Quicksilver (23 page)

Isaac had worked out during which hours of the night Venus would be shining her perfectly unidirectional light on Wools-thorpe Manor’s south wall, and he’d done it not only for tonight but for every night in the next several weeks. All of those hours were spoken for: he had planned out a whole program of experiments. It was clear to Daniel that Isaac had been arguing his case
against a whole court full of imaginary Jesuits hurling Latin barbs at him from every quarter, objecting to his methods in ways that were often ridiculous—that Isaac fancied himself as a combination of Galileo and St. Anne, but that unlike Galileo he had no intention of knuckling under, and unlike St. Anne he would not end up riddled with his tormentors’ arrows—he was getting ready to catch the arrows, and fling them back.

It was the sort of thing that Hooke never bothered with—because for Hooke being right was enough, and he didn’t care what anyone else thought of him or his ideas.

When Isaac had got his prisms situated in the window and blown out the candle, Daniel was blind, and painfully embarrassed, for several minutes—he was anxious that, lacking Isaac’s acute senses, he would not be able to see the spectrum cast against the wall by the light shining from Venus. “Have due patience,” Isaac said with a tenderness Daniel hadn’t heard from him in years. The thought stole upon Daniel, as he sat there in the dark with Isaac, that Isaac might have more than one reason for wearing those golden spectacles all the time. They shielded his burnt eyes from the light, yes. But as well, might they hide his burnt heart from the sight of Daniel?

Then Daniel noticed a multicolored blur on the wall—a sliver, red on one end and violet on the other. He said, “I have it.”

He was startled by a heavy rustling directly above them, in the attic, a scrabbling of claws.

“What was that?”

“There is a tiny window up there—an invitation for owls to build nests in the attic,” Isaac said. “So vermin don’t eat the grain stored up there.”

Daniel laughed at it. For a moment he and Isaac were boys up past bedtime playing with their toys, the complications of their past forgotten and the perils of the future unthought of.

A deep hooing noise, like the resonant tone of an organ pipe. Then the rustle of feathers as the bird squeezed through the opening, and the rhythm of powerful wings, like the beating of a heart, receding into the sky. The spectrum of Venus flashed off, then on, as the owl momentarily eclipsed the planet. When Daniel looked, he realized that he could now see not only the spectrum from Venus, but tiny, ghostly streaks of color all over the wall: the spectra cast by the stars that surrounded Venus in the southern sky. But spectra were
all
he could see. The earth spun and the ribbons of color migrated across the invisible wall, an inch a minute, pouring across the rough plaster like shining puddles of quicksilver driven
before a steady wind, revealing, in gorgeous colors, tiny strips of the pictures that Isaac had drawn and scratched on those walls. Each of the little rainbows showed only a fragment of a picture, and each picture in turn was only part of Isaac’s tapestry of sketchings and scratchings, but Daniel supposed that if he stood there through a sufficient number of long cold nights and concentrated very hard, he might be able to assemble, in his mind, a rough conception of the entire thing. Which was the way he had to address Isaac Newton in any case.

But I did believe, and do still, that the end of our City will be with fire and brimstone from above, and therefore I have made mine escape.

—J
OHN
B
UNYAN,
The Pilgrim’s Progress

C
AMBRIDGE TRIED TO RESUME
that spring, but Daniel and Isaac had only just settled back into their chamber when someone died of the Plague and they had to move out again—Isaac back to Wools-thorpe, Daniel back to a wandering life. He spent some weeks with Isaac working on the colors experiment, others with Wilkins (now back in London, running regular meetings of the Royal Society again) working on the Universal Character manuscript, others with Drake or with his older half-siblings, who’d returned to London at Drake’s command, to await the Apocalypse. The Year of the Beast, 1666, was halfway through, then two-thirds. Plague had gone away. War continued, and it was more than just an Anglo-Dutch war now, for the French had made a league with the Dutch against the English. But whatever plans the Duke of York had hatched with his Admirals on that chilly day at Epsom must not have been altogether worthless, because it was going well for them. Drake must be torn between patriotic ardor, and a feeling of disappointment that it showed no sign whatever of developing into an Armageddon sort of war. It was merely a string of naval engagements, and the gist of it was that the English fleet was driving the Dutch and French from the Channel. All in all, there was a failure of events to match up with the program laid out in the Books of Daniel and of Revelation, which forced Drake to re-read them almost every day, working out interpretations new and ever more strained. For Daniel’s part, he sometimes went for days without thinking about the End of the World at all.

One evening early in September he was riding back toward London from the north. He’d been up in Woolsthorpe helping Isaac run the numbers on his planetary orbit theory, but with
inconclusive results, because they did not know exactly how far from the center of the Earth they were when they stood on the ground and weighed things. He had stopped in at that plague-ridden town of Cambridge to fetch a new book that claimed to specify the crucial figure: how big around was the Earth? and now he was going down to visit his father, who’d sent him an alarming letter, claiming that he had just calculated a different crucial figure: the exact date (early in September, as it happened) that the world would end.

Daniel was still twenty miles outside of the city, riding along in the late afternoon, when a messenger came galloping up the road toward him and shouted, “London has been burning for a day and is burning still!” as he hurtled past.

Daniel knew this, in a way, but he had been denying it. The air had had a burnt smell about it all day long, and a haze of smoke had clung about the trees and the sheltered hollows in the fields. The sun had been a glaring patch that seemed to fill half the southern sky. Now, as the day went on and it sank toward the horizon, it turned orange and then red, and began to limn vast billows and towers of smoke—portents and omens that seemed incomparably vaster than the (still unknown) radius of the Earth. Daniel rode into the night, but not into darkness. A vault of orange light had been thrown about a mile high up into the sky above London. Thuds propagated through the earth—at first he supposed they must be the impacts of buildings falling down, but then they began coming in slow premeditated onslaughts and he reckoned that they must be blowing up whole buildings with powder-kegs, trying to gouge fire-breaks through the city.

At first he’d thought it was impossible for any fire to reach as far as Drake’s house outside of town on Holborn, but the number of explosions, the diameter of the arch of light, told him nothing was safe. He was working upstream against a heavy traffic of soot-faced wretches now. It made for slow going, but there was nothing to do about it. The folds of his clothing, and even the porches of his ears, were collecting black grit, nodules and splinters and flakes of charcoal that rained down tickingly on everything.

“Cor, look, it’s snowing!” exclaimed a boy with his face turned upwards to catch reflected light. Daniel—not wanting to see it, really—raised his eyes slowly, and found the sky filled with some kind of loose chaff, swirling in slow vortices here and there but heading generally downwards. He grabbed a piece of it from the air: it was page 798 of a Bible, all charred round the margins. He reached again and snared a hand-written leaf from a goldsmith’s
account-book, still glowing at one corner. Then a handbill—a libel attacking Free Coinage. A personal letter from one Lady to another. They accumulated on his shoulders like falling leaves and he stopped reading them after a while.

It took so long to get there that when he actually saw a house burning by the roadside, he was shocked. Solid beams of flame protruded from the windows, silhouetting people with leather buckets, jewels of water spinning off their rims. Refugees had flooded the fields along Gray’s Inn Road and, tired of watching the fire, had begun throwing up shelters out of whatever stuff they could find.

Not far from Holborn, the road was nearly blocked by a rampart of shattered masonry that had spilled across it when buildings to either side had been blown up—even above the smell of burning London, Daniel could detect the brimstone-tang of the gunpowder. Then a building just to his right exploded—to Daniel, an instant’s warning, a yellow flare in the corner of his eye, and then gravel embedded in one side of his face (but it felt like that side of his head had simply been sheared off) and deafness. His horse bolted and instantly broke a leg in the rubble-pile, then threw Daniel off—he came down hard on stones and splinters, and got up after lying there for he had no idea how long. There had been more explosions, coming faster now as the main front of the fire drew closer, its heat drawing curtains of steam and smoke out of walls, rooves, and the clothing on the living and dead persons in the street. Daniel took advantage of the fire’s light to stumble over the rubble-wall and into a stretch of the road that was still clear, but doomed to burn.

Reaching Holborn, he turned his back to the fire and ran toward the sound of the explosions. Some part of his mind had been doing geometry through all of this, plotting the points of the explosions and extrapolating them, and he was more and more certain that the curve was destined to pass near Drake’s house.

There was another rubble-heap on Holborn, so fresh that it was still sledding toward its angle of repose. Daniel charged up it, almost afraid to look down lest he should discover Drake’s furniture beneath his feet. But from the top of the heap he obtained a perfect view of Drake’s house, still standing, but standing alone now, in a sag-shouldered posture, as the houses to either side of it had been blown up. The walls had begun to smoke, and firebrands were raining down around it like meteors, and Drake Waterhouse was up on the roof holding a Bible above his head with
both hands. He was bellowing something that could not be heard, and did not need to be.

The street below was crowded with an uncommon number of Gentlemen, and better, brandishing swords—their gay courtiers’ clothing burnt and blackened—and musketeers, too, looking somewhat unhappy to be standing in such a place with containers of gunpowder strapped to their midsections. Very wealthy and prominent men were looking up at Drake, shouting and pointing at the street, insisting he come down. But Drake had eyes only for the fire.

Daniel turned round to see what his father was seeing, and was nearly slapped to the ground by the heat and the spectacle of it—the Fire. Everything between East and South was flame, and everything below the stars. It fountained and throbbed, jetted and pulsed, and buildings went down beneath it as blades of grass beneath John Wilkins’s giant Wheel.

And it was approaching, so fast that it overtook some persons who were trying to run away from it—they were blurring into ghosts of smoke and bursting into flames, their sprinting forms dissolving into light: the Rapture. This had not escaped Drake’s notice—he was pointing at it—but the crowd of Court fops below were not interested. To Drake, these particular men had been demons from Hell even
before
London had caught fire, because they were the personal bootlicks of King Charles II, an arch-daemon of King Louis XIV himself. Now, here they were, perversely convened in front of his house.

Daniel had been waving his arms over his head trying to get Drake’s attention, but he understood now that he must be an indistinct black shape against a vast glare, the least interesting thing in Drake’s panorama.

All of the courtiers had turned inward, attent on the same man—even Drake was looking at him. Daniel caught sight of the Lord Mayor, and thought perhaps
he
was the center of attention—but the Lord Mayor had eyes only to look at another. Sidestepping to a new position on the heap, Daniel finally saw a tall dark man in impossibly glorious clothing and a vast wig, which was shaking from side to side in exasperation. This man suddenly moved forward, seized a torch from a toady, looked up one last time at Drake, then bent down and touched the fire to the street. A bright smoking star rolled across the pavement toward Drake’s front door, which had been smashed open.

The man with the torch turned around, and Daniel recognized him as England.

There was a kind of preliminary explosion of humanity away from the house. Courtiers and musketeers formed a crowd behind the King to shield his back from flying harpsichords. Up on the roof, Drake aimed a finger at His Majesty and raised his Bible on high to call down some fresh damnation. From the burning timbers that were now coming down from Heaven like flaming spears hurled by avenging angels, he might have thought, in these moments, that he’d played an important part in Judgment Day. But nothing hit the King.

The spark was climbing the front steps. Daniel plunged forward down the piled house-guts, because he was fairly certain that he could outrun the spark, reach the fuse, and jerk it loose before it touched whatever powder-kegs had been rolled into Drake’s parlor. His path was blocked by members of the King’s personal bodyguard who were running the other way. They looked at Daniel curiously while Daniel changed course to swing round them. In the corner of his eye he saw one of them understand what Daniel was doing—that slackening of the face, the opening of the features, that came over the faces of students when, suddenly, they knew. This man stepped clear from the group and raised a yawning tube to his shoulder. Daniel looked at his father’s house and saw the star snaking down the dark hallway. He was tense for the explosion, but it came from behind him—at the same moment he was bitten in a hundred places and slammed face-down into the street.