Daniel staged an orderly retreat to a church-yard with a view down to the harbor, where the sound of the argument was partly masked by the rushing and slapping of the surf. Various Puritans found him, and lined up to give him pieces of their minds. This went on for most of the day-but as an example, Edmund Palling came up and shook Daniel’s hand.
Edmund Palling was a perpetual old man. So it had always seemed to Daniel. Admittedly his strategy of radical hairlessness made it difficult to guess his age. But he’d seemed an old man running around with Drake during the Civil War, and as an old man he had marched in Cromwell’s funeral procession. As an old trader he had frequently showed up at Stourbridge Fair peddling this or that, and had walked into Cambridge to inflict startling visitations on Daniel. Old Man Palling had attended the memorial service for Drake, and during his years living in London, Daniel had occasionally bumped into this elderly man on the streets of London.
Now here he was: “Which is it, Daniel, stupid or insane? You know the King.”
Edmund Palling was a sensible man. He was, as a matter of fact, one of those Englishmen who was so sensible that he was daft. For as any French-influenced courtier could explain, to insist on everything’s being reasonable, in a world that wasn’t, was, in itself, unreasonable.
“Stupid,” Daniel said. Until now he had been every inch the Court man, but he could not dissimulate to such as Edmund Palling. To be with this old man was to be thrown back four decades, to a time when it had become common for ordinary sensible Englishmen to speak openly the widely agreed-upon, but previously unmentionable fact that monarchy was a load of rubbish. The fact that, since those days, the Restoration had occurred and that Europe was in fact ruled by great Kings was of no consequence. At any rate, Daniel felt perfectly at home and at peace among these men, which was a bit alarming given that he was a close advisor to King James II. He could no more defend that King, or any monarch, to Edmund Palling than go to a meeting of the Royal Society and assert that the Sun revolved around the Earth.
Edmund Palling was fascinated, and nodded sagely. “Some have been saying insane, you know-because of the syphilis.”
“Not true.”
“That is extraordinary, because everyone is convinced he has syphilis.”
“He does. But having gotten to know His Majesty reasonably well, Mr. Palling, it is my opinion, as Secretary of the Royal Society, that when he, er…”
“Does something that is just amazingly ludicrous.”
“As some would say, Mr. Palling, yes.”
“Such as letting us out of gaol in the hopes that we’ll not perceive it as a cynical ploy, and supposing that we’ll rally about his standard as if he really gives a farthing for Freedom of Conscience!”
“Without staking myself to any position concerning what you’ve just said, Mr. Palling, I would encourage you to look towards mere stupidity in your quest for explanations. Not to rule out fits of syphilitic insanity altogether, mind you…”
“What’s the difference then? Or is it a distinction without a difference?”
“ Thissort of thing,” Daniel said, waving towards the Ipswich gaol, “is stupidity. By contrast, a fit of syphilitic insanity would lead to results of a different character entirely: spasms of arbitrary violence, mass enslavements, beheadings.”
Mr. Palling shook his head, then turned toward the water. “One day soon the sun will rise from across yonder sea and chase the fog of stupidity and the shadows of syphilitic insanity away.”
“Very poetic, Mr. Palling-but I have met the Duke of Monmouth, I have roomed with the Duke of Monmouth, I have been vomited on by the Duke of Monmouth, and I am telling you that the Duke of Monmouth is no Charles II! To say nothing of Oliver Cromwell.”
Mr. Palling rolled his eyes. “Very well, then-if Monmouth fails I’m on the next ship to Massachusetts.”
STRETCH A LINE,and another intersecting it, and rotate the former about the latter and it will sweep out a cone. Now shove this cone through a plane (fig. 1) and mark every point on the plane where the cone touches it. Commonly the result is an ellipse (fig. 2), but if the cone’s slope is parallel to the plane it makes a parabola (fig. 3), and if it’s parallel to the axis it makes a two-part curve called a hyperbola (fig. 4).
An interesting feature of all of these curves-the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola-was that they were generated by straight things, viz. two lines and a plane. An interesting feature of the hyperbola was that far away its legs came very close to being straight lines, but near the center there was dramatic curvature.
Greeks, e.g., Euclid, had done all of these things long ago and discovered various more or less interesting properties of conic sections (as this family of curves was called) and of other geometric constructions such as circles and triangles. But they’d done so as an exploration of pure thought, as a mathematician might compute the sum of two numbers. Every assertion that Euclid, et al., made concerning geometry was backed up by a chain of logical proofs that could be followed all the way back to a few axioms that were obviously true, e.g., “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” The truths of geometry were necessary truths; the human mind could imagine a universe in which Daniel’s name was David, or in which Ipswich had been built on the other side of the Orwell, but geometry and math had to be true, there was no conceivable universe in which 2 + 3 was equal to 2 + 2.
Occasionally one discovered correspondences between things in the real world and the figments of pure math. For example: Daniel’s trajectory from London to Ipswich had run in nearly a straight line, but after every one of the Dissenters had been let out of gaol, Daniel had executed a mighty change in direction and the next morning began riding on a rented horse towards Cambridge, following a trajectory that became straighter the farther he went. He was, in other words, describing a hyperbolic sort of path across Essex, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire.
But he was not doing so because it was a hyperbola, or (to look at it another way) it was not a hyperbola because he was doing so. This was simply the route that traders had always taken, going from market to market as they traveled up out of Ipswich with wagon-loads of imported or smuggled goods. He could have followed a zigzag course. That it looked like a hyperbola when plotted on a map of England was luck. It was a contingent truth.
It did not mean anything.
In his pocket were some notes that his patron, the good Marquis of Ravenscar, had stuffed into his pocket with the explanation “Here is a pretext.” They’d been written out by John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, apparently in response to inquiries sent down by Isaac. Daniel dared not unwrap and read this packet-the uncannily sensitive Isaac would smell Daniel’s hand-prints on the pages, or something. But the cover letter was visible. Wedged into the chinks between its great blocks of Barock verbiage were a few dry stalks of information, and by teasing these out and plaiting them together Daniel was able to collect that Newton had requested information concerning the comet of 1680; a recent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn; and the ebb and flow of tides in the ocean.