“Where’d you get the idea you were escaping from intrigue?”

Daniel ignores this, too busy glaring at the other customers.

“My father, Drake, educated me for one reason alone,” Daniel finally says. “To assist him in his preparations for the Apocalypse. He reckoned it would occur in the year 1666-Number of the Beast and all that. I was, therefore, produced in 1646-as always, Drake’s timing was carefully thought out. When I came of age, I would be a man of the cloth, with the full university education, well versed in many dead classical languages, so that I could stand on the Cliffs of Dover and personally welcome Jesus Christ back to England in fluent Aramaic. Sometimes I look about myself-” he waves his arm at the tavern “-and see the way it turned out, and wonder whether my father could possibly have been any more wrong.”

“I think this is a good place for you,” Enoch says. “Nothing here is going according to plan. The music. The furniture. It’s all contrary to expectations.”

“My father and I took in the execution of Hugh Peters-Cromwell’s chaplain-in London one day. We rode straight from that spectacle to Cambridge. Since executions are customarily held at daybreak, you see, an industrious Puritan can view one and yet get in a full day’s hard traveling and working before evening prayers. It was done with a knife. Drake wasn’t shaken at all by the sight of Brother Hugh’s intestines. It only made him that much more determined to get me into Cambridge. We went there and called upon Wilkins at Trinity College.”

“Hold, my memory fails-wasn’t Wilkins at Oxford? Wadham College?”

“Anno 1656 he married Robina. Cromwell’s sister.”

“ ThatI remember.”

“Cromwell made him Master of Trinity College in Cambridge. But of course that was undone by the Restoration. So he only served in that post for a few months-it’s no wonder you’ve forgotten it.”

“Very well. Pardon the interruption. Drake took you up to Cambridge-?”

“And we called on Wilkins. I was fourteen. Father went off and left us alone, secure in the knowledge that this man-Cromwell’s Brother-in-Law, for God’s sake!-would lead me down the path of righteousness-perhaps explicate some Bible verses about nine- headed beasts with me, perhaps pray for Hugh Peters.”

“You did neither, I presume.”

“You must imagine a great chamber in Trinity, a gothickal stone warren, like the underbelly of some ancient cathedral, ancient tables scattered about, stained and burnt alchemically, beakers and retorts clouded with residues pungent and bright, but most of all, the books- brown wads stacked like cordwood-more books than I’d ever seen in one room. It was a decade or two since Wilkins had written his great Cryptonomicon. In the course of that project, he had, of course, gathered tomes on occult writing from all over the world, compiling all that had been known, since the time of the Ancients, about the writing of secrets. The publication of that book had brought him fame among those who study such things. Copies were known to have circulated as far as Peking, Lima, Isfahan, Shahjahanabad. Consequently more books yet had been sent to him, from Portuguese crypto-Kabbalists, Arabic savants skulking through the ruins and ashes of Alexandria, Parsees who secretly worship at the altar of Zoroaster, Armenian merchants who must communicate all across the world, in a kind of net-work of information, through subtle signs and symbols hidden in the margins and the ostensible text of letters so cleverly that a competitor, intercepting the message, could examine it and find nothing but trivial chatter-yet a fellow-Armenian could extract the vital data as easy as you or I would read a hand-bill in the street. Secret code-systems of Mandarins, too, who because of their Chinese writing cannot use cyphers as we do, but must hide messages in the position of characters on the sheet, and other means so devious that whole lifetimes must have gone into thinking of them. All of these things had come to him because of the fame of the Cryptonomicon, and to appreciate my position, you must understand that I’d been raised, by Drake and Knott and the others, to believe that every word and character of these books was Satanic. That, if I were to so much as lift the cover of one of these books, and expose my eyes to the occult characters within, I’d be sucked down into Tophet just like that.”

“I can see it made quite an impression on you-”

“Wilkins let me sit in a chair for half an hour just to soak the place in. Then we began mucking about in his chambers, and set fire to a tabletop. Wilkins was reading some proofs of Boyle’s The Skeptical Chemist- you should read it sometime, Enoch, by the way-”

“I’m familiar with its contents.”

“Wilkins and I were idly trying to reproduce one of Boyle’s experiments when things got out of hand. Fortunately no serious damage was done. It wasn’t a serious fire, but it accomplished what Wilkins wanted it to: wrecked the mask of etiquette that Drake had set over me, and set my tongue a-run. I must have looked as if I’d gazed upon the face of God. Wilkins let slip that, if it was an actual education I was looking for, there was this thing down in London called Gresham’s College where he and a few of his old Oxford cronies were teaching Natural Philosophy directly, without years and years of tedious Classical nincompoopery as prerequisite.

“Now, I was too young to even think of being devious. Even had I practiced to be clever, I’d have had second thoughts doing it in that room. So I simply told Wilkins the truth: I had no interest in religion, at least as a profession, and wanted only to be a natural philosopher like Boyle or Huygens. But of course Wilkins had already discerned this. ‘Leave it in my hands,’ he said, and winked at me.

“Drake would not hear of sending me to Gresham’s, so two years later I enrolled at that old vicar-mill: Trinity College, Cambridge. Father believed that I did so in fulfillment of his plan for me. Wilkins meanwhile had come up with his own plan for my life. And so you see, Enoch, I am well accustomed to others devising hare-brained plans for how I am to live. That is why I have come to Massachusetts, and why I do not intend to leave it.”

“Your intentions are your own business. I merely ask that you read the letter,” Enoch says.

“What sudden event caused you to be sent here, Enoch? A falling-out between Sir Isaac and a young protege?”

“Remarkable guesswork!”

“It’s no more a guess than when Halley predicted the return of the comet. Newton’s bound by his own laws. He’s been working on the second edition of the Principia with that young fellow, what’s-his-name…”

“Roger Cotes.”

“Promising, fresh-faced young lad, is he?”

“Fresh-faced, beyond doubt,” Enoch says, “promising, until…”

“Until he made some kind of a misstep, and Newton flew into a rage, and flung him into the Lake of Fire.”

“Apparently. Now, all that Cotes was working on-the revised Principia Mathematica and some kind of reconciliation with Leibniz-is ruined, or at least stopped.”

“Isaac never cast me into the Lake of Fire,” Daniel muses. “I was so young and so obviously innocent-he could never think the worst of me, as he does of everyone else.”

“Thank you for reminding me! Please.” Enoch shoves the letter across the table.

Daniel breaks the seal and hauls it open. He fishes spectacles from a pocket and holds them up to his face with one hand, as if actually fitting them over his ears would imply some sort of binding commitment. At first he locks his elbow to regard the whole letter as a work of calligraphic art, admiring its graceful loops and swirls. “Thank God it’s not written in those barbarous German letters,” he says. Finally the elbow bends, and he gets down to actually reading it.