Daniel said nothing. After years of sparring with Hooke over gravitation, Isaac had soared far beyond Hooke’s reach since Halley’s visit.

“I see,” Daniel said finally. “Well, I must go north anyway, to play at being the Puritan Moses.”

“It would be worth an excursion to Cambridge, then, in order to-”

“In order to clear Newton’s name of any scurrilous accusations that might be made against him by jealous rivals,” Daniel said.

“I was going to say, in order to disentangle him from the foreign supporters of a doomed King,” Hooke said. “Good night, Daniel.” And with a few dragging steps he was swallowed up in the sulfurous fog.

THE ENTIRE COUNTRY SEEMS WARMto me… in particular the eastern limb.Hooke might throw accusations carelessly, but not words. Among men who peered through telescopes, “limb” meant the edge of a heavenly body’s disk, such as the moon’s crescent when it was illumined from the side. Setting out to the northeast the next day, Daniel glanced at a map of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk and noticed that they formed a semicircular limb, bounded by the Thames on the south and the Wash on the north, and in between them, bulging eastwards into the North Sea. A bright light kindled above the Hague would shine a hundred nautical miles across the sea and light up that entire sweep of coastline, setting it aglow like a crescent moon, like the alchemist’s symbol for silver. Silver was the element of the Moon, the complement and counterpart of the Sun, whose element was gold. And as the Sun King was now pouring much gold into England, the possible existence of a silvery lunar crescent just to the north of London had import. Roger had no patience with alchemical suppositions and superstitions, but politics he knew well.

The fifty-second parallel ran directly from Ipswich to the Hague, so any half-wit with a backstaff and an ephemeris could sail unerringly from one to the other and back. Daniel knew the territory well-the North Sea infiltrated the Suffolk coast with so many spreading rays of brackish water that when you gazed east at sunrise the terrain seemed to be crazed with rivers of light. It was impossible to travel up the coast proper. The road from London was situated ten to twenty miles inland, running more or less straight from Chelmsford to Colchester to Ipswich, and everything to the right side-between it and the sea-was hopeless, from the point of view of a King or anyone else who wanted to rule it: a long strip of fens diced up by estuaries and therefore equally impassable to horses and boats, easier to reach from Holland than from London. Staying there wasn’t so bad, and staying out was even better, but movement was rarely worth the trouble. Objects would not move in a resistive medium unless impelled by a powerful force-ergo, any travelers in that coastal strip had to be smugglers, drawn by profit and repulsed by laws, shipping England’s rude goods to Holland and importing Holland’s finished ones. So Daniel, like his brothers Sterling and Oliver and Raleigh before him, had spent much time in this territory as a youth, loading and unloading flat-bottomed Dutch boats lurking beneath weeping willows in dark river-courses.

The first part of the journey was like being nailed, with several other people, into a coffin borne through a coal-mine by epileptic pallbearers. But at Chelmsford some passengers got out of the carriage and thereafter the way became straight and level enough that Daniel could attempt to read. He took out the printed document that Roger had given him in the coffee-house. It was a copy of Acta Eruditorum, the scholarly rag that Leibniz had founded in his home town of Leipzig.

Leibniz had been trying for a long time to organize the smart Germans. The smart Britons tended to see this as a shabby mockery of the Royal Society, and the smart Frenchmen viewed it as a mawkish effort by the Doctor (who’d been living in Hanover since ’77) to hold up a flawed and tarnished mirror to the radiant intellectual life of Paris. While Daniel (reluctantly) saw some justice in these opinions, he suspected that Leibniz was mostly doing it simply because it was a good idea. At any rate Acta Eruditorum was Leibniz’s (hence Germany’s) answer to Journal des Savants, and it tended to convey the latest and best ideas coming from Germany-i.e., whatever Leibniz had been thinking about lately.

This particular issue had been printed several months earlier and contained an article by Leibniz on mathematics. Daniel began skimming it and right away saw distinctly familiar terms-the likes of which he had not glimpsed since ’77-

“Stab me in the vitals,” Daniel muttered, “he’s finally done it!”

“Done what!?” demanded Exaltation Gather, who was sitting across from Daniel hugging a large box full of money.

“Published the calculus!”

“And what, pray tell, is that, Brother Daniel? Other than something that grows on one’s teeth.” The hoard of coins in Exaltation Gather’s strong-box made dim muffled chinking noises as the carriage rocked from side to side on its Suspension-one of those annoyingly good French ideas.

“New mathematics, based upon the analysis of quantities that are infinitesimal and evanescent.”

“It sounds very metaphysical, ” said the Reverend Gather. Daniel looked up at him. No one and nothing had ever been less metaphysical than he. Daniel had grown up in the company of men like this and for a while had actually considered them to be normal-looking. But several years spent in London coffee-houses, theatres, and royal palaces had insensibly altered his tastes. Now when he gazed upon a member of a Puritan sect he always cringed inside. Which was just the effect that the Puritans were aiming for. If the Rev. Gather’s Christian name had been Exultation his garb would have been wildly inappropriate. But Exaltation it was, and for these people exaltation was a grim business.

Daniel had finally convinced King James II that His Majesty’s claims to support all religious dissidents would seem a lot more convincing if he would take Cromwell’s skull down from the stick where it had been posted all through Charles II’s quarter-century-long reign, and put it back in the Christian grave with the rest of Cromwell. To Daniel and certain others, a skull on a stick was a conspicuous object and the request to take it down wholly reasonable. But His Majesty and every courtier within earshot had looked startled: they’d forgotten it was there! It was part of the London landscape, it was like the bird-shit on a windowpane you never notice. Daniel’s request, James’s ensuing decree, and the fetching down and re-interment of the skull had only drawn attention to it. Attention, in a modern Court, meant cruel witticisms, and so it had been a recent vogue to address wandering Puritan ministers as “Oliver,” the joke being that many of them-being wigless, gaunt, and sparely dressed-looked like skulls on sticks. Exaltation Gather looked so much like a skull on a stick that Daniel almost had to physically restrain himself from knocking the man down and shoveling dirt on him.

“Newton seems to agree with you,” Daniel said, “or else he’s afraid that some Jesuit will say so, which amounts to the same thing.”

“One need not be a Jesuit to be skeptical of vain imaginings-” began the now miffed Gather.

“ Somethingmust be there,” Daniel said. “Look out the window, yonder. That fen is divided into countless small plots by watercourses-some natural, some carved out by industrious farmers. Each rectangle of land could be made into two smaller ones-just drag a stick across the muck and the water will fill up the scratch in the ground, like the ?ther filling the void between particles of matter. Is that metaphysical yet?”

“Why no, it is a good similitude, earthy, concrete, like something from the Geneva Bible. Have you looked into the Geneva Bible recently, or-”