The sound of men thinking.
Pepys: “Then you could build a container that was a certain number of those units high, wide, and deep; fill it with water; and have a standard measure of weight.”
“Just so, Mr. Pepys.”
“From length and weight you could make a standard pendulum-the time of its alternations would provide a universal unit of time!”
“But water beads up differently on different surfaces,” said the Bishop of Chester. “I assume the same sorts of variations occur with mercury.”
Hooke, resentfuclass="underline" “The surface to be used could be stipulated: copper, or glass…”
“If the force of gravity varies with altitude, how would that affect the height of the drop?” asked Daniel Waterhouse.
“Do it at sea-level,” said Hooke, with a dollop of spleen.
“Sea-level varies with the tides,” Pepys pointed out.
“What of other planets?” Wilkins demanded thunderously.
“Other planets!? We haven’t finished with this one!”
“As our compatriot Mr. Oldenburg has said: ‘You will please to remember that we have taken to task the whole Universe, and that we were obliged to do so by the nature of our Design!’ “
Hooke, very stormy-looking now, scraped most of the quicksilver into a funnel, and thence into a flask; departed; and was sighted by Mr. Pepys (peering through the Newtonian reflector) no more than a minute later, stalking off towards Hounsditch in the company of a whore. “He’s flown into one of his Fits of Melancholy-we won’t see him for two weeks now-then we’ll have to reprimand him,” Wilkins grumbled.
Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together-that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them. But they could not all break free at once: Churchill and others wanted more details from Daniel about this Mr. Newton and his telescope. The Duke of Gunfleet got Pepys cornered, and interrogated him about dark matters concerning the Navy’s finances. Blood-spattered, dejected Royal Society members stumbled in from Gresham’s College, with the news that Drs. King and Belle had gotten lost in the wilderness of canine anatomy, the dog had died, and they really needed Hooke-where was he? Then they cornered Bishop Wilkins and talked Royal Society politics-would Comstock stand for election to President again? Would Anglesey arrange to have himself nominated?
BUT LATER-too late for Daniel, who had risen early, when Isaac had-the three of them were together in Pepys’s coach, going somewhere.
“I note my Lord Gunfleet has taken up a sudden interest in Naval -gazing,” said Wilkins.
“As our safety from the Dutch depends upon our Navy,” Pepys said carefully, “and most of our Navy is arrayed before the Casbah in Algiers, many Persons of Quality share Anglesey’s curiosity.”
Wilkins only looked amused. “I did not hear him asking you of frigates and cannons,” he said, “but of Bills of Exchange, and pay-coupons.”
Pepys cleared his throat at length, and glanced nervously at Daniel. “Those who are responsible for draining the Navy’s coffers, must answer to those who are responsible for filling them,” he finally said.
Even Daniel, a dull Cambridge scholar, had the wit to know that the coffer-drainer being referred to here was the armaments-maker John Comstock, Earl of Epsom-and that the coffer-filler was Thomas More Anglesey, Duke of Gunfleet, and father of Louis Anglesey, the Earl of Upnor.
“Thus C and A,” Wilkins said. “What does the Cabal’s second syllable have to say of Naval matters?”
“No surprises from Bolstrood*of course.”
“Some say Bolstrood wants our Navy in Africa, so that the Dutch can invade us, and make of us a Calvinist nation.”
“Given that the V.O.C.*is paying out dividends of forty percent, I think that there are many new Calvinists on Threadneedle Street.”
“Is Apthorp one of them?”
“Those rumors are nonsense-Apthorp would rather build his East India Company, than invest in the Dutch one.”
“So it follows that Apthorp wants a strong Navy, to protect our merchant ships from those Dutch East Indiamen, so topheavy with cannons.”
“Yes.”
“What of General Lewis?”
“Let’s ask the young scholar,” Pepys said mischievously.
Daniel was dumbstruck for a few moments-to the gurgling, boyish amusement of Pepys and Wilkins.
The telescope seemed to be watching Daniel, too: it sat in its box across from him, a disembodied sensory organ belonging to Isaac Newton, staring at him with more than human acuteness. He heard Isaac demanding to know what on earth he, Daniel Waterhouse, could possibly be doing, riding across London in Samuel Pepys’s coach-pretending to be a man of affairs!
“Err… a weak Navy forces us to keep a strong Army, to fight off any Dutch invasions,” Daniel said, thinking aloud.
“But with a strong Navy, we can invade the Hollanders!” Wilkins protested. “More glory for General Lewis, Duke of Tweed!”
“Not without French help,” Daniel said, after a few moments’ consideration, “and my lord Tweed is too much the Presbyterian.”
“Is this the same good Presbyterian who enjoyed a secret earldom at the exile court at St. Germaines, when Cromwell ruled the land?”
“He is a Royalist, that’s all,” Daniel demurred.
What was he doing in this carriage having this conversation, besides going out on a limb, and making a fool of himself? The real answer was known only to John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, Author of both the Cryptonomicon and the Philosophical Language, who encrypted with his left hand and made things known to all possible worlds with his right. Who’d gotten Daniel into Trinity College-invited him out to Epsom during the Plague-nominated him for the Royal Society-and now, it seemed, had something else in mind for him. Was Daniel here as an apprentice, sitting at the master’s knee? It was shockingly prideful, and radically non-Puritan, for him to think so-but he could come up with no other hypothesis.
“Right, then, it all has to do with Mr. Oldenburg’s letters abroad…” Pepys said, when some change in the baroscopic pressure (or something) signified it was time to drop pretenses and talk seriously.
Wilkins: “I assumed that. Which one?”
“Does it matter? All of the GRUBENDOL letters are intercepted and read before he even sees them.”
“I’ve always wondered who does the reading,” Wilkins reflected. “He must be very bright, or else perpetually confused.”
“Likewise, all of Oldenburg’s outgoing mail is examined-you knew this.”
“And in some letter, he said something indiscreet-?”
“It is simply that the sheer volume of his foreign correspondence-taken together with the fact that he’s from Germany- andthat he’s worked as a diplomat on the Continent-and that he’s a friend of Cromwell’s Puritanickal poet-”
“John Milton.”
“Yes… finally, consider that no one at court understands even a tenth of what he’s saying in his letters-it makes a certain type of person nervous.”
“Are you saying he was thrown into the Tower of London on general principles?”
“As a precaution, yes.”
“What-does that mean he has to stay in there for the rest of his life?”
“Of course not… only until certain very tender negotiations are finished.”
“Tender negotiations…” Wilkins repeated a few times, as if further information could thus be pounded out of the dry and pithy words.