Daniel tilted his head back and looked up at the stars and supposed that seen from Drake’s perspective up in Heaven it must all look like Hell-and Daniel right in the middle of it.
BEING LOCKED UPin the Tower of London had changed Henry Oldenburg’s priorities all around. Daniel had expected that the Secretary of the Royal Society would jump headfirst into the great sack of foreign mail that Daniel had brought him, but all he cared about was the new lute-strings. He’d grown too fat to move around very effectively and so Daniel fetched necessaries from various parts of the half-moon-shaped room: Oldenburg’s lute, extra candles, a tuning-fork, some sheet-music, more wood on the fire. Oldenburg turned the lute over across his knees like a naughty boy for spanking, and tied a piece of gut or two around the instrument’s neck to serve as frets (the old ones being worn through), then replaced a couple of broken strings. Half an hour of tuning ensued (the new strings kept stretching) and then, finally, Oldenburg got what he really ached for: he and Daniel, sitting face to face in the middle of the room, sang a two-part song, the parts cleverly written so that their voices occasionally joined in chords that resonated sweetly: the curving wall of the cell acting like the mirror of Newton’s telescope to reflect the sound back to them. After a few verses, Daniel had his part memorized, and so when he sang the chorus he sat up straight and raised his chin and sang loudly at those walls, and read the graffiti cut into the stone by prisoners of centuries past. Not your vulgar Newgate Prison graffiti-most of it was in Latin, big and solemn as gravestones, and there were astrological diagrams and runic incantations graven by imprisoned sorcerers.
Then some ale to cool the wind-pipes, and a venison pie and a keg of oysters and some oranges contributed by the R.S., and Oldenburg did a quick sort of the mail-one pile containing the latest doings of the Hotel Montmor salon in Paris, a couple of letters from Huygens, a short manuscript from Spinoza, a large pile of ravings sent in by miscellaneous cranks, and a Leibniz-mound. “This damned German will never shut up!” Oldenburg grunted-which, since Oldenburg was himself a notoriously prolix German, was actually a jest at his own expense. “Let me see… Leibniz proposes to found a Societas Eruditorum that will gather in young Vagabonds and raise them up to be an army of Natural Philosophers to overawe the Jesuits… here are his thoughts on free will versus predestination… it would be great sport to get him in an argument with Spinoza… he asks me here whether I’m aware Comenius has died… says he’s ready to pick up the faltering torch of Pansophism*… here’s a light, easy-to-read analysis of how the bad Latin used by Continental scholars leads to faulty thinking, and in turn to religious schism, war, bad philosophy…”
“Sounds like Wilkins.”
“Wilkins! Yes! I’ve considered decorating these walls with some graffiti of my own, and writing it in the Universal Character… but it’s too depressing. ‘Look, we have invented a new Philosophickal Language so that when we are imprisoned by Kings we can scratch a higher form of graffiti on our cell walls.’ “
“Perhaps it’ll lead us to a world where Kings can’t, or won’t, imprison us at all-”
“Now you sound like Leibniz. Ah, here are some new mathematical proofs… nothing that hasn’t been proved already, by Englishmen… but Leibniz’s proofs are more elegant… here’s something he has modestly entitled Hypothesis Physica Nova. Good thing I’m in the Tower, or I’d never have time to read all this.”
Daniel made coffee over the fire-they drank it and smoked Virginia tobacco in clay-pipes. Then it was time for Oldenburg’s evening constitutional. He preceded Daniel down a stack of stone pie-wedges that formed a spiral stair. “I’d hold the door and say ‘after you,’ but suppose I fell-you’d end up in the basement of Broad Arrow Tower crushed beneath me-and I’d be in the pink.”
“Anything for the Royal Society,” Daniel jested, marveling at how Oldenburg’s bulk filled the helical tube of still air.
“Oh, you’re more valuable to them than I am,” Oldenburg said.
“Poh!”
“I am near the end of my usefulness. You are just beginning. They have great plans for you-”
“Until yesterday I wouldn’t’ve believed you-then I was allowed to hear a conversation-perfectly incomprehensible to me-but it sounded frightfully important.”
“Tell me about this conversation.”
They came out onto the top of the old stone curtain-wall that joined Broad Arrow Tower to Salt Tower on the south. Arm in arm, they strolled along the battlements. To the left they could look across the moat-an artificial oxbow-lake that communicated with the Thames-and a defensive glacis beyond that, then a few barracks and warehouses having to do with the Navy, and then the pasture-grounds of Wapping crooked in an elbow of the Thames, dim lights out at Ratcliff and Limehouse-then a blackness containing, among other things, Europe.
“The Dramatis Personae: John Wilkins, Lord Bishop of Chester, and Mr. Samuel Pepys Esquire, Admiral’s Secretary, Treasurer of the Fleet, Clerk of Acts of the Navy Board, deputy Clerk of the Privy Seal, Member of the Fishery Corporation, Treasurer of the Tangier Committee, right-hand-man of the Earl of Sandwich, courtier… am I leaving anything out?”
“Fellow of the Royal Society.”
“Oh, yes… thank you.”
“What said they?”
“First a brief speculation about who was reading your mail…”
“I assume it’s John Comstock. He spied for the King during the Interregnum, why can’t he spy for the King now?”
“Rings true… this led to some double entendres about tender negotiations. Mr. Pepys volunteered-speaking of the King of England, here-‘his feelings for sa soeur are most affectionate, he’s writing many letters to her.’ “
“Well, you know that Minette is in France-”
“Minette?”
“That is what King Charles calls Henrietta Anne, his sister,” Oldenburg explained. “I don’t recommend using that name in polite society-unless you want to move in with me.”
“She’s the one who’s married to the Duc d’Orleans*-?”
“Yes, and Mr. Pepys’s lapsing into French was of course a way of emphasizing this. Pray continue.”
“My Lord Wilkins wondered whether she wrote back, and Pepys said Minette was spewing out letters like a diplomat.”
Oldenburg cringed, and shook his head in dismay. “Very crude work on Mr. Pepys’s part. He was letting it be known that this exchange of letters was some sort of diplomatic negotiation. But he did not need to be so coarse with Wilkins… he must have been tired, distracted…”
“He’d been working late-lots of gold going into the Navy Treasury under cover of darkness.”
“I know it-behold!” Oldenburg said, and, tightening his arm, swung Daniel round so that both of them were looking west, across the Inmost Ward. They were near Salt Tower, which was the southeastern corner of the squarish Tower complex. The southern wall, therefore, stretched away from them, paralleling the river, connecting a row of squat round towers. Off to their right, planted in the center of the ward, was the ancient donjon: a freestanding building called the White Tower. A few low walls partitioned the ward into smaller quadrangles, but from this viewpoint the most conspicuous structure was the great western wall, built strong to resist attack from the always difficult City of London. On the far side of that wall, hidden from their view, a street ran up a narrow defile between it and a somewhat lower outer wall. Stout piles of smoke and steam were building from that street-which was lined with works for melting and working precious metals. It was called Mint Street. “Their infernal hammers keep me awake-the smoke of their furnaces comes in through the embrasures.” Walls hereabouts tended to have narrow cross-shaped arrow-slits called embrasures, which was one of the reasons the Tower made a good prison, especially for fat men.