Raising my voice, I said, ‘Straw will not solve your problem here.’
‘Who’s there?’ the rougher of the two male voices called. A lantern was raised, illuminating three faces. ‘What are you doing here, sir? This is the king’s property.’
‘And I am here at his command.’ I stepped forward. ‘Carlo Demirco, at your service.’
‘The confectioner?’
‘The same.’
The group coming towards me consisted of three people, wrapped in thick coats against the cold. The man with the lantern was evidently the one called John: the other man, the one who had suggested straw, was being helped by a woman, who was supporting his arm at the elbow. In his other hand he held a stick, on which he leaned. It was this man who now eagerly addressed me.
‘Tell us, Demirco. Why is straw not sufficient?’
‘All the straw in the world will not make up for a poor design.’
‘Mind your manners,’ the rough man growled. ‘It was the Honourable Robert Boyle here who instructed the architects, after the drawings brought back from Italy by Sir John Evelyn.’
I shrugged. ‘The building is sound enough. It is the location that is flawed. And the central drain is either blocked or inadequate.’
‘A central drain!’ Boyle said. ‘Of course! How do they drain such places in Italy, then?’
‘In Elorence they place a cartwheel over a central pipe so that it removes any meltwater. Ice keeps better if it is dry.’
‘Is that so?’ Boyle asked keenly. ‘Now that I think of it, it may
be. Water is the natural element of ice, so it may facilitate the transition of the chilling corpuscles . . . We could determine it with a simple investigation. Come.’
He hurried outside, and crossed to' a building immediately
behind the ice house. We all followed, the woman because she was *>
still supporting his arm, the rest of us - it seemed t© me - simply because Boyle had a natural air of command.
‘Be careful, uncle,’ the woman said anxiously. ‘You have already been in the cold for twenty minutes, and Dr Sydenham said—’
‘If a man could get sick from cold,’ Boyle said cheerfully, ‘I should have been dead long ago. In here, Demirco.’
He opened a heavy door and we entered a room that was light and cold. It was, I realised, a workshop of some sort, the shelves lined with chemical apparatus; alembics, mortars, measures and so on. ‘What is this place.>’ I asked, curious.
Boyle was by now weighing some small blocks of ice, and noting down the amounts in a pocketbook. ‘My elaboratory. My second elaboratory, I should say. Here, with the king’s permission, I carry out my investigations into cold.’ He glanced at me. ‘Perhaps you think it strange, sir, that a chemist chooses to work with ice rather than with a furnace.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I have spent my life working with ice. And yet I believe I understand its properties only dimly.’
He nodded. ‘Then let us take a small piece of ice, and place it in water, so, and then a similar piece, pladed so it wiU drain. Which will melt faster.>’
‘It is a waste of time,’ I said, shrugging. ‘I already know the answer.’
‘Perhaps, sir, but I do not, and until I have proved it to my own satisfaction I do not hold it to be true. Nullius in verba., yes?’
‘It is the motto of their society,’ the woman explained.
A dim memory from the schoolroom came into my head. “‘There is no truth in words, and so I will not swear to the authority of any master.” Horace, isn’t it?’
‘Very good,’ Boyle said, nodding.
‘But I think the results of this experiment may be the exact opposite of what Signor Demirco has described,’ the woman said thoughtfully. ‘Because ice in a drink makes the drink very cold, whereas ice irf air does not cool down the room to the same extent.’
‘Well, we shall see, we shall see,’ Boyle said happily. ‘But first. . .’ He was hunting through a stack of papers. ‘Here. Demirco, show us where we have gone wrong.’
He spread the architect’s plans in front of me. With them were some sketches torn from a traveller’s notebook.
‘The drain goes here,’ I said, pointing. ‘But even if you make a drain, you will still have the problem of those trees. Better to have your ice house sunk into the earth, and in an open clearing.’
‘Then we shall have to fell the trees, and bank the earth,’ Boyle said. ‘What do you say, John?’
The other man sighed. ‘If it is necessary, we will do it. Although we have not yet started on the bridge for the king’s new road to Chelsea, nor the birdcages on the walk.’
‘Roads can wait. Ice melts,’ Boyle said. ‘Speaking of which . . .’ He turned to the blocks of ice on the table.
‘The one in water does appear to be shrinking faster,’ his niece conceded.
Boyle consulted a pocket watch. ‘I wish now I had thought to add a third bowl, with some salt. It would be interesting to compare the rate at which that speeds up the process.’
‘You mean saltpetre,’ I said, then bit my tongue. I should not have been discussing the secrets of my art with any Englishman, let alone one so clearly capable of understanding them.
But Boyle was shaking his head. ‘Saltpetre? No, that is very oldfashioned. Saltpetre is of no more use than ordinary salt for this process.’
‘Ordinary salt?’ I repeated. ‘But that cannot—’ I stopped, confused.
Boyle shot me an amused look. ‘I can assure you, sir: if you have been using saltpetre, you have been wasting a great deal of money. It is, as it were, the salt and not the petre that has been doing the job you require. The corpuscles within the salt are attracted to those within the ice, and thus release them from their solid state.’
T thought not all the Fellows agreed with your corpuscular theory, uncle,’ the woman murmured.
He frowned. ‘They do not disagree. Some of the virtuosi require more proof That is a different matter altogether.’
‘■'■‘'VirtuosiV'’'' I enquired.
‘The invisible college,’ Boyle said. ‘The Gresham Gang.’
‘He means The Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘A group of natural philosophers, who investigate and debate such matters.’
Boyle nodded. ‘Cold is one of our particular interests.’
‘Though it is fair to say,’ she added, ‘that so many other natural phenomena also come under that heading, that cold is scarcely unique on that account. Or even particular.’
‘I see,’ I said. Then something occurred to me. ‘Would your . . . philosophical investigations be able to tell you why certain liquids freeze thicker than others?’
‘Go on,’ said Boyle. ‘I sense an interesting mystery’
‘It is simply . . .’ I stopped, unsure how to put this. ‘I wish to make an ice cream that is truly smooth'. Not one that crunches between your teeth, with bits of frozen water in it. I managed it once, but I have been unable to discover since what it was that made it work.’
‘An ice that contains no bits of ice?’ Boyle said with a smile. ‘Well, compared with designing the new cathedral, or understanding circulation, it is perhaps not so very pressing a matter. But if I know my colleagues, it is exactly the sort of problem that would capture their fancy. We could devise some experiments, set you on the right path, and then, if we were successful, publish our findings—’
“■v,
138
“‘Publish?’” I said quickly. ‘What do you mean, “publish”?’
‘My dear fellow, there is no point in acquiring knowledge unless it is made public. That is how our society operates: every experiment is faithfully minuted, debated, verified and subsequently pubUshed, for the benefit of all.’
‘At which point,’ Elizabeth added, ‘the arguments usually start.’
‘There are occasionally some small matters of precedence or originality to be determined,’ Boyle conceded. ‘The point is, we jostle for experimental prominence, not commercial advantage.’