Is the weather in London still quite dismal? From the vantage point of Versailles, I can assure you that spring approaches London. Soon, I will be approaching, too.
Daniel (who was reading this in the College’s entrance hall) stopped there, stuffed the letter into his belt, and stumbled into the penetralia of the Pile. Not even Sir Thomas Gresham his own self would be able to find his way around the place now, if he should come back to haunt it. The R.S. had been having its way with the building for almost three decades and it was just about spent. Daniel scoffed at all talk of building a new Wren-designed structure and moving the Society into it. The Royal Society was not reducible to an inventory of strange objects, and could not be re-located by transporting that inventory to a new building, any more than a man could travel to France by having his internal organs cut out and packed in barrels and shipped across the Channel. As a geometric proof contained, in its terms and its references, the whole history of geometry, so the piles of stuff in the larger Pile that was Gresham’s College encoded the development of Natural Philosophy from the first meetings of Boyle, Wren, Hooke, and Wilkins up until to-day. Their arrangement, the order of stratifications, reflected what was going on in the minds of the Fellows (predominantly Hooke) in any given epoch, and to move it, or to tidy it up, would have been akin to burning a library. Anyone who could not find what he needed there, didn’t deserve to be let in. Daniel felt about the place as a Frenchman felt about the French language, which was to say that it all made perfect sense once you understood it, and if you didn’t understand it, then to hell with you.
He found a copy of the I Ching in about a minute, in the dark, and carrying it over to where rosy-fingered Dawn was clawing desperately at a grime-caked window, found the hexagram 19, Lin, Approach. The book went on at length concerning the bottomless significance of this symbol, but the only meaning that mattered to Daniel was 000011, which was how the pattern of broken and unbroken lines translated to binary notation. In decimal notation this was 3.
It would have been perfectly all right for Daniel to have crawled up to his garret atop the College and fallen asleep, but he felt that having been stupefied with opium for a night and a day ought to have enabled him to catch up on his sleep, and events in the Star Chamber and later in Hogs-den had got him rather keyed up. Any one of these three things sufficed to prevent sleep: the raw wounds around his neck, the commotion of the City coming awake, and his beastly, uncontrollable lust for Eliza. He went up-stairs to a room that was optimistically called the Library, not because it had books (every room did) but because it had windows. Here he spread out Eliza’s letter on a table all streaked and splotched with disturbing stains. Next to it he set down a rectangle of scrap paper (actually a proof of a woodcut intended for Volume III of Newton’s Principia Mathematica). Examining the characters in Eliza’s letter one by one, he assigned each to either the 0 alphabet or the 1 alphabet and wrote a corresponding digit on the scrap paper, arranging them in groups of five. Thus
The first group of binary digits made the number 12, the second 4, the next 16, and the one after that 6. So writing these out on a new line, and subtracting a 3 from each, he got
Which made the letters
The light got better as he worked.
Leibniz was building a splendid library in Wolfenbuttel, with a high rotunda that would shed light down onto the table below…
His forehead was on the table. Not a good way to work. Not a good way to sleep either, unless your neck was so torn up as to make lying down impossible, in which case it was the only way to sleep. And Daniel had been sleeping. The pages under his face were a sea of awful light, the unfair light of noon.
“Truly you are an inspiration to all Natural Philosophers, Daniel Waterhouse.”
Daniel sat up. He was stiff as a grotesque. He could feel and hear the scab-work on his neck cracking. Seated two tables away, quill in hand, was Nicolas Fatio de Duilliers.
“Sir!”
Fatio held up a hand. “I do not mean to disturb you, there is no need for-”
“Ah, but there is a need for me to express my gratitude. I have not seen you since you saved the life of the Prince of Orange.”
Fatio closed his eyes for a moment. “’Twas like a conjunction of planets, purely fortuitous, reflecting no distinction on me, and let us say no more of it.”
“I learned only recently that you were in town-that your life was in danger so long as you remained on the Continent. Had I known as much earlier, I’d have offered you whatever hospitality I could-”
“And if I were worthy of the title of gentleman, I’d have waited for that offer before making myself at home here,” Fatio returned.
“Isaac of course has given you the run of the place and that is splendid.”
Daniel now noticed Fatio gazing at him with a penetrating, analytical look that reminded him of Hooke peering through a lens. From Hooke it was not objectionable, somehow. From Fatio it was mildly offensive. Of course Fatio was wondering how Daniel knew that he’d been hobnobbing with Isaac. Daniel could have told him the story about Jeffreys and the Star Chamber, but it would only have confused matters more.
Fatio now appeared to notice, for the first time, the damage to Daniel’s neck. His eyes saw all, but they were so big and luminous that it was impossible for him to conceal what he was gazing at; unlike the eyes of Jeffreys, which could secretly peer this way and that in the shadow of their deep embrasures, Fatio’s eyes could never be used discreetly.
“Don’t ask,” Daniel said. “You, sir, suffered an honorable wound on the beach. I’ve suffered one, not so honorable, but in the same cause, in London.”
“Are you quite all right, Doctor Waterhouse?”
“Splendid of you to inquire. I am fine. A cup of coffee and I’ll be as good as new.”
Whereupon Daniel snatched up his papers and repaired to the coffee-house, which was full of people and yet where he felt more privacy than under the eyes of Fatio.
The binary digits hidden in the subtleties of Eliza’s handwriting became, in decimal notation,
which when he subtracted 3 from each (that being the key hidden in the I Ching reference) became
which said,
THE FULL DECIPHERMENTtook a while, because Eliza provided details concerning her travel plans, and wrote of all she wanted to do while she was in London. When he was finished writing out the message he came alive to the fact that he had sat for a long time, and consumed much coffee, and needed to urinate in the worst way. He could not recall the last time he had made water. And so he went back to a sort of piss-hole in the corner of the tiny court in back of the coffeehouse.
Nothing happened, and so after about half a minute he bent forward as if bowing, and braced his forehead against the stone wall. He had learned that this helped to relax some of the muscles in his lower abdomen and make the urine come out more freely. That stratagem, combined with some artful shifting of the hips and deep breathing, elicited a few spurts of rust-colored urine. When it ceased to work, he turned round, pulled his garments up around his waist, and squatted to piss in the Arab style. By shifting his center of gravity just so, he was able to start up a kind of gradual warm seepage that would provide relief if he kept it up for a while.
This gave him lots of time to think of Eliza, if spinning phant’sies could be named thinking. It was plain from her letter that she expected to visit Whitehall Palace. Which signified little, since any person who was wearing clothes and not carrying a lighted granadoe could go in and wander about the place. But since Eliza was a Countess who dwelt at Versailles, and Daniel (in spite of Jeffreys) a sort of courtier, when she said she wanted to visit Whitehall it meant that she expected to stroll and sup with Persons of Quality. Which could easily be arranged, since the Catholic Francophiles who made up most of the King’s court would fall all over themselves making way for Eliza, if only to get a look at the spring fashions.