain said with the air of impatience often heard on quarterdecks.

  The clerk took notice of Rhys and straightened, dropping some of his load. “No sir. Yes sir. I mean ’tis the other end of the corridor, sir.”

  The corner office overlooking the forest of masts on the Thames was lined with tables covered with charts, and the clutter overflowed onto the large desk in the center of the room. A telescope on a tripod was aimed downriver, toward the larger ships anchored in the Lower Pool. Rhys gave a sigh of disappointment at finding the office empty and was turning away as the mound of papers in one of the deep windows moved. The window was half-obscured by an easel to which more charts were pinned, but a leg now revealed itself from under the papers. A moment later, a disheveled man emerged, wearing what looked like a baggy scholar’s robe.

  “Oh,” was all he said when he saw them. He looked about and located a cold cup of tea balanced on the edge of the desk. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.” He stood up straight and pushed back his long hair. “Was I?” He stretched his arms, revealing a rumpled linen shirt under the robe, then drained the cup.

  “Gentlemen?” he asked then, in afterthought, apologizing for his appearance. “I was up most of the night with the new telescope. A two-inch apochromatic! Not as good as the reflector in Edinburgh but I still found three moons of Jupiter!” With new energy he pulled off his outer garment, straightened his shirt and britches, and donned a waistcoat that was draped over the desk chair. “Charles Mason. May I be of service? Did Nevil send you? Is this about Tahiti? I thought that wasn’t until next week.” He shrugged. “I am so immersed in the world of lunar tables I tend to lose track.”

  “I came from Philadelphia,” Duncan said. “Charles Thomson and the philosophers’ society.”

  The announcement ignited Mason’s countenance. He hurried to the door, looked into the hall as if for eavesdroppers, then closed it and leaned against it. “It is rumored that they were successful on June third,” he said, question in his tone.

  “Very successful. Three sites.”

  Excitement lit Mason’s eyes. “The city, the farm, and the Henlopen peninsula? David Rittenhouse? Mr. Biddle?”

  “Yes to all, I believe. The captain and I were on the Atlantic on June third, but I heard them speak of their readiness before I left, and have had confirmation since.”

  Mason looked upward and briefly closed his eyes as if in prayer. A smile rose on his broad, earnest face. “At last!” he exclaimed. “My greatest hopes have been realized!” He glanced back at the door and his happiness seemed to fade. “And you, sir, Mr.—”

  “McCallum. Duncan McCallum. And this is Captain Rhys of the Galileo.”

  “Bark from Philadelphia,” Mason acknowledged with a nod, then approached Duncan and spoke in a low voice. “Prithee, McCallum, be sparing of this news for now. Who has the numbers? Where are the blessed results?”

  “In the hands of the agent for Pennsylvania.”

  “Benjamin?” Mason considered Duncan’s announcement, then nodded with satisfaction. “He understands the volatility of such news, for he is himself a fellow of the Royal Society. Or, as he and I sometimes call it, the club for inflated mirror gazers.” Mason nodded more vigorously and pumped Duncan’s hand. “It was kind of you to bring word, sir.”

  “We were coming in any event,” Duncan said, “to speak of the War Council and its battle with natural philosophy.”

  Mason jerked backward as if physically struck. He glanced nervously from Duncan to Rhys. “The War Council serves the best interest of the country,” he said, his voice grown brittle. “May God preserve the noble gentlemen.”

  “I have a friend who came to England to reason with such noble gentlemen,” Duncan said. “He now wastes away in Bethlem Hospital despite being the sanest man I know. I think the War Council put him there.”

  Mason’s gaze shifted to his feet. He did not look up as he spoke. “They serve the best interests of the country,” he repeated. From somewhere down the hallway a clock chimed the hour, followed closely by another timepiece, then a third. “I have important work, gentlemen,” he said and moved behind the big desk. He seemed frightened. “The lunar tables are tedious, but in the hands of a trained navigator they can save lives. The proper chronometers are finally being produced, but should one prove defective nothing but the lunar tables will serve. Captain Cook’s survey of the Pacific relied entirely on lunars.” He seemed desperate to change the subject.

  “Mr. Mason,” Duncan said. “I am familiar with the challenges of sine and cosine and am convinced the world owes a great debt to you and your colleagues.”

  “It is a heavy burden, sir, but I dedicate my very soul to it. The War Council is well served here, I assure you, for the first to get the new tables will be our naval ships.”

  “Perhaps you confuse me for an emissary of Whitehall. I am no friend of the Council, sir,” Duncan declared.

  Mason seemed to think Duncan was trying to entrap him. “We all should be friends of the War Council,” he said with an uneasy glance at Rhys, who had positioned himself to block the door. He cast about nervously, then saw his hat hanging on the wall and retrieved it. “I have an engagement,” he said, his voice cracking. “I forgot I had an engagement.” He would not look Duncan in the eye.

  “A few weeks ago,” Duncan ventured. “I was in Lancaster, in the Pennsylvania colony. I met some of those who were emulating your preparations for the transit of Venus, following your very helpful chart. Your good work was bringing out the nobility in them, sir.” Mason hesitated
, and finally looked into Duncan’s face again. “A farmer there brought in the fragments of one of your marker stones,” Duncan continued. “It had been purposely shattered by an agent working with the Horse Guards.”

  Mason’s eyes flared. “Dear God, no! They go too far! The stones were to be perpetual! What stone? What number? A five-mile marker or a single-mile stone?”

  “I do not know. What I know is that you and I both have enemies among the Horse Guards. I am convinced two of their officers committed murder to suppress certain efforts of Dr. Franklin.”

  Mason seemed to weaken. He steadied himself on the corner of his desk, then settled into the chair. “Do not antagonize them, I beg you! If you love life, sir, do not antagonize the fiends.”

  Duncan cleared the chair on the opposite side of the desk and sat. “I only wish to discuss the fiends with you, sir. In the way one man speaks to another of mutual enemies.”

  As Captain Rhys entertained himself with the telescope, focusing on the war ships on the Thames, Mason slowly revealed his tortured experience with the Horse Guards. He began tangentially, speaking first of his surveying commission and the hardships he and Jeremiah Dixon had endured. “The marker stones,” he said, “they made it all seem permanent, as if indeed our work was for the ages, that people might recall it decades from now. They were all mined and carved in England, you know.” The astronomer was clearly disturbed by the news that one of his precious stones had been destroyed. “Three years and nine months. Such a labor. Living rough. Taking over a thousand star fixes, checking timepieces, sighting lines across rivers, through thickets, over high rocky ridges.”

  “It was a labor of Hercules,” Duncan offered. He was ashamed to have made the man so uncomfortable. Mason’s work in America had been an extraordinary accomplishment.

  “We weren’t permitted to finish,” Mason confessed. He sounded brokenhearted yet somehow relieved to speak of it, as if Duncan had become a long-sought confessor. “When we started west of the Alleghenies the tribes had to be placated. The superintendent of Indian Affairs, the great Sir William Johnson, got involved, and had to convince the tribes that we were not seizing land, simply measuring it for the good of all. It had not been all that long since the Indian uprising, so it was agreed that we would have an escort of Iroquois warriors.”

  Duncan was well aware of the tensions with the tribes over the survey, for William Johnson and Patrick Woolford had asked for his help, and more importantly that of Sarah, in convincing the Iroquois Council to support the effort.

  “We had a terrible scare that last summer when an Iroquois war party intercepted us. We were sure we were to be set upon, but they were only passing through to pursue some feud with the southern tribes. Still, several laborers deserted after that and half of our own escorting warriors decided there was more glory in the war party and left us.” Mason shrugged. “We pressed on. What an ordeal. But then on October ninth our enterprise was terminated. Our Iroquois friends had spied enemy tribesmen of the Leni Lenape across a creek and insisted we could go no farther.”

  It was an exaggeration to say the Iroquois and Leni Lenape, the Delaware, were enemies, but the Leni Lenape did have a deep resentment of the Iroquois for giving away huge tracts of their ancestral lands to the Penn proprietors. Duncan had heard of the incident at council fires, and knew the Leni Lenape party had far outnumbered the survey crew. Lives had indeed probably hung in the balance, and the Iroquois had made the right decision.

  “Two hundred thirty-three miles,” Mason said. “It might have felt better if we had terminated on some majestic mountaintop, but it just ended at some nameless muddy creek.” He hung his head a moment. “Destroying a marker. It is sinful. It is a crime against civilization.”

  “Help me, Mr. Mason, and I will ensure a proper replacement stone is erected. The farmer preserved the location with a post.”

  “Pennsylvania stone can be very soft,” Mason pointed out.

  “I know of good granite in the northern mountains,” Duncan said. “I vow to you that I will do this. But I need to know more about the Horse Guards.”

  Mason lowered his face into his hands for a moment. “Not here,” he said when he looked up. “Walk with me outside.”

  They left the building and climbed to the topmost ruins of the old castle, with Rhys following a few steps behind, and sat on a slab of stone fallen from the ancient walls. “They called this a castle but it was really a hunting lodge with a tower, built for Henry the Fifth. The Eighth liked to bring his mistresses here, they say, and would joke about yearning for a good hunt. It’s all dust now. The Henrys, the mistresses, the castle, all dust. Worlds come and worlds go. Looking back now I can see that to the tribes it was as if we were laying cornerstones for new castles in their ancient homeland. But if Jeremiah and I hadn’t done it the Royal Society would have found someone else.”

  “The Royal Society? I thought it was the colonial governors who sent you.”

  “They asked the Royal Society to select the leaders of the expedition, and determine the protocols for measuring. It felt unifying somehow, the way relations with the colonies were meant to be, answering a political problem with the application of scholarly knowledge.”

  “The Society must have been overjoyed upon your return to London.”

  “Most members were, the ones who are true scholars. Several said I should be the new Astronomer Royal. But others were furious when I reported that I had helped the colonials prepare for transit observations. They said I had exceeded my commission, that if the king desired to advance such knowledge among colonials he would have so decreed.

  “I admit I didn’t take them seriously, Mr. McCallum. By what right does one man tell another that he is not permitted to acquire knowledge of the world? Isn’t the process of acquiring knowledge the very essence of human progress? I continued my efforts to help the colonists, assembling and shipping equipment to them. Three telescopes, two sextants, tinted glass lenses, plumb bobs and levels for setting up the equipment, even special bound ledgers for recording the observations and performing the calculations.

  “One day months ago a horrid man appeared in my office wearing high boots and a uniform so overdone I thought it might be a costume. He said, ‘Sir, you must stop presuming on the king’s affairs.’ I thought he was gibing me, and laughed. Then he picked up one of my lenses and dropped it, shattering it, and repeated the words. I called for the house stewards to escort him out, saying that the army had no authority here. He sneered and said he was not the army, he was the king, as far as I was concerned. He named himself Major Hastings and said that if I did not respect his word, I would learn about the power of the king well enough.

  “I put the miserable man out of my mind, for I was busy preparing our presentation to the Royal Society about the survey line. I kept up my transit work, though, and was corresponding with astronomers in France and Germany. I always thought natural philosophy was the best unifier between nations, the structure to build common ground with others despite political differences.”

  Mason quieted. He picked up a piece of stone at his foot that Duncan saw was the carved head of a bird broken off a statue or wall carving, and spoke to the bird. “I came into my office one day to find Hastings in my chair. He dragged me to the window. Another officer stood outside with a basket filled with papers. It was all the correspondence they could find on my desk, including important letters from the continent and several calculations that had taken days to complete. Hastings didn’t say anything, just clamped a hand around my neck to force me to watch as his man—a Lieutenant Nettles, I learned later—ignited my papers. They reduced all that valuable work to ash and then laughed about it.

  “I was furious. I complained to the Astronomer Royal, who was strangely subdued in his reaction and just told me that with dedication to prayer I would find the right path.” Mason shrugged. “Nevil started out as an Anglican minister. So I complained to the Society. I complained to the commander of the Horse Guards.
”

  “Their colonel?” Duncan asked.

  “A man who is as genteel as he is worthless, a mere figurehead. He offered me brandy and explained very solemnly that Major Hastings was on long-term detachment to the War Council, engaged in matters vital to the security of the kingdom.”

  “The War Council is eight men. Hastings works for all of them?”

  “I doubt Hastings and the Secretary at War would worry about anyone less than an earl.”

  “So you gave up your efforts.”

  “No. Ignorant, proud fool that I was, I redoubled them. Surely, I thought, a few bullies cannot be allowed to interrupt the pursuit of knowledge, for that is the God-given right of every man. I printed instructions for observing the transit and dispatched them to Philadelphia through the Pennsylvania agent.”

  “Dr. Franklin?” Duncan asked in surprise.

  Mason nodded absently. “I began to give lectures on the transit observations in church and guild halls. It was so gratifying to see how the common man was uplifted to learn about the workings of the heavens. In the words of poor Mr. Wilkes—may he find peace in his captivity—the masses are a great fallow field waiting for the seeds of knowledge to be planted. At one hall a man actually shouted out ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ at the end of my talk, as if I were speaking for Wilkes. I though it somewhat droll at first, but later it scared me.

  “One day Hastings and his men appeared at the back of one of my lecture halls. He waited until I finished, then informed me that I hadn’t sufficiently grasped his lesson, then just left.” Mason’s face twisted with pain. “I had an assistant, a bright young student from Oxford. The next day he was bringing some instruments for us to calibrate. He never arrived. His wagon was found on a bridge with no sign of him. The instruments were gone. Of course we thought it was highwaymen. But two days later his body was found in the river. I don’t know that they meant to kill him, probably just threw him off the bridge. But he drowned, and I don’t think they cared. A day after that, Hastings and his man Nettles were waiting at my door with the missing instruments stacked in the hall. It hadn’t been highwaymen—it had been the despicable Horse Guards.