The faces around that table were warmed by port and candlelight, and exhibiting a range of feelings. But on the whole they looked satisfied. The last Master who’d tried to enforce any discipline on the place had suffered a stroke while hollering at some rowdy students. There was no preventing students and faculty from drawing weighty conclusions from such an event. His replacement was a friend of Ravenscar, an Earl who’d showed up reliably for R.S. meetings since the early 1670s and reliably fallen asleep halfway through them. He came up to Cambridge only when someone more important than he was there. The Duke of Monmouth was no longer Chancellor; he’d been stripped of all such titles during one of his banishments, and replaced by the Duke of Tweed-a.k.a. General Lewis, the L in Charles II’s CABAL.
Not that he or any other Chancellor made any difference. The college was run by the Senior Fellows. Twenty-five years earlier, just at the moment Daniel and Isaac had entered Trinity, Charles II had kicked out the Puritan scholars who had nested there under Wilkins and replaced ’em with Cavaliers who could best be described as gentlemen-scholars-in that order. While Daniel and Isaac had been educating themselves, these men had turned the college into their own personal termite-mound. Now they were Senior Fellows. The High Table diet of suet, cheese, and port had had its natural effect, and it was a toss-up as to whether their bodies or their minds had become softer.
No one could recollect the last time Isaac had set foot in this Hall. His lack of interest was looked on as proving not that something was wrong with Trinity but that something was wrong with Isaac. And in a way, this was just; if a College’s duty was to propagate a certain way of being to the next generation, this one was working perfectly, and Isaac would only have disrupted the place by bothering to participate.
The Fellows seemed to know this (this was how Daniel thought of them: not as a roomful of individuals but as The Fellows, a sort of hive or flock, an aggregate. The question of aggregates had been vexing Leibniz to no end. A flock of sheep consisted of several individual sheep and was a flock only by convention-the quality of flockness was put on it by humans-it existed only in some human’s mind as a perception. Yet Hooke had found that the human body was made up of cells-therefore, just as much an aggregate as a flock of sheep. Did this mean that the body, too, was just a figment of perception? Or was there some unifying influence that made those cells into a coherent body? And what of High Table at Trinity College? Was it more like a flock of sheep or a body? To Daniel it seemed very much like a body at the moment. To carry out the assignment given him by Roger Comstock he’d have to interrupt that mysterious unifying principle somehow, disaggregate the College, then cut a few sheep from the flock). The aggregate called Trinity noticed that Isaac only came to church once a week, on Sunday, and his behavior in the chapel was raising Trinity’s eyebrows, though unlike Puritans these High Church gentles would never come out and say what they were thinking about religion. That was all right with Daniel, who knew perfectly well what Newton was doing and what these men were thinking about it.
But later, after Daniel and several of the Fellows had filed out of the Hall and gone upstairs to a smaller room, to sit around a smaller table and drink port, Daniel used this as a sort of lure, dragging it through the pond to see if anything would rise up out of the murk and snap at it: “Given the company Newton’s been known to keep, I can’t help but wonder if he has become attracted to Popery.”
Silence.
“Gentlemen!” Daniel continued, “there’s nothing wrong with it. Remember, our King is a Catholic.”
There were thirteen other men in the room. Eleven of them found his remark to be in unspeakably poor taste (which was true) and said nothing. Daniel did not care; they’d forgive him on grounds that he’d been drinking and was well-connected. One of them understood immediately what Daniel was up to: this was Vigani, the alchemist. If Vigani had been following Isaac as closely, and listening to him as intently, as he had followed and listened to Daniel this evening, he would know a lot. For now, the ends of his mustache curled up wickedly and he hid his amusement in a goblet.
But one man, the youngest and drunkest in the room-a man who’d made no secret of the fact that he desperately wanted to get into the Royal Society-rose to the bait.
“I’d sooner expect all of Mr. Newton’s nocturnal visitors to convert to his brand of religion than he to theirs!”
This produced a few stiff chuckles, which only encouraged him. “Though God help ’em if they tried to get back into France afterwards-considering what King Louis does to Huguenots, imagine what kind of welcome he’d give to a full-blown-”
“To say nothing of Spain with the Inquisition,” said Vigani drolly. Which was a heroic and well-executed bid to change the topic to something so banal as to be a complete waste of breath-after all, the Spanish Inquisition had few defenders locally.
But Daniel had not endured years among courtiers without developing skills of his own. “I’m afraid we’ll have to wait for an English Inquisition to find out what our friend was just about to say!”
“ Thatshould be coming along any day now,” someone muttered.
They were beginning to break ranks! But Vigani had recovered: “Inquisition? Nonsense! Freedom of Conscience is the King’s byword-or so Dr. Waterhouse has been telling everyone.”
“I have been a mere conduit for what the King says.”
“But you have just come from releasing a lot of Dissenters from prison, have you not?”
“Your knowledge of my pastimes is uncanny, sir,” Daniel said. “You are correct. There are plenty of empty cells available just now.”
“Shame to waste ’em,” someone offered.
“The King will find some use for those vacancies,” predicted someone else.
“An easy prediction to make. Here’s a more difficult: what will that King’s name be?”
“England.”
“I meant his Christian name.”
“You’re assuming he’s going to be a Christian, then?”
“You’re assuming he’s one now?”
“Are we speaking of the King who lives in Whitehall, or the one who has been spotted in the Hague?”
“The one in Whitehall has been spotted ever since his years in France: spotted on his face, on his hands, on his-”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, this room is too warm and close for your wit, I beg you,” said the most senior of the Fellows present, who looked as if he might be on the verge of having a stroke of his own. “Dr. Waterhouse was merely enquiring about his old friend, our colleague, Newton-”
“Is this the version we’re all going to relate to the English Inquisition?”
“You are merry, too merry!” protested the Senior Fellow, now red in the face, and not with embarrassment. “Dr. Newton might serve as an example to you, for he goes about his work with gravity, and it is sound work in geometry, mathematics, astronomy…”
“Eschatology, astrology, alchemy…”
“No! No! Ever since Mr. Halley came up to enquire on the subject of Comets, Newton has had many fewer visitors from outside, and Signore Vigani has had to seek companionship in the Hall.”
“I need only enter the Hall and companionship is found, ” said Vigani smoothly, “there is never seeking. ”
“Please excuse me,” Daniel said, “it sounds as if Newton might welcome a visitor.”
“He might welcome a crust of bread,” someone said, “lately he has been scratching in his garden like a peckish hen.”
I cannot choose but condemn those Persons, who suffering themselves to be too much dazzled with the Lustre of the noble Actions of the Ancients, make it their Study to Extol them to the Skies; without reflecting, that these later Ages have furnished us with others more Heroick and Wonderful.