“What happens then if we continue subdividing?” Daniel asked. “Is it the same all the way down? Or is it the case that something happens eventually, that we reach a place where no further subdivision is possible, where fundamental properties of Creation are brought into play?”

“Er-I have no idea, Brother Daniel.”

“Is it vanity for us to consider the question? Or did God give us brains for a reason?”

“No religion, with the possible exception of Judaism, has ever been more favorably disposed towards education than ours,” said Brother Exaltation, “so that question is answered before ’twas asked. But we must consider these, er, infinitesimals and evanescents in a way that is rigorous, pure, free from heathenish idolatry or French vanity or the metaphysical infatuations of the Papists.”

“Leibniz agrees-and the result of applying just the approach you have prescribed, in the mathematical realm, is here, and it is called the calculus,” said Daniel, patting the document on his knee.

“Does Brother Isaac agree?”

“He did twenty years ago, when he invented all of this,” Daniel said. “Now I have no idea.”

“I have heard from one of our brethren in Cambridge that Brother Isaac’s comportment in church has raised questions as to his faith.”

“Brother Exaltation,” said Daniel sharply, “before you spread rumors that may get Isaac Newton thrown into prison, let’s see about getting a few of our brethren out -shall we?”

IPSWICH HAD BEEN A CLOTHport forever, but that trade had fallen on hard times because of the fatal combination of cheap stuff from India and Dutch shipping that could bring it to Europe. It was the prototype of the ridiculously ancient English town, situated at the place where the River Orwell broadened into an estuary, the obvious spot where anyone from a cave-man to a Cavalier would drive a stake into the muck and settle. Daniel judged that the gaol had been the first structure to go up, some five or six thousand years ago perhaps, and that the rats had moved in a week or two later. Ipswich was the county seat, and so when Charles II had whimsically decided to enforce the Penal Laws, all of Suffolk’s most outstanding Quakers, Barkers, Ranters, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and the odd Jew had been rounded up and been deposited here. They might just as well have been released a month ago, but it was important to the King that Daniel, his chosen representative, come out and handle the matter in person.

The carriage pulled up in front of the gaol and Exaltation Gather sat in it nervously gripping his strong-box while Daniel went inside and scared the gaoler half to death by brandishing a tablecloth-sized document with a wax seal as big as a man’s heart dangling from it. Then Daniel went into the gaol, interrupting a prayer meeting, and spouted an oration he’d already used in half a dozen other gaols, a wrung-out rag of a speech so empty and banal that he had no idea whether he was making any sense at all, or just babbling in tongues. The startled, wary looks on the faces of the imprisoned Puritans suggested that they were extracting some meaning from Daniel’s verbalizations-he had no idea what exactly. Daniel did not really know how his speech was being interpreted until later. The prisoners had to be released one at a time. Each of them had to pay the bill for his meals and other necessaries-and many had been here for years.

Hence Exaltation Gather and his box of money. The King’s gesture would fall flat if half the prisoners remained in pokey for debts accumulated during their (unjust and un-Christian) imprisonment and so the King had (through Daniel) encouraged special collections to be taken up in sympathetic churches and had (though this was supposed to be grievously secret) supplemented that money with some from his own reserves to make sure it all came off well. In practice it meant that the nonconformists of London and the King of England had used Exaltation Gather’s strong-box as a dust-bin for disposal of all their oldest, blackest, lightest in weight, most clipped, worn, filed-down, and adulterated coins. The true value of each one of these objects had to be debated between the gaoler of Ipswich on one hand, and on the other, Exaltation Gather and any recently freed Puritans who (a) were sharp when it came to money and (b) enjoyed verbal disputes-i.e., all of them.

Daniel staged an orderly retreat to a church-yard with a view down to the harbor, where the sound of the argument was partly masked by the rushing and slapping of the surf. Various Puritans found him, and lined up to give him pieces of their minds. This went on for most of the day-but as an example, Edmund Palling came up and shook Daniel’s hand.

Edmund Palling was a perpetual old man. So it had always seemed to Daniel. Admittedly his strategy of radical hairlessness made it difficult to guess his age. But he’d seemed an old man running around with Drake during the Civil War, and as an old man he had marched in Cromwell’s funeral procession. As an old trader he had frequently showed up at Stourbridge Fair peddling this or that, and had walked into Cambridge to inflict startling visitations on Daniel. Old Man Palling had attended the memorial service for Drake, and during his years living in London, Daniel had occasionally bumped into this elderly man on the streets of London.

Now here he was: “Which is it, Daniel, stupid or insane? You know the King.”

Edmund Palling was a sensible man. He was, as a matter of fact, one of those Englishmen who was so sensible that he was daft. For as any French-influenced courtier could explain, to insist on everything’s being reasonable, in a world that wasn’t, was, in itself, unreasonable.

“Stupid,” Daniel said. Until now he had been every inch the Court man, but he could not dissimulate to such as Edmund Palling. To be with this old man was to be thrown back four decades, to a time when it had become common for ordinary sensible Englishmen to speak openly the widely agreed-upon, but previously unmentionable fact that monarchy was a load of rubbish. The fact that, since those days, the Restoration had occurred and that Europe was in fact ruled by great Kings was of no consequence. At any rate, Daniel felt perfectly at home and at peace among these men, which was a bit alarming given that he was a close advisor to King James II. He could no more defend that King, or any monarch, to Edmund Palling than go to a meeting of the Royal Society and assert that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

Edmund Palling was fascinated, and nodded sagely. “Some have been saying insane, you know-because of the syphilis.”

“Not true.”

“That is extraordinary, because everyone is convinced he has syphilis.”

“He does. But having gotten to know His Majesty reasonably well, Mr. Palling, it is my opinion, as Secretary of the Royal Society, that when he, er…”

“Does something that is just amazingly ludicrous.”

“As some would say, Mr. Palling, yes.”

“Such as letting us out of gaol in the hopes that we’ll not perceive it as a cynical ploy, and supposing that we’ll rally about his standard as if he really gives a farthing for Freedom of Conscience!”

“Without staking myself to any position concerning what you’ve just said, Mr. Palling, I would encourage you to look towards mere stupidity in your quest for explanations. Not to rule out fits of syphilitic insanity altogether, mind you…”

“What’s the difference then? Or is it a distinction without a difference?”

“ Thissort of thing,” Daniel said, waving towards the Ipswich gaol, “is stupidity. By contrast, a fit of syphilitic insanity would lead to results of a different character entirely: spasms of arbitrary violence, mass enslavements, beheadings.”

Mr. Palling shook his head, then turned toward the water. “One day soon the sun will rise from across yonder sea and chase the fog of stupidity and the shadows of syphilitic insanity away.”