“A lesser road-not so impressively tree-lined as this. Perhaps it leads away to some humble down-top farm-stead.”
But having turned on to that road they immediately drove through a stone gate: clearly not the formal main entrance, but a side door, of some substantial demesne. It seemed to Daniel, as they trundled along the rutted road, that they must be following in the steps of the Whig Association Foot, who must all have paused along this stretch to void their bladders. But then he got it. And for once in his life, he got it slightly quicker than Newton or Leibniz. The last few minutes’ travel-the roads, the turns, and the odor-tallied with the penultimate leg of Mr. Kikin’s journey. They were there-almost. “Driver!” Daniel exclaimed, “tell me-do you see, up ahead, a place where one might turn to the right, and go up-hill a short distance on an old track that is paved in patches with flat stones?”
“No, guv’nor,” said the driver. But then they rounded a bend and he saw just what Daniel had described. As did Newton and Leibniz, who by this point had their heads thrust out of windows. “Go that way!” they all began to shout, for all of them recognized this from Mr. Kikin’s narration. The driver complied. They were now ascending a knoll.
At its top was a cluster of old Norman-looking farm-buildings, very down at heels. A dog was barking. Hooves sounded behind; it was their minder from the cavalry. “Turn about! You are going the wrong way!” he called.
“We are going the right way!” insisted Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse in unison; which set them all to laughing, and sent the dog into a frenzy.
“Who goes there?” came a call from far away down the hill, and something in the tone of voice gave Daniel the idea that this was not some resident of the place, challenging an intruder, but a fellow intruder, trying to make out what was going on. Which was quite striking, and (an instant later) a wee bit disturbing. Until now, he’d been supposing that they were going over ground that had already been traversed, and laid claim to, by friendlies, operating according to some coherent plan. But now he could hear a simply ludicrous amount of effort being expended by several units and individuals, all within earshot of one another, and all on the same side, for the simple purpose of trying to make out who the other blokes were, what direction they were headed, et cetera. So for all he knew, he and Newton and Leibniz might be in front of the rest of the force. And finally-as a sort of crowning ornament to this edifice of startling realizations that had been set a-building by the shouted “Who goes there?”-he understood that all military operations were this way, that no one here, other than Daniel, was surprised by any of it, and that (as in so many other situations in life) no remedy was possible and no apologies would be forthcoming.
It kept his mind occupied, anyway, until they crested the knoll and found themselves lost in and surrounded by the Odor: a stench of sal ammoniac so bad that it panicked the horses and forced the driver to use every bit of his wit, will, and whip-skill to rein them in, wheel them about, and drive them up-wind, out of the bad air. This confused and wild U through the hilltop lasted for all of ten seconds, and left a farrago of weird impressions in Daniel’s mind: the hysterical dog at the end of its tether, the gutted buildings, stained ground. The phrase “abomination of desolation” hung in his head; he could hear the voice of Drake intoning the words out of the Geneva Bible. The ancient half-timbered buildings of the farmstead-which had probably been in ruins even before Jack and his gang had gotten to them-had been attacked, as beetles scavenge a fallen carcass, and holed, torn, gutted, stripped, and remade into some monstrous novelty. The sides that faced out into the surrounding countryside had not been changed much, but the middle of the compound had been turned into something that was part giant machine, part Alchemist’s laboratory. Vast boilers, stained black with smoke, narrowed to serpentine tubes of hammered copper, frosted with dripping beads of solder and fuzzy with fertile encrustations of chymical crystals. Patches of soil lay burned and dead where they’d been plashed with murderous tinctures.
It finally occurred to him to look at Isaac to see how the arch-Alchemist reacted to this glimpse of the Art writ large. Daniel saw in Isaac’s face neither fascination nor disgust but a kind of pensive bewilderment: the look he got when he was drawing connexions in his mind that were beyond Daniel’s powers. But he looked suddenly at Daniel and remarked, “Clarke’s house.”
Which was a reference to a thing he had taken Daniel to see fifty years earlier, on a visit to Grantham, Lincolnshire: an apothecary’s house where Isaac had boarded as a schoolboy. Clarke had dabbled in Alchemy and had filled a side yard of the house with wreckage of his experiments. It was much smaller than what they had just seen, but to young Isaac must have seemed as large, and as glamourous with hazards, and as seething with mystery. In the half-century since, all things Alchemical had become familiar to Isaac; but what he had just seen must have jolted him with the same emotions he had known as a boy making illicit forays into Mr. Clarke’s laboratory.
For Daniel’s part, he wanted to loathe what Jack had made of this good old farm, and to be outraged, and to hate Jack all the more for it. But none of these feelings came to him. They would never come, because Daniel had already seen in Devon the works of Mr. Thomas Newcomen, which were like a harbinger of this thing. Or perhaps the Engine for Raising Water by Fire, and Jack’s phosphorus-mill, were both harbingers of something else, which he could scarce picture in his mind-and scarcely wished to. He had once said to Mr. Threader, in a very self-righteous way, that England did not need Slaves, if she could learn to make Engines, and that Engines, being clever, were a more English sort of thing than toiling Negroes; but now he was beginning to think that he ought to be more careful of what he wished for. The first phosphorus laboratory ever made-that of the Alchemist Heinrich Brand-had been so clever that it had inspired Leibniz to write a poem about it. But Daniel could see from the look on Leibniz’s face that he’d be writing no poems about this place, unless it was a supplementary Canto of Dante’s Inferno.
They debarked from the carriage, for the horses would on no account draw any nearer to the noisome Works. They knew that the dog was tethered, for they had nearly run over it, and they knew that no humans would be about, because who could or would sleep atop such a hell-mouth? So Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse strode rather than crept toward the Factory, and when they heard hoofbeats coming up behind, none of them paid it much mind, knowing that it was the young Mohawk who had been detailed to keep an eye out for them.
The last breaths of the fog had at last blown off from this hilltop, though the low places among the downs were still gloomed under fat gray rivers. One could see ten miles from this place-and anyone save a Natural Philosopher would turn his back to the ugly scene in the center to enjoy the prospect. But these men, who thought nothing of dissecting a beautiful corpse to examine a necrotic ulcer, had eyes only for the phosphorus-works.
The compound was ringed by an old hedgerow that had been viciously trimmed back by its new tenants, and cut down to the height of a man’s mid-section. Newton, Leibniz, and Waterhouse passed through a gap where it was pierced by a little side-track, and the Mohawk, who was angling in from another direction, jumped it easily on his mount, wheeled round, and trotted toward them. Waterhouse, well knowing his place, assumed the tedious duty of talking to the rider so that the great ones’ observations would not be disturbed. “Never mind what orders you have been given,” said Daniel, “this place is the objective of the day-it is why we have all come here.”
“Shall I go and summon others?”
“I do not think it necessary-they’ll find us anon.”
“I meant, sir, in case we should meet with resistance.”