“Simple extrapolation told me that Bedlam might be next. I paid Mr. Stubbs to show especial vigilance. John Doe was captured a week ago. He has done his utmost, I am told, to keep up the facade of a raving lunatick. Now that he knows what treatment lunaticks may expect in Bedlam, he may confess to simple burglary.” Daniel caught Stubbs’s eye-which was not easily done, as Stubbs was paralyzed with astonishment to see what was being dragged out of the walls. “Pray go to John Doe’s cell. Tell him nothing about what has really occurred. Rather, tell him that Dr. Waterhouse has knocked holes in all four corners, and found nothing-proof that Doe is a madman indeed, who may, therefore, look forward to a stay here of indefinite duration.”
Peter Hoxton had been carrying out a rough sort of the booty from the wall. Which was to say, he had raked out all that was of Saturnine interest and put the discards in another, larger pile. He had already culled out enough to keep him rapt for weeks: for the trunks were packed with small wooden chests, and the chests with fine instruments wrought of brass, and even of gold. Many of these were obviously clock-work. Saturn, wary of the dust, peered quickly at these, then closed them up and stacked them out of harm’s way, covering them with a large drawing which he pressed into service as a tarpaulin. But the drawing itself-a phantastickal rendering of the skeleton of a bird-had now cozened him into rigid fascination. Isaac too was drawn to it. “I thought it were a rendering of a bird, at first,” Saturn said, “until I spied this cull-” and he pointed to a snarl of lines that Hooke had, over the course of a few seconds’ lazy yet furious drawing, scrawled and slashed onto the page. These by some miracle added up to a perfectly intelligible rendering of a man in breeches, waistcoat, and periwig, standing with arms raised above his head to support one joint of the wing. If this was supposed to be a bird, it would have a wingspan several times that of the largest albatross. But where a bird would have muscles to pull, this skeleton had pistons and cylinders to push, the great bones of the wings. It was inside-out and backwards, exoskeletal.
Daniel’s gaze fell on a great leather wallet, gnawed at the corners by rodents, but still intact. He unwound the ribbon that held it closed, and spread it out on the lid of a trunk. It was a stack of foolscap sheets rising to the thickness of three fingers, creased and compressed from long immurement, but still perfectly legible. It contained notes, written in Hooke’s hand, and illustrated with more admirable diagrams, on divers subjects:
Dr. Dee’s Book of Spirits expos’d
Animadversions upon Dr. Vossius’s Hypothesis of Gravitation
Acerbity in Fruits
Plagiarism in the Parisian Academy
Cryptography of Trithemius
Sheathing ships with lead, as practic’d by the Chinese
Telescopick Sights for Instruments Vindicated
Inconceivable Distance of the Fixt Stars
Parisian philosophers evade Proof from Observations, when they are unwilling to allow Consequences
272 Vibrations of a String in a Second, make the sound of G Sol re ut
Python explain’d
Of the Rowing of Ancient Gallies
Structure of Muscles explain’d
Iron and Sp. Salis take fire with explosion
Unguent for Burns, a Receipt
Ideas are corporeal, with their Explication, and the possible number that may be formed in a Man’s Life
Monkeys wherein different from Men
How Light is produced in putrifying Bodies
Micrometer of a new contrivance
A Cause hinted of the Libration of the Moon
Flints: of their formation and former fluidity
French Academy have published some Matters first discovered here
Why freezing expands water
Effects of Earthquakes on the Constitution of Air
Hills generated by Earthquakes
Hob’s Hypothesis of Gravity defective
Flying Fish, and of Flying in general
Center of the Earth not the Center of Gravity
Decay in human bodies observed
Anthelme’s Opinion of Light refuted
The Genuine Receipt for making Orvietano
Why heat is not sensible in the Moon’s Rays
Gravity and Light the two great Laws of Nature, are but different Effects of the same Cause
Hodometrickal Method for finding the Longitude
Effects on one Experimenter of the Plant, call’d Bangue by the Portugals, amp; Gange by the Moors
Mechanical Way of drawing Conical Figures
Burning-glasses of the Ancients
Implicit was that Hooke had concealed these in the walls of Bedlam because he would not entrust the Royal Society-specifically, Newton-with his legacy. And so Daniel began to read these titles aloud as a sort of rebuke to Isaac. But having started in on such a Litany, he found it difficult to stop. This was a sort of concentrated essence of that quicksilver spirit that had animated Daniel’s, and the Royal Society’s, halcyon days. To handle these pages was to drink deep from the Fountain of Youth.
What eventually stopped him was a page written, not in English like most of the others, and not in Latin like some of them, but in a wholly different alphabet. The characters on this page bore no relationship to any from the Roman, Greek, or Hebrew script; they were not Cyrillic, not Arabic, and yet bore no connection to any of the writing-systems of Asia. It was an admirably simple, clean, and lucid way of writing-if only one could understand it. And Daniel almost could. The sight of it stopped him cold for a minute. He was just beginning to decipher the glyphs of the title when Saturn put in: “I have already come across several of those, Doc-what tongue is that?”
Isaac, gazing at the leaf in Daniel’s hand from three yards away, answered the question: “It is the Real Character,” he said, “a language invented by the late John Wilkins, on philosophical principles, in hopes that it would drive out Latin. Hooke and Wren adopted it for a time. Can you still read it, Daniel?”
“Can you, Isaac?” Daniel asked; for it might be important for him to know this.
“Not without revising Wilkins’s book.”
“It is a receipt,” Daniel said, elevating the page slightly, “for a restorative medicine, made from gold.”
“Then pray do not waste time translating it,” Isaac said, “for we all know of the late Mr. Hooke’s susceptibility to quackery.”
“This is not Hooke’s receipt,” Daniel said. “He wrote it out, but did not invent it. He gives credit to the same fellow who shewed the Royal Society how to make Phosphorus.” To Saturn and diverse other eavesdroppers this signified nothing, but to Isaac it was as good as saying Enoch the Red. As such it drew Isaac’s full and disconcertingly sharp attention. “Pray go on, Daniel.”
“It begins with a sort of narration. An account of something Hooke witnessed somewhere…” A long pause now for difficult translation, then sudden knowledge: “No, here! Just here, where we are standing. The date given is…if my arithmetick is to be credited…anno domini 1689.”
“The same year, and place, as your strangely premature going-away party,” Saturn reflected.
This tripped Daniel up for a moment, being an acute observation on Saturn’s part, and one that Daniel had entirely missed. But Isaac urged him to go on, and so he did, haltingly: “It began with a medical-no, a surgical procedure on a subject-human-male-aged two score and three.”
“Ah, a contemporary of you two gentlemen!” Saturn put in. “Perhaps you knew him.”
“He was quite ill because of a stone. A stone in his bladder. Hooke performed a lithotomy.”
“What, here!?” Saturn exclaimed, looking about.
“I have seen them done in the street,” Daniel said.
“It would not be the strangest thing Hooke did here,” Isaac assured Saturn.
“That becomes the clearer, the more we go through his leavings,” Saturn mused.
“Pray continue, Daniel!”
“The procedure went normally. However, the patient…the patient died,” Daniel translated. He had begun to feel unaccountably woozy, and took a moment now to sit down atop a dusty trunk, lest he lose consciousness and topple over the balustrade into Bedlam’s Well of Souls. “I beg your pardon…the patient died, as often happens, of shock. No pulse was evident. Whereupon the learned fellow I spoke of earlier emerged from a place of concealment, from which he had been observing the procedure.”