Or of anyone. Obviously Bolingbroke was scared. Roger Comstock, the Marquis of Ravenscar, was too outward merry to let on that he was scared; but then he was apparently deep into mustering a Whiggish army, which was not the act of a man who had been sleeping soundly.
Who wasn’t scared? The only person Daniel could think of who wasn’t, was Sir Christopher Wren.
If the Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm was scared, she was not letting on.
Perhaps Marlborough wasn’t scared. There was no telling as long as he remained in Antwerp.
Those were the only ones he could think of.
Then he had one of those moments where he suddenly stood outside of his own body and beheld himself, as from a seagull’s perspective, standing on the deck of Mr. Charles White’s sloop running down the tide in the Hope. And he came to ask, why was he, who had little time left on earth, devoting these minutes to drawing up a tedious inventory of who was, and was not, scared? Was there nothing better for a Doctor and Fellow of the Royal Society to do with his time?
The answer was all around him, buoying him up and keeping him and the others from drowning: Hope. According to myth, the last thing to emerge from Pandora’s Box. Feeling Fear’s clammy arms reaching around him, Daniel had an almost physical longing for Hope. And perhaps Hope was no less contagious than Fear. He wanted to be infected with Hope and so he was trying to think of someone, like Wren or Marlborough, who would give it him.
It was an hypothesis, anyway. And it described the actions of others as well as it did his own. Why had Princess Caroline summoned him from Boston? Why had Mr. Threader wanted to make a Clubb with him? Why did Roger want him to find the Longitude and Leibniz want him to make a thinking machine? Why did the likes of Saturn trail him through Hockley-in-the-Hole, asking for spiritual direction? Why did Isaac solicit his aid? Why did Mr. Baynes expect Daniel to look after his wayward daughter in Bridewell? Why were Colonel Barnes and Sergeant Shaftoe asking him these pointed questions today?
Because they were all scared, and, just like Daniel, they longed for Hope, and sought anyone who might give it to them; and when they drew up their mental inventories of who was and wasn’t scared, why, somehow-through what was either a grotesque error or a miracle-they put Daniel in the “wasn’t scared” column.
Daniel laughed when he understood this. Bob Shaftoe might’ve been unnerved by that. But because Bob had got in the habit of thinking Daniel wasn’t scared, he read it as further evidence of Daniel’s supreme and uncanny self-confidence.
What to make of it? Daniel briefly considered hiring one of the printers in St. Paul’s Churchyard to make up a broadsheet in which he, Daniel Waterhouse, declared to the whole world that he was scared shitless nearly all the time. And in other times this might have been a fair course-humiliating to be sure, but honest, and a sure way to be rid of all these needy people who wanted to feed from his supposed rich store of Hope.
But that was to take a child’s view of the Pandora’s Box story, and to conceive of Hope as an angel. Perhaps what Pandora had was really just a jack-in-the-box, and Hope had never been anything more than a clock-work clown, a deus ex machina.
God from the machine. Daniel had spent enough time with theatrical machinery to watch its workings, and its effect upon audiences, with a cynical eye. Indeed, had passed through a long phase of despising the theatre, and the groundlings who paid money to be fooled.
But coming back to London (which had theatres) from Boston (which didn’t), he had seen that his cynicism had been ill-founded. London was a better city, England a more advanced place, for its theatres. It was not wrong for people to be fooled by actors, or even by machinery.
And so even if Hope was a contrived thing-a mechanism that popped up out of Pandora’s Box by dint of levers and springs-it was by no means bad. Which signified that if a crowd of people had somehow deluded themselves into phant’sying that Daniel was un-afraid, and, from that, were now generating Hope and courage of their own, why, that was an excellent practice. Daniel was obliged to remain upon the stage and to play his role, be it never so false. Because by doing so he might defeat the contagion of panic that was leading men like Bolingbroke to pursue such abysmally stupid gambits. False, machine-made Hope could make real Hope-that was the true Alchemy, the turning of lead into gold.
“Charles White is very like my lord Jeffreys, would you not say?”
“In many respects, yes, guv.”
“Do you recall the night we hunted Jeffreys down like a rabid dog, and arrested him, and sent him to justice?”
“Indeed, guv, I have dined out on the tale for a quarter-century.”
Which explained much, for the tale had probably grown in the re-telling, and made Daniel seem more heroic than he’d been in the event.
“When you and I were leaving the Tower that evening, we encountered John Churchill-I use his name thus since he was not yet Marlborough in those days.”
“That I do remember. And the two of you drew aside for a private conversation, in the middle of the causeway where you’d not be overheard.”
“Indeed. And the subject of that conversation must remain as private as ever. But do you recall how it ended?”
“The two of you shook hands, very pompously, as if closing a Transaction.”
“You are almost too keen for your own good, Sergeant. Now, from what you know of Marlborough, and of me, do you phant’sy either of us is the sort to renege on a Transaction, solemnly entered into in such a pass: before the very gates of the Tower of London, on the eve of the Glorious Revolution, when both of our lives hung in the balance?”
“Of course not, sir. I never-”
“I know. Stay. Only let me say to you now, Sergeant, that our Transaction is still alive, even today; that the present voyage and mission are part of it; that all is well, and the Revolution only grows more Glorious with each passing day.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear, guv,” said Bob with a little bow.
Daniel resisted the urge to say I know it is.
The Monument, London
LATE AFTERNOON
HALF-WAY UP THEY STOPPED to pant. The two younger pilgrims shared a stone ledge lit by a wee air-hole; some stone-masons had gone to a lot of trouble, here, to frame a toenail of gassy white sky in thunderous vault-work.
“Pity ’tis such an indifferent day,” said one, but not until after he’d lunged at the window and worked his lungs, for a minute, like black-smith’s bellows.
“We’ll have to gin up our own meteorology,” answered the other. He jammed a shoulder into a crevice of light that had opened up between the frame of the window and his fellow-pilgrim’s ribs, pried him out of the way, and availed himself of some air. Being London-air it could not be called fresh, but it was an improvement on the congealed miasma that filled these confines: a sort of well-shaft two hundred feet high.
An older pilgrim, several turns of the helix below them, stumbled. He was too short of breath to curse. He had to be content with inhaling and exhaling in a very cross way. “Out…of…my…light!” he then managed, one syllable per stair-tread.
The younger two-who were not really all that young, being in their middle thirties-moved up. Then they came aware of an impending need to make way for three young gentlemen who were descending. These had all prudently removed their small-swords from their hangers, so as not to trip on them, and were carrying the weapons before them like saints with crucifixes.
The two ascenders by the window were garbed all in black, except for their white collars, and even had black capes reaching below their knees. They were evidently Nonconformists: Quakers, or even Barkers. The three descenders were gaudy Piccadilly boys reeking of snuff and gin.
“Beg pardon, we have been up to view Heaven,” sang one of the latter, “and found it ever so boring, and now we are in a great hurry to reach Hell.” His companions laughed.
The pilgrims had their backs to the light and their faces to the dark. Otherwise, un-pilgrim-like amusement might have been seen.