This particular issue had been printed several months earlier and contained an article by Leibniz on mathematics. Daniel began skimming it and right away saw distinctly familiar terms-the likes of which he had not glimpsed since ’77-
“Stab me in the vitals,” Daniel muttered, “he’s finally done it!”
“Done what!?” demanded Exaltation Gather, who was sitting across from Daniel hugging a large box full of money.
“Published the calculus!”
“And what, pray tell, is that, Brother Daniel? Other than something that grows on one’s teeth.” The hoard of coins in Exaltation Gather’s strong-box made dim muffled chinking noises as the carriage rocked from side to side on its Suspension-one of those annoyingly good French ideas.
“New mathematics, based upon the analysis of quantities that are infinitesimal and evanescent.”
“It sounds very metaphysical, ” said the Reverend Gather. Daniel looked up at him. No one and nothing had ever been less metaphysical than he. Daniel had grown up in the company of men like this and for a while had actually considered them to be normal-looking. But several years spent in London coffee-houses, theatres, and royal palaces had insensibly altered his tastes. Now when he gazed upon a member of a Puritan sect he always cringed inside. Which was just the effect that the Puritans were aiming for. If the Rev. Gather’s Christian name had been Exultation his garb would have been wildly inappropriate. But Exaltation it was, and for these people exaltation was a grim business.
Daniel had finally convinced King James II that His Majesty’s claims to support all religious dissidents would seem a lot more convincing if he would take Cromwell’s skull down from the stick where it had been posted all through Charles II’s quarter-century-long reign, and put it back in the Christian grave with the rest of Cromwell. To Daniel and certain others, a skull on a stick was a conspicuous object and the request to take it down wholly reasonable. But His Majesty and every courtier within earshot had looked startled: they’d forgotten it was there! It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on a windowpane you never notice. Daniel’s request, James’s ensuing decree, and the fetching down and re-interment of the skull had only drawn attention to it. Attention, in a modern Court, meant cruel witticisms, and so it had been a recent vogue to address wandering Puritan ministers as “Oliver,” the joke being that many of them-being wigless, gaunt, and sparely dressed-looked like skulls on sticks. Exaltation Gather looked so much like a skull on a stick that Daniel almost had to physically restrain himself from knocking the man down and shoveling dirt on him.
“Newton seems to agree with you,” Daniel said, “or else he’s afraid that some Jesuit will say so, which amounts to the same thing.”
“One need not be a Jesuit to be skeptical of vain imaginings-” began the now miffed Gather.
“ Somethingmust be there,” Daniel said. “Look out the window, yonder. That fen is divided into countless small plots by watercourses-some natural, some carved out by industrious farmers. Each rectangle of land could be made into two smaller ones-just drag a stick across the muck and the water will fill up the scratch in the ground, like the ?ther filling the void between particles of matter. Is that metaphysical yet?”
“Why no, it is a good similitude, earthy, concrete, like something from the Geneva Bible. Have you looked into the Geneva Bible recently, or-”
“What happens then if we continue subdividing?” Daniel asked. “Is it the same all the way down? Or is it the case that something happens eventually, that we reach a place where no further subdivision is possible, where fundamental properties of Creation are brought into play?”
“Er-I have no idea, Brother Daniel.”
“Is it vanity for us to consider the question? Or did God give us brains for a reason?”
“No religion, with the possible exception of Judaism, has ever been more favorably disposed towards education than ours,” said Brother Exaltation, “so that question is answered before ’twas asked. But we must consider these, er, infinitesimals and evanescents in a way that is rigorous, pure, free from heathenish idolatry or French vanity or the metaphysical infatuations of the Papists.”
“Leibniz agrees-and the result of applying just the approach you have prescribed, in the mathematical realm, is here, and it is called the calculus,” said Daniel, patting the document on his knee.
“Does Brother Isaac agree?”
“He did twenty years ago, when he invented all of this,” Daniel said. “Now I have no idea.”
“I have heard from one of our brethren in Cambridge that Brother Isaac’s comportment in church has raised questions as to his faith.”
“Brother Exaltation,” said Daniel sharply, “before you spread rumors that may get Isaac Newton thrown into prison, let’s see about getting a few of our brethren out -shall we?”
IPSWICH HAD BEEN A CLOTHport forever, but that trade had fallen on hard times because of the fatal combination of cheap stuff from India and Dutch shipping that could bring it to Europe. It was the prototype of the ridiculously ancient English town, situated at the place where the River Orwell broadened into an estuary, the obvious spot where anyone from a cave-man to a Cavalier would drive a stake into the muck and settle. Daniel judged that the gaol had been the first structure to go up, some five or six thousand years ago perhaps, and that the rats had moved in a week or two later. Ipswich was the county seat, and so when Charles II had whimsically decided to enforce the Penal Laws, all of Suffolk’s most outstanding Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the odd Jew had been rounded up and been deposited here. They might just as well have been released a month ago, but it was important to the King that Daniel, his chosen representative, come out and handle the matter in person.
The carriage pulled up in front of the gaol and Exaltation Gather sat in it nervously gripping his strong-box while Daniel went inside and scared the gaoler half to death by brandishing a tablecloth-sized document with a wax seal as big as a man’s heart dangling from it. Then Daniel went into the gaol, interrupting a prayer meeting, and spouted an oration he’d already used in half a dozen other gaols, a wrung-out rag of a speech so empty and banal that he had no idea whether he was making any sense at all, or just babbling in tongues. The startled, wary looks on the faces of the imprisoned Puritans suggested that they were extracting some meaning from Daniel’s verbalizations-he had no idea what exactly. Daniel did not really know how his speech was being interpreted until later. The prisoners had to be released one at a time. Each of them had to pay the bill for his meals and other necessaries-and many had been here for years.
Hence Exaltation Gather and his box of money. The King’s gesture would fall flat if half the prisoners remained in pokey for debts accumulated during their (unjust and un-Christian) imprisonment and so the King had (through Daniel) encouraged special collections to be taken up in sympathetic churches and had (though this was supposed to be grievously secret) supplemented that money with some from his own reserves to make sure it all came off well. In practice it meant that the nonconformists of London and the King of England had used Exaltation Gather’s strong-box as a dust-bin for disposal of all their oldest, blackest, lightest in weight, most clipped, worn, filed-down, and adulterated coins. The true value of each one of these objects had to be debated between the gaoler of Ipswich on one hand, and on the other, Exaltation Gather and any recently freed Puritans who (a) were sharp when it came to money and (b) enjoyed verbal disputes-i.e., all of them.