“All right, I admit it’s only a pretext.”
“What then is your real reason?”
“I would attempt, one last time, to attain some reconciliation with Newton, and to settle the calculus dispute in some way that is not squalid.”
“A much sounder and nobler motive,” Daniel said. “Now, let me explain to you why it shall not work, and why you should simply go home.” And then he did, against his better judgment, discourse of Alchemy for a little while, explaining that Newton’s desire to control the Solomonic Gold arose not simply out of a practical need to survive the Trial of the Pyx but out of a quest to obtain the Philosophick Mercury and the Philosopher’s Stone.
But it was to no avail. It only confirmed Leibniz’s desire to remain in London. “If what you are saying is true, Daniel, it means that the root of the problem is a philosophical confusion on Newton’s part. And as I need not explain to you, it is the same confusion that underlies our disputes in the realm of Natural Philosophy.”
“On the contrary, Gottfried, I think that the question of who invented the calculus first is very much one of the who-did-what-to-whom type; a what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it sort of affair.”
“Daniel, it is true, is it not, that Newton kept his calculus work secret for decades?”
Daniel assented, very grudgingly. He was perfectly aware that to admit to any premise in a conversation with Leibniz would lead to a Socratic bear-trap banging shut on his leg a few minutes later.
“Who started the Acta Eruditorum, Daniel?”
“You, and that other chap. Listen, I stipulate that Newton tends to hide his work while you are very forward in publishing yours.”
“And hiding one’s results-restricting them to dissemination among a tiny fraternity-is a characteristic of what group?”
“The Esoteric Brotherhood.”
“Otherwise known as-?”
“Alchemists,” Daniel snapped.
“So the priority dispute would never have arisen if Sir Isaac Newton were not thoroughly infected with the the mentality of Alchemy.”
“Granted,” Daniel sighed.
“So it is a philosophical dispute. Daniel, I am an old man. I’ve not been in London since 1677. What are the chances I shall ever return? And Newton-who has never set foot outside of England-will not come to me. I shall not have another opportunity to meet with him. I will remain in London incognito-no one need never know I was here-and find some way to engage Newton in Philosophick discourse and help him out of the labyrinth in which he has wandered for so many years. It is a labyrinth without a roof, affording a clear view of the stars and the moon, which he understands better than any man; but behold, when Newton lowers his gaze to what is near to hand, he finds himself trapped and a-mazed in dark serpentine ways.”
Daniel gave up. “Then consider yourself a member of our Clubb,” he said. “You have my vote. Neither Kikin nor Orney shall dare with-old his support from a savant whose pate still glows with the knuckle-prints of Peter the Great. Newton would doubtless vote against you. But he came to a separate peace with the Clubb’s quarry a few evenings since, and no longer has any reason to attend our meetings.”
YEVGENY THE RASKOLNIK had fallen like a tree in the dust of Hockley-in-the-Hole. From the looks of things he had given a fine account of himself. In this posture, viz. lying on his back, his face to the sky and framed in the iron-gray burst of his hair, it was obvious that he must be close to sixty years old. Had he been closer to Peter’s age (the Tsar was forty-two) and in possession of both of his arms, the fight might have gone differently. As it was, Daniel could only interpret this as a spectacular form of suicide. He could not help but wonder whether Yevgeny knew about today’s transfer of the gold from Minerva, and had somehow taken the notion into his head that, as a result, his time in the world was finished.
“This was an odd bloke, who was loyal to Jack for many years, but went his own way in recent years, and tried to burn the Tsar’s new ships in Rotherhithe even as he was conniving with Jack to invade the Tower and sully the Pyx,” Daniel explained to Leibniz. “He was a great villain. But it is a shame to see him, or anyone, lying thus unattended.” At that moment, though, he spied Saturn approaching, with a few lads behind him and an empty wagon.
Daniel, Leibniz, and Solomon caught up with Peter and his entourage at Clerkenwell Court, just as they were mounting up to travel back to Rotherhithe. Daniel sent with them a note to Mr. Orney, giving him the news that the incendiary who had attacked his shipyard was dead. Leibniz took his leave of the Tsar, and Solomon promised to rejoin the party later at Orney’s. For it would take a few days to inspect and take delivery of the new ships, and to man them; then they would sail directly into combat against the Swedes in the Baltic. Then the Tsar and his company departed.
Daniel did not know why, but he now felt more energetic than at any time in the last few weeks. Perhaps that was what made a Tsar a Tsar: the ability to move those around him to great exertions. Perhaps the sight of the dead Yevgeny had reminded Daniel, as if he needed it, that he should not live forever. Or perhaps it was a simple desire to get the Solomonic Gold moving, to get it out of his possession as fast as he could. Others who toiled in the Court of Technologickal Arts seemed to feel likewise, for suddenly-after having avoided the place for nearly a week, because of Whig/Tory strife and Hanging-shenanigans-they began to show up and pry the planks off the fronts of their little workshops around the Court and heave the dust-cloths off their machines. Saturn came home, having seen to the transfer of Yevgeny’s body to a Russian church somewhere, and by sundown the Court was in full production. They rolled, cut, and weighed the largest batch of plates they had ever made in a single day. Then Daniel pressed half a dozen idle but relatively sober Mohawks into service as escorts, and they took the plates down the banks of the Fleet to Bridewell.
The very first cargo unloaded from Minerva upon her arrival on Thursday had been the paper cards on which Daniel had, over the course of a dozen years’ toil at the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, written out the tables of the Logick Mill. These had already been forwarded to the card-punching workshop in Bridewell, which now sported half a dozen organs.
“It’s all right,” insisted Hannah Spates, upon being rousted from bed, “all the girls are accustomed to working nights anyway.” And so presently the shop was alight, and alive, with Hannah and five other nimble-fingered girls working the keys of the organs, and several pairs of big strumpets spelling each other on the bellows, fueled by beer from a barrel that Saturn fetched from a brewery across the ditch in Black Fryars. Some of the cards were punched even before he returned with this enhancement, and a good many more after-though Daniel insisted that the six women at the keys must remain dry. The entire batch was finished before three in the morning, and the banker William Ham, who’d been abducted by a Mohawk raiding-party from his bed in the city, did the sums, and weighed the cards and the bits that had been punched out of them, to the evident satisfaction of Solomon Kohan. The Jew had watched all with the keenest interest, but occasionally scowled at those aspects of the operation that looked as if they might be vulnerable to theft or embezzlement.
Daniel now presented him with a tiny purse sewn of the finest kid. It was no larger than a walnut, but plumped heavily in the palm of the hand, like a globule of quicksilver. “These are the tiny disks punched from the cards by the organs,” Daniel explained. Solomon nodded; he had already observed how these motes of gold were harvested from the machines and weighed by Mr. Ham. “As a rule we take these back and melt them down to make more card-stock. Tonight I make an exception and give them to you, Monsieur Kohan, as a memento of your visit to London, and a token of my esteem.” Solomon clapped the wee purse between his hands and accepted the gift with a bow.