The Devlin Diary (10 page)

She’s still waiting for the apprentice to return when Lucy and Hester walk into the alley with a young man she has never seen before. They stop at the clearing where Blackhorse Alley meets Carter’s Lane. They are on their way to market, empty baskets on their arms, laughing, dawdling, killing time. She doesn’t mind. She remembers, if only remotely, what it is like to be young, though she can imagine the sharp words Mrs. Wills would have for them. She should remind her not to be so severe with the girls.

The young man is tall, fair, sturdily built. She supposes he is handsome by the way Lucy is smiling up at him and laughing, but they are on the other side of the alley and she cannot make out his features. Hester hangs back from the other two, silent and watchful, but that is always her way. And it’s clear that he’s smitten with Lucy, but then everyone is.

After a few minutes he tips his hat to the girls and walks on. Arm in arm, Lucy and Hester cross the alley and pass by the apothecary shop.
Instinctively Hannah steps back from the door. An odd response, she supposes, but as they walk past she is thankful they don’t see her.

“Why don’t you ever say anything to him?” Lucy chides Hester. “He probably thinks you’re simple.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hester says. “It isn’t me he fancies.”

“Mrs. Devlin.” The apprentice holds a tray with an array of small glass bottles and packets of powder. “Two shillings, ten pence,” he says as he places it on the counter.

“Is that all?” The tariff is less than she expected.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but Mr. Murray says we’re all out of poppy syrup for today. He only has the treacle.”

Her disappointment feels almost like panic. She is due at Whitehall, and now she will have to go to another apothecary. She tries to think of one along the way, perhaps one in Westminster, for surely she will not get through the day without a few drops.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

She assures him that she is fine. How odd. People have been asking her that question a great deal lately.

“Y
OU, SIR, ARE
a cheat and a dog!” Theophilus Ravenscroft attempts to straighten his small, stooped frame to its most imposing height as he confronts Christopher Mead inside the optician’s shop on Long Acre Street. “Six pounds fifteen for a faulty microscope! It is too much to be borne.”

“And you, sir,” Christopher Mead replies with equal antipathy, “are a wastrel and a blight upon all instrument makers, who torment themselves to come up with better and more powerful devices for your use, only to see them mishandled and abused.”

“This instrument”—at Ravenscroft’s urging, his young assistant Thomas Spratt offers up the broken pieces of the microscope in question—“is so obviously deficient that it can’t stand up to a long night of work and one—only one, mind you!—accidental collision with the floor.”

“If you drop a glass, sir, it will break. Any child knows that.”

“If it were only a two-penny drinking cup I had purchased from you, I would not be here now, Mr. Mead. But as you see…” He takes the eyepiece from Thomas’s hand and puts it under Mead’s nose. “This ’scope is broke at the jointure to the arm, which should be sturdy
enough to handle a bit of knocking about. Not to mention that the lens”—he removes a sharp fistful of tiny glass shards from his pocket and sprinkles them on the counter—“is in pieces.”

In spite of Ravenscroft’s incontrovertible argument, Mead responds in his usual mulish manner. “How am I to know what really happened?” he asks, stubbornly crossing his arms across his chest and jutting his chin. “Perhaps you threw it on the floor.” He glances at the broken glass. “Then stomped on it. Your volatile temperament, Mr. Ravenscroft, is well known.”

“My temperament is well justified. I pay a high price for the best, and I expect nothing less. A philosopher cannot achieve greatness if he is forced to work with inferior tools. How can you call yourself a craftsman when you produce instruments as are not fit to be used? Do you not feel an obligation to provide your finest work for others’ experiment and inquiry? Odd’s Fish, man, do you not
care
?”

His fit of spleen makes little impact on Mead. The optician runs his fingers though his disheveled hair and sighs impatiently. And rather rudely too, Ravenscroft thinks. He and Thomas arrived at the shop at ten of the clock to find Mead upstairs asleep in his bed, looking as though he’d just been turned every which way but loose. Disgraceful. It is shockingly apparent that men are no longer concerned with mastering their art or with achieving perfection. All the young bucks are lazy and more eager to play the fop and the gallant than to attend to the business of furthering knowledge. Has it always been so? Ravenscroft searches his memory—a mysterious region full of light and shadow, but a place where, more and more often, what is illuminated seems insignificant—but he cannot recall that such carelessness was the fashion in his youth. The world has become full of incompetents and mediocrities and ignorant coxcombry fools.

“Mr. Mead,” he says firmly, drawing himself up (which places the crown of his head no higher than Mead’s chin), “you would be wise to spend less time fondling your mistresses and keep a mind to your craft, and thence to your customers, for the other fellows of the Royal Society will follow my lead in this matter and take their business elsewhere if I am not satisfied.” He is not certain this is true. The members of the
Royal Society are more inclined to lead than to follow; their fraternity contains a healthy measure of anarchy at its core. But it cannot be disputed that the majority of Mead’s customers are Royal Society fellows. Who else but a natural philosopher intent on examining the wonders of the world and the heavens requires a relatively newfangled invention such as a microscope or telescope?

Mead sighs again, less impertinently this time. “What is it you want, Mr. Ravenscroft?”

“I insist that you build a new microscope for me. This one will not do.”

“You insist, do you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mead scowls, but Ravenscroft knows that his threat is too genuine for the optician to ignore. “As you wish, then,” Mead sullenly replies. “But do not imagine that I will do it right away.”

“Do you really think he’ll make you another?” Thomas asks as they walk past the shops of wheelwrights, carpenters, metalworkers, glaziers, and clockmakers that populate this West London neighborhood. Ravenscroft buttons up his coat against the bitter wind. It’s nearly two miles back to his house on Bishopsgate Street.

“Of course.” He glances quizzically at his assistant. “Did you think he would not do as I asked simply because we engaged in a bout of verbal fisticuffs? Not to worry. Mead and I have the same argument at least once every few months. Natural philosophy is a fractious business. If you are afraid to make yourself heard, you will not go far.”

The two men, one young and one old, make a droll pair. The philosopher has never been handsome; even as a child, he lacked the sort of appearance that would endear him to others. His absence of vanity and a good deal of parsimoniousness are evident in his apparel, from his poorly clad feet (shoes, very worn rust-colored pigskin, twelve shillings, over fifteen years old) to his body (topcoat, coffee-stained wool, one pound, secondhand store on Gracechurch Street) to his head (periwig, matted gray hair, two pounds ten, castoff from another of his Cheapside barber’s customers). Ravenscroft’s slight and slightly
crooked figure moves swiftly ahead at a jerky but determined pace, his shoulders hunched deep into his coat, fists shoved into pockets, his head hatless in spite of the cold. Beside him, the fair-haired, fair-featured, and strapping Thomas Spratt lopes along, his long stride nearly two of his employer’s, his ungainly feet as outsized as a puppy’s.

Thomas is the son of an acquaintance from Garraway’s, Ravenscroft’s favorite coffeehouse in Exchange Alley near the Old Exchange. He became Ravenscroft’s assistant only two months earlier, when the position was suddenly vacated in the usual manner: Ravenscroft threw his former assistant out on his ear. Although the philosopher is not prone to excessive praise, he would admit that so far Thomas has exhibited the qualities he sought: “a sober and virtuous young man, diligent in following direction.” He has artistic skill as well and has already proved himself a capable draftsman and copyist. His daily duties include preparing trials and experiments, copying Ravenscroft’s drawings, and doing errands. In exchange, Ravenscroft houses him, feeds him, and allows his maid Nell to launder his clothes, a trade that is greatly in Thomas’s favor, he believes; for surely he is learning much that he can profit from later on.

“You must be willing to stand up for your convictions, Thomas, and forge ahead with a free and open mind,” Ravenscroft tells his assistant, finding himself in a rather expansive mood following his altercation with Christopher Mead and so offering another of the impromptu lessons he feels are such a necessary part of his work as a man of science. “I have found that truth more often resides in what is newly discovered than in the theories of the past. Only last week in Mead’s shop I was introduced to an old coot, one Mr. Hobbes, who would not be persuaded that a microscope afforded a closer view than his own spectacle glasses; and who pretended to see better by holding his spectacles in his palsied hand, which shook as fast one way as his head did the other. That is what happens when people cleave tight to ancient beliefs: they do not even credit what they see with their own eyes. The old fool would not allow himself to be convinced that optical instruments further our sight, and so he will never have the sublime pleasure of witnessing the fiery details of a comet as it streaks across the sky, or seeing the crisp,
pockmarked face of the moon, or the fascinating, impossibly intricate anatomy of a bee, a beetle, or a baboon. The natural philosopher has three faculties: sense, memory, and reason, and all of these may be improved upon—our senses most profoundly by the instruments we create to expand them.”

They turn into Harper’s Lane, passing a heavily laden horse cart slowly creaking along to market, and dodge the mud thrown up by the horse’s hooves as they skirt the piles of stinking refuse that litter the road. Low in the sky above them a smudge of pink the color of a pig’s bladder momentarily peeks through the clouds. The reddened sun, courtesy of the miasmic coal smoke that continually blankets London, flares briefly, then is swallowed up again by the heavily overcast sky. The blustery autumn wind reddens the tips of Ravenscroft’s ears, and in the damp air he feels the presence of impending rain: a day for omens and portents.

As they near the Fleet Bridge, Ravenscroft becomes aware of the pains in his swollen feet, his knobby knees. The cold, damp weather aggravates his gout. Happily he is on speaking terms with some of London’s finest physicians and apothecaries, all of whom give him frequent advice for his gout, his vertigo, his neuralgia, his excessive wind, his costiveness, his megrims, and his melancholy, as well as recommending the latest and most modern treatments. In addition to the usual prescription of vomits, purges, and bloodletting, Ravenscroft has tried innumerable patented “waters,” distillations, and cordials; tinctures of wormwood, solutions of iron oxide, and fomentations of frog spawn; white wine infused with dried peacock’s dung and powdered stag’s pizzel; as well as the inhalation of the fumes of a burnt horse’s hoof. He has experimented with all these many treatments and more, separately and in combination, but for some reason his health never seems to improve. Not that it is likely to as long as he lives on Bishopsgate Street, he reflects bitterly. A coaching inn has lately been built on what was an empty plot next to his house, and every day he is forced to breathe in the suffocating stink of the stables and jakes.

The only odor worse than the one he suffers daily is the one that as
saults his olfactory sense now, at the foot of the bridge that crosses the Fleet Ditch. Once a river cascading from the green hills and meadows of Hampton Heath, the Fleet has for centuries been London’s largest open sewer, a turgid morass that flows thickly to the Thames, carrying with it waste of the meanest kind: human and animal excrement, offal from the slaughterhouses, poison from the tanneries, food slops, garbage, drowned rats, dead dogs. He looks north, where pigsties and cheap, hastily built timber dwellings line the muddy banks. After the Fire, wood houses were outlawed in the City, but they have managed to proliferate outside the walls in the poorer areas. These Ditch-side abodes, inns, and taverns shelter the lowest sort—cutpurses, whores, thieves, and worse—and those too poor to live elsewhere, for no one readily chooses to reside near the Fleet and its noxious exhalations.

A few splintering planks shore up the sides of the riverbed adjacent to the bridge.

“What is that?” Thomas asks Ravenscroft.

“The remains of a rebuilding project begun after the Fire,” he replies. “Christopher Wren, surveyor-general of the King’s Works, and Robert Hooke, city surveyor, were commissioned by the king to turn the Fleet into a navigable canal.” The work progressed in fits and starts, he explains, then finally stopped altogether, as Wren and Hooke were not able to come up with a satisfactory method of cleaning and dredging the ditch. Busily engaged all over London in rebuilding much of the city, the pair has allowed the project to lie fallow, much to the distress of the king.

They climb the stairs to the top of the bridge and stop for the momentary ease of Ravenscroft’s aching knees. He looks south toward the Thames, a wide pewter-colored streak that shines dully in the distance, making silhouettes of the new houses and heaps of rubbish that characterize the post-Fire city. He rubs impatiently at his watery eyes, rheumy from lucubration, then slips on his spectacles (lenses ground by Christopher Mead, he thinks with a pang of annoyance), and glances down at the opaque river. The detritus that the Fleet carries daily bobs along on the mud-brown current: a goat’s disembodied head, a gray mass that looks like pig’s intestines, a furry black thing that might be the
hide of a curly-haired dog or an old periwig. Only God and the Devil know what is underneath the surface of the water; the cellar sweepers and the night-soil men too often dump their noisome cargo into the Fleet. It is nothing less than a river of shit. No wonder Mr. Wren and Mr. Hooke have given up.

Like Ravenscroft, Wren and Hooke are fellows of the Royal Society. He is acquainted with both men and is in no doubt as to their extraordinary abilities, though he has wildly differing opinions of their characters. Wren is a gentleman and a genius; Hooke is capable, indeed, but a boaster and a braggart. He is perhaps the world’s most annoying man: Ravenscroft has only to hint at a new discovery to ensure that Hooke will claim to have found it first.

He has learnt that the only way to avoid such trouble is to keep his own counsel and not speak to the man. Not an easy task, as Mr. Hooke is the society’s curator of experiments and so attends nearly every weekly meeting of the natural philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, physicians, chemists, and noble patrons who comprise the membership of the Royal Society. Even though Hooke is busy enough for three men, he apparently finds time to discover the secrets of everything under the sun, at least according to himself. But if that is true, Ravenscroft would sometimes like to ask, why is Hooke continually at the coffeehouses, gabbling on for hours with others of Ravenscroft’s own acquaintance? He hesitates to call them friends, because there are so many in addition to Hooke with whom he no longer speaks. The perfidy and treachery of natural philosophers is beyond that of the worst assassins and spies. He cannot count the number of times he has been close to gaining the recognition he deserves, only to see it snatched away by another.

Ravenscroft crosses to the other side of the bridge and rests his palms on the cool, rough stone of the waist-high balustrade. As he gazes north, he envisions the Fleet Ditch unsoiled, its waters clear. No one living has seen it so. What if he could find a solution where Wren and Hooke could not?

This thought produces a sense of excitement Ravenscroft has not felt in years. The king would no doubt consider this a scheme of the highest importance, as it would make possible Mr. Wren and Mr.
Hooke’s canal project. That he would do anything to Mr. Hooke’s benefit is slightly galling; but what a blessed change it would be for London to have unsoiled water and fresh air where now there are only noxious, pestilential miasmas. Not to mention that clearing the Fleet of its filth would secure his fame at last. Why, he might even be awarded a knighthood!