What is the optimal size (he wonders) of a shard of pottery for firing out of a blunderbuss? When the King’s guards shot him before his father’s house during the Fire, he was knocked down, bruised, cut, but not really penetrated. Probably the larger the better, which makes his job easier-one would like to see great sharp triangles of gaudily-painted porcelain spinning through the air, plunging into pirate-flesh, severing major vessels. But too large and it won’t pack into the barrels. He decides to aim for a mean diameter of half an inch, and mauls the plates accordingly, sweeping chunks that are the right size off into small canvas bags, raking bigger ones toward him for more punishment. It is satisfying, and after a while he finds himself singing an old song: the same one he sang with Oldenburg in Broad Arrow Tower. He keeps time with his hammer, and draws out those notes that make the cargo-hold resonate. All round him, water seeps through the cracks between Minerva ’s hull-planks (for he is well below the water-line) and trickles down merrily into the bilge, and the four-man pumps take it away with a steady suck-and-hiss that’s like the systole and diastole of a beating heart.
The Inquisitive Jesuit RICCIOLI has taken great pains by 77 Arguments to overthrow the Copernican Hypothesis… I believe this one Discovery will answer them, and 77 more, if so many can be thought of and produced against it.
–ROBERTHOOKE
DANIEL SPENT A GOOD PARTof two months on the roof of Gresham’s College, working on a hole-making, not mending, one. Hooke could not do it because his vertigo had been acting up, and if it struck while he was on top of the College, he would plunge to the ground like a wormy apple from a tree, his Last Experiment a study into the mysterious power of Gravitation.
For a man who claimed to hate the appearance of sharp things when viewed under a microscope, Hooke spent a great deal of time honing jabs at Inquisitive Jesuits. While Daniel was up on the roof making the hole, and a rain-hatch to cover it, Hooke was safe at ground level, running up and down a gallery. Strapped into his groin was a narrow hard saddle, and projecting from the saddle a strut with a wheel on the end, geared to a clock-work diaclass="underline" a pedometer of his own design, which enabled him to calculate how much distance he had covered going nowhere. The purpose-as he explained to Daniel and diverse other aghast Fellows of the R.S.-was not to get from point A to point B, but to sweat. In some way, sweating would purge his body of whatever caused his headaches, nausea, and vertigo. From time to time, he would stop and refresh himself by drinking a glass of elemental mercury. He had set up a table at one end of the gallery where he stockpiled that and several of Mons. LeFebure’s fashionable medicines. There were various sorts of quills, too. Some of them he used to tickle the back of his throat and induce vomiting, others he sharpened, dipped in ink, and used to note down data from his pedometer, or to vent his spleen at Jesuits who refused to admit that the Earth revolved around the Sun, or to sketch out plans for Bedlam, or to write diatribes against Oldenburg, or simply to transact the routine business of the City Surveyor.
The Inquisitive Jesuit Riccioli had pointed out that if the heavens were sown with stars, some near and some far, and if the Earth were looping round the Sun in a vast ellipse, then the positions of those stars with respect to one another should shift during the course of the year, as trees in a forest changed their relative positions in the eyes of a traveler moving past. But no such parallax had been observed, which proved (to Riccioli, anyway) that the Earth must be fixed in the center of the Universe. To Hooke it only proved that good enough telescopes hadn’t been built, nor precise enough measurements made. To obtain the level of magnification he needed, he had to construct a telescope 32 feet long. To annull the light-bending effects of the Earth’s atmosphere (which were obvious from the fact that the Sun became an oval when it rose or set), he had to aim it straight up-hence the demand for a vertical shaft to be bored through Gresham’s College. Gresham’s antique mansion was now like an ancient plaster wall that had been mended so many times it consisted entirely of interlocked patches. It was solid scar tissue. This made the work more interesting for Daniel, and taught him more than he’d ever cared to know about how buildings were put up, and what kept them from falling down.
The goal was to gaze straight up into Heaven, and count the miles to the nearest stars. But as Daniel did most of the work during the daytime, he spent most of his idle moments looking down into London-six years since the Fire now-but its reconstruction really just getting underway.
Formerly Gresham’s College had huddled among buildings of about the same height, but the Fire had burnt almost to its front door, and so now it loomed like a manor house over a devastated fiefdom. If Daniel stood on the ridge of the roof, facing south toward London Bridge half a mile away, everything in his field of view bore marks of heat and smoke. Suppose the city were a giant Hooke-watch, with Gresham’s College the central axle-tree, and London Bridge marking twelve o’clock. Then Bedlam was directly behind Daniel at six o’clock. The Tower of London was at about ten o’clock. The easterly wind, and its glacis, had preserved it from the flames. The wedge from the Tower to the Bridge was a tangle of old streets with charred spikes of old church-steeples jutting up here and there, like surveyor’s stakes-literally. This to the chagrin of Hooke, who’d presented the City with a plan to rationalize the streets, only to be frustrated by a few such impediments that had survived the flames; for those who opposed his plans used the carbonized steeples as landmarks to shew where streets had once been, and ought to be remade, be they never so narrow and tortuous. The negative space between construction-sites defined new streets now, only a little wider and straighter than the old. Right in the center of this wedge was the place where the Fire had started-an empty moon-crater cordoned off so that Hooke and Wren could build a monument there.
Directly before Daniel, in the wedge from about noon to one o’clock, was the old goldsmiths’ district of Threadneedle and Cornhill streets, which converged at the site of the Royal Exchange-all so close that Daniel could hear the eternal flame of buying and selling in the courtyard of the ‘Change, fueled by the latest data from abroad, and he could look into the windows of Thomas Ham’s house and see Mayflower (like a matron) plumping pillows and (like a schoolgirl) playing leapfrog with William Ham, her youngest child, her dear heart.
The west-bound street formed by the confluence of Threadneedle and Cornhill became Cheapside, which Hooke had insisted on making much wider than it had been before-eliciting screams of agony and near-apocalyptic rantings from many-attacks that Hooke, who cared less than anyone what people thought of him, was uniquely qualified to ignore. It ran straight as Hooke could make it to the once and future St. Paul’s, now a moraine of blackened stones, congealed roofing-lead, and plague-victims’ jumbled bones. Wren was still working on plans and models for the new one. The streets limning St. Paul’s Churchyard were lined with printers’ shops, including the ones that produced most Royal Society publications, so the trip up and down Cheapside had become familiar to Daniel, as he went there to fetch copies of Hooke’s Micrographia or inspect the proofs for Wilkins’s Universal Character.